‘Put the gun down, Abraham.’
‘I’m not Abraham to you. I’m not anyone to a snake like you.’
‘No, you’re right about that. You’re not anyone, full stop. Just a sad old hatter who beats his daughters. That’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Remember yer manners and who it is that’s got the gun,’ Delaney scowled, pushing the weapon closer.
‘I don’t care what you’re holding. You’re not fit to be a father.’
‘How do yer know what I am? You’ve no family, except yer rubbish troopers.’
Heavy rain streamed from the shingled roof in torrents. Niall pushed on his toes, watching for a single second’s distraction from Delaney so he could make a dash and snatch his rifle from the other side of the house.
‘Everyone will come looking for me. They know I’m here,’ Niall lied.
‘I’ll take me chances on that one,’ Delaney rumbled. ‘Now head out that way.’ He gestured with the rifle barrel. ‘Hold yer hands up so there’s no tricks.’
He pushed Niall ahead alongside the wash house, across open ground towards the fence.
‘Thought you was smart, did yer? Take away a man’s land. Try to take away a man’s daughter and be the man around the place. I’ll show yer what the law is here.’
Niall knew he was to be taken into bush that could swallow him alive. He had no more than forty yards before he’d have to act, wrench the rifle from Delaney or evade him for long enough to reach his own. The skies were black and teeming now, a gale ripping through the heavens and tearing the crowns off trees. Ahead of him the bush was just like forest in the old country, just like poaching, being wandered into the forest as his father led him into misery.
Only thirty more yards, with Delaney slightly behind him and to his right, the ground began to slip under his feet, rain pooling just ahead.
Twenty yards. There was no more time left for him now.
A slapping of door and sudden light came from the house.
‘Niall?’
A gun roared through the black night.
‘Niall!’
35
A crack of timber igniting, like bones breaking, was so distinct on slippery night air it woke Alec from fitful slumber. He’d fallen asleep before nightfall without meaning to and now shook himself as he sat on the edge of his bunk, nauseous from sleeping at an unaccustomed hour.
He glanced across at Merriman, who was dozing quietly for the moment and virtually invisible beneath his blankets. It smelt musty in this tent despite the open entrance. And foul. It was as though Merriman’s illness, his festering wounds, were now infecting the tent’s interior as well.
Alec’s blood raced. His hearing had become so attuned to the island since they’d become separated from contact with others that he could isolate sounds, distances, their creators. Though the noise was distant, he knew it to be a great fire this time.
Furthermore it had to be the Geelong party. Even Bill and Kentucky wouldn’t have been so foolhardy as to waste all their firewood in one mad go.
The shearer Silas had swum back with his kill. Alec had waited in hiding long enough to see him returning close to the island, dragging and towing the lifeless wallaby behind him. When he was thirty yards from the island his nephew Chris and Spearitt leapt into the water, all of them going under a number of times in helping land the dead animal.
Alec had backed away then and hurried to the sanctuary of his tent.
And now, waking with the sickness of hunger and fractured sleep, he crept from the shelter and peered at the night sky, seeing only high, black cloud packed hard against the heavens and feeling rain getting harder on his face.
‘I’ll go over and see what they’re up to, eh?’ he said, but he was talking to himself. ‘See what those fellows are up to.’
Everything was different at night, every sound unsettling and disturbing. Someone could be lying in wait just behind a patch of scrub or squatting on their heels at the back of his tent in the dark waiting for him to step out. He’d never feel the quick flash of knife across his throat.
No one knew they had no food left in their tent. No one knew he was telling the truth, in spite of what Merriman had done.
When he looked back the Englishman was silent, lying straight as a plank under his coverings with the top blanket a shroud over his face.
‘Let’s just go have a little look,’ he whispered to himself. ‘No harm in that. I’ll be careful.’
But he nearly leapt out of his skin when he heard a voice call, ‘What?’
Inside the tent a ghostly hand came up to pull the blanket away from Merriman’s face.
‘Is that you, Jack?’ Alec peered back.
‘I didn’t tell you,’ he said. ‘Didn’t tell you the true story.’
‘What true story?’ Alec’s voice shook.
‘What happened on the river.’
A cautious step took Alec another pace back inside the flap of the tent.
‘Here? What do you mean?’
‘London. On the river.’
His voice was cold and rattling, the rain more agitated outside.
‘They’ve got a big fire going over there,’ Alec trembled. ‘The Geelong ones.’
‘My father took me on that river. That’s where I learnt the ciphering. We had to.’
‘For what?’
To be interrupted like this when he was about to set off and find the source of the fire jangled Alec’s senses even more.
‘Taking goods in.’
‘Smuggling?’
Merriman’s voice had no more animation in it than a dead man’s. Only his lips let the words escape. His eyes were pressed shut.
‘Fencing for my father. Jewellery from outside come in on boats. Jewellery from London.’
‘Is that why you ended up here?’
‘They were onto us.’ His lungs then wheezed with the effort of speaking. ‘A gang of us took a ship, middle of the night high up on Thames. Thousands of pounds worth.’
‘And you got caught?’
Merriman’s tongue tried to find moisture on his lips. ‘They never found us. My father neither. No one did.’
‘And the treasure?’
‘I was the fence. Buried the lot a yard under the bank. Near old Hutley’s Bridge.
‘It’s still there?’
Merriman coughed painfully. ‘All tanneries and glue factories. No one pokes about the river. Smell is enough. Police knowing. Jumped a boat to France next morning and then came here. Trail will be dead by the time I get home.’
‘When you get home,’ Alec murmured, staring at his rigid figure.
‘Be a rich man.’
With that he fell silent again.
Alec stood watching him but Merriman was no longer able to speak.
Old Hutley’s Bridge, Alec said to himself. Old Hutley’s Bridge.
He stepped outside the tent again, stared into night and pulled his coat tight against the rain.
No one had come for them and perhaps they never would. Unless he did something there was no chance he would last more than a few days.
Old Hutley’s Bridge.
He wanted to be sick as hunger churned and protested in his stomach. If someone had been coming for them it should have happened by now. All it would have taken was a small boat to get across to them and on the river there should have been plenty of boats. There was the barge at McLaren’s Crossing ferrying cargo and drawn back and forth across the river by ropes.
But that would’ve been useless, he knew. There was too much river. Too much of everything in the floods.
They’d been forgotten like Jack Merriman had said. Perhaps the river had flooded harder and wider, even more than what they could see here, maybe over the diggings itself. On the other side they might have been driven away like ants from a nest and be huddling somewhere in wet bush waiting for the waters to suck back to their original course.
There was no one behind the tent when he checked. Despite the rain, he could still hea
r the crack of fire, see a halo of light through the scrub, and this time he wasn’t dreaming it.
Old Hutley’s Bridge. A yard under the bank.
He could hear the change of wind before feeling it on his skin, hear it slippery with rain over the river, racing through drowned timber as it bore down on the island.
And then just before the wind turned came the warm breath of raw flesh roasting and the sharp smell of burning fur.
‘They’re cooking the kangaroo,’ Alec said to the wet air around him. ‘Can smell that. Keeping it all to themselves.’
He went to turn and tell Merriman what was going on but took only a half pace before staring back at the bush ahead of him, shaking his head to take the dripping water from his hat.
It was colder air with the change, smelling of wet and rotting foliage.
Another few days of downpours and they were all finished. He imagined himself standing paralysed at the water’s edge as floodwaters rose higher and higher minute by minute until he was up to his knees in water and no firm ground to stand on any more, the others scattered thigh-deep in the flood, all still and mute as trees as they waited for the river to consume them.
And Emily and the boy might be at home, packing their things. ‘Why do you have to mess everything up?’ she’d said. If nothing else, she was right about that.
Bursts of noise came from the shearer’s camp. Through scrappy, prickly scrub ahead he saw the light of their big camp fire with a few errant sparks lost into nothingness against the black curtain of night.
They weren’t going to eat the whole thing. They couldn’t.
They would give him some if he only asked the right way, not like Merriman had done. Maybe he could cut them in to Merriman’s hoard.
Move up a little closer, he told himself. See what’s going on and pick the right moment to show yourself. Don’t startle them. Ease out nice and slow so they’ve got plenty of time to see you coming.
He had to watch himself as he moved nearer to the noise. Someone had been experimenting here and there with a shovel and there were gouges and furrows and animal scrapings filling with rain. It was easy to turn an ankle in the dark. Sometimes he took hold of a dripping sapling to steady himself, one eye always ahead. His hands and arms wore scores of scratches though he hardly noticed them. All he was conscious of now was the tormenting, low growling in his stomach. He had to eat soon.
He began hearing voices ahead in the night through the sound of wind and rain. The light from the fire was brighter as he pushed through each bank of scrub, another thin clump of gums behind him.
At first he couldn’t tell whose voice was whose. But then a few yards further the breeze faltered and he could hear the shearer’s gruff sounds.
Everything Silas said might have been a threat and Alec stopped in his tracks, wondering if he should go forward, knowing what the Geelong crowd could do.
But there was no choice now. There was nothing for him to discover on this island and anyone who might be able to help was too far away. The worst thing that could happen to him, if he went about it the right way, was that they’d send him off with nothing.
Just go easy with it, he mouthed silently as he inched further forward over scratchy, muddy ground.
Old Hutley’s Bridge.
Soon he was close enough to see the miners’ fire roaring up from the clearing around their claim.
They were wasting every spare bit of wood they had. There was a furnace of a blaze going, a second, smaller one already beaten down by the rain. Here in this second fire, in a nest of smouldering red wood, they’d dumped the hacked remains of the dead wallaby. Alec narrowed his eyes, making out figures gathered in the watery light. It was as though there were several conversations going at once, sometimes quietly and reasonably, at other times quarrelsome and loud.
Oriente always said fire was an excellent way of covering your tracks or throwing someone off a scent, and that he had done it more than once himself. That was what came into his head as he stared through the scrub at the scene in front of him. And Oriente might have been handy here with all his tricks and ruses, wily enough to have taken the shearer on and quick enough to strike before the other man knew what had hit him.
It wasn’t just the Geelong crowd in the firelight, he realised. Bill and Kentucky were there too. The Geelong men were staying close by their fire and the shearer Silas himself was holding something – an axe – waving it about as he paced in front of the two interlopers from the other side of the island.
‘Take off!’ he yelled at them. ‘Get out of here, you bludgers!’
But if Kentucky and Bill were saying anything Alec couldn’t hear. They were silent as wraiths, flitting about the edges of the clearing in the dim between firelight and the dark of the bush. Shadows masked their faces. Every time the shearer took a step closer with his axe the other men retreated just enough to be safe. Silas, for all his bluff and bluster, was also wary about shifting too far from his kill and the fire. Spearitt and the boy were jittery, poised on the knife edge of either joining in on an attack or taking flight themselves.
‘Curs!’ Silas spat at the would-be thieves to goad them into something. ‘Come on, you mangy curs!’
The other men said nothing, which only made the shearer fling more abuse. As he stalked them, Bill and Kentucky wordlessly separated. Bill moved left with his miner’s pick, Kentucky to the right with a solid length of branch. Caught in a pool of shadow, firelight licking his lanky frame, the American hopped about like a stick-figure dancing some ancient rite.
Spearitt and the boy stayed close to the smoking wallaby in its smouldering pyre.
Alec began crawling forward, knowing that all in the clearing were fixed on the battle being played out. Spearitt had been caught defenceless by the arrival of the others and there was no space or time now to run to the tent for anything he might use as a weapon. For all his former bravado he was clinging to the boy as the interlopers worried themselves into the clearing while staying out of reach of the axe.
When Alec saw into Bill’s eyes he knew it wouldn’t have mattered who was trying to stave him off. Bill was soaked, starving and wretched and it was the smell of meat drawing them closer and closer, as it was him. And now that Bill and Kentucky had moved to either side of the camp Silas had trouble on his hands.
Bill shook his pick at Spearitt. The shearer’s offsider, desperate to find something, snatched a half-burning piece of wood about two feet long from the blaze.
All the shouting was coming from the Geelong party, the other two remaining eerily silent while moving ever closer to where the wallaby was dripping fat into the spitting fire.
Alec shuffled forward like a crab. If the fighting took the men into the bush there would be a chance for him to dash in and seize a chunk of food, and drag it safely away somewhere into scrub.
Like dogs determined to take their share of a feed the two invaders ducked and dodged into the clearing, Kentucky ungainly. Bill singled out Spearitt, who was slashing at air with his burning torch, while Kentucky was taking Silas further away around to the other side of the pyre.
Rain was belting down now, the men oblivious to it.
‘Come on and have a go!’ Spearitt screamed but he was rattled by his adversary grinning and moving towards him, Bill low and stocky and turning the pick in his hands as though choosing his moment for one fatal swing.
Spearitt frantically searched for a place to run to.
‘Chris!’ he cried, to the boy. ‘Chris!’
But the youngster, for all his size, had scuttled away from the fires to the edge of the clearing just ahead of where Alec hid, ready to bolt into scrub himself.
Spearitt knew he was on his own.
Bill snarled with menace, locking a stare on Spearitt. ‘I mean to have some of that food.’
Alec crept closer, his gut twisting around itself.
‘Silas!’ Spearitt wailed. ‘Help me! Help me!’
He slashed his piece of wood from side
to side in a mad flurry to ward off the other man, backpedalling as he did so. His weapon flared with each swipe.
I have to eat, Alec thought, moaning as the wind wafted the smell of roasting meat to him through a fall of heavy rain. Just get them out of here for a minute.
As Silas saw his partner panicking he leapt forward and caught the lanky American off guard. He threw the axe about, one lunge missing Kentucky by inches and forcing him back to the safety of the scrub’s fringe. The shearer bought vital seconds to break around the fire to help his mate.
At that moment the boy glanced around into the rank bush and caught Alec staring, two eyes peering like an animal’s.
For Bill, totally fixed on his man with the blaze erupting beside him, the smell of wallaby rising in his nostrils and Spearitt screaming in his ears, there was no time to react as the shearer raced up behind him and cleaved his head open with one mighty blow of the axe.
36
The commissioner dressed without assistance in the morning and his uniform seemed less tight, more comfortable on him. He rinsed his face and hands in a dish of water before shaving carefully in front of the looking-glass, dropping his hands now and then to let tiredness run from them.
Today was the day when all would be decided. The Victory was ready and he had chosen six troopers who would take the boat across to the island. He clipped his moustache neatly into shape, sucking in his lips as he delicately trimmed with the scissors, studying his face in the glass.
When he had completed his ablutions he wiped the razor clean on a cloth and checked the buttons on his uniform. As he stared again in the looking-glass he thought he could see some colour, though there was pallor there too. He thought of what compensation there might be today for Phillip, his relic, Row, all the things that had run aground to date.
As his feet shuffled over the floor, he reached to touch his most recently completed letter, folded neatly and sealed. The dutiful son, he had surely kept his family informed with his regular correspondence. They would have been pleased to read of his progress – though there was no certainty around that fact. He had received nothing from Kent, or anywhere else in England, since what amounted to his exile had commenced.
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