The Clay Dreaming (51 page)

This was not, then, a reference to war with New Zealand, as Sarah’s first assumption had been: she realised it must be the Napoleonic War with France.

Ceres
, written ‘
Searces
’, she would have taken for
Circes
, ‘
Lemure
’ the
Lemur
, not
Namur
(‘
Namur
at the Nore’). Without the list of shipping Dilkes Loveless had supplied, she would have been…well, quite lost.

But what ‘committee’ did Druce speak of? What ‘society’? Was it the same as that providential company of gentlemen who, by their timely appearance, had prevented Druce from committing murder? Who were
they
? A dizzying array of persons came and went in this part of his
Life
; and, again, not the whole of the story. Why, for instance, should Wheatley act so vengefully towards him, when the swindle involving his portrait had already been successfully accomplished?

Tucker and Wheatley, two more names to be added to the list – Tucker commonly written ‘
Cuker
’; and, like Luker before him, a fiend.

The exchange with Dr Gilliam smacked of something Masonic. Sarah wished that she knew more about the activities of the mysterious Masons.

The school committee, she guessed, must be that of the celebrated Borough-road School in Southwark, its founder Joseph Lancaster. Under the patronage of King George III, it had been Lancaster’s express wish that every poor child in the dominions be taught to read the Bible. ‘A place for everything,’ was his maxim, ‘and everything in its place.’

If Joseph Lancaster, then, at a push, that would make Mr Fox the Quaker, Joseph Fox…

Head swimming, Sarah felt a sense of coming to – awareness that she had fallen asleep in her chair, that she sat alone in a dark room, gone cold. She had been grinding her teeth. Bone curses and superstition; struggling to rise, she groaned out her stomach cramps and stretched. A long day, and too much attention paid to Sir John Lubbock’s theatrics…

Still clutching hold of her notebook, Sarah took up the short candle in the other hand and made her way upstairs, pressing an ear to her father’s door; cursory ablutions, and then preparations made for bed.

Unable to sleep for her whirring thoughts, and in spite of her desperate need, she sat propped, just like Lambert, on a bank of pillows. Firefly glow, the stars of a new constellation; at the end of the bed, reflected candlelight played across the brass inlay of the opened lid of the great sea-chest, filled with her mother’s things. Inspired by night-thoughts of Aetockoe, the princess of New Zealand, she had woken to rummage through it early that same morning – or was it the day before? No, not yet midnight. For many years the trove had not seen light of day. She retrieved many of the objects from within: the hairbrush inlaid with mother-of-pearl, reinstated on the dresser; the old nightdress her mother wore. Sarah had only been a girl when these had disappeared into the depths of the coffer. Now that she was a woman, full-grown, the dress fitted her perfectly – too perfectly. Other hand-me-downs hung from the cupboard and curtain-rail, unspoilt but in need of airing.

More things, childhood memories, lay buried at the bottom of the chest, but Sarah had not yet touched them: never before could she have braved the day, too afraid of dissolving in tears at every moment. They were relics, preserved against the day…some vain hope, a day that would never come.

Events did not sit well with her: nowhere was the fate of Aetockoe’s baby girl mentioned, or even pondered – if Druce even knew it. The
Petition
within the manuscript had read ‘
distant from his child as his self nfome
’.

Elusive Druce; she thought both more and less of him as the result; and Lambert too, distant from his child as his self-infamy.

The notebook lay open in her lap, ready to receive her thoughts. Her pen hovered, loaded with ink with which to darken a fresh, blank page. She wrote it out in note form. 

For an unlettered man, Druce was at times possessed of rare eloquence. What was that awkward phrase, that came just before?

Sarah did her best to replicate the slant and loops of the hand she knew well from long hours in study of the manuscript.

A harness? There had been a correction above it, but the ink was too faded to make it out. ‘Heinous’? That made no grammatical sense.

Traces of a rubric – against the spider-scrawl of red ink, the blaze of white page was fearsome: her eyes watered from puzzling overlong.

An ‘
heiress
’ perhaps; or ‘
her highness
’, meaning Aetockoe? No, he knew very well she was no real princess. ‘Wracked by the loss of an heiress, and distant from his child as his self-infamy.’

His self-loathing was justified – an heiress, abandoned. But what, anyway, would have been her likely inheritance?

Sarah’s eyes burned like twin coals in her head. All the crowding objects in the room appeared unstable, looming near then far: a thick mist, like smoke, and flying colours shot about before them. She knew it was her own fault, working each night in such low light conditions, all in short-sighted quest of economy. Too many years of close reading without spectacles had anyway begun to spoil her vision.

The circle of light about her rapidly diminished, the bedside candle guttering. The darker it became, the brighter seemed the glare of the open page.

She closed the book.

Phut-phut-phut
came that panting intake of oxygen, the whippoorwill call of drowning wick. As if on cue the room was plunged into darkness.

The sound carried on. It came from downstairs.

‘…Father?’

It is another fine and clear day.
Warri
the wind shows his strength.

Brippoki enters into the canal waters. He wears a crown of marsh grass, broadleaf frond beneath obscuring his face and beard. In one hand he carries his dilly-bag, empty, and in the other a
tat-tat-ko
– a very long, tapered rod, the last joint of which is a twig tied with
witchi
, bulrush-string, in the form of a deadly noose.

Submerged up to his chin, he wades gently towards
mallanbool
, that stretch of water where he has previously planted the lengths of roosting-stick.
Warri
makes waves, disguising his approach. His liver shrivels. No diving-birds perch there.

He floats a while in hope, then catches sight of an even better prospect wending its way downstream. It glides closer, a stately white swan. He must be swift and sure – a single blow from its beak might break his arm. Leaving go of his
tat-tat-ko
, he takes a deep breath and submerges. He means to seize the legs and pull the bird sharply under, snapping the powerful neck, breaking both wings for good measure.

A boil of bubbles startles the swan. It takes immediate flight. Brippoki breaks surface in a thrash of limbs. Choking, spluttering, he is barely able to drag himself to the bank.

Kau-we? Kumpu! Kuna! Wuhrm-numbool kuna!
Whatever this shit is, it does not deserve the name of water!

Only when the wind blows is the air not foul and choking. The smoke of a million fires finally clears, for the first time in days. A huge commercial gas works stands revealed, less than 500 paces north of Brippoki’s campsite.

The sickly cloud and its smell have seeped into his bones, these last days. A fool to his senses, senses fouled, the willow, the stream, the rushes before him no
longer seem quite natural. Collapsed within the ruins of his makeshift shelter, Brippoki shivers on a sickbed of leaves, weaker, and still weaker.

The trains scream as they pass overhead, making the ground tremble.

When the land is no good, a body must move on – but where?
Walypela
spreads himself over the whole of the earth, like a heavy, foul-smelling blanket.

Before he is born, the
walypela
, the
Ngamadjidj
, come up
Karawalla
, yellow-rain river, seen crossing the lands next to their own; and then their own. By the time he is a baby, they have already come to
Konongwootong
. Taken it. As payment for their land, the
Wootong
clan steals their sheep. The Whyte brothers shoot them all down, so the story goes.
Ngamadjidj
then come to
Mar-deer-um
. The
Darkogang Gundidj
live there.
Darkogangs
take many licks from the thunder stick.
Mar-deer-um
becomes Muntham Station.

And so the story goes.

Ngamadjidj
take the
Jardwa
lands. The
Jardwa
come to live on the land the
Wudjubalug
belong to. His people make war with the
Jardwadjali
, when he is only a boy.

The land can only support one. That is the Way. More than one child at any one time, and two will starve.

Brippoki thinks of his
be-anna
, his blood father, and compassion bows his head. He is known only as
Rockootarap
, ‘one whose wife is dead’

His mother, she wanders up from country far to the south,
mainmait
, and his father takes pity on her – so the story goes, from before he is born. Once she is gone, he is nothing, not belonging to No place. Brippoki is only
Kertameru
, a number, a small child at this time. His care falls to Old Aunty, his father’s sister.

Blood must answer blood.

Ngamadjidj
does not stand against the spears to take his punishment, so they spear the friends and relatives of the dead. His father is no good. He does not take his punishment well – a spear in the thigh makes him lame. He wanders their new lands in misery, or else hangs about the
walypela
houses, begging for food, more often drink – for rum, for gin. His dingo is shot for going after chickens, and he tries to spear Old Aunty for it.

A wife gives value when a man has none. Once
Rockootarap
’s wife, his mother, is gone, poor father mourns, but does not replace her. Got to give him respect for that.

Lambert, as a young man, would take long hikes into the mountains, exploring. He once told Sarah about extinguishing his lamp deep inside a cave, far underground, an accident revealing a natural wonder. Gradually, an ever so subtle light seemed to shine – illumination, he realised, coming from within the rocks themselves. Sarah had often admired Brippoki’s black skin: unless greased, he returned no light. The hidden depths of his black eyes, however,
had on occasion yielded something similar, suggesting frequencies of light that existed beyond sight – beyond average human perception, at least.

She had first suspected it when they walked the colonnades of the Royal Naval Hospital, Whit Monday in Greenwich, without an inkling of what he saw; his world view drawn from another source, the blazing blacklight of his imagination or else a unique brand of faith.

Brippoki was so very far from average.

A block south of the British Museum, Sarah sat within the nave of St George’s, Bloomsbury, the blackened church with its aberrant north–south orientation. She had come here to pray for her father.

Diamond shapes, glowing pink and red; a sliver of blue; shards of yellow – others scattered across the cool dark flared so bright they seemed almost liquid silver. The sunlight faltered. Sarah blinked against a phosphorescent
afterimage
, etched, as it were, into the air itself. Wherever she looked, there it also was, within her; a magical effect, achieved without magic – merely coloured light, filtered through stained glass, splashed against the deep brown wood of the pews.

She prayed for her father. She prayed for her mother. She prayed for Brippoki; even for Druce.

For her own sake she asked nothing, except forgiveness for what she was about to do.

Presenting the small pink card, the Ordinary Reading-ticket – her means of entry into the library – Sarah could not help but look at its reverse.

Without even looking at her card or noting her down in the Register, the young attendant on duty waved her through.

Not until the hour before dawn had her father finally ceased struggling for breath and fallen into a slumber. He had been sleeping soundly when Sarah had left the house.

It wasn’t his first attack. Temporary setbacks, that was all they were; disturbed nights.

Dr Epps assured her sleep was the best tonic; and that, if Lambert was able to sleep at all, things couldn’t really be that bad. If she wished – oh, yes, she wished very much – he would pay them a return visit on Saturday morning. She should get some rest herself, and not worry about it.

There was little chance of that.

On sunny days, the central dais appeared the focal point of the sun’s concentrated eye. Sarah looked towards where George Bullen, the superintendent, sat in surveillance of the entire Reading-room. She purposely chose to situate herself at short table XVI, adjoining long table T – one of only two spots in the public part of the library where she could not be directly observed.

Really, thought Sarah, she shouldn’t have been there; it was entirely wrong for her to be out. But then, she was there for
his
sake – to set herself free.

Only first, she needed to understand. She must understand.

One final circuit around the shelves led to her text of last resort: the second volume of Edward John Eyre’s
Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the years 1840–1 –
specifically, the catalogued supplement:
An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines, and the State of their Relations with Europeans.

This well-thumbed book, opened on the desktop in front of her, was one she had formerly and very deliberately passed over because of its author, the notorious ‘Monster of Jamaica’. She could hardly credit the evidence in front of her own eyes – the voice of reason coming from the least likely of sources. How could this comparatively enlightened and sympathetic overview be the work of the same man?

At the time of his account, Eyre had been living in South Australia for over a decade, as resident magistrate of the district of Adelaide and the Murray River system, a place more densely populated by natives than any other in that colony. Prior to his arrival in October 1841, frightful scenes of hostility, bloodshed, rapine and murder between the natives and settler squatters had been of frequent occurrence.

Aborigines were Eyre’s constant companions, but as employees or servants. In quest of peace, therefore, he went to where no settler had ventured, to make himself familiar with tribesmen in their native state.

Out of all the many authors Sarah had consulted, only Eyre showed insight sufficient to entertain ideas of their religion, citing cave paintings discovered by Captain Grey as indicative of system and reflection in their minds, and avowing that other conclusions owed more to the carelessness and ignorance of enquirers.

Of all the experts she had attended, it took Eyre to solve the mystery of why, on that fateful Monday nearly a fortnight ago, Brippoki had fled shrieking from her parlour, quite possibly never to return.

Mr Eyre declared, ‘I have never known a case of twins among the Aborigines, and Mr Moorhouse informs me that no case has ever come under his observation.’

Twins – this, she had no doubt, explained the obscene and revolting sin which missionaries among them could not even bring themselves to pronounce: child-killing.

If a child were born a twin, it and its sibling would be killed, smothered in sand. The slaughter of twins was an imperative. Given all of her burdens, her duties, the inconstancy of supply in an arid land, a mother could not spare more than one arm to carry an extra infant. Such a hardhearted act was made easier by dint of superstition. Twins were discounted as ‘
manu-tjitji
’, malignant spirit children.

Joseph and Josiah Druce – the names alone perhaps contained unholy power; more dread lay in the combination of two together.

Brippoki is still
Parnko
, a young boy, when men from his mob camp near
Mokepille
, ‘not many trees’, to join with
Barbardin
and
Djab
Wurrung
warriors for raids on sheep at ‘spear point’, now Ledcourt Station. The
Nundadjali
formerly belonged to these lands, until Briggs, the first
walypela
, at spear point shot them down. By and by he learns to live with them, and go hunting ’roo instead. Many tears are shed when he moves on.

The new boss, Boyd, has a headman name of ‘Hamilton’. So the story goes, Boyd tells his man not to worry if blackfellows take a few sheep. Hamilton don’t listen, and buys mantraps. He’s always on horseback, more beast than man, patrolling his fences, a gun in each hand. When Hamilton comes across any hunting party, he breaks their spears and shields and spikes their water-skins. Two and two blackfellows are shot and killed out
Wurri-wurri
, along the
mallee
scrub. Rose – the stickybark next door – says Boyd complains. The men and not we are the masters, he says. The lost clans of six lands aim to make Hamilton listen,
Barbardin, Djab Wurrung, Jaggilbulug
, lake people from around
Ngalbagutja
, the moody people – and
Wudjubalug
.

A new
walypela
law goes against gathering, and any
boree
is soon broken up. In any dispute, accused and witnesses alike end up in a neck chain, rounded up and taken away for trial. Same time as the raids,
Rockootarap
goes along to the station like always, to beg a little. Seized and chained to a tree for two moons, he’s off to jail in Adelaide. Never seen again.

Parnko
is already ‘orphan’, the meaning of that name – the bottle took his father away long time before. If
Rockootarap
ever seen him, he bursts into tears, and can’t even speak. He looks at the boy and sees his mother.

His mother.

One night long ago, in the dry, the men are off hunting. That night,
gins
and little piccaninnies are burning the bush, to get at the small game and make sweet new grass.
Ngamadjidj
comes along. The
gins
and piccaninnies are resting on the banks of the
Wimmera
, at
Worrowen
, ‘place of sorrow’. Night turns day, sounds of thunder, and then night darker than ever.

Brippoki clings to his mother, to her bosom, the hole through it – that night long ago, when he is a baby.

‘The grand error of all our past or present systems – the very
fons et origo mali –
appears to me to consist in the fact, that we have not endeavoured to blend the interests of the settlers and Aborigines together; and by making it the interest of both to live on terms of kindness and good feeling with each, bring about and cement that union and harmony which ought ever to subsist between people inhabiting the same country. So far, however, from our measures producing this very desirable tendency, they have hitherto, unfortunately, had only a contrary effect.