by Meg Keneally
She approached one knot of men who were waiting for goods to be lowered to them on a rope. They looked at her with interest and nudged each other. Nearby, an older man with crinkled grey hair sat on a crate, puffing streams of pipe smoke into the air. Their gaffer, perhaps, if longshoremen had such things.
‘Know nothing about sisters,’ he said when she asked, ‘but Mr Keenan’s over there.’ He pointed to another ship being unloaded by longshoremen. ‘The skinny one.’
She thanked the man and walked over. Keenan, thin and wiry, was taking a crate from one man and passing it to another. He was old enough to have a full brown beard although it had been unevenly trimmed, and he resembled most longshoremen she had seen, with his sweat-soiled neckerchief and sun-punished skin.
He carried his load inside a warehouse, and she waited near the entrance until he emerged again; she did not wish to march up to him and converse in the presence of a group of longshoremen.
When she unfolded the picture, he stared at it for a few seconds, then gave her a sharp glance. ‘No time to look at some girl’s silly scribblings,’ he said, but did not move away. He spoke in an accent she had once heard in Angel Meadow, where many of the mill workers were Irish.
‘Nor do I have time for liars,’ she said.
He glanced at it again, and at her. ‘The police use women, sometimes.’
‘And if you thought I was a police informer, you would never have told me that.’
She gasped as he seized the paper, crumpled it and threw it into the ocean. ‘I don’t know what that symbol means,’ he whispered harshly, ‘and you should not be bothering a poor working man with such trifles.’
Sarah was a little startled by his anger, but also encouraged – the symbol must have some meaning to him, to evoke such a response. ‘Of course you don’t know what it means. But you might have seen it, somewhere.’
He ran his hands through his hair. ‘All right, I might have,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not far from here. Above the door of a house, up beyond the stream.’
‘Do you know who lives there?’
‘I know very little. People go there most Sundays, when others are busy drinking themselves stupid.’
He paused. ‘More are always welcome, if they’re of the right mind.’
A man called out to Keenan, urging him back to the ship. He pressed his lips together, shook his head and walked back to his task, striding up the gang-board and onto the deck.
*
As soon as Sarah had left the dockside crowds behind, she broke into a run. There was no time for her to search for the house before Mrs Vale returned.
By the time she was nearing the English Rose, her eyes were focused on the uneven road that seemed to enjoy tripping the unwary. She did not see the chain gang until she was almost upon them; they were a little way off the road below her as she came over a small hill. Judging by their axes and fallen trees around them, they had been cutting some timber. Their presence was brought to her attention by the shouts of an incipient fight. Two men, bare-backed and leg-ironed, had their heads down as they gripped one another, each trying to overbalance his opponent. The overseer was laughing and clapping, which was all of the encouragement most of the others needed to down tools and watch.
Henry was towards the edge of the group, glancing at the combatants but also looking around, frowning. She had seen that frown when he was reading Briardown’s letters aloud to the others in the loft, instructions delivered when their leader was otherwise occupied. Henry had struggled to decipher the florid English, the filigree sentences. What was he trying to decipher now? Perhaps he was still making sense of his foreign surroundings. Of the tall, slender trees and the grey-furred creatures that clung to them. Of the alien seasons. Of the knowledge he would never return home.
As badly as she wanted Henry to see her, Sarah preferred not to draw any notice from the other men. She walked just behind the bushes that lined the opposite side of the track, picking her way carefully down until she was parallel to the group, hoping he would continue looking around.
He did, and when his eyes landed on her he smiled, showing a new gap in his lower row of teeth. He glanced back at the fight, which continued to consume the attention of the others, then walked towards her. His leg irons would no doubt be clanking, but she couldn’t hear them above the shouts and the clanks of iron on the legs of the fighters.
She looked at Henry far more closely than she had on last seeing him, when the shock of his features among the scared faces and leering mouths of the gang had stopped her searching his face for strangeness among the familiar. It was there now, though. A yellowing bruise under one eye. A face of red and pink patches, where some parts of his skin had peeled off to present another layer to the sun for burning. Dry lips that cracked as he smiled. ‘I can’t linger,’ he said. ‘But you – you’re safe! I had hoped—’
‘As I continue to,’ she said. ‘There are others like us here. I don’t know much about them, not yet, but perhaps they could help free you. I can’t bear to think of you like this for – how long?’
‘Well, I have a life sentence, although I might be able to get a ticket of leave after seven years. I’ll never be able to leave the colony, though. Listen, Sarah, do not do this. Do not risk yourself again.’
‘But they do not know who I am! I am safe.’
‘No, you’re not!’ he said urgently. ‘You never will be. You don’t know—’
‘Landers!’
The roar came from behind Henry, and Sarah realised that the sound of the fight had dimmed. The overseer was now strolling over towards them, a man whose face had been punished by fists as well as the sun. He grabbed Henry’s shoulder and sent him sprawling.
The other men, including the two with bloodied lips and noses, were clearly delighted by this fresh entertainment, and laughed as Henry hit the ground.
He got to his feet, giving her a reassuring half-smile.
Sarah tensed, thinking the overseer might do the same to her. Instead his scowl transformed into a serious look of concern. ‘Stay away from these men, miss. They’re not the harmless kind who stole a bit of food. They have beaten people, sometimes almost to death. And that’s not the worst of it. The one you were talking to is guilty of high treason.’
*
Sarah was probably committing treason herself, for the second time, as she slunk out of the English Rose the next afternoon while Mrs Vale attended a charitable gathering after church, and made her way through town. She walked past a grooved rock funnelling water down to the open mouths of those who stopped to drink there, then she strode into the area known as The Rocks, on the western arm, far less hospitable with its jagged shoreline than other parts of the harbour.
Some of the buildings she had seen in Sydney, such as the courthouse where she’d participated in the inquest, were nearly as grand as those to be found in London, and clearly modelled on their counterparts. But here these buildings looked almost ridiculous, transplanted to a place of heat and dust and space.
In The Rocks, none of their kind were to be seen. A few wattle and daub cottages with fenced yards were interspersed with slab huts topped by roofs that had been patchworked out of any available materials and probably had no hope of keeping out even the most gentle rain. There were no roads, the only thoroughfares created by feet that had trod down grass until it refused to grow. The land rose up sharply enough that the upper row of huts was only accessible by a precarious track.
The house did not have any windows to speak of, simply shutters set into the daubed front wall on either side of a plain door. In the lintel above the door, someone had scratched the crude shape of a serpent. A small veranda extended from the house, upon which people sat in chairs or on the wooden boards, drinking a substance that Sarah suspected was not tea.
She raised her hand to knock, and the door opened under her fist. A woman bustled up to her as stepped inside. Some of those lounging outside had not taken much care with their clothing; the expanse of fle
sh visible would never have been tolerated in church. This woman, though – older, but not yet with as many years as Molly Thistle – would clearly never have allowed such a thing to happen to her. Even in the advancing heat of spring, a woollen shawl was crossed over her chest and tied at the back. Her skirts were so worn and faded that Sarah could not make out the design of the fabric, but they had been patched with some diligence. She had shown less care for the cooking pot she was holding, the base of which was covered in dents. ‘This is a private residence,’ she said.
Sarah tried not to laugh. ‘I do apologise,’ she said. ‘I was given the impression I might find a particular kind of . . . conversation, here. Maybe I was mistaken.’
The woman narrowed her eyes and yelled, ‘Mr Keenan!’ She turned back to Sarah while they waited, staring at her as though fearful she might produce a phalanx of police from under her skirt. ‘Mr Keenan!’
A door set in the rear wall of the cottage’s front room opened, and the wiry young man stepped in.
‘Another of your little mice, Mr Keenan,’ the woman said. ‘Why do you believe women can be trusted more than men?’
‘I don’t, not always,’ he said, arching an eyebrow at Sarah. ‘You get a feeling, sometimes.’
‘Oh, a feeling! How odd that these feelings of yours are usually in relation to young women.’
‘Mrs Addison, if she was a police spy, we would already be in chains,’ Keenan said, with the weariness of someone who was constantly having to explain himself.
‘Say nothing,’ Mrs Addison told Sarah sternly. ‘Not now, not afterwards. There are some here who don’t share Keenan’s finer feelings.’ She banged on the doorframe with the pot stop and called out, ‘Time, you lot!’
‘Well, as you’re here, you might as well stay,’ Keenan said to Sarah. ‘If you’re lucky, you might even hear something interesting.’
CHAPTER 25
The crowd at the front had swelled. Most of those who had been there when Sarah arrived looked as though they lived in The Rocks, that theirs was a world of bark and scrap. They had been joined by people who looked as though they lived in houses of brick. Nobody was rich, certainly, but some of the men were dressed as though they might work in Mrs Thistle’s warehouses, some of the women appropriately attired for serving at Mrs Vale’s table.
They all turned with the others at Mrs Addison’s call, then filed slowly into the cottage. It was furnished with chairs of uncertain structural integrity, a seemingly impossible number jammed into the small room, while the empty, smutted fireplace had an upturned crate in front of it. Some shrank a little as they passed Mrs Addison, and she glared at each one, leaving them in no doubt that they were here at her pleasure, which was limited.
There seemed to be some common sense of propriety, with the better dressed of the men yielding seats to the most slovenly of the women. Keenan walked over to Sarah and gestured her to a seat near the centre, facing the fireplace and its crate podium.
‘I have told you,’ said Mrs Addison, standing in front of the audience once they were all seated. ‘Again and again, I’ve told you. If you mill about the house out the front like that, every Sunday? Someone will report us, nothing surer. Pretend you’re having a Sunday stroll. Come later – Mr Keenan doesn’t mind being interrupted. But the next time I open the door to find a throng waiting for the loaves and bloody fishes, that’ll be the last use you will have of this place. And I’ll stop letting a room to Mr Keenan. Here he is.’
There was a smattering of applause, before those clapping remembered that nothing laudatory had been said as yet.
Taller than Mrs Addison by a head, Keenan stood on the crate that she had ignored. ‘We are grateful, madam, for your indulgence,’ he said with a little bow.
‘Go to blazes,’ Mrs Addison retorted, grinning as she swatted him on the arm.
Sarah’s conversation with him at the docks had been in urgent whispers. She had not realised that his voice was quite so deep, nor that it carried so well.
‘You will have heard, all of you, of the sentence handed down to those soldiers.’
A few nodded, while some glanced at each other in confusion.
Keenan smiled at Sarah. ‘So our new friends can follow – soldiers killed that fellow on George Street. Beat him to death with palings from his own fence. And for what? He was trying to shelter a woman they wanted to get to.’
Some indignant murmuring, a few nodding heads.
‘Now, none of us are likely to see the place of our birth again,’ Keenan continued. ‘And some of you did as little as stealing a scrap of food. These men, though. What did they get?’ He paused, looking around the room.
He fancies himself a bit, thought Sarah.
After a moment, he pounded the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘A one shilling fine and six months in gaol!’ he roared. ‘Not banishment from everything they knew! Not exile! There is no clearer indication – if anyone needed any – of how the government sees us. The slaying of a working man is a lesser crime than stealing a head of cabbage!’
Was he happy with the response? The muttering in the room was louder, to be sure. But there was no standing, shouting, or thrusting of fists into the air.
He sighed, but kept going. ‘We have no value to them! We are simply a means to greater profit. Oh, you’ll hear them talk. Talk about how when they do well, everyone else does too – that they can hire more farmhands for the pastoral properties they barely set foot on, or obtain more servants for their houses. They say their good fortune washes down to the rest of us. Well, something washes down, but it is not fortune.’
‘What do we do about it, though?’ said a man dressed in a hessian waistcoat that looked as though it hadn’t been hemmed, just a rough shape over a stained shirt. On his feet were leather sacks drawn closed by leather thongs. ‘Take up arms? What good will that do, except to get us killed?’
‘Thomas Spence wrote it was a pity that people did not perceive the immediate and inexpressible blessings that would infallibly result from a revolution. He said, “the good effects of such a charge would be more exhilarating and reviving to the hunger-bitten and despairing children of oppression, than a benign and sudden spring to the frost-bitten earth, after a long and severe winter.” How are we to exercise any power? We are under the yoke of the King, but we aren’t able to vote for members of his parliament. We have no recourse against the decisions of his governor, no means to influence the world being built around us. None, except arms.’
‘A good way to hang!’ a man called. ‘A good way to die.’
Another man stood. Making no attempt to interject, he folded his arms and glared. He looked like a schoolmaster waiting for silence before settling on an appropriate punishment for rowdiness. He was old enough, too, to have been Keenan’s schoolmaster. His bald head was fringed by grey hair, which he had made no attempt to tame so that it stuck out at the sides like the ears of the grey creatures in the trees. Hair also sprouted from his nose, and he had the florid, red-netted cheeks of a habitual drinker.
Keenan faltered as he returned the man’s stare. ‘Yes, Mr Baxendale,’ he said, ‘you wish to speak?’
Baxendale turned to the other man who had spoken. ‘You think in shades of grey, if you think in terms of degree.’
‘There are no degrees, Mr Keenan!’ he continued. ‘Either one is for the people, or one deserves death. And anyone not actively working for the overthrow of this corrupt system of government is a sympathiser.’
‘What of those who are unable to join us in this effort? Those too poor, too frightened?’ said Keenan. ‘Are they to be put to the sword, in this world you wish to build?’
‘If they are unwilling to fight for their freedom, they do not deserve it,’ Baxendale said. ‘Poor? Frightened? I have been both of those things, I still am. It has not stopped me, nor should it stop anyone else. But the poor are not the ones who should be most admonished.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Mr Bax
endale,’ said Keenan earnestly.
‘It is the rich,’ cried Baxendale, pounding his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘Those who have the ability to bring pressure to bear in the administration, those with influence who choose to use it only on their own behalf. The McAllisters, with all of their land. Old Manning, with his trading and his public houses. And that Thistle woman – appalling creature she is. Those like her who came here as convicts the worst of all, for they know the cost of oppression and are willing to let others pay it.’
‘Your passion is commendable, although while all the wealthy have a case to answer, we must not be distracted from the administration,’ said Keenan. ‘We lack the rights of even the most humble of our counterparts in Britain. They will not cede them to us if we simply ask nicely. The history of the world, my friends, is soaked in the blood of those who understood that the only way to gain their rights was to take them.’
*
‘And will you take your rights?’ Sarah asked Keenan after the meeting had broken up. They were standing in front of the house as it slowly emptied, people nodding at Keenan or glancing cautiously at her as they passed.
‘In course,’ he said. ‘We had been expecting some help. Help that sank before it could reach us.’
‘Help?’ Baxendale said. ‘The only reliable source of help lies within you, boy!’
‘Mr Keenan,’ she said, ‘would you care to introduce us?’
Baxendale glared at her, eyes wide and brows drawn as though she had just offended him beyond words.
‘Miss Marin,’ said Keenan. ‘Noah Baxendale. One of our more . . . enthusiastic members.’
Baxendale bowed stiffly and shallowly.
‘You speak as someone who has done more than talk in the past, Mr Baxendale,’ Sarah said.
‘And I speak with caution of the past. It holds its own dangers.’
‘Even among friends?’
‘And how can I be assured that I am? You heard of the conspiracy in London? Necks stretched over that, and all because they were betrayed.’