by John Marsden
I looked across at Sophie. She was idly pulling shreds of bark from a stick that had been washed onto the island by the swollen river. Was it cynical to use her in the way that Johnny had suggested? It probably was, but now that I had a glimmer of hope of returning to civilisation I was tempted to snatch her up and run full pelt down the river, looking for the first outpost of the colony that we could find.
‘Of course, there are no guarantees,’ Johnny warned me. ‘They could still stretch us.’
We had to wait until mid-afternoon to cross to dry land again. If Johnny and I had been on our own we could have left earlier, but Sophie was too fearful of the water. We eventually constructed a sort of pathway of logs, but even then it took a great deal of coaxing and patience to persuade her to make the journey.
When we finally got across we were both eager to keep moving. We hurried Sophie along as best we could, going downstream, but she was painfully slow. She complained incessantly of hunger; we had found and baked a few more yams, and kept one for her, which we now fed her, but it was hardly a decent meal.
Eventually we gave up and made an early camp, then tried to catch a fish. The heavy rain had changed the nature of the pools in which we generally sought our prey, and the best we could do, after a long search, was a small green and yellow fish with an almost elliptical shape, which we found in a pool left isolated by the receding floodwaters. Hungry though Johnny and I were, we gave most of it to Sophie, in the hope that it would help her regain some strength.
Chapter 46
It did not take me long the next day to become extremely irritated by Sophie’s petulance and dilatory progress. I had never really had any contact with a little girl before, apart from Josephine Ogwell and the native children, but I rapidly came to the conclusion that if Sophie were typical of the species I would do my best to stay away from them in future.
Though she found herself in a difficult predicament she seemed incapable of showing any of the spirit or resilience that had characterised the Indian girls. One minute she would tell us she was too tired to walk and she wanted to lie down; the next she would dash off into the forest in pursuit of a butterfly. She complained incessantly, particularly about hunger, but she rejected much of the food we found for her. Around midday Johnny killed a large lizard, so we lit a cooking fire and baked it, but she found the whole procedure disgusting and would only eat a few slivers of the meat.
Sometimes she accepted my offers of rides upon my shoulders; at other times, with apparent capriciousness, she declined them, even though she would not walk for herself. She flatly refused all such overtures from Johnny.
She told us that we were ‘mean’ when we wanted her to walk, and ‘rude’ because we were not wearing clothes, and ‘cruel’ because Johnny killed the lizard. She cried when her dress tore as she was getting over a fallen log; she cried when she fell and got her hands covered with mud; she cried when we wanted her to ford the river again.
We were steadily losing height and getting closer to the coastal plains. The river twisted and turned considerably, which meant that we no doubt covered much more ground than necessary, but we were afraid to get too far away from the river’s comforting presence. It was, however, becoming wider and shallower, so fording it was by no means an insurmountable challenge. I had to carry Sophie across, for she refused point blank to traverse it herself. Unfortunately I slipped halfway and fell on my back, so that she landed in the water and was thoroughly soaked: an outcome she probably would have avoided had she used her own legs to make the crossing. This incident provoked screams of rage, and many threats of ‘telling Daddy’ and ‘telling Mummy’ directed at me, so that I began to fear my sentence would be doubled by the time we delivered Sophie back to civilised society and she had finished her litany of complaints.
Johnny’s characterisation of her as our ‘angel’ was starting to appear wide of the mark. There were times when I felt like putting her in the pouch of a kangaroo and telling it to deliver her to her parents. The situation was not helped by Johnny’s abdication of responsibility for her; for the most part he kept well away and left it to me to manage her progress, a task for which, as I have said, I was singularly ill-equipped.
We camped that night on the flattest land we had seen for many a long day, and were more successful in obtaining provisions: our usual standbys of fish and yams. After this, the best meal we had yet been able to provide Sophie, she seemed in a better mood and went to sleep quite quickly.
Our dreary progress continued the next morning, but did not last long. After about two hours we saw a thin trail of white smoke rising in the still sky. We hastened towards it and soon came to a fence. A fence! What a symbol of civilisation it is! I looked at it quite stupidly. I had almost forgotten the nature of fences, their function, the very concept of them. I felt an unaccountable wave of melancholy. For all the licentiousness of the natives, despite the savagery with which their men so often treated their women, I nevertheless had found something noble about the way they roamed freely through the countryside, living with the land, not from it. I was willing to swear that not a single aboriginal person of this country had ever built so much as a yard of permanent fencing.
We found a gate, and passed through it. My melancholy was replaced by the sickness of fear as I realised how much we were gambling on the return of Sophie. If she did not buy us a pardon for Johnny’s attack on the woman, and our escape from lawful custody, we were certain to face at best a flogging and an extended sentence; at worst, the gallows.
A track led us to another gate, and another fence, and through it we saw a simple log cabin, less than a mile away. The smoke we had observed earlier was rising from its chimney. I looked at Johnny and he looked at me. I think we both felt that we were taking an irrevocable step which could end very badly for us. Sophie was excited, but also exhausted, and was riding on my shoulders.
Suddenly Johnny said: ‘Clothes!’
I realised at once what he meant. We were hardly in a seemly condition for meeting the occupants of the hut. We had been away from civilisation for so long that nakedness had become our natural state. There was, however, a barn to our right, so we went towards that, and entered, hoping to find something with which to clothe ourselves.
The sweet smell of hay filled our nostrils; another sign that we were back in civilised society.
We looked around and immediately saw a row of kangaroo and wallaby skins hanging high, to dry. Whilst Sophie played on the hay, we took a quick survey of the building, but found nothing else of interest except some twine. We tied pieces of that around our waists, as belts, and then fetched down a wallaby skin and, in the absence of any knives, used a hatchet to cut the skin into rough pieces. With these we improvised loincloths.
Sophie was becoming querulous again, so we resumed our march towards the log cabin.
With each step my trepidation grew. I could not imagine the reaction of settlers in these wild parts when a couple of escaped convicts, dressed in nothing but animal loincloths, came to their door. Only Sophie’s presence would likely save us from the blast of a musket. I glanced back to where she was trailing fifty yards behind me, and felt the compassion I should have felt for her earlier. She had been lost for some considerable time, judging by her condition. It was a miracle she had survived, and now she was almost asleep as she walked. I stopped and waited for her. ‘You look silly with that fur,’ she said as she came up to me.
‘Do you want me to carry you?’
She held up her arms, so I picked her up and swung her around my shoulders. She didn’t seem to weigh much more than the wallaby skin. I reflected on the circumstances of our finding her. I was sure she had been in a sleep from which she would never have awakened had we not caught a glimpse of that patch of white. I found it disturbing that profound events could be determined by such slight chances. I wanted the world to be structured and logical; instead of which I had the Book of Job c
hronicling the apparent capriciousness of God. ‘Doth God pervert Judgement? Or doth the Almighty pervert Justice?’ Bildad the Shuhite asked Job. I was not sure that I could give the answer the Revd Mr Grimwade would have required of me.
We reached the cabin at last. It was bigger than it had first appeared. I felt unutterably tired myself, and I put Sophie down. As I did, a woman came out of the front door, carrying an infant on her hip. She took one look at us, screamed, and ran back inside crying: ‘Nathaniel! Nathaniel!’ I was not sure that she had even noticed Sophie. Johnny and I stood there irresolute. Sophie sat down in the mud and started sobbing. Her attitude towards mud seemed as capricious as God’s attitude towards Job.
A man came out of the front door, slowly, cautiously, with a musket held to his shoulder and trained on us. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ he growled.
‘We’ve brought back a lost child,’ Johnny said wearily.
For the first time the man seemed to see Sophie. He hesitated. The woman must have been watching from inside the darkness of the doorway, for suddenly she came flying out, calling: ‘Sophie! My God! Sophie Collins!’
Sophie cried all the louder. The woman snatched her up and held her, at the same time touching her, checking her. ‘She’s all right, missus,’ I said. ‘She just needs food.’
Suddenly a shadow seemed to come over the woman’s face. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, then she stared at Johnny. She addressed him. ‘How long have you had her?’ she asked. ‘What have you done with her?’
We were both dumbfounded. ‘We saved her,’ I said blankly. ‘We found her close to dying, miles back up there in the hills. Two days ago, after the big storm.’
‘She’s been missing a week,’ the woman said. ‘She couldn’t have survived that long on her own. How do we know you didn’t snatch her away yourselves? You look a right pair of ruffians.’
I broke out into a sweat. ‘Sophie,’ I said, ‘tell them how we found you.’
Sophie, whimpering and sucking her thumb in the woman’s arms, did not answer, did not even look at me. The man raised his musket again, threateningly. I looked at Johnny helplessly. ‘Well here’s a pretty pass,’ I said to him. ‘Not the welcome we expected.’
Behind me came a noise I had not heard for a long time: the drumming of a horse’s hooves. I looked around. A horse and buggy had come through the last gate and was approaching the cabin. ‘It’s the new chaplain,’ said the woman. ‘He’ll know what’s to be done.’
We waited in silence. I felt that my doom was about to be pronounced. The buggy pulled up, and a big man in clerical garb swung himself awkwardly to the ground. He looked at Johnny, at the woman holding Sophie, at the grim-faced man with the musket, and then at me.
‘Well, Barnaby Fletch,’ he said warmly, ‘we meet again. I always had the feeling we might. But my dear child, you look as though you have suffered greatly.’
My knees buckled under me; I struggled to stay upright. It was the Revd Mr Haddock.
Chapter 47
Although he never said so, a few veiled allusions by the Revd Mr Haddock gave me the distinct impression that he might have requested a posting to New South Wales to escape the oppressive atmosphere of St Martin’s. His concept of religion as a comfort, a source of hope, a sustenance and consolation for saints and sinners alike, was at odds with the beliefs of the rector, the Revd Mr Cartwright, and the Revd Mr Grimwade, who seemed more interested in endless predictions of eternal damnation for the wicked. Of course for them the wicked included almost everyone but themselves.
Or perhaps the ill-tempered advice of the Revd Mr Grimwade that he would be better suited to a position in St Luke’s Asylum had planted a seed in his mind. At any rate, the Revd Mr Haddock shipped out to the chaos of the new colony, accompanied by his new young wife Amelia, who gave birth to a baby girl during the voyage. I just hoped that their daughter would not grow up to be as querulous and spoiled as Sophie.
Sophie’s miraculous emergence from the forest was the talk of the colony for many a long day. This was a country of strange and marvellous things. It seemed impossible that a child so young could be in the wilderness for so long and yet survive. But after all, why should it be deemed impossible? As far as anyone could tell, there were no predators in New South Wales. The weather was getting colder and in consequence the snakes seemed to be making themselves more scarce. A child can go a week or more without food if she has to. If Sophie had not become so cold in the thunderstorm, and provided she did not slip over the edge of a waterfall or stand under a falling tree or aggravate the Indians, she might have survived even longer. I had managed to raise myself on the streets of London, which in many ways were more dangerous than the forests of New South Wales.
There were some who speculated that native tribes must have helped Sophie, but in the weeks that followed her return to the bosom of her family, she spoke of seeing no one but Johnny and me.
To my astonishment she attached herself to me with every evidence of great fondness. Nothing could have startled me more. I saw a good deal of her, because her parents and she lived less than a mile from the Revd Mr Haddock and Amelia, and their baby Clarissa. And I lived with the Revd Mr Haddock and his young family, because he arranged for me to be assigned to his household as a servant.
Johnny’s gamble had succeeded. When we told the story of how we had found Sophie, how we had ridden logs down the flooded river in order to reach her, how we had revived her when she appeared to be beyond reviving, how we had fed her and carried her and brought her back to her loving parents – and here I confess that we did not minimise our account of our heroic efforts on her behalf – women wept and men pressed money upon us whilst dabbing their eyes with their handkerchiefs. Sophie’s father petitioned the Governor for a pardon for us both, and whilst the Governor did not so far acquiesce as to remit our sentences entirely, he did absolve us for our escapes from lawful custody, and for Johnny’s assault on the woman from whom he had stolen the food. Johnny told me he was no murderer, and he was right: the woman had been only stunned and had made a full and speedy recovery.
It was not only the fortunate resolution of her case which helped him, though. His expectation that the rescue of Sophie would work in our favour was better founded than he himself could have realised, for Sophie’s father, the kind man who petitioned the Governor on our behalf, was none other than the deputy judge advocate of the colony, Mr David Collins. I sometimes wondered what would have become of us had Sophie been the daughter of a convict. Judge Collins was highly regarded, as a man who always urged moderation, who used common sense as the chief basis for his decision-making, and who often pleaded the case for the original inhabitants of New South Wales, so cruelly swept aside by the arrival of the Europeans.
I will remain discreet about the identity of Sophie’s mother, for certain it is that Mrs Collins never made the long journey out from England to the colony, and yet her husband fathered two children in Sydney, Sophie and her brother George.
Although the Governor did not see fit to set Johnny Piggott free, he did in his gubernatorial wisdom commute the original sentence. Johnny was ordered to serve a further eighteen months. He was not treated well however, being assigned to roadwork, one of the least favoured jobs among the convicts. Furthermore, his movements were strictly curtailed, as he was confined to barracks when not in the road gang. I was at least permitted to see him every Sabbath Day, which I did without fail.
He was a changed man in so many respects. He had but one purpose, one burning desire, and that was to return to the country of his birth and seek out his loving parents, in order to acquaint them with the miracle of his return from the grave. This ambition assisted him to restrain himself when provoked by the overseers, who, considering the Governor to have been too indulgent towards him, were inclined to deal with him harshly.
I offered to write his parents a letter on his behalf, to let them know the
facts of his situation, but Johnny was afraid of the effects upon them of receiving the news in such a way. ‘And besides,’ he said, ‘with the greatest respect to you, Barnaby, and your powers of eloquence when you take up your pen, how are they to believe you? The only proof that will satisfy them is if I can stand before them once more and take them in my arms. I must pray that they will live long enough for us to have that meeting.’
I had my doubts about the practicality of his intentions, for there was much official and unofficial resistance to the idea of men who had served their sentences being allowed to go back to England upon their release. Some were successful, as the presence of the returnee in the Pie and Peas testified, but they were few in number.
I did not press the suggestion of a letter further with Johnny however, as it occurred to me that were he to die out here in New South Wales, as was most likely, it might be kinder for his parents never to know. They believed him to be at the bottom of the cold ocean off the coast of Scotland and they had, as much as humanly possible, reconciled themselves to his loss. It would be cruel to subject them a second time to such bitter grief.
Johnny’s story however reminded me of the Lord’s treatment of his servant Job. For Job, having suffered the loss of his sons and daughters, was then recompensed with a new complement of children. Job 1:21, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Silas and Abigail Piggott seemed to be God-fearing, righteous people, and yet the Lord had allowed their precious eldest son to be as one dead to them. When I pressed the Revd Mr Haddock about this he replied in the same terms he had used at St Martin’s, that it was not for us to question these mysteries. Yet this was not enough for me. Being always of a restless and inquiring mind I found myself unable to show such meek compliance, much as I admired it in the Revd Mr Haddock. Though I fear the possibility that life is determined by random chance rather than divine intervention, yet I am forced to consider it a possibility. Should it prove to be so, I must find the strength to bear the dreadful burden of being a bark adrift on a capricious ocean; but if I am wrong I can only pray that the Lord will forgive my arrogance, for surely I would merit far worse sufferings than were meted out to Job – or the Piggotts.