The River Sings

by Sandra Leigh Price

  A kingfisher, a flashing shot of brilliance, dazzled my eye, golden and blue. It plunged into the water, a fish with jewelled scales flip-flopping between its beak before it flew back to the safety of the trees.

  I looked at the brass crescent sitting on Mrs Gooseberry’s blouse and Mrs Gooseberry’s face lit up.

  “I am a queen,” she said, tapping her crescent-shaped breastplate. “Governor made me so.” She grinned wider then. The queen. Her doll, my faithful constant, now buried with my mother in the embrace of the oak, the river eroding the soil, year by year. The Coronation. My father’s return. Attracted by the brightest jewel in the kingdom. I was a thief’s daughter, but no matter how agile my fingers, no matter how many times I fished out things from my father’s pockets, no matter that I’d taken a doll from a child who’d have more dolls in her life than a hundred children, I’d never be like him. My mother had been stolen from me. The loss of her shaping all that was to come. I leaned over the edge of the boat to splash water on my face, but it rose up to meet me.

  The water filled my ears, my nose, my throat.

  The boat disappeared above me like a dark cloud on the horizon.

  The water turned from light to dark as I fell towards the bottom of the river, fish drawn to the bubbles that strung up above me, a rope to the rescue, but I had not the strength to climb it, my arms and legs not at my command.

  The riverbed came closer and in the dim light the tiny minnows swam around and around, opaline flashes, the foreign bracken and the bladderwrack brushing out to touch me like fingers. And then there was a rushing sound as if all the waters of the world were converged in one place. And then I stopped falling. I was on the bottom of the riverbed, the white sand cradling me.

  A curious eye peered at me, the eyelid ribbed like a cockleshell, drowsy at half hemisphere.

  In the ripples of his beard of bulrushes little seahorses hooked their tails, little twirling fins. His grizzly chest was covered in sea lichen and moss and tiny molluscs whose frilled lips held on with a kiss. His breath made its own tributaries.

  Oh, how the thing laughed then, a wide stormy laugh, a little fish darting in and out of his mouth during its duration. The water vibrated around us, a living thing.

  “You know me not, little human thing?” he said and his eyes flashed, seaglass. Then he sighed, the sound of water rushing. He sucked deep on an abandoned clay pipe and puckered his lips upon it; a plume of bubbles soared to the surface of the river. With a barnacled hand, he caressed my hair which rippled upwards in the water like black coral.

  All the world was refracted light. I blinked and she was there.

  My mother. Patrin. In the water, willing me to move, but all I wanted was her and I reached out. Her dark hair had not faded, nor had she aged; all the love she had for me shone from her face. We were the cogs to each other’s wheel, orbiting each other, even after death. She’d been with me all along, always the water. She pulled at my arm and I blinked again. The air dispersed from my lungs and all the faceted light of the water turned dark. But then my mother called to me by my secret name; it swelled in my chest like a song, the name she had given me at birth, and something in me snapped open, desperate for breath.

  Above me was the shadow of the boat’s hull, the reflection of faces peering over the edge, hands breaking the surface.

  My mother pulled at me and I felt my body leave the sandy riverbed. I saw the diamonds in the water, all sparkling, shooting stars through the water, my clothes heavy. I hung on to my mother, my heart tied like a rag on a wishing tree, full of her, up towards the light. Together we broke the surface, the water teeming from my face. She was with me in the water, one arm around my waist, the other holding the side of the boat. She had her hand beneath my arm, trying to pull the heavy weight of me, my skirts, dragging over the edge like a fisherman’s haul.

  On the boat I heaved with air. The riverman leaned over and helped Cora Gooseberry, Queen of Sydney, back into the boat. I blinked river water from my eyes. It was she who had pulled me clear, pulled me back to life.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Eglantine, 1838

  We continued along the river, the trees thick with green cover, ghostly spirals of smoke creeping above the canopy. Occasionally a clearing, farmhouse, horse, sheep. The lowing of a cow.

  At a point along the river, at a jetty made of raw planks, the riverman tied up the boat and looped the rope around a split post. He helped me and then he helped Cora Gooseberry, who had been the strength of my arms, the fulfilment of my desire, her grip the wish of my fingers. The taste of river water in my mouth, a bubble of it blocking my ears. Riverling, it said. All of me had been enveloped in the river’s embrace and I’d not been afraid, but now walking on the dry earth and feeling the water shed from me, the fear began to swell at how close I’d come to drowning.

  “Just up that way, Cora will show you, Mrs Fookes,” the riverman said and I felt the earth firm beneath my unsteady feet. The name Mrs Fookes made me want to look over my shoulder, not familiar with the sound of it, my new name.

  Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, cart. Where shall I live? Big house, little house, pig-sty, barn. My mind drowsily circled the old rhyme beneath the beating of the afternoon sun as Cora Gooseberry kept a steady pace, waiting for me a few steps ahead when I lagged.

  We kicked up clouds of dust that seemed to turn and spin golden. Ahead of us a creature ran up the rough bark of a tree and watched us. Rooko-mengro. Tree fellow, though it was no squirrel I’d seen. A kakkaratchi, a new magpie, swooped low in the flickering trees, a black and white streak alongside them, before it stopped and sung for me a carol, a full chortle of joy.

  Over the rise a church had been built and a graveyard opposite, but I didn’t want to linger there, I’d had enough of graveyards in this life. Sloping away from the church was a hill, canopied in tree branches, framing a small glimmering slick of water, a beautiful lagoon that acted as a mirror to the sky; clouds unfolded above and below like a bolt of fabric, the wind blowing it wide. A black swan cut through the glassy water. Beside the lagoon was a shelter made from branches, a living tent, a blanket folded inside, waiting for the occupant to return. Cora pointed the way I was to go and I kissed her cheeks in thanks. She patted my stomach with a tender hand and ambled away, the silvery trees falling in behind her.

  I walked up the hill, past a grand house with a fine garden, to where a marketplace was packing up for the day, and was met by the smell of fruits and vegetables that had turned overripe in the sun. Opposite was a field of scraggly grass, where I stopped. There was Fookes, stripped to the shirtsleeves, his back bent away from me, taking the beating of the sun as he took a brick in one hand and a scoop of mortar in the other.

  I stood there for a while, all of me wanting to call out to him, but I hesitated. Our promises back in London were fogged by all that had happened since. I followed his steady, familiar movements – his hat perched on his head, the tilt of his head – until I could stand it no longer.

  “Fookes,” I called and I watched him stand up and put his hands to his forehead to shield his eyes from the light. “Fookes.” I longed to reach out to him, but I stood, still damp from the river and my own sweat, and waited. Uncertain.

  “Eglantine?” he said, the mortar slipping from his trowel into the dirt, followed by the trowel itself. He moved fast, the mortar on his hands suddenly on me, wrapped around the growing girth of me, his lips on mine.

  “How did you get here?” he said in disbelief. “Your ship is not due.” He wiped the sweat from his face into his hair and held me back from him to take me in and I felt changed from the young woman at my father’s house. “Eglantine,” he said again, my name lost in the press of his kiss. “Why, you all soaked through!” His hands outlined the shape of my face, catching in the wet tendrils of my hair, a rope to reel me in with and kiss me again. His thumb traced the strand of coral he’d given me at our wedding and I saw the silver heart inscribed with my birth on a cord on his chest
.

  “Do you not see it?” he said, a catch of excitement in his voice.

  “See what?”

  Fookes led me around the boundary of a ditch, bricks grew up in one, a wooden peg pulling string taut between them, a phantom wall.

  “Our home, well the start of it,” Fookes said proudly. Fookes was ruddier than he’d been back in England, his skin beneath my fingers hot and unfamiliar, the sun burrowing into him. He’d been remade from sunlight, as would I be. The light was an elixir for us all. I put my hand against the bricks of the chimney breast which stood a sort of tower attached to an inner wall around which the house was being built. I closed my eyes and breathed in all the smells of this new country and couldn’t place any of them, warm and dry like a sort of spice. When I opened my eyes the external walls, yet to be built, shimmered in the air.

  Together we walked through the invisible rooms of the house that would soon be our home and I felt my mother’s blessing in every pore of my skin, in my every breath and beat of my ragged heart. I had been her baby, my mother a gypsy, my father’s lady, and now I’d be my own queen.

  Fookes cupped my hands in his as he told me of an old tradition, to bless the house, to leave something in the hearth or the threshold, something tucked and secret, something to keep us safe against life’s storms. As he spoke I knew what I must do. I carefully eased them off and handed them to Fookes, still sodden and thick with river water, and felt the heat of the earth rise up into my feet. These shoes that had been dipped in all the world’s waters. Half rose. Half hip.

  Fookes lifted me up and in all my life I’d never felt so light. In a cavity of the flue I tucked my shoes that had travelled so far, and I was reminded of the little baby shoe my father burned with their spotted foxglove petals against the fever. So small.

  Back on the ground I looked into Fookes’s face and I saw myself in his pupil, a tiny image. My breath quickened, for it seemed my mother looked back at me from his eyes.

  “Eglantine?” Fookes said, concern on his face.

  “Just then I saw myself in your pupil. I saw myself, yet I saw my mother,” I replied but felt what I’d said to be overfanciful and wished I had kept it to myself. A soft breeze came, curled around us, ruffled our hair and flipped the leaves of the gums, their white bark as sinuous as limbs. A strange bird coo-eed out in the breeze-tossed branches.

  “Do you know what the word pupil means?” Fookes said. I shook my head. The grass ran like water with the wind. “You’ve heard the expression ‘apple of my eye’?” And the wind seemed to blow beneath my clothes and my skin, and my father’s words hushed in my ear, the quick scatter search for the marzipan in his pocket. I shivered.

  “It was my father’s name for me,” I said quietly. Fookes took my hand in his and at his touch my father’s voice vanished from my ears.

  “Someone once told me that pupil means little doll, when you can see yourself in another’s eye.” Out of habit I dipped my hand into my pocket for the secure clutch of that little wooden body, as long as a seedpod, as familiar to me as my own skin, but I knew she was entombed now with my mother.

  Fookes lifted my face and looked right into my eyes, not the little doll’s, not his reflection. He looked right at me. And I felt a strange hush fall; the wind dropped and let me be. All the little stars in God’s heaven were as numerous as the freckles inside the cup of a foxglove blossom. The cicadas chanted their hallelujahs until they rang in my ears and I felt my own skin stretch and shift in time with them. A moth danced between our faces, drawn to the flame. And I felt my baby unfurl and stretch, growing. Waiting to be born.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK

  Who can say what sparks the idea for a book? For me, it’s not just one idea – rather, it’s a kind of a weaving of many ideas, many inspirations, until it is hard to find the first thread. One such thread was the memory of Dickens’s character Fagin, who “mothers” the young Oliver Twist. Fagin was in fact based on true life, the returned convict Ikey Solomon. I was also taken by the description of Queen Victoria’s dolls, small wooden tuck-comb dolls, a type of wooden peg doll, and how she cared and collected 132 of them throughout her childhood, sewing clothes and inventing biographies for them, sometimes based on real people or characters at the theatre. I was also struck by the childhood of Victoria herself, the princess the ultimate doll, captive to the whims of the power brokers around her, and her collection of dolls. I was also fascinated with the idea of dolls being transitional objects, the term coined by D.W. Winnicott in 1951 to describe the special meaning that children attribute to their toys, an extension of attachment to the mother and the promise of her return.

  I was also captivated by the Romany tradition of burying dead children by the side of the road with acorns in each hand, resulting in entwined trees so they’d never be lost or forgotten. And ultimately I always knew that somehow I would also use in this novel the house of my convict ancestor William Price, built in Richmond, NSW, circa 1827, and which still stands, now an antique shop, the interior nearly unchanged, the banister burnished by the palms of generations. I was struck by a concertinaing of time. Here was a house, the beginnings of a new empire, a new life, humanistic as Georgian houses can be, built within a whisker of a decade of his transportation. What had William left behind? The sorrow of banishment, the loss of his family, his country and all he’d know and the burden of a singular crime, all the past sealed in the foundations by a hand hopeful for the future.

  Victoria as a young princess showed great interest in the “Gipsies”, and drew them in her sketchbook. When one of the women gave birth to a son, she sent food and blankets and considered requesting they name the son after her uncle, Leopold. Later at Buckingham Palace, she employed as a ratcatcher a gypsy named Mattie Black. As a young woman and towards the end of her life, she had her palm read by the Rom.

  As I was writing the scenes of Josiah Scamp, I came across the story of Joshua Scamp (The Journal of Gypsy Law Society, Third Series, Vol. IV, p. 190, published by Liverpool University Press) who, upon taking the platform, to be hung for theft, proclaimed: “You see what you have brought me to, live soberly and take care of your wife and your family.” He tied the knot of the noose with his own hand and was hanged. His son-in-law later confessed to the crime. Joshua Scamp’s family persuaded the rector to have him buried in St Mary’s in Odstock, Wiltshire, 1 April 1801.

  Gypsies or the Romany were transported to Australia in great numbers and are usually only discoverable by their occupation listed in court records, such as Basketmaker, Hawker, Horse dealer, Tin-man, or Dealer and are concealed in the records. One of my other convict ancestors shares one of these occupations, a tin-man, but we will never know whether he is romanical or not.

  Cora Gooseberry (?1777–1852), wife of King Bungaree (who was the first Australian to circumnavigate Australia with Matthew Flinders), was known as the Queen of Sydney to South Head, and also known as Queen Gooseberry. Her Aboriginal name was Kaaroo, Carra, Caroo, Car-roo or Ba-ran-ga. She was known throughout Sydney, and camped around Pitt and Market streets, Sydney. Macquarie, unaware of Indigenous societal structure, gave out gorgets or breastplates from 1815 in an attempt to create “leaders” whom he could then use as an intermediary between the tribal groups and the government.

  For understanding Romany life in the early nineteenth century, I relied on The Gipsies’ Advocate; Or Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits, of the English Gipsies, by James Crabb, London, 1832. Also Gypsies of Britain, by Peter Vesey FitzGerald, Readers Union, 1974. To learn about the child Victoria, her relationship to her dolls, and Georgian childhood, I relied upon Becoming Victoria, by Lynne Vallone, Yale University Press, 2001. For insight into early colonial and Aboriginal contact and connections, I referred to Grace Karsken’s The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2009; and for understanding early colonial superstitions, I am grateful to Ian Evans for allowing me to read his thesis on concealed shoes and other objects, “Touching Magic:
Deliberately Concealed Objects in Old Australian Houses and Buildings”.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank readers Karen Ferris and Ruth Quibell for their kindness and support in reading the manuscript at a very early stage in a time of chaos.

  I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of spirit and keen-eyedness of Lucy Treloar, who read a later draft of the book. Her support and suggestions were invaluable.

  I’d also like to thank Melissa Harrison for sharing the story of the entwined trees above and to Hilary Davidson for sharing her vast knowledge on shoes. I’d also like to thank Grace Karskens for taking the time to discuss with me the Indigenous history of the Darug people of Pugh’s Lagoon at Richmond, NSW.

  I would like to thank James Kellow, Shona Martyn and Pam Dunne and all the team at HarperCollins Australia.

  With gratitude to both my editor and publisher, Julia Stiles and Catherine Milne. To Julia Stiles for her sensitive, astute and enlightening work on The River Sings; if it sings, it is because of her. And to Catherine Milne for her passion, belief and commitment to this book when it was just a mere unloved sapling. Her insight and care are a treasured gift.

  And lastly, I would like to acknowledge The First Nations people of Sydney, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and pay my respects to the Elders both past and present – on this land, this novel was written.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SANDRA LEIGH PRICE’s first novel, The Bird’s Child, was published by Fourth Estate in 2015. She lives in Sydney.

  Instagram: sandraleighpricewriter

  Praise for The Bird’s Child:

  “The Bird’s Child is entirely original, its familiar Sydney settings set asparkle and rendered dreamlike by Sandra Leigh Price’s lyrical and lovely writing. This is a magical fable that penetrates to deep emotional truths”