Band of Gold (20 page)

Mick shook his head. Despite his positive comments, his face was white with shock and dismay. He pushed his dripping hair back off his face. ‘Take a look?’

Hawk slid off the bough and dangled his legs until his feet had safely touched solid ground. Mick followed and, without letting go of the branch, they made their way towards the bank until they were out of the pull of the current. As they stood and watched, the water level dropped another foot, leaving the ground strewn with branches, small rocks, plant matter, bits of broken cradle and diggers’ gear, and scummy foam. Around them diggers themselves were hauling themselves from the water, stunned at what had just occurred. Two bodies were visible, one face-down on the far bank, and one floating down the river towards them.

Hawk estimated that he and Mick must have travelled with the wall of water at least 500 yards down the river, as they were now nowhere near where they had set up the long tom. With cold dread settling in his belly, Hawk raised a hand to his eyes and peered across at the body lying on the bank. It was hatless and shirtless, but from here he couldn’t tell anything more.

A handful of bedraggled diggers stood gingerly in the shallows, apparently waiting for the body in the river to wash up. Hawk watched as Mick strode past them, up to his knees in water, then turned the body face-up. He signalled a negative to Hawk, then dragged it by one limp arm out of the river and onto the muddy bank.

He shook his head as he approached Hawk, who pointed across the river at the other body.

‘Current safe in the middle yet, do you think?’ Mick asked.

Hawk shrugged, and together they made their way carefully
across, armpit-deep in water that was filled with mud and floating debris.

The body was lying on its face but the head was turned to one side, and before they even got close Hawk and Mick saw that it wasn’t Rian. They both let out deep breaths of relief. This unfortunate digger had been bearded, although he possessed only part of his beard now, as his right lower jaw had been torn off. His eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the mud that had become his final resting place. Near his nose was embedded a small nugget of gold. Mick crouched, dug it out and slipped it into the man’s trouser pocket.

They recrossed the river, and Hawk sent Mick running back to the claim to fetch the others while he began to walk back along the bank searching for Rian, but before Mick had gone far he met everyone else, piled into the cart, coming the other way.

Daniel reined in the bullocks, and Simon called out, ‘Is it true, there’s been a flash flood?’

‘’Tis,’ Mick shouted, ‘and we can’t find Rian!’

All around them streams of diggers were heading for the river, and several stopped to listen while Mick gave a very abbreviated version of what had happened, until Daniel told him to get in and finish telling them while he drove on.

‘He will just be further downstream,’ Gideon said. ‘You say there are men pulling themselves out of the water everywhere. He will just be walking back.’

‘He might not even have gone down as far as you and Hawk,’ Simon suggested. ‘He might even have only gone a few yards and then managed to get out.’

‘Ae, he might just be sitting there on the bank where the long tom was, wondering what is taking you so long,’ Ropata added.

Mick looked at them, staring back with hopeful faces and trying to reassure themselves that nothing bad could have happened to
Rian, and he couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t tell them how incredibly powerful the torrent of water had been, and he couldn’t tell them that it had carried within it rocks that could smash a man’s head open like a rotten pumpkin, and he couldn’t tell them how once it had dragged you under it was only luck that spat you out again.

But he felt Haunui gazing directly at him, and saw that somehow Haunui knew, and he suddenly couldn’t meet the older man’s eye.

Haunui turned to Simon and said quietly, ‘Go and let Kitty know what’s happened. Stay with her. Don’t let her come out here.’

By the time they reached the river it seemed that every man on the Ballarat diggings had arrived. They couldn’t get near the water’s edge, and Hawk was nowhere to be seen. When they located him an hour later, two more bodies had been recovered from the river. Nobody had seen a man answering to Rian’s description, dead or alive.

At five-thirty, Hawk said, ‘We need to tell Kitty.’

She sat at the table at Lilac Cottage, a cold cup of tea in front of her, her back as rigid as though a rod of iron were lashed across her shoulders. Simon sat opposite, pushing around a slice of the spiced fruit billy bread that Maureen had brought across and which Kitty had refused to touch. Amber was huddled on the daybed cuddling Bodie, who for once was allowing herself to be excessively petted.

Kitty had repeatedly made Simon tell her what he knew, but as it wasn’t much they’d been silent for some time, Kitty sitting whitefaced and tight-lipped. Initially, as predicted, she had wanted to go to the river and help with the search, but Simon had convinced her to stay by telling her that she needed to be at the cottage in case Rian staggered home under his own steam, exhausted and disoriented. He thought this highly unlikely, but it was preferable to the idea of her witnessing the extraction of Rian’s pale, lifeless body from beneath
some overhanging bank miles downstream, or from several feet of stinking, sucking mud. But he wouldn’t be dead, of course. He could well be lying hurt somewhere, but he wouldn’t be dead.

Amber leapt up and opened the door. ‘They’re here, Ma!’

Kitty hurried to the door and moved Amber aside, then mutely stepped out of the way to let in Hawk, Daniel and Haunui. A quick study of their faces told her that the news wasn’t good, and her heart felt once again gripped in a fist of ice. For a short while, sitting at the table, she had managed to convince herself that everything that was happening was nothing more than an exceptionally unpleasant and unwelcome dream, that if she sat still enough and said nothing, it would eventually stop and she would wake up. And that had worked for a little while, but then Simon had started pushing around his piece of cake and the tines of the fork had made irritating, intrusive noises on the plate, and then she’d begun to think she could hear the bits of dried fruit in the cake squeaking and scraping over the porcelain, and by then the bubble she’d fashioned around herself had been punctured and little snippets of what he’d said had started creeping into her thoughts again. And now here were Hawk and Haunui and Daniel, and they’d never been able to hide anything from her when it came to Rian.

They all looked exhausted. Hawk had someone else’s shirt on. It was too small for him, and he must have hurt himself because the back was stained with watery blood.

He touched her shoulder. ‘Kitty, you should sit.’

‘No.’

So Hawk sat instead. ‘We have searched thoroughly up and down the river bank for two miles from where we were working. There is no sign of him.’

‘So he must have been swept farther down than that,’ Kitty said simply.

‘Yes, he must. We will go back soon, and keep searching.’ Hawk
blinked up at her, and Kitty could see how terribly tired he was. ‘But Kitty, we cannot search tonight. It is overcast and there will not be enough light.’

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, and even she heard the desperation in her voice. ‘I’ll take a lantern.’

Haunui and Daniel exchanged an uneasy glance; she was not going to be rational and calm about this, but then none of them had expected her to be. They hardly felt rational and calm themselves, but searching in the dark would be unlikely to help find Rian. Next, she would get angry, as she often did when she was frightened or upset, and Kitty angry could be extremely daunting.

‘E hine,’ Haunui said gently, ‘there are new…puddles? What do they call them?’

‘Billabongs,’ Hawk said.

‘Ae, from the flood, and some of the shafts near the river have filled with water. It’s too dangerous in the dark. You can’t search tonight.’

Kitty stared at him. Suddenly she blurted, ‘He’s not dead, you know. Just because you haven’t found him yet, don’t start thinking that.’

Slowly, Amber uncurled herself from the daybed and stood, her hair an untidy halo and her arms loose at her sides. In a very quiet voice, she said, ‘No one said anything about Pa being
dead
.’

‘No, Amber, dear,’ Simon said hurriedly, ‘He’s not dead, we just haven’t been able to find him yet.’

Amber’s gaze swept from Kitty to Simon, then back to her mother.

‘Ma?’

‘We will find him, love, I promise.’

But Amber’s face crumpled. She marched up to Kitty and punched her arm. ‘You swore on Bodie, Ma. You said Pa would be fine!’ Her voice shot up an octave. ‘You swore on Bodie’s
life!
’

And she hit Kitty again. And again, until Haunui stepped in and picked her up and carried her away.

The following morning, they were all out at the river just after dawn. Pierre had propped a sign in the bakery window saying
Closed Until Further Notice
, even though he, Leena and Maureen were inside cooking furiously to feed the search party, which had grown as word had spread overnight about Rian’s disappearance.

Flora would have to be consulted some time during the day, but he had arbitrarily decided to dedicate himself to supporting the search, rather than baking for their usual customers. Anyway, he was too distraught to piddle about making fancy little breads and confectioneries—now was the time to be throwing meats and spices into pots to create hearty Cajun dishes that would line the bellies of searchers and give them the energy to find his beloved Rian.

The men from Patrick’s syndicate had taken the day off to help search, and so had about two dozen other diggers whom Rian had become acquainted with over the past months. Wong Fu, too, had arrived with a dozen men from the Chinese camp. And even the majority of diggers on the Malakoff Lead who couldn’t spare the time removed their hats in a show of support as the search team moved towards the river.

They searched all day until sundown, wading along the river, which had returned to a level only a little higher than normal for that time of year, risking bites from eels and stings from catfish spines while feeling under banks, poking about in the debris that had piled up along the river’s edge, and wading through the billabongs and tiny, shrinking tributaries the flood had left behind. The only places they didn’t—couldn’t—check were the flooded shafts close to the river. The water in those would eventually drain, but, according to old hands, that could take more than a fortnight.

The following day they searched again, and the day after that. The river gave up two more bodies, grotesquely bloated and nibbled by
fish and eels, but neither was Rian. Funerals were held for the dead, the undertaker’s black and glass-panelled hearse busy for two days in a row, ferrying its increasingly stinking cargoes along the Main Road to the cemetery on Creswick Road.

Haunui kept a very close eye on Kitty. He had half-expected her to begin to wilt with grief as it became more and more obvious that Rian might never be found, that he might have been swept away to some secret little place where Hine-Nui-Te-Po would hold him in her arms for ever. But she wasn’t wilting. Instead she was angry, and she seemed, to Haunui at least, to be using her anger to drive herself on. She wasn’t eating enough, she was refusing to rest—according to Amber she was barely sleeping at night—and her distress was certainly showing on her face, which was pallid and drawn, her eyes underlined by deep purple shadows. She was making herself sick, and for once he didn’t know what to do.

On the fourth morning after the flood, the search team was noticeably smaller, as most of the diggers who had gathered to help had gone back to work. But the
Katipo
’s crew naturally all mustered, and Wong Fu and three or four of his people also stayed on.

They were eating one of Pierre’s hearty breakfasts outside the crew’s tents just after the sun had risen when Kitty emerged from Lilac Cottage and marched across the dew-damp ground towards them. She was wearing her panama hat, had a rolled-up tube of some sort under her arm and a wild look in her eye. Amber trailed after her, and in the rear came Bodie, picking her way delicately through the wet grass. Without Rian, Haunui thought with a stab of sorrow, the three of them looked somehow diminished, even the bad-tempered cat.

Kitty sat down and unrolled the tube. It was a map. Haunui passed her a plate of stew, which she put aside.

‘Eat,’ he ordered.

‘In a minute.’

‘Now!’ Haunui countered in a voice that made everyone flinch.

Reluctantly, Kitty dipped a spoon into her stew and ate a tiny morsel. Then several more as Haunui stared at her menacingly. Then, defiantly, her gaze daring him to challenge her again, she put down the plate and went back to her map.

‘I’ve divided the whole area up into squares, see?’ she said, pointing with her finger. ‘And if we break into groups and each group takes a square on this side of the river, then we do the same on that side of the river, and cross each square off my map when we’ve done it, then nothing will be missed. We will have covered every inch. That way, if he’s tucked away somewhere we might not have checked until now, we’ll find him. And I think we should start going further downriver. I don’t think five miles is far enough.’

Haunui nodded, but said nothing. He’d sent Daniel and Ropata ten miles downriver on the horses yesterday and they’d found nothing. And he had told Kitty that last night.

Kitty rolled up her map, stood up and said, ‘Right. Let’s set out.’

The others, still eating their breakfast, looked at her, embarrassed. No one knew how to manage this new, strange Kitty. It was deeply upsetting seeing her so distraught, deliberately domineering and demanding. Hawk, who had finished his stew, crossed to the scrap bucket and scraped his tin plate. Then he approached Kitty and laid a compassionate hand on her arm.

Looking at her with empathy and doing what he believed to be the kindest thing, he said, ‘Kitty, you must prepare yourself. You know I love Rian as a brother, and my heart is bleeding for him. But you must accept that he is probably dead. You must be prepared for that.’