‘You would scarcely believe,’ she wrote, ‘how primitive we are here. All that distinguishes us from the Pomona is that the deck no longer heaves beneath our feet…’
She sneezed and looked around the tiny room. Dust was everywhere. Nellie Riley suddenly burst in, waving a feather mop and began to use it with great vigour—which only served to waft it around the room in a red cloud. This started Sarah sneezing again.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Nellie, looking anything but sorry. ‘Mrs Hackett was telling me to begin me duties by cleaning the room since it hadn’t been done for days.’
Her expression told Sarah, better than words, that the whole business of keeping clean was a complete waste of time so far as Nellie was concerned.
Sarah waved her pen at her. It was no longer fit to write with, but waving it somehow expressed her feelings.
‘Good God! Is it always like this? And where does the dust come from—and why is it red?’
‘Well, it’s allus hot, if that’s what you mean, but it’s not allus as dusty as this. It’s them bricks.’
‘Them bricks?’ asked Sarah faintly.
‘And the wind. Why, Mum, when the winds’ southerly the dust from the brick-fields blows across the town. It’s the Governor’s fault.’
This remarkable demonstration of the Governor’s climatic powers intrigued Sarah. ‘The Governor’s fault?’
‘Aye, Mum, cos he’s a-building of the barracks and the hospital and they need bricks from the fields. Are ye comfortable, Mum? Can I get you anything?’
Convict she might be, but there was a frankness about Nellie’s speech that interested Sarah, who was used to the servility of home. There was almost a contempt in the manner in which convicts and Emancipists alike spoke to the respectable. She knew now why Mrs Middleton had fumed to her about the speech and behaviour of the servants and shopkeepers in Sydney.
She sighed. The letter to Emily must wait. She walked to the window and looked out at the swirling red dust and the brazen sun. On the verandah opposite, not one, but two cockatoos, restless in their cages, squawked their displeasure at the world. She sympathised with them.
It was a relief when there was a knock at the door and Mrs Hackett came in with a letter for her. It was from Mrs Menzies, inviting her to a soirée at the weekend.
Later, looking back on this time, Sarah thought that her first weeks in Sydney passed like a dream. There was so much to arrange, so much to do that in the past had always been done for her. Fortunately for her peace of mind she had not encountered Dr Kerr again. He had been called, Tom Dilhorne told her, to treat a fever which was raging in Paramatta. His absence brought on such an access of high spirits that John feared that the fever had reached Sydney, or so he chose to quiz her, not knowing the true cause.
Sarah had been so busy herself that she scarcely found time to paint, although this had been the excuse she had given for undertaking this journey with John. Her father had encouraged her to develop her talent, but unlike John she had many duties that took up her time. First she had been her father’s hostess, her mother having died at her birth, and then, after her father’s death, she had performed the same function for her brother.
Coming to Sydney had seemed an opportunity to develop her skills since she thought that she would surely have more time to spend on herself. What she had not foreseen was that the primitive nature of life in New South Wales would create even more demands on her.
‘I would never have believed it,’ she told Lucy Middleton when they were upstairs in the Menzies’s bedroom, inspecting themselves in a long mirror before going downstairs to enjoy the pleasures of a typical Sydney soirée. ‘I spent this morning supervising the wash while Mrs Hackett went to the market to buy provisions. She had left Nellie in charge of it, but as you might guess her attitude to cleanliness is best expressed in the old adage, “what the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve over.” She actually said to me, “I don’t know why we bother, Mum, it will only have to be done again next week. All this dusting and scrubbing don’t seem natural to me.”’
Lucy adjusted a curl. ‘I really can’t understand why you bother with her, Sarah. Why don’t you just send her back to the Female Factory?’
Sarah gave a sigh. She knew very well that Mrs Hackett would have preferred to send Nellie back to the factory soon after she had arrived in the hope that she might receive someone more suitable in return. She, on the other hand, found that although she could endure the idea of women whom she did not know being cooped up in prison, it was unthinkable that Nellie, whom she now knew, should be sent back there.
It was her free spirit, which Mrs Hackett could not crush, that Sarah found admirable, with the result that she had ended up being the laundress herself in order to ensure that Mrs Hackett’s complaints could not be seen to be justified and Nellie’s removal determined on. She found it impossible to try to explain this to Lucy, particularly since she found herself out of sympathy with the rest of the colonial ladies whom she had met. Their preoccupation with precedence, which she had thought to be peculiar to Mrs Middleton, turned out to be common to them all. Being a member of the highest society in England, she found little to choose between all those beneath her in rank.
So she changed the subject of Nellie and Mrs Hackett and commented on Sydney’s fixation with precedence and propriety instead.
‘You see, Sarah,’ said Lucy while she was rearranging the flowers in Sarah’s hair, ‘you’re so grand yourself that you don’t understand the differences that lie between a clerk in the Government offices and one of the shopkeepers. What’s worse, you’re so sure of yourself that you can afford to talk to Tom Dilhorne and Will French, even though they’re Emancipists—and do the wash, as well. You don’t fear that you’re lowering yourself, as Mama does. And it’s no good saying Pish and Tush to me, either, that’s the truth.’
‘I like it when you scold me,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s like being scolded by a kitten. No one else, apart from John, ever reprimands me.’ Which wasn’t strictly true, because Tom Dilhorne had said something similar to her the other day.
‘Oh, you may laugh,’ replied Lucy, ‘but you know that you wouldn’t marry any of them. Only one of your own kind.’
She stopped and looked thoughtfully at Sarah. ‘I don’t know, though. There’s a wildness about you sometimes. Look at the way you spoke to Dr Kerr in Hyde Park.’
‘Oh, Dr Kerr.’ Sarah shrugged. ‘Let us not speak of Dr Kerr. Forgive me, Lucy, for saying this, but you amaze me sometimes—you look as though you haven’t an idea in your head—and then…’ and she shrugged again.
‘I know—that’s what Mama and the men think, that I’m stupid. It’s better that way, Sarah. You don’t annoy them—and you can always get what you want if they believe that you’re just a dear little kitten.’
Sarah nodded. ‘I know who is going to make a good marriage, thinking like that, Lucy. That is, if you don’t meet someone devastatingly handsome, and quite worthless, and fall head over heels in love with him. I don’t advise you to do that.’
Her tone was so bitter that Lucy looked at her curiously—but said nothing.
‘Come on, my love,’ Sarah said at last, slipping her hand round Lucy’s waist. ‘Downstairs with you so that we can try to find these paragons whom we ought to marry.’
They met Pat Ramsey in the little hall. Lucy moved away, probably to try to find Frank Wright, leaving Sarah to entertain Pat again.
‘Your servant, Miss Langley. No Emancipists here to amuse you tonight, hey?’
Sarah was annoyed to discover that her friendship with Tom was the subject of gossip, but she refused to betray her feelings.
‘I’m sure, Captain Ramsey, that Mrs Menzies’s guest list