A Fringe of Leaves (39 page)

At one point she could have sat down and started crying, but looked ahead and saw the convict laid open and bleeding from hacking a path for them. On catching up, she noticed that some of the thorns had remained embedded, and that the blood they had drawn still oozed to the extent that it hung tear-shaped from the wounds.

Thinking she was some way back, he shouted, ‘I reckon ye must be tired, eh?’

She answered with a colourless, ‘No,’ and snuffled back the mucus threatening to fall.

She was so grateful for his inquiry she seriously wondered whether she dared ask him if he loved her, then controlled this foolishness. He might have told her what he believed she would wish to hear, or not have answered. In any case, there would be occasion enough to ascertain during the years spent together in this expedition to Moreton Bay.

Farther on he began laughing, and called back, ‘Do you sing, Ellen?’

‘I was never musically inclined.’

Even so, she tried to remember, again out of gratitude, some song which might entertain him, and did come across the words of a ballad she and her mother-in-law had practised on a wet and empty afternoon. (Old Mrs Roxburgh enjoyed dabbling her fingers in the keyboard, and derived an almost unbridled pleasure from crossing her wrists.)

Ellen Roxburgh sang for her deliverer,

When first I met thee, warm and young,

There shone such truth about thee,

And on thy lips such promise hung,

I did not dare to doubt thee.

I saw thee change, yet still relied,

Still clung with hope the fonder,

And thought, though false to all beside,

From me thou couldst not wander.

But go, deceiver! go—

The heart, whose hopes could make it

Trust one so false, so low,

Deserves that thou shouldst break it …

Her guide showed no sign of appreciating her attempt at amusing him. He went so far as to spit into a bush they were passing. (Mother Roxburgh had a particular aversion for those of the lower orders who spat.)

When Ellen remembered from farther back,

Wee Willie Winkie

Run through the town,

Opstairs and downstairs

In ’is nightgown;

Tappin’ at the window,

Peepin’ through the lock,

‘Time all children’s in the bed,

Past eight o’clock …’

She had sung it in a low, shamed, because unmusical voice, but it must have pleased him, for he shouted back, ‘Go on! Wotcher stop for?’

She giggled. ‘I dun’t remember no more—if there was ever more to it.’

They trudged.

To break the monotony and silence, she called, ‘It’s your turn, Jack.’

He grunted. ‘Can’t remember. Nothun fit for a lady’s ears.’

Again she might have reminded him that she was a lady only by adoption but was either too breathless from the present climb, or perhaps her companion had influenced her in favour of caution.

At the conclusion of their next descent they were received into a straggle of trees which proved to be the outskirts of a thick forest. By contrast with the sun’s fire, the dark cool felt downright liquid; moist leaves soothed flesh suffering from martyrdom by thorns as a plaister might have; feet gratefully sank into carpets of humus and hussocks of moss.

It prompted the convict to confess, over the shoulder which carried the net, ‘Mab had a sweet voice, but songs was never much in my line.’ After a pause of a few yards in the name of delicacy, he brought himself to the point of admitting, ‘I could always imitate the bird-calls. That’s what led me to take up catchin’ as a profession.’

Nothing would have induced her to behave so unprofessionally as to break the silence with a comment. If her mere physical presence might disturb him, the leaf-mould would surely help make it less obtrusive.

Presently he began to demonstrate his talent. From out of the trills, the suspended notes, the lush warbling when bird-vanity seemed to disguise itself as innocent rejoicing, she thought to recognize the thrush.

‘I’ad a little bird-organ I’d carry with me, but didn’t use it overmuch. I’d say me voice served me better.’

A while farther, in darkest forest, he launched into a prolonged jugging: the sound spilled and glowed around them and would have illuminated worse shades than those through which they were passing. In spite of her exhausted blood and torn feet, everything in fact which might have disposed her to melancholy, she was throbbing with a silent cheerfulness; until, from somewhere in the distant sunlight, an actual bird announced his presence in a dry, cynical crackle such as she associated with the country to which she and the convict were condemned.

Soon after, they came out into the blaze she had learnt to accept as their normal condition in life.

They marched, and she never dared ask to be informed on the progress they were making, but assumed that her guide was possessed of knowledge he did not wish to share. Seduced by the mystery of timelessness, she might have chosen to prolong the journey rather than face those who would quiz them upon their unorthodox arrival.

That, she preferred not to think about, since the settlement at Moreton Bay had begun to exist for her in brick and stone, in dust and glare, in iron and torment, as though she too, had escaped from it only yesterday.

He told her one night as they sat warming themselves at the fire after a dinner of roasted goanna, ‘I was never out of hobbles the years I spent at the settlement. They kept all us lifers in chains. I forgot what it was to move like a free man, but I noticed more for bein’ slowed up. I reckon I got to know every stone, every stump, on the tracks round Moreton Bay—the hairs in another ganger’s nose, the corns on the next feet at the treadmill. That heavy light you been floggin’ against all of summer. None of it you can forget, Ellen.’

She would not.

He said, ‘We didn’t go without our little luxuries and pleasures. Some of the coves at the lumber yard—that is where the “better class”, mostly short-sentence men—is put to work at makin’ various articles—nails and bolts like, boots, soap and so on—some of these beggars might bake a pumpkin and pertater loaf, and smuggle a lump to our mob if we was in good with ’em. It was lovely, I can tell yer. And terbaccer. There was one elderly customer whose sentence was just on finishin’, who they put to shoo away the crows from the corn down around the point. This codger—a gentleman by all accounts—used to grow a fair crop of the weed. ‘E’d hide a wad of it under a stone for we gangers to come across. We’d pass round a pipe and enjoy a coupla puffs while the overseer was away.’

His usually lifeless eyes shone. ‘By Ghost, I could do with a pipe of terbaccer! Or cud to chew.’ Deprived of it, he spat in the fire, and ran his tongue over craving lips.

She had noticed before how the more perfect among his teeth were stained brown, as though still influenced by tobacco; the worst of them were rotted stumps.

Now he put his hand on her knee. ‘What we’ve got, Ellen, is often better than what we haven’t.’

She did not exactly shudder.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s cold by this time of evening.’ She hoped to have hidden the truth of the matter.

He appeared convinced to the extent of drawing her close; when for days he had not touched her, seeming to have taken a dislike to physical contact, or perhaps remembering his dead mistress.

So she must make amends to him for her passing revulsion. ‘Shan’t we go inside? We’ll find it warmer.’

He said, ‘If that is what you want,’ and laughed, but gently.

Because it was what she most desired, again she shuddered, and hoped he would interpret it as shivering.

She wanted to be loved. She longed for the vast emptiness of darkness to be filled as she encouraged him to enter her body and pressed her mouth into his, against what she only momentarily remembered as a grille of broken, stained teeth.

What she offered was in some measure, surely, a requital of all he had suffered, as well as remission of her own sins? Of deceit, and lust, and faithlessness. She hoped that if they could prolong their journey to Moreton Bay, if not lose themselves in it for ever, she might, for all her shortcomings, persuade him to believe in true love.

So she cried out, and he redoubled what might have been demonstrations of love. Or was it desperation? After they had fallen apart, exhausted, they continued soothing each other with the hands of hardened criminals.

Again she remembered the teeth, and was driven to kissing his throat, a cheek, a shoulder, one of his nipples, disguising her remorse as tender frenzy.

Because he no longer responded, she asked, ‘After Mab—was there no one, Jack, you could bring yourself to love?’

She lay listening for his reply. A wind was ruffling the roof of the hut. There were moments when the thatching failed to protect those inside against a cold interrogation by starlight.

‘Nobody at Moreton Bay’, she suggested, ‘you was able to form a relationship with?’

Nobody could sound as crude and awkward as Ellen Gluyas.

‘There was the women’, he said, ‘at the female factory. But who in chains could ever take up with a woman? with the iron eatin’ into ’is legs! An’ the women—they wasn’t chained, but as good as. The poor sluts was never ’ardly let draw breath. They was put to pickin’ oakum, an’ other occupations. They did the laundry for we men, so far as it was done.’