Bereft (20 page)

Quinn felt tears boiling behind his eyes. He nodded.

“After all,” she went on, her words by now almost inaudible. “After all, what good is it to me now to know about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or that Henry's fifth wife was Catherine Howard now that I'm here on my deathbed—”

“Mother! You are not on your deathbed. Don't say such a thing. Please.”

“Tell me. What good are stories?”

From the enamel dish on the bedside table Quinn took the wet cloth and pressed it to her fevered brow. His hands shook as he returned the cloth to the tepid water.

“Do you know what I mean? Quinn?”

He stood. “Mother, you are feverish. I will freshen this water. It is no cooler than you are.”

His mother gripped his leg with her pathetic fingers.

He stared at her, horrified, as it dawned on him. “My God. You still don't believe me, do you?”

“It's not that …”

“Then what?”

She took a long time to answer. “A mother knows when her child is keeping something from her. Quinn, tell me what you saw that day. I need to know. Before I die. What did you see?”

He paused with the dish in his hand. It was a request he had been dreading.

“Quinn?”

“There is nothing more to tell you. I found her and she was already dead. Whoever did it was long gone.”

“Very well.” She fumbled beside her and pressed a tea tin to him. “Here. Take this. It's thirty pounds, maybe more. All we have. Take it and go, Quinn.”

He opened the tin. Sure enough, inside was a roll of notes bound tightly with string.

“You should get away from here before they find you. Leave us, my son. Go and live your life. You are free. This place has been no good for us—”

“But I can't leave you. I can't take this.”

“You can and you will. I prayed for your return but now I want you to leave while you still can. You have done all you needed to by coming back. They will kill you if they find you. I need to know that you will be safe. Please. I have already lost one child, I cannot bear to lose another. Can you not see that, Quinn?”

He took the roll from the tin and held it in his palm. He had never seen so much money. It was a small fortune. He stared at it for a long time. She was right; it was only a matter of time before his uncle found him and Sadie, and then everything would be lost.

He leaned down to kiss his mother's hot forehead. “Are you sure, Mother?”

“I am sure.” She gasped for breath.

“Will you be alright?”

“Leave as soon as you can. Promise me.”

He thumbed the roll of money.

“Quinn, do you promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

He said goodbye and waited for her response, but she said nothing further, whether from exhaustion or despair he couldn't tell. He changed the water in the dish and refilled her glass. He lingered at her side for several minutes until, finally, he crept away.

When he returned to the shack an hour later, Sadie was sitting cross-legged on the floor gnawing on a chicken leg. She failed to notice him for several seconds, then glanced up.

“How is your mother?”

He squatted on his haunches. The meeting with his mother had drained him. He felt exhausted. “She's not well. I don't think she has long to live.”

“You have been crying.”

“Yes.”

Sadie tossed away the chicken bone and licked her fingers. She grunted sympathetically. “Before my mother died she said some curious things. Told me our father had flown in to see her.” She mimed this by flapping her crooked elbows against her ribs. “They have fever, you know. They don't always realise what they are saying. Ginny Reynolds raved for two days about little blue men she had seen running around her bed and—”

“Sadie. We have to get away from here. We have to leave. Now.”

“I can't. I'm waiting for Thomas. I told you that.”

“But what about the tracker? He'll be back any day and then Dalton will come after you. After us. They'll kill us.”

“We have time to wait a bit longer.”

The girl was so infuriating. “What if the tracker gets back before Thomas?” he demanded. “Then what will we do? Then it will be too late.”

She frowned. It seemed she had not even considered this.

“I have some money,” Quinn went on, eager to press his case. “We can get away from here. Go to Sydney. To Queensland, even.”

She looked at him. “I have a special way to find out exactly when the tracker will be back.”

“How?”

She dismissed his query. “In any case there are things we need to do first.”

“Like what?”

She sauntered over and squatted before him, bringing her odour of lemons, of soil and of girlish sweat. She inspected him closely with her dark, watery eyes before raising a hand and caressing his beard. Quinn shrank back. Sadie Fox, so febrile with energy he feared she might scorch him with her touch.

“A few things,” she said.

She trotted away, rummaged in the next room and returned to rearrange herself on the floor before him. She took his face in her hand and turned his head this way and that. Then with the slightest upward pressure on his chin, she tilted his head back, leaving his throat naked to the air. From the bottom edge of his vision, Quinn caught the fishtail flicker of his razor in her hand.

He drew back and moved to protect his throat but the steel was already at his neck. A handful of his shirt in Sadie's grip forestalled any sudden movement.

“What”s the matter?” she asked.

Something small meandered down his bare neck, an ant or spider perhaps, a dribble of sweat.

“Did you think I might kill you? Cut your throat? Would you even care, Quinn Walker?”

They stayed like that for some seconds, she smirking, he frozen, until she pressed the blade against his skin and trimmed the edges of his beard. This she did in silence, pursing her mouth in sympathy as Quinn stared at the water stains and cobwebs on the ceiling. The razor crackled against his cheeks and neck. When she was done, Sadie loosened her grip and removed the blade. Quinn slumped back on his heels.

“I needed to tidy your beard,” she said, closing the razor and handing it to him. Then she brushed the tiny trimmed hairs from his shirtfront and collected them in her palm as one might a handful of iron filings. “You're almost ready now.”

“Ready for what?”

But she only smiled at him, as if it were a foolish question to which surely he knew the answer.

18

Q
uinn lay on his back. It was late afternoon, hot. He wondered once again what he was doing in this strange house with Sadie Fox. He heard her singing. Despite the wretched quality of her voice, her earnest quavering made him smile. She had told him the Donovans had a phonograph player and when they wound it up on Sunday evenings she sometimes hid in the rose bush beneath their window. The thought of her huddling against the wall of a stranger's house broke his heart.

What's the use of worrying?

It never was worthwhile, so

Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag

And smile, smile, smile

Her singing devolved into exuberant humming before she launched into another verse. Clearly, she had not been paying attention to the words.

Private Perks he went a-marching into Flanders

With his smile

His funny smile …

She paused and there followed the noise, faint at first, of what sounded like a family of well-shod mice skittering a short distance over the boards. Startled, Quinn sat up. Again she hummed, followed by a few half-sung words. He jammed a finger into his ear. His rotten hearing was still no better. He stood and went to the doorway of the next room.

Although she had her back to him and appeared to be absorbed in what she was doing, he was sure she was aware of him standing there. She always was.

She scattered something to the floor and, smiling, turned to face him. “You want to play?”

“Play what?”

She laughed, revealing a glint of teeth, like a shiv tucked behind her lips. “You know.”

Quinn felt queasy. His palms were clammy.

Sadie scooped objects from the floor and held out her hand. In her palm were five or six lumpy bones, sheep's vertebrae. “Knuckles, of course!”

He shook his head. “I don't think I know that game.”

“You do.”

“No. I don't.”

“You
do
.”

“How would you know?” His tone was more aggressive than he intended, and he regretted it at once.

Unperturbed, she demonstrated it for him. “Everyone knows this game. It's very common. You throw them down, then pick them up, one after another. Like this. Then over hand ones, over hand twos. Oh. Like
that
. You probably forgot, that's all. Then that one, there. Like that … and
that
. Then … on the back of your hand. Remember now?”

Quinn watched as she showed him again. She tossed the half-a-dozen bones into the air and caught two on the back of her hand. Those two she threw into the air and caught in her palm. The idea was to throw those already caught into the air and attempt to pick up as many of the others as possible before catching them again. He knew there were more complicated versions according to one's expertise. Horse in the stable, over the jump, threading the needle.

Quinn found himself drawn into the room, as if the room—indeed the whole house—had shifted on its meagre foundations to re-situate him within it. A flickering trickery of light and he was on his knees beside her, breathing hard. She took his hand, which he gave up without protest. Her palm was soft and moist as bread dough, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

She prattled on for several minutes, saying how good it would be if they could play together. “It passes the time and it helps with your coordination. People have played it for thousands of years, you know.”

He watched her as she spoke. Her lips were cracked and she had a mole on her left cheek he had not noticed before. “Who are you?” he asked in a quivering voice.

Sadie laughed and picked over the bones. “I told you.”

Quinn sensed the hard heat of her thigh alongside his own. He coughed into his hand. He felt puzzled, excited. “No. Who are you,
really
?”

She looked at him as if caught in an act of mischief, before her mouth—her entire face—exploded into a grin.

“I'm a little reprobate!”

“What?”

Now serious, Sadie levered herself to standing and looped a strand of hair behind her ear. “I'm Sadie Fox. That's all.”

“Where is your family, Miss Sadie Fox?”

She smoothed the front of her dress, which was stained with dirt and food and dried chicken blood. “Dead from the plague. I told you that, too. The bubonic plague, or whatever it's called. My mother died from it, and my father left before I was even born. My brother looked after us, then I did when he went to war. But he'll be back soon and he'll know what to do, even if you don't. He'll help me.”

He ignored her implied taunt. “Does Thomas know about your mother?”

She fixed him with her dark-eyed gaze and said something under her breath.

“What?”

She tilted her chin, only a fraction, but enough to make plain her sudden disdain for him. “If you can't help me, why don't you leave?”

“No, I—”

“You
know
what he did to her.”

“What? Who?” Quinn began rolling a cigarette with uncooperative fingers. The atmosphere in the room had altered, as if yanked tight. The gas lamp growled.

“Don't you even care what happened to Sarah?” she persisted when he didn't answer.

He threw down his cigarette. “Of course I do. She was my sister.”

“You can't hide up here forever. They'll get you, they'll get
us
.”

“You're mad.”

“And you're scared.”