‘Oh yes sir, they brained him and near chopped off his nethers, I seen that.’
‘And Caleb sits at your table?’
‘Papa has him wear a clean shirt and he gets to sit on a goose-down cushion on account of the wound . . . I reckon if that don’t conciliate his affections nothin’ will.’
Sparrow had no desire to talk on about the savages. It made him queasier than he already was. But the boy’s secret was a good one, and something of a comfort. Caleb knew about goodwill, having been restored to rude health by the doctor and allowed to eat at the Woody table and let to sit on a goose-down cushion. That was a lot of goodwill. That meant Caleb would help them if they got in a fix and Griffin Pinney said he would anyway, said he was a . . . formidable interlocutor. That sounded to Sparrow like it meant helpful in a fix.
‘Caleb says he will return Thyne’s gun, the Swedish flintlock,’ said the boy.
‘I didn’t know they took the gun.’
‘Yes sir, old Wolgan, he took the gun, and Caleb says for goodwill they will return the gun.’
The idea of the savages falling upon the settlers at harvest armed with guns was too awful to contemplate, so Sparrow was pleased to know about Caleb’s promise.
‘I must go,’ said the boy.
‘You will come tomorrow. Do I have your word as a young gentleman?’
‘My mama’s an expiree so I ain’t a gentleman and never will be, but you got my word.’
He stood and took down the fish and separated the two juveniles in the brace and poked a sharp stick through their skulls by way of their milky white eyes and drew a piece of twine through and tied them to the porch beam way clear of the pup. Then he gave a wave and turned and started for home, his catch in hand. ‘We’ll fish early,’ he said.
‘Come as early as you please,’ said Sparrow.
26
When Jonas Wick departed, Mackie sat back in his chair. He slowed his breathing, thus stifling an eruption. He felt himself suddenly cold and his frame limp and his every muscle weary.
He trolled through his rules of engagement: an unrushed disposition, always; never be captive to a mercantile proposal; seize the high ground with the better information or moral rectitude, or both. He was not unpleased with the course of the conversation. But he was surprised to notice that, for the better part of half an hour he had forgotten about the girl downstairs, daughter to Jeannie Faa.
The girl was motherless. So said Wick.
He’d let that pass.
There was no sign of Bea Faa downstairs. Gudgeon and the Parsonage twins were busy with their dice and their jars, shrouded in smoke and shadow, like the rest of the trade. Mackie went direct to Sam.
Sam leant forward, his voice low. ‘I put her out the back with Atilio, away from the prying eyes.’
Mackie found the girl at work in the kitchen, listening to the big cook recount the story of his life, beginning with his vivid memories of long days in the womb. The kitchen was a dark locale lit only by the burnished light around the cookfire and a slush lamp on the heavy trestle table.
The girl was cleavering a boiler into small chunks and feeding them into a stew-pot on the kettle prop where diced cabbage was already simmering in a liberally salted solution.
Mackie sat and invited the girl to do the same, opposite. She put aside the cleaver and wiped her hands on towelling and sat herself down.
In the fire light, the wash of her pale green eyes.
Mackie rapped his knuckles on the table to get Atilio’s attention. ‘I suggest you take the air,’ he said.
‘I don’t like the air,’ said Atilio, his thumbs hooked in his leather apron.
‘Perhaps, tonight, you will like the air.’
Atilio looked at the girl and shrugged. ‘Alright.’
When the rear door closed Mackie spoke. ‘You’re caught up with Jonas Wick. I count that a misfortune.’
‘I’m caught up with Gudgeon, that’s the misfortune. He’s caught up with Wick.’
‘He bought you, Gudgeon?’
‘Yes.’
‘From?’
‘From the sailor who took me for a wife.’
‘With your approval?’
The girl closed her eyes and ran a finger softly along the scar on her forehead. ‘Better one comer than all comers.’
‘And he sold you, the sailor?
‘I suppose he got a good price.’
‘Did you have a say?’
‘No.’
‘What did you want?’
‘I wanted to be dead.’
Mackie leant back in his chair. ‘You fled the transport.’
‘I was sold on from one to another and my arts with me. Come or go I had no say.’
For a time, well beyond politeness, he could not look away. He felt himself blush with shame. He could not forget, try as he might, how Jeannie Faa made a pillow of his stolen gift, the cloth, and lay back in the pungent, sorted straw in the waste barn, his tutor in those private things.
He looked away. ‘What to do with you . . .’
‘I am not yours to do with.’
‘I am the chief constable at the river.’
‘I know that tale.’
‘They gave you up, your people?’
‘If you want the story of my life you can have it.’
‘How you come to be here is what I want to know.’
‘I’m the bait, for Jonas Wick and his proposition.’
‘And before that?’
‘Long before . . . my mother died.’
Mackie looked down at his hands, his eyes following the bulging blue veins.
‘They gave me to a butcher’s wife in Yetholm. She died when I was ten and he took to drink, and took me at his whim.’
‘What then?’
‘Deep in his drunkard sleep I took the killing hammer. I smashed his shin bones. I crippled him.’
‘Did he die?’
‘He got the rot in his blood.’
‘But you did not hang.’
‘No.’
‘If you have fled a transport, then I am required to shackle you to the wagon and send you to Parramatta.’
‘See no disrespect comes to this girl. That’s what you said.’
‘While she is under my roof is what I said.’
‘Perhaps then I should stay under your roof.’ She smiled. Strands of long black hair swung about her shoulders as she withdrew the wooden pin from the knot and loosed her mane.
‘I am sorry to hear your mother is dead.’
He dragged the slush lamp along the table so he could see her more clearly. Straight away he could feel the fumes feathering the back of his throat, stirring him to cough. He slowed his breathing. He studied her in the glow.
She was not as dark as her mother but she was sufficiently dark to pass for one of the Faa. The raggedy scar low on her forehead was not so old, it still carried some of its raw colour.
‘You owe me something,’ she said.
‘Is that so?’
‘I know the grief you brought my mother, you and the good people of the Kirk.’
‘You have your something. You are safe under my roof.’
‘I’m never but a plus on the accounts.’
‘I have no need nor want for a woman here.’
‘You had want for my mother.’
‘For that I paid a price.’
‘As did my mother.’
He could hear the spit and crackle of the cookfire, the hum of the chatter in the tavern. He wished them all gone, Wick most of all, for Wick had brought the girl, thinking to sway some commerce in his favour. And the girl, she brought Mackie nothing but a turbulence of the mind, gnawing memories that stirred him in unwelcome ways.
‘If you speak of this I will send you down,’ he said.
‘You send me down and I will speak of this,’ she said. There was a copy of the Gazette within reach. She pulled it into view.
‘You’ve more cheek than a rat in a pantry.’
&
nbsp; ‘I can work, read . . . tally.’
‘The auctioneer can tout all that come market day . . . say nothing of your arts in the butchering department.’
‘You’ll see me sold, again.’
‘A wife sale according to custom. You will have a say.’
Atilio came in rubbing his hands together. He went to the fire and warmed them. ‘I have the air,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Mackie. He was about to rise when the girl leant across and put her hand on his.
‘I know the cure.’
Mackie took his hand away and settled back in his chair. ‘The procedure?’
‘I know the makings, the measures, the soaking, to the minute. I can finish a pelt to perfection.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I will have that say, come market day.’
‘You will have a say, yes or no as to the right or the wrong of it.’
‘You’ll see me safe, a good man?’
‘A good man, yes.’
She wrapped her arms around herself and hunched over the newspaper. She was thinking what she might tell of the cure and what she might withhold. She scanned the columns under the masthead on the Gazette, the government orders, the editor’s note.
‘Go on then, read.’
She read aloud. She did not get far, just a few lines from the orders when she stopped.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She sat deadly still, as if listening for a storm. She reached into a pocket on her skirt. Her other hand clutched at the rim of the table. ‘Help me,’ she said, as she slipped to the floor.
Her body went rigid and her limbs convulsed as her eyes rolled back in her head. In the firelight Mackie could see her face, contorted. He dropped to his knees and took hold of her shoulders and felt her body arched and trembling in his hands, taut as a bowstring.
He did not know what to do. Atilio stepped in, the leather strop in his hand. He pushed Mackie aside and knelt with some difficulty and took hold of the girl’s jaw and squeezed hard and forced the strop between her teeth and she bit down. The cook pressed on her shoulders and held her still and they were otherwise helpless, gathered there, watching, listening to the agitated hiss of her breath, the sound of her teeth grinding, her entire body in a fix of tremor and spasm.
Her hand slipped from her pocket, a wad of leather gripped tight.
Atilio worked his fingers gently upon her cheeks and jaw and he took the strop from her mouth.
Blood was running off her chin. She closed her eyes and lay there, her body quieted, her breath still quick. The cook ran his palm gently back from her forehead onto her hair. ‘The falling sickness,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Mackie.
He turned to Fish who was standing in the doorway. ‘Not a word,’ he said.
Fish raised his hands. ‘I have no tongue, sir.’
Mackie’s sleep that night was restless, stirred by visitations from long ago, when the mob marched to the old waste barn to save him from a Romany girl, from the arms of Satan in voluptuous guise, so said the minister and the elders and the congregation, scandalised to a righteous fury. They seized this Satan and carried her as meat on a pole, banging their pots and pans, a ram’s horn trumpeting to rally the pious folk of Yetholm to the bridge, where they tied her into a corn basket and roped the basket and dropped her from the bridge, trussed and helpless, into the depths of the Bowmont river. And they told him, later, of how he screamed something horrible, as if shouting Satan from his very bowels as they raised her up and dropped her, again and again, six times over, until he was sure she was dead, how they left her, on the bank of the river. And they dragged him home, the minister talking loud of how the Prince of Darkness never sleeps and of how we go among snares – a snare in every pleasure – and how the senses are like open windows, every sense a window to temptation, and ruin.
27
When Sparrow took to his pallet that night he was so wide awake it felt like he might never sleep again. He could hardly lie still such was the agitation in his frame and such was the thumping in his heart and such was the rampant meandering of his mind.
The pup was in a similar state, or so it seemed. He lay down in the doorway emitting a low whine. Then he got up and walked about. He came and sniffed at Sparrow. He ambled back to the porch by way of the cookfire and stared into the darkness, cocked his head and listened to the creature sounds, nature’s raucous symphony. Then he lay down, whimpering, and then he came inside again and sniffed at Sparrow some more.
Finally, the world outside fell quiet. Sparrow fell asleep. The pup crawled into the space beneath the pallet and lifted his nose and sniffed at Sparrow’s arse through the ticking and promptly dozed off and neither man nor dog woke when, in the early morning, with the dawn stars a faint grey scattering in the east, a human frame stood silhouetted in the doorway.
An arm reached up and rapped the lintel.
The pup stirred and yelped and Sparrow sat up, blinking.
‘Good thing my intentions are pure,’ said a voice.
Sparrow knew that voice. It was Seamus Peachey. His first thought was declarativical. ‘I got no grain, saleable or otherwise.’
Peachey dropped his haversack, squatted on his haunches and clicked his fingers and beckoned the pup but the pup did not go to him. ‘I don’t want your mouldy grain. If you had grain I wouldn’t be here. I’m here ’cause you got no grain, you got no seed, you haven’t ploughed, haven’t done a damn thing and I know why.’
Peachey stood up. He pointed at the dog. ‘You sure as hell gotta run now boy.’
‘Run?’
‘I’m goin’ with you, that or oblivion. I’ve had my fill.’
‘I don’t plan to run.’
‘Yes you do, Griffin told me. Griffin says we’re better pairin’ up you and me, pair up and get yourselves to Pig Creek is what he said. He’ll meet us there.’
‘Why now, you?’
‘Because, Marty, contrary to appearances I live in a state of abject indignity, my sex dishonoured, my manhood embarrassed . . . Winifred is a feme sole.’
Sparrow hesitated, wondering what this meant. ‘She is?’
‘You don’t know what that means, do you?’
‘No. I mean yes I don’t know.’
‘A woman who comes free with her felon husband – that would be me – is a feme sole according to the Civil Court of England. That means the land grant is in her name and she holds the licence to the Tap. That means I am her dependant. I’ve seen it Marty, I’ve seen it. I am in the dependant column in the government accounts. You might as well cut my balls off.’
‘That’s not right.’
‘She treats me like a dog! What’s more there are other femes soles, decent, sensible women, who have freely surrendered the property to their husbands upon emancipation. But Winifred do that? I think not. She says I have no claim on her and no right whatsoever to any part of her business, her business, and to think, the work I’ve done!’
‘That is shocking,’ said Sparrow.
‘And that’s just the half of it. She’s got a legal document, Marty.’
‘What does it say?’
‘I do hereby aver . . .’
‘Aver?’
‘Yes aver, I do hereby aver that the said properties were originally granted to me or acquired by me, Winifred Isabel Peachey, free settler, and that the right of possession to the said moiety is now vested in me and only me, signed W I P.’
‘That is pure evil.’
‘I know, and I am done with it. I intend to renew my manhood in the teeth of the wilderness.’
‘I hope it don’t come to that.’
The dog had sauntered across to Peachey and had a good sniff around his boots. Peachey squatted down again and took hold of the dog and held him firm and still and talked to the dog like he was talking to a little child.
Sparrow did not like Peachey coddling his dog. ‘What you got to trade, you got a axe?’ he said.
‘No, I don’t got
a axe.’
‘You should have brought your dog, Tool.’
‘Tool’s not been out for an age, if I take him I give the game away and God help us all if Winnie gets wind.’
‘You got to have somethin’ to trade, otherwise old Wolgan, he’ll skewer you.’
‘I brought handkerchiefs, they made o’ Irish linen.’
‘Handkerchiefs?’
‘Griffin says the savages like handkerchiefs.’
‘He never said that to me.’
‘Well he said it to me, so I snuck off with Winnie’s best, she won’t notice till Sunday.’
Sparrow had no idea what day it was. He had to assume Sunday was a way off. ‘You won’t get a toll out o’ handkerchiefs.’
‘You got a axe?’
‘I got the pup, I got the game dog.’ Sparrow was surprised at just how triumphal and troubled he felt, declaring that out loud.
‘I mean you got a axe, for me to trade?’ said Peachey.
‘I got a old axe, short-handled.’
‘I’ll take that, that and the Irish linen.’
‘I cannot imagine what a savage wants with Irish linen.’
‘Well then, I’ll have the axe, won’t I?’
The dawn chorus was underway, all manner of bird life sounding out. A faint cool breeze washing into the hut.
They heard the rattle of cart wheels and the steady paces of Woody’s bay mare. ‘That’ll be the doctor,’ said Sparrow. They peered out, scanning the track on the forest rim to the east. Soon enough they saw the doctor’s gig with the bay mare in the shafts, bound for Prominence. They saw the mare trot on past Sparrow’s patch and follow the track into the gully to the south.
Sparrow sat himself down on his bed. ‘He’s regular to and fro, he don’t come in here.’
‘What’s to eat?’ Peachey was on his knees. He turned the coals in the cookfire and loaded fine kindling upon them, blowing softly on the glow.
‘Not much, bit o’ salvaged corn, bit o’ fish,’ said Sparrow. He was not at all hungry at that moment but the question turned his mind to food and the immediate prospects for a better life. ‘Griffin says there’s meat every day on the other side.’
‘I heard that too.’
‘What else you hear?’ Sparrow wanted to know what Griffin Pinney might have told Seamus Peachey.
The Making of Martin Sparrow Page 15
