Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘Easier for who?’ the daughter asked.

  ‘That’s up to you to decide.’

  ‘Easier for you, maybe.’

  ‘As I said …’

  While Niall had been speaking, the settler had been watching him through narrowed eyes, trying to place him.

  ‘I seen yer about somewhere, haven’t I?’ he said.

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘I reckon I have.’

  ‘You’ve probably seen me riding around here. I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘Tell us what you’re here for,’ the daughter said. ‘You haven’t ridden out here for no reason.’

  Niall wasn’t used to conversation with women, besides the banter at the stores and a little in the line of his work. This woman had an open manner about her that he had known before. She reminded him of someone he hadn’t seen in some years. But there was also something different about her, the way she would throw a quick, uneasy glance to her father before she said anything.

  She had her arms folded now.

  ‘Tell us what yer here for,’ the old man barked. ‘Comin’ out here to waste a man’s time. Say yer piece and be on yer way.’

  ‘I need your name first.’

  Daughter and father exchanged a quick look, he about to refuse when she said, ‘I’m Sarah Delaney. This is my father, Abraham Delaney. My mother and my sister Louise are inside. Now, what was it you came here for?’

  Her father pulled roughly at the sleeve of her dress.

  Niall leant back on his heels. ‘Steady on. We’re going to take this place over for a while.’

  ‘Take over our place?’ the old man steamed.

  The daughter leant closer to say something to him but he brushed her aside.

  ‘Take over my place?’ he rumbled again.

  ‘That’s right.’

  From where they were standing a distance away Smales and Lightbody shifted weight on their feet, ready to jump forward at a sign from their sergeant. The settler had looked back briefly over his shoulder into the house behind him, they saw. There was no telling who or what else might be inside.

  Surprisingly then it was the daughter who spoke next.

  ‘Why our place? And who says you have the right to take it over? You can’t just take over somebody’s house.’

  ‘And land,’ Niall said. ‘We’re going to need your property as well. We’ll only be using it as long as we need to. Then it’s back to you in the same nick we found it in.’

  Sarah Delaney stared at the sergeant in disbelief. ‘You can’t just take over somebody’s land.’

  ‘There’s no choice.’

  Niall knew he had to be economical with his words now. Once he’d made up his mind about something there was nothing to be gained by retreating or conceding in any way. Giving ground would only mean more strife when he could see the settler was unlikely to be cooperative anyway.

  ‘What do you want it for?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Official business.’

  ‘Official business? What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that right now. It’ll be obvious enough before too long. In the meantime we’ll put you up somewhere else.’

  She laughed disbelievingly. ‘We won’t be staying under canvas!’

  ‘You won’t have to. We’ll be putting you up in a decent place. You’ll be all right.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Close to the diggings,’ Niall said. ‘But not too close.’

  As they spoke another woman appeared, more than likely Delaney’s wife. She made no attempt to make herself noticed as she stood behind her daughter in the doorway to the hut. Tall but frail, she mostly looked down as though she was never going to enter the conversation and had arrived at the door almost by mistake.

  Sarah Delaney stood appraising Niall for a moment, aware her mother was behind her now.

  ‘I think you’ll need to come up with better reasons than you have before my father will agree to us going anywhere. Just saying you want our place is hardly any solid reason.’

  ‘When do they have to go, Sergeant?’ Smales called out to his superior and for once Niall was glad of his interruption.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Again the settler picked up what he’d said.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked in the same incredulous, rumbling tone.

  ‘Yep, tomorrow, mate,’ Smales called.

  ‘So you’ll need to pack up what you need today. We’ll send some carts over first thing in the morning for the shift,’ Niall added.

  ‘You have to be reasonable,’ Sarah said. ‘We can’t do all that in half a day. You have to give us more time than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We’ve got no more time than that. We’ll round up your stock, record everything in an inventory and move them to good ground as well. The commissioner will sign off on everything so you’ve got some security. All we want is your place for a while, nothing else. The commissioner will give your father something for the use of your land for however long we need it.’

  ‘We’re not interested in your money,’ Sarah said.

  But the stridency had evaporated from her argument now. She was conscious of her father behind her, Niall felt, and there was some uneasiness there between them that went beyond the situation they found themselves in now. There was also something vaguely unsettling about the mother too, the way she wouldn’t look at anyone, the way she absently picked at her fiercely tied-back hair, straight and grey as tin. Then there was the absent second daughter.

  ‘We’ve got good reason for what we’re doing. I’ll tell you when I’m able.’

  He watched Sarah’s profile as she quietly explained something to her glowering father and he was struck by her appearance; the straight line of her nose, the rich, dark eyebrow, firm chin, black hair so thick he could bury his face in it.

  Whatever words were exchanged she seemed to decide on a change of tack. She crossed stumblingly away from the step so it seemed more an involuntary move forward than a wilful decision, to bring her to where she was just out of range of her father’s hearing.

  ‘I don’t know what will happen in the morning when you arrive, but be as careful as you can,’ she whispered.

  ‘What are yer saying?’ the old man barked.

  And she looked again at Niall, not in challenge or even appeal, but in some other deep way he didn’t understand.

  ‘We’ll do what we can,’ he promised.

  ‘Sarah! Get inside the door now!’

  The family retreated indoors, the settler pushing off the doorframe and quizzing the daughter heatedly. In doing so he afforded Niall a view of the hut’s interior, or at least the first room where a lush emerald rug spread over the floor. The furniture Niall saw fleetingly was made elsewhere: chairs with curved legs and a dark table of heavily varnished walnut or some other European timber. Niall figured the settler had done well out of supplying the diggings, and that on top of good prices for wool and cattle before the frenzy for gold began.

  The sergeant found himself trying to see more. The settler shut the door, yelling something indistinguishable in a final parting salvo.

  Then for a second the door flung open again.

  ‘You be ready for me whenever yer come!’ Delaney shouted. ‘Be ready to be taught a lesson yer’ll never forget! Never!’

  The door slammed closed and Niall stood staring at it while Smales and Lightbody approached.

  ‘We should’ve packed him up today,’ Smales said. ‘Now he’s going to be waiting for us in the morning. Sitting ducks, we’ll be.’

  ‘You think he’s going to go without any problems?’ Lightbody asked his sergeant.

  Niall turned and scanned the countryside around him. ‘What choice does he have? He’ll be all talk.’

  ‘It only looked like it was just him,’ Lightbody said.

  ‘Could be that tart gives us more trouble,’ Smales snorted.

  ‘We don’t know how they’ll be in the morning. We’ll just go a
s easy as we can. So long as everyone keeps their head down we should be all right.’

  ‘He won’t want to go without a fight,’ Lightbody reckoned. ‘I wouldn’t if I was him.’

  ‘Yep, but if I was him I’d sort you out so you’d be on your arse in two seconds,’ Smales said.

  Lightbody laughed. ‘Mate, you couldn’t knock shit off a shovel.’

  ‘Off yours I could!’

  But the trooper just laughed again and seeing where mud had caked the bottoms of his trouser legs, he shook each leg clean in answer.

  ‘You look like a dog shaking piss off its leg,’ Smales baited him.

  Lightbody was too easygoing to fall for it and instead pointed out another small pen tucked away further in the bush where Niall thought hens and geese might be locked up at night.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Niall said of Delaney. ‘He’ll get it all back when he returns. Just make sure we’ve got enough men and wagons here first thing in the morning.’

  As they rode away back down the track Niall mentally listed all the things they’d need to assemble this evening in preparation for shifting the settler and his family. When he was back at his own hut he’d write down their plans more formally, as he liked to do. There was something about the writing down of a thing that made it more real, seeing that black ink soak into paper and then reading it back to himself.

  This Delaney had been a convict either in New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land, Niall thought, and probably a good while ago now. But the mark of it never rubbed off and Niall could see it in the settler as much as feel it in himself.

  Delaney had made a good fist of opening up the countryside here though, there was no question about that. He’d thought things through properly and had set his buildings in the right spot where tree clearing was kept to a minimum. There was also a stream nearby barely touched by the rains, the settler’s stock fenced off with only limited access to it; enough to drink from but not enough to foul it. Several rude huts Niall hadn’t noticed before sheltered hay and neatly cut timber from the elements. The slat-rail fences were sturdy, as was the dogleg fencing employed for holding stock close by.

  Niall well understood the desire to make a good go of things. He was lucky himself to have survived Macquarie Harbour when many others didn’t, and there was a determination in him to improve his situation, not waste it like he had in the first years after his release from prison.

  His first job in Van Diemen’s Land after his release had been labouring work at Hobart Town, where he moved from doss-house to doss-house close to the water at Battery Point. In between jobs he drank to stave off the strange sense of loneliness born of being given his freedom. Hoping company would rid him of that feeling he spent raucous nights in hotels, his money disappearing before he knew it. He was aimless, often lost staring across the rippling water running away from the island. One year became two, two became three, though he managed to scrape a handful of pounds together.

  Eventually he became reacquainted with a former Macquarie Harbour inmate who had been given his freedom several years before him. Together they hatched a plan to begin an enterprise felling and carting timber from the hills behind the town. His friend Bernie Hobbs put the proposition to him one night over several glasses of rum in the Commercial Traveller’s Hotel, Bernie’s wonky eye leery when he explained what they’d need to set themselves up: crosscut saws and axes, men to do the hard felling work, oxen to drag timber out of the forest, somewhere to strip the timber into shape as they filled orders, wagons to cart it into town.

  What else? he wondered, thinking it couldn’t be that straightforward. He was both repelled by and drawn to Bernie: repelled because the man had the stink of failure all over him, drawn to him because he was someone Niall might talk to, to explain what had happened on that escape attempt, to someone who had known what Macquarie Harbour was like and who might understand.

  ‘Well,’ Bernie rattled on, his breath smelling of sour beer and expectation, ‘there’s the land. We’ll need to buy land to build a storage place for the tools and wagons and such, and ourselves, of course. We’ll need to live close by.’

  ‘Only one problem – two in fact,’ Niall countered. ‘We haven’t got much money. And we’ve got no land.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where I come into the story again,’ Bernie had said. ‘You get me a rum and I’ll tell you what we can do about that.’

  Niall’s new business partner knew someone who could put them right for a loan. Because he understood nothing about such things he assumed Bernie did. Niall would need to put in whatever money he could – his total savings of twenty-five pounds. Bernie, for his part, was ‘a little tight for finances at the minute’, but would come good once their business was up and running.

  He handed his money over reluctantly. He’d never held so many pounds before. But here was a chance to own a business, to be as normal as everyone else.

  What they’d had to borrow was terrifying, to him at least. And the forested hills behind Hobart Town were dark and black and tangled. During winter, rain attacked in horizontal sheets, winds like ice shaking him to his bones. Some days when the winds blew hard he shut his eyes and was as good as back at Macquarie Harbour, once having to drag the Ticket of Leave out of his pocket to remind himself he was a free man.

  Their timber-fellers were an erratic lot, coming and going as they pleased. Bernie soon took to running his part of the business, the finances and orders, from inside a ramshackle hut some of his mates had built, nursing a bottle through the better part of the day to help me think. It was left to Niall to deal with the day-to-day matters. When competition arrived in the hills in the form of a bank-backed company from Sydney he knew the best they could hope for would be supplying local, small-fry builders. Their business started going backwards amid heated arguments when he would come in from overseeing a job to find Bernie hunched over his papers, asleep. Any sense of camaraderie had long since vanished.

  And then one night he was called to the back of a hotel in town to find Bernie mangled on the cobbles, thrown and trampled by a horse he was trying to steal from the hotel stables. The hotel owner had leant over the prone body and asked if Niall wanted a doctor to attend, but he replied that there was no point paying a doctor to tell him what he already knew. What he remembered most of the episode afterwards was a black gelding watching their activity from a stable box, the horse regarding them quizzically while they held a lamp over Bernie, debating who should have to call the police.

  When everything was sold to pay their debts and the original loan, Niall was twenty-five pounds worse off than when he’d first spied Bernie in the Commercial Traveller’s Hotel. If Bernie Hobbs was still alive, he sometimes thought, he would have gladly kicked his worthless backside from one end of Hobart Town to the other. There was something he knew for certain, though. He’d never borrow money or find himself in a business venture again. He took another labouring job in town and started thinking about how he might transport himself away from Van Diemen’s Land.

  Niall wondered what Delaney’s story was. He was distracted too by the last thing Sarah Delaney had said to him and the look she’d given him. He tried to unravel it as they jogged along the track.

  Nearing the diggings, Lightbody asked, ‘Is it what they really say it is?’

  The sergeant had been lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Typhoid.’

  Smales had temporarily fallen back and dismounted, having trouble with one of his boots. When Niall looked back to see what he was up to he saw Smales perched on a stump with one boot off, holding the sodden sock up to his nose in an attempt to find whatever was irritating him from inside it.

  ‘Could be typhoid fever. Or cholera. Or dysentery. Anything at all, really. It’s too early to tell,’ he said.

  He was unsure now himself.

  ‘So what is it about typhoid or cholera? How can you tell what it is?’

  Niall kept riding through the damp air,
not wanting to stop and fall cold now that they were on their way back to the diggings.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t? I don’t want to catch it.’

  ‘You’ll be safe enough here.’

  ‘But how can you tell?’

  ‘Just the way a lot of people are coming down with it. When it strikes it’s usually a group of people at once. It might spread, it might not, but we want to be as careful as we can.’

  Lightbody dug his heels into the ribs of his horse to catch up and ride alongside the sergeant.

  ‘The people that have got it. What do they look like?’

  ‘It could be the runs,’ Niall said. And all this water around, he thought. ‘Get the shits that bad their whole insides run out.’ His mind was still tripping ahead to what he’d need to have in place by the morning. ‘You know what an epidemic is?’

  The trooper didn’t.

  ‘One gets it after the other after the other. Like a mouse plague when you lift up a big slab of wood. They all run over each other trying to get out of the way. Except with cholera or typhoid it’s just they fall all over one another and drop down dead in anything from hours to days.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Spewing up sometimes. Fever. Really, they die of thirst.’

  ‘So why don’t they drink a lot of water?’

  ‘Some do. Some can’t because they’re past it too quick. What’s going out can’t be replaced with what’s going in.’

  ‘And what if it isn’t typhoid?’ Lightbody finally asked.

  Niall let his gaze settle on him for only a second.

  ‘Then it’s probably something worse.’

  15

  They were up early before there was daylight, men coaxing bullocks into a rough line and harnessing them before wagons and carts. The animals themselves were still dumb with sleep, compliant as their masters fidgeted gear onto them. Saddles were thrown across the horses. Everyone’s fingers moved slowly with the cold.

  Earlier Niall had addressed his men, telling them they’d pack the settler’s possessions first and relocate his family before returning with the first of the ill. Other troopers were rounding up the sick at Mosquito Creek as he spoke. The initial part of the journey worried Smales and Lightbody, the second part had them all uneasy.