by JH Fletcher
They were out in the stream now. Eagle on the Hill was no more than a memory, a nightmare.
Thank God.
There was a bang like a hammer clap, a twang and clang as something ricocheted off the boiler. A hole appeared in the bulkhead above the saloon door.
Sarah’s eyes were wide, her mouth filled by her frantically pulsing heart. She could not believe it. This was the last decade of the nineteenth century. Such things did not happen … but it had. They had been fired on in their own paddle steamer, in the middle of the Murray. Someone might have been killed.
Meanwhile the hull trembled under the thunder of the paddles as Brenda powered her way upstream.
CHAPTER 40
‘Your poor face!’
It looked as though a mule had stamped on it. They had moored for the night, well upriver from Eagle on the Hill and on the opposite bank. Now, with a bowl of hot water, a cloth and some disinfectant, Sarah began to dab at Charlie’s bruises. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘We had a disagreement. About terms. He thought he was buyin’ me as well as my labour. I said he wasn’t. We talked it over, then things got a tad heated. There didn’ seem no point hangin’ around, so I left.’
‘After a fight.’
‘There was a disagreement, like I said.’
She pressed the cloth against one cheekbone, where a bruise the size of a peach had risen.
Charlie winced. ‘Take it easy!’
‘There’s dirt in the cut. I gotta get it out.’
He shifted restively. ‘You’re harder than Baxter was.’
‘How’d he get into it?’
‘Musta bin lurkin’ about. When Rufus whistled him up he came quick enough, with that young brother of his. Then things got exciting. The youngster seemed to fancy his chances so I slung him through a window. That cooled him down a bit. But Baxter went for a rifle so I found Alex and we left together.’
‘But what started it?’
‘Rufus told me to get out.’
‘And?’
‘I didn’t like the way he said it. Next thing, we was poundin’ each other all round the room, chairs goin’ over, a table … Made me feel good, I can tell you.’
‘And Rufus?’
‘He’ll live. But he’ll never make a prize fighter.’ Again he winced as she dabbed at the bruise. ‘Go easy, can’t you?’
‘How did you get it? From Grenville?’
‘Do me a favour!’ Charlie grinned. ‘Baxter had a club. I took it off him but he got in one good lick first.’
‘He could’ve killed you — or any of us, shooting at us the way he did! Thank God he missed.’
Charlie had been smiling as he remembered the exhilaration of the fight, but her words sobered him at once.
‘I’ll be havin’ a chat with Baxter about that, one of these days.’
Now Sarah was disgusted with him. She slapped her cloth into the bowl of bloodstained water. ‘Hasn’t there been enough violence?’
‘He fires a rifle at my family and you’re telling me to forget it?’
‘I don’t want anyone gettin’ hurt, that’s all.’
Charlie was implacable. ‘You said it yourself. He could’ve killed any of us. No, there’ll be a reckoning, you can bet your life on that.’
‘In more ways than one, maybe,’ said Sarah. ‘I don’t suppose Rufus Grenville is likely to forget either.’
‘He told me he made a bad enemy. Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out.’ Charlie laughed ruefully. ‘Like father, like son. Two generations of the richest family on the river and I end up fightin’ both of ’em. I know how to pick ’em, don’ I?’
Sarah saw that he regretted none of it. He had tried to turn himself into the lackey it was not in him to be; the fight had helped him reassert his independence. She foresaw the problems they might have because of it, but was glad all the same; from the first she’d been uncertain of how she’d relate to a new and servile Charlie. Now, thank God, she never need find out.
She could feel the heat radiating from him. Bruises and all, he was on fire with excitement at what had happened. Never mind what the future might bring; never mind how bad an enemy Rufus Grenville might prove; Charlie was a man again, and free.
Sarah felt her own heat rising as she looked at him. ‘Tea and then bed,’ she said.
His eyes met hers. ‘What about my bruises?’
‘Never mind your bruises,’ she said.
They collected Luke from the Duggans and went on up the river. Alex and Luke were due back at school. Education had been compulsory for years, but Charlie said it could wait a week or two and so it did. Not that it made any odds. Sarah was determined that her kids would have a better education than she’d had. The prospect of Alex’s going to Regency College in Adelaide had stirred her imagination. That hope had disappeared, at least for the moment, but she would do all she could to make up for it. Sarah got out all the old school books she’d been hoarding and sat the children and even Elsie around the saloon table. She weighed in with the reading, writing and arithmetic and would have sworn they learnt more from her in a day than from Miss Tossall in a month.
She would have been willing to be quite fierce had a schools inspector challenged her about it. There’d be no trouble with Miss Tossall; she was probably delighted that the Armstrong children were not honouring her with their presence for the time being. As for Mrs Target, their landlady …
‘I’ll see her right,’ Charlie said.
Although coming up with the money might be easier to say than do. In one or two places this trip they got looks from customers who weren’t too happy about dealing with them now. News travelled fast and there were several families uneasy about taking sides against a family like the Grenvilles.
‘Slim pickings the next trip, by the look of it,’ Charlie told Sarah.
‘We’ll survive, no worries.’
Sarah was stronger than ever, now the family was threatened. Even more so after she heard what Rufus Grenville had said. Not from Charlie, but Alex had been playing with Martin in the next room and had overheard the beginnings of the argument.
‘He called me a brat,’ she said importantly, and put on a voice. ‘“Get your brat outta here”, that’s what he said.’ It hadn’t bothered her but she was willing to be indignant, seeing that was clearly what her mother wanted. ‘Then Daddy sloshed him.’
Sarah was indignant herself. ‘I’d have sloshed him too if he’d said that to me.’
She was sorry about Martin, though. Alex needed a friend and they were in short supply on the river. Elsie was too old, and might be leaving them, in any case, once Alfred Gooch summoned the courage to pop the question. Luke had Josh, Alex had had Martin. It seemed strange, a boy of that age being friendly with a girl, but they’d hit it off from the first. Now that story, too, was over.
Not that Alex seemed to care. ‘They’ll be sending him off to school in Adelaide next year, in any case.’
Sarah knew how hard it was to make friends in this life. She’d never had any herself, apart from Petal. So she encouraged Alex to play with the selectors’ children, although it was hard to see long-term friendships developing from such brief meetings. She would even have been willing to get one or two to take a trip with them for Alex’s sake, but her cautious inquiries came to nothing: children were needed at home for the chores. It might have worked the other way round, and if Alex had spent a week or two mucking out the hogs it wouldn’t have hurt her, but no invitations were forthcoming. Visitors had to be fed, and having a strange child to stay didn’t fit in with the lifestyle of those who had barely enough to feed themselves.
Which was why Sarah objected less than she might have done when Alex struck up a friendship, of sorts, with some of the black kids she met along the river. Sarah couldn’t understand how friendship was possible when they could barely speak to each other, but children seemed to have a language of their own that had no need of words.
The Aborigines had even less t
han the whites — less than nothing at all, or so Alex said — but it didn’t seem to worry them. Not that it stopped Alex trying to help out where she could.
‘That ham I bought in Niland,’ Sarah said one day after scouring the boat. She looked vexed as she sat down at the table in the saloon. ‘I coulda sworn I left it in the cool box.’
Alex watched the river through the window, as innocent as a new lamb.
‘Elsie, have you seen it?’
‘No, mum.’
‘Alex?’
‘Seen what, Mummy?’
‘The ham.’ Growing suspicion hardened her voice.
‘I gave it to Bethany.’
It was what she called one of her new friends, because she couldn’t pronounce her real name.
Sarah put her hands flat on the table. ‘You gave Bethany our ham?’
‘They haven’t got anything.’
‘That was for our tea! Now we haven’t got anything!’
‘We have,’ Alex said. ‘We’ve got bread and jam and —’
‘So we eat bread while your friends eat ham?’ Sarah’s eyes were leaping tigers. ‘It didn’t occur to you to ask me first, I suppose?’
‘I was afraid you’d say no.’
Sarah looked and looked. ‘There was nothing else you thought they’d like, I suppose, while you were about it? None of the chops from that old ewe your father slaughtered the other day?’ It had been butchered and dry-salted, and was now hanging in a chaff bag near the paddles, where it could catch most of the breeze.
‘No, Mummy.’
‘I suppose we can be thankful for that.’
‘I offered,’ Alex explained, ‘but Bethany tried one and didn’t like it. I thought it would be a waste to give her any more.’
‘A waste? I see.’ Sarah’s lips were as prim as prunes. ‘Perhaps you should’ve kept tryin’. Maybe, who knows, she might’ve come to like it in time. Then you could’ve given her the lot and we’d really have had nothing. Perhaps that would satisfy you?’
Alex was ready to cry with indignation. ‘But we’ve so much! And they’ve got nothing at all!’
Sarah went to her and hugged her close. ‘Hush, now, hush … I know you only wanted to help them, but —’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Alex’s voice creaked like a gate. Now she was really crying.
‘I didn’t say it was wrong. But ask me first, next time. You meant well, I know, but taking things without permission is never right.’
CHAPTER 41
On his thirteenth birthday, 23 September 1892, Luke walked out of Miss Tossall’s school for the last time, strolled down to the wharf and got himself a job as a deckhand with Jock Harris.
Jock wasn’t too sure about it. ‘Your dad say it’s okay?’
‘I haven’t asked him.’
‘Maybe you should.’
‘He’s not around.’
‘I’ve got a lotta time for your old man. I wouldn’t want to fall out with him.’
‘Why should you?’ Luke was very sure of himself, for just thirteen. ‘I’m not a kid no more. No point hangin’ around school. It’s just a waste of time.’
So Jock, who needed a hand on his boat Proud Agnes and had known Luke all his life, agreed to take him on.
‘Teach you the ropes,’ he said. ‘I’ll expect you to jump to it, mind. No muckin’ about, you hear?’
Old Jock. All fire and brimstone, as always, but more talk than action, as always.
So Charlie and Sarah, when they came back at the end of term to pick up the kids, found only one of them.
‘He might’ve talked to us about it first!’ said Sarah.
Who she meant by ‘he’ wasn’t clear. Both Jock and Luke, perhaps.
But by now Proud Agnes was long gone, with a load of fertiliser for a station near Menindee. It was the way of the river: hang around for someone to catch up with you and you could be in for a long wait. And business came first — always.
‘We’ll see him often enough,’ Charlie told Sarah.
Charlie was right, but it wasn’t much consolation for a mother who had lost her only son overnight, or so it seemed.
Meanwhile Alex, left after Luke’s departure feeling more naked than ever before in her life, was happy to go upriver with what was left of her family.
A month later, when they were two miles west of Niland, Sarah slipped off the wheelhouse ladder, fell ten feet and cracked her head against a steel stanchion. Charlie wanted her to go to the hospital but Sarah wouldn’t hear of it.
‘We’ve no money to waste on nonsense like that.’
But she was willing to see the quack, which showed how crook she must have felt. The doctor said she was all right but should take it easy for a bit.
‘Take it easy?’ Sarah said, laughing, when she got back from the surgery. ‘Shows how much he knows about riverboats!’
But she wasn’t up to doing the engineer’s job. She denied it with all her might to begin with, but a day later had to admit she couldn’t handle it.
‘We’ll get someone to help,’ Charlie said. ‘Temporary, like.’
‘While I lounge about like an old sow.’ Sarah was annoyed at her clumsiness at falling in the first place, and then at being too fragile to ignore it afterwards, but there was no help for it.
It came as a terrible shock to Alex. For Sarah to be sick was like a tear appearing in the fabric of her world. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she told her mother, as though that would somehow put things right. ‘I’ll do your chores for you.’
But the engineer’s job was beyond her, so Charlie had to get someone to help out. They were lucky. When they got to the wharf at Wentworth they came across a man who spun them a yarn about having left his previous boat because his brother had been sick in the Outback. Jig Jenkins, his name was; he had straight black hair swept back and little eyes that almost touched above a needle-thin nose. Now the brother had recovered, Jig was back on the river and looking for a berth. He’d got back to the Darling only two days before, he told them.
‘Good luck for you, good luck for me,’ he said, all winks and razzle-dazzle smiles. ‘Musta bin meant to happen.’ Which presumably meant that Sarah’s accident must have been meant to happen too.
Charlie gave him a look. ‘You reckon?’
But it was only for a week or two, after all, and Jig seemed to know his way around an engine, no worries.
They went a few miles past Wilcannia, then turned and came back down, since there wasn’t enough water to risk going any higher. Even then they had a problem easing their way past Christmas Rocks, but they made it. With the river dropping every day they headed towards Wentworth, Sarah chewing at the bit to get back to work.
‘We’ll be lucky if we reach the Murray without hittin’ somethin’,’ Charlie said.
He was right. Three days short of Wentworth they ran aground on the same sandbank that had snared Charlie on the first trip he had ever made down the Darling. He swore. ‘You’d think I’d know better …’
They launched the dinghy and ran a cable ashore, with some blocks to ease the load, and got off easily enough.
‘We’ll leave the dinghy in the water for the moment,’ Charlie decided. ‘We may need it again before we’re through.’
They drew into the bank for the night and next morning found themselves in even more trouble. Because the dinghy had vanished.
Charlie was puzzled but unworried. He didn’t understand how it had happened but, with the flow of the Darling down to a dribble, the dinghy couldn’t have gone far.
‘I can’t have fastened the painter properly,’ he told Sarah, scratching his head.
No other explanation seemed possible. Yet …
‘You bin fastenin’ the painters of dinghies all your life and it’s never happened before.’
Charlie set out to search. He had already decided Jig Jenkins was not a man to be left in charge of anything, so he took him along, leaving Elsie to keep an eye on things. He told Sarah and Alex to check
upriver while he and Jig went down.
Jig gave his kookaburra cackle. ‘This the age of miracles or somethin’? How can it have drifted up agin the current?’
‘If the Murray’s flowin’ well and nuthun comin’ down the Darling, it could back up the other way.’
Jig was a man who believed only what he could see, and even that reluctantly. ‘No way.’
Charlie had heard how the Murrumbidgee had flowed backwards in similar circumstances. It could have happened here on the Darling, for all he knew, but he wasn’t going to waste time arguing with Jig Jenkins about it.
‘Keep a good lookout,’ he told Sarah and Alex. ‘And make sure you check both banks.’ He turned to Jig. ‘Let’s git on with it,’ he said.
They walked for two miles, past mud flats and reed beds, the secret hideaways of ducks, around bends where the river twisted like a thrashing snake. They found nothing.
‘Hopeless,’ said Jig, who’d been all for turning back after the first half mile. ‘Musta gone down into the Murray.’
Charlie wouldn’t listen; nothing was ever hopeless. It was strange, though. He pulled a stem of grass and dropped it into the river. It barely moved. No way a dinghy could have drifted as far as this. As for the Murray … forget it.
They retraced their footsteps, checking the other bank with an extra-close eye on the reed beds, in case the missing boat had somehow ended up in the midst of them. There was no reason why it should, yet it had to be somewhere.
By the time they reached Brenda, Alex and Sarah were back too, and Charlie saw from their faces that they’d had no better luck.
‘It can’t have flown away!’
Yet it seemed it had.
It made him mad to have lost such a valuable item through his own carelessness. He went over and over the process of securing the dinghy but could remember nothing unusual in what he’d done.
There was no point fussing; it had happened, and that was an end of it. He gave up.
Brenda had steam. They eased the mooring lines and went on down to Wentworth, where, with luck, they’d be able to buy a replacement.