Golden Hope

by Johanna Nicholls

  ‘Too flaming right!’ a voice called.

  ‘What happened to them?’ others asked.

  Steinham waited until quiet was restored. ‘The three troopers were tried at a British court martial and found guilty of inciting mutiny. They were ordered to be shot.’

  Clytie felt the babe struggling in her womb as if caught up in her panic.

  Please God. Don’t let Rom be one of them.

  Her voice was one of many who called out demanding their names.

  Steinham’s voice rode over them as he read from a piece of paper.

  ‘Troopers James Steele, Arthur Richards and Herbert Parry. We’ve received word that General Kitchener has commuted their sentences. Steele will serve ten years’ imprisonment, the other two prisoners a year each – all three in military prisons in England. Full details will be published as they come to hand. Thank you.’

  Steinham resumed his seat, openly mopping his brow. Doc Hundey leaned across and offered his handshake to congratulate him.

  All around her, voices with traces of various British and foreign accents were united in anger. Men and women rose to their feet, shaking their fists and yelling at each other.

  A miner jumped up onto the stage and extended his arms to the crowd.

  ‘It’s a damned outrage! These blokes weren’t trained soldiers – they were volunteers who answered the call to serve the Empire. What bloody right have Imperial officers to hold a court martial to try Colonial volunteers?’

  ‘Watch your language!’ a woman cried out.

  Sergeant Mangles swiftly frogmarched the impromptu speaker from the stage.

  Twyman took control. ‘I would like to call on the heads of our churches.’

  Teddy Baker, the quiet Welshman who owned the Bakery, was moved to speak out. ‘Indeed, it is no good to be asking the clergy for their advice. Good men they are, but they’re either pacifists or consider the Empire can do no wrong.’ He pointed at Doc Hundey. ‘Now there’s the one man around here who has the voice of reason. I am asking you, Doc. How best can we see justice done by those three prisoners?’

  All heads swivelled to hear Doc’s response.

  Clytie saw Doc almost crumple in his seat, reluctant to assume the role of spokesman, but after a quiet word from Twyman he rose and walked to the apron of the stage. His voice betrayed a slight tremor in a higher register, but despite a shaky start he gained control of his voice and grew in confidence.

  ‘I am as shocked as the rest of you by the news. But I want to remind you all that we are not simply residents of Hoffnung, Victoria, thousands of miles from the war. And we are not helpless. We have a voice. Federation has united all Australians. We are no longer six squabbling Colonies competing against each other. We have a right to challenge this decision. I dare to predict that in coming weeks our fellow Australians will speak with one voice to condemn this injustice.

  ‘Our Prime Minister Edmund Barton represents all of us. According to the census there are nearly three and three-quarters of a million of us,’ he added, ‘not counting the Aborigines who our politicians didn’t include in their count.’

  Clytie was stung by the implication.

  Despite the rumble of disquiet, Doc pressed on. ‘I do not doubt that right now the Australian Government is pressuring the British Government for the release of these three Australian troopers. Their lives have been saved by Kitchener. Now begins the fight to restore their reputations – along with all those courageous young men who volunteered.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ voices called out, causing Twyman’s face to twitch in anger that Doc was stealing his thunder.

  Doc continued, ‘Remember what our children are taught – what it means to be an Australian. Like me, many of you came from distant lands to settle here – or your ancestors did. But we are united in courage. Australia is one land, one language and one people.’ He waved a weary hand. ‘And we stand by our mates. Your fight to free Steele, Richards and Parry has just begun. Meanwhile I bid you all goodnight.’

  As Doc faltered and turned to leave the stage, the whole hall broke into applause and cheering.

  Clytie lost all sense of decorum. Recalling Tiche’s instructions, she put two fingers in her mouth and produced a piercing whistle. Several women looked at her in horror, but some men laughed outright and she saw a number of thumbs raised in approval.

  While the crowd were still milling around, Clytie chose the moment to make herself scarce, glad to have a Kelpie’s protection as she hurried home along the road in the darkness.

  The crunch of carriage wheels behind her caused her to spin around to check who was driving.

  Doc Hundey drew the cart to a halt. ‘Climb aboard, Clytie, and bring your furry friend. No time and place for a young girl to walk alone, cattle dog or no.’

  Clytie climbed thankfully up beside him. Shadow sat respectfully at her feet.

  ‘Doc, you were wonderful! You made the mood of the crowd do an about face.’

  Doc gave a sheepish grin. ‘I never spoke so much jingoistic rubbish in my whole life. Please don’t ever remind me what I said tonight.’

  Clytie burst out laughing. ‘Nonsense, I was dead proud of you. I only wish your sister had been there to hear you.’

  Doc gave her a sceptical glance. ‘Thank God she was not. Adelaide is nothing if not a radical. I rather suspect if she had been born a man, she’d be in South Africa – fighting in Viljoen’s Commando for the right of the Boers to govern themselves.’

  Clytie began to laugh until she saw he was serious.

  Doc had the last word. ‘Best not repeat that or both of us Hundeys will be run out of town. Twyman’s just living for the day when he has enough ammunition to rid himself of two troublemakers with one shot.’

  Standing at her front gate and waving to Doc as he drove away, Clytie was left wondering. Why is Twyman out for revenge? What is it that Doc and his sister are supposed to have done?

  That night she slept with Rom’s letter under her pillow, hoping he would come to her in a dream. He did. She stood watching him, powerless to move or speak.

  They were on some alien landscape that might have been the Moon. Rom was running away from her, stumbling in the dark. Destination unknown.

  Chapter 19

  Jolted back to consciousness in a total black void, Rom was startled by sounds of muted agony and the strange smell of the darkness. Disembodied male voices eddied around him, their guttural cries pierced by odd ribald comments and suppressed laughter.

  In the pitch darkness the jumbled sounds were laced together with the smell of antiseptic, stale sweat and urine, countered by the almost forgotten aromas of baked bread and coffee – and the indefinable sweet smell of a woman.

  ‘Where the hell am I?’ he mumbled. The dry, rasping voice hardly seemed to belong to him.

  Hell. The word had new meaning. He was instantly transported back to splintered images of slaughter. Men. Horses. Blood. Khaki. Wilmansrust.

  With a sheer effort of will, he struggled back to the present darkness. Lying somewhere safe on a bed, blessed with the smell of fresh clean linen.

  His head throbbed so painfully when he tried to raise it, he sank back onto the pillow – another forgotten luxury. Instinctively, he reached up to touch his eyes and felt the rough textured bandage that cut the world from sight.

  Close by a female voice rose on a gentle note of warning. ‘Rest easy, lad. I’ll remove that when Doctor says the time is right. Give me your hand. I need to take your pulse.’

  Rom enjoyed the touch of her hands, cool, professional, reassuring – an intimacy he didn’t want to end. Her voice held a slight accent of some kind.

  Eager to keep her at his side, for once he couldn’t frame a question.

  A male voice cried out ‘Sister!’ like a fraught child, but Rom grabbed her hand to detain her.

  ‘Hey, don’t leave me, Sister. We’ve only just met.’

  There was a smile in her voice. ‘Open your mouth, Delaney.’

>   He obeyed, only to be silenced by a thermometer.

  The moment she removed it, he was quick to ask, ‘Will I live?’

  ‘Your temperature is near normal. Good to see you’ve come back to us.’

  ‘Where have I been? I’d never have left you.’

  ‘You were brought in over a week ago. Your temperature’s been spiking through the roof. You’ve had enteric fever – like hundreds of your comrades. You can expect to feel as weak as a kitten for some weeks. But you’ll live – and go home to the girl who’s waiting for you.’

  Clytie’s face instantly imposed itself on the darkness in his mind.

  ‘How do you know there is one?’

  ‘There was a letter addressed to Corporal Roman Delaney tucked into your clothing when you were brought in. I didn’t read her letter, of course, but I checked it for an address.’

  ‘In case I snuffed it, right? Don’t worry, only the good die young. You pulled me through. Hey, it’s all beginning to come back to me. I was leading my horse – carrying another V.M.R. soldier I found half dead in an abandoned barn.’

  ‘You’re half right. It was the other way around. You were hit by a sniper’s bullet that grazed your temple. It was your body on the horse. The soldier walked barefoot for miles and led you to a field hospital. You both ended up here.’

  ‘Crikey, he stole my thunder. I thought I was the hero.’

  Suddenly struck by the significance of his bandage, Rom tried to sound indifferent but his heart was racing.

  ‘That sniper’s bullet. You mean I could be blind?’

  ‘It’s unlikely you’ll suffer more than a severe headache – but we err on the side of caution.’

  He felt emboldened to ask. ‘You know my name, Sister. Fair’s fair. What’s yours?’

  ‘Macqueen.’ She hesitated. ‘Heather.’

  ‘Heather. That’s why you smell so nice.’

  ‘I can see you’re well on the mend!’ she said as she straightened his pillows.

  Rom caught a faint trace of perfume. Far from the cheap scent worn by the girls in the brothel in Cape Town, this had the clean, sunlit quality of Pears’ soap.

  He was only too willing to obey the nurse’s directions when she slipped her arm around his back and raised him to a sitting position.

  ‘Time to eat. Don’t get too excited. We have to build up your tolerance for food slowly.’

  Before he had the chance to tease her again, he obeyed her command to ‘open wide’, felt the welcome touch of a metal spoon and warm broth filling his mouth.

  ‘That’s the way to do it,’ she said encouragingly.

  He caught the lilt in her voice. ‘You’re Scottish? Or a Kiwi, right?’

  There was a smile in her voice. ‘A bit of both. Scottish Highland genes but my New Zealand accent’s a dead giveaway, so they tell me. More to the point, where are you from, Delaney?’

  ‘The name’s Rom, Sister. I’m a rolling stone. But Victoria was my last port of call. A little place no one’s ever heard of – Hoffnung.’

  ‘That’s German for “hope”, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah! How come you know that?’

  ‘I’ve been nursing in South Africa since before the first war broke out in ninety-six. I picked up a smattering of Dutch, German and the new Afrikaans from patients along the way.’

  ‘From soldiers trying to woo you?’

  She avoided a direct answer. ‘It’s amazing what decent men say coming out of the anaesthetic.’ Her voice dropped to a confidential note. ‘Don’t tell a soul. I could now swear in four languages.’

  Rom opened his mouth to laugh but found it filled with a spoonful of soup. Unaccustomed to food, he struggled to finish it then sank back into the pillows, suddenly in need of sleep but determined to have the last word.

  ‘That bloke who brought me here – he had a fever. Did he pull through?’

  ‘He’s lying over there in the far corner.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him? Did he also cop a sniper’s bullet?’

  ‘That the problem. He hasn’t a mark on him. He’s suffering amnesia. No memories – not even his name . . .’

  Sleep drowned out the rest of her words.

  • • •

  Within minutes of having the bandage removed next day and hearing the physician’s welcome verdict that his eyesight was not affected, Rom was rearing to get up and go – a mental energy that his body did not quite live up to. The problem was he no longer had any burning desire to return to the Front – a change of heart that was triggered by the arrival of two letters.

  One was already torn open. Postmarked Melbourne, the name and address printed perhaps to preserve its anonymity, it contained newspaper cuttings of Noni James’s wedding to George ‘Sonny’ Jantzen. Hand-printed below it was the warning, ‘Don’t bother to come back’. At first Rom dismissed this as the work of a crank. Yet its anonymity niggled at him. Why bother sending it to him, a man considered so inferior to Noni, the town princess? Was it sour grapes, or revenge? He almost tossed it out but on second thoughts stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket.

  He tore open the other letter, at first moved by Clytie’s description of Dolores’s death then stunned by her casual postscript.

  Jesus! I’m going to be a father.

  The news threw him into a quandary. How could he help her from a distance of more than six thousand miles? He could not bring himself to answer her letter until he had worked out a solution.

  Rom became aware of the passing parade of pairs of orderlies bearing stretchers with the bodies of soldiers, their faces covered en route to their last resting place. He knew that each body, sewn in a blanket, was carried to the corner gum-tree plantation and the ever extended lines of graves.

  Enteric fever could carry them off at any time. He should do the decent thing and check on that sleeping soldier whose life he had saved, or vice versa – it was a moot point.

  He hated to be dependant on crutches, but until he retained his full strength there was no choice. Pacing the corridor, he returned to his ward and propped in the doorway, glad to lean against a supporting wall.

  He studied the patient who lay in the far corner of the room, his gaze fixed on a small bird, a beautifully coloured African Finch that was pecking at a bowl on the windowsill.

  Rom found it difficult to believe this was the same chap he had found in that barn, dirty, blood-stained, with matted dark hair, and naked.

  The young man sitting upright in bed wore a regulation white hospital gown. Scrubbed and clean as a newborn babe, his shaggy long hair was now the colour of snow when stained by sunlight. His features, tanned by the sun, were strong – regular except for the long, slightly skewered nose. The high cheekbones and jaw line had a distinctive cast, the curve of the mouth wide yet surprisingly soft.

  Even from across the room, Rom could see his eyes were the vivid blue often found on men born to the sea. He could be of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, or like many Australians of their generation, the product of mixed European ancestry with a strong Nordic vein.

  Intrigued by the mystery of a man with no name, Rom hobbled across to his bedside. The snowy-haired patient watched his approach but gave no sign of recognition. Rom drew up a chair and propped his crutches.

  ‘G’day, mate. How are you feeling today?’

  ‘More than a bit lost. You know me, do you?’ the patient asked.

  ‘Let’s just say we have a bit of shared history. The name’s Rom – Roman Delaney. I’m the V.M.R. scout who found you lying in a derelict barn, naked as the day you were born. You had a raging fever. You drained my water bottle. I slung you over my horse and headed for a field hospital. That’s all I remember. Any of that make sense?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? I’m the man with no name. Nothing.’

  Rom nodded. ‘No need to bust a gut worrying. It’ll all come back to you. I just dropped by to say thanks.’

  ‘What for? Sounds like you saved my life.’

  Rom tapped th
e scar over his brow. ‘I copped a sniper’s Maxim-Henry bullet. Evidently you came to and led the horse that carried me to safety. So here we both are, alive and all in one piece.’

  ‘Except for one vital missing part – my memory.’

  ‘Let time take care of that. Meanwhile, what the hell do I call you?’

  The patient gestured to the windowsill. ‘When Sister asked who I was, I mumbled something. Maybe I said “French”. Maybe I was just looking at that African Finch. Anyway, she wrote “Finch” on my medical chart until my real name turns up.’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘If it ever does.’

  ‘There must be some clues in the records. Us Australians were split up and assigned to British officers all over the country – as messy as a dog’s breakfast. But the Imperial records will track you down sooner or later.’

  Clearly less confident, Finch shook his head. ‘They tell me scores of men have gone missing. Maybe killed in action and buried somewhere by the Boers.’

  Rom had a vivid flash of the face of the young Boer he had buried in the mass grave at Wilmansrust.

  He looked just like me. He could have been my brother.

  Rom managed an evasive answer. ‘There’s nothing more equal than death on a battlefield, mate.’

  Finch gave him a searching look as if to test him. ‘Maybe I’m a deserter – they shoot you for that, don’t they?’

  Rom hoped he sounded convincing. ‘Nah, they’re too busy shooting the Boers. But if you were a deserter, don’t expect me to be shocked. There but for the grace of God, go I. After the bloodbath at Wilmansrust, I ran like the devil – until the Boers took a mob of us prisoner.’

  ‘Did they shoot any prisoners?’ Finch asked warily.

  ‘Not their style. They stripped us of our weapons and uniforms, commandeered whatever Argentinean mules hadn’t been shot in the ambush. Marched us miles across the veldt – then set us free to walk back to our lines barefoot. Guerrilla fighters don’t have the facilities to take prisoners. I reckon as enemies go, the Boers are a decent mob.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for that.’

  To bridge the silence, Rom sounded positive. ‘Were there any clues in your jacket?’