Dorothy Eden (11 page)

‘Thank you, Mrs Jarvis, you can help me dress, and pack my night things.’

‘Very well, ma’am. Can I brush your hair for you, too? There’s no mirror, and the water they expect you to wash in isn’t fit for a pig. But I expect we can manage one way and another.’

The hair-brushing was soothing. Mrs Jarvis had a nice rhythmic style. She twisted the heavy locks into a respectable coil, pinned it up securely, and then helped Eugenia into her dress. Since there was no mirror Eugenia had no way of knowing what her face looked like, and she didn’t intend to ask Mrs Jarvis. The quiet eyes were observing enough already.

‘I am stiff all over from that jolting in the waggon yesterday,’ she said, and at last found that she could talk about the previous night. ‘What has happened to the convict?’

‘Two troopers came for him. He was taken away before dawn.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘He’ll be hanged,’ said Mrs Jarvis quietly. ‘I have to tell you the truth.’

Eugenia shivered.

‘How have you not been brutalized, Mrs Jarvis? You must have seen so many dreadful things.’

‘It’s my nature not to be, I expect, ma’am.’

‘And you don’t want to go back to England?’

‘What would there be for me there? I belong here now. My child will belong here.’

And so will yours, those too perceptive eyes said.

Eugenia pressed her hands to her stomach, wondering fleetingly if there were the seed of a child there already. She saw that Mrs Jarvis had noticed the movement, and hastily smoothed down her skirt.

‘Did you hear the dog barking all night, Mrs Jarvis?’

‘It was a dingo. There, ma’am. You look very well after such a long journey yesterday.’

‘It was a long journey for you, too, in your condition.’

‘I’m a strong woman. And I’m used to the climate.’

‘Yes, you seem to be, I must say. Then I will be obliged if you will bring me my breakfast. Just some tea and a little bread and butter. Then I must go and see how Jane is. If she is still so poorly, she had better ride in the buggy with Mr Massingham and me.’

Though her motives, she admitted privately, were not entirely concern for Jane. The girl’s presence would serve to postpone the moment when she had to be alone with her husband.

T
HE HOUSE WAS SUCH
a surprise that, as the buggy stopped and Gilbert leaped out, Eugenia fell spontaneously into his arms.

They had turned off the road at a sign ‘Yarrabee’ painted on a post in rough black letters, and had driven more than a mile over a bumpy track that seemed to lead nowhere. Then suddenly the graceful sand-coloured house, on a slope that led down to green willows and a glint of water, was like a mirage in the parched landscape. It had two storeys, a verandah running round the lower one, and balconies at the upper windows. The doors and window frames and verandah posts were painted a pristine glistening white. The whole impression was of cool shady comfort.

‘Oh, Gilbert, I couldn’t imagine it would have been like this,’ Eugenia exclaimed in delight.

Gilbert looked pleased and proud. He looked a suitable part of the landscape, too, with his blue eyes, his pale red thatch of hair. Seeing him like this against the background of his fine new house, Eugenia could almost forget the hot slippery body that had slid off hers last night. She intended to forget it, at least in that particular context. Here was her new home, and it was much much better than she had dreamed it could be. Even in England she would have been proud of it.

Only in England it would not have been built by unhappy suffering men detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.

‘I treated the men well.’ Gilbert was getting rather too clever at reading her expression. ‘They were sorry when the house was finished and they had to leave. But come in, and see it properly. Your furniture has been arranged but you may care to dispose it differently later. When you’ve seen the house I want you to see my winery and vineyard. I expect you not to be too tired for that.’

On the ground floor the dining-room, the drawing-room, the library (as yet empty of books), the sitting-room, each opening on to the verandah, a china room, a linen room, and across a paved courtyard the kitchen, the dairy, and the servants’ rooms. Upstairs six bedrooms, a nursery, a schoolroom, two bathrooms with enormous baths mounted on pedestals. It was all just as Gilbert had told her it would be, three years ago, in England. He had kept his word about everything.

In her mind, Eugenia was planning wallpapers, curtains, rugs. She would like a yellow bedroom and a blue bedroom, as there was at Lichfield Court. She could hardly wait to get at her boxes and crates and begin unpacking the smaller items she had brought with her. The French four-poster bed, already arranged in the largest bedroom, looked wonderful. The high ceiling and the long windows on to the balcony set it off perfectly. There was a turkey rug that she would put in the sitting-room which faced south, the direction that got the most shade in this upside-down country.

Gilbert enjoyed her exclamations of pleasure, but he hadn’t too much time to waste on the house. He was impatient to show her his prized possession, his vineyard.

Jane, still a greenish colour beneath her crumpled bonnet, but looking more cheerful, had crept into the downstairs hall. She had sat, a silent third, in the back of the buggy, more like a miserable little animal than a human being. But now her eyes had brightened a little, and she was timidly asking for instructions.

‘Take the smaller bags upstairs and begin unpacking,’ Eugenia said, enjoying giving her first order in her new home. ‘We will decide later where things are to be put. But I would like my white muslin aired and ironed. Gilbert, is there someone to prepare a midday meal for us?’

‘Yella will do that. To the best of her ability.’

‘Yella?’

‘A native woman. Now don’t look alarmed, my love. That’s the very reason that we have brought Mrs Jarvis. Because I didn’t think you would care for Yella’s very amateur skill. Besides, she hasn’t the most advanced ideas on hygiene. Well, come. I’ve waited long enough to show you the most important part of the estate.’

On the far side of the courtyard, beyond the kitchen buildings, there were stables, cowsheds, and a row of huts. Where the outside staff lived, Gilbert said briefly. The stable boys and the labourers who tended the vines.

‘Convicts?’ Eugenia asked, trying not to let her distaste show.

‘Ticket-of-leave men and two ex-convicts who have elected to stay at Yarrabee. They work well, for the most part. They get drunk at vintage, of course. One has to allow that. And one has to see they go to church on Sundays. That is a law.’

The sun was growing unbearably hot. Eugenia was glad to step into the cool winery with its immensely thick stone walls situated a little distance beyond the stables. It was full of casks, and had a pervading sour smell that she found nauseating. The odour strengthened as she followed Gilbert who carried a lighted lantern downstairs into a long cool dark cellar.

Here were more casks which Gilbert explained were filled with wine ready for bottling. In another room, bottles lying in neat rows on racks were labelled with vintage dates. The huge vats, empty now, would be scoured and made ready for pressing the new season’s grapes in just over a month, if this hot weather kept up.

Gilbert went on to describe the pressing, the great piles of grapes squeezed until the juice, or must, ran into the vat to await fermentation. He explained how the bloom of the grapes carried its own fermenting property, how the temperature of the cellar must be exactly right, and the hope that the fruit would have had the most beneficial amount of rain during its swelling on the vine. Too little affected the flavour, too much produced a woolly fungus.

After fermentation the bottling was a skill in itself. Sufficient space must be left between cork and wine to allow ullage, the bottle must lie on its side—

‘Are you following me, Eugenia?’

‘I am afraid some of the words you use are unfamiliar.’

‘They will soon be familiar to you. Is something the matter? You look a little pale.’

‘There’s a very strong odour down here.’

‘You’ll get used to that. You’ll grow to like it. Wait until vintage, when the baskets of grapes begin coming in. Murphy and Tom Sloan and I do the pressing. It’s hard work. We don’t use our feet as the Portuguese do, we use wooden presses, which are just as effective and more civilized to my way of thinking.’

‘Gilbert, I’m sorry, a little fresh air…’

She managed not to vomit. She rested on an empty cask in the storeroom above, and saw Gilbert’s cool disdainful gaze. Was it disdainful? Or just disappointed? Was he going to be sorry that he had married a woman who couldn’t stand the smell of sour wine? She was furious with herself.

‘I will get used to it,’ she said determinedly.

‘Of course. I expect you’re still suffering from the shock of last night. I should have realized that. Shall we return to the house? I can take you up to the terraces later.’

She would have preferred the terraces, where the sun shone on rows and rows of ripening grapes, to the dark winery cellar. She was sure she would have been able to express enthusiasm there, and have felt her sense of adventure returning.

But Gilbert, leading her back to the house, seemed to have overlooked the fact that she had not expressed enthusiasm. He was explaining that he had laid out his entire capital on the house and its contents, and the vineyards. It was important that this year’s harvest be a good one. The portents were excellent. The vines were bearing well, there hadn’t been late spring frosts, the little blight he had noticed on the Malaga vines hadn’t reached the red Bordeaux or the Epernay. If only it would rain a little in the next few days he would begin planting out the new clippings. It was best to put them in after a heavy shower. He had had men preparing new terraces all the winter and spring.

‘We’ll give a house warming after vintage. You can dress the house up by then, can’t you? I have enough money left to make the place civilized.’

‘The garden?’ Eugenia asked. For there had been none, only dusty dried grass and a few recently planted shrubs, struggling to survive.

‘That’s your province, too. I’ll let you have Peabody. He says he was a gardener at a royal palace, though I doubt if he’s telling the truth. He lives in a realm of fantasy. But it was he who planted the shrubs. He said coming straight from England, you would be homesick for a bit of green. You can buy plants from a nursery in Parramatta, rose bushes, geraniums, plenty of English flowers to stop you feeling homesick.’

Eugenia evaded his searching look, and asked how such plants could grow in the parched soil. The shrubs didn’t appear to be very happy.

‘They need to be kept watered. You can even have a lawn if you water it. Luckily water is one commodity we aren’t short of. I’ve sunk a very good well. And when it rains that little creek down the slope overflows its banks. There’s a lake five miles away where the black swans nest. You’ll find it charming. Well, my dear? Are you satisfied with your new home?’

As convincingly as he could wish, Eugenia replied that she found it quite astonishing, out here in the wilderness.

His look of gratification made her smile. She was touched that he had wanted so much to please her.

‘We’ll make it famous. We’re the aristocracy in this country, because we’ve come of our own free will. That makes us the true inheritors. Do you see what I mean?’

She could hardly tell him that at this particular moment she was reluctant to accept her inheritance. The dusty dry land—would it ever grow roses? Would she ever be able to walk bare-headed in the blazing sun, or get used to the wild melancholy uncanny bird calls or the enormous sky? Or the captive men who sometimes howled like dogs. She gave a little shudder that Gilbert took for physical discomfort.

‘You haven’t brought your parasol. It’s my fault, I should have insisted. I never want to see you out without it when the sun’s as hot as this. You have an English skin. I want it preserved. I don’t want a burnt-up sallow wife.’

‘Very well, Gilbert,’ she answered meekly. If carrying a parasol pleased him, it was a simple enough thing to do.

She held the parasol over her head when she took a walk down to the creek later in the afternoon. Still suffering from that miserable inertia, the aftermath of last night’s unnerving experience, she had felt too languid to do anything but consent when Gilbert had suggested that the arrangements in the house be left until the arrival of the bullock dray with Mrs Jarvis, and the remainder of the baggage. It had become too hot even in the shade of the verandah where a rocking chair had been set out. Gilbert had said the creek was dry, but she thought she could see the shine of water. It looked cool.

Strolling down the half-mile slope was a small diversion in the boredom of the afternoon. For immediately after the midday meal Gilbert had gone off to his vineyard leaving her alone. He hadn’t bothered to conceal his impatience to get there.

She was glad to see him go, yet when he had done so she felt unbearably lonely. Jane, who had cheered up considerably now she saw that she had not come to a hovel, was busy washing and ironing the clothes they had worn on the journey. Yella, the native woman who looked at least a hundred years old but who must have been reasonably young since she was undoubtedly pregnant, had served an almost uneatable meal of tough cold, mutton, pickles and stale home-made bread. Eugenia had had to take herself sternly to task for feeling queasy at the thought of those brown hands touching the food. But she had eaten only a mouthful or two of the mutton. Poor Gilbert, if this had been his daily fare. Tomorrow she would take the servant problem in hand. There must be young white girls in the town of Parramatta who would come out here to learn to be housemaids.

Yella could remain, of course. Eugenia had no intention of being unkind, but in future the woman must have nothing to do with the actual cooking. She could prepare vegetables, under Mrs Jarvis’s instructions, wash dishes, sweep the floor. She would no doubt be happy enough. She looked a lazy creature. How unattractive the Australian natives were, with their low brows and deep-set animal eyes. But they were friendly and harmless if they were treated kindly. One didn’t need to fear a spear in one’s back. They had a musical language, too. Yarrabee. That was one of their words.