The Secret Fate of Mary Watson (26 page)

2ND OCTOBER 1880

Percy’s been ignoring me for three weeks. Coolly, politely. Firmly.

I’ve no appetite. My dresses are loose. My wedding ring slipped off at some stage of the morning last Wednesday. I found it again in the bread box at dinnertime.

I’ve caught Porter watching me, frowning. Sometimes his gaze falls on my reddened fingers with their chewed nails. Sometimes he stares at the slight hitch I can feel at the corner of my mouth.

‘I’ve brought you something,’ he says now.

I’m kneading bread dough at the table: earthy spores of yeast up my nose, the peach light falling in segments through the shutters and onto the dirt floor. He pulls a hand from behind his back. It’s a cream-smooth nautilus shell with tiger-striped markings.

He’s apologetic. ‘Not as big as some of them can get. Up in the Strait, they can grow to a foot.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

The shell is cool and slick. I peer into the open cavity and up an endlessly twisting staircase.

‘The animal grows outwards from the shell, sealing each chamber behind it. The last fully open chamber is the living one.’

‘So it just closes all the old doors behind it?’

His glance grazes my face. ‘Yes. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could do that?’

I’m caught by surprise, distracted by his hands gathering up both of my own; the mausoleum-cool shell in the centre of our four warm palms. His eyes have a patient question at their centre.

‘What is it that you want, Mary?’

‘Right now?’

He nods.

Want, as opposed to need? I fix on a specific, tangible target. Something that’s not so big as to yawn like a cavern when I approach it.

‘I want Carrie off the island, away from here.’

‘Is that all?’ He lets my hands drop.

I don’t know what else to say that won’t betray me. He looks at me for a long moment then nods once, slowly.

‘I’ll go over with Bob when he next takes the slugs to Cooktown and see what I can do about getting passage home for your sister.’

And then he’s gone and I’m alone with the creaking house, the shell and the dough.

A week later and I’m staring at the shell again. So long, this time, that its stripes shimmer in the afternoon sun, orange into cream, until the surface looks like the mandarin dainties Grandfather Oxnam used to bring back in brown-paper packets on his weekly
trips in the buggy to Truro. The taste of a miniature boiled-sweet sun is on my tongue. Saliva squirts into my mouth.

When Carrie comes in, I ask her if she remembers them, or was she too young?

‘I remember.’ Without being asked she ties the spare apron around her waist, fetches the bucket and the potatoes and brings them over to the table. She sits on the stool and starts peeling with the knife. ‘We used to eat them under the monkey-puzzle tree,’ she says. ‘I’d lie on my back looking up at the bits of sky. It was like lying at the bottom of a wolf trap, with all the crossed branches above.’

‘Funny, I always pretended the branches were the thatched roof of my own secret house, where only the people I invited could stay,’ I tell her.

‘Except you never invited anyone. You preferred to be alone.’

Today’s bread dough is shiny and smooth now. I set it aside in its dish, drape a cloth over it. Then fetch the beans Ah Leung dumped at the door this morning, and begin topping-and-tailing them.

‘Do you remember the fig tree in St Newlyn’s churchyard? The one with a curse on it?’ Carrie asks, looking up.

The corners of my mouth feel heavy, nevertheless I can’t stop a smile when I think of the old schoolyard chant. ‘Who plucks a leaf will need a hearse,’ I recall.

‘It’s not a laughing matter,’ she says, with a seriousness that doesn’t suit her face. ‘Didn’t you hear the story of the church warden who took his shears to it when the branches blocked the gutters? He fell off his horse shortly afterwards and died.’

‘Lots of men in the country have falls from their horses, Carrie.’

The ocean’s particularly calm today. We hear a swishing sound, accompanied by low, anti-tonal singing. Ah Leung with his scythe is clearing the long grass around the clothesline.

‘Well, then,’ she continues, ‘remember the Archdeacon of Cornwall? He made a visit to the church in sixty-four. He tore off a few leaves to prove that the power of Christ was stronger than the power of the Devil. And guess what?’

‘He had a heart attack and went to his maker. I know the stories, Carrie. He was ten years older than God himself. It was about time he kicked off from something.’

‘Well,’ she’s digging around in the salt pig with the wooden spoon, mounting her arguments, ‘what about the blacks?’

‘I didn’t know they’d been to Cornwall.’

She gives me a flat look. ‘That bone that they point at their enemies. It’s a human bone. And it doesn’t matter if you know you’ve had it pointed at you or not. It doesn’t matter if you believe it’s nonsense. You waste away and die. Just like that.’

‘We all waste away and die,’ I say, ‘eventually. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have happened anyway?’

She shakes her head. ‘You’re so stubborn! Even to the point of being wrong.’

I feel a small shiver in my chest. ‘That’s possibly the most accurate thing you’ve ever said about me.’

I take Porter’s nautilus shell over to the sill by the shutters so that when the light shines through, it will fall on its smooth surface.

‘Mary, you didn’t ever … you know … the fig tree?’

‘Pick a leaf? Of course I did. Who could resist a challenge like that?’

‘How could you be so reckless!’

‘I’m not dead, am I?’

Ah Leung’s still carving up the grassy air outside. The evening birds chatter at the feeder.

‘Do you remember much about Grandfather, Carrie? Apart from the sweets?’

I’m thinking of Porter. Somehow I’ve conjoined the two men in my head. It seems somehow right, even perceptive of me, this balmy afternoon.

‘He had neckerchiefs in different colours. And a walking stick with an eagle’s head.’

‘Clever girl. That’s right.’

She’s encouraged by my praise. ‘He used to write letters with special paper. I remember the box. It had solid triangle shapes on it and palm trees. I asked Mama what the triangles were and she said they were pyramids.’

I nod. ‘Charta Egypta. From the land of the Pharaohs. I memorised all of the writing on the box before I knew what the words meant.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you know how, before you learn to read, when it’s the shapes of words and letters you fall in love with?’

‘Not really.’

I’ve lost her. But, we continue our work in a companionable silence.

Later, after the vegetables are done and the light has turned bruised-orange, she says, ‘I was jealous of you and Grandfather. You always went on walks with him. You used to come back knowing all the names of the trees and plants. He never took me. You were his favourite.’

I don’t deny it. ‘I wish he’d been my father.’

I look down to the backs of my hands. They’re blotchy with work. I’ve lost so much weight lately, the veins look like purple worms under a thin, writing-paper surface.

‘I’ve asked Porter to get you passage on a steamer out of Cooktown,’ I say.

She pales a little. ‘I thought you didn’t want me to go back to Papa.’

‘I don’t. By the time you go, I’ll have some money you can take.’

Percy hasn’t yet been to Cooktown, but there are at least three dozen bags of slugs ready for transportation to the mainland. He will come back with the money that’s owed me.

‘But where will I go?’ she asks.

‘If Mama hasn’t managed to save enough for the boarding school, there’s a landlady I know, Mrs Menzies, who runs a house in Brisbane. She’s an old harridan, but, if you pay your board, she can help you to find a job. You might have to lie about your age. Promise me you’ll do it. You’re not too young for domestic or governessing work. And you’ll get all meals free, a bed and a small allowance.’ Mr Wilson’s fleshy face swims into my vision for a few seconds. ‘Just stay away from drunks and lechers, no matter how attractive their propositions sound.’

I steel myself for her defence of Papa. Her accusations of paranoia. But they don’t come. ‘But what about Mama?’

I look across to the nautilus shell. It glows faintly in the last light. ‘What about her? She’s like me. She’s made her bed, and now must lie in it.’

Her eyes are full of a new idea. ‘But
why
must you lie in it? Come with me! We can have a place together. We can change our names so that Bob can’t find you.’

‘I can’t leave the island just now, Carrie. Not yet. But when I can, I’ll come for you. I swear it.’

3RD NOVEMBER 1880

A bleak day. Wet and dirty. Percy and Bob came back from Cooktown a week ago. Percy had a wad of pound notes from Roberts, for me, hidden in a rolled-up copy of the
Brisbane Courier
. Less welcome was his news that there’s still no word on the new drop date.

Carrie walks up behind me as I stand outside the door to the house, rubbing my palms up and down my skirt and swaying slightly in the nor-easterly bluster.

‘I can’t believe the men are going out in this.’ Her skirt moulds her legs at the back and she holds her hat on with one hand. Her lips have small hairline cracks from the wind. ‘Someone will fall overboard for sure.’

A quick, let-it-be-Bob look passes between us.

‘Only the good die young,’ I say dryly.

She looks down at my hands, clucking her tongue. ‘You should have asked him to get you some cream for that rash when he was in Cooktown.’

‘I’ve tried it before,’ I say, remembering John Adam’s rancid-smelling ointment. ‘It doesn’t work. And I …’

The rest of the sentence is left hanging but understood:
wouldn’t ask him to get me anything.
We exchange another glance.

Carrie’s bed is separated from ours by only a thin wall. She is well aware of how things stand.

Bob returned from Cooktown with a disappointing profit for his slugs, a lingering scent of the brothel on his skin and a violent glint in his eye. He’s taken me roughly every night since. Slapped me twice: once on the cheek, a short, sharp sting; once across the ear, leaving a background noise in my head. Not ringing exactly; more like a hissing crackle — the sea’s feet, in riding boots, treading on discarded bark. I hardly notice the bruise on my cheekbone, until the wind strikes its nerves in a certain way that makes the teeth behind it ache.

I find myself thinking a lot about Laura from French Charley’s these days. How far did Bob go with her? How much violence had she put up with? A few bruises? A broken bone or two?

The only thing that comforts me is the fat pile of notes now hidden in my locked box under the bed. The money that will enable Carrie to leave.

I hear Bob’s medicinal balls approaching. He’s been in the house, looking for the bottle of ammonia used on the luggers for the long-spined sea-urchin stings. I see it dangling from his hand as I turn to speak to him, having to raise my voice a little to ride over the whistle of the wind.

‘Are you coming back tonight?’

His eyes are steely with a mix of indifference and something else I can’t quite pin down. The scarred side of his face is a pitted silver landscape in the light.

‘Ye’ll miss me, will ye?’

His fingers move towards my face, carefully, snake-charming. The rough tips barely touch my skin, pass lightly over the bruise, darker, I’m sure, against the cream of my complexion. He knows I won’t flinch. Not with Carrie next to me.

‘Ye look like something the moggy dragged in,’ he says.

I can’t fathom what he’s thinking these days, and it makes me anxious. Does he know what happened between Percy and me? How could he? More likely, he’s finally noticed that our marriage is a sham. But if so, what was the tipping point? What made him sure? How did my charade go wrong?

He looks to the ocean, as though tired of my features. ‘We may stay out.’ Then: ‘We could have made it work, ye know.’

‘What did you say?’

I stare at his face, but his attention is fixed on the sea. The click of the medicinal balls in his pocket slows. Wind tousles his sparse, greasy hair. He turns, something watery and naked in his eyes, before he hastily dresses them in the low-grade contempt I’ve become used to.

‘I said we’ll work the slugs overnight if we get on to a good patch.’

He strides off towards the luggers. A wave of the nausea I’ve battled on and off for days rises to my throat. I lower myself casually to the ground, as though I’ve just thought to sit and watch the preparations for a while. I draw my knees up to my chest.

Carrie sits next to me, the bottom of her skirt wrapped around her boots. ‘Are you ill?’ she asks. ‘You’re very pale.’

I close my eyes briefly and swallow. ‘I’m all right. Something I ate disagreed with me, I expect.’

We watch in silence as the wind churns clouds to grey butter and the crews make ready to weigh anchor. One of the Kanakas pushes through an agitated swirl of ocean, a thick stack of hessian bags balanced on his head. The sky’s bearing down with its sackful of wriggling rain.

Percy’s walking across the beach, a coil of rope over one arm. The wind has pasted his shirt to his back. He bends at the water’s edge, rolls up his trousers, starts a little at the first cool infusion of sea. The material darkens as he wades through the weedy chop towards
Petrel
. Gulls dip overhead. Somehow, in their small brains, they’ve made the connection between the men and the slugs. They’re obviously smarter than I am at calculating cause and effect.

‘Stop it, Mary!’

I shake my head, come back from the bleak place behind my eyes, and turn towards Carrie. ‘Stop what?’

She’s looking at my hands. There’s red under my fingernails. My absent-minded scratching has made my palms bleed again.

Bob’s prediction was wrong. The men aren’t out all night, after all.
Isabella
came back at one in the afternoon. Now, at three, with Bob’s slugs boiled and pinned onto the sand to dry,
Petrel
anchors in the shallow water. It’s still swelteringly hot. The horizon’s bright scarf shimmers around the sunburned neck of the world, and the sun’s glaring like a feverish eye. The wind’s died, leaving only high, striated clouds and a fug of humidity. As usual, the seabirds have gathered. The sky above
Petrel
is a piece of tin with the small, metal hooks of their cries scraping down it.

Ah Sam takes off his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow, then puts it back on. His bare feet are filthy, the nails black, the corns covered in sand mixed with grey ash.

He’s just set fire to a new load of wood under the boiling tank. He and Ah Leung have filled it with water. The flames leap like dragon’s breath. I stand to the right, upwind of its torture, until it subsides to a useable heat.

I’d managed to stir Bob’s slugs earlier without too much trouble. But Percy’s are another matter. It’s all I can do to approach the tank. The tipped-in creatures fume, hiss and stink: squirming in their greasy stew. The nausea is back in force. My eyes sting, as though each eyeball has been pulled out, polished with a rag made of fish scales, then sat back into its socket. No amount of blinking takes the irritation away.

In the middle of my misery, Percy wanders up the beach, almost a mirage in the rippling heat. His trousers rolled up and his slouch hat on sideways.

‘All right, Mrs Watson?’

I don’t answer his question. Just keep stirring. Try not to vomit.

His chin is unshaven. He pokes his pipe through an opening in the undergrowth and pulls a box of matches from his pocket. Seeing that they’re damp, he grabs a piece of driftwood from the sand and holds it to the fire until it catches alight before bringing it to the tobacco in the bowl. The flare makes his eyes sparkle for an instant. The skin beneath them looks raw from the salt air.

‘I notice there were only four bags from
Petrel
,’ I say. ‘Bad trip?’

‘Weather was against us. How many bags did your husband get?’

‘Eight.’

‘He’ll have cause to think he’s a better man than me, then. For today, at least.’

He hooks my eye, and I should feel elated after so much evasion on his part. But it’s too little, too late.

He blows smoke through his nose in a long, slow stream. ‘You look like death on toast.’

I think about Bob’s earlier comment. ‘Is that better than something the moggy dragged in? I think I’m pregnant.’

His jaw tightens like a hawser on its scaffold of bone, then lets go. ‘If you are, then you’d better get rid of it quick smart, or your work for Roberts is over. Just as well Ah Leung’s foot is mending nicely.’ He tilts his head on the side. ‘Funny, I thought you were smarter than that. My mistake for trusting a woman, I suppose.’ He turns to leave.

Not this time. I grab a handful of his shirt and jerk him around so that he faces me. In my peripheral vision I can see Bob further along the beach with the Kanakas, rearranging the net over his drying slugs. He’s watching us. I don’t care.

‘It might be yours.’

‘And how exactly did you draw that conclusion? Don’t you make enough hogmagandie with your husband to do the job? No wonder he’s such a surly bastard.’

His face is hectic and creased, the smarmy arrogance replaced with something not really under control. My hand falls away, but I don’t take my eyes from his.

‘I’ve been using something with Bob.’

‘But you didn’t with me? What a calculating bitch you are.’

There’s a taste in my mouth like an old attic smells: shredded paper, mouse droppings.

‘Get yer hands off her, Fuller.’

Percy lifts both arms in mock surrender. ‘I think you’ll find the good lady is exercising her claws on me, Watson. Seems she
thinks I’m not pulling my weight. Just because I only managed to bring in a paltry catch.’ He looks regretfully down to the beach where his now-empty hessian bags are lined up on the damp sand. ‘A fair little cost accountant, your better half. Still, you must be in the good books with your haul.’

Bob looks between us in narrow-eyed suspicion. He says something to Percy in a long distortion of words. Their bodies shimmer, flip like fish in a hot white net. Nothing is exactly where it should be. Even the sky is tilting sideways.

Carrie dips a flannel in the enamel dish of water she’s brought to the bedside and wipes my brow without first squeezing the cloth out. Trickles run down my cheeks and neck. The coolness tickles.

‘I’m fine,’ I say, and still her hand with mine. Try to get my bearings. ‘What time is it?’ The light through the open doorway is burned umber; the rest of the room, darkening. Then I smell the savoury layers of stew. ‘Dinnertime.’

I start to rise, but she stops me with a hand on my chest. ‘I’ve made it. The men are eating.’

I blink. There’s a twinge in my back. I must have fallen awkwardly. It’s a miracle I didn’t tumble headfirst into the boiling tank.

I can hear low voices from the other room.

‘What happened between Bob and Percy?’

‘They’re prowling around each other like old tomcats — as usual.’

‘Neither of them are that old,’ I say.

She shifts her weight on the bed. ‘Well, Bob’s not too ancient to get you pregnant. You are, you know. Fainting is one of the symptoms.’

‘When did you acquire a medical degree?’ My mouth is dry. I’d love a drink of water.

‘I’ve browsed your Dr Foote’s
Medical Common Sense
.’ When I look doubtful, she becomes defensive. ‘Well, I haven’t got anything else to read, have I?’

‘What would Dr Foote know? He’s a podiatrist.’

‘A what?’

‘A foot doctor. It’s a joke. Dr Foote — a podiatrist.’

‘Ha, ha.’ She won’t be distracted. ‘Dr Foote says you shouldn’t wear your stays now that you’re in the family way. It constricts the blood flow to the baby and that’s what makes a woman faint.’

‘Even if the baby’s smaller than a grain of rice?’

‘The blood supply to the womb increases three hundred per cent in the first three months,’ she quotes.

‘And doesn’t continue exponentially, I hope, or the mother-to-be would end up exploding.’

‘What’s exponentially?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Carrie, I can’t get up if you don’t get off the bed.’

‘You shouldn’t get up. Dr Foote says —’

‘Enough!’ I give her a gentle push and she stands.

She took off my boots and hose when she put me into bed, but didn’t clean off my soles, so the sheets are gritty with sand. I stand, put my feet into slippers.

‘Help me off with the sheet. I don’t want to lie on a beach all night.’

‘Yes, all right.’

Together, we pull the skin off the bed.

Her eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t want to leave you on the island
with all these men. It’s not right. Porter’s booked me a berth on the
Wotonga
out of Cooktown on the fourth of December. He’s paid for it himself and won’t hear of being reimbursed. But of course I’m not going now.’

‘Yes, you are. Nothing’s changed.’

‘But how will you have a baby on your own on the Lizard?’ She lowers her voice. ‘And to that horrible …’ She tilts her head in the direction of the voices.

‘If I don’t miscarry, then I daresay I’ll go to Cooktown for the confinement. Bob will hire a nurse and rent me a place to stay. If he won’t, then I’ll throw myself on the mercy of Charley Boule. Let everyone in town know what a rum show of a husband I’ve ended up with.’

‘You sound so cool and sensible about it.’

‘Would it help to be heated and hysterical?’

She puts her small hand over mine. ‘Shall I bring you some dinner?’

‘No, you shall not. I’m not an invalid.’

I walk out into the communal space. Four sets of male eyes look up.

‘Feeling better, Mary?’ Porter puts both hands on the table to stand, but I motion him with my free palm to stay sitting.

Ah Sam places a damper on the wooden board. I hand him the sheet. ‘Will you shake this out, Ah Sam?’

When he’s gone, I turn to the one man in the trio I now have any time for. ‘Sorry about the fuss, Porter. I’m just a bit under the weather.’

I wonder which one of them carried me to bed and decide it must have been him. Neither Bob nor Percy would care enough to do so.

‘Carrie’s told me you’ve organised her trip home,’ I go on. ‘Thank you.’

‘It took a while to confirm. But yes, I’ve had word from the mainland that there is a berth.’

Bob lifts his head, his brows damp in the steam from the stew, and pins Porter with his eyes. ‘When?’

‘Fourth of December. On
Wotonga
.’ Porter lifts his plate to the rim of the pot, spoons out a second helping of stew.

I see that Carrie’s cut the carrot pieces too big. They’ll be hard in the middle, whilst the potato, cut too small, has turned to mush. I glance at her. She’s seen me looking at her handiwork and is waiting for admonishment. I smile at her gratefully.