by Lydia Syson
‘A roundabout route to here,’ one of the other sailors said.
‘By way of the Navigators too,’ said Billy.
Pa thrust Lizzie and Queenie forward.
‘Say how d’ye do. Where do you think you are?’
The first mate’s courtesy was serious and universal. He crunched Billy’s fist, bowed to the curtseying girls, then turned to Albert, and hesitated. It had been long enough for Lizzie to forget how it always was with Albert and strangers, to be surprised afresh by that passing uncertainty. To her eyes, he looked more gaunt than angelic these days, and his curls were tarnished. But his beauty still brought the visitors up short.
‘Dang my buttons,’ said Higgins. ‘Settlers on Monday Island again! Never thought I’d see the day.’
The other men moved closer, eyeing Albert, winking at Gussie, nodding at the older girls. Then came so many questions, all at once, nobody knew who or how to answer.
‘We always heard this place had a curse on it.’
‘If we’d not seen the smoke, we’d have given you a wide berth.’
‘The sight of your little ones, dancing round the bonfire! Heartbreaking!’
‘How’re you faring?’ asked Higgins. ‘Short commons?’
Pa shook his head, but it was no denial.
‘It’s not been easy. Every day banyan day for a while. Then we got ourselves up the cliffs –’ at this they both glanced up, and Higgins whistled ‘– and tracked down some wild goats … we’ve fish and mutton-birds, and eggs of course, in season, and goat’s milk, and taro … corn and pumpkins coming.’
‘My, oh my. Regular Swiss Family … what did you say the name was? Peacock? Well, we’ve brought you some provisions.’
Then he turned and yelled to the crew in a topsail voice. ‘Set to, my livelies! We’ve got ourselves a Swiss Family Peacock here … What are you waiting for?’
Quickly forming a chain and breaking into song, the sailors started tossing crates and boxes between them.
‘Are you coming to live here?’ asked Billy.
‘We’ll help you build a house,’ Queenie said.
‘No, miss, this lot’s for you,’ said a dark-skinned sailor with a plait down his back. Seeing her mouth fall open, he added, ‘And the rest of your fine family.’
Higgins quickly turned to Mr and Mrs Peacock. ‘Hope we wasn’t presumin’? We figured you could do with supplies. Brought you … now let’s see …’ He checked the items off on his fingers. ‘Flour, sugar, a few potatoes …’ A collective gasp. ‘Somewhat wormy now. What else is there? Salt beef and pickles. Couple o’ sides o’ bacon. Biscuit. Molasses. A tin or two of coffee too – not much, I’m afraid ma’am … and the smallest packet of tea, but better than nothing.’ Here he turned to Ma. She let out a whisper of a sigh. ‘Some baccy. Oh, and a barrel of brandy. And we’ll have no talk of payment.’ Higgins glanced at the children. ‘We’ve had a good haul in the Solander Grounds, and our own supplies are grand.’
Pa began to bristle.
‘We’re no charity cases,’ he said. ‘We—’
Higgins stepped back, hands raised soothingly.
‘I see what you’re saying,’ Mr Peacock went on. ‘But the strength of the matter is—’
‘The strength of the matter is that we’re very grateful to you,’ interrupted Mrs Peacock. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done if you’d not come back, I really don’t. Hush now, Joseph. You know quite well the truth of it.’
At last Pa nodded, and looked at the sand, and then the sky, and nodded again.
‘Very grateful,’ he said, his voice choked.
Mrs Peacock sniffed and rummaged in her apron pocket for a handkerchief.
Higgins’s hand closed about the monkey bag round his neck, as if he didn’t trust the Peacocks not to fill it up with coins regardless, and he and his crew followed the children up to their battered home.
‘Not surprised we didn’t spy this place from the Cloud. Sure looks like a cosy spot up there by the woods.’
To Lizzie, the hut looked small and shabby.
‘Show them the gardens, Joseph, while I make the tea,’ said Ma, pointedly.
So many deep voices, so many men at the table on their best behaviour, awkwardly silenced by white linen and blue china. Two golden hoops gleamed from a single ear on the shaven dome of the biggest man of all, the boat-steerer. He shook his head when Lizzie offered the milk jug, as if he didn’t trust himself not to crush it between his timber-dark hands. Billy couldn’t take his eyes off him.
‘Stores are in the outhouse, Mrs Peacock. Everything you could need, we hope,’ said Higgins, joining them at last.
‘We don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Anyone would have done the same. Anyone but that hufty-tufty toe-rigger of a captain who brought you here.’
So Pa had told him everything.
‘Why, if I ever run into … Still, you must be mighty proud of what you’ve managed here. You’ve raised yourself a plucky bunch. If you can survive what you’ve had to so far – and you’ll get through this winter, now – I reckon you’ll make a go of it here.’
‘I believe we will.’
‘But have you never thought about moving to the other side? Landing’s much easier on North Bay.’
‘Perhaps. But we’ve planted so many vegetables here now, and they’re growing so well.’
He looked at Ma, expecting her to agree, but the mask of tranquillity she usually wore was sliding away. Her lips twitched. Her eyes were unreliable. Then out she burst:
‘Mr Higgins, I must ask you. I wasn’t going to, and I know I shouldn’t, but really I have to. Could you not find a little room for us on the Magellan Cloud? I beg you, sir, could you not just take us off this wretched island?’
The children held their breath. The slurping stopped. Saucers hovered mid-air.
Ma turned to Pa. He looked at the mud floor very slowly. His fists, hanging by his side, uncurled and stretched out all their fingers. Queenie slipped her hand into Lizzie’s. Albert’s eyes were huge. Pa will never leave here, thought Lizzie, chilled and fearful. Does Ma intend to flee without him?
‘Mrs P,’ Pa said, slowly and sadly shaking his head. ‘Oh, Mrs P. Can you really mean that?’
Ma put a hand on his arm, looking for forgiveness.
‘It’s too much,’ she said, turning from Pa to Mr Higgins. Her fingers trembled. ‘We’ve given it our best, but who’s to say what’s around the corner, when these folk have gone, and not another ship till Lord alone knows when. We’ve never been quitters by choosing.’ A last anxious glance at Mr Peacock, and then she said it again, and nobody could doubt she meant it. ‘It’s too hard, this place. It’s too much. Won’t you take us off with you? All of us, I mean.’
The silence deepened. Mr Peacock turned his back and gripped the window frame, as if he did not trust himself to speak. Lizzie burned with sorrow. Slow seconds passed. It seemed to take forever for Higgins to stammer out his answer. He couldn’t look at Ma.
‘No. We can’t.’
Mrs Peacock wilted. Just for a moment. And then recovered herself so quickly you’d think she’d never even asked.
‘Well. That’s that then. Not to worry. Now, if I can just get to that flour you’ve brought us, I’ll have a plate of scones on the table before you know it, and at least we’ll send you on your way well fed.’
Mr Higgins stood in the doorway and didn’t move to let her past, even when she tried to dodge his bulk. He addressed her sincerely and directly.
‘Mrs Peacock, I’m dreadful sorry. If I could change matters, I would. But like I said to your husband, we’re on our way north now. We’ve come from the cruising grounds the other side of En Zee, and we’re working our way north, but we’ll be dead off the shipping routes all the way. There’s not an island I can think of to put you down on … leastways not one a jot better than this, and plenty worse … the whaling season’s nearly over, and … I lied to you before, God help me … we’ve only ta
ken five hundred barrels, so we’re hard-pressed as it is. If the odds were with us, I’m sure the master would take you up to Feejee, or some other semi-civilised kind of port … but we’ll be going nowhere near. You wouldn’t want a shoddier spot than you find yourselves in now?’
‘No, indeed,’ agreed Mrs Peacock, awkwardly.
Lizzie wished Ma had never asked. The shame and regret on Mr Higgins’s face was something awful. And the humiliation of begging like that. Poor Pa. Not even to be consulted. She spoke up without thinking.
‘It’s all right, Mr Higgins,’ Lizzie boldly soothed him. ‘Really it is. It’s not your fault. And like Pa says, we’re not quitters. It’s a fine island when it’s not so stormy. We love it really. It’s ours, you see.’
Her father turned round when he heard her words. His eyes, their clarity always startling, had acquired a peculiar charge. They fell on Lizzie with a look of such loving intensity that she felt her powers limitless. Almost weightless. She knew then she was right, and Pa agreed. This was no time to be giving up. With all the new supplies, and more hard work, they’d make a paradise of their island yet. Defeat was unthinkable. She didn’t even notice she’d given Ma’s words to Pa.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Mrs Peacock agreed, blushing. ‘And we can’t thank you enough anyway. You came back, didn’t you? And you didn’t have to. We truly appreciate your kindness.’
‘And yours to us.’ Mr Higgins nodded at the party of sailors, who had set down their empty cups, and were eager to leave such high emotions on the shore. ‘We must be making our way now, but I’ll tell you this: from here to Nantucket, wherever we go, any ship we meet will hear all about you. We’ll tell ’em all to come and call if ever they’re near.’
‘Very good of you,’ said Mr Peacock. ‘And they’ll soon get something for their pains. I came here with plans, you know. Growing plans. Trading plans. Another few years … Albert’s helping me … might look a bit puny now, but he’s growing, aren’t you, boy?’
‘You’ve a strong team indeed, Mr Peacock.’ Doubt scudding, Mr Higgins took in the labour force lining up outside the hut, all knobbly wrists growing out of too-short sleeves. Too many bones showing altogether, he must have thought. ‘But a few kanakas would make it stronger still. Had you thought of that?’
Pa shook his head.
‘Well, I’ll put the word out for you. The boys from Savage Island are all good workers, from all I’ve heard.’
Ma shook her head in a different way. ‘Very good of you, Mr Higgins. But every kanaka I’ve seen on a plantation has been a lazy kind of fellow.’
‘Oh no, indeed, not these ones. Trust me. You won’t find better the length and breadth of the Pacific. Don’t fret, ma’am, Savage Island means nothing now. Those boys work hard, and live clean. No drinking. No cursing. As God-fearing as you or me and maybe more so.’
‘It’s an idea, Joseph. What do you make of it?’
Mr Peacock pondered, weighing up two different versions of independence.
‘Yes. We’d like that,’ he said. ‘Very much.’
BEFORE
They came in the night, with no warning. Where had they been hiding before? What had they been doing? Breeding, certainly. Watching perhaps, peering out from the shelter of fallen palm fronds, straw-dry yellow, waiting until the pale silky strands were sprouting from the cobs in the stand of Indian corn, and the first sweet squash forming from bright orange flowers below, waiting until the baby beanstems were winding skywards. They had bided their time with infinite patience, somehow knowing that it would be worth it. The beasts could not have planned it better. Now they could have the new crop and the old. Nobody heard the scuttle of tiny claws, the crunch of rodent teeth on fresh, sharp stalks, the slide of a bare tail.
*
‘Why’s Pa cursing?’ asked Queenie, looking over to the garden. ‘Is he angry with Albert?’
‘I hope not,’ said Ada. ‘Anyway, Albert’s fetching wood.’ Unless it was something he’d done earlier. Or failed to do. You could never tell.
‘Is Pa hurt?’ Lizzie joined them, Gus on her hip.
There was something animal in the tone, something between pain and anger and despair. Mrs Peacock dried her hands and said they should all go and see if Pa needed help. Her voice was low and clipped, her mouth hard and shrunken. She could never bear bad language.
Mr Peacock seemed to be praying. He was on his knees, bowed over the fresh earth which Lizzie had helped dig and rake the day before.
‘Joseph?’
Ma began to run. Pa looked up, raw-faced as the children had never witnessed, and flicked a despairing hand at the tidy rows of tiny craters which now marked the soil.
‘Gone. Every one. Every single one.’
Every newly planted bean, every kernel of maize, every creamy pumpkin seed. Taken with the precision of a long-planned military operation. The same could not be said of the attack on the growing vegetables. Here the rats had left a careless mess. Morsels of scattered squash flesh, double-grooved by incisors working pair by pair. Empty corn husks, and half-chewed cobs. Discarded bean pods, bright green, and torn, tangled strands of golden thread. The whole garden laid waste.
Queenie began to cry, Sal and her scrawny puppy to scratch and sniff and growl. Lizzie felt herself shaking. ‘Why? Why?’ she moaned uselessly, at nobody in particular, in no hope of an answer. Albert found his legs could not support him, and collapsed against Ada.
‘Can nothing be saved?’
Pa didn’t answer Ma’s strangled question. He was turning over a cob he’d picked up, checking to see if any kernels had survived. A few. The children stood in a half circle around him, waiting for his reply.
‘I don’t know, Mrs P. I don’t know.’
‘Oh, Joseph, Joseph, we did not deserve this,’ whispered Ma. ‘How can we go on?’
Pa shook his head, looking again at the ravagement around him, and his devastated children. He bent to scoop away Queenie’s tears with a rough finger in the dark dip below each eye: one, two. And he knelt again, fixing his eyes on his small daughter’s face, devouring her, determined to rouse her from despair. ‘So what do we need now?’
She stared back, frowning.
‘Breakfast,’ she replied.
‘Traps,’ Pa corrected her, already reaching for a shovel.
*
More digging. Great, deep holes all around the devastated vegetable garden.
‘The bottom must be wider than the top,’ ordered Pa. But the sides kept crumbling. Eventually only Billy was both strong and light enough to dig. He scraped away at the bottom, out of sight for hours. Pa said that he would end up in England. Nobody laughed. The others held out hooked sticks to hoick out rich billycans of rich earth he filled up for them. Eventually Pa stuck a long bare branch into the hole, and Billy clambered up it like a terrified tightrope walker, hanging on with all his might to Pa and Albert’s outstretched hands. The branch would become a ladder for the rats, Pa explained, and they started to dig the next hole.
‘Where have they all gone?’ Queenie asked later that morning.
‘They’re sleeping off their feast,’ said Ma, bitterly, and disappeared inside so the children would not see her face.
Pa took the children into the bush to show them the beginnings of rat runs – tiny paths and tunnels in the vegetation, not four inches wide or tall. All led straight to their vegetable garden.
‘They must think we planted everything specially for them,’ he said.
Rotten fish heads and goat offal, all the detritus they usually left on the mountain or on the beach to be swept away by surf, became precious bait. At dusk Pa tied up Sal and Spy and left them whining in the shade of the outhouse. He smeared the rat-ladders with entrails, and slopped more guts and lungs into the wide bottom of the pits below. Then it was a question of waiting for darkness to fall.
‘They’ll be back,’ he assured the exhausted children.
That first night Ma made them all stay in the house. Liz
zie didn’t see why, and crept out as soon as the others were asleep to stand under the shadow of the trees, out of the moonlight. She soon heard skitter-skattering and squeaks – the rats were arriving. Her fingers curled. The terriers began whining to be released. But Pa shushed them. Waiting. Waiting. Till the time was right.
And then he untied the dogs.
They were in the nearest pit in a single bound. A moment later, the scrapping and scratching and screeching and killing began. Lizzie hugged herself, her eyes bulging and her heart galloping. What had she expected? Not enemies in these numbers. The invisible frenzy seemed endless: sharp, sudden movements, the occasional yelp and high-pitched screech, but for the most part intense, efficient and chillingly quiet. From time to time Pa’s growl overlaid the circling, scratching, rooting, scrambling sounds.
‘Drop it, Spy! Good dog, Sal!’
Until there were no rats left to kill, and all that could be heard was the snap and crunch of tiny bones as the dogs ate and enjoyed their reward.
The morning revealed abandoned tails and corpses. The rats were smaller and darker than English ones, Ma told the children. In New Zealand, where Pa had seen pit traps like these, the Maori called the creatures kiore. Polynesian adventurers, they were said to swim from island to island, their teeth in each other’s tails. But Pa said that was just a story; they came ashore with passing ships, and bred so fast, so what could you do but kill them?
‘Eat them?’ suggested Billy.
Ma shuddered and Pa said quietly, ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.’
Lizzie saw that he actually thought it might, and wondered too. The taro and kumara were all finished. All fruits and berries stripped from the trees. The goats were getting ever more canny. If they didn’t defeat the rats, they’d be back to milk and fern roots. Or the rats themselves.
So many corpses, yet still more live ones came. One hundred and twenty-three one night. A hundred and seventy-six the next. A few nights later the dogs killed two hundred and twelve of them, Pa said. Ma worried that the terriers would get fat and lazy. The rats started foraging by day as well as night. Pa made swinging larders for Ma to keep the food in, and Lizzie and Billy joined Sal and Spy on the warpath, collecting the rodents in baited tins, hidden in bushes and tilted towards the rat runs. On a command from Lizzie, just as the rats came swarming and leaping inside, squirming and crawling over each other in their eagerness, Billy would jerk the tin upright. In the blink of an eye the creatures tipped into a seething mass of tails and claws and sleek black fur which the children presented to the dogs and then turned away. Though it was hard not to look. There was a fascination in seeing one animal so effectively dispatching another, even if nobody would admit it.
