This Golden Land

by Wood, Barbara

  Outside in the hot sun, Jamie shared the money from Mr. Grootenboer with the others with the promise that he would continue to sell the opals and dole out the profits. Of course, now he would have to work with more care, with his likeness plastered all over town.

  "Hannah, I know of a place where me and the boys can lay low, but what about you? Where will you be? How can I find you?"

  Hannah had expected to be staying at the Australia Hotel. Now she would have to find lodgings. But first it was a trip to the post office. When she and Neal had parted back in April, they had devised a plan to connect with each other when he returned. The central post office, where they could leave letters "in general care." "I am going to see if my friend Alice is back in town. She would have been at the Australia Hotel, but she might be somewhere else now. I can find out at the Elysium Music Hall. And for now, until I find somewhere to stay, that would be the best place to send me a message."

  They looked at each other on the hot, dusty sidewalk as people stepped around them. The air was filled with the drone of flies and the odor of horse droppings, but Hannah and Jamie were aware of nothing except each other. There was so much each wanted to say, but now was not the time. And . . . something had changed. Hannah didn't know what exactly. The new bounty poster had come as a shock. The police threat was now very serious.

  And also, now that they were back in the city, things felt different. Hannah had ties here, another life, and the prospect of Neal in her near future. She was momentarily caught off balance. Where did Jamie O'Brien fit in?

  "We have to go," he said quietly, watching her from beneath the broad rim of his dusty bush hat. Jamie had also sensed a change. "I'll send you word when all the opals are converted into cash."

  She watched him go, riding the horse he had purchased with a forged deed while Blackie White took the wagon. As they disappeared down the busy street, Hannah was reminded of the night a man materialized out of the darkness to save her from a savage dog. She was filled with that same sense now, that Jamie O'Brien had sprung from Australia's red earth to walk awhile in her life, like a mythic being, drawn from gum trees and cockatoos and the Rainbow Serpent, only to leave her again and return to the land that sired him.

  35

  T

  HERE WAS NO LETTER WAITING FOR HER AT THE POST OFFICE, so she surmised that Neal was still in Perth, for surely they had made it by now. But just in case, she would write to him in care of the authorities in Perth who were sure to give it to him when the expedition arrived with great fanfare and celebration. She didn't want Neal going to the Australia Hotel and receive the same shock she did.

  The front doors of the Elysium Music Hall stood open to the heat of the day, music pouring out onto the sidewalk. As Hannah stepped into the relative coolness, a large burly man with arms like hams and wearing a striped waistcoat blocked her way. "We're closed until this evening. No one's allowed during rehearsal."

  "Is Miss Alice Star here?" Hannah asked, trying to peer around him into the theater where acrobats were tumbling on the stage.

  "Who wants to know?" he said.

  "I'm a friend."

  "You and half of Adelaide," he said.

  "Please tell her Hannah Conroy has come to visit."

  A moment later, she heard her name called out in a familiar voice. "Hannah!"

  Alice burst into the theater lobby to take her startled friend into a tight embrace. "We were so worried! We had no idea where you went! Liza said you were with Mr. Scott. Did you join the expedition? Have you been to Perth?"

  Alice drew back, her eyes the color of cornflowers wide with amazement. "Hannah, your tanned! You've been in the sun! Tell me what—"

  Hannah laughed. "Alice, let me catch my breath." She was amazed at the change in her friend. Gone was the shy girl who had worked for Lulu Forchette. The touring and singing on so many stages had brought out Alice's natural sparkle and charisma. She exuded self-confidence. She was also physically beautiful. The scars were so well hidden, the eyebrow painted on so perfectly, and her hair arranged so artfully that one would never suspect the deformity underneath.

  "Alice, you act like a woman in love."

  "I am in love—with the theater, with audiences, with singing." In a more somber tone Alice said, "But I am not in love with a man and I doubt I ever will be. But I do have admirers now, and I am satisfied with that."

  Hannah marveled at the beautiful gown of green and orange silk, dropped shoulders edged with lace, wide, flouncy sleeves and an adorable cap set on her blond hair at a tilt. Alice Star was a vision of the very latest in fashion.

  "But never mind me! We were so worried about you, Hannah!"

  "It's a long story. What do you know about Liza Guinness? The hotel is closed up."

  Alice explained how she had returned to the Australia Hotel, to rest after the hectic tour of the colonies—to great acclaim, she added with no false modesty—and learned that Liza had met and fallen in love with a drover. When they heard of the gold strike in America, Liza's new beau wanted to go. So they got married and took the first ship to a place called San Francisco. "Liza left a letter for you, Hannah, and I have all your things, your clothes and trunk, even the little statuette of Hygeia.

  "Oh Hannah!" Alice said, hugging her again. "I am so happy to see you. Where are you staying?"

  "I don't know yet. I have only just returned to town."

  "Then you will come and stay with me. I've rented a lovely house. It even has a housekeeper and servants. Imagine!"

  36

  T

  HREE NOTES ARRIVED AT THE ELYSIUM FROM JAMIE O'Brien, telling Hannah that he found it necessary to move around and stay hidden, but that the opals were bringing good money and that he would soon have plans for a new life. He added that she was in his thoughts and in his heart, and that it tore him apart to be in the same town with her, and not be able to see her.

  The final note came precisely two weeks after they had said good-bye in front of Grootenboer's Jewelers. He asked to meet her outside of town on an old logging road that led to nowhere. As the location was not far from Lulu's, Hannah had no trouble finding it. They met in the late afternoon, in the privacy of a stand of gum trees where the dusty ground offered a patch of grass beside a trickling creek.

  Jamie was already there, his horse a few feet away, grazing. As Hannah brought her buggy to a halt, she felt her heart rise in her throat, as she knew they had come here to say good-bye. Jamie wore clean clothes and even wore a new bush hat, but he had kept the beard, Hannah noticed, although it much more nicely clipped and shaped than when she last saw him. She assumed he kept it as a disguise, and she thought the golden blond an attractive contrast to his darkly weathered skin.

  Jamie went to help Hannah down from the buggy, and as he neared her he saw that the change he had first sensed outside of Grootenboer's was now complete. Hannah was a city person again, and a proper lady, from her silk bonnet tied beneath her chin, to the crinolined gown of silk the color of early corn. Her face still bore the tan from the Outback, but he knew it would fade in time as she protected her complexion beneath hats and parasols. And her hands, too, would eventually go soft and smooth again, erasing all evidence of her time as an opal hunter.

  He removed his hat as he looked down at her with eyes, though he smiled, that were filled with sadness. "Me and Mikey," he said without preamble, "have to leave."

  "I know."

  Shafts of golden sunlight pierced the overhead branches, while the drone of insects filled the air.

  "We're going to California. We have signed on as deck hands on the Southern Cross. The captains of private vessels have discovered that they can have their pick of crews and don't have to pay a cent in wage as all the men want is to get to California—men whose names the captains don't ask, as long as they are strong and able to go up in the rigging."

  "It must be hard for you to leave Australia," she said.

  "I feel a thirst for far off places. I thought I could settle down a
nd change my ways, but the call of adventure is hard to ignore. I have never sailed across an ocean, Hannah, I have never visited a foreign land. It's time I expanded my horizons." He grinned. "And think of all those rich pigeons in California, waiting to be plucked."

  He reached inside his pocket and pulled out a roll of bank notes. "This is your share of the opal money."

  "This is too much!" It must have been hundreds of pounds.

  "We don't have to pay for passage, and just need some money to get us started on a gold claim. The others have all gone home—Bluey Brown, Tabby, Charlie Olde and the rest, back to where I first rounded them up, going home richer men and with big smiles on their faces. But they chipped in, so this is from all of us. We want you to have a good start in Australia. My mates have a soft spot for you, Hannah. I think they all fell in love with you."

  He paused, his manner growing somber. "I want to ask you to come with me, Hannah, but it wouldn't be fair to you, and I don't think you would say yes. You came to Australia to accomplish great things. Maybe someday I'll come back and see they've put a statue of you in Victoria Square."

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  "I have something else for you." He gave her a small book bound in black leather with silver embossing. The word Diary was stamped on the cover. She opened it and saw a cramped hand in pencil, every page filled. "It's my stories," Jamie said. "I'm giving them to you."

  Hannah was speechless as she flipped through the pages and saw the stories of Queenie MacPhail, the dog on the tucker box, and all the rest.

  "But you should take these with you to California, Jamie!"

  "The stories are yours now, Hannah, they don't belong to me any more. I reckon I'll be collecting a whole new bunch of tales in California. Stories about gold fossickers and a whole new country."

  He stepped closer. "Go ahead with your dream, Hannah. Be a health practitioner. Make your own rules. Let your hands work miracles. You saved my life. You can save others. Be a healer, Hannah." His voice broke. "My God, I love you, Hannah Conroy. And I know that if I live to be a hundred, I will never love a woman as I have loved you."

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard.

  As Hannah hooked an arm around his neck and returned the kiss, leaning into him, tears stinging her eyes, she thought that Jamie O'Brien, for all his boasting that he was a true Australian, that here was where he belonged, he was in fact a man without a home.

  He stepped back and released her once and for all. "I'll come back someday. You'll see. I'll come back to you, Hannah."

  She watched him mount his horse and ride off through the trees, southward in the direction of the docks from where, in the morning, a ship named the Southern Cross was setting sail for a place called California.

  37

  M

  Y GOD, MAN, DID THEY TURN YOU INTO A SAVAGE LIKE themselves?" Sir Reginald did not bother to hide his contempt. It rankled him the way the American refused to act like a decent human being. Two weeks with the expedition now, and he still refused to put clothes on.

  Neal said nothing but continued to turn the lizard on the spit over his fire. I'm a savage? he thought. I'm not the one who stinks to high heaven.

  With water scant and needing to be rationed, the members of the expedition had abandoned all attention to personal hygiene. And despite the intense December heat, they still went about fully dressed so that their filthy clothes smelled. They had ceased bothering with dental care, too, and they were constantly scratching flea and lice bites. Neal had not returned to European clothing on purpose, so that his sweat could evaporate. He protected his skin from insects with paint made from pulverized rocks and plant juice. And he took care of his teeth the way Jallara's people did, with fine twigs and eucalyptus leaves.

  He knew he was a queer sight, a half-naked white man wearing a fur loincloth as he stood at his camera tripod, giving instructions to young Fintan. Neal knew that Sir Reginald disapproved. The contempt went both ways. Neal had looked at Sir Reginald's expedition map with disgust. The men had named places after themselves, as was their right as the so-called discoverers: Mason's Creek, Allen's Hill, Mount Williams. Neal saw now where he had traveled with Jallara's clan, in an area of the map that was blank, with the word "Unknown" stamped on it. But Neal saw names there: Ant Dreaming, Dingo Songline, No Name Mountain. He wondered what the real names were of the places these white men had christened after themselves.

  They had finally reached Galagandra, the place where they were to have found an abundance of sweet water. So far, none had been found. It was a region of salt-lakes and sandplains covered with desert oaks and mulgas, impossibly flat from horizon to horizon with only the occasional hill here and there. The expedition was camped alongside a dry creek bed where spindly trees struggled to survive. Farther up, a cluster of boulders taller than a man abutted the foot of a homely red hill no more than a thousand feet in elevation, and covered in scrubby brush.

  Tracker John Allen had taken two scouts with him earlier that morning to explore the source of the creek which no doubt overflowed its shallow banks the few times it rained out here. That would make the soil in this area alluvial, the silt run-off being carried down from the hill to the plain, and rich in quartz. Neal knew this because Sir Reginald had asked him to analyze the local soil, although to what purpose Neal had no idea.

  Sir Reginald got up from the campfire and glowered at his expedition geologist. He couldn't put into words what exactly rankled him about Scott's behavior. The tattoos in particular unsettled him. Six rows of red dots rising from below the navel, up along either side of the sternum, over the pectorals and gracing the shoulders. It was a cicatrix both fabulous and disturbing. The older man could only imagine the pain endured. What else had gone on during the savage rites? Neal wouldn't talk about it, saying it was taboo. As if the laws of the natives had any credibility in a white man's world. And what the devil did he carry in that leather pouch about his neck?

  Oliphant paused as he watched the American roast a lizard in Aboriginal fashion, unskinned. Since the day he had suddenly walked out of the desert in kangaroo fur and carrying a spear, and in the days of trekking since, Neal had made no mention of the sandstorm and its aftermath. He had been strangely quiet, not at all the cheerful and loquacious fellow he had been before the sandstorm. Had something sinister been done to him during his six months with the savages? Or did the cause lie closer to home?

  Does he suspect the truth about me?

  "Put some clothes on, man," Oliphant barked as he turned on his heel to walk away.

  Neal ignored him. The reunion with his white colleagues had not turned out to be such a happy affair after all. The men were constantly asking him about the sexual practices of Jallara's clan, asking him if he had tasted "black velvet." And Professor Williams was wanting to pick Neal's brain for his book on wildlife. What could he tell him? How the Aborigines celebrated when a baby was born, or how they mourned when someone died—just like white people did. They weren't a subject for a book on animals. Neal thought of the nights around the campfire, listening to the resonant twang of Thumimburee's didgeridoo and the soft melodic voice of Jallara as she explained to Neal how songs came down from the spirit-powers of the Dreamtime and how playing such songs spun a web of continuity between the people and their Dreaming, in a succession of creation, uncreation, and re-creation.

  He touched the small leather pouch on his chest, and felt the smooth magic stone inside. "Very strong spirit-power, Thulan," Jallara had said with a glowing smile. "Spirit-power take care of Thulan while he follow his songline."

  He also thought of the emerald glass tear catcher, empty now. My mother's tears brought me back from the spirit world. In the days since his experience at the rock wall, Neal had examined his vision. The truth was obvious to him now. Looking back: Josiah's constant boastings of his adoptive son's many achievements, the holidays in the mountains, the birthday parties, giving the boy whatever he asked for. Neal had assumed it was to
make up for his lack of having a real father, that Josiah had gone overboard in compensation, when in retrospect it was all the actions of a truly doting father.

  Neal looked across the camp to where young Fintan was taking care of their horses. In the days since being reunited with the expedition, Neal and his assistant had captured some beautiful images of the Australian Outback. Astounding rock formations. A lone tree in the middle of a vast plain. A rainbow that went straight up in the air like a column. Neal wanted his father to see them, wanted Josiah to know about his son's accomplishments. I lived with a tribe of Aborigines, Father. I survived on my own in the desert. I underwent a secret initiation. And I have preserved the beauty and soul of Australia on my photographic plates—sights which no white man has ever seen.

  As he turned the goanna on the roasting spit, the morning silence was broken by a shout. John Allen calling out, "Gold I've found gold!"

  Everyone jumped up and ran, breakfast forgotten.

  Neal followed and found the men near the giant boulders, on their hands and knees, frantically digging in the dry red soil while Sir Reginald watched with a smug grin on his face.

  "We came here for gold?" Neal said.

  "That's right, and gold we've found."

  Neal stared at the white-haired man. "You never said anything about gold."

  "The fewer who knew it the better." Oliphant reached into the pocket of his baggy shorts and brought out his fist. Opening it, he exposed a bright, shining nugget. "It's history is spotty, but a bloke in Perth told me about escaped convicts. This nugget somehow made it back to civilization and I bought it for fifty pounds and one word: Galagandra."

  "So this whole expedition was a sham," Neal said.

  As he watched Billy Patton and Andy Mason and Colonel Enfield—even the sedate Professor Williams—dig into the red soil in the shadow of stunted mulga and gum trees, Sir Reginald said, "I couldn't very well let the truth be known, now could I? Have a stampede on my hands. Just a trusted few."