Nanberry

by Jackie French

  She bent her head, feeling the tears cold on her cheeks. How could she live without him? Day after day, year after year, when he was simply … not.

  If only she could keep every day of his six years with her, like you stored butter in a well, days that she could take out and live again. But you never paid attention when you should. You spent the days cooking, washing, brushing your hair. Stupid things, when you could have been watching your son.

  She knew there would never be another child. Not for her.

  There was nothing she could do. Wash his face and chest to try to keep the fever down, bundle him in rugs when the chills came, reassure him when he screamed in his delirium. Try to coax him to drink some boiled water, to eat a spoonful of stewed apple.

  And pray.

  It was her fault. Don’t play with the convict brats, she’d said, as if that was enough to keep him safe. But the whole colony was a land of convicts and their diseases.

  She should have sent him to England last year, when his father had first written about Andrew joining him. There’d even been a woman passenger, one of the officers’ wives, who’d have looked after him, especially with the golden sovereigns his father sent. Andrew should have been in England now, in that fine brick house on the hill, being raised a gentleman, not running wild with muddy feet.

  Not lying here, dying.

  Her fault. All her fault.

  She bent her head. ‘If he lives,’ she prayed, ‘I will let him go. I promise. No matter how much it hurts, I will let him go.’

  She opened her eyes. Somehow she had hoped that her prayer might have made a difference. But Andrew still lay there in a feverish sleep, from which it looked like he might never wake.

  He needed fresh water. She stood, leaving the candle burning by the dish of stewed apples, went out to the kitchen and dipped the bowl into the bucket by the door. It wasn’t till she was headed back that she saw the thing on the table.

  A fish. A giant fish. Had a friend of her husband’s brought it? But they would have left it covered in a cloth to keep off the flies. And this fish had a great gash in its side. It had been speared, she thought, not caught with a net or hook.

  It was a mystery. But she had no time to spare for mysteries now. Still she stopped to put the fish away in the fly-proof safe.

  Chapter 57

  ANDREW

  SYDNEY COVE, JANUARY 1800

  He was cold, then he was hot. He shivered when he was hot and sweated when he was cold and monsters lurked at the edges of the room, even when his eyes were shut.

  He had to go. To death, to England, into the monsters’ jaws, it didn’t matter. All that was Andrew was going to vanish as though it had never been.

  A monster growled at him; a monster with the face of one of the small green birds, a monster with a beak that clacked and chirped …

  He opened his eyes, hoping the monster would vanish.

  It did. He was all alone. Tears sprang to his eyes. No Mama. No Papa, no Father, no Maria or Nanberry. He was going to die; and if he lived he would be sent away.

  Alone. Alone.

  Tears made the room shimmer. Something moved on the windowsill.

  He blinked, trying to see more clearly.

  It was … fuzzy … its shape indistinct in the darkness, but sort of golden with the brightness of the moon behind it. Like a halo, he thought dazedly. But only angels have haloes.

  An angel in his room.

  The angel gave a tiny growl. It lifted up his bowl of stewed apples and bent its head.

  The door opened. The bowl clattered onto the floor, spilling the stewed apples.

  Chapter 58

  RACHEL

  SYDNEY COVE, JANUARY 1800

  She caught a glimpse of an o’possum as she came in the door. A big old o’possum, bending down to eat stewed apples, just as the Surgeon’s o’possum had, so many years before. The bowl crashed onto the floor. The animal vanished in a blur of fur.

  Could it be the same one? She supposed so. Kangaroos and emus were never seen in the town these days, but there were o’possums in plenty, feeding on the fruit trees and the roses. She had no doubt that the Surgeon’s o’possum had done very well. And it had loved stewed apples …

  ‘Mama!’

  Andrew struggled to sit up. She ran and put her arms around him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mama!’ His voice was weak but steady. ‘Mama, I saw an angel!’

  ‘A what?’ She wondered if he was still delirious. But his face looked cooler now.

  ‘An angel,’ he whispered. ‘By my bed.’

  She looked down at the broken bowl, at the scatter of droppings on the floor. ‘That was no …’ She looked at her son again. His face was thin, and there were black shadows under his eyes. But the fever had broken. He looked at her in wonder.

  ‘Is it my guardian angel? Just like Reverend Johnson said?’

  ‘Reverend Johnson didn’t mean …’ Or did he? she thought dazedly. Perhaps angels could come in many forms. Even as o’possums …

  She looked at her son. ‘Yes,’ she said steadily. ‘Maybe it was your angel. I’m sure you have an angel who’ll look after you.’

  ‘Even if I go to England?’

  ‘Yes.’ It tore her heart to say the words. ‘Even in England. Your angel will look after you. Your angel will bring you home.’ He nodded, already half asleep. She settled him down on the pillow, swept his hair from his forehead with her fingers, then sat by the bed and watched him. The moon slid across the sky and the o’possum crashed from branch to branch.

  Her son. Her wonderful, dear son. But she had promised. She had to think of him, not herself. She had to let him go.

  Chapter 59

  RACHEL

  SYDNEY COVE, DECEMBER 1800

  She hugged him before he got into the ship’s boat to be rowed out to the Brilliant. He didn’t like being hugged in public, not by his mama. But this time he hugged her back, as though he’d never let her go.

  At last Nanberry put his hand on her shoulder. Nanberry was a fine young man now, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair caught back in a sailor’s braid. Even the gap in his teeth made him look like a sailor who had lost a tooth to scurvy.

  She nodded. ‘I love you,’ she whispered to her son. ‘Stay safe.’ Then she stepped back.

  It was a silly request. She knew it. The dangers he was facing weren’t ones he could avoid: the enormous waves that crushed a ship, the ice floes that might wreck it. How many ships had already been lost on their way to the colony or back? Had anyone even bothered to keep count?

  Dysentery, ship’s fever … She shut her eyes, then opened them again quickly, so as not to lose a second of these last moments watching her son, trying to keep the memory of his warmth on her skin.

  The tiny boat bobbed on the waves. The rowers heaved at the oars. She watched as the boat reached the ship, out in the harbour, and as they climbed the rope ladder.

  At last two figures stood by the rail: one small with white skin, one tall with black. They waved at her. She waved back.

  The ship’s sails had already been hoisted. She saw the anchor raised, dripping seaweed, saw the taller figure run off to his duties on the ship. But the small one stayed by the rail. The sails billowed. The ship glided across the blue. Then it rounded a headland and was gone.

  She thrust her fist into her mouth so as not to cry out. Her son was gone. She forced herself not to think of shipwreck, his tiny body washed up blue on the ice; not to think of him bullied at school as a convict brat; not sick and calling for her, impossibly far away across the oceans.

  No. She had to think of the man he could become; an old man with a grey beard perhaps, but still the same green eyes, laughing with his grandchildren at his knee. He would be a gentleman. He would be happy. He would be safe. He would survive.

  But the boy she had waved away — the seven-year-old, with scabby knees, who’d played around the rocks and coves of this beautiful, alien harbour — that boy was lost to her
forever.

  She turned at last to go home and found her husband behind her. He must have waited there to let them have their last minutes alone; he had wished to let her drink in the last sight of her son, to make memories of his face she could call up when the pain grew too great.

  Thomas folded her in his arms. He didn’t say, ‘We will have other children.’ He knew it wasn’t likely to happen now. Nor would it have made any difference to her feelings. One child couldn’t replace another. Instead he said, ‘He will come back to us. I know it.’

  She nodded, feeling the comfort of his warmth.

  Chapter 60

  NANBERRY

  ABOARD HMS BRILLIANT, DECEMBER 1800

  Nanberry stood at the rail, Andrew’s hand again in his. His brother was trying not to cry. Nanberry picked him up and hugged him, as he had so many times before. The boy felt smaller, somehow, out here beyond the land.

  The ship had changed course now; the colony was lost to sight behind them in the massive harbour. The land was treed again, and here and there appeared the small spires of Gungai fires.

  Sydney Town is tiny, thought Nanberry, clinging to the edge of a vast land. If the country shivered, if the wind blew strong, perhaps the whole colony might vanish, leaving the land to the black nations once again. Sometimes — just sometimes — he even hoped that might happen.

  He put his brother down and smiled at him. ‘Come on, my brother. I’ll show you your bunk. It’s in a cabin! And how about a slice of your mama’s plum pudding? I’ll tell you a secret.’ He bent down. ‘Plum pudding is the best thing in the world to keep away seasickness. You won’t be seasick, will you?’

  ‘No.’ The boy’s voice was uncertain. He lifted up his chin. ‘But I didn’t cry, did I? Mama would have been more sad if I had cried. I am going to be brave. Like you.’ He hesitated. ‘Will you sleep in my cabin too?’ He tried to make it sound as though he didn’t care one way or the other.

  ‘Of course.’

  There was no of course about it — mostly Nanberry slept in a hammock, taking turns with whoever wasn’t on watch. But there was no need for Andrew to know that. It was his job to keep the child happy. Keep him alive, through storms and freak waves, stop him falling overboard when he had to sit on the high toilet seat above the waves.

  And after that …

  Nanberry gazed back as the land turned to pale blue haze on the horizon. When his brother was safe he would come home again. It was time to go bush, to listen to the trees, to watch for badagarang prints among the tussocks, to be a Cadigal for a while, instead of an Englishman. To take a wife. He would have children, and they would have children too. He was Nanberry, striding across the world.

  Epilogue

  CAPTAIN ANDREW WHITE

  SYDNEY, 1823

  He had forgotten the smell of gum trees.

  Captain Andrew White of His Majesty’s Royal Engineers, a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, stood at the rail as the ship glided across the smooth waters of the harbour. He had forgotten the way the land slipped a thousand tiny fingers towards the water, shining like the waves were scattered with diamonds.

  England was behind him: years living in his father’s house, years of boarding school with its cold baths, burnt porridge and floggings, years studying engineering at military college, the horror of Waterloo, a killing field where bodies and severed limbs lay among the mud.

  He had survived.

  Now he was coming home.

  Yet how could a land be home when you hadn’t seen it since you were seven? His early childhood seemed like a dream now. Had he ever been that barefoot lad, running down to the harbour? And fishing with spears? Was it even real? There had been an angel too.

  He smiled, and shook his head. A small boy’s dreams.

  And yet some of the most unlikely things had been real. A brother with black skin, who had taught him how to swim. Nanberry had been real: his mother spoke of him sometimes in her letters. She’d sent him a throwing stick one Christmas, a gift from Nanberry. Andrew smiled at the thought of using a native throwing stick in front of his fellow officers.

  No, that part of his life was secret. A ghost life: the ex-convict mother; the black brother; the even worse secret — his parents hadn’t been married. His father had advised that they let everyone think his first wife had died, that Andrew was his legitimate eldest son.

  But the ghosts had kept whispering to him — the blue of the mountains, the smell of the smoke. Home, they whispered. This land is home.

  The Scots called it your calf country — the land where you were born, that gave you life. You never forgot it, they said. Andrew gazed about him at the white-trunked trees around the harbour. Was this really home?

  The sails flapped above him as the ship turned into another twist of harbour, the wooden hull creaking, the sailors yelling as they hauled at ropes. He stared. That couldn’t be Sydney Cove!

  He’d left a huddle of huts creeping up the hills. He’d come home to a city.

  Where there had been cabbage-tree huts, there were stone warehouses, stout cottages, and wharves not with one poor vessel hired to ship convicts, but ship upon ship. Suddenly he could smell the oil: whale oil, seal oil, the stench of burning blubber. How many whaling ships must use this harbour now?

  But there were other ships too. There was at least one other passenger ship — he could see ladies with bright parasols on the deck. Another that might be a convict hulk …

  It was … big.

  If only Father could see this, he thought. His father believed that nothing could come from New South Wales but dirt and squalor, that it was merely a huddle of captives at the bottom of the world.

  But it was beautiful, thought Andrew, remembering the birds and playing in the waves. It was beautiful when I was a child. It’s still beautiful now.

  He stared as the shore grew near, as though he might see his mother’s face among the crowds on the wharf. But that was impossible. She didn’t even know he was coming. The first ship that could have brought her a letter was this one. She would be at her home in Liverpool, with his stepfather. His stepfather was magistrate now, one of the wealthiest men in the colony. But Nanberry …

  Andrew breathed deeply, trying to find the tang of gum leaves again. Home.

  It was strange to feel solid ground under his feet. The world still shifted from side to side.

  There was no chance of taking a carriage to Liverpool today, not till his luggage was brought ashore. He found a hotel not far from the wharves — a good one, with a bedroom to himself, a feather mattress and clean sheets. A fire burnt in the fireplace. He sniffed, the scent of gumwood suddenly almost unbearably lovely after the sour coal fires of England.

  He went downstairs to the taproom and ordered dinner, then stepped out of the door and looked around.

  Once again he was shocked at how … substantial everything was. The old huts and cottages had looked as though one big southerly could blow them away along with all the white people on the continent. These grand stone buildings and broad streets and solid warehouses would be a credit to any city in Europe. Even the streets in this part of town seemed to go in different directions from those he remembered, though of course they hadn’t even been streets then. Just paths through the mud. This might have been a different town entirely from the place he’d known as a child.

  At last he decided to go uphill, and south, to try to find the house where he’d been born.

  The street sellers’ cries rose around him as he walked along the footpath, ‘Pies! Hot pies! Oyster pies!’; ‘Who’ll buy my lavender? Sweet lavender!’; ‘Fisho! Fisho!’

  They were the same cries you’d hear in any English city, and the same accents too. It was almost possible to forget that this was still a place of punishment … Then he saw them: a line of lags in convict grey, chains linking their ankles as they shuffled up the road.

  A passing man saw him staring. ‘Road gang, most like.’

  ‘They look half starved.’


  The man shrugged. ‘Well, that’s government work for you.’ He tipped his hat politely, and walked on.

  Andrew kept walking too. But it was impossible to find the house or even the street. Either it had vanished or his memory — a seven-year-old’s memory — wasn’t good enough to find it. Instead he walked down to the harbour, not to the wharves, but to one of the coves, a little way beyond. Suddenly he was a boy again. These were the rocks where he’d speared fish with Garudi. It hadn’t been a dream, after all. The waves were the same, slapping against the rocks, the white spray.

  But no Garudi. No black limbs outlined against the startling blue of the sky. How could he have forgotten this sky? What had become of Garudi? Is there even, he wondered, any way to find out?

  He walked slowly back to the hotel. The dining room was full of men like himself: solid respectable men, ships’ captains or merchants perhaps, with money for good food and lodging. There were no women — even the servers were men, pockmarked and brittle-toothed. Old lags, he supposed. But at least they had food here, not like the poor wretches working the roads.

  Faces turned to look at him as he came in. He heard a mutter: ‘Waterloo.’ The news must have come from the ship already. Andrew was used to the awe that people showed to any Waterloo veteran now.

  Every man who had survived the Battle of Waterloo was a hero. They had saved England — and all of Europe — from Napoleon. No man who had served at Waterloo had to pay for his own drink in any hotel in England. But in truth he recalled little about the actual battle.

  Instead there were memories of small things: grimly focusing on scraps of paper in front of him, trying to sketch maps of what troops were moving where to send to the commanders; seeing a redcoat scream defiance as he charged at the French soldiers with his bayonet, only to realise that the Englishman’s left arm was a bleeding stump … and yet the man kept on, running a Frenchman through before he collapsed; the messenger boy who had brought news of one of the battle’s shifting tides, standing there at attention till he fell dead, the blood soaking the back of his red jacket.