An Unconventional Heiress

‘So,’ he said to Chalmers, who was directing operations, ‘I am to understand that the medical supplies which I ordered, and which I badly need, have not arrived. Your excuse being that there was not enough room for them in the hold. Tom,’ he said, turning to his companion, ‘which do you think ought to come first? The needs and health of the colonists, or the comfort and convenience of a fine lady and gentleman from England?’

His companion, a sandy-haired man with a pair of striking blue eyes and a humorous, rather than handsome, face, was wearing what Sarah was later to discover were the typical clothes of a Sydney Emancipist. Easy and careless, they consisted of a white-spotted red neckcloth, a loose grey jacket, baggy trousers, scuffed boots and a grey felt hat on the back of his head. He was pulling at his friend’s arm to indicate the presence of Sarah and John.

‘What?’ snapped his friend, turning his head and giving Sarah an excellent view of his eagle’s profile and a pair of furious grey eyes that were regarding them both with a look of ill-concealed contempt. John, with his stance and air of a gentleman, and Sarah, the very model of a useless fine lady with her cream silk dress and tiny parasol, seemed to be anathema to him.

Frank Wright could almost feel the Langleys’ indignation. ‘Steady on, Dr Kerr,’ he said cheerfully. ‘There’s no need to insult Miss Langley and her brother. That won’t restore your missing supplies.’

The hard grey eyes swept over him, too. ‘Squiring the ladies again, Wright?’ he said, unbending enough to doff his straw hat in John and Sarah’s direction before he strode off along the deck without waiting to be formally introduced.

His friend, raising an eyebrow, half-bowed, his bright blue eyes hard on Sarah and her brother, assessing them coolly without Dr Kerr’s open hostility. In contrast to his friend’s taut self-control he was all ease. ‘I am Tom Dilhorne, at your service. I hope to see you in my store.’

His voice carried overtones of a rural Yorkshire origin, but he could scarcely have been more confidently sure of himself than if he had been on equal terms with them for years. Lieutenant Wright made no attempt to introduce him, or to acknowledge him in any way when he, too, pulled off his battered felt hat before following Dr Kerr’s path along the ship’s deck.

‘Good God, who in the world were they?’ asked John Langley, his voice indignant. He was not accustomed to be spoken to in such a cavalier fashion. To make matters worse, the second, ill-dressed oaf was the owner of a shop!

‘Oh, Dilhorne,’ said Frank Wright carelessly. ‘Dilhorne’s nothing. He’s an Emancipist. I wonder he had the impudence to speak to you at all. That’s not true,’ he added, with a laugh. ‘I should say that Dilhorne’s got impudence enough for anything. The brute has even made a friend of one of the aborigines.’

‘Well, his manners are better than Dr Kerr’s, even if he is an Emancipist, whatever that is,’ said Sarah, furiously. She might not like circumstance, but good manners were good manners the world over.

Frank Wright began to explain to her that an Emancipist was a man or woman who had come to New South Wales as a convicted criminal, and who had served their term or been pardoned. They had no social standing, and were cut off from the colony’s elite, the so-called Exclusives, who were those free men and women who had gone out in the service of the Crown as civil servants, the military or the Navy, or who were free traders and farmers, there by choice, not necessity.

‘You mustn’t mind Dr Kerr,’ he ended. ‘That’s his manner. He doesn’t mean anything by it—what’s more, he’s the best doctor in the colony. The Governor swears by him, although…’

What the ‘although’ meant Sarah was not immediately to find out, for Carter, who had gone ahead, now returned with the request that Lieutenant Wright should arrange for the transfer of the Langleys’ possessions from the hold to the shore as soon as possible.

The Lieutenant, John and Carter left Sarah in the waiting carriage on the quay outside, her parasol up to defend her from the hot sun that shone down brilliantly on this inappropriate November day. ‘We shan’t leave you long, I trust. Corporal Mackay, the driver, will look after you,’ Frank Wright volunteered before he left her. He was invariably cheerful, Sarah was to find.

Sarah was not destined to lack company. First of all Tom Dilhorne emerged from the ship and saw her sitting on her own. He evidently considered himself to have been introduced for he came over to the carriage, pulled off his hat, and said, ‘Abandoned already, Miss Langley?’

From anyone else this might have seemed almost impudent, but his cool, laconic manner and his impersonal blue eyes seemed to rob his words of any undesirable overtones.

‘Indeed, Mr Dilhorne. But not for long, I hope. There seem to be a large number of ships in the harbour, which I confess surprises me very much. Why is this so?’

He answered her question as gravely as she had asked it without the accents of condescension that most men whom she knew employed towards a pretty woman. ‘Why, Miss Langley, Sydney is a major staging post in the Pacific already. There are ships from Macao here and Yankee whalers, too. The nearest one, The Sprite, is my own.’

‘I understood you to say that you were a store-owner, Mr Dilhorne.’

‘I am a trader, as well, among other things. I shall be unpacking some silks from Macao tomorrow. I think that you might like to inspect them.’

‘Huckstering away, Tom?’ Dr Kerr had arrived while they were speaking. His words to his friend were jocular, but his manner to Sarah was cool if not so brusquely harsh as it had been when they were on board ship. Behind him John, Carter and Lieutenant Wright were also coming down the gangplank, making for the waiting carriage.

‘Miss Langley,’ he said, ‘I must apologise for my earlier discourtesy to you. I fear that my anger at the non-arrival of some of my stores was transferred to your brother and yourself.’ He half-turned towards John at the end of his little speech.

Before John could answer him, Sarah lowered her parasol and stared over Dr Kerr’s shoulder at Tom, who had retreated and was watching them impassively. Her reply was short.

‘Your apology is accepted, Dr Kerr, although there was no need to make one. My brother and I are well aware that our presence is not particularly welcome in New South Wales. However, that is no matter since it is unlikely that our paths will cross again.’

Her tone and her manner to him were as cold as she could make them.

Dr Kerr clapped his hat firmly on his head and answered her in kind. ‘You are mistaken, madam. Unless your health is perfect, or you are willing to settle for some half-trained leech from The Rocks, then you and your brother are likely to encounter me on a number of occasions. I bid you good day and good health—you are likely to need both.’

With that, he was gone, leaving Sarah with her mouth open and John amused at his impudence. ‘My sympathies, sister. Yonder colonial doctor is obviously made of sterner stuff than the puppy dogs who surrounded you in London. Not that I approve of his manners, you understand: they appear to be worse than those of his Emancipist friend.’

Sarah’s face was scarlet beneath her parasol and, although her answer to Frank Wright, who advised her to ignore Dr Kerr’s incivility since he was the colony’s only decent doctor, apart from a retired surgeon called Wentworth, was a composed one, she was inwardly seething not only at his rudeness, but also at John’s amusement. Later she was to admit that it was her own less-than-polite reply which was responsible for the doctor’s subsequent insolence. She was dismally aware that it was her own folly in travelling to this barbarous shore, plus the sense of rejection that she had felt since Charles’s jilting of her, which had combined to make her less than sensitive to the feelings of others.

At first, the passing scenery which surrounded them on their journey to Government House was a vague blur in front of which she mechanically exercised her forgotten good manners. She recovered sufficiently to ask Lieutenant Wright about something which had puzzled her in Dr Kerr’s rejoinder.

‘Dr Kerr mentioned The Rocks a moment ago. Are they a street or a district?’

‘The Rocks?’ Young Lieutenant Wright’s insouciance temporarily deserted him. ‘It is a district, Miss Langley. It is where the convicts and the rascals of the colony live. No decent person goes there.’

Unspoken was his conviction that Dr Kerr should not have mentioned the place to a lady of quality such as Miss Sarah Langley. For her part, Sarah was now painfully aware that Dr Kerr had been mocking her in recommending to her a physician from such a quarter.

She tried to forget the whole unhappy incident by a closer examination of her surroundings, but her thoughts reverted again and again to the uncivil Dr Kerr. Who would have thought that such a handsome and apparently polished gentleman could have taken against her—and John—on first meeting them? His behaviour had merely served to reinforce her conviction that the whole of the male sex was unworthy of the interest of a woman of sense.

A woman of sense would try to forget Dr Kerr by concentrating instead on her journey through Sydney, which, Sarah found, was composed of a strange mixture of building styles. There were ramshackle huts, cabins and lean-tos with children and chickens running around them, next door to houses that would not have disgraced a wealthy London suburb. There were flowers everywhere.

Sarah might have felt a little happier if she had not been suffering from the inevitable consequences of spending such a long time aboard ship. Her head was swimming and the ground, when she stepped down from the carriage, seemed to be moving beneath her. Her sense of relief when she finally entered Government House was great. Here, in this attractive, if small, building, she found a haven of rest: a room of her own where she was surrounded by modest luxury, pure water and clean linen.

Surely now she could forget both Charles Villiers and Dr Kerr.

‘It’s not like you to be such a boor towards a pretty young lady before she has even set foot in the colony,’ Tom Dilhorne offered mildly to his friend on their walk back to Tom’s gig. ‘Got out of bed the wrong side this morning, did you?’

Alan Kerr could not have said—indeed, he did not understand—why the first sight of Sarah Langley had roused such anger in his breast. After all, it was scarcely her fault that his stores had been left behind, but in some odd way her imperious chestnut-haired beauty had touched a nerve in him that he had long thought deadened by the years which had passed since he had arrived in New South Wales.

Was it that she reminded him not only of the pretty girl he had lost, but also of the life that he might have lived before his own folly had brought him to the other end of the world?

‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘I can’t imagine why such a fine lady and gentleman should wish to come here at all. They are exactly the useless kind of gentry the colony could do without. They will want servants, accommodation and care that should be reserved for those who are willing to work to make Sydney a better place for all of us. We could, for instance, really do with another qualified doctor. I am almost run off my feet, as you know. What I also know is that, far from the Langleys working, they will expect others to work for them.

‘I do regret, though, that I was so short with Miss Langley. It was not the act of a gentleman, although God knows, I cannot really call myself a gentleman any more.’

‘Short,’ drawled Tom, ‘that’s a mild word for biting the poor young thing’s head off. Still, I take your point about your stores, although you might have waited to make it later—and more tactfully. You’re usually the tactful one, not me.’

Alan Kerr began to laugh.

‘Come, come, Tom, you know that you’re the devious devil, not me—you ooze tact when you think that it will pay off. Now let’s forget the Langleys. With luck, I shan’t have much to do with them in future.’

Nevertheless, when he reached his home again, he couldn’t help thinking of Sarah Langley as he had first seen her in the pride of her beauty and wondered again why he had felt such fierce resentment at a sight that should have compelled his admiration, not his anger.

Chapter Two

Sarah was soon to find that in Sydney she and John were curiosities since so few cared to make the long and difficult journey from England, unless compelled by the law, or their duty. That they should have travelled so far to see and record this new fragment of Empire was strange enough: that they should come from the highest reach of English society was even stranger.

Lachlan Macquarie received them with enthusiasm. He had originally been sent out as the Colonel of the 73rd Highland Regiment, but after the mutiny against the previous Governor, William Bligh, in 1810, he had unexpectedly found himself the new Governor on his arrival. A highly competent man of strong principle, he was determined to make his newly acquired fief a land to be proud of rather than simply exist as a kind of dustbin for the unwanted and the criminal.

He was pleased to welcome John and Sarah precisely because they had come to study the colony’s beauties, and on the third day after their arrival he gave a dinner party in their honour in order to introduce them to the social life of Sydney. He could also painlessly, through his guests, make the Langleys fully aware of the forms and difficulties of life in this outpost of Empire.

Sarah was careful to dress herself as though she were going to be the guest of honour in the presence of the Prince Regent himself since, after all, the Governor was his deputy in New South Wales. She was magnificent in pale yellow silk. Her only jewellery, a beautiful topaz brooch, which matched the colour of her dress, served to add lustre to the striking beauty that had so overset Alan Kerr.