Forgotten Places Page 5

  Dalton pointed again.

  “No. I can’t give up on her.”

  He began to walk. What, did she think he was going to do the chivalrous thing and follow her to the end of the Earth?

  “Alexander,” she said. “Please.”

  He kept on towards the hut, knowing how quickly the light would disappear.

  Grace called his name. She ran towards him, staying close to his heels.

  Her shoulders sank when they arrived back at the hut to find it empty. She paced, tugged at her hair. Dalton lit a fire in the hearth, though he was still hot from all the walking.

  “I got to go back out,” Grace kept saying. But it was dark by then and he was sure she knew it was no use. She chewed fingernails. Alternated between heaving, messy sobs and single, silent tears. Dalton lifted a small stump of wood from the pile beside the hearth and sat on his stool. He began to carve. Grace stopped pacing. Dalton could feel her eyes on the knife; on its rapid back-and-forth scrape, scrape, scrape. Shavings settled at his feet. He began to forget himself in the monotony. He imagined the features on the wood as though they were already there. The determined eyes, narrow nose. Bird’s nest of curls.

  Then Grace said loudly: “We ought to be out there looking for Violet. Instead, you’re sitting here carving dolls.”

  He put down the knife. Looked up at her. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Some attention?

  She gnawed the side of her thumb. “Your chimney. It’s made of wood.”

  Yes, pine.

  “A wooden chimney? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

  He tore a hunk off the loaf of bread on the table, flicked away the ants and held it out to her. She shook her head. He gestured again, insistent.

  “No,” she said sharply. “How could I eat?"

  Dalton tore the bread in half and chewed slowly on his piece. He placed Grace’s share on the table.

  “She must be so hungry. She’ll not sleep out there without me. What will she do? It’s so late. Must be eight or nine at least. Not that that means anything to you, I’m sure. Have you any idea what day it is? Do you even know the year?”

  Stay out here long enough and she’d realise the hours and days were meaningless. Just names. A way of measuring the immeasurable.

  He had kept track for a while; counting the days after they had run from Macquarie Harbour.

  Escaped on a Friday.

  Reached the river on a Monday.

  He had left the other men on a Sunday.

  After that there seemed to be little point counting.

  He had walked alone through land that twisted into caves and mountains. His stomach was empty, his legs like lead. His heart was weary and hopeless. Each night, he had closed his eyes and waited for the end. A big part of him wanted to die. What was there to live for when he’d been thrown from society like a rabid dog? But the part of him that wanted to live was stronger. It kept him walking, kept him seeking out the lights of those mythical eastern settlements. Kept him placing unknown berries and roots on his tongue, gambling with his life for a meagre supper. A slab of kangaroo meat stolen from a native camp. The discovery of the purple berries. And each morning, another rising sun. Another reprieve. His body refused to give up. Dalton felt he’d been cheated out of death when he found the cattle duffers.

  Delirious with hunger, he stumbled into the camp of a cattle-raiding ring on the Fat Doe River. They poured water down his throat and stuffed his mouth with salted pork until he could sit up and look at them. Six men; bolters and crooked emancipists who’d not lost the taste for crime. They took one look at Dalton’s convict slops and decided he was the perfect man to join them.

  Livestock plucked from the settlements, driven down the coast and sold in New Norfolk and Hobart Town. In their plans they saw riches; the wealth they had been denied in England. Dalton saw a ticket back to Macquarie Harbour.

  So this is how a man makes his own world:

  While the duffers are plucking cows from the paddocks, he takes other things from the farmhouses. A rifle and cartridge box, powder flask, knife and saw. An axe, twine for the traps. He uses his own resources. While the men are snoring, he wraps up their boiler and cups in the shirt they gave him. He raids a farmer’s shed in the middle of a thunderstorm. No-one will see him and even if they could, would they bother braving the rain for a hammer and a tin of nails?

  Dalton left the duffers’ camp in the middle of the night, stolen goods in a pack over his shoulder. He walked in the fragile light of the moon. The bush became a labyrinth of purple and green. The beginning of his own world.

  So no, he couldn’t have told Grace what day it was. The sun and stars kept time for him, beyond the restraints of ticking clocks and calendars. The colour of the sky and the changing winds told him of each year’s passing. Eleven summers. Eleven autumns. Made this a cold night in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-three. The eleventh winter was on its way. Sit a little closer to the fire.

  Grace rubbed her eyes. “She got Rosie with her at least. Her doll. I didn’t find it nowhere. Least she got Rosie.” She pushed her tears away with her palm. “What is it you’re making?”

  Dalton held it out to her. He had barely begun; one edge of the branch still rugged and dark, the other smoothed down to its soft white flesh. He’d begun to whittle her narrow chin, her long, graceful neck. Could she tell it was her? Soon he’d have her sitting on the shelf with the others. He’d put her at the front, beside the farmer from Oxley who had given him a pair of boots in exchange for digging a ditch.

  Carving was the one piece of his old life he’d allowed himself to keep. He’d not let himself think of the things he didn’t have. They’d just stopped existing. Sugar. Tea. Whisky. Good morning. Over the years, his mind had stilled and, before long, it was enough to spend his days hunting, stripping bark, making flour. Watching the light change and the land swell and wither with the passing seasons.

  But, over time, familiar faces had begun to appear from amongst his woodpile. The commandant of Macquarie Harbour with his dead slug smile and fifty lashes. That bastard of an overseer at Dalton’s first convict post in Oxley. And there at the back were Pearce and Bodenham and the others. He’d carved them years ago in the hope that giving them some form might drive them from his mind. All seven of them, in the order Pearce claimed they had died. Bodenham first, then Mather, the weak fuck. Greenhill with madness in his wooden eyes.

  *

  Grace stared into the glowing remnants of the fire. She felt the carved faces watching her. Judging.

  How could you lose her?

  “I got to go back to Hobart Town,” she said. “Bring a search party.”

  Alexander’s breathing was deep and even with sleep. He didn’t stir.

  Five days to Hobart Town. Five days back, if she could ever find the hut again. Ten days at least, then she’d be thrown back into New Norfolk for her troubles. Violet couldn’t last out there for ten days. She had to stay here and find her herself.

  She stepped outside and pulled her cloak tight against the cold. She couldn’t just stand still and hope. But where to even start? Perhaps if she were Violet’s mother, she’d have been able to find her. Perhaps if she were Violet’s mother she’d never have lost her to begin with.

  She’d had her chance to be a mother. Life had stirred inside her before the twins were a year old. There was a woman, Harris had said, in Seven Dials, who could take care of such things discreetly. Grace had left the blue house in tears and walked all the way to the lodging house in Stepney. She sat on a stool and cried while her mother puffed on her pipe. The house smelled of tobacco and piss and her childhood.

  “And here I was thinking you had a few brains in that skull of yours.” Her mother gave a loud, wet cough.

  Grace had been bringing her mother a crown each week since she’d begun working for Harris. She knew it went mostly on booze and not the coal she’d intended it for. Grace always left Stepney with a quiet satisfaction tha
t she’d crawled her way out. That she’d have walked the shit off her boots by the time she’d returned to Covent Garden. But now, as she sat opposite her mother and stared through the rag-patched window, she saw how easily her charmed life could topple.

  “I love him,” she said. And, in spite of herself, she loved the unborn child they’d created. Couldn’t bear the thought of losing it at the hands of some witch in Seven Dials.

  Her mother snorted. “You love him. You think that matters one scrap? He’s a gentleman. You ain’t ever going to be nothing to him but a good time.”

  Grace cried harder. She knew these things happened all too often; the man of the house making a stitch with the help. For all she wanted to believe things were different, she knew a girl who’d crawled out of these shit-infested slums would never be clean enough for a man like James Harris.

  Her mother leant forward and grabbed Grace’s chin in her hand.

  “Stop that weeping. You want to end up on the streets with some snotty-nosed chavy hanging off your hip?”

  Grace shook her head.

  “Course you don’t. So if your Mr Harris says he’ll take care of it, you let him take care of it. Plenty more than most girls in your position could hope for. Don’t know how lucky you are.”

  She returned to the blue house after midnight. Harris was pacing across the parlour, shirt untucked and waistcoat unbuttoned.

  “Gracie,” he said, “I was afraid you’d left.”

  The next day he sent her off with a pouch of silver to take away the shame.

  The second time, six months later, the pennyroyal potion hadn’t worked. Harris’s woman had taken to Grace with a bowie knife and the resulting torrent of blood ensured she never need worry about bastard children again.

  Losing her phantom babies was a dull ache compared to the desperate pain of Violet. She longed for that little voice singing along to her lullabies, the sticky hands at her skirts. Of course, she had no choice but to think of Violet safe in a bed of moss like a fairy. Couldn’t let herself consider the alternative.

  Violet had left no footprints. Had Alexander truly carried her out? Or had the previous night’s sprinkling of rain been enough to wash away any trace of her? How desperately she wanted to trust him. But perhaps Violet was safer out there than she was in the hut with him. A gnawing fear sat in her stomach. Only two sets of footprints. The thought circled through her mind until she was convinced he was about to bury her beside Violet.

  She ought to run. But what if she was wrong? What if Violet found her way back to the hut and Grace wasn’t there? As much as she knew Alexander wanted his silence back, she had to stay.

  She sat on the tree stump, shivering in the drizzle. Moonlight spilled across the tree ferns. She squinted, trying to make out shapes in the dark. The more her eyes strained, the more the shadows blurred and shifted. A moving branch? A native? Perhaps nothing at all.

  She heard rustling in the bushes. Saw a flash of glowing eyes. Two devils pushed through the scrub. Grace drew her knees to her chest, balancing on the stump. They came closer, drawn to the smell of meat. She ran into the hut and curled up on her side. Beside her, Alexander lay with his coat pulled to his waist. In the dim glow of the fire, she saw the interwoven trails of the cat splayed across his back. The white whip scars stood out against his brown skin the way a dewy spider web glowed in the sun. She tried to count the lashes, but they ran together, curled, meshed. She had an odd urge to touch them. Instead, she stared into the mess of it until the first hint of sun slid beneath the door.

  VII

  Confession of Alexander Pearce

  As recounted to Lieutenant John Cutherbertson, commandant of Macquarie Harbour

  1824

  ‘I was working with a gang at Kelly’s Basin, under Overseer Loggins. On the 20th September 1822 … we made up our minds to seize a boat and proceed to Hobart Town.’

  He found the bones poking from the mud. A skull, backbone, a few other scattered pieces. They were aged and yellow.

  Human.

  He’d kept her away from the cliffs the previous day, knowing she’d want to search them. He sure as hell didn’t want to climb down there.

  But by the second morning, Grace had found them herself. She must have gone looking again at dawn, because when she shook Dalton’s shoulder to wake him, the light in the hut was still grey and pale. He rolled over. Grace’s eyes were shadowy from sleeplessness, her skin blotchy with tears.

  “We need to go down the cliff. What if she’s fallen?”

  Dalton stood wearily. He’d not slept much either. Had found himself worrying she would run into the darkness and try to find the girl.

  He laced his boots and took a chunk of bread from the table. He turned to offer some to Grace, but she had already sprinted away.

  He caught up with her on the edge of the escarpment. She knelt, peering over the edge into the hazy valley. Beneath her, the cliff fell away in columns like the pipes of a church organ. Dalton pointed west. Further around the ridge, the rocks opened out into an incline. Steep, but climbable. He turned up the collar of his coat as they walked. The back of his neck, having been covered in hair for the best part of a decade, was feeling the chill.

  Grace tucked her skirts up and began to climb. She moved quickly, streams of pebbles shooting out beneath her boots. Twice, she lost her footing and cried out. Perhaps she’d fall. Dalton hoped it would be a swift death. Skull against rock. Not a broken ankle or something that would have him shooting her like a lame horse.

  He reached the bottom first and began to beat his way through the web of creepers. The bush was wetter down here. Water trickled beneath his collar and soaked through the holes in his boots. He could hear the dull thunder of a waterfall.

  And there, poking out of the ferns were the bones.

  Dalton picked up the skull. Turned it over. A gaping hole at the back.

  A fall down the escarpment?

  Axe to the head?

  Flit flit said a bird above his head.

  “Alexander? Where are you?”

  He dropped the skull and kicked the bones into the undergrowth.

  “What have you found?” Her eyes were wide with fear.

  He shook his head.

  Nothing at all.

  They walked along the base of the cliff. One end to the other, until their path was blocked by a great curtain of water. No Violet.

  Grace’s steps were crooked with weariness. He’d not seen her eat in days, Dalton realised. She turned her eyes to the steep, mossy slope and sank to the ground, skirts pooling around her like tar.

  “I got to rest a moment.”

  Dalton pulled a handful of berries from a bush and handed them to her.

  “To eat?”

  He nodded.

  “Not poisonous?”

  He took one, swallowed. Grace placed one cautiously on her tongue. She winced with the bitterness and flung the rest onto the ground.

  Dalton plucked them from the scrub and held them out to her. Food. A gift.

  Don’t you know what happens when it runs out?

  He stood with his hand outstretched, the berries like flecks of blood on his palm. Finally, Grace took them, crammed them into her mouth and swallowed.

  “Now can we go?”

  He nodded.

  Up she went, her long fingers curling around the rocks. Sometimes she would pause and look back over her shoulder at him. Dalton would point: this way, that way, and up they went like this until they both collapsed at the top of the escarpment.

  Grace stumbled back to the hut and fell asleep at once, her skirts still tucked up and one bootlace undone.

  Dalton paced back and forth across the clearing, thoughts banging against his head.

  Bones in the gully.

  The skeleton of a black? No.

  Once he had heard their songs drifting through the bush and followed the sound for half a mile. He peered out from behind a tree and watched them shroud a dead man’s bones in a hollow
log. Their chants and sung prayers reverberated inside him. Human life at one with the wilderness. If the blacks could survive out here, so could he.

  That burial was a thing of beauty, of respect. They’d never leave a man to rot at the bottom of a cliff. That was the domain of the Macquarie Harbour bolters.

  Eleven years this September since they had run from the harbour. The timing, the decomposition was right. The place? After the first death, Dalton had run north. Perhaps the others had continued this way, southeast past the lakes and into the valley. That gaping hole at the back of the skull, well that was Greenhill all over.

  Could be anyone.

  But there was no one else out here.

  In eleven years he’d seen no one but a few blacks.

  Likelihood of it being one of those seven men? High.

  So what? Whoever it was was dead. It mattered little if Dalton had known him or not.

  His thoughts knocked together until he wanted to cry out.

  He didn’t want the bones near his hut. He’d done his best to forget those men. Forget what the worst of humans were capable of. How could he do it with a beaten skull lying at the bottom of the cliff?

  Next he knew he was standing in the gully with the axe in his hand. He swung the blunt end into the skull. Bone splinters shot into the sky. He swung at the arms, the rib cage. And then with the blade, hacking at the legs, the spine. With each swing, he felt anger rise within him.

  There was a beauty to being the only person in the world. When there was no one to judge, a man stopped judging himself. When there was no one judging a man’s past, the past ceased to be. A man could kill another and learn to forget it, as long as there was no one there to hold him accountable. What do the trees and the birds know? What do they remember?

  A beauty, wouldn’t you agree? You see now what you took from me when you thundered into my life?

  He swung again, again. Finally, he dropped the axe. He had reduced the skeleton to a pile of brown fragments. Could be bark now, or dried leaves. It would wash away with the next rain.