‘Well, you see, Captain Lovell,’ she hastened to appease him while it was still easy, ‘it was the gathering of the tribes — for corroboree.’
‘Did you take part in their corroboree?’
‘As much as a woman is expected to. It is the men who perform. The women only accompany them, by chanting, and by slapping on their thighs. Oh yes, I joined in, because I was one of them.’
‘Did you understand what you were supposed to be singing?’
‘Of course not. I was not with the tribe long enough to pick up more than a few words in common use. But surely it is possible to understand what words are about without understanding the words themselves?’
The Commandant more than likely did not understand, but was writing. Mrs Roxburgh suspected that what she understood had little to do with words, in spite of tuition from Mr Roxburgh and his mother. So it would be throughout her life.
‘There was one morning,’ she remembered, ‘very early, when I came across some of the members of my tribe, in a forest clearing. I never understood so deeply, I believe, as then.’
‘What were the blacks doing?’
‘It was a secret ceremony. They were angry with me and hurried me away.’
‘Because you saw what they were at?’
‘It was too private. For me too, I realized later. A kind of communion.’
‘If it made such an impression on you, I should have thought you’d be able to describe it.’
‘Oh, no!’ She lowered the eyes she had raised for an instant in exaltation.
The Commandant threw down his quill, and sat back so abruptly the chair and his heels grated on the threadbare carpet.
‘To return to our more factual narrative, it was at the corroboree, was it not? that you first saw the escaped convict who, according to my informants, rescued you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and added, ‘I am sorry that friends I hold dear should have informed against me.’
The Commandant could not suppress his irritation. ‘Isn’t it natural for human beings to exchange information on matters of importance?’
‘Yes, and I am unreasonable, I know. Mr Roxburgh often suggested that.’ She smiled at her hands as they tightened on each other against the sash.
‘This man — the convict,’ Captain Lovell suggested, ‘would have told you his name — or a name — I don’t doubt.’
‘Yes. Chance. Jack Chance.’ She pronounced it softly because she could not remember ever having spoken it before in its entirety.
The Commandant echoed it, little above a whisper. His quill engraved, then embellished it, but in the margin, because he might not have accepted the name.
‘Don’t you believe in him?’ she asked sharply.
‘There was a man called Chance who bolted, but before my time. I have it in my predecessor’s record.’
Captain Lovell continued embellishing the name ‘Chance’ with curlicues. ‘How did he treat you?’
‘With the greatest kindness and consideration.’
‘His reputation is not of the best.’
‘Oh, I know he is a crude man. But I am used to crudeness, Captain Lovell.’
She looked at him to reinforce her assertion, and his blue eyes snapped at her.
‘Haven’t I lived among the blacks? But had I not, to live is to experience crudeness.’
‘From what I have heard of the Roxburgh family, I should have thought, Mrs Roxburgh, that you had led a sheltered life.’
‘The mind is not always sheltered, Captain Lovell, from its own thoughts and imaginings.’
It must have sounded eccentric. She could read distaste in the expression of his mouth; he was only used, no doubt, to sweetness and compliance in a woman.
‘The man Chance,’ he asked, ‘how is it that, after accompanying you on this arduous journey, in what can be termed a gallant rescue, he ran back into the bush on reaching the Oakes’s farm?’
‘He was frightened, of course.’
‘But could he not imagine that his action might weigh in his favour, perhaps even earn him a pardon?’
‘I promised him a pardon.’
The Commandant frowned.
‘But he was still frightened, naturally,’ she said, ‘after all he suffered. The scars are in his back.’
‘Those were from the old days,’ Captain Lovell grumbled.
Then he looked at his witness and asked, ‘You did not by any chance discourage him, did you? I have known men frightened by forceful women.’
‘He is a forceful man. He cannot have been discouraged by any action on my part. I promised him a pardon,’ she insisted.
‘My dear Mrs Roxburgh, the pardon is for His Excellency to grant, upon my own recommendation.’
She had begun twisting her hands. ‘But I promised it, Captain Lovell! I have nothing left in life, not even my wedding-ring, which I preserved till the last day — and lost. Nothing, I tell you! It is for this reason — and surely I deserve some reward for all I have undergone? for this that I insist on a pardon for my rescuer.’
After she had subsided into unhappy silence the Commandant seemed to be listening for reverberations.
‘Perhaps you do not realize, Mrs Roxburgh, that the man was convicted for the brutal murder of his mistress, herself a slut of the lowest order.’
‘Oh, Captain Lovell,’ she cried, ‘most of us are guilty of brutal acts, if not actual murder. Don’t condemn him simply for that. He is also a man who has suffered the brutality of life and been broken by it.’
She could hear, she could feel herself, gasping with the desperation of the farmyard in which she was reared: the calf with the knife at its throat; the hissing goose whose neck she herself had severed; more relevant, and worse, she could see the terror in Jack Chance’s eyes, and the mouth on which her own had failed to impress that loving-kindness which inspires trust.
The Commandant poured his prisoner a generous quantity of brandy. ‘You are carried away by a tender heart,’ he decided with approval, to which was added the slightest dash of irony.
‘Duty’, she protested, ‘will not allow me to keep silent.’
Would his sense of irony persuade him to question her claim? She was almost too shaken by emotion, as well as too fogged by brandy, to care which direction her defence took. The tumbler with only the dregs left was hanging aslant in her hand.
When suddenly she asked, because it had been nagging at her, ‘Who is the other survivor?’
‘A fellow named Pilcher, the second mate, who was in command of the pinnace when it became separated from the long-boat in a storm. Do you remember?’
‘I remember Mr Pilcher the second mate.’
‘But the circumstances in which you last saw him?’
‘Yes, I expect I do. But it was all storms for weeks on end — and dreams — or nightmares. I believe I was delirious for much of the time, from drinking sea-water — and the birth of my little boy. Had not Mr Roxburgh sustained me throughout, I would not be here.’
She had stood the empty tumbler on the desk, and sat twisting the invisible band on her ring-finger.
‘I think’, said the Commandant with cruel persistence, ‘I should bring you together with your fellow survivor. He is a little unhinged, poor wretch. He is working at present as a clerk at the Commissariat, and shows no inclination to proceed south or be forwarded home. Yes, I think you should meet. The exchange of common experiences may exorcize some of the ghosts in your recollections.’ The Commandant was standing above his victim, looking down upon her with what could have been scientific detachment or vindictiveness, though if taken to task, he might have professed solicitude.