Captive Wife, The (8 page)

In her heart, Adie Malcolm does not believe that Betty Guard will return. After the first day, when she has failed to keep their appointment, she tells herself she must contain her disappointment.

And yet each day at three o'clock, she finds herself waiting. The house is empty, except for Hettie the cook, for in this past week she has found reasons for the children to visit the homes of others. She knows this has to stop. This morning at breakfast, the lieutenant had called in, and drawn up a place at the nursery table. This is so unusual that Adie's hands had shaken and spilled tea on the linen cloth, long ago embroidered with love knots and daisies by her friend Emmeline for her hope chest. Pale golden daisies spiral out from the centre towards the edge of the cloth and then suddenly stop near the edge. She sees Emmeline's beautiful fingers with their translucent fingernails tracing a path on the linen as she explained why the daisies did not, as intended, cover every inch of the cloth. Emmeline had first set eyes on Gerald on her sixteenth birthday. Straight away
she had known she was in love. Her mother has been coaxing her to persist at her embroidery: all the other girls were doing petit point and tapestry while she was still on lazy daisy. She had sworn to her sister that day,
sworn
she had breathed in a whisper, that she would go on making daisies until the day he proposed marriage to her, and then she would learn to crochet. She was sure this would happen the very next time he saw her, for she had dropped her handkerchief and he had picked it up and put it to his cheek. So she knew that this sudden stinging attack of love was mutual. Only, unbeknown to her, he was about to leave the very next day for Prussia with his regiment. So for a year and two months she had sewed on and on, often, it seemed, in vain, until one day he appeared again, and as soon as he saw her fell to his knees, beseeching her to marry him. The hand she held out to him was worn from the thimble, and the daisies had spread across the cloth as if a thousand bees had pollinated it, but at least she was able to stop. And at that point in the recital she would say, with her small laugh that Adie had so loved, ‘It's nothing but a rag, something I would never use for more than serving the children their breakfast on.' Adie tried to keep it fresh for all but the one day of the week when she instructed the girl who came to clean in its washing and ironing. Every morning she encouraged the children to count the daisies, which Austen still did, though Mathilde was getting bored with the game. And the lieutenant must have forgotten for the moment, the way he put his elbows on the table when he sat down, although a slight frown flickered over his brow when the tea was spilt, and Adie could have cried with vexation at her clumsiness, and the pain her carelessness would have caused.

‘Forgive me,' she had said, as the stain spread among the little marguerites, wandering between the toast and the empty shells of boiled eggs.

He had shaken his head, as if uncertain of what she was talking about, watching his children. Mathilde is seven, a sturdy girl with dark braids and a full raspberry-coloured mouth;
Austen is a frail little boy of four with wispy blond hair, his complexion the colour of skim milk.

‘Eat up, old chap,' said the lieutenant, picking up a discarded crust dipped in egg yolk and thrusting it in the boy's direction. The child squirmed away, his eyes pale and yet hot at his father's words. ‘You'll never make a soldier at this rate,' said the man, and for a moment Adie thought him about to weep. His heavy moustache needed a trim; it was curling over his still full upper lip, redder than that of most men. This is where Mathilde gets her rosy smile. Adie had a swift impure vision of his mouth pressing down on Emmeline's throat which caused her to utter a small inarticulate squawk. She half rose to her feet as if choking on what she had just seen in her mind's eye. If it had not been for that woman and her talk, this would not have occurred to her. But at that moment his proximity jolted her senses, so she almost felt the ripple of hair on his wrists, lying on the table beside her, could smell his rank breath, like hay that had been out too long, or digestion in need of a good cleanout. She could taste that smell, as if his tongue were in her mouth. She had closed her eyes, holding onto the edge of the table.

‘The children,' he had said, as she lowered herself back into the chair. ‘Are you finding them too much, Miss Malcolm?'

‘No. Why ever would you think that, Lieutenant?'

‘Mrs Bowman says they have spent a lot of time at her place just lately.'

‘Oh really,' she had cried out. ‘Mrs Bowman has asked Mathilde and Austen to call so often since they lost their mother, I thought she would be insulted if I did not allow them to join her children more often. She has told me they are good company for each other.'

‘I beg your pardon, Ma'am,' the lieutenant said, though with a touch of insolence.

‘I am insulted,' Adie had replied. ‘Yes, that is what I am.' Of course, racing through her mind, was the conversation last week at the Governor's dinner party. She might have known there
would be repercussions. She wondered, then, if she should talk to the lieutenant about what had happened, her random comments, her disappearance with Mr Barrett Marshall that others would have noted, and perhaps repeated. But a voice within told her that that would be reckless, might complicate matters still further. It had even been on the tip of her tongue to tell him about the visit of Betty Guard. And yet, she found she could not.

‘Well, never mind,' Roddick had said, as if their difference was already in the past. ‘Perhaps if you could keep them home for a day or so, it would be all to the good.'

‘Really,' Adie said, this time with a touch of steel in her own voice, ‘an arrangement has been made for today, and if I am to be in charge of the children, then I can't simply cancel things at a few minutes' notice. I will keep them home tomorrow.'

‘That seems to be settled,' he said. ‘The headaches are all right?' he asked, apparently as an afterthought, and looked away, as a gentleman should when such matters are raised.

A flush travelled from Adie's collarbone and up her throat. For a moment, she felt betrayed by the late Emmeline. The headaches of her middle age are a secret she had shared with no one else. Besides, in the years since she has had the children to herself she has not had much time to think about the headaches and they have all but disappeared.

She felt her mettle firming, even as her cheeks flamed. ‘I will speak with Mrs Bowman's governess this afternoon about future arrangements for the children. I am sure they will be disappointed if they are not to see each other again.'

At five minutes past three on that Tuesday afternoon, the last one that Adie Malcolm will be free for some little while, there is a soft insistent rap at the door, and Betty Guard is back.

I have come dressed with care for I want to make a good impression on Miss Malcolm. My dress is navy blue, with ivory buttons fastening the front. I wear turquoise faïence beads around my neck, and my grandmother's best brooch for luck, not the mourning brooch that is shared by all the family, but the one she held onto after the fall, when my grandfather lost his money and land.

The brooch is made of gold filigree and cloisonné enamelling. My mother and my aunt both eye it as if it should belong to one of them (though, goodness knows, they would have fought over it) but Granny gave it to me and I will always hold it fast. By good fortune, I left it behind on my last voyage to Sydney, otherwise it would be lost in the bush that lines the coast of Taranaki. My capture took place, not on the way to Sydney, as many have supposed, but when the ship went aground on our way home to New Zealand. I have always kept a good wardrobe at our Sydney house so that I don't have to carry my town clothes back and forth across the Tasman. There is little call for
fancy clothes in New Zealand, not on a whaling station. All the same, I hadn't meant to leave Granny's brooch behind me when I was here for Louisa's christening. I was in a panic when I first discovered it left behind, for Charlotte cannot be trusted to keep her fingers out of my belongings. But as I often wear it, I suppose she never thought to look.

I feel dashing today, my outfit finished off with the silk scarf and bonnet I bought last year.

I have brought Miss Malcolm a gift of a paua shell, shaped like a small dish. The outside is rough but the inside is like luminous blue and green mother of pearl, streaked in swirling lines of pink and silver.

‘It is so beautiful,' she exclaims. ‘This is a jewel of a shell. I hope it didn't cost you a great deal.'

I laugh. ‘There are thousands of them to be had around the coast of New Zealand,' I say. ‘The flesh of the shellfish is black and like a steak. It leaves the strong taste of the sea upon your breath.'

She continues to sit and wonder over the shell. ‘Such blue. A
passionate
blue,' she murmurs, her voice quivering. After a further exchange of pleasantries, and discussions about the weather, she uncovers a prepared tea tray and goes to fetch some hot water. I hear her voice down the passage, low and insistent, as if she is having words with someone.

I have time to look around the pretty room, which I couldn't take in at all on my first visit. Though it is nicely decorated, it is a little shabby as if it hasn't had much attention beside cleaning for a long time. A portrait of a lady hangs above the mantelpiece. The woman is very fine-boned with one of those big straight noses, Roman I think they're called, and a look of pathos. She reminds me of Mrs Ivy Kentish who came to stay at our whaling station once and spent her whole stay with us in tears. So she had been shipwrecked and it was all a misery, but you learn to make do with what you've got, and at least she was alive. I could see this woman in the picture carrying on just the same, fainting and
fluttering her eyelids when she came around, and jumping horses without falling off. They're tougher than they make out, women like that, not my kind at all.

Miss Malcolm follows my eyes to the painting. ‘My dear friend Emmeline,' she says, as she pours water into the teapot. ‘We are out of mourning here, officially that is, but all of us still mourn her in our hearts.'

I wonder if Emmeline would still be mourning Miss Malcolm if things were the other way round but I do not say this of course. This explains the run-down front room, the rubbed fabric of the chairs. No point in giving her the name of a good upholsterer; Miss Malcolm is simply a servant in this house, even if she appears to have the running of it.

As I sit there, I'm aware that she is waiting for me to make some startling revelation. She too, has dressed carefully, as if for company. Her gown is of dull oyster satin, the neckline filled by a lace collar that frills about her throat.

But I have nothing to say to Miss Malcolm. She is old and foolish and I don't really know why I've come to see her. Well, that's not exactly true, I do have an idea, but it's not one I can tell her straight away.

‘I've been having bad dreams,' I say. But I cannot go on.

‘What have you been dreaming about?' she asks, as if this will get me going, like the reluctant child she once knew, and no doubt still sees.

Now that I'm here my whole plan seems mad even to me, and I'm madness itself. It's just this — since my last unrehearsed visit, I've remembered something my grandmother told me about fixing trouble. And Lord knows, I've enough of that. I've lain awake at nights, mostly alone, and pretending that I'm asleep when Jacky finally collapses beside me, and thought about Granny's advice. Find a virgin, her touch can heal — only the touch must come from the right thumb. Well, I suppose any virgin would do though I don't know a lot except those who are children at the Rocks. I want a grown-up one, and Miss Malcolm seems ideal.

But I can't see how I will get Miss Malcolm to touch me ever again. I could have offered to shake her hand when I arrived, but she would have thought that is what men do, and found it odd. Perhaps I could seem to faint and she would have to take my pulse to see whether I was still breathing.

But all this is nonsense, and so I think I will tell her about my dreams, as she has asked. Only, there are so many, and some I do not want to tell her.

‘I've been dreaming about my Granny,' I say, which is the truth for I dream of her almost every night. She is like a small dark sparrow hopping on the edge of sleep, admonishing me sometimes, but mostly praising me, for Granny believed in me. I was her special child.

I can tell that Miss Malcolm is disappointed. ‘Granny is where it all begins,' I say. ‘There is no story without Granny. She is the person who has loved me most truly and asked nothing in return, and now she is gone. She speaks to me from the grave and without her I would not be alive now. Granny Pugh is at the centre of everything I have to tell about my life before I married Jacky Guard.'

‘What have you dreamt of her?' asks Miss Malcolm, as if by humouring me I will move on to something more interesting.

But I cannot tell her. Granny comes to me in many forms, and you know how it is, it's easy to forget dreams when you wake, and there are so many in my head, I cannot sort one out from another today. Sometimes she comes in the form of an old black spider, spinning her web, for even when she was old her eyes were dark coals and her skin tawny. Some say spiders mean money, others say they're a sign of death, and Granny herself was served death too often.

‘I will tell you about my grandmother, and perhaps that will help me understand all this trouble in my head,' I tell the governess.

Miss Malcolm has no choice but to sit and hear me out.
My grandmother was born Hannah Smith, in the old country from where you are from, near Winchester. I believe her parents died when she was still young and she was left alone. I have wondered whether she might have come from gypsies. At any rate, she became a servant girl, which is where she fell in with a bad lad called Daniel Gordon.

Perhaps she was set to marry Daniel and wanted to look smart at the church, who can blame her, I like to look nice myself. At any rate, he was with her when she took some clothes from the house in Upham where she worked and Daniel was a groom. The mistress said to Daniel, tell Hannah to go and help herself to some of those old clothes that have been put out for pedlars. Or that is what he told Granny.

But the mistress must have changed her mind, or perhaps it was never true in the first place. Granny did say that there might have been confusion as to which pile she intended to throw away, but that was never clear to her. She took a red cloak, and it was not until later that she remembered that red was an unlucky colour, as well as two pairs of shoes and a pair of stockings.

Next thing, she is arrested for stealing, and finds herself in the dock at Winchester Quarter Sessions. She was sentenced to seven years' transportation beyond the seas. No word of what happened to that rascal Daniel Gordon. He'd vanished. What he did leave for Granny to remember him by was a little boy, and this lad was only three months when she was ordered onto one of the hulks. This is fifty years ago, around 1785, before the First Fleet set out for Botany Bay.

You will know of the hulks, Miss Malcolm, although perhaps you never saw one. I hope for your sake that it is so, for they are wicked places. Not that I have seen them either, for I was born free in Australia, so I can only go by what I've been told. As well as my grandmother and the man she later married, my grandfather Edward Pugh, my family are all from convicts, including my husband John Guard.

They put Granny and her baby in the black hole at the
bottom of the ship because she screamed and cried to be let out so she could find Daniel. Well, to hell with him, don't mind my language, Miss, but she was better off without him. Granny was locked up in that place with her little baby, all in the dark, and all alone, and nothing but muck to eat, but she must so she could keep her son, her little William, alive. She wept and pleaded to be let out into the light, for she feared the baby would go blind, and all the time she had an iron around her leg so that she could not leap at her gaolers and kill them as she would have if she could. When I remember Granny, I wish for nothing more than I could have been there to help her do the job. But I was still to come, a long way off, and far down in her history.

When Granny got to Sydney a long time had passed. By then little William, my Sweet William as she called him, as if he was a flower, was going on two years of age. On the way to Sydney she was taken on and off three ships altogether, which may have been because she kicked up such a fuss. She told me she would fight other women on the ships for scraps of food for William, even if it was something you or I would think twice about feeding to a dog.

First, she was put aboard a ship called the
Charlotte
, the name she gave my aunt. I've lived with Charlotte on and off since I was a girl. At Rio de Janeiro they took her off that ship and put her on another called the
Friendship
, and on board that one was my grandfather. At that time he was the lover of a woman called Elizabeth Parker and they had a child called Nancy.

I see how that surprises you, Miss Malcolm, for Elizabeth Parker was my name, my true name, when first you knew me, and now you are wondering if I've simply made you up a ghost story. Hear me out.

I don't think there were many rules for transporting convicts, for later on they separated them out, the men from the women. My grandfather had been ordered to go to America for stealing a greatcoat, but at the last minute, due to a war over
there, he got sent to Australia too, along with Elizabeth and their baby. I remember him as a small man with a pockmarked face and a leathery skin. He seems to have had a way with women.

I did ask my grandmother, was it because of Elizabeth Parker that they put you off the
Friendship
, because it occurs to me that my grandmother might already have had eyes for Edward Pugh, who would become my grandfather. And I wonder, did the two women come to fighting.

She would not give me a straight answer over this, but as I was a child I can see why. The reason she gave was she had smuggled eggs aboard for Sweet William. But on the journey she was found out, and eggs on board a ship are said to cause contrary winds, and there are sailors who will not allow them on a ship. They will not even say the name of an egg and are more likely to call it a roundabout. So all the roundabouts were tipped overboard, and at the next stop, which was the Cape of Good Hope, she was taken off and put on to a third ship which was called the
Lady Penrhyn
, and it was by this means she eventually got to Sydney.

Meanwhile, the
Friendship
carried on to Sydney and within a month of its arrival Elizabeth Parker was dead, but that is the way it is, there are always the dead when the convict ships sail, and this happened right at the beginning when more died than arrived alive. On the other hand, it could have been that my grandfather had turned away from Elizabeth, having met my devilish Granny, and Elizabeth died of a broken heart, but who's to know?

There were more deaths to follow.

By this time Granny's ship had arrived in Sydney, and she too had come ashore to join the people living in tent city. Soon she and Edward Pugh met up again. She must have given him a good deal of comfort. It would have made sense for them to set up a new life together, especially as she had Sweet William to consider, and he had little Nancy. They would have seen at very close quarters how short life could be, and how pointless it was to wait.
The authorities gave permission for the marriage to take place. Granny always remembered her wedding anniversary, even if my grandfather did not. What is the date Edward, she used to say, and jab him in the ribs with her elbow. When he looked blank, as he always did, she would say, it is the fifteenth of June you old fool, the date I wed thee, and count back the years to 1788, when this wedding took place.

To my grandmother, it seemed some good was coming out of all her trials. She looked forward in great excitement to her wedding day. A little wattle-and-daub church had been set up along what is now George Street. The weather was crisp and clear in the days leading up.

Nine days before the wedding, her Sweet William died. He fidgeted and cried in the evening but he didn't have a fever, and she settled him down to sleep, and then herself. When she woke, William was still and cold beneath the blanket, and she cried, ‘God have mercy on me, what have I done?' My grandfather took her in his arms and said, ‘It is nothing you have done. It is this place, and it is too far away for God to hear us.' When she told me this she wept, and that is the only time I saw my grandmother crying, though she did say that the following week, she cried all the way through the wedding service. As well as her grief over little William who had come so far, and suffered so much, only to be snatched away from her in a moment of happiness, I think deep down my grandmother felt guilt over Elizabeth because it was her my grandfather should have been wedding. She may have wondered if it was an eye for an eye. My grandmother said she should have known better than to agree to marry on a Friday, but perhaps she didn't have much choice. Do you know how the old rhyme goes, Miss Malcolm?