Corroboree (13 page)

‘Buried it, of course. Out at the back, where the mulga grows. He buried his horse there, too, do you remember Kookaburra? Dear Kookaburra. It shows how sorry he felt.'

‘It also shows that he thought of Yanluga as somewhat less than a human being.'

Charlotte reached up on tiptoe and kissed his lips. ‘You mustn't be bitter, my love. I do believe that father means well. It's just that he sees life so differently from you and me.'

‘Yes,' said Eyre. He held her very close. He could have held her all day, feeling the softness of her breasts against him, and breathing in her perfume. He twisted one of her damp curls of hair around his finger, and then kissed her forehead.

‘Shall I see you again?' he asked her.

‘Whenever I can get away; but we may have to go to Angaston for a week or so; and father's started to drop hints that he might be taking me to Melbourne.'

‘I shall wait for you. You know that, don't you?'

‘Oh, Eyre,' said Charlotte.

At that moment, Robert Pope, one of Eyre's assistants, appeared on the wharf with a large umbrella. ‘Eyre? Sorry to interrupt you, old man, but Mr Duffy wants to know when you can arrange to ship that wool of his. He's in the office now.'

Eyre squeezed Charlotte's arm, and kissed her once more, on the lips. ‘I shall have to go,' he told her. ‘But remember that I love you.'

‘Please say you forgive me,' Charlotte begged him.

‘There's nothing to forgive.'

Eyre followed Robert back to the office. The rain blew in his face as he turned the corner on to the wharf. Charlotte remained under the lean-to for a while, until an unshaven
matelot in an oilskin hat stopped and stared at her, and hitched up his trousers, and said, ‘What ho, my darlin'.'

Mrs McConnell knocked excitedly on the door of Eyre's bedroom to tell him that their hired carriage had arrived outside. He knew, he had seen it, but he dutifully said, ‘Oh! Excellent!' Mrs McConnell also announced that Christopher was downstairs in the front parlour, drinking small beer with Dogger, although he knew that, too. He had heard Christopher's giggling through his red-patterned carpet, and guessed that Dogger was relating his favourite story of the Nyungar Aborigines at New Norcia. These proud and independent tribesmen had been given trousers and sandals by the missionaries there, and told to cover their shamefulness; only to return the following week with their trousers on their heads, and their sandals ostentatiously buckled around their penises.

Eyre had just finished tying his black silk cravat, and he pivoted around on his heel for Mrs McConnell to admire him. He was dressed in a magnificently cut black tailcoat, and double-breasted waistcoat, with satin-trimmed britches and black-kid slippers. Severe, but correct, and very handsome. His collar was extravagantly high, which he understood to be the latest fashion in England; but it did require him to keep his head rather loftily raised, and Dogger had described it as a Patent Double-Chin Cutter-Offer.

‘Lord have mercy,' said Mrs McConnell. ‘You could be the King of South Australia.'

‘Well, Mrs McConnell, if only I were. The things I wouldn't put right.'

‘You're not still worrying yourself about the blackfellow? You'd be best off forgetting about that.'

Eyre picked up his cane and his gloves. ‘I can't, Mrs McConnell. I would that I could.'

‘But you're such a gay fellow, Mr Walker. Why should you let such a grave affair distress you?'

Eyre took her hand, and affectionately pressed it, and kissed her cheek. ‘A man can only be gay when his conscience is at ease, my dear. I saw Yanluga die, and it was my fault that Mr Lindsay set his dogs on him. Therefore, the task with which Yanluga charged me is a most serious responsibility. He must be buried according to the dignity of his own beliefs, and not laid to rest in some pet's graveyard, with foreign words spoken over him by a man who had nothing but contempt for the sanctity of his life.'

Mrs McConnell looked a little flustered. ‘Well,' she exclaimed, ‘I can only say that your father must have been a rare preacher.'

Eyre said nothing. He tried to look happy, but it wasn't especially easy. The truth was that every night since Sunday, he had been having grotesque nightmares about Yanluga's death, and about frightening Aboriginal rituals in which he had been somehow compelled to take part. He had heard weird ululating voices, and seen black flickering silhouettes, and hooked devices that tumbled over and over in the air, whistling as they went. And every morning he had woken up with his nightshirt tangled and sweaty, and the vision of Yanluga's ripped-open entrails vivid in front of his eyes.

To dress up for this ball tonight was a marvellous relief; quite apart from the fact that he wanted to meet Captain Sturt. He led Mrs McConnell down the stairs, and into the front parlour. Christopher was waiting for him there in a bright peacock-blue coat and yellow britches, his hair frizzed up with curling-tongs; and Dogger was just
pouring out two more small beers. Mrs McConnell said happily, ‘Doesn't Mr Willis look the very picture?'

‘Smartest I've ever seen you,' Eyre grinned, and shook Christopher's hand. ‘Not sure about the hair, though. You look as if you've been struck by lightning.'

‘I'm glad you've come down to rescue me.' Christopher replied. ‘Any more of Mr McConnell's small beer and I do believe I wouldn't have been able to stand up tonight; let alone dance.'

Dogger stood up, sniffed dryly and lifted his glass. ‘Since I myself have no dancing to do, I'll venture a toast. To the young Queen who promises to be good; and to Britannia herself who needs no bulwarks; and to the man who said that black's not so black, nor white so very white.'

Mrs McConnell, unusually indulgent, poured a glass of beer both for herself and for Eyre, and with all the selfconscious solemnity of the English during moments of extreme patriotism, they drank. Eyre thought that the small beer tasted exactly like the thinned-down varnish with which the verger at St Crispin's used to refurbish the pews, but he smiled at Dogger nonetheless, and said, ‘Excellent.'

‘Now,' put in Christopher, rubbing his hands, ‘we must be on our way to collect Daisy Frockford. And you'll be delighted to hear, my dear Eyre, that May Cameron will be accompanying us, too.'

The muscles in Eyre's cheeks tightened a little. ‘Why should I be delighted to hear that?'

‘Why? My dear fellow, you must have heard that May's engagement to Peter Harris was broken off, after Peter lost all that money at the races. And apparently she's desperately anxious to be seen walking out with somebody else, just to spite him. And when I say
desperately
anxious, well, please excuse my implications, Mrs McConnell. May Cameron's a healthy girl.'

Mrs McConnell furrowed up her forehead, this time in disapproval. ‘Remember this is a Methodist home, Mr Willis.'

‘I apologise,' said Christopher, bowing his fluffed-up head. ‘We do live in practical times, however. Not all appetites can be satisfied with hymn-books.'

Dogger cackled. ‘That reminds me of another story they told me at Mallala; how they found some of the Aborigine women taking Bibles back to their camp in their dilly-bags, and stripping off the leather bindings for a tasty chew. They even boiled the glue off the spines, and drank it like soup.'

‘Now then, you're right, Christopher, we really must go,' said Eyre; who was afraid that Dogger's beer had already made Christopher too pompous and Dogger himself too reminiscent. He took Mrs McConnell's hand, in its fine crochet mitten, and kissed her neat little cuticles. Then he took Christopher's arm and led him out on to the verandah. The carriage was waiting under the lamplight; a hired phaeton from Meredith's, rather dilapidated, and leaning askew on its worn-out suspension, but brought up to a high polish nonetheless, and harnessed up with two quite respectable-looking bays. The coachman was a stout, broad-shouldered fellow with a high hat and a face like a Mile End prizefighter, with scarred eyebrows and a twisted nose. He climbed down as Eyre and Christopher came out of the house, and put down the step for them, so that they mount up and take their places on the dusty green upholstery.

‘You know where to go first, don't you?' Christopher asked him.

‘Flinders Street, sir, no need to remind me,' the coachman told him, with undisguised aggression. He climbed back up on to his box, and snapped his whip, and the phaeton began to lurch off with an eccentric up-and-down motion which caused Eyre and Christopher to look at each other and laugh in amusement.

‘You may walk if you wish, gents,' the coachman told them.

‘I wouldn't dream of it,' Christopher replied. ‘This
carriage has all the safety and comfort of a vehicle which travels on land; and yet all the general hilarity of a boat.'

‘Well, sir, in that case, you've nothing to complain of,' replied the coachman, in a voice as hoarse as a parrot.

‘Nothing but your manners,' Christopher told him.

‘My manners, sir?' The coachman shifted himself around in his seat and stared at Christopher with eyes as black as waistcoat-buttons. ‘Well, sir, you'll have to forgive me for being one of the blunter sort. But then bluntness was never on the catalogue of criminal offences, was it, sir?'

‘Your employer may have different views,' said Eyre, who was beginning to find this fellow irritating. ‘Now trot along, and let's have less of this chatter. We've come out this evening for amusement, and we don't want any sourness, especially from you.'

The coachman looked as if he might have a less than courteous reply to that remark; but he closed his mouth tight, like a doctor's portmanteau, and shifted around on his seat again, and stung the horses' ears with the tip of his whip. ‘Hee up, you shamblers.'

‘I hope you haven't made a mistake, hiring this coach,' Eyre said to Christopher, under his breath, as they wallowed towards the end of Hindley Street. He inclined his head towards the coachman. ‘He may very well be perfectly respectable, but he looks like a legitimate to me.'

‘Nonsense,' said Christopher, running his hand through his fuzzed-up hair. But then he leaned across and said, ‘He does seem a trifle uncouth, though, for a coachman.'

‘Legitimate' was the generally accepted euphemism for ‘ex-convict'. There were comparatively few in Adelaide, which had been founded as a free settlement; but a few score of pardoned men had sailed here from Sydney to seek their fortune in farming and prospecting and keeping sheep, and most of all to try to escape the social stigma of having been ‘sent out'.

Eyre said, ‘I suppose it's all right. The firm where you hired the coach was respectable enough, wasn't it?'

‘Of course it was; although this isn't one of their usual carriages. Everything else was taken for the ball.'

Eyre raised an eyebrow at Christopher, and sat back on the seat in a conscious attempt to appear relaxed; although he wasn't.

‘Well, this is all nonsense,' Christopher repeated. ‘You're just trying to put the wind up me.'

Eyre looked around. They were now in a particularly deserted part of Pulteney Street, by an area of waste ground; and the only inhabited houses that he could see were a group of small workers' cottages behind a high picket fence, and the lamps were lit in only one of them. There was a tippling-house called the Cockatoo a hundred yards further along the street; and three or four men were sitting out on the verandah with bottles of rum, singing and laughing. But apart from these, and apart from the ghostly pale gum-trees which rustled in the evening wind, they appeared to be all alone.

The coachman eased out his reins, and said, ‘Ho, now,' to his horses, and gradually the lop-sided carriage began to slow down, almost to walking-pace.

‘What's going on?' Christopher asked him. ‘What have we slowed down for?'

The coachman didn't turn around; but said something in a hoarse mutter, like ‘traces slipped', or ‘braces tripped', or ‘brakes is stripped'. Eyre said loudly, ‘What?' but at that moment the coachman applied the phaeton's brake and the whole assembly jingled to an awkward halt.

Eyre heard running feet, and at once said to Christopher, ‘Out, and make a dash for it!' But the coachman just as quickly swung himself down from his box, and hurried back to their door, wrestling the handle open and banging down the step. He jumped up into the carriage, and Eyre saw that there was a heavy hardwood truncheon in his hand, which he brandished under Christopher's nose. ‘Legitimate indeed!' he snapped, roughly. ‘I'll break your nose for you; see how
you
care for it!'

Three more men appeared, as promptly as Jack-in-the
boxes, a trio of hardened old ruffians in baggy sailcloth britches and woollen hats. One of them hoisted himself up on to the opposite side of the carriage, and grinned up at Eyre with a face like a withered red pepper. Eyre raised his arm defensively and said, ‘Get away!' but the man simply grinned and swung up a shining machete, and said, ‘I'll geld you first, mate.' Another man, limping, went around to hold the horses' bridles, sniffing as he went.

‘It's your money and your timepieces, that's all, sirs,' said the coachman. ‘And it's your promise of silence, too; for we have too many loyal friends for you to think of grassing on us. Go to the military, and say one single word, sirs, and our friends will have your gizzards slit within the hour. A friendly warning, sirs, that's all; for what you're losing tonight is nothing as painful as your life.'

Eyre looked at Christopher, and said, ‘I think, under the circumstances, we'd be better off doing what he says, don't you?'

Red-pepper-face grinned even more broadly, and spat, and said, ‘You're cool enough, aren't you, mate?'

Eyre unfastened his watch-chain, and held up the watch that his father had given him. ‘That's only because the Lord is with me,' he said. ‘And because you'll most certainly get your punishment in Heaven, even if they fail to catch you in Adelaide.'