‘Not really. I’m surprised how good they are going with the flood. But it mightn’t stay that way for long. One other thing.’ He paused and waited for the commissioner to catch his eye. ‘I’m also looking into something unusual with a digger who’s gone missing.’
‘One digger? Heaven knows how many missing we may bring back in the Victory. And they’re coming and going like the wind here.’
‘There’s a lot already leaving because of the flood, true. And some taking fright with the typhoid. But this one looks different.’
‘How so?’
Niall wondered how to put it. It wasn’t easily explained. ‘I don’t know. It just seems like he’s been ripped from his claim. Someone else has told me there’s some goings-on with him.’
The commissioner moved a sheet of paper on his desk, drew the inkwell closer as if he was about to write something.
‘What is this fellow’s name?’ he asked.
‘Oriente. Phillip Oriente.’
‘I see. What do we know about him exactly?’
‘Not much. He’s disappeared and someone could be behind it, but what we’ll find is anyone’s guess.’ He stopped again before continuing carefully. ‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘No, why should I? Has he committed any crime that we are aware of?’
‘Not that I know of. I’ve sent a message to Beechworth to see what I can find out, but I’m not expecting much to come of it.’
‘So there is no warrant out for him or anything else on this goldfield?’
‘Nothing. He’s never been in trouble here.’
‘Then leave the matter alone, Sergeant. We have more consequential matters to deal with. I want work on the Victory to proceed without interruption and every single trooper making sure we have no trouble from the miners. This eruption of typhoid has me concerned.’
‘As you say, everything we are doing is the right thing.’
‘Yes. All right, then. Is there anything else?’
‘Not that I can think of. Oh, except … Can you write me a note to give to the settler Delaney? I need one covering it from his point of view, so he knows he’s not going to be out of pocket at the end of it.’
‘We are not renting his property, Sergeant.’
‘I know. He just wants to be sure he can return to his place when everything is clear again. But perhaps we could give him something too.’
‘He and his like will already have made small fortunes from the goldfield. We don’t need to line his pockets any further.’
‘All right. But can we at least let him know he’ll return eventually?’
‘What would you like me to write?’
‘Just that our …’
‘Occupation?’
‘… occupation of his property is for the time being only, until things are clear.’
‘A promissory note,’ the commissioner said, drawing closer the piece of paper and tapping the nib of his pen against the inkwell. ‘Except a promissory note usually attaches monetary value to something.’ He regarded Niall momentarily. ‘Which in this case it won’t.’
Niall baulked, before saying, ‘That’s for you to decide, sir.’
‘Indeed it is.’
When the commissioner was done signing and folding the note, Niall took it and left. At least now, he thought, he had something to back up his undertakings to Sarah. There was still the uncomfortable matter of her father but he could deal with that as it came.
As he was making his way from the commissioner’s hut he almost collided with Doctor Cole, who was usually brought in to perform any police work that needed doing.
Making his apologies, Niall said, ‘The commissioner says you’ve been out to Mosquito Creek. What do you think it is?’
On this occasion the doctor didn’t seem all that happy doing the commissioner’s bidding, judging by the way he appraised Niall. ‘Looks like cholera. Still, we won’t know till a bit later, after we can watch the progress of the disease more carefully.’
‘Cholera?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘That’s what I thought too. That or typhoid.’
‘What’s your medical experience?’
‘None, it’s just what I think.’
‘Then don’t think until you know what you’re talking about.’
The doctor’s face flushed pink. He might have been hurrying on his way to a grog shop, Niall thought.
‘Fair enough.’
‘What have you done with those people who were living at that farm? The Delaneys?’ the doctor asked sharply.
‘Moved them out to a place on top of the escarpment.’
‘You know what’s been happening there, don’t you?’
‘On the escarpment?’
‘No, at the Delaneys’.’
‘No, I don’t.’
Cole puffed, looking ahead to the hut. ‘He beats those women. The wife and the daughters. I’ve been out there before to treat one of them.’
‘The father beats them?’
‘Yes, and it’s probably been going on a long time.’
‘Says who?’
‘It’s come from the mouth of Mr Common Knowledge. And another thing, that water they’re drinking at Mosquito Creek. Putrid!’
And with that the doctor stalked off. Niall watched him as he rapped on the commissioner’s door.
It took all kinds of people to make a world, Niall thought, and there were certainly all kinds out here. There was nothing he encountered or anyone who would put him much out of his stride, however. He was determined about that. His family in England had lived hand to mouth, time marked only by the constant shifts from one form of rough living to another, interrupted only by stints in prison suffered by one or other member of the family, which over time became more of an annoyance than a hardship. From the accident of being born into that family he had been incarcerated a long period of his life. Van Diemen’s Land after his release was another spell of aimlessness. But all that was changing now.
Niall wandered away from the commissioner’s hut through drizzle to check on the boat. There he found the solitary guard lazily keeping watch.
This afternoon everything had turned silent, restful, as a calm descended over the diggings. In less than two days the carpenters had made good progress on the Victory. Those lugging logs to the hill and sweating over crosscut saws had periodically stopped their labour to catch their breath, wipe sticky sawdust from their faces and exchange stories with other diggers. Near them the boat was becoming something more than just a skeleton of gaunt ribs. As lengths of timber were measured, cut and bent with the right bow and nailed around the frame, the daytime gallery of onlookers could see what it was becoming. Stanfield, the boy commissioner, wasn’t bad after all, they said, to have come up with this idea.
But as Niall picked his way over the uneven ground, turning his head for another look at where the guard kept watch, he saw the boat burying itself into the ground, obstinate in its refusal to reveal itself properly. The canvas sail staged over the boat to protect the carpenters from rain began flapping in protest at a rising wind.
‘Sergeant Kennedy.’
Niall turned to see a figure rising from the earth. The man had lost his hat but in the gloom of a darkening afternoon still wore the same mud-caked trousers, his equally muddy boots rooting him to the ground.
‘Who —?’
‘It’s me. I saw you yesterday. Remember?’
He seemed more certain of himself today, though, and Niall guessed he’d poured enough grog into himself to keep his demons at bay.
‘Did I get your name yesterday?’
Only the top half of him swayed slightly from the drink he’d taken. ‘No and I don’t want to have a name. I learnt a long time ago it’s better to be without one.’
‘You don’t do anything wrong it doesn’t matter what your name is.’
‘You think so?’
‘I do. Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me now. Only that other bu
siness we spoke of.’
‘Yes, the digger.’
‘Him.’
The man felt the top of his head as if surprised to find his velvet hat gone and now was jittery again, glancing about for his headwear. He unglued his boots from the mud one by one.
‘So what more can you tell me?’ Niall demanded.
‘You know what I told you last time?’
‘Yes, and I gave you a gold sovereign so you’d tell me more.’
‘Which I will. Or at least as much as I know.’
‘Which had better be something.’
‘Windy,’ the man said.
‘We’re not here to talk about the weather.’
The digger stared around him anxiously.
‘What are you worried about?’ Niall asked.
‘No one trusts anyone who’s been talking to the traps.’
‘It was you who found me out here. If you wanted to meet me somewhere else you should have said so.’
‘It’s not easy for me to find people.’
‘Except if they’re at the grog shop.’
‘I’ll be quick anyway.’
‘Start talking then.’
‘I told you about the commissioner …’
‘You didn’t tell me much.’
‘I told you he was mixed up in this Oriental going missing.’
‘Oriente.’
‘Oriente, then.’
‘But you didn’t tell me how or why.’
‘If I knew I would say. But it was one of the diggers who used to work with the fellow who went missing who said this.’
‘And this is what you heard with your own ears?’
‘No, but the information is good.’
‘Go on then.’
‘I heard this fellow say that something was arranged to happen tomorrow night at the entertainments. Something is going to happen to this Oriente.’
‘And why should he suddenly turn up there?’
‘Don’t know. But he will be and you need to be watching out for the commissioner. Stan …’
He stopped talking.
‘Stanfield.’
‘Stanfield. You need to be watching for him. Something is going to happen.’
‘But you don’t know what?’
‘No.’
‘So, the commissioner will definitely be there for reasons of something to do with Oriente?’
‘Oh yes, he’ll be there.’
Niall considered the digger, with his filthy clothes and matted beard, his wild eyes and the shakes.
‘Where do you come from?’ he asked, but the digger looked perplexed. ‘Where around here do you live?’
The man stared around him again, watchful. ‘I don’t live here. I wouldn’t stay here,’ he said quickly.
‘Where then?’
‘I stay in one of the camps over near Mosquito Creek,’ he answered and Niall involuntarily shuddered and suddenly saw more than just the grog in him.
Niall stepped back a pace without even realising it. ‘Are you feeling all right? Don’t feel sick or anything?’
‘Nothing worse than usual. Why should I be?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Niall said. ‘But you want to look after yourself.’
This time it was Niall searching around, back over to where the canvas over the commissioner’s boat was trying to rip itself away from its moorings.
He turned his attention back to the digger. ‘You’d better be on your way, then.’
He reached into his pocket and drew out another sovereign, passed it over to the digger who nodded his thanks.
‘Anything else …’ Niall began but his voice trailed off until he was jolted back to the moment. ‘Just something else,’ he continued, another thought occurring to him on the off chance. ‘We shifted a settler from a place out west this morning, out to the escarpment. Goes by the name of Abraham Delaney. You ever heard anything about him?’
The digger pulled himself together a moment. ‘Now that is one man I can tell you something about,’ he said, volunteering several fingers to the heavens, surprised there was a fact he knew for sure. ‘He’s well known, he is. And not a person you’d want to get too near.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He’s a Van Diemen’s Land man.’
‘Come from where? What place?’
‘The Harbour, they say. He come from Macquarie Harbour.’
As the fellow took himself away Niall had half a mind to call him back, but instead watched him disappear among the tents and claims of the diggings.
19
The commissioner had slept poorly, waking at intervals and startled to find himself lying in darkness in an unfamiliar bed in a foreign place. Once, when he lit his bedside lamp and drew out his watch, he learnt to his dismay that the time had yet to cross two o’clock when he expected it to be nearer five or six. At four o’clock, when he could stay in bed no longer, he shrugged himself from it and pulled on some of his warmer woollen clothes, feeling air in his bedroom as chill as the mist outside.
In the tiny room that made for the dwelling’s kitchen he lit the stove and boiled water for tea. He stoked the fire alive in the main room and lit the larger of the lamps to write by. Perhaps now, he thought, he might be able to attend to his letter writing uninterrupted.
This morning too, he knew, he would have to finalise his plans with Alfred Row, in addition to giving Constable Ramage his last instructions. There were all these matters to deal with when Row’s Circus would be giving its first performance tonight.
It was soundlessly still.
With a pot of tea on the desk beside him he arranged the pages of the letter to his family in a neat pile to his left, each page perfectly atop the other. He topped up the inkwell from a small glass bottle and lay his two pens down side by side, selecting the one he considered possessed the sharpest nib. He resumed his letter.
When one might have expected the floodwaters to retreat of their own accord we observe nature’s contrary aspect everywhere we look. Yesterday I again inspected my vessel and made an estimation of the journey we will need to undertake. There is no obvious or immediate path. Our navigation will be guided as much by the spirit of endeavour as by a hard and fast course to where these men stand waiting. If not tomorrow then the following day we will set ourselves upon the water.
At one point as he wrote he thought he heard a scratching at the door but on carefully opening it discovered there was no one. Phillip Oriente was no longer at his claim though he was certain he was close by. He felt that in his bones. He checked again that he had secured the door and then that his windows were tightly closed. Another pull on the door handle convinced him he was safe.
He remembered his father striding across the grounds surrounding their home whenever poor weather was ready to rattle their buildings. At the sight of tumbling grey cloud he would step outside to test the air, savour its breath as if inhaling the bouquet of a fine vintage. ‘There is weather coming!’ he would call to them excitedly. ‘Terence, walk with me please!’ And his brother would have to pace alongside his father as they completed circuits of the lawns in front of the house, increasingly hurriedly as rain and wind and spattering darkness stormed towards them. Maintaining a brisk pace, father and son would feel the buffeting of wind as their clothes absorbed the wetness. ‘Are the doors properly secured? Are they all shut tight?’
‘I will look after you,’ he told his brother later as he helped him out of his sodden clothes. ‘I will look after you.’
The Victory would take him from this place and return him to England. Of that he was certain. There could be no intrusion from Oriente, with his wild stories and claims to possession of what was not his. When he had tried to help him and show him kindness he had been repaid with barbs and thorns and threats that must not be allowed to find their way back to England. Nor could his fanciful stories and claims as to the past make that journey either. None of that could ever be allowed to happen.
It will not, it must not, he t
old himself.
It could not happen.
There would be no repeat of the past and the persecution that had gone with it.
He pictured his grandfather taking ill at the dinner table that time, the silver cutlery neatly laid out on the starched linen of the tablecloth as the serving girl Carrie mutely ladled soup into white porcelain bowls. At first no one noticed his grandfather’s going untouched. It wasn’t unusual for all of them to sit silently through an entire meal, staring down into their bowls and plates as they delicately spooned up or dissected what was before them.
Carrie brought out the main course – first, plates of steaming, brimming vegetables, then placing a tray before them on the table bearing thinly sliced, bleeding red meat.
He stole a glance at his grandfather, he recalled, and noticed pinpricks of perspiration appearing on the old man’s brow as he tried raising his soup spoon. Watching him struggling like that and with only him realising, it seemed an eternity before the spoon did finally clatter to the floor. Then they couldn’t help but stare. His grandfather’s frail, white knuckles gripped the edge of the table as he tried standing from his chair. And then came a catastrophe.
Rather than rising from his seat his grandfather had instead seized a knife and lurched forward, slashed back and forth with the knife upsetting soup and wine and crockery, for a few mad seconds turning the dinner table topsy-turvy while they sat there stunned. ‘Get him out!’ his father shouted in the midst of the tumult, and a serving girl from the kitchen rushed to hurry the old man away.
As he stared into the lamp’s flame the commissioner could still see them there, could see them there so vividly he could almost reach out and touch everything that was on that table. His father had insisted on finishing the meal, restoring himself at the head of the table, so they sat there more uncomfortably than usual, picking at their meals while red wine bloomed crazily through the white linen tablecloth.
But there was nothing wrong with the old man, so they said, nothing wrong at all.
Stanfield sipped his tea, drew the pen back and forth from the inkwell as he waited for light to appear at the window.
Mosquito Creek Page 14