Cold blows the wind, p.3
Cold Blows the Wind, page 3
The day drew in, the trees casting long shadows over the clearing, a heavy chill on the air. This is summer, Harry thought. Bob was right, he would need his thick coat come winter. Thick gloves too. He almost laughed. He had never worn gloves in winter before.
Chapter 4
A fire burned steadily in the large fireplace that extended across the end wall of the cottage, the air thick with the smell of cooking. His mouth watering, Harry slid along the bench behind the table at the centre of the room. The old man sat at one end as Jane served a stew of vegetables seasoned with lumps of bacon; thick slices of bread lay on a plate on the table.
There was no conversation as they devoured the meal. Harry had never enjoyed a meal more. Eliza’s Sunday roasts were nothing on this. He cleaned his plate, sopping up the gravy with the bread.
‘That was a fine meal,’ he said to Jane as she took the plates away.
Her face lit up. ‘You’re quite welcome, young Harry.’
He sat back, waiting for the usual cup of tea that had followed a meal in Perth.
The old man went to the sideboard where a small flagon stood and filled a jug. He called Harry over to the chairs by the hearth and handed him an earthenware mug, pouring a generous measure of spirit into it. ‘My own brew,’ he said proudly. ‘I keep the still out in the bottom hut.’ He jerked his head towards the door.
Harry swallowed a mouthful and spluttered, gasping. It was as if he had drunk liquid fire.
‘Give the lad some water with it,’ Jane chuckled as she sat down beside them, nursing her own mug. ‘’Tis the best mountain dew you’ll ever taste, young Harry.’
The old man splashed a small measure of water into Harry’s mug. ‘It was my brew that decided Jane here to set her cap at me.’ He winked at the old woman.
She grinned. ‘Aye, that and his gift of the gab.’
The playfulness surprised Harry. Once the early days were over, marriage seemed to be an uneasy truce between most of the couples he knew.
When he had his breath back, he asked, ‘How many parties do you take up the mountain each day?’
The old man stared into the fire. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago, in the height of summer we would have hundreds trooping up here. I’d often go to the top twice a day. I’ve even taken a party up to watch the sunrise and then in the afternoon taken another to Wellington Falls and back. These days I can barely manage one.’ He sighed as if exhausted at the thought of it. ‘I’m not as young as I was, nearing a hundred now.’
Harry raised an eyebrow. Nearing eighty was closer the mark but, as he had realised, here on the mountain, you could spin whatever tale you wanted.
‘We had a couple of girls here, great guides they were.’
Jane snorted. ‘We treated them like daughters, yet they took themselves off with a couple of gentlemen last year.’
The old man peered into his mug. ‘No goodbyes, not a backward look.’
‘I couldn’t get here any sooner,’ Harry said into the silence. ‘I left Perth as soon as I got your letter, but I had to stop off in Adelaide and Melbourne to earn enough for the fare.’ He sipped at his drink, careful this time. ‘Thought I could work my way over on a steamer—they laughed when I asked, said I was too old to be starting out. They were probably right. It was rough in the Bight—I heaved the whole way from Albany to Adelaide.’
The old man gave a great bark of laughter.
Jane lifted her mug and downed the contents in one long swallow. She smacked her lips, and took a pipe from her apron pocket. After teasing out the contents of the bowl and adding more tobacco from a pouch she kept in her apron pocket, she lit it. With a couple of puffs to get it drawing, she sat back in her chair, utterly content with the world.
‘Your mother said, when she came from England with her parents, she spewed from Portsmouth to the Cape, but was right after that. No problem at all when we came here from Swan River.’
Harry took a swig, swallowed with a shudder, and forced out the question that had eaten at him for years. ‘What happened to her?’
The old man shrugged. ‘It was a mess and all my fault. I thought we could get me assigned to her and we could live together like a normal family—I’d seen it done in New South Wales. And once we were settled here, we would send for you and Sarah.’ A twist to his mouth, he said, ‘But they added three years to my sentence because I had done time in New South Wales, and sent me to Port Arthur as I was a hardened criminal. I was there two and a half years. She was gone when I got my Probation Pass and came back to Hobart Town.’
Harry stared into his mug. They had all sailed out of his life, his mother and his two little sisters, never seen again. His sisters were a blur, vague memories of laughter, squeals and running feet.
‘It was bitterly cold when we got here.’ The old man shook his head slowly. ‘Heard she couldn’t find work—she had your two little sisters with her, she said they were too young to leave behind.’
‘If you had brought Sarah and me, we would have found work.’ He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
‘She fell ill,’ the old man said, ignoring Harry’s comment, ‘and was in the Colonial Hospital for a while. Got jack of waiting, I s’pose. Hope she found herself another man to take good care of her. She deserved better than me.’
Whatever she deserved, she shouldn’t have deserted her older children. Harry scowled at the logs glowing in the fireplace. ‘She could have come back to Fremantle—we were all there. Not just Sarah and me but Granny and Grandad—they would have helped her.’ His voice creaked. ‘She didn’t have to go in the first place.’
The old man spoke as if he were discussing something of no great concern. ‘She married me but she was always respectable. I doubt she could have stood the shame if she’d stayed in Fremantle.’ He picked up the jug from beside the hearth and refilled his mug. ‘And old Joe and your grandmother are gone now.’
Harry stood and took the jug. ‘Yes,’ he said, pouring most of what remained into Jane’s mug. He tipped the rest into his own and set the jug down. ‘All gone—Granny and Grandad Broughton dead and Mum cleared off God knows where.’
‘But not Sarah, not your sister.’ The old man’s eyes glistened as he said her name. Sarah, his firstborn, his favourite. He had her name tattooed across his right forearm, the rest of his children mere initials on his left.
‘No, not Sarah,’ Harry said. She had not left Perth but she had as good as deserted him—married the year after their parents had left, her attention on her almost annual child, some now well into adulthood. Harry stared, silent, into the hissing flames.
‘Don’t make the lad miserable,’ Jane said. She broke into song.
There lived a man in yonder glen,
And John Blunt was his name, O
She looked at Harry and his father. ‘Come on you two—join in.’
Rise up, rise up, auld Luckie, he says,
Rise up, and bar the door.
Harry had no doubt, had she been a few years younger she would have had him up dancing.
~
Harry woke, his head throbbing, his mouth parched. He couldn’t remember getting himself to bed. He lay on the bed in the second room of the cottage, a rough blanket over him. He could hear the old woman in the next room, singing softly to herself as she moved around.
He struggled to sit up, wincing with the pain gripping his head. Swinging his legs off the bed, he braced himself as he bent down to pull on the boots set neatly on the floor. He had slept in his clothes! He could imagine what Eliza would have made of that.
Jane turned from the fireplace where she was stirring the pot hanging over the flames as he came out into the larger room.
‘Good morning, young Harry.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Sleep well?’
‘A bit too well.’ Bright daylight poured through the doorway almost blinding him. ‘Can I get some water to wash?’
‘Aye, but first break your fast.’
Harry sat at the table, and she set in front of him a bowl of porridge and a cup of strong black tea.
‘There’s no milk,’ she said, pushing a dish of sugar towards him.
He dug out a spoonful and sprinkled his porridge generously, heaping a couple more into his tea—exactly what his grumbling stomach needed.
He gazed around the room in the daylight. The walls had been whitewashed once but were now heavily smoke-stained. The old couple’s bed stood in the far corner, a tall cupboard and a sideboard against the other walls. Faded blue curtains were pulled back from the window, the morning light spilling onto the floor.
‘You’ve not a strong head for the drink.’ The old woman sat opposite him, sipping her own cup of tea.
‘No.’ Eliza had tended towards Temperance but hadn’t minded him having an occasional drink with the rest of the family. He had only seen her truly angry the few times he had rolled home, singing at the top of his lungs, with Frank, one of Sarah’s sons-in-law.
‘We’ll learn you to drink up here. Himself brews a fine drop. Many a visitor comes mainly for a sup.’
Jane looked to be in her sixties, nowhere near as old as his father. In repose her face was stony, the effects of life’s unkindness plain in her eyes. Yet, as he had discovered last night, she could talk the leg off a table once she got going and was full of an impish humour.
When he had drunk the last of his tea, he stood up. ‘Thank you, that was just what I needed.’ He paused a moment. ‘What should I call you—Mrs Woods?’ He wouldn’t be calling her mother but it didn’t seem right to call her by her first name.
‘We’re no swells here.’ She screwed up her face, thoughtful. ‘These days most people call me Grannie. That’ll do.’
‘Grannie it is.’ Not that she was anything like his own grandmother had been.
He went back to the other room. He picked up his swag from the floor, unrolled it on the bed and took out a clean shirt and a comb.
Grannie came in and placed a bucket, half-filled with steaming water, on the floor beside the ancient washstand set next to the window.
Harry watched as Grannie rifled through a cupboard in the corner of the room. ‘Where’s Dad?’ he asked.
‘Gone off to town early, he does every couple of days.’ She handed him a towel. ‘He should be back by dinner time.’ She pulled the door closed behind her as she left.
This smaller room was clearly the bedroom. Harry wondered why the old couple didn’t sleep in here. He supposed the other room was warmer in winter. Perhaps they used it for overnight guests, but he doubted anyone had stayed in years. There were chairs stacked in one corner, boxes piled beside the cupboard—it had the air of a storeroom. Not exactly the sort of place a paying guest would want.
He walked out into the clearing ten minutes later, face washed, hair and beard combed, a clean shirt, feeling much more himself. The air was clear, a hint of warmth in the breeze. He stood listening to the silence that had struck him on his climb yesterday. It was a silence alive with movement—the stirring of the breeze through foliage, the rustle of the undergrowth, the call of unfamiliar birds—not silence at all but the absence of human noise.
The old man led a bony white horse up from the track, a half-filled sack slung over the saddle. He untied the sack and held it out to Harry. ‘Take this in to Jane, son, while I see to the horse.’ He led the horse towards the barn, but turned, beaming. ‘I still can’t believe my eyes.’
After handing over the sack, Harry walked from the cottage to where the old man stood staring at a fair-sized garden behind the barn—cabbages, carrots, swedes and parsnips were laid out in neat rows, as well as staked canes of blackcurrants, gooseberries and raspberries. All around watercress and mint ran riot
‘The raspberry canes are looking ragged,’ he said to the old man. ‘They’ll need a hard prune soon.’
‘That they will.’ The old man nodded. ‘The apple tree needs pruning. The last of the potatoes need to be dug up. The roof needs patching. There are a couple of chairs need mending.’ He crossed his arms. ‘I’m not up to much these days.’
‘I’ll get on to it,’ Harry said. ‘Time to earn my keep.’
‘You’re staying?’ There was longing in the old man’s voice.
‘I am.’ For now. It was as good a place as any at the moment.
The old man showed him around—the huts, the barn with its store of wood, a shelter attached to one side for the horse. The whole place had a tired air, yet Harry could see the idyll it must have been when his father was younger and stronger and could keep the place in good repair. They climbed to the track above the cottage and followed the path towards the south, the old man showing him the troughing, wood and masonry, and the pipes carrying the water from the mountain to the reservoir holding Hobart Town’s water supply.
‘How often does it snow?’
‘When doesn’t it snow?’ the old man chuckled. ‘Even in summer there can be snow at the top. In a few weeks we’ll start to feel the cold and by mid-winter we will be snowed in.’
‘Never seen snow.’
‘Wait a couple of months and you’ll have seen more than you could ever want.’
Chapter 5
April 1878
Ellen hummed as she walked along Liverpool Street, more than happy with the contents of the parcel she held tight against her. She had saved the extra shillings for the past few weeks and not given in to the temptation to buy ribbon, feathers or flowers to decorate her hat. Today she had bought not only an almost new woollen coat for herself but one for Billy that would last through winter the next two years. It was far too big for him now but it was a bargain too good to let go. They both looked clean and smelt of nothing other than camphor but she would hang them in the yard for a day. And she might sneak them into Mrs Bryce’s next washing day and go over them with the potions in the laundry for cleaning gowns, jackets and coats.
She glanced ahead to check whether she needed to cross the street before she got to the Rob Roy, slowing her step at the sight of George and Alice standing with that skinny rat, Dan Rogers. George held a bundle in his arms too, a squirming bundle.
Ellen hurried up to them, scowling as she looked from George to Dan. ‘What’s going on here?’
George grinned at her. ‘We thought we’d give young Billy some air.’ There was a glitter in his eyes. ‘And then we ran into my mate, Dan, here.’ He nodded toward Dan. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Dan?’
Dan nodded his head furiously.
‘And Dan was saying what a fine lad Billy is.’
Ellen raised her eyebrows. ‘Was he?’ She passed her parcel to Alice and took Billy, settling him on her hip and pressed her nose against his hair, breathing in deeply. She looked up to see Dan Roger’s forced smile.
‘Tell her yourself, Dan.’ George grinned.
The Adam’s apple in Dan’s scrawny neck bobbed up and down as he swallowed. ‘He’s a grand lad, he certainly is.’ There was strain around his eyes.
Ellen wondered what George had threatened him with.
‘I know,’ she said, still unsmiling. ‘He takes after his mother’s family.’
‘And Dan was saying he wants to give you something for the lad.’
Ellen pressed her lips tight shut against the laughter bubbling up. She almost felt sorry for the skinny gutter rat.
Dan’s eyes had bulged with surprise but he obediently put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a shilling. ‘Sorry, Ellen, I’m a bit short at the moment.’
‘Not so short you can’t buy a mate a drink for old time’s sake.’ George threw his arm over Dan’s shoulder and steered him into the bar.
Ellen held tight to the coin. She’d buy Billy a toy, that brightly coloured spinning top she had seen in the window of the pawnshop. She could already hear his burbling laugh.
Alice beside her, Ellen walked smartly across the street ahead of a couple of carts trundling down the hill. ‘How did George manage that?’
‘He asked him how his mate Hawkes was and Dan’s knees went wobbly.’
‘I’ll remember that if there’s a next time.’ She had forgotten Dan Rogers was related to Hawkes. Will and George had done a month in gaol three years ago for the hiding they had given him. Rogers should remember that Thompsons never forgot a wrong.
‘George said he’d get him to make up for being rude to you.’
‘I wish the mongrel wasn’t rude to me in the first place.’
‘Perhaps he’s sweet on you,’ Alice said.
‘What? No. He’s just a nasty little rat picking on someone he thinks is weaker.’ She stopped and stared at her sister. She was only eight years old. ‘Where did you get the idea boys behave like that? You’re too young ...’
‘From you and Mary Ann. I listen.’ Alice skipped along beside Ellen.
They turned into Watchhouse Lane, past the mercifully quiet Sunday School on the corner. The children bellowing out their raucous hymns on Sunday mornings made sleeping late almost impossible.
‘Anyway.’ Alice spun around and skipped backwards as she spoke. ‘George said, with Easter coming, we should go up to the Springs and see Grannie and Mr Woods.’
‘Oooh, that would be good. We can all go and make a real party of it.’
‘Mr Woods has his son staying with him.’
‘I didn’t know he had a son.’
‘He’s come from wherever Mr Woods was from, but he’s old.’
Halfway along the lane, Ellen pushed open the gate with her foot. ‘I suppose he would be. Mr Woods is ancient. How do you know all this?’
Alice skipped in and stood holding the door for Ellen. ‘I listen.’ She grinned.
‘As long as you learn from what you hear,’ Ellen said, hoping her sister would learn enough not to get involved with feckless men.
Chapter 6
To begin with, Harry followed as the old man led parties of climbers along the tracks through the bush and scrub and across the rocky expanses up to the pinnacle. On days when there were no visitors, he explored the mountain. He visited the Rocking Stone, a large ovalish rock balancing on a base nearly as big that rocked when touched. He walked along the Watercourse Track above the Springs, following the stone and, later, wooden channel carrying water from the mountain springs to feed into Fork Creek and Browns River and be transported along wooden troughing to Hobart Town’s reservoir. He detoured from the track to the monument to John Smith, a ship’s surgeon who had become lost and died on the mountain not long before the old man had come to live at the Springs. Farther on, he struggled down gullies and over fallen trees and rocks covered with mosses of varying colours, through damp forest with tree-ferns, tea trees and wildflowers, the sound of running water a constant presence. He came to the Fern Tree Bower, a man-made retreat planted with three rows of tree ferns and with tables and seats of planks set about for picnickers to use. He had gone from there to see the Silver Falls, overhung with creepers and spreading fronds of ferns and sassafras, its water cascading like a flow of silver in the light.
