The Gallant (31 page)

“If I’m for the chop, Wexford, I’m takin’ you with me and be damned! You ain’t got the guts to pull that trigger-an’ you know I’ll get you if you do!

Make a run for it, Will, d’you hear me?

The bastard can’t

get

us both!”

Haines flung himself forward on his face and the next instant was scrambling on all fours for the door. Michael closed his finger about the trigger, only to realize that the old flintlock had misfired, and then Josh Simmons was upon him, the bayonet jabbing at him savagely and aiming for his throat. He was

conscious of excruciating pain in his right shoulder.

The musket fell from his grasp, but he managed somehow to ward off a second blow, and with his left hand he wrested the bayonet from his assailant and flung it away.

His senses reeling, he heard Haines yell from the door for Josh to join him. As he slipped to his knees, there was a loud explosion and he guessed that someone-Amos Meldrum, perhaps, or one of his sons-had fired the musket Josh had left behind.

When he staggered to his feet, he saw Amos coming back into the house, a smoking musket in his hand, shaking his head disconsolately.

“They got away, all three of them, devil take them! And I missed the big fellow by a hairsbreadth!”

“We could ride after them, Pa,” Peter urged.

“It’ll only take me a few minutes to saddle a couple of horses. We-was

“No,” his father said reluctantly. “Best leave the troopers to hunt for them. They won’t get far, and at least they’re not armed now, so they won’t do much bushranging. Thanks to our good friend Wexford here, we’re rid of them, praise be to God!” He held out his hand, beaming and clearly greatly relieved. “We’re in your debt, Mr. Wexford.

We-was Michael attempted to take the proffered hand, but there was a red mist floating in front of his eyes, and Amos Meldrum’s face abruptly vanished.

Peter’s voice, seeming to come from a long way away, exclaimed, “He’s been hurt, Pa!

He’s bleeding like a stuck pig!” Hands clutched at him as he slithered to the floor, the mist closing over him to blot out sight and sound, only the awareness of pain remaining and a nightmare vision of Josh Simmons’s face, contorted with rage, as he plunged in with his bayonet.

Fifteen days after he had first arrived at the Meldrums’ farm, Michael climbed

down from the wagon in which Oscar had driven him to the outskirts of Hobart and prepared to make his way on foot to the harbor. The promised seaman’s papers, made out in the name of Thomas Albert Blaney, reposed in the breast pocket of Blaney’s old brass-buttoned jacket, together with a note from his employer, releasing him from his assigned service. They would not bear too close an inspection, since Blaney had been in his late fifties when granted his ticket-of-leave, but . .

. Michael tried to dismiss the worry from his mind.

A ship’s master, short of his complement, would probably refrain from asking too many questions, and he did not intend to linger in Hobart for any longer than he could avoid. His injured arm was still bandaged, but the wound had healed quickly and now incommoded him very little.

Mrs. Meldrum and her daughter Prudence had been excellent nurses, he reflected, conscious once again of the regret he had felt when, no longer needing their services, the time for his departure had finally come.

Amos Meldrum had not pressed him to stay, and he understood the farmer’s reasons. Two different search parties had come to the house in the space of a week-one military, the other composed of mounted police troopers and local constables. They had both announced that they were seeking four escaped convicts from the Port Arthur Penitentiary, desperate men who had committed murder and piracy and were wanted comdead or alive-in return for a substantial reward.

Meldrum had, perforce, told them of the raid by Haines and his companions, insisting, however, that there had been three men, not four, and both parties had made extensive searches of his land and buildings before moving on. Michael had remained hidden in an attic, and the family had made no mention of his presence there, but the sergeant in charge of the military party, a conscientious man, had come perilously close to discovering his hiding place. He had, furthermore, a note to the effect that Thomas Albert Blaney, a ticket-of-leave convict, had died while in assigned employment on the Meldrum property, and had demanded confirmation, even going so far as to inspect the old seaman’s grave. And he had taken the stolen muskets…

. Michael touched the Adams revolver, which was tucked into the belt of his trousers, just as Haines had carried it. At least the conscientious sergeant had not known of its existence, and Amos Meldrum had insisted that the weapon was of no use to him.

“You might run across those blackguards, Michael, before the search parties catch up with them,”

the older man had said gravely. “And if you should, you’ll have to defend yourself. So take the pistol-I don’t imagine they’re likely to come back here.

But that sergeant may-it’s evident that he wasn’t entirely satisfied, or perhaps my story didn’t ring quite true. We’re not ungrateful for what you did, but you’re not safe here, and … there’s Prudence. For her sake, lad, it will be best if you leave as soon as you’re fit to travel.”

He had added, with genuine sadness, “She has lost her heart to you, poor child. But there’s no future in it for either of you, is there? Not in the circumstances. She’ll get over it, once you’re gone.”

He was probably right, Michael thought.

Certainly there could be no foreseeable future for a little cripple girl of barely sixteen and an escaped convict with a price on his head … who was almost twice her age. All the same, the memory of her stricken face, when he had bidden her farewell, tore at his heartstrings. She was so gentle and sweet, so trusting and so blind to what the years of his imprisonment had made of him.

William Stuart Long

To Prudence Meldrum he had been, however briefly, a hero … and a wounded hero, at that, as much in need of her care and pity and, yes, her love as an orphaned lamb or a stray dog.

Or even the injured nestling-a bronze-wing pigeon-that she had reared, with infinite patience, from featherless infancy to healthy adulthood, and which she had proudly displayed to him, perching on her outstretched arm, after it had flown down from a tree in response to her call.

““He knows me, Michael,” she had told him, eyes bright with pleasure at the bird’s tameness. “And even though he has long ago returned to the wild and found a mate, he still comes back to me when I whistle to him. He doesn’t forget me, and I-oh, Michael, I shall never forget you! As long as I live, I shall think of you and pray for you. And I-I shall hope, one day, to see you again.”

But he had not been able, in honesty, to promise her that, Michael recalled, with sudden bitterness.

For was he not, even now, about to seek for a ship that would take him to Melbourne for the purpose of killing a man? And had not the thought of taking John Price’s life been all that had sustained him throughout the long, tortured years of his convict exile? His fingers closed on the butt of the pistol at his waist. For God’s sake, had not the initial theft of the Adams been for that purpose? When he had taken it, he had seen the weapon solely as a means to accomplish his escape and the escape itself as a means to seek out the er/while commandant of Norfolk Island and exact his revenge.

What then, he asked himself, had such a man as he to give to a little, innocent girl, whose name was incongruously Prudence and who, all unwittingly, had wanted to give him the most precious gift she had to bestow? Her father had been right-there could be no future for either of them, in the circumstances, and, in all probability, as Amos Meldrum had also said, Prudence would get over it, once he had gone.

Michael quickened his pace. Oscar had set him down only a short distance from the center of town, at the start of a long street named after one of the earlier governors, Macquarie, with instructions to follow it until he came to the intersection with Murray Street:

“That will take you to the docks. There are a good many taverns in the dock area, as you might expect, and most of them are patronized by seagoing folk. You should be able to make inquiries over a drink or two without inviting attention. Pa gave you enough money, didn’t he?”

Indeed, Amos had been generous; he had enough for a night’s lodging, as well as for the drinks he might have to buy, but, Michael decided, stepping into the shadows as a mob of men emerged from the gate of a nearby shipbuilder’s yard, it would still be wise to use care in choosing the hostelry he patronized.

A small, quiet place, whose clientele did not include the military, he thought-and gave a wide berth to one in whose lamplit taproom he glimpsed half a dozen scarlet coats. But, even as he moved away from it, the rhythmic thud of steel-shod boots on the cobblestones of the road behind him set his pulses racing, and he again sought the shelter of a shadowed doorway. A squad of soldiers marched past him with shouldered arms, heading for the docks and scattering a knot of loud-voiced revelers-seamen, by their garb-who had gathered in the roadway outside the tavern they had just left.

“Bloody lobsterbacks!” one of the seamen exclaimed, shaking his fist at the soldiers”

retreating backs. “It ain’t enough that they’ve bin in every tavern between “ere an” Battery Point, makin’

a flamin’ nuisance o’ theirselves! Now it seems they’re goin’ to search the ships at the bloody anchorage. If some o’ the poor devils of convicts got away from the Tasman Peninsula by makin’ off with a bleedin’ gover’ment steamer, good luck to “em, I say! Got the steamer back, didn’t they?”

The speaker, who had addressed no one in particular, concluded with a loud hiccup, and one of his shipmates gave him an ironical cheer.

“Better not let ‘is Excellency ‘ear you sayin” things like that, Davie boy! I reckon “e’d have you clapped in irons an” shipped off to

whatever they call the place-Port Arthur, ain’t it? An’

you

wouldn’t know “ow to set about piratin” no gover’ment steamer to get away from there, would you, now?”

“I’d “ave a bleedin” good try,” the man called Davie retorted defiantly. He

hiccuped again and then, noticing Michael stand ing

William Stuart Long

a few yards away, turned to grin at him with drunken good humor. “Evenin’, matey. On yer tod, are you?”

He was English, Michael decided-an English Cockney by his accent-and probably a member of the crew of one of the mail steamers that berthed at the customs wharf, according to what Oscar had been able to tell him of the layout of the Hobart dockside.

“Why, indeed I am, friend,” he confirmed, slipping easily into the suggestion of an Irish brogue.

He started to explain that he was aiming to sign on with any ship’s master who was looking for hands, but one of the other men, even drunker than the friendly little Cockney, came staggering unsteadily toward him and clapped a muscular arm about his shoulders.

“Jaysus!” the newcomer greeted him. “Amn’t I knowin’ a Wexford voice when I’m hearin’ it?

Ye’re from t’ould country, surely? From de beautiful county o’ Wexford, I’d swear that’

God!”

Conscious that he might be treading on dangerous ground, Michael admitted the truth, and the big Irish seaman continued to extol the beauties of his native land, his eyes filled with sentimental tears.

“Sure and we must drink on it,” he insisted.

It would be a way of avoiding notice, Michael thought. As one of a crowd of seamen on a run ashore, he would not be given a second glance by the military search parties. A police patrol might pick up the whole mob, if they became too riotous, and lodge them in jail for the night, but if there were any risk of that happening, he could quickly part company with them at the first sign of trouble.

He spent the next hour with his newfound companions, in a dockside tavern near the waterfront, contriving-not without difficulty-to limit his drinking to a few glasses of rum punch. It was time well spent, for they located a number of vessels in the port, with their names and destinations, and gave him chapter and verse of the hunt for the absconders from Port Arthur, which had apparently been going on for most of the day.

“First ‘twas reckoned as they’d shown a clean pair o’ heels and was off bushrangin’ or whatever it’s called in some place called the Huon Valley,” the little Cockney seaman

called Davie volunteered. “But then the people from the gover’ment steamer,

the

Hastings,

was brought in, an’ they spotted one of “em ‘ere in town, so the ‘unt was up wiv” a vengeance. There’s big rewards out for “em, see, so everyone’s trying ter nab the poor sods. An” now they’re searchin’ all the ships in the anchorage that’s due to sail in the next coupla days.” He eyed Michael thoughtfully. was “Ave to be a mite careful if you’re lookin” for a berth, mate.

They’re checkin’ papers real carefully, from what I’ve “card.”

What, Michael wondered, as he listened-what in the world could have induced Haines, of all people, to return to Hobart, where he was known by sight? The fact that he and his companions had no weapons, save for Josh Simmons’s bayonet? Or had the search parties in the Huon Valley been closing in on them, rendering the risk of capture even greater there than in the town? With the rewards as inducement, probably the settlers had joined the hunt, rendering their position untenable, and … He smothered a sigh. His own also, of course. Even with the late Thomas Blaney’s papers, he would have to move with extreme caution.

Davie ordered another round of drinks, and then, to Michael’s relief, his friend Geordie, a tall, rawboned North-countryman, announced that it was time they went back to their ship. They had to half carry the homesick young Irishman, who had-drunk himself into a paralytic stupor, and their return to the docks was noisy. Michael stayed with them until they were in sight of their brightly lit mail steamer, the guard on duty at the dock gates letting them through with indulgent admonitions to sober up and hold their tongues. He slipped away from them unnoticed and, after a wary search, found a deserted and virtually empty, warehouse from where he could watch what was going on without himself being seen.