by Peter Watt
He did not want Patrick to think he was scared. He knew that he would climb with him if he went ahead with his foolish venture. Dear God please make something happen so I won’t have to climb the tree, Martin prayed. His prayer was answered almost immediately by a voice that came from the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. ‘Master Martin Duffy,’ the voice said. ‘Your ma told me that she wants you to go home right away.’ Both boys turned to watch the man emerge from the shadows.
‘Who are you?’ Patrick asked suspiciously.
Charlie Heath grinned at him. ‘I was up ’avin’ a drink in the bar and the big German fella there . . . what’s ’is name?’ Charlie said, scratching his unshaven chin.
Martin piped in helpfully, ‘Uncle Max . . . ’
‘Yeah, that’s ’im,’ Charlie continued. ‘Your Uncle Max told me to tell you if I see you up this way that your ma wants Master Martin home straightaway. Says you can stay Master Patrick. Seems she’s got a job for Master Martin.’
Patrick glanced at Martin. Chores were better than having to follow Patrick up that tree. ‘I’ll go,’ he said.
Patrick sighed with frustration. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Charlie’s grin evaporated. He had not anticipated that the boy would choose to go with Martin when a job was mentioned. ‘No need Master Patrick,’ he said quickly. ‘I see you are tryin’ to get up the tree. You after robbin’ a nest?’ Patrick felt uneasy in the man’s presence. He was a stranger – and yet he seemed to know the family. Deception did not really cross his young mind. ‘I know where there’s a plover’s nest with eggs in it not far from here,’ Charlie added. ‘Be much easier than tryin’ to climb this tree at this time of day. I’ll show you while yer brother goes home and does his chores.’
Patrick glanced at Martin who shrugged his shoulders before turning to walk back to the hotel. For a brief moment Patrick felt his unease warn him that he should follow. But the stranger was smiling easily, and had turned to walk towards the old creek that had been clear and flowing in the time before the white man came to settle on the sandy lands around the harbour. Plovers’ eggs were a prize and Patrick followed the man into the scrubby bushland adjacent to Fraser’s paddock.
‘What does Ma want me to do Grandma?’ Martin asked Bridget as she sat at the kitchen table shelling peas. ‘A man said that Ma had some job for me to do here.’ Bridget ceased what she was doing and looked up at her grandson. ‘What man?’ she asked with a puzzled frown.
‘The man who Uncle Max talked to in the bar a while ago,’ Martin answered. ‘He said Uncle Max was told by Ma for me to come back here and do a job for her.’
‘Dear God!’ Bridget exploded, spilling the peas in her lap as she sprang to her feet. ‘Max hasn’t been here for days you foolish boy.’ Martin’s face crimsoned with shame. He had been so intent on finding an excuse to get away from the paddock, and possibly making the dangerous climb, that he had forgotten Uncle Max had been away for the past week.
‘Go to the bar and tell your mother to fetch your father immediately,’ Bridget said, gripping the stunned boy’s shoulders and shaking him in her consternation. ‘Tell her that she is to send as many of the men in the bar straight to Fraser’s paddock.’
Young Martin reacted quickly and Bridget snatched a shawl from the back of the kitchen door. She did not wait for the patrons to spill out of the main bar before rushing into the darkening shadows.
She stumbled blindly in the night muttering a prayer over and over again. Dear God let Patrick’s guardian angel be with him in his moment of dire need. The pools of muddy brown water that had haunted her dreams were quickly turning to crimson pools of blood.
Bridget was the first to reach Patrick. She called his name and he answered from the scrubby land adjoining the paddock. She stumbled through the scrub and saw him standing over the body of a big, evil-looking man who stared with sightless eyes at the tops of the tall gums. Bridget noticed the glint of a knife blade in the dead man’s hand.
‘Are you all right Patrick me darlin’?’ she said, grasping the boy to her in a great hug. Patrick did not respond, but merely stared curiously at the dead man at his feet. Bridget followed his gaze down to the man. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
Patrick broke his trance-like state to stare at her with wide eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered slowly. He was still attempting to piece together the blur of sights and sounds mere seconds before he heard his name called. ‘I was walking along and the man was following me. I was just ahead of him through the bushes there,’ he said, pointing towards the old creek. ‘And I heard a noise like croaking. When I came back, I saw the man lying here, with his head twisted around strangely. I think he is dead.’
Bridget looked down at the man at their feet. She had seen broken necks before, when the British had hanged rebel Irishmen on the gallows, and the dead man certainly had a broken neck. ‘I thought I saw Uncle Max,’ Patrick continued hesitantly. ‘I thought I saw him running away.’
Before Bridget could reply a party of Erin Hotel patrons stumbled upon them. One of the men swore when he saw the body. ‘Charlie Heath,’ he said. ‘I know him. A bad one from The Rocks.’ The man bent to scrutinise the knife still in Charlie’s grip. ‘Looks like he was up to no good.’ The others nodded and the man looked up at Patrick. ‘You see what happened?’ he asked.
‘Patrick did not see anything,’ Bridget answered quickly before Patrick could reply. ‘He just found the man here.’
‘No matter,’ he said, wisely dismissing the affair. ‘The traps can look after Charlie. Don’t think they will be looking too hard for whoever slew him. Charlie’s a bad ’un.’
The other patrons from the Erin nodded their agreement and sauntered back to the hotel to recount amongst themselves what they knew about the dead man’s evil reputation. Bridget guided Patrick away from the paddock and fell behind the crowd noisily debating who might want to kill the infamous thug.
‘Was it Uncle Max?’ Patrick asked quietly, as he walked beside Bridget.
‘It was your guardian angel,’ she replied, and he knew not to ask any further questions.
Later that night Max returned to the hotel via the kitchen. He was startled to see Bridget sitting at the table with her rosary beads in her hands. At this time of night she was normally in bed and it was obvious that she had been waiting for him.
‘I would like you to have these Mister Braun,’ she said, offering the well-worn rosary beads to him. He did not take them but bowed his scarred head. ‘I am not of your faith Missus Duffy,’ he replied.
Bridget smiled enigmatically. ‘But you are a guardian angel of my faith Mister Braun. I would like you to keep the rosary beads as a gift from an old woman who will not be haunted by dreams of muddy water tonight.’
Max accepted the gift and felt the smoothness of the beads in his hand. ‘Danke Frau Duffy,’ he said. ‘I vill always keep them. Vun day I vill give them to Patrick.’
THIRTY
Wallarie stared in awe at the swirling red eddy of dust twisting and turning in a tortured dance across the plains. He shifted his balance and rattled his spears as the dust devil plucked at the spindly dry trees in the distance. The powerful column of air swirled away, and the Darambal man recommenced his long trek south across the plains.
He trudged with his head down, his left arm hanging by his side, as useless as a dead limb on a coolabah tree. His wound caused each step to be dogged by a fevered vision: the dust devil had spoken to him across the desolate plains, and recounted the story about a spirit woman and a spirit man.
They had met and the spirit woman gave birth to a boy. But the ancient spirits of the Nerambura people had said this was not meant to be. The spirit woman was of the evil tribe who had come as black crows to pick out the eyes of the living, and the spirit woman lost the boy. Now he wandered far, searching for his spirit father who was a great warrior. But the spirit father was at war with the evil spirit of the night, and the time of reckoning was coming.
Shaking his head and muttering at the incomprehensible images in his mind, Wallarie continued to stumble under the sweeping azure skies above. When he looked up at the sun he froze, and began to tremble in his fear. His trembling turned his legs weak and he crumpled into the red earth. For above him the sun had turned black, and he knew it was his time to die.
Although the Osprey battled with unseasonable northerlies as she sailed north, Captain Mort was not concerned. That was until he noticed the dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure, indicated by the ship’s barometer.
Mort frowned and spread the nautical charts before him on a table in his cabin. He traced a line to the government settlement at Somerset and although it was within a day’s sailing, his considerable experience navigating in tropical waters told him that the storm somewhere off the Osprey’s bow would be a bad one.
Whilst poring over his charts he felt the ship slow. The wind had dropped ominously and the barque plunged sluggishly into the oily, ominous swell of the tropical sea. The Osprey was sailing on a course north to the island of New Guinea and navigating through the treacherous waters of the world’s largest coral reef. Mort was many despicable things, but one thing he could be commended for was his skill as a sailor. He had sailed the wild and cold waters of Bass Strait as a young man and had learned his trade under the best skippers who had ever sailed the treacherous southern seas. However, although Bass Strait during its worst storms may have had massive rolling waves and howling winds, it did not have the added peril of deadly coral reefs.
The jagged, mostly uncharted reefs had taken many ships to the bottom; passenger ships, freighters and bêche-de-mer schooners had gone down in the maze of coral shoals over the years. Such had been the toll on shipping and lives that Sir George Bowen, Governor of Queensland, had established the outpost of Somerset on the tip of Cape York Peninsula ten years earlier. The settlement was intended to provide a base from which rescue parties could retrieve shipwrecked sailors. It was established as a rival port to Singapore, strategically located to the Straits of Malacca.
But Sir George Bowen was not to realise his dream of a new Singapore. Within five years of the Osprey’s captain contemplating the outpost as possible refuge, it would cease to exist as a settlement. Remote and besieged by both wilderness and hostile tribesmen, Somerset would be abandoned, to be reclaimed in time by nature and the tribesmen of the north.
Mort lay the metal dividers on the chart and pondered the plunge and roll of his ship. He could read the movements of his ship as a horseman understood the moods of his mount. But the approaching storm was not the only problem that he was contemplating.
There was the serious problem of the Baron’s men under the command of the American O’Flynn. He had not liked the man from the moment he had set eyes on him. There was something about the big American that disturbed him. It was not just in the man’s openly hostile manner but something intangible made him sense that the American was definitely a threat.
‘Cap’n?’ The first mate stood apprehensively in the open doorway to Mort’s cabin.
‘What is it Mister Sims?’ Mort asked irritably, as he resumed plotting a course for Somerset.
‘Mightn’t be much,’ Sims mumbled. ‘But something funny goin’ on off the portside bow. Thought you might like to have a look fer yerself.’
Mort abandoned his charts to follow his first mate onto the deck where a peculiar drama was unfolding off the bow of the Osprey. Under a purple-black sky, Mort peered across the oily seas, to watch two ships manoeuvring.
‘She looks like a Frenchy gun boat out of Noumea,’ the first mate speculated, ‘in an awful hurry to cut off that Chinee junk over there, off our starboard bow.’
Mort was inclined to agree. The French gun boat was little more than an armed ketch with an auxiliary steam engine. She was using both sail and steam to intercept the lumbering junk which looked as if she had seen a lot of rugged years at sea. Big sailing craft – with their high, raised sterns and peculiar, ribbed sails – were not an uncommon sight in Queensland waters. They often sailed south with their cargoes of Chinese miners and goods for the Asian workers in Queensland’s northern goldfields.
The curious spectators gathered on the Osprey could see the crew of the junk frantically rushing about on deck preparing to repel boarders. The match was an uneven one, as the French gun boat had the firepower to sit off at a safe distance and pulverise the Chinese junk into teak splinters.
But behind the French ship, came an even more deadly threat; boiling black clouds and roaring winds lashed the waters into huge, white-crested rolling waves. The storm was moving so fast that it would catch the French before they had time to manoeuvre for action.
Michael Duffy stood at the railing beside Luke Tracy. They had also surmised that the French gun boat was intending to intercept the junk. In the distance, they could see the white-jacketed French sailors man the deck gun with precise drill movements, while other sailors stood ready with carbines and cutlasses.
Mort ignored the unfolding drama and bawled orders to his crew to batten down hatches. As the crew galvanised into action, Michael noticed that the French boarding preparations had radically changed. The French captain was also anticipating a major battle with the Coral Sea’s fury. Already his crew had abandoned their stations and Michael too ordered his men below.
~
At first the Osprey seemed to be dead in the water. Then her sails flapped and the barque rose with her stern out of the water. The billowing sails cracked as the giant waves rolled under her.
The storm hit with its full fury. The ship rose and lurched violently sideways and as she rose on the crests – and pitched into the deep troughs – the bushmen felt as helpless as prisoners under a sentence of death. It was the beginning of a long and terrifying night for them.
‘What do you think that was all about up there?’ Luke asked in an attempt to take his mind off the storm. Michael shook his head. It was certainly a puzzling situation. Why would a French naval vessel want to intercept a Chinese junk in Queensland waters?
In the days they had been together on the Osprey the two men had formed a friendship based on their common link with America. They had talked about the places and people they had encountered on their travels in the American West.
Michael had hoped to draw out the American prospector’s particular interest in his sister Kate, and the opportunity had eventuated the previous evening when both men were alone on the upper deck of the Osprey.
‘I get the impression,’ Michael had said casually, ‘that you got yourself into that scrap with that lawyer fellow over a matter concerning the honour of a young lady by the name of Kate O’Keefe.’
Luke did not reply immediately but gazed at the grey-green scrub that bordered white sandy beaches rising and falling off the port. Behind the beaches lay the relatively flat Cape country. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he finally drawled, as he puffed on his pipe. The grey smoke swirled away on the gentle evening sea breeze.
‘Must be a pretty special lady for you to risk your life as you did,’ Michael noted. ‘That Darlington fellow could have killed you with his first shot.’
Luke fell for the carefully set trap. ‘She is worth the risk and more,’ he answered wistfully. ‘Not much else worth dying for in my life anymore.’
‘What about working for me,’ Michael reminded him. ‘You know there is a good chance that you could still get yourself killed. That would not be much good to the lady.’
‘The money you are paying makes the risk worthwhile,’ Luke replied sadly. ‘I figured that after the job is done I could use the money to grubstake me for a prospecting expedition for Kate. And maybe then she would see that I’m serious about settling down in one place when I came back.’
‘You fixing to ask the lady to marry you then?’ Michael asked carefully.
‘Something like that,’ he answered. But in his heart Luke felt that something had gone terribly wrong. Events had conspired to
separate him from her in a way she would not understand. A man’s pride was something a woman did not understand, and the showdown with Darlington had been as inevitable as the sun rising each day.
Michael smiled and slapped Luke on the shoulder. ‘The lady could do worse than you Mister Tracy,’ he said with a chuckle.
~
On deck Mort fought the storm. No-one and nothing was about to take his ship from him. Chronically seasick bushmen huddled below the decks, where they cursed the ocean and all who sailed on her. The stench of their vomit made Michael feel decidedly queasy. He had travelled the Pacific before but never had he struck a storm of such intensity.
As he sat helplessly with his men he had a nagging thought about the stability of the bomb he had hidden at the ship’s stern with the expedition’s supplies. Horace had suggested that it be detonated off Somerset so that the Osprey’s lifeboats could be launched and rowed the short distance to the settlement.
Michael had formulated a plan to have all his men on the forward deck when the bomb went off. This would then give them the chance to get to the longboats, launch them, and row away from the sinking ship. His excuse to have his men assemble at the forward deck – as well as the barque’s crew – would be for a shooting competition. The Winchester rifles would be used to fire at empty barrels they would toss into the sea. He had also planned to have the Baron attend with Karl Straub which would also place them forward of the explosion.
While he had been below decks stowing the bomb, Michael had ferreted through the stores Karl Straub had brought aboard, and found a theodolite in a lined case. A further search revealed charts and tables used by surveyors. He also found engineering manuals on specifications for establishing port facilities and a map of New Guinea with points marked on it, all of which gave credibility to Horace Brown’s suspicions of an expedition to annex the southern side of the island.
A day out of Cooktown, the Baron confirmed the expedition’s mission, when he summoned Michael to a meeting with himself and Karl Straub. Michael was briefed on his role: to use his men as a security force for Karl Straub and himself when they landed on the New Guinea coast. The Baron did not elaborate any further on the mission. It was not necessary for Michael or his men to know the purpose of the surveying that would be done.
