I pitied her, naturally. Nevertheless, I was also shamefully relieved. For with Miss Rudd about the place, drawing fire, I was able to dodge my stepfather’s evil humours more effectively.
I could not shun his attention for long, however. Because as the seventh day drew to a close, I began to grow uneasy. And at the end of the eighth day, with my mother still absent, I asked myself a truly terrible question.
Would she ever return at all?
Sixteen
On the morning of the ninth day of my mother’s absence, I resolved that Miss Rudd should be informed of the facts.
My fears had kept me awake for most of the previous night. I had passed many black hours reflecting on Thomas Smith, and John Lynch, and the curious sense of persecution that Lynch seemed to arouse in my stepfather. Was this a symptom of the diseased state of Barton’s mind? Was it fear of reprisal, for having agreed to testify against Lynch at all? Or was it the sign of a guilty conscience? Had Barton killed Thomas Smith himself, because Smith was involved in the flogging—or because he had jeered at Barton on account of it? Had Barton falsely accused Lynch, who might have spotted him near the corpse, before Lynch could effectively accuse him? Alternatively, had Barton hired Lynch to kill Smith, and reneged on their agreement? Was that why Barton seemed to live in perpetual alarm at the prospect of Lynch’s reappearance? Was that why he had been drunk in court?
I was only ten years old, but such thoughts were not new to me. They had crossed my mind more than once in the past, owing to George Barton’s influence and my own familiarity with certain common colonial events: fraud, murder, assault, pillage, highway robbery—even the wholesale slaughter of settlers by bloodthirsty natives. The reasoned logic of a mature intellect was as yet beyond my powers; I nursed only a mass of confused suspicions and desperate fears. All the same, they were compelling. They were convincing. And though I knew nothing of John Lynch, I did know a great deal about my stepfather. I could easily imagine George Barton killing a man.
If he had killed Thomas Smith, what was to stop him from killing my mother?
Young though I was, I realised that he could not have committed such an act directly, with his own hand. But I was frantically worried that he might have engineered it somehow. He might have poisoned my mother’s supply of flour. He might have sent men ahead of my mother, to arrange an ambush. Or perhaps the trap had been sprung when she was on her way back from Budgong.
Alternatively, she might have suffered a stroke of misfortune unrelated to her husband. She might have met with an accident or a gang of bushrangers. Even the notion that John Lynch had escaped and returned to our neighbourhood did not seem utterly irrational to me; my stepfather had discussed the possibility so often that I naturally wondered if, by a dreadful coincidence, Lynch’s path might have crossed my mother’s.
You will observe that my fears were all predicated upon the belief that some violent fate had overtaken her. It never once occurred to me that she might have fallen ill. Yet this was Miss Rudd’s immediate suggestion upon being approached. By way of preamble, I said to our governess: ‘Mama should be back by now.’ Whereupon Miss Rudd replied: ‘She might have been taken ill, Charlotte. She might have found her way impeded. You must not begin to worry yet.’
‘We should send someone. We should send a party out to find her.’
Miss Rudd’s expression changed. She shifted uneasily. ‘Well—that is hardly in my province,’ she replied, with an unconvincing little smile. ‘You must consult Mr Barton on that subject.’
‘He will not do it.’ I could scarcely believe that she needed to be informed of such an obvious fact. ‘He wouldn’t even want her found.’
‘Now, Charlotte—’
‘He would like to see her dead. He said so. I heard him.’
‘Oh, but he—he was not himself, I daresay.’ This was Miss Rudd’s way of referring to my stepfather’s drunkenness. ‘He did not really mean it, I am quite sure.’
‘Yes, he did.’ I proceeded to tell Miss Rudd about Thomas Smith’s murder, and George Barton’s drunken appearance in court, and John Lynch’s subsequent acquittal. I was trying to explain that Smith’s murder might not have been committed by John Lynch, in which case Barton himself was an obvious suspect. Miss Rudd, however, preferred not to be enlightened.
‘My dear, these are not fit subjects for a gently reared young lady,’ she interrupted. ‘Rather than indulge in such morbid reflections, you should direct your thoughts towards our Heavenly Father, and pray for your mother’s safe return.’
‘But—’
‘We shall say a little prayer together, shall we? I always find prayer such a comfort, at times like this.’
It became apparent to me, then, that Miss Rudd was a broken reed. So I approached Robert the dairyman. I asked him to arrange a search party, comprising a handful of reliable men who could be trusted to return. His response was a look of complete incredulity.
‘Ye’ll have to ask the Master about that, Miss,’ he said. And when I appealed to some of the other servants, they shared Robert’s opinion.
I could not condemn them for it. Most of them were as afraid of George Barton as I was. However, the life of my mother was at stake—or so I thought. My fear for her outweighed my fear of him.
I went to his bedroom and knocked on the door.
‘Get out of’t!’ was his response.
I knocked again. ‘Mr Barton?’ I said—and flinched away as something solid (a boot, perhaps?) hit the panel on the other side.
‘Go away!'
‘Mr Barton, you must send out men!’ I spoke very loudly, conscious that Louisa and Emily were listening at the foot of the stairs. ‘My mother should be back by now!’
There was no reply.
‘Mr Barton?’
Still he said nothing. But it was an ominous silence. Emily began to beckon to me, in a frantic fashion. ‘Come away!’ she whispered. ‘Stop it, Charlotte, leave him alone!’
My instinct told me that to press any farther would only elicit a storm of indignation. Yet what else could I do? Abandon my mother to whatever perils awaited her? ‘Mr Barton,’ I repeated, whereat the door was flung open.
There he stood, in his nightshirt. I caught a glimpse of Emily and Louisa ducking out of sight to my left as he thrust his mottled, unshaven, contorted countenance into mine.
‘Are you bloody deaf?’ he bawled. ‘I told you to get out of’t!'
‘But my mother—’
‘Yer whore of a mother can rot in hell!'
Yer whore of a mother can rot in hell!
SLAM! I was lucky. Rather than box my ears or throw me downstairs, my stepfather chose merely to shut his door in my face—nearly bruising my nose in the process. Perhaps he was feeling unequal to any kind of physical exertion.
‘I told you,’ Emily muttered, when I joined her in the vestibule. ‘He will never allow it.’
‘Perhaps we should go and look for Mama ourselves,’ Louisa suggested. She had a way of saying the most absurd things with the most tranquil self-assurance.
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Louisa!’ Emily snapped. I said nothing. Having already resolved to communicate with Mr Benjamin Carter, I did not want anyone to know what my intentions were. If my sisters were inclined to believe that I approved of Louisa’s proposal, well and good. For then, upon being questioned, they might allude to my sympathetic attitude. And the search party would set off in the wrong direction—towards Budgong, instead of Newbury.
I had no doubt that a party would be organised. Though Miss Rudd was reluctant to institute a search for my mother, she could not, in good conscience, allow one of her charges to wander off into the bush alone. Even if George Barton opposed her, she would undoubtedly make some effort. She might even send to Newbury or Sutton Forest for help. That would be the ideal solution. If my stepfather would not cooperate, and Miss Rudd went to Newbury herself, then it would hardly matter whether I completed my journey or not. For Mr Carter would learn of my mother
’s extended absence through Miss Rudd, and would act accordingly.
On the other hand, Barton might cooperate. A search party might be organised. In which case I would have to avoid the dogs. Though not afraid of the convicts, I was concerned about the dogs. We had some very good tracking dogs at Oldbury. And I feared that they might trail humans as well as they trailed cattle.
Still, I had to try.
Leaving the house was no great challenge. Every morning Miss Rudd would take a lesson in the sitting room. All I had to do was ask permission to leave, feigning stomach cramps; someone suffering from diarrhoea could not be expected to return from the pot very quickly. Mr Barton was still upstairs. Few of the servants were about, and those I passed were intent on their various allotted duties. Only the convict huts presented a problem. I did not want to be seen from the huts, since it would then be known that I was heading for Gingenbullen.
I therefore went out of my way a little, skirting the rear meadow and entering the forest of stringybark that lay to the north-west of the house, before swerving east again.
You must understand that I was avoiding the roads. On the roads I would have been picked up in no time. I reasoned that by cutting through the bush, around and over Gingenbullen, I would have a better chance of reaching Newbury unhindered. In those days, there was a great deal of uncleared land on both the Oldbury and Newbury estates—and the heights were more heavily wooded than the flatter country to the south of Gingenbullen. Furthermore, I knew Gingenbullen quite well. My family had explored it many a time on long, rambling rides, which had also taken us into the more rugged terrain towards Berrima. So I was familiar with the endless stretches of woolly gum, the hidden groves of tree fern and sassafras, the lavish yields of topaz that could be gathered from White’s Creek and the Medway Rivulet. I had collected mimosa blossom and the curious banksia pods. I had sheltered from the rain in gibber-gunyahs, and heard cockatoos quarrelling in the high branches of a red cedar.
Consequently, I was not much afraid to penetrate the woods on my own. After all, it was broad daylight, and perfectly dry, with a cloudless sky that gave me all the navigational assistance I needed. On such a day, the menace of John Lynch (who might have escaped from Newcastle, and come back to wreak his revenge on George Barton) seemed far less palpable than it did in the evenings, when mist concealed the rocky heights of Gingenbullen. I thought it unlikely that John Lynch would jump out at me. At night, in bed, my siblings and I might frighten each other with the threat of John Lynch. We might discuss the possibility that a troll-like Lynch was living in a wombat hole near the native burial mounds, or hiding in our wine cellar. During the day, however, this prospect felt altogether less likely.
My only real worry was the threat of snakes. We supported a rich crop of snakes at Oldbury. My mother had been long ago informed by a native of the area that snakes were best avoided by making a great deal of noise. But it had occurred to me that if I was noisy, I would be heard by anyone within earshot. So I tried to tread softly, though I was also very careful.
As a result, I made rather slow progress.
My path did not take me directly over the spine of Gingenbullen. Instead I struggled along its northern flank for a while. It being early December, the day was already warm, with not a breath of wind. Dry grass crunched beneath my feet. Lizards skittered out of my way. As the hillside grew steeper and stonier—as its basalt ribs began to show through the earth—its covering also grew sparser; I became nervous that someone might spot me up amongst the blackbutts, and dropped down a little until I found a shallow gully to follow. Here I was pleased to discover a specimen of terrestrial orchid. But I left it where it was, having no time for botanical pursuits.
From the eastern slopes of Gingenbullen, the Nicholsons’ residence at Newbury lay to the south. There was nothing much in between, save for clumps of forest, and some patches of cleared land. You might wonder at my courage, faced with such a rough trek. But recall that I was not heading west, into the wildness of Belanglo and the Wollondilly. To me, this was simply a stretch of land that intervened between Gingenbullen and Sutton Forest. Such a journey was not beyond my powers. Even if I veered off to the east a little, I would eventually hit the Argyle Road, and could follow it back down to Newbury. I was not in the least afraid of getting lost.
I was, however, concerned about getting caught—and for good reason. Because as I passed to the east of Swanton, I could hear the distant sound of barking. This was not the steady, repetitious barking of a bored and lonely sentinel but a volley of yelps from a group of excited dogs. I knew at once that they were looking for me. Nothing else seemed as probable. I could not, however, identify their exact position. Were they heading straight for me, or were they rounding Gingenbullen’s western tip? It was difficult to tell.
For a while I crouched motionless behind a grevillea bush, listening. At last I concluded that I was not at any immediate risk, though this decision was perhaps prompted less by my own reasoned judgement than by the fact that I was positively beset by flies. When the flies are as bad as they were then, one’s only real defence is to keep moving. So I went on, down to the flats, leaving the slopes behind me.
It was at this point that I lost my bearings. The horizon was masked by a screen of treetops, and the sun was high overhead. It became more difficult to judge direction. Consequently, I strayed a little further south-west than was my original intention. Indeed, my discomfort was such that I almost lost interest in navigating. I was conscious of very little save the heat, the flies, and my own thirst. I also had a blister on my heel, which was quite painful. Once my cocked ear picked up the faintest sound of a distant ‘Coo-ee!’ Once I came upon the skeletal remains of a sheep, and wondered whose flock it might have strayed from. I encountered no snakes or bushrangers. Nothing attacked me except the ants and the flies.
Still, it was a dangerous expedition to have made. Without food or drink, I had left myself little margin for error. And back then the bush was fraught with peril. Why, my own father had once presided over a case in the local magistrate’s court, involving two natives who had murdered two sawyers in the cedar country beyond Fitzroy Falls. This sort of thing was by no means an everyday occurrence—any more than was the assault on George Barton, or the murder of Thomas Smith. But recall the many attacks by bushrangers on isolated farms. Recall the high incidence of robbery on the roads. Even where ‘nature never did betray the heart that loved her’, the work of Man was often less benign. While a lone female child adrift in the bush would more often have met with hospitable tendance than brutal handling, her safety was by no means assured.
Even so, I probably felt safer on my own, in the woods, than I did at Oldbury.
I walked on unmolested, as the sun traced a path into the western sky. And suddenly I came to a post-and-rail fence, which I followed southwards. It did not lead me to the Nicholsons’, however. I found myself in the paddocks to the west of Sutton Forest, with a view of the church through the trees, and a faint smell of kitchen smoke on the air. Newbury lay some distance to my left.
I might have veered off in its direction, had I not been so thirsty. I was also very footsore, and it seemed to me that I might just as well approach Mrs Wright, or Mrs Davey, or even Mrs Vincent, as Mr Benjamin Carter. Any responsible adult must see that my mother was long overdue. So I slipped under the fence and crossed the well-watered pastures that perhaps belonged to Mr Wright, past motionless dairy cows and an overgrown potato field, through the Medway Rivulet and around the edge of an associated lagoon. Skirting the cemetery, I finally reached the Argyle Road, coming up to it between Mrs Davey’s shop and the Talbot Hotel.
There were horses outside the Talbot.
It was a moment before I recognised one of them as Angel, my mother’s filly. The poor beast was dusty and sweating and laden with bags; I have never seen an animal so manifestly disillusioned with the role allotted her. Trapped in a cloud of flies, she twitched and stamped and flicked her tail. She seemed read
y to bite someone.
My mother stood some distance away, looking almost as weary as her mount. She was talking to a small clutch of interested young men, most of whom I recognised. James Barnett was holding the horses.
‘Mama!’ I screamed.
My mother turned. So did everyone else; even the horses swung their heads. I stumbled down the rutted dirt road towards Mama, limping a little on my blistered foot.
‘Charlotte!’ my mother exclaimed, and glanced around, as if in expectation of spying the rest of her children partly concealed by fence-pickets and tree-trunks. ‘What are you doing here? Where is Miss Rudd?’
‘You’re safe!’ I cried, flinging myself at her. She returned my embrace absent-mindedly.
‘Where are the others? Charlotte?’ she said.
‘I thought you were lost!’ My voice was muffled by layers of muslin. ‘You didn’t come back!’
‘What? What are you saying?’ She pushed me away, so that she could look into my face. ‘Charlotte, where are the others?’
‘At home.’
‘At Oldbury?’
I nodded, wiping my eyes. My mother’s expression hardened.
‘Surely you did not come here alone?’ she said.
‘I had to! You told me! We thought something had happened!’
‘You are not making sense, Charlotte.’
‘I was going to Mr Carter! You should have been back!’
My mother took a deep breath. All around us, the men had retired politely to a discreet distance. The flies, however, had not extended us the same courtesy. My mother flapped them away with an irritable gesture.
‘It has been barely ten days, Charlotte,’ she pointed out. ‘There was no cause for alarm.’
‘You said a week!’
‘I said that I would try to be back in a week. Did you tell Miss Rudd where you were going? Does she know where you are?’
I hesitated.
The Dark Mountain Page 17