by Peter Watt
As he rode to rejoin his troop waiting in their saddles a short distance away he noticed a strange expression on Trooper Jimmy’s face. If he did not know any better he would have thought he saw a terrible fear in the Aboriginal police tracker’s dark eyes.
‘You still have his tracks?’ Garland asked when he reined in beside his tracker. Jimmy ducked his head. Garland could see that his man was extremely nervous. He had never seen Trooper Jimmy behave like this before. ‘Can you still see Wallarie’s tracks?’ he asked again irritably.
‘No boss,’ Jimmy answered furtively. ‘Track all gone . . . track all blown away . . . Wallarie gone.’
‘You lyin’ to me?’ Garland hissed menacingly. ‘You’ve had him all the way to Schmidt’s farm. So how could he disappear? I know you Jimmy. You could track a fart in a crowded pub on pay day.’
‘Sorry boss,’ Trooper Jimmy mumbled. ‘Track all gone.’
Garland shook his head in resignation and sighed. He knew from his long experience with his tracker that nothing would budge him when he set his mind to it. At least now he had an excuse to turn around and return to the camp a hundred miles back. There was enough to do around the goldfields without setting out on an expedition in pursuit of just one blackfella suspected of killing a prospector. At least back in the police camp he could get a drink, a wash and a woman. As it was he had been warned by the older troopers back at the barracks that hunting Wallarie was a waste of time. There was an almost grudging respect for the man from both Aboriginal and European troopers who had attempted to hunt him years earlier. He remembered something an Aboriginal trooper once said to him. Garland turned to his trooper. ‘He has used magic, hasn’t he?’
Jimmy did not answer but glanced away guiltily. How could the whitefellas know about blackfella magic? How could they read the signs that he could when their eyes were closed. Jimmy glanced at the eagle feathers scattered across the track. They were the signs put there by Wallarie to warn him off. Jimmy sensed the power of the magic and feared its deadly strength. Working for the white man for tucker and tobacco was not worth his life.
Garland did not expect an answer from his tracker. He had the answer in the stricken expression on the man’s face. He glanced back at the tall missionary standing beside his pretty wife by the dwindling waterhole. If a man of the Bible was prepared to lie for a myall killer then there could be something in the magic bit that protected the Darambal warrior. The police inspector was starting to feel that he had worked amongst the Aboriginal people for too long. He was starting to believe in their ways.
Otto watched the horsemen disappear in the direction from whence they had come. He knew that for some reason they were no longer interested in continuing the pursuit of the man who had saved their lives.
‘You did not tell the policeman the truth,’ Caroline said quietly as she watched the patrol fade into the dust. But it was not an accusation.
‘No my wife. I lied. Just as Danny Boy lied to us,’ he answered ruefully. ‘But I understand why he had to lie to us.’
‘Do you not think that it was our duty to tell the policeman that Danny Boy might have been the man they sought?’
Otto glanced at his wife from the corner of his eye. ‘God sent us an angel to save and guide us to our new home, not a devil as the police think this Wallarie person to be. The black man who helped us had a good soul. I could sense it as strongly as I can smell the red earth of this land.’
Caroline touched her husband’s elbow. It was her way of letting him know that she accepted what he said to be true.
‘Well, Herr Schmidt has left us all his land to build a mission station,’ Otto said as he turned to walk back to the rough bush hut. According to his letter it seems he knew that he was dying and set out for help. When he realised that he would not make it he set out his last will and testament leaving all that he owned to us and the Aboriginal people. It has been witnessed and formally notarised. This land is legally ours . . . and the Aboriginal people we must help in the years ahead.’
‘Do you think Wallarie will ever return to us?’ Caroline asked quietly as they walked towards the hut.
‘I think Danny Boy will,’ he replied with an enigmatic smile. ‘After he has done what ever mission God has sent him on.’
FORTY-TWO
‘No use going on. We could walk off a cliff,’ Christie advised as he and Michael stood on a ridge gazing across the magnificent vista. The night was rapidly descending and as spectacular as the view was, Michael saw the valleys and ridges not for their natural beauty, but for the lung-tearing, strength-sapping obstacles they presented to their retreat from Mort.
‘We move out before first light,’ Michael said wearily. ‘We set up a sentry roster for the night. No fires and we keep close together.’
The others listened and nodded their exhausted agreement. With glazed eyes they stared at the soft purple shadows covering the mountain in front of them while a scatter of mauve-edged clouds drifted like a delicately stained blanket hiding the tree-lined ridge. If that mountain was to be climbed the next day they held out little hope of getting back to Cooktown.
But Christie had no intention of tackling the mountain. His keen eyes were already plotting a course through the valley below. He could distinguish a creek line in the thicket of rainforest as the shadows pointed out the changes in the valley’s topography to him. It would not be easy in the dense scrub, he surmised. But they did have jungle knives to hack a way through the tangle of vines.
Hue followed John to the base of a giant tree, the buttress roots of which provided a cosy nook for the night. She sat beside him and he passed her something to eat. ‘It’s dried meat,’ he said when he saw her puzzled expression. ‘Like the way your people dry fish.’
With a delicate bite she gnawed at the meat stick which had the consistency of leather. Finally, she was able to bite a piece off. It tasted salty but good.
John smiled at the girl’s suspicious reaction to her first taste of jerky. ‘You will have to make it last because that is all I have,’ he said with a sigh.
‘You speak Chinese well for a white man,’ she said as she savoured the strong flavour. ‘But then, you also have Chinese blood.’
‘You speak Chinese well for a Chinese,’ he replied with a grin. Hue looked away shyly. He was surprised to see her unexpected reaction. She was, after all, the daughter of a mandarin, and he had not expected to see her act as a young girl might. His smile continued as his eyes roamed over her. She was tiny in comparison to him, and under her blue trousers and jacket, he could see that she was slim in a boyish way.
Hue found his frank appraisal refreshing. He was not intimidated by her simply because she was the daughter of a mandarin. She guessed that his brashness was part of his European blood.
‘I also speak French,’ she said proudly, and anger suddenly clouded her beautiful face. ‘It is the language of my enemy,’ she frowned. Although John was only vaguely aware of the place called Cochin China, he was less aware of the French insidiously colonising the land of the Viets.
‘Tell me about you,’ John said disarmingly, and Hue’s thoughts of politics waned under his friendly and frank gaze. She smiled, and talked softly about her life until Henry came late in the night to tell him it was John’s turn to stand guard.
When Henry and the girl made their way back to the makeshift camp, John sat with his back against a tree, while the others snatched some welcome sleep. He sighed. Of all the girls to be interested in, he mused as he watched and listened in the night, it had to be one who just happened to be the daughter of nobility and a rebel against the French.
Possums rustled in the trees and their sound was vaguely reassuring. But John tensed when he heard the rustle behind him. Very slowly, he raised his rifle, and Hue’s pale face suddenly loomed in front of him. He relaxed, and lowered the gun.
‘I was frightened and could not sleep,’ she whispered in a small voice as she sat beside him. ‘I feel safer with you.’ For the fir
st time since she had been taken prisoner by the Chinese pirates, Hue felt an overwhelming need to trust in another human – and a need for emotional comfort. Her life as a rebel against the French and many of her own people who had collaborated with the European colonisers had kept her in a perpetual state of tension and suspicion. But deep in the forests of the land so alien and far from her own she felt that she was no longer the young woman who had once stood against the French invaders. Here she was a woman who depended on the courage and determination of others to save her. Her fate had passed from her hands.
Within minutes she was asleep, her head resting against John’s broad chest. Very gently he slipped his muscled arm around her shoulders and holding her he experienced a tenderness that he had never known before. He felt awkward. It was as if he were holding some ethereal creature, something so fragile that the mere movement of his arm might crush her. Her breath was warm and moist against his throat. But his moment of tenderness was short lived when he remembered Soo Yin’s instructions. To betray Soo Yin was to invite death in an obscenely slow manner. Inevitably, he would have to betray the men he depended on to survive the flight across the jungle-covered range, and that would not be easy. But he knew his sworn duty to the tong leader in Cooktown.
FORTY-THREE
Within the walls of her tiny room at the top of the stairs Miss Gertrude Pitcher sat at the edge of her bed and stared at the flicker of the lamp wick. Her position as governess that Missus Penelope had secured for her was everything she could have dreamed of. The children were a delight and the master and mistress of the house were wonderfully generous. The Baroness certainly had a considerable amount of influence in Sydney social circles.
But Gertrude hated being alone when the night came and her busy duties caring for the children were at a temporary standstill. For it was in the dark hours of the night that the memory of a great betrayal crept into her room to sit at the end of the bed and torment her with overpowering guilt. Now she was exposed to a truly close family, the torment seemed to be greater, and she often cried alone in the privacy of her tiny room. Mister Granville White’s threat – to do her a terrible mischief – should she tell Missus White of what had occurred in the library with Dorothy was rapidly fading in its ability to terrify her anymore. But the guilt she lived with every time she looked into the innocent faces of her young charges in this new household was far worse than anything Mister White could do to her.
Gertrude turned down the wick on the lamp by her bed and undressed in the dark. She slipped into a long nightdress and crawled between the crisp sheets of her single bed. She lay staring in the dark. Weeks had passed and still Dorothy’s screams of despair and pain echoed in her mind. Gertrude twisted and turned as she vainly attempted to stop the screams in her head. The anguished, pain-stricken face of the little girl floated near the ceiling and Gertrude clenched her eyes shut to make it go away. But the tormented face remained in her head and she cried out in her despair.
Was not the desertion of a soldier in the Queen’s army an aberrant crime punishable by death, she thought, as she threw back the bed sheets and placed her feet on the cold floor. Nigh on thirty years she had devoted her life to children. She had no other family other than a brother in England. She had always been alone in the colonies, except for the children she had raised for other people – children who had grown to adults and loved her for the maternal concern she had lavished on them.
Gertrude reached for the lamp and lit the wick. The room was filled with a soft light and the demons dissolved. The time had come to stop fearing Mister White. She would leave this place and go to one where he could no longer hurt her with his threats. Before she did, however, she would expose the man feted to become a knight of the realm for what he was – a truly evil man with no soul.
For a long time the governess had known this time would come. She had prepared herself carefully, and had all that she needed hidden in the room.
Calmly Gertrude changed from her night wear into the best dress she owned. She pinned back her hair into a bun and sat down at the table in her room. From a drawer under the table she took writing paper and by the light of her lamp she wrote a short letter.
When the letter was written she placed it in an envelope and wrote across the front ‘Missus Fiona White’.
FORTY-FOUR
By mid-morning Michael and his party found the going harder. The rainforest closed against them with a tangle of vines and brush as they descended from the ridge and into the narrow valley below. Under the canopy of the close-packed trees, they sweltered in the still, humid air.
The stagnation in the valley brought back terrible memories to Luke. He vividly remembered similar conditions years earlier when he had trekked across the mountains west of Port Douglas to the dry plains and broad valleys, south of the Palmer River.
In the late afternoon Michael called a halt at the edge of a mountain stream and their battle with the undergrowth and scrub of the valley was temporarily set aside while water canteens were refilled from the stream that gurgled crystal clear over a rock and pebble bed. With sweet notes it swept along fallen leaves from the forest giants and swirled around rocks where tiny shrimp-like creatures scuttled out of sight of predators.
Hue modestly excused herself to go into the bushes while the men stripped to wallow in the shallow stream and wash the cuts and leech bites that covered their sweat-grimed bodies. The water soothed their tired bodies, lulling the bushmen into a lethargy. But Hue’s agonised screams galvanised the men into action. They tumbled from the stream snatching their clothes and rifles as they ran to her.
John had been standing guard whilst the other three bushmen had been bathing and was the first to reach Hue. She stood with her pants around her ankles and clawed frantically at her arms and legs.
‘Jesus!’ Henry gasped. ‘She’s brushed up against a stinging tree.’ The nettle-like leaves were covered in tiny glass-like spikes and Christie shouted a warning to the others to be careful not to go near.
The pain inflicted by the leaves was excruciating. The young woman’s delicate skin was particularly vulnerable, and such was the extent of the searing pain, that she was not even aware that her pants were still around her ankles as John gripped her wrists to stop her scratching any further. He pulled her away from the tree and sat her down in a small clearing. ‘It will sting and hurt but it will not kill you,’ he said, as tears of pain and confusion welled in her eyes. ‘You have been stung by the leaves of a tree.’ Hue responded positively to his soothing words and fought to control her panic while the men averted their eyes to her nakedness, a reflex action to years of learned respect for the sanctity of a woman’s body.
‘We’re going to have to rest up here,’ Michael said flatly, ‘until the girl gets over the worst of the stinging.’
‘How long?’ Luke asked, as he gazed through the gloom of green foliage. He was half-expecting to see Mort and his men close behind them.
‘Not long. Maybe half an hour,’ Michael replied. ‘Means we will have to send somebody back the way we came to stand guard.’
‘I’ll go,’ Luke volunteered.
John had quickly stripped Hue of her clothes and explained that they would need scrubbing in the stream to wash away any nettle barbs. She whimpered, and her face was contorted with pain as she gripped his big hand, as a child would an adult. Her dark eyes held his as if she were imploring him to take away the agony. But he felt helpless. There was very little he could do but empathise – and wish he could take on her pain himself.
He sat Hue gently on the bank of the mountain stream and placed his shirt around her slim body. Although the coarse shirt helped keep her warm she still shivered uncontrollably from the effects of both the stinging tree and her acute embarrassment at being seen naked in front of the bushmen.
Michael knew they should have a fire to help warm the girl. But he also knew that the smoke would mark their position to anyone who might be on the ridges above them. Nor did John requ
est a fire for her. He also appreciated the deadly position that they were in. It was not only Mort they had to fear but possible detection by the Aboriginal warriors who had slaughtered their horses.
While John tended to Hue’s stings, Henry very cautiously scrubbed Hue’s clothes, using sand to remove the tiny poisonous barbs. Even Christie who disliked the Chinese felt sorry for the young woman. He watched as the girl whimpered and John stroked her long ebony hair while crooning soothing words as one would to a child in distress. Christie yanked a blood-bloated leech from under his shirt and flicked it into the bush. He tugged thoughtfully at his beard as he scanned the crest of a hill that rose to one side of the trail. He had earlier seen the faint wisp of smoke rising from the hill and guessed it was an Aboriginal fire. According to his calculations it would have been impossible for Mort to have been on the steep ridge. ‘Mister O’Flynn,’ he called softly, as he squatted on his haunches gazing up at the ridges. ‘I think I’ve got an idea that might help us.’ He did not wait for Michael to respond. ‘I’m going to talk to the darkies. Might be our only chance if Mort is after us.’
Michael gave him a look as if to say he was mad, but he remembered that the bushman spoke some of the Aboriginal dialects of the north and nodded. They were both aware of how grim their current situation was. Henry was having trouble keeping up and now the girl was temporarily incapacitated. ‘You talk the lingo here Mister Palmerston?’ Michael asked.