Sara Dane

by Catherine Gaskin

  She lifted the latch of the door softly, and moved out into the passage. This would be her last patrol of the night. In a little more than an hour the bush would be grey in the first light, and then she would rouse Annie and Trigg to watch in her place. Her eyes were blurred with fatigue as she started the rounds of all the window-shutters. First, the dining-room … She halted in the doorway, the lamp casting long shadows before her. She had nothing to do but to try the three windows in a row on one wall, yet it seemed to require a lot of time and effort to do it. She went to the kitchen next.

  Nothing had disturbed the silence of the house during the long night. She had sat, the gun across her knees, too frightened to drop into even a doze while she listened for the sound of anyone trying to break into the house. As the hours dragged quietly out, she became calmer, and felt safer. But the silence was wearing; sleep dragged at her body, and yet her nerves, taut as wire, would not let her relax. It was a relief whenever Jeremy called to her for water, or when Trigg woke because the dressing had slipped on his arm, and needed changing.

  She walked along the passage to the kitchen, and opened the door softly. She held the lamp down low, looking towards the heavily shuttered windows, hoping that the first streak of light might have appeared against the chinks. It was as black as when she made her last round, an hour earlier. She stood still, her thoughts on the escaped convicts on the other side of the river, wondering what sort of camp they had made to sleep off their drunken stupor. In the daylight they might raid farms on the opposite bank ‒ or they might make their way as quickly as possible beyond the range of the settled areas. She didn’t know what their choice would be, and for the hundredth time that night she pondered the question, and tried to answer it for herself. She sighed, and rested her tired body against the door-frame.

  ‘If only it were light …’ she whispered, her voice coming back softly to her out of the darkness. ‘If only the troops would come …’

  And as she spoke she felt the breeze of the cold spring morning on her right cheek. It was sharp, coming down off the mountains, with a hint of frost in it. The thought froze in her mind … a sharp breeze in a room that was shuttered!

  She straightened then, leaning forward into the room and trying to fight off the fatigue that dulled her brain. She raised the lamp, peering into the gloom towards the storeroom. Its door was open. The shutter that the two women bad torn down was letting in the wind in cold gusts.

  Her eyes narrowed in fear and bewilderment as she struggled to remember if she herself had opened the door, and left it open. Had she done that in her last round? Her memory fought for recollection. But her mind remained blank ‒ apprehension as well as suspicion crowding into it.

  She was certain now that something was wrong, and it seemed to her more dangerous to go back and rouse Trigg than to stand her ground. She put the lamp carefully down on the floor. Then she levelled the gun, and moved towards the storeroom. The weight of the gun made her well aware of how clumsy and cumbersome it felt in her hands; she thought longingly of the pistol, left lying beside her chair in the sitting-room. Fool! she told herself, a little whistling breath of dismay escaping through her teeth.

  She couldn’t see into the storeroom; the half-open door blocked her view. The boards beneath her feet creaked so loudly that she bit her lips to check the cry that rose in her throat. The lamp threw her shadow in a long line before her, and, seeing it, she stopped still. She stood as if she were frozen, listening. Then, after a few moments of reassuring silence, she took a step nearer.

  Before she could move again, a man’s figure suddenly thrust itself round the edge of the open door. She raised the gun instantly, and stepped backwards. But he was tall, and moved with the swiftness of a hawk. His hand shot out, knocking the barrel aside before she realized fully what was happening. She fired automatically, but the gun resounded with nothing more than the dull click of a jammed chamber.

  The man was huge and bulky, towering over her; he bent to look into her face. She tried to take another backward step, but he gripped her wrist; he twisted it backwards, and she moaned faintly with pain. One by one her fingers slipped off the trigger. He might have knocked it out of her hand in the first place, but he seemed to prefer to wait until she let it go herself. It fell on the ground between them. She opened her mouth to call Trigg, but his rough hand, smelling of sweat and rum, was clamped over her face. She clawed at it madly, until he reached round her body and, with one arm, pinned both hers to her side.

  ‘Not a sound out of you, or I’ll break your neck! Do you hear?’

  The huge hand slipped down and circled her throat.

  Terrified, Sara stared up at him. The hoarse, whispered voice had the tones of a countryman with a London accent overlaid. He was drunk. The reek of his breath as he leant over her made her stomach heave. His face was shining with sweat, his eyes red-rimmed. He swayed as he held her.

  ‘How many men here?’ he said. ‘Two?’

  She didn’t answer.

  His hand tightened threateningly on her throat. ‘Don’t try to trick me ‒ I saw them! Both wounded ‒ dead by now probably.’ He touched the gun with his foot. ‘The ammunition for this ‒ where is it?’

  She made no answer, except to jerk her head backwards in the direction of the door and the passage leading to the rest of the house.

  ‘Any food?’

  ‘Over there.’ She nodded towards the shelves lining one side of the kitchen.

  He gave a satisfied grunt.

  ‘They left me behind, curse them!’ he said. ‘I fell and knocked myself out, I did, and the bastards took my gun and left me lying there by the river bank.’ He gave a low, expressionless laugh, shaking her a little. ‘But I’m not one to be easily beaten ‒ and now I’ve got more than any of them! I’ve got a gun and food ‒ and no one to go shares with me. And I have you as well!’

  Her eyes widened slowly.

  A smile spread itself over his sweating face. ‘You don’t remember me, do you? You’ve been playing the fine lady too long now to remember your pals of the Georgette.’

  She stiffened, and tried to break away.

  ‘Ha! You didn’t like that, did you?’ He rocked back on his heels. ‘Oh, I’ve watched you ‒ a year it is now since I first came here. I don’t forget how it used to be. You, with rags on your back, and not a shoe on your foot. And now you’ll turn your nose away from the bad smell of us ‒ from the likes of us who slave on this farm to put silk on your body, and gold in your husband’s purse. Well … you made the most of it on the Georgette, didn’t you? You found your way into that fool’s bed while the rest of us rotted under the hatches. D’ye think I don’t remember? I remember every time I clap eyes on you ‒ and I’ve ached to get my hand round this white neck of yours and choke the life out of it … you scheming whore!’

  ‘Who are you?’ The words were nothing more than a whisper, because of the pressure of his hand on her throat.

  ‘You’d have no cause to remember me, Mrs. Maclay. Except you might happen to remember that they flogged the skin off my back twice on that voyage. Johnny’s the name. Johnny the Penman, they used to call me in London. A pretty well-known citizen I was before they hung a sentence of fourteen years round my neck. Time was when I could have forged the Governor’s signature so as he wouldn’t know it himself. But not any more. Not since I lost two fingers cutting wood for your bloody fires! I nearly lost the whole hand, but did Mrs. Maclay know about it, or come to bind it up? Not a chance! The great lady doesn’t put her foot inside a convict’s hut!

  ‘But let me tell you,’ he said, his face sickeningly close to Sara’s, ‘you’ll never escape it. No matter how long you’re in this colony, or how far behind you leave the Georgette, you’ll never be allowed to forget it. Every convict has you marked ‒ and every fresh arrival hears your story. There’ll always be someone to reach up and drag you down, like I’m doing now. Do you understand? You’ll never be allowed to forget it!

  ‘Well …
’ He shook her roughly. ‘I won’t have to care about it any more. I’m free, and I don’t have to look at you any longer, or hear you giving orders, or see you lift your skirt out of the way, in case it might touch one of us. No more of it, d’y hear? I’m getting away, across the river where they won’t find me. And I don’t care if I never lay eyes on another white woman again. The native women will do for my purposes.’

  Then he spat out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘The horses,’ he muttered, ‘where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t lie, you whore! There should be three horses. They were gone from the stables even before we raided the stores. Where have you hidden them?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the horses.’

  He struck her then across the face. ‘Whore! Tell me!’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she gasped.

  He shook her again, his eyes suddenly crazy. ‘I’ll make you tell me, gutterbrat!’ He struck her a second time in anger. She reeled back, almost out of his grasp.

  Abruptly, his expression altered. His sweating face became alive with a new emotion, a vicious, drunken lust that hitting her had awakened. He rode his sensation with deliberate abandon, laughing wildly. He took one of his hands away from her, and looked down at it, as if surprised at the power there.

  ‘We’ll see now who can touch you, and who can’t. You’re not too good for a convict to have, Sara Dane, when he has his mind to it. Whore …’ He breathed this softly. ‘You were glad to take what you could get when you were on the Georgette. Now I’m not asking!’

  His hand jerked out and ripped open the bodice of her gown down to the waist. He was half-smiling.

  He loosened his grasp a moment to kiss her, and Sara suddenly tore his hand away, and clutched fumblingly at her breast. But she wasn’t quick enough to catch the tiny Italian dagger. It fell to the floor between them, tinkling, with a sharp little sound against the gun.

  The man looked down, and his slight hesitation gave her time to stoop quickly and snatch at it before he did. She crouched, with the dagger in her right hand, facing him. Maddened, he lunged at her, hitting her again across the face. The blow knocked her to the ground; she lay there sideways on her elbow. For a few seconds he stood looking down at her, and then he dropped to one knee, balancing drunkenly with his hand on the floor. From that position he began inching forward.

  She let him come as close as she dared, then, like a flash, she twisted and rolled on her left side, thrusting the pointed dagger upwards with all her strength. His mouth fell open the instant he realized what she was doing. He made a clumsy stab to push her away, but as he bent forward, the blade punctured the skin of his throat.

  A glazed, startled look sprang to his eyes, an expression both of terror and disbelief. He grasped frantically at his throat, his fingers encountering the dagger. He dragged at Sara’s hand, trying to loosen her hold, but the movement sent the point farther home. Blood began to gush out. A bubble of blood appeared at the side of his mouth, and his hand slipped away nervelessly. Slowly he fell forward, the dagger sinking into his throat up to the hilt.

  He fell across her grotesquely, with arms outstretched. He was already dead when his body struck her, and the blood came in a bright red stream from his mouth. She pushed at his shoulders until at last he slid off, rolling to one side. He lay face upwards, his eyes open, and the dagger slanting downwards at an angle from his throat. The delicate silver handle gleamed in the faint light.

  Sara twisted away from him and began to get stiffly to her knees. But she paused and shuddered. The man’s blood was still warm on her gown, and on her bare breasts and throat. Her face twitched with pain from the blows he had given her. She looked down at her hands, and then over at the dead man. Her stomach heaved; she wanted to be sick.

  And while she knelt there, the sounds of stumbling footsteps reached her from the passage. She lifted her head, too weary to care now who it was. She waited, and at last Jeremy’s figure appeared in the shadowy doorway. Her breath came in a little gasp of relief. In the lantern-light she could see the sweat standing out on his forehead and his upper-lip, but his eyes no longer had the mad brightness of fever. He swayed unsteadily, clutching at the door-frame.

  ‘Sara …’ he said, using her name for the first time.

  ‘Jeremy!’

  She began to crawl across the floor towards him.

  V

  Jeremy watched her closely across the office table. They sat there alone. She poured a second brandy for them both; her hands were unsteady, and some of it slopped over and ran down the edge of the glass. The lamp stood on the floor; it threw the shadow of the table upwards to the ceiling. Sara’s features were darkened and distorted by the shadow. Her hair hung down her back in a wild tangle; the blood had dried on her torn bodice, on her breast and hands.

  She put the glass to her lips, biting on it to stop their trembling. Then she gripped it with both her hands and set it carefully down.

  ‘There’s nothing more to tell you,’ she said dully, looking away. ‘Now you know the whole of the story that will be ringing through the colony in a few days’ time.’ She cupped her forehead in her hand. ‘I can just hear it … “Mrs. Maclay, with an ex-convict’s special gifts with a knife, kills one of her own labourers.” Or what’s worse still, “one of her old associates of the Georgette”.’ Her head sank down farther, and she gave a low groan. ‘Oh, Jeremy, what meat the gossips will make of it! I have at last fulfilled all their ideas of a tavern-room slut. That’s what he called me ‒ a whore!’

  ‘Sara!’ Jeremy leaned forward, the movement making his head spin with pain.

  She lifted her eyes to his. ‘What do you care about that? You’ve never expected any different from me. If you dared, you’d call me a whore as well.’

  He gripped the edge of the table with both hands and made a slow attempt to rise.

  ‘If I were capable of it, Sara,’ he said faintly, ‘I’d go round and shake you for that.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you deny that you’ve thought that of me … ever since the day of my marriage? Deny that you’ve thought Andrew no more than a madman to have married me.’

  After a long silence, he said slowly, ‘I don’t deny that I thought it once. But my views have changed.’

  Jeremy focused his eyes on the damp rings the glasses had made on the surface of the table.

  ‘It’s not what happened in the last few hours that’s changed it,’ he said. ‘Though, God knows, I owe my life to you ‒ neither of the other two would have gone to bring me in.’ He smudged one of the rings with his finger. ‘No ‒ the change isn’t as recent as that. No man in his right senses could have done anything but admire you right along.’

  She made a sound that might have meant anything.

  He looked at her quickly. ‘I was jealous of you, Sara ‒ because Andrew loved you. A man who’s cut off from the normal society of women is apt to either hate or love the one woman within his reach ‒ and at the same time out of his reach. I desired you, but wouldn’t acknowledge it ‒ even to myself. God knows, that’s understandable. You’re lovely enough for any man to want to possess.

  ‘Andrew and I were friends before you came. And then you confounded me because you were all the things he had boasted you would be … efficient, calm, intelligent … You never complain about the sort of life you have here at Kintyre. You never mention the loneliness. I’ve seen you bear your child away from the company of other women without showing the fear you must have felt. I’ve watched you grow to meet every fresh demand Andrew made. And I’ve watched you become more and more vital to his being every month you’ve been together. He wasn’t much more than a small gambler when he came off the Georgette. What he is now you’ve made him.’

  She did not move; she watched him closely.

  After a pause he said, ‘And even in face of all this I was half-disappointed because you hadn’t turned out to be the slut I’d hoped. If you
want the truth, Sara, I was disappointed that you didn’t fall into my open arms.’

  He leaned back and took his hands off the table.

  ‘My jealousy was finished when I saw you in there.’ He nodded in the direction of the kitchen. ‘That made me finally realize that since yesterday afternoon you had done what I didn’t believe any woman would do. Whatever you care to do in the future will seem all right to me.’

  He lay back in the chair with his eyes closed, his hand gingerly going to the place where the blood had clotted on his shoulder bandage.

  ‘From now on, Sara …’ He paused and opened his eyes. ‘From now on I’ll slave for you. You can take that just whatever way you like. But you can take it from me straight what my motives will be. They’ll be love and desire ‒ because I doubt if Andrew ever loved or desired you any more than I do now.’ His voice had become hard, and his lips too dry. ‘I’ll have to forget this talk ‒ act as if it had never happened ‒ because you belong to Andrew. You’re his … but I shall serve you whatever way I can as long as I live.’

  She did not reply, merely nodded. Then her head sank down on her arms folded on the table. As Jeremy watched, her shoulders seemed to shake; she might have been weeping, but he wasn’t sure. The soft glow of the lamp shone on her skin where the gown had been torn away. The mad disarray of her hair gave her a look of troubled youth. He watched her, and longed to reached across the table and lay his hand reassuringly on her arm. But she gave no sign that she wanted him ‒ or was even conscious of him any more.

  They sat in silence for a long time while the daylight grew stronger at the chinks in the shutters. For half an hour Sara did not move; she lay with her head on her arms, like a piece of warm-coloured stone. Finally, the same sound roused them both. Sara stirred and lifted her head to listen. Then she rose and walked with dragging steps to the window.