The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam was tasked to rip down these posters if he came upon them, but this was a dangerous enterprise, and on one occasion he was chased by a draper waving a pistol through the streets until he reached Sydney-town, and there the draper refused to follow. A notorious Cove by the name of Jemmy from Town, who stole and fenced and marauded for Mannix, was shot in the back in the middle of the plaza square, and in the streets there was talk that the Nativists under the leadership of Mayor Bannon had hired the remnants of The Hounds, and were embarking upon a program of assassination, although it was termed extermination by many. Jemmy died in Hell Haggarty’s dram-house and Mannix, Barr and some of the others swore mortal revenge.

  There were other mysterious disappearances of notable Australians, and when Sam was tasked to attend the adobe prison-house, he learned on every occasion that the missing were not there.

  It had long been the custom that when an Australian was arrested, one of the several drunks who earned their living as professional alibi-givers would present themselves at the prison, and the Australian would be released. Now, however, the sheriff warned Samuel to warn Keane, that under Bannon’s orders this practice must cease, and that Bannon had placed a Nativist judge on the bench whose instructions were to imprison, exile or hang every Southlander who came before him, and to only accept bribes from Americans. So Casey the New Yorker was put to earn his money as the Australians’ champion, but he did this with mixed success. He was the subject of bitter abuse in the city’s two newspapers, and occupied himself mostly with getting Charlie Duane and Yankee Sullivan to avenge his good name by way of fists and boots.

  Sam was busier than ever delivering and receiving messages in the light of recent events and ensuing rumours. When a Vandiemenlander named John Williams was caught trying to sell distinctive jewelled necklaces and bracelets to a Welshman named Clarke, upon learning that the previous owner of the goods was assaulted and robbed, the Welshman went directly to Mayor Bannon who rather than handing Williams over to the police, sent his thugs to apprehend the Cove and torture him in the mayor’s home. Williams turned coat under duress, and named every aspect of the Cove’s operations, before his eventual release, confirming, it was said, Sam’s employment as collector of tithes and deliverer of bribes to Bannon’s countrymen. It was Clement who took Sam aside, and relayed the news that Sam must be careful. He was notable in his employment by leaving Sydney-town, and venturing throughout the city, and was therefore vulnerable to kidnapping. Because he was a boy, moreover, he was susceptible to the breaking of his vows after the certain application of violence. Sam needed to remain vigilant, and keep a watch for spies, and routes of escape. Should he be caught, he needed to remember the lag’s covenant that his confession should touch upon elements of the truth while avoiding relevant names, and otherwise delay until his rescue, which was certain as it had been proclaimed by Keane.

  It was Clement who schooled Sam, because Keane was lately absent with his Frenchwoman, although this too was dangerous, because away from Sydney-town Keane was liable to assassination. Tasked to deliver the message to Keane that Charlie Duane was looking for him, Sam passed along the wharf-front until he reached Battery Street, and then turned inland toward the French camp. It was his first visit to this location in many weeks, and already the place was different, and precisely as Keane had described. There were the remnant canvas tent lodging houses downhill in the mud, but on a rise up Bush Street there were several new wooden structures that were clearly molly-houses, with sheets hanging off the front verandahs, and one large building made of red-brick, whose balcony was under construction within pinewood scaffolds. The miners in this precinct wore woollen suits, with great bone disks for buttons, and their beards were mostly black and oiled and looked combed as well. There was the usual tobacconist, and purveyors of whisky shots and smoked fish, but also a drapers larger than any other, whose trestle-table shopfloor was laden with wind-rows of cotton and silk and tweed bolts, and a whole table given over to red and green and black velvet.

  Sam entered the shop and pretended to linger over a table of silks, while he looked over the direction he’d come to see if there were pursuers. There wasn’t anybody he could identify as different to the milling Frenchmen, and the shop-owner was giving him fish-eyes from atop a high stool, so he gave them right back and left into the mud. He looked a final time before entering the plank boardway inside the scaffolding, into the brick building.

  The inside of the building was truthful to the rumours of opulence, and even Sam could see that the curving stairway and the dark-wood panelling wasn’t locally made or salvaged from a ship, but imported for the purpose. There were pictures on the wall that weren’t of women, and the bar-top was made of hammered zinc. The shelves behind were lain with all the drinks that Keane was lately offering in The Stuck Pig, from all points of the globe: absinthe and cognac, and gin and vermouth and sloe gin, and the local favourite which was pisco, and the only thing from South America that was favoured by the miners. There were liqueurs that Sam didn’t recognise, and he was standing in the darkness reading the labels when the barman entered from a trapdoor in the floor bearing a barrel of ale on his right shoulder. He was an old man and stripped to the waist, and the whole aspect of his face beneath his nose was concealed behind a long grey beard. But his eyes were kindly, and he asked Sam what he wanted in heavily accented English. Sam was told to ask for Mr White, and when he did so the man lost the friendliness, and shrugged and pointed with his chin to the staircase.

  ‘The Lyon Room,’ was all he said.

  Sam climbed the stairs, which smelt of new wax, and the plush red carpet-runner was also new, and the whole establishment smelt like no molly-house he’d ever known. There was piano music being played somewhere, and fresh flowers in vases on little tables outside every room. The Lyon Room was at the end of the hall, and Sam knocked and presently a woman replied from behind the door, and when Sam asked for Mr White the door cracked open. The woman was very beautiful, with curly black hair, freshly combed over her bare shoulders, and she wore nothing but a corset and bloomers and her arms were pale and plump and she smelt like flowers, and she had a pocket deringer pointed at Sam’s belly.

  She didn’t say anything but took her time looking him up and down, as though he were a picture, and then she smiled and she had white teeth and her eyes were a warm kind of blue.

  ‘The man downstairs told me—’

  She waved the gun like she’d forgotten it. ‘Bah, my husband. Come in.’

  The boudoir was bigger than the whole Stuck Pig bar-room, and there was Keane propped up on pillows in a brass bed with polished fittings between two tables laid with flowers in vases. He gave Sam a weak smile, and he didn’t look very well. The woman went about combing her hair again, while watching them in a gilt-edge mirror. Keane got two feet onto the boards and sighed but he didn’t look drunk.

  Sam had never seen his superior with no clothes on. Unlike most Australians, his body wasn’t marked with tattoos. There was probably no place on him to mark with a tattoo because of all the scars. Sam had seen the scarring caused by wrist-manacles on Keane’s forearms, but in this he wasn’t unusual. There were the same burnt-looking welts on his ankles, and his back was junked, but his chest was also striped and pocked with scars that had healed red and shiny, and he had a terrible zig-zag scar across his belly with every stitch visible, and the same kind of scar down one thigh. There were too many scars to count, and some of them were knife-inflicted, and some of them made by musket-ball, but it was Keane’s thinness that was shocking, with his belly slack and every rib visible. Keane smiled at Sam and tottered to his feet, and held onto the bedpost, and pointed to a bottle containing a dark green liquid on the bedside table and ushered Sam to bring it. It was tincture of hemp on the label, and Sam passed it and Keane drank off the shoulders of the bottle and gave it back while his eyes watered in the semi-gloom.

  ‘What a sight I am, eh, boy?’

  Sam didn’t know what to say tha
t was polite, so he said, ‘You’re sick, Mr Keane.’

  At this the woman laughed, but made no comment.

  ‘Aye, Samuel. It’s the consumption. Caught in Her Majesty’s cold stone hostelries. I’ll be lucky to see out the year at this rate. But what brings you to my sanctuary? I trust that you weren’t followed?’

  He was tying his long hair as he spoke and there was a gurgle to his voice. The woman came from behind Sam and wrapped her arms around Keane, and then there were two sets of eyes staring at him.

  ‘No, Mr Keane, I was careful in that regard. But I got a message from Charlie Duane, to meet him this evening at sunset, at the regular place.’

  The woman tut-tutted and kissed Keane’s neck. He closed his eyes and went limp in her arms until the woman leant backwards and laid him gently down on the bed, and tucked up his legs, and Sam could see the strength in her arms and in her eyes.

  She patted Sam’s cheek and straightened his collar.

  ‘He is your hero, no? But the fate of every hero is tragic, and this one needs rest. The tincture is my own patent, and a ready balm, but it requires sleep and time to dream. He will be at his meeting with whatever thuggee you have named, but you must never speak of this or his illness to anyone. Do I have your word?’

  She saw it in his eyes, kissed him on his cheek, then turned him to the door.

  It wasn’t until Sam was outside and in the mud that he remembered his surveillance, and paused to look left and right for the odd note among the Europeans. But there was nothing he could see, and in a kind of swoon himself he began to climb higher up Bush Street, and found that there were tears in his eyes. Clement was old, and Keane was likely dying, and he couldn’t trust a single other soul beyond Sarah Proctor on this whole world. It was the sight of Keane’s wracked body that had shocked him, and there was pity in his remembrance of the bony torso that was skinny as his own, but his wondering as he climbed the hill was the lack of pity in the Frenchwoman’s eyes, and instead a kind of understanding. What Sam asked himself, as he laboured to his next destination, was when his own strong feelings would be replaced by understanding of the kind that she had shown, and Clement too, and Sarah Proctor as well, but was denied him on account of his age. This frustration bred a kind of foolishness in him, however, and despite his orders Sam crossed the plaza square openly with only his hat pulled low to disguise him.

  His next destination was Nob Hill, so named by the Australians on account of all the richer folk who lived there, above the noise and stink of the port. Perhaps it was the mood that gripped him, or perhaps the opportunity, but he decided even as he began to climb the bare hill through the miners camps, and the track that crossed eroded gullies, that he would find a way to introduce himself to Mrs Walker of Nob Hill, and thereby ascertain the truth of her story of a murdered husband and children at the hands of Australian blacks. For it wasn’t fear of her husband that had delayed him, but more the strategy of his approach.

  Mrs Walker’s house wasn’t hard to find. There were fewer than a hundred houses on the craggy hill, and only one building defended by armed men at its gate: cannibal roughnecks in leather coats bearing rifles of the latest manufacture. Sam walked past the home twice before the giant guard noticed him and cocked the hammer on his rifle, though he said nothing and stared mostly at the dog. And so Sam walked to the end of the street, and climbed the peak of the hill and laid in the heath-bush.

  There was a kind of clover thereabouts that he laid upon, and some scraps of cress that he knew were edible. Beside him in a low gully was also a stand of yellow mustard flower growing among red-limbed waxy shrubs whose flower bulbs were not yet open. All the plants and the dirt were damp, even though it hadn’t rained, and Sam assumed that the bushes were watered by the fog that hadn’t lifted for days.

  But the dog wanted to play, and kept stamping on Sam’s back and darting away. Sam held it by the scruff and looked down into the rear yard of the two-storey home with a great bricked chimney and a dozen or more rooms. He could see the flagged stone floor, and the copper in the laundry where a woman was boiling sheets. Sam looked more closely at the upper windows, where Mrs Walker was likely to spend her time away from the sights and smells of domestic chores. But there were only the heavy drapes. With his belly on the ground, Sam felt the earth begin to tremble long before the guards and the servants noticed. He stilled the dog who was prone to howl when the dirt began quaking, and watched the shingle roofing bounce and the plank-boards shudder and the stone fence lose its mortar. It wasn’t a big shake, but all the servants ran outside and one of them got down and prayed, and crossed herself when she’d finished. The guards looked across the hillside, and Sam ducked his head. When he showed himself again there was nobody in the yard, and he went back over the hill and found the goat-trail that curved down toward the settlement.

  In the distance, he could see a mountain range to the south, although its peak was hidden in fog, and all down the peninsula there was more hills than he could count, and each of them was now crested with tracks and wood smoke and homes and shacks rising up the side. Directly beneath him was the Chinese quarter, and behind that Sydney-town. He turned and looked out into the bay and gave up counting the ships when he reached four hundred. The counting was all to take his mind off thinking about the danger he was in. The question of whether he’d be able to prevail if he was captured. The loneliness that would follow if the Australians were purged from the city, and he was once again truly orphaned.

  At the back of his mind were thoughts about Mrs Walker, and what she might mean to him, but in anticipating his probable disappointment, he thought instead about the girl Ai. She was at least real in her friendliness, and the memory of her sustained him in those moments of ugliness that were punctual in Sydneytown.

  That morning she had received him in the back yard with the pig, and by now he assumed that the Chinaman was aware, although that didn’t amount to permission, and never would. He listened and watched Ai’s face come over dreamy and warm while she described the land of her childhood, with its mist-shrouded mountains and highways of cobbled stone, and stories about the creatures who inhabited the great forests.

  This morning he had watched her especially closely, in the light of Clement’s revelation that Ai was not the Chinaman’s daughter or even his ward, but rather what Clement described as a serf, akin to a slave. Clement knew the Chinaman, who he called Chen, because Chen was the source of his opium resin. Chen was, according to Clement, the Chinese equivalent of Keane, with his own brothels and mah-jong gambling houses, even if he pretended to the respectable and industrious habits of Walker.

  Clement described Ai’s future as Chen’s bride, if she wasn’t already. Or perhaps Chen would sell Ai when her price was maximised by longer experience in the domestic arts, and her capacity to either please men or bear children.

  Sam looked again in his memory at Ai, seeking in her innocent features the hand of mistreatment or disguised suffering, of which there was nothing that he could remember. He thought of the Coves’ armoury, and pictured what weapon he would choose and what he would do if Chen was mistreating Ai. Lost in his angry thoughts, when Sam looked next for the dog he understood that they weren’t on the path to Sydneytown, but had returned to the street where the Walkers were housed. The cannibal guard watched him come, and it was the guard’s suspicion that firmed Sam in his intention to continue to her home.

  He told the guard what he wanted, who craned an ear close, and smiled when he understood. The guard told Sam to stay there, even as he clucked at the dog, who cocked its head. The cannibal waddled to the other guard, and spoke, and returned. The other guard went inside, and a minute later Sam saw an upstairs curtain shiver, and a pale hand, and the curtain return to its place. The other guard came out and the cannibal took his message and returned.

  ‘She don’t know no Samuel Bellamy. So you’d better step off. And not return. Or else.’

  The Pacific man cocked the gun and laughed. It was hard
to know if he was serious or not, but the dog knew, and backed away behind Sam’s legs.

  Sam crossed to the other side of the street and sat down. There was a picket fence, which was the back fence of a cottage lower down the hill. The dog sat on Sam’s feet and watched his face. But Sam just stared at the mansion’s windows, and the cannibal seemed content with this distance and didn’t say anything and pretended Sam wasn’t there. Pretty soon the dog was asleep, and the sun was gone, and the fog closed in from the ocean and there were gunshots from Sydney-town but that was nothing unusual. Sam’s stomach growled, but he was used to that too. He was warm in his suit and boots, and he must’ve fallen asleep at some point, because when he awoke the cannibal was nudging him with the toe of his moccasin shoe.

  ‘The Missus want to see you. In the parlour. You touch anythin or look at her the wrong way, I got orders to gutshoot you. Savvy you?’

  Sam nodded and got out of the giant’s shadow, following him to the front door. But the other guard pointed his rifle at the dog and shook his head. The dog looked sadly at Sam but was used to it now. The Pacific man knelt and tweaked his ears, and the dog let it.

  ‘Don’t do that when I’m gone inside. He won’t allow it.’

  The man laughed, and stood up, and stepped away.

  The door was held open for Sam, and he entered a large room with lime-washed walls and red wallpaper. Fancy pieces made of brass and china on hardwood tables. A painting above the staircase of some ships at harbour. A ceremonial sword in a glass case. A bookshelf with a glass face. Some carpets on the flagged stone, and leather chairs and a leather bench.

  He stood there in the middle of the room and waited. Saw the shadow in the stairwell, and watched her come. If Sam was expecting his heart to reach out and touch hers, it didn’t happen. She looked like a well-off woman, in an ankle-length domed skirt that showed the crinolines beneath its surface, and ruffles at her waist. She wore a chemise that was the same blue as her satin skirt. Paisley shawl over her shoulders. His own red hair, tied back severely. Painted lips and fierce blue eyes, watching him watch her. With a flick of her wrist she waved the guard outside, then floated toward Sam, her face unchanged. He expected her to stop at a distance but she came in close and took his arm and pinched it.