by Jane Rawson
‘Henry.’ Sarah grasped the boy’s hand. ‘Henry, don’t listen to her. I know I said we must be patient, but your aunt is an awful, awful woman. I cannot tell you not to heed her – she is your aunt – but please do not listen to a word she says. Her mind is bitter and awful. Do you understand? You’re a good boy, and we all love you very much.’
Henry did not look up, and let his hand hang slack in his aunt’s. When she released her grip, he walked slowly out into the backyard, never once looking at her.
Uncle William found him there, maybe half an hour later, standing on a box and trying to see into the room where Georgie’s body had been laid out.
‘Hello, Henry.’
‘Hello, Uncle William.’
‘Do you want to come inside and see Georgie?’
‘What did he die from, Uncle William?’
‘Well, the doctor isn’t sure, but it seems he drowned.’
Henry got down from the box. William asked him again, ‘Do you want to come in with me and see him?’
Henry thought of his experiments, his cats and snakes and lizards. He thought of the headless swaggie Mr Sidney had shown him. Henry knew a lot about death, and the ways it treats a body. He nodded.
The room was dark, the thick drapes drawn and no fire in the grate. The chairs had all been pushed to the side of the room, leaving nothing but a table in the room’s centre. On the table there was a small wicker casket, its lid propped open. Flowers were piled around the casket – stinking lilies, making Henry hold his nose. Aunty Sarah was sitting with the body.
‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ Henry said.
‘Pardon?’ said William.
‘Aunty Sarah, I’m sorry about the mess. I wanted to help.’
‘I know you did.’ Sarah looked up from her lap. ‘We were going to make tea. It doesn’t matter now. Maybe tomorrow, after the funeral.’
Henry walked around the table to be further from his Aunt Sarah and peered into the casket. It was dark in this room. He couldn’t see much. Georgie looked asleep: pale and sleeping.
‘He looks asleep.’
William looked into the casket too. ‘He does, doesn’t he? He is at peace now.’
‘That isn’t what dead people look like. Are you sure he’s dead?’ Henry reached into the casket and touched his brother’s hand. He was dead. ‘He doesn’t look right.’
‘Your Aunty Sarah and the nurse have tried to make him look peaceful. It’s helpful for your mother and father to see him this way, to think of him sleeping in heaven.’
‘It doesn’t sound helpful. How will they know that he’s dead if he looks like he’s sleeping?’
‘Well, I think maybe it will take some time for them to get used to the idea that he’s gone. This is kinder. They can take some time to get used to never seeing their boy again.’
Henry thought about this. ‘Do you think they wish it was me instead?’ But he said it very quietly and no one heard. He spoke louder. ‘There isn’t any way to know, from the outside, how he died.’
William agreed. ‘It’s true. I think mostly the doctor relies on what he knows of the events leading up to Georgie’s death. Georgie was found underwater, so it seems likely he drowned.’
‘How do they know I didn’t put him there?’
‘Henry, don’t be silly!’ Sarah exclaimed, but William hushed her.
‘Well, if you had fought with your brother and pushed him under the water, Georgie would have been bruised. And he wasn’t bruised. The doctor thought it looked as though he had fainted, and then fallen in the water.’
‘He said he felt sick.’
‘So there you are. That is probably what happened.’
‘I told him to shut up.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? There are few things more annoying than a younger brother complaining about feeling sick.’
‘I probably should have helped him instead.’
‘But you didn’t, because you didn’t know he really was sick. And why should you care if he was?’ William asked. ‘That isn’t an older brother’s job. An older brother’s job is to tease and fight his younger brother, and stick up for him when someone else tries to tease or fight him.’
‘Yes, that’s my job.’ Henry looked into the casket again. ‘He was just starting to be a proper boy. Now there’s only Wills, and Wills is no use at all. Stupid Georgie, why did he have to drown?’ Uncle William sat down and gestured for Henry to sit with him, but Henry didn’t want to sit right then, so instead he went out the back door and through the yard and set off towards the water.
Henry had two choices. He could run away to California or he could go to gaol. Father was busy now, comforting Mother and being upset about Georgie, but it couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later he would start to ask where Henry was and then he would remember that Henry was a murderer, like Aunty Hills kept saying. He would think about Henry’s Mark and he’d either slice him up or he’d send him to gaol.
He hadn’t any money to get to California. Could he stow away on a boat? He knew a lot of sailors. Maybe one of the sailors at the Home could help him get to California, and he could find work there or go to the goldfields in Alaska or logging in Oregon. Uncle William had told him how the west coast of America was opening up to civilisation, north to south. He’d shown him on a map. It had been wilderness there, all of it, home to no one but birds and bison and the Red Man, just lying around useless, all that land, until the settlers headed west and found gold and planted crops and built cities and logged the forests and dammed the rivers, and now there was progress. They’d built a new home for humans out of a useless wilderness. Stomping boots, his Mark had said, turning the whole place into dirt, but the anger Henry had felt bubbling up under his skin had been weaker than the urge to go go go.
Stupid Georgie, why did he have to go and die? It was a simple task – get the mace and the jousting stick. That was all he had to do. Fetch the weapons from under the bed and come back, and then they could defeat the tramp and get his treasure.
Maybe he should try to get the tramp’s treasure and then he could use it to buy his way to California.
There was no tramp. There was no tramp and there was no treasure and Georgie had gone to get the weapons for no reason at all. Just for a made-up thing in Henry’s head.
Henry prised a piece of wood off the edge of the wharf and flung it into the water. He would like to go home and see Mother and have a cuddle and make her a cup of tea. He would like to make Georgie come back.
He would even go to school if that would make his parents happy, and he would sit quietly in class and write properly and learn how to add numbers together and to say a verse in front of the other children. And Mother and Father could be proud of him and he would be allowed to come home.
Maybe he could live with Aunty Sarah and Uncle William. Uncle William didn’t think he was a murderer. But what would that be like, to live at their house with no other children and to have to hide whenever Mother and Father came to visit? Perhaps he would have to live always in their attic and never run or climb anymore, just sit and read. Uncle William would visit him in the attic and ask him what he had been reading and tell him facts. That could be good or bad. Uncle William knew some interesting facts. He also knew a great many very dull facts.
He should go back to the house and see if they were waiting for him to take him to gaol.
Had he done anything wrong? He didn’t know. He had sent Georgie for the weapons. Georgie wanted to hunt the tramp: he wanted to. Yes, it had been Henry’s idea but Henry had been ready to give up and it was Georgie who wanted to get the treasure. But Henry should have known better. Isn’t that what Mother was always telling him? That he was almost grown-up now and he should know better. How do you learn how to know better? Henry just did things that were good ideas. Where do the better ideas come from? Were they meant to come from God or something? Then why didn’t God ever give them to him? He would like to know better if only someone would help him.<
br />
I suppose school is for that, he thought. They are supposed to teach you to know better. But who can sit down all day and listen to such boring ideas over and over and over again? Who can do that? They never told him about anything interesting anymore, just adding up numbers over and over again and writing out things from books. The things had already been written once; why write them out again? But whenever he tried to write something new and make the books more interesting he got the cane, and then Father was angry and he and Mother would talk to each other about him and they would always say ‘What are we to do about Henry?’
Well, now at least they knew the answer to that. They could send him to gaol. Or slice him to ribbons.
Now it was raining and the wind from the water was horribly cold. The wind was blowing the rain into his face and it hurt his eyes. Could he go home now? He should go home now and if Mother had stopped crying he should make her a cup of tea and blast his horrible Aunty Hills if she got in the way. He should make Mother a cup of tea and give it to her and say, ‘Mother, I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt Georgie and I’m sorry that I’m wicked and if you need me to go to gaol I am ready to go.’
That was what he would do.
He pulled another splinter of wood from the pier and dropped it into the water below, watched it eddy and get caught up by the waves and sink. He watched a seagull fight another seagull for a scrap of fish, hopping on one leg even though it clearly had two. He thought about how once he would have tried to lure the seagull to him but how now he knew better than that. He pushed his hands into his pockets and stood up and started walking home.
As he walked he counted stones that were stuck in the gravel of the road. He only counted the shiny ones. If he counted more than ten, his Aunty Hills would be gone when he got back. If he counted more than twenty, Uncle Hills would be gone with her too. If he counted more than thirty, Mother would walk him to gaol and they would cuddle and then Mother would look like she was leaving but instead she would turn around and let him out again. If he counted more than forty, just as he arrived, one of the sailors would be leaving on a trip to California, and he would ask Henry to please come along with him and would tell him that no, he needn’t pay his own passage.
If he counted to more than one hundred, his Mark would forget about going to California, and Mother and Father would forgive him and love him even with his Mark and they could all sit down together and talk about what Henry would do at school tomorrow. Then Henry could start all over again and this time he would try his very best to be good.
If he counted to one thousand, Georgie would come back.
He tried to remember how many stones he had seen and realised that he had lost count.
5
Tucked in to bed at Uncle William and Aunty Sarah’s house, Henry listened to the murmurings from next door.
‘He’s lost his mind,’ Uncle William said.
‘Well, of course he has,’ said Aunty Sarah, ‘his little boy just drowned. I feel like losing my mind too. He’ll get better with time. Or he won’t, and we will all learn to live with it.’
‘Sarah, it’s not grief. Or if it is, it’s something else as well. That time, before Georgie – it went clean out of my head with all that’s happened – but we’d been shopping with Eliza, remember? Wills had a bit of a cough and Eliza decided we should come back to the house, and when we came back George was there, demanding I go to the pub.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten all that. He was a man possessed, stomping around the house and yelling at the boys, dragging you off to the pub.’
‘That’s not the half of it. He told me a story – most of it made no sense at all. Maybe none of it made any sense. It was about the wreck. About that woman, Bridget Ledwith.’
‘Bridget who?’
‘Ledwith. The woman who survived the wreck. You remember?’
‘I think so. Whatever happened to her?’
‘There’s a question you don’t want to go asking George. He has some idea in his head that she kept him alive on the wreck through some form of witchery, that she’s some other-worldy creature and that, I guess, he gave her his mortal soul in order to survive. I think that’s what he was saying.’
‘His what? His soul? I didn’t think George even knew he had such a thing.’
‘He was telling me that he’s been having horrible dreams and I think even waking horrors too ever since, all of which he blames on this woman. And he’s been trying to find her, to somehow reverse whatever it was that happened to him. He’s met some fake Bridget Ledwiths. And he … oh, that’s right! He said you would know what he was talking about.’
‘Me? I barely know what you’re talking about.’
‘The midwife. He said the midwife at Henry’s birth was Bridget Ledwith. And that she had done something horrible to the boy.’
Henry felt sick, even sicker than he’d already felt, which was horribly sick. He swallowed it down and sat very, very still so he could hear the rest. His Mark flickered and writhed and he could feel it listening through his ears.
‘She did … she… George didn’t even see the midwife. He was out getting drunk and by the time he got back Henry was born and the midwife was gone.’
‘That’s not what he says. He swears he saw her in the house and that Henry’s birthmark is some kind of curse she laid on the boy while she was there.’
‘He is insane,’ said Aunty Sarah.
‘I’m glad the boy is here for now. It wasn’t safe there for him.’
‘Well, it was certainly unpleasant. You think it was actually unsafe? You don’t think George would harm him, do you?’
‘I couldn’t say. But he said that his first mission had to be to “fix Henry”. He’s obsessed with removing his birthmark. And honestly, I don’t see any way such a thing can be done safely, do you?’
‘God. He seemed so nice when Eliza first met him. The wreck changed him, obviously, but I hadn’t realised how profoundly. William, are you sure he said all those things? It wasn’t the beer talking?’
‘I barely drank. George was doing the drinking for both of us.’
‘Well, maybe once he sobered up he realised what nonsense he’d been talking. And all of this, with Georgie …’ It sounded like Aunty Sarah was crying a little. ‘Surely that will bring him to his senses?’
‘Or drive him further out of them.’
‘He’s lost one boy – he won’t want to lose another.’
‘I don’t know that he thinks of Henry as his boy. He seems to think he’s some creature of this Ledwith woman’s.’
‘He’s a strange boy. But he’s not much stranger than you, William.’
‘I beg your pardon!’
‘I do love him. So much. Almost like he’s ours. He’s not yours, is he?’
‘Madam! What a thing to say about your husband. And about your sister!’
Henry was confused. Sarah sounded as though she was laughing now, though, so perhaps it was just a thing adults said. Their voices got quieter, a low hum between them and then some creaking for a while and then it was quiet.
It was me, his Mark told him.
What was you?
It was me. I was her.
You were …?
I was her. The woman. The woman on the wreck, the woman when you were born. It was me.
But you’re my Mark! You’re mine. You’re not a woman.
Henry watched the wreck unfold. He’d seen it before, the horses trying to swim, drowning. He felt terribly sad. The cold of it, but not the pain of cold. Just the fact of cold. A man, his father, young and naked, and Henry always tried to look away at this point but you can’t look away when something is inside your mind. And himself, his eyes, in a woman, wet too and naked. They ate a man: he had seen this part before too and he could always taste the taste and it was not horrible like everyone said it would be, it was just cold and wet and for a moment he saw, fleetingly, a great white lump of meat pocked through with tiny bright stars and then it was
gone.
Then they were gone, taken away in boats, and Henry saw his father left behind on the wreck and the look on his face oh the look on his face. They were on land and the ground reared up to meet him and his hands fell down beside his feet and a thrill of running soared through him.
You don’t need the rest of that, his Mark told him. Too much for you. But here, have this. And there was a baby there, wrinkled, wet and warm and he scampered beside it on tiny feet and spread himself across its back and there they were, baby and Mark, and he could feel his own skin under his own fingers and it was all much, much, much too much and he bashed the back of his head against the wall and cried out and then Sarah was there in the doorway and by his side saying, ‘Henry, Henry, Henry, wake up.’ He was awake, but he didn’t want to open his eyes now or ever again. Sarah held him close and he wished he could be Georgie and be put nice and quiet in the ground after a short and blameless life.
Henry slept and Henry woke and for a moment none of it was there. He tried to remember if today was a day he had to go to school. He wondered if there was a way to get out of it. He remembered his brother was dead and no one cared whether he went to school or not. He remembered his father wanted to remove his Mark with a knife.
In the kitchen he took the bread from the larder and boiled himself an egg. He squashed down thoughts of removing his Mark himself, fed it some egg instead. It was too late anyway. Father hated him. Father thought he was evil. Nothing would fix that. Nothing.
Except maybe this Bridget Ledwith.
Henry tried to shake the thought loose then realised it wasn’t his thought, not his to shake.
Like this, and he felt his skin peel away from itself. He gripped his shoulder and recoiled at the unfamiliar humanness. On the floor, he saw a shape that was not a shape, its edges blurred, blending into floor, chair, wall behind. He shook his head but it would not focus, would not turn into sense. He put his hand out to touch, and felt just a faint dampness, a faint scratchiness. He prodded harder and whatever it was resisted his finger. Then a limb wrapped around his arm and sucked itself to him and, suddenly visible, glowed blueringed and pulsing.