For years Caroline will wonder if her father had made it to some distant shore, lost his mind, and lived some other life. She wants to believe that he would not have abandoned her if he had his mind. If he could write. If he could find a way back. She takes down the family Bible and regards the name of Jacques-Louis Auguste Henri Colbert. Years later, she adds a year but not a date for his death, because she will never know . Of Quill she writes nothing in the Bible at all, imagining that he, too, will yet come home, a figure on the pathway , a knock at her door. But he does not, and the ache will remain with her all her life. Thoughts of him come unbidden as she is hanging out the washing, stirring a winter soup, cutting back vines that grow on the wall at the rear of their garden, always a reminder of the vineyard. You wrote your life, my love, she thinks, when he walked into the fields of her memory . You wrote it upon my heart. Before she d eparts Everlea, Caroline gives away vine stock to friends. She sends barrels of plants to several farms outside Melbourne and also in New South Wales and South Australi a. Vines go to a family on the east coast of Tasmania where the weather is drier and more clement, and another barrel to the north of the island. Tasmania. It becomes the new name for her island home. A name to silence the past. An attempt to bury the brutal history of Van Diemen’ s Land. The major thoroughfare in the city of Melbourne is named after Captain Swanston. The Swanston sons go on to farm an expanding estate near Melbourne and acquire lands in New Zealand. Georgiana never returns from England. For Caroline there is a new home to tend and medicines to make up for John’s patients, ointments to create and powders to grind. It is good to find
herself healing people again. There are accounts to manage, and the needs of four daughte rs who arrive over the ensuing ten years. They lose their baby, Henriette, to scarlet fever when she is five. It is only a few weeks after the death of Cornelius. For a long time the voices of all the dead call to Caroline, day and night. John is infinitely loving. By the time she emerges from that hollow place of mist and shadows, she feels as if she is getting old. Almost forty . In time Everlea would be demolished, the vineyard cleared for an orchard, the giant gum cut down. The oak tree would grow and remain for many years, until it too fell to the insistence of progress. When her hair is white, giving her a fey look, Caroline is given a volume of poems by the American poet Emily Dickinson. She reads the words and is moved. ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – That per ches in the soul – And sings the tune without the wor ds – And never stops – at all – The desire for something more had run through her life. It had all been the fruit of hope. A slow vintage of family , a harvest of souls. Her father had been the murderer Jacques-Louis Colbert, imprisoned on Norfolk Island, but this was never mentioned. Nor was the story of his disappearance on his way to Europe with a cargo of wine, in the hope of establishing Van Diemen’ s Land as the new France for champagne. When her children and grandchildren ask her about him, she will tell them that his parents, a duke and duchess, were beheaded in the French Re volution. He es caped to England where he became an apothecary . She will not mention that he was also a brother, a vigneron, a murderer . If they asked her where he had died, she said falling from a roof in London not long after her mother died. She could find a grain of truth in that. She and John had agreed to this. It was for the best. Señor Clementi was a ghost who did not visit. She remembered the night in the forge, the tremor in Cornelius as he was handed the knife. She knew he could not do it. Not Cornelius. Nor could it be her father. Yet to let the man live would always risk Cornelius’ s freedom, and her father’s, too. So, she had taken the blade from Cornelius’ s hand.
She had considered the neck, the ease of severing the carotid artery, but no. Not that way. Laying the point against his chest, she felt the resistance of bone before she twisted the knife and pushed it between the ribs into the muscle of the heart. She observed the light going out of Clementi’ s eyes, but first the surprise and bewilde rment that this was being done to him. And by her. When she looked at her father, something inscrutable passed between them. I am your daughter , she thought. But it ends here. It ends now . None of them spoke of it in the days that followed. Nor the years beyond, when there was only Cornelius and Caroline to carry it. The truth must have no feathers to wing it to another time. It must become dust and blow away . Cornelius became a grandfather to their children, living with them until he died a quiet death while reading in his favourite chair by the fire. Bessie continued to live with them too and never married. She shared with Caroline the grief of losing Quill and Cornelius, and the miracle of every baby that arrived. She contracted measles and died when she was forty- nine. Caroline’ s daughters observed patterns in the stars and mused on history, the structure of plants and rocks, and the philosophies and creeds that shaped the world. They k ept diaries and sketchbooks, read poetry and wrote some of their own, learned French and painted watercolours. They might have devised mathematical theorems and solved medical riddles to shape the progression of humanity but, despite encouragement, they did not. By the time there was a university in the colonies where a woman might study, marriages had been made and children born. Greatness was neither expected nor sought of women. Their days were given to the growing and making of food, the healing of wounds. To the love and conversations that hold a community together , and a family. Babies died or survived. No one avoided the impetuosity of chance, nor the lamentation of loss. What did endure was a fondness for marmalade on toast. A desire to enquire into the curious. To grow and to harvest. To relish the good. To wonder at the unknowable. To feel the pain of the world and yet not succumb. The square knees of Jacques-Louis appeared in subsequent
generations, and his exuberant laugh, along with his and Caroline’ s love of botany, healing, books and history . There was Tante Henriette’ s appreciation for silk, velvet and fine bed linen. Hannah’ s skill, and Augusta’s, too, for painting, quilting, sewing, cooking and embroidering. Tablecloths and napkins, bedspreads and wall hangings were passed down, a watercolour or two, and an exquisite walnut chess set inlaid with a budding vine of gold. Grandsons started small businesses or took to the land, where they planted fruit trees and tended crops and livestock, pursuits suited to the remote island on which they were born, and vestiges of a grandmother who had been skilled in business and strategy . One great grandson carved a verse of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ’ into the lid of a chest because he loved the poem. There was, it must be said, an irritation in the family line with seemingly unnecessary rules and regulations. An urge, in fact, to break them. And a great love of acting. Also a dislike of enclosed spaces. But no one went to gaol. By and large they were kind and generous people. Prudent with money and careful with secrets. After a generation or two, it becomes hard to know who is to blame or applaud for family traits. The person who takes to drying herbs and planting crops, grinding spices and making cordials or tinctures, performing a sonnet or ruminating on the mysterious fabric of existence gives little thought to an ancestor also drawn to the same. Everything is sensitive to the unreliability of recollection, mould, fire, the whims of a moment. Over the years, journals were abandoned, paintings faded, recipes, letters, poems and photographs were eaten by silverfish and consumed by the great arbiter known as time. Much of our lives we are feathers, Caroline thinks. Barely touching the earth in the short breath of life. The days, the months, the seasons and years, even the century in which she had lived, they had not been the linear things they pretended to be. She saw that while her life had been particular to her, it had also been a tending to something unfinished. She did not know how far back the threads went; to people who lived long before there was a printing press or the fanciful notion of the earth cycling the sun. And further still to a woman who lived in a stubbled land of date palms and a wilting sun who sent forth, through her womb, stories that would visit the lives of her descendants in whispers and dreams.
Every now and then, she had been a coin dropping down to the sediment. A tidal creature from the great swamp that flows back into molten rock and salt water. A body is a flawed and brilliant container for human life. Hers was almost done and would soon become what it was drawn from. Dust, air, earth. Returned to the great wholeness. A fleeting presence who had seen this sparkling world and then was gone. ‘I have trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored,’ she thinks, varying the poem a little. A battle cry to make sense of a part of her life laid to rest. She knew the desire to be done with the past, and she also knew the desire for the past to contain all the wisdom needed for the future. She had been a wife and mother, benign names for such ample responsibilities and duties. A daughter and grandmother , too. A great- grandmother . No one would have described her then, at the end of her life, as a diplomat, medico, merchant or vigneron. Nor as a liar, a thief or a murderer . In this late hour, it is the light that calls her. The quiet fanfare of moonlight, the sunshine as the curtains are drawn back, the light of John looking into her eyes, a new morning cast upon the water. And now, and now, the welcoming light of death. This has been the canto of her life.