Alas, I regret to inform you that the safe when opened was empty, that is, save for a sealed envelope. When opened it contained an envelope addressed in printed writing to The Solomon Family, the note within contained only these words in Ikey’s handwriting:
‘Always remember to leave a little salt on the bread.’
You will recall it is a saying much favoured by Ikey.
And now to business which I trust will always remain only between you and I, dear Mama.
You will remember the two lines in the riddle poem:
‘To this cipher be one more to fit
&
then add roses ringed to love’
By much speculation it came to me some months ago that ‘To this cipher’ meant not Hannah’s part of the combination but only one number, and not three. The lowest number when the number 276 is finally reduced is 2 + 7 + 6 = 15 and 1 + 5 = 6. I took the number for the line ‘To my one and only blue dove’ to be six.
Then again, by working some weeks in my spare time on the conundrum I came one evening to the notion that the ring of roses seen surrounding Ikey’s tattoo was in the shape of a zero, the cipher ‘0’. I now had two numbers, six and zero. But it was the final one which took me near to despair, until some weeks ago I chanced to read the final line in a different manner, ‘then add roses ringed. . .to love’. The third number was, I concluded, contained in the reduction to a single number of the sum of the numbers made of the word, love!
These I soon worked out, which you will see from using the alphabet code are: 12 + 15 + 22 + 5 = 54. When reduced to the lowest possible number, that is 4 + 5 = 9. The third number was nine.
I now had three numbers, 6, 0, 9, and the final line tells me clearly that the ring of roses (the ‘0’) is added to the word ‘love’ so the zero, I surmised, must come after the number nine.
I am pleased to inform you that I concluded the number must be 690. Using the numbers you had given me as being the combination held by Mistress Hannah, I had a sequence complete of 690816. This proved sufficient to open the safe some four weeks before I received Ikey’s letter of instruction when David Solomon and I met on board.
I must inform you that Mr David Solomon has taken ship to return home with the sad news of the missing contents to the safe. This letter will be despatched in the care of the captain of the same vessel, the Mermaid, bound for Hobart. You should expect great unexplained lamentation from Ikey and even perchance some effect to his heart, so you must tell him immediately! You should also anticipate considerable wrath should you meet up with Mistress Hannah, or she come upon Ikey. For with him Master David carries the note from Ikey and a magnificent gold signet ring encrusted with diamonds and rubies, so that Ikey could be true to the message written on the note. I feel sure Ikey will be most pleased at the notion.
I am therefore delighted, my dear Mama, to acquaint you with the news that you are now a woman of most considerable means. The value of the gold and silver in sovereigns and in the form of ingots, and there be a great many precious stones besides, is in the region of one hundred thousand pounds. If you wish you shall have the land in the entire Huon Valley for the cultivation of hops.
I am now exceedingly happy to inform you that I have learned all we will need to know on the tilling, sowing, netting and harvesting of hops and have, with my own hands, worked every part of the growing and harvesting process. I have also acquired fifty bags of the finest quality seed.
I now most eagerly and impatiently await your instructions to come home as I must set out upon my search for my brother Tommo.
I remain, your humble, loving and obedient son,
Hawk X Solomon.
P.S. I caution you to burn this letter at the conclusion of your having read it. I will include a bank draft for the value of Ikey’s house made out in your name, to the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, though I shall find the ten percentum commission most useful. I shall bring you a new Sunday bonnet, some bright ribbon, which I do not suppose you will affect, a winter coat, two of the splendid crinoline gowns so popular with our young Queen Victoria and several pairs of good stout, English boots. H.X.S.
Hawk’s letter crossed with one from Mary.
My darling Hawk,
I thank God every day that he has given you to me. Though I confess I also thank the great mountain as often. My news is both wonderful and sad; Ikey has passed away, though peacefully in his sleep. I wish you to come home at once. This letter is extremely short for there is a ship which leaves for England within the hour.
And now! Our Tommo is back!
This morning at eight of the clock there was a knock at the door and a boy in rags who looked not much more than eleven years old, skinny and of a dirty appearance stood as I opened it. His hair was fair and his eyes a most beautiful blue.
‘Mama, I am home, will you take me back?’ he asked.
I love you, Hawk Solomon, and we are all together again, Mary, Tommo and Hawk!
Your loving mother,
Mary Abacus.
Acknowledgements
The first thing a writer learns is that real life contains far more coincidence than any he or she will ever be allowed to get away with in a fictional plot. Life is simply stranger than fiction. Almost at a glance any daily newspaper carries examples of character and plot well beyond the imagination of the boldest of fiction writers. Good, historical fiction may be said to be fact that went undiscovered at the time it happened and the historical novel is the writer’s ability to dig deep enough to find some of the truth as it was at the time. To help me do this a lot of people gave generously of their knowledge, intelligence and time. Without them there could be no book. While they may appear below only as a list of names in alphabetical order, I count myself most fortunate to have known them all, for they are the fuel which fed the fire of my fiction.
Louise Adler, Jennifer Byrne, Adrian Collette, Benita Courtenay, David Daintree, Owen Denmeade, Margaret Gee, Alex Hamill, Jill Hickson, Elspeth Hope-Johnstone AM, Rabbi J.S. Levy, Dr Irwin Light, Larry Lyme, Essie Moses, Libby Mercer, Ross Penman, Roger Rigby, Jeff Rigby, Irene Shaffer, Michael Sprod, Paula Teague, Barbara and John Tooth. There are others who helped in smaller though no less important ways and I am grateful to you all.
There are always one or two people who need to be singled out for special mention. My editor Belinda Byrne qualifies as the star at the top of the tree, closely followed by Dr John Tooth and Paul Buddee AM. Also my publishers, Reed, who chewed their collective fingernails but kept their patience and their expletives to themselves when my manuscript was well past its promised deadline.
I thank you all.
I acknowledge and recommend Phillip Tardiff’s book, Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls: Convict Women in Van Diemen’s Land,1903–1829, as an important piece of scholarship and a valuable source of information on the transportation of female convicts to Tasmania.
Finally, I acknowledge my gratitude to all those writers and historians past and present who go before me; they are too numerous to mention and too wonderful for words.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Australia)
707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada)
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England
Penguin Ireland
25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ)
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New
Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd
Rosebank Office Park, Block D, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Johannesburg, 2196, South Africa
Penguin (Beijing) Ltd
7F, Tower B, Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by William Heinemann Australia, 1995
First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1997
This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2006
Copyright © Bryce Courtenay 1995, 2006
Copyright © Christine Courtenay 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
www.penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74-228068-4
Also by Bryce Courtenay
If poker was an addiction then music was an overwhelming obsession; one could never replace the other in my life.
During the Great Depression there was little hope for a boy born into the slums of Cabbagetown, Toronto. But Jack Spayd is offered a ticket out in the form of a Hohner harmonica, won by his brutal drunken father in a late-night card game. Jack makes music as a way of escaping his surroundings, and his talent leads him to a jazz club and, eventually, to the jazz piano.
Jack is a virtuoso and hits the road, enchanting audiences in Canada, wartime Europe and Las Vegas, where he is caught up in the world of elite poker and falls under the spell of his boss, the enigmatic Bridgett Fuller. Vegas is a hard town ruled by the Mafia, but Jack prospers, until his luck turns bad and he falls foul of the Mob. Forced to run for his life from Vegas, he must also leave the woman he adores. His adventuring takes him to the far reaches of Africa, to a rare and valuable bird that may seal his fate – and to the love of a very different woman.
Set across three continents, Jack of Diamonds is a spellbinding story of chance, music, corruption and love – and Bryce Courtenay’s last novel.
Simon Koo is an ambitious Australian-born Chinese who goes to Singapore in the mid-sixties to work for an advertising agency. But the Wing brothers, who run the agency, are not what they seem. There is soon trouble when Simon falls in love with the forbidden Mercy B. Lord.
With no family or connections, this beautiful young woman is powerless to resist the evil influence of Beatrice Fong, a manipulative businesswoman, who, in league with the Wing brothers, lures her into the international trade in sex workers and heroin trafficking involving the American CIA. Simon must save her at any cost.
Set against the wretched trade in drugs and human misery operating during the Vietnam War, Fortune Cookie is a compelling thriller, with a story of love against impossible odds at its heart.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression few opportunities existed for working-class boys, but at just eighteen Danny Dunn has everything going for him: brains, looks, sporting ability – and an easy charm. His parents run The Hero, a neighbourhood pub, and Danny is a local hero.
Luck changes for Danny when he signs up to go to war. He returns home a physically broken man, to a life that will be changed forever. Together with Helen, the woman who becomes his wife, he sets about rebuilding his life.
Set against a backdrop of Australian pubs and politics, The Story of Danny Dunn is an Australian family saga spanning three generations. It is a compelling tale of love, ambition and the destructive power of obsession.
Nick Duncan is a semi-retired, wealthy shipping magnate who lives in idyllic Beautiful Bay, Vanuatu, where he is known as the old patriarch of the islands. He is grieving the loss of his beguiling Eurasian true love, Anna, and is suffering for the first time from disturbing flashbacks to the Second World War.
So he puts pen to paper and tells the compelling tale of the life he has lived since his war-hero days. It’s an adventurous life that has had at its heart the love of two passionate and unforgettable – but very different – women.
The seductive Anna Til and the beguiling Marg Hamilton have spent a lifetime in contest for Nick’s devotion. Nick remains torn between them, and struggles between their two opposing worlds of economic exploitation and environmental crusade – until he is called upon to referee . . .
Moving between the exotic Pacific Islands, Japan and Australia, over several decades, Fishing for Stars is an epic drama of adventure, ambition and unconventional love, and the stunning sequel to Bryce Courtenay’s best-selling The Persimmon Tree.
The persimmon tree is a symbol of life, a heartwood that will outlast everything man can make . . .
It is 1942 in the Dutch East Indies, and Nick Duncan is a young Australian butterfly collector in search of a single exotic butterfly. With invading Japanese forces coming closer by the day, Nick falls in love with the intoxicating Anna van Heerden.
Their time together is brief, as both are forced into separate, dangerous escapes. They plan to reunite and marry in Australia but it is several years before their paths cross again, scarred forever by the dark events of a long, cruel war.
In The Persimmon Tree, Bryce Courtenay gives us a story of love and friendship set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pacific during the Second World War.
‘I am Sylvia Honeyeater; I think myself born around 1196, and this is the story of my life.’
From master storyteller Bryce Courtenay comes the colourful epic of Sylvia. Late twelfth-century Europe is torn by religious intolerance. Sylvia, with a singing voice that can literally charm the birds out of the trees, and an acute and questioning mind that refuses to accept unreasoned beliefs, embarks on a pilgrimage. She joins the Children’s Crusade, bound for the Holy Land.
From a bawdy life as an entertainer in a whorehouse to an austere and frequently cruel existence in a convent, she fights to be true to her destiny. And her mysterious birthmark causes much confusion: can this peasant maid indeed be a chosen messenger?
Sylvia is a tale of adversity, of adventure and crusades, and of a beautiful and gifted woman.
From Bryce Courtenay comes a novel of Africa. The time is 1939. White South Africa is a deeply divided nation with many of the Afrikaner people fanatically opposed to the English.
The world is also on the brink of war and South Africa elects to fight for the Allied cause against Germany. Six-year-old Tom Fitzsaxby finds himself in The Boys Farm, an orphanage in a remote town in the high mountains, where the Afrikaners side fiercely with Hitler’s Germany.
Tom’s English name proves sufficient for him to be ostracised, marking him as an outsider. And so begin some of life’s tougher lessons for the small, lonely boy. Like the whitethorn, one of Africa’s most enduring plants, Tom learns how to survive in the harsh climate of racial hatred. Then a terrible event sends him on a journey to ensure that justice is done. On the way, his most unexpected discovery is love.
Inspired by real events, Brother Fish tells the story of three people from vastly differing backgrounds. All they have in common is a tough beginning in life.
Jack McKenzie is a harmonica player, soldier, dreamer and small-time professional fisherman from a tiny island in Bass Strait. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan is a strong-willed woman hiding from an ambiguous past in Shanghai. Larger than life, Private Jimmy Oldcorn was once a street kid and leader of a New York gang. Together, they reap a vast and not always legitimate fortune from the sea.
Spanning eighty years and four continents, Brother Fish is an inspiring human drama of three lives brought together and changed forever by the extraordinary events of recent history. But most of all it is about the power of friendshi
p and love.
Billy O'Shannessy, once a prominent barrister, is now on the street where he sleeps on a bench outside the State Library. Above him on the windowsill rests a bronze statue of Matthew Flinders’ cat, Trim. Ryan is a ten-year-old, a near-street kid heading for the usual trouble. The two form an unlikely bond.
Through telling Ryan the story of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia as seen through Trim’s eyes, Billy is drawn deeply into Ryan’s life and into the Sydney underworld.
Matthew Flinders’ Cat is a modern-day story of friendship and redemption by internationally bestselling author Bryce Courtenay.
In a small town like any other small town around Australia live the Maloneys. They are a fifth-generation Australian family of Irish Catholic descent who are struggling to reach the first rung of the social ladder. The Maloneys are a family you won’t forget: a strong mother, a father broken by war, three boys and two girls, one of whom has an illegitimate daughter. Each of their lives is changed forever by the four fires – passion, religion, warfare and fire itself.
Four Fires is a story of the power of love and the triumph of the human spirit against the odds.
A Vietnam Vet returns to an Australia that regards him as a mercenary guilty of war crimes.
Thommo begins to develop all kinds of physical and mental problems, and thinks it must only be him until he finds that he is not alone. Ten mates, all ‘who remain of his platoon’, are affected in the same way.
Now Thommo and his mates are eleven angry men out for revenge. They rope in an ex-Viet Cong with ‘special skills’ and his own secret agenda. They’re the ‘Dirty Dozen’, just like the movie. Only it’s real life, and they’re so screwed up they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
Potato Factory Page 71
