The Devil's Eye (10 page)

A little bent Malay cut the grass with a scythe. He shuffled forward like a tiny loose-skinned elephant waving its trunk over the greenest street on Thursday Island.

The Honourable John Douglas wondered whether the man could ever uncurl his bent form. He appeared from nowhere once every week in the wet season to cut the grass that grew furiously day and night.

The smell of it filled the air.

It was evening and Douglas stopped to watch the grass cutter, a man whose hopes and dreams, like his own, had been played out. He believed that he felt a kinship; they may well have been the same age, but it was hard to tell with the Asiatic races.

He walked on, considering his own finished career. He had recently lobbied humbly for a seat on the Queensland Legislative Council, a seat that should have been his due. It now seemed a foolish thought, that the party might offer him a seat and he could end
his days in relative comfort in Brisbane. He still had something to offer, but Brisbane now seemed further away than his grave.

He found himself at the front gate, and looked up at the Residence. It had been a happy place once but now, like a ruined church, it looked worse for what it had once been. He had a mind to go back down to Pearson’s hotel for company this evening, but he didn’t have the energy and the new cook had already committed him to dinner.

Tsk
,
tsk.
The blade kept a rhythm with the crickets that sang away the day’s end. The port was slowly being lit by the few vessels that rested on the dark Ellis Channel. Lights were appearing in the town.

The Residence had such authoritative views of the channel and the islands that the garrison commander wanted to put a field gun right here, in his front yard. It would mean that Douglas could level the town if he wanted to.

The islands turned blue-black. All was quiet except for the crickets, and the blade through the last light on the ground, and the Malay now humming something without tune.

The evening really was beautiful and he wished his girls were there to share it with him. At that moment, the little Malay looked up at him and, without stopping, smiled toothlessly. A sheller in retirement, no
doubt. Douglas nodded in return, opened the gate, and went up the path.

His bags remained inside the open front door, unpacked, where they’d been delivered from the
White Star.
It was disgraceful, he knew, but he simply hadn’t had the energy to unpack them himself and he didn’t want the Japanese servant to do it. Perhaps Maggie was right to bring Hope back, whatever the cost.

He smelled chicken coming from the kitchen and, sneaking into the dining room, he grabbed a glass and the whisky decanter from the sideboard and stepped quietly back out onto the verandah, feeling like a thief in his own damned house.

He sat in a wicker chair. The darkness was almost complete and the whisky began to ease the pains of body and soul. He’d once, in court, asked a mainland Aborigine why he drank. The poor wretch was plainly on the way to drinking himself to death and had been brought before Douglas for deserting a pearling lugger. The man had said, ‘It gives me hope.’

That was the simple truth of the bottle: the delusion that there was hope, when the reality of course was damnation. For someone already without hope, though, what difference did it make? When reality was hell, delusion in a bottle was not to be condemned too harshly.

John Douglas faced east, away from Asia and towards Melanesia. The breeze had died and he could
hear the Jap servant complaining to himself in the kitchen between the thumps of the cleaver.

Just then, the eastern horizon lit up from end to end. He could see the outline of Horn Island against the night sky, an imperfect impression of a leaf being the ghost that he could still see long after the lightning had gone. He waited for the thunder, but there was none.

There were footsteps on the path and Douglas stood.

‘Telegram,’ he heard from the darkness.

‘Oh dear God, not again.’

‘Is that you, your Honour?’

Douglas thought about retreating into the darkness of the house, where Beach may not be able to find him, but he said, ‘Oh well, damn it, come up then. Come up.’

The postmaster appeared from the gloom. ‘My word. There’s a storm in the offing,’ he said.

‘Is that what your instruments say?’

‘As a matter of fact, no. I just saw—’

‘Yes, yes, all right. Sit. Whisky?’

‘Oh please don’t—’

‘I’ll get you a glass.’

Douglas stumbled about the darkened dining room and found by feel a crystal tumbler, taking it to the verandah where it cracked against the decanter.

He poured Beach a blind measure, sloshing some over the side, but no matter. He sat.

‘Thank you,’ he heard the man say.

They sat deep in the worn wicker chairs and looked
out over the channel. After a moment’s silence, Douglas said, ‘What’s in the damned telegram then, Mr Beach?’

He heard Beach shift uncomfortably. ‘It’s confidential.’

‘Nonsense. Who’s it from?’

Beach paused. ‘Jack Hamilton.’

‘Oh, dear God.’

He heard Beach take a sip of whisky before saying, ‘You should probably read it yourself, Mr Douglas.’

‘Well I can’t, because no one’s lit a damned lamp,’ his voice rising to a shout directed to the Jap inside, and then to Beach he said, ‘So you’d better tell me what it says. Consider it a command from Her Majesty’s representative to Her Majesty’s servant, if you like.’

‘Oh yes, I see. Well, it seems that Mr Hamilton, M-P, is asking for more information about this man Thomas.’

‘He’d know more than I do. He has Thomas in the flesh. Can’t he interrogate the man himself?’

‘Ah, well,’ said Beach. ‘That appears to be the problem.’

‘Don’t tell me he’s dead now, too.’

‘No, no, it’s much more serious. He’s vanished.’

Douglas thumped down the glass. ‘Damn it, Mr Beach!’

‘I’m terribly sorry.’

Douglas took a deep breath and looked out to sea. Another blaze of lightning lit the horizon.

‘It’s not your damned fault. Nothing to damned well do with you. Don’t apologise.’

‘Of course,’ said Beach. ‘Thank you.’

They sat together in the dark.

‘But you did say that you knew this man Thomas.’

‘If it’s the same Thomas,’ said Beach. ‘And only on a professional basis, of course. He would deliver a package and I’d help him fill out the insurance forms.’

‘He worked for Bowden, I take it.’

‘Oh, so you…? Well, I do believe he bought and sold pearls for Mr Bowden’s companies, yes.’

‘Yes. Does Bowden know yet that his pearl buyer has been speared?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes, Mr Beach.’

Douglas heard the wicker creak and Beach’s head bang against the wood of the wall behind him as he feigned collapse while seated. ‘Oh my.’

‘This conversation is confidential. Don’t worry,’ said Douglas. ‘But it would have been uncomfortable, wouldn’t it? For Bowden. If Thomas was dead or in hospital and there was an investigation.’

Beach breathed, ‘Absolutely.’

‘Vanishing would seem to be the best result for everyone.’

‘I suppose it would.’

‘Illicit pearl dealing’s not something anyone wants to own up to.’

Beach said, ‘Oh, I don’t believe it’s illegal to buy your own pearls.’

Douglas leant forward.

‘Mr Beach. If a Kanaka has a pearl, that pearl by definition is stolen goods. Buying it back not only
ignores the crime, but encourages it. The transaction itself is illicit. And there’s the question of taxes. Is the sale declared? Of course not.’

Beach was silent.

‘Well,’ said Douglas, sitting back, ‘no doubt the police will eventually get to the bottom of it.’

Not a hope now, of course, but he let Beach ruminate.

Without a victim or any suggestion of pearls to complicate the matter, it was clear now to Douglas how the spearing would play out politically.

It was obvious that Jack Hamilton, the Honourable Member for Cook, was fishing only for an issue for re-election. Another spearing did him no harm. An Indian speared wouldn’t get him much sympathy, but perhaps he could make something of the alien question. A speared Indian, even if it wasn’t fatal, was also likely to have the Labourites crowing. He expected a telegram shortly from Alex Riddel.

‘The dead man. Joe Harry,’ said Douglas, aloud. ‘The name sounded familiar and I found that he’d been in court a few months ago. Broke someone’s arm with a stick. He was with the Clark fleet.’

‘Oh?’

‘Could he and Thomas have been in business together?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Beach, but he sounded distracted now and Douglas let him think for a while.

‘Well,’ said Douglas, ‘if we suddenly have no body and no witness we might not even have to set up an inquest,’
and he stood and went to the door to shout at the Jap to set the table for two and light the damned lamps.

‘Oh, no need to go to any trouble. I should get back, anyway,’ said Beach, when Douglas returned.

‘Nonsense. This man’s the best cook on the island. Do you like chicken?’

The horizon was now pulsing with light.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Beach, but I appear to have been cross-examining you. Bad habit,’ Douglas continued. ‘It’s just that my daughter’s down there and it makes me uneasy to hear about people getting themselves speared and disappearing. I’d like to believe that the police have things under control and that the pearling fleets aren’t havens for rogues, but no one seems to be able to reassure me on those points.’

He could see Beach’s face now, lit by the distant storm. It looked old, white, cadaverous—a trick of the lightning, no doubt.

‘You have daughters, I take it, Mr Beach?’

‘Five.’

‘My word.’

Silence. And then Beach said, ‘I think we’re in for a long show tonight,’ as the lightning flashed and Douglas poured more whisky into his glass. They watched for a while. ‘Oddly quiet, though.’

Douglas held his glass up to the east, and the lightning turned the liquid red.

‘
I beheld Satan
,’ he said, ‘
as lightning fall from heaven
.’

The wind that had blessed the fleet was withdrawn again on Friday morning. The schooners woke in a steaming pond, the smoke from their galleys collapsing onto the water.

Maggie Porter cooked her husband’s breakfast under the glare of the Manila cook. She sometimes felt as if she were a stage actress playing ‘The Daughter’ and then ‘The Wife’, but not very well. She had never quite suspended disbelief in her role, even after Alice was born and she became ‘The Mother’.

On a pearling schooner it was difficult enough being a woman. Captain Porter already had a cook and a cabin boy. Maggie was happy enough not to cook or clean, but she had nothing else to do except to dress, feed and bathe Alice, and then watch her sleep.

On this occasion, though, she was determined to feed her husband, and the sweat fell from her chin to sizzle in the pan. The smell of frying turned her stomach, but she persisted. She took the pan to the
main cabin, where she put the bacon and eggs on a white plate beside the white napkin and then she sat to watch him eat.

Alice circumnavigated the table, falling without complaint.

‘I’ll go to the lightship on Sunday,’ she said. ‘Captain Fuhrman says the
Duke of Norfolk
’s due. It slows for the mail, anyway.’

Porter stopped eating to stare at her. ‘No.’ He chewed slowly, breathing loudly through his nose, and said, ‘There’s no damned point. Hope can’t leave Cooktown.’

Maggie gave a short laugh. ‘Why would she want to stay?’

‘Her place is there, yours is here.’

She leant forward, seizing on this admission. ‘And that’s why I’m going. So I can be
here
.’

‘What the devil are you talking about? Damned foolish…’ but he returned to his eggs. He must have seen the sense in it, her father having a nurse and housekeeper and he having his wife back.

Speaking to his plate, he said, ‘Let’s forget about it for the moment. We’ll go ashore today. Take a basket.’

Maggie almost clapped her hands, the change of subject a victory. ‘The three of us?’

‘We’ll take the whaleboat.’

The idea of the three of them being alone, truly alone, made her dizzy. It hadn’t happened in months. Alice could play in the sand. Alice could sit in the water
with her father. Alice could play with sticks and shells, and Alice might even take a nap and they could be
on their own
as they could not aboard the crowded schooner. She would show him what it meant to have a wife by his side.

‘Is it safe?’ said Maggie.

‘What? Oh, the natives have all run away,’ said Porter. ‘Treacherous devils have all taken off for the hills.’ He pointed his fork to where the hills might be.

‘But if they’re treacherous,’ said Maggie, ‘they might not have gone away at all. If they’re treacherous they’d want us to think that they’ve run away, but they might still be there.’

‘What the devil are you talking about now?’

Porter finished eating and she took the plate away. In her cabin she chose cool white cotton dresses for herself and Alice.

And then she sat heavily on the bunk. They’d have an hour or two at the beach and then they’d have to return.

For Maggie, there seemed to be no absolute satisfaction any more in even the simple pleasure of a picnic. Perhaps it was the presence of another life inside her that made her anxious about everything.

And so perhaps the picnic would be a good time to tell Porter her news, that they were to have another baby.

She imagined the range of reactions. Shock, of course. Pleasure? Disappointment? She couldn’t bear
for him to take it badly, but surely the prospect of an heir…

She knew why she was fearful and it was for none of those things. Another baby could not be tolerated aboard the schooner. And Porter would certainly want her to go to Auckland immediately, so they would argue.

She could not go back to Auckland and suffer that loneliness again. It was absolutely necessary that she persuade Hope to return to Thursday Island. Hope could deliver her baby—she was the compromise that both Porter and her father would have to accept.

And Hope would be overjoyed to return. A fling, even with a black man, could be forgotten. She needed to speak to Willie Tanna, though, to be sure.

In a small wooden crate she put Alice’s hat, a cloth doll and a wooden spade. She fetched oranges from the galley, a large blanket on which to sit. A jar of pickled onions. And then she sat again, wondering what on earth she was doing.

Poor Tommy was watching as the whaleboat was lowered with Maggie holding Alice tight. Captain Porter climbed down and took up the oars.

Tommy called out, ‘I’ll keep an eye on things.’ He waved his hat.

Porter said to Maggie, as he rowed towards the shore, ‘For the life of me I don’t know what Mr James Clark was thinking.’

‘Tommy’s an expert in pearls.’

‘Exactly. He’s an expert in being a damned menace.’

A gust made the water shiver around them, but as they approached the shore the heat rose and the wind vanished. A school of fish shattered the surface beneath the bow.

The beach had been swept clean by the morning tide, and Captain Porter leapt out into the clear shallows to pull the whaleboat up onto the sand.

Maggie stepped into the water and was hardly aware of it until she looked down. The wet sand, though, was a pleasure. She lowered Alice, who held tight to two fingers and stood on wobbling legs.

The girl had the dark hair of her father and her mother’s eyes. She crawled on the sand and tried to eat it. She hadn’t walked on sand before, Maggie realised. The beach, too, had probably never seen a white child.

The alien surroundings heightened Maggie’s wonder and fear. As she watched Alice crawling and cooing, Maggie felt a stab of grief, confused again by a rush of contrary emotions. Alice was a baby; now she was a small girl. It was as if in coming ashore she had left one behind.

Alice’s little fingers urgently pulled her towards something higher up on the beach. A cocoa-nut, brown.

‘A good sign,’ said her husband.

‘Is that a sailor’s superstition?’

‘It means there are no blacks around. They’d swoop on this pretty quick. If it’s still here, then they are not.’

But Porter had brought a rifle and displayed it for the wilderness to see on the blanket beside him.

‘Where did the nut come from?’ said Maggie. ‘I haven’t seen a cocoa-nut palm since we left port.’

‘A lot of things bump around in the Coral Sea. It probably came down from New Guinea.’

Alice pushed the thing and it rolled down the beach a short way.

There were more boats in the bay now. A few early luggers wafted in from the shipping channel on fickle breezes. Maggie could see the industrial tower of the lightship in the shipping channel.

In front of her, from Bathurst Head to Cape Melville the world was condensed into a few miles of green water and boats. It contained a collection of men as diverse as God could make them, all sharing the same air, scenery and fate.

To Maggie it all seemed improbably balanced. She could see Alice laughing on the beach, the ships behind her framed by the sea and sky. At that moment, she knew it was a scene that she would never forget and was overwhelmed by the certainty that it would never be this way again.

The sense of grief she’d felt earlier enveloped her and she groped around again for its source. It was grief
in advance
for her babies, grief for this moment that would be gone.

Absurd, at a time of happiness to be aware of its passing and therefore to be denied it. The feeling, though, was unshakable and when her husband came to sit beside her she leant against him and silently wept. He would never understand the tragedy of such a perfectly happy moment.

After some time, she collected Alice and went to the shade. Porter had brought his glass and began examining the sails and masts.

‘Who the hell is that?’ he said to himself.

He appeared to be focusing on one sail, approaching from the north. It came alongside the
Crest of the Wave.

Alice was asleep in her mother’s lap. The heat came off the sand in waves. Large fat flies had come to settle on Maggie’s arms.

Porter exclaimed, ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ and turning to her he said, ‘I’m sorry. We must go back.’

The breeze was at their backs, a small consolation, when they reached the schooner.

Poor Tommy leant over the side.

‘It’s the
North Wales
,’ he yelled down to them, and Porter muttered about getting Tommy occupied at some task in the bilge.

When they came aboard they saw the familiar face of William Powell. Tommy was smoking vigorously beside him and appeared to be more nervous than usual.

‘Drink?’ said Porter, automatically, and the two captains went below to Porter’s cabin.

They emerged a short time later and Porter distractedly handed Maggie a letter.

‘Your father,’ he said. ‘He’s not happy.’

‘You’ve read it?’

‘What? No. Of course not. He sent me a letter, too. So did Mr James Clark.’ He held up two sheets of paper and yelled, ‘Tommy!’

Tommy dragged himself from behind the wheelhouse.

‘Tommy,’ said Porter. ‘Does the name Thomas ring any bells?’

‘That’s my name.’

‘Eh? Oh, I see. No, I mean that other Thomas, of course. The fellow we were told was dead. Seems he was a pearl buyer. You must know him. You seem to be in that line of business.’

Poor Tommy said, ‘Captain Porter, I believe the man who’s buying pearls for Bowden is called Thomas. But did you say Thomas was dead?’

‘Hadn’t you heard? The fellow was one of those coves speared.’

‘Speared?’ Tommy stared at the piece of paper in Porter’s hands.

‘Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that he’s no longer dead. He’s apparently very much alive and in the Cooktown hospital.’

Tommy looked confused.

Porter looked at the letter again. ‘But here’s the interesting news. The man who was with him is dead. And it says here that Thomas has named the dead man as Joe Harry.’

‘Captain Porter!’ said Tommy. ‘That can’t be right. We saw him yesterday.’

‘Of course it’s not damned well right!’ said Porter. ‘But what the hell’s Joe Harry up to? And for that matter, where the hell is he?’

Maggie saw that Tommy was as white as a sheet.