Wild Island (46 page)

When we were settled, Bergman repeated that we did not want to cause trouble, but would like to hear anything they could tell us. George Fairfax had died the night of the Bridge Meeting?

Dinah said slowly, ‘Aye, a terrible hot day it was—like today.'

Led carefully by Bergman, she admitted eight or ten gov'ment gen'lemen were in New Norfolk that night for the meeting—not lodged at The Eagle, but at the Bush Inn above the river. And so when the Fairfaxes came off the coach at midday—the two Mr Fairfaxes and Mrs Fairfax and the daughter—there warn't no beds left at the Bush, so they was sent across to The Eagle.

‘The two Mr Fairfaxes?' asked Bergman, after the slightest hesitation.

Yes, the two gen'lemen (patiently, as though Bergman were a little backward).

‘Did they say where they had come from?'

Yes, but then, no. The older gentleman, Mr George Fairfax, he wrote in the book Harris's Landing, but that was wrong. Harris's was on the other side of the river where the bridge was to be built—and he didn't live there any more than she did. He'd come on the coach hadn't he? No one lived there. Mr Magistrate Harcourt grazed his horses on it.

‘The younger man was Mr Rowland Fairfax?' I asked.

She looked doubtful. She could not rightly say, now. It being such a hot day, Mrs Fairfax and her daughter had stayed in the back parlour reading while the two men went out walking and came back, and later they went out again to the meeting at the Bush Inn. The daughter was about thirteen. She and Sal spoke a few words when Sal took in some barley water. She, Dinah, was not taking much notice because Mr Henry Arthur came in about that time, to visit his brother Mr Charles Arthur, and that put her on edge. You had to keep an eye on Mr Henry.

Mr Charles Arthur was generally magistrate up north at Muddy Plains, but he was at New Norfolk because he'd changed places with Mr Thomas Mason, the one they called ‘Mister Muster Master Mason'. Mr Mason had been in trouble a few months previous, for insulting another gentleman. There was talk he must lose his place, but Governor Arthur let him change for six months with Mr Charles Arthur instead.

Mr Henry said he would join his brother, who had already left for the meeting, but he stayed and stayed and in the end did not go—all on account of Mr George Stephens, the brother of Mr Alfred Stephens, Lawyer Stephens, who was there too. Mr Henry and Mr George called for brandy and water and persuaded Mr Montesquieu and Mr Ross to play at cards. Which she didn't like on account of when Mr Henry Arthur was gaming and drinking there was no saying what he might do. He had once rid a horse up the stairs into the Launceston Hotel and got the poor beast stuck so it had to be shot. And another time he tried to climb the spiked front railings of a respectable house and got himself stuck hanging by the breeches, shouting and threatening any who tried to help. And Mr Ross just as wild sometimes—and her husband Seth was away, gone to the meeting too.

Dinah noticed Sal staring at her and fell silent.

At any rate—Dinah spoke quickly now as though to get finished—after the meeting the two Mr Fairfaxes were walking back and the older one had a fit as they came in and died.

‘A fit?'

‘Yes, an apperlectic fit, the doctor said.'

‘Was it your local doctor?' I asked. ‘A good man?'

‘Our Doctor Maynard was good,' she nodded at me. ‘But it weren't him. They fetched Dr Brand from the meeting, a gov'ment gen'leman.'

After a pause she added: it being that hot, the poor man was buried quick and she was sorry for our loss but there it was. Sal brushed something from her skirt and began to breathe again. The two women exchanged a look. Bergman and I too exchanged a look of suddenly renewed complicity and interest. The Arthurites had brought in an Arthurite doctor, not the local man.

There were voices outside, sounds of horses and men, and the women rose and began to set out bowls on the table with platters and spoons. Sal peered through the one tiny window, in which a dry hill was framed. The little girl stared at me but looked away shyly when I smiled at her.

The hut erupted suddenly with the entrance of three men; large active limbs, the smell of hot working bodies, horses, leather and smoke. They took off their hats, acknowledged us with brief nods. Two sat at the table, where one produced a knife and begun cutting wedges from a large round damper Sal had put down beside the grey-brown slab of cold meat. The second man hacked slices from this. The third, evidently Dinah's husband, came and shook hands with Bergman, nodded at me, and indicated that Bergman should sit at the table. The little girl clung beside her father until he hoisted her onto his lap with a ‘whhoa-hup, lass' and fed her morsels from the point of a knife.

Dinah handed me the two-year-old. He sat on my knee, staring into my face, fingers in his mouth, nose running a greenish slime, shocked into silence by this betrayal. His mother wiped his nose with a rough pinch of a rag, swung the iron arm to bring the pot off the fire and dealt stew into the bowls Sal handed to and fro. The heat in the room grew even more stifling. The men ate, grunting a few phrases, cutting more meat and a second damper. Another man, lizardy and old, came slowly in. Bent and gnomish, he might have been a hundred. He sat, was served, sucked his stew noisily. Every time I looked towards the table he caught my eye, winked, and grinned gummily. I looked away. When the meal was ended, he limped slowly past me, chucked the toddler under the chin, and quick as a snake reached out a hand to pinch my upper arm between finger and thumb. I winced at the fierce nip.

‘No fa'aat on she,' he cackled.

Dinah whisked at him with a cloth.

‘Git out, yer'ould divvil,' she called after him.

The men left, taking Bergman with them. Dinah took the toddler and fed him damper crusts dipped in stew. Sal brought another baby from one of the curtained alcoves, unbuttoned her bodice and attached the infant to a nipple. Its little fists opened and closed. The small girl stood on tiptoe at the edge of the table, her eyes just above the level of it, humming softly and making hills out of the crumbs on its surface.

‘What is your name?' I asked her gently.

‘Jane,' she whispered.

They invited me to help myself to the stew, which was greasy but good. There was tea to follow, black and sugary. Sal put the baby back to sleep and went outside, calling little Jane to follow her.

Taking my chance, repeating that I did not mean to cause trouble, I drew the books from my bag and asked Dinah if she could tell me about them. She flushed and said she had not stolen them, she had found them at the inn, left behind. She went to the door and looked out, shut it and came back.

‘I knew this'd come,' she said. ‘I said to Seth, this is a bad day's work. It's bin on my mind these two years. Why do you want to know?'

‘We are looking for a man called Mr Rowland Rochester. We thought he and George Fairfax might be the same man. Do you know the name Rochester?'

She shook her head and said, ‘Seth heard Mick Walker is dead? Constable Walker. Killed? That's a right wicked thing, if it is so. He and Seth come out on the transport together, the
Medina
—a good man.'

‘I'm very sorry. It is true.'

She looked at me steadily, her eyes welling with tears, and spoke with great bitterness. ‘Poor Mick Walker. 'e never did harm to nobody. Dead all on account of Mr Henry Arthur, may he rot. It might of bin Seth.'

She seemed to come to a decision and began speaking so fast it was not easy to follow.

The real reason why Henry Arthur had come to New Norfolk was not to see his brother, nor for the meeting, but on account of a girl, a convict-assigned servant working at the inn. Nan. Poor silly girl. She believed he would marry her. Mr Henry made Nan sit beside him to bring luck in his playing, but it done him not a speck of good. He lost, and being drunk grew quarrelsome and said he did not like the way George Stephen looked at Nan. ‘What are you looking at?' he said, and fired a pistol through the window—that was nothing new—but Nan got up and ran out the back. George Stephen told Henry he was
a fool and should consider what his uncle the Governor would do if he heard of Henry's goings-on.

Mr Henry quietened a bit but soon began again, saying George Stephen and Hugh Ross were cheating. She did not see who began the fight but they knocked over the table and bottles and glasses and cards. The gun was on the table and fell to the floor. Someone picked it up and fired twice just as Nan came back in, followed by Mr Charles Arthur and Mick Walker, returned from the meeting. Nan was suddenly on the floor lying there all bloody and Mr Henry on his knees beside her white as starch, blubbing like a schoolboy, pulling at her and moaning, ‘Come on, Nan, get up,' and Mr Ross trembling so he couldn't hardly stand.

Then Mr George Stephen picked Nan up in his arms and carried her into the back parlour just as Mrs Fairfax came downstairs to see what the noise was. At the same time the two Fairfax men came in from the meeting, and that was when the older Mr Fairfax, seeing the body and blood, took his fit. Mr Charles sent George Stephen to fetch the doctor and Mr Alfred Stephen from the Bush Inn. They told her, Dinah, and Mrs Fairfax too, that Nan had only fainted. But Dinah saw the way Nan's head hung backward, her eyes and mouth open, and the blood. The poor girl was past help. Mrs Fairfax said nothing but rushed away upstairs to her daughter.

When Seth came back, he and Mick Walker carried the dead man up to his room. Alfred Stephen was in a terrible state, red-faced and sweating and mopping hisself with a great handkercher. Then younger Mr Fairfax said he and his family must leave at once. It seemed strange that they would go without waiting for a funeral. There was something strange about it all. He wanted to take his wife and the child away then and there, although it was just past midnight! Mick Walker persuaded them to wait a while, and later he took them down in a skiff to the Black Snake to catch the morning coach. Fairfax also gave Mick money for the burial of the older man, and for a headstone.

When the Fairfaxes were gone she had found the books left behind. She had thought they might do to teach Jane her letters, but she did
not know how to begin and when Harry Bentley the pedlar came, she had given them to him in exchange for—she indicated the shelf by the fire. A chipped china plate with a border of painted flowers, propped standing up with a stone. The only object of beauty in the place. I suddenly wished I'd brought some more interesting gift than the jam and walnuts in the package.

And straight after, Dinah was continuing, Mick Walker was taken for housebreaking, which she did not believe—and Mr Henry came and told Seth to say nothing of what had happened or it might be blamed on Seth, and he didn't want another sentence, did he? If they kept quiet, something might be done for them. Later they were offered this place. Seth had been wanting to breed horses and this run was on a good creek, but lonely, not like the inn.

Strangely lonely, I thought, to a woman used to the coming and going of an inn. And at night, the small clearing would be full of wild shadows, and the tall whispering crowding gum trees and the thick dark undergrowth alive with the scrabbling of unknown creatures. And if they took Seth away . . .

I promised Dinah I would do everything in my power to make sure no harm came to her from the story she had told me. I had brought nothing with me except what I took everywhere: the small sketchbook, now about a quarter used, a tiny watercolour box and a couple of brushes and pencils. I gave them to Dinah.

‘For Jane,' I said.

The last barred gate was shut behind us by mid-afternoon, and as we rattled away down the track the humid afternoon was building to a storm, the air no fresher than in the hut. I was weighing up what to say, but need not have troubled. Seth had told Bergman the same story, with an added detail: Mick Walker had arranged for Nan to be buried in the same grave with Fairfax. The sexton was an old man, a heavy drinker. When he drowned in the river a month later, nobody was surprised.

‘Two Fairfaxes!' I exclaimed. ‘Where did they go afterwards? Wouldn't the Carmichaels have had to account for losing a servant?'

‘They probably reported her “absent from her place of work”.' Bergman, too, was clearly exhilarated by what we had heard. ‘Female convicts disappear from the records more easily than men. If they're assigned outside the main townships they may not come under the eye of the authorities for years.'

‘You can't blame the Carmichaels for keeping quiet,' I said, ‘but why would the Fairfaxes agree to say nothing? Why did they want to leave so quickly? Do you suppose the younger man
was
Rowland Rochester?'

‘We don't even know who George Fairfax is—or was. The younger man could simply be his son. But Rowland Rochester is almost beside the point now. This is the kind of thing people have been trying to prove against the Arthurites for years. No wonder Alfred Stephen and the rest were determined to prevent Arthur finding out. He'd have had no compunction about letting the law deal with all of them, even his chief officers. At any rate, St John Wallace now has the evidence he wants.'