Band of Gold (6 page)

‘A percentage of the profits, and when it’s time for you to move on the business would revert solely to me.’

Kitty had to admit the proposal sounded far more interesting than the prospect of sweeping Lilac Cottage’s floors and hanging out laundry for the foreseeable future. ‘It’s a generous offer, Flora. Very generous. But I would have to talk to Rian about it.’

Flora inclined her head in acquiescence. ‘Of course.’ Then she looked amused. ‘But there is the possibility that he may object to his wife engaging in the sort of work that involves getting her hands dirty. Well, floury, at least.’

Kitty recalled the many times she’d helped on the
Katipo
’s deck when the weather became rough, or occasions when the schooner had had to leave port with the utmost haste. And there had been plenty of those. She smiled, almost to herself. ‘He’s not that sort of man.’

‘No, I didn’t think he would be. Otherwise he wouldn’t have married you.’

At that moment three men entered the dining room, removed their hats and sat down, their rough work clothes, unshaven faces and shaggy hair incongruous against the crisp, white cloth draping
their table. As one, they stared at Kitty and Flora.

Flora stared stonily back, until one by one they lowered their gazes. She sat back, satisfied.

Kitty said, ‘Flora? This Lily Pearce, what sort of woman is she?’

‘She’s spiteful, Kitty, and has very few scruples. Watch out for her.’

Impatiently, Rian looked at his watch: they’d been standing in this queue for almost an hour now.

‘Is it like this every bloody day?’ he muttered to Hawk.

They were lined up outside the office of the gold commissioner, waiting to pay the compulsory twenty shillings each for a monthly licence to ‘dig, search for, or remove gold from Crown lands’. It was enforceable by government officials via the police, and the inability to produce one could result in a hefty fine or even imprisonment.

Rian thought the fee was outright extortion, but he couldn’t risk not having a miner’s licence: Sir Charles Hotham, Victoria’s new governor, had announced that licence searches would increase from once to twice a week. Apparently it wasn’t enough to have one licence per hole in the ground—every digger working said hole had to pay for the privilege. The rest of the crew would have to come in tomorrow for theirs. He waved as he caught sight of Patrick O’Riley hurrying up the street. The Irishman waved back, and mimed the raising of a glass to his mouth. Rian signalled his agreement.

Forty shillings grudgingly handed over and their licences finally procured, Rian and Hawk met Patrick in the nearest saloon. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but already it was crowded, noisy and thick with pipe smoke.

‘Holy Christ,’ Patrick complained as he sat down, clamping his hands to the small of his back. ‘The rheumatiz, so it is, from workin’ waist-deep in cold water for nigh on a year. Got your licences, I see?’

Their glasses of hot brandy arrived. Hawk thoughtfully turned his around on the scarred table top, and remarked, ‘It is busy in here for the time of day. Is this usual?’

Evidently there was no rheumatism in Patrick’s elbow: he lifted his glass and half-emptied it in one draught. He nodded in approval. ‘There’s usually a good handful of diggers keepin’ the seats warm in these places any time you care to go in, but I have to admit there’s a fair few today, so there is.’

‘Any reason?’ Rian asked, his eyes watering from his first sip of brandy.

Patrick tapped the side of his nose, and Rian wondered whether one day he might actually wear a hole in it. ‘Trouble on the diggin’s,’ he said conspiratorially. ‘This Hotham business, the diggers aren’t too happy about it.’

‘Well, I’m bloody well not, either,’ Rian said hotly. ‘Twenty shillings a month!’

‘Sure, and La Trobe, the fellah before Hotham, was a fool as well. Introduced the licence fee in the first place, then was after raisin’ it to three pounds a month. Three pounds! Nothing but a tax, pure and straight! But the chums organised and the fee stayed at thirty shillings. And, to be fair, it did go down to twenty shillings in November last year. But La Trobe wasn’t just a fool, he was blind as well. Must’ve been, not to have known what a drunken, corrupt pack of Joes he had running around on the diggin’s makin’ an honest digger’s life a misery. And they still do, the thievin’ heavy-handed bastards.’

Rian raised his eyebrows. ‘“Joes”?’

‘The peelers,’ Patrick explained. ‘Coppers. Now Hotham’s supposed to be investigating’—and here he affected a braying upper-class voice—‘ “goldfields disputes and grievances”. Couldn’t investigate his own arse, if you ask me.’ He hoicked in disgust and aimed at a spittoon. ‘Oh, the bloody fanfare when he turned up here, I tell you. Just before you came, it was. People were thinkin’ he was
Christ risen, the way they were carryin’ on. But that soon changed, I can assure you.’

‘And the disputes, what is the cause of them?’ Hawk asked.

‘Well, claim-jumpin’ and claims overlappin’—or should I say
under
lappin’—and the like. ’Tis a real problem with deep-sinkin’. The trouble is the way the gold commissioner, that’s Robert Rede, settles the disputes. Very arbitrary, so he is, and not often fair. The
grievances
now, that’s all about the fees and the vote and the land and the like.’

‘So this Hotham’s not popular among the diggers?’ Rian said.

‘You could say that.’

Rian looked thoughtful. ‘Is there any organised resistance to what he’s doing?’

Patrick looked at him in surprise. ‘Course there is, and why wouldn’t there be?’

‘Is it widespread?’ Hawk asked. ‘And
how
organised?’

Patrick took a moment to shred some tobacco and tamp it into his pipe, light it with a Lucifer and make himself more comfortable on his stool. ‘It’s been goin’ on for nearly three years. It all started before I got here—with the monster meeting at the Forest Creek diggin’s, up north of here, in ’51. They were agitating for the cursed licence fee to be reduced, and the right to vote—except for the blackfellahs, of course—and to purchase land. That led to the Red Ribbon Rebellion last year in Bendigo. A mass meeting, it was, more like a carnival. All the nationalities had their flags flyin’, so they did—the Americans and the Germans and the Danes, and the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh, and the English. There was a Diggers’ Banner, and pipes and a brass band. And they all decided that they were only goin’ to pay ten shillings for their September licences. A lot did, and wore red ribbons in their hats to advertise the fact. After that they took a petition—over forty feet long, it was!—to Melbourne in a dogcart. Not that it did much good, mind.’
He drew mightily on his pipe and was rewarded with a mouthful of smoke that dribbled out as he spoke. ‘These days, because of that eejit Hotham, things are getting
very
interestin’ here. ’Specially now that the Gravel Pits—’

Rian interrupted. ‘That’s the leads on the other side of Bakery Hill? To the north?’

‘’Tis. Now that them leads are payin’ well, the Tipperary mob, who’ve staked most of the claims there, are gettin’ stirred up. And rightly so. Claims allotted are only eight feet square, as you know yourselves, and if you hit a payin’ lead beneath one, that’s all and good, but if you don’t it’s a lot of hard work for bugger-all. Bigger claims would mean more chance of strikin’ gold. ’Tis an awful waste the way it is. The tension’s becomin’ terrible. And you know what a crowd of Irishmen are like when they get riled, and there’s thousands of them on the Gravel Pits. Plenty on this side, too.’ Tap, tap, tap went Patrick’s finger against his nose. ‘You mark my words, there’ll be trouble on these diggin’s before the year’s out. Serious trouble.’

Rian hoped not. He was itching to get stuck into his claim, which had only been driven to a depth of around fifteen feet below ground by the unfortunate Mr Murphy. Especially as two days ago, as he had been idly kicking at the mullock piled around the shaft, he had, to his utter amazement, uncovered a nugget the size of his thumbnail.

‘Rian?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I need to talk to you about something.’

‘Good,’ Rian said, who wasn’t listening. The firelight flickered on his face, sharpening the planes of his cheeks and jaw.

‘Can you put the paper down, please? It’s important.’

Rian folded the
Ballarat Times
, then scooped Bodie from his
lap and plonked her on the floor. ‘There, you have my undivided attention.’

Kitty wasn’t sure where to start. ‘Well…you remember when Simon and I went to stay in Auckland that time, when Hone Heke was campaigning against the British in the Bay of Islands?’

Rian nodded cautiously. He certainly did remember it—he’d almost had to physically force her to board the ship that would take her to safety.

‘And you know how I stayed with Mrs Fleming? And Hattie and Flora, and Flora turned out to be a prostitute?’

Rian nodded again. When Kitty had told him about it, he’d laughed his head off imagining the quiet, bespectacled girl who worked for a watchmaker during the day transformed into a seductive
demimonde
by night. He’d enjoyed the story immensely.

‘Flora was the one who procured the horses for you, wasn’t she? So you could come back up north against my
express orders
, and be abducted by Hone Heke’s warriors and then almost drown, along with our daughter?’

‘Er, yes. Well, I ran into her today.’

‘Really? Here on the diggings?’

‘Yes, here in Ballarat. She was out shopping, and we had morning tea together.’

Rian grinned broadly. ‘And what’s she doing in Ballarat? Repairing watches?’

‘No, making lots of money running a bordello.’

‘That’s a surprise.’

‘She had a business proposition for me.’

‘She wants you to go and work for her?’ Rian looked shocked. ‘But you’re
my
wench! No, I
refuse
to share.’

Kitty gave him a withering look. ‘She has money she would like to invest. She suggested she buy a business here in Ballarat and that I run it for her. A bakery, actually.’

Rian looked crestfallen. ‘But, sweetheart, you can’t cook.’

She had known he was going to say that. ‘No, I know—but Pierre can.’

Rian looked at her for a long moment, his face gentle with concern. ‘Come here, love. Come and sit on my knee.’

Kitty sat in his lap, flinching as the rocking chair gave an ominous creak. Rian put his arms around her and rested his chin on the top of her head. ‘Are you bored?’

Kitty nodded, her face brushing against the fabric of his shirt.

‘Already?’

Another nod. ‘Yes, and I miss the
Katipo
and the sea terribly. I need to do something, Rian. It’s all right for you, armpit-deep in mud, but what do I have to occupy my time?’

Rian rocked for a moment, enjoying the warm weight of Kitty’s bottom on his thighs. ‘Are you asking me for permission to accept Flora’s offer, or telling me you’ve made up your mind?’

‘I’ve already made up my mind. I want to do it.’

Kitty felt, rather than saw, Rian smile. ‘That’s my girl. I would have been quite shocked if you were asking me. So out of character. I have one proviso, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That you don’t sample everything that gets baked.’

Indignant, Kitty sat up. ‘Are you saying I have a big appetite?’ She did, actually, but it never seemed to have a negative impact on her waistline.

‘No, I just mean you shouldn’t eat all the profits.’

And he began kissing her. Slowly at first, then with increasing passion.

‘Where’s Amber?’ he murmured.

‘Out somewhere with Daniel and Simon.’

‘Good.’

O
ne evening in the first week of October, as Kitty and the crew ate supper around Pierre’s cooking fire, a horse and cart emerged from the shadows and came to a halt near the rear of the cottage. For a second no one moved, then Ropata, his piled plate forgotten, shot to his feet, grinning wildly.

‘Who is it?’ Rian asked, his fork halfway to his mouth.

Kitty, smiling broadly herself now, exclaimed: ‘Leena! It’s Leena and the children!’

Ropata hurried to the cart and helped his wife down, then swung her jubilantly around so that her mass of black hair fanned out around her head. His children jumped off the cart and leapt around him, swinging on his trouser legs and demanding to be picked up.

Kitty crossed to Leena and embraced her. ‘You came! I’m so glad you did. Ropata has been missing you terribly.’

‘And I have missed him,’ Leena replied in her low, melodious voice. She met Kitty’s gaze, and Kitty noted that between Leena’s
full brows was a vertical line that had not been there a year ago. And, as always, she reminded herself of how lucky she was never having to live apart from Rian.

‘You look well,’ she said, and it was true. Leena’s tall figure was as willowy as ever, and her dark eyes sparkled in the firelight. ‘Will you stay long?’

‘We will stay until we go again,’ Leena replied in her relaxed, philosophical manner.

‘And how are you?’ Kitty asked, stooping to address the younger of Ropata and Leena’s children, four-year-old Molly.

Her curls bouncing with a life of their own, Molly shouted, ‘Good! I am good! We’ve come to see Papa!’ and clapped her pudgy hands with excitement.

‘And what about you, Master Will?’ Kitty asked.

Six-year-old Will, his own curls rivalling his sister’s, opened his mouth but his intended reply became a shriek of laughter as Ropata snatched him up and dangled him by the ankles.

‘Me, too, Papa! Me, too!’ Molly demanded.

Then someone else climbed down from the cart, stretched stiffly, and ambled over.

Kitty grinned, delighted. ‘Mundawuy! What a
lovely
surprise! How
are
you?’

Leena’s uncle, Mundawuy Lightfoot, a full-blooded Aborigine of the Cadigal band, held a special place in Kitty’s heart. It was he who had offered to inter the body of Kitty’s closest friend, Wai, in his people’s burial cave in Sydney after she died in childbirth, and it was he who had taken Kitty back to the cave five years later to collect Wai’s bones so Kitty could take them back to New Zealand for burial.

Mundawuy clasped Kitty’s outstretched hands. ‘Good to see you, too, eh?’

‘It was nice of you to bring Leena and the children down, Mundawuy,’ Kitty said.

‘Maybe, eh? But safer, too.’ He hoicked up a gob of phlegm and fired it irately at the ground. ‘Bloody police troopers and their bloody pet blackfellah trackers.’

Kitty nodded, aware of how unsafe it was for an Aborigine to travel alone, especially a woman. ‘Will you be staying?’

Mundawuy shook his head. ‘Got things to do. Gotta go back in a couple of days.’ He looked past Kitty, his face lighting up as Gideon approached.

Mundawuy thrust out his hand. ‘G’day, black man!’

Gideon, grinning from ear to ear, shook it energetically. ‘Good evening, friend Mundawuy.’

It was a ritual they’d shared since they had first met years ago, when Gideon had gone to the aid of some of Mundawuy’s people in Sydney.

Rian appeared, full of
bonhomie
, followed by Pierre, who urged the travellers to come and sit by the fire and allow him to feed them.

As the last morsels of extremely tasty stew were being mopped up with thick slices of fresh bread, Rian asked Mundawuy if he’d seen any of the New South Wales goldfields.

Mundawuy nodded and said through a mouthful of bread, ‘Been out to Hargraves and Ophir. And Turon.’

‘Did you try your hand?’

Mundawuy swallowed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘Yeah, had a go, but us blackfellahs not popular on the goldfields, eh?’

Rian grunted.

‘What about you? You rich yet?’ Mundawuy asked.

‘Not quite,’ Rian said, ‘but the claim’s showing promising signs. We’re down forty feet now, to the basalt, but we’ve to get through the main drift next, and it’s absolutely saturated with water. Christ knows how deep that’ll go before we get down to the lead.’

‘You got it all slabbed up and rendered? Don’t want a cave-in, eh?’

Rian nodded, his aching back and shoulders testimony to the number of eucalypt slabs they had cut and carted to the claim, then laboriously lowered and secured into place.

‘No, we certainly do not,’ Kitty said. She quickly changed the subject. ‘Leena,’ she asked, ‘how are you at baking bread?’

Rian, Mundawuy, Patrick and the rest of the crew sat in the Eureka Hotel. At half past twelve in the morning liquor had been crossing the bar for quite some time, and no one was sober.

The Eureka Hotel, on the Melbourne Road between Bakery Hill and the Eureka diggings, was hard to miss. James Bentley, the publican, was an ex-convict who had made money and, it was rumoured, influential friends in Melbourne, and had arrived in Ballarat with what many saw as a somewhat suspicious friendship with the police magistrate and chairman of the licensing bench, John d’Ewes. But, as Patrick pointed out, no one cared about any of that on the nights when he chose not to close his hotel’s doors until one in the morning.

The hotel itself was two storeys of weatherboard with a shingle roof and costly sash windows, a fancy lamppost outside the front door, a detached dining room, a livery stable and horseyards, and a canvas-covered bowling alley, the whole precinct covering half an acre. Nearby were stores, auction rooms and professional offices. The hotel was always well patronised. Sly-grogging was prohibited on the diggings, although in fact it was rife, but it was better to be fleeced in a hotel than to continually pay the fines demanded by corrupt police, even when you were innocent—and even when it was common knowledge that those in their cups at the Eureka Hotel were frequently robbed, set upon and thrown into the street by Bentley’s henchmen. And this in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that the goldfields police and the commissioner’s troops also drank there. The Eureka
might have had a fancy lamp lighting its entrance, but to many on the diggings it was known as the ‘slaughterhouse’.

‘I’ll be buying the next round,’ Mick said with the magnanimity of the pissed, even though he didn’t have a penny to his name.

Rian opened his purse and peered into it, noting that there was very little left inside. He was fast running out of money, and if they didn’t strike gold soon the whole endeavour could end in embarrassing failure and they would all be forced to return to Melbourne, penniless.

‘One more round, lads, then that’s it, I’m afraid.’

The last round was duly purchased and imbibed and, just as Rian was returning his empty glass to the table, there came a rattling at the front door, now locked.

No one took any notice. The rattling became more frenzied and eventually a front window shattered and a slurred voice shouted, ‘Can ye no’ let us in? We’re wantin’ a drink!’

From the vantage point of Rian and the crew, little could be seen of what happened next, but it seemed that Bentley, surrounded by his bullies and accompanied by his wife, crossed the room to the broken window and began to quarrel with someone outside. Insults were traded and threats made, and suddenly a hand gripping some sort of weapon emerged from the crowd, and struck out at a figure just visible beyond the glass.

Rian decided it was time to leave and they slipped out through a side door. For some minutes they walked through the darkness, skirting around the hotel’s stable, doing their best to avoid a pungent stream of steaming horse piss, then headed down the hill towards the Flat.

Rian said, ‘Perhaps we should have lent a hand. Poor buggers.’

‘No, we should not,’ Hawk countered. ‘It is not our business. We cannot help every lame duck we come across.’

Rian tsk-tsked. ‘You’re a hard man sometimes, Hawk.’

‘No harder than you. But I perhaps have a little more common sense.’

‘I think you’ll find you’re the only one favouring that particular point of view.’

‘I think you will find I am not.’

Behind them, Mick expressed his opinion of their drunken bickering by letting out an enormous, rumbling belch.

Late the following afternoon, Patrick told Rian that the man who’d been set upon the night before—a digger called James Scobie—had died. He’d been kicked mercilessly and suffered a fatal head wound. His inquest had just been held, and James Bentley had sworn that he’d been retired upstairs at the time that Scobie had been attacked.

‘The jury found there wasn’t enough evidence against Bentley. It’s a rum business, so it is, Rian,’ Patrick said, packing fresh tobacco into his pipe. ‘A bloody rum business.’

After much haggling over the price, the deed to the bakery had finally been transferred to Flora and the astronomical £50 fee for the shopkeeper’s licence paid. Until then Kitty and Pierre had been busy planning what they would sell, having decided to operate as a bakery only, not a bakehouse. Kitty favoured plain loaves and buns, because they were the only things she thought she could bake successfully, but Pierre had other ideas.

‘
Non, chérie
, we will make this the best
boulangerie
this town has ever seen,
n’est-ce pas?
We can’t be doing with just the breads and the buns! The other bakeries, they do the breads and the buns, but
we
will make the money.
We
will sell the
baguettes
and
pains de seigle
and
brioches
.’ His eyes lit up with enthusiasm. ‘
Oui!
And the
macarons
and perhaps even the
petits choux!
’

Kitty hadn’t eaten
brioche
in ages. ‘You hardly ever cook anything like that for us. Except for
baguettes
.’

Pierre waved his hands theatrically. ‘To waste on sailors?
Pfftt!
Who would?’

Kitty was doubtful. ‘You don’t think, well, you don’t think
petits choux
and what-have-you might be a little
exotic
for prospectors? Mightn’t they just prefer plain bread?’

‘
Oui,
but they can get plain bread up the street. At Kitty Farrell’s Fine Foods, they can buy something special, a treat for the midday meal. A reward for the hard work. And what about all the wives,
hein?
And the swells from the town and the greedy officers from the Camp?’

Pierre had a point there, and Kitty knew it. There were several bakeries on the Flat and in the town itself, but none of them sold anything particularly fancy. And she knew Pierre was an excellent bread and pastry chef. ‘Well, all right, on one condition. Actually, two. The first is that we make
croissants
instead of
petits choux
, providing we can find a source of butter that isn’t too outrageously expensive. And eggs. I think finding a source of cream for the
petits choux
might be more trouble than it’s worth. And the second is that we call the business Pierre’s Bayou Bakery. You’ll be doing most of the cooking, remember.’

Pierre’s swarthy face went pink with pleasure. ‘It be
baking
, not cooking.
Mais oui,
I like that.’

Then came the day for them to inspect the vacated shop, a wooden building wedged between the
Ballarat Times
office and a drapery. Towards the rear wall sat an enormous bread oven made of solid brick, its dome peaking several feet below the ceiling, in which an opening had been formed for the chimney. Shelves for ingredients lined both side walls, several wide work tables stood before the oven, and a counter and bread racks bisected the shop, leaving an area at the front for customers. The floorboards throughout were unvarnished, and the store window bore the painted legend:
Golden Bakery
.

‘We’ll have to change that,’ Kitty remarked.

The shop, unsurprisingly, smelled strongly of bread and yeast, and
needed a good clean as smoke stains had accumulated on the walls and ceiling around the oven. Leena lifted the hatch in the counter and they moved through to the business end of the shop.

Standing before the oven, Kitty admitted sheepishly, ‘I don’t actually know how one of these works, Pierre. Aunt Sarah had a very small one in our house at Paihia, but I have to confess I never used it.’

Pierre flapped a hand dismissively. ‘It is easy. The fire, he goes inside the oven,
oui?
Then, when the oven is white hot, we rake the fire out and wait until the oven cools a little bit. Then in go the doughs!’

Kitty eyed the oven’s wooden door. ‘Won’t the door catch fire?’

‘
Non
, we leave her open until the fire comes out, then we douse her in water.’

Kitty nodded.

‘The hard part is getting up at the fart of the sparrow to prepare the breads and the pastries. Before, even. And we will be needing two of us—she is not a one-person job. Of course, I will have to be one of those persons, as I am the only one with the special recipes.
And
I will be having to prepare the breakfasts for the others, remember.’

Kitty felt vaguely guilty that Pierre would have so much extra work, but he’d insisted he didn’t mind. Anything, he had admitted confidentially to Kitty, to avoid going down the shaft: he had a morbid fear of being underground.

‘I do not mind rising early,’ Leena offered.

‘No, Leena.’ Kitty was adamant. ‘You have the children to tend to. I’ll do it. You can come in later.’

Leena had already arranged for a local Aboriginal woman—a pleasant, pipe-smoking grandmother named Binda—to mind the children two or three days a week. And when Binda wasn’t available, Amber had volunteered to look after Will and Molly, or to take Leena’s place at the bakery.

Leena thought for a moment. ‘I will come to the bakery and take the morning meals back to the crew, then I will start work.’

Kitty beamed. ‘Yes, that will work beautifully, won’t it, Pierre?’