by Robert Edric
‘Perhaps,’ Cornelius said.
‘But we all have contracts,’ I said.
‘Even Abbot,’ Fletcher said. ‘Even Abbot.’
A moment later we were distracted by the ringing of the bell used to signal the approach of a vessel to our wharves.
‘Is anything expected?’ Cornelius asked Fletcher.
Fletcher shrugged.
We rose together and went outside. It was late afternoon and the bulk of the day’s business was over. The four vessels moored at our jetties were empty. Steam and smoke rose from the single boat preparing to leave. The crews of the others lay asleep around their decks and in the shade of their awnings.
The man ringing the bell ran towards us. Few others paid him any attention. He was a man proud of his position as our human alarm and sat in silence for days on end scanning the empty river. He grabbed Fletcher’s arm and indicated where half a dozen small boats negotiated the upriver current on their way across to us. Fletcher studied these through his glasses.
‘Ivory,’ he said.
Cornelius snorted his disappointment at this. ‘Anything else?’
Fletcher continued looking. ‘Hard to say.’
The boats approached closer. Even without binoculars I could see that their loads did not amount to much.
‘I have work to do,’ Cornelius said, and left us. Several years earlier he had submitted a report to the Company recommending they abandon the ivory trade, and to concentrate instead on the gathering of valuable timbers – teak, bomba, mahogany and ironwood – for export to Europe, and for larger scale trade in staples such as caoutchouc, palm oil, groundnuts and gum, but the profit still to be made on tusk and horn was too high to be ignored. It was not out of any thought for the slaughter of the animals which caused Cornelius to make his appeal, but the knowledge that most of the ivory was stolen from other collectors, and that small but vicious wars were still being fought to acquire it. He was convinced that any man bringing more than a dozen pieces to trade brought them with blood on his hands, and for this reason he had relinquished this part of his work to Fletcher. I was once with Cornelius at the Belgian Station when he pointed to a twenty-foot length of boxwood trunk and told me there was enough there to make a thousand clarinets.
‘Perhaps you want to go with him and keep your own hands clean,’ Fletcher said to me, his glasses still fixed on the approaching boats.
I indicated to him that I would remain, if only to stay beyond the reach of Abbot.
Then he said, ‘Amon,’ and wiped his eyes.
‘You might have guessed he’d be involved in some form or other.’
‘But only as Hammad’s whipping boy. We owe Hammad too many favours.’
‘Will his involvement push the price up?’
He considered this, but said nothing.
By then the boats were within hailing distance and Fletcher shouted to Amon. The man – whom none of us trusted – drew back his white hood and returned the greeting.
‘If he’s come with the ivory, then the chances are it’s a good load. It’s valuable and he’s come to keep his eye on it as Hammad’s agent. It’s the first we’ve had for a month.’
He waded into the water and grabbed the prow of the leading boat. Amon leaped from it and the two men embraced. I could imagine the look on Fletcher’s face as the Syrian grasped him. The remaining boats were secured.
Amon saw me and came to me. Our greetings were less effusive. I had hitherto had little to do with him and he remained mistrustful of me. He bowed and offered me a salute. I shook his hand. I was incidental to the proceedings; my presence had no bearing on the price he would be paid. He returned to Fletcher, shouting for the men on the boats to uncover the ivory.
‘Bring it ashore,’ Fletcher told him.
‘But you may not wish to buy it. We may be forced to go back across the river with it.’ Amon bowed his head as he spoke. He then called for one of the loads to be carried ashore. They were long, white tusks, most taller than the men who carried them.
‘He’s cleaned them up,’ Fletcher whispered to me. He went to inspect the tusks.
‘Nothing buried and dug up here,’ Amon said. ‘All freshly gathered. Look closely and you may even see some blood.’ This was meant as a joke, but only he laughed.
‘And the rest?’ Fletcher said.
Amon called for a single tusk from each of the other loads to be carried ashore.
Fletcher tapped them with his cane. He ran his hands along their curved lengths. He sniffed deeply at their sawn ends, or at the yellowing roots where they had been pulled whole from the slaughtered animals.
I had been present a year ago, along with Frere, when Fletcher had been called upon to kill a rogue elephant that had trampled the crops of several nearby villages. Our excursion had lasted only an hour, at the end of which Fletcher downed the animal with a shot to each of its front knees, and then by a succession of shells into its eyes as it knelt trumpeting and lashing its bloody trunk at the men who tried to approach it. The price for this had been the better of the creature’s two ten-foot tusks, both of which were extracted before it was dead. Even when the flesh and muscle of the sockets had been hacked away and the ivory extracted, the creature did not die, and sat turning its sightless head from side to side for a further hour as the blood continued to pour from its wounds. Fletcher left immediately his work was done, but I remained behind with Frere while he attempted to sever one of the creature’s feet, and as he cut off its tail and then removed foot-square pieces of its hide. I wondered aloud if there was anything we might do to put the animal out of its lingering misery, but Frere laughed at the idea.
Down at the jetty, more of the ivory was brought ashore. I was surprised at how quickly Fletcher concluded his bargaining with Amon. I saw what a game was played in their transactions and how secretly reluctant they were to conclude their business. Fletcher shouted for drink to be taken to Amon’s boatmen. Amon himself did not drink.
Scales were set up and each of the tusks weighed.
Abbot appeared and watched all this from a distance. He would be angry that he had not been called sooner to record the transaction. He called for Fletcher to go to him, but Fletcher pretended not to hear him, though most of the others turned and looked. Each tusk was weighed and the necessary calculations made. Realizing that he was being deliberately ignored, Abbot turned and walked away.
‘He’ll write it all down,’ I said to Fletcher, still not fully convinced that Abbot was the spy he and Cornelius accused him of being.
‘Your name will be in there, too,’ Fletcher said. ‘Did you not hear him calling you? Perhaps you were the one who didn’t answer him.’
* * *
A word about Bone. Almost thirty years ago, Bone, then a corporal, served in Hobart Town. At that time, a cousin of mine – my mother’s brother’s son – twenty-three years my senior, attempted to make his name under the auspices of the Aboriginal Protection League by studying the last of the pure-bred native people then living there. He was directed to the garrison, where he encountered Bone. The man’s name was Fairfax, my mother’s maiden name, and having spent five months in Hobart, he contracted some fever or other and died there. All his work was subsequently lost – whether never completed, whether stolen from him by the aboriginals or lost at some point along its journey home remains uncertain. No-one in the family tried particularly hard to ascertain the truth of the matter. There was some disgrace attached to the venture, but I never knew what that was. I knew vaguely of all this as a boy, but was more forcibly reconnected with the facts by Bone himself, who began to tell me the story one night not knowing that I was a distant relation of the man. I do not recollect ever meeting the scientist, except possibly as a very small child, knowing only that his line of the family had encountered some trouble following the suicide of his father and that he had gone to Australia to live beyond this shadow.
Bone, it transpired, afterwards succumbed to the same fever, but survived it. He
told me about the illness, comparing his greater suffering to that of my cousin, and looked upon his survival as an achievement of his own making. A large number of the Hobart garrison had also died and been buried in unmarked graves. As a direct result of this, Bone had risen from corporal to sergeant. This, too, he regarded as being the reward of effort and ability.
Less than a year afterwards Bone was allegedly the protagonist of an incident in which two old native women had been killed. Bone’s story was that he had been attacked by a tribe of killers and that the old women were merely the unlucky victims of his fight to defend himself. The two small fingers of his left hand had been severed in the attack, the rest of his hand saved by a Government surgeon. After that, Bone was transferred, first to Sydney for five years, and then God knows where.
He was here at the Station before me, and six months passed before we discovered this connection.
Now, in these present circumstances, his behaviour towards me was becoming ever more unbearable – one moment gloating and condemning me for what had happened, the next speaking to me as though we were equals, as though we were related by blood, men who might share confidences, men who did not stand in daily contemplation of each other from the opposite sides of the abyss.
4
I was surprised on my second visit to Frere to discover that he was no longer chained to the wall, and that a table, two chairs and a lantern had been taken into his cell.
Proctor unlocked the door for me and then withdrew before I opened it. He again gave me the key, and I made a remark about being entrusted with it, about helping Frere to escape, but he simply looked hard at me and then at the surrounding trees.
It was midday, and the ante-chamber to the cells was already airless in the heat. I saw the lines on the dirt floor where the table and chairs had been dragged across the room, and only then did it occur to me that they might have been taken into Frere’s cell for the purposes of questioning him.
I was surprised, too, by the change in the man sitting at the table. It had been a week since my last visit and I had anticipated finding him in an even worse condition than previously. But he had evidently been well treated since then and had recovered further from his time in the forest. During the crossing I had calculated how best to pursue my own questioning, but seeing him as he was, sitting at the table reading a book, I was caught off-guard, uncertain of how to even begin.
‘James Charles Russel Frasier,’ he said, rising to greet me, speaking before I was fully visible to him in the doorway. I heard the distant echo of our first encounter and was encouraged by it. He held out his left hand to me. The wrist of his other was bandaged and I saw that he held his fingers stiffly. His voice, too, remained little more than a hoarse whisper. The natural light of the ante-chamber flooded into the small space, transforming everything it touched.
‘They told me you were coming,’ he said. He carefully marked the page of his book and laid it on the table. There were other objects in the room that had not been there previously: several containers, plates, cutlery, other books, a small tin case and a mirror.
‘Are you being well treated?’ I asked him.
‘Only you would think to ask me that particular question,’ he said. ‘Two days ago our friend Proctor asked me if I would prefer to move to another of the cells.’
‘To what end?’
‘Who knows. Perhaps it was just by way of being offered something. As you can imagine, there is not a great deal else.’
‘How did they know I was coming?’
‘The same way everything is known in this place.’
He filled two cups from a jug of tepid water. The door behind me remained open and he kept his face to the light. His skin was a better colour, he had combed back his overgrown hair, and the sores on his cheeks and neck were faintly discoloured, as though someone had dabbed them with iodine. I considered all this as I wondered what next to ask him.
I had left the compound accompanied by Bone, whom I had encountered supervising the stacking of bricks and timber alongside our own dilapidated gaol. I placed no significance on this – supplies and materials were frequently laboriously manhandled from one place to another on the grounds that they might be closer to where they might one day be needed, and that regardless of their eventual use, even this pointless labour was preferable to idleness.
Bone had walked with me to the water’s edge, but then came with me only a short distance along the path there. He knew where I was going, and I was prepared to agree to him accompanying me. I sensed something in his manner and in the things he said which suggested he knew something concerning Frere that I did not – something he might perhaps have learned from Proctor – something he was not at liberty to tell me, and I was intrigued by this, knowing that if it had been anything to his advantage then he would have been unable to resist telling me.
But he told me nothing, and he left me where the long grass gave way to the soft clay of the bank. The river was lower than previously and the old boatman waited closer to the quarry.
‘Did Proctor say anything to you?’ Frere asked me. He feigned indifference, but I caught his concern.
‘Regarding what?’
‘The powers that be – their powers that be – wish me to be returned across the river.’
‘Then surely that’s good news. I’ve been trying myself—’
‘Good news?’
‘For you to be with us, there, among friends, among your countrymen, than to be held here—’
‘Among the heathens?’
‘To be held here where you have no voice. What else do you know?’
‘Only that there have been changes in the government on the coast.’
‘There are tales of changes every month.’
‘But I suspect these are to be believed. I was visited yesterday by the almighty Hammad, who informed—’
‘And you believed a single word of what he said? A man motivated solely by greed? A man who, by common consent, has done more to counter the stability and proper government of the place than – than…’
He waited for my anger to subside.
‘Of course not. I know him for what he is, and he, of course, understands that. You have always underestimated him, James.’
I acceded to this in silence.
Hammad had been there long before the Belgians, slave-trader, unofficial governor and war-lord of a region so vast that his hold over it was beyond all understanding.
‘And whatever you think of him, he is a reliable source of information. He has been in Brazzaville recently. He came here only to negotiate the sale of some of his assets.’
And to take delivery of you from the feather-trader, I thought, but said nothing. Hammad had always seemed to me to be a man surprised by his ability to make money, and then afterwards one intoxicated by it. I had heard accounts of his achievements and excesses on the voyage out. He was a man either venerated or despised by all who knew him. His cruelty to his native employees was well known, and yet they had never truly risen in revolt against him, nor even deserted him in the numbers and with the regularity ours now left us. It concerned me to see how much faith Frere still had in what the man said, but I was unclear in my own mind how much this concern was simply the result of hearing that which I did not wish to hear, and how much it was born of my belief in Frere and his own judgements.
‘Delegations are meeting even as we speak,’ Frere said. ‘Balances of power going up and down.’ He made scales of his hands as he spoke.
‘And what bearing will all that have on you?’
‘Quite simple. I may soon – if indeed I am not already – be eligible to stand trial in the country – in the new nation, say – in which I am accused of committing my crime. Imagine that – tried here and not in my own country.’
There was no alarm in his voice, but rather a growing excitement, as though he were rising to another of his challenges. I did not know what to say to him, everything having raced so far ahead of my expecta
tions in coming to see him.
‘In short, again according to Hammad, my presence here – here among the benevolent Belgians – has become something of an embarrassment. Steps are being taken to have me removed.’
‘Have you brought across to us, you mean?’
‘In the first instance, yes.’
Again, I could not help but feel relief at the prospect. It did not then occur to me to ask him why he had not been brought to us directly.
‘Where,’ he went on, ‘I shall presumably become an even greater embarrassment and liability. To be handed over to a native court – and there are lawyers and judges among these men, James – by the Belgians, despised corrupters of this fabulous paradise that they are, is bad enough, but imagine being forced to be handed over by your own countrymen.’
I could think of no answer. A galaxy of flies circled above us. The sound of distant men came faintly into the room.
After several minutes, he said, ‘And all of which, never let it be forgotten, will acquire a considerably greater significance in the eyes of the watching world than my crime itself. Hands will need to be washed, copy-books kept clean.’
I had known since the time of the first of the stories that he was the last man among us to deny anything he had done, and that whatever this was, he refused to speak of it now for my sake alone.
‘There are too many conflicting tales,’ I said.
‘I imagine there are.’ He put his hand on my arm to impress his meaning upon me. ‘I shall tell you, James Charles Russel Frasier, but it would serve neither of us for me to tell you now. I imagine the details of what happened are already being rendered superfluous to the greater purpose they might soon serve.’
‘Then tell me one thing,’ I said.
He withdrew his hand.
‘Did you kill a child?’ It was the most I could ask of him.
He breathed deeply and bowed his head.
‘A death in which you – however indirectly – were in some way involved, and for which you are now being held solely responsible?’