Band of Gold

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘We won’t. We’ll keep looking until we find them.’

  Hawk made an arbitrary decision. ‘We will meet at eleven o’clock back here. We will eat, then we will go back out again.’

  Rian seemed satisfied and turned away, ready to go. But then he paused, and said, ‘And if we find them, and they’ve been—’ he glanced at Wong Fu, wondering if his own face was as awash with fright as the Chinese man’s. ‘If someone’s got them, then I want to deal with them. My way. Understand?’

  Everyone nodded, and set off.

  Rian’s party had not been walking for more than ten minutes before footsteps came pounding along behind them.

  ‘Rian! Rian, man, stop. Wait!’

  Patrick O’Riley was pelting down the track after them, dodging potholes in the rapidly fading light, his gun in one hand, hat in the other. Panting, he pulled up and bent over, his hands on his knees. ‘Kitty told me what’s happened, so she did. Thought I could lend a hand seein’ as I’ve been here a lot longer. Know more people, you see. Know where they live and that.’

  Grateful, Rian nodded. ‘Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate it.’

  They walked on, looking left and right, in every shaft and pit, behind every mullock pile, and calling out at every tent, hut and shanty they passed. A few hard-hearted bastards shouted at them to shut up and piss off, which made Rian want to pound them to a pulp, but a gratifying number of passers-by stopped and asked who they were looking for, and said they’d keep their eyes open.

  ‘How many friends has the lass got?’ Patrick asked after a while.

  With a jolt Rian realised that he didn’t know, that he had spent so much time lately up to his waist in muddy water that he’d lost touch with his daughter’s daily affairs. ‘Just Bao, I think,’ he said, looking to Wong Fu for confirmation.

  The other man nodded. ‘Bao has not said anything about another playmate. I would know.’

  ‘So no other friends at all? Not even acquaintances?’ Patrick probed. ‘Not even to say hello to in the street? Lasses? Adults? Women? I might be after knowing them, you see.’

  ‘No. I’m pretty sure—’ Then Rian remembered something that had happened at the dance. ‘A chap named…Christ, what was it? Apparently comes into the bakery all the time. Stirling? Sewell? Scurr?’

  Patrick’s face fell. ‘Ah, shite. Searle?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Rian’s eyes suddenly narrowed. ‘Why?’

  Patrick looked as though he wished he were anywhere else but standing in front of Rian. ‘Josiah Searle. He’s, well…ah God, how do I say it?’ He blew out his cheeks and took a precautionary step backwards. ‘I’m sorry, Rian. Some say he’s one for the girls. The young girls.’

  Rian remained utterly motionless for several seconds, then kicked viciously at a mullock pile, sending gravel and dirt scattering in all directions.

  ‘Steady,’ Hawk warned, laying a hand on Rian’s shaking arm. ‘We do not know whether this man even has them.’

  Remembering Searle’s cheery smile as he lounged on the counter chatting to Amber, Pierre said, almost to himself, ‘I will kill him.’

  Wong Fu said nothing, simply stood with his fists clenched by his sides, his face rigid.

  ‘Does he live by himself, this Searle?’ Hawk asked Patrick.

  ‘He was livin’ in a shack out past the end of Navy Jack’s, with an eejit called Alfred Tuttle. And he is an eejit—the man’s half-witted. But Searle had the shite beaten out of himself back in July, and he might have set up his swag somewhere else by now.’

  ‘Could you find this shanty?’ Rian asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Patrick replied, hoping he hadn’t just signed an innocent man’s death warrant. But he didn’t think he had.

  Rian checked for the third time that his pistol was loaded. ‘Come on then, let’s go.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ Hawk asked, nodding at the gun.

  But Rian didn’t answer.

  They moved in silence now: Rian didn’t want to alert Searle to their approach.

  After close to half an hour it seemed they had passed the last derelict shacks some time ago; uninhabitable affairs that had collapsed into the mud during the winter. This far out, the sounds of the diggings were muted.

  Rian stopped, peering around the now moonlit landscape. ‘You’re sure this is the right way, Patrick?’

  ‘’Tis.’ He held a finger to his lips and pointed.

  A hundred yards away a squat little hut came into focus, a faint line of yellow light spilling from a window. Suddenly a yelping sound ensued from the shanty. Rian raised his pistol, fully cocked now, and felt his heart lurch into his mouth as the door flew open and two figures, hand-in-hand, shot out and raced towards them. A second later he was almost sick as he realised he’d been about to shoot his own daughter.

  Amber launched herself at him and he dropped the pistol and gathered her in his arms. ‘Amber, sweetheart, are you all right?’ But she wasn’t—he could see that her lip was bleeding. ‘Oh, Christ, love, did he hurt you?’

  ‘They tried. We have to go, Pa. I’m frightened of those men.’

  Men? Rian felt an incandescent rage rise up in him. ‘In there?’ He gestured at the shanty.

  Amber nodded, and started to cry.

  So did Bao. She had collapsed and was crouched in a huddled heap, keening quietly, her delicate hands covering her face. Wong Fu squatted before her, his hands fluttering helplessly over hers, trying to calm her, speaking to her gently in Chinese. The fastenings on the front of her jacket had been torn and he clumsily tried to do them up again, but she let out an anguished wail and jerked away from him, scrabbling at the fabric and wrenching the garment closed herself. Then she turned her head and vomited a stream of watery bile onto the ground.

  Rian, fury making his voice almost unrecognisable, tuned to the Irishman. ‘Patrick, take them home, can you? Tell Kitty we’ll be back shortly. Tell her we’re…dealing with it.’

  Patrick understood exactly what was going to happen, and condoned it wholeheartedly. He slung his gun over his shoulder and held out his hands. ‘Come on, lasses, let’s go home, shall we?’

  ‘Wong Fu?’ Rian looked at Bao’s father. ‘Do you want to stay or go back?’

  The tears running down the man’s cheeks caught the moonlight, but his jaw was clenched when he answered, ‘I will stay.’

  Bao seemed on the verge of fainting. Patrick offered to carry her, but she immediately shrank from his outstretched hand, so Amber settled an arm protectively around her. The Chinese girl clung to her so tightly that Amber felt the fabric of her dress tear.

  As Patrick led the girls away, Rian, Hawk, Pierre and Wong Fu crept up on the shanty. Then Rian kicked in the door.

  Two men sat on wooden crates in front of a small fire. The smaller of the pair nursed a copiously bleeding nose, while the larger, a man with a shock of red hair that obviously hadn’t been cut or brushed for some time, was hunched over with his hands clamped on his privates, moaning to himself. What meagre possessions there were lay scattered around the shanty—a single spindly chair on its side, the bedding from two bedrolls kicked about, and the remains of what appeared to be a meal of cabbage, meat and perhaps damper strewn all over the floor.

  ‘Josiah Searle?’ Rian demanded, pointing the barrel of his pistol directly at the man’s face.

  Searle nodded miserably. He seemed to have bite marks across the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Alfred Tuttle.’ Searle said quickly, clearly keen to share the blame for whatever had gone on in the shanty.

  ‘Did you lay a hand on those girls?’

  Searle blinked up at him. ‘What girls?’

  Rian kicked the crate out from underneath him so that he sprawled on the dirt floor. ‘My daughter, Searle, Wong Fu’s daughter! Those girls!’

  Searle righted himself. ‘I didn’t touch them.’

  ‘We didn’t do nothing,’ Tuttle mumbled. ‘She kicked me in the nuts, that one with th
e pretty hair.’

  Rian didn’t believe either of them. ‘For God’s sake, they’re children!’

  ‘You were going to touch her, Josiah,’ Tuttle accused Searle. ‘And you slapped her face.’

  ‘Shut up! You tore the Chinkee girl’s blouse!’

  Rian fired his pistol at the roof to shut both of them up.

  ‘Stop it!’ Searle whined, his hands over his ears. ‘I can’t help it—I’ve tried, but I can’t.’

  Apparently not bothered by the noise, Tuttle wiped his nose on the back of his hand and said, ‘Got nice tits, the Chinkee girl.’

  Pierre stepped over to him and gave his flank a swift, hard kick.

  ‘If you let us go we’ll never go near them again,’ Searle pleaded.

  ‘No, you won’t go near them again,’ Rian said, ‘and let this be a reminder.’

  He reached down, dragged Searle up off the floor and punched him in the face. Then he did it again. And when Searle fell down, he kicked him hard in the kidneys. But when he dragged him back up by the hair, Hawk grabbed his arm.

  ‘No, Rian, leave him. You might kill him. He is not worth swinging for. You, too. Pierre. Let him be.’

  Pierre was only two-thirds the size and weight of Tuttle, but such was his rage that he had managed to rip out a chunk of his hair, knock out two of his teeth and bloody his nose.

  And through it all Wong Fu stood by the door and watched, his face impassive.

  ‘Did they interfere with her?’

  ‘She says not.’

  Rian felt ill with relief. ‘And Bao?’

  Kitty shook her head. ‘Thank God, though it was close.’

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘Having a wash. She’ll be out in a minute. Put your hand back in the basin.’

  Rian dangled his swollen knuckles in the warm salted water again. They stung where he’d grazed them against Searle’s ugly perverted head.

  They sat in silence, the lamplight flickering on their dismayed, weary faces.

  Eventually, Rian said, ‘She lied to us.’

  ‘I know she did. But she shouldn’t have been able to. I should have known where she was.’

  ‘You thought you did. You thought she was with Bao at the Chinese camp.’

  ‘But if I wasn’t so busy at the bakery, I’d be spending more time with her.’

  ‘And if I wasn’t so busy trying to become the richest bloody man in the Southern Hemisphere, I’d be spending more time with her.’

  Kitty shook her head slowly and blinked back tears. ‘God, Rian, she wasn’t even safe with Bao. The two of them together, and they weren’t safe.’

  They gazed at each other remorsefully until Amber appeared and sat down at the table. She had scrubbed herself from head to toe, and her hair was wrapped in a towel and piled on top of her head. Her poor lip was swollen from the slap she’d received and her face was very pale.

  Rian folded his good hand over hers. ‘What happened, sweetheart? You don’t have to tell me the bits you talked to your mother about, but what happened?’

  So she told them.

  She and Bao had gone to the circus. She had already been once with Kitty, but she’d wanted Bao to see it, too. They’d both known, however, that they would not be permitted to go alone, especially not by Bao’s father, so they’d gone anyway. And yes, she was very sorry now that they had lied, but the circus at least had been good.

  When the performance had finished just after three o’clock, Amber had seen Mr Searle at the entrance to the tent, standing with his hat in his hand. She had waved and he had approached them, saying he had a message for her from her mother.

  ‘I was at the bakery earlier and she’s asked me to take you to pick up some new aprons she’s ordered for the shop. Pretty ones with the name embroidered on the pockets.’

  And Amber had said, ‘But she doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks I’m at the Chinese camp.’

  Mr Searle had winked at her then. ‘Is that where you’re supposed to be? I thought the pair of you looked like you were up to something! I saw you after I left the bakery and followed you here, but I didn’t want to interrupt your treat. I know how children love the circus. My daughters do, anyway.’

  His message had annoyed Amber—surely her mother trusted her to look after herself while she walked into town from the Chinese camp to the draper on the Main Road?

  ‘Which draper?’ she had asked.

  ‘They’re not at the draper’s. Your mother had a seamstress make them up. She lives out on Navy Jack’s. Her husband’s a digger. Not a very lucky one, by all accounts, so she makes ends meet doing a bit of sewing.’

  ‘We do excellent tailoring at our camp,’ Bao had said to Amber. ‘We could have made you lovely aprons.’

  And Mr Searle had given Bao a strange and not very friendly look.

  Amber had wondered why Kitty couldn’t collect the aprons herself, but supposed she must be busy, and could see this afternoon’s lie unravelling if she didn’t do as she was asked, so they had gone with Mr Searle.

  ‘It’s a long way out,’ Amber had said.

  ‘We’re almost there, see?’ Mr Searle had said, finally indicating a tiny hut.

  Mr Searle had knocked and called out, ‘Mrs Dunne, the young lady is here for the aprons!’ and opened the door for them.

  But as soon as they were inside he had slammed the door shut. And there had been no Mrs Dunne in the hut, just a big ugly man with wild carrotty hair.

  ‘And the hut smelt, Pa. It smelt of really dirty bodies and farts. We were nearly sick,’ Amber said, screwing up her face at the recent memory.

  Bao had run to the door, but Mr Searle had barred the way, grinning and giggling like the monkeys they had seen in the circus. He had pushed Bao and she had fallen down, then the big man had picked her up and dumped her in a corner, and put Amber there as well. The girls had yelled and screamed, but no one had come to help them.

  Then the two men had had an argument. The big one, whom Mr Searle had called Albert, had wanted to get straight down to ‘doing the business’, but Mr Searle had wanted her and Bao to be ‘their wives’. He was sick of eating bad cooking, he’d complained, and he’d always wanted a pretty girl for a wife instead of the sour old bat he’d been saddled with in England, and what could be nicer and more fitting than a good meal followed by the conjugal rights owed a man by his loving bride? Albert could have Bao, because he wanted Amber.

  In an effort to stall for time, Amber had asked Mr Searle how his daughters would feel about their father pretending to be married to someone who wasn’t their mother.

  ‘And do you know what he did, Pa?’ Amber said, tears forming again and spilling down her cheeks. ‘And this is just about the worst bit. He just laughed and said there had never been any daughters! He said he’d made all that up so there would be something to talk about in the bakery! He took me for a fool, Pa. He tricked me!’

  He tricked all of us, Kitty thought miserably, and wished to hell she’d paid more attention the dozens of times the bloody man had been in the shop.

  So Amber and Bao had made Albert Tuttle and Josiah Searle a meal of mutton, cabbage and damper. While they waited for the mutton stew to cook—and, to their delight, it had taken over an hour and a half—they were told to clean up the shanty, which was in a filthy state. All the while, Tuttle had sat on the single chair with his back against the door, watching their every move, and Mr Searle had perched on a crate in front of the fire, smiling to himself and humming happily with anticipation.

  Finally, the food was ready. Amber and Bao had been offered a share but had refused.

  ‘That made Mr Searle angry,’ Amber said. ‘He said it was very rude of us, and a real wife would be pleased to be invited to eat with her husband.’

  ‘What time was this?’ Rian asked, wondering how far away he and the search party had been at the time.

  ‘I don’t know, but it had gone dark.’

  Amber and Bao had sat in the corner grow
ing more and more fearful as the men consumed their meal. Then Tuttle had put aside his plate, wiped his hands on his shirt, burped loudly and ordered Bao to stand in front of him. When she refused, he dragged her across the room to the fire and ripped open the front of her jacket, exposing her golden skin and budding breasts. She struck out at him, but he batted away her hand and tried to press his greasy lips against hers. Horrified, Amber had leapt after Bao and darted around behind Tuttle. His knees were bowed as he bent to accommodate Bao’s diminutive height and Amber delivered an almighty, well-aimed kick to his baggy crotch that sent him grimacing in silent agony to his knees, then onto his side on the floor.

  Searle, appalled that his lovely evening had gone so suddenly wrong, reached for Amber, grabbed a fistful of hair and slapped her face, opening the cut on her lip. Bao, her normally serene eyes flashing with shame and fury, grasped the front of Searle’s waistcoat, launched herself upward, clamped her teeth on his nose and bit down hard. Then, amidst the groaning and outraged squealing, Amber had taken her hand and they’d run for the door.

  ‘And there you were, Pa,’ Amber finished. ‘I knew you’d come and find us. I knew we’d be all right.’

  Rian sat at the table nursing a glass of brandy. His sixth glass of brandy, if truth be told. Kitty and Amber had gone to bed. Amber had not wanted to sleep out here on her own tonight, and he had offered to take the daybed. His vision was blurring slightly—whether from the brandy or fatigue he wasn’t sure—but the more he drank the more he became convinced that he knew who was behind Amber’s abduction. And poor little Bao’s, although he didn’t believe she had been the primary target—she’d just had the misfortune of being Amber’s friend. What the hell was he going to say to Wong Fu the next time they met?

  No, it had been an orchestrated kidnap, and he knew who had planned it. Who in Ballarat had it in for him—especially him—and for Kitty? And who, in particular, would know about the nasty little proclivities of a man like Josiah Searle?