Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  ‘A gift for the wonderful doctor!’ Dufrêne said.

  ‘He’s no good to me dead,’ Girodet said. ‘Have you given the man any water, food?’

  ‘He’s not dead yet,’ Dufrêne said. ‘And providing a man’s last meal on earth isn’t in our bargain, Monsieur Docteur de la guillotine.’

  Girodet frowned, then looked at Bergerard. ‘Tell the cook to bring something.’ He pulled out a leather purse, tipped some coins into his hand and put the small stack on the table where the agent and his son were sitting.

  ‘That’s it?’ Dufrêne said.

  ‘Why? Have you something more for me?’

  The agent swore. ‘you can feed us at least, then.’

  ‘I always do,’ Girodet said. ‘Christophe, and something for our friends here.’

  Just then, the door to the outbuilding opened. Girodet turned to see Josephine over his shoulder. She was wearing clothes he’d given her (left behind by his wife), a yellow dress and white shawl. He knew why she’d come. He saw her scanning the room. Josephine had been asking about the slaves, the ones she’d been brought in with (‘Where have they gone?’) and all the others. Girodet told her the Portuguese had taken them.

  ‘Why not me?’ she’d said.

  ‘Because you are mine.’ He’d paid Dufrêne three times the money for her.

  The agent now held up his glass. ‘My beauty! My Josephine!’

  She ignored Dufrêne and looked around, saw the white man sitting on the floor. He’d lifted his head up now and was squinting at her through his swollen eyes. And in that moment, Josephine saw her brother’s obia hanging around the man’s neck.

  GREAT SOUTHERN LAND

  They’d passed through the heads and into the great mouth of the harbour that was still like the wild sea, an enormous expanse of water fringed by rough-hewn sandstone cliffs and densely wooded hills of dry, dull green. A blustery wind threw sprays of foam and snapped the Guildford’s sails, leaned the mast; the timbers creaked and stretched, the ship reached up tall and carved the water with gleeful lunges of its bow. The sky was immense and swept clean, the palest, perfect blue.

  Claus von Rolt shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand. Gulls swooped the hull, sleek and white, their harsh cries hungry.

  The Guildford dropped anchor at ten o’clock in the morning. It was a Saturday. Passengers and most of the 73rd Regiment were disembarked first, while the convicts remained shackled below. Claus von Rolt could hear them underfoot as he crossed the deck, their chains dragging, the sound cold and woeful.

  Sydney Cove was busy with construction: windmills and new stone docks, warehouses and trade buildings, barracks and roads. Rolt saw wagon carts loaded with quarried stone and surveyors at every corner, convicts labouring with picks and shovels, soldiers standing guard. Out past the clearings and towards the trees, small groups of blacks sat around smoky fires. The men were lean and tall, the women heavy-breasted, their laughing children running and playing in the sandy dirt.

  He found lodgings on Bridge Street and spent his first night in the Antipodes listening to drunks outside his window. In the morning, he enquired about passage to the South Pacific and was told to ask at the docks, down where the whaling ships came in.

  The captains were already in the taverns. They took a cup of rum when Rolt pulled out a coin and paid, but shook their heads at his request.

  ‘It’s the southern seas we ply, man, don’t be daft. It’s a working ship!’

  They were coarse, bearded men, hands clawed, dry as brick, made stiff by hemp rope and harpoon, and with the fish stench of dead whale in their salty clothes. They looked at Rolt’s fine tailoring and smiled.

  ‘you’d get yourself all wet!’

  They all said no.

  An American whaler anchored in the late afternoon and Rolt went down to the dock again, still hopeful. The first man he saw come off the New Bedford wore a shrunken head around his neck. He was Māori. Rolt approached and spoke to him and the Māori pointed out his captain. Claus von Rolt offered double the money for passage.

  ‘New Zealand’s a way and the waters ain’t pleasant,’ the captain said.

  ‘I’ve sea legs,’ Rolt said, watching the barefoot Māori walk off with his crewmates.

  ‘Well, good then. you’ll need ’em. And I’ll have the fare in advance.’

  LETTERS

  In Rio de Janeiro, Marta gave birth to a baby boy, brown and smooth and as shiny-dark-haired as she was.

  ‘He will be Juan,’ she said, but then she whispered another name into the child’s ear, in Pataxó, which nobody would ever hear or know or be able to take from him, and this was the child’s true secret name and it would protect him from possession and harm. It would remain between mother and son long after their bodies were corrupted and it would echo beyond them, through the infinite Great Forest, and for eternity.

  The pregnancy had been easily hidden, as Marta didn’t bloat in the way of white women, but with the birth now, of course, everything was different. It made things awkward for Curado, who’d since returned from the wars in the Banda Oriental, alive and decorated. His wife would not have the Indian girl back to serve at their estancia anymore.

  ‘She has disgraced herself and shamed God and her womanhood!’ Curado’s wife had said, and insisted Marta return the wooden crucifix that she’d once given her.

  Without complaint, Marta took the necklace off and handed it to her master. The child was at her breast and she swept the soft hair from his sweaty forehead. She was relieved to be rid of the crucifix. Marta had always feared the symbol of the white Christ’s terrible death. It was a yoke and now she was free of it.

  ‘They’ll both have to stay here,’ Curado said, ‘until you are released. And then …’ The field marshal gestured with his hands, held them out. ‘And then it will be as it will be.’

  Général Fourés nodded, not really listening to what his friend was saying. He watched the little brown child being suckled. Ever since Marta had become pregnant, it had seemed to the général that he’d somehow slipped outside of his life and was watching it take place before him, as though it were somebody else’s—or a dream.

  ‘Juan,’ he said, the child curled into his mother’s breasts.

  A whole new world had taken place in his prison cell. Where was France, where was Napoleon? Nowhere. They were nothing. And Juan was perfect, as beautiful as Marta, a brown cherub, an angel.

  Earlier, Marta had painted a thick black stripe across Juan’s tiny chest, and again over one half of his torso to the hips; then down his left arm with double lines (one roughly thicker than the other) and small connecting triangles between them, and two narrow bracelets around his plump wrists. The same motif was above and below his mouth, drawn out across his cheeks and to the ears on either side, all in dark black ink.

  Curado had watched and been disturbed by Marta’s tribal instincts. At the estancia, she’d been baptised and taught the Lord’s Prayer and had always sat piously in the chapel while the priest swung the censer and splashed holy water with the aspergillum. But water couldn’t penetrate skin. Could God even penetrate souls?

  The boy was quiet. When Marta lifted him to the other breast, he cried, wriggled and kicked, desperate, then softened the instant her nipple was between his lips. Fourés couldn’t account for the strength of his new love and desire for Marta.

  ‘If you need anything, Michel …’ Curado said (they called each other by their first names now). He smiled, almost sadly, paused at the door and then knocked for the guard to let him out.

  In the weeks and months following, the général wrote Elisabeth many letters. He tried to capture in words all that had happened to him. He wrote and rewrote and read them over, but was unable to say one thing with certainty. Everything was true, but so much seemed to be missing, as though each word had only empty sky around it. The words wouldn’t hold still, no matter how hard Fourés concentrated and firmly pledged them with the truth. His hammer slid from every nail head
, struck none of them cleanly.

  He tried to imagine Elisabeth before him, sitting in the chair, and wrote as he would have spoken to her, but all that fell to nonsense too.

  Silence seemed to hold the only semblance of what his heart held: but what in God’s name was a silent letter? He was a fool (of this he was certain).

  Général Fourés tore up all the letters and threw them away.

  Marta saw the strips of paper and wondered what they were. She knew only that her général frowned when he wrote them. It was best they were burned.

  DREAMS OF CHINA

  It was the Irish who said that China was nearby and it didn’t matter that Johannes Meyer knew otherwise and said so.

  ‘Been there before, right?’ they said, and snarled at him, each man clinging desperate to the plan, for without China there was nothing but the impossible years lined up ahead and beyond.

  ‘It’s in the northern hemisphere,’ Johannes said. ‘This is the southern.’

  ‘So it’s just up the road a ways.’

  Johannes had no idea of the wider geography of the world he’d been brought to, but considering how long it’d taken to sail here, he couldn’t see a short walk to anywhere.

  ‘you’ll need water,’ he said, ‘food.’

  ‘yeah, well, the main thing is we won’t be needin’ you.’

  (Laughter.)

  They’d been sent north from Sydney Cove to Newcastle and mainly it was tree felling, upriver for a month inside huge stands of cedar, twelve-hour days and deadly snakes, the lash to coax their labour. Or it was the cliff mines for coal, shafts cut straight down into the sandstone, the sea spilling in and black lungs for the effort. But still, lime burning was the worst. Shells sliced their feet out on the mudflats where they fired the oyster beds and filled buckets of quicklime, the smoke burning their eyes raw and blind, a misery like no other.

  The guards, to a man, were the cruellest under the Crown. There wasn’t a convict soul didn’t think about running, all the time, every day and every night.

  ‘The blacks’ll get you,’ said the one they called Lacey, who’d himself absconded twice before but couldn’t run again, his feet swollen and bruised blood crawling up his legs. ‘They’re cunning fucks!’

  ‘I’ll take me chances,’ Dingle Donovan said, still scowling at Johannes Meyer. He was the leader here, among the ruined Irish bound for China. His teeth were as rotten as his soul, though they said he’d once been an upstanding man in Kilkenny and could play the fiddle. ‘The rest of you can stay and sew curtains with the German here.’

  Two days later, twelve men and two women serving the officers’ barracks absconded, soldiers in pursuit and blacks on their trail too, silent through the bush. Eight were returned inside a week, most of them found sitting down in the scrub or leaned back on a tree, waiting and in a daze, starving. The rest were left to their fates, predictable enough.

  Dingle Donovan managed to stay out for two months. One day he limped back into the settlement, in rags and half-mad, his frail body broken out in sores and pustules from the hard sun, a spear wound festering in his leg, feet chewed and black. They tried to feed him but nothing stayed down. He died the next day on a cot in the hospital, no blanket spare to cover his corpse.

  ‘What’d I say?’ Lacey said and shook his head. ‘Didn’t I say it?’

  THE ELECTRICAL MONK, BROTHER SALINAS

  The abandoned hut was a low, rough thatching of branches and broad leaves, not far from the riverbank. Montoya ducked his head and looked in the doorway. He saw a sagging hammock and a stool on its side, a couple of wooden bowls on the ground and a box with its lid askew and bent on the hinges, a small pile of animal bones, some firewood, a rusted hatchet.

  He turned to Elisabeth, who stood behind him. ‘Well, he’s not in there.’

  She glanced into the hut. ‘What now?’

  Montoya took a deep breath, let it out slowly, thinking. He called over the two paddlers from the canoe, where they’d pulled up onto the riverbank. Each man shouldered a musket. Montoya pointed to a couple of openings in the forest near where they stood and sent each man to take a look.

  ‘you think he’s out for a walk?’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘Who knows?’

  Elisabeth took off her hat and stepped into the shade of a tree. It was a scorching day. There’d been a slight breeze on the river, but here at the monk’s hut there wasn’t a whisper. She fanned herself with the brim of her hat and watched Montoya as he walked around the hut and looked over the ground. She’d resisted him and had nothing to regret, but felt ashamed now at her thoughts, which had succumbed and imagined much. Away from the settlement, alone with him here, she realised they would all come true.

  ‘Maybe he went back to Caracas,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Elisabeth von Hoffmann could no longer endure a life of waiting. It had taken its toll and crept into her sleep. Waiting was no life and the général wasn’t coming back and these were things she needed to attend to.

  One of the paddlers came running out from the forest.

  ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ He’d found Brother Salinas.

  Montoya told Elisabeth to wait but she ignored him. They followed the paddler back through the forest, twisting through the thick and tangled growth.

  ‘The monk,’ the paddler said, ‘he lives in a tree!’

  The tree was enormous, the size of a cathedral. They couldn’t see him at first, but then Brother Salinas threw something (narrowly missing Montoya) and the paddler took the musket from his shoulder and pointed up into the foliage.

  ‘There he is!’

  They saw him. He was standing on a huge branch, one hand holding onto the branch above, dressed in rags that must have once been a cassock, his long legs bare, his head completely bald and white against the green all around him. He stared down at them and said nothing.

  ‘Brother Salinas!’ Montoya called out, moving closer. ‘I have come a long way to see you!’

  The monk picked up something on the branch beside him, cocked his free arm and threw whatever it was at Montoya; again, it almost struck him. The paddler put the musket to his shoulder.

  ‘Be calm,’ Montoya said. ‘Put the barrel down.’

  ‘He is crazy!’

  Montoya turned to Elisabeth. ‘Stay where you are.’

  She smiled at the serious look on his face. ‘The hairless man of genius,’ she said. ‘In a tree.’

  ‘Brother Salinas! My name is Alejandro Joaquin Montoya! I have come to speak with you of science!’

  Monkeys screeched higher up in the tree, their faces peering through the leaves to see what was happening. Then the monk suddenly called out, a wild, high-pitched imitation of the sound, and Montoya took an involuntary step back.

  ‘By God!’

  Another projectile came flying through the air.

  ‘Ask him about the ice machine,’ Elisabeth said.

  ‘What are you doing, man?’ Montoya said, angry now. ‘Desist!’

  The monk threw something again and shrieked like a monkey. The other monkeys above joined him in an excited, piercing chorus.

  The paddler crouched down beside one of the projectiles on the ground, looked it over and then grimaced in disgust. It was a hardened piece of excrement. Human. The monk’s own.

  ‘He’s shitting on us!’

  Back in the canoe, Montoya cursed the man vehemently, until Elisabeth’s laughter was too much for him to resist.

  ‘That’s the last time I take you anywhere,’ he said.

  OBIA

  When Krüger opened his eyes it was night, but the windows were silvered with moonlight. She was standing above him, a ring of keys in her hand, a soft glowing lamp in the other. It was true, what Mr Hendrik had said; she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

  ‘Tell me,’ Josephine said.

  His mouth was dry, he could barely swallow. ‘Water.’

  She put the keys and the lamp down, fetched him a cup.r />
  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  Krüger held up the empty cup. The shackles clinked, fluid, hard, water and stone together. ‘More,’ he said.

  She went and poured him another. He listened intently to the sound of her bare feet padding over the floorboards.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  He drank the tepid water but was no nearer to quenching his thirst. He put the empty cup beside him.

  ‘you kill Mr Hendrik.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘you see him killed.’

  ‘No.’

  Josephine kneeled down, sat on her heels.

  ‘He wanted me to take you away,’ Krüger said.

  ‘Dead don’t want nothin’.’

  ‘We should go from this place.’

  Josephine looked away. ‘He was my brother.’

  ‘The keys.’

  She pointed at his chest, at the obia there. ‘Don’t you know?’ she said, appalled at his ignorance.

  The weight on Krüger’s body was sudden. He gasped, coughed. The pain in his ribs was sharp.

  ‘you know it,’ she said. ‘Accept.’

  Krüger grimaced, but took strength from her shining eyes. She looked away, disappointed.

  ‘No changing it,’ she said.

  ‘We can go, together we can go. I will take you.’

  Josephine shook her head. From somewhere in the front of her dress, she took out a pipe. She tamped tobacco into the bowl, took a long, thin splinter of wood and lifted the glass on the lamp, lit the splinter off the lazy oil flame. She brought it to the tobacco in the pipe and puffed.

  ‘Mr Hendrik suffer,’ she said.

  ‘He loved you.’

  Josephine closed her eyes, rocked back and forth a little. ‘And he suffer.’

  ‘The keys.’ Krüger held up his shackled wrists.

  She frowned. ‘Where you go?’

  ‘Together we go.’

  ‘No buyin’ nothin’ no money.’

  ‘The keys.’ He dropped his hands into his lap.