by Mark O'Flynn
Violet had passed Crusher and the others hauling Dundas’s body up the cliff.
I went down to her. I thought my pulse would burst through my neck as the sun caught her hair. I set my pick down, loosening my bowyangs so that my strides fell to ankle height. I didn’t like for her to see me in my bowyangs, which were labouring wear.
Without saying a word, we turned along the path. We walked. The track was narrow and I paused for a moment, unsure whether to walk ahead of her or behind. I went ahead. Those damned bowyangs. We passed half a dozen of the ponies waiting to haul the next skips back along the tramway.
‘Which one is Dandy?’ she asked.
‘Dandy?’
‘Is there not a pony called Dandy? With blue eyes.’
‘Not that I know of. And I know them all.’
After half a mile or so we turned off the track and began to climb the Golden Stairs. Violet bunched her skirts into fistfuls at her sides to avoid tripping on them. Soon enough we were puffing and panting. The valley opened out below us. The sun met us at the top.
She had a duty to stay, she said, and help her mother with the smaller children. That wasn’t a thing to shy away from. That, in its small, ordinary way, was a calling. Clancy was good at running away when it suited him, but it wasn’t a thing she would choose to do. Clancy didn’t care so much for duty. She had a fairly good notion of the mistake that had been made at the Carrington, the switching of the rooms, and how it had come about. She had to accept some blame for wanting, in the heat of the moment, to punish Parkes. She could see now that hot soup down his collar would have been preferable. She also saw that Clancy wasn’t about to admit his errors. He denied taking the jewels. And she couldn’t admit her part for the jeopardy that would put her in with Goyder. She was afraid. She was afraid of what her guilt might make her do. All she wanted was for her friends to get their jobs back, but at what peril to her own if she stepped forward with what she knew? But if she must, she would.
I didn’t know why she was telling me this. All I understood was that she wouldn’t run away with him. That was all I needed to hear. ‘Have you told Clancy this?’
‘He said he would return tomorrow for my answer.’
When I explained that I had seen the jewels she cried out, ‘But you must get him to return them! Then all the maids would have their positions back.’
‘I don’t think he is considering that.’
‘Persuade him!’ Her hands opened and closed.
‘I swore I would not tell.’
‘Don’t tell, Byron. Act.
Do what is right.’
‘You want me to put my own head in the noose?’
‘You are not to blame. Return the jewels discreetly and no one need ever know where they came from.’ She was pertinacious, and I began to see she spoke from a position that my mother would call a higher good. She lived in a different world from the one Clancy inhabited. In the sunshine on the Golden Stairs, Violet had presented me with a dilemma.
She explained her part in Clancy’s half-cocked plan, supplying him with the key. However, she swore she had no idea what he was going to do, least of all with his hammer.
‘It was his way of restoring your honour,’ I said with a laugh of disbelief.
‘Oh, honour. You boys are so up in arms about honour. Honour and loyalty. I wish it hadn’t happened. But it did. I wish that I could forget. But I cannot. It burns in my brain. I have said all that should concern you. It is more than I told Clancy. Luckily, I managed to get away. I would rather my friends all had their jobs back than an old man be punished. Some of them have babies to feed. I’m asking you to act in friendship. My friendship. And my guilt.’
Looking across the valley we watched a single white cockatoo glide over the canopy of trees, like a loose thread in a bolt of cloth.
‘If they catch him, he’ll hang,’ I said numbly.
‘I did not send him to Parkes,’ she said.
‘I know. But you could have stopped him.’
‘Could I? Could you?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Clancy has never really listened to me.’
‘You owe him nothing, Byron.’
‘He is my brother,’ I said, and the words choked in my throat.
She said nothing for a while, then laying a hand on my sleeve: ‘I understand about your oath, but will you help me in what I have to do?’
It was a straightforward question, and I suddenly knew where my loyalties lay.
NINETEEN
Violet’s voice echoed in my ears. Time was racing me. I wouldn’t be tentative. That was another thing Dundas had said. I had to get out to the Ruined Castle before Clancy returned. He would have to come back some time to collect his treasure, and his wages, too, from Edwards. How many times had Clancy made that climb? It never got any shorter. How many steps are there in a lifetime? When I asked in the village no one had seen him return. It was late afternoon and already a shadow loomed over the settlement. I moved into sunlight as I climbed the castle track. It was very rough where rain had washed out the clay and gravel. The she-oaks leaned to the east. I found the crevice. What if he was here in the bush, watching? Would I be prepared to fight him? I removed the stone plug. Clancy’s secret bundle was still there. I took it, thinking, He will never speak to me again. I have broken the pact. Our history is meaningless. I am no brother.
I hid the hessian bundle in a hollow log behind the hut of Thomas Brimfield, covered with moss peeled from a rock. I made myself busy with chores that had long since gone to younger boys. I gathered some water from Causeway Creek. I split some firewood.
That evening, after our tea, Clancy showed up, limping; he was wearing his old, too-small boots, riddled with holes. Douglas saw this and stiffened, but he refused to ask about the ones he had given Clancy. I could see it irked him. Good boots with plenty left in them. How long had he known that Clancy wasn’t his son? I thought it kinder to let my father’s worries be about boots.
My mother fed him and Clancy was civil, like a condemned man with his warders. I tried to catch his eye, but he averted his face. He wasn’t like someone we had known all our lives. Polite, on the cusp of departure, he placed his knife and spoon together daintily, like a lady folding her legs. It was too late for him to get out to the Castle tonight. He wasn’t yet aware that I had betrayed him. That he had lost everything. It was like the world had already ended, but Clancy didn’t know.
The humpy that moonless night seemed emptier than ever before. Clancy’s imminent departure – we all seemed to know it without words – depleted us. Emma tried to cheer us with a song, but my father was too low in spirits. Even the candles seemed to feel the discomfort, shrinking into themselves. My mother picked up her Bible and began to read it, her lips moving silently over the words. Soon enough she went to bed without a word to any of us. The dishes lay dirty in their bucket. Douglas had himself long given up reading. The print was too small, and he feigned a lack of interest in the meaning. Sitting in Emma’s chair by the fire I picked up the old Bible with its cracked vellum cover. It fell open naturally to the bookmark at Joshua, where the old Israelites were taking whatever they wanted from the land of milk and honey. What was my mother doing reading this, I wondered? Keeping her life to herself. Clancy was staring at the flames.
A yellowed square of newspaper, folded and frail, slipped out from between the pages. I opened it to see myself, younger and, it seemed, wiser, perched like a duck atop John Britty North’s nugget of coal. I was stern with the attentions of the daguerreotypist; gathered about me were the other miners, including my father, who also looked much younger, so much more in command of his world. There at the end was Herb Grainger, unsmiling. I glanced up at Douglas to see him snoring softly in his chair, his head dropped to one shoulder. I closed the book on Exhibit no. 2711, with jockey before Clancy should guess what I was looking at, and took myself off to my cold, awful bed.
In the night Clancy whispered to me that he would leave something shin
y for my mother, something for her to remember him by. I told him not to bother. She would remember him anyway. We lay a long time in the lean-to where it was the mosquitoes that spoke loudest. All that night I contemplated sneaking out of the hut, retrieving the sack from the mossy log, and returning it to the niche on the Ruined Castle. I retraced every step of the journey in my sleepless mind, but I didn’t do it. There was no moon. And he would have woken. And I was a coward.
In the morning, he collected his possessions, which amounted to precious little, and thrust them in his swag. His cicadas were all dust. Then he gave the three of us a brief goodbye and headed south, past the kerosene shale pits in the direction of the Ruined Castle. My mother wept. My father ate a hearty breakfast of potatoes. He prepared for work as though nothing had happened. After filling our water bags from the communal drum in the clearing, I ducked behind Brimfield’s hut and shoved the hessian bundle into my old mutton bag with my crib. Then I had to go. I needed as much head start as I could conjure. I left my father at the coalface and continued, as if towards Edwards’ office. Edwards did not see me. Nor did the storekeepers in Aulds’ store. I spoke to no one. I needed the distance between the moment of my treachery and what I now had to do with it.
At the top of the Incline there was still a fair hike to the Carrington. The warm, kitteny feeling of Violet’s greater good did not absolve the wrong I knew I had done Clancy. At one moment I was basking in the glow of her favour, the next I was appalled at myself.
The ice cart was rumbling down the Government Road towards the Centennial. I asked the driver for a chip or two to suck on, which he kindly gave me. At the grand hotel there was a horse and hansom cab waiting at the foot of the steps. The grounds were empty, apart from a lone gardener raking the shorn grass of the tennis court. I gave him a second glance and saw that the gardener was Angus Lovel, my nemesis from the schoolhouse. I had intended to slip into the foyer and leave the bundle on a desk or chair, skedaddling off before anyone should see me, but as I approached the door, I saw Mr Goyder himself manhandling a trunk down the steps with the help of the driver. I waited behind a tree for them to hoist the trunk up. My guts were churning. Seeing Angus did not forebode well, and my nerves were frazzled. Perhaps I should simply leave the bundle on the carriageway?
The driver said something I didn’t catch, to which Goyder replied, ‘Not now, not now, I’ve got the premier departing shortly for Faulconbridge and no staff to help me.’ I was aware of my flaxen miner’s breeches, minus the bowyangs. My mutton sack reeked. I watched Goyder go up the steps and disappear into the hotel. Then, determined and resolved, I raced towards the steps. Angus watched me suspiciously.
I noticed the drainpipe to one side of the balcony, recently scraped clean. I stepped across the threshold. Goyder was nowhere in sight. The ceilings inside the foyer were the most ornate I had ever seen. Against the wall was a velvet chaise longue the length of a felled tree. My clothes seemed like an affront to the rich, calm wallpaper – two opposing substances – and I felt faintly sorry for the carpets beneath my boots. Two giant vases painted with scenes from China framed the front desk. I placed the mutton sack, objectionable as it was – and all the more so in this smooth, polished context – on the reception desk, then turned and bolted for the door. I allowed myself a moment of elation as I felt the sunlight again on my face. It was done!
However at the bottom of the front steps Angus Lovel stood waiting for me, his arms held wide. I stopped. He seemed to be attempting to examine his own bottom lip. ‘Mr Goyder, Mr Goyder,’ he bellowed. My heart was hammering. I could see Lovel wasn’t going to let me pass. ‘No one to save you now,’ said Angus.
There were rapid footsteps behind me, then the cold muzzle of Goyder’s pistol pressing against my ear.
‘Thank you, Angus,’ he said, then to me, ‘I’m very busy and in no mood for mischief.’
At pistol point, he marched me back inside and into his office. ‘Don’t make any sudden move.’
He had picked up the mutton sack as we passed the desk. Now, with one hand, he tipped out the hessian bundle, still with little bits of moss clinging to it, and spread it open on the desk. Well, let me tell you, his eyes popped open as wide as a couple of sundered oysters. The jewels made quite a display, juxtaposed against the rough rag of the hessian on the polished walnut of the desk. We were both silent for a moment.
‘Where – where did you get them?’ he asked.
‘I am not at liberty to say.’ I could feel my pulse at work in my thumb.
‘Did you take them?’
‘No.’
He stood before the door, his squatter’s shoulders barring the way. ‘Then who gave them to you?’
‘I found them.’
‘Where?’
‘I am not at liberty to —’
‘Your liberty,’ he interrupted, suddenly angry, ‘seems to mean a great deal to you.’ He waved the little pistol in my direction.
I decided to see if it would help if I put my hands up. The words I had prepared, just in case, now seemed pretty ineffectual. ‘If I had taken the trouble to steal them would I have walked in here so willingly to bring them back?’
‘I don’t know what sort of game it is you’re playing.’
Goyder and I stood watching each other. Why did I not just charge him? I was, after all, a big strong miner with powerful muscles of my own. But that would have been tantamount to admitting some level of guilt. Perhaps in acting with this level of stupidity a bullet was what I was seeking? How could I explain myself to Clancy? I had broken the pact. I was trying the noose on for size. Perhaps, my guilty conscience argued, I was trying to lessen Clancy’s culpability in the matter. Had I wanted to be caught, in some strange way, to stop him from leaving? But that was something I knew he wouldn’t have allowed. It was never like him to say sorry. He preferred notoriety. I didn’t move because it seemed to me I was frozen with guilt. And, fair enough, little or not, the gun was a powerful disincentive.
Mr Goyder moved to plant himself strategically in front of the doorway. He cocked the hammer of the pistol and called loudly for Angus, whom he sent to find Mrs Haddock. She eventually arrived in the hall, flustered and puffing. He gave her instructions through the doorway. She had to ask him to repeat himself. The effect of these instructions was to summon, first, Sergeant Brownrig (Angus Lovel was dispatched), and secondly, Lord and Lady Carrington, who were in their suite upstairs. When Mrs Haddock had gone, Mr Goyder and I resumed our positions and waited.
‘You misunderstand,’ I said. ‘I am merely returning the lost property I have found.’
‘Shut up and stay there.’
The jug of water on the desk looked wonderful, yet I dared not ask for any.
Eventually Brownrig arrived with, much to my trepidation, his cohort Constable Buggery Clout. ‘There is no need for that, sir,’ said Brownrig, indicating Goyder’s pistol. Goyder slipped it into his pocket. Mrs Haddock was sent out to drag in more chairs.
Then Lord and Lady Carrington appeared. Seeing the vivid display on the desk, Lady Carrington gave a gasp of recognition and pleasure. She clutched the jewels to her ruffled bosom and even kissed some of them. For a while everyone spoke at once. It was quite crowded in the office. Lord Carrington sniffed the air, and I realised what he was sniffing was my mutton sack. Or perhaps me. Clout moved to the window and wrested it open. Sergeant Brownrig opened a notepad and repeated the same questions I had already answered, to which I gave the same responses. I had not taken them. I was returning them. I was the agent of their restoration. How unintelligent would it be to walk in here if I had taken them? They said I didn’t look particularly intelligent. They didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know who had taken them.
I asked them to check with Crusher Edwards of the Katoomba Coal Mine. My whereabouts could be checked against the wages book. It was not me. I knew nothing. There was, I felt, a compelling, if slippery, logic to all this.
‘Who are you protecting?’
demanded Brownrig.
‘I am protecting no one.’
‘How did you get the master key?’
‘That is beyond my knowledge.’
I was wary of Buggery Clout, who stood behind me at the open window, saying nothing. It was like he was taunting me with an invitation.
Suddenly Lady Carrington spoke up, squeaking as though she had just been pinched by her rust-proof corsets. ‘And where is the box?’
I paused for thought. What box? I could see my compelling logic unravelling before my eyes.
‘My beautiful maple box. It has a silver latch and some gold hinges and garnets over the lid. My mother left me that box. Where is it?’
At that moment Sir Henry Parkes, who had presumably been wandering the vacant corridors wondering where everyone was, poked his shaggy head around the door, starting slightly at the number of us packed into the office. ‘Do you know, Goyder, there is not a working clock in all the hotel.’
‘Henry,’ said Lady Carrington, ‘they have found my jewels.’
‘Have they indeed,’ he said, squeezing into the room, which suddenly appeared to be a third smaller. ‘I hope they can find my luggage. I do believe I am late for my train, but there is no way of knowing exactly how late.’ There was some minor shuffling of chairs. We all had to accommodate Sir Henry’s large presence.
‘My, this is cosy,’ he said. He looked at me standing by Goyder’s desk in my miner’s rags. ‘Is this the culprit?’ I suppose I must have looked guilty. The governor gave the premier a swift précis as to the state of affairs at play in the office. Sir Henry, nodding, perhaps thinking he was in parliament, asked a question no one had yet thought to ask. ‘What is your name?’
I replied, ‘Byron.’
‘Ah, She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies.’
‘Henry!’ interjected Lady Carrington.
‘Forgive me, my dear. Well, Byron, is that your only name?’
‘Byron Wilson, sir.’
‘From the sublime to the prosaic. Are you, by any chance, Byron Wilson, a Fenian?’
