The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger (10 page)

They were married at the police station in Goulburn. Billy gave his place of birth as ‘Bristol’. He said he was older than he really was as well. No one looking through the Bristol records would ever find mention of a convict called William Marks.

Annie too hesitated before she filled in the notice, but neither of them mentioned the hesitations to the other. It was best to keep their past disguised.

This was a new life: no more Billy Marks, the convict; no more Annie Lamb, the squaw. Instead there would be Mr and Mrs William Marks, of Markdale, County of Argyle, New South Wales.

Billy was glad that there was no clergyman available to marry them. He suspected there’d be a ruckus when Annie found out he wasn’t Christian, same as her. She’d want to get her babies christened…

But that was in the future. Now there were men to hire to build the house—men who’d work for their
rations and a few shillings in their pockets, hoping to get a regular job when the farm was going.

It was hard to say goodbye to Roman John. The older man was giving up the tallow business: he’d made enough to get him by and his own farm was well set up by now, with more neighbours moving in every few months now the land was cheaper. He promised to visit their new place, but it wouldn’t be the same as working side by side.

Billy wanted to get the house built before Annie came to join him. Annie refused. If he could live in a tent, then so could she. Besides, there were things she wanted organised. Who knew what mess men would make of a house and dairy, without a woman to tell them what to do?

They bought a cart, second-hand but good, and hired a bullock wagon. No furniture yet—they’d make another trip to get that when the house was built, or hire a carpenter to come and build it from timber on their farm. His farm. Markdale. He said the words under his breath over and over.

Markdale.

He had ridden out to look it over before he’d signed the deeds of course, in case it was all a trick.

Ah, it was a grand place! Good land, good water, trees that brushed the sky, thick with claw marks from native bears and possums. You only had to look at the dirt spilling from the wombat holes to know how deep the soil was, not like the thin skin of dirt over clay or shale like most of the colony.

There was the spot for the house, and the first horse paddock over there. They’d need cows too, for Annie’s dairy—she said that children needed milk,
and good cooking needed butter. Wheat there, maybe, and corn for the horses there. Hens…a sudden memory of Ma feeding the hens when he was small. Red hens, clucking under lavender bushes.

Annie drove the cart. Billy didn’t know why he was surprised that she could handle a horse and cart, and was a good rider too. His Annie could do anything: make cheese, tend bees for honey, sew her own clothes and his. She had recipes to help sick children or to make liniment for a horse. He’d taught her to fire a pistol too, in case of bushrangers or native attacks. Her first shot went right to the target.

The cart held fruit trees—plums, quinces, apricots, pears, bush lemons, persimmons; and all the kinds of apple to be had: early apples, late apples, good keeping apples, so Conservative could have an apple every day. Nut trees too—walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts. You had to get fruit trees in fast, said Annie, so they’d be bearing by the time the children were old enough to eat them.

There were rose bushes for out the front, a tent and blankets, a chest for Annie’s clothes and hats, another chest of lengths of calico, linen, muslin, broadcloth, flannel, needles, pins and thread. She’d already started sewing baby’s clothes each night.

Billy rode Conservative. He liked to think no other rider could manage the horse. He would never let anybody try. The big stallion almost pranced along the roadway, as though he knew he was going to their first real home. Billy leant forward and stroked the big horse’s neck. ‘You’re going to your own paddock now, old boy. All the mares you want, and apples soon as well.’

Behind them a bullock dray held even more: adzes, axes, long saws and cross saws, buckets, pitchforks, scythes, shovels and spades, a winch, a seed dibbler and sacks of seed, coils of rope, lime to mortar up their chimney, potatoes for planting and for eating, bags of flour and casks of salt and prunes to keep them regular, bee skips and veils, and three kinds of plough. You could buy a lot with nearly two hundred pounds, especially when you had a farm more or less given to you.

Conservative tossed his head and snorted as a couple of roos bounded along across the road. Two hundred pounds could buy you a second chance.

Mattie Jane’s favourite place in all of Markdale was the storeroom.

On hot days like today, when the sun baked the hills and sent the air shimmering, you could sit on the stone floor and watch the honey drip from the comb into the barrel, smell the pots of strawberry jam and last winter’s marmalade, the preserved plums and pears, and the damp soil scents of potatoes in their sacks.

The dairy next to the storeroom was cool too, but in the dairy the cheeses stared at you as though to say ‘remember to turn me to let me drain’. Mattie Jane already spent too many hours working in the dairy, scooping off the almost solid yellow cream so that big sisters like Martha or Elizabeth or Mary Anne could churn the butter.

No one ever looked for Mattie Jane in the storeroom. When you were eight years old, a girl and the youngest of nine children there was always
someone to give you a boring job, like knitting stockings or folding the washing. Only boys got interesting jobs, like fencing or rounding up the horses.

Boys got to ride the best horses too. Mama laughed when Mattie Jane complained, and said she’d get good horses when she was as old as her brothers. But Mattie bet that somehow William Junior and Elijah, and even the younger boys, James and Alfred and Richard, would still make sure they got the best horses: big white ones with the strength and temper of their father, Conservative.

Mattie Jane peered out of the storeroom. She could see the horse paddocks from here, as well as the gravelled courtyard and the kitchen. If she were a boy she’d ride every one of those horses, even the stallions, not just her own little pony, so fat its back was like a butter barrel. She wouldn’t ride side-saddle, either. She’d ride properly, like a boy. She’d even ride Rebel Yell…

As though he’d heard her thought the big horse looked up. Rebel Yell was the last of Conservative’s sons, and the biggest and best too.

Conservative had died last year. Somehow the old horse had given them their farm, and made them all so happy too. Mattie wasn’t sure how a horse could do this, even one as special as Conservative. But Mama had taken Conservative apples every morning, and at Christmas and on birthdays Papa always took him carrots, or cobs of fresh corn, so Conservative could celebrate as well.

When other horses died you burnt them if they were close to the house, or else just left them for the
crows. But Papa helped his sons and the workmen dig a massive hole, then dragged the big horse into it. He’d set a slab of wood in the earth piled on the grave, just like for a person. It read ‘Here lies Conservative, a great hearted horse, our friend’.

Papa had made a seat by Conservative’s grave. Sometimes he sat there in the dusk, puffing his pipe, as though remembering. Sometimes Mama sat there too, holding Papa’s hand—they seemed to like remembering together.

Out in the paddock Rebel Yell snorted, and pretended to chase an imaginary sheep, tossing his white head.

Papa said that Rebel Yell was almost the image of Conservative. When he was older, and properly broken in, Rebel Yell was going to win every race in the county, just as Conservative had.

Papa had been leading him on a rope for months now. He had ridden him along the road a few times too, keeping the reins short, soothing the big horse with pats and words. A horse with spirit had to be handled carefully, Papa said, and Rebel Yell could be nervous, just like his father.

Mattie Jane giggled. Papa didn’t know that William Junior had tried to ride Rebel Yell. William boasted he could ride anything. But he couldn’t ride Rebel Yell even if he was fifteen. The stallion had bucked him off, then bitten his hand when William had tried to catch his reins.

Mattie Jane leant back against the honey barrel and thought some more. Papa said you had to make friends with a horse before you rode him. William had never noticed how much Rebel Yell liked apples.
Mattie had brought Rebel Yell apples on the flat of her hand for more than a month. He was her friend now.

Would he let her ride him? If she managed to ride a horse like Rebel Yell, surely Papa would have to let her ride any horse on the whole farm.

If she rode without permission she’d get Mama’s wooden spoon against the back of her legs, and no pudding for a week.

But on the other hand…

Mattie Jane grinned. On the other hand Mama had said yes last night when Mattie Jane had asked if she could ride to meet Papa on his way back from Goulburn. Mama had been busy talking to that darkeyed young man, one of the travellers who were always staying the night as there was no hotel nearby. She was so involved in what he was saying she didn’t even notice Mary Anne had burnt the gravy till it was on the table. Mama had still stayed talking to the traveller when Mattie and her sisters went to bed.

But Mama hadn’t said Mattie Jane had to ride her pony, had she? She hadn’t said she could only ride as far as the farm gate, either.

Mattie Jane opened the sack of last year’s withered apples—this year’s crop wouldn’t be ripe for weeks—and filled the pocket of her pinafore. She peered out of the storeroom again, then ran across the courtyard and slipped under the railings to the horse paddock.

There were apples in the orchard.

My paddock was next to the orchard, which was a temptation to a horse when there were apples. If I stood right at the fence and stretched my neck I could just reach a branch of the nearest tree. The apples never had a chance to ripen on that branch. The rest of the time I had to rely on the master or Mattie Jane to bring me apples.

It was a small paddock, just for me, across the courtyard from the kitchen, so visitors could admire me. I was the biggest horse around, so there was a lot of me to admire.

Someone ran across the gravel, then ducked under the palings of my paddock.

It was Mattie Jane.

She held a bridle in one small hand, and the edge of her apron scooped up in the other. I could smell apples!

Mattie Jane stroked my nose as I ate my apples. Her hair was long and dark. It had been held up in
plaits, but one had come loose, and she had a smudge of flour on her nose.

‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ she said. I bumped her with my nose as I crunched another apple. Suddenly she slipped the bridle over me.

I jerked up my head. What was she doing? Only the master put on my bridle.

‘You won’t let William ride you, will you? But you’re going to let me.’ Mattie Jane’s voice was gleeful as she tightened the bridle, her small fingers quick and firm. I knew I might hurt her if I jerked back so I held still, though I was unsure about what she was doing.

She tugged on the reins, leading me over to the paling fence. I followed her. Maybe, I thought, she was going to pick more apples from the orchard. Maybe she’d hand them over to me, across the fence.

But she didn’t. Instead she looped the reins about her hand, then clambered up onto the fence, then scrambled over onto my bare back.

I reared a little in surprise. The master had been on my back before. I had liked it, the feeling of us working together, knowing how the people and the horses admired us as we cantered along the road. But it still felt new and strange.

My hoofs met the ground again. Mattie Jane was so light I almost wondered whether she was really there. But then she dug her knees into my side to make me canter.

She wasn’t the master. I could buck off a man, or bite him. It would be easy to get rid of a little girl.

But she had brought me apples…

I considered what to do.

William Marks Esq.—though Billy still in his own mind—sat comfortably in his saddle and looked at his acres as his mount clopped down the track to home. Every time he saw his farm his pride grew. The fields cleared of trees, the grass still green from the winter rains, the breeding paddocks fenced…

Who’d have thought that little Billy Marks would be riding home wearing boots made for him by Sydney’s best cobbler? Not to mention a coat of superfine cloth and a top hat taller than the one worn by the man who’d once courted his Annie?

He smiled at the thought of Annie. She’d have his favourite steak-and-kidney pudding waiting, most like, and be wearing that blue silk dress he liked.

You’d never think to look at her she’d had nine children. There weren’t even threads of grey in her black hair. He loved to watch her comb it out each night, see it flow like a dark waterfall around her
shoulders as it had the first time he ever saw her. She still had a waist a man could put his hands around.

They had been hard years at first. Annie had worn his boots and his trousers too to get her trees planted, to dig the garden and plant vegetables. She was determined to have the house built and the garden bearing by the time the first baby came. She’d milked the cows and made the cheese and butter, and melted wax to make her candles—he still hated to have a tallow candle burning in his house.

Billy grinned. No woman in the colony was the like of his Annie! She’d shot the dingo that tried to take one of her hens. She’d worked with one baby in her arms, two tugging at her skirts and another near to be born.

And then Hargreaves had found gold.

The colony’s gold had always been there, sleeping bright under the ground and under the gleam of streams. But now the whole world, it seemed, wanted to come to Australia—a clean new name to make a rich land respectable, just like he and Annie were respectable these days as well.

Or almost. Billy’s face lost its grin. Gold had made him a rich man. Not that he’d gone off to the diggings—Annie had seen to that. She wasn’t having her children fatherless, she’d told him, while he went off to chase a dream. There were more riches to be made as a farmer than a miner.

And she’d been right. Any farmer with meat or wheat or horses to sell had grown wealthy the past few years, supplying the desperate men who tramped the roads from goldfield to goldfield, handing over whatever grains of gold they’d found just for supplies to keep themselves alive.

The stockmen’s wives scrubbed the floors and table now, not Annie, and ironed the damask tablecloths that covered the big new dining table, though Annie still liked to do the cooking, and the dairying too, with her daughters’ help. Annie was sure that no one could ever make a pudding as light as hers, and trusted no other to pat all the moisture from the butter to keep it sweet.

But even wealth hadn’t made him and his Annie respectable. Not quite.

It wasn’t his convict past. William suspected that, like him, several wealthy neighbours lied about how they’d come to the colony. He looked and spoke like a gentleman these days, casually mentioning now and then the good farming family he came from back in England. But there was no changing Annie’s eyes, the shape of her face or the colour of her skin. All of their children looked white as the Queen of England, despite their dark hair and eyes. But put them next to their mother and suddenly you saw the native in them. ‘Half castes’. It was a horrible word. It was meant to hurt. It did.

He hated the word ‘native’ now—wouldn’t even have a dark-skinned man work at Markdale, in case someone thought he was a relative of theirs.

Annie did her best. Never went out into the sun without a straw bonnet, so her skin never grew brown. She wore dark colours, to make her skin seem pale in comparison, and high collars and gloves when they had company. People were polite to Annie, and friendly too. Annie charmed even the most suspicious. But there were no invitations from the wealthy squatters of the county. Not for him and Annie or their children.

It pained him to see the hurt in Annie’s eyes sometimes. It was never lonely at Markdale, not with nine children, and travellers staying with them most nights too, caught between hotels and glad of the chance to sleep in proper beds. Bullock drivers and servants ate in the kitchen with Mrs Mack the fencer’s wife, who did the washing up. Ladies and gentlemen dined at the big table with its damask cloth, its silver candelabra and beeswax candles.

The visitors brought gossip from Sydney, Goulburn, Bathurst and Maitland, sometimes even from London. Annie played the piano after dinner—he’d had one sent down from Sydney the first year of the gold rush, having coveted one since he learnt that his Annie could play. But despite her light plum puddings, her moist apple pies, the way she played for them all to dance after dinner, or sang as well as any concert singer back in Sydney, none of the ladies returned the invitation to their own homes, for Christmas gatherings or summer race-meetings, not for him or Annie or their children.

Billy’s face grew grimmer. Only last month some jumped-up squatter’s wife—her own mother a convict most like—had ordered his Annie to ‘fetch my shawl, woman. Don’t stand there gabbling to the gentlemen.’

Gabbling! His Annie!

He had crossed the room in a fury. ‘This is my wife, madam! Not a servant.’

He should have said nothing—knew it as soon as he saw Annie’s face. Now the whole room had heard her called a servant. And the squatter’s wife had given a vinegar smile. ‘Your wife, Mr Marks? I do apologise. I would never have guessed.’

Neither he nor Annie ever spoke about the invitations that didn’t come. Their pasts were—well, past, even though they touched on their present and their children’s future. Only the sons of poor farmers or stockmen came courting his daughters, not boys from properties as rich as Markdale.

Who needed invitations from stuck-up squatters anyway? Billy could provide for his children, even give his daughters farms when they married if need be. He grinned again. He’d ordered a bolt of dark blue silk and one of pale pink yesterday in Goulburn, and new boots and moleskin trousers for the boys—they grew so quickly—as well as barrels of flour, chests of muscatels, candied citron, a cask of best vinegar, and spices for Annie’s cooking. The bullocky would bring them with the regular supplies next month. He had new books for the family in his saddle-bag, and new sheet music too, as well as ribbons for his girls.

His horse cantered around the corner. He caught sight of something and stared. Someone was galloping down the Markdale road toward him. Someone on a great white horse…

Only one white horse was as large as that!

He dug his spurs into Comet’s sides. He’d tan the hide of whichever son was up on Rebel Yell. Did they want to ruin the horse, riding him hard before him was ready?

Whoever it was was riding as fast as a bushranger. For a moment Billy even wondered if one of the local outlaws had held up Markdale while he’d been away.

But Annie and the boys could face down any pack of bushrangers. Nor would Rebel Yell have allowed a
stranger on his back. And that figure was surely too small to be a bushranger. Billy stared. Black hair…and skirts…

A cold fist grasped his heart. His Mattie Jane! And riding bareback, almost hidden behind the great animal’s mane.

He urged Comet faster. Any instant now the child would fall. Granted she’d been in the saddle ever since she was three years old. But only on a pony, and side-saddle, as befitted a young lady.

‘Papa!’ Mattie’s yell was definitely not a young lady’s. She reined in the big horse as casually as if she’d ridden him for years, then raised one hand and waved. ‘I’ve come to meet you!’

She’d lost a shoe, he noticed, and one stocking had fallen down. Slowly he pulled back on Comet’s reins too, unsure whether he felt greater pride or anger. ‘Mattie Jane girl, what were you thinking of?’

She grinned at him. ‘I asked Mama last night if I could ride to meet you. She told me yes.’

‘Said you could ride Rebel Yell?’

‘Not
bacifically.
’ She grinned, showing the gap where her ‘big teeth’ were growing in. ‘No one rides Rebel Yell, except for me. And you of course,’ she allowed him generously. ‘He likes you too.’

He should yell at her. Promise her a spanking with Annie’s wooden spoon. Tell her she had to sit with her embroidery for the next month, with no more riding at all.

He couldn’t do it. Her eyes were Annie’s eyes. Her grin was his. And there was no gainsaying it—she’d ridden that big horse as though she’d been riding for twenty years—and galloping him barebacked, too. It
seemed his daughter had inherited his genius with horses, as well as his grin.

Rebel Yell tossed his head, almost as though he was embarrassed.

Well, there was one thing he was going to say. ‘Mattie Jane.’ He kept his voice as stern as he could make it. ‘Ladies ride side-saddle. What would the neighbours say if they saw you riding like that?’

She considered. ‘Mrs Picker would faint. She always faints. Mama says she does it for attention. Mrs Pearce would scream. Mrs Quince would say, “Well done”.’

‘Ahem.’ He had to hide his smile now. ‘I want you to promise me you’ll ride side-saddle from now on.’

She considered, her head on one side, so like Annie.

‘You’ll do as I say,’ he added more sternly. ‘Or I’ll tan your backside so you won’t be riding a horse before next Christmas.’

She grinned again at that, sure he’d never carry out his threat. ‘I promise. But I can ride Rebel Yell again, can’t I?’ she added anxiously.

‘If he lets you.’

She stroked the horse between his ears. ‘He’ll let me. He likes me best. After you, of course,’ she added hurriedly.

He smiled at her. His daughter, his wonderful, astounding daughter. His handsome sons, his lovely daughters, his horses, his grand acres and his Annie.

William Marks was happy.