The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  She seemed not to hear. She seemed intent upon examining the grainy residue in the tot.

  Upstairs the two men sat across from one another, separated by Mackie’s neat desk, the Sydney Gazette beside the accounts book, a little sign plate to the fore: In Work is Rest.

  ‘Bea Faa,’ said Wick as he placed the pelt carefully on the desk. ‘I thought that might snap your hinge.’

  ‘And I thought you’d be dead. I see we are both mistaken,’ said Mackie.

  ‘From what I heard I thought you’d be a fox-hunting man with polished boots and a painted lady for a wife and a shiny black chaise and a footman with a horsehair wig . . . perhaps a novel-reading daughter dressed in fine silks or one of them modish skirts that requires a pair of frilly drawers, lest all be revealed.’

  Mackie was silent.

  Jonas Wick thought best to move the conversation on. He read the words upon the sign plate. ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘My troubles, I got no time for riddles.’

  ‘It’s not a riddle, Mr Wick, it’s a verity, and I live by it.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. I hear you got acreage, grain. I hear you got salt too, that and more.’

  ‘Be careful with hearsay.’

  Wick drank the last of his milk and put the jar on Mackie’s desk, beside the pelt.

  The chief constable stared at the jar, such a stare a man would be forgiven for thinking it was a muddy boot.

  Wick retrieved the jar and looked about and settled for the floor. He put the jar on the floor.

  Fish knocked and the door opened ever so slightly. ‘You want I light the lamps?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mackie, and Fish hurried in, fussing at one lamp and then another.

  ‘Do you remember the surgeon on the transport?’ said Wick, as Fish departed. He was looking at Mackie’s hand, the finger pads tapping on the desk.

  Mackie nodded.

  ‘He said the climate here would fix you.’

  ‘I believe the climate helps.’ Mackie leant forward and shifted the newspaper ever so slightly. He squared the accounts book in line with the edge of the desk.

  Wick got up and stepped to the window and looked out on the square. It was almost dark. ‘A prominence indeed, well beyond the reach of your famous flood I heard.’

  ‘It is the best of scarce elevation, hereabouts.’

  ‘They say the waters rose fifty feet?’

  ‘Here and there the tops of trees, little islands, otherwise . . . an ocean.’

  ‘Imagine that.’

  ‘I still do. Now, tell me why you are here.’

  ‘I brought you the girl.’

  ‘You do me no favour on that account.’

  ‘She’s the daughter of Jeannie Faa.’

  ‘Why would that please me?’

  ‘You buy her you can do with her as you wish.’

  ‘I do not trade in women.’

  ‘She has talents, Alister, I’ve never had a skinner quite like her. There’s no damage, no nicks, no wastage when that girl skins a seal, you know why?’

  Why Jeannie Faa’s daughter would have such a skill was not without its fascination. ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘She got took in by a butcher’s wife. He trained her. Skinnin’ lambs for the warden, for the tables of the clergy.’

  ‘Why took in?’

  ‘All I know the girl was motherless. All the more reason I bring her here – I thought you might want her, being there’s history there.’

  ‘History’s naught but gossip well told.’

  ‘History may lie but blood don’t. I see you in her, plain as day.’

  ‘See what you like but keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Oh I will, I’ll keep that to myself, that and more.’

  ‘What more?’

  ‘She fled a transport, with the help of Gudgeon. She maimed the butcher.’ Wick was chuckling at the very thought.

  ‘A fugitive then?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  ‘And you bring her to me!’ Mackie stood up, the chair shunting back on the boards.

  ‘The girl’s in trouble, I thought you might take her in, see her to safe passage . . . somewhere, anywhere, I don’t know, but I do know Gudgeon’s had his fill of her.’

  Mackie closed his fists and leant upon the desk. He looked at the pelt. ‘Let’s to business.’

  Wick ran his hand along the pelt, loosed the tie. ‘We’re enterprising men are we not?’

  ‘It’s fifteen years, Mr Wick, I don’t know what you are save for the rumours.’

  ‘Alister, you’re makin’ this hard.’

  ‘Then put your case and be done.’

  Wick stared at Mackie, nodding. ‘How the wheel has turned. I feel like I have an audience with a potentate.’

  ‘You’ve done me no favour bringing that girl.’

  ‘She’s but a morsel, this is the meal.’ He tapped the pelt.

  ‘Then you best serve it up.’

  Wick took hold of the pelt and put it on his lap, played his fingers upon it like he’d just sat down to a reed-organ. ‘I don’t know another soul so ripe and ready as you for the gift I bear.’

  He rolled out the pelt on the desk, ran his palm across the fur. ‘Ever seen the like? Cured to perfection, better than otter, better than beaver, why, I doubt mink would compare, you just run your hand, feel; that my old friend is the finest, softest pelt this dark world has ever seen. I can see the gentlemen and the ladies in all the grand cities, promenading in their long coats and hats and muffles and gloves and fur-lined boots and God knows what else, saddle blankets for soft-skinned Galloways, underlays for bed-ridden nabobs – I say there’s a fortune to be made . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve seen islands south of the forties, teeming with the fur seal – rookeries like you never laid your eyes on.’ He paused for a moment, noting that Mackie was content to listen. ‘To speak of abundance does not convey the numberless sights I’ve seen.’

  The chief constable gestured for the pelt and Wick handed it to him. It was without a doubt the finest pelt of any kind he had ever handled. Wick was keen to talk: ‘Note the bristly hair is gone. Gone! Not a filament of them bristles left.’

  Mackie nodded. The pelt was a miracle. ‘I know of no way to cure the fur of its bristly hair without degrading the product.’

  ‘I can cure pelts to perfection, not the slightest damage to the underfur. You won’t find a muff in a nunnery as soft and pure as this,’ said Wick.

  ‘You have in mind a venture?’

  ‘I hear you got a ship, a sealer.’

  ‘Hearsay will run a mile before the truth gets its boots on.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I do, in Sydney . . . the ribbing stressed to ruination, the wedges rotten.’

  ‘A salvage?’

  ‘No, a liquidation.’

  Jonas Wick sat quietly, taking this in. ‘Can it be fixed, and fitted out, for the South Seas?’

  ‘I am advised yes.’

  ‘What I need from you is a ship and provisions and what you get from me is the venture, the cure, profitable beyond your dreams, a quarter of the profit, probably more.’

  ‘A quarter?’

  ‘The owners take half, the officers a quarter and the crew and the gangs split the last quarter in the pot. You and I split the half because I will dress and cure the pelts and you, you have the means to come into a ship and provision the enterprise, salt included. Who knows, it might be more than a half for the two of us.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘The crew and the gang is paid out of the catch, paid in pelts – skins and oil – so upon return we buy their share back at the market price, about three shillings a pelt, and most of that they’ll want in grog.’

  ‘I have grog,’ said Mackie.

  Wick sensed Mackie snared. ‘You have grog, indeed you do my friend. And I’ll have a crew so deep in hock we’ll buy their share for nine pence per pelt
or thereabouts, less than a shilling let’s say. I do sometimes wonder how the common sea rat manages to scratch his cadaverous arse.’

  Mackie was contemplating the portions and the figures. ‘Nine pence?’

  ‘A shilling at the most.’ Wick was pleased they were now talking the figures.

  ‘That is peonage.’

  ‘That is what?’

  ‘Debt slavery. I cannot abide such arrangements and I will not sink to them. We are awash with peonage here and I am its enemy.’

  ‘If you have scruples in this regard . . .’

  ‘I have scruples, and I know fair dealing is lucrative in the long run – some people have trouble understanding that.’

  ‘Seems you demean me at every turn, I had hoped for a better welcome.’

  ‘You live on hope you die fasting.’

  Jonas Wick took a deep breath and heaved a sigh. ‘This is a perfect pelt right here, no spoilage in the curing, no discount for damage in the dressing or the packing – we can deliver up crated pelts the likes of which have never before been seen in London, knock the beaver out, sink the damned Americans. They can eat cack and drink their own piss and you can go home to Yetholm, you can buy the entire village if you want to, why, you can build a house to make your mother’s head spin.’

  It was one of Wick’s prerogatives to know more of the chief constable’s past than most on the river, save for Cuff and Dr Woody.

  ‘I have no intention of going home,’ said Mackie.

  ‘The question is, are we in the way of business, you and I? Think of our time on that stinking transport. What a turn it would be . . .’

  ‘I have not forgotten that transport; I owe you my life, I know that.’

  For a time on the transport he could barely sit up, let alone walk. But for the attentions of Wick who fetched his ration and fed it to him and gave him water, he would have died, his body, shrouded, slipping from a greased plank into the black depths of an infinite ocean. ‘Don’t let them bury me at sea,’ he’d said. But down he went, the eye of his periodic dream tracking the lumpy, billowing shroud into the depths until he woke, gasping for air, his heart fit to burst.

  ‘A bond forged in obstinate misery,’ said Wick, ‘and here we are plotting riches beyond our wildest dreams.’

  ‘There is no bond. What debt there was . . . was paid.’

  ‘Them seven florins in the waisting, I never took them I swear.’

  ‘I make no accusation on that score,’ said Mackie. He gestured for the pelt and Wick handed it to him. He took his time looking it over once again, running his fingers through the fur. ‘I’ll see the cure at work before I commit a penny. Every step, every detail, and I’ll know the cost per piece from start to finish.’

  ‘You’ll see the cure when we have an agreement, not before.’

  ‘The cat is chasing its tail here.’

  ‘What cat is that?’ Wick was at a loss. The slack in his leverage had come as a surprise. ‘What we have here is an impasse if not a rupture.’

  ‘Every step, every detail. Take it or leave it.’

  Only now did the full meaning of the hearsay about Mackie come home to Jonas Wick. He was a man entirely in command of his sphere at the river, content to make no compromise. ‘Here is the man, the boy is no more!’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘As it should be, an agreement between men. Alister, we’ll turn the trade upside down, think of it!’

  ‘I’ll first have that cure.’

  ‘And I will give up the cure when I have a written agreement for a joint enterprise in the sealeries.’

  ‘You do as you please, as will I.’

  ‘You look a prince’s fortune in the eye and turn away?’

  ‘My good fortune began when I stepped off that transport.’

  ‘You’d be dead without me. Why, I looked after you, fed you, cleaned you . . . kept you warm.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me of warmth. I paid for the warmth . . . so do not speak to me about warmth, nor debt or obligation.’

  ‘That is the sourest note I’ve heard in many a long day.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Another impasse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m here but briefly, then I’m gone. And the cure with me.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  25

  Sparrow had hardly slept since he’d got the pup home to his patch on Cattai Creek, where the Cattai met the river. He worried Dr Woody might visit on his way home, though Dr Woody had gone to and fro in that gig a thousand times and never once done that. He worried Henry Kettle might learn the whereabouts of the pup and send a complement of soldiers to shackle him and drag him all the way back to the ridge and give him up to Hat Thistlewaite who would no doubt think it comical to lock him in that cell together with the copper worm. ‘That brindle pup was a big mistake, you shoulda stole the worm,’ he’d say, or something to that effect.

  In his pictorial mind Sparrow could see Hat’s awful black smile.

  He worried, too, about Mackie. With every day that passed there was more chance the chief constable might call, or Heydon on Mackie’s behalf, the overseer, intent upon scrutinising the acreage in service of his principal’s pecuniary interest. That made Sparrow jittery, made him ponder and puzzle over his propensity for prevarication.

  Sparrow and the pup were living on a salty broth of cooked-out bones and grub-ridden corn. There wasn’t much else, save what he’d packed in the haversack, what he would carry when they bolted for the other side, him and the pup.

  The ache in his gut was sharp and it sent spasms all the way to his shoulder and his palms were sweaty as a pig’s snout. Several times he had unpacked the haversack and then packed it again and readied to go but every time he got so frightened he had to sit down and when he sat down and contemplated the perilous journey ahead, well, suddenly that journey seemed impossible. Suddenly his patch didn’t seem so bad. He would think of Thyne all chopped up or of Shug, dangling, and then he would think of Biddie Happ and wish he could see her one more time but that he could not do, for that would pile misery upon misery, say nothing of humiliation.

  The misery and the worry had combined to visit upon him a bad bout of the drizzles, doubtless accentuated by the broth, and he was making regular trips to the hole in the ground that he called his camp latrine.

  It happened that on one such occasion, with Sparrow in the midst of a hasty evacuation, the Woody boy came round the corner of the hut with a brace of pan-sized bream in hand. ‘I got a fish for you Mr Sparrow,’ said the boy.

  Sparrow’s innards were in no fit state to accommodate fish but he could not say no. In his indigent circumstances he could not say no to any provisions that might come his way. ‘Might you hang him up for me, off the porch?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  As ever Sparrow wondered at the strangeness of the ‘sir’. He buttoned up his flap and wriggled his parts to a comfortable repose inside his britches. ‘You still fish in that little boat of yours?’

  ‘Why yes.’

  ‘Will you come tomorrow, take me fishin’?’

  Sparrow half expected the boy to once again ask for help plaiting the eel traps but he did not do that.

  ‘I will if I can play with your dog for a while.’

  ‘You can play with him if you don’t tell anyone. He’s a secret.’

  ‘That’s easy, I don’t hardly tell anyone anything anyway. I can tell you one of my own, then we’ll be square, I’ll have one o’ yours and you’ll have one o’ mine.’

  Sparrow thought that was a good idea for secrets exchanged were a binding thing, a compact. ‘Alright, you tell me your secret.’

  They walked to the front of the hut and sat on stump stools and the dog came sniffing at the boy’s fishy fingers and then he prowled beneath the brace of fish that hung from the porch beam until he settled in the crusty dirt.

  ‘Well?’ said Sparrow.

  The boy hesitated. He beckoned the dog with a click of his f
ingers and the dog went to him. He looked up at the fish, wondering if perhaps he was giving up too much, a pan-sized bream and a secret. He decided in favour of the aforesaid arrangement not least because he’d been taught to keep to his word. ‘We got Caleb, at home,’ he said, pointing upstream, up the Cattai.

  Sparrow had to think about that. ‘You mean the savage?’

  ‘He ain’t entirely savage, he knows more bible than I do.’

  ‘He was the Reverend Hardwick’s foundling, years back.’

  ‘I know, and he’s got table manners, I’ve seen them. Papa even has him say grace.’

  ‘He eats at your table?’

  ‘Yes sir, Mr Sparrow. Has done ever since he got off his sick bed, ever since the fever come off him. He come in with a awful wound. Papa said the ball shattered in the bone.’

  ‘Did you see it, the wound?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘A most grim repose, the ball in the pelvic bone, lodged there and otherwise shattered all about, shards in the flesh, like splinters, and a good deal of pus too. Papa says lucky it didn’t rupture an organ and lucky it didn’t fester ’cause that part of the human body does not brave infection with any grace at all.’

  Sparrow recalled his conversation with Griffin Pinney on the subject of Caleb. Said he was honourable.

  ‘Whose ball?’

  ‘Thyne Kunkle’s. Papa says how the world turns.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means they took Caleb right off the tit when they shot his ma. That’s why he limps the way he does.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Well, now he’s shot again, but Papa says it’s a God-sent opportunity to show goodwill. He says the savages are near to finished, says it’s pitiful come to this. Says we’ve done them a most unpleasant service just bein’ here, but he says goodwill can redeem all manner of sins.’

  ‘What sins?’

  ‘We steal their land, their wherewithal, their liberty to come and go upon their domain, then we call them brutes.’

  ‘That does sound like your papa talking.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You know what they did to Thyne?’