Preservation

by Jock Serong

  Charlotte knew that something was troubling Joshua too. She thought it was the return of Boorigul, the odd and abrupt end to the girl’s troubles with Warrander. Charlotte had worked patiently to extract the story from her: even then she had only parts of it.

  A detachment had come to their camp on the flats beyond the Cowpasture. Redcoats, not patrolling but looking specifically for Warrander. Boorigul wasn’t there at the time—she was out fishing—but she was told a short conversation had turned to shouts, and the shouting to gunfire. The soldiers had shot Warrander, and shortly afterwards two women and a child. They insisted they were attacked when they approached the camp, and were forced to fire in self-defence. Boorigul thought this was unlikely—Warrander had been asleep when she left. Charlotte recognised the euphemisms: she’d heard them often enough.

  And Joshua had been spending long days at Government House. He was distant and unsmiling. It seemed most logical to put it down to the soldiers and the raid and the four more human lives that had been taken without reason or process. But it could be something else entirely. And unlike with Boorigul, there would be no coaxing the story from him. She waited, and finally he spoke.

  She listened with horror as they lay in bed and he explained the Parramatta mission to her. Nothing to do with Boorigul and Warrander after all; and yet this was worse. Matters were closing in, he said. He had to act against Figge, and she had to understand.

  But there in the dark with the words making terrible pictures in her mind, his explanation brought only foreboding. His hip and a length of his thigh were touching hers, and their fingers were interlaced. That vicious man and all the trouble that came with him. He had made a little empire of his own up there in Parramatta, she had no doubt. He would be waiting for Joshua, ready to harm him. And Joshua’s usual caution had deserted him: he was rattled, vengeful. He would act in haste.

  ‘I need you here,’ she said simply.

  ‘No you don’t.’ He tried laughing but nothing came. ‘It is a small matter, and I will have a detachment with me anyway.’

  ‘It’s not small. He frightens me.’

  ‘Surely that’s a reason to go and bring him in?’

  The wind picked up outside the small house, and the loose whipping of the lone eucalypt above sent a scatter of debris down to their roof, each falling twig on the shingles puncturing the darkness. She imagined the girl outside, listening to the same sounds; understanding them to mean different things.

  ‘I can’t lose you,’ she said. ‘I mustn’t lose you.’

  ‘You’re the woman who walks the bush alone, the one who can speak to the Cadigal. You’d cope without me.’ Again, he tried to chuckle in defiance of harder things.

  ‘Do not make light of it,’ she said, fiercely now. In the darkness she couldn’t tell if her vehemence had changed his expression, but his hand squeezed hers more tightly. ‘I cannot have you gone. Imagine this night without me here, because I am imagining it without you.’ She shook his hand away, traced her fingers urgently upwards to his face and over the light beard he had grown. The fingertips found his brow and brushed gently down over his eyes. One finger stopped on his mouth.

  ‘What of all this emptiness? If there was nothing more than all of that and just one of us alone?’

  ‘The governor,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He lives that way.’

  ‘He’s old, Joshua. You’re loyal to him, but he’s old and we are not.’

  He made a small sound of assent.

  ‘Feel me here,’ she said and took his hand and placed it on her belly. ‘I can’t tell you…the love and the fear and all these things in my heart.’ She began to cry, and it shook her. ‘Our child is in here.’

  Her hand was on his, on the warmth of her skin, when she became aware he too was crying. Quietly at first, so she only knew by the faint shaking in his body. But then she could hear it in his breathing, tiny moans in the night among the wind-clatter and the restless trees.

  A cold stake of fear had been driven between them and her joy was washed away.

  39

  Grayling didn’t want to go.

  He could no sooner imagine himself a father than he could imagine the prospect of leaving Charlotte widowed. But this was all foolishness: no one was going to kill him. The light of day washed the doubts from his mind and returned him to pragmatism.

  He wanted to believe that a malign presence had absented itself from the township; that in any case feinting at dark things was a fool’s errand for those with such scant resources to devote to keeping order. Figge was gone, and with him a shadow and a taint that covered everything.

  But he saw the settlement with different eyes as he made the familiar walk to Government House. He saw a camp that had overreached, and clung fearfully to the cleared spaces in the bush. Looking outward for spectres, for Black Caesar and Goam-Boak and Pemulwuy, and inward for traitors. The Rum Corps and the civil classes eyeing each other for evidence of open revolt and the Cadigal and the Gweagal watching them all for further moves to despoil their world. The farmers and the traders watching their convicts and the convicts watching each other and it was a wonder anyone got anything done for all their compiling and cataloguing of paranoid visions.

  He found the governor alert and clear eyed. Gone were the doubt and worry that seemed increasingly to shadow the old man. He had the lascar boy, Srinivas, waiting in an anteroom. He had satisfied himself that the reports were consistent: since his disappearance from Sydney, Mr Figge had been observed over several nights in the taverns of Parramatta.

  He’d ordered the Eliza and the Francis to head south under ballast and bring back all of the Sydney Cove’s survivors and cargo, or as much of the latter as they could carry. They would leave within days. He would impound the cursed rum and sell it off in rations: if he couldn’t stem the tide of spirits he could at least turn that tide to the colony’s financial benefit. With Clark gone back to Calcutta, profiting from some unspoken brand of immunity that attached itself to the merchant classes, all that remained in conclusion of the strange episode was to bring in Mr Figge.

  What worried the governor most was the mythology that was building up around the story, a scandal that had set the malcontents gossiping. I have no wish to make heroes of rum speculators, he’d said in front of the Macarthurs—apparently in reference to Captain Hamilton, who still waited on Preservation Island. The two of them had glared at the governor in malevolent silence.

  In the previous week, a group of convicts had absconded with the avowed intention of finding and commandeering the wreck. It was no more or less ambitious than any other fantasy the lags had cooked up, like walking to China; but public order was a thin veneer, and excitement could lead to anarchy. A fortune in rum, wedged between boulders to the south, with no sentry other than a straggle of bony survivors to be clubbed like seals. It was only geography, not governance, that prevented it.

  They agreed that Clark’s departure was a blessing of sorts. The Corps were already suggesting that his evasive journal left room to place blame for the loss of fourteen men at the feet of the natives. ‘It is ugly but useful,’ the governor told Grayling, ‘that the only surviving account of the episode is one which says Go out there and this is your fate.’ It rang false to Grayling, but of course the old man was right. The people would rush to reinforce their own fears.

  Hunter marked Grayling’s mission with his signature caution: in addition to the earlier stipulation that he take an escort, he was to approach the town by river to avoid the convict stopover on the road at Longbottom. This, the governor reasoned, would lessen the chances of an ambush. Lastly, most crucially, he was to ensure the thing was done without bloodshed.

  When he had received Grayling’s nod of assent, he looked to the door of the anteroom. ‘You’d best bring in the boy.’

  Srinivas appeared different from how Grayling had seen him previously. His chin was up now: he looked angry and defiant. Older, somehow. Over his should
er Grayling could see that a sentry had been posted by the door: this must have been a jarring change of circumstance for the boy.

  ‘It is a pleasure finally to meet you,’ said the governor, once Srinivas was seated. ‘I’m told that you speak good English.’

  ‘I do,’ he said calmly. No trace of his earlier deference to authority.

  ‘I hope you understand my reasons for detaining you.’

  There was no response. The boy’s gaze travelled vaguely over the braided shoulder towards the window.

  ‘You have suffered, I know,’ the governor continued. ‘I was shipwrecked once, too.’ He laughed unexpectedly. ‘In fact I was shipwrecked several times. But I refer to a time when I was very young, smaller than you, sailing aboard a naval vessel with my father. We were separated in the wreck. I don’t remember being distressed by it, but I am told my father was beside himself. I suppose in youth it is hard to know the sorrows you inflict on your parents.’

  From the tilt of the boy’s head, his lowered brow, it was clear he was listening intently. ‘I wish to go to him,’ he said, unexpectedly.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Grayling.

  ‘I wish to go and find him. In the bush. I do not believe he is dead.’

  The governor paused. He folded one hand over the other on the surface of the desk. ‘My lad, it sorrows me greatly to say it, but the likelihood is that your father is long deceased. You have the opportunity to make a life here now. We will assist you until you are able—’

  ‘No.’ The governor recoiled from the interruption. ‘I wish to go and find him. And the other lascars.’ The boy levelled his gaze at the two of them. ‘This is your place. It is not mine. I am as likely to prosper on that coast as I am to do so here. Perhaps more so.’

  Grayling and the governor looked at each other briefly before the older man spoke. ‘You showed great sense in keeping your counsel throughout the shipwreck, and along the walk. In hiding your English, I mean. You would be wasting all that effort.’

  ‘No, sir, I was mistaken to come here. I should have gone with my companions to look for my father when the chance was there. I chose duty at the time, but duty is worth nothing. I wish to make it right.’ The boy sat back in his chair, but made no attempt to leave.

  The governor sighed. ‘I am sorry lad. I am truly sorry, but that cannot happen just now. Lieutenant,’ he said quietly, looking away, ‘will you have the corporal come in here and take the lad into custody? I cannot risk that man’s proximity to him. When Mr Figge is tried and convicted—and only then—we will release the lad to do as he pleases.’

  He turned to Srinivas as the corporal entered the room and stood heavily behind him. ‘I am sorry, boy. I do this solely for your protection.’

  40

  Now the night slipped past the longboat, north from Cockle Bay then west. Silent eucalypts framed the evening lives of those on the bank: convicts drinking around fires, families in their dimly lit cottages and Cadigal on the ground in huddles of six or eight. It was cold, a breeze bringing the ocean over the river from behind them, clouds obscuring the stars. Grayling stood while the company of six redcoats rowed. He could smell food cooking on fires that were visible only as a glow. He could smell the slime and the oysters, the smoke and the night. He felt wary of the places that glowed and the ones that didn’t, in equal measure but for different reasons. The shadowy mangroves. He was a target for any whistling bottle the drunks cared to hurl as much as a silent spear.

  Pemulwuy was out there in the night. Maybe seated in a rock shelter somewhere on the south side of the river: Wangal country. A tall man folded in thought. Nursing his grudges, ruminating. Perhaps hidden close by, watching and waiting and flanked by warriors bent on mayhem. Such was the nature of their campaign—no one could tell, and the warriors aimed to keep the settlers in a state of constant, exhausting suspense.

  Grayling felt relief when he saw the lights of Parramatta ahead, the rowers dipping their oars so the stern swung round and the beam of the slender boat lay alongside the wharf. Their faces did not reveal what they thought of this expedition. Anything to relieve the monotony, he supposed. They threw lines over the bollards, on the quiet orders of the provost marshal who’d sat his considerable frame in the centre of the boat.

  The party worked their way up the ladder, standing to loose attention under the oil lights of the wharf in a small forest of bayoneted muskets. A dipped knee, a hand on a hip, approximations of discipline. How much use would they be in a crisis? Figge’s fame was already spreading in the colony—this man who had defied shipwreck and distance and the terrors of the natives at close quarters enjoyed a rare prestige among those confined to the cleared acres of civilisation. Grayling, by comparison, represented little more than the constraints upon excess. Regulations, boundaries. No one would be going to any lengths to ensure his safety out here.

  The township rose from the bank, its bulk concealed by the night. He gestured to the provost marshal to have the men follow him across the open square to the tavern, cutting a path around a drunken trooper flailing at a taptoo drum by a bonfire. The King’s Birthday: he had forgotten. He was about to look away when he recognised a man half-lit by the firelight. Barrington, the convict Macarthur had raised to chief constable in Parramatta on the promise of his useful violence. He was seated on an upturned cask on the far side of the flames, the dull, flattened face turned towards Grayling, assessing him with rum-washed eyes. Barrington had been told by letter of the expedition. His assistance had been requested. There had been no answer. The man made no move to stand.

  They walked on, and found the place Grayling had been told about. At the door he told the detachment to wait outside and entered, stooping under the heavy lintel.

  A waft of grease and beer and noise struck him. Lamplight, a fiddler on a table, wheeling about as though his body was strung to the instrument. The floor was hard earth built up with planks to make a platform where the bar was. The place neither stopped nor even paused for his entrance, despite the uniform.

  A crowd gathered around him, roaring and swaying, the room more shadow than light. There were a handful of women in the room, each clutched in the embrace of a male, leering, groping, laughing: the approaches differed but the intent did not. Grayling saw a man’s whiskered face buried in the creamy downslope of a woman’s bosom, two men in sweaty embrace, lost in sentiment as they howled a song—possibly not the same song—at the fiddler. Others clutched spilling fistfuls of ale or wooden cups of rum. Some sat among the handful of chairs, drinking determinedly with glazed eyes, or they stared into the fire or did none of these things but merely occupied space. It was Tuesday, or possibly Thursday or Friday to them all. It was of no significance. It was oblivion.

  Grayling stepped delicately through the crowd, struck once or twice by an insensible body until he reached a man who looked, because he wasn’t swaying, as if he might be the innkeeper. He inquired after Figge and received only a stare in return. Tried describing him: a tall man with a broken nose and pale eyes. The barman scrunched his veiny face and broke his silence only to scoff. Good many broken noses in ’ere, lieutenant.

  Grayling could see every corner of the room from where he stood. And Figge, he knew, was not one for hiding in the shadows. He stepped outside, found the soldiers wandering off from their posting at the door, two of them talking to convict women, one pissing, the others deep in conversation. He took them along the waterfront, tried a different tavern and this time was told to go up the hill. The detachment was straggling again. These latest directions might have drawn him closer to his quarry, but might also have reflected nothing more than a desire to keep the armed posse moving down the road. Arrayed on the boat with their rifles stood, the detachment had represented order. Here on the street they were a rabble. He pressed ahead of them, disgusted.

  The last tavern was on the far side of the rise, a growth in the dip between hills. The streets out here were wreathed in wood smoke, the building visible as a patch of spilled fire
light in the gloom, a dark timber structure that stood beyond a pen holding goats and swine. A worn path led to its door, weaving around the mud and laid with a few planks. Somewhere beyond sight a mule cried out its soul to the sky.

  He approached the building in a kind of haze, feeling strongly now that he was drawing close. He gave no thought to whether the soldiers had bothered to follow. Or half a thought: You walked recklessly, Charlotte, and I chastised you. He pushed through the door and its corner dragged on the compacted ground within. And now he remembered he was unarmed.

  It could have been the same people as he’d seen in the last place. Carousers, drunks, trollops: forlorn and forgotten. They had no cause for celebration; their desperate revelry only mimicked it. The attire of traders, farmers, convict slops, even, to Grayling’s disgust, military uniforms. Bodies that heaved and collided. The tables in the centre of the room had been pushed haphazardly aside to allow space for dancing, or staggering. Beneath a table, a yellow dog fucked a bald one, tongue lolling. A row of small benches projected from the far wall, lit only by a greasy lamp overhead. The reek in here was rancid tallow and piss.

  A woman tended the bar, her face a sack of wrinkles under a stained bonnet. Her eyebrows curled in front of her eyes, compelling her to squint as though through fog. Grayling edged his way towards her, but was intercepted by a younger woman, short and strong. She took hold of his lapels, swung from them a little and made a face that mocked seduction. There were words about him, how handsome he was, a promise to suck him dry for a silver coin. He reeled back and threw her off and she disappeared, cursing, into the crowd.

  ‘I’m looking for a man named Figge,’ he said to the old woman at the bar and she looked over his right shoulder. Before he could turn, a hand clamped itself on that shoulder.

  Figge smiled down on him. Heavier and stronger than he’d been in Sydney, and quite unlike anyone else in the room. A man in confident command of himself. Days ago, though it felt like an eternity, he had insisted he was not much older than Grayling. But the pale eyes belonged to another age.