The Clay Dreaming (53 page)

Only faith that was fragile sought challenge in every little thing. Only a questing faith might sow seeds of progress – truth sought not only in word, but also in action. Underestimating the capability of men like Brippoki arrested their development – in both concept and practice held them back, as surely as Adam did Eve.

Except God cursed knowledge withal.

Sarah stood for a while at the parlour window, unwilling, just yet, to fasten it shut.

She trembled to consider a universe filled with
noumena
that her God might not be the single answer to, after all.

‘Father,’ said Sarah, ‘what do you remember of the painter John Downman?’

Lambert’s rheumy eyes, weary with sadness, circuited the room before settling on her. He resembled not a snail so much as a giant Galapagos turtle, or South Seas tortoise, flipped over onto its back.

‘Downman?’ he repeated.

Sarah suddenly wished that she had let him sleep: it was later than she thought.

‘Sir John,’ she said. ‘Sir John Downman.’

Lambert’s sad eyes rolled away again. He seemed to submerge within himself. Speaking at last, his voice gargled in his throat.

‘He liked to play…with toads,’ he said. ‘I was eight. Or nine. There…in the garden, at Went House…Swan Street…on the corner of Frog Lane.’

They both smiled, their smiles quite unalike.

‘Downman,’ said Lambert, ‘talked to the birds…and animals.’ Searching the ceiling, he enumerated a distant menagerie. ‘Tame toads, a favourite dove… two cats…and a pair of robins.’ He smiled some more. ‘They came to him when he called. He taught them…tricks.’

‘What else?’ she prompted. ‘What else do you remember? Do you know what happened to him, after that?’

She should not exhaust him with her enquiries. He seemed short of breath.

‘He very much enjoyed the company of the rich and famous,’ said Lambert – slow, but steady. ‘They were his favourite sitters. He was…a very good painter. Very popular…at one time.’

While resident in Town Malling, Downman had maintained rooms at No.188 Piccadilly. Even after the old man returned to London, he and young
Lambert had maintained a lively correspondence, prior to his quitting the capital for good, in 1817.

‘Business…had greatly fallen off,’ said Lambert. ‘He was forced to retire.’

He gave Sarah a querulous look, no more than a glimmer, unsteady in his eye. Slowly and surely he shrank back inside his shell.

Sarah began to clear away the supper articles, piling them onto a tray.

Was the coincidence too fantastic? The possibility might not even have occurred to Sarah had Druce’s amanuensis not written ‘down’ for ‘done’. Done…by Downman? Fancy, Lambert would have said, finds the facts it wants. Of course she had no proof. Three doors down, on the corner of
Charlotte-
street
, a man named Louis Hermann maintained premises as a picture dealer. She might enquire there, come daylight.

Sir John Downman had painted a great many royal portraits; Queen Charlotte, the Princess Royal and daughter of George III; Frederick the Great, King of Prussia; and those of other exalted persons such as Lord Nelson; Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; and Sarah Kemble, the ‘Tragic Muse’. Among the great families, procuring a ‘Downman Head’ became a fashionable cult. Fashion, alas, was ever fickle. His heyday had been in the 1780s: if, in 1807, his favouritism had become so debased that he should portray the Larkin family, then by 1813 it feasibly might have encompassed the likes of Joseph Druce. That, or else Druce was the dupe of a street-sharp charlatan posing as the genuine article, ‘His Majesty’s miniature-drawer’.

In his dotage, poor old Sir John had ultimately failed in business – and where were his society friends then? Nor was his star alone in falling. Lambert’s mother, her own grandmama, had been the daughter of a baronet; yet, looking at them now, who could imagine it? So, too, the Twyttens of Royston Hall had shown no favours following the family’s tragic loss, the distaff side all but disowning them. How much further their fortunes could stand to diminish did not bear thinking about.

Woe unto them! for they have gone the way of Cain…clouds they are without water, carried about of winds…Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

Sarah lay in her bed, in the dark, clutching Druce’s manuscript. Old age, ill fortune, recession and hard times, the themes within were all too close to home. A great net tightened about them, woven with the threads of immutable fate.
Every night now she struggled to fall asleep; in fear not of black night, but of what new reality morning light might bring.

Her father dealt in moral absolutes. When he spoke of light, he evoked a perfect morality, and darkness equally perfect immorality. Each was a manifestation of consciousness made palpably real; right and wrong; good, versus evil.

Without the one, there could be no sense of the other. Pure light was no more visible than pure darkness; only the two combined, extremes meeting. The innate power of darkness was as the absence of light: it was darkness that defined the essential features of persons and landscape.

Lambert, in his fealty to the letter of the Word, held progress only ever made by shining light into darkness. Yet if, like the painter, one allowed for only light and shade co-dependent to be at all effective, then the world might be more clearly understood. There might be virtue in embracing the darkness.

How completely Druce’s miserable existence had come to align itself with his mother’s curse, the mark of Cain indelibly inscribed on his face for all to see; cursed, as God cursed the serpent, to go upon his belly and eat clay. Sarah acknowledged him an unlucky individual, although often as not his troubles were duly his own. She also knew him as the vengeful type, his propensity for violence and bearing a grudge already noted, as well as the savagery of his temper. Often, when repeating his wrathful oaths, she found the incandescence of his rage – so ably communicated across time, through space – hard to resist.

The vivacity of his low character kept getting the better of him – and of her. Light, and leading; what, after all, was the worth of a stained glass reputation? Without the black in between, one might never make the distinction.

‘Your goodness must have an edge to it,’ wrote Emerson, ‘else it is none.’

Druce’s
Petition
, dictated within the
Life
, appeared to be a draft in preparation: even perhaps as late as 1819 he had persisted in his desire to return to New Zealand. The
Memoirs
from 1810; his 1813
Memorial
; the
Petition
; his
Life
itself – he reinvented his story the entire time in that same forlorn hope.

Druce’s choice of alias invoked the inspirational Scotsman Robert the Bruce. He maybe saw something of himself in the sufferance of that legendary spider – never giving up, and never giving in, no matter how many times his efforts were in vain; his life’s work left, as he was, hanging in tatters. Ambition might ennoble, even if it extended no further than the capture of a fly.

‘George Bruce’ returned to England in the
Porpoise
. Sarah assumed that on board the same ship sailed Commodore Bligh, one of the very instruments of fate whose action had frustrated his earlier efforts to return to New Zealand. If ever Druce were predisposed to commit a murder, surely this then would have been it – that of the former Captain Bligh, of the
Bounty
.

A shadowy individual, that he was, and certainly vengeful in spirit, but so far as she knew Druce wasn’t a murderer. Yet what might any man, ‘poor muck-worm’ or valiant spider, prove himself capable of, when fighting for his very survival?

The taste of blood was not so very different from that of dirt: both tasted of iron.

Joseph Druce. George Bruce. Jack alive. Joe-Jack. The villain had two faces. Driven to commit the deadliest of all sins, his soul would then be lost forever.

If Joseph Druce was not a murderer already, Sarah feared he might yet be.

The great Spirit Ancestors dwell in the depths of the earth. One by one they emerge, pushing up the earth as they come. Caves, rocks and waterholes formed, these certain sacred places are revisited for all of eternity.

In the feast days of the dry the clans gather to exchange gifts on the
Wirrengren
plain, a past burning of roots and stumps, or at
Banyenong
, ‘a possum a long time ago’, for the purposes of a
corroboree
. The ceremonies they enact include marriage partnership, initiation rites, and the mourning of the dead.

In Brippoki’s fifth summer, he travels there with Old Aunty. Father, inconsolable, stays behind. More than 600 heads from any number of mobs normally attend the festivities. Numbers this season are sorely depleted. Recent disputes and age-old scores are laid aside in their greater need for healing.

As they come near to
Banyenong
, the young men are sent ahead with the nets of greeting. In the evening, the nets are returned. At sunrise the next day they proceed, to find their hosts seated together in a clearing, patiently awaiting their arrival. The men form a long row, painted for battle and with their weapons arrayed,
gins
and children clustering some way behind. Warriors of the
Wudjubalug
form a second line opposite this first, their ranks soon swelled by the arrival of further clans, until everyone expected has assembled. From where the boy
Parnko
huddles, he watches as the
gins
advance into the space between the two parties, their heads bowed and coated with lime. Throwing down their possum cloaks and
rocko
bags, they extract pieces of natural glass, sharpened flint and shell. Hungrily these glitter in the sunshine. Howling, loud and melancholy, the
gins
slash at the flesh of their thighs, their backs and breasts. Blood pours
from their wounds until they are red from head to foot, more blood than the dry ground can soak up. Their shuffling feet splash in the streams. Everyone else sits in silence, except, from each group, a designated
bourka
. One by one these stride forward, and in terms of violent outrage declaim the losses their people have suffered. At this point, the challenges and wounding thrusts necessary to satisfy the aggrieved parties should take place. Many spears –
leipa
– are brandished, but none is thrown. There have been too many losses of late for anyone to stomach more. The chief mourners stagger back behind the lines, their many voices raised in chorus. The entire company takes up the death-wail.

The circle of campfires burns brightly through the evening, each group ascribed a place according to the direction in which they have come. In turn, they take up positions at the centre of the circle, to sing and dance. Performances last the whole night through. Swallowed pride drives them on to greater and greater exertions, in their efforts to outdo and outlast one another.

Their bodies are painted with red and white ochre, heads strung with feathers or woolly with down, grass seeds stuck to the dried sacred blood let from their veins. Some carry bunches of feathers or leaves, tree limbs lengthening their own. Basic rhythms are tapped out using two short sticks, or by clashing together their weapons –
waddy, leowell, leipa. A bourka
of repute sets the time and tune.

‘
Kartipaltapaltarlo padlara kundando
,’ he sings.

The women sit before the dancers in a line or semi-circle. They wear possum skins, white down banding their foreheads, and horns of cockatoo feather. Removing their cloaks, they roll them tightly into a ball, and strike them with their palms in time to the beat.

Songs are sung in dialects so ancient that all meaning has been lost, and only the melody remains. The dancers shimmer by firelight, moving quick, quick, slow. Their dances portray the animals, the thrill of the hunt, great exploits in love and war. Each black limb painted with a broad white stripe, reanimated skeletons live out past glories, thighs wide apart and quivering madly.

Tears streak the faces of spectators.

He remembers. As part of the ritual call and response, before each repeat of the chorus, different solo performers ‘ride’ into the ring. Some introduce strange new words in English. He remembers the sound. These players of the stranger men are challenged and questioned, beaten down or forced back, or else their opponents collapse to the ground in a dead faint – scenes distressing to the young
Parnko
. He remembers the sound of their voices, in the night.

Brippoki stands and sings the curse of vengeance – a song of power filled with all of the righteousness of
Bugaragara
, with invocations of
tjurunga
. His enemy is no better than a wild dog. He will sing him to sleep, steal on his camp, and strike to kill him where he lies.

He remembers all of it: the grief, the fury, and the fear.

The songs are wild that night. At certain intervals each dance halts, the entire company raising their hands to the stars, the campfires of their Ancestors.

‘WAUGH!’ their voices cry out as one.

‘WAUGH! WAUGH!’ he cries, until the approach of dawn, until his voice is cracked and gone.

They are off to see the King of Corsica.

Sarah walks the graveyard. Hand-in-hand with her mother she walks, although desperate to run. No birds sing. The light itself is smeary. Heavy rains have fallen all night, and through the best of the day. The air does not smell sweet and fresh, as it should after a storm. It stinks. What is that smell? On her left, and on their right, the topsoil has been washed away.

She sees for herself what the dreadful smell is. Sticking out of the ground, at their feet, are mottled green hands, stiff as claws. Her mouth and nostrils fill with the stench of rotting flesh…

Sarah Larkin woke to the sound of her own screaming. Her throat felt raw and tight, her tongue swollen like a slug.

She lay sweating, hot, then cold, and unable to move her head. The
atmosphere
seemed electrified, filled with bursts of strange light, although the room was in total darkness. It was early morning still – after midnight, but not yet dawn.

Nightmare soaked her pillow – no, not nightmare, childhood memory. Her mother, Frances, had taken her to visit William Hazlitt and Theodore, King of Corsica; in their graves in St Anne’s churchyard, Soho. The cholera epidemics crowding London’s cemeteries beyond capacity, the latest victims were stacked six-or seven-deep in shallow interments. It only took a rain shower to expose the bodies.

She had been walking with her mother, mottled green hand in her hand, through the graveyard.

Pulling herself together, Sarah rose to fetch a glass of water. Lingering at the doorway to Lambert’s room, she heard the wet struggle of his lungs.

The night is thick, the brutal sort of darkness one can feel. A light moves about in the house opposite. Brippoki shifts position on the roof to gain a better point of vantage.

Thara moves about her
gunya
, carrying a candle. It lights up the white of her nightdress like the flame of a torch. From her chamber, she moves downstairs.
The firefly hovers in between floors for a time, and then disappears to the back of the house. Brippoki scrambles up. He is about to make his way around to the farther side when it reappears, hovering down another flight.

Thara enters the room he knows best. She stands, looking into the large mirror above the mantelpiece. She studies herself in the glass, at great length, as he has seen her do before. He is too far away to make out the expression on her face. She takes up scissors, and begins to attack her silver-streaked hair, throwing great chunks of it into the unlit fireplace.

Something then – a noise? – makes her freeze. She grasps the candle and runs up the stairs, and into her father’s bedchamber. The curtains there are drawn.

She does not emerge again.

He creeps back to his former position, concealed within the eaves. The night is chill. His bones are weary, his head heavy. Brippoki dares not sleep.

Instead he scans the night for the glitter of predatory eyes.

The first tracks they discover are beneath the stony cliffs of
Merri-merri-winnum
. Soon, more are found, where the swamps of
Engottene-nurmwurm
fringe the plains of
Cattiong nyam nyam
. These are still fresh.

Their
corroboree
over for another season, his party returns home, to their lands further to the southwest, where Emu’s egg rolls away.

A small stream waters the valley in which they camp. The turf around the banks is heavily scarred, the soft clay, at points, churned into a white and liquid mud. They are greatly disturbed by the tracks of mysterious
Ngamadjidj
. The No men have yet to see a white man. They consult with the womenfolk who survived that fateful night at
Worrowen
.

Ngamadjidj
are horrific creatures, having two heads, as many legs as a beetle, and running just as fast. Their long and dragging footprints lead right up to the water’s edge. There are also marks of a great many two-pointed toes – the white man’s women, so their own
gins
say, are exceedingly ugly and smelly.

A finger of smoke rises from the far country spread before them. Some of the younger warriors are all for following the trail and taking their revenge. The wise men advise against it. So they set up camp in a hollow next to the stream, careful to keep the smoke of their own fire low.

A call from the surrounding brush alerts them. When they look up, they see white faces. Everyone scatters, shrieking at the tops of their voices. They leave behind bags and weapons.
Parnko
, he shits in terror. The stranger fellows stand their ground and cry ‘cooey’. Everyone stays silent, in the trees or crouched behind them, until long after the evil has gone.

A few darks later and they meet the same party again, standing on the opposite banks of the broad
Wimmera
. Feeling safer, they take the time to study the curious whitefellows. Spears are brandished – threats, and furious reproach
– and, as evening falls, a war dance performed. The whites sit impassive throughout. In the morning, following a sleepless night, envoys from either side meet mid-river and exchange intimacies. They say they come from the sea, and present many useless gifts for which his people are obliged to give up their nets and a few weapons. They want to know where to find fresh water in the regions ahead. Directions are given to
Keyinga
, the lake.

Everyone is glad to have made peace. For the ghosts of their dead to return from the grave, and not know them, is a terror they wish ended.

The sky to the east grows lighter. Soon Emu’s egg will roll around, and it will be time again for Brippoki to move on – aimless, alone, and in fear.