The Touch (16 page)

Alexander had collapsed on the stable door, crying with laughter. “Oh, Ruby, I like you best when you’re on your soapbox!” He wiped his eyes, took her hands and refused to let her snatch them away. “Listen, you idiotic bigot! Listen! Some people cause a chain of events to begin, and you’re one such. Without you, I would never have been inspired to form an alliance with Sung Chow, and that in its turn would have led to troubles aplenty for me in this new enterprise. I’m not paying you for the divine pleasure you give me, but for doing me an invaluable business service. It’s true that I’m a stingy Scot, but the Scots are generally honorable, as am I. I have needed to be stingy to get where I am, but once I can afford not to be stingy, I won’t be. This is a deal that you deserve to be a partner in, Ruby—even if, for the time being, you’re only a sleeping partner.”

That last phrase, so blatantly provocative, made her laugh; the tempest was over. “All right, all right, I see your point, you bastard. Let’s shake.”

He shook her outstretched hand, then pulled her into his arms and kissed her. How easy it would be to love her!

AN ALLIANCE between a Scot and a Chinese meant extreme care in planning and an obsession with secrecy. Sung announced to the Chinese community of Hill End that he was going to visit China for six or eight months, and was taking a bodyguard with him; his wife and children would remain behind in the custody of Sam Wong, Chan Hoi and several other relatives.

Sung’s twenty men were young, strong, and, so Alexander suspected, bound to the patrician Mandarin by ties that could never be plumbed by anyone not Chinese. They were probably his to the death. Though they all spoke better English than most goldfields Chinese, they were dressed as coolies.

The mission to China set off in state on the Rydal road, always busier than the Bathurst road, since Rydal was the rail depot for Hill End. Nearing Rydal, the party let darkness fall before leaving the road to disappear into the forest.

Alexander had left a day earlier, and waited for them in a clearing well away from habitation. With him was Summers and a string of pack horses loaded with rolls of wire, a post-hole borer, heavy wooden posts, tents, square five-gallon tins of kerosene, lamps, axes, picks, mattocks, hammers and an assortment of saws, the latter to prepare more fence posts from local trees. Sung’s carved chests contained nothing but food: rice, dried fish, dried duck, onion and celery seeds, cabbage seeds, various bottled sauces and a gross of eggs preserved in isinglass.

“We travel on tonight,” said Alexander to Sung, who was now in peasant garb. “We’ll be able to continue in daylight tomorrow, then we’ll rest the following night. A hard slog, but I want to get as far from civilization as possible before we halt.”

“I agree.”

Alexander introduced Summers. “He’ll be our contact with Bathurst, Sung. I’ve a house on its outskirts where the rest of what we need is waiting. Summers will fetch it a little at a time, always leaving Bathurst in the wee sma’s. I’ve sent my housekeeper to Sydney armed with a very long shopping list and instructions that she’s to stay with her relatives there until I want her back.”

Sung frowned. “Is she a weak link?”

Summers grinned. “No, Mr. Sung. She’s promised to me in marriage, and she knows which side her bread is buttered on.”

“Good.”

BY THE END of January 1873 the fence was finished and Alexander’s slab house almost finished. He and half the Chinese were already using the sluicing devices called toms, a great improvement over pans and rockers. The gravel was rich with gold, richer indeed than Alexander had originally thought; it seemed to be present far past his western boundary, which meant that the first horde of prospectors would stay long enough to put up a town. Sung and his twenty men all had prospecting licenses, but a claim once staked was only twelve feet square. They pegged their claims contiguously at the foot of the cascade, but until others discovered what was going on, the twenty-two men scattered down the river skimming off as much gold as they could outside their claim areas. Which left plenty; under the surface alluvial layer were deeper ones, and not restricted to the present riverbed—riverbeds moved around a great deal over the millennia.

Now they varied their diet with fresh eggs and chicken from a fifty-hen coop, duck and goose meat, pork from a pig sty, and a host of different vegetables from a thriving garden. Alexander loved Chinese food, though Summers, he noted with amusement, was not so keen. The Chinese tents were spread in an encampment some distance from Alexander’s slab house, which he shared with Sung. Summers elected to be perpetually on the move.

At the end of six months they had retrieved 10,000 troy ounces of gold dust, tiny nuggets, a few larger ones, and an awesome beauty that weighed over a hundred pounds. Thus far their finds were worth £125,000, but more gold came in every day.

“I think,” said Alexander to Sung, “that it’s time I paid a visit to Mr. Charles Dewy, who used to lease this land.”

“It surprises me that he hasn’t yet descended upon us,” said Sung, raising his thin, elegant brows. “Surely he would have been notified that you bought a selection on his leasehold?”

Alexander laid his index finger against the side of his nose, a universal gesture that Sung entirely understood. “Yes, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he asked, and went off to saddle his mare.

DUNLEIGH’S HOMESTEAD overlooked the Abercrombie River to the west of Trunkey Creek, a gold-mining settlement that had made the magical transition from placer to reef gold in 1868. It had greatly irked Charles Dewy that Trunkey Creek became an official goldfield, but when the gold-bearing quartz vein was discovered, Dewy invested heavily in several of the Trunkey Creek mines; so far they had returned him a profit of £15,000.

Unaware that Mr. Dewy was a gold investor, Alexander rode up to what was an imposing collection of well-kept buildings inside an immaculate white post-and-rail fence. In front of the stables and sheds stood a magnificent two-storied mansion of chased limestone blocks. It flaunted towers and turrets, French doors, a covered verandah, and a slate roof. Mr. Dewy, thought Alexander as he alighted from his mare, is a wealthy man.

The English butler conceded that Mr. Dewy was at home, all the while eyeing the visitor askance—such peculiar apparel, an ungroomed horse! However, as Mr. Kinross exuded a calm dignity and authority, the butler agreed to announce him.

Charles Dewy looked anything but a man of the land. He was short, stout, white-haired, wore prodigious side whiskers but no beard, and a Savile Row suit; the collar of his crisp white shirt was starched within an inch of its life, his cravat silk.

“You’ve caught me in town clothes—just returned from a junket to Bathurst for a meeting. The sun,” Dewy continued as he ushered Alexander to his study, “is well and truly over the yardarm. Therefore a drink is called for, don’t you think?”

“I’m not an habitual imbiber, Mr. Dewy.”

“Religious scruples? Temperance and all that?”

Charles Dewy fancied that, had he been out of doors, Kinross would have spat upon the ground; as it was, he lifted his lip. “I have no religion and few scruples, sir.”

This rather antisocial reply didn’t dismay Charles in the least; of a sanguine temperament, he tolerated his fellow men’s foibles without judging them. “Then you may drink tea, Mr. Kinross, while I drink the nectar of your native peat streams,” he said cheerfully.

Settled in a chair with his Scotch whisky, the squatter regarded his visitor with interest. Striking-looking chap, with those pointy black eyebrows and natty Van Dyke beard. Eyes that gave nothing away but saw everything. Probably highly intelligent and educated. He’d heard of this Kinross in Bathurst; people talked about him because no one knew what he was up to, yet everyone knew that he had to be up to something. The American frontier clothes meant that the popular guess was gold, but, though the man had been to Hill End several times, rumor said that the only gold he had paddled in was Ruby Costevan’s hair.

“I’m surprised that you haven’t paid me a visit, Mr. Dewy,” said Alexander, sipping his Assam tea appreciatively.

“A visit? Where? And why should I?”

“I bought three hundred and twenty acres of your leasehold almost a year ago.”

“The devil you did!” Charles exclaimed, sitting up straight. “This is the first I knew about it!”

“Surely you had a letter from the Department of Lands?”

“Surely I should have, but surely I have not, sir!”

“Och, these government departments!” said Alexander, tongue clicking. “I swear that they’re even slower in New South Wales than they are in Calcutta.”

“I’ll have words to say about this to John Robertson. It’s he who started this nonsense with his Crown Lands Alienation Act—and he’s a squatter himself! That’s the trouble with going into parliament, even a hamstrung one like ours—the members become blind to everything except ways of raising revenue, and the ten pounds a year a squatter pays for his leasehold isn’t much help.”

“Yes, I met John Robertson in Sydney,” said Alexander, putting down his teacup. “However, this isn’t a mere courtesy visit, Mr. Dewy. I’m here to inform you that I’ve discovered gold placer on the Kinross River, where my selection is.”

“The Kinross River? What Kinross River?”

“It was an unnamed tributary of the Abercrombie, so I gave it my name. I will die, but I hope my river will flow forever. It’s full of gold, phenomenally so.”

“Oh, Christ!” Dewy moaned. “Why do so many gold strikes have to happen on my leasehold? My father took up this land in 1821, Kinross, and squatted on two hundred square miles. Then came the gold and John Robertson. Dunleigh is shrinking, sir.”

“Dear, dear,” said Alexander mildly.

“Whereabouts did you buy?”

A Department of Lands map came out of one saddlebag; Dewy set down his drink, hooked a pair of half-glasses behind his ears, and came to peer over Alexander’s shoulder. The man smelled sweet, he noticed—the leather suit was leather fragrant, and its wearer liked to wash his body too. The long, well-shaped and clean hand pointed to the very edge of Dunleigh’s eastern boundary.

“I cleared a bit of that when I was still half a boy,” Dewy said, returning to his chair. “Before anyone even dreamed of gold. And I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to go back. The wild mountains start there, so I can’t graze sheep and cattle—they scramble up into the native forest and disappear. Now you tell me that the creek is full of alluvial gold. That means an officially declared goldfield, a shanty town and all the hideousness of a collection of human beings thrown together by mutual greed.”

“I also bought ten thousand acres of the mountaintop at auction,” Alexander went on, pouring himself more tea. “I’ll build a house up there to get away from, as you put it, all the hideousness.” He leaned forward, looked earnest. “Mr. Dewy, I don’t want to make an enemy out of you. I’m geologically knowledgeable as well as an engineer, so there was method in my apparent madness, paying five thousand pounds for a useless mountain I’ve named Mount Kinross. Any town that grows up on the goldfield will also be named Kinross.”

“It’s an unusual name,” said Dewy.

“It’s mine, and mine alone. In the general scheme of things Kinross town ought to die when the gravel is mined out. However, it isn’t the placer gold concerns me, though I’ve already made a lot of money from it. Inside my mountain is what the Californians call the mother lode—a reef of quartz containing free gold—that is, gold unassociated with pyrites. As you know, any man can extract placer gold from gravel, but to mine a deep vein in solid rock is beyond the financial resources of the men who flock to a goldfield. It needs machinery and too much money to be privately funded. So when I’m ready to mine the mother lode on my own land, I’ll be looking for investors to form a company. I assure you that every investor in that company will end richer than Croesus. Rather than have you agitating against me among your political friends in Sydney, Mr. Dewy, I would prefer to have you as my ally.”

“In other words,” said Charles Dewy, refreshing his drink, “you want investment money from me.”

“When the time comes, of course. I don’t want my company owned and controlled by people I don’t know personally and can’t trust, sir. It will be a private company, therefore not publicly funded. And who better to be a shareholder than the man whose family has been in the district since 1821?”

Dewy rose to his feet. “Mr. Kinross—Alexander, if you’ll call me Charles—I believe you. You’re a canny Scot, not a visionary.” He heaved a sigh. “It’s too late to oppose the rush, anyway, so let the locusts gather to strip the alluvium as quickly as possible. Then Kinross town will settle to proper mining, just like Trunkey Creek. My investments in the Trunkey Creek mines have paid for this house. Will you stay the night, share our dinner?”

“If you will excuse my lack of evening dress.”

“Of course. I won’t change either.”

ALEXANDER CARRIED his saddlebags upstairs to a beautiful room whose windows revealed the surrounding hills and the sadly dirty waters of the Abercrombie River, polluted by a dozen gold discoveries farther up toward its sources.

Prepared to think poorly of Alexander Kinross, Constance Dewy ended in liking him very much. A good fifteen years her husband’s junior, she had been a great beauty in her youth, now twenty years in the past. Hers, Alexander divined, was the hand that had shaped this house with such good taste, for she was superbly gowned in ecru satin flaunting the rudimentary bustle just coming into fashion. She wore rubies at her throat, in her ears and over the wrists of the ecru satin gloves that sheathed her arms to the elbow. She and Charles, he noted, stood on very good terms with each other.

“Our three daughters—we have no sons—are away at school in Sydney,” Constance said, her breath catching. “Oh, I do miss them! But a governess can educate them only so far. Once they turn twelve, they have to learn to mix with other girls, make the social connections that will help them when they’re old enough to think of marriage. Are you married, Alexander?”