Daughter of the Regiment

by French, Jackie

  The boy hesitated, then vanished in the direction of the horse whinny. He was back a few seconds later. He held out a slightly grubby hand. ‘You can taste it if you like,’ he offered.

  ‘Really? Your ma won’t be angry?’

  ‘There’s plenty there,’ reassured Daniel. ‘It was a whole tree full. They’re not like bees back home. I’ve never seen a hive so big before.’

  ‘Did you keep bees back home?’

  ‘My grandfather did. Twenty skeps out the back, and more sometimes. He made mead too, but they never let me taste it,’ said the boy regretfully.

  ‘What’s mead?’

  ‘It’s a drink. Honey and spring water. It’s got to be spring water mind, that’s what grandfather said. And yeast. Some people add herbs as well, but grandfather says they spoil the taste. Then you let it brew and that’s the mead. Like beer maybe, but better. Least that’s what grandfather said.’ Daniel held his hand out to her again. ‘Here, take it.’

  Cissie lifted the lump from the boy’s hand. It looked sticky, and sort of shiny. It must be honeycomb, Harry realised, not like the honey that came in jars.

  Cissie tasted it. ‘It’s … it’s strange.’

  ‘But good,’ asked Daniel anxiously.

  ‘Good,’ agreed Cissie. She tasted it again.

  ‘I’d give you some to take home,’ said the boy regretfully. ‘But I did promise Ma.’

  ‘No, please,’ said Cissie quickly. ‘I wouldn’t want to take your honey. Maybe … maybe you’ll be this way again though. You could show me the tree. Then I could get some for myself.’

  ‘I will if I can,’ said Daniel. ‘But I can’t tell you when. It took me and Mabel half the day to ride here, and it’ll be the rest of the day to get back, and the roof’s still not secure on the house and there are fences to build …’

  ‘I understand,’ said Cissie softly.

  ‘Maybe you could come our way sometime? It’s a grand spot we’ve got by the river. The most beautiful place you’ll ever see!’

  Cissie was silent for a moment. ‘I like the creek,’ she said finally. ‘It’s sort of mine. I don’t think I’ll ever see a place more beautiful than this.’

  ‘But this is a creek, not a river! A river’s much more grand.’

  ‘This is my place,’ said Cissie stubbornly. ‘I think it’s lovely.’

  The boy looked round, as though seeing the cascades, the waterlilies, the gentle grass for the first time. ‘WeIl, it’s a beautiful place, too,’ he agreed. ‘Do you think you can come? One of the soldiers will bring you surely if you ask?’

  ‘I will if I can,’ said Cissie. She hesitated. ‘It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Someone who isn’t a soldier. I mean I love them all, but … do you have any sisters?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Three,’ said Daniel cheerfully. ‘All younger than me and all the worst nuisances you’ve seen in all your born days. Sarah’s the oldest. A bit younger than you, I think. Then there’s Bet and Laura, and two brothers, too, Benjamin and Charlie. Charlie’s eight years old and Ben is seven. And we’ve dogs—a pair of them—and a dozen hens and twenty-seven head of cattle.’

  ‘I’ve got a pet bear,’ said Cissie wistfully. ‘It eats gum leaves. But it sleeps most of the day. I’d like to see dogs.’

  ‘You must get them to bring you down!’ urged Daniel.

  ‘I will,’ said Cissie. ‘I will.’

  The horse whinnied and they walked away. Harry waited, but neither came again.

  chapter sixteen

  Heart’s Place

  White Ice had laid an egg and wanted to proclaim it to the world. Sky Maze leapt up onto the box beside her, prepared to lay on top of her if she wouldn’t move. White Ice squeaked and flapped down to the floor.

  ‘I wish I’d seen them,’ said Angie. It was Saturday morning. Angie had brought three pots of jam—her mum had been cooking up the last of the apricots—and her homework to fill in time while Harry was watching through the hole.

  ‘I wish you’d seen them,’ said Harry. It was the truth. Some time in the past week he’d stopped feeling that Angie was an interloper. Cissie was hers now, as well as his.

  Angie peered down at the hole again, and shook her head. ‘Still nothing,’ she said. ‘You know, it’s funny. It’s almost as though nothing happens till we’re watching.’

  ‘Except we don’t know what’s happened that we haven’t seen,’ said Harry practically. ‘I mean all sorts of things might have happened. Cissie might have been bitten by an eel or Sergeant Wilkes might have been carried off by a wedge-tailed eagle.’ He grinned as Angie giggled. ‘Cissie must have been here lots of times when we haven’t seen her. It’s her favourite spot—her special place, she said.’

  ‘I know. It’s just … I just feel we haven’t really missed anything. But you’re right. Who knows what we haven’t seen?’ She bent down to the hole again. ‘Still nothing happening. Feel like a swim? I brought my bathers this time.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll meet you down there after I get changed.’

  ‘What, here!’ Harry was startled. ‘You can’t get changed in a chookshed!’

  ‘Why not? The chooks don’t mind. They’re used to me. I’ve spent enough time in here in the past week. Go on. I promise I won’t disturb your chooks.’

  The creek was cold, as though it had searched for all the chill within the rocks and gathered it together in the swimming hole. You could sort of smell the rocks, thought Harry, as he floated on his back. Hot rocks on the top and cold soil and rocks below. Rocks smoothed by a thousand floods, pink rocks, white rocks, grey rocks, rocks and water, rocks and sun. Clouds spilled lazily out from behind the hills and floated slowly along the sky.

  Angie slid into the water behind him and stroked slowly out to the rock in the middle of the swimming hole, just submerged below the water. She held onto it with both arms, idly kicking to keep herself horizontal. ‘You know it’s funny,’ she said, after a while.

  ‘What’s funny?’ Harry still watched the clouds.

  ‘When you first slide in you think your toes will drop off with cold. Then after a while your body sort of gets used to it. You know …’

  ‘Yeah.’ Harry knew.

  ‘Will you miss all this when you go away?’ asked Angie a few minutes later.

  Harry rolled over. The spell was broken.

  ‘I don’t know if I am going,’ he said shortly.

  ‘But Spike said …’

  ‘I don’t care what Spike said. I haven’t made up my mind.’

  ‘It’s a good school,’ said Angie slowly.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But I suppose you’ll get homesick. I will I bet if I get into St Helen’s.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ Suddenly everything seemed clear, clear as the swimming hole and just as cold. ‘I … I’m afraid I won’t get homesick. That I won’t miss this place.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Everyone says how great the school is. How much fun you have down in the city. All the other kids, all the things you can’t study here. I’m afraid I’ll like it too much. That when I come home I won’t love it any more. And I have to love this place. It’s who I am … and if I change I don’t know who I’ll be …’

  Angie was silent.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Harry at last. ‘That sounded dumb.’

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ said Angie. ‘I understand, I think.’

  A goshawk swooped above them suddenly, its shadow flickering across the pool. It seemed about to grab a fish beneath the water; then saw the children, and twisted up and through the trees instead.

  ‘Come on,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll race you to the other end.’

  chapter seventeen

  Decision

  The end came unexpectedly.

  The day was cool, the mist hanging above the hilltops seeping down in an almost imperceptible wet haze. The chooks ruffled down in dust baths as though seeking the warmth stored in the soil, or pecked about the stone
s in Mum’s rockery at the edge of the garden.

  They’d seen Cissie twice during the week. Both times she’d been reading. Once, a book, thick with a red cover, but held away from them so they couldn’t see its title, and the other time a letter. Or it had looked like a letter. As Angie had pointed out it might just have been lessons she was supposed to learn, or poems, if she still tried her hand at poetry.

  There wasn’t really much chance she’d be there today, thought Harry, watching Wild Thing being chased by Hazelnut around the flat. Wild Thing had a beetle and Hazelnut wanted it … Harry stepped inside the chookshed and crossed over to the hole.

  There was no mist in the world within the hole. The sky was clear, the tree trunks dappled brown and red as though there’d recently been rain.

  As Harry watched, Cissie stepped into sight. She wore a bonnet, pale straw with ribbons hanging on each side. She looked no older than she had the last time he’d seen her.

  Cissie stepped silently onto her rock and sat down. She looked at the pool, at the trees and the sky. She spoke to the face, the gnarled face of bark and ancient sap, on the trunk of the red gum tree that leant across the bank.

  ‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ she said. She trailed her hand across the water. The waterlilies bobbed in the ripples. She looked up at the tree again.

  ‘I know it’s silly saying goodbye to a tree, and to the creek and to the wind. But I’ve got to say goodbye to someone. They’re all packing and seeing to their uniforms and no one has time to take me down to the farm, so I can’t say goodbye to Dan and the others. I don’t even think they know yet that the garrison is being withdrawn. The boat only came last night.’

  She paused again and shut her eyes. For a moment Harry was afraid she’d say the rest of the goodbye in her mind, but after a moment she opened her eyes and spoke again.

  ‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how I’ll miss you. They don’t understand, back at the garrison. They don’t understand how you can love a place so much it’s part of you. They say I have to go home, now that the regiment has to leave here. England isn’t home. This is my home, but no one understands.

  ‘They think I should be happy to go. I’ll see snow and daffodils and live in a nice house instead of barracks. They think now my cousins have written and say they want me I shouldn’t be afraid.

  ‘I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything! But you are all I’ve got—all I’ve had of my own for so many years. Why is it so silly to love a place as you’d love a person? If I leave you it’ll be as though my heart is wrenched right out of me!’

  Was she going to cry? wondered Harry. But her eyes were dry and bright. It was as though she didn’t want to waste her last time here with tears. Tears might blur the world, and she wanted every memory to be clear.

  ‘I wanted to beg them to let me stay, stay with Dan’s family, but of course I can’t. I haven’t any money to pay them for my keep and the farm’s not paying yet. They’ve got too many children of their own to take another.

  ‘If I could stay with a family in Sydney maybe it mightn’t be so foreign, so strange … or even in school there, then one day, somehow, I might get back here … but there aren’t any schools for girls in Sydney, or not the sort they’d be prepared to leave me in, and no money anyway …

  ‘I didn’t say anything. They’ve been so kind. None of them my family, but all of them have made me theirs. They’re all so happy at their recall. They’ll see their wives and families, the places they love, where they grew up. The bluebell wood, the shaggy ponies, old Sam’s public house—the tiniest in England, Captain Piper says—badger hunting, chestnuts … all the things that they remember.

  ‘Let them think that I’m happy to go back, that I’ll be glad to be living with my cousins. That’s the best way that I can thank them now.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  Wild Thing had eaten her beetle. Smokin’ Joe and Sky Maze hesitated at the door, then trotted in to peck at the chicken pellets in the feeder on the wall.

  Harry walked across the flat and up the stairs. The house was empty. Dad was off at a sale somewhere, and Mum had gone as well.

  The phone was in the kitchen. Harry picked the receiver up. It felt cold to his touch. He dialled the number carefully—8, 6, 3 …

  ‘Mrs Lucas? It’s Harry. Could I speak to Angie please?’

  ‘Angie, it’s me. Something’s happened. Something terrible has happened. Do you think you could come down?’

  chapter eighteen

  Gone

  ‘But she can’t have gone!’ cried Angie, for what seemed the hundredth time. ‘They must have realised that she was upset, even if she wasn’t going to tell them. They must have noticed something wrong. They must have let her stay.’

  ‘Stay where?’

  ‘At that boy’s place. Daniel’s. Or even down in Sydney.’

  ‘She had no money.’

  ‘One of them could have paid for her.’

  ‘Why should they? They weren’t related to her.’

  ‘But she loved them! She must have loved them! Sergeant Wilkes and Captain Piper and all the others—they must have loved her back.’

  ‘Maybe they did,’ said Harry slowly. ‘Maybe none of them had enough money to pay for a kid to stay in Australia. I don’t suppose they were paid a lot back then and they’d have families to support, back in England. And they’d have said to each other, “Well, she has people who’ll look after her. Nice people more than likely.” Cissie said they had a big house. They had more money probably than anyone at the garrison. The soldiers might have thought she’d be homesick for a while, but once she had other kids for company and proper lessons, a governess maybe …’ Harry’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Then she’d forget,’ finished Angie.

  Harry nodded.

  ‘I don’t think she’d forget,’ declared Angie. ‘I think this place was too much part of her. I think she’d remember. And I don’t think she left. She can’t have! I think she would have found some way to stay.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we have to keep on looking. We have to find out, Harry. We can’t stop now. We have to see.’

  ‘But what if there’s nothing! What if we look for years and never see anything at all.’

  ‘I …’ Angie stopped. ‘Harry. We’re all she has. Even if she doesn’t know about us—even if she never will. We can’t abandon her. We have to be here for her—just so there’s someone waiting …’

  ‘But it can’t make any difference now!’ cried Harry. ‘It’s lost. It’s gone.’

  ‘It hasn’t gone!’ said Angie passionately. ‘It’s still there through that hole. Even if we can’t see it! It’s the past and the past is still here with us, all the time.’

  ‘But you can’t change the past!’ yelled Harry.

  ‘But, but, but … you sound like a chook,’ flared Angie. ‘Harry—do you want to leave her? Do you want to stop watching?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry.

  Suddenly all his anger was gone. He wasn’t angry at Angie anyway. He was angry at … at nothing. At everything. At the past for being so untouchable, at school next year and at the future for being so unknowable. Angry at himself, maybe, for being powerless when someone he cared about was being hurt, so very far away.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll keep on watching.’

  chapter nineteen

  Searching for Cissie

  ‘Angie?’ Harry peered through the chookhouse door. ‘I brought you down some cordial. It’s pineapple. I hope that’s okay.’

  Angie lifted her eyes from the hole. It seemed to pulse today, dark and light and dark again. Harry wondered if there was wind on the other side, blowing the clouds across the sun.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Angie. ‘It’s okay. I like pineapple.’ She crawled out from underneath the perch and took the glass.

  ‘See anything?’
>
  Angie shook her head. ‘I’d have called you if I had. Just a fish jumping at some insects. And there was a black snake, too. But not Cissie. Not people at all.’

  That’s all they’d seen all week, thought Harry. Wallabies … and once a kookaburra laughing at the wind. But never Cissie, or anything that might tell them where she’d gone.

  ‘They must have all left,’ said Harry slowly. ‘The garrison withdrew. That was the last time she was able to come to the creek …’

  ‘But there must be someone left!’ cried Angie.

  Harry shook his head. ‘My great-something-grandad took up this place in the 1840s, and there wasn’t anyone here then. Not even any Aboriginal people. They’d all got sick or something, I can’t remember what. But I remember Gran saying it was years before they started to come back down here again.’

  Harry crouched down with his back against the doorjamb.

  ‘There’s no point us keeping watch anymore,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We just have to face it. We might watch the hole for twenty years and not see anyone.’

  ‘But time doesn’t pass in the hole like it does here!’ protested Angie. ‘Years have gone by there since you first saw Cissie. Maybe years have passed there now.’

  Years without Cissie, thought Harry forlornly. He shook his head. ‘She’s not coming back no matter how long we look. No one is coming back.’

  ‘But we can’t just leave her like this!’ cried Angie.

  ‘We’ve got no choice,’ said Harry. ‘She’s gone, Angie. And no matter how long we look we won’t find her.’

  ‘It’s like … it’s like we’re abandoning her!’

  ‘We’re not abandoning her, Angie. We’ll still think of her—hope for her. But we just have to face it—no matter how hard we hope, how much we look through the hole, we’re never going to know what happened to her.’