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An Unconventional Heiress Page 20


  ‘True,’ said Lucy, ‘my own feeling is that everyone’s getting worked up about nothing. I do so wish that I could go with you to Grimes’s farm tomorrow, away from all the silly gossip, but Mama would never hear of it, so I didn’t ask.’

  Sarah told John of Lucy’s story about the kangaroo when, much later, he came home, having dined at the Officers’ Mess again.

  ‘A cup of tea only,’ he said, waving away Sarah’s offer of a light meal. Over it he suddenly remarked, ‘I saw Alan Kerr today.’

  Sarah, answering him, was surprised to find how steady her voice was. ‘And did you have occasion to speak?’

  ‘Yes, I told him that I hadn’t seen much of him lately, and he explained that he has been infernally busy. It seems that he has been engaged in a battle with O’Connell over the treatment of the convicts. Kerr has told the Governor that he doesn’t think it is sufficiently humane, and of course, Macquarie has agreed with him. O’Connell is saying that he won’t be instructed by an ex-felon on the proper way to deal with criminals. I suppose that he has a point. After all, Kerr did come here as a convict.’

  ‘You used not to think that. You used to like Dr Kerr,’ returned Sarah a little bitterly.

  ‘I still do, but he is sadly lacking in tact. A typical Scot. He asked after you, though. I told him that you were well and were looking forward to going home.’

  ‘Then you did not tell him the truth. I do not want to go home.’

  Unspoken were the words: and I do not want to leave Alan for good. If I do not marry him, then I shall never marry anyone.

  ‘Oh, come, Sarah,’ said John easily, ‘you know that you don’t mean that. Of course you want to go home. Think of what is waiting for you there.’

  Sarah rose abruptly and looked out of the window. The blue and red cockatoo hanging in the veranda of the house opposite could be heard screeching its boredom.

  ‘Nothing is waiting for me there. The trouble is, there’s nothing waiting for me here, either. Only Lucy’s wedding; once that is over, my life will be a desert.’

  John shrugged his shoulders. There was no talking to her these days. He said, trying to sound amused, ‘I see that you are determined to be contrary. When we were in England you wanted to be here. Now that you’re here you don’t know where you want to be.’

  ‘I think that I would like to be at Grimes’s farm, helping in the fields, or even at the hospital, doing something useful. I am sick of idleness.’

  ‘Come, come,’ said her brother. ‘You know that in your station of life these things are impossible. Ladies don’t work.’

  ‘Then perhaps they ought to,’ said Sarah, and, unable to bear being with her brother and constantly being told what she ought to do and think, she left him and walked upstairs to her bedroom. She could not tell him what she really wanted.

  She wanted to be with Alan. Her whole body yearned after him. Until she had met Alan she had never known that she possessed a body. Now it had taken her over quite ruthlessly, so that the cool lack of interest which she had always shown to her suitors, and which she had partly maintained with Charles Villiers, had disappeared as though it had never been.

  She ached to be with Alan, to see him again, to be in his arms, to learn from the book of love with him… For the first time she felt that she understood what the marriage ceremony meant when the groom addressed the bride with the words, ‘With my body I thee worship.’ She knew now that such a statement held true for the bride as well. No etiquette book, no novel that she had been allowed to read, had ever hinted at such a thing. Love had been a mental, not a physical, attribute and to express it through the body had not even been an idea to discuss. The heroes and heroines were bloodless creatures.

  Downstairs her brother, unaware of how his sister really felt, was telling himself that once she was home again all this would be forgotten. Kerr would be forgotten. To that end it was convenient that she wished to visit Grimes’s farm. By the time that she returned their passage to England might be assured and, in the excitement of packing, her foolish tendre for Alan Kerr would disappear. More than that—he had embroidered his original lie to Alan by informing him that Sarah’s pallor these days was because she was pining for Charles Villiers and was finding their wait for a passage home intolerably long.

  Afterwards both Alan and Tom were to regret that, while John and Sarah were going ahead with her visit to Nellie, they had had no opportunity to warn them of the dangers and urge delay. At the one function that the Governor gave before Sarah was to leave—another dinner for the notables of both sides—neither John nor Sarah was able to attend.

  Not that John would have taken any notice of them. He had spoken to O’Connell about Sarah’s visit and the Colonel had assured him that the journey would be safe—but that Carter should carry a case of pistols with him. As a result, Sarah was packed into a carriage with her luggage, her painting equipment, a rag doll from Sukie for the baby and a parcel of baby clothes that she and Lucy had made from the scraps of delicate material which were the off-cuts from Lucy’s trousseau.

  Lucy and the entire Langley household, including Mrs Hackett, gave her a truly royal send-off. Sukie was in tears at the prospect of losing Sarah for a fortnight. Sarah’s own feelings about her short holiday were mixed. In the last few days, while walking around Sydney, she had looked for Alan in an attempt to speak to him, but had never had the luck to see him. Carter, who appeared to know everything, had told her one day, apparently idly, that ‘Dr Kerr is working at the Hospital these days’.

  Tom’s dismissal of John’s intellect—or rather lack of it—was never more just than when John was using it to consider Sarah and Carter’s future. He had no inkling that Carter had already decided not to return to England and had arranged to take up employment with Tom as a useful man of all work when he moved into his new villa on The Point.

  Alan Kerr was sadly amused, but not surprised, to learn that one of the on dits running around Sydney was that part of John Langley’s reason for sending Sarah away was so that he would be able to live a more free and easy social life. For the first time he would be able to sample the various delights that the fancy ladies in the Rocks offered, without having to lie to Sarah about the reason for his returning home shortly before breakfast.

  His carefree fortnight was crowned by his invitation to a party in the Officers’ Mess to celebrate Major Stewart’s thirty-fifth birthday and his survival as a bachelor to that great age. After dinner the company adjourned to Madame Phoebe’s, where such a good time was had by all that John finally arrived home, completely fuddled, around four of the clock, and then managed to sleep through all the early excitement of the Rising, as it was always to be known.

  Alan Kerr had worked late at the hospital on the previous evening. It was fortunate, he thought, that he was so busy, because otherwise he might have forgotten his rule about not drinking. To drink himself senseless would at least have the merit of enabling him to forget about Sarah, but would render him incapable of being useful when he was most needed.

  Early the next morning he was woken up by the sound of men shouting outside. He ran to the window to see half a dozen soldiers, bayonets fixed, running along the street. In the distance a trumpet sounded. Suddenly a volley of shots coming from the centre of Sydney rang out, to be succeeded by more shouting and the sound of a bugle.

  In the middle of this brouhaha Drew McMaster arrived to pound on his bedroom door, bellowing, ‘Wake up, wake up, sir. We shall be wanted. The Irish have risen and they are fighting the soldiers in the streets.’

  Alan, who had begun to pull on his clothes, shouted back, ‘One moment, and I shall be with you.’ He picked up his medical bag, which lived on his washstand, and flung the door open.

  ‘What time did this begin?’

  ‘Recently,’ Drew panted back at him. ‘It started under my bedroom window and then the fight moved on. There are dead and dying lying outside—mostly Irish, I think.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Alan
wryly. ‘They can’t expect much mercy from O’Connell now that they’ve proved him wrong. Which way do we go?’

  ‘George Street,’ said Drew, who was carrying his own medical bag, eager to put into practice what Alan had been busy teaching him. They ran down the stairs and into the street. The noise of firing grew louder and louder until, suddenly, before they reached the corner of their road, which led into George Street, it stopped and a ghastly silence fell.

  Once they turned the corner it was plain that the attempt at a rising was already over. The small group of Irish rebels, and the even smaller one of dissident convicts, which had set up a makeshift flag and some crude barricades in George Street, were either lying dead or injured around the flag, or had already run through the streets leading to the bush with the soldiers in hot pursuit after them.

  The long volley that Alan had heard had disposed of their leadership: in particular the main organiser, Francis Xavier Ryan, who, realising that the Rising had failed, had called for quarter from the military. He was now lying dead in his own blood, shot down as he spoke. The looked-for support had not materialised and his dawn foray had failed miserably. To this extent both the Governor and his critics were right: the Governor in his belief that an uprising was likely, O’Connell and his officers claiming that it was unlikely because it stood no chance of success.

  Alan, joined by Tom Dilhorne, who had left his bed on hearing the noise of the brief battle, walked over to Pat Ramsey, who was one of the officers called out at short notice to deal with the rebels and who had ordered the series of volleys that had disposed of their leaders.

  ‘It’s all over, then?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pat briefly, gesturing at the wounded rebels lying around their dead leader, and at those who were not vitally injured and were trying to drag themselves away. Their arms were lying scattered on the road. They consisted mainly of old fowling pieces, improvised pikes and scythes and a few wooden staves whose ends had been cruelly pointed. It was hardly an arsenal that could have given them victory against O’Connell’s disciplined men.

  ‘May I treat the wounded? With your permission, of course.’

  He looked at the soldiers, some of them leaning on their muskets and others who were helping their fellows to improvise bandages for the few wounds that they had sustained in the hand-to-hand fighting which had preceded the final skirmish. Drew was already in action, helping them. Pat followed Alan’s gaze, and wondered whether there was censure in it.

  ‘I didn’t join the Army to shoot down stupid, barely armed peasants,’ he said stiffly. It was not the sight of men dead in action that affronted him, but the sheer pointlessness of the whole business. Useless to say that he was not a butcher when O’Connell had ordered them to refuse quarter—that is, surrender without further loss of life when the rebels called for it—until the leadership had been disposed of. It might make good military sense, but was distasteful for all that.

  ‘I also,’ Pat told them, ‘have orders that you are to attend to our own men first. The other poor fools must wait their turn. I must also warn you that some disgruntled rebel might take a pot shot at you at any moment, so be careful.’

  Pat was completely different from the cheerful, light-hearted, friendly fellow that both Alan and Tom had always known: he was transformed into the complete soldier, doing his job impersonally and dispassionately.

  ‘Very well,’ said Alan, ‘but by the look of it, Drew is capable of looking after your men’s light wounds. With your permission I shall, with Dilhorne’s assistance, take charge of the rebel wounded. Tom, I wonder if you would be good enough to help me.’

  ‘Can Dilhorne help you?’ queried Pat.

  ‘Indeed. He was my medical aide on Norfolk Island and a good one, too.’

  ‘Go ahead. I shall organise some stretcher-bearers to carry them off to prison when you have said that they are fit to be moved—or to the cemetery. You may simply be prolonging their lives so that they may be tried and executed—but you have your job, as I have mine.’

  Alan and Tom laboured together as they had not done since Norfolk Island. It did not take long. Some of the wounded had died before they reached them. Tom said when they both straightened up at last, ‘I was told on the way here that the rebels broke immediately and that the majority of them deserted at once and fled to the bush. They have a camp there—or so I was told.’

  ‘Is there anything going on in Sydney which you don’t know of, Tom?’

  ‘Not much, and the rest I can work out. Come home with me and have some breakfast—we’ve earned it.’

  They began to leave when the first stretcher-bearers arrived and with them the soldiers who were ready to chain and march away the walking wounded.

  They had barely left George Street when, of all people, they saw a frantic Sukie running down the road, tears streaming down her face.

  She stopped when she saw them. She was so short of breath that she couldn’t speak properly, but began to pant incomprehensible words in their direction. Alan took her by the shoulders and said gently to her, ‘Wait a moment to get your breath back, Miss Sukie, and then tell us what is wrong.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad I’ve found you both,’ she managed at last. ‘It’s Miss Sarah, Miss Sarah… In the whole of my life she was the first person ever to be kind to me and through her I met George, I mean Carter, and you and Mr Tom, and you were all kind to me, too.’ She stopped and began to sob uncontrollably.

  ‘Miss Sukie,’ said Alan, taking her by the hand. ‘Think a moment. What is it that you are trying to tell us about Miss Sarah?’

  ‘That she’s been visiting Grimes’s farm and that George took the carriage there yesterday afternoon to drive her home this morning and, oh, I’m afeared for them both. The road leads back through the bush and they might be caught by the rebels running away from the soldiers to the camp they’ve built there—and what will happen then?’

  She had, as once before, begun to wring her hands. This time it was Tom who took them. ‘Sukie, have you spoken to Mr John about this?’ He was not surprised that Sukie almost certainly knew more about the details of the Rising than the military and her betters.

  ‘Oh, yes, and that’s why I came looking for you now it’s over. He won’t listen to me. He says that Colonel O’Connell said that Miss Sarah would be safe and that I’m making a great fuss about nothing. He sent me back to the kitchen with a warning.’

  In all the years he had known him, Tom had never heard Alan swear, not even in the depths of his misery on the transport and at Norfolk Island, but when Sukie had finished he let off a volley of oaths about John Langley that left both Sukie and Tom dumb.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wiping his face with his handkerchief. ‘I shouldn’t have said that before you, Miss Sukie.’

  ‘I’ve heard worse most days.’ She shrugged. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Visit John Langley first,’ Alan told her, Tom nodding agreement, ‘and then we shall set off to try to find Sarah—you will come with me, Tom, won’t you?’

  ‘Aye to both proposals,’ Tom said.

  John Langley, a fuddled expression on his face, never even allowed them past his front door. He stared at Sukie, saying, ‘I suppose that she’s been filling you up with her nonsense about Sarah.’

  ‘Is it…’ asked Alan, trying not to let the anger that filled him cause him to set about Sarah’s brother immediately, ‘is it true that George Carter is driving Sarah home from Grimes’s farm this morning?’

  ‘Yes, what of it?’

  ‘You mean that you aren’t afraid that they might be in danger?’

  John Langley shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why should they be? The Rising was a damp squib, is already over and, in any case, O’Connell said—’

  He got no further. Alan, his usual calm face purple with anger, seized him by his cravat and began to shake him.

  ‘You damned short-sighted fool. Miss Sukie here has more common sense in her little finger than either you
or O’Connell in your whole bodies. How dare you palter with your sister’s safety by claiming that she’s not in danger? Don’t you know that when the military dispersed the rebels they fled into the bush in the direction of Grimes’s farm? I’ve a damned good mind…’ and he began to shake John, who was only able to splutter back at him while his face turned purple.

  Tom interrupted his friend and put a calming hand on his shoulder, saying equably, ‘Let go of him, Alan. You’ll strangle him if you’re not careful, which would help neither you nor Sarah. Let’s away to do that since her brother has no mind to save her.’

  Alan, recalled to sense, loosened his hands from John’s throat and stood back from him. ‘You’re right as usual, Tom, but mark my words, Langley, if ill has come to Sarah through your inaction then be sure that I shall come back and make dog’s meat of you—and if I swing in consequence it will be worth it.’

  With that he turned to Tom. ‘We’ve no time to lose. Miss Sukie, if you’re in any trouble, go to my lodgings and ask my landlady to look after you until I return.’

  She nodded agreement and ran into the house.

  ‘Well said,’ Tom told Alan with a grin, ‘and I might as well put in my pennyworth before we leave.’

  He, too, leaned forward and took the shaken John by his cravat. ‘Now let me tell you this, John Langley, you’re not only an excuse for a man, but you aren’t a patch on your sister as a painter, choose how!’

  Alan was still laughing at this last sally as they almost ran to Tom’s home over his office to collect what Tom described as the necessary armaments before they took horse for the bush, Sarah and Carter. They stopped to speak to Pat Ramsey on the way. He told them he couldn’t release any of his men yet to accompany them on their mission—O’Connell’s orders.

  ‘We can only hope that Sarah is safe,’ he said, ‘and that your journey is unnecessary.’ He looked hard at them both before adding, ‘Take care of yourselves, particularly you, Dilhorne—there’s some of those who’ve risen today who don’t exactly love you.’