‘They did me. My father had a habit of going onto other people’s properties at night and relieving them of their game, pheasants and the like. My brothers and me were there to do his dirty work for him. In the end he would have been happy it was me transported and not him.’
It was true, he thought. He’d done nothing that warranted transportation, his father was to blame for that. But there were still the other unthinkable things he’d somehow fallen into in Van Diemen’s Land, out of fear and desperation and wanting to keep his head above water.
She walked on carefully, her voice as quiet as her steps.
‘It is true, though,’ she said, ‘about my father. He’s violent.’
Niall glanced at her. ‘And why does he do it?’ When it seemed she wasn’t going to answer, he added, ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, either.’
‘No, that’s all right. I don’t know what makes him start. I thought for a long time that it must have been something Mother had done. Something she’d done to displease him. And then I’d watch him strike her when she’d done nothing at all. So then I thought it must have been Louise and I. But there was no reason to any of it. None at all.’
‘Does he take to the grog?’
‘No, he’s never touched a drop of anything strong in his life. There’s just something in him that comes out of nowhere, out of some blackness, and we’re the closest ones around him when he strikes out.’
‘You’re the only ones.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Would you like to be away from him if you could?’
‘Of course I would. Even if it meant leaving others behind, hard as that would be. For years I thought it would only be a matter of time before things changed, but look at me now. Nothing’s changed.’
‘What about your mother with all this? Doesn’t she try to stick up for you?’
‘She never does anything. She doesn’t want to believe it, even after all this time. She says it’s the devil at work, that it’s not father at all. So she forgives him. And we all keep on nursing our bruises, or hide out in the trees till the storm passes.’
Niall felt himself boiling. ‘Well, he can’t keep on. I’ll say something to him.’
‘And what good would that do when Louise and I still have to keep living with them?’
‘Then you have to go.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered, ‘but I’ll think of something. I’ll certainly think of something.’
‘But it’s me thinking it’s not all his fault either. Van Diemen’s Land, from what you hear, must have been a terrible place.’ She paused. ‘You said that was where you were sent, too?’
‘Yes, I was. It was probably everything terrible you could think of. And then some more heaped on top of that.’
‘Do you think you’re still there?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The way your eyes look.’
He swallowed, taking his bearings even though he knew where they were going.
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘But in your own mind. When there’s nothing and you let yourself go blank. What comes in?’
He said nothing for a while, and then, ‘Well, what do you think about?’
‘I dream I’m away from here,’ she said. ‘I imagine some other place where you always feel safe, where I can see that there’s a story to my life with a beginning, a middle and an end, where I’ve been able to be happy, not trapped here where I’m forever in the middle with no chance of anything ever changing.’
And in his mind, Niall trailed off again to Macquarie Harbour where intrigue governed everything, from where an extra ration of bread might come, to who might be pulling oars on the longboat out to a ship taking convicts to Sydney for hanging. Rumours fuelled the days there as well as pettiness and small and not so small cruelties. Bored soldiers would send convicts waist deep into the icy, winter waters of the harbour to retrieve lengths of floating branch. And no sooner would the prisoner come back shaking and shuddering than the soldier would toss the branch back out again, like sending a dog after a stick. Inevitably there were those who flailed back – a few weedy punches thrown or, more rarely, an attack with a shovel or lump of iron. The former brought a severe flogging, the latter an appointment with the gallows in Sydney.
‘It’ll change for you,’ he said, snapping that picture out of his mind. ‘I know it.’
Presently they came to where floodwaters lapped at the diggings. Tent poles and the framework of timber windlasses poked through water, revealing the location of drowned shafts and camp sites. Scattered about were broken carts and discarded spokes and metal rims. A pile of empty cans with jagged lids had been sculpted into a cairn.
‘It’s completely deserted,’ she said, looking about, astonished. ‘There’s no one around at all.’
‘I think this flood is the finish of the place,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t done for already.’
Sarah contemplated the expanse of water ahead of her, the meandering line of great river red gums further in the distance where the river lay hidden.
‘And where will you go first when it’s all over here, Niall?’ she ventured.
He stared at the river, too.
‘Maybe head back to Melbourne for a spell and start looking for somewhere to live. There’s supposed to be good country just out to the east of the city.’ He waited a moment. ‘So, if you had the choice, where would you go?’
‘Perhaps to the city, too.’
He pushed his hand into his cheek. ‘By the way, I’m not the type to take out my past on someone else,’ he said. ‘In case you’re wondering. Van Diemen’s Land didn’t turn me into that kind of person.’
‘You’re lucky then.’
‘It’s not all luck. You have to want to be something.’
‘Do you think people can make up for all the cruelties in their lives?’
He traced the line of red gums with his eyes.
‘You have to believe that, don’t you?’ he said.
‘But do you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And you’re certain of it?’
‘I am.’
I have to be, he thought. Otherwise he was as damned as Delaney. When he had bolted from his work party at the Harbour that afternoon and charged into the bush, he hadn’t considered what it meant and what he would do. Running had been a hasty decision. He had seen an opportunity to flee and his legs had taken flight before he had thought anything through. But no amount of forethought would have led him to imagine what would happen when he came across those other two.
Sarah cut across his thoughts.
‘Why don’t you come out to the escarpment this evening? I could cook you something.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said why don’t you join me this evening? Keep me some company while the others are away. Just for dinner, I mean.’
‘What about your father?’
‘I told you. He’s away. Beechworth.’
‘Of course. Sorry.’
‘So what do you think, then?’
‘I could,’ he answered, his head still in the fog of Van Diemen’s Land. ‘Yes.’
30
Niall’s flight from Macquarie Harbour found him deep in thick bush within two minutes; in five, running and splashing through a shallow creek; in ten, hunching down behind a rocky outcrop listening for the sound of pursuers. When no voices came, when there was no clop of horses with their liquid brown eyes watching for him along the ridge line, he crouched over and resumed his flight, scrambling, clawing and gasping upwards into the surrounding country, the hill before him ever rising when he cast his eyes higher to look.
From the safety of wooded country he saw smoke climbing from where he knew the settlement must be and set off in the opposite direction. He drank from the clear water of streams and sometimes walked through them should dogs be sent after him – he’d seen the result when an escaped prisoner
was run to ground. For the whole of the first day he trudged and pushed his way through dense bush till his arms and legs were scratched and bleeding beyond irritation. At night he made a shelter of bark and branches and listened to the sound of every living thing fossicking in the dark, his imagination alive. Sleeping only through exhaustion, he continued on his way when a milky grey dawn broke above him through the treetops.
He pressed on the next day, caught something like a small disfigured crab in a creek and snapped its shell open to tear out the sweet, pale meat. He sucked the creature’s shell in his mouth a long time before spitting it out, cracking the claws open later with a rock. Even staying high along the ridge it became impossible after a while to tell in which direction he was heading. Enormous trees loomed over him every yard his feet took him. A second night was spent huddled against a fallen log and he felt the cold badly. He knew he was hopelessly lost.
On the third day he walked down from a ridge into more open country harbouring low scrub and tall waving grass, a narrow valley with rising hills on both sides. A stream wound its way through the centre. He saw smoke rising from a black’s fire and sank onto his heels while he thought what to do. Standing more upright, he estimated the smoke to be not more than a hundred yards away. If the blacks were hostile he might be slaughtered on the spot. If they took him in, it might be his one chance of surviving.
He chewed on grass a while, torn between skirting away around the fire and approaching it. In the end he knew he would die, through cold or hunger, if he did nothing. Or by a black’s spear if he did.
He carefully approached the fire, his hands up all the way to show he was no threat.
When he was as close as fifty yards away he threw caution away and began singing a song that came to him from his childhood.
‘When I was a little boy
My mother kept me in,
Now I am a great boy,
I’m fit to serve the king.
I can handle a musket,
And I can smoke a pipe.
And I can kiss a pretty girl
At twelve o’clock at night.’
He heard shuffling ahead of him as he broke into a clearing where the fire was leaping and crackling in the cold air.
As he stood looking around with his hands still aloft, from behind tall grass stepped two men, ugly grins across their faces.
The escaped convicts Percy Jefferson and Martin Badger.
While Niall was still dressed in the convict garb he had escaped in, this mad pair, who had escaped a full two weeks before him, had found or stolen clothes from somewhere. Both were in dark clobber: weighty coats down to the knee, trousers too long gathering at the top of their boots. Their days on the run had left them bearded and dirty of face, their straight lank hair greasy and matted.
They laughed to see him standing there in his convict clothing.
‘Going to meet pretty girls out here, are you?’ Jefferson cackled like a hen.
‘Didn’t want to catch anyone off guard, that’s all,’ Niall said.
Jefferson looked him up and down.
‘You got rid of the irons?’
‘They didn’t have any on me,’ he told them. ‘Trusted prisoner.’
Which made them laugh slyly again.
‘Kennedy, ain’t it, sheepshit?’ Jefferson said.
‘Niall Kennedy.’
Niall remembered there was also a third escaped with Jefferson and Badger, though he couldn’t recollect his name.
‘You had someone else go with you too,’ Niall said, peering around the clearing. ‘Where’s he?’
Badger straightened a little.
‘There was no one,’ Jefferson said coldly.
And then Niall felt it creep along his spine, a tightening telling him he shouldn’t walk out in front of these two or allow himself to fall asleep at night before they did.
When the time came to move on, Niall feigned an injured foot, letting Jefferson and Badger lead with enough yards between them so he could pick up their voices without making out their actual words. Now and then Jefferson would throw a contemptuous glance behind him to see what their straggler was up to.
It took them hours to walk clear of grassland that blew high and knotty till they reached rocky ground beneath their boots that caused all three in turn to stumble.
‘You keep walking that slow we ain’t going to carry you along,’ Jefferson called back at him. ‘We ain’t taking no baggage.’
As they rested at the foot of a gently rising range, Niall asked, ‘Where are we going anyway?’
‘Hobart Town,’ Jefferson said quickly.
‘How do you know which way?’
‘East. I seen it on a map once. Hobart is east from the Harbour.’
The quieter Badger added, ‘But we can’t take you dressed like that.’
‘You gonner have to find yerself a new suit of clothes,’ Jefferson said.
‘Out here?’ Niall said.
‘You look out for something along the way,’ Jefferson told him, easing his legs straight out in front of him as he gazed over the waving grassland they had just passed through. ‘There will be people soon enough.’
They dragged themselves up the hillside, their calves and thighs aching after each climb, stopping repeatedly. Badger asked his mate, ‘How far to Hobart, do you suppose?’
Jefferson chose the way forward, though the bush was much of a muchness whichever way he led them.
‘From what I saw on the map, fifty miles, I reckon.’
‘That’s a long way walking,’ Badger complained.
‘It’ll be more grass and clearing when we get closer.’
But Niall had been delivered to Macquarie Harbour after setting in at Hobart for passengers and supplies and he knew the decent spell it took the vessel to reach its destination. Even allowing for a south-westerly wind that sometimes had blown into their faces, and battling a choppy, contrary ocean, the ship had made reasonably good progress according to his captors. It still took a good many days. And that was a ship that knew which way it was going and in a more or less direct line.
Out here in this wild country the ranges turned every which way and as they laboured higher and higher, hoping for a view from somewhere near the top, Niall knew that none of them had any more sense of direction than a blind man in the night.
Jefferson uncovered the stiff remains of a dead bird of prey beneath a towering mountain ash, squinting up as if he might spy its living cousins high among the branches. The bird’s carcass being alive with ants, he shook it and then his hands as the ants quickly changed hosts, finally bashing the bird against the rough bark of the tree’s lower trunk to rid it of its insects.
‘Marty and me go first. You get the leftovers,’ he ordered, lest there be a dispute.
Niall watched, barely able to contain his disgust as the two men knelt on the ground either side of the bird, the carcass with its black and brown wings spread on its back as though the men were about to perform some elaborate scientific experiment on it. They dug their fingernails into its entrails and gouged out bloodied worms of intestines and organs to stuff into their mouths.
‘Good, eh?’ Jefferson cried gleefully.
Niall walked a short distance away and sat down.
Lengthening shadows spread over the ground by the time they thought they found the top of the ridge line, only for them to learn again and again that a higher point rose just ahead of them. There was no sign of anything through the straight-trunked eucalypts.
‘We settle here for the night,’ Jefferson decided. ‘Be night soon.’
After resting briefly they scrounged around for loose leaves of bark and dead branches for a shelter.
‘You didn’t eat nothing of that dead bird,’ Jefferson said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Niall said. ‘Ate just before I saw you.’
‘You got anything left then? Show us your pockets!’
Niall turned them out. ‘Nothing.’ He wondered where he should sleep,
how he might be safe.
Badger relieved himself not five yards away from where they were going to lie.
‘Have to find something in the morning, then,’ Jefferson determined. ‘Can’t last much longer like this unless we find a hut or something.’
‘Some settler with a pretty wife,’ Badger said as he rejoined them.
‘And I’m first if there is,’ Jefferson said, turning on him suddenly.
The other man shrugged.
Badger carried two pieces of flint and from them they were able to get a small fire going. The miles they had covered had exhausted them, though, and Niall kept his eyes open only long enough to see the other two fall asleep. Once or twice he woke in the night to the fitful snoring of Jefferson and Badger, the two lying like dead dogs in their filthy clothes.
Niall rose from the hard ground in the morning feeling like he hadn’t slept at all, his two fellow escapees not stirring for a good while. He stared at his convict uniform all stained with dirt and mud and sweat and water. Prickles and burrs and fragments of stick and leaf had attached themselves to him so he seemed to be becoming as the very earth around him.
Once they had all woken enough to get their limbs going they climbed the last few hundred yards to a summit now visible through thinning trees.
‘See? Nearly there!’ Jefferson exclaimed. ‘We’ll get a good path to take from there!’
But once they reached the top, standing on a granite cap, all they saw in every direction was endless forest rising and bucking.
‘I think we should head back the way we came,’ Niall suggested. ‘Go back over our steps and try to head back along to the coast. Then we could follow it east and try to get to Hobart.’
‘Listen!’ menaced Jefferson, turning and grabbing him by the throat. ‘We didn’t escape from there so as you can take us right back!’
Niall didn’t resist but neither did he concede ground. When the other released him he said, ‘We’re dead if we stay out here.’
‘And you’ll be dead if you got any ideas about handing us back over to the traps.’
When Niall caught Badger’s eye the other convict quickly looked away. There would be no help from that quarter.
Mosquito Creek Page 24