The Coves

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  Sam looked across at Sarah Proctor, who was looking at him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sarah. My Ma told me she was sendin you away.’

  Sarah spat blood into the wind. ‘She was never sendin me away. I was there just for this. She was always goin to frame me up for stealin.’

  There were two men in the crowd distributing silver coin to each of the gathered, and Walker nodded approvingly to another at its fringes, who had a bucket of pitch and some kindling torches.

  ‘My Ma, she’s alive?’

  ‘No, she ain’t. He done for her, even after she blamed me. I didn’t see it, but I heard it.’ Sarah Proctor spat again, licked blood off her lips. ‘There’s no use blowin on a dead coal, Samuel Bellamy. I was aimin to tell you. I’m sorry for your Ma, but that woman was broken and bent every way. Not an ounce of human feelin left. And I truly am sorry for that. You got to her too late. I seen the like, as described, and was probably headed there myself. Though I ain’t now, neither me or my babe.’

  Sam’s tears blurred his vision and when he blinked them away he saw Clement at the edge of the crowd, slouch hat pulled low, but that familiar set of the shoulders and scraggy beard. Saw him lift his head and take aim at Walker with a revolver and the faces of those around him and the crack of the ball on the iron gantry and the gunsmoke clothing his head as the crowd fell upon him. Pulled him this way and that. Stomped and wrenched him until three of Walker’s men got inside the circle and clamped him with their great arms.

  Walker turned on the iron beam and smiled at Sam. ‘One more for the hangin’. Evidence of his malfeasance for all to see. I expect more and have prepared a welcoming.’

  On the rooftops and balconies around the square the hard men of Walker’s company arose at his waved command. Some twenty or so. Armed with rifles that glinted in the sun.

  There was cursing and kicking behind them as Clement was drug up the stairs.

  ‘You got to be brave now, boy,’ said Walker. ‘You got to reckon-up with your maker.’

  Sam’s throat was choked. ‘You murderin bastard, you’ll pay in Hell. My Ma—’

  That made Walker smile. ‘Stupid boy. She ain’t your Ma. Nothin of the sort. She come out of Moreton Bay convict establishment, where I took her from. That story about her family and the blacks was just a story for these fools. And for you as it happens. When you came to her, I assume she humoured you along. Got you to steal for her. Which is why you’re hangin—for the theft and her murder.’

  Sam made to speak but Walker struck him on the face.

  ‘God damnation. Hurry him along.’

  At the pointed finger of one of his minions, Walker turned and regarded the flagpole in the square. There was no flag on it but the ropeline had begun to clank against the cleats that fastened it. The sun was high, and the drifting fog off the ocean had stilled. Sam felt the first breeze off the eastern land on his face. The smell of brine and seaweed and wood smoke from Sydney-town.

  Sam looked to his right and Clement was standing there bound in hemp. His face was bloodied and his mouth was gagged but he nodded in kindness at Sam. Then a noose went over each of their necks and for the first time Sam looked down at the drop. The weeds in the banked dirt. The stains of spat tobacco. The prints of boots and bare feet in the wheel-churned muck. A panic came over him, and he glimpsed his dog in his mind, and closed his eyes and apologised to the dog and to his mother that he’d never know. A gag was thrust into his mouth, and he couldn’t breathe, and with every beat of his heart the fear got worse, and the terrible weight came over him even as he floated above himself.

  He saw the black snake then, watching him, and he apologised to it as well. The snake stared long and hard in reply, and then it did what no snake had ever done—it blinked, and closed its lidless eyes.

  Sam came round when Walker shouted, paraded to the edge of the beam as he’d done before, and threw up his hands to the gathered crowd.

  ‘Good people of this town. Lately the most terrible kind of betrayal has been visited upon me by the condemned stationed behind. A calculated and evil scheme hatched in the parlours of Sydney-town by those noted cutthroats who have plagued us too long. My beloved’s life was taken after the worst kind of deception—perpetrated by a boy masquerading as her long-lost son, but I stand before you today as evidence of the prevailing force of justice. Those torches being distributed and the knives and guns at our disposal will be our means and a true measure of this manifest force. As we carry the flame down to the stinking shoreline, we carry among ourselves the divine—’

  The first shot broke over the square and rang in its empty spaces and bent the heads of the gathered men. A hard volley followed that made even Walker flinch, and reach for his revolver, and take aim at the horse-charges that broke into the square from the northern and eastern streets led by Keane on one flank and Mannix on the other, followed by Southlanders on foot bearing muskets and bayonets and flaming torches, shouting fiercely to break the spirits of the gathered mob. In this they were successful, and Walker swore, and began firing, as did the men behind Sam.

  Walker shouted to one of them to turn Clement off, but the man refused because he was using Clement as a shield, as Sam was used. The Southlanders tossed the flaming torches onto the porches of the establishments and turned to their guns and some of them were shot and some of them brought down the rooftop men and the snipers on the balconies who fell and were still.

  Walker crouched and emptied his revolver in the direction of Keane but the gunsmoke blew into the loading bay and made it hard to see. Walker holstered his emptied pistol and clambered through the smoke, pushing Sam toward the edge but something held him fast. He looked to Clement, who was on his toes twisting in the wind while the cutthroat in black fired from behind. Sarah Proctor was making herself small, and twisting her head to get away from the terrible noise of the pistol at her ear. Sam felt his hands come free at the back, and his chair get dragged away from the edge. He was lifted and laid down, and pulled by his lifeless arms out of the line of fire. He recognised the rescuing party as the steersman on the whaler who he’d rescued in turn, cut free of the wheel and seen go over the edge. The steersman didn’t say anything, just gave over his newly charged pistol to Sam and ran for the stairs.

  The gunman behind Sarah Proctor looked in his powder-bag to recharge his rifle but the bag was empty and he saw the gun that Sam trained on him and backed away and fled down the stairs as well.

  The man in black behind Clement levered another charge into his pistol and took aim but the blood was back in Sam’s legs and he crawled to his feet and took a step, Clement watching him come. The fear made Sam’s steps heavy like he was wading in mud, but the man was turned away, and that made it easier. Sam didn’t fire because his finger wouldn’t allow it, but he nevertheless got a leg raised and kicked the man behind the knee, and when he buckled, pushed him again and over he went.

  Sam laid down the revolver and untied the knot at Clement’s ankles and unwound the length that finished at the old man’s wrists. Clement grunted, and took off the noose and did the same for Sarah Proctor, and they didn’t speak because the sound was deafening, and the flames were growing bigger as the pine-board shopfront and shingled rooftops caught fire in great sheets. Sam took up the pistol again and looked down into the melee and saw the great redheaded Mannix drive his horse up to Keane and in the midst of the confusion and the other man’s firing, Mannix lifted his pistol and fired into the back of Keane’s head. Turned his horse and called his men and bolted into the nearest street. Sam’s body went limp and he stared until he felt Clement by his side and when the old man saw the fallen Keane dragged about by his stirrups he cried out a terrible sad cry.

  There was a tugging on Sam’s sleeve, and he looked to his feet as a sheet of flame closed the loading bay. Sarah Proctor was pulling him toward the stairs. The second storey was on fire too, and the flames danced about in pretty whirlpools in the sawdust and the bales of cotton roared into life and leapt
one upon the other. On the ground floor the plank-wood partitions were aflame, enticing the fire through the building one room at a time. Sam saw the strongroom door open and a handcart with a wooden wheel taking weight, and he led Clement through the smoke and raised the pistol and opened the soot-blackened safe door and there was Walker, bag of gold dust in each hand, ready to toss onto the handcart. The shelves where his paper money and notables had burned now charred and wet. Walker saw that Clement was blinded by smoke and blood and looked at the gun in Sam’s hand and laughed. For he had taken his measure of the boy already. Didn’t even look at the shaking hand or the frozen finger or the knees that were trembling. Dropped the gold dust and reached out from the scorched insides of the safe to disarm Sam but the pistol fired and opened Walker’s side and spun him into the shelving. There was no more shot or ball for the pistol. Sam fell to the nearest bag of gold and hefted it above his head and brought it down on the great dome and the man grunted and crumpled and immediately started to raise himself. Sam raised the bag one more time but heard a warlike shriek and saw Sarah Proctor charge into the room with a pitchfork that she thrust bayonet-like into Walker’s ribs who so impaled fell sideways into the ashes of the earlier fire. The great fork trembled as he thrashed and was still.

  ‘Pass it.’

  Sarah Proctor’s hand beseeching, claiming the bag of dust in the leather sack. Some twenty or thirty more of the same. Beams were falling onto the storey above them and Sam bent to his labours and the handcart was too heavy and Sarah Proctor disappeared and returned with another. Clement righted the last one and transferred its weight across. The box of nuggets and the singed bag of banknotes Sam had delivered to his mother. The unloaded revolver in Walker’s holster.

  The two handcarts were taken one each by Sam and Sarah Proctor to the great bolted rear loading-bay door where looters were clamouring for entry. Sam and Clement clothed their hoard with blanket and miners’ sieves and Clement unlocked the door and the looters flooded into the flaming building. The same people out in the square they were. Numbered at five score or more, Russians mostly and a few Americans in canvas trousers and red shirts and oilskin coats and armed with knives. The party ran to the stairs and Clement kicked over a cart-board, and the handcarts were walked carefully down the plank and onto the heated dirt.

  The fire was all around them and they watched it spread across the hill into the squatters’ camps and up Russian Hill to settle in a great swathe of red-green flame at the base of Nob Hill while behind them it burned in a strangely precise angle up the side of Goat Hill. They wove the carts through the square until they came to the fallen Keane. Nothing of his face remained, and Clement groaned pitifully and fell to him and wept and took up Keane’s great revolver and hefted it and made the face of war. They weren’t in a position to carry the tall man and all the horses were bolted, and Clement shook the revolver on his thin arms in a way that defied natural strength, and suggested the inhuman capacity of the enraged man for final acts of revenge. He shook the revolver until his arms finally weakened, and then he lay the gun on the handcart and turned from the body.

  The buildings around were already guttering while others burned in tall columns that hissed and roared. The way to Sydney-town opened up to the east with the groan and collapse of buildings there burnt out and they huddled together and Clement lifted the revolver and pointed it at anyone who looked close. For the lags of Sydney-town had followed the flames down from their camps on the hill and up from the shore and they entered the square with bags and picks and drawn knives ready to loot and plunder. They were many of them drunk, and cheering as establishments fell inwards and windows burst and beams cracked and thumped the ground. All the way down the hill Sam watched the carrion-birds from the Southland picking over the charred remains with picks and poles.

  The air quietened as they left the flame-front behind. The looters amongst the ashes and cinders who were spread across the hellish flanks of the old town took on the postures of seashore fossickers, picking over the fallen beams and charred boards.

  ‘They look for the yeller, or the strongbox, in the melt and the burn.’

  Clement was struggling, a hand on Sam’s shoulder, limping along. The barrow was heavy and the road was sandy with ruts and puddles. The old man took to muttering and shaking his head. They paused in the street to rest and saw horsemen bearing torches led by Mannix enter the Chinese quarter and begin to shoot and burn.

  ‘It was Mannix that shot Keane,’ Sam said. ‘I saw him take his chance in the gunfight.’

  Clement squeezed Sam’s shoulder. ‘It’s good that you told me. For now you must never speak of it again. The world of Sydneytown, the world I knew and favoured, has gone.’

  They looked down the hill to the Cove and despite the fact that because of the north-easterly wind there was no fire burning in that quarter, alone among the whole town, the truth of Clement’s statement was manifest in the vision of Mannix, his blood up and revolver spearing fire into the unarmed Chinese, raising a clay-jar of whisky to his lips in a toast to his deeds.

  Sam left the handcart handles and took up the pistol, but Clement stayed his hand.

  ‘I warned Ai, you know. I told Chen this morning the likely turn of events. Like many of his kind, he will have taken to the sand dunes to watch and wring his hands but live another day. Don’t concern yourself with Mannix. His kind aren’t easily killed. That is the nature of devils.’

  Sarah Proctor coughed and spat black into the dirt. ‘I want to thank you, old man. I know you favour this boy, as do I, who I think of as a little brother. Because you surely fired at Walker from the square, so as to get yourself a noose alongside us. For to bring your friends to our aid.’

  Clement smiled. ‘Which is not to credit that I didn’t aim true.’

  ‘Thank you, Clement. And I’m sorry about Keane.’

  The old man nodded. ‘He was like a son to me—that is true. A remembrance of myself at that age. And now he is gone, although the truth is strange and melancholy. It was a matter of time, as he would have said. For he longed to depart this world, and he wore that longing in a cloth of courageous action and ready alarm. I’ll miss him, Samuel, but you must not be like him. For I see myself in you also, at your age, in your capacity for fellow-feeling. There are too many who bear the human form but there is a part of them dead. Mannix is such a man.’

  Clement took the pistol from Sam’s hand, and placed it on the handcart. ‘You see, we stand in the street and discourse on fate and goodness, and it transports us from the task at hand. Woman, I don’t know your name, but I see no reason why the contents of that handcart mightn’t be yours to cleverly hide, and in hiding, bear you good fortune for the rest of your days.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought to ask your blessings, old man, but I reckon a place, sure enough.’

  Sarah Proctor embraced Sam and kissed the top of his head, and took up the handcart. Sam and Clement followed at a quiet distance, within pistol-range, to protect her if needed from the leering fools still leaving the Cove to loot in the hills above. But she looked so bloodied and the contents of the handcart so wretched that she wasn’t molested, and they watched her trundle along the shoreline street, up toward the bawdy-house where she was quartered, the lemony sunlight reflected off the bay catching in her matted hair and the strong muscles of her shoulders as the cart rolled forward.

  ‘My wager’s that she’ll sink the load in the privy forthwith, clever woman that she is. Where nobody’ll think to look.’

  Sam looked to Clement, even as he saw the dog bowl out of The Stuck Pig and down the steps and roll its hindquarters in the dusty street before straightening into a run, its tongue lolling and its ropey legs building speed as its joyful eyes trained on Sam and nobody else.

  ‘And us, Clement, the same?’

  The old man laughed. ‘No, I have a secure pit for my hoardings, beneath the fettler’s yard. Let’s go directly, and not look back.’

  The dog leapt and the concu
ssion in Sam’s legs nearly took him over. He held the dog by its red scruff and buried his face into its neck.

  Clement sat upon their trunks like no man would shift him, smoking his pipe and taking his measure of the clipper’s captain, supervising the loading into the hold. Beside him stood Sarah Proctor, wearing a new velvet dress but otherwise cautious of displaying her wealth, her belongings contained in a single leather bag. Joseph Borden’s more substantial property was presently being loaded: tea-boxes and trunks filled with mining supplies for his Victorian expeditions. He and Sarah had struck up a friendship the night before, and it was clear when he looked at her the direction things were headed.

  The wind off the bay was right for departure, and the rest of the clipper’s crew returned in drunken groups of two or three from Sydney-town. Several of them purged their stomachs over the docks in preparation for a rough voyage. The clipper was bound for Hawaii and then New Zealand, and finally Melbourne-town, where Sam and Clement would disembark. It was a long journey but they were well provisioned. They wore their regular kits so as not to arouse suspicion, and had gone about their regular business these past weeks. Mannix was proving a predictably rough leader, and the men drawn to him would not be tempered or controlled.

  Mayor Bannon and the newspapers railed at the outrage that saw Walker murdered and the city burned down, excepting the Australian quarter, but even Bannon quieted after a period, because it was clear that all the merchants were busy with the rebuilding of San Francisco that had begun almost immediately. The inland mills delivered timbers the very next day, and soon rough-hewn shacks and huts numbered among the earliest dwellings. The stone commissary on the town square that’d been plundered acted once again as the offices of government, and the three-storey frames on the land-blocks about the square were already well advanced. There was work enough for every hand in the rebuilding, and the ships from all over the world kept coming. New gold finds were reported daily but many stayed to work in the old trades. They were paid in gold dust and spent their wages in the grog and bawdy houses of Sydney-town and the favoured brothels of French-town, and the gambling saloons clustered round the plaza square. The Chinese quarter was near rebuilt, and it echoed with the sound of hammer and nail, and sawing and shouted commands as the longhaired Chinese labourers and tradesmen worked the timber into shape.