Eagle on the Hill

by JH Fletcher

  ‘No,’ Des said. ‘I’ll sort the bastards out meself.’

  Along the river men handled their own problems, without troubling the wallopers. Everyone knew whose side the police were on, anyway, and it wasn’t the selectors’. His attackers had worn sacks over their heads, but Des had recognised their voices. He knew damn well who they were and who had sent them. He spread the word, and two nights later the Grenvilles’ man Smart was trussed up in a sack and left on the riverbank by blokes he never saw.

  ‘Be outta here by morning,’ one of the unseen men told him, ‘or you’re cod bait.’

  Smart had received plenty of threats in his life, but this time had a nasty feeling the bloke had meant it. In the morning, after his tearful wife had found him and cut him free, the pair of them took off for the city and never came back.

  It was good news for the Baxter brothers, who until now had been Smart’s assistants. Now they took over and set about trying to out-smart Smart.

  * * *

  George had been in Adelaide, but when he found out he came back on the double, and his response was everything Rufus had feared.

  ‘I can’t believe it! Arson? Have you taken leave of your senses?’

  ‘Smart exceeded his instructions —’

  ‘I told you to make sure there was no violence!’

  ‘We couldn’t let Jolley get away with it! It was a deliberate double-cross —’

  ‘For what? A dozen bales of wool? You’d risk this family’s reputation for that? If it gets out you arranged it …’

  You. That was cool, considering they’d discussed it over breakfast.

  ‘Reputation?’ Rufus was proud of the way he’d handled the affair. Jolley had been taught a lesson, and Smart was expendable, after all. There were plenty more Smarts in the world. He’d expected praise, not this nonsense. ‘Father, do you really imagine the selectors think you’re Father Christmas?’

  ‘Being hard is one thing. But arson … I never authorised arson.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Rufus was as sulky as a schoolboy. ‘Apologise to the man?’

  ‘You’ll stay well away from him. Any sorting out that’s needed, I’ll handle myself.’

  He did so at once.

  Tempers would be high along the river after this Jolley business. He remembered Armstrong’s warning. Titan and even Eagle on the Hill might be at risk. A successful businessman had to know when to back off. Before he returned to Adelaide, he sent a message via Saul to tell Con Copper to start increasing freight rates.

  That was easy, but the real problem remained. What was he going to do about his son? How could Rufus have sent in a rabid dog like Smart without giving him specific instructions?

  George went back to Adelaide with his mind in turmoil. He was so vexed that he even spoke to his wife about it — something he seldom did, but Rufus was her son, too, and he wasn’t about to let her forget it.

  Not that he had much joy from the conversation.

  ‘You’ve never had any time for him,’ said Jane. ‘Your own son …’

  As though this Jolley nonsense were George’s own fault!

  ‘It’s stupidity I’ve no time for,’ he replied.

  George was barely sixty, but his heart had started playing up and the specialists had advised him he needed to take things more easily from now on. He didn’t know the meaning of the phrase, but it was a warning and George was concerned for the future.

  Two days after his return from Eagle on the Hill he went for a walk through the city. Carriages passed him in a clatter of hooves, but his mind was filled by images of the big house on its ridge, dominant and beautiful, its stonework glowing golden in the sunlight. He was proud of all his ventures but the house was special. Matters like Titan or the Jolley business were irritants, no more than that, but Eagle on the Hill was different. He was determined that the great house would remain an icon of his family forever.

  If he left it to his son, God knew what would happen to it. Rufus had never liked it; he found the fleshpots of the city far more appealing. For the present George had no intention of humouring him but who could say what might happen in the future? Once George was out of the way Rufus might put in a manager. He might — Heaven forbid! — even sell the estate.

  Something would have to be done.

  1877

  CHAPTER 23

  In February 1877, two months after his visit to Eagle on the Hill, Charlie collected a spare part for Cassidy’s pump at Edward’s Crossing and went back upriver.

  For months now Charlie had carried an image in his head of a face, young and warm, with eyes of the deepest sapphire. Of a woman who understood the realities of life along the river, as he did. But this visit, of course, was purely business. Or so he told himself.

  When he arrived at Cassidy’s he found Sean Cassidy and old man Keach away with the pixies, and empty grog bottles everywhere. He handed over the spare part and decided it would be best to escort Sarah’s father home, so he could make sure he got there safely.

  It took a while, with the old man barely able to walk and bawling sozzled, hiccuping shanties in his sozzled, hiccuping voice, but they made it eventually — only to find Sarah, blue eyes blazing, waiting to give them a piece of her mind.

  ‘You oughta be ashamed of yourself!’

  Just over six months later, Charlie and Sarah were married, and life on board Brenda would never be the same.

  Until now Charlie and Will had run their own show. Will’s resentment of his brother had faded after Charlie had left him to look after the engine room, but now it was rekindled. Because the girl who without a by-you-leave had helped herself to his cod, and whom he had been quick to put in her place because of it, was now his sister-in-law. The skipper’s wife. He knew all about petticoat rule and was not about to put up with it.

  But Sarah went out of her way to ask his advice on how things worked on board and soon he came to the conclusion that things could have been a lot worse. What if Charlie had fallen for a squatter’s daughter, someone who crooked her little finger over a cup of tea and didn’t know how to lift a spoon for herself? Didn’t bear thinking of.

  He had another thought, too. Where one brother led, another might follow. If marriage was in the air, he had one or two ideas on that subject that he might decide to explore himself, when they next visited Goolwa.

  First, though, they had selectors to visit upriver, stores to sell and produce to ship out.

  CHAPTER 24

  Their first trip together had begun catastrophically, with neither Charlie nor Sarah able to bridge the awkwardness that separated them. Even the fact that, with Dilly’s help, she had finally found her way through the impasse did not altogether make up for the earlier difficulties. Charlie had given his word, and Sarah had believed him, of course she had, yet still she had not been sure. Only marriage, signed and sealed before witnesses, had brought certainty to Sarah’s mind.

  Before, she had merely watched Charlie, Will, Brenda and the river playing out their shared existence. Now she had become part of it — but not without lingering reservations. Would she be able to fit into such a life?

  It wasn’t easy. Living on a riverboat made it impossible for people to get away from each other, and for Sarah and Charlie to find the space in which their relationship could flower. Every day Sarah found herself tripping over her own inexperience. She was never bored; the river, with its trees and hazards, its kangaroos and dark-skinned nomads, its voice and the intermingling of water and light, was still strange enough to made sure of that. Yet the lassitude of placid hours could be interrupted without warning by a crisis demanding instant response. This took some getting used to.

  The episode of the nightdress was a case in point.

  Sarah and Charlie had been married a week. Brenda was pushing east against the current as they tried to beat the advancing dusk to a landing where, in the morning, they were scheduled to pick up a load of wool.

  It had been an uneventful day. Sarah ha
d watched the stately shape of the passing trees, the drifting flotillas of pelicans, and wondered whether this was the peace for which she had longed so fervently through all the gipsy years of childhood. She had dreamt of an ordered and tidy life in an ordered and tidy town. What she had found was far removed from that, yet she had come closer to realising her hopes than she would have believed possible. Even the steady throb of the engine, the swash, swash of the paddles, spelt peace.

  Charlie was up in the wheelhouse. Darkness was almost upon them. The three of them lived their life by the coming and going of the light, and Sarah was already in her nightgown and ready for bed. Any minute now Charlie would draw into the bank for the night.

  Lulled by the peaceful passage of the river and the hours, Sarah decided she would share the last minutes of the day’s journey with her husband. She went to the galley and made them both a cup of tea. There was no-one about; Will was in the stern trying his luck with a baited hook trailed in the water behind them. Sarah lit the saloon lantern and stood watching the gutters of light spilling across the river’s rippled surface. She went forward past the engine, feeling its heat and pulse enclose her, the whir of the paddle drum singing in her ears.

  There was a tug, violent and unexpected, as her nightdress caught in the drum. Thrown off balance, Sarah was yanked backwards and nearly fell. Scalding tea flooded over her. She tried to free herself but the hem of the dress was caught fast and tightening with every second. It was made of good material and did not tear.

  Soon she was on hands and knees, trying to hang on to the wooden deck, to the side of the boiler, to a hot metal pipe that raised blisters on her palms. Her world contracted to one endless, terrified scream for help. On and on, while her feet scrabbled on the deck, the nightdress drew tighter and tighter and still would not tear, dragging at her body, hauling her inexorably towards the whirling blur of the metal drum …

  Will came rushing with a knife. He slashed at the nightdress, opening a rent in the material. Again he slashed. The dress ripped. Sarah fell forward. She was nearly naked, breasts everywhere, and for the moment did not care, her life returned, it seemed by a miracle, from a frenzy of terror, heat, noise and disbelief.

  Charlie’s feet thundered on the wheelhouse ladder as Will, still holding her, slammed the valves shut and disengaged the engine. The paddles fell silent. Sarah, palms blistered by the steam pipe, scalded by the spilt tea, gibbering and frightened witless — so close, so close! — was safe.

  The boys saw how, on the face of it, it took only two days for Sarah to come right after that episode. It’d been scary, of course. It might have killed her. It was the way things happened, on the river. One thoughtless moment … Now she was as cheerful as ever. Spunky little thing.

  But to be safe in her body was one thing; the mind was something else. Sarah was buffeted by nightmares of which she never spoke; times without number she jerked awake, sweating in the darkness, eyes starting. It would be years, if ever, before she was over it altogether.

  Yet despite her lingering terrors, there were many times when she knew herself to be happy. One evening, in the upper reaches of the river, they passed two fishing boats working together, their nets down, the figures of the men moving in the unspeaking ritual of their craft. A mile beyond the fishermen they drew into the bank for the night. They ate their tea in the golden glow of lamplight, the tranquil kernel at the heart of their day.

  It was a month since the accident with the nightdress and tonight Sarah was drowsy and content. They would finish their tea. She would clear away the dishes. She and Charlie would go to their cabin, for sleep and whatever else the night might bring. Peace was real despite her narrow escape.

  ‘I’ll never get such an expensive nightie again,’ she said, half to herself, half to Charlie. ‘Coulda killed me.’

  ‘Don’ see no point in ’em, anyhow,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re quick enough to take ’em off, thank God.’

  So that she slapped his wrist and was happy.

  ‘Why don’ we take the dinghy?’ Charlie suggested. ‘Row down and watch the fishermen we passed? There’ll be a moon later.’

  Sarah was wide awake at once. ‘That’d be lovely!’ She danced with pleasure; it might have been a royal occasion and not simply a short row down the Murray.

  Charlie put the dinghy in the water. They climbed aboard, Sarah balancing herself without thought. She’d come a long way since the day she and Charlie met, when she’d so nearly drowned Will, her brother and herself in the river.

  The air was cool. Sarah had brought a blanket and wrapped it about her shoulders. She sat in the stern, trailing her fingers in the river, while Charlie rowed with slow, steady strokes amid the darkness. The trees were dark against the sky. The water rippled.

  Charlie eased the oars and let the current carry them down. An owl flew on silent wings as the moon climbed behind a latticework of branches.

  They came to the fishing boats. Charlie backed his oars to hold them against the current. The men had just started to haul one of the nets; Sarah and Charlie could hear the murmur of voices as they bent their backs, heaving rhythmically. The net was heavy; even from here, they could sense the men’s excitement as it drew steadily tighter. The first fish broke the surface in a scattering of silver light. Others followed, until the river was a churning mass of foam and leaping, plunging fish.

  ‘I feel sorry for ’em,’ said Sarah.

  Charlie’s eyes glinted in the moonlight. ‘Be sorry for the fishermen, rather, if there weren’t no fish to catch.’

  ‘I know that. All the same …’ She tried to find words for how she felt but couldn’t manage it. ‘Because I’m happy,’ she said. ‘I’d like everythin’ else to feel the same, I s’pose.’

  It was the best she could do.

  Now the fishermen were sorting the catch, packing the fish into boxes. One leapt free. It fell with a hard slap into the water and vanished.

  ‘There’s one happy fish,’ Charlie said.

  He began to row slowly back against the current, arms reaching out with the oars, shoulders working smoothly beneath his shirt. He asked, ‘Are you happy, Sarah?’

  ‘Yes.’ The moon had cleared the trees and the river blazed with light. ‘I believe I never knew happiness until now.’

  They came back to Brenda. Will had gone to bed and all was still. They went to their cabin, undressed and followed his example.

  They lay side by side, watching the moonlight beyond the window and feeling the faint stirring of the hull beneath them. He took her hand and raised it to his lips. He kissed it and then her mouth with a feeling that contained not passion alone but something more enduring, a sharing and a contentment that was something new between them.

  She had told him she was happy and he believed her. Now he dared hope that he, too, had found peace and — for the first time he permitted instinct to mould the word — perhaps love.

  1879

  CHAPTER 25

  On 20 September 1879, with the blue skies of spring giving promise of warmth after a winter of endless rain, Will Armstrong and Petal Snibbs were married in the tin-roofed Goolwa chapel where Petal’s father was an elder.

  Sarah was vexed — not by the fact of the wedding, but by its timing. ‘Couldn’ you have waited a coupla months?’

  Because Sarah was out to here and expecting to pop any day.

  ‘People see me lookin’ like a haystack …’

  ‘They’ll think you’re the bride,’ Charlie told her.

  They probably did, to judge by the sideways looks she got after she’d struggled up the hill from the wharf. It was a hundred-yard trip but felt more like a hundred miles, with the weight she was carrying. In her condition a truly respectable woman would not have appeared at all.

  Delicacy would certainly have prevented her mentioning it, at the very least, but Sarah had never claimed to be delicate, thank God.

  ‘Her turn next,’ she said as the bride came down the aisle, earning herself a glare or
three from old bats who felt her comment in the worst of taste.

  Half the town was there; Owen Snibbs traded or prayed with most of the folks in the district, and was set on sending off his eldest daughter in a fashion suited to her background. He preached for nearly an hour, and a wailing whimper it was, with Charlie shifting this way and that on the hard wooden bench and Sarah wondering whether she might drop the baby in front of the bride, who, at least in theory, knew little of such things.

  At last it was over. Everyone gathered in a stone-built hall, dark and chilly after the long winter and thus admirably suited to the dark and chilly looks of the Snibbs clan, who thought that Petal was marrying below herself. They could have been right, but Petal, short and well-rounded, with dark hair and eyes and a lively, red-cheeked face full of laughter, had blossomed, most appropriately, with the ending of the prolonged service. She made it plain that she couldn’t wait, beaming and beaming, standing close to her new husband and touching him repeatedly — as though her wedding were a time of joy and not, as her doleful father had reminded them, a sober commitment to a future that, alas, looked darker and more doubtful than most.

  The miracle was that Will had been able to prise Petal loose from the steel grip of her family at all. Hard-working shop assistants were hard to find, especially unpaid ones. But Sarah, watching the flashing eyes and tossing head of her new sister-in-law, was less surprised than she might have been. One thing was sure: Petal was no-one’s woman but her own.

  There was tea and little cakes, with stamp-sized sandwiches of cucumber from which the crusts had been removed. Many lugubrious sighs were uttered as the tea, brewed in the urn provided especially for the occasion, went down. Heads were shaken by those who knew better but whose advice, sadly, had not been sought. While Petal wriggled like a rabbit in a gin.

  There were no real drinks, since spirits were frowned on by the Snibbs menagerie. Their absence made the festivities — festivities! — seem endless, but at last even this most joyous of occasions had its end and the two couples headed back to the river, where Brenda, dressed overall with little flags to mark the event, was waiting for them at the wharf.