Dorothy Eden (10 page)

Should she call Mrs Jarvis back? She rejected the impulse immediately. How ridiculously helpless that would make her. As if she could not find the way alone.

The stairs and the narrow passage were lighted by an oil lamp. The door, bolted with a rough wooden latch, opened easily enough. There was even sufficient light from a window (obviously belonging to the kitchen, for there was a strong odour of stale fat) to show her the dusty path to the odorous privy.

It was as she was leaving this unpleasant refuge that she had her first fright. A thin shape leapt at her ankles and began weaving about them, mewing loudly.

A cat! Eugenia said aloud, ‘You wretched little creature! Such a fright you gave me! Why, you poor thing’—she had bent down to touch the quivering body—‘you’re nothing but a bag of bones. You’re starving. Doesn’t anyone here feed you?’

The cat mewed again, with a pitiful note of supplication. Eugenia remembered the hard narrow mean face of the woman who had admitted them. She remembered, too, the smell of fat from the kitchen and was reasonably certain there would be the remains of a joint of mutton somewhere. She could not abide people who were unkind to animals. They deserved to be stolen from.

‘Come, kitty, come,’ she said, picking up her skirts and running, with the cat at her heels, to the kitchen door. When she found that it was slightly ajar one part of her mind was elated, the other recorded that it was strange for the passage door to be bolted and this one open.

There was a lamp turned low on the table. In the gloom someone moved.

‘Mrs Muldooney?’ said Eugenia tentatively. ‘Your cat seems to be starving. Is there a little spare food?’

The shadowy form took a quick step nearer.

‘If it is your cat—’ Eugenia went on, and the next moment a hand was clapped over her mouth, an arm like iron held her still. Her nostrils were filled with an intolerable stink of dirty clothes, unwashed flesh, foul breath. In the dim light she saw the bearded face, the glint of wild eyes.

‘Hush up!’ a voice growled. ‘If you yell when I take my hand away I’ll shoot you. Now, where’s the food?’

It seemed as if the cat, probably familiar with kicks, had had the good sense not to come into this treacherous room. Eugenia could hear its howls retreating down the garden. From farther off laughter came from the distant bar. Gilbert was in there, no doubt washing the day’s dust out of his throat, and talking about his vineyard. His wife was alone with an escaped convict.

For whom else could this desperado be?

The nauseating hand was moved tentatively. When no scream came the man loosed his grip, nodded approvingly.

‘Food,’ he demanded again in his rasping voice.

‘Then turn up the lamp so that I can see what I’m doing,’ Eugenia said. Was that her voice, so cool and composed?

The dirty hand came out to obey. As the light bloomed she looked round swiftly. The ragged figure stood menacingly between her and the door. He held a pistol. Another door into what looked like a pantry was on the opposite side of the room. She pointed instinctively.

‘In there. The joint left from supper.’

Her wrist was seized and she was dragged to the door. Dear heaven, supposing it was not the pantry! It was so dark, neither of them could see what was within. But the smell of cooked meat was plain enough.

The grip on her wrist tightened. The bony fingers cut into her flesh. Skeleton fingers. The man was more starved than that pitiful cat.

‘Where’s the food?’

‘On the shelf. Can’t you smell it?’

Again she had acted from instinct, not realizing that his hunger would drive him into carelessness. For with a groaning intake of breath, he let her go and groped with both hands for the tantalizingly invisible joint of meat.

In a flash she was able to shut the door, and press against it with all her might, at the same time screaming in a voice that could never have been her own.

‘Help! Gilbert, Gilbert! Help!’

The door rattled violently behind her. She heard the cursing voice, ‘You slut! You bitch! I’ll kill you!’

She screamed again, piercingly loud, and then the whole world exploded behind her.

He had fired his pistol, she realized. She could not have been hit, for she was still on her feet pressing against the rickety door, as it inexorably opened behind her. It burst open at the precise moment that another door burst open and the room was suddenly full of people. And the stench of gunpowder, and that unforgettable sour jail smell.

Someone was carrying a lantern. All at once the light was too brilliant, too cruel.

For the fugitive she had trapped, held now between two burly men, was like that starved cat in the backyard. A little scarecrow of a man with a tangled black beard and blazing defeated eyes. He didn’t look at her. He looked beyond everyone into some unreachable distance. He had the expression of the men she had seen in the chain gang in Sydney, wild, forlorn, unbearably hopeless.

She felt suddenly terribly sick. She hardly realized that Gilbert had his arm round her and that his face was alight with pride and admiration.

‘So the little bride caught him!’ Mrs Muldooney was exclaiming. ‘Trapped him in my pantry. Got some nerve, ain’t she? Never would have thought it!’

‘Dearest, you aren’t hurt, are you?’ Gilbert was looking with concern at her white face.

She shook her head dazedly.

‘We heard the pistol shot. Look at that!’ Gilbert whistled in horror. ‘The bullet went through the door not six inches above your head.’ He gripped her to him so tightly that she felt swimmingly faint. Yet her eyes stayed stubbornly open as she watched the prisoner’s bony wrists being tied with cord. Tightly, cruelly. Didn’t they realize they were cutting him to the bone?

‘What’s that, love?’ Gilbert bent his head to hers as the scarecrow in the ragged clothes was hustled outside.

‘I was asking if they would give him some food. He’s starving.’

‘He’ll soon find there are worse things than being hungry,’ Gilbert said grimly.

‘Are there?’

‘Of course there are. I’d prefer not to mention them to your pretty ears.’

‘Have you ever been hungry like he is? He was so hungry he forgot to be careful. That’s how—I caught him.’

‘And were the bravest woman in the world,’ Gilbert declared, proudly, entirely failing to understand what she was trying to say.

‘She deserves a pint,’ someone shouted. ‘Give her a pint. She’s a regular heroine.’

But Eugenia begged to go upstairs. She was not a heroine. What she had done had been perfectly simple. She had suffered no damage but a bruised wrist.

‘You can’t make light of it in that way,’ Gilbert said. She saw that his eyes were very bright and that now his first shock was over he looked as if he were enjoying the excitement. ‘Mrs Jarvis will take you upstairs. I’ll be up when I have assured myself that our prisoner is safely secured. We’ll have to mount a guard over him until the troopers arrive.’

Upstairs, in the small bedroom from which she had seemed to be away for an age, Eugenia asked, ‘Where will they put him, Mrs Jarvis?’

‘They’ll have to tie him to a tree. I’ve seen that done more than once.’

‘A tree! Like a dog!’

‘None of those rotten old sheds would hold him. That pantry door wouldn’t have held him a minute longer, would it?’

Eugenia shivered violently.

‘He put his hand over my mouth. I must wash. I can still smell his smell.’

‘You were very brave, ma’am.’ Mrs Jarvis’s eyes were warm with admiration. ‘Can I get something to soothe you? You’re all of a tremble. Some milk with a dash of brandy?’

‘I wish I’d let him go,’ Eugenia whispered.

‘What did you say, ma’am?’

‘I wouldn’t have been so frightened if I had known how small and thin he was.’

‘But he had a gun. He was dangerous. Don’t you be wasting your sympathy on him.’

It was quite some time before Gilbert came upstairs. Eugenia had obediently drunk the milk lavishly laced with brandy that Mrs Jarvis had brought. Since she had scarcely eaten all day the mixture had immediately gone to her head. In a daze, she had allowed Mrs Jarvis to undress her, put on her nightgown, and settle her in bed. Her head spinning, her eyes smarting and burning, she had lain listening to this terrible night’s unfamiliar sounds. A dog barking incessantly, men’s voices, Mrs Muldooney shouting something in her harsh tones, a horse galloping off. She thought she heard someone crying, too. But the brandy that had made her head spin must have distorted her hearing. That deep uneven breathing, like caught sobs, was the intermittent rustle of wind in the metallic leaves of the gum tree near the window.

The tree to which the prisoner was tied, the cord cutting into his thin wrists?

When Gilbert came in quietly, he leaned over the bed to see if she slept. At first she pretended to, not wanting to look at him in case that wild excitement was still in his eyes. She had once seen one of her father’s gamekeepers look like that when he had caught a weasel in a trap and had found that the animal was still alive.

Men had this overpowering pleasure in hunting down a dangerous quarry. It was perfectly natural and right. Murderous felons, as well as weasels, must be destroyed.

‘Eugenia! Are you asleep?’

Her lashes trembled. ‘Mrs Jarvis made me drink—quite half a pint—of brandy.’

‘Splendid.’ He was laughing softly. ‘Exactly what you needed. I can’t tell you how proud I was of you tonight.’ He was taking off his clothes, dropping them in a great hurry on the floor. ‘I didn’t intend you to have such an initiation to this country, but you have passed your first test magnificently. I am almost glad it happened so that I could see your mettle. Which I knew you would have, of course.’

The blankets were tossed back, and he had lain heavily beside her, his hands dragging at her nightgown, his face almost smothering her.

‘Gilbert, you said—’

‘What did I say? Something I’ve since regretted.’ His breath smelled heavily of wine, one of his arms was round her neck like an iron bar. Her head swimming with brandy and shock and exhaustion, she recognized a horrifyingly familiar sensation, the grip of the convict’s bony arm making her prisoner, the feeling of suffocation when his hard hand had held her mouth.

Crazy! This was her husband kissing her, murmuring endearments.

‘I meant to leave you to rest tonight. But I can’t resist you. That’s the simple truth. You’re so lovely. You don’t want me to resist you, do you, my darling?’

She started up tensely.

‘What’s that noise?’

‘Only a dingo howling.’

‘Dingo?’

‘A wild dog. They roam around.’ His voice was impatient. He had no ears for anything outside the confines of this room. He playfully loosened her hair and pulled it over her ears to deaden sound. Then, smiling, his lips came down on hers, his hands pulled at her nightgown again. She could no longer even protest. She was not permitted the breath. And the melancholy howl, half human (could it really be what she fantastically imagined it was, the miserable wretch tied to the tree howling for mercy?), came again, and later again, echoing her own sudden startled cry of pain.

The room went black. She was only half-conscious, struggling with the fantasy that it was the thin savage face of the convict above her, and his body performing this unbelievable intimacy.

She fought the darkness, opening her eyes wide to stare at the flickering candlelight, telling herself that it was her own loved husband whose body, slippery with sweat, was sliding off hers. There was his familiar red hair, his loving eyes, his voice murmuring inaudible endearments.

When she said nothing he settled down beside her, one hand entangled in her hair. Almost at once he was asleep, and she, too exhausted to move, too feeble even to loosen his hold on her hair, thought that she was as much a prisoner as the man tied to the tree.

In the end her exhaustion was a blessing, for it made her sleep. She awoke to a tremendous cacophony of noise as kookaburras in a gum tree outside her window saluted the morning. She was alone. Gilbert’s rising had not disturbed her, but the harsh uncanny laughter from the squat kingfisher-like birds was something she was sure she would never grow used to. It had a primeval sound, just as the animals here were primeval. In what civilized country would one find a creature as awkwardly shaped as the kangaroo, for instance? Or the giant lizards that looked a million years old. She must remember to tell Sarah about the lizard she had encountered on the stairs at Bess Kelly’s, both of them so frightened that neither could move.

But nothing of last night must be recorded.

It was better to pretend that it had never been, shutting out the shocking painful memory. The dog had stopped barking, the convict was no longer howling for mercy, the dark secret pain between her legs had gone. There were dishes rattling in the kitchen, and loud cheerful voices. A smell of frying bacon drifted upstairs. The sunlight lying across the floor was already hot.

She must get up and groom herself as well as possible. Daylight made the rust-coloured water in the jug look even more distasteful. But the sooner she was dressed, the sooner they could leave this horrible place.

She noticed, as she got out of bed, that the gown she had worn yesterday had been neatly laid over a chair. All trace of the dust that had smeared it had gone. Her under things were also laid out.

Jane was proving more capable than one would have expected her to be, after her prostrate state last evening. She must have been surprisingly quiet, too, since her movements in the room had not disturbed Eugenia.

There was a tap at the door.

‘Is that you, Jane? Come in.’

‘It’s Mrs Jarvis, ma’am.’ The door opened. Mrs Jarvis, dressed in the grey cotton dress in which she had travelled yesterday, but which also had been cleansed of travel stains, stood there.

‘Jane is poorly still, ma’am. So I’ve come to see if there’s anything I can do.’

Eugenia’s first impulse was to send her away, those warm brown eyes saw too much. But this was nonsense. The woman seemed to be a good servant, that was the important thing. Much better that composed face than Jane’s sickly hysterical one bending over her. Besides, she found she rather badly wanted the company of a woman, otherwise that terrible combination of homesickness and fear that lay just beneath her consciousness would rise and burst over her in a flood.