by Peter Watt
‘Then you will be welcomed in all the public houses here.’
‘I doubt that, Father,’ Patrick said somewhat sadly, shaking his head. ‘I hold the Queen's commission in her army as a captain.’
The priest stared at his guest.
So that would explain why the man had been so deeply tanned by the sun, he mused. Soldiering in some far-flung and godforsaken campaign. ‘The tradition of the Wild Geese is very strong in these parts,’ he replied sympathetically. ‘Many of the young men from the village have served, many under the Union Jack. I don't think it matters to an Irishman who he fights for, so long as he is promised a good donnybrook. But,’ he added with a note of caution, ‘it may not pay to announce to the world that you hold a commission. Your accent is enough to label you an Englishman.’
Patrick nodded. English, Irish, Scots … he had the blood of the Celts, Gaels, Angles and Saxons in his blood. Not to mention a touch of French from his paternal grandmother's side. That's what made an Australian, he mused to himself. He had held onto the identity of his birth and had even used his fists at Eton to defend the pride of his country although he had not seen it for many years. Maybe it was just his predominant Irish blood that made him so defiant of slurs about his colonial identity. But at the same time he was also fiercely proud of his Anglo-Scots ancestry.
Mary served the steaming soup to Patrick in a chipped china bowl. He glanced up at her and disarmingly said in a deep Irish brogue, ‘Begorrah, Mrs Casey. ′Tis like me sainted old aunt herself would serve. God rest her soul!’ And winked with a wicked smile that glittered with mirth.
Mary hooted with delight. ‘Be away with ye, Paddy Duffy!’ she said with the voice of a young girl, and nudged the handsome grandson of the man himself. ‘You'd be takin’ advantage of a good woman like meself next!’ It was a familiarity that took the old woman back to another time when the young man's grandfather had swept her into his arms for a stolen kiss. Old memories in a new time.
‘Ah but that I would, Mary Casey, except Father O'Brien might not approve.’
Eamon blushed and ducked his head at both his housekeeper's brazen response and the irreverent way Patrick encouraged her. Before Patrick could take a sip of the soup Eamon mumbled a hurried thanksgiving prayer for the food about to be consumed. He suspected that Patrick was not a practising Catholic as he had noted that the young officer had not been awed by his position in the village as the local priest.
‘Where are you staying while you are visiting us, Captain Duffy?’ Eamon asked.
‘Down at the pub in the village. Bernard Riley's pub I believe it's called.’
‘A distant relative of yours then,’ Eamon commented. ‘You have a lot of relatives in the village. Even Protestant relatives, since your grandmother was Elizabeth Fitzgerald. As a matter of fact I often visit with your dear departed grandmother's brother, George Fitzgerald. He and I share an interest in archaeology which I do not think my fellow Irishmen appreciate, do they, Missus Casey?’
‘′Tis not a good thing to be disturbin’ the old places with picks and shovels, Father,’ Mary growled as she stirred the soup in the big pot. ‘The old ones should be left alone.’
‘But that's superstitious nonsense, Missus Casey,’ Eamon retorted, and Patrick detected a hint of teasing in his reply as the priest added facetiously, ‘After all, Saint Patrick broke the power of the old ones and brought Our Lord to Ireland.’
Mary Casey did not reply but continued to stir the soup. She was as good a Catholic as any in the village but some things would never go away. Things that lived in the still grey mists beyond the village and were witnessed and sworn to by many a devout Irishman.
‘You do not talk how I remember our Irish priests did when I was a boy growing up in Sydney, Father.’
Eamon smiled broadly although he was unsure whether it was a compliment or a rebuke. It depended on whether one was a devout follower of the True Faith. ‘I grew up in England amongst Anglican Catholics and have travelled much of Europe,’ he answered. ‘But alas, my education in the broader world did not really prepare me for life as a parish priest in an Irish village. However, here I am as a mark of my vow of obedience to the Church.’
‘Some would say English Catholics have no place in the Church of Rome,’ Patrick baited with his own touch of humour. ‘That English Catholics are as heretical as the Protestants.’
The priest beamed and took his glasses from his nose to wipe them.
‘Ahh, Captain Duffy, I think you and I could have many a philosophical debate on many subjects. Cambridge old chap?’
‘Oxford actually,’ Patrick replied in his best affectation of English and broke into Latin. ‘That we could, Father. Tacitus, the historian, was a particular interest of mine.’
The priest raised his eyebrows at the young captain's fluency in the language of his Church. ‘Do you also have an interest in Irish history?’ he replied in English.
Patrick frowned. ‘I'm afraid I know little of Irish history.’
‘That's not surprising,’ Eamon snorted. ‘You received a classical English education. But possibly I could alert you to the prehistory of the land of your forefathers, Captain Duffy. If you had an interest in Tacitus then I could possibly intrigue you with the history of Rome's most serious rivals – the Celts.’
Before he could reply Mary Casey ladled another stream of steaming soup into Patrick's almost empty bowl then excused herself to shuffle off to attend to other duties in the small annexe that served as a presbytery.
When they were alone – and Patrick had finished his second helping of hot soup – Eamon continued with the conversation. ‘I think if you are staying for a while I should take you to George Fitzgerald's place to meet him. He has a very good collection of artefacts we think date back to the age of the warrior heroes of Old Ireland. The Bronze Age, we amateur archaeologists call that time.’
‘I would like that,’ Patrick said. ‘I think we can dispense with my rank. The name is Patrick.’
‘I doubt that you are a religious man, Patrick, so call me Eamon,’ the priest said with a warm smile. ‘I gather that your lack of respect for titles is part of your colonial upbringing.’
Patrick laughed. ‘Some things stay with a man. Yes, I suppose you are right. Australians all think they are as good as their masters no matter what their occupation or standing in society.’
‘I see that the well-travelled Englishman Mister Trollope also noted the same thing in his travels in the colonies,’ Eamon said with a smile. ‘He was rather taken aback by the coachman addressing him as an equal.’
Into the late afternoon priest and soldier carried on a lively conversation on subjects of politics and history. Each of the two very different men, bound by education, warmed to the other's informal attitude. The priest produced a bottle of whisky and before the sun set in a grey sky both men had consumed three-quarters of the contents.
Mary Casey hobbled as fast as she could down to Riley's pub where she would spread the word on Patrick's arrival in the place of the birth of the great man, Patrick's grandfather himself. The news earned her an endless supply of whisky as she spun out the story to a spellbound audience of Riley's patrons.
Old men with pipes nodded sagely as they remembered the giant Patrick Duffy of the old days. They had been young men then but they vividly remembered the night the British troops came to arrest the big man and it was recalled that a sympathetic clerk in the magistrate's office had forewarned the Duffy family. They had only been short hours ahead of the arrest warrant and had taken the first ship out of port – which happened to be sailing for Australia, and not America, as Patrick Duffy had initially hoped.
When the grandson of the great man himself arrived back at the hotel somewhat the worse for wear after drinking with Father O'Brien, the patrons stared with a mixture of awe and pity at the young officer. Awe for the blood in his veins, pity for the fact that his blood had been diluted by that of the English.
In the confines of t
he smoke-filled bar Patrick politely nodded his greeting to the wall of silent faces that stared curiously at him before going to his room to snatch some badly needed sleep. And in his troubled dreams he would find himself back on the battlefield. But his moans and whimpers were lost in the Irish night as he tossed from side to side in a lather of sweat.
THREE
A day's ride east of the Kalkadoon ambush on the mounted police patrol Ben Rosenblum grunted as he raised a timber rail into position to complete his stockyards.
Ben was close to his thirtieth year and had finally realised a dream to own his own cattle property. It was not a grand place, just a single-room bark hut, stockyards and a corrugated iron lean-to that acted as a shed for saddles, tools and a few bales of hay. But he intended to carve out an empire one day for his young family and knew this with the optimism of his Jewish ancestors and their tradition of fighting the odds stacked against them.
Ben had once worked for the astute businesswoman Kate O'Keefe and had shared the early years of Kate's rise to her considerable wealth. As a young teamster he had trekked the dangerous tracks to the Palmer River goldfields with her and together they had faced hostile tribesmen, floods and privation. Part of her unrelenting spirit to win had rubbed off on the young man who had spent the first part of his life in Sydney's tough waterfront suburbs. With Kate as his inspiration and guiding light, Ben had saved his money and the fruition of his thriftiness was the purchase of the property he had sentimentally named Jerusalem.
The name was a belated acknowledgement of his Jewish ancestry although he no longer practised as an orthodox Jew. Nor did he observe the dietary rules of his religion as the practicalities of survival on the frontier made this seem unimportant to him.
He had stepped further from his beliefs when he had been married by an Anglican priest to Jennifer Harris who had not been accepted as a suitable wife by his more conservative aunt and uncle, Judith and Solomon Cohen. It was bad enough that Jennifer was a Gentile but she also had a child outside of wedlock and, to confirm their worst fears, she refused to have her children taught the ways of Ben's religion.
Ben had first met Jenny on the Palmer River. She had been a grimy and malnourished young girl with a dirty and surly child in tow, the product of a terrible wrong. Jenny had been Ben's first love – and only love.
Jennifer had returned Ben's love with a spiritual more than a physical passion. Despite her reluctance to indulge in unrestrained passion he knew Jenny's love for him was as deep as a woman could have for a man and he was always patient. Kate had once hinted at terrible wrongs that had occurred to Jennifer when she was merely a child in Sydney but Jennifer never spoke of this – and Ben never asked.
When Ben heard the distant drumming of a horse at full gallop he checked the swing of the heavy hammer he was using to nail the railing of the stockyards. He cursed at the stress his adopted son Willie was putting his horse through and decided that he would have a few words with him.
‘Ben!’ Willie's call had a note of alarm not usual in the young man. At sixteen Willie had seen many terrible things in his life and as such it took a lot to cause him to lose his composure.
Ben straightened his aching back and watched Willie rein his mount across to the newly constructed stockyards still fresh with the sap of the trees oozing from cracks. The young man slid expertly from his horse to confront the tall, bearded man. ‘Big war party of darkies camped out on the western boundary’ he panted as if he had run the four miles from the western boundary marked by the dry watercourse of Ben's property. ‘Fifty, maybe a hundred,’ he gulped with a mixture of excitement and fear.
‘Any gins and piccaninnies with them?’ Ben asked quietly. His casually asked question had a calming effect on the young man who felt a little ashamed of his boyish excitement in the face of adult calmness.
‘Yeah, they got women and kids with ′em.’
‘Then I don't think they're going to be an immediate threat to us,’ Ben concluded. ‘But we will take no chances.’
Willie nodded his agreement. He had absolute faith in the decisions of the man who he had slowly come to view almost as his own father. Willie still did not know who his real father was as his mother had refused to tell him – or Ben.
‘′Bout time we had a cuppa,’ Ben said as he hefted the hammer over his shoulder and turned to walk towards the little bark hut that was their home. Willie followed and hitched his horse to a rail outside the hut.
Inside the hut Jenny kneaded flour into a bread loaf. Sweat ran down her face in tiny rivulets and the bun she had secured to her head was falling apart. Time – and the rigours of the frontier life – had brought flecks of grey to her crowning glory of golden tresses. She no longer attempted to conceal a large strawberry birthmark on her face as she had long forgotten it existed.
Ben constantly told her that she was the most beautiful woman on earth even though she was sometimes self-consciously aware that her once slim waist had thickened since they had courted.
Rebecca, their youngest child, sat at the roughly hewn slab table kneading a small loaf in imitation of her mother. Although she was only four years old she could already cook. She glanced up at the two men blocking the light from the doorway, then returned to her task of getting the dough ready for baking.
‘Where's Saul and Jonathan?’ Ben asked trying to sound calm.
Jenny paused in her task and brushed aside the trickles of hair from her face – which left a dab of flour on her nose – and stared at her husband with a glimmer of concern clouding her eyes. ‘Why? What's wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. I was just wondering where the boys might be.’
‘They took the dogs and went out in the bush to see if they could find some native honey.’
‘I saw a bunch of darkies up on the dry creek. Did they go in that direction?’ Willie asked.
Jenny's mouth gaped. ‘I don't know. They just took off and said they would be back by dark.’
‘They will be all right,’ Willie said to soothe his mother's natural fears. ‘Nothing will happen to ′em.’
Ben was also worried but he had faith in his two sons' alertness. They had been born in the bush and, although Jonathan and Saul were nine and ten respectively, they were independent in the ways of survival. Already they worked as men on the property and Ben respected them for their adult-like toughness. They could handle the cattle and were both crack shots with the heavy Snider rifle. Very rarely did they return to the hut without a kangaroo which would be shared with the five station dogs.
Rebecca felt the tension in the small hut and watched with wide eyes as the adults conversed. Willie could see her fear. He loved the little girl – almost as much as his mother – and placed his hand on her head to pat her fine locks of gold. She was very much like his mother in appearance and manners whereas his two half-brothers were much like their father. She glanced up at Willie with questioning eyes and was answered with a reassuring smile.
‘I will ride out and find the boys,’ Ben said in a manner that did not evoke any sense of panic. ‘Willie, you can stay here and finish the yards while I'm gone.’
Jenny nodded. There had been a time many years earlier when he had said similar words and gone unarmed to warn the big Eurasian John Wong of the Aboriginal warriors' ambush on the track to the Palmer.
‘Ben?’ she said quietly, and with just the faintest trace of fear in her voice.
‘I know,’ he replied with a sad smile and the pair exchanged loving glances which cut short any need for words.
Ben took a rifle from a long wooden case beside their bed and slipped a box of cartridges into his pocket. He also strapped on the big Colt revolver Kate had presented him with on his first trek west with one of her wagons. Jenny retrieved the lead shot and powder flask from a sideboard. She loved the sideboard for its delicate woodwork carvings of flowers and leaves along its edges. It was one of the rare items in the hut that was actually shop bought although Ben had promised that one day she
would have the best furniture in the colony.
Not that she cared for worldly goods as much as she cared for the tall, gentle man who was her husband. She had followed him across the frontier when he had walked beside the huge creaking wagons pulled by the stolid oxen and she had given birth to her sons in the shade of the wagons when her time came. Only Rebecca had been born in what was now their home on the property.
When Ben had completed his preparations for the search he turned to hug his daughter with a crushing expression of love and gently reached out to touch his wife's cheek. She responded by pressing her face into the broad, work-hardened hand. There were no tears in the parting, as tears might be an admission that she was worried for her husband and sons, but she closed her eyes briefly to draw in the scent of newly hewn timber and tobacco that lingered in the pores of his flesh.
Ben swung himself into the saddle and urged his mount forward with a gentle kick. As he rode past the stockyards and into the shimmering heat of the dry silent scrub he had a fleeting thought. It was as if the scrub were attempting to reclaim the hut for itself.
When he was gone from their sight Jenny took her daughter's hand and led her inside the hut. There it was acceptable for her daughter to see her tears. To be able to cry was the domain of women. Men bore their pain in silence.
The laughter of the women and children turned to cries of terror as they fled from the dry creek bed for the cover of the scrub.
Terituba scooped a spear from the cluster at his feet and faced the tall, bearded white man who had suddenly walked upon them. How could a white man take them so easily? He cursed as he prepared to fling the barbed weapon at the man walking fearlessly towards him along the creek bed. But the Kalkadoon warrior hesitated. If the white devil had penetrated the camping ground of his clan, then he could have as easily fired on them with the white man's terrible weapons that left bloody holes in their victims.
Terituba was not alone. Both young and old warriors bristled a wall of spears uncertainly at the approaching white man carrying a bag in either hand. On the white man's hip was the gun that could be fired many times without a pause to reload like the long guns. But it was not in his hand.