The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  Matthew still had a couple of drinks at the Royal whenever he went into town, still saw Janice afterwards. It had become part of his routine.

  His whole life had become routine.

  Rumours of gold continued. Strikes had occurred north of the Murray in Ophir and the Turon River. One or two men packed up and left but for the most part the din of the diggings echoed quietly through the streets of Amherst. Until on 8 July 1851 word broke that payable gold had been found forty miles away, at Clunes, in Victoria.

  After that it was like a flash fire. In July gold was discovered on the banks of a creek flowing into the Yarra River, less than a day’s walk from Melbourne. On 11 August another strike was declared at Buninyong, fifty miles north of Geelong. In September a thousand men were digging outside Ballarat. October, and the biggest field of all was discovered at Mount Alexander, outside Castlemaine. By then Amherst and the surrounding districts were almost empty of men.

  ‘Aren’t you going, too?’ Janice asked Matthew.

  He shook his head. ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Her brown eyes ached with her hunger to get away. ‘They say half the colony’s gone. You could be rich.’

  ‘That’s the point. Too many people. Thousands of them. Only a handful will ever make anything.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you be one of them? You’re tough enough.’

  Matthew read her hunger but ignored it. ‘Reckon I’ll stay where I am.’

  He expected anger, tears even. Instead she looked at him appraisingly. ‘I know why, too. You reckon there’s gold at Glenmona, don’t you? I know my dad does.’

  He hadn’t thought about it. ‘Cusack would have said if there had been.’ However, when he got back he decided it would do no harm to stop off at the homestead to have a word with Cusack.

  ‘They say there’s gold to be found along the creeks. Maybe I should have a poke around.’

  ‘No!’ The word exploded like a gun shot. ‘I absolutely forbid it!’ Cusack became aware that Matthew was staring at him, astonished by his vehemence. He took a deep breath. In a calmer voice he said, ‘People running away from their jobs … Gold fever will be the finish of this country.’

  Man like Cusack, Matthew would have expected him to be digging trenches all along the creek. ‘I don’t suppose you’d mind if I came up with a ton or two of gold nuggets.’

  ‘I told you no! Do anything around the creek, you’ll muddy the water and that’ll interfere with the stock.’ The meanness spilt from his voice into his eyes. ‘No digging. None at all. Understand?’

  Matthew shrugged. ‘It’s your land. You’ve got the right not to find gold if you don’t want to.’

  It didn’t sit right, all the same.

  Next morning, back at the shepherd’s hut, Matthew woke early. He removed the sheep folds to let the flocks wander.

  There was a smear of mist over the creek and the grass along the bank was wet with dew. For a moment he wondered if there really was gold there, then put the thought out of his mind as he mounted Juno and followed the ambling flock across the run.

  Jack warned him but it was the horse saved his life.

  The dog came chasing back to meet him, barking furiously. Matthew rode over the crest of a low rise and came face to face with a group of perhaps thirty black men armed with spears and the throwing sticks they called woomeras.

  At first he was not alarmed. Groups of blacks were always crossing the run. They helped themselves to the odd sheep—something that he ignored—but apart from that gave no trouble. Now, however, unconcern changed to alarm as they fanned out and hurled a few of their long spears in his direction. They must have been as startled as he and the spears came nowhere near him. Before they could try again Matthew hauled on the reins, Juno reared, and they were galloping out of range, the dog racing along at his side.

  Damn them, he thought, one hand on his hat as he sped away, what’s riled them up?

  Cusack wore his normal scowl of welcome as Matthew galloped up. ‘What the hell are you doing back here?’

  ‘There’s a war party of blacks coming.’

  ‘Is there, by God? We’ll soon see about that.’

  He ran back inside the house. Matthew waited outside, eye on the brow of the hill, but no one had appeared by the time Cusack came back. He was clanking like an armoury. He had a rifle in each hand, a couple of pistols in his belt and two cross-belts of ammunition strapped across his chest. He was so heavily armed it was a wonder he could walk at all.

  Fetching his horse from the stable at the back of the house, he hauled himself into the saddle. ‘Let’s go and see what’s happening.’

  They traversed the slope of the hill until they reached the summit where they reined in and looked out across the expanse of open country that lay beyond. There was no sign of any war party.

  ‘Sure you didn’t imagine them?’

  ‘They were there. I don’t know what set them off though.’

  ‘It’ll be that damn gin, I expect,’ Cusack said.

  ‘Gin?’

  ‘The two I got working for me at the house. Lost my temper with one of them last night. Gave her a good thrashing. This morning I found she’d cleared off in the night. Gone back to the tribe. I hit her pretty hard. Could have died, I suppose. If she did, they might have decided to get their own back.’

  He might have been talking about a tree that needed felling.

  ‘Why me?’ Matthew said. ‘I never laid a finger on her.’

  ‘You’re white. I do something they don’t like, it’s your fault too.’

  They came up to the flock. Suddenly they were both off their horses and running but it was too late.

  Dead sheep everywhere. Cusack knelt by the nearest and lifted its head an inch or two before slinging it down again in disgust. He stood, wiping blood from his fingers.

  ‘Speared,’ he said. ‘Every last one of them. They couldn’t get you so they killed my sheep instead.’

  They made a quick count. There were over eighty carcasses in this section alone. God knew what they might find elsewhere on the run.

  Cusack turned on Matthew, eyes hot with rage. ‘Eighty sheep,’ he said. ‘While you rode off and let them get on with it.’

  ‘There were thirty of them,’ Matthew said. ‘What was I supposed to do? Ask them nicely to pick up their spears and go home?’

  ‘You got a gun. Use it.’

  ‘That gun’s a six shot. You reckon I’m good enough to kill five of them with each bullet?’

  ‘I don’t intend to argue,’ Cusack said. ‘You let me down and that’s all there is to it.’

  Matthew was seething. ‘Maybe I’d better ride on, you think that?’

  Cusack stared at him, mouth working. ‘Maybe you had.’

  ‘Pay me what you owe me, I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Pay you?’ Cusack’s heavy face darkened with anger. ‘After what you let them do to my sheep? You should pay me.’

  ‘Seven weeks,’ Matthew told him. ‘Three pounds ten. I reckon I’ve a right to it.’

  ‘And I reckon you don’t.’

  They glared at each other, stirrup to stirrup.

  Matthew was growing angrier by the minute. ‘I have to, I’ll come round and take it off you by force.’

  Cusack bared his teeth. ‘Try anything with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll see you hang.’

  He turned his horse and rode away. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Be off my property by nightfall or I’ll shoot you myself.’

  That night, after dark, Matthew rode up to the homestead. He had collected his things from the hut by the creek and had nothing to keep him here except his stubborn determination not to leave without his three pounds ten. Fifty yards from the house he dismounted.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said to Jack. Obediently the dog sat, tail thumping softly on the ground.

  Matthew covered the rest of the way on foot. He took his rifle with him. Cusack had said he would shoot him if he saw him around after dark. He didn’t know
if Cusack meant it but if he had killed that gin he was capable of killing Matthew too.

  He checked that Cusack’s gelding was in the stable, put his hand on the handle of the kitchen door and inched it slowly open. The house was silent.

  He went inside and closed the door softly behind him, not daring to leave it open in case the wind banged it shut. A corridor connected the kitchen with the rest of the house. Half way along it a lamp burned on a wooden table, the smell of oil heavy in the silent air. Several doors led off the corridor, all of them closed.

  Matthew walked softly along the corridor, trying each door in turn. Nothing in any of the rooms. Eventually there was only one door left, at the end of the corridor. He walked up to it, put out his hand and turned the handle. It clicked. He took a deep breath and inched it open.

  Janice moved restlessly about her bedroom. It was adequately furnished—no doubt more than adequately, by many people’s standards—but she would not care if she walked out the door and never saw it again. She would not care if she never saw this town again or any of the people in it. If only she could find some way to leave.

  By herself it was impossible.

  When news of the gold strikes first filtered through, she had hoped Matthew would go and take her with him but he didn’t seem interested. Her father was no better, for all his talk. The booze he poured down his neck each night had long ago dissolved his ambitions. Talk cost nothing.

  Not that she wanted to go anywhere with him.

  After her mother died—left—the old man had gone through a phase when he’d brought women home almost every night. Janice had been no more than a kid then. Hadn’t even known what he’d brought them home for. Soon learned, though. Oh yes.

  When she was eight something happened, maybe an angry husband or brother, she never knew what. Overnight they ran away from Sydney and buried themselves in this little town in the bush. It felt like living in the jungle.

  There were no women in Amherst—no available ones, anyway—so instead he got into the habit of going down to the Royal, staying there all hours. Always, when he came back, he was in a strange, black mood. Sometimes he sat and wept. Sometimes he belted her for no reason. And one night, when she was just fifteen, he came back from the Royal with his face the colour of sunset and the stink of liquor on his breath and beat her hard with his hand on her bare backside and the blows had changed by degrees to caresses and he had turned her on her back and raped her.

  Hangdog looks the next day as he waited for her to say something. She had not. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She made sure he never forgot it though. There might be no women in Amherst but there were men. When a man she fancied passed through town she went after him. She couldn’t have said exactly why.

  The first time it happened the old man had started to say something. She looked at him, once was enough, and after that did what she liked. He never said a word.

  Trouble was, none of the men had been worth a spit. She would have stopped looking, only she didn’t want to admit she had been wrong to try.

  And then came Matthew Curtis.

  She had given up expecting much from any man but as soon as she saw him she knew he was different. His age was part of it—not much older than she was. In some ways he was younger. He was innocent; she had forgotten there was such a thing as innocence. Something else about him that struck her as soon as Dorian introduced them—he seemed to have a fire burning under his skin. The others had been mostly dead ashes.

  She turned and looked out of the window at the darkening street, seeing Matthew’s face. I am going to get you to leave this town, she thought. Go to the goldfields or anywhere, I don’t care, but when you do I’m going with you. She smiled, determination diamond-hard. What do you think of that, Mr Curtis?

  *

  Matthew stared. He could have walked right up to them and they would not have noticed.

  Cusack had mentioned two girls but after what had happened it had not occurred to him that the other one would still be here. She was.

  The girl was bucking up and down, hair flying, sweat gleaming on her back. Curtis lay like one dead beneath her, eyes closed, clenched hands extending outwards from either side of his body. He was uttering a low, undulant cry, on and on without variation, broken only by the violence of the movement of her body on his.

  Matthew stood at the open door of the bedroom, watching what was happening on the bed with stupefied astonishment.

  The frenzy was mounting, the cries growing sharper and more abandoned. Something made Matthew back out into the corridor and wait, door half-closed between him and them, until he heard the final explosion of shouts and bouncing bed springs followed by a diminishing moan and, at last, silence.

  Thank God for that, he thought, waiting another minute before pushing open the door.

  The girl’s black body lay collapsed over Cusack’s white body, two flaccid sacks of flesh entwined with each other. There was a strong odour of sex in the air.

  Rifle in his hand, Matthew said, ‘Mr Cusack, I’ll trouble you for my money now.’

  EIGHTEEN

  A kookaburra cackled in the early morning light as Matthew Curtis rode Juno down the main street of Amherst, Jack trotting along behind him. It was a clear day with the promise of heat later and he had come to say goodbye to Janice Honeyman.

  It was still very early but when Matthew walked into the forge Dave Honeyman was leaning over a bench covered with fragments of harness, springs and metal straps.

  Red-veined eyes stared at Matthew. ‘Looking for Janice? This hour? You’ll be lucky, lad.’

  He found the piece of metal he was seeking and carried it to the forge where the fire glowed cherry red through the bars. He pumped the foot bellows and the fire brightened.

  ‘Go into the house and wake her up, you want to.’ Honeyman had never been one for conventions.

  ‘Wait there,’ Matthew said to the dog and opened the door.

  Inside the house it was dark and cluttered. Matthew stumbled over a stool before finding his way to a closed door. He hesitated, tapped and opened it.

  The scent of powder and femininity was unmistakable. The curtains were pulled across the window. The bed took up most of the floor space. Wallpaper with a pattern of roses covered the walls and clothes were scattered everywhere. Janice lay in bed, eyes closed, face turned to the wall.

  He coughed. She opened her eyes.

  ‘Matthew!’ She sat up, knowing he could see her body through the flimsy nightgown. ‘What are you doing here so early?’

  ‘I thought I’d take your advice and give the diggings a go.’

  Her heart bumped. Sudden hope ran like fire through her veins. ‘You were dead set against the idea.’

  ‘There’ve been some changes.’ He told her about the war party, his escape, the discovery of the dead sheep, how Cusack had sacked him.

  When he told her what he had seen when he opened the bedroom door, she giggled. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He had a pistol beside the bed. He tried to grab it and I hit him with the butt of my rifle.’

  She felt her eyes go round as she stared at him.

  ‘I got him on the side of the head and he went over like I’d shot him. Then the girl started screeching …’

  It had been a nightmare, he told her—Cusack collapsed on the bed, the girl yelling fit to bring the walls down. He nearly turned tail and ran but stubbornness stronger than fear prevented him.

  He decided Cusack was the sort to keep his cash in the bedroom and he searched frenziedly, yanking open drawers and cupboards, tossing piles of clothes to one side, finding in a corner of a drawer beside the bed, a heavy canvas sack with crumbs of dried soil still sticking to it. He fumbled with the stiff rawhide and opened it.

  Now he stared at Janice in the shadowed room. ‘It was full of gold. The bag had been buried, there was earth on it. So Cusack or someone must have dug it up. And two years ago Thomas Chapman brought a jeweller all the way from Melbourn
e.’

  ‘And then disappeared,’ Janice said.

  ‘Exactly. I don’t have any proof but I’m sure I know what happened.’

  ‘Cusack killed him?’

  ‘For the gold. Yes.’

  ‘In that case you’re in danger, too.’

  ‘That’s right. So I thought, if I’m going, I might as well take the gold with me. I’ve as much right to it as he has. And he still owes me my wages anyway.’

  ‘How much is there?’ Janice asked.

  ‘See for yourself.’ He pulled the canvas sack from his pocket and offered it to her. She took it gingerly, nearly dropped it.

  ‘It’s heavy!’ She looked inside, touched the nuggets tentatively with her finger, then gave the sack back to him.

  ‘About two pounds there, I’d guess.’

  ‘That must be worth more than three pounds ten.’

  He grinned. ‘About ninety quid.’

  So he was a thief as well as a burglar, a man who had knocked his ex-employer unconscious in his own bed. She didn’t care. If anything she admired him more than ever.

  He said, ‘They got enough to hang me six times over, they catch me.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘I thought Mount Alexander. I might even make my fortune like you said.’

  ‘With those nuggets you’re well on the way already, you ask me.’ She looked at him. ‘Take me with you?’

  ‘Mount Alexander’s no place for a woman.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be the only woman there.’

  ‘But most of the others will be …’ He fell silent.

  ‘Whores?’ she challenged bitterly. ‘What you think they call me here? I’ve got to get out of this place,’ she said passionately, grabbing his hand. ‘You think I’ll be safe, Cusack finds out you came to see me before you left?’

  ‘Of course you’ll be safe!’

  ‘They hang people for murder. Didn’t you know? He can’t risk me talking.’