‘Mrs Douglas has expressed an interest in the vineyard, Charles,’ says Georgiana to her husband. ‘And I suggested that it is a task she might begin with the boys.’ ‘Strange work for a lady ,’ Captain Swanston r eplies. He has joined them for tea in the conservatory . It is the twins’ birthday , and a table is arrayed with scones, sandwiches, a leg of smoked ham, fresh bread and preserves, and for each boy his favourite cake—a fruitcake for Nowell and a gingerbread for Robert. ‘Surely such a task requires a phalanx of workers, Mrs Douglas?’ Swanston says. ‘These rogues are almost certain to be insufficient for the task.’ He tousles the head of the nearest son. ‘Father!’ says Robert. ‘W e want to help!’ ‘We do!’ say Geor ge and Nowell. ‘And you will continue to learn your sums?’ Swanston asks his boys. They nod enthusiastically . ‘I shall see to it they do, Captain Swanston,’ says Caroline. ‘It will just be a little pruning to see what might be revealed.’ ‘I cannot imagine anything more healthful, after their mornings at the school,’ adds Geor giana. ‘You know my thoughts about winemaking here, Mrs Douglas,’ says Captain Swansto n, ‘but Dalrymple was saying to me only yesterday , at the council meeting, that good wine is hard to come by. You might speak with the Walkers. They have a vineyard and some knowledge of the process though, being great advocates of temperance, they make only vinegar and a rough medicinal wine for the hospital. Still, if, after your explorations, you find small boys inadequate to the task, perhaps I can be of assistance in securing more ef fective labour .’ Caroline inspects the Walkers’ vineyard with Julia Walker, who points out some of their older vines and where there are early indication s of rot and
insect incursions. These will be r eplaced with new plants. She speaks of mildew and mould. She shows Caroline how to cut back all but three or four strands of the healthy vines to just a few feet long. ‘It looks straightforward here,’ says Caroline, ‘but the whole vineyard is tangled with weeds. It takes minutes to free even one of the plants before I have any chance to observe the plant and cut it back.’ ‘Have you any experience in grape growing?’ Julia asks. ‘I do not. We grew table grapes in our glasshouse in London, but we did not make wine. And ...’ But there Caroline halted. There must be no mention of her father. ‘Perhaps it is the potential that calls me. I do not like to see such an opportunity gone to waste.’ ‘And you have an understanding with Captain Swanston, should you entice the vineyard to become productive once more?’ ‘Yes, of a sort.’ ‘Well, do not let your hard work go unrewarded.’ ‘The Swanstons have both been nothing but kindness,’ Caroline says. ‘Yes, Georgiana is a delightful woman, but Captain Swanston ...’ Here she pauses and Caroline waits. ‘I want only the best for you as you settle in here,’ Julia continues at last. ‘Captain Swanston is a shrewd and capable man of business and politics. I do not wish to speak out of turn, but only to ensure that you are well protected in any commercial arrangement you might make with him.’ ‘Do you think investing here is imprudent?’ Caroline asks. ‘I think all of it is a great risk in this colony, for there is no certainty we will ever be without the strictures the colonial government insists on imposing. My husband and I prefer to ke ep our savings close and to live modestly until we can secure a suitable building for the school. We go slowly, ensuring we are not reliant on the decisions and ambition s of others. But perhaps you are keen to be underway .’ ‘Thank you, Julia,’ Caroline says. ‘I do appreciate your counsel.’ ‘I think you are wise to seek the allegiance of Swanston, but he is a man who will always put his own interests first. Now, shall we go in for dinner? My sister and her husband will be joining us. She is expecting her third child.’ It is the second time the Walkers have made Caroline welcome at their dinner table. Caroline finds she likes the Quaker silence before the meal. It
gives her a moment to settle and breathe, to find r epose beyond all her racing thoughts. As they are finishing the roast lamb, Caroline says, ‘I find it very strange to think that there was an entirely different people here such a short time ago.’ ‘You refer to the natives?’ asks the husband of Julia’s sister. ‘They were removed.’ ‘It would be more accurate to say murdered and kidnapped, Mrs Douglas,’ says Washington Walker. ‘“ He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? ”’ quotes Julia. ‘It is very grim, by all accounts, the place to which the last of them have been sent,’ says Julia’ s sister. ‘But we have heard that there is a church and a school,’ says her husband. ‘We are the beneficiaries of their stewardship,’ says Washington . ‘When I first came here, it appeared to me as a sort of garden. There were many great trees and wide grasslands along the river and far up into the hills, but now it is given to she ep.’ ‘Or has become over grown,’ adds Julia. ‘You may have seen a few of their children about, Caroline,’ Washington says. ‘Half-castes and such. I cannot understand why they have not been sent to be with their own people.’ ‘The Queen’s Orphan School has quite a few, too,’ adds Julia. ‘Did you know there are more than seven hundred children residing there?’ Caroline did not. ‘I am told that the slightest offence is met by a flogging,’ says Washington. ‘Perhaps when we begin our own school,’ says Julia, ‘we can offer scholarships for such students.’
The Swanston boys and Quill are leaping from the loft into the straw below. Caroline stands in the door of the barn and watches a shower fall across the fields leaving behind a double rainbow arcing across the entire valley. She turns and sees an eagle mounting a current. It seems strange to have the boys learn of English kings and queens, ancient Greek and Latin, when it is all so far from here. The histories of London, Constantinople, Athens and Rome. As if those peoples belonged to another world. How was she to convey to these boys the sense of their part in the continuum of human life, when the houses, the buildings, the boats, the wagons, the gardens, even this vineyard planted barely more than fifteen years ago, all of it was new, a r eplica under construction, paying homage to a country the boys had never seen. She could take the boys to the grove of she-oaks and show them the flints that she and Quill had discovered. A people now gone as the Phoenicians were gone, the Spartans, the Lydians, Thracians and Parthians. Perhaps Marco Polo had felt the same when he visited the Orient. Did he find evidence of peoples who lived there before and now dwelled only in story and myth? What became of stories when no buildings or statues, carvings or crypts remained to recall the people of such times? What could she convey of her own ancestor s? What did she really know of their daily lives, their curiosity , their habits and peculiarities? She thinks of the blacksmith, Cornelius. She can often hear him at work in the barn. The various notes of his tools striking metal. What brought him here? Who were his people? Did he feel, perhaps, as she felt? The reassuring distance of Van Diemen’ s Land from all that had come before? The conqueror Alexander might have done it differently if he, and not the English, had arrived and sought to enfold the peoples of this place into his kingdom as he had the Orientals. But spiritual tolerance was not the way of the English. Nor the French. Nor the Spanish.
She felt doubt dampening her spirits. She must look upon Europe as the future destination of the Swanston boys. That was where they would go within a few years to complete their education and find their professions. Possibly Quill, too. But is it wise or right to think in that direction? Would the society here ever rival that of Europe? Was here the new future? She might be living at the birth of an empire, but how would one know? How would one pr epare? When Caroline had asked Mrs Roper, on a recent visit, what she made of the young Queen Victoria, Mrs Roper had said, ‘Treasono us words I know ... but I have been pondering what I owe her? I am sure I would like her well enough if we were to sit down and have a cup of tea. I expect she is very polite. But being sent off with not a thought to how I might fare, a girl of fourteen, and never allowed back. Gone so long from that place it hardly seems real. What a lot of fuss it is, really. The soldiers in their uniforms. The Governor with his plans for some new Government House, a great thing to be built out there on the riverfront.’ ‘To what or whom do you feel a sense of loyalty, Mrs Roper?’ Caroline asked. Mrs Roper turned her head and stared out the window . ‘I’m getting old. I know when snow is coming because my hands ache something terrible. I’ll be buried, and that will be the last of me. And I don’t mind that; I’ve had an interestin g life. But it makes me think that maybe what I am really the subject of is that there river, and the mountain. Am I crazy to have such thoughts?’ ‘Not at all,’ Caroline said. ‘Should we bow? I do sometimes feel like bowing to the mountain.’ And they chuckled at this, and Mrs Roper poured them both another sherry. The clouds clear, the rainbows have dissipated. A brilliant blue sky returns and, with it, the welcome warmth of winter sunshine. Caroline calls the boys to her. They come with straw in their hair and clothes twisted and pulled from their antics in the hay . She instructs them to tidy themselves. Nowell jostles George, who stumbles against Robert. Robert pushes him back. Quill looks on, amused. ‘I remind you that a classroom can be many things,’ Caroline says sternly. ‘You could have your knees under a desk and a teacher with a
switch to settle your fidgeting fingers. Or you can be here, on this special occasion, learning about grapes. You are expected to work with all the diligence you give to your indoor studies. Am I understood?’ They look at her with a sort of fear attended by regard. It is almost a recipe, she thinks. She wonders what Captain de Hoog would make of her young crew . Georgiana has provided a pair of gloves for each of them, and as she pulls them on Caroline observes the S stamped carefully into the thumb. ‘Who makes such things for your family?’ she asks. ‘Cornelius,’ says Nowell. ‘He makes our shoes, too.’ He sticks out his foot and Caroline observes the sturdy leather boots. She gives each boy a pair of shears and asks them to gather about as she kneels and begins to chop back the grasses. The ground is damp and Caroline is grateful for the mats Bessie had sent with Quill. Feeling around the first vine, Caroline hopes it is true that there are no snakes at this time of year. ‘They are extremely venomous ,’ Georgiana had said. ‘Both the black snake and the copperhead. Several men have died from the bite, and last year a child in the midlands was bitten and suf fered a horrid death.’ Robert had shown her a picture he had drawn of his father with a dead snake. Captain Swanston had his arm outstretched and the snake hung from his shoulder to the ground. Caroline remembers sarsaparilla. Grown in Italy, Spain and other warm countries. Both leaves and berries drunk before or after any deadly poison are an excellent antidote. It helps the aches of sinews and joints, running sores in the legs, all foulness of the skin and cures the pustules of venereal disease . Her father’s friend, the herbalist Dr Culp eper , would have to begin afresh. A world of plants that would take a lifetime to study and document. Had any of the early settlers learned from the natives the medicines of this land? How foolhardy it seemed to her that all the ancient knowledge of this place might have been lost. She had spent many days walking the banks of waterways and traversing fields with her father looking for comfrey , hedge mustard, the roots of elecampane for ridding the stomach of worms. Flaxweed or toadflax for weals, pimples, spots and l eprosy. Cowslip to strengthen the brain and nerves. There were mosses and fungi from ground and tree, many
useful for women and each with its own properties. Plant knowledge that had been gleaned, passed on, shared and refined. People living alongside plants, tending and harvesting them for both food and medicine. ‘It was my boyhood,’ her father had said. ‘Amongst the grapes with Philippe and the other workers, learning the way of grapes.’ ‘Do you wish for a vineyard, Papa?’ she had asked him. ‘Henriette and I talk of it. She is very keen to live there again one day .’ ‘In France?’ ‘In Champagne,’ he had said, and his face took on a look she rarely glimpsed. ‘Does it make you sad, Papa?’ ‘A little,’ he had r eplied. At last the trunk of the vine is revealed, low, gnarled and grey beneath the weeds. She shows the boys how to trim away most of the outer growth, choosing two or three canes and cutting these back to a foot or so in length. ‘Do not chop your fingers of f,’ she says. ‘Nor anyone else’ s.’ ‘This is going to take a long time,’ says Nowell, sighing. ‘It is lucky then that we have until spring,’ says Caroline, but as she regards the overgrown acres, she sees that he is right. Progress will indeed be slow. And lessons must continue. As they set about their labours, she calls out to the boys, ‘What mineral sits on the table every night?’ After a pause, Robert says, ‘Salt.’ ‘Yes, Robert,’ Caroline r eplies, ‘and what is meant by minerals?’ ‘Rocks,’ he says. ‘Everything beneath our feet. It’s all made of minerals.’ ‘Nowell, can you add to this?’ Caroline asks. ‘Coal is a mineral,’ he says. ‘And limestone. Clay . Sandstone?’ ‘Yes,’ says Caroline. ‘It is composed of minerals. And do you remember what makes coal special?’ ‘It burns,’ he says. ‘It ke eps us warm.’ ‘And where does coal come from?’ ‘Mines,’ says Geor ge. ‘Convicts dig it up.’ ‘Not always convicts,’ Caroline says. ‘But here, yes. And somewhere close by there is a very lar ge mineral.’ Quill looks up at her, and then his eyes widen. ‘The mountain,’ he says, staring beyond her to the slopes beguiled by cloud.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I understand it is dolerite, and some say it was once a volcano. Who remembers where the word “volcano” comes from?’ ‘He was a god,’ says Nowell. ‘V ulcan.’ ‘He threw thunderbolts that he made for Jupiter,’ adds Robert. ‘I drew that.’ Soon Caroline’ s back is aching from the bending, and her arms are weary from the tugging of grasses and the wrangling of vines. She wonders if letting in the chooks might be helpful in breaking up the weeds and soil. She will discuss it with Bessie. The scale of the endeavour seems overwhelming. ‘ Ne sois pas découragé ,’ she can hear her father saying—a phrase he employed when snails or slugs had eaten the greens in the glasshouse, or a rat had been at the lemons. All right, Papa, she r eplies. I will not be discouraged yet. She spies a large wombat hole disappearing back under the stone wall. She and the boys gather around it, observing the curious square droppings at the perimeter of the burrow . ‘Do you think this is the only way out?’ she asks the boys. Robert says, ‘I have seen them run down a burrow like this, but come up later over there.’ Caroline and the boys stuff the hole with weeds and cuttings. She trusts that the wombat, if he is still within, will find another exit from the vineyard. She looks about at their small patch of effort. A tiny section of the vineyard has been cleared of weeds and pruned, the passage between the plants tamped down by feet and knees. ‘You have done a wonderful job, all of you,’ she says. ‘But it is growing chilly. I think that is enough for today . We have made a beginning.’ ‘Huzzah!’ says Nowell, wielding his shears. ‘Be careful!’ she admonishes, but the other boys are joining in the cry. ‘Huzzah, huzzah!’ Caroline cannot help but raise her own shears and join the boys in their salute. Back at the barn they stow mats, tools and gloves. Caroline can hear Cornelius at work in the for ge. ‘Robert,’ she says, revealing a cake tin hidden in her basket, ‘you cut, the others choose.’
Robert dances for a moment with delight, then dives towards the tin. ‘I’m so glad to have girls,’ she hears her father say. ‘A boy is easily motivated by food, but a girl needs curiosity .’ ‘And Quill,’ she says, ‘will you please take a piece of cake to Cornelius? Tell him he is most welcome to join us.’
Cornelius brings Caroline a stool to sit on. He places a slate on the bench and invites her to put her hand upon it. She is made slightly uncomfortable by the ease with which he has arranged her, his proximity to her, and yet he is gentle and deferential. Jefferson, the manservant of the family where she had been a governess in New York, the friend who had posed as her servant when she secured her passage on the Alliance , had been born a free man, the son of a Southern slave who had fled north. The sailors on the Alliance had all borne evidence of accident and brutality , but the black men’s scars were by far the more serious. ‘I do not ask about their past,’ de Hoog had told her. ‘If they prefer the sea to the land, that is enough.’ Cornelius produces a length of chalk and begins to trace the outline of Caroline’ s hands. She sees the way his nails are almost as black as his hands, a blacksmith’ s hands, and she looks down at her own and finds new affection for the remnants of earth evident under the nails. ‘I have set myself a task, Cornelius,’ she says. ‘No small task, Mrs Douglas, if it’s the vineyard you have in mind. And with a small tribe of boys.’ ‘They grow weary of it even after two afternoons. But if we can retrieve something from beneath all that ...’ Caroline realises that from his forge, the whole valley is laid out before Cornelius. There is little he doesn’t see of the movement of humans to and from the harbour , and the wagons and carriages going north towards other townships. ‘There have been more than a few who have planted a vineyard here,’ Cornelius says. ‘But few who outlasted the cold, the rain, the birds, the opossums, or simply the years waiting for the vines to mature.’ Caroline observes the lines in Cornelius’ s face as he captures the boundaries of her hand.
‘Have you grown grapes before, Mrs Douglas?’ Cornelius asks. His voice is low and soft. ‘I have not,’ she says. ‘And I do not know what is really in volved in producing a single bottle of wine.’ ‘Yet still, you begin.’ ‘Does it seem ridiculous to attempt such a thing?’ He turns away , placing the slate with her outlined hands on a bench. ‘Some might say it is a calling,’ he says. ‘Do you remember the vineyard when it was flourishing?’ she asks. ‘I do, Mrs Douglas,’ he says. ‘I remember it very well.’ ‘And was the wine good?’ ‘By all account s, very good. Mr Broughton sold a great deal of it. It went to England and to Europe. One crate was sent to a famous wine merchant in London. Unfortunately , most of that cargo was lost on the voyage, bottles being easily broken. Little of the wine survived, but in a letter the merchant pronounced it very fine indeed and said he wished to make a sizeable order .’ ‘And then?’ ‘Mr Broughton never read that letter. He was gone by then. He died in his sle ep a young man. His heart gave out, they said.’ ‘Oh. I didn’ t know.’ ‘Many a day he was there at dawn and still there in the moonlight. He sent plants to people wanting vineyards both here in Van Diemen’s Land, outside Sydney and to South Australia. I imagine some of those vines are growing and fruiting still.’ Lineage. Caroline feels it. Something that binds the past irrevocably with the future. ‘It’s the right time to be cutting back,’ Cornelius says. ‘Mr Broughton started in May, especially if the snows came early. In July he grafted new vines onto the rootstock. He experimented with many varieties of grape. He had no time for the vines from the Cape colony. He found the grapes that did best were the same as those that did best in the cold parts of northern France. That’s why he had the notion to make champagne. And he always racked the wine under a new moon because he said the pressure in the bottles was at its most subdued.’ ‘What is racking, Cornelius?’
‘It’s when the wine is s eparated from the sediment that gathers from the first fermentation, Mrs Douglas. Sometimes it might wait in the bottles for a year and a half, sometimes longer .’ ‘Did Mr Broughton ke ep any journals? A library, perhaps?’ Cornelius regards her. A fresh-fa ced young woman with a dimple in her left cheek, pretty green eyes, small hands, and a formal way of holding herself. She is not who he had imagined might ask him such a question, yet here she is, wanting to know . ‘The land will teach a person a lot,’ he says. ‘Best to watch, let a year go round, Mrs Douglas. It takes time to get a sense of a place.’ ‘I am foolish, I think, to be contemplating this, Cornelius,’ she says. ‘Seems to me that we should attend to the things in our hearts, Mrs Douglas, if we can. So no, not foolish.’