The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  ‘At least you can count your money too,’ Hamish said. ‘You know how much money we’ve made since we got here?’

  Janice neither knew nor cared. ‘Sittin’ here in all the heat and flies … Wha’s the use of money if you live like that, eh?’ She lurched towards him, hand outstretched. ‘Gimme a drink.’

  ‘No.’ He held the bottle away from her.

  She looked at him angrily, breath stinking. ‘You’re a bitch, you know that? Won’ even have a drink wi’ me when I’m all alone an’ … an’ miserable.’ Her mood changed. ‘Le’s have a drink, Hamish, eh? Be nice to me,’ she wheedled. ‘Why aren’t you nice to me?’

  ‘I’m always nice to you.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ He would have run a mile, given half a chance. She crowded closer to prevent him. She ran the back of her hand up his cheek, giggling, and gave him a sloppy smile. ‘Gimme a kiss then. If you wanner be nice.’

  ‘I’m not giving you no kiss. I don’t reckon Matthew would like it if I did.’

  She cackled in derision. ‘Matthew’s a good bloke,’ she said. ‘But he’s not here, is he? When I need him. Nobody’s ever here.’ Spite flashed. An’ you won’ even give me a drink.’

  The tent was lurching and swaying about her. She put her hand to her forehead. ‘Gawd, I feel queer.’

  She made the door of the tent—just. After she had finished throwing up, she staggered back inside, plunged full length on to the bed and passed out.

  Next day she felt terrible—headache pounding like a hammer in her temples, mouth as dry as sand, eyes red and swollen.

  She inspected them in her scrap of mirror, running her hands through her tangled hair. ‘Like bloody boils,’ she muttered.

  Matthew was cheerful, his foray up the creek successful. ‘You certainly hung one on last night. What got into you?’

  Not you, she could have said but did not.

  She looked out of the open flap. The hot, brilliant sun lay over the roar, the dust, the unending bang bang bang of the bloody diggings. She thought her head would burst.

  ‘You’d better take it easy for a while.’

  Matthew’s voice, still amused, made her mad. ‘Where’s Hamish?’

  ‘Down the shaft. We’ve been working two hours now. I only came back to see how you were.’

  If he thought she would be grateful for his concern he could think again. ‘Sick. That’s how I am.’

  ‘You’ll live,’ Matthew said. ‘I better get back or Hamish will come chasing me.’

  ‘Why should you care?’ Suddenly she was full of resentment at Hamish who had rejected her advances. ‘It’s your business as much as his!’

  ‘Won’t be worth much to either of us if we don’t keep working.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘You have a sleep. You’ll feel better when you wake up.’ He hesitated. ‘You won’t go out or anything, will you?’

  There was a thousand ounces of gold in the locked box in the corner of the tent, ready for tomorrow’s shipment. There was no shortage of thieves in the diggings and she knew he was wondering if she was in a fit state to keep her eye on it.

  ‘Get on,’ she said irritably. ‘No one’s going to pinch your precious gold while I’m here.’ She might not be strong enough to handle a robber but she could raise the alarm soon enough and in the congestion of the diggings that would be enough. ‘When’re you coming back?’ Not that interested but making the effort.

  ‘Early. We’re going to have another talk with that bloke who wants to sell his claims.’

  Matthew went out. Janice drank some water and grimaced. Even the bloody water was no good, for God’s sake. Half the camp was down with one bug or another although so far they’d been lucky. She’d read somewhere that boiling killed the bugs so did so. Maybe it helped.

  What a place, she thought. There were days when she actually hoped the gold would run out. Crazy, but she couldn’t wait to get away.

  I am a fool, she thought. Why can’t I be happy? I said it only the other day—Matthew is all the luck I need. Not because he took me out of bloody Amherst. Not because he has stayed with me, been good to me. Because I love him. Love him love him love him. More than I would have thought possible.

  It was hot and she really did feel sick. Maybe a sleep would do her good, as he had said. She closed the tent flap and undressed.

  He had told her from the first he did not love her. She had always known that. She had always been afraid he would throw her out but he never had. He had even come back, now, to see how she was.

  Downright disagreeable, that’s what she’d been. Never mind. She smiled, cupping her full breasts in her hands, remembering the sensations his lips had kindled in her only two nights ago, like fire and an intolerable, wonderful, golden ache. She’d make it up to him later.

  For the first time for days, hangover or not, she felt cheerful, almost happy. She thought that Matthew might love her, just a bit, after all.

  ‘We shall have a wonderful life,’ she said aloud. ‘I just know it.’

  She lay naked on the bed and closed her eyes.

  Matthew and Hamish had just shaken hands with the owner of the claims when a man Matthew knew came pounding down the track towards them. He was lathered with sweat, his breath coming in gasps.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Bin lookin’ all over for you. You’d best get back to your tent. There’s been some trouble.’

  He grabbed the man by his shirt-front. ‘What sort of trouble?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Dunno, mate. That was the message.’

  Matthew ran for his horse, Hamish behind him, flung himself into the saddle and rode like a madman across the plain. He passed people on foot who scattered before him, another horseman with a dark, thin face, riding fast. He ignored them.

  A crowd was gathered outside the tent.

  Matthew elbowed his way through. ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

  Pete Saul was there, face grave. ‘I’m sorry, mate. Some bastard’s had a go at your tent.’

  Matthew stared at him. ‘How’s Janice? She all right?’

  The ring of faces muttered. He swung around, staring at them, but no one would meet his eye. Terror rose in him like a wave.

  ‘For God’s sake …’ He thrust past them and went into the tent.

  The canvas wall at the rear sagged where it had been slit by a knife. The slash extended from the bottom almost to the top. Sunlight shone through the slash. Through it he could see the spokes of a dray wheel drawn up two yards away. It had been there for weeks. He saw clearly how the grass had grown up all around it. He saw everything clearly—the light along the edge of the cut canvas, the trinkets Janice had picked up here and there to make things more homely. There was a black and white china dog she had bought him after Jack had been killed.

  There was a fat woman sitting beside the bed. Grey dress, grey face as she turned to look up at him. He did not know her. Janice lay on the bed. Someone had combed her hair and it lay neatly around her head. It reminded him of how she had been when he saw her in the street at Amherst, the gay white parasol, the little dog with the happy red lead. Nothing like she had been earlier that morning, nursing her unaccustomed hangover.

  He did not need to ask how she was.

  Her eyes were closed but she was not sleeping. She was wearing a dark dress. She had always said it was too dark for her and had never worn it much. Now it was arranged decorously around her. Someone had cut their way into the tent and killed her. Killed her for being there. Killed her for nothing. He glanced at the corner where the locked chest had stood. It was missing. Of course. A thousand ounces. Nothing.

  ‘I put the dress on her,’ the woman said, prim mouth disapproving. ‘She wasn’t decent before. Couldn’t find no sheet to cover her with. I looked for her wedding ring,’ she said. ‘She must’ve taken it off or somen. Mebbe the thief stole it. I couldn’t find it nowhere.’

  She had arranged the hands right over left so the absence of the wedding ring coul
d not be seen.

  ‘What happened?’ Matthew asked. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Someone come into the tent,’ the woman said.

  ‘I know that. I meant what did they do to—’

  ‘They stabbed her. Through the heart. Must’ve died straight off,’ she said lugubriously.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘No blood,’ the woman said. ‘Can’t have suffered, that’s one thing.’

  That was supposed to be a comfort.

  ‘Tried to raise the alarm, I ’spek. That’s why ’e killed her, to stop ’er singin’ out. Done better to lie still an’ say mithin.’

  Get out. He managed not to say it. ‘Could you leave me alone with her a minute?’

  He could see her think about it, making sure the request complied with her sense of decorum. Apparently it did. She rose, fat-buttocked, puffing, and waddled out with ponderous dignity, leaving upon the air the faint imprint of sweet talcum and sweat.

  Matthew turned to the bed.

  He took the hands and rearranged them. No wedding ring, no sheet. Nothing but gold in the bank. Nothing. He had thought of her as a good-time girl. He had not wanted to bring her, had agreed to do so only because, after he told her about Cusack, she would have been endangered by staying. He had not let her believe anything different. He had warned her he did not love her, whatever the truth of that might have been, and thought himself right to do so. He had left her nothing at all.

  Eighteen years old.

  He picked up the cooling hand and tried to say something to her about all this but could not.

  He put the hand down again, gently. The woman had been right. There should be something covering her … her face, at least. He got up and found a cloth. Luckily it was clean. He wondered about kissing her one final time. He bent over her, the closed eyes, closed mouth devoid of breath. He hesitated, withdrew. No point. She was not there any more. He shook out the cloth and spread it over her face. He went outside.

  There were people waiting in the bright sunlight. A low murmur of voices that stopped as he emerged blinking from the shadowed tent. Hamish was there. Pete Saul, who had known her before he did. A dozen others. He shook off their sombre, commiserating glances.

  ‘I’ll be back presently,’ he said.

  He walked away between the line of tents, sun hot on his back, but there was nothing there either.

  Later he went to see the preacher Janice had mentioned, the little man with his talk of Mount Calvary. There was no need to explain why he was there. Word travelled fast in the diggings and everyone knew what had happened.

  ‘Mr Jeffrey,’ he said, ‘I’d be obliged if you would say a few words at the funeral.’

  It was not an easy thing to ask—Matthew did not have much time for preachers after Andrew—but he made himself do it because he thought Janice would have wished it. The man might refuse, saying she was a woman living in sin, staying with a man without the sacrament of marriage. He could say she was a harlot, fallen from the way of God.

  Jeffrey looked into him with large grey eyes. He was a small man who looked big because of what was in him. He held Matthew’s hands in his own and said, ‘Of course I will hold a service for her.’

  The burial ground was on a bare patch of earth on the edge of the workings. Piled clay lay in sterile heaps twenty feet and more in height and baked under the sun. There were no trees, no shade. The air shimmered in the heat. Flies buzzed. Matthew did not want her to lie here, in this place devoid of beauty and peace, but there was no help for it.

  They stood around the grave that had been hacked out of the harsh earth. The plain wooden coffin looked barely big enough to hold a doll. There was a big turn-out. People Matthew had never seen were there. Mount Alexander was a place of death as much as it was of gold. Life was as cheap as the gold was dear but something about the manner of Janice’s dying had struck a resonance in these people so they felt the need to farewell a girl many of them had never known.

  Jimmy Jeffrey stood beside the grave, the hot wind blowing the hair on his head. He said in a voice so troubled and low that Matthew had to strain to hear him, ‘Our sister is gone from us, killed because of the gold in her tent. She were eighteen year old. Her life has been spilled needlessly on the ground from which the gold itself came. Some of you may ask where was God that he should permit this to happen? Why did he not stop the loss of this beautiful woman, her beautiful life that was barely begun?’ He paused, the silence broken by sobbing. When he resumed his voice was stronger, a clarion call over the sterile yellow ground. ‘God did not kill our sister Janice. A man killed ’er. A man with the devil in ’im. This is not God’s work. Tes the devil’s.

  ‘And God did not stop it because he has given us all the free will to do what we d’wish to do. The best of us and the worst. For good or for ill. The man who killed her could have stayed his ’and but the devil held the knife and he surrendered himself to the devil. If the authorities catch that man they will kill him. If they do not, he will mebbe think he’s got away with it. Friends, he has got away with nothing. The day of judgment will seek him out. The punishment he will endure then will be worse than anything we or he can imagine. Where is God, you say? I’ll tell ee.’ He pointed. ‘He is ’ere. With you.’ The finger moved. ‘And with you. And with you. With you and in you and beside you forever. As he is with our sister Janice who has gone from us into the glory.’

  He raised his Testament in his hand, a thin, black book much used and soiled with use. He read, ‘“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”’ He closed the book. ‘Amen.’

  It was not only the women whose eyes were wet. Matthew went forward. He sprinkled a few crumbs of soil on to the coffin and the sunlight struck sparks and rainbows across the grave as he looked down into it. Others followed, one by one, silence broken only by the whisper of sobs, the voice of the wind. When they were finished the men bent their backs and shovelled the soil over the coffin, over the grave, over Janice Honeyman in her black box.

  Waiting for Judgment Day? Matthew wondered. Maybe. She would be lonely, as she had been all her life. Maybe God will guide her home he thought. Not a praying man, he prayed then. Be kind to her.

  Eyes hot, heart burdened, he went away, Hamish with him.

  He was sleeping—empty tent, empty bed—when the memory of a face came to him with a force that woke him immediately. He lay in the darkness, watching the dim shape of the tent above him, trying to still the pacing of his heart, to retain the shreds of the vision that had roused him.

  A man’s face, narrow and frowning, dark-skinned, with greasy black hair swept back. The face of the man in the Royal Hotel in Amherst, questioning Charlie Oates about gold. The man named Schultz.

  Matthew put his feet out of the bed and sat, head in his hands. What had made him think of that face now? He had seen it somewhere recently. He thought and thought but nothing came to him. Eventually he lay back, closed his eyes and, surprisingly, slept.

  When he awoke he knew where he had seen the man. He had passed him on horseback, not half a mile from here, during those despairing minutes as he raced back frantically and unavailingly to the claim.

  That sighting had put the man in the vicinity. It did not mean he had anything to do with Janice’s death yet conviction, as deep-seated as it was irrational, said he did. The man he had seen in the bar of the Royal Hotel in Amherst and again here at Mount Alexander was the killer.

  I will hunt him down, he swore. I will find him and I will kill him.

  Words. He did not know where the man was. He did not even know his name. He knew nothing about him at all. Yet the determination remained.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘This place is all show,’ Hamish said. ‘Lots on the surface but when you dig down there ain’t nothing underneath.’

  By the end of 1852 they were barely paying the
ir way and three months later had their first loss since opening the number two claim over a year earlier.

  ‘Done us proud, Mount Alexander,’ Hamish said. ‘But I guess we’ve had the best of her by now. We need to move on.’

  Matthew was all in favour of turning their backs on Mount Alexander. The field had been kinder to them than most but Janice’s shadow still lingered painfully.

  Several times he had dreamt she was still alive. He reckoned she was probably the closest thing to a true friend he had ever had. He told himself that he hadn’t loved her but knew she had loved him. This didn’t make the memories any easier to bear. He thought if they could get away from Mount Alexander he might be rid of the dreams and memories, too. They decided to go to Melbourne and raise hell for a while before making up their mind what to do next.

  In May 1853 the two men rode down the long road into the city. Ahead of them the waters of Port Phillip Bay gleamed in the westering sun. On the far side of the water a line of hills, blue against the pale sky, marked the distant horizon.

  Melbourne had grown so much since Matthew had accompanied Cusack’s wool clip two and a half years earlier that he would not have recognised the place. There were hundreds of buildings where before had been open plains. The waterfront was choked with more ships than he had seen in his life. The rigging of square-riggers from around the world webbed the sky while between them the river teemed with ketches and schooners from up and down the coast.

  They left their horses at an ostler’s and wandered through the brawling, crammed streets. Everywhere was movement, everywhere people jammed together, all in a frenzy to get somewhere or nowhere.

  They went to the grandest hotel they could find in a street named Collins and ordered a suite. Matthew had wondered if they would be admitted—the dark suits, snowy shirts and flowing silk ties of the men passing through the decorous foyer contrasted interestingly with their own red flannel shirts, moleskin trousers and wideawake hats—but nothing was said to suggest they were unwelcome.