‘Don’t leave me.’
Niall started to find Badger watching him, the sick man’s eyes red and old. Niall stared at him.
‘Don’t leave me. Please.’
Niall put a finger to his lips to quieten him.
‘Not with him,’ Badger implored.
‘Quiet!’ Niall hissed.
Badger spoke more softly.
‘Don’t take off. Stay.’
‘I mean to go,’ Niall whispered.
‘Kill him, then.’
‘What?’
‘Kill him.’
Niall glanced at the sleeping man.
‘I’m not killing anyone.’
‘He’s going to kill me.’
‘He won’t.’
‘He will.’
Badger’s eyes pleaded with him.
‘I have to go. You’ve a fire. You’ll be better once you’ve slept.’
Badger rolled to his side, sobbing.
‘He’s going to kill me,’ he wept.
Niall checked Jefferson again but there was no movement from him.
He quietly drew away, careful not to step on anything that might snap under his feet. Picking his way from the camp, he kept his eyes on Jefferson the whole time. When he lost sight of the firelight he knew he was as good as safe and eased up, taking a minute to let his eyes adjust to the darker surroundings.
Rather than go back directly the way they’d come he followed the ridge line for what he thought was about twenty minutes, staying high, listening for the noise of animals scuttling about the bush floor. He found a good-sized fallen tree branch, snapping its lateral branches away to make a staff to defend himself with or to club a night-wandering animal for food. He searched for the flints in his boot and was satisfied when he felt them still there.
Once he was a good distance clear of Jefferson and sure he wouldn’t be chased in the dark, he stopped at a rocky outcrop of huge boulders, an overhang providing enough shelter for him to gather some tinder and get a crackling fire going. He felt badly about leaving Badger but knew he wouldn’t have been able to carry a sick man along with him. Still, it gnawed at him.
Presently he slept, and slept deeply, till he was woken by morning light, suddenly disoriented finding himself alone with the fire burnt out. He quickly surveyed the bush around him but there was a perfect stillness with no sign of anyone about. Nonetheless he kicked the remains of his fire apart with his boots and scattered all evidence of it with some bushy foliage.
He continued on the ridge line before descending into lower country, into the narrow valley, climbing again to the next ridge before descending into the grassland valley on the other side, skirting the line between it and the foothills as he aimed for where he had originally come. In a lower slope of the valley he found the grassland turned to swamp, a patch of shallow criss-crossing streams no more than a foot deep. In one he splashed about to catch a fat brown frog and a handful of fingerlings that had lost their way from a larger stream. He pinched the heads off the fish and savoured them one by one, wrapping the dead frog in leaves to keep for later.
When he rested he was stabbed again by leaving Badger behind when he knew too well what that meant. He twitched and turned, tipped out and examined all the reasons why he should have left him at the camp, all the reasons he couldn’t take the man with him. Nor could he kill. Even the attack on the thief on the Eleanor was to do with defending what was his, not a thought-out plan to rid himself of an enemy.
He walked further on till the grass grew as tall as him.
‘What can I do?’ he cried to an imaginary accuser as he trudged on. ‘I couldn’t carry him on my back.’
Could I? And then with each further step he lamented his father leaving him behind in the forest to fight for himself, saving his own neck before that of his own watery blood. Badger was nothing to him and he could barely remember him from the Harbour, but the sight of him defenceless and retching in the dirt wouldn’t leave him now. Nor the picture of Jefferson snarling and stamping.
He tramped on slowly, sloshing through shallow streams, until in exasperation he tossed the dead frog away and stopped and stared at the sky.
He turned back in the direction he had come.
‘Bloody hell!’ he cursed. ‘This bloody place!’
It was near night when he was picking grass prickles from his sleeves with the ground growing stonier beneath his feet. He scanned the hillside rising before him, knowing if he climbed it to the top of the ridge and then followed it along he would find Jefferson and Badger, assuming they hadn’t moved on.
More than ever he was damning himself for his decision to escape the Harbour in the first place. There was nowhere to flee to out here and with no papers there was no hope of ever slipping back unrecognised into a town.
He saw the firelight of the camp before he heard any sound.
Niall watched the shift of his boots on the ground, the fire’s glow brightening through the trees.
Martin Badger was lying on the ground, asleep by the fire with his legs sprawled, his left leg half tucked up. Jefferson was propped on a log beside him. As Niall’s eyes grew accustomed to the firelight he realised what he thought at first was just part of the log, a knobbly growth out of it, was Badger’s severed head.
Frozen where he stood, Niall stared as the head drew in and out of the wavering light, its hooded eyes half open as if in contemplation, as if the mouth was about to speak, to keep the other man there company despite his tiredness.
Jefferson leant down and stretched to take an arm away from the body so easily that all of his partner must have been in pieces but kept in an arrangement pleasing to the murderer. The arm seemed thinner than it would have been were it still attached to a living man. Jefferson held the limb out to the fire, tentatively at first, as though it might be his own at risk of scalding, before reaching it into the fire so the hand’s stiff fingers touched it. Getting the hang of it, Jefferson cackled as the dead man’s arm felt for and fiddled over a smaller branch into the red-embered heart of the fire, a peculiar melody issuing from the convict’s lips as he sang and turned the limb, roasting it like a piece of meat on a stick.
And right through the forest blew the smell of a foul, sweet, rottenness.
Niall slipped away again, this time oblivious to the noise he made as he slid and slithered down the slope through the trees, running and falling and rolling, crashing through everything in his path.
Niall’s gaze fell to his hands as the memory of his betrayal of Badger wrenched at his heart. He and Sarah Delaney rode into a valley of low, undulating farmland as evening began to settle. Rain had fallen heavily here, too, spurring wild growth of grasses everywhere they looked. They had made a sombre procession leaving the settler’s homestead, riding away with the packhorse trailing behind them at the end of a length of rope. All that they had, Niall thought, earthly possessions at least, sat astride a broken-backed police horse loaded high as a hawker’s cart as they picked their way along a track fringed by grey, broad-leafed eucalypts. Most of what he could offer had been given to Sarah’s mother and Louise even though they had more than him as it was. It was of little importance to him anyway. Where they were going everything would be new, paid for by the pounds he had put away and the work he would do; whatever work that might be.
But the remembrance of Van Diemen’s Land, a sense of something passing and the mournful silence of the country they moved through left him pensive. A flock of cockatoos squawking aloft almost startled him from the saddle.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘I’ve nothing to complain about,’ he answered. He stared at the darkening sky. ‘Night’s coming in.’
‘You think we’ll make the town before nightfall? What’s the name of it again?’
‘Chiltern.’
‘Do you think we’ll get to there?’
‘Maybe, but perhaps not too.’
‘What sort of answer is that, Mr Niall Kennedy?’ she grinned.
/>
It pleased him that she didn’t ride side-saddle like many women. It wouldn’t have made sense anyway, he thought, with all the riding they would have to do to make Beechworth.
‘It’s the answer of an equivocator,’ he said, smiling quietly from where he rode ahead.
‘That’s nice sort of language coming from a policeman.’
‘A former policeman.’
‘I think you mean to keep me out here tonight, Sergeant. Do you think that’s so?’
He reddened. ‘It was the town I was thinking about.’
Sarah smiled, but a little further, as they rode for a spell in silence, she noticed uneasiness in Niall’s eyes.
‘Is it about my father?’
‘I didn’t want that to happen.’
‘I know you didn’t. But you don’t have to be sorry for it. If it wasn’t him it would have been worse. For both of us.’
‘I know that. But it doesn’t make it seem any better. He was your father.’
‘In name only,’ she said. ‘I feel more grieving for Mother and Louise, leaving them like that.’
‘At least they’ll know how to look after themselves,’ Niall said. ‘There’s no work to do there that they haven’t done before.’
‘I know. But I still don’t feel all that right about it.’
‘It’s natural you’d feel that way. But once we find something and we’re settled they can follow us.’
‘It’s just in the meantime I’m worried about,’ Sarah said.
‘They’ll be all right. It won’t be long till we sort ourselves out.’
He fell back so they rode side by side. He reached across to touch her as reassurance and catch her eye.
‘How long will it take to reach Melbourne, then?’ she asked.
He thought.
‘I’ll arrange for someone to take care of our horses at Beechworth. We’ll take a coach from there. A couple of days then to Melbourne, I’d think, maybe less depending on which road we take.’
‘I’m not in any hurry,’ she said. ‘It’s been all this time and it’s good being out here now, but it’s strange too. I still feel as though I need to get further and further away to be safe.’ She pointed ahead. ‘There’s someone coming.’
A horseman approached from the direction they were headed, the rider easing up as he came nearer so they all stopped in the middle of the track. He was young, about twenty, with an excitable, flushed expression. He was bursting to talk.
‘I say, you fellows,’ he exclaimed eagerly. ‘Messy business up at the Mosquito Creek gold diggings, they say. You know anything about it?’
‘You’re nearly a week late,’ Niall replied.
‘They say the commissioner drowned there, poor chap.’
‘I did hear something like that,’ Niall said.
‘I want to get up there and see what’s happening for myself,’ the young man said. ‘I hope I’m not too late. Hell of a thing, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know enough to say.’
‘Have you come from the Mosquito, then?’
‘Near there.’
‘It’s a damned thing,’ the horseman puffed. ‘Drownings. Murders. They say they haven’t uncovered the half of it.’
‘There’s always the other half you don’t know about,’ Niall said.
‘Well, it’s my job to find out and get the record straight. Anyway, you fellows, I don’t want to hold you up so I’d best be going.’
And with that he flicked his mount with his whip and bolted up the track.
‘Odd man,’ Sarah murmured.
‘He’ll have plenty of like company where he’s headed,’ Niall said.
They rode on for a while.
Niall kept his eyes ahead to watch for anything untoward on the track but his mind returned to the events of the last week. When the floodwaters subsided they did so quickly, taking with them any stories they could have told. There would be no answers to some things, he knew. Another day, maybe two, he thought, and none of it, the boat and everything else, would have been necessary. It was all folly: the plan to rescue the diggers, the commissioner’s boat, the men he took with him across the river. And then there was the discovery on the other side, the mayhem, the madness.
When they came to the next rise in the track he peered through falling evening to look for any signs of the town in the distance. He gleaned lights when his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom settling over the bush. They were specking a ridge perhaps a mile away, maybe closer, but it was too hard to tell.
‘I think we’ll have to camp,’ he said to her. ‘We won’t be able to see a thing soon. What do you think?’
‘You’ll know.’
They rode through fading light and when Niall’s hand absently felt in his coat pocket it came upon the small box he had forgotten. So why had that Oriente made such a fuss as he had to hide this thing – this tiny wooden box with its hinges and scrap of cloth kept inside? What was its worth? Had it travelled with him all the way from England, was it a sentimental remembrance of a past love? Or did it in previous times contain a gold ring or locket? Whatever it once held, as Niall stared into the dimming countryside around him he knew it amounted to nothing out here in all this vastness. What was real in England was just air out here. What had value and worth in the old country was worthless now.
He held the box in his hand a minute longer. Perhaps there was some significance about it he couldn’t see, or some magic he had missed. But nothing came to him and he knew it never would. He flung it far away from him into the wild grass.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘How much longer before we stop?’
‘I think we’ll stop here. We’ll set ourselves up somewhere.’
He found a place on open ground a short distance from the track where he thought they should camp for the night. They were close to the town but it was getting late and he didn’t want to push ahead any further. There was something too about the prospect of being in the town that might’ve broken the lazy spell hanging over them. He was here with Sarah now and it was just the two of them and he didn’t want to see that go.
‘I can set us up a couple of places to sleep,’ he suggested awkwardly.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ Sarah said, the coming night expansive above them as they untied a sheet of canvas and some blankets from the packhorse. ‘And I want to sleep right beside you tonight. That would be a pleasing thing, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, it would.’
She unrolled blankets over the canvas he spread on the ground.
‘We can lie down together and stare up into the sky.’
After they’d fixed themselves a simple dinner of cold slices of lamb, carrots and potatoes from yesterday, and had drunk long from a bottle of water, they sat talking by a fire he’d mustered for company and warmth.
‘We’ll do all good things together in Melbourne, won’t we?’ she said dreamily. ‘Our own place.’
‘We’ll have everything we want and only the things we want. The things we never had before.’
As he lost himself in the crackling red and yellow flame of their fire he wondered again about Badger’s fate and if he might have saved the man’s life if he hadn’t left him that first time. After his eventual return none of his captors had even thought to ask if he’d come upon the other escapees so he remained silent, carrying that episode inside him every day thereafter.
His family also churned in his mind; what they might be doing now, marooned over there on the other side of the world. There was as much chance of him ever going back there, he knew, as of them suddenly appearing in Melbourne riding on horseback through the streets. It was all too long ago now. He could never undo what had happened there. And perhaps it was for the best that all these years had come to make a complete, final separation between him and them.
He poured water into a deep dish so Sarah could wash, discreetly turning his back as she did so.
‘Turn i
n soon?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Everything’s happened so quickly, I think that’s the reason.’
What was in his father had in the end poisoned his whole family, Niall thought. Where there was a beginning there was also the seed of an end. But as he lay awake in the night and turned on his side to watch Sarah in her sleep, and listen to her breathing, all the other possibilities revealed themselves to him too.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the following for their support of this novel: Ben Ball, Pamela Biggins, Laurie Clancy, Garry Disher, Gerry Engwerda, Michael Nolan, and the Australian Society of Authors through its mentorship program, supported by Copyright Agency Limited.
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Australia)
250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada)
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England
Penguin Ireland
25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ)
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd
24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2010
Mosquito Creek Page 30