I gave him a quick kiss, which Bully allowed as part of business; nothing with passion in it, but a touch or a kiss to keep the men hopeful and drinking. The letter disappeared quickly into my bodice, and for the rest of the evening I raced through my numbers and danced in quick-time, willing the entertainment to finish. Surely the circus lady would be my dear friend Maria! Oh how I had missed her. We had met just once these past two years, when Foley’s Circus and Buckinghams were performing together in Tasmania, and had had a good chat and a laugh. Four children she had by then, Maria making up for lost time as it were, and as motherly as a cat with kittens.
I devoured that letter as if it were a rich meal. The scrawl was hard to read in the flame of my little candle. Maria had dashed it down to get the news to me. This is the substance of what she wrote:
Dear Lily — or Rosa I should say. I saw an advertisement in the Arrow paper which a miner showed me. So I know you are performing at the Prince of Wales and that you are still with that Bully Hayes, more fool you. The news is Jack’s wife is dead and he is looking for you. He has shifted to somewhere near Whanganui. Bill bought a horse from him there. Jack asked Bill to keep an eye out for you.
Well Lily, there is a choice for you. Will you be a wanderer or settle down, I wonder?
In haste, your friend Maria.
Rosetta dead! But how, and when? My heart near choked me with its thumping. And Jack looking for me! Oh, I was torn this way and that like a rag in a storm: joyous one moment, tormented the next. Surely if Jack was looking for me it meant he still had feelings towards me. But I was living with Bully. And would soon give birth to his child. When Jack found out he would surely turn away. I remembered how quickly he had turned from me when I sailed away to Australia. And even more pressing, how could I ever escape Bully?
I began to think — to dream — of Jack. Had he been happy with sweet Rosetta? He and I had been such friends. Surely we could be so again. What a world away that life seemed now. I was desperate to know about him, to write. Perhaps the Buckinghams knew an address. Jack would have been the one to tell them of Rosetta’s death.
On the morning after I received the letter, I walked across the road to the Provincial. I hoped to find Conrad, who was more likely to speak to me, but it was George who met me, frowning, at the door.
‘You’re not welcome here, Mrs Hayes, go back to your own establishment.’
‘George, George,’ I cried, ‘I have just heard news that Rosetta is dead.’
He looked at me stonily but said nothing. Clearly the death was not news to him.
‘You never told me! Have you no heart? I who played her part for so long?’
George looked a little shamefaced but preserved his silence.
‘But when? At least tell me where Jack is now.’
Conrad came to the door, half his face lathered, the other shaved clean. But even he shrugged to see who it was, and turned to go back inside.
I grabbed at his sleeve. ‘Jack was my dear friend. I need to write to him! In pity’s name …’
Conrad shrugged again. ‘Rosetta died some months ago. At the time we feared you might run away to Jack. Now instead, you have run away to Bully Hayes. At any rate we have no idea where he is. His letter simply said he was moving south.’
Together they turned away and went back inside, leaving me standing in the street, large with child and so cast down I could not hold back my sobs. What a fool I had been. The Buckinghams, my good, fine friends, hated me; Jack was looking for me, but surely had no idea of my circumstances; and on top of all this mess, Bully was as sour as a crock of turned milk when it came to his new wife.
By this time I knew that Bully had already been married — was still married! The great idiot boasted of it. I toyed with the idea of letting the police know, a stupid thought as the voluntary militia had more than enough to deal with in this wild outpost. Bigamy would be the least of their worries. Running away from the Arrow was not an option. Especially in my condition. And in any case, I feared Bully would chase after me. But if I could get Bully to move to a more civilised place, somewhere near the sea, perhaps some escape could be made. Then I thought of another plan which might drive Bully away from Arrowtown — or at least put me in the good books of the Buckinghams.
First I had to catch George at a good moment. Not easy. Their business sank day by day. Bully had managed to lure the Inimitable Thatcher to our hotel. If I hadn’t hated my ‘husband’ I would have had to admire him for that. However had he persuaded that famous singer and his wife, Annie Vitelli (who rivalled me for power and range of voice), to perform a season at our pitiful Prince of Wales? I had seen the Inimitable on our travels in Australia, but there by the Arrow River was the first time I met the famous couple face to face. Such a handsome pair: he tall and fair, she slight and dark. He would walk around the town with Annie on his arm as if they were taking the air on the Riviera or some other grand place, stopping to raise his hat at any passing scruffy taverner or policeman, chatting easily, probing for interesting gossip to fuel his scurrilous songs. Then he might sit in front of the barber’s shop, taking his morning shave, pencil in hand, to scribble away, humming and laughing at his own wit. By evening the new song would be polished and ready to delight.
Everyone was flocking to us. Annie and I sang together; Charles Thatcher roared out his ‘locals’: mocking the authorities, laughing at the hard life of the diggers, railing at the unfairness or the rain or the good luck, whatever was topical. The man was a miracle, the way he could put together words — rhymes and chorus — then have us all joining in with a will, as if we’d known the ballad all our lives. A veteran, the Inimitable: hadn’t he been singing at Bendigo years ago, when that rush was on?
It was seeing him at the barber’s that planted the seed of my idea. I accosted George Buckingham in the street and put it to him quickly before he could turn away.
‘George, you want to get even with Bully, and so do I.’
He looked at me as if I had crawled out of some slimy hole. ‘You have made your disreputable bed, now lie on it, Rosa.’ He put especial scorn into my stage name.
I bit back angry words. Another time I would have slapped his weak and sneering face. ‘Bully Hayes has a weakness,’ I said. ‘A secret that he is sensitive about. A disfigurement. If it came out, he would be a laughing stock.’
George began to look at me with more interest.
‘I have a plan,’ I said, ‘but will not talk about it here in the open. Bully Hayes is a jealous and violent man.’
‘And you are no better,’ he said.
I sighed. ‘If you are interested, I will talk further with you and Conrad tonight after the entertainments. Bully sleeps like the dead after a night of drinking.’
George looked bleak at the talk of entertainment. I felt sorry for the fellow. Bully Hayes, for all his faults, possessed some entrepreneurial charm that George lacked. It should have been George who enticed the great Inimitable to his superior establishment. Now he was losing money at a great rate. He nodded once and walked away.
That night I slipped quietly across the road to the back of the Provincial. The Thatchers had gone to their little room in a boarding house nearby. Bully had only the one bedroom at the Prince of Wales and he was snoring in it.
George and Conrad were sitting at a little table in the room behind the stage, a flickering lamp lighting the small pile of coins from the night’s takings. Conrad stood and brought me a chair. I was dog tired, but determined.
‘I will tell you Bully Hayes’s secret shame, and a plan I have to make you good money at his expense,’ I said in a low voice, giving my words mystery and allure to draw them in. Mrs W.H. would have approved.
The two men nodded, wary of a trap, but interested. George looked tired and pale. The hard life on the Arrow didn’t suit him, though he was an entertainer born and bred.
I took breath and eyed them both sternly, looking from face to face in the dim lamplight. ‘First, I need a
promise from you. Payment, if you like, for what I will divulge.’
‘Oh dear sweet God,’ muttered Conrad, ‘get on with it, Rosa. We are dead weary and need our sleep. Out with your condition.’
‘I require Jack Lacey’s address.’
Both boys stared. ‘You are a married woman, Rosa,’ growled George, ‘and a loose one, God knows. No need to ensnare the decent widower of our sister.’
I explained that I was not a legally married woman. That Bully had tricked me, to lure me away from the Buckinghams. That I hated Bully Hayes as much as they did, even though I carried his child, but feared to leave him, which was the truth. I knew enough of Bully Hayes to realise he would not let me go. Not unless he wished it himself.
‘Please believe,’ I said, speaking in deepest sincerity, ‘that I miss Jack, who has been my friend for many years. I wish to comfort him in his time of loss. Simply that.’
‘No need to lay it on so thick,’ said Conrad dryly. ‘We have seen your theatrics too often to be drawn in.’
The trouble was, they didn’t know Jack’s address. ‘Somewhere north of Whanganui’ was all they could tell me. Hardly better than Maria’s note. But we came to an agreement anyway. My hope was that Bully would be driven out of town.
‘Bully Hayes is missing one ear,’ I said, smiling, though the danger of speaking the words sent a shiver down my back. ‘That’s why he wears his hair so long. He was caught cheating at cards and they chopped it off as punishment out in the Islands or Australia. But, my friends, he is deathly embarrassed by the lack of that ear. He is a vain man and would do anything to keep it secret.’
The Buckingham boys grinned. ‘And your plan?’ George, who was smart, had an inkling already.
‘Set a rumour around the camp that the ear is missing,’ I said. ‘Offer a prize to any barber who will cut his hair short enough to prove the rumour true.’
‘Good, good,’ whispered Conrad, who had also caught the drift. Anyone born to entertainment could see the opportunity.
‘And when the rumour is proved true, write a farce and put it on at the Provincial. I will help with the lines.’
George bristled. ‘We are more than capable of writing our own farce, Rosa.’
‘Well, the songs at least. Your new girl will not have the wit.’
Conrad showed some concern for me at last. ‘But if Bully finds out it was you spilled the beans?’
I eyed him sharply. ‘See that doesn’t happen. I would never survive his rage. Let the rumour come from some digger who has just left town.’
We talked it through, thinking of how to stage it. The timing. The restless Thatchers would be heading north to the new goldfields on the West Coast two weeks hence. Let the rumour out now, tempt a barber (I had Stanley Jones in mind, for he was a tough fellow, feared for the sharpness of both tongue and razor), then be ready with a farce to drop into the void left by the departing Inimitable and Annie Vitelli.
My blood was pumping and the baby kicking to the beat. The plan was dangerous — Bully would be enraged. But what fun! What a piece of theatre! Suddenly I felt that my life was not at a dead end. Surely a good future lay ahead.
Well, the rumour began to spread. One night, after a particularly unruly session at the Prince of Wales, Annie Vitelli whispered to me, ‘Your husband … do tell me … has he only one ear?’ She dug me in the ribs, giving me her wickedest grin.
We were sat on the bench in the tiny room behind the bar, our bare feet sharing a tub of hot water, for we had both been on those poor feet, showing a bit of ankle and singing, for four hours or more. (It was all very well for the men. The Inimitable sometimes sat on a stool to sing his ballads and the crowd cheered and joined in, but they would not tolerate a seated woman. Annie herself was newly with child: a fact she bemoaned, for there was no way her Charles would stop his wandering minstrel ways, so she must follow.)
I cast my eyes to heaven. ‘Annie Vitelli, you must know better than to ask such an intimate question. It is more than my life’s worth to answer.’ But I sent her a wink that said there might well be truth in the rumour.
Annie chuckled. She was a tough woman, Annie: not born to the boards, as we say, but a true musician, who grew up in an ordinary, non-performing family. So much life she had lived, and much of it sad.
‘Lily,’ she said to me once (she was the only one who called me Lily: we had shared our stories of the Bendigo goldfields), ‘what possesses me to fall in love with musicians? My first — my singing teacher, an older man — left me a widow when I was hardly out of childhood. You’d think I would have been warned off, but no, I had to fall for my Charles, who will never settle, I suppose.’
Charles was not an easy man to live with. Genial, certainly, and clever, outrageously handsome with his golden hair parted down the centre, eyes the colour of cornflowers, and his trimmed yellow moustache that the barber must keep just so. But he was even more wedded to the bottle than my Bully. The two men would drink all hours of the night. Several nights at the Prince, poor tired Annie, having sung her items and given three encores of ‘The Mocking Bird’, which was her special, would have to sit on a stool at the side of the stage, prompting her husband, who was too drunk to remember the lines of his latest creation. Annie and I sometimes sang duets together at the Prince, competing to see whose voice could rise higher or louder. The diggers would cheer us on, even laying bets on their favourite. We would get the giggles sometimes and have to stop mid-line. But it was all good fun and a tonic for me to have a friend.
Charles could sniff out the mood of these diggers and produce a song to suit every time. He could overstep the mark, mind. Once Annie had to charm the local land agent, whom the Inimitable had enraged, into dropping a libel suit.
‘Oh never mind,’ she said on that occasion, when I commiserated with her. ‘We won’t be here much longer. Your Bully tricked us into believing his establishment was booming. It is certainly not. Charles’s sharp nose for a richer vein will take us away soon, count on it.’
She could laugh and sing sweetly on stage, but the Annie I knew was sadder, lonelier. Like me.
That particular night, as we soaked our feet together, she was in good spirits, though. ‘I hear,’ she pursued, watching me closely, ‘that there is a prize offered to a barber who will settle the matter of the ear.’
I nodded primly, but couldn’t stifle a little giggle.
‘Does Bully know about the wager?’ Annie was as persistent as a mosquito, probing, probing. She loved a gossip, did Annie. In truth I never knew an entertainer who didn’t.
‘He does not,’ I said with a warning frown. ‘Nor should he, otherwise he’ll never set foot in any barber’s. So mum’s the word, if you please.’
We dried our feet and went wearily off to our separate beds. I admired Annie. She managed to appear freshly laundered, ruffled and ribboned every night, though the floor was mud, the canvas roof mildewed and the diggers filthy. She would sing her songs and flash her painted eyes at the men, while never letting a one of them within a yard of her pretty dress or shapely ankle. A true professional. Annie wore her dark hair in little ringlets each side of her face and was as fussy as the Inimitable about her looks. I suppose I looked rougher in those days, though I did my best. We could have been sisters, Annie and me; both dark hair and eyes, both slim and not particularly tall. Annie was the older, by my guess, though she never said her age. She had refined manners, eating with a knife and fork, and patting her little mouth with a napkin after every few bites, but for all that she had the knack of turning it on for the men — enjoying it, too — then stepping away from all the ugliness and drunken behaviour, to become a proper well-bred lady, as if someone had rung a bell: ding dong, time’s up! I tried to learn the knack, but was younger, and of course near term with child. It all seemed too hard.
The day came when Mr Jones the barber stepped out from his little shack to stop me in the street. He wiped the sharp blade of his razor and nodded in a friendly way. I guessed w
hat was coming, but pretended innocence.
‘Good morning, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, all polite. To see a smile on that sour face was as unlikely as a woman’s bonnet on his knobby head.
I nodded to him and drew my shawl closer over the bulge of my baby. The sight of that sharp razor, which never left his hand, terrified me.
‘Your husband, now, Mrs Hayes,’ the rough fellow said, ‘could do with a shave and a smarten up. Mr Thatcher has been to me today and is looking his best. Why not send your good man down, while I have a moment to spare?’
I kept a straight face. ‘My husband is not a man to take orders from his wife, Mr Jones, as I am sure you will be aware. But I will pass on your suggestion.’ Or some such polite rejoinder.
So here was my chance to move the matter ahead. It was a bitter, grey day: autumn had scarcely touched the Arrow. We seemed to be sliding from a puny summer directly into iron-hard frosts and violent winds. I hurried back up the rutted road, beating against the rising southerly.
Bully was at breakfast, having risen late. He seemed to need little sleep, but what he took was always in the morning. He smiled at me through a mouthful of bacon.
‘Well, Mrs Hayes, how is my son this morning?’ Bully always spoke of the baby as a son. I believe he had a daughter or two elsewhere, unloved, discarded. He wanted a son to bring up in the wild, seafaring, piratical ways of his father. Bully gestured to me to sit and eat. I made an effort to stuff down a mouthful of the greasy, tainted stuff. Vegetables or a fresh piece of fruit was all I could think of in those days.
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