Band of Gold (9 page)

Protective as always of his honorary daughter, Haunui asked, ‘How does Kitty feel about this Lily woman?’

Pierre made an unhappy face. ‘Well, it not be a man’s place to ask. But Rian don’t like her—he know she upset Kitty.’

‘But apart from that, everything else is good?’

‘
Oui
, it is. Rian say the gold is not far away, Ropata be thrilled that Leena and the children are here, Mick is happy trying to bed all the
jeunes dames
, although there not be all that many
jeunes dames
here to bed, I have to say, and I am having a good time doing the baking. Gideon be happy, Simon is fine, Daniel
seem
happy, Hawk is himself, Bodie chasing the mousies and stealing the chops and chickens, and Amber has made a little friend called Bao.’

Haunui wondered if Daniel had finally managed to forsake his love for Kitty. Daniel obviously believed he kept it well hidden, but Haunui, at least, saw it in the boy’s eyes every time they met. Nothing good could ever come of it, but he did understand: he had never ceased loving Hareta, another man’s wife, not even after death had taken her from them both.

‘This Bao is a girl?’ Haunui asked. Behind him he sensed Tahi’s sudden stillness, and smiled to himself.

‘
Oui,
a Chinese child. Very pretty manners. I approve,’ Pierre
declared magnanimously. ‘She do not have the chance to make many friends, and a girl should have the friends,
non?
’

Haunui nodded. ‘I have not seen many children yet. Are they all at school?’

‘The schools they open and they close down. Hardly any of the little ones attend.’

‘So where are they?’

‘Somewhere getting into trouble,’ Pierre replied philosophically. ‘Fossicking. Scrounging. Stealing, perhaps.’

‘There is a lot of thieving here?’

Pierre snorted. ‘All I say is you should nail your hat to your head,
mon ami
.
Oui
, there is stealing here. Life on the diggings, she is not easy.’ Then he brightened and his eyes began to gleam. ‘Course, in such a place, you get
la révolte!
And, if I am not wrong, she is not far away!’

Wong Fu had invited all fifteen of them to share an evening meal at the Chinese village. The Chinese were extremely self-contained and rarely mixed with other communities on the diggings, and so Kitty knew the invitation was an honour.

The camp was located some distance from the diggings, as the Chinese had no need to protect claims: they fossicked rather than mined for gold. The walk there in the deepening twilight was hazardous, but only because of the prospect of tripping over piles of mullock or falling into holes; Kitty, Leena and the children were surrounded by the protective cocoon of the crew. At the head of the party walked Wong Fu, his outstretched arm bearing a lantern that spilled only a little light across the treacherous ground. The evening air wasn’t cold, but Kitty had brought her shawl, aware that on clear nights here the temperature could drop quite markedly.

‘How far is it, Ma?’ Amber asked.

‘I don’t know, love.’ Amber had made Bao a small cake, and Kitty suspected the icing on it might be melting from the heat of her hands. ‘Why don’t you ask Mr Wong?’

‘Excuse me, Mr Wong,’ Amber called, ‘but how far is your camp?’

‘Not far.’

Soon the ever-present sounds of the diggings diminished somewhat and they came to another settlement of tents and tin and timber buildings, albeit smaller than the town they had left behind. From within dwellings pale lamps glowed, and the people walking the beaten paths in the encroaching darkness stared in open curiosity. Here, it was Kitty and the crew who were in the uncomfortable position of feeling out of place.

They passed a building that, in the darkness, appeared to gleam softly, suggesting to Kitty that its walls might actually be painted, a rare sight on the diggings. Its roof line was ornate, and the door lintel carved. A temple?

Wong Fu led them on through a jumble of tents and huts until they came to a larger structure, its windows covered with oilskin that allowed only a flicker of lamplight to escape.

‘Welcome. We will take our meal here,’ Wong Fu announced. In the porch, he paused to remove his shoes, prompting everyone else to prise off their boots, and hope their socks weren’t too pungent.

Inside, several lanterns hung suspended from a central rafter, chasing shadows to the farthest corners of the room. A long, very low table sat in the centre surrounded by flat cushions. At the head of the table, his bird-like legs crossed, sat an elderly man; on his left sat another, although he was perhaps no more than middle-aged.

‘This is my father, Wong Chi-Ping.’ Wong Fu indicated the younger man.

Wong Chi-Ping bowed his head. ‘Good evening.’

Rian, as captain of his crew, bowed in response, in the manner he usually employed when doing business with the Chinese.

‘And this is Wong Kwok-Po, my grandfather.’

Wong Kwok-Po nodded a curt greeting.

‘He does not speak good English,’ Wong Fu explained, ‘but he understands a little.’

‘But why has he come all the way to Australia?’ Amber asked. ‘Isn’t he too old to travel?’

‘
Amber!
’ Kitty coloured with embarrassment.

Wong Fu shrugged. ‘He wanted to see the world before he dies. And why not?’

Rian then introduced his party, and Wong Fu invited them to sit around the table, the men near the top and the women and children at the end nearest the door, Gideon and Haunui grunting as they struggled into unaccustomed cross-legged positions.

Rian gazed around the room. There was a red cabinet, on top of which sat an extensive teaset, against one wall, and a low cupboard in gleaming black against the wall opposite. A large and decorative hanging adorned the wall behind the elderly gentlemen.

‘Do you normally take your meals here?’ he asked.

‘No, we eat in our tents. This is our association’s meeting rooms.’

‘Where’s Bao?’ Amber asked. ‘I’ve made her a cake.’

‘Bao will be serving shortly,’ Wong Fu replied.

‘I thought we might meet your wife this evening, Mr Wong,’ Kitty said. ‘I’ve very much been looking forward to that.’

‘My wife did not come to Australia with us, Mrs Farrell. She has remained in China with our younger children.’

‘Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Well, then perhaps I may meet some of the other wives?’

‘No,’ Wong Chi-Ping said suddenly.

Kitty froze, wondering if she had made some awful gaffe.

‘There are two only,’ Wong Chi-Ping continued. ‘And they do not wish to show their faces.’

‘I’m sorry? Only two
wives?
’ Kitty was incredulous.

‘There are only two women altogether,’ Wong Fu clarified. ‘There are four thousand Chinese men here and only two women. And a handful of children.’

There was a long silence. Then Mick, stunned, asked, ‘What the hell do you do, then?’

‘We work.’

Mick ignored Rian’s warning look. ‘I was meaning, you know, when you want to relax, let off steam.’

Wong Fu’s face lit with understanding. ‘Ah, I see. We have our
tong
—our association—through which we meet in this room to talk and drink tea, we play
fan tan
and
pakapoo
,
mah jong
and cards, we smoke opium, and we have visiting Chinese musicians and theatre. We do not become bored.’

It wasn’t the answer Mick was looking for, but he had the sense not to pursue the matter further.

‘But you must become lonely at times?’ Kitty said.

‘Oh, yes. We miss our families. And we miss our home.’

The door opened and Bao appeared, almost staggering under the weight of a lacquered tray bearing several huge bowls of steaming rice. Amber jumped up and presented her with her cake. But, her hands full, Bao could only nod her thanks. Amber set the cake aside and took one of the bowls off the tray and placed it in the middle of the table.

‘The older gentlemen first, love,’ Kitty whispered, aware of protocol. ‘That includes your father.’

Amber giggled and moved the bowl nearer to the senior Wongs. Bao disappeared again, and returned a minute later with more bowls containing pickles, salted fish, preserved duck, and dried beans, as well as fresh vegetables prepared in a light, piquant sauce. The food kept coming until there was a feast on the table, including the tiny cups and six decorated teapots with wire handles from atop the cabinet, which Bao filled with fragrant tea. Finally she presented each person
with a bowl and a set of bamboo chopsticks, and sat down herself.

‘What are we supposed to do with these?’ Haunui asked, mystified.

‘Watch this.’ Pierre deftly chopsticked a small pile of rice into his bowl, arranged some vegetables and duck on top, then, slowly, so Haunui could see what he was doing with his fingers, secured a piece of duck between his chopsticks and lifted it to his mouth. ‘
Oui,
the sauce she is delicate but
piquante
.’

Haunui fiddled about with the sticks, attempting to set them between his fingers the way Pierre had. Carefully, he reached across the table and dug them into a bowl of rice and scooped out a portion—which, halfway back to his own bowl, exploded, scattering fluffy white grains far and wide. There were roars of laughter, especially from Wong Kwok-Po, then more as Simon did exactly the same thing. It soon became obvious that only Rian, Kitty, Pierre, Hawk and, for some reason, Leena, were adept at managing chopsticks—everyone else’s clothing and immediate surroundings were quickly accumulating little deposits of food.

Finally, at a nod from Wong Fu, Bao quietly slipped from the room and came back with a handful of porcelain soup spoons, which she distributed to all those who clearly would be going home hungry without them.

At the end of the meal, Bao rose once again and cleared the table.

Rian thanked Wong Fu and his kin for the fine meal. ‘I would like to ask, however, why did you invite us?’

Wong Fu appeared to consider the question. Eventually, he replied, ‘We invited you because you personally have shown us respect, because Mrs Farrell has welcomed us as customers at her place of business, and because we think it is important that Bao has a companion her own age, even if that companion is not Chinese. We wished to thank you for that.’

Grimly, Rian met his gaze. ‘It is that bad, is it?’

‘Yes, it is.’ Wong Fu gave a deep sigh. ‘You must understand that
we are reviled here on the diggings, and indeed almost everywhere, it seems, except in our homeland. Few of us can speak English, and even fewer white men can speak Chinese. Our way of life is vastly different, and we are hated for our frugality and our industry. We work together and threaten the concept of independence, and we are content to scrape our hands raw, scrabbling in old workings. We are called locusts. We are seen as filthy, idolatrous and immoral. It is believed that when we are not mating with each other we will try to mate with white women, therefore contaminating the British character of this fine colony.’ Wong Fu paused. ‘But I believe we would have to mate with a lot of white women to do
that
.’

‘Quite,’ Rian agreed. ‘I suppose the obvious question is: why do you stay?’

‘We make much money here,’ Wong Chi-Ping interrupted. ‘We send it home to our families. Kwangtung Province is poor, our villages are poor. It is why we come here.’

‘I have heard you operate in specific groups, is that right?’ Simon asked.

‘That is correct,’ said Wong Fu. ‘Under the credit-ticket system, each group—sometimes they are as small as thirty, sometimes as large as a hundred or more—borrows money from a broker in China to come here. These groups are connected by kinship and community, and they are led by an individual of some standing and wealth. The borrowed money is paid back to the broker from earnings from gold, and the rest is sent home.’

‘And who is that individual in your group?’ Rian asked.

‘My brother, Kai,’ Wong Fu replied. ‘He is in Melbourne.’

‘And how long will you stay here?’

‘We do not know.’ Wong Chi-Ping shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘Perhaps until the gold runs out? How long will
you
stay, Captain?’

Good question, Rian thought as he trotted along the Main Road. McCool hadn’t been ridden for a week, and pulled at the bit, tossing his head and skittering sideways at imagined dangers in every narrow alleyway. All the signs indicated that they would hit the lead in the next few days. They’d gone reasonably deep now, near enough to forty yards, and had spent some time slabbing and rendering the sides of the shaft for safety. The windlass used to lower and lift the men and buckets had started off flat on the ground, but, during the sinking, the mullock brought up to the surface had gradually piled up until the windlass had finished up sitting on a small hill, packed in place by a retaining wall of logs. If the washdirt proved to be good—if the ore in the lead did actually
contain
gold—the crew intended to build a shelter for whoever was operating the windlass, and for resting in. A sail had already been erected to ventilate the shaft, as the air became foul at a depth of around fifteen feet. And if the lead
really
paid and there was potential for going even deeper, Rian had plans to employ a whip, which entailed buying a workhorse—another expense—which would raise and lower the buckets without everyone having to nigh-on kill themselves slaving over the windlass.

But, of course, if the lead they struck yielded little, or it turned out they had missed the lead altogether, all that time and money would have been wasted.

However, Rian had other business to attend to today, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. At the northern end of Red Hill he turned off the road and made his way to what appeared to be a private house set a short distance from the road. He had been told, when he’d discreetly enquired, that ‘you can’t miss it’, and actually you couldn’t. The establishment was single-storeyed, of unpainted wood and fronted by a rather precarious-looking verandah, but was catapulted from the ordinary by a huge sign painted across the front wall in red and gold copperplate proclaiming
Lily Pearce’s Saloon of Delight
. Rian reined in and dismounted, tying McCool to the verandah rail and hoping
that nothing spooked him, or he’d have the whole verandah off and dragging across the diggings behind him.