Salt Creek Read online

  ‘How was it when you reached Grandmama and Grandpapa?’

  ‘To them?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think it was as if I’d risen from the dead.’

  ‘Yes. More for you, I suppose. They were waiting for me, since you had been and gone already.’

  ‘Grandmama would not stop feeding us.’

  ‘She had so many things made for me. “Nothing but rags and tatters,” she kept saying.’

  Fred smiled. ‘I dream about Tull sometimes. That I find him and know what to say. He understands. He forgives everything. He’s out there somewhere. I’ve met people who know him. He’s quiet, they say, a pleasant fellow. Good with his hands. He still likes to read. I ask for him at every port and leave a letter with the harbour master. Sometimes I tell myself that nothing has really changed. I used to walk through the trees looking for him, and now it’s masts all around. Wooden docks instead of dirt tracks; the water is still at my feet. I’ll be leaving again soon. Perhaps this time.’

  ‘Remember to mention what Addie said in your next letters, about Mr Stubbs and that she would be pleased to hear from him.’

  ‘I will. That might bring him to the surface. I would like to make amends, if that’s possible. He was closer to me than any brother. I cannot help wondering what would have happened if I had not spoken.’

  ‘She was with child. They would have been discovered.’

  ‘Or they would have run.’

  ‘Or that. But what then?’

  Fred took another biscuit and began to eat around its edges.

  I said, ‘Do you remember that night? Oat biscuits, and possum for breakfast. Malachi Martin the murderer. Life is dull here.’

  Fred leapt to his feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go for a walk.’

  I put on my pelisse and bonnet and Fred his coat and hat and we strolled along the road. The trees were almost bare – just a few leaves still falling. People brushed past, carriages and hansoms came towards us and receded; there was no end to them. ‘Look at us, Fred. No one would know that we ran wild in Australia. No one. I thought I would feel free here.’

  ‘It’s why I go voyaging. Not so many rules.’

  We walked to the park and climbed to the top of Primrose Hill. There were few people about, it being rather late in the afternoon by then, and cold. Our breath huffed out in clouds. The sun was like an old penny sliding above the horizon. The clutter of London spread into the distance. Below, along the road, the lamps were being lit and the light that glowed from each of them seemed to gather the dark closer. ‘I miss it, but it makes me sad to think of it,’ I said. ‘Not only because of Tull.’

  ‘You never told me what happened with Charles.’

  ‘If you don’t ask me about Charles, I won’t ask you about Ralph.’

  Fred was startled at that, but said, very quiet, after some consideration, ‘I cannot change my drives, even knowing their wrongness. Perhaps that is what it means to be human. I do hate myself for it. I will not say more than that, and that only to you, Hett.’

  ‘No.’ I tucked my hand through his arm. ‘We can’t help our natures. Addie believed that.’

  ‘I saw you and Charles. I came back early that day and went to Tull’s room and you were both there, lying so peaceful. I could not think it wrong, only wished that I had someone too.’

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you tell Papa, Fred?’

  His gaze slid away from me and he moved his body and face very slightly, helplessly. Finally, he said, ‘I would think you would know why.’

  A breeze picked up, and I tucked my hands into my pockets, and pulled one out again. ‘I meant you to have this.’ I handed him the small white stone.

  His fingers curled around it. ‘Oh, Tull,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Coorong, June 1862

  FRED DID NOT TROUBLE TO CONCEAL HIS departure the morning after Papa burned his books. I made him a batch of oat biscuits and wrapped them in a paper packet and we went onto the veranda.

  ‘Perhaps I will see you at Grandmama’s,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful.’

  The wind was gusting cool as he left: a tall, slender figure hefting a bag upon his shoulder walking away from me in plain view up the path to the stock route, not bothering to see if Papa was about.

  I never felt more alone than I did at the moment he turned the corner and was gone from view. I knew no one but a few natives and the wife of a murderer. The time for waiting had passed and I must do something, else be forced to discover myself to Papa and that I would never do. There was no reason to stay. Jane Eyre ran away across the moors and made her own way; I lacked her courage, and she had not been with child. There was nothing for me between Salt Creek and Adelaide; there was nowhere further to fall. I went inside and lit the fire in the parlour. The familiarity of the task and the flames crackling up and the warmth touching my face were a kind of comfort.

  All I had left was pride, and there was no room for that. I did not doubt my feelings for Charles, only mistrusted where they led. I wished it were otherwise. And now there was so little of choice left to me. All I could do was keep the baby safe, give it a name, come what may.

  I fetched paper and pen and ink. What might Charles expect from a union? Surely not obedience. I would not stay; I would leave him rather when I could. I would find a way. We had never spoken of it, only soft words at the end. I thought of the day he rode away from Salt Creek.

  He had been mounted, his horse restless to be gone. ‘You remember what I said: to leave, to flee—’

  ‘And never to look back.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I do.’ I had put my hand on his knee.

  He bent until his head was close. ‘I would go with you, anywhere. You know that I hope. Only say. Or come to me.’

  It was the hardest thing to let him go, and to stay. All I had was those words.

  I began to write: a letter to Charles, asking him to come for me, and to Grandmama and Grandpapa, asking if I might stay with them. I did not mention my condition to them. They would surely disown me if they knew. There was nothing for it but to conceal it until Charles and I married.

  Once the letters were sent, there was nothing to do but wait. It was almost winter. The house was quiet and my chores were done quickly. There was one cow to be milked – I let the other two go dry – a little washing, small meals. It was all I could do to disguise my wretched sickness. Papa hardly spoke. I played the piano softly. It was out of tune and the pedals stuck sometimes, but I had grown to like the wayward sound. The piano’s old sparkling grandness would have fitted ill with my mood and circumstances. When the mail boat next made its ponderous journey down the lagoon I rowed out to meet it. There was no news from Charles, only a letter from my grandparents. Mr Kruse hung over the railing, scratching his beard idly, waiting while I read it. The boat bobbed in the swell. I paused to be ill over the side. They would be delighted to see me whenever I should arrive, they said.

  ‘Would you please stop on your return this afternoon?’ I asked Mr Kruse. ‘I will be travelling to Adelaide.’

  ‘Certainly, Miss,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised, Mr Kruse.’

  ‘Mrs Stubbs mentioned the possibility. She said to keep watch for you.’

  ‘You’ve seen her? Is she well?’

  ‘Well enough. A nice little thing, en’t she?’

  ‘She is. I’ll be bringing two dogs,’ I said.

  ‘Anything up to and including sheep,’ he said. ‘It’ll cost you, mind.’

  I packed a case, at the last minute collecting one or two of Tull’s things: tools and a weapon and a stone. I did not like to leave Tull’s shield behind, but it would not fit. I put the money that Addie had sent me in my pocket and sat on the edge of our bed. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Papa returned at lunch.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I said.

  He ducked his eyes
. ‘I’ll get some bread and cheese and take it with me. No need to trouble yourself.’ He opened a drawer on the dresser and pulled out a roll of twine and went out into the cold.

  ‘Goodbye, Papa,’ I called from the door. He raised a hand but did not look back, just went across to the kitchen. It was as if he had been wounded and I was nothing but salt. I tidied the dining room and straightened the dresser and left a letter there for him to find and went down to the shore and sat watching the lagoon for Mr Kruse’s boat, which emerged from the mist and slid across the silver water – so still now that the boat by some illusion appeared to glide above it – and drew closer. I had tethered our boat to the shore by the longest piece of rope we had (when Papa found my letter, he could pull the boat back to shore), and now I put my case in the boat, and persuaded the dogs in too. I rowed out to the mail boat. Mr Kruse sent a harness over for the dogs and heaved them and then me aboard. The rowing boat drifted away from us to the end of its line and with the dogs on either side of me I watched it and my home and everything I knew slide away and grow smaller, the water flowing so smooth, so quiet beneath the boat and up its sides, until all of that world disappeared.

  ‘Oh, I’m glad to see you, my dear,’ Grandmama said when I arrived at her door. Her face was thinner and her hair quite grey. She held me within her arms and patted my back, and patted it, as if she were comforting herself as well. ‘I’ve been waiting and hoping for this moment since Freddie was here, and for so long before that. While there was a chance, we could not leave, and now I think we never will. But come in, my darling, and tell me your news.’

  My memories of that time are all fragments: the snowy folds of unmended sheets, the strangeness of people, noise, Grandpapa’s humour and the softness of his hands. I could not let go my old habits of thinking. Before I could stop myself I had calculated that at least two dresses could be made from the curtains in the drawing room, and that the roast beef served one night could have been stretched to three meals had it been stewed and served with dumplings. The plenty left me uneasy, and sad at the thought of Papa, and fearful at the thought of him too. I started at each knock on the door, and shook, until Grandmama made a sound with her tongue behind her teeth and looked at me as if I were a flighty horse. She sent me out riding, ‘to give you something sensible to think about, my girl,’ she said. I found Charles’s house and spoke to his mother, a sombrely dressed woman with faded brown hair and Charles’s startling eyes, and she looked at me as implacable in her own way as Papa – I, a girl who would appear at a door without introduction, and perhaps looking as desperate as I felt.

  She knew who I was and took the letter I left with her for Charles. ‘He and Mr Bagshott are not expected back for some time, perhaps months, but I will give it to him then, you may be sure.’

  I was not gambler enough to wait that long. Papa had taught me the dangers of hope and expectation. Grandmama agreed. It had been quite bad telling her. Exclamations of shock punctuated our conversations.

  ‘Beyond the reaches of civilization,’ she said. ‘What did he expect? Nothing to temper you. Running wild. I blame myself. I blame your father for taking you there.’ She quivered with rage and her eyes snapped; a moment later it gave way to regret: ‘We should have come and taken you away. And your Mama – poor, dear Bridget.’

  ‘Papa would never have allowed it.’

  ‘Perhaps not. He’s a proud man. Proud and improvident. But we should have tried. It’s England for you, my dear, and we can keep things quiet. Only you will have to go alone. Francis, your Grandpapa, will not withstand the voyage, I fear. He is not at all well. Oh, what were you thinking though?’

  ‘I was not thinking.’

  ‘No, I daresay you were not.’

  Before my ship left there was news of the impending trial of Malachi Martin. He was like a creature from mythology that had lurked at the Travellers Rest, at the mouth of the creek, waiting. I thought of Addie at the other end of the Coorong now, beside a lake, caught in the trap of Papa’s devising.

  It did not seem fair that I should be the one to break loose. It is hard to discern design or justice in life. I was healthy and thanks to my grandparents without need. Because of them I had the means to provide for my boy. I could not help seeing that it was losing control, having a child, that had led to my escape and thereby set me free, as I had dreamed of for so long. Would I have had that if I had received Charles’s letter and stayed on the Coorong in the hope of his arrival, if I had waited in Adelaide in growing disgrace? No knowing when he would return: I had to keep reminding myself of that. Still, I hoped for him until the day that Grandmama settled me in my cabin, and looked for him as the ship sailed from Port Adelaide, until all the white faces watching from the shore were as blank as polished shells.

  I survived without him, but I did not feel quite human.

  Chichester, 1874

  We are all fettered by the past no matter how we struggle to free ourselves. Papa carried all of England with him it sometimes seemed: its grandness and vision and civilizing power. And I feel always that I carry Australia with me. I am thrifty when I need not be; I have a longing for space and heat, the scent of eucalyptus, and still, after all these years, for Charles, so that there is no true comfort for me. The search for it in my memories is futile and leads only to despair, but I cannot prevent my thoughts from travelling.

  I often wonder what Mrs Bagshott would have thought of me had she met me in Chichester. It is as watery in its own way as the Coorong, with marshes and birds aplenty; it is the safest, most respectable place in the world. We are civilized here, you see. We have keys as big as your hand and walls of stone that are a foot thick and houses so bristling with flint that they would cut you to ribbons if you brushed against them. The stresses on the walls are such that bands of iron skewer the walls to hold them, as coarse stitches do cloth. In South Australia we lived in the bones and skins of drowned ships. A spear could pass through a wall with ease, but none ever did, and we lived among savages, people say.

  I attended the cathedral service this morning. I move to different parts of the building from week to week. It allows me to vary the reading material: tombs, burial stones, epitaphs. My favourite seat is between two such markers in the north transept. One is a white marble column for Edmund Woods, husband, father, J.P. (1751–1833), and his two wives and three of his daughters, all of whom predeceased him. I think of Papa when I read the epitaph, which speaks of Mr Woods’s ‘conscientious discharge of all the duties of life in the advancement of true religion and in constant acts of benevolence and charity’. Papa would have liked this said of him, he would like to have been ‘esteemed and regretted’. I prefer the other marker. It is a simple one of mottled grey stone set into the floor, damaged by the look of it when the cathedral spire fell; the carved letters and numerals are chipped and some ambiguous. It looks like something that has endured.

  John Barnard

  Deccaled 5 March

  1715 Aged 32

  Nic Son of his Died

  February 1711 AGED 3 YEARS

  Also Mary His Wife who died

  1733 Aged 47 years

  I felt for her in her sadness. At least I had my son.

  CHAPTER 24

  Chichester, 1874

  I HAVE READ THAT SOME SPECIES OF FINCH become distressed and grieve and cannot settle when separated from their true mate but once returned to each other are restored to life. As to whether this is true I do not know, never having observed such birds.

  The events of this afternoon and the evening will not cohere, yet I am strangely peaceful at the end of the day. It is as if yesterday and even most of today was the end point of a journey across a salt plain that had seemed without limit until the final step. I will say, though, that there is an austere satisfaction to traversing such a plain, to stepping forward each day. I took some pride in it. These things I recall clearly: Charles meeting my gaze through the window; that I ran past Ruby and flung the door open; Charles leaping th
e stairs; Ruby’s shocked face; Charles holding me in my private sitting room.

  ‘You are very forward these days. How do you know I’m not married?’ he said.

  ‘Are you married?’ I put my hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat against me. I had been thinking of it for so long.

  ‘No I am not. I could not find anyone. But you did, Mrs Crane. Is your husband about? Should you be here on my lap? Should you be doing that?’ He laughed as if he did not care and tightened his arms about me and rested his cheek against my hair.

  ‘There is no Mr Crane.’

  ‘You are widowed?’

  ‘And never was.’

  He stroked the backs of his fingers down my cheek. ‘You’ve become so pale.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why are you Mrs Crane then? So your father would not find you? Why did you leave?’

  I told him about Joss.

  We pieced the past together, what we could: his parents had not given him my letter or direction, and my father from bitterness had not forwarded his letter to me, and when Charles went to the Coorong Papa would tell him nothing; he sent him away. We have Hugh to thank. It was through a chance meeting with him on Collins Street in Melbourne that Charles discovered where I now live.

  Whether we will ever make something complete I cannot know. It is a fractured thing, life; it is in its nature. These things are true: a fallen cathedral can be rebuilt, a wall held up with a clover leaf of metal, a house brought back to life, and broken people can survive and find each other and become whole. And the people of Salt Creek: some of them have persisted despite all, if Hugh’s letter is to be believed. Charles and I cannot be what we were, but we might become something other. I am not reconciled, not to any loss of freedom, which is part of my dearest self, nor yet to life without Charles. But I will live the life I have. I will take the chance.