The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  It was over: one of his charges dead. Lawrence’s worst nightmare had been realised.

  He took up a handful of earth, as directed.

  ‘“FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy”,’ intoned the priest, ‘“to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.”’

  Dirt pebble-dashed the cheap coffin’s lid.

  ‘“I HEARD a voice from heaven”,’ the priest resumed, ‘“saying unto me, Write…”’

  Lawrence, looking down into his calloused palm, found it empty.

  ~

  In a public bar along Bethnal Green High-street, not far from the burial ground, the team captain swallowed another swig of beer. He drank alone.

  ‘Lawrence is the black sheep,’ the papers jibed, ‘because he is white!’

  Journeying alongside the Blacks had, he felt, led to the growth of his understanding of the world – or at least the limitations of mankind. In the innate decency of their natural character, his native players were so much more than savages, the naïve infants or even blanks they were so often mistaken for. The longer he spent in their company, the more he earned their respect; and they his. Familiarity bred contempt only for those who would denigrate such essential humanity, and continued so to do, almost every day.

  It was no better in Australia.

  Oh, surely they were rude and unmoulded – when not being mulish, over-generous to a fault. Yet a willingness to adapt and an eagerness to please were countermanded by their keeping the greater part of themselves remote. Even as events modified their more immediate environment, they cultivated an inner world, resolute and unchanging. What was perhaps a source of strength also proved their fatal weakness: they could only take so much, and then no more. Their character cast and fired in their disturbed imagination, any alteration too great threatened to shatter them completely.

  As his dear colleague Hayman had said, it took time to know the Aboriginal character – longer, perhaps, to appreciate it. And time on the world’s stage was a luxury they were not afforded.

  King Cole was laid in his grave, Lawrence’s high hopes with him.

  ‘Another,’ Lawrence said, placing a shilling on the bar. ‘Keep ’em coming.’

  Neither the most skilful player nor the steadiest, even as Cole’s captain Lawrence couldn’t very well denounce the poor fellow in his elegy. The battered copy of Tom Brown lay on the sticky bar before him; he had pulled quotes, as he took so much else, from that book serving as his personal Bible. Within its curled pages, a fine balance was ever maintained between joy and pain, a man’s duty to himself and to others, and the will towards personal betterment – the very objects he had most lost sight of.

  Taking up the book, Lawrence eyed the wise verse from Ambarvalia, by Clough, the Rugby poet, an epigraph heading the chapter ‘Tom Brown’s Last Match’. In search of guidance he began to flick back and forth through the pages, wherein so much of the text had been underlined, and margins annotated. His vaunted ambition – to make his living, while at the same time doing real good – had fallen to mere money-making. The tour turned a healthy profit for its investors. George Smith, financier, over from Sydney – cousin to George W. Graham, their accountant – intended to purchase stallion bloodstock for shipping home. William Hayman’s stake matured nicely. Lawrence himself was fourth in the concern.

  He paid for his silence only now. Meantime, they kept losing. Some losses were harder to bear.

  ‘“Derry down, then fill up your glass, he’s the best that drinks most.”’ Lawrence, well in his cups, motioned again to the barman. The Reverend Cotton’s ‘Cricket Song’ echoed and re-echoed. Lessons could be learnt from cricket, all right. Not all were of benefit.

  ‘And when the game’s o’er, and our fate shall draw nigh

  (For the heroes of cricket, like others must die),

  Our bats we’ll resign, neither troubled nor vex’d,

  And give up our wickets to those that come next.’

  ~

  Victoria had been Queen longer than Sarah had been alive. In 27 years as one of Her Imperial Majesty’s loyal subjects, she had known conquest, mutiny, epidemic, abolition, and countless wars – the country even coming close, once, to revolution – without ever really experiencing any of it.

  Mother had died in 1854, shortly before Sarah’s thirteenth birthday; the past was never spoken of thereafter, current events at most vaguely discussed. Little to live for, save day-to-day business between these four walls. Hers had been the life of a nun – contemplation of life, not life itself.

  Sarah was standing at the front window, as she had late into the night, in the parlour this time. Having gained her freedom, she little knew what it meant, or what to do with it. Unmarried, an only child, she could not assume the duties of sister-in-law or maiden aunt. She was effectively redundant; no innocent, but ignorant, an artless girl who had needed a modern-day Le Huron, the savage out of Voltaire’s L’Ingénu, to show to her the country in which she lived – a realm of ignorance and poverty, and, worst of all, willing ignorance of poverty: old England, sick and sad at heart.

  The city, even unto its hospitals and churches, had become a nightmare scene. She looked in from outside of it – belonging nowhere in it.

  Intimacy with the details of Druce’s tortured Life were not, on their own, necessary for her to have approached greater understanding: poverty respected neither class nor capability; not intellect, prudence, labour or health. There was nothing deserving at all in poverty – vice no singular promoter, nor, heaven knew, virtue any great defence.

  Everyday trials and tribulations, the struggle for existence, brought down the tyranny of the Word. Religion was an irrelevance in the face of such suffering, just as she was – moral superiority, morals themselves, impossible to maintain, while the broad mass of people existed beyond reach of the gospel.

  Who more truly lived in denial? Who more truly lived? Living hand to mouth, by the hour, freed poor folk from the curse of intellect holding her in thrall. She might be better off unable to afford such torturing luxury, the time on her hands all her own. Or was this but the first, halting step in her uncertain decline – poverty, fear of poverty, her selfish regard, all rooted in the same spiritual sickness.

  She must keep faith. The sheer effort it took to change one’s self might take many years, oceans even, but it was always possible to move forward.

  Almost unconsciously, Sarah touched her hand against the cold window glass.

  Not until that day Brippoki arrived on her doorstep had her own self awoken, from within as much as without. She would not allow her new life to be so soon over, now that he was gone.

  Sarah dressed and took a turn around Russell-square, wandering, directionless. A wise heart rarely found in the house of mourning, she strove to restore her equilibrium.

  She paused beneath the shade of a London plane tree, Platanus X hispanica, the most common of trees, planted widely throughout the city as it was the only kind to thrive in a polluted atmosphere. Plain as its name, it was not without aspects of beauty. By virtue of its mere existence the evil world was done some good.

  She removed one of her gloves, to stroke the mottled bark’s rough surface.

  Only a month since she had been to see him play in his first match at the Oval, and now he was dead and buried. She had known the appointed time, and she had known the appointed place; Captain Lawrence had been kind enough to make certain of that. Sarah preferred to honour Brippoki her own way – his way, most likely: in silent communion with nature. If she was wrong, he must forgive her. They had put Lambert Larkin in the ground on Tuesday, in Malling. She could not face a second funeral inside a si
ngle week.

  Her goodbyes said privately, Sarah tried to picture Brippoki as she wished to remember him – seated atop One Tree Hill, beneath the elm.

  She found herself picking at the bark. Friable, it came off in sizeable chunks. An area about the size of her fist was now exposed – the layer beneath, disclosed to the air, noticeably lighter in colour.

  Sarah took a step back and, guilty for the injury, replaced her glove. Turning, she looked up, searching somewhere above the drifting clouds.

  When we died, as in our dreams, we returned to the place that we came from.

  ‘Weep, weep.’

  Heels grinding the gravel path, she spun about.

  A childish giggle issued from among the highest branches of the tree; Sarah moved side to side, trying to see where. Taking a step or two further from the trunk, she almost collided with a perambulator. Deep within the shifting leafshadows, and sufficiently high up, she could not make out the face, not even to determine the colour of his skin – but it appeared to be a boy of about eight years old. He could have been black but was more likely white, and filthy – a sweep’s boy, a small white child, sitting tall in a tree and laughing at her.

  Much later, Sarah again occupied the front parlour, her chair pulled up close to the windows; no longer staring down into the street; content merely to look out occasionally, at the night skies.

  She wondered if she could have helped Brippoki any better, now that he lay beyond all help – but if so, how? Lambert had always led her to despise the phrase ‘if only’: in a universe directed by God’s purposes, regrets were immoral.

  Bitterness was futile, and twisted a life. Sarah thought, if anything, she should be grateful to Druce, and, yes, to Lambert, for the example they had set. Only in taking back the responsibility for her own life could she look down into the grave without bitterness.

  Sarah’s fingers worked, turning over and over the small object in her hand.

  Things her elders would call – had called – supernatural, primitive tribal societies accepted as part of the natural order, the intangible accredited with power to affect the tangible, and indelibly so. Ghosts, Holy or otherwise, achieved dynamism through the strength of their belief – beliefs making for reality.

  Some sort of connection existed between Brippoki on the one hand and Druce on the other; she was not meant to know what it was, only to bear witness to the blood sacrifice, part of a ritual; living proof. Brippoki, gentle soul, had believed a vengeful spirit unleashed. His sensitivities had caused him no little distress and a very great fear: fear of a figment something like his personal Nemesis.

  According to what she had learned of his complex mythology, that vengeful spirit would often employ another agent to do its dirty work. Druce himself was dust, a ghost; less substantial than Wall, more a Moonshine sort of man, made up of lantern, dog, and thorn-bush. If he were the killer then she was his mouthpiece, the one to deliver his curse.

  Had she herself embodied the ‘In-gna’?

  And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time. Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.

  Harbinger of doom, or doom herself; for all she knew the tail of a fiend lurked concealed beneath her skirts. It could not have been any worse if she had killed him herself, and either buried or burned all evidence.

  Sarah clutched her free hand, which had been resting on Druce’s manuscript, to her racing heart. She knew something, a little, of Aborigine custom. Should she disclose to anyone her suspicion of his death by haunting, Brippoki’s erstwhile fellows might feel it their obligation to seek out the killer – be he or she alive or dead. And if the guilty party could not be discovered, then another of his people would do as well: as and when the opportunity presented itself, sooner or later they would enact their dreadful revenge.

  When it came to knowledge of secrets, she began to understand the responsibilities of holding one’s tongue.

  The murder unsolved, late revelation of Brippoki’s heritage, his white blood, drove Sarah once more to consider that long list of names, names of those who had wronged Druce during his lifetime, trawling for possible suspects. Captain Lawrence had intimated rumours of a figure in authority, a governor perhaps, or ship’s captain at least. Grose, King, Bligh, Macquarie…for whatever reasons, there had been a quick turnover among the governors of that colony. Each of them had some recorded association with Joseph Druce; and they were also, presumably, in daily contact with the native population, if only as their servant underclass. Dalrymple, Simeon Lord – who knew? It could be one of any number of early traders, chancers and swindlers who had chanced to cross paths and swords with the unfortunate man. Seventy-six years had elapsed since the date of Druce’s transportation in 1792 and the present moment – the span of up to at least four possible generations, maybe more.

  Hic Occultus Occulto Occisus Est: thus read the epitaph of Kaspar Hauser. ‘Here an unknown was killed by an unknown.’

  Really, there was no way for her to know. Here she was, still trying to make sense of the evidence when more often than not there was none, or else none that could be qualified, the larger part of the story already over, long before she was even born.

  Pale face reflected in the window glass, Sarah looked to herself, not recognising that creature staring back, strange and new. She surprised herself at the immediacy with which was willing even to think along these lines, able by now to enter into the mindset of men as different as either Brippoki or Druce.

  ‘In consideration of a certain reward…’

  Sarah opened up her closed palm. In it lay the whittled carving of a small boat. She had found it on the windowsill about an hour earlier. A crimson impression creased her palm from where she had clutched on to it so tightly, for so long; gladly she endured the vague ache of her tendons.

  Brippoki had perhaps intended to represent the Rangatira.

  His superstitious belief proved inspirational in another way. Any ghost story necessarily entailed belief in a return from the dead: if not the resurrection exactly, then at least notions of an afterlife. By the same token, his ultimate conviction in what threatened and probably killed him revealed – to her mind at least – an aspect of hope. Both Lubbock and Lawrence had intimated Aboriginal concepts of an afterlife, one entailing a return across the oceans, supposedly home; even so far as wearing the skin of a different colour. They entertained ideas concerning the persistence of the soul…its migration, after death, into the living body of another, be it animal, vegetable, or white man; and, perhaps, of a better world.

  Mutability of matter, immutability of soul – the flower may bloom and die; buried, the bulb lives on. Lambert would have liked that.

  Christ preached that he rose from the dead, and yet some still argued against the feasibility of resurrections, the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles. If there was no resurrection, then Christ had not risen: preaching was in vain, and her faith also. Her faith, which was above all a quest for truth – even if it might never be grasped. What was real, except for what the mind told you?

  Man feared death in uncertainty of his status in the afterlife. Neither Lambert nor Druce had departed in peace, whereas Brippoki…his eyes had smiled, finally, in recognition – as if to say ‘you’ve been a good friend to me’. He himself absolved her.

  She alone might unite Druce with Brippoki in her thoughts, so that they were reconciled, although dying at the opposite ends of the earth from where they most wanted to be. Gladly, or so it seemed, Brippoki returned to that place he came from, wherever it might be – the same timeless realm perhaps where Joseph Druce took stock. They walked in conversation along the shores of Eternity; awaiting, as one, the messenger to bid them embark.

  The grandfather clock began to strike the late hour, soon joined by the sound of church bells. Standing at the opened window, Sarah heard none of it – her mind half the world and months on the ocean distant.

  More than one path existed to glor
y and to God; a longer path, and more treacherous, than any she could have imagined…

  There was more than one truth.

  No one should judge another for the meat they chose to eat, for the drink they chose to drink, in respect of their high and holy days, of new moon or their Sabbath days.

  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

  DEATH OF KING COLE, THE ABORIGINAL CRICKETER

  Cricketers will regret to hear that King Cole, one of the celebrated Black Eleven now on a professional visit to this country, died last Wednesday eve in Guy’s Hospital. His death was caused by inflammation of the lungs, and his loss is severely mourned by his mates and all who knew him.

  Daily Telegraph

  27 June, 1868

  THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS

  REGISTERED AT THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE FOR TRANSMISSION ABROAD.

  No. 1490. - VOL. LIII. SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1868. WITH A SUPPLEMENT, FIVEPENCE.

  BIRTHS AND DEATHS.

  The following is the return by the Registrar-General of births and deaths in London, during the week ending Saturday, June 27: –

  The deaths registered in London during the week were 1454. It was the twenty-sixth week of the year; and the average number of deaths for that week is, with a correction for the increase of population, 1304. The deaths in the present return exceed by 150 the estimated amount, and exceed by 226 the number recorded in the preceding week.

  METROPOLITAN NEWS.

  A complimentary dinner was given last Saturday to Sir John Young, who has been succeeded in the governorship of New South Wales by the Earl of Belmore. The colonial department was represented by the Duke of Buckingham and Mr Adderley, and of the guests a large number were connected to the Australian colonies. In response to the toast of his health, Sir John Young sketched out a great future for Australia; for although fortunes might not be made as rapidly as they once were, the general progress of the people was satisfactory, and wealth was increasing. He attributed the prosperity of the colonies to the marked absence of intemperance, and to the indomitable energy of the people.