The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger

by Jackie French

  I screamed! I tried to rear, but the hobble kept me down.

  More noise. Bang bang bang bang. My master tried to run, his arms stretched out toward me. I tried to canter to him, but the hobble kept my steps too small. If I could reach him he could undo the hobble. If I reached him we could gallop away, away from the noise and yells.

  I heard my master’s breath, sobbing as he staggered closer to me. A few more steps…

  The men were all around us now. One grabbed my tether. I jerked my head away. He swore, then jumped back as I tried to bite him.

  My master began to slide onto the grass. ‘I am wounded,’ he whispered. ‘I’m dying. I’m dying.’

  One of the men ran up. He stood over my master’s body. My master’s eyes met his. ‘I’m wounded. Kill me dead.’

  Another bang, and then another. My master’s body twitched. His legs beat upon the ground. Then he lay still.

  I wanted to run, to rear. I stamped, the hobble tearing at my legs. I whinnied, my eyes rolling in my fear. But my master’s eyes were closed.

  I could smell only blood, and death.

  At last they quietened me. One man with gentle hands spoke to me softly, stroked me till I stopped shivering. He found the saddle-bag, held out an apple.

  I couldn’t eat. I shivered again at the thought.

  The other men wrapped my master in his blankets. It was easier then: I couldn’t see his face. I could still smell the blood though, and the fear. They had caught Midnight now, had him tethered with their horses. At last they threw my master’s body over my back. The man with the gentle hands held my tether as he led me from the camp. I think that he was crying, although he made no sound.

  I didn’t understand how a man could kill another and still cry. I didn’t understand at all. All I knew was that my master was dead.

  Again.

  CHAPTER 61

  Rebel Yell, 6 May 1965

  We walked. I could smell my master’s body as my hoofs clopped along the road. Smell his sweat, his blood, his death. I hung my head and watched the ground. This time too the dead man was heavier than the living one had been.

  There were houses, and then more houses. A boy let out a yell. For a few moments people crowded around us. ‘Ben Hall!’ they cried. ‘Ben Hall is dead.’ I shivered again. But the crowd melted away. One by one the doors of the houses shut. The curtains were pulled at all the windows.

  We walked in silence now, just the clip clop of the hoofs.

  And then a building, small and squat and stone. They lifted off my master’s body. They carried him away. The man with gentle hands led me to a stable. There were other horses. None of them smelt of blood and death like I did.

  He unsaddled me. He brushed me down. He gave me water and fresh hay.

  I drank. I couldn’t eat. I stood and stared down at my hoofs. I stood there for days and nights and days. Neither dark nor light mattered. I stood there, in the stable, and I grieved.

  CHAPTER 62

  Mattie Jane, 10 May 1865

  Ahmed the pedlar brought the news. He called every month these days, his cart crammed with bolts of calico, with saucepans, fry pans, chamber pots—cheap things that a settler’s wife might buy. Mama rarely bought much from Ahmed, but she gave him a good meal with the family, and sent him away with fresh bread and pudding.

  Ahmed was so excited he’d brought his pony to a trot. That pony always plodded, but not today. ‘Madam!’ he called, jumping out of his cart and running to the kitchen door, while Elijah took the reins. ‘Madam! You’ll never guess!’

  Mama wiped her hands on her apron. She was making jelly with the last of the crab apples, straining the juice from the stewed fruit through muslin into the big copper pan. Mattie was washing the dishes in the washing basin. She hadn’t been able to wash them straight after the meal, because Elijah had forgotten to bring in more water. Now she wiped her soapy hands too, and walked slowly to the door. Her cough was worse today. Cold nights always made it bad.

  ‘Ahmed, what is it? You sit down,’ added Mama. ‘There’s tea hot in the pot.’ Most of the travellers wanted Mama’s ale or beer, or a rum tot, but Ahmed drank tea. ‘Such news!’ cried Ahmed. ‘You know the bushranger, madam? The big bad one who held up your ball?’

  ‘Nothing was stolen,’ said Mama gently. ‘But yes, I know the one you mean.’

  ‘He will never make trouble again! Never!’

  Mama’s hands clenched her apron. Mattie moved closer to her, needing the comfort of Mama’s arm around her shoulders. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that he is killed! The troopers killed him stone dead while he was sleeping. They carried his body through the streets of Forbes, strapped on his horse, so everybody could see, and then—’

  Mattie Jane could hear no more. He was dead. The brightness gone. His future cut like it had been sliced off with a knife.

  She wrenched herself from Mama’s arms. She ran out the door, oblivious to Ahmed’s exclamation, raced to the storeroom, and shut the door—quietly, as always, so no one would know that she was there.

  There were barrels of apples at the far end of the storeroom, next to the cool stone wall. Rebel Yell’s apples. But Rebel Yell was gone as well. Ben Hall was gone.

  Everybody leaves, she thought. Everyone I love.

  She crouched behind one of the apple barrels, and held her apron over her head. If she could block out the light maybe she could block out the thinking too: the dead man carried by Rebel Yell.

  He was dead. If he could die so suddenly then she could die as well. Everything she had hoped for was just a dream. He had been right to call her a little girl. A little girl and her stupid dream.

  She wanted to scream. Screaming might help block it all out. But it would also make her cough. People would hear a scream too. They’d ask her why she was making a fuss. They’d laugh at a girl who loved a bushranger, who dreamt that one day he’d come for her, or write her a letter from California, where Mama said he was going. A letter that said: ‘I have a house, a farm. I’ve booked a passage for you. Will you sail to me and be my wife?’

  The door opened, then shut again. Someone stepped across the flagstones. Mattie pulled her apron down.

  It was Mama.

  Mattie waited for the questions, the comfort. But somehow Mama seemed to know there could be no real comfort now. Instead she sat beside her on the cold and dusty floor.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘The poor young man. Never got his second chance. And if anyone deserved it, that man did.’

  Mattie said nothing. At last Mama said, ‘He’s dead, my darling. But you’re still here. You’re still alive. There’ll be other men, lovely men, you’ll see.’

  ‘No,’ said Mattie Jane. She looked at Mama, met her eyes. ‘I’m dying, Mama, aren’t I? I’ve got the consumption. I heard the doctor tell Martha, two years ago. My cough is getting worse, not better.’

  Mama was silent. Tears ran down her cheeks. She didn’t move to wipe them off.

  ‘I thought,’ said Mattie, ‘that maybe he was a sign. From an angel maybe. A sign to say I’d have a life, that I’d grow up. Even if I didn’t marry him, it didn’t matter. I’d be alive to choose. But now it’s like I’m dead as well.’

  ‘No!’ Mama’s hand gripped hers so hard that it hurt. ‘You’re not going to die!’ She tried to smile. ‘Or not till you are eighty years old, with your great grandchildren by your side.’

  Mama stood up, and held out her hand to help Mattie Jane to her feet. She held her gently then, in the sweet jam warmth of her apron. ‘I failed you once,’ said Mama quietly. ‘I won’t fail you again. There is a place up in the mountains. It’s called a sanatorium. I read about it in the paper. I wrote to them. Ahmed brought the answer now, with the mail from town. There are doctors there from Switzerland, in Europe. They say they can cure consumption with cold air, and walks, and lots of cream and butter. We’re going there, you and I. And when you’re better we’ll come home.’

  Mattie still
ed. It was as though the whole world stilled around her too. Ben Hall was dead; so was the future she had half believed in, but not quite. A bushranger’s dream bride.

  But a sanatorium up in the mountains, eating butter and cream. That was…almost…like it could be true.

  ‘Can Sarah come too? Please?’ she added. ‘Sarah would like to come.’

  Mama hugged her closer. ‘And you would like it. Yes, she can come. The doctors say you need to be happy.’

  ‘I will be happy with Sarah,’ said Mattie. ‘And with you.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Mama. ‘I promise you, Mathilda Jane. I’m not leaving you again.’

  They stood there in the cold silence. Mattie could feel Mama’s heartbeat, and her own. We are alive, she thought. He is dead but we are alive. For the first time she could imagine herself as an old woman, a walking stick beside her chair; a good fire in the fireplace and children’s laughter out the window. Her children’s children’s children…

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What about Rebel Yell? Mama, what will they do with him?’ Sudden fear took her. ‘Maybe they’ve sold him already.’

  ‘A horse with two masters dead? No one will buy him now, except for glue and hide. I’ll send Elijah for him. He’ll be your horse, when you’re strong enough to ride again.’

  ‘And he’ll have foals,’ said Mattie. ‘If he’s going to be my horse I want him to have foals too.’ Slowly happiness was seeping in. Sadness, loss, pain for the man who’d died. But there was hope now as well. ‘Can I give one of them to Sarah? Please, Mama?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mama. ‘A big white horse for Sarah too.’

  ‘Elijah likes Sarah,’ said Mattie Jane.

  ‘Well,’ said Mama, ‘we’ll see about that in a few years. Now we’d better give Ahmed some cake. He’ll have drunk the teapot dry by now.’ She took Mattie’s hand. ‘Life goes on, my darling,’ she said. ‘Life goes on.’

  Mattie Jane nodded. For suddenly it seemed it did.

  CHAPTER 63

  Rebel Yell, Markdale, 1870

  I was dozing in the warmest corner of the paddock, the one that got sun, when I heard Mattie Jane run across the grass. Mattie Jane was bigger these days, but still light to carry on my back. I lifted my nose as she held out two apples on her palm. She stroked me while I crunched them.

  ‘George has asked Mama!’ she said. She sounded happy, and excited too. ‘Mama said yes! I’m getting married. Elijah has asked Sarah to marry him too, but they haven’t told anyone else yet.’

  She hugged my nose. I let her. She had given me two apples. I could smell more in her apron pocket too.

  A young man stood in the kitchen doorway. He waved. Mattie’s smile was bright as sunlight on the waterhole. She waved back, then reached in for my other apples. ‘I wanted to tell you first. Mama would think I am silly, telling a horse. Even Sarah would laugh. But George understands.’ She grinned. ‘Or says he does, to make me smile.’

  I watched her run back across the grass, lifting her skirt out of the dew. The young man stood watching her, his smile as bright as hers.

  I liked him. He brought me apples too. I sat there, savouring the flavour, thinking of all the fruit still to come.

  I was older now. Not old, but older. I had things to remember as I bent down to munch my grass. Grass tastes of apple if you eat it while the taste is still fresh in your mouth.

  I remembered my first master, the days when he was happy, when he rode me with such joy. I remembered the first time Mattie Jane rode me. I remembered the long years when no one rode me at all.

  I remembered the other master. It still hurt, to remember him.

  A magpie swooped down, trying to pluck hairs from my tail for its nest. I lashed my tail and stamped my hoofs, to show I was not to be trifled with, especially not by a bird.

  I was the biggest horse in all the district. These days the best mares all came to me. No one remembered I was the horse who had killed his master. These days I was the horse so quiet even a girl could ride him safely, so strong he had raced the best horses in the country, and won. All the young horses, it seemed, slowly turned white as they grew older.

  I stood there in the sunlight, and munched my grass. I was happy.

  I was the King.

  Notes

  The Marks family

  Billy (William) Marks and Ann Lamb were my great-great-great-grandparents. I am descended from the Elijah in this book, who married Sarah Quince. My mother remembers Elijah as an old and slightly spooky man, living with his daughter. (If anyone is trying to do the maths, it’s worth knowing that members of my mother’s family usually live to a very ripe old age and the women don’t start to grow grey till their seventies.) Elijah had lost an arm. Family legend differs on how he lost it: one story says it shrivelled in the cold when he was gold-panning in the river; another says it was amputated after an infection.

  Sarah passed on the story of the dance with Ben Hall to her daughter, Emily, who married Gilbert Sheldon. I was only three when my great grandmother Emily died, but can remember her telling me the story. Emily’s daughter Thelma was my grandmother. She told me the story often too. Thelma’s daughter Valerie is my mother.

  The only thing I’ve inherited from Ann Lamb (except perhaps a slightly olive skin colour and the love of cooking much too much) is her recipe for plum pudding. Even my mother—who is decidedly not a cook—makes a stunning plum pudding. Every generation has changed it slightly—my mother adds grated carrot instead of grated apple, and I use glacé pineapple as well as sultanas and currants—but it still is, and always will be, our ‘family Christmas pudding’.

  I haven’t inherited Sarah’s talent for painting, although my grandmother did. Or perhaps that came from yet another ancestor. There is so much about the people in this story—and the ones who aren’t—we will never know for sure.

  William Marks was a convict. Ann Lamb was a free settler, who was paid a bounty to come to Australia, where there were few women and many men who needed wives. That is about all I can be certain of.

  This is a story made from scraps and whispers. Most of it comes from stories my great grandmother and my grandmother told me about their family. Other bits I’ve found in letters, diaries—and history books, the past dug up by other people.

  Both the dates of Billy and Annie’s births and the places where they were born are unknown—they gave different versions at different times, almost certainly to hide their true past. I’m pretty sure both kept other details of their past deliberately vague too. Ann may not have been an indigenous person from what is now Canada, but I do have a photo of her children, and they all have dark hair, dark eyes, and the high cheekbones that support the legend. I have wondered for many years where the slightly brown skin in my mother’s family comes from. It’s certainly possible it comes from Ann. One thing we do know is that she was an extraordinary cook, who loved feeding lots of people lots of food.

  Mostly, though, this book comes from my own imagination, taking the few facts I have and trying to make them fit together. This is the first of the Animal Stars books where I have changed dates deliberately. I have even left out major events, to make the book simpler. Sometimes you can convey a better idea of what things happened, and why, by removing pieces that make the story too complex to easily understand.

  William and Ann arrived in Australia in 1825 and 1833 respectively. I changed the dates to make it possible to tell their stories through the lives of two horses. Ann worked for at least one other employer before she met William. William worked for at least one other settler before he was assigned to the Reverend Hassall, and he worked at several of Hassall’s properties. He also bought and leased several properties before he bought the large farm called Slete’s Gully, which he renamed Markdale.

  William and Annie’s relationship was also far more complex than I have made it in this book. I’m not even sure how many children they had together, either before or after they were marrie
d. Many of the records of the 1800s are inaccurate, or simply not there. Families didn’t immediately make an official record of marriages, births or deaths. They waited till they had to go to town—and sometimes never bothered. Many families, like the Markses, called children after other children who had died. In those days, when nearly a third of children died before their fifth birthday, you might have three or even four children with the same name, often the name of a parent or grandparent.

  The story my grandmother told me was that while working for the Reverend Hassall Billy Marks tamed a great white stallion that no one else could touch. He rode the horse in a race and won so much that he was able to buy Markdale from Mrs Moses, who sold it to him cheaply—or loaned him the money—because he had said a prayer for her husband.

  There is nothing in any source I’ve found that backs that story up; there’s nothing that contradicts it, either. William did win a race on a horse called Conservative a few years after he bought Markdale, but I have no idea if that was the horse he originally made his money from—or even if that first, almost miraculous race actually happened.

  The same is true with the story of the dance with Ben Hall. It is a strong piece of our family’s folklore, but there are no records to back it up.

  However, when I started to hunt, I did find many small corroborative details: there really was a Mrs Moses whose husband was a prominent member of the Jewish community of Sydney and Goulburn. The prayer that was so important to her may have been Kaddish. William wasn’t christened till many years after his marriage and, despite working for the Reverend Hassall, wasn’t married in a church, though there were several nearby. My great grandmother Emily kept a kosher house, in her old age at least (she and her husband lived apart for much of their married life).

  And when I found evidence that the horseracing, the balls, the inn really happened, suddenly the far-fetched stories looked like they might be true.