The Promised Land. Mudrooroo

preferably a mature man who would be able to give the necessary stability to their overimaginative daughter. It was on their second evening at the dinner table that the newly-titled knight, Sir George Augustus, made their acquaintance. Enquiries revealed that he was of dubious ancestry, though possibly of the Durham Augustuses, and a widower of independent means as well as of some status in scientific circles. Apart from this, he was short and rotund, with a baldness concealed by a wig of gingerish colour. He also had a roving eye and often it settled on Lucy. The parents did not object and they invited him to share their table. It was soon obvious that he was smitten by the pale, blonde girl and in proof of this he composed some indifferent verses:

      The sky’s blue is bordered,

      Alack a daisy,

      By the fringed lashes of palest bronze;

      Let it be said that a beating heart

      Becomes all mazy

      With thoughts of sweet bindings,

      One to another.

      This did elicit a smile from Lucy and, thus emboldened, he approached her parents, who, after ahumming and ahemming and a settlement of two hundred a year, agreed to him as a protector for their dear, dear daughter. He did not notice their sigh of relief. Lucy lurched into a crisis when she was presented with the decision. She wanted a young Byron (without the pain), not an ancient chap who, once when he had been seen walking with her, had become a laughing stock as a sudden dash of breeze had whipped the red wig from his head and sent it flying off like some errant rooster with him in short-breathed pursuit. Still, her parents made some allusion to her malady and to the necessary stability that a mature personage would engender on her flighty nature, and even sat genially through a tantrum or two as their daughter adjusted to the idea of her new future. Eventually, her sullen face creased with frown lines, Lucy surrendered her life. She found herself the wife of an elderly man, though one who did not neglect his marital duties and in his way loved her to some length; for, like many older men, he was slow to spend but he remained smitten, enjoying showing her off as a property well worth the expense.

      Marriage did indeed put an end to her sleepwalking, but not to her dreams, which now were tinged with a vague eroticism which her husband’s embraces stirred rather than alleviated. She turned pensive, restless with inchoate desires which fluttered her heart and pinched her face. She might have continued like this, growing steadily sour, had not Sir George received a commission to voyage to a faraway colony on a tour of inspection. This news raised her spirits and she twirled about the floor in a dance step. Of course she would be going, and where to? The Great South Land! It would be a perfect romantic wonderland, she knew it, she knew it. And Sir George, in the face of such enthusiasm, could not deny her the imagined pleasure, though he knew the substantiality was nowhere near the perfection of her dream.

      At first glance, the Great South Land did seem romantic in its desolation; and before this impression could be replaced by one of tedious boredom, the young wife met a mysterious woman, a Mrs Amelia Fraser, who fascinated her much as a serpent is said to fascinate its prey. Lucy welcomed this feeling, for she had been pining for her best friend, Mina, now thousands of miles away in the motherland. The woman had a strange malady (that is, if it was not mere vanity) being unable to receive the full light of the sun on her skin. She appeared in public completely draped in black so that not a patch of pale skin showed. Even her features were hidden, beneath a deep bonnet and a closely woven net, Lucy had a somewhat unorthodox imagination and so Mrs Fraser became the dark figure to which she had surrendered in many of her dreams. Now, here she was in the flesh and just as powerful. Lucy’s eyes sought to penetrate the veil and she flushed as she felt a return gaze examining her form. Her innermost being began to tremble with an intensity such as had left her gasping in the troubled electric air of the fishing village where she had had Mina alone to herself for perhaps the last time. She sighed at the memory, then turned away blushing as she remembered their playful games.

      In her present dreams, Lucy often found herself trapped, lying naked and helpless under the onslaught of some dark figure while being pierced through and through as if by large hot needles. Now she awoke from such a dream, her body tingling from its exertions to be free. She stretched and as she did so there was a tapping at her door. It opened to let Mrs Fraser (and her beast) slip through just as the sun was sinking from the sky. She sat beside the still-dazed girl and in the gathering darkness made smalltalk. Then with a sigh of ‘at last’ she tugged off her bonnet to reveal her pale face and hair. She turned her burning gaze on the figure of the girl, much like a carnivorous animal might on its prey. Then her hands were pushing up the shift Lucy had been sleeping in and pulling it over her head. Lady Augustus had sat up for the latter, and now completely naked she flushed a deep startled pink which made the woman even more assertive.

      Lucy was a willing, but submissive participant. To emphasise her complete subjection, Mrs Fraser tied the girl’s hands and feet to the bedposts with scarves. She glared down at her spreadeagled victim as she stripped off her own bulky garments. Naked, she sat beside Lucy, gently stroking her cheek, before parting the girl’s blonde flowing hair to reveal the pulsing vein at the side of her neck. Lucy’s helpless eyes stared up at the woman’s face as she felt the fingers pressing against the jugular vein through which her blood soared in anticipation. She moaned as the woman’s lips and then other lips touched her skin. She had forgotten about the dingo.

      The imprisoned girl writhed, but not to be free. At the extent of her vision, at her loins, was the thin tawny animal lapping away with a long tongue that, sweeping in and out of her, made her body squirm. The sensations were of such strength that she did not at first cognise the lips at her throat turning into hard teeth, two of which were as sharp as needles. This she knew suddenly, as they bit down. She felt the blood spurting from her and into a mouth clamped about her wound just as her body spasmed and spasmed. She gave a piercing scream and then went limp, content only to be fed on.

      The government mission was of a minor nature which Sir George Augustus, bored in England, had been urging his patron in Bath to get for him. Now he and his new wife had voyaged to this distant and most obscure colony of Westland whose only settlement was a squalid collection of shacks clustered about a few substantial buildings below a rise on which the governor’s house squatted: a dak bungalow transported from India with rooms opening onto a surrounding verandah. Although it might have served for a waystation for company officials in India, it lacked the dignity of a seat of government and so the governor, at his wife’s urging, had commenced a more substantial dwelling, which after a lengthy correspondence had been sanctioned by London. At the moment only the foundations had been dug, for all work had come to a standstill with the egress of almost the entire male population from the town.

      The dwelling indeed was small even for the limited affairs of the colony. The largest room, which had to serve as a dining room, drawing room, library and often as the governor’s office, was crowded with bulky furniture. A piano stood in one corner and in the other the governor’s desk. A bookcase leaned against another wall, and there was a sofa, two easy chairs and a small table with a large leather armchair beside it, which might have been termed the governor’s residence, for in it he sat for hours at a time, sipping on brandy when he could get it, or rum bartered from the ships when he could not. There he sat like a Hindoo yogi contemplating nothing, except when he became the harassed husband; then he thought about how to avoid his wife, Rebecca Crawley, who had never grown used to being exiled at the edge of the known world. She lamented her evil fate much too often for his comfort and when it had grown too overbearing he had petitioned the colonial office for a better posting. These requests were acknowledged, and that was all, for in truth the obscure posting was the result of Rebecca Crawley’s own misdeeds and had been engineered to get her as far away from the capital as possible, to put a stop once and for all to her meddling in affairs above her station.

      Now, the unhappy woman arranged herself on the sofa in her once sumptuous finery, an evening dress of a heavy velvet material which draped her hips in countless folds while leaving her shoulders bare. With a weary shrug, she tossed her black hair – often dyed, now streaked with grey, but still carefully arranged to dangle curls about her narrow fox-like face – and leaned back attractively as her deep dark eyes studied the man who held the floor. His small dainty feet, shod in Bond Street leather, supported