The Boy with Blue Trousers

by Carol Jones

  *

  It had all happened so fast that Young Wu did not have time to think. He could only act. When he spotted the knife in Little Cat’s hand, his fighter’s reflexes took over, performing a movement he had practised a hundred times. Snatching her wrist, he used her forward momentum to propel her out and around, then released her to fly backwards, giving him time to position himself for a renewed attack as she regained her balance. He did not mean to kill her. Despite his vow to avenge his father, he realised now that he could never kill her. He would rather die.

  But by the time he saw her drop the knife it was too late. By the time his brain registered her open hand, she was already falling.

  Young Wu had never moved more quickly in his life, yet he wasn’t quick enough to save her. As he reached out to grab her arm, her leg, her trousers, any part of her, she was already disappearing over the lip of the shaft. If it had been one of his countrymen’s shafts she might have been saved by its small circumference, but she fell into one of the large rectangular holes dug by the European miners. The thud of her landing was echoed by the thud of his heart as he realised what had happened. He stood at the edge of the shaft peering down to the shadowy bottom. He could just make out the shape of her, lying motionless about twenty chi down.

  ‘Little Cat!’ he called into the silence. ‘Little Cat!’

  There was no answer and no movement. He waited a short while and called again. ‘Little Cat.’

  She was brave. Annoyingly so, it was true, yet she could never be anything else. That was her nature. Difficult and disobedient and a terrible dancer, yet he wanted to hold her close and never let her down again. His father had violated her and now he might have finished what his father began. It was a long way to fall and she lay so still. What if she were dead?

  Never in his life had he felt such a torrent of emotion, not even when he found his father’s lifeless body lying in a pool of congealing blood. His body shook with it. His mind whirled with it. His heart ached with it. Dropping to his knees at the edge of the shaft, he leaned out into the dark hole, trembling with anger at his father’s betrayal. He had come to accept that his father wasn’t the righteous man he had once believed him to be. He realised that Big Wu might well abuse his power over a vulnerable girl. Yet how could his father have defiled the girl his son wished to marry? How could he steal love from his son? He accepted the truth of his father’s actions now. That day by the river when Little Cat first told him, he had refused to see it. But nothing else made any sense.

  Little Cat wasn’t a killer. She was a fighter. She would fight to save herself or those she cared about but she would not kill unprovoked. And she had dropped the knife. She did not want to kill him, just as he could not bring himself to kill her that day by the river.

  Perhaps, despite all that had happened, she too might love him.

  ‘Little Cat.’ He breathed her name. He wanted to shout and rage and rend his clothes but he could not give into fear and grief now. Not while there was a chance that she might yet live.

  42

  When Violet arrived back at the American Hotel a smile played unconsciously at the corner of her mouth. She had been wrong about Strong Arm meeting the bullocky. She was meeting someone entirely other, someone with whom Violet did not need to be concerned. The girl had seemed uneasy, it was true, but Violet suspected from the tension in the two Celestials’ manner that she was also in love. It was clear that they knew each other well. Perhaps the man was a friend from her village. Could it be that she had followed him here? What other reason would a girl from the Middle Kingdom have for disguising herself as a boy and exposing herself to the dangers of journeying so far alone, in the midst of thousands of men? Look what happened to her at the Glenelg River. One error of judgement and she had almost been killed, or at the very least, ravished.

  But love often called more stridently than good judgement, as Violet knew to her shame. She had vowed never to heed it again and yet… here she was, breathless with anticipation before her rendezvous with a Welsh bullocky. But that was different. He was different. This time she would speak of love like one man of business to another. And then they would arrive at a satisfactory arrangement. She would not be taken for a fool again.

  ‘Back again, love?’ the yellow-haired woman cawed as she hurried down the street towards Anthony’s Hotel. ‘Where’s your man then?’

  Her man would be waiting for her. Just as Strong Arm’s man had waited. Violet supposed that a woman might find the Celestial attractive. From what she could observe in the fading light, his features were broad and regular with high cheekbones and a solid neck. He had a certain swagger about him if you could overlook his odd hair. But then all the Celestials wore their hair in a long plait with a shaved crown. Strong Arm might well find him acceptable.

  She wondered if Lewis would say the same about the situation. He had an annoying concern for the girl. Sometimes she wondered if that concern bordered on attraction. But what red-blooded Welshman would hanker after a skinny Chinese girl garbed in shapeless blue rags when Violet was to hand? No, his concern was no doubt of the fatherly variety. There was nothing fatherly about his concern for Violet. At least, that was what she told herself as she spotted the man leaning against the veranda post outside her hotel.

  ‘Am I late?’ she asked. She noted that he had changed his moleskins for the occasion and wore a blue serge coat against the cooler night air. Damn, the man. Why did he have to look so handsome?

  ‘A lady’s prerogative.’

  ‘Prerogative? That’s a fancy word for a simple bullock driver,’ she said.

  ‘Ah well, I wasn’t always a bullock driver.’ He offered her his arm. ‘It’s a beautiful evening. Shall we walk?’

  They strolled arm in arm down the wide main street. Lewis was courteous but oddly distant. He wore the air of a man who had ordered a new suit because he could not pay his tailor. But Violet was not about to be dunned.

  ‘I hear you return to the Glenelg shire soon. I had thought you may have formed attachments here.’

  ‘It’s past time. I’ve been gone too long. I can’t be sure my shepherds haven’t up and left for the goldfields. Though they’re good men and have been with me for years.’

  ‘And you were going to leave without saying goodbye.’ She stared up at him with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not a good prospect, Violet,’ he said. Like her, he ignored polite convention and got straight to the point. Then again, their friendship had been hardly conventional. She had travelled across country with him for five weeks, two hundred and sixty Chinamen as chaperone. She had tended a dying man to impress him. She had wrapped her legs about his hips and let him love her.

  ‘I’m not prospecting,’ she said.

  No, she had done with that, she realised. She wanted to find a sure thing before it was too late. Before she exhausted her finest attributes. She did not want to find herself poor and alone at five and fifty, making over her gowns year after year until they were threadbare, little boys chasing after her in the street hurling unkind words or worse. She did not want to be the joke of the parish. She wanted a roof over her head and a man who had the gumption to go places and take her with him. Lewis could be that man. He might not be rich but he was ambitious. More importantly he was here, with no evidence of a wife.

  In return she would give him her love, her loyalty and all that remained of her youth. It wasn’t a bad bargain. Moreover, there was something that neither could ignore, a heat that radiated between them. Violet knew when a man wanted her. Lewis might crook his arm through hers and hold her at a discreet distance, but she could not miss the tension in his body that betrayed the effort it took not to pull her close.

  ‘To be frank, Violet, I have to find £640 to buy my homestead outright or I’ll lose it to someone else. The remainder of the run is leased from the government and if I don’t make some improvements I may lose that too. Wool alone isn’t going to pay
my costs. Every penny I scrape together driving bullocks goes towards that purchase, and making the necessary enhancements,’ he said, his mouth set in a hard line. ‘I will not lose my land again.’

  Clearly, there was more to the story than he was telling her, some history that had nothing to do with her. Some wound from his past.

  ‘What do you mean, you will not lose it again?’

  He heaved a sigh in answer.

  ‘You made love to me, Lewis. I won’t pretend that I was an innocent, but you took advantage of my vulnerable situation. I trusted you. I think you owe me an explanation, at least.’

  ‘Ah, it’s an old story…’

  ‘But it’s your story.’

  ‘Well, if you insist. My brother and I had a farm once. More a manor than a farm, with considerable landholdings in the Welsh vales. After my father died, my brother and I inherited. But my brother, being the elder, inherited the greater share, and also control over the management. And he lost it.’ He paused in the telling, and she nodded encouragement.

  ‘Gambled most of it away, squandered the remainder on fine clothes, fancy carriages and fancier women. I had to sell my last holdings to save him from the debtors’ prison.’ She could feel his arm rigid as it held hers, the muscles taut with the memory.

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with you and me,’ she said, turning to look up into his eyes. ‘I don’t expect a manor in Wales.’ Although it would be nice, she would be content to make do for the moment.

  They had reached the edge of town now, where an ancient gum tree threw its shade over the street during the hottest part of the day. With the dusk, it loomed over the ramshackle town like a protective giant. Drawing her behind the tree, he released her arm and swung around to face her.

  ‘You’re a beautiful woman, Violet. Any man would be proud to have you as his wife. But I can’t provide you with the comforts you deserve.’

  ‘But you were happy for me to comfort you.’

  ‘What can I say? I can only apologise and assure you that it won’t happen again.’ His voice rasped the words. ‘But I can’t promise to make a life with you.’

  She didn’t have to pretend anger or tears. They fell freely, rolling down her cheeks, fat and glistening and dripping onto her collarbone. She had given him her body but he had stolen her heart. And now she required payment.

  He made to comfort her, taking her by the shoulders and drawing her towards him. But she shook him off. ‘No. You’re all the same.’

  ‘If you need money—’

  ‘Not everything is about money! Sometimes it’s about self-preservation. And sometimes it may even be about love.’

  ‘And this time?’ he asked.

  This time? For the blink of an eye, the flutter of an eyelash, the beat of a heart, she had thought this time might be different.

  ‘The last thing I want is to hurt you.’

  ‘It would take a more callous man than you to hurt me.’

  Her shoulders shook with shame remembered, disap­pointments suffered. Her entire adult life she had walked a tightrope between respectability and shame, until that day when she had fallen. Fallen so far that she might never have risen again. Even now she heard the shrill screech of the earl’s daughter calling her ‘whore’ as her husband buttoned his trousers and escaped the room. She felt the cold stone of the steps through the thin muslin of her gown where the footman had deposited her like unwanted baggage. She saw the scandalised glances of neighbours and passers-by as she avoided their eyes.

  She had come to this land to pick herself up. To make herself anew. She had thought Lewis might be the one to help her but she should have known better. She could only rely upon herself. She stood, hugging her quaking shoulders, half hoping she was wrong, that he would change his mind. But she had been too strong in fending him off. This time, when she needed him to hold her, he stood back.

  ‘I’m sorry, Violet.’

  ‘I’m the one who is sorry.’

  ‘You’re a strong woman, difficult and demanding, but more resilient than I would have guessed. I wish I could be the man for you, but I can’t give you a fine house, a carriage and servants. I can’t give you the life you want, the life you deserve. If I take a wife I will need a woman to help me build a life from nothing.’

  ‘I could have been that woman.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You would tire of the life. Tire of being a bullocky’s wife.’

  So… he needed a woman to help him build. A woman accustomed to hardship. A woman with a strong arm and a fierce will. A woman like… Suddenly, it occurred to her that the reason he had lingered in Creswick wasn’t for her. She had let love blind her to a truth she should have seen upon their journey. She should have listened to instinct, but she let love blind her to a slim girl with leaf-shaped brown eyes, black hair and trousers.

  ‘If it’s the China girl you want, you’re too late.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She looked away with a toss of her curls.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, taking her chin in his hand and turning her to face him.

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘I would never hurt you. I…’

  ‘You’ve already hurt me. More than once.’

  ‘Do you know something about Strong Arm?’ She hated the expression of fear in his eyes, his open lips waiting upon her answer when they should have been waiting for her kiss.

  ‘With her lover, I presume. I saw them meet at sundown. From the way they looked at each other there was little doubt what they had in mind.’ She cast the words at him like a stone.

  ‘What did he look like, this man you saw her meet?’ He brought his other hand up to her face now. The grip on her chin was firm, cradled by his hands, and she hated him for his concern.

  ‘He was tall for a Celestial,’ she said with a shrug, ‘taller than her. With a broad face and the build of a soldier.’

  ‘Oh, Violet, what have you done? Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ He dropped his hands to his sides, staring at her with a mixture of fear and disappointment. ‘If I’m not mistaken, this is the same man who tried to strangle her at the river. The same man who has followed her all the way from China. This man isn’t her lover. He’s her killer.’

  ‘No. That can’t be true.’ She had seen the way they looked at each other. She had seen the man preen for the girl. She couldn’t have been mistaken.

  ‘Where did you see them?’

  ‘Out along Slaty Creek, beneath the old red gum where the two creeks meet. Then they walked in the direction of Cabbage Tree Hill. I thought they were seeking somewhere secluded to…’

  ‘Somewhere secluded for him to finish what he started. Strong Arm killed his father after the old man attacked her. He has hunted her across half the globe. This man won’t rest until he has his vengeance.’

  She thought of the way the two had walked side by side yet apart. Had the man forced the girl to go with him? Did he have a weapon? Had Violet seen a pair of lovers because that was what she wanted to see?

  Lewis snatched up her wrist, holding it in a tight grip. ‘You’re coming with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I’m going to find her,’ he said, patting the breast pocket where she knew he carried his revolver. ‘And you’re going to show me the way.’

  Violet heaved a great sigh and rolled her eyes. ‘If I must.’

  43

  ‘Little Cat has fallen down a shaft and isn’t moving.’

  He got the words out so quickly that he wasn’t sure that his uncle had heard him at first. The old man looked up from his place by the campfire, where he squatted on his haunches cooking up some vegetables. The flames cast his face into a moving picture of ridges and furrows. When Young Wu spoke, the furrows on his forehead seemed to writhe in incomprehension.

  ‘She may be dead.’

  The old man nodded, making a small noise in his throat. Young Wu wasn’t sure whether it was a noise of approbati
on or sorrow. ‘We had better move her then. If the white ghosts find her they will start asking questions. The headmen will not like that. I will get the handcart.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say, Uncle?’ His heart still pounded, as much from fear as his wild run through the diggings.

  ‘If she is dead, we must bury her where no one will find the body.’

  Young Wu realised he was waiting. ‘Don’t you have an opinion? You have opinions on everything else.’

  The old man bowed his head, staring into his pan of vegetables. ‘I no longer know, Jat Jai. I no longer know if the Wus are worthy of this killing.’ He removed the vegetables from the fire, setting the pan on a flat rock. ‘It is easier to have opinions on simple matters. In important matters, perhaps we must trust the tao to show us the way.’

  Young Wu took a deep breath. The old man was right, in his roundabout way. This was a time to follow instinct, to follow what the universe was telling him. Despite everything, he loved Little Cat. And she had dropped the knife. She couldn’t bring herself to kill him. His father had betrayed both of them. And now the woman he loved lay at the bottom of a deep hole in need of his help.

  ‘Perhaps this too is a simple matter,’ he said, turning back towards the creek and Little Cat’s resting place beyond. ‘Go fetch the doctor and bring him to our tent, Uncle.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the other side of the creek. I will pull Little Cat from the shaft. If she lives I will carry her here. If she is dead, we will say the doctor is for me.’

  *

  Strong Arm opened her eyes to darkness and the smell of earth. When her vision adjusted, she realised that a small patch of that darkness was lit by distant pinpricks of light. At the same moment she became aware that every part of her body was hurting. Her head thumped as if it had been hit by a rock. Every muscle in her back was rigid with pain. And apart from the faraway lights, the blackness was so thick she could almost feel it pressing down upon her. She moved her head. A mistake, as needles of pain shot up her neck. She twitched her sides, a safer option. Both arms lay close to her sides. She reached out with her left arm, feeling rough grit beneath her fingers as it slid away from her body. It did not get far before touching a wall of earth. She tried the right arm with the same result.