by Rachel Leary
‘Ah, yes, well. She’s well…thank you.’
During the meal the rain that had been threatening all morning began to drum steadily on the roof. Drops raced down the muslin-framed window and the landscape outside disappeared behind a veil of water.
‘Well, it would be absurd to go out there in this weather. You must wait here until it eases. I will have Emily bring tea.’ Mrs McCarthy left no room for a response, immediately summoning the servant girl.
‘Yes, better rest up, it’s a big job you’ve got to do.’ Mr McCarthy winked at Marshall. The captain felt himself failing in his battle to reserve judgement on this smug, self-assured man who in conversing adopted a position of leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, an all-knowing grin tormenting his rather large V-shaped face. Marshall, ever an advocate for diplomacy and mutual respect, firmly discouraged intolerance, both in himself and others, and went to great pains to reflect these values in his manner. However, when he spoke his tone was curt.
‘Thank you for that advice, Mr McCarthy.’
‘I only meant that—’
‘I am quite aware of what you meant. Thank you.’
The servant girl entered the room and Marshall, shaken by his loss of control, was quite relieved when Mrs McCarthy seized the opportunity to jump up and clap her hands together. ‘Ah, here we are. Who’ll have tea then?’
Tea continued to be poured amid somewhat awkward conversation. Finally, around two-thirty, the captain offered his sincere thanks to Mrs McCarthy, gathered his soldiers and set out on the puddled road for Lovely Banks.
...
In the late afternoon the grey cloud mass split to reveal canyons of deep blue. White clouds with edges as sharp as cut-outs sat high in the sky like snow-covered mountains. The pungent smell of wet vegetation spiced the air and as the sun grew closer to the horizon, a queer yellow glow settled over the land. Marshall rode through this uneasy splendour, his thoughts dipping and surging with the rhythm of the horse’s walk. It was a beautiful part of the country, an area of grassy woodland, well suited to grazing. Little surprise it was so popular among the settlers. There was, however, always the feeling of danger—not just physical, although he knew it existed; what bothered him more was the sense of spiritual danger. He had tried to explain it to Eleanor once, early on. ‘Oh, Richard,’ she laughed, ‘I wonder these large thoughts of yours don’t drive you to the grave. Must you be such a sombre bore?’ She held up one of two beaded doilies on the table next to her. ‘Which one of these should I give to Mrs Arthur, do you think?’
Eleanor may have been right about him—for too long he had chewed the same raw material, constantly failing to produce anything resembling a clear thought or direction. A smarter man might have admitted defeat by now, but his mulish mind, indifferent to its owner’s welfare, persisted.
...
Notification had arrived from a settler in Ross that there was someone living in a cave who he believed to be stealing from him. The settler’s convict servant had described a woman who had come to the house and stolen food. The constable at Ross had done nothing but send the report on to Hobart Town.
Marshall had wished to come out here alone, but the governor had insisted that he be accompanied by Lieutenant Pullen—and by these other buffoons, no less.
There was a mole near her lip. It had been written in the report. The convict servant had stated that the woman who barged in and took the bread and pork had a mole near her lip.
It was in her convict record too, listed under ‘Remarks’.
He remembered it well. He should not have, but he did. And it bothered him.
Behind him now laughter cut a swathe through his thoughts. He turned around to see John Macintosh off his horse with his trousers down around his ankles, the look on his face one of shock rapidly turning to anger. Above him Hawkins sat in his saddle holding a whip in his hand, grinning from ear to ear, as the men around him fell forward onto their horse’s necks, laughing.
‘Fuck you, Hawkins. You think you are so fucking funny. Ha fucking ha. Wait till I hack your balls off in your fucking sleep and see how funny you are.’
The men laughed harder as Hawkins put his hand down onto his crotch and crossed his eyes.
Macintosh had obviously got down off his horse to relieve himself and Hawkins had hit him across his bare buttocks with a whip. He was always the butt of their jokes, although not usually so literally. And Hawkins was a troublemaker, a bully who needed to be the centre of attention. He had the men’s admiration, although Marshall thought it a thin kind of admiration and wondered if they feared him more than they liked him. Feared his ridicule and, for some reason, desired his tinny approval.
It was his duty to intervene but it seemed the damage had been done and really he didn’t care. Pullen could do it. It was fast becoming his expedition, Marshall trailing like a ghost. Let them carry on, let them do as they would. They might kill each other one by one behind him and he would keep riding. Even when there was no one left, still he would keep riding. Such was his mood.
...
On reaching Lovely Banks, Stratton, Mr Hooper’s servant, took their horses and the men set about creating a fire outside the wheat shed where they were to sleep. Lieutenant Pullen and Sergeant Barker borrowed Hooper’s dogs and set off in search of kangaroo, returning soon after with two. By the fire Barker cut off the animals’ heads and threw them to the dogs. Taking a swig from the cup beside him, he ran his knife down the belly of the first one and began peeling back the grey fur to expose the meat. Marshall, not hungry, wandered towards a stand of gums a little way off.
It was just on dark and the last smears of indignant daylight lent blue to night’s black. One by one the stars appeared and hung in the sky like tiny spiders on the end of infinitesimal threads. Marshall walked on through the trees and picked his way carefully up a rocky rise, where he watched as the day finally withdrew, taking with it the certainty of shape. In the distance he could just pick out the dark outline of the Sweet Water Hills. To the west, behind the Lovely Banks homestead, a hill rose up, now settled under the shadow that earlier it had thrown out over the paddock below. In the morning they would proceed north to Salt Pan Plains, where they would leave the horses and head west towards the tiers along Blackman’s River—where, if the informant was correct, they would find her.
He wondered what he was doing out here. Some people were dealt a bad hand in life. He did believe that. He strove to see all people as equal, as they were in the eyes of the Lord—something that he knew Eleanor hated. ‘Those who are good will be rewarded and the Evil will be punished,’ she said, ‘which is precisely what they deserve, and exactly as it ought to be.’ He wished he thought it were so simple. And anyway, the real truth of it, perhaps, was that he sought to ease his own guilt. He still felt somehow to blame. Of course it wasn’t his fault. The girl—or woman, he supposed she was—could and would do as she wished. But he still couldn’t help feeling that something had gone wrong. If he’d have been better…Perhaps he had caused it—whatever chain of events had come about. Eleanor had taken a dislike to the girl. He worried that she had sensed his interest in her. After Mary had gone to Eleanor crying that Bridget had tried to kill her, Eleanor had insisted she go. When he said he didn’t believe everything that Mary said was gospel Eleanor had yelled at him that she wasn’t having Bridget there a second longer and that she was going to go down into town herself to get the constable. He had told her they would speak about it later as he had to go. When he had come back that afternoon Bridget was gone. Eleanor had done just as she said she would.
Some time ago Marshall had been walking along the road and had met Mr Price, the surveyor. He asked him had he seen Bridget Crack at the lake, with the men, with the bushrangers. Price had said yes, he had seen her. When Marshall asked did he think…had she appeared…coerced, Price had stood in the road and looked at him a moment. ‘Coerced?’
‘Yes, I just wondered if, well, if she gave the
impression of being there of her own free will, or if indeed—’
The captain was stopped by the look on Price’s face. He appeared overly interested, intrigued. There was the flicker of a grin, then he said: ‘No, Captain. No, I don’t think she was coerced.’ And he excused himself and walked on.
The next time Marshall had seen him was at a social gathering that Eleanor had insisted they attend. Price had come up next to him, a drink in his hand. His face was flushed. ‘So,’ he said, making himself comfortable against the wall, ‘you know Mr Ainsley, don’t you, Captain?’
‘I know of him. Why is that?’
‘I heard he married his convict servant.’ He grinned into his glass, turned it in his hand, then looked up for the captain’s response.
‘Is that right? I had not heard.’ (He had, in fact—it had been spoken about all over the town.)
Price was now looking across the room at a fair girl who had just smiled at him. He pulled himself away from the wall, passed uncomfortably close to Marshall, whispered with whiskey breath as he went: ‘They’re all whores, Captain.’
...
In the middle of the night Marshall woke. He had been dreaming: he was sitting up in a bed and there on the end of the bed was a fox. Behind it an open window, moonlight streaming in through the window onto the fox. It was standing there watching him, its fur rich orange, the colour of fire. Then it turned around and in one leap was gone. The dream changed then and he was no longer in a bedroom but standing at the base of a mountain. He looked up at the top of it and just then realised what was about to happen. He turned and ran, but behind him the whole mountain started to crumble. Rock tumbled down and covered him. He tried to dig himself out, to find air, to find light, to get out from underneath the rubble. He was just about to suffocate when he woke himself up.
He sat up, looked around at the sleeping men. The air in the shed was full of the musty smell of grain. The only sounds were of the men breathing and the hiss of a possum. He was awake now and he remained sitting, staring into the dark.
...
It was several hours since the men had left the cottage of the settler who had made the report. They had been following the northern bank of the Blackman’s River. About half a mile back the scrub by the river had got too thick and they had been forced to make their way further north. Now they were pushing through a net of thick scrub, trying to find their way back to it. Marshall had just noticed that the air was getting damper when up ahead of him Pullen raised his arm. They had indeed made it back to the river. Above its bank, almost indistinguishable among the trees, was a cave. A number of trees grew very close to either end. As they stood looking a dog started barking, the sound coming from the cave.
Next to Marshall, Pullen was making wild signals with his arms, directing some of the men along the river. The men hesitated, looked to Marshall, seeking his command.
‘Wait,’ Marshall whispered.
‘For what?’
‘Just wait a minute.’
Marshall looked up at the cave, put his hands around his mouth. ‘Is there anyone there? Bridget Crack? This is Captain Marshall. Please come out.’
Seconds later a shot came from the cave and narrowly missed Pullen’s head. He raised his gun, fired at the side of the cave. Automatically the soldiers behind him followed suit and a volley of shots ricocheted off the rock.
‘Hold your fire!’
Pullen’s eyes widened. ‘What? Do you want us all dead?’
‘I said hold your fire.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but surely you don’t expect—’
Stones scattered. A figure appeared running across the slope of loose rock, a dog behind it. Pullen, the self-proclaimed finest shot in the regiment, aimed at the running figure. The sound rang in Marshall’s ears. ‘Damn you!’ Fear gripped him as he waited for her to fall. And then for a moment he was confused. There was a flash of grey as the figure disappeared into the trees, a dog going after it.
Pullen turned, ‘Alright, men, let’s go.’
‘No! Stay here. I order you. Stay where you are.’
...
Marshall ran hard, followed the sounds of her retreat. He caught glimpses of her ahead of him. He saw her trip, fall forward. Then she was up again, but it was enough for him to gain ground. When he came up close behind her he called out for her to stop, please stop. To his surprise she did stop, a gun hanging from her hand at her side. She turned to face him.
Marshall stood looking at the figure in front of him, barely recognisable as the striking girl who had got up into his carriage that day. She looked for all the world more like an animal than a human being, let alone a woman. Her eyes were the same, although harder perhaps, the crystalline green having more of a shattered look than he remembered; like rare rocks that had sustained an impact not quite enough to break them, only to create shock lines, tiny cracks, through the weaker points. Her face was filthy and her hair hung matted around her face. Cheeks drawn, skin stuck to bone, eyes big in the head. On her feet she wore shoes of some kind that appeared, like the vest she wore, to have been sewn together in the most extraordinary way. In her body she possessed the alertness of the hunted, every sense wired, the muscles taut and active in their stillness, as though they too listened. He could see nothing in her eyes to show whether she recognised him. Surely she must; he was little changed. His own musket was in his right hand by his side and her eyes flicked down to it. If he moved it, she would run, he was sure of it. She was summing him up, he knew, trying to decide what options were open to her. ‘Please come with me. I don’t know what happened, but you cannot…There is nowhere to go here.’
Her eyes, which had been wide open, narrowed slightly. Emotion—of what kind he could not quite tell—pricked their cool surface.
‘Please…look at you. Honestly, I…’
She said nothing, only continued scrutinising him, probing more deeply now, her sharp eyes, finely tuned tools of extraction, boring and flicking. Then, without warning, she turned and ran.
‘Bridget!’ Instinctively Marshall raised his gun but immediately let it fall to his side again.
...
Marshall stood still listening to the crack of branches. He listened until there was no more trace of her going, until all he could hear was the slight whisper of wind through the gums. High up in the trees leaves twirled, flashing silver in the light. On the ground in the place where her feet had been the flattened grass began to move, to rise slowly, like a concussed man from a road. Marshall felt suddenly tired, very tired. He let the gun drop to the ground. Behind him was a clearing and he turned and walked to the middle of it.
The cold moist wind that ran down off the mountain grazed his cheek. Such a quiet place. And that same timeless quality he always felt in these places. What was time in the face of all this space, all this stillness? Nothing. A laughable concept. Yet another crutch pulled out from under a man, leaving him naked and howling. How we build these ideas to lean on. Hoping they’ll hold our panic at bay, we push them ahead of us into the darkness. In the end, he thought, they crumble easily, turning out to be nothing but towers of sand.
He stood perfectly still, allowing the cool air to snake around his back. For as far as he could see tree trunks charged straight and true towards the sky. It was such an effortless kind of trying they managed. Striving graciously and succeeding—a sweet, enviable condition. Higher up, wisps of cloud raced east towards freedom, away from the imposing black rock where birds of prey soared on their luck, waiting for pickings.
Bridget stood on top of the rock, the river below her, the dawn light a powder pink dust over the hills. As she stood there the sun showed itself behind the hill and rose like a god, huge and quaking in the sky, preaching its bright gold word over the land.
She stepped down off the rock and hit her thigh, signalling for the dog to follow.
He stood where he was, looking at her.
‘Come on.’
He picked his way down off the rock
, followed along behind her and then walked next to her along the top of the hill.
The ground was dry and craggy, the hill messy with outcrops of rock. The grasses that grew around the rocks and between the grey-barked trees had turned brown under the sun.
Up the slope the dog stopped, turned back to look at her and then stood there waiting. She came up next to him, dropped her hand onto the back of his neck and he fell in next to her.
Captain Marshall put the newspaper down on Arthur’s desk, walked over to the window. Three ships sat at anchor in the bay, their masts swaying, the river busy with whitecaps. Beyond them, on the hill overlooking the bay, the work of clearing the land was progressing. When he had arrived, only three years ago, most of that hill had been covered in timber and now it had been cleared almost to the top. The town was growing. And in the last three months Arthur had signed off on hundreds of new land grants in the Interior.
Arthur had only days ago issued an order stating that the military and settlers could use force to drive natives away from properties. The settlers already had been using force, Marshall had thought. But the military—that was something new. And the paper Arthur had just shown him, the Colonial Times, contained a letter from a settler lamenting that he had to build a wall around his house to protect himself and his family. In the name of Heaven, is it not high time to resort to strong and decisive measures?
‘They will have to be removed from the settled areas,’ Arthur said now. ‘That is the fact of the matter.’
Marshall’s thought was: How? How would they be removed? But he didn’t ask. He had a feeling he already knew.
...
That night, having heard about the governor’s order, Jane came to the house. She had been staying with Mrs Potter.
‘You have to do something about it.’
‘What am I to do? There is nothing I can do.’ He was tired, not in the mood for Jane, once again, telling him—lecturing him—about how things ought to be.
‘Speak to Arthur,’ she said.
