Shadow of the Osprey (8 page)

C
aptain Morrison Mort was not a man who reflected on the vagaries of life. If he had been, standing in the office of Granville White, he might have reflected that it had once been the office of David Macintosh.

That had been over a decade earlier and life as captain of the Macintosh barque had appealed to his health. At the beginning of his fourth decade of life he was tanned and fit with curling blond hair and pale blue eyes that had somehow captured the essence of sun and sea.

The office had changed little from the time that he had been given command of the
Osprey
. His employer Granville White sat in a big leather chair with his back to a window that overlooked the busy docks below. Granville now controlled the financial management of the vast Macintosh empire of shipping, property and stockmarket shares. In his mid-thirties he was a rather handsome man. A finely boned face and a receding hairline gave him an aristocratic appearance that women found appealing. And he carried with an arrogant ease an aura of genteel wealth and power. ‘Welcome home Captain Mort,’ Granville said with more formality than warmth. He rose and briefly extended his hand across the desk between them. ‘Please be seated.’

Mort swept back his long navy blue jacket and sat down in one of the smaller leather chairs opposite his employer. ‘Good to be back Mister White,’ he mumbled without much conviction.

Sydney was not a place where he ever felt safe. Not since those years earlier when the Irish lawyer Daniel Duffy had attempted to indict him for murder. Only the power of the Macintosh name and their considerable resources had saved him from swinging on the gallows at Darlinghurst Gaol. As far as he knew Daniel Duffy was still active in attempting to bring him to justice. ‘Your telegram I got in Brisbane said you had an urgent job back here.’ Mort was not a man to mince with polite formalities. The meeting was about business and he got right to it.

A slight frown creased Granville’s features. He lived with the genteel formalities of colonial society and Mort’s abruptness was an affront to the social niceties of idle chatter as a preamble to business. ‘You have a new assignment,’ he said as he leaned back in his chair and puffed on a Cuban cigar. He had not bothered to offer one to the Captain who he knew did not indulge in alcohol or tobacco. The Captain was a man of spartan habits. ‘The
Osprey
has been chartered by Baron von Fellmann as soon as he reaches our fair shores.’

‘We are doing well with the kanakas,’ Mort began in protest. ‘The last shipment to Brisbane . . . ’

‘I accept that Captain,’ Granville said, cutting the protest short with a wave of his cigar. ‘But the Baron is prepared to compensate us generously for any loss of revenue. And besides, he is my brother-in law,’ he added with a hint of sarcasm. ‘One does not ignore my sister’s requests.’

‘Where does he want me to sail?’ Mort grunted. He had resigned himself to obeying the obvious command.

‘Cooktown,’ Granville replied. ‘After that only the Baron knows. But wherever he decides to sail you are to obey without question. He is, after all, paying for the charter.’

Mort raised his eyebrows. The assignment had an air of something wrong about it. Not that he particularly cared – so long as he was paid and commanded his ship. ‘The Baron going after gold up on the Palmer?’ he asked conversationally.

‘Whatever the Baron’s intentions are will not concern us,’ Granville answered with a scowl. ‘The less questions you ask the better you will get on with the Baron.’

Mort nodded his understanding. ‘What I have to know Mister White,’ he said, ‘is what stores I will need and sailing times.’

Granville took a long puff from his cigar and blew a halo of grey smoke into the still air of the office. ‘George Hobbs will have all the answers to your questions,’ he replied. ‘You can talk to him on the way out.’

Mort accepted that the brief meeting was at an end and started to rise from his chair. But Granville resumed speaking and Mort sat back down. ‘Something of a somewhat disturbing nature has been brought to my attention in recent times,’ Granville said. ‘It appears your first mate Mister Horton has been saying things around The Rocks when he was on his last leave to Sydney. Things that are better left in the past.’

Mort felt a touch uneasy about the comment. He knew Jack Horton was a man who liked to partake of rum in the hotels around his old territory of The Rocks. When he was drunk he had a habit of becoming boastful of his adventures in the South Seas. ‘What sort of things?’ he asked.

‘Things about that papist bastard Michael Duffy. And about my cousin David. Hints that they met with foul play.’

‘Duffy was killed by the Maori in New Zealand,’ Mort replied dismissively. ‘And Mister Macintosh was killed by Chief Tiwi over five years ago. Got nothing to do with us.’

‘Duffy I grant,’ Granville agreed. ‘But my cousin’s demise might cause further questions to be asked, certainly in regard to the circumstances surrounding his death. My mother-in-law despises me enough to use her position to make things very uncomfortable for me. She might get it into her head to use her considerable resources to resurrect her own investigation.’

Mort knew that Lady Enid Macintosh believed that her beloved son had been murdered by himself on the orders of Granville White. Her hatred for them both was no secret in the company circles. Only the fact that Granville was her son-in-law – and so ably managed the vast financial empire – kept him temporarily safe from her wrath. But if something could be proved . . .

‘Horton has a big mouth,’ Mort agreed. ‘It needs shutting.’

‘Good!’ Granville said. ‘I am sure you can pension him off with an appropriate incentive to ensure his silence. You talk to him and settle the matter of his severance with the company. I am sure you can find a new first mate to your liking while you are in Sydney.’

George Hobbs sat behind his desk scribbling figures in his ledgers.

‘Mister White says you have the information I need for the von Fellmann charter.’

Hobbs glanced up at the captain standing before his desk. He lifted a sealed envelope from the table and passed it to him. Mort ripped open the envelope and scanned the pages.

George Hobbs watched him from behind his spectacles. He did not like the
Osprey
’s captain despite his reputation for turning a handsome profit in the blackbirding trade for the company. Something about Mort made him feel decidedly uncomfortable in his presence. George shuddered involuntarily.

‘Who’s this Michael O’Flynn mentioned in the report?’ Mort grunted without looking at him.

‘I believe he is an American gun dealer who took a passage out of Samoa on the Baron’s instructions. And, as far as I know, Mister O’Flynn is currently in town as a guest of the Baroness von Fellmann,’ he replied. ‘Other than that, I can tell you little more than what you have read, Captain Mort. The Baron is a rather private man, not inclined to divulge his business dealings.’

‘And this cabbage eater, Karl Straub . . . ?’ Mort queried further.

‘I’m sorry Captain,’ George shook his head. ‘I know only as much as you and what is in the report.’

Mort stared hard at the little clerk behind his desk. He suspected that Hobbs knew more. But he also knew that his sympathies were with Lady Enid Macintosh. Why White had not dismissed David’s private secretary made little sense to him. He could only conclude that dismissing Hobbs might confirm to Lady Macintosh that her son-in-law had something to hide. He looked into the bespectacled man’s eyes and felt satisfied. Hobbs was a man who might have loyalties but he also understood fear. ‘If Mister White requires my services in the next few days he can find me aboard my ship,’ Mort said as he tucked the papers in his coat pocket and left the room.

After Mort’s departure, Granville had remained sitting at his desk. He continued to puff at the big cigar, savouring its rich taste. Michael Duffy. He had not thought of the man for a long, long time. He was annoyed that the dead man’s name should once again intrude in his life, albeit merely as a reminder of the unpleasant things he had to do to gain control of the Macintosh empire.

He stretched, stood and walked over to the window overlooking the wharves. From where he stood he could see the
Osprey
moored. And there was cousin David, he mused. Long dead to the world – but not to Lady Enid, his memory to her a potent obstacle to his own ambitions to rule the Macintosh fortunes.

His mother-in-law posed a real threat to his continuing ambitions to wrest complete and utter control for himself. But one day she would die, he consoled himself, and Fiona would inherit everything as the sole surviving Macintosh. And as Fiona’s husband he would manoeuvre things so that he owned it all.

A dark cloud pervaded his thoughts when he reflected on his wife. He scowled and ashed the cigar on the floor. Fiona might be his wife but in name only. She was ‘wife’ to his sister Penelope. At every opportunity Fiona went to his sister’s bed and continued to do so despite the fact that Penelope was now married to Baron Manfred von Fellmann.

Granville did not seem to care anymore that his wife had moved into another room. And he had long resigned himself to losing his wife’s body to his sister’s bed. What mattered was that Fiona had kept her word to be a publicly dutiful wife to him in his ruthless drive for power. He had after all, the solace of the bodies of the young girls he had procured in the Glebe tenements years earlier. A place where life was cheap and the patronage of the wealthy man a matter of survival for the families of the girls. The bestial pleasures he had taken with the prepubescent Jennifer Harris had long been forgotten for the pleasures of young Mary Beasley, eleven years old and already well practised in the ways of his perversions.

For a brief moment Granville thought about Glen View Station, a place he had never visited. Somehow the twists and turns of misfortune in his life could be traced back to a time twelve years earlier when Fiona’s father, Sir Donald Macintosh, had ordered the dispersal of the Nerambura clan of Aboriginals on his property. A fateful day in November 1862 when the Native Mounted Police – commanded by none other than Morrison Mort – had slaughtered men, women and children without mercy. Very few had survived the massacre. And the pitiful handful that did were eventually hunted down like vermin and eliminated.

But from that terrible day rose the spectre of the Duffys. As witnesses and also unwitting victims they had become sworn enemies of the Macintosh family. Had all the misfortune visited upon him been the result of some obscure Aboriginal curse brought on by this slaughter?

The question was ludicrous but stubbornly persisted. As an educated and refined gentleman Granville knew such things were nonsense. But there had been a string of diabolical deaths over the years, albeit a couple he had actually conspired to. Both Sir Donald and his son Angus had died on the spears of a blackfella by the name of Wallarie. And even the hated Duffys had suffered their fair share of tragedy: Michael Duffy’s brother Tom had been killed by the Native Mounted Police, his death graphically recorded in the southern papers weeks later.

If only the accursed Daniel Duffy could suffer some kind of death, he thought bitterly. Life would be much easier without his continuous crusade to bring the Macintosh name into disrepute.

The curse even seemed to reach into his life with his wife refusing her favours to him to procreate a son. Two daughters did not count. Females only counted as objects to serve his carnal desires.

The cigar had shrunk to the wrapper and Granville stubbed it on the window shelf. Outside the office life went on in Sydney. Maybe one day he would travel to Glen View and see for himself the supposed heart of the curse that was said to influence the lives of the Macintoshes and Duffys. He remembered long ago listening to Sir Donald rambling on about a strange cave on the cattle lease. What had amused him at the time was that Sir Donald actually had a look in his eyes as if he believed in the power of the site which was sacred to the Aboriginals.

But Sir Donald was a Scot, he scoffed as he turned away from the window that looked out onto the civilised world of Sydney. And the Scots were just as stupidly superstitious as the ignorant Irish.

~

Captain Mort walked the short distance to his ship. He noticed with some interest men and women clambering for berths on ships heading north to the newly opened goldfields on the Palmer River and the Queensland colony’s far-flung territory on Cape York.

Mort knew about goldfields. He had once served as a policeman on the Ballarat diggings in ’54. The damned miners had built a stockade and resisted by force of arms the British army and police, he remembered bitterly. But the Eureka Stockade – as they called their fortification – had fallen one hot summer morning to the might of British arms. He had been involved in the slaughter that followed.

Since that glorious day of killing Mort had led a colourful career, previously an officer of the Queensland Mounted Police, he was now Captain of a South Seas blackbirding barque. And in all his occupations he had been able to indulge his demonic madness for torture, rape and murder.

He soon walked to a wharf to admire the love of his life: his barque aptly named the
Osprey
– the sea eagle who had swooped on many an island to take either by persuasion or force of arms indentured black labour to toil in the sugarcane fields of tropical Queensland.

Jack Horton was nowhere to be seen when Mort boarded his ship. Not that he cared. His murderous first mate no longer had a job with the Macintosh companies. All he had to do now was replace him and it would not be hard to find a qualified man for the job as first mate in Sydney Town.

Mort leaned on the rail and gazed over the inlet to the infamous slums of The Rocks. The jumble of old sandstone buildings had fallen into decay over time, moving enterprise away from the western side of the Quay. No doubt Horton was staying at his favourite boarding house. He knew where to find him – and how to terminate his employment.

Before he settled the matter of Jack Horton he knew it was time to visit The Rocks on a very special pilgrimage.