by Mark O'Flynn
Suddenly, through the closed door, he heard wine-warm voices approaching. There was no time to think, but when did Clancy ever think things through? Dazzled by the jewels before him, in an instant he had the box under his arm and was out the window. It was a long way down. He crept along the ledge to the drainpipe. Below him grew a perfect row of manicured rosebushes. He dropped the box and the roses caught it neatly. He could now hear voices in the room behind him. He lowered himself by his fingertips, reaching with his toes, then slithered down the drainpipe, past the library window through which he glimpsed a gentleman snoozing in an armchair. (Funny, the things you notice in a crisis.) His fingers tore. It was a rapid descent but luckily the soft grass cushioned most of the fall, although the hammer in his waistband cracked against his hip. He retrieved the box – ouch, the thorns – stuffed it up his shirt, and was off like a hare, past the tennis court, slowing to a limp as he approached the street, upon which the usual commerce and trade was taking place. The Chinaman was doing a brisk business in beans, which were in season. There was a crowd for Clancy to disappear in. Slow down, he breathed. No point in being the fastest runner in Katoomba if it attracted unwanted attention …
And now Clancy stopped speaking and reached behind him into a secret hidey-hole in the rock, from which he extracted a hessian bundle. We had made our pact. I wiped my hand on my trousers. Then he untied the parcel. As he laid it on the ground between us I was horrified, although I must admit it was a spectacular sort of horror. The brazen currawongs were also curious. The jewels glistened in the early light. The trees whispered around us. Suddenly I understood about the maids.
‘Byron,’ Clancy said. His voice was strange. ‘That is not all.’
EIGHTEEN
You shall have to imagine, as I do – although I have more basis for imagining this on account of what came later – the pandemonium that erupted in the King George Suite. Let me picture this scene. Let me not remember Clancy’s words, which I would like to gouge from my ears with a knife …
As Clancy slides down the drainpipe, someone screams. (Lady Carrington, probably.) Her trunk lies open like an eviscerated cadaver, dresses oozing. Lord Carrington flings open the door and bellows for Goyder. Goyder calls for Mrs Haddock. Mrs Haddock summons the maids. All this takes time. Together the staff search the King George Suite on hands and knees. They peer under the bed, so soft you could die in it and hardly notice. They search behind the mirrored wardrobe, the whatnot, the ottoman, all to no avail. Violet, shocked at finding herself in this room again, looks beneath a claw-footed walnut bureau. What on earth had Clancy done? Lady Carrington’s trunk is gently upended to see if the box has sunk through the fabrics like a stone through quicksand. It has not.
Lord and Lady Carrington look on in disbelief. You can imagine it. Julian Ashton, portrait painter, appears at the door wondering why Lord Carrington has missed their appointment. The tableau that greets him as he prepares to knock may well be an image that stays with him, and perhaps he wonders if he might paint the scene. He will call it The Lost Jewels. When it becomes apparent that the jewellery box is indeed missing (as Lady Carrington has been remonstrating all along), Goyder says he will search the entire hotel. On second thoughts – he amends his initial impulse – he will leave no stone unturned. The hotel is a big place. It will take some searching. Instead he will interrogate the staff. He will force someone to confess.
‘Starting with you, Mrs Haddock.’
‘Me?’
‘Where were you three hours ago?’
‘I was with you. In the laundry. Don’t you remember?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘I shall want the police informed,’ insists Lady Carrington.
The lace curtains billow – can’t you see them? – appliquéd with the design of a peacock’s fan, and no one thinks to close the window.
Relocating to his office downstairs, the inquisition is formed by Goyder and Mrs Haddock. A fuming Lady Carrington watches over proceedings. The maids line up outside. Violet can confirm that after the initial fuss has died down Lord Carrington absents himself to the library and the brandy decanter. The office is too small for all of them. Julian Ashton joins him, hoping to get to the bottom of the scandal via a circuitous route. He thinks, perhaps, that Lord Carrington slouching in an armchair would make a much more compelling portrait than the one they have discussed and shaken hands on. That is, the one with the medals, in battle dress, the subject holding aloft his greased whiskers.
One by one the maids are interviewed. There is quite a line of them outside in the foyer, perched like sparrows along the chaise longue. Violet Kefford comes into the office. Where has she been this morning? Violet has been waiting on table over luncheon. Prior to that she has been out shopping for vegetables. The chef will confirm this. Nonetheless, Lady Carrington will not be mollified.
‘Is not this hotel named in honour of my husband, the Governor of the State?’
‘Indeed it is,’ says Goyder.
‘Is there not a law, a protocol that must be followed in situations like this?’
‘There has never been a situation like this.’
‘You prevaricate.’
‘Then I suppose there is,’ Goyder concedes.
Consequently, and it goes against his feeling in the matter (what is she doing traipsing around the countryside with so much jewellery anyway?), Goyder is obliged to dismiss all the chambermaids. Lady Carrington, when the announcement is made, smiles at last. Now for the stable boys.
(Another reason it goes against his temper is because Goyder knows full well that, without the maids, he and Mrs Haddock will have to carry the burden of running the hotel on their own. Think of all the dust. And can he have complete confidence in Mrs Haddock? Her age and the number of steps in the hotel are not a happy marriage. However, it is impossible that he could dispense with her as well, as much as he might like to. Furthermore, reading between the lines, Goyder is probably worried that he may have jeopardised his campaign for the mayoralty.)
There are tears. There are ululations of distress. There is anger. Violet and Matilda Sherman hug each other in grief. Violet isn’t exactly sure what it is she knows, what her part has been in this disaster.
In due course Sergeant Brownrig is summoned. He arrests no one. He says he will put on the case every man he has at his disposal. Lady Carrington, now slightly appeased, dearly wants someone to be arrested.
‘But we have no suspect,’ says Brownrig.
The sackings will have to do. She wants Goyder to post a reward. She seeks out her husband, interrupting his third brandy snifter in the library, in a mood of some vindictive satisfaction with her work. She is ready for high tea.
‘But there is no one to serve it, my dear.’
‘Goyder will serve it. It is the least he can do,’ says Lady Carrington.
The portrait Julian Ashton now has in mind is not one of which he thinks Lord Carrington will approve. He will call it The Brandy Balloon or, even better, Pickled Lord.
It always strikes me as curious how historians have a tendency to describe the past in the present tense, when their subject is so palpably past. Unless they simply do not want to let it go. Perhaps this is another willing symptom of memory’s fallibility?
Violet left the hotel with her last wages in her pinny pocket. She worried, not that she might be blamed for the theft (the master key had been found in the door; anyone could have put it there, if they had known where to find it), but that a new, weighty silence had been imposed on her. A silence that somehow seemed to censor the voices of the birds, muffled them, sent them further off. The longer she kept it the more oppressive it became.
We gazed out over the forest, listening to its susurration. Words were becoming hard currency between us. In time Clancy’s next thought rose to the surface like a rancid bubble.
‘A body doesn’t get in the trees all by itself. Either a body falls by chance, or else it jumps, or else it gets thrown there by Buggery Clout.’<
br />
I had not wanted to think of that, but I could see he might be right.
‘You don’t know that for sure, Clancy.’
‘Nor do you.’
That was true, I didn’t. An ant crawled across my hand, indifferent to me as to the rock.
‘Clout and Brownrig will see you hang for this. This is the perfect distraction from Dundas. If you are right.’
The jewels lay spread on their hessian sack, multicoloured and flashing. Strange to see them against the rock, so exposed up on top of the Ruined Castle, nothing between them and the clouds above.
‘They’ll have to catch me first.’
‘Why wouldn’t they catch you? They could be looking for you right now.’
Clancy raised his eyebrows in consideration of his actions. ‘I shall have to leave.’
‘They’ll find you.’
He said nothing as the sun inched through the sky. When he spoke it was as if he had not heard me. ‘Unless you were to come with me?’
‘I thought you would have wanted to take Violet.’ It cost me a lot to say that sentence.
‘I would. Of course. It’s just that I’ve yet – there was no time to ask her.’
‘Now that she no longer works for Goyder,’ I observed, ‘she is more at liberty.’
‘That is true. And also the fact that I am a rich man.’
‘Clancy, you are a rich thief, and a marked man. Clout will have you now unless you run a mile.’
‘I’m not afraid of Clout.’
He did not look convinced.
‘You ought to be. I am. Tom Kefford gave you two shiners. Douglas sat you on your arse. Clout will make mutton of you.’
He indicated the bundle. ‘I now have the means to run.’
‘How are you going to live on this?’ I asked. ‘You couldn’t buy dodger with a – what is this red one? A ruby ring. How many loaves of bread will this buy you?’ I raised the ring to the light. It held a reminder of blood.
‘I’ll find a fence. There are ways. How do you think I got rid of the building tools? And it’s not as though I killed anyone.’
‘You may as well have for the way they’ll treat you.’
‘They’ll never find me.’
‘I hope so, for your sake.’
We paused while an orchestra of parrots screeched all about us, then flew away.
‘Byron. There’s more,’ he said softly.
‘What?’
‘When we were in the tunnel, in the goaf.’ His voice caught in his teeth. He composed himself with a breath. ‘When the candles blew out and I tasted dust, I thought I was dead.’
‘So did we.’ I recalled my feeling that day on the rock face. The forest falling silent around us, desolate and empty.
‘Billy grabbed my arm and dragged me after him. I thought, so this is what death is like. Like dust. The pain will come soon. We were buried alive. It was so dark you couldn’t see a thing. You could smell new, split rock. I was so scared I shit my britches. There was water trickling down some of the rocks and I kept cupping it in my hands and wiping my face. Trying to wash the dust off. I thought it might be the last thing I would ever do. Billy was yabbering away, praying I guess, until Harv told him to shut it.’
I let him gather his thoughts, still raw in his mind. His fingers sifted absently through the jewels. I had never seen this in him before, this expression of fear.
‘That went on for hours, it seemed like. I was terrified, Douglas was too. We all were. You wouldn’t believe what I kept hearing, or wanting to hear.’
‘What?’ I asked quietly.
‘In the back of my mind, Emma singing. I kept on hearing her singing. It took quite a while for Harv to come up with the idea of digging out the other side. And in that time, waiting to die, Douglas told me he wasn’t my father.’
What did I just hear? Had I heard that? ‘What did you say?’
‘Douglas Wilson is not my father.’ Then the terrible words. ‘Byron, you’re not my brother.’
‘But,’ I was poleaxed, ‘it’s not true. Why would he say that?’
‘It is true. I don’t know why he said it then, but it’s true. I thought I was going to die. I guess he did, too. Wanted to get it off his chest, I suppose. That man is not my father.’
‘What a place to tell you.’
I tried to picture the darkness. The smell of dust, and the fear.
‘Yes. Then Harv thought he could feel a draught and we started digging. After a while you could smell the air. Then we started laughing.’
I felt like I had fallen off the cliff. Was it true? Had Douglas been just as afraid? ‘But he took you in. He raised you as his son. We were raised as brothers.’
‘But we’re not. We are not brothers. All this, my life, has been a fabrication. And do you know what else? He gave me a dead man’s boots.’ He looked down at his feet as if they were repugnant to him.
‘What? Whose?’
‘These boots here. They were Grainger’s.’
‘Well, that’s hardly a hanging offence. He wanted them for himself.’ They were good boots. The she-oaks hissed and gossiped. Clancy reefed off his dead man’s boots and flung them off the parapets of the Castle into the bush. We heard them clatter faintly down below us.
‘Clancy, come back from the edge.’
‘Why? It’s not as though I still need them. I still have my alberts.’ He wiggled his ragged toes.
Even though my head was still reeling I tried to make a joke, waving at the sack of loot. ‘You can always buy a new pair.’
‘I will buy ten pairs.’
I had a sudden thought. ‘So this – the jewels – was all an accident. You went there for Parkes.’
‘And I nearly had him, too. I would have popped his ivories for him. And Edwards and North, they’re all the same. I’d like to smash all their faces for them.’ One fist became a hammer in his open palm. ‘But I can’t. So I’ll take their oodle instead.’
‘It’s not North’s money. Or Parkes’.’
‘They’re all the same,’ he repeated.
Again the silence between us, like a jammed cable line.
‘If Douglas isn’t your father, do you know who is?’
‘No. I don’t. I don’t think Douglas knows himself. We were too busy digging when I thought of that.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No, Byron, you don’t understand. It makes perfect sense. For the first time this makes sense of how I have felt my whole life. The way Douglas looked at me, it wasn’t the way he looked at you. This explains why I have never felt I belonged with you, why I have always been outside of you. Of you and Emma and Douglas. It’s all making sense. And now I need to go and find where I do.’
I could hear what he was saying. Douglas did treat us differently.
‘Where you do what?’ I asked.
‘Belong.’
Again, awful words that I could only make light of.
‘With all your sudden wealth perhaps you will find you are one of them.’
‘If I do,’ he said, showing me the palm with which we had sworn our pact, ‘you can cut my eyes out.’
Carefully he wrapped up his treasure, shoving the bundle back into the crevice in the rock, sealing it against the beaks of curious birds with a wedge of sandstone. All about us the raucous warble of the currawongs in the trees, like a jury.
Brothers or not, babes in rags or not, pact or not, I could not have gone with him as he had asked. There was a wild mixture of passions working in him. In me, too. I could not, as it seemed he now could, think of him as anything other than my brother. I was lost. Suddenly unbrothered, the goaf tumbling down about me in hollow, heavy abandon. No smell of dust, only the empty, silent world.
I managed to convince Clancy to come to work that morning. We would only be a little late. The safest place for him would probably be down a mineshaft. However, as we lined up to collect our tools from the stockpile, Clancy turned to me. ‘I need to speak with my
mother. And with Violet.’
It is strange, or maybe not so, how each miner had his favourite pick or shovel or other instrument, moulded to his own grip. I watched as Clancy tossed his shovel back on the pile. I think I understood: he was never going to go down the mine again.
‘Where are you going, you cheeky bugger?’ Crusher Edwards called after him. ‘Come back and take your shovel. I ought to knock your block off.’ Clancy kept walking, heading for the Incline. ‘Just because you dig your way out of the goaf don’t give you the right to come and go as you please. I’ll dock your wages. I’ll give you the run!’
But, according to some unspoken miners’ superstition, coming and going as he pleased was exactly what we thought someone who had dug their way out of the goaf should be allowed to do. To walk through walls like a ghost.
‘Let him go, Crusher,’ said Douglas.
I studied Douglas and wondered if he would have talked like that if I was the one walking out of his life. I could not tell if they were kindly words.
There was a sombre mood among the miners that morning, I wasn’t the only one feeling empty and bereft. What had Dundas told me? Never give up on your people. But what if your people gave up on you? What if they decided and declared they were no longer your people?
I lay on my side and tapped at the stone roll with my pick. I had been at this work for nearly six hours when Bert Dulhunty summoned me to the mouth of the tunnel. Occasionally sightseers would interrupt us at our work and ask what we were about, digging like trolls in the ruined wilderness, but standing there by the towpath was Violet. The hem of her dress was grey with the slack it had passed through.
‘Go on, lad,’ said Bert. ‘Crusher won’t know you’re not in the hole.’
