Eagle on the Hill

by JH Fletcher

But she was sent on her way with a brisk clapping of her mother’s hands. She snatched up a waterproof, covered her head with it, and rushed to give Elsie the word.

  ‘Alfred’s comin’! He saw through that blouse of yours and wants to check out if they’re real!’

  And left Elsie with a face the colour of fire and in two minds about whether to put on her best clothes or hide under the bunk.

  By the time Alex got back to the saloon, Luke was pushing and prodding Alfred Gooch through the door ahead of him.

  ‘He didn’ wanna come,’ he announced to the world. ‘But I said if I had to git soakin’ wet all over again he was comin’, like it or not.’

  He looked very pleased with himself, while Alfred Gooch stood, his starched collar as limp as rags, wishing he could disappear into the puddle that was spreading like a second Lake Alexandrina about his boat-like boots.

  Sarah threw him a towel. ‘Dry yourself on that.’

  Which he did, in an apologetic way, with a dab here and a dab there, until Sarah could have snatched the towel from his hands and given him a scrub over herself. Instead she did her best to make him feel at home. She was having a hard job of it, having just persuaded him to rest the cheeks of his backside on the very edge of a chair, when he leapt up all a-tremble, as though someone had kicked him on the kneecap, and stood with eyes starting from his head as Elsie came in.

  The downpour, falling as hard as ever, seemed to have left her unscathed. This was the Elsie whom a hundred times Alex had tormented to weeping frustration. Whose bloomers she had hung on the funnel stay for all the world — including Alfred — to see. Who had darted about the boat day after day with her hair hanging about her face, in a tatty dressing gown that barely hid her. On one occasion, after the wind had blown the gown right open, Luke had followed her around for days, hoping for a repeat performance that, alas for Luke, had never come.

  There was no tatty dressing gown today.

  Elsie would never make a princess — except perhaps to Alfred Gooch — but she had a good shot at it now. She was wearing a dark blue dress, with ribbons of a different shade of blue at her waist. The dress was tight across her shoulders and back, fitting snugly into the white column of her throat, and there was white lace in bunches at her wrists. The toes of her boots peeped from beneath the hem, which swirled around her ankles as she walked. She had swept her hair high up on her head and fixed it in place with two tortoiseshell combs.

  Alex had no idea where all this finery had come from. Elsie, their Elsie, looked almost stately as she walked across the saloon towards Alfred, who stood there with his tonsils in a tangle, red-faced and uncertain where to put his hands. In contrast, Elsie was quietly smiling, as confident as though she’d stage-managed the storm herself.

  ‘Come on,’ Sarah said, as misty-eyed as though Elsie were her own daughter, and pulled Charlie and Luke and Alex out of the saloon, leaving Elsie and Alfred to make the most of their chances. The rain had eased, thankfully.

  Alex had a second before the saloon door closed to see Elsie with her arms around Alfred’s waist, looking up at him with an expression that she’d seen only once before, on her mother’s face when her father had been acquitted after the trial.

  Alex turned from the closed door, feeling warmed and — yes — excited by her first glimpse of a world of which she knew almost nothing, but that she knew would be waiting for her when she grew older.

  CHAPTER 55

  Four months later, on Saturday, 10 August 1895, Elsie and Alfred finally got around to marrying.

  Everyone had a grand time at the wedding, and afterwards they all waved as Alfred and Elsie Gooch drove away in a horse and trap hired for the occasion, with Elsie laughing and crying and Sarah doing the same. The dust from the roadway rose in a glittering cloud behind the wheels and settled on the ribbons that had been tied to the trap and plaited into the horse’s mane.

  Among the guests was Wilf Laird, the Wentworth storekeeper, with his wife and son. Alex remembered Davis Laird very well; he was the brave boy who almost a year before had called her Annie when he’d smuggled the note to Sarah under the eyes of the walloper. That had been a real Adventure, although it had seemed horrible at the time. Alex guessed Davis was about two years older than she was. She grinned at him across the church.

  After the guests had seen Alfred and Elsie on their way, the Armstrongs and the Lairds went off to tea together at the Niland hotel — as if they hadn’t stuffed themselves enough during the reception. The grown-ups — among whom Luke numbered himself nowadays — talked: Charlie, Luke and Wilf about business; Sarah and Mrs Laird about their weddings, their children and the scandalous cost of food and clothing. Alex had expected Davis to join them but he didn’t. After tea, with the others still yakking, he and Alex mooched down to the riverbank together.

  Davis skimmed a flat stone across the water. Alex did the same, to prove she could do it as well as he could.

  ‘You still goin’ to school?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah. Finished up last year. You?’

  ‘In Niland.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Not much. I learn much more on the river. What I’d like is to go to a real school. Down in Adelaide, maybe.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’d like it. There’s so much to learn. But it’ll never happen under Miss Tossall.’

  And so on, swapping notes about life on a paddle steamer and life in a shop, what they liked and what they hated, looking each other over, getting a sense that here might be a friend.

  Although of course this was a girl, Davis reminded himself, and you couldn’t do much with them. Mind you, at fifteen, he was beginning to change his mind even about that.

  Although of course this was a boy, Alex reminded herself. Not Luke or Martin but someone different, who, being a boy, might not be someone you could trust.

  But there wasn’t much time to find out, either way. Soon, with the cicadas singing and a bright evening sky darkening into night, the Armstrongs went back aboard Brenda. Next morning, with the first light silvering the trees, they went on up the river.

  Two months later people were telling each other that the Aborigines were back.

  Alex had just about given up hope of seeing her friend again. Even after hearing the news she had her doubts, but when she quested along the bank Bethany was there, taller than before but still the same girl. They related to each other as well as ever. As always, there were no words to share so gestures had to do, both of them shy at first, then more confident. An exchange of glances; the soft touch of brown hand on white, fingers tracing the structure of each other’s face; the gleam of eyes and teeth in a mutual smile; the shared laughter …

  But now the settlement was entirely different. Instead of the cluster of reed wurlies, fragile and impermanent as dreams, there were two log huts roofed with grass, smoke billowing from within. Two women sat in the entrance to one of the huts, smoking and enjoying the pale wash of the sunlight. Bethany was as naked as she had always been, but now the women were wearing skin cloaks that covered them to the necks. The smoke from their pipes cast a blue haze across their features. Their eyes looked not at Alex but through her. She might have been invisible. She looked over the shoulders of the women into the hut’s smoky darkness but dared not enter.

  Bethany tugged at her hand.

  ‘Bukar something something.’ A liquid river of sound.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Bukar something something.’

  Alex shrugged helplessly. ‘Dunno what you’re on about.’

  Bethany laughed. The tugging hand became insistent.

  ‘All right. I’m comin’.’

  Only then did one of the women speak.

  ‘Willawittalungawerara.’

  Or something like that. The sound blew like smoke from the woman’s pipe and disappeared just as quickly in the spring sunshine.

  ‘Mullawullawulla.’

  Bethany answered her shrilly, while her tugging han
d said Come on!

  ‘I’m comin’!’

  Eel-quick, Bethany ducked into the hut and emerged clutching what looked like a bag made of woven grasses. Her spare hand grabbed Alex’s wrist. They ran together.

  They came to a place where the river clucked softly among the soft spears of reeds.

  Bethany pointed beyond the reeds.

  ‘Widli,’ she said. ‘Bukartilla.’

  Alex stared. There were the reeds. There was the river. But as for what the sounds meant … it was hopeless.

  Bethany dropped her hand and slithered between the reeds into the open water beyond.

  ‘Bukartilla,’ she said again happily, and gestured to Alex to join her.

  How many times had Alex’s mother warned her to be careful, told her that the river was treacherous? But Bethany seemed safe enough. She was splashing up and down, disappearing beneath the surface then coming up again, her head thrown back, water streaming from her long black hair. Alex thought it would be all right to join her. In two winks she was out of her clothes and into the reeds.

  Beneath her feet the squishy mud was cold. Again she hesitated, then took a deep breath and went on. Inch by inch the cold water rose up her naked body. She looked down at herself. So white, her skin puckered with cold. While Bethany, further out, shone chocolate brown in the sunlight, her gleaming body at one with the river, the reeds, the tree-clad banks.

  Alex reached the edge of the reeds. She took another deep breath and plunged forward into the water.

  ‘It’s freezing!’

  But the impact passed. Patches of sand shone yellow beneath the surface. She felt the gentle tug of the stream and put down a tentative foot. She found she could stand upright, the water no higher than her waist. Bethany had been right. It was a safe place.

  ‘Widli,’ she said aloud, tasting the sound. ‘Bu-kar-tilla.’

  ‘A safe place’? ‘A shallow place’? ‘A swimming place’? The name of a place?

  No way to know, nor did it matter.

  Alex hurled herself like a tiger at her friend.

  ‘Yaaa!’

  She scooped water in her cupped hands and flung it at Bethany in an arc of shining drops.

  ‘Yaaa!’

  Afterwards, still as naked as the sun, she followed her friend to a ledge, where they prised mussels from a rocky ledge and put them into the bag that Bethany had brought with her.

  When they had finished, Alex placed her fingertips on her own chest.

  ‘Alex,’ she said. And again, separating the syllables. ‘Al-ex.’

  ‘Burrawurrawee,’ said Bethany. Or something like that.

  ‘Beth-any.’

  The brown child shook her head, laughing. ‘Burrawurrawee.’

  ‘No,’ Alex insisted, ‘Bethany. I know it’s not your real name. It’s a special name because I can’t say your real one. And because you are my special friend.’

  ‘Burrawurrawee.’

  ‘Bethany!’

  They made a game of it, laughing and shouting and swinging each other round and round.

  ‘Bethany! Bethany! Bethany!’

  They went back to the settlement, Bethany running ahead with the bag, Alex in a hurry to keep up in case she got lost. She snatched up her clothes, with no time to put them on, and rushed on through the trees, feeling the soft earth warm beneath her feet after the sharpness of the cold river.

  The two women were still sitting in the entrance to the hut.

  This time they looked at the naked white girl. They laughed, but in a good-natured way. Alex thought of putting on her clothes, then changed her mind. She would stay naked, like her friend. Brown and white, they were the same.

  She shared some of the mussels with her friends. They tasted fresh and cold, and of the friendship that warmed her. When she left she promised them, and herself, that she would be back.

  ‘I bin thinkin’ …’ Sarah said to Charlie.

  It was evening. Beyond the saloon windows the river flowed silently as ever. The hull creaked, swaying beneath them in the current.

  Charlie watched her, the lamp kindling golden pools of light in his eyes. ‘Thinkin’?’ he repeated. ‘Am I supposed to be pleased or frightened?’

  ‘Don’ mock. I bin thinkin’, we got so much.’

  ‘Not that much. Look at George Grenville.’

  ‘I wouldn’t change places with a dozen George Grenvilles. We got each other, and the children, and our life together. We got everythin’ that matters. We’ve even got some spare money, now we don’ have to pay Elsie’s wages no more.’

  ‘Now we’re comin’ to it,’ Charlie said. ‘You wanna put in a bid for Eagle on the Hill.’

  Sarah gave him a look. ‘That’s Alex’s dream, not mine. I wouldn’t have it as a gift. But you remember Rufus Grenville tellin’ you about that girls’ school in Adelaide?’

  ‘Regency College? But it was a boys’ school, not for girls. He said they were sendin’ Martin there.’

  ‘But you told me he said they had a separate section for girls too. Don’ you remember?’

  ‘I recall he did say somethin’ like that,’ Charlie said slowly. ‘What about it?’ But knowing what Sarah was going to say, even before she answered him.

  ‘I want Alex to go there.’

  ‘Isn’t it too late? Alex is fourteen.’

  ‘And as wild as a kangaroo.’

  ‘Speak to her teacher about it.’

  ‘Miss Tossall hardly ever sees her.’

  ‘Not Miss Tossall. You.’

  ‘She learnt everything I could teach her years ago. She’s gone far beyond me, Charlie — or would if she had the chance.’

  ‘Which is more than Luke had.’

  ‘Luke was never interested in school. But Alex is different. An’ there’s another thing. She needs friends, girls her own age.’

  ‘I s’pose you’re right.’

  Sarah knew very well she was right. ‘The other day she was off with that black girl she’s made friends with. I don’ have no objection, I haven’t said a word to her about it but, let’s face it, they’ll never be real friends. They can’t even talk to each other. What Alex needs is someone like herself and she won’t find much of that around here.’

  ‘Maybe we can make inquiries,’ Charlie said, thinking about it. ‘Find out what it’s gunna cost us.’

  CHAPTER 56

  Sarah’s brother Arthur had been a fisherman at Murray Mouth for years. He’d been making a good thing of it, too, but for some reason — too much water in the river, some said; too little, according to others — catches had fallen off in recent months and he was pushed for cash.

  Samuel McKinley, the elder of the smuggling brothers for whom Charlie Armstrong had worked back in the eighties, had his informants up and down the river. It wasn’t long before a whisper reached Arthur’s ear that a well-paid opportunity might be available for the right man.

  He worked his passage to Niland where, in the pub’s candlelit back room, he sat at a scarred table and drank rum with a man he did not know who said his name was Abel Jones. It was not a long conversation, and by the end of it they had reached an understanding.

  ‘Not what you’d call reg’lar employment,’ Jones said. ‘Night work.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Can’t say. Git a job on the wharves an’ keep yerself ready. Could be twice a week; couple a month is more likely. We’ll git word to you an’ you’ll need to be there. Orright?’ Abel Jones, large and hard, stood. The candlelight threw his shadow onto the stained wall. He drained the last of his rum and placed a heavy hand on Arthur’s shoulder. ‘Don’ say nuthun to anyone, mind. Breathe a word and you’re dead.’

  Arthur got a job humping wool bales from the bullock trains that brought them from the interior and stacking them aboard the barges and paddle steamers that lined the Niland wharf. The work was hard, the pay not enough to feed a maggot, but most weeks he got the word to be at a certain place at a certain time, and the money he made out of the tra
de across the Murray made up for the miserable wages of his regular employment.

  It was a good life. Risky, if you worried about that sort of thing, but Arthur had never thought beyond today, and right now the todays were pretty good. He liked the rattle of coin in his pocket and a drink or three with a mate. There were sheilas, too, some willing to share a kiss round the back of the pub. More than a kiss, when his luck was in.

  ‘You’re a wild one,’ one of them said, half-delighted, half-alarmed, and norks out to here. Yeah, Arthur was a wild one, and proud of it.

  Then he had a bit of bad luck. One night, in November, he got pissed and the next morning fell down a hold and broke his wrist. There was a run on that night but he knew there was no way he’d be able to take part. So, after getting the word to Abel Jones, he arranged for his father to stand in for him. Harold Keach was better at drinking grog than shifting it, but for one night, hopefully, he’d be sober enough to carry his share.

  So he was, but made up for it afterwards, getting rotten with his old mate Cassidy on a bottle of jungle juice strong enough to blow your ears off.

  ‘Where yer get this stuff?’ Harold asked. Cassidy’s days of making his own were over now; Ma Cassidy had smithereened his still in a night of domestic violence six months earlier.

  ‘Mate o’ mine makes it.’

  ‘Have to pay ’im a visit, I reckon. Where’s his place?’

  ‘A cave up in the cliffs. You can see the smoke where they make it. Cost you, mind.’

  ‘Money’s no problem,’ Harold said owlishly, the lovely liquor tightening its hold on him.

  ‘Where you get it?’

  Harold spat towards the river, which was ablaze with moonlight.

  ‘Sworn to silence,’ he said.

  ‘Bin on a run?’ Everyone on the river knew about the smugglers, but most kept their noses out of such dangerous business, unless invited.

  ‘My lips is sealed.’

  ‘How come you get to take part in that show?’

  Harold gave his friend a slow wink that contorted half his face. ‘Influence,’ he said.

  ‘What influence’ve you got?’ Cassidy was aggrieved, hating to miss out. ‘A pisspot like you?’