by Peter Watt
Patrick nodded politely. Somehow his exposure in his early years to a staunch Irish Catholic family had not prepared him for a Protestant Irishman declaring his Irishness.
‘Captain Duffy has expressed an interest in learning more about the history of this county, George,’ Eamon said brightly. ‘No doubt to add to his understanding of the Fitzgeralds and the Duffys.’
Patrick had noticed that the priest used the old man's name in the familiar and guessed rightly they were firm friends – despite the difference on opinion over religion, and Ireland's political future.
‘Then he has arrived at an opportune time, Eamon,’ George replied. ‘I am having a dinner for a few guests tomorrow night. Amongst my guests is Professor Clark who I have been corresponding with about our hill. He feels it may be well worth undertaking a dig.’
‘We saw Catherine there on our way here,’ Eamon said quietly.
Patrick thought he noticed a fleeting shadow of disapproval cross the old man's face. But Fitzgerald made no comment, except to frown. ‘Catherine has probably as good a knowledge of the history of this region as her grandfather and I,’ Eamon added, as if attempting to defend the girl's presence on the strange, dome-shaped hill. ‘She is fluent in Gaelic and somewhat an authority on the old stories of the country. Especially those relating to the Celtic heroes and Druidic customs.’
‘She neglects her French to achieve her fluency in that language,’ her grandfather growled as he threw back the last drams of whisky and soda. ‘I fear she has an unholy interest in the myths and towards that purpose she studies the old texts.’
Father Eamon O'Brien had to agree with his friend. The pagan ways of Old Ireland were steeped in savagery with dark sexual undercurrents always present, a licentiousness of the warrior cult where the strongest took all they desired. As if conjuring the old gods by speaking of their existence in the mists of Celtic mythology, Patrick was suddenly aware of another presence in the room.
The pungent smell of dog and the sweeter scent of crushed flowers came to him on the whisper of a breeze. Catherine's barefooted entry into the library had been so silent that the men had not noticed the big oak door swing open behind them.
The two male hounds were impressive creatures, each two and a half feet tall at the shoulder with their long wiry grey coats giving them bulk. Patrick had heard of the legendary dogs of Ireland – the Irish wolf hounds – which had graced the halls of the Celtic kings. He remembered that they had been used to hunt wolves and deer, and the two that had accompanied Catherine certainly looked as big as any deer they might hunt.
The two giants padded across to the hearth and plonked themselves before the fire at George Fitzgerald's feet. ‘Catherine, we have a guest Father O'Brien has brought from the village,’ her grandfather said. ‘Captain Patrick Duffy.’
Patrick rose, turning to exchange his introduction and was struck as surely as a heavy lead bullet from a Martini Henry carbine might fell him. Standing before him and framed by the ancient timbers of the doorway was the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. Her fiery red hair unencumbered by combs or ribbons, flowed about her shoulders. Her milk white complexion was flawless and her deep green eyes almost glowed in the dim light of the library, such was their startling clarity. She wore a blouse in peasant European style – similar to those worn by gypsies – and her long skirt swirled around her ankles as she crossed the room. Patrick fought to recover his composure. ‘Miss Fitzgerald, a pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ he stammered. He was annoyed to see the flicker of haughty amusement cross her face. The damned girl knew she was beautiful! How many other men had she devastated with her beauty?
Catherine continued to hold his rapt gaze. ‘I have been expecting you to come, Captain Duffy,’ she said quietly with her faint smile. ‘From the hill I saw you with Father O'Brien.’
‘I also saw you, Miss Fitzgerald,’ Patrick answered, recovering his composure. ‘Then you seemed to disappear.’
‘I can do that,’ she answered, with a teasing note in her voice. ‘Just disappear.’
Patrick knew that the perfume of the crushed flowers was a figment of his imagination but somehow it had heralded Catherine's entrance into his life. His life! What life? His thoughts were gloomy as the realisation struck him that within forty-eight hours he would be leaving the village to return to the regimental barracks in London and thence shipped on active service to Africa. He was on the verge of travelling to the deserts of the Sudan to face the savage warriors there and no life was guaranteed beyond the next battle. For a reason beyond his understanding he knew that he had just met the woman who he most desired in the world. ‘Well, I hope you will not disappear tomorrow night, Miss Fitzgerald,’ he said. ‘Your grandfather has kindly invited me to dine with him.’
‘Captain Duffy must wear his mess dress,’ she said turning to her grandfather. ‘Or he will not be allowed to dine with us.’
The old man smiled at her imperious order. ‘My grand-daughter's commands are rarely disobeyed, Captain Duffy,' he chuckled softly. If you have mess dress with you, you are to present yourself accordingly at dinner. Decorations to be worn.’
‘He has mess dress,’ Catherine said knowledgeably. She had friends in the village and the inquisitive maid to the young officer's room had verified so. ‘Redcoat and kilt.’ Patrick raised his eyebrows questioningly at the young woman but she simply returned the question with a smug look of I-know-more-about-you-than-you-know.
‘I shall wear my red dress,’ Catherine said happily. ‘It will complement Captain Duffy's uniform. I will be looking forward to you dining with us, Captain.’
Patrick smiled. He was aware of Catherine's frank appraisal of him. ‘The feeling is mutual, I assure you, Miss Fitzgerald,’ he replied. ‘I shall be interested in Ireland's mythology, as much as its history. Father O'Brien informs me you are somewhat of an expert on the subject.’
‘Mythology often has a basis in history,’ Catherine said as she glanced at the priest. ‘I dare say the exploits of your father over the last few years – as often narrated by the villagers here – will one day be part of our mythology.’
‘I'm afraid your villagers have good imaginations, Miss Fitzgerald,’ Patrick replied quietly. ‘My father was killed fighting the Maori in New Zealand. That sad event occurred before I was born.’
‘I know you must be right,’ she said with a slight frown. ‘The villagers are prone to tell tall stories in the public houses. It is part of the tradition in this part of the world. Still, many of the myths of old do have a basis of fact to them, Captain Duffy.’
Eamon had heard the same stories: of a big Irishman who went under many names. A man who had fought the Maori warriors of New Zealand and before that had fought in the Civil War of America. He had gone on to fight the Red Indians of the American West as well as fighting as a soldier of fortune in Mexico. It was said that the Irishman had one eye – the other lost in war – and was at least seven feet tall!
An Irish prospector returning to the Duffy village from the Australian Colony of Queensland swore on his mother's grave that he had once met Duffy in a place called Cooktown. That had been ten years earlier and he had called himself Michael O'Flynn.
‘It is sad that the villagers are wrong,’ Catherine sighed. ‘A man such as the villagers describe would be well at home in the pantheon of Celtic heroes in this land.’
‘If the rumours did indeed have a basis in fact, Miss Fitzgerald, then I am sure I would have known,’ Patrick said with a grim smile.
‘Well, Captain Duffy, I wish they were true, because I would have liked to have met the man you may some day become.’
With this wistful utterance she parted company from the three men and Patrick noticed the two huge hounds devotedly rise from their comfortable place in front of the fire to pad after her.
Patrick did not remember much of the conversation that afternoon. He let Eamon and George dominate with talk about Professor Clark's intending visit. They discussed t
he possibilities of archaeological finds in a dig on the strange hill. Patrick's thoughts, however, were focused on the beautiful entity he had met.
Entity? Was such a word appropriate? he mused. Did not such a word best describe a goddess? And his thoughts drifted to the mention of the Irish mercenary, Michael O'Flynn. It was strange how this O'Flynn character could be linked to his dead father.
Eventually the conversation dwindled away as Eamon O'Brien reluctantly faced the fact of his office. He had confessions to take, cottage visits to the sick and elderly, and a mass. Patrick bade his gratitude to George Fitzgerald for his hospitality and left with Eamon.
They trudged in silence towards the village. As they passed the hill Patrick glanced up as if expecting to see Catherine. But she was not on the hill, which was taking on a soft, dark glow as the summer sun slowly sank over the cold Atlantic ocean. The evenings were long in the Irish summer and filled with a magical hush, Patrick thought. And magic was in the aura that surrounded the beautiful young woman he had met briefly that afternoon.
Father Eamon O'Brien had been astute enough to notice the intensity of the exchange between Patrick and Catherine and brooded on a statement made by the young woman. He prayed superstitiously that its utterance had been merely a coincidence. Or was it that she knew exactly what she had said? ‘I shall wear my red dress then!’ Had not the Morrigan worn a crimson mantle when she first encountered Cuchulainn?
Summer eves were also the time of the Druids whose pagan practice was deeply rooted in the mystical psyche of the Irish. Patrick Duffy had come to the village on the eve of the summer solstice.
FIVE
Jenny's expression was a fixed mask of surprise. It was as if death had come to her as a total stranger even when she knew its arrival was inevitable.
In the tiny bark hut that had once been her proud home Rebecca whimpered. Her mother was dead but she did not know what death meant.
Sniffling back tears of grief, Ben's two boys stood behind their little sister while their father knelt by the narrow double bed holding his wife's cold hand and sobbing great splashes of silent tears that soaked the rough blanket covering Jenny's body.
From the moment he had seen Willie stumbling towards him Ben had known something terrible had happened to Jenny. Nothing else on earth could have caused the total despair he had seen in the young man's face other than the death of his mother. Now she had gone in an obscene and painful death to the deadly venom of a snake bite.
If only he had gone to the wood pile to fetch logs for the stove then she might be alive now, Willie anguished. But he had churlishly protested and in her anger his mother had gone in his stead.
The huge taipan had only been protecting her young when she struck with a blurring speed that was impossible for Jenny to recoil from. The syringe-like fangs buried deep in the unsuspecting woman's arm above her elbow, releasing the toxin to travel its lethal course.
Willie had been at the table in the hut cleaning his revolver when he heard his mother's strangled scream and instinctively snatched up the weapon. As he bolted from the hut his first thought was that the Kalkadoon had launched an attack. Once outside, he realised that the revolver was not loaded and hesitated, torn between returning for the bullets, and reaching his mother.
But the fear for his mother's safety overrode everything and he sprinted with the empty gun to the wood pile. There he saw his mother standing ashen-faced, holding her arm. She stared at him with her mouth agape and he saw the huge brown snake's tail disappear deep into the stack of logs as it slithered away.
Without a word he had dropped the pistol to grasp his mother by her arms and led her back into the hut. Rebecca watched with wide-eyed confusion as her mother trembled uncontrollably in her shock.
Willie led his mother to the bed and laid her down gently as he searched frantically for the sharpest of the skinning knives. Rebecca started to cry when she saw Willie tear open the sleeve of her mother's dress and slice quickly across the fang punctures. Jenny stifled her cry of pain as the sharp blade bit deeply. She did not want her daughter to know she was in great pain. But the poison had done its deadly job and Willie's efforts were to no avail.
Jenny sensed that death was only a short time away and before she died she spoke of many things to her son. Of the love she had for him and her other children, of her love for Ben – and of the identity of Willie's true father. A fire came to Jenny's eyes and she recounted the terrible oath she had sworn as a thirteen-year-old girl nursing him as a squalling infant in a filthy rat-infested room in Sydney's slums.
Outside the hut Willie stared into the silence of the hot night and brooded on all that his mother had said to him before she died. His world had come apart in the awful speed of a striking snake and his thoughts were numb with loss and bitter with a terrible hate. She was torn from his life and her death left a wound that would never heal. But she had also left him with an oath sworn on all that was sacred.
His father's name was Granville White and he would confront him one day for the years of suffering he had inflicted on his mother as a child. A suffering so horrific that she could only bring herself to tell him as she died sweating and vomiting her life away. He had listened to the words of a terrified child as the drowsiness came to his mother and eventually turned to death. Granville White, a fine gentleman from Sydney …
He spat onto the ground as if to cleanse his thoughts of the very name and was vaguely aware of the taste of blood in his mouth. It was his mother's blood, that upon which he had sworn that he would settle one way or the other with the man who had sired him. He would confront Granville White who had so ruthlessly abused his mother and then cast her aside to fend for herself in a world where men used her body to slake the thirst of lust.
Oh yes, he remembered. The savage bites to her flesh when the drunken miners grunted like animals over her on the Palmer River goldfields. He remembered her screams of pain as they laughed in their lust and remembered her crying inconsolably in the rain and mud as they slowly starved to near death. She had begged scraps for him without thought of her own survival, such was the strength of a mother's love for her young. And only the kindly intervention of Kate O'Keefe had saved them.
‘Willie?’
Young Jonathan stood holding an oil lamp which cast an anaemic light over his grief stricken and dirty face. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asked with the numbed despair of a ten-year-old boy confronted by the unthinkable.
‘Ask Ben,’ Willie snarled. ‘He's yer father isn't he?’
‘He's your father too,’ Jonathan retorted with an uncomprehending frown for the unexpectedly savage tone of Willie's reply. ‘I thought you might know what to do …’
‘I know what to do,’ Willie snarled as he snatched the lamp from his half-brother. ‘Buggered if I know what you're goin' to do but I'm goin' to kill the bloody snake that killed my mother.’
Jonathan had never seen Willie so dangerously angry before. It was an anger like the beginnings of the fierce electrical storms that came on the hot and sultry days before the breaking of the Dry season in the Gulf Country. An anger of silence expressed in the explosive crack of the lightning striking down the strongest of trees. He watched grim faced and frightened as Willie hurled the lamp at the wood heap where it shattered with a woomph.
The dry wood crackled as the burning oil spread the flaring fingers of flame and with a blind hunger the fire consumed the wood pile. The spreading ring of light crept outwards to silhouette the thin trunks of the surrounding silent trees as the fire rose higher and the thick smoke billowed with a sweet scent of the bush.
‘Die you murderin' bastard,’ Willie howled with a venom equal to that of the trapped taipan. ‘Burn in hell!’ But it was not just the snake that had taken his mother's precious life from him. For as the flames engulfed the twisted sticks of timber his thoughts were on a man whom he had never met but knew some day he would. And when that time came he knew that the fancy Mister Granville White should share t
he same fate as the creature writhing in agony, trapped in the centre of the fire's heart.
Jonathan watched the wood pile turn to a funeral pyre for the snake as the inferno writhed in on itself and sent cascades of red cinders skyward like fireworks. He watched as Willie ranted obscenities into the night and yowled like a wounded animal.
Then suddenly Willie was gone. Swallowed by the depths of the vast scrub he ran blindly, sobbing for the pain that was in his body and soul.
Willie returned in the morning as the sun rose – an orange ball in the eastern sky above the stunted trees of the flat scrublands.
Rebecca ran to him and hugged his legs as he shambled across the yard towards the bark hut. He had always been her favourite brother as he was gentle and not teasing like Jonathan and Saul. She held him as one would cling to a life raft in a stormy sea but sensed that her beloved Willie was a different person to the one she had known the day before.
Ben had stood as a gaunt spectre under the shade of the tiny sloping verandah roof that provided a cooling shelter to the front of the hut. He had watched his daughter run to Willie across the dusty yard and greet him with her love and watched as the young man stopped to stroke the mass of yellow curls that came to his waist.
‘Becky! Go and put the billy on,’ Ben asked the little girl before turning to call back into the hut, ‘Jonathan, Saul. Go and fetch some wood for the fire and help your sister.’
The children responded eagerly to their father's orders as they were the first words they had heard him utter in hours and were thankful for direction in a time when the world had come to a sudden halt. Although the terrible grief was in him, so too was the firm and gentle guidance of a father.
The sadness was not a surprise to Rebecca who knew tears had a place in life. For it had been her alone who had often witnessed her mother's tears when the men were absent at their work. Tears that her mother cried for the loneliness of their existence; tears for reasons unknown to Rebecca when her mother held her tightly in her lap as if she was frightened she might lose her only daughter to a monster that came in the night to snatch her away. And sometimes tears of happiness which welled when her father stood awkwardly in the hut grasping a bouquet of wildflowers.