Pete said, ‘You rogues cost me a night’s sleep. Now I’m going to try and catch up a bit of it.’ And left.
Matthew looked at the others. ‘So let’s vote.’
‘I’ve said what I think,’ Janice said. ‘But I don’t mind saying it again.’ She looked straight into Jud Hendy’s eyes. ‘They wanted to kill us for nothing at all. Hang them.’
Matthew looked at Hendy, too, then away. He could feel the others watching him.
He said, ‘After what they did to Jack I thought I’d want to kill them too. I don’t. I suppose I haven’t got the guts.’
Hamish also looked at Jud Hendy. There was none of the pain there had been in Matthew’s face. ‘I told you stealing was a hanging business where I come from.’ His voice was cold. ‘Best say your prayers.’
They took them out of the camp on horseback, tying Jud’s feet to the stirrups. He had begun to realise they meant what they said and was screeching and performing so they gagged him as well. Hamish almost got bitten for his pains.
‘Mad dog like this bites me I reckon I’ll be dead too,’ he said.
A faint trail wormed its way up the side of the mountain. The sky was lightening in the east and a fresh wind bent the grasses on either side of the path. Below them the diggings were dark although here and there lights were beginning to prick out as early risers got ready for the new day.
After ten minutes they found a level patch of ground.
‘Good as anywhere,’ Matthew said.
They dismounted, got the Hendy boys off the horses and retied Jud’s ankles.
‘How we going to do it?’ Hamish said.
Matthew considered. ‘I thought hanging but we don’t have a tree.’
‘Not so easy, either,’ Hamish said. ‘I’ve seen a few in my time. More end up strangling than get their necks broke.’
‘Let’s shoot them,’ Janice said.
‘My rifle will just about blow their heads off,’ Matthew said.
‘You voted not to kill them at all,’ Janice told him. ‘Give me the gun and I’ll do it.’
Matthew shook his head. ‘I reckon not.’ But it was not easy. ‘You said it yourself,’ he told Hamish. ‘Pity to waste your first murder on trash.’
‘This ain’t murder. We hand these rascals over, the police will hang ’em anyway. We took a vote on it, like in a trial. This is justice.’
Still Matthew hesitated. He was conscious of the others waiting, the darkness beginning to dissolve before the first approaches of the dawn. He told himself he was too soft. Life was hard and the only sure thing was punishment, deserved or not. What happened to good people was often far worse than this, the execution of two men for their crimes.
Before he could change his mind he cocked his rifle and fired into the back of Monk’s head.
Jud Hendy was gabbling through his gag, trying frantically to crawl away even though his ankles were tied.
Hamish tried to get him to kneel but he would not. He sprawled on his back. The front of his trousers was dark where his bladder had released. Hamish turned him over with his foot, raised his revolver and fired once.
They dug a grave in the stony ground and threw them in. They covered them, mounted the horses and rode back down the hill. Their faces were white in the dawn light. They did not look at each other. No one spoke.
TWENTY
Later that morning Janice made her way through the hurly-burly of the diggings to the shop. MacTaggart’s, the only store in the Mount Alexander goldfields, was located in a huge marquee positioned strategically in the very centre of the diggings. It stocked every commodity you could think of and many you could not.
Janice hesitated outside the entrance. By now everyone in Mount Alexander would have heard the story; suitably embellished by imagination and ignorance. She knew that she would be the focus of attention as soon as she went inside and was dreading it. Doubt and her conscience overcame her like a sickness.
There was the usual mob of people inside the store. It was easy to see who had struck lucky. They were the ones pawing over the piles of garments, the boots and shoes, the tins of caviar at what MacTaggart was pleased to call his delicacies counter. It was easy to recognise the others, too. Janice joined them as they ordered a cup of flour, a twist of salt, a few ounces of dried beef.
She counted out her pennies with scrupulous care, knowing how few of them remained. There was always the gold Matthew had stolen from Henry Cusack but she was determined not to use that until they had exhausted every other possibility. The gold was their talisman. She felt if she spent even a part of it she would be spending their luck. She would not even talk about it, had persuaded Matthew not to tell Hamish they had it salted away.
Now she was in the shop she realised that no one wanted to talk about the Hendy boys after all. They were history. People were more interested in a huge strike that some lucky newcomer had made.
‘Eleven hundred ounces,’ some woman, a complete stranger, told her. ‘One nugget! Can you imagine it!’
Janice could not imagine it. The diggings were full of stories of miracles that happened only to people you did not know, never to your friends or yourself.
By the time she got back the two men had gone down just over a foot.
‘How’s it going?’
Matthew gave her a strange look and handed her a large piece of cloth folded into a clumsy parcel. ‘See for yourself.’
It was very heavy. She looked at him, barely daring to hope.
‘Open it.’
She did so, fingers trembling.
Three nuggets, all of them bigger than the largest he had taken from Henry Cusack.
She wiped tears from her face. She thought how the Hendys might have driven them off, deprived them of what was rightfully theirs, deprived her of this moment of glory. Her feelings now seemed to justify what they had done. Why, she thought, they were no better than bushrangers. They deserved what happened to them.
‘Will there be more?’ she asked.
‘No way of knowing. The gold seems to be in pockets. One claim has nothing, the one next door a lot. So yes, probably. Only way we’ll find out is to keep digging.’
By nightfall they had recovered over forty nuggets. They weighed them on a little scale Hamish had borrowed from somewhere.
‘Two hundred ounces,’ he declared.
‘What’s that worth?’ Janice asked.
‘At two pounds eighteen an ounce, let me see, that comes to …’ He looked at them while they hung on his words. ‘Five hundred and eighty pounds.’
Matthew gave a great whoop of excitement. ‘We’re rich!’
‘Don’t let the whole camp know,’ Hamish cautioned, laughing.
‘I’d like the whole world to know!’ Still at the top of his voice, excitement blazing from the brilliant blue eyes.
‘So they can come and steal it from us?’
‘I’d like to see anyone try to steal this!’
‘To say nothing of the gold you brought with you,’ Hamish said in a quiet voice.
There was an awkward silence as they looked at each other.
‘How did you guess?’ Matthew asked.
‘I didn’t, not to begin with. I thought it was the Hendys’ gold but when I started thinking about it that didn’t make sense. Jud Hendy believed it had come out of the number one claim. That was why he said we’d stolen it. I didn’t want to believe him,’ his eyes met theirs, ‘but why should he lie? I knew we hadn’t found anything in number one.’ He raised his hand as Matthew tried to speak. ‘It’s your gold. I guess you had every right to keep quiet about it.’
‘No,’ Matthew said, ‘we had no right. We should have told you.’
‘It wasn’t that we didn’t trust you,’ Janice told him. ‘I wanted to keep it as a reserve in case things got really tough.’
‘We killed the Hendys together,’ Matthew said. ‘We should be able to trust each other over a few ounces of gold.’
They all knew it would not be
as easy as that. By their secrecy Matthew and Janice had violated some unspoken agreement between them. It would take time for faith to be restored.
Hamish did his best. ‘One thing’s sure,’ he said, looking at the gold they had recovered that day. ‘We won’t go off to dinner and leave these beauties behind.’
Gold, dust or nuggets, was the common currency of the diggings but the lucky ones had enough over to send parcels of gold to Melbourne with the government escort that left every week. That week Matthew, Janice and Hamish sent four hundred and eighty-three ounces to Melbourne.
‘And we’ve still got another twenty ounces for our day-to-day needs,’ Janice said.
They had lucked on one of the richest claims in the Mount Alexander diggings.
‘Champagne!’ Matthew shouted as they came through the door of the Great Eastern Hotel. ‘Three magnums! And keep it coming.’
The law said there was to be no alcohol on the diggings but who cared about the law? When you were rich there was no law.
They settled down around a table, smiling and shouting drinks for a stream of diggers who came up to congratulate them.
‘Touching us for luck,’ Matthew said in lordly fashion as he leant back in his chair, a cigar jutting from his mouth. ‘Let them, it doesn’t do us any harm.’
It was wonderful, this air of mastery. Gold gave them power in little things as well as big. They could put a jar of dust on the table, toss down a nugget or a sovereign, and it would buy them whatever they wanted—a drink, a meal, a man. Many men, maybe. Go into MacTaggart’s and within seconds the owner himself would be at their side, head bent obsequiously. A week ago he had not known of their existence, would not have cared if he had.
It meant they drank champagne instead of tea, bought Hennessy Battle Axe at fifty-four shillings and ninepence a case instead of Jamaica rum at eighteen and nine; not because they preferred it but because it was more expensive.
Powerful stuff. They were lords—and lady—of all they surveyed. It was hard not to be affected by it and they did not try very hard.
‘A month ago we lent you ten pounds.’ Hamish carried a heavy walking stick when he paid business calls of this nature. The end of the stick was weighted with lead and hissed as he swung it idly to and fro. ‘It was due two days ago. Where is it?’
The digger’s face contorted with anxiety. From the back of his dray the white, half-starved faces of a woman and a couple of kids watched apprehensively. ‘I’m nearly down to the blue clay. I only need another week, Mr Fairchild. A week at most.’
‘I’ve already given you two days over the limit. I’ll have to take your claim over, I’m afraid. Nothing personal, you understand. Purely business.’
‘For God’s sake, Mr Fairchild …’ The man’s voice broke beseechingly. ‘Everything I got is in that shaft.’
‘Including ten pounds of mine.’ Hamish shook his head sadly. ‘I’m sorry for you. I really am. Just the way things are. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a shilling a day to carry on as a labourer for me.’
The man flushed angrily. ‘Shilling a day? I could get better’n that working on the docks back in Melbourne.’
‘Take it or leave it.’
And another claim was added to their growing portfolio.
Janice and Matthew lay in each other’s arms in the little tent and listened to the noises of the night coming clearly through the canvas walls: the cries and yells, laughter and screams, the repeated rattle of gunfire. They still used the tents because there were no substantial buildings to be had. Matthew had suggested building something for themselves but Hamish had been against it.
‘We won’t be here long enough.’
They had stared at him. ‘Why not?’
‘This ain’t going to last,’ he said. ‘The gold’s too near the surface. This mob we got here’—there were twenty thousand men on the field now—‘will have turned over every stone in the valley before another couple of months is past. There soon won’t be anything left.’
‘What then?’ Janice had frowned.
‘Move on. Ain’t no shortage of other fields to go to.’
It was true. Every Sunday the coach delivered copies of the Argus from Melbourne. Even at two and six a copy those who could afford it rushed to buy and each edition talked of more strikes across the colony west of the mountains.
Whole communities were on the move. Children went to school to find their teachers had left for the diggings. Ministers inveighed against avarice to congregations stripped of men. Shepherds abandoned their flocks, the sheep unguarded, graziers desperate.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ Janice said, tracing with one finger the line of Matthew’s dark eyebrow as she leant over him in the patchy light.
‘What is?’
The finger continued its rhythmic movement. ‘Us. On the bones of our arse one minute and then one lucky break and it all changes.’
‘Not just luck. We picked those sites. We had to fight for them, by God.’
‘Course we did. But it was still luck. Luck we met up with Pete Saul. Luck he told us to take up those claims. Luck the Hendys had left them.’
‘So we didn’t do anything?’
Matthew sounded displeased. She kissed him. ‘Course you did. You found it. You dug it out. That was the hard part. Scary, though, isn’t it? I mean, why us?’
Matthew was not so metaphysical. ‘I don’t care why. So long as we get it.’
‘Oh yes, we get it, don’t we?’ Janice’s hand was questing lower now. ‘I mean, we’re here, aren’t we? That’s luck too.’
He smiled. ‘In a tent? Surrounded by this infernal din every night? Some wouldn’t call that luck.’
‘With you,’ she said. ‘That’s all the luck I need.’
Oh God may it continue, she thought. Let him not get sick of me. He goes off, what will happen to me?
But would not let herself dwell on it. Not while there were other, nearer things to command her attention. She sought them, found them.
‘Oh God!’ Janice cried out to the ridge of the tent above her. Her face contorted, her head rolled from side to side as she gave herself to passion’s surge. ‘Oh God oh God …’
There were days when Janice was bored.
Each morning she tidied the tents and organised the food for the day. It didn’t take long. By the time she was finished there remained hours to fill. Hours. Matthew wouldn’t even let her do the washing any more.
‘We can afford to get the Chinese laundry to do that.’
When she protested he said, ‘I don’t want my woman to be seen doing all that hard work. We’re beyond that now.’
‘I didn’t notice my hands drop off when I did it before.’
‘You always said you wanted to live a life of leisure,’ he teased her. ‘Now’s your chance.’
She had discovered a life of leisure was not all it was cracked up to be. She had enjoyed the camaraderie of the communal wash, the laughter, the gossip, even the occasional bickering. It had kept her alive. Now she felt like an ornament: decorative, but essentially useless.
To fill in the time Janice went to MacTaggart’s Store and tried to work out special things for them to eat. The choice was limited unless you wanted food like tinned caviar and none of them was a fancy eater. She bought tinned pilchards and a pudding wrapped in a cloth that she boiled over the fire. While it was boiling it smelt more of the cloth it was wrapped in than the pudding. Matthew said it tasted like it too. Nobody liked the pilchards either. Discouraged, Janice went back to producing the meat and stew and damper on which they normally lived.
One Sunday she tried going to church. She failed to get Matthew to go with her but when she got back she told him about it.
‘There was this little gnome of a preacher with a flow of words fit to stop a clock. Yelling something about laying out a claim on Mount Calvary. People were flinging up their arms like lunatics and crying out praise and alleluia. I felt a right fool but no one seemed to notice I
was there. All of a sudden someone ran in and shouted there was a prize fight being held outside and half the men got up and walked out. Better than a circus, it was. Tell you the truth, I almost walked out myself.’
It cheered her up for a day or two but by the end of the week she was as down as ever. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, for her to do.
A few days later Matthew was negotiating with the owners of two claims located on the banks of a creek five miles away. He had left in midmorning and did not expect to be back until evening.
Janice went to the shop for food. On the way back she stopped at the sly grog shop for a bottle of Battle Axe to go with it. They did not drink very often but she thought a couple of glasses would cheer her up.
She drank half the bottle in little hot sips and by the time Hamish came back from the diggings she was drunk.
‘Matthew back yet?’ He had been down at the creek washing dirt through the cradle and was filthy and exhausted.
‘No.’ She stared at him owlishly. ‘Com’n have a drink.’
He looked at her. ‘I’d say you’d had enough.’
‘You’re not wrong.’ She shook her head sadly and hiccupped. ‘Enough of me, enough of you, enough of this place.’ She gave him what she meant to be a big, beaming smile from lips that had developed minds of their own. ‘Nev’ min’. Few drinks will shoon pu’ tha’ righ’.’ And she tipped the bottle back, well beyond decorous sips by now.
Hamish took it from her. ‘I’d say that is definitely enough.’
She did not resist. ‘I’m unhappy,’ she said. ‘Why’m I unhappy?’
‘I don’t know, Janice.’
She heard the patient tone in his voice, humouring a drunk. Anger flashed through the liquor fumes. ‘Don’ put on that voice wi’ me! I’m bored, tha’s why.’
Hamish laughed. ‘How can anyone be bored in the middle of a goldfield?’
‘All right for you, maybe. For Matthew.’ Maudlin tears were leaking down her cheeks. Her voice trudged through the litany of the day’s routine. ‘Get the food. Tidy the tent. Sit around in all the stinking heat an’ flies. Doing what?’ Another flash of anger. ‘Counting my toes is what!’
The Burning Land Page 24
