At this, Kitty and the others let out a horrified, ‘Oh!’ and then started ‘tee-heeing’ again, hands over their mouths.
‘… and walk the rest of the distance through that-’ Ellen released her skirts and pointed to the swampy, mangrove-infested shoreline.
‘Oh!’ they exclaimed, even louder than the first time.
‘Them’s the choices, ladies, I’m afraid,’ Fletcher chipped in, not without some merriment.
‘I’ll stick with you and do what I can until you’re on dry land.’
It was decided that Fletcher would lead the way, to try and find a safe path through the treacherous shallows. It was also decided, after much giggling and blushing, that he would carry Kitty, the youngest, on his back. The others would maintain single file behind Fletcher: Sarah first, then Ellen – carrying Annie – with Nora bringing up the rear, ready to support Ellen if she stumbled.
And so they struggled up the Creek, inching towards their destination. A destination which seemed always that tantalizing and wearisome few extra steps ahead. All except Ellen ‘hoisted their mainsails’; with both arms clutching Annie to her, Ellen had no choice but to let the water soak the hemline of her dress, driving it against her legs and making her progress even more unsteady as she gingerly moved forward. When the dress did free itself, it floated out ahead of her, obscuring her view of the bottom.
Behind them in the boat they had left most of their belongings, apart from what they wore and what little they could carry, thrown over their arms and shoulders.
On they edged, Fletcher calling out, warning, encouraging them, with Kitty clinging to him for dear life, trying not to press too hard against his Adam’s apple, which she could feel against her forearm.
Suddenly, Fletcher stumbled and disappeared from view. At first the screaming Kitty appeared to sit on top of the water, her dress billowing out from her like a canopy. The others froze, watching the water bubble up over the sides of her dress, as she began to submerge into the canopy, and then down into the Creek. But, miraculously, she began to slowly rise again, borne up out of the water like some sea-goddess, as Fletcher found his footing and regained the shallow ground. Apart from swallowing some creek water, he appeared none the worse for wear. Kitty, however, refused to straddle him again – something which, Ellen thought, Fletcher might be grateful for at this stage.
Eventually they reached an accessible part of the shore and Fletcher bade them farewell: ‘Missies, I hate to leave you, but I’d best be back to the Eliza Jane presently, else old thunder guts will have my hide on the rigging! You should be all right from here on. Just hug the shoreline and use the mangroves for support, and you’ll reach McLaren’s Wharf. So, stick together, and Godspeed!’
He turned to go.
‘Mr Fletcher!’ Ellen called to him. ‘Thank you for your great kindness in bringing us safely ashore, and for your assistance throughout the passage to Australia.’ She smiled at him, and he hoped she’d be all right out here in this wild, untamed country. She was a fine woman, this redhead – a fine woman indeed. ‘May God take you in His care, and keep you there,’ she said, giving the sailor her blessing.
‘Thank you, miss. Likewise, to you in your new country – may the Lord keep you all safe. It was a pleasure to be of service to you.’
He bowed towards them and, with slight heaviness of heart, set off once more, wading into the waters of Misery Creek, back towards the rowing boat and the Eliza Jane.
Ellen and the others, meanwhile, carried on with their journey towards the port of Adelaide. If traversing the Creek had been bad, this was a thousand times worse. With each footstep, their feet sank, sucked downwards into the mud in which the mangroves flourished. It was torturously slow progress. Ellen used the trunks of the swamp trees, as best she could, for support. But the gnarled roots of the mangroves tripped and thwarted them in their progress – each root curling up out of the water towards the life-sustaining air, the root-tips like giant fish-hooks, waiting to impale the unwary walker – so that shins and legs were scored and bruised over and over again.
Mosquito-bitten and bloodied, soaked to the skin, and weak from the hellish conditions of the long voyage, each step they took into the slimy muck beneath them seemed to strip away the last vestiges of human dignity. With each exhausting minute that passed, Ellen grew more and more dispirited about this Australia, with its bloodthirsty insects and its hostile and forbidding landscape.
What must Jasper Coombes be like? A man who had come to this wild land and tamed it, made good for himself. Try as she might, she could form no mental picture of him – but his name sounded narrow and mean, and grasping.
28
‘Welcome to Australia!’
Ellen awoke from her fatigued sleep on McLaren’s Wharf, to find a tall, well-built man standing over her. He smiled at her as she blinked up at him.
‘Mrs O’Malley?’ he enquired.
She nodded. Was this Jasper Coombes? This clean-shaven, sandy-haired man, roughly of an age with herself, looking down on her with twinkling eyes. Surely not. He was dressed fine enough: wide-brimmed hat, neckerchief knotted above a partly unbuttoned white shirt, brown trousers tucked into leather boots. Still, he didn’t look like one of Pakenham’s clique, and, sure, wasn’t he too young anyhow.
The man reached out a hand to help her up. ‘Dia dhuit, ’s tá fáilte romhat go dtí an Astráil,’ he said, extending to her the traditional Irish greeting, and again welcoming her to Australia.
Ellen almost fell backwards with the shock of these words, spoken with the West of Ireland blas with which she was so familiar. He was Irish – and from the West! The greeting was music to her ears.
She gripped his hand tightly, and Kevin Lavelle, from Achill Island, County Mayo, saw the biggest smile he had seen since leaving Ireland’s shores.
‘Ó, Dia’s Muire dhuit, Dia’s Muire dhuit,’ she repeated, returning the greeting.
Lavelle took her in. He had barely recognized her from the description given him by Coombes: ‘A tall, red-haired woman with a young child.’ All afternoon he had scoured the port looking for her, anxious for sight of this woman from the West, this Ellen Rua. He had almost given up hope of finding her when he overheard two port scavengers talking about a shipload of women from Ireland being disembarked up the Creek, leaving their fineries behind them. Lavelle had then walked the length of the wharf, almost passing by the dishevelled heap of rags that was Ellen, asleep on the dockside. Only when he noticed the child beside her did he realize that it must be she.
Now, as she stood up and smiled, lighting up with the joy of seeing one of her own, Lavelle was impressed by the beauty of this woman. Covered as she was with grime and slime, her hair tangled and knotted like the mangrove roots, Ellen Rua O’Malley’s spirit nevertheless shone out at him.
Ellen, for her part, was conscious only of how bedraggled she must look to this young stranger from her homeland.
‘Mr Coombes is waiting for you, ma’am, at the Halfway House Inn.’ He pointed back towards the sprawling port town. ‘We won’t travel to the Barossa today – it will soon be nightfall – so I suggest we go to the inn. You and the baby can get cleaned up, and get some food into the two of you.’
By now the other three were awake, and Lavelle saluted them in Irish. They were mightily brightened up by this, and when he enquired, ‘Is one of you, by any chance, a Kitty O’Halloran from Louisburgh, County Mayo?’
Kitty leaped up with a ‘Yes, that’s me, sir – Kitty O’Halloran!’ while Sarah and Nora giggled.
‘Well, then, you’ll be making the journey with us,’ Lavelle told Kitty, much to her delight.
‘And what about you two?’ he asked of the others.
‘We’re bound into the service of a Mrs Hopskitch, of Adelaide,’ answered Sarah importantly.
‘Yes, we’re to be indentured to her,’ said Nora, with a giggle, adding: ‘Whatever that means!’ And the two of them set off laughing again.
‘Well, I
doubt Mrs Hopskitch of Adelaide will be too pleased with the sight of—’ Lavelle stopped himself, realizing that they looked no worse than Ellen and Kitty. ‘What I mean is … I’d better bring you two, as well … to the inn … first of all,’ he stammered out.
As he turned away, Ellen saw a wash of scarlet flood his tanned face. Not wishing to increase his embarrassment, she made no comment as she fell in step behind him. But she thought again how harsh the country must be if the sun out here could burn his face that colour brown. She’d never seen the like of it before.
There was no sign of Jasper Coombes at the Halfway House Inn, so Ellen first washed and changed Annie, and then tended to herself. Lastly she washed the clothes they had been wearing, which were stained and torn from the journey.
Lavelle called for food for all of them. The inn with its weatherboard exterior was crowded and bustling with all sorts: sailors, stockmen, merchants, with an Irish accent or two thrown in here and there.
Ellen noticed how quickly night fell like a blanket over everything. No beautiful, lingering twilight of imagining, with spirits moving hither and thither. No slow dimming of day’s light into the soft darkening, no lazy broom sweeping in the colours of the two lights. Just day. Then night. Would she ever get used to this strange, strange, land?
That first night in Australia, as she lay in exhausted sleep, the bed pitched and rolled with the mountainous swells beneath her; the cries of the dying, and the mad, filling the room about her. Behind these sounds came a deathly chorus, hushed by hunger: the fearful mouthings of her famished people. Stricken by the desolation on every side of them, they walked, spectre-like, through the dead villages with their torn-down shacks. They picked their way – these grey, dancing skeletons – between the arms and legs of those strewn before them, who would dance no more.
Her own village was deserted, tumbled to the ground. Not even a wisp of smoke – a wisp of life – rose up to the stars. Above stood Crucán na bPáiste, stone-sepulchred against the hill. She saw Michael’s fine face, starched by death, looking up at her. She threw the tufts of grass and the cold clay down on him, wanting to be rid of the sight of him staring at her, willing her to be with him. He remained silent as the clay covered his pink-blue lips, and the grass tufts covered his eyes with their green blindness. Then she cast a fistful of mountain pebbles on his black Spanish locks, battening them down, turning them grey – prematurely ageing him in death. Around the graveside were shapes – the shapes of his children, and hers. Lengthened by shadow, silently watching her entomb their father. They raised not a hand to stop her, or to assist her. Just stood there, motionless shapes diffused by the light. Witnesses.
Were they all there? She couldn’t tell – couldn’t count them properly, with the rolling and pitching of the ship. She started to soft-call them into their real shapes, but they wouldn’t materialize, wouldn’t answer her.
‘Katie, mo mháinlín … Mary, a stór … Patrick, a chroí geal,’ she whispered to them in the old tongue across their dead father’s body.
Desperately, with both hands, she shovelled in the earth and the scraws over Michael.
Why couldn’t she cover him and be finished with it? And why weren’t they helping her, instead of standing, sentinel-like, in judgement on her? Blaming her for burying him – she who loved him. Why wouldn’t they answer her? Come and be with her, instead of over there, across the grave?
At last she was finished. She searched for a leac to mark his resting place. A stone she would recognize again. She found one, but couldn’t move it. She begged the children to help her in this final act.
‘We must mark your father’s grave, else we will never find it again.’
They listened not.
In anger she bent to the leac again. This time it budged. She crouched and slowly rolled the gravestone ahead of her, hunched over it, legs apart, her bare feet clenching the earth. The stone, balled within her body space, seemed to come from her as she delivered it to the grave, inch by inch, straining and convulsing with the effort of its birthing.
This was its purpose. This was what she had formed it for, brought it forth with her own body. To forever mark his death, and life.
But what had happened to the rose, the brightest flower? She scrabbled in the dark, searching, until it, finding her, drew the blood of her palm. She held the rose to the light, looking for where her own dark-red stain had smeared its green stem. Then, she drew its petals to her lips, before placing it on the grave.
From the grave mound she took the handful of earth she would carry with her. As she scooped up the soil, something caught her eye. She bent to examine it: a piece of cloth – maybe a shawl or a blanket. It was not hers. One of the children must have dropped it – left it there. She called again to them as she lifted it. ‘Cé leis é’ – Whose is it?
And still they answered her not.
29
The instant Ellen saw Jasper Coombes she knew him.
He was arrogant, condescending – everything she didn’t like. She wondered if it came with being British.
An hour earlier, she had been released from her nightmare by the sound of Lavelle rapping on her door. But though the dream ended, the children’s silent faces and the image of Michael’s dead body lingered on. As she washed and dressed – her clothes having dried overnight on the inn’s balcony – her mind was tortured by thoughts of her children: was the dream some terrible omen, like the one she’d had that All Souls night in Maamtrasna? She tried to concentrate on getting herself ready, determined to present herself with some semblance of decency to her employer. Her hair, though, would not be tamed, defying her best efforts to put a shape on it. It remained lank and unkempt, no body to it, giving her a streelish look.
‘Good day, Mrs O’Malley. Welcome to the Promised Land!’ He stuck out his hand to her. ‘I’m Jasper Coombes.’
She held out her hand and he grasped it tightly for a brief moment, then let it go.
‘You’ve had a long and arduous journey from Ireland to South Australia, and, I believe, further tribulations since you’ve arrived here?’
Ellen nodded, but remained silent.
‘I trust you rested well, for we now have another journey, of some forty to fifty miles, to the Barossa. There, you can have some respite at last. Pakenham – Edith, that is – has charged me with looking after you well, and I have assured her that we will most certainly do our best.’
He beamed at her, his thin lips drawn back over gleaming white teeth.
‘Thank you, Mr Coombes.’ Ellen broke her silence.
Coombes nodded in acknowledgement, and continued: ‘I am sorry, too, to learn from my old friends of the misfortunes which have beset your troubled land … and of your own great misfortune in losing your dear husband.’
Ellen nodded, liking him even less for mentioning Michael. Then she found herself saying, ‘Many thousands – many tens of thousands have died.’
She stopped herself there. No point in making an enemy of this thin man who was a friend to her mortal enemy, Pakenham.
Coombes was speaking again, but not to her.
‘Lavelle!’
She brightened to see the young Irishman again, and he darted her a quick look and a ‘Good morning, ma’am.’
‘Are we ready to depart yet? And where are the other three?’ Coombes snapped.
‘They’re on their way, and the spring-cart is waiting outside,’ Lavelle answered him.
‘I knew it! I should not have deviated from our plan by listening to you, Lavelle, and agreeing to carry those other two to Adelaide. Now, see how they delay us?’
Coombes cut short his remarks as Sarah and Nora bounded into view, followed by a bright-faced Kitty.
‘Which one of you three is Kathleen O’Halloran?’ Coombes asked, rather tartly. He was clearly not amused by their late, if breezy, entrance into his presence.
Silence greeted his question.
Both Ellen and Lavelle looked at Kitty, who had her lips fi
rmly pressed together, brazen-like, staring straight ahead of her.
‘Did you not hear me?’ Coombes rasped out more loudly. ‘Which of you three … ladies is Kathleen O’Halloran of Louis … Dammit, Lavelle, what’s the name of that confounded …? – Of County Mayo.’ Coombes blurted, having found a way out without having to be told by Lavelle.
Yet, again, he got no answer. Now Sarah and Nora turned to look at Kitty, who was still trying to keep a straight face.
‘Is it you, girl?’ Coombes spoke directly to Kitty.
Kitty just looked at him.
‘Answer me, damn you!’ he swore at her.
‘No, sir!’ said Kitty.
The other two put their hands to their mouths, horrified at Kitty’s reply.
‘No, I’m not Kathleen …’ Kitty gave a little laugh. ‘I’m Kitty O’Halloran, and it’s Louisburgh, sir!’ she said, emphasizing the ‘sir’. Then she burst out laughing – joined, somewhat nervously, by the other two.
Ellen caught Lavelle, who stood slightly behind Coombes, smirking at Kitty’s cheek towards his employer. She noted, too, Jasper Coombes’ clenched knuckles, and hoped Kitty would not pay for her sport with him at a later date.
The flash of anger, however, seemed to leave Coombes as quickly as it had arisen. His only comment was: ‘I see we have a bright spark coming to join us.’ Then he turned to Lavelle – now straight-faced once more – and said, ‘Well, it’s a tough life in the bush, and a sprinkling of fun is to be welcomed. I’m sure Mrs Baker will be delighted with our new arrivals.’ Leaving the girls wondering who this Mrs Baker was.
Ellen watched the way Coombes, from under his narrow brows, studied Kitty as they filed out to their transport. She knew he would be looking her up and down in the same way as she passed him.
And Jasper Coombes, gambler, overlander, colonist, smiled. He liked what he saw.
The Whitest Flower Page 25