The Touch (48 page)

She went on to tell Ruby about the dog, upon which Jade had based her decision to kill its owner.

“That won’t impress a judge,” said Ruby.

“No, it won’t. Sergeant Thwaites—he was very kind, Ruby—recommended that I engage a legal firm immediately, but I don’t even know the name of Alexander’s lawyers—do I need solicitors, or barristers? And don’t firms specialize?

“Leave it to me,” said Ruby briskly, glad to have something concrete to do. “I’ll cable Alexander, of course—he’s at his gold mine in Ceylon—and I’ll have the Apocalypse lawyers depute the right firm to care for Jade’s interests.” She stopped in the doorway. “It may be that they decide to send the poor little bitch to Sydney for trial if they feel that a jury drawn from a pool of locals would be prejudiced. In my opinion a city jury would be worse”—she snorted—“but then, I’m prejudiced.”

NELL FOUND out as she was witnessing the removal of dynamite from the explosives shed, and raced up the snake path, too impatient to wait for the cable car. All the grief and horror that Elizabeth was too controlled to show sat upon Nell nakedly as she stared at her mother, tears making visible runnels down her dirty face, her slight breast heaving under the stained overalls.

“Oh, it can’t be true!” she cried after Elizabeth told her the story. “It can’t be true!”

“What can’t be true?” Elizabeth asked levelly. “That Jade killed Sam O’Donnell, or that Sam O’Donnell was the one who got at Anna?”

“Do you ever feel, Mum? Do you ever feel? You’re sitting there like a mannequin in a shop window—Lady Kinross to a tee! Jade is my sister! And Butterfly Wing is more my mother than you’ve ever been, God knows! My sister has confessed to murder—how could you let her do that, Lady Kinross? Why didn’t you clap your hand over her mouth if you could shut her up no other way? You let her confess! Don’t you understand what that means? She won’t be tried at all! You only try someone if there’s a doubt of guilt. That’s the jury’s job—the jury’s only job! A man or woman who confesses and doesn’t recant is simply put in the dock to be sentenced by a judge.” Nell turned on her heel. “Well, I’m off to the police station to see Jade. She has to recant! If she doesn’t, they’ll hang her.”

Elizabeth heard it all, heard the hatred—no, not hatred, dislike—in her daughter’s voice, and turned the bitter words over in her heart acknowledging their truth. Someone has put a stopper in the bottle that holds my spirit, my soul, and glued it there for all eternity. I will burn in Hell, and I deserve to burn in Hell. I’ve been neither wife nor mother.

“I suggest,” she called after Nell, “that you have a bath and change into a dress if that’s where you’re going.”

BUT JADE REFUSED to recant. Sergeant Stanley Thwaites would never have dreamed of forbidding Miss Nell to see the prisoner, so Nell was allowed into the one cell saved for violent offenders, sequestered from the half-dozen cells wherein drunks and petty thieves were incarcerated.

“Jade, they’ll hang you!” Nell cried, weeping again.

“I don’t mind being hanged, Miss Nell,” Jade said gently. “What matters is that I killed Anna’s raper.”

“Rapist,” Nell corrected automatically.

“He ruined my baby Anna, he had to die. No one else would have acted, Miss Nell. It was my job to kill him.”

“Even if you did kill him, Jade, deny it! Then you’ll have a proper trial, we can bring up all the extenuating circumstances, and I’m positive that Daddy will engage barristers who could—who could get Jesus freed by Pontius Pilate! Deny it, please!”

“I couldn’t do that, Miss Nell. I did kill him, and I am proud that I killed him.”

“Oh, Jade, nothing is worth a life, especially your life!”

“That is wrong, Miss Nell. A man who tricks a little child like my baby Anna into serving his disgusting wants and fills a little child like my baby Anna with his stinking slime, is no man. He deserves everything I did to Sam O’Donnell. I would do it again, and again, and again. I live it in my mind as joy.”

And from that stand Jade would not budge.

The next day at dawn she was put into the police wagon and taken to Bathurst Gaol, one constable driving the team, another sitting beside her. They feared her yet did not fear her. When Sergeant Thwaites decreed no manacles they thought him foolish, but the journey passed without incident. Jade Wong was delivered into captivity at about the same moment as the body of Sam O’Donnell was interred in the Kinross cemetery, the cost of his burial borne by Theodora Jenkins and several other grieving, distraught women. The Reverend Peter Wilkins gave a moving eulogy at the graveside—best be sure not to offend God by having the body in the church in case he had interfered with Anna—and the mourners picked their way between the wreaths, sobbing behind their black veils.

Though the police searched O’Donnell’s camp and the ground around it with admirable zeal and thoroughness, they found nothing to connect the fellow with Anna Kinross. No items of feminine clothing, no trinkets, no initialed handkerchief—nothing.

“We opened his tins of paint and emptied them, we took his brushes apart, we unpicked the seams of his clothes, we even made sure that he hadn’t hidden anything between the leaves of bark on his humpy roof,” said Sergeant Thwaites to Ruby. “My word of honor, Miss Costevan, we looked everywhere. It wasn’t as if he lived slipshod, either. Neat as a pin for a camping man—had a clothesline rigged up, a washing tub, his food all in old bikkie tins to keep the ants out, boot polish and boot brushes, clean sheets on his palliasse—yes, neat as a pin.”

“What will happen now?” Ruby asked, looking every year of her age.

“I understand that the stipendary magistrates have been authorized to charge her, and that bail will be refused as it is a capital crime.”

BY NOW THE news had broken in Sydney, where the newspapers printed all the gory details without actually mentioning what parts of Sam O’Donnell’s anatomy had been severed and stuffed in his mouth, though they implied that he had been forced to eat them. Editorials tended to concentrate upon the hazards of employing Chinese servants, using the death of Sam O’Donnell as additional proof of the inadvisability of permitting the Chinese to immigrate. The yellower dailies and weeklies were all in favor of mass deportation of Chinese already resident in the country, even if they had been born in Australia. The fact that the demure little nurserymaid proclaimed her guilt proudly was taken as evidence of total depravity. And somehow Anna Kinross was described as “slightly simple”—a state of mind that readers assumed meant that she could add up two and two, but not thirteen and twenty-four.

The cable found Alexander on the west side of the Australian continent, though he hadn’t yet notified his fellow board directors of his imminent arrival. He had lost none of his secretiveness with the passing of the years. His ship docked in Sydney a week after Jade was charged, and he was faced with a jostling crowd of journalists swollen by men from interstate and by stringers for the big overseas papers from the Times to the New York Times. Nothing daunted, he held an impromptu press conference on the wharf, fielding questions with the constantly reiterated plea that as yet everyone in Sydney knew more than he did, so why were they bothering?

Summers was there to meet him, shepherd him to his new hotel in George Street, far removed from those wretched steam trams.

“What happened, Jim?” he asked. “I mean, what’s the truth?”

To be addressed as “Jim” was novelty enough; Summers blinked several times before replying, then said, “Jade killed the fellow who interfered with Anna.”

“The fellow who did interfere with Anna, or just the fellow she thought interfered with Anna?”

“I’ve no doubt in my mind, Sir Alexander, that Sam O’Donnell was the man. I was there when Anna called my dog Rover. I saw her face—she was as happy as a sandboy, and looking for its master. If I’d only known that Sam O’Donnell owned a blue cattle dog named Rover, I’d have understood at once. Jade understood because she’d met O’Donnell and the dog at Theodora Jenkins’s house. He was painting its outside. But I didn’t tumble, so Jade stole a march on me.”

Alexander studied his face, sighed. “It’s a pickle, isn’t it? I take it that no other evidence has come to light?”

“None, sir. He must have been very careful.”

“Can we get her off, do you think?”

“Not a hope, sir, even with you on her side.”

“So it’s a matter of putting up a good show for the sake of my family and preparing them for the worst.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If only she’d reported her suspicions to you or Ruby!”

“Perhaps,” said Summers diffidently, “she knew even then that it would boil down to his word against Anna’s, and decided it was better not to involve Anna.”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure of that. Poor, poor Jade! I owe her a great debt.”

“I don’t think that’s ever crossed Jade’s mind. She did it for Anna, only for Anna.”

“Who have Lime and Milliken recommended?”

“Sir Eustace Hythe-Bottomley, sir. An elderly chap, but a Queen’s Counsel and the most eminent criminal barrister in—well, all of Australia wouldn’t be far from the mark,” said Summers.

BEFORE HE LEFT Sydney for Kinross, Alexander had done what he could. In conjunction with Sir Eustace (who could foresee no other decision than the death penalty unless the accused were to recant), he had used his connections to ensure that the presiding judge would be a reasonable sort, and that the sentencing hearing would be held in camera in Bathurst rather than in Sydney. And as quickly as possible. Sir Eustace traveled in Alexander’s private car as far as Lithgow, where it was detached to be coupled to the Kinross train, then went on alone to Bathurst in a first-class compartment with his numerous staff still jammed into one second-class compartment, there to mull over the Laws of England as they applied to the colonies.

His interview with Jade in the Bathurst Gaol was a futile business. Coax, cajole and sing like a bird though he did, she remained obdurate: she would not recant, she was proud of what she had done, her baby Anna was avenged.

WHEN ALEXANDER arrived at Kinross station, only Ruby was on the platform to welcome him.

The sight of her was a shock—do I look as suddenly old as she does? Her hair is still that unique color, but she’s put on so much weight that her eyes are disappearing into a pudding of flesh, her waist is nonexistent and her hands like podgy little starfish. But he kissed her, linked his arm through hers and walked with her through the waiting room.

“Your place or mine?” he asked outside.

“Mine for the moment,” she said. “There are things we have to talk about that you won’t be able to talk about with either Elizabeth or Nell.”

The town, he was relieved to see, looked exactly as it ought despite the halving of its work force. Its streets were clean and tidy, its buildings well kept, Kinross Square’s flower beds awash with dahlias, marigolds, chrysanthemums, all the proper blooms of late summer. A riot of yellow, orange, red, cream. Good! Sung Po’s gardeners had done what he ordered, excavated an artificial bank to insert a gigantic mechanism that drove the ten-foot hands of a flowering clock through the twelve hours of each half day, brightly colored leaves and tiny blossoms picking out the Roman numerals, the disc of the clock face, the ponderous hands. What’s more, the thing was correct: half past four in the afternoon. And the bandstand was freshly painted—had O’Donnell done it, or that sot Scripps? The trees that lined the streets had grown, crepe myrtles in vivid bloom, melaleucas with bark like multiple layers of peeling paint—oh, come, Sir Alexander, think of metaphors that have nothing to do with paint!

How he missed the place that bore his name, yet how he longed to be free of it the moment he was in it! Why wouldn’t people do as they were supposed to do, live their lives with logic, reason, common sense? Why did they fly around like thistledown in the eddies and surges of a hot summer’s day? Why couldn’t husbands love wives and wives love husbands and children love everyone? Why did the differences between people always outweigh the things they shared as one? Why must bodies grow older than the minds that fuel them? Why am I so surrounded, yet so alone? Why does the fire burn as brightly yet the flames grow ever dimmer?

“I’m fat,” she said, sinking on to a sofa in her boudoir and fanning herself with an accordioned affair the color of bile.

“You are,” he said, sitting opposite.

“Does it irk you, Alexander?”

“Yes.”

“Then just as well that this business is proving extremely good for my figure.”

“We had a monster in our midst.”

“A very cunning monster who half the town is convinced was no monster, but a harmless odd-job man.”

“The idol of fools like Theodora Jenkins.”

“Of course. He had her measure, got a kick out of charming her into adoring him—didn’t desire elderly virgins or widows, but probably masturbated on making them wet their drawers.”

“How is Elizabeth? Nell?”

“Elizabeth’s much as always. Nell is dying to see her daddy.”

“Anna?”

“Due in about a month.”

“At least we know the pedigree of the child.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Summers is positive that the man was Sam O’Donnell. He was there when Anna thought she recognized the dog, and I think he saw more of Anna’s face than Jade did.”

“Bully for Summers!”

“More importantly, Ruby, how do I tell Elizabeth that Jade will hang?”

Her face changed, squeezed itself up into grosser folds. “Oh, Alexander, don’t say that!”

“It has to be said.”

“But—but—how can you be so sure?”

His fingers groped in a pocket, fished out a cheroot. “Are you not smoking these days?”

“Yes, give me one! But how can you be so sure?”

“Because Jade is a political pawn. Both the Free Traders and the Protectionists—not to mention the trade unionists, who are now beginning to call themselves Labor—need to make the people see that they’re opposed to the Chinese, that they’ll obey the people when the time is right and get rid of the Chinese. How better to soothe feelings now than by hanging one poor little half-Chinese girl, Australian born though she may be, for what is seen as an unspeakable crime? A crime against men, Ruby. Castration. Amputation of manhood! The man she did that to was white, and of evidence against him there is none beyond my mental daughter’s recognition of his dog. Can Anna be called into a court and made to testify, even if the court is a closed one and there is no jury? Of course not! The judge may call for any testimony he likes before passing sentence, but to call Anna would be seen as a travesty.”