He went up to the hairy men seated on logs. Their crude possum skin coats lay by them on the floor. He refilled their mugs with a clear and thus potent liquor from a stone jug, then set it down on his slab timber table, returned to me, winked, and nodded towards the door, despite his earlier invitation to warm myself, asking for a conference.
Outside, the hutkeeper’s breath flumed in the steely afternoon. ‘Even at this time of year, sir, it can be cold evenings.’ We walked across to Hobbes. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, but disapprovingly. ‘Nice bloody little pony, sir. And bloody nice tack.’
I looked at him askance.
‘Those visitors of mine indoors. Nameless fellows. Aren’t such bad fellows as all that. But flogged men, yeh see. Therefore spoiled men. Runaways from work gangs. No ticket-of-leave like myself. Nothing to lose. Which makes nice pony and nice tack a problem. Unless, of course, they like yeh. They have their code, yeh know.’
‘I’d heard,’ I said, beginning to unsaddle Hobbes, whose back smoked in the failing light. I asked his name.
‘I’m Goldspink, sir, the overseer. This is Mr Treloar’s run, Bulwa Mountain, ye’re on. But my stockman and wagon-driver are off at an outstation, so I am solitary here to welcome yeh.’
I told Goldspink my own name.
‘Has a Biblical ring, thinks I,’ he told me. ‘Well then my dear Mr Bettany, I’d say don’t put yer tack in the outhouse. Sleep on yer saddle, if I were yeh. Use saddle bags as a bed bolster and adopt no airs. Drink little and seem to drink much. That’s the rule in this part of the known and unknown world, sir. No trouble with me, sir. Did I say I have my ticket-of-leave?’ And he pulled from his pocket a creased and grimy certificate, unfolded it and showed me his name and the absolving signature of Governor Bourke. And though he was playing at old world servility, he was also making sure I knew I’d get none here.
We turned Hobbes into the home yard, and Goldspink closed the gate. ‘I wonder where yeh found the little black man?’
‘I encountered him last night,’ I told him, as if it did not matter.
I carried the bridle, saddle and bags on my shoulder back into the slab hut. The men by the fire, Goldspink had implied and I had guessed, had permanently escaped from government service and were living wild in the bush off kangaroo and stolen livestock. In carrying indoors to them my bank notes and cash sewn in my saddle, I may have more or less carried my death warrant. But I was calm. Indeed, I was stimulated, as if I had come here for this encounter, this test.
In the corner the sheepskin was now over Felix’s head. I could not assess the conditon of his face. One of the men by the fire gestured lazily with a hand to acknowledge my entry. They talked deeply and in lowered voices to each other in the Irish tongue – in Van Diemen’s Land as in New South Wales a common method of Gaelic convicts for closing the shutters on strangers. I placed my saddle and bridle and bags in the hut corner, making of them a rampart around the child. Goldspink poured me a tin mug full of grog, and I sat at the table in the middle of the hut, not wanting to claim a place too close to the fire, and momentarily stung my lips with it.
‘Very good,’ I told Goldspink.
As the Irish runaways by the fire continued to exclude me from their company, I told Goldspink about Felix and my afternoon meeting with the natives. I wanted to narrate the story enthusiastically, as an exceptional narrative. But the way Goldspink nodded his head was meant to tell me that this was a tale he was used to. He looked at the absconders too, suggesting with his hands I keep what I said unheard by them. ‘These lads live to the west,’ he told me. ‘Savage bastards. Take black women as dibbunuk. When they’re done or tired, they poison the poor gins.’
I didn’t have to ask what dibbunuk meant. So, was I proposing to share a hut with the killers of native women?
‘I saw the little boy smiling,’ said Goldspink. ‘I’d smile round those lads, sir.’
‘But if it’s true, what you’re suggesting, I must go. I must report the death.’
‘On a night like this, sir? Yer intentions to speak to authorities would be pretty bloody clear. Wouldn’t they, sir?’
‘Let them be clear!’ I said.
‘But do ye have the latest pistols, sir, to ward such fellows off? And the infant … How could yeh go off in the night and take the infant?’
And the nearest magistrate was in Goulburn, a huge march away. Nonetheless my father had been careful never to permit his family to exclude the savages from the list of humankind – he retained that from his Spencean Philanthropist days. The death would need reporting, and if the men by the fire were accounted guilty, so should it be.
So began a peculiar night. Leaving the absconders by the fire with their pipes, I helped Goldspink cook some damper and offered him a little of my tea to pay for the night’s accommodation and the liquor I had pretended to savour. At Goldspink’s call, the Irish escapees joined us at table. I sat with the sleepy child in my arms, placing morsels of mutton in his mouth. He kept his face averted from what might have been his mother’s murderers, yet with the demeanour of a normally shy infant.
Through their asking from each other for salt or a slab of damper, I discovered their preferred names were Tadgh and Captain, Tadgh no more older than I behind the thickets of hair and what weather had done to his face. Captain, a wishful name, had grey in his russet beard and sometimes Tadgh called him Captain Rowan, and sometimes Tadgh’s name, Brody, emerged. In their company, which proved not uncongenial, it was most weirdly easy to forget by the second what Goldspink had accused them of.
‘Whatever part of God’s Britain d’you come from?’ Captain Rowan asked me from the blue.
I looked at him levelly. ‘I am Manchester-born,’ I told him.
‘I see now,’ said Rowan, chewing mutton. ‘Find that babby?’
‘Found him in the bush.’
‘You’re the lucky one.’
He looked to Tadgh to laugh with him, but the young man’s features remained innocently dark, though his eyes never left me.
The meal over, the two runaways were up without apology to attend to nature.
‘Very well then,’ said Goldspink, while the absconders were out of the hut. ‘Those lads like yeh well enough for now. It won’t be so easy when yeh come back with livestock. Capital is blessing and curse for a fellow, I can say, being utterly flat myself. Now it would be twenty-five miles from my ample residence here to the hut of Mr Treloar’s last shepherds. But I could show a young fellow of capital, if that’s what yeh are, a little something beyond, to the south-west. Grassy uplands there. High meadow would be another name for it. Not all of the quality of the country closer in … the best has a way of going first, as is clear and plain.’
I agreed that was obvious truth and stood up, disguising my hope that Goldspink might be of aid to me, and put down the sleeping native child in our nest of rugs in the corner. Goldspink followed me. ‘If I showed yeh something to yer liking, I surmise I could expect a small capital reward?’
I chose not to be too forthcoming. ‘My resources are naturally enough deposited with the bank. But I would pledge an appropriate gratuity.’
‘A poor fellow dreams of herds,’ Goldspink murmured without bitterness.
The runaway Irishmen strode back indoors and settled themselves by the fire. This closeness to the hearth was their unspoken reward for being dangerous and hard to predict, for leading an uncertain life.
‘When could this visit to the right land be arranged?’ I asked Goldspink, probably too eagerly.
‘Why tomorrow,’ he said. ‘While yeh’re a guest of the country.’
Settled against my saddle, for some reason I was very much at ease. Outside a huge wind scraped against the ridge. Astoundingly, in view of the company I was resting in, with the child of the murdered woman by my side, I contentedly put my hand into a saddlebag, hugging it to me, and took out the Horatian Odes. Through fighting at Philippi with the republican assassins of Caesar, Horace destroyed his own father, H
oratius Senior, an up-jumped slave whose land in Venusia was confiscated as penalty for his son’s folly. On the other hand my father, without once wielding a knife, had by Jacobin fervour saved his children from landless Manchester, and brought his son to such a fine fire as this, amongst the lost and the absconded, and on the edge of huge pastures to be delivered to me directly from God’s hand with Goldspink as possible midwife.
I looked occasionally to the fire, where Captain Rowan had wrapped up his russet body in skins and was sleeping. But then the younger man, Tadgh was there above me, fully dressed though on bare feet.
‘The babby, mister,’ he remarked.
‘Yes?’ I said. He was scratching the stitching of my saddle with a toe. I resisted punching his ankle.
‘You ought leave him alone.’
‘I found him by his dead mother.’
Was this the ambush? Would I have room at least to stand up to defend myself? I had eased onto my elbow and then half sat up.
‘I know, I know the tale,’ said the rogue with utter indifference.
‘His people won’t take him.’
‘I know that one too,’ said Tadgh. ‘It’s the taint, you see.’
‘I think it all disgraceful.’
Tadgh laughed privately. ‘Oh Jesus now, it certainly is that. But if kind you should shoot him, before some shepherd of Treloar takes unkind hold of him.’
I felt rash. ‘No one will take hold, kind or unkind. I intend to present him to the authorities.’
‘Ah then. Those authorities. They’re the boys all right.’ He yawned. ‘Poor little feller, he is. See this now?’ He turned, dropped his coat off his shoulders and pulled up his shirt. Sure enough, his back had the tracks of the flail criss-crossing it, and the dead blue and white of scar. ‘Read this testament, sir. It’s an old language, this one. Older than the Barns of Joseph.’
‘Barns of Joseph?’
He went on displaying the scars. ‘Those pyramids built by slaves, sir, in Pharaoh’s Land. If you read this right you see it’s my title deed to the mountains beyond. I hope a man like yourself could respect such a document.’
‘It is not a licence for doing whatever you want.’
Facing me from his bed of laths and leather opposite, Goldspink, frowning, clearly hoped I would not spoil his night or my prospects by making any improbable protest.
‘Well, sir,’ Brody said in a murmur which sounded very like exhaustion, ‘I think it might be a licence to be let breathe, you understand.’ And he pulled his coat on again and went without looking at me and lay near his friend.
I was not further disturbed at any point of the night.
When I woke the next dawn I found the hut empty of humans and invaded by grey light from the half-opened door. The absconders were vanished. But so were Felix and Goldspink. I jumped from my blankets and ran barefoot out into the frost-rimed shadow of Goldspink’s bark portico. From here, the overseer could be dimly seen beyond a screen of saplings, stooping at the stream below the hut. He seemed to be watching over his shoulder and yelled, ‘The boy, Mr Bettany!’ the instant he saw me. I ran to join him, and found him hauling naked Felix from the stream. ‘I found him floating in the stream when I came for ablutions,’ said Goldspink. ‘He must’ve wandered out earlier and the boys pushed him under.’ I admit I wondered if the truth was that he’d been drowning him himself when I woke, and had now converted murder to a rescue. But my suspicion was lulled when he put the limp boy up against a tree trunk and said with unfeigned moral bemusement, ‘The interesting thing – they would have done it as a mercy.’
I took Felix in my arms and squeezed him until he coughed and his eyes flickered, and turning him over, shook his body until he retched water. Behind me, Goldspink said, ‘The Captain and Tadgh are gone from the scene. I need to say though, sir, as an honest Christian, I’ve seen that boy and his mother. They lived near one of my stockmen for a time. The boy may know my face, I think.’
Felix, redeemed a second time in a few days, coughed and gagged in my arms.
‘So it might have been your stockman who used her and tired of her?’
‘Please, sir, please!’ said Goldspink with such earnest outrage that I felt bound to believe him. ‘I would not put my Mr Treloar in such a bad position as to draw the border police down on Bulwa Mountain. That above all is what the man hates. Intrusion from the government, sir. Magistrates he hates; surveyors he abominates; clerks from the Colonial Secretary or the Convict Department raise his special ire, sir. As for inquiries about natives … well, I think ye’ve got the drift. What I say to yeh, sir, is this. After I’ve pointed out the likely country to yeh, take the little chap away to Goulburn and put him with a missionary.’
‘Nice of you to spend my money for me,’ I commented, still holding the reviving Felix upside down.
He held out a preventive hand. ‘Sir, I wouldn’t presume to say. But the tiny fellow should be put anywhere safe!’
Felix’s eyes opened and my own eyes all at once clouded with tears. I smiled at him with something like parental relief, then rushed him back to the hut and swathed him in the rough but comforting texture of a possum rug. He did not howl – he made a low, monotonous humming. The more he revived the more his crazed grin was restored. Casting about, I found Felix’s little blanket-cum-cape in a corner. Whether he wandered forth to his accident, or was rudely snatched by Tadgh and the Captain, he had gone out naked to his death.
Behind me Goldspink was industriously feeding the fire with the dry wood of the region which conveniently fell from trees and provided kindling without the necessity of an axe. Such were the mercies of this marred paradise, which like Eden had suffered its founding murder, and in which, depending on one’s angle of view, a child had been half-redeemed or half-murdered.
‘Course,’ Goldspink said, ‘there’s likelihood of other gentlemen coming through here asking after country. I would like to put ye in place before that should happen. I shall show ye wondrous country, sir.’ How I liked that phrase ‘wondrous country’.
I offered Goldspink £30 if he agreed to act as my guide. I wished to see the promised region as soon as I might, so that I could cut blazes on trees and know, however briefly, the land for which I would need to buy stock. So we packed quickly, then Goldspink and I, with a restored but restive Felix travelling perforce on my saddle, rode out past Treloar’s last, squalid shepherd’s hut. There Goldspink dismounted to talk to the hut-keeper, and I was thinking of descending too, to put some tea into Felix, but the poor, near-mute, grimacing child let out a whimper of protest.
‘You will see nice country, Felix,’ I promised him above the wind.
Goldspink reappeared from the hut, and we crossed a little creek in rising country and rode through a pass between wooded ridges, during which it seemed the child was torpid or asleep. We were now south of Treloar’s last sheep and, on Goldspink’s advice, I marked a number of trees with a hatchet he had brought with him, and saw to my joy that all trees and boulders were free of human scars. The light was sharp as we came into a great, open natural parkland, scattered with trees and strewn about with great smooth stones which looked deliberately placed, like the work of some tribe who believed in a plurality of gods. On the mountain ahead, to the south-west, great storm clouds lay like a promise, and a river, its track marked by native oaks, its surface high, threw back the shifting sun’s cold light.
‘This country,’ said Goldspink, ‘our native stockman tells me is named Nugan Ganway.’
‘What’s it mean?’ I was happy for it to mean anything at all.
‘Dratted if I know, sir. Maybe the little lad can tell yeh. The natives have these names … I’d say it meant: plenty gibbers, big bloody stones, or something similar. Yeh see there that hollow hill above the river? That’s a good place to put a hut, I’d say.’
He indicated the dome of a low, boulder-strewn hill. So the site of my future homestead was pointed out by the ambiguous Goldspink, though that did not mean I had grounds
to reject the idea. I had already extracted the £30 in bank notes and had it in my jacket. I paid it over now, to release him. For I wanted to be rid of him. If he rode hard, and into the early evening, he could make his southernmost shepherds’ hut.
‘Look to the little chap there now!’ he cried as his horse trotted off and left Felix and me to our own sweet devices. I rode up into the saddle-backed hill Goldspink had pointed out and made my camp there, secure from winds. Making fire and brewing tea, I let the poor bemused child rest, fed him occasional sips from my mug, and lumps of mutton from my saddlebag. I was Horace in Venusia, in benign hills, by kindly streams.
‘Jolly good,’ said the poor child.
As much as I already felt for him and was growing to like him I had not come to New South Wales to become guardian of a black child. Returning north and seeing a thread of smoke from a wooded ridge to my west, a sign of natives, I was overtaken by the sense that, given the misadventures which had been imposed upon him, he was surely better with his own, who were just then cooking wallaby or kangaroo above us. They could not, seeing him from a height, alone in the plain, abandoned by myself, finally reject him. I could not deny him a final chance for reunion with his kind.
When he was drowsy after our midday meal I sat him in his little blanket surcout under a tree and made gestures of such friendly but firm emphasis that he knew he was to stay there. His mouth contorted but no tears came, and I mounted Hobbes and rode away, but kept the child always in sight. I must have ridden two miles on to a saddle amidst hills from which in a sparkling day I could see him seated still in place, reduced by distance to a scintilla, a little jot on the hour’s huge manuscript. I would have liked to have had a glass to train on him, and I swore I’d bring one back to Nugan Ganway with me. I waited and he did not move. I hoped he slept. His fidelity to remaining a speck was terrible for me to see, and though I waited some time there was no sign of anyone emerging to claim him, and the smoke from the ridge had vanished. It had been a simple-minded concept of mine anyhow, and I realised it grew from a disordered and wrong-headed feeling that in this country I was perpetually watched by the sable brethren. Now, in that immense natural Australian sphere which lay before me, the remote child took on the look of the sort of ragged fragment of life only a brute could abandon.