The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  I told him I hadn’t.

  ‘Heatherley did fourteen years in Van Diemen’s Land as a forger. Take Yandi or anyone you like to fetch him in. We are in need of him.’

  I noticed how he had said, ‘Yandi or anyone you like . . .’ As if Yandi was no longer an essential person to him.

  I found Yandi, who did seem a happier soul now that his initiation was accomplished. He called cheerily to other darks as we left, saying, ‘Mr Dickens and me are off to find that Heatherley feller.’

  Yandi was a useful guide. Fred Bonney had boasted, like a proud uncle, that the Paakantji did not have maps but they had songs, and as they travelled they mentally recited the song and compared it to hills and watercourses or sumps round about to find out where they were. He’d told me, ‘If you ever hear a Paakantji say he knows the song for the country, you can be at ease. You’ll never get lost.’

  The country over which we rode on the way to Cobrilla was undulating, with revelations beyond most low ridges and now and then a treasure – a waterhole, or mulla mulla grass with white cones of flowers, or the vivid purple blooms of the parakeelya desert bush in the midst of red soil. For I too was acquiring a map of this country. I could tell a clump of cow Mitchell grass from Queensland bluegrass and from neverfail, the grass that defied droughts.

  We got to the gate into Cobrilla paddock late in the day, and advanced into a basin full of saltbush to Heatherley’s hut. He was not there but rode in at last from inspecting Cobrilla’s western boundary. He was a man in his late thirties, I would say, tall but with an apologetic stoop and amply bearded. He didn’t seem surprised when I told him I’d been sent to fetch him by Edward Bonney.

  It was getting cold in the manner of this desert country, and he invited us into his hut to eat dinner. Several crayon sketches of the countryside were pinned on the walls, along with a watercolour of what looked like the Lake District back home. It looked recent so was possibly done from memory. When I praised the drawings he’d done of the Mutawintji mountains and the Cullowie artesian springs, all he replied was, ‘Learned a mite of draftsmanship once.’

  After dinner, Heatherley offered me his bed for the night, but I liked my swag, the glint of my own fire and the southern hemisphere sky thick with so many constellations.

  The next morning we left early, when the hills were pure fawn edges in the clearest early light. Whatever the day came to deliver, this country looked newborn each morning and in winter, with frost or condensation, glinted forth promises it might not keep.

  I asked Heatherley if the priest or Cultay had come through Cobrilla on their search for Barrakoon.

  ‘I wouldn’t have objected to seeing a priest,’ said Heatherley, ‘my old mother being of that persuasion. But no.’

  I delivered him to Edward Bonney’s office a little before noon, and waited in the dining room for a glimmer of enlightenment as to why Edward had sent for him by way of voices overheard through the closed door.

  After a while Edward emerged, his manner secretive but jovial. He thanked me for fetching Heatherley and said, ‘This is to be a confidential matter between us. Are you happy that it be so, Plorn?’

  I said of course, and he said I had always been a properly discreet chap, and that since I had come to him with news of Fremmel’s machinations, I deserved an explanation. ‘Come here and have a sherry with me at five,’ he suggested. ‘Willy Suttor’s got the right materials for Heatherley, so he’ll be over there by then. I’ll tell you all in confidence. Very well?’

  Naturally enough, I agreed, believing Edward Bonney had no interest in me in terms of his ‘tendency’. Meanwhile, I went over to the blacksmith’s shop and found Larkin and his assistant crafting a metal gate frame.

  Larkin, child of convicts, carried that quietly intoxicating air of a man who had found precisely his time and place and companions.

  ‘Have you heard from the priest?’ I asked Larkin.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll ever send me news, Mr Plorn. But one of the Afghan camel drivers who was here recently saw Father Charisse trailing behind Barrakoon’s people on the road up near Mount Browne. I asked did he have a horse, and the Ghan told me, “No horse, sahib.” Walking, he said, and looking thin. Probably had gut problems from some of the food.’

  We let our minds play on this image of the cassocked monk keeping up with the ruthless pace of a clan of darks on their travels.

  ‘A strange choice for a priest to make,’ I said.

  ‘If I were him, I would stay with my own people,’ Larkin replied, ‘which is certainly the way things are normally done. But he has a different wisdom.’

  We thought about the monk, and of how far from the normal exercise of clerics like the Reverend Rutledge in town he had strayed. It was a strange comfort to know Anglicans were not tempted to anything as extravagant as Father Charisse was chasing.

  ‘I hope they give him a second kangaroo skin against the cold at night.’

  ‘My wife gave him one of the quilts,’ said the blacksmith. ‘The thing is, he can claim to be the apostle to the Paakantji . . .’

  It struck me that it was midsummer in England and I wondered if the guvnor had enough time to enjoy himself at Gad’s Hill. Falstaff’s Hill just by it. The Medway behind, the Thames before. A place not far from where the guvnor had grown up, in Chatham. It seemed Father had always wanted to live on that hill. We were required to memorise Falstaff’s speech from Shakespeare: ‘But, my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning, by four o’clock early at Gad’s Hill, there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses. I have visors for you all; you have horses for yourselves.’

  Aunt Georgie said once, casually, that this speech from Henry IV added hundreds if not thousands to the value of Gad’s Hill as far as Father was concerned. The guvnor seemed, every chance that he got, to call it Shakespeare’s Gad’s Hill, and he would not have been as proud of Gad’s Hill had it been the scene of a tragic event in Shakespeare as he was that it was a sportive one, in the spirit of the place.

  I couldn’t remember much of my childhood before he owned it, and it was associated with those particularly rich, full times of which I wanted to remind Alfred; when it was full of people and we children all ran mad in the garden. And Uncle Henry Austin helped him build a wonderful tunnel under the road into the area we called the Wilderness, on the other side, where he had his little chalet.

  In the spirit of these memories, I wrote to Aunt Georgie to find out how the summer was progressing, and then to Mama at Gloucester Terrace, boasting a little of my colonial accomplishments.

  By the time I’d finished writing to Mama it was nearly five o’clock. Edward welcomed me into his office and poured us each a glass of port, saying, ‘Heatherley’s labours kept him late into the day and he will rest tonight with Willy Suttor and be off home to Cobrilla paddock tomorrow. It is fortunate for my brother and I that British society, combined with the penal history of the colonies, generates an army of reclusive men, and Heatherley is yet another of them.’

  He paused briefly and then said, ‘I did receive a letter from Maurice. It is a confidential letter between him and me. But now, Heatherley is a remarkable fellow with remarkable gifts who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for forging elegant bills of exchange and promissory notes. He arrived in Tasmania on the heels of some Canadian and American rebels who had taken part in an uprising in Ontario. Our consul-general in New York warned the government that an American plot was afoot to rescue some of the rebels by having whaling ships rendezvous with them. Letters to the prisoners from the conspirators – friends, that is, of the prisoners – were intercepted, as were replies from the American convicts. So the authorities in Van Diemen’s Land promised Heatherley his ticket-of-leave if he forged new letters, which he did. These caused a number of the prisoners to be arrested for attempted escape when they arrived at the wrong point on the coast to be picked up by their rescue ships, while the whalers likewise hove to at a false
meeting place and ultimately continued their voyage without a single escapee to their credit.

  ‘So I’ve asked Mr Heatherley to use his magic with Maurice’s letter, interspersing what Maurice wrote with false information. He has also aged and marked an envelope with an Adelaide postmark, since postmarks are one of his skills as well. I hope you get the same small thrill of subversion from it as I do.’

  I smiled.

  Edward told me I could use one of the drovers to deliver the revised letter to Mr Fremmel with a note to him saying I’d found it inside a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in Mr Bonney’s office. Edward sent me into the office, and there it was in the Golden Treasury. The envelope prepared by Heatherley had the slight furriness around its edges that oft-handled and specially stored envelopes have. When I came out of the office again Edward Bonney winked at me, in a modestly triumphant frame of mind. ‘It’s dangerous to cross Mr Fremmel, but it’s dangerous to cross the Bonneys too,’ he said. ‘I’ll always be grateful to you, Plorn.’

  Beneath my excitement I did feel a little like a man on a rock ledge, fascinated by the prospects before me but uncertain of how secure my footing was. But one day, when the time was ripe, I would have a splendid story to tell Alfred, perhaps in his stock and station agency in Hamilton, Victoria, should that come to pass.

  Just after Clough turned his horse to town with the forged letter and envelope, enclosed in a larger envelope still, I saw Heatherley move out from the store, grateful to be returning to Cobrilla.

  30

  One crisp day in June, which would turn out to be a momentous month, I received a letter from my brother Frank on embossed letterhead saying: ‘Sub-Inspector F. J. Dickens, Bengal Mounted Police.’

  I was impressed by ‘Sub-Inspector’ – it seemed to sit on the page like a promise of greater things still.

  Dearest Plorn,

  I’m conscious that I haven’t written to my favourite and youngest brother to wish him a happy time in the colonies. I’ve hesitated for fear that my interest in doing so might be a bad omen because after the guvnor got me a post here, I was expecting to meet up with dear old Walter in Calcutta, just as you were hoping to meet up with Alfred. And to think that he died just weeks before I landed! At least he died in an hour of happiness, looking forward to home.

  Poor Walter indeed. Dead at twenty-one before the New Year pealed.

  All I ended up seeing of him were his bills for the officers’ mess, the regimental store, the billiards room and a few merchants. Little more than a fairly modest pile, but more than I could deal with, given my uncertainty about my own future expenses. So I sent these invoices on to the ever-reliable Aunt Georgie. Anyhow, because of the fit that killed poor Walter, it was not to be a conquest of Bengal by the Dickens brothers. I got over it, of course, and have made sure he has a neat little grave in the military cemetery at the camp in Bhowanipore. Please tell Mother you heard as much when you write to her. Brother Charley tells me she still takes Walter’s loss pretty hard, poor woman, and knowing we keep Walter’s memory green between us is a comfort to her.

  Indeed, such is the potency of the guvnor’s name that a number of the powerful here have suggested Walter be moved to South Park cemetery, the chief one here, as if it is to be Walter’s duty in death to console passing mourners on the basis that if a Dickens is there people will know that even the great wizard of tales has given a son to the Indian enterprise!

  There is a certain amount of routine in the work here. I am often sent with a troop of native police just to seize a debtor’s assets. But the place is colourful. All cloth, all spice. And no one could say I was overworked. The guvnor could do what’s required of me and still have time over to write in the long evenings. There is no shortage of servants and my villa is charming in a plain sort of way, with filmy curtains all through it that sometimes give a sense to me that it’s built out of air. We are all quite safe. Walter and others did excellent work suppressing the mutiny, and I doubt anything like it will happen again.

  Even so, I think I might like Australia or New Zealand or South Africa perhaps. Yes, it is all very colourful here, but not with the colours of my soul, I don’t think. Yet I do feel I owe it to the guvnor to achieve rank and merit here, and I am pleased it is within my power to do so. By the way, the other day I was in the regimental library of the Black Watch and there was a thin bound volume of the guvnor’s letter to fallen girls going to Urania Cottage. It is a wonderful letter, written without any false piety from a grand soul to souls in the abyss, and my heart burst with pride in it. I think I can say it was Christ-like. I’ve determined to keep a copy close to me, to remind me how to behave towards others.

  I believe Alfred is near you in the bush, which must be very pleasing and a solace. Give Skittles my fraternal love when you see him. I imagine you are both dazzling the colonial maidens with pavanes and the monologues of Mayhew? Here there are many girls, but their targets are the regimental chaps and we police are chiefly approached by widows whose standards have slipped. If your forlorn brother Frankie is ever to find a bride, I think it must be during home leave if I can persuade some innocent girl she will love Bengal. And indeed, if you saw some of the parasitic fevers chaps from the remoter stations catch, Calcutta can seem a desirable centre with every convenience. Of course, should I ever be promoted to Inspector, I will be posted to one of those outer places like Ghaihab amongst the Moslems or Jhargram amongst the Hindus. I am sternly determined, let me assure you, to live through with daily ingestion of malt whisky chota pegs.

  With brotherly affection,

  Frank

  I felt an exquisite pleasure at Frank’s assessment of our father, and went looking for his letter amongst the bookshelves in the living room of Momba Station homestead. The titles of a number of my father’s works chided me here, but at least I could pretend I was approaching them through the foothills of the guvnor’s shorter works. I searched in some bound copies of Household Words, then I looked at a volume of essays and found his American Notes, written long before I was born, as well as a piece on the Anglican Church and A Child’s History of England. But not the letter Frank had mentioned.

  31

  Very early one morning I was woken by the sound of movement and horses, and some loud shouting in the homestead paddock. When I rose and shaved, the house seemed serene again. It was only when I walked into the dining room that I saw an extraordinary and flamboyant man sitting sideways at the table drinking tea through an assembly of mighty moustache and beard. Slung over his left shoulder was the type of short jacket worn by a Russian or Hungarian hussar. He was also wearing blue pants with gold piping and large knee boots. On the table in front of him, in the place of the plate, was a revolver.

  Both Fred and Edward Bonney tried to catch my eye, signalling me to be careful.

  ‘Ah, Plorn,’ said Fred, ‘may I introduce you to Mr Pearson? Mr Pearson is in charge of us for the time being, it seems.’

  ‘It is Doctor Pearson, if you don’t mind,’ the visitor told us in a West Country English voice, quite melodious.

  ‘Dr Pearson,’ Edward murmured, as if he were trying out the name on the tongue.

  ‘Dr Pearson arrived early this morning and has command of the station,’ Fred told me.

  ‘Starlight,’ I murmured. ‘I have read about you. You’re Captain Starlight.’

  ‘I never claimed that nickname,’ he told me. ‘I am a doctor. Learned thereto by doctoring horses in the Russian army. But I am not a captain, you must understand.’

  ‘You and your associates are captains of Momba at the moment,’ observed Edward Bonney with a sniff.

  ‘Well, we will bring everyone in here soon, and then we’ll see what captaincy is about. What is your name, young man?’

  ‘I’m usually called P-L-O-R-N, Plorn. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a family name.’

  ‘And what is your family name?’

  The Bonney brothers semaphored frantically with their eyebrows.

&
nbsp; ‘Simpson,’ I told Captain Starlight. ‘S-I-M-P –’

  ‘I can spell it,’ Dr Pearson informed me as I saw the relief and small nods of approval from the Bonney brothers.

  ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘I’ve heard that this station is huge, you run it sweet as a nut, and I’ve been wanting to visit for some time. During our stay, all will remain sweet, Messrs Bonney. We have no animus against anyone here, and take pride in how we treat our guests, and all in fun. Yes, Mr Bonney and Mr Bonney both, fun!’

  At that he picked up the revolver and went to confer with his lieutenants outside. For Captain Starlight was holding up our entire station, remote boundary riders excepted for the moment.

  ‘By the way, my associate Rutherford is a cultivated man,’ he said, stopping at the door. ‘Do you have newspapers, books, et cetera?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Fred.

  ‘D’you read, Simpson?’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Rutherford would enjoy The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins’ latest, which I have.’

  ‘I want you to put together newspapers and books. Don’t stint. And you, Mr Bonney, come at your convenience, but without too much delay, and tell your darks there’ll be no station labour today. No one will ride out of Momba either.’

  Fred nodded. ‘As you say, Doctor.’

  And off Pearson strode, holstering his revolver as he walked into the hallway.

  ‘Well, my young friend Simpson . . .’ said Edward Bonney, dryly amused. ‘We are bailed up by bushrangers. That’s a new colonial experience for you. But who do they think they are, striking such poses?’

  ‘Pearson thinks he’s a surgeon, obviously,’ said Fred. ‘And he thinks Plorn’s called Simpson. Let’s maintain that. We don’t want him writing to your father for a ransom, and in the meantime Plorn will have to bucket round the countryside with Pearson and co. until it’s paid. I’ll go out and talk to the dark people. Plorn, put together a parcel of perhaps half-a-dozen recent books, none of your father’s, and any newspapers around the place. By all means, go into my office.’