The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam backed away a few steps, confused. That ship he knew to be a merchant vessel who plied the Sandwich Islands route, where the richer men sent their shirts to be boiled and starched and ironed. Sam knew this because Clement had joked about the merchants who because of the shortage of domestic help in the city, thought it preferable to send their dirty washing on a journey that might take one month, or even more if the shirts went to Shanghai, such was the importance of appearance to a paper-collar gentleman.

  ‘What’s goin on here, Mr Vaughan? I don’t see no schoolmaster hereabouts.’

  Vaughan occupied himself inserting some snuff in his nostrils while the dinghy approached, and when finally he turned, he seemed about to speak in friendliness then thought better of it, and grabbed Sam and pinned his arms. He was strong for such a small man and grasped Sam about the throat so that he couldn’t shout. The dog growled, and began to dance around them as the dinghy cut across the longshore current and rode the wash, and Sam could see the men grinning.

  So he was to be sold, and made a shipboard slave.

  Sam began to twist and stamp his feet on Vaughan’s shins, but that only made Vaughan lift him off the ground and tighten his throat-grip, and now Sam couldn’t breathe. The dog danced around and lunged in, and took a hold on Vaughan’s knee, and Vaughan grunted but didn’t shout. Then there was a mighty clap, and some of it caught Sam’s ear, and suddenly he was facedown in the sand. There were more slapping blows and Sam was winded and the dog snuffled his face, and behind the dog he could see the dinghy had turned away, and was making back to the ship. Sam was rolled over and he looked up into the bruised and skewed face of Oofty Doofty, whose eyes were large with excitement. Sam groaned, couldn’t hear what Oofty said because of his deafened ear, and he looked over and there was Dirty Tom McAlear sitting on Vaughan’s chest. Vaughan was retching under the weight of Dirty Tom’s notorious stench, and Dirty Tom saw that Sam was watching and punched Vaughan in the face and Vaughan went quiet.

  Sam left them on the beach while Oofty guided him across the shore, and into the street, then up the steps into The Stuck Pig, where the Ancient who’d sent Oofty and Dirty Tom to observe Sam’s position awaited him with a mug of tea. The old man didn’t say anything to Sam, but passed the mug of tea and patted Sam’s shoulder and went back to his panning. One look at Vaughan and he’d understood the man’s nature, and therefore his likely enterprise.

  Sam sat quietly at an empty bench, angry because he’d been so stupid, even after Missus Hogan had warned him. He finished his tea, and nodded his thanks to the Ancient, and called the dog and went out into the streets. He walked up toward the crowded plaza square. His eyes were sharp on the faces as the voice of self-reproach continued in his head.

  As was his usual custom, Sam next stood across the road from the Chinaman haberdashers and watched for signs of the Chinese girl, of which there was none.

  On the porch beside him there was arrayed three tables where men played vingt-et-un, and he had a clear line of sight across the street and down the alley where he’d first seen the girl. Sam hoped for nothing more than a glimpse of her, while in the meantime he occupied his fingers with Clement’s schoolwork—picking his own pockets of the timepieces and coins, slipping fingers inside the jacket where the heaviest timepiece sat clipped with a silver chain, although today his fingers too seemed angry, and he could feel them inside his pockets and that only made him angrier.

  He doubled his concentration while practising the various manoeuvres taught to him by Clement in the tavern: the fishing for chain and gentle lifting of the watch from a vest pocket; the making a pincer of his hand so to extract a fat wallet from a jacket or a back pocket; the insertion of his middle fingers into a forward pocket to lift out a coin in the manner that the Chinese ate with their twin sticks, and always the governing principals of patience and nerve and a ready eye on avenues of escape. When Sam could pick his own pockets without noticing, then he would be ready to practise on the drunks in the tavern, under the armed gaze of Clement or Barr, who would both intervene to protect him.

  Sam eyed a drunk man watching the turn of cards beside him, first employing Clement’s advice to identify whether a quarry was worthy of robbery. This man was swaying in his boots, and his hands looked rough and reddened by hard work, although his clothes were not the red serge shirt and canvas trousers of the recent arrival but the fine broadcloth suit and plug hat of the successful miner. There were gold rings on each of his fingers, and Sam was sure gold necklaces inside the paper-collar shirt. Because he was feeling angry and a little reckless, Sam nudged the miner behind the knee as he had been taught, and stood back ready to apologise. The man staggered round and Sam caught the glinting of gold teeth, a newly common practice, and a heavy gold watch-chain at the man’s vest. Sam steadied the man by taking his forearm, as he’d been instructed, and distracted him with practised words of contrition, although he didn’t move for the great gold seal that hung from the man’s neck on a thick gold chain.

  The miner’s eyes were red and his breath was foul, and Sam stepped away, and apologising a final time with raised hands backed onto the street. There had been something in the miner’s eyes as he looked down at Sam’s face, and he pressed his fingers against his throbbing cheek and felt the swelling around his eye. The puffed skin had gone silky, and Sam knew that the bruise would blacken. He had gone but a few steps when he heard jeering and cheering, and saw ahead the Englishman Vaughan, knee-deep in the muck and entirely naked, hobbling up the thoroughfare. The townsfolk parted to let him through, and Sam joined them to observe the man whose hands covered his privates, his hair plastered over his face, and then the silence as the Englishman passed and Sam like the others saw the terrible welts and red stripes across his back.

  10

  It was too early to report to the American harbourmaster in his cabin at the end of the jetty, who knew what was in the hold of every ship. As Sam did every morning, he left the churned streets and headed down the rows of molly-houses that lined the blocks inside the Australian quarter. As always, Sarah Proctor was sitting on the ground floor porch of her brothel on a rocking chair with her legs in the sun, smoking a cigar. She wore rouge on her lips, and her newly long hair was combed out and warmly glowing, but as Sam bent to climb the steps he saw that Sarah too had a black and swollen eye.

  ‘Lookit you, Samuel Bellamy. Did someone catch you stealin, or did you likewise walk into a doorknob?’

  Sam grinned and waved away the enquiry, and the dog rushed to Sarah and buried its head in her lap, staring fondly at her, pleading for a scratch.

  ‘You’re just in time. I was set to preparin breakfast.’

  Breakfast for Sarah Proctor was a mugful of her favourite drink of hot chocolate, boiled on a brazier like they boiled tea in Australia. The raw chocolate was bought in great chunks from the markets of the plaza and cost very little as it was sourced from Mexico. Sarah drank her chocolate laced with rum, but Sam drank the muddy brew in a tall mug mixed with cream, which was a luxury item due to the lack of dairy cows in that territory. Every few sips she spilled some on the boards for the dog, who sat before her and whose eyes followed her every move.

  Sam had learned her ritual of making the chocolate, and while the dog continued to nudge its nose between her legs, and rest its head on her belly and look up at her with beseeching eyes, he knelt and took up the block of chocolate and began to scrape it with his knife. When there were sufficient scrapings he tipped them into the pot that was already filled with water. He struck a match and held it to the newspaper and kindling that was ready in the brazier, and when the fire was crackling he placed the pot on the fire and watched it carefully in case the flames went out. He wiped the two tin mugs with his finger and nodded to Sarah. ‘You want me to add yer rum?’

  Sarah Proctor passed the bottle that she’d cradled in her lap and which was near empty. Sam poured the rest of the bottle into her mug and put it beside his own. He took his regular position on a l
ow wooden stool and mimicked Sarah’s posture by putting his legs out onto the railings and inclining his face into the sunlight.

  ‘A doorknob you reckon?’ he asked her.

  Sarah winked with her good eye. ‘You should see my opponent. Wicked Amy we call her. We all got our favourite town men, and it’s an agreement that we don’t steal them that’s regular customers, but she won’t never listen. Sometimes she needs remindin but she saw it comin and got me first.’

  Now Sam looked at her closely, and like every morning, Sarah shook her head, and that and the pang of disappointment he felt was enough to tell Sam that she’d had no luck finding his mother, and that they needn’t speak of it further. He knew that Sarah worked till dawn, and that her nights were rough and long, and so most mornings they didn’t talk much but drank their chocolates and watched the street and every manner of strangeness to be found among the dress and customs of the folk from all regions of the globe. Their experience of Anderson Dempsey’s tyranny on the American whaler was a bond between them, and their ritual of sitting in companionable silence was what he imagined a brother and sister might do.

  Sometimes Sarah’s friends came into the sunshine to join her, and they played with the dog, and teased Sam and messed his hair, and spoiled him with little treats of hard candy and silver coin if he wrote a letter to their sweethearts back in Australia. They were mostly young women who spoke in a manner of code when they didn’t want Sam to understand, although on occasions he heard them quarrelling in their quarters upstairs and their anger was something to behold. Sarah then nudged Sam with her bare foot and told him to get.

  On three occasions in those first weeks Sam was reluctantly drawn to tell the story of his father’s butchery at the hands of the black warrior. Sarah’s hope was that the particularities of the narrative might trigger a recollection in one of the dozens of women who came to listen, until she eventually forbade their asking on account of Sam’s discomfort. It was his secret, shared only among the women, for Sam hadn’t told any of the Coves apart from Clement and Keane about his reasons for being there, and no other had asked.

  But the women, by and large, thought the search for his mother a romantic quest, and in particular favoured the story of how he’d made passage to San Francisco. The women would sit closer, and listen, and none of them looked sceptical because they each had a story that was similar to Sam’s own.

  The women leaned in to hear his quiet voice, and he told them how he’d persuaded one of the overseers at the Vandemonian Boys Home to investigate his mother’s whereabouts in the colony. Sam had learned that his mother had been granted her ticket-of-leave three years previous, and according to all reports had journeyed to Sydney in the company of a sealskin merchant. With the overseer’s permission, Sam wrote a letter to that merchant and learned that his mother was off ‘whorin on the Rocks’.

  The following week Sam wrote another letter, this time to the overseer, apologising for his treason, then broke into the superintendent’s office and stole a silver watch and chain, and a silver letter-opener, and five shillings in change.

  He made for the Launceston port directly, with nothing to eat but a loaf of bread and the knowledge that the merchant’s clippers sailed regular to the New South Wales colony. He slept in a cave in the nearby gorge during the day, and at night he went down to the docks. When the clipper made port and was loaded with sealskins he slipped aboard and hid himself in the hold amongst the reeking cargo, and stowed away for the week it took to make Sydney. He was so hungry that he chewed the sealskins, and ate raw flour, and licked the condensation off the rough wooden ribs of the ship as it rolled through the waves.

  At the port he was discovered by a sailor, and beaten, but not turned over to the peelers on account of his parting with the silver letter-opener. He bought bread and biscuit that first night, and slept in bushland on the edge of the settlement, and by day enquired around the brothels after his mother. He was by and large treated kindly by the colonists, although the sick feeling that developed over that first week was the understanding that his mother mightn’t want to be found. After all, she’d been free for three years and had made no enquiries back in the Swan River about her children.

  One night Sam made friends with the dog, who appeared beside him on the shoreline while he stared into the black waters. Sam was at that moment pitiful crying, and the dog arrived at his side like it was summoned by his sadness and desire for company. The dog was merely a puppy, starved and lame where it had been cruelly mistreated.

  Sam carried it back to his camp behind the tree-line and shared his dinner and they were loyal partners ever since. The Sydney Rocks was a frightening place at night, and from their hill they looked down at the eerily lit shacks and narrow sandy tracks and listened to the fiddle music that was punctuated by shrieks and roars and things being broken.

  Sam continued his enquiries until all his money was spent, and then he saw the advertisements for California, and he learned about a woman who might be his mother, because she had red hair and her story contained a history in Van Diemen’s Land and the Swan River colony. But she was gone weeks earlier, he was told, with a band of other mollies. Asking around at the docks he learned with barely an hour’s notice that an American whaler was departing for California, and that it was taking passengers. He didn’t like the fearsome aspect of the crew but decided to abandon his country and his worldly goods at his camp, and everything that he didn’t carry in his knapsack. He sat there and felt sick with nerves until he finally approached the Captain, and offered the silver watch as payment, and then he and the dog were pointed toward the whaler.

  So began the story of Dempsey and his tyranny, although it was Sarah Proctor who told the other women about the mutiny and the murder, and their eventual escape onto the shore of San Francisco, and Dempsey’s execution at the hands of Thomas Keane.

  At the termination of the story some of the women would pat Sam’s arm or ruffle his hair, and some of them offered their own stories, to which he listened with the equal patience they’d offered him. They otherwise consoled him, and made pretend love to him if they thought him unhappy in appearance, and laughed when he blushed, so easily overwhelmed by the power they had over him.

  But there was never a hint of recognition, or any recollection of a band of Sydney mollies under the charge of a madam arriving in a party. None of the women said what Sam understood was on their minds, on account of the rumours of the many ships that had sunk on the way to America.

  The water came to the boil and the dog stood back in fear of the hiss against the rim of the pot that it knew was coming. Sam stirred the chocolate a final time with a fork and used a cloth to protect his hand while he tipped the brew into their cups. It was only now that Sarah Proctor opened her eyes. She took her cup and put her lips to it and gave him the barest smile.

  ‘Tastes good, thank you Samuel. I been breakin my fast on this bottle on account of not bein able to sleep. And no, I ain’t gonna tell what happened with Wicked Amy. There’s nothing but shame and stupidity in the tellin for all players. But I will say that you look mighty fine this morning. Where is it you’re headed next?’

  Sam shrugged, and looked down into his mug. The thin brown water on the top. He swirled the mug and drew up the sediment and put his lips to it. He knew that despite her affection for him, Sarah envied his position as a man of Sydney-town, who went wherever he wished and did whatever he wanted. In actual fact, he didn’t do what he wanted, but that was how it looked.

  Down on the street a middle-aged woman paused and looked their way. She was dressed in the French fashion, wearing high leather boots and a flounced skirt of green velvet, and a red caped jacket with bell-shaped sleeves, holding a parasol in her gloved hands. The moment that Sarah saw the woman her face changed, and she leaned forward and started to sneer.

  ‘Hey darlin, are you lost? I think you gone and walked down the wrong street.’

  The woman was proudful in bearing but she still blu
shed, looking around and pretending she hadn’t heard. Sarah rose to her feet and doubled the volume of her mockery. ‘Don’t tell me you’re givin it away, love! Don’t tell me you’re makin that mistake? Come up here an’ join me for a rum. I’ll set you straight about a few things. I can see you is lost and mistaken in your directions.’

  Sarah’s call was taken up by other women down the street, some of whom began lewd whistling while others made love to the woman with shouted endearments. The well-dressed visitor turned and fled as fast as she was able, using her parasol to pitchfork the mud when she slipped.

  Sarah’s face remained fixed in anger until the woman was gone from sight, then she winked at Sam with her good eye.

  ‘We can’t be entertainin tourists like we’re monkeys in a cage, Samuel.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The flush of anger was gone from her face, but her eyes were still alive with an odd light. Now that he knew Sarah better, there were often unguarded moments like this when he looked at her and saw the child that she’d been in her features, and those moments made him feel even more tender toward her.

  ‘Samuel, you didn’t tell me how you got your own shiner,’ she said, not looking at him.

  ‘I’ll gladly relate that story to you, but first, tell me again about London,’ he said. ‘Them summer days when you’d go out the commons with your sisters. Tell me about them birds and animals that you’d see.’

  Sarah Proctor laughed, then started on her hacking morning cough brought on by the hot cocoa. She drank down the rest and tipped the dregs on the boards for the dog, then settled back on the chair and drew her skirts up higher so the sun touched her knees.

  ‘Well, we only went on Sundays, see, because…’

  11

  A downy grey chicken feather was crusted in the muddy rim of Sam’s right boot. He bent in his chair and prised it off and looked around the room. The Mayor’s clerk had gone, and Sam tucked the tattered feather under his seat and resumed his posture of sitting and waiting for the Mayor to call him. The Mayor was in the office next door, but it was no grand establishment like you would expect. The two-storey sandstone building smelt like it used to be a barn, and the planks of the old wooden staircase were loose in their carriage posts and there was no balustrade either. The walls were cracked because of the earth-shakes, and the deeper cracks had been stuffed with mud and straw. Even so, Clement had ordered that Sam wear his best clothes for this delivery, and Sam had dutifully scrubbed his face and hands with carbolic, and ladled icy water over his back to get rid of the smell of crab and cockle and mussel. The delivery to the Mayor was a promotion for Sam, and he wanted to make the best impression.