The stranger’s feet were treating the boards not so much with actual disdain as an amused, gliding irony. It was the step of one who might always express disbelief at finding herself where she happened to be.
A not unpleasing, genteel contralto was aimed at the target. ‘Mrs Roxburgh? I’ve come to keep you company on the drive down to the settlement. You may not remember,’ the woman, or rather, the indisputable lady reminded, ‘we have met before — which makes the occasion — for me at least — a most agreeable coincidence.’
So Mrs Roxburgh could no longer postpone investigating this individual, acquaintance as well as harbinger, and was faced with a figure dressed in brown, finical from the toes of her boots to the bridge of her noticeably cutting nose.
‘Do you not recall’, she asked more gently, abashed perhaps by tales she had heard as well as her reception at this humble farm, ‘how we met, the day our mutual friends the Merivales paid you the visit, on board ship? Surely you must?’ She was reduced to begging.
Out of the turmoil of emotions, of storm and shipwreck, of death and despair, of trust and betrayal, Mrs Roxburgh did begin to recollect the brown woman’s accusing nose.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I do, of course — Miss …?’ The lady could hardly have lost her maidenhead for frightening off the men or tearing out the entrails of those unwise enough to approach.
‘Scrimshaw,’ the beak slightly squawked to fill the gap in a deficient memory.
The eyes, dark enough to daunt the casual opponent, were piercing as deep as Mrs Roxburgh’s own. Finally the women seemed to understand each other.
Miss Scrimshaw extended a hand firmly encased in brown kid. ‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ she advised, ‘I do not wish to push you unduly, but suggest that for practical reasons we start without delay, to arrive before nightfall. In these parts, as I know from several months residence, one cannot leave too much to chance.’
‘I leave it to you,’ Mrs Roxburgh murmured, who had spent her whole life in other people’s hands.
Miss Scrimshaw hurried on. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed with such vehemence that the spray flew out of her mouth. ‘Mrs Lovell, who is kindness itself, has sent you this.’ The emissary began disentangling the string from a cardboard box she carried suspended from her second hand. ‘She realized that you were not provided with a bonnet, and did not wish you to travel bareheaded.’
With a conjurer’s flourish Miss Scrimshaw whisked out of the box what must have been a woman’s last fling at girlhood, a gauzy, but somewhat squashed affair from which the nodding pansies, daisies, or whatever, had been thoughtfully stripped, and replaced by a broad band of crape, the pretty ribbons by crape streamers, and over all a veil, likewise crape.
Miss Scrimshaw bared her teeth to guide the novice towards an enthusiasm she seemed to lack.
Then Mrs Roxburgh agreed, ‘Yes, Mrs Lovell is kind, she is most thoughtful,’ and settled the bonnet on her head, and drew the veil to disguise her face.
While Miss Scrimshaw was organizing their departure Mrs Roxburgh searched without success for Mrs Oakes. In the end it seemed like almost everything, immaterial.
‘Such good people, I understand,’ Miss Scrimshaw remarked as they took their places in the unsprung carriage.
Mrs Roxburgh could not answer. The escorts spurred their mounts, and the latter sidled and dropped their dung. Only as they wound their way downhill did she raise her widow’s veil to glance back, and there was her friend standing like a crudely modelled statue at one corner of the primitive barn. It struck Mrs Roxburgh that everything which one most respects, and loves, is rapt away too soon and too capriciously. Then the scents of laundering and baking, not to say the smell of boiled mash, rushed back, and she started sneezing.
She lowered her veil, thankfully.
Miss Scrimshaw said, ‘There is something in the air. I do so sympathize. I am affected by it regularly. Oh dear yes, what we suffer! But must, I suppose, put up with it.’
So they ground on, and were rolled at dusk along the tracks linking the scattered buildings which composed the settlement at Moreton Bay.
‘You see, Mrs Roxburgh, I was correct in my calculations,’ Miss Scrimshaw announced and laughed.
Mrs Roxburgh was more than ever glad of the veil falling from the brim of her bonnet. It dimmed lights and concealed thoughts. But would she hear the sounds she most dreaded? For the moment she did not.
The Commandant’s house was set in what appeared by twilight a spacious and well-planted garden from which heady, dusk-induced perfumes were wafted through the windows of their bone-breaker of a vehicle. The residence itself, at this hour less a house than a series of illuminations, was revealed as an amorphous sprawl behind jutting verandas, the whole effect suggestive of practical comfort rather than official presumption.
Mrs Roxburgh felt drawn to the house. She would have liked to burrow in without being received, and to remain there unnoticed. But this was not to be. The Commandant himself had been waiting for them, and had come out, and was standing on the steps, a fine figure of an officer, obviously enjoying the power and benefits which the command of a remote but unimportant outpost brings.
Captain Lovell’s hand guided his guest out of the carriage and compelled her up the veranda steps. ‘You are almost as punctual as Miss Scrimshaw would have wished.’ He glanced back in ironic approval at his subaltern, who came as close to a giggle as an Awful Presence might allow herself.
‘Come!’ he commanded the prisoner. ‘Everybody has been waiting to see you.’
‘Oh, please!’ Mrs Roxburgh protested.
Miss Scrimshaw came to her charge’s defence. ‘Poor Mrs Roxburgh is fatigued to say the least.’
In the light from the doorway the Commandant’s eyes were an enamelled blue; he had the cast of face which might flush and swell, a mouth which might brood whenever thwarted; all of which would have amounted to flaws in another, but added to Captain Lovell’s looks.
The looks or flaws were on the verge of displaying themselves when the one who was presumably his wife appeared, surrounded by a clutch of little children, fair-haired, blue-eyed, all of them agog. The mother too, was on the fair side. She made a rather crumpled impression, not unlike the gauzy bonnet which must surely have been hers before handed over to the object of her charity.
‘Everybody will want to see her, but not before she has put her feet up.’ Mrs Lovell decided with a firmness unexpected in one so frail and evidently harassed. ‘Mrs Roxburgh is not on parade, Tom.’
Although he made some show of grumbling and snuffling, the Commandant accepted his rebuke amiably enough. ‘To hear your mother, anybody would think me a tyrant. Wouldn’t they, Kate?’ he appealed to the eldest little girl, who considered his question too foolish to answer.
At the head of her platoon of children, and seconded by the inevitable Miss Scrimshaw, Mrs Lovell marched their guest to the room she was to occupy.
‘After all you have endured I can imagine that you will appreciate being left alone. Not that you haven’t been alone enough,’ Mrs Lovell added, and blushed, ‘lost in the bush for months on end — except for the company of blacks, of course, as we have heard — and the man who rescued you.’ Mrs Lovell blushed deeper still. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘a room of your own, with the comforts civilization can offer, will have its appeal.’
Mrs Roxburgh realized that she was standing stripped before Mrs Lovell, as she must remain in the eyes of all those who would review her, worse than stripped, sharing a bark-and-leaf humpy with a ‘miscreant’. To the children, she was of even greater interest: they saw her squatting to defecate on the fringe of a blacks’ encampment. Only the children might visualize her ultimate in nakedness as she gnawed at a human thighbone in the depths of the forest. Finally these children might, by their innocence and candour, help her transcend her self-disgust.
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