The homecoming, p.11
The Homecoming, page 11
He stood looking up at the stars in the frosty night, his breath blowing white in the cold air, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He had forgotten how clear and bright the sky could be, each star like a brilliant cut diamond, glinting in the broad sweep of the Milky Way.
He glanced back at the cottage and thought about Margaret’s words. Over the years since her rejection, he had harboured a memory of Margaret Campbell that he realised now was no more than hurt pride. Seeing her again stirred nothing more than the pleasure of seeing a familiar face in a strange place and there had been another familiar face that had stirred more in his heart than Margaret Campbell had.
He had seen the hurt in Charlie O’Reilly’s eyes when she had reminded him of that lost dance all those years ago. If nothing else he had to make amends to her for his caddish behaviour. He allowed himself a small smile. There was no hurry to return to Melbourne. He had all the time in the world.
Eighteen
After leaving Margaret, Danny returned his horse to Sones Livery Stables. Amos was at home but his stable lad, Johnny, assured him the other horse had returned uninjured a couple of hours earlier. Word had already reached town of an accident on the Thompson River track so he hadn’t felt the need to raise an alarm or bother Amos.
Thrusting his hands in his pockets and pulling up his collar against the cold night, Danny walked up the quiet main street to the Britannia, his immediate thoughts fixed on a warm meal and a blazing fire. The nagging suspicion that the shooting of Bertie Campbell had been deliberate tugged at his conscience, and he hurried on, half wondering if every darkened doorway harboured Micah Allen. Unconsciously his hand went to the butt of the unloaded Colt.
He stopped as he reached the police station. A light burned in the window but he didn’t have the energy to deal with the police. It could wait till the next morning. He turned towards the Britannia where lights burned brightly from the front bar.
As he walked through the bar he heard his name … but not his name. A name no one had called him for twenty years.
‘Danny bloody Greaves.’
He froze and turned slowly to see who had hailed him. A bearded miner seated at a table with three mates raised a half-empty glass of beer.
‘Don’t you recognise me, Greaves?’ The miner rose from the table.
Danny straightened his shoulders. He would have recognised Bert Marsh anywhere, and in that moment he could have been ten years old again. The man’s ginger hair may have begun to thin and the lines on his face were highlighted with the ingrained dirt of the mine, but the hard eyes that raked him were those of his childhood nemesis.
‘How are you, Bert?’ he said.
‘Heard you was in town,’ Bert said. ‘Come back to slum with us, have you, Greaves?’
‘Hunt,’ Danny said. ‘I go by my stepfather’s name.’
Bert nodded. ‘Good bloke, Caleb Hunt, but you’ll always be Danny Greaves to me. Come and have a drink with us, Greaves. Or are you too high-and-mighty to rough it with a bunch of miners?’
Danny’s instinct was to turn and run. He glanced at the bar where Joe gave him a nod. ‘Set up a round for the table, Joe,’ he said.
Bert pulled a stool to the table and Joe carried the beers over with practised ease, compensating for his limp and not spilling a drop as he set them down.
‘So, Bert,’ Danny said, hoping the men didn’t hear the tension in his voice. ‘I hear you’re doing well up at the mine.
‘Foreman of the D shift. This here’s some of my crew.’ He introduced the three other miners. ‘Married me a pretty little thing from down Moe way and we’ve three nippers. How about you, Greaves?’
Danny shook his head. ‘No wife or family yet.’
‘Look at you with your fancy city clothes and your parents donating money to build the hospital. You fell on your feet, Greaves. No earning an honest living like the rest of us.’
‘I’m a lawyer,’ Danny said, oddly grateful that he could name a profession.
‘I said, honest living,’ Bert said, and his comrades laughed.
‘You a good lawyer?’ Bert said when the joke was done.
‘I think so.’
‘So why are you here? Haven’t seen you for twenty years and here you are.’
‘I came to visit friends,’ Danny said. ‘The Burrells,’ he added for good measure.
Bert nodded his approval. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.
Danny drained his beer and pushed his stool back. ‘It’s been good to see you, Bert.’ He held out his hand.
Bert’s eyes met his. ‘Tell me, are the stories true?’
Danny’s breath caught in his throat and he dropped his hand.
‘It was all over town. For all your ma’s fine ways, you was a bastard and your father was that English cove who got caught in the fires?’
Danny felt the blood drain from his face. ‘That is none of your business.’
Bert stood up to face him. Danny stood nearly half a head taller than the miner but he would be no match for Bert if it came to fisticuffs, and he doubted Bert would abide by the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
To his surprise, Bert held out his hand. ‘I liked you a hell of a lot better for being a bastard,’ he said.
Danny took the proffered hand and Bert clapped him on the shoulder. ‘My da was a hard man,’ he said. ‘Too much drink and he’d lay into Ma and us kids when he got home.’ He picked up his hat from the table. ‘Always envied you for not having to face that every night.’
Bert had envied him? He thought back to Bert’s stories about going fishing with his father and how he had wished he had a father to take him fishing. But he also remembered the bruises, dismissed by Bert as rough-and-tumble with his brothers or an accidental fall while out in the bush.
‘I’m sorry,’ Danny said.
‘Yeah, well, he’s dead now, and I made a vow on his grave that I wouldn’t be like him.’ He looked around at his friends. ‘Better get home or the little lady will raise hell. Night, gents.’
Bert tipped his hat and strode out of the bar.
Danny bid the other miners good night and with a quizzical glance at Joe, he retired to his sitting room. Joe followed him up and lit the fire in the sitting room, closed the curtains against the dark night and left a tray with a thick, hot soup and fresh bread on the table. Danny ate the simple meal and settled down in front of the fire with his copy of Mystery of the Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, which he intended to loan to Bertie when he visited the next day.
Danny had known Fergus Hume, a law clerk in adjoining chambers to his. Hume had left Melbourne a few years earlier, but not before he and Danny had shared several alcohol-fuelled dinners when they had talked of nothing but books and writing.
The book had been a prodigious success since it was first published some six years earlier. Although he’d read it before, several times, Danny started at the preface, lingering on Hume’s description of how he had come to write the book; asking a bookseller what his most popular seller was. On being told it was a particular detective story, Hume wrote ‘… I determined to write a book of the same class; containing a mystery, a murder and a description of low life in Melbourne …’
He tapped the book thoughtfully. Maybe that’s what he was doing wrong. Much as he loved writing his stories of derring-do, all of which resembled the last Rider Haggard he had read, perhaps like Hume he needed to take a more scientific approach. If detective stories were selling, perhaps that was what he should consider writing.
Exhausted by the day’s events, he felt his eyelids begin to droop and drifted into a half-sleep where he dreamed of faceless men and blazing rifles and a girl in a green dress.
Nineteen
Monday 1 August
Robert Campbell’s continual high-handed demands for a private room and better food and drink interrupted the Monday-morning routine at the hospital. Even Sister Keegan failed to calm him. When Danny Hunt turned up during visiting hours, Charlie took him to one side and told him in no uncertain terms that if Mr Campbell did not behave himself, he would get his wish and be evicted from the hospital and into his friend’s care.
Danny marched into the ward and Charlie followed at a discreet distance under the pretence of seeing to one of the other patients. She was curious to see how Danny Hunt dealt with his difficult friend.
Danny slammed the book he had brought on the table beside the bed and glared at Campbell. ‘What’s this I hear of you causing trouble for the hospital staff?’
‘For God’s sake get me out of here, Hunt.’ Campbell pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘The food is vile. The women are all harpies, including my sister and—’
‘You should count yourself fortunate that you are here, Campbell,’ Danny said. ‘In my day there was no hospital. If you were lucky you would have been carried over the mountains on the back of a cart. If you were unlucky you would end up at the Australis Hotel being fed gruel. Your leg would have turned gangrenous and …’
Charlie coughed and Danny looked up. Charlie indicated the poor man whose foot had been recently amputated.
‘And you would probably be dead,’ Danny finished sotto voce.
Bertie subsided onto the pillows with a grunt.
‘How long am I going to be here?’ he mumbled.
Danny turned to Charlie and she joined him at Campbell’s bedside.
‘You will have to stay here until the break has healed enough for you to be transported safely. At least a couple of weeks,’ Charlie said. ‘Until then I ask that you respect my nurses and your fellow patients.’ The bell by the front door jangled and Charlie drew herself up. ‘Now excuse me, gentlemen, I have others to see to.’
Lizzie Ryan beat her to the door, turning as Charlie approached. ‘Constable Smith asking for you, Matron,’ she said.
The policeman standing on the front doorstep whipped his cap from his head.
‘Afternoon, Sister.’
‘What can I do for you, Constable?’
‘We’ve a problem down in the cells,’ he said. ‘Picked up Martha Drew, drunk and soliciting. She’s coughing fit to burst a lung so the sergeant asks if maybe someone could come and take a look at her. Doc Linacre available?’
Charlie shook her head. ‘He’s running a clinic up at Aberfeldy. I don’t expect him back until tomorrow, but I’ll come and have a look at the woman.’
‘Suit yourself, Sister—’
‘Matron.’
Constable Smith ducked his head with an apologetic, ‘Matron’.
As Charlie packed a bag with medical supplies, Mary Keegan stood watching, her arms crossed. ‘Martha Drew is the town nuisance, Matron. Good luck with her.’
‘I’m sure I’ve met worse in the slums of the cities,’ Charlie said, reaching for her coat.
‘If you’re not careful, she’s more likely to scratch your eyes out,’ Keegan said.
Charlie followed the young constable down the path to the police station. The sergeant at the front desk looked up from his paperwork. Sergeant Maidment, who had been the law when she was a child, must have long since retired or moved on, and at first Charlie did not recognise the solid man as he, in turn, looked her up and down.
‘Who are you?’
Charlie held out her hand. ‘Matron O’Reilly. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sergeant …?’
‘Prewitt.’
She started at the familiarity of the name. During her childhood, the law had been represented in Maiden’s Creek by the cadaverously thin Sergeant Maidment, a sensible and much-respected police officer.
Prewitt had been one of Maidment’s constables and had been, in all respects, the opposite of his superior. It seemed he had remained in Maiden’s Creek and the years had not lightened his girth. His brass buttons strained over a massive belly and his self-important face held an unhealthy high colour.
‘Were you a constable here twenty years ago?’ she asked
He narrowed his eyes that were almost lost in rolls of saggy flesh, closely resembling two poached eggs. ‘I was. Do I know you?’
Charlie was saved from answering by the broken strains of ‘Annie Laurie’ coming from the back of the police station.
Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie,
Where early fa’s the dew,
Twas there that Annie Laurie
Gave me her promise true.
Gave me her promise true
The woman’s voice was surprisingly sweet and all three turned to look at the door leading through to the cells.
Which ne’er forgot will be,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and—
The song cut off to be replaced by crashing and foul language, interspersed with violent coughs.
Prewitt grunted. ‘Smith here found Martha down by the Miner’s Arms Hotel, begging for coin for her next drink. Fortunately, most of the town knows her and her bad habits, but it doesn’t stop her trying. If it were me I’d have let her be, but Smith’s got a soft heart and thought she needed the doc.’
‘Where does she live?’
The young constable answered, ‘She’s got a hut out near the Chinese gardens. Vile, stinking place it is too. Her ’usband built it on the site of a place that was burned down owing to smallpox. Got the land for a song ’cos folk reckon it’s haunted.’
Charlie shivered. She had passed the site of the smallpox house, as it was called, on her way to and from school. When she reached it she would always break into a run for fear of the ghost of the woman who had died of smallpox who was said to haunt it.
‘Where’s her husband?’ Charlie asked
‘Fell down a mine shaft five years ago. He was no great loss. Drunken brute of a man. He was pretty free with his fists, broke her arm once. Left with her with a bairn what died of typhus the following summer. Been all downhill for Martha since then.’
‘Poor woman,’ Charlie said.
‘You haven’t met her,’ Prewitt said with a snort. ‘Take the sister through to her, Smith.’
The cells at the back of the property were little more than caves, cut into the rock and secured by heavy grills. The stench of vomit, and worse, hit Charlie as soon as the constable opened the door. The area was lit by a single kerosene lantern hanging from a hook by the door, so at first it was hard to make out which cell the woman was held in, until she lunged at the grill door like an unbroken animal, spitting obscenities at the policeman.
The constable instinctively took a step back. ‘Blimey, what a mess. You better settle down, Martha, or you’ll get another bucket of water. I’ve brought the nurse from the hospital to see to you.’
‘I don’t need a nurse,’ the woman said. ‘I just need a drink.’
The effort of speaking provoked a paroxysm of racking wet coughs.
‘I’m going to let the sister in to take a look at you. Behave,’ Smith said.
The constable lit a second lantern and handed it to Charlie. He unlocked the grille and Charlie stepped into the cell.
The woman, crouched on the floor, looked little better than a bundle of filthy stinking rags. Long strands of unkempt hair fell around her face and her arms were wrapped around herself as she tried to stem the coughing.
‘Give me a hand here,’ Charlie said to the constable.
With a grimace he stepped into the cell. ‘I’ll have to clean this mess up,’ he grumbled as he helped Charlie lift the woman to her feet and guide her to the rock-cut platform covered in a lumpy hessian mattress that served as a bed.
‘She’s soaking wet,’ Charlie said.
The constable shuffled his feet. ‘Only way to calm her down,’ he said.
‘A dousing in this weather is more likely to kill her. Let’s look at you.’ Charlie set the lantern on a stool and raised the woman’s head.
The hair fell away from a ravaged face that looked ten years older than the woman’s true age. A face that even through the grime and marks of dissipation, Charlie recognised.
‘Good God,’ she blasphemed. ‘Martha Mackie.’
The woman stiffened, her chin coming up, and for a fleeting moment Charlie caught a glimpse of her nemesis from school, the prissy little girl in her immaculate pinafores who had called her mother a whore … and worse.
‘No one’s called me that for a long time. Who the hell are you?’
‘Don’t you recognise me, Martha?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Charlie O’Reilly.’
The woman’s mouth fell open. ‘Mad Annie’s daughter?’ She snorted and looked away. ‘Who’d’ve thought Mad Annie’s daughter would come back here. Now I’m the whore and they call me mad and you’re the one in the nice clothes who smells of soap.’
She doubled over, coughing again.
‘I’m going to take you to the hospital, Martha. You need a bath and a square meal,’ Charlie said.
‘I need a bloody drink,’ Martha spat back. ‘Leave me be.’
‘I’m not leaving you here. It’s cold and damp and you need a doctor to see to that cough and some decent wholesome food.’
Martha leaned back against the wall, studying Charlie through half-closed eyes.
‘So Mad Annie’s little girl did all right for herself. All that sucking up to the McLeods paid off.’
An old, ugly, familiar knot gathered in Charlie’s stomach.
You are not ten years old. This woman has no hold over you, she reminded herself.
She turned to the doorway. ‘Constable, will you help me get Mrs …’ She turned back to Martha. ‘What is your name?’
‘Drew. My name’s Martha Drew.’
‘Help me get Mrs Drew up to the hospital.’
‘I don’t wanna go …’ Martha dug her fingers into the mattress. ‘People die there. I’ve seen ’em. He comes for ’em at night.’
The constable cast Charlie a knowing look and made a drinking motion with his hand. ‘In and out of the hospital she is. They get her fixed up and within a couple of months she’s back there again. Come on Mrs Drew, let’s get you out of here,’ he said, prying Martha’s hands away from the mattress.
It took both Charlie and the constable to drag Martha to the front desk and secure her release. Outside the young constable took her by one arm and Charlie took the other. Martha resisted them all the way up the hill, screeching her protests to the world.
