Night Ride into Danger

by Jackie French

  DEDICATION

  To Angela, without whom this book could not have been written, with endless love and gratitude.

  To the Brisbane ‘Turkeys’ who stalked me in a friendly kind of way during COVID lockdown.

  And with grateful thanks to Norm Whitfield, for his memories of Braidwood coaching days, and to Eddie Nomchong, who lent me a router so this book could be finished, and who continues the tradition of his family’s generosity that inspired part of this book, because of course the Nomchongs of Braidwood would have offered hospitality to a ‘Miss Lee’.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  ‘The Lights of Cobb and Co’ Henry Lawson, 1900

  Chapter 1: Braidwood, New South Wales, June 1874 a Mystery Passenger

  Chapter 2: Taking the Reins

  Chapter 3: The Crossing

  Chapter 4: Disaster

  Chapter 5: Holding the Reins

  Chapter 6: Bail Up!

  Chapter 7: Waiting

  Chapter 8: The Greatest Secret of Them All

  Chapter 9: Paw’s Secret

  Chapter 10: Talking to Juanita

  Chapter 11: The Dawn

  Chapter 12: At the Station

  Chapter 13: Mr Pickle’s Secret

  Chapter 14: Return to Cobb & Co

  Epilogue: October 1876

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Jackie French

  Copyright

  ‘THE LIGHTS OF COBB AND CO’

  HENRY LAWSON, 1900

  Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;

  A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;

  The mail-coach looming darkly by light of moon and star;

  The growl of sleepy voices; a candle in the bar;

  A stumble in the passage of folk with wits abroad;

  A swear-word from a bedroom — the shout of ‘All aboard!’

  ‘Tchk tchk! Git-up!’ ‘Hold fast, there!’ and down the range we go;

  Five hundred miles of scattered camps will watch for Cobb and Co.

  CHAPTER 1

  BRAIDWOOD, NEW SOUTH WALES, JUNE 1874 A MYSTERY PASSENGER

  It was raining frogs the afternoon Ma Grimsby sidled up to Paw in the chilly Cobb & Co coachyard as he and Jem waited for the passengers to board the night mail coach to Goulburn.

  Outside the courtyard Braidwood smelled of kitchen fires and dunnies. The Cobb & Co yard smelled of horse and adventure, of yarns in the night and miles of bush track eaten by the pounding feet of eager teams.

  The team was already harnessed. The horses snuffled and stamped with impatience, ignoring the small brown frogs hopping about the mud and straw. Cobb & Co grooms changed teams in two minutes, but this afternoon’s coach from Araluen had been twenty minutes early, according to Paw’s pocket watch. Paw always left on schedule. The horses had to wait. They were the team Paw always used on this first leg of the night mail to Goulburn, three leaders at the front and two horses on the pole.

  Ma Grimsby gave Paw her best smile, the one that showed her missing teeth. ‘There’s somethin’ strange about one o’ your passengers tonight,’ she whispered, her bonnet dripping in the drizzle.

  Paw shrugged, a tall figure in his oil-cloth cloak and hat, his eyes on the horses.

  Jem grinned. A strange passenger? Every Cobb & Co coach carried someone strange: gold miners who’d made their fortune but never changed their underwear, or that squatter who kept a tame rat in his hat. And the stories they told!

  ‘Terrible strange,’ hissed Ma. ‘Enough to shiver in your boots!’

  Paw still didn’t answer.

  ‘What sort of strange?’ demanded Jem, to get rid of her.

  ‘I’m not telling secrets to a whippersnapper like you,’ snapped the landlady. She edged closer to Paw and tapped her nose. ‘I knows what I knows. You leave the lad with me tonight,’ she coaxed.

  Ma Grimsby owned the lodgings where Jem and Paw stayed between shifts at the Braidwood end of the Braidwood to Goulburn run. She’d been trying to get Paw to notice her ever since her husband had tripped and broken his neck falling down the cellar stairs. But if Paw married again it wouldn’t be to a skinny hen like Ma Grimsby, who served watery mutton stew for breakfast, dinner and supper, and whose last husband might have fallen down the stairs, but might just as easily have been pushed.

  Paw still said nothing. Paw never said much. When the brown snake had peered down from the coach roof last summer Paw had just grabbed it behind the head and flung it under the wheels before it had time to strike. All Paw said was, ‘Ain’t paid its fare.’

  And that time a passenger had bounced out of the coach and into the swamp? Why Paw had just pulled the horse to a stop, hauled the man in again, and told him, ‘Won’t charge you extra to carry the mud.’

  Paw was the best driver in Cobb & Co, which meant the best in all Australia. You needed to be a skilled Whip indeed to handle five horses, and an even better one to do the overnight mail run to Goulburn to meet the train to Sydney, a fourteen-hour drive on a rough track in the darkness with only a few minutes’ break at each of the four coaching posts to change horses.

  Changing horses every ten or twenty miles and light carriages was how Cobb & Co could get the mail, and passengers, from place to place so fast. But it was drivers like Paw who could handle anything from flooded rivers to sun so hot you could fry an egg on the coach roof that meant the coaches got through safely — most of the time.

  ‘You mark my words, Mr Donovan, you don’t know what you’ll be carrying tonight,’ hissed Ma.

  A storm of clapping from the grooms and stable hands interrupted her, as Señorita Carmelita Rodriques stepped into the courtyard, followed by her younger sister.

  Señorita Rodriques blew the grooms a kiss. She wasn’t wearing the flounced red and gold dress she’d danced in at the hotel that afternoon, so short in the front that Jem had glimpsed her red garters when he’d peered through the doorway. Paw had lingered a moment to watch the dance too.

  But even in her green travelling coat and buttoned boots the señorita was still the most beautiful woman Jem had ever seen. Her hair was long and glossy black as a yellow-tailed black cockatoo, held back from her neck with jewelled combs, and her brown eyes were shiny as creekwater. She had cherry red lips, just like the heroines in the dime-store novels Maw used to read.

  Señorita Rodriques stopped well back from the horses stamping in the icy mud as the groom hurried to tie her trunk onto the coach. Her sister stopped next to her. The girl was about twelve, Jem’s age, her olive skin slightly more tanned than her sister’s, her dark hair pulled back in plaits, plainly dressed in dark green too. Both sisters carried carpetbags, and gold-fringed Spanish shawls for the cold journey.

  Ma Grimsby sniffed. ‘A Spanish dancer? She’s nothing but a painted hussy, showing off her legs to anyone who pays a shilling. Not the kind of company you want for a nice young lad like yours.’

  Now they both ignored her. The passengers would be inside the coach anyway, where they wouldn’t bother Paw with silly questions, while he and Jem sat outside on the box above the horses. Paw didn’t hold with men riding the coach roof, where any jolt might send them hurtling down under the wheels. He wouldn’t even allow a passenger to sit up beside him, only Jem. Jem rode beside Paw, night or day, rain or shine, for the full fourteen-hour stretch, and then the whole journey again the next day after a night’s sleep in Braidwood or Goulburn.

  Fewer passengers was one of the reasons Paw liked driving the night run. The night run coach was small and fast — it had to be, to get the mailbags to the Sydney train on time. Paw’s coach only carried eight passengers at most, and the mailbags and the passengers’ luggage, at thir
ty pence a pound, double the daytime rate.

  Most people preferred to use the slower day coach, spending a night at the hotel at Sherwin Flats on the way, rather than rattle for fourteen hours straight and pay twice as much for the privilege. Those travelling tonight would have a good reason to get to Goulburn as soon as they could. Most, or even all of them, would be bound for the morning train to Sydney, just like the mailbags. The mailbags were tied on the back with the passengers’ trunks, and the passengers inside.

  It was hard riding for Jem, up on the box, but it was worth it. Crack Whips like Paw made fourteen pounds a week. Paw and Jem didn’t even have to pay for their meals on the road — the innkeepers liked Paw, or felt sorry for a widower caring for his son, and it didn’t cost much to rent a room here and in Goulburn. Sometimes a passenger even bought them a slap-up breakfast at the end of the run, too, hoping for wild tales of bolting horses or storms that cracked the sky with lightning. Another three years of saving and he and Paw would have their farm, breeding horses for Cobb & Co instead of driving them.

  And every journey was a new adventure. Floods, fog, fallen trees, mobs of kangaroos . . . Paw had even been held up by a bushranger one night. He didn’t so much as slow the coach, just kept driving so fast by the light of the lanterns that the bushranger couldn’t follow him in the dark, his pistol shots singing overhead.

  ‘All aboard!’ yelled Boney Nick, as the grooms carefully fastened a third tin trunk onto the back. It was extra heavy, Jem judged, looking at the way the coach sagged on its leather thoroughbraces, but the grooms had expertly stowed it so the weight was evenly distributed.

  The passengers moved towards the red coach, its oiled leather curtains fastened to each side so they could climb into the cabin, with its narrow plush seats.

  A skinny little man in a tall top hat reached the coach first. His wife was short too, but fat as a dumpling, though half her bulk might be all the shawls she was wearing as well as the bustle at her back.

  Jem grinned. She’d feel sore after sitting for sixty miles of ruts and bumps on a wire bustle. Boney Nick had told Jem how a mouse on the day coach had poked its nose out of a woman’s bustle once, then run along the seats with all the men trying to stamp on it and the women screaming. Every time Jem saw a passenger with a bustle he hoped it would happen again.

  The next passenger approached the steps: a slim young Chinese man, though he was dressed like an Englishman — or an American like Paw — with an oilskin cloak over a dark suit and vest, and a top hat and boots. He walked swiftly, but with strange tiptoeing steps, carefully not meeting the eyes of anyone in the courtyard.

  The fat woman peered out at him, then gave a squawk like a hen who’d laid an egg. ‘A Chinaman! Horace, do something! I’m not sitting next to any Chinaman!’

  ‘He bought his ticket, same as anyone else.’ The new passenger stepped out of the shadows. He was thin as a match with the wood shaved off, with short-cropped grey hair under his top hat. He was clean-shaven too, with strangely white skin. His boots and suit and big carpetbag looked new. ‘Cobb & Co carries anyone who can pay for their ticket,’ the thin man added. ‘If a kangaroo comes up with the fare, Cobb & Co will carry him. Isn’t that right, sir?’ he asked Paw.

  Paw said nothing.

  ‘You can’t expect decent folks to sit next to a Chinaman!’ gasped the fat woman. ‘Go on, Horace, tell them!’

  Her husband peered out of the coach at Paw. ‘Mrs Pickle is easily upset . . .’

  ‘Then she can wait for tomorrow morning’s coach,’ said the thin man calmly.

  ‘But we have to get to Goulburn . . .’ began Mrs Pickle, as señorita Rodriques and her sister approached. Mr Pickle immediately held out his hand to help the señorita into the coach.

  ‘Good afternoon, Señorita,’ he said, ignoring the younger sister. The girl squeezed past Señorita Rodriques and plonked herself on the seat opposite the Pickles.

  Señorita Rodriques smiled at Mr Pickle. ‘Gracias, Señor,’ she said. She sat and arranged her skirts. Even her voice was lovely, with its lilting foreign accent. ‘This is my sister, Juanita.’

  ‘A pleasure to meet the sister of the famous señorita,’ said Mr Pickle, still looking admiringly at Señorita Rodriques.

  Mrs Pickle snorted, and clutched her shawls around her. The Chinese gentleman climbed in quickly. He sat in the furthest corner from Mrs Pickle as Juanita wriggled over to make room for him, his eyes down and his hands in his lap.

  Mrs Pickle moved as far away as she could, her buttoned boots scraping the straw on the coach floor that was meant to keep the passengers’ feet warm. ‘Horace! There’s a funny smell in here,’ she began.

  The thin man ignored her, turning to Paw. ‘Five shillings to sit up beside you for the journey,’ he offered.

  Paw shook his head.

  ‘I sit next to Paw,’ Jem explained.

  The thin man grinned down at Jem. His teeth were white and perfect. False teeth, thought Jem. No one as old as this man must be, could have teeth like that. He must have no teeth of his own at all.

  ‘I reckon one day you’ll grow big as your paw, lad, but just now there’s room for both of us up on the box. My name’s Smith. John Smith. I’ll give you a guinea to take me up on the perch with you,’ Mr Smith added to Paw.

  Paw considered, then shook his head.

  ‘Ten guineas.’

  Jem stared. The night fare to Goulburn was only three guineas.

  ‘Fifteen guineas. Don’t like being shut in,’ added Mr Smith easily.

  Fifteen guineas added to their savings! Jem met Paw’s eyes. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  Paw looked at the stranger. ‘You don’t put a hand on the reins and the boy wears the second safety strap.’

  Mr Smith nodded. ‘I don’t need a strap over my lap to keep my seat.’

  Paw held out his calloused hand to seal the bargain. You only needed to see the strips of thick skin along Paw’s fingers to know he was a Whip.

  Mr Smith pulled out a bundle of bank notes from the carpetbag and counted them out. His hands were thin and white too, just like his face, and the nails long and dark yellow. Paw shoved the notes into the pouch at his belt.

  Jem clambered up onto the perch, with Mr Smith after him. Jem fastened his strap, then waited while Paw fastened his, and then checked Jem’s too. Paw lifted his hand to Boney Nick.

  Boney Nick stepped back from the horses’ heads as Paw flicked the reins. ‘Git up now!’

  The lead horses raised their heads. They almost flew as they darted forward, mud splashing under their hooves. Inside Mrs Pickle gave a startled scream. ‘Horace! Is it going to be like this all the way to Goulburn?’

  Jem laughed, glad they’d soon have town behind them. If Mrs Pickle thought this was bad, she was in for a shock when they hit the ruts out of town. The coach bounced four times on its leather thoroughbraces then steadied, as the horses swung into Duncan Street, the smoke from its woodfires sifting through the drizzle. Ma Grimsby raised a hopeful wave to Paw. Paw ignored her.

  Jem waved back to her, to be polite. He wondered vaguely which passenger she thought was so strange. The Chinese man? Or Señorita Rodriques? But they weren’t really odd, just foreign, not like the man with a pet magpie who’d made a nest in his beard, or the bloke with a single cheese-coloured tooth who insisted on showing everyone how he could still eat raw onions.

  The team slowed as Paw guided them around the corner into Wallace Street, then down the hill and over Monkittee Creek and out past the Pig and Whistle and the Station Hotel. Paw cracked his whip above his head and the horses broke into a steady, groundcovering trot.

  Jem breathed in the scent of gum trees and winter earth. The misty horizon stretched forever, trees and farms and endless possibilities.

  The night mail coach to Goulburn was on its way!

  CHAPTER 2

  TAKING THE REINS

  The road became rutted puddles as soon as they left town. Paw expertly guided the horses
away from the worst of the bumps and holes. The drizzle cleared as if they’d plunged through a curtain, leaving a pale blue winter sky above them and brown frosted paddocks either side. Mr Smith gazed at Braidwood’s outskirts curiously.

  ‘What’s that building?’ he asked Paw, pointing to a well-built two-storey house on the hill.

  Paw didn’t reply.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jem.

  ‘How about that stone building back there? Looked like a dairy.’

  ‘I think it is,’ said Jem. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know Braidwood much. Paw and I only stay there long enough to sleep and get a bite to eat. It’s always stew,’ he added gloomily.

  ‘Your mum not a good cook, eh?’

  ‘Maw died five years ago. Consumption after influenza,’ said Jem shortly. Paw said nothing, expressively.

  ‘I’m sorry, lad,’ said Mr Smith softly.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jem politely.

  Mr Smith glanced at Paw, the reins held loosely in one hand, his right foot resting on the brake. The brake stopped the coach’s wheels, but it didn’t stop the horses. The five horses harnessed to the coach needed the Whip’s hands on the reins to tell them to slow down, as well as a willingness to obey.

  Mr Smith raised an eyebrow. ‘Your dad doesn’t say much, does he?’

  Jem shrugged again. Paw talked when they were alone: he just didn’t like strangers, especially ones who asked questions. Jem thought of Ma Grimsby’s warning again. She’d mentioned something secret, he realised, not just that one of the passengers was strange.

  But Mrs Pickle didn’t look like she could keep a secret from a cat, nor her husband neither, and the Chinaman probably didn’t speak English, so Ma couldn’t have found out a secret about him. Señorita Rodriques? Ma Grimsby probably just meant that the señorita’s red lips were really face paint, and her tiny waist was moulded by a corset. Maw had subscribed to a fashion magazine and Jem had read all about things like face paint and corsets. Señorita Rodriques would be lovely even without cherry lips and a corseted waist.