Bereft (27 page)

Quinn stood—shirtless, arms akimbo—while Sadie wrapped lengths of blue wool around his waist with the concentration of a tailor measuring him for a suit. To one of the strands she had fastened a leather pouch the size of a child's fist. The pouch contained items she deemed crucial to the success of his mission: snail shells, a stone wrapped in red twine, whiskers she had trimmed from his beard, his broken tooth, an earring.

“The dogs won't smell you if you wear these,” she assured him as she issued him with directions. “So he won't know you are there when he gets back. Follow the cart track past Willow Creek. Mr. Gracie's place is a stone cottage on the rise above the old Chinese Village. You can't miss it. I'll wait for you here.”

“Will you be alright?”

She severed a piece of wool with her teeth. “Of course.”

“Hide under the floorboards.”

“I still have my knife.”

“Hide under the floor. In case Robert comes up here.”

“He'll never find me by himself.”

He grabbed her arm. “Please.”

She shrugged him off. “Alright. I will.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart.”

Quinn had come to love her seriousness, which seemed pilfered from someone much older. “I remember when you were born,” he said. “You were so small that you were like … an insect wrapped in blankets. Eyes closed. There was blood on the floor and on the bed, of course. The sour smell of birth. Mother had a hard time in labour. You know we had a brother who died before? Before even I was born. But on the night you came, William and I were outside on the veranda listening to her scream like an animal. We weren't allowed inside. Father pacing up and down. Afterwards, the doctor left in his sulky and you cried louder than you would think a baby could. All night you screamed. Mother tried everything, but in the morning I took you up off the bed and you stopped straight away. In my arms. And you opened your eyes and looked at me as if I had saved you from something. Most people can't remember things that happened when they were four, but I can. I'll always remember that.”

Sadie had finished wrapping the wool around his tattered body. She stared up at him, as if about to respond, then changed her mind. She tucked an apostrophe of hair back from her eyes. She scrabbled in her box of treasures and, still kneeling, took Quinn's hand in her own. Onto one of his fingers she slid a large ring. “This will help, too. Gold is the best thing. The gold for this was probably mined right here in these hills. Now go. Soon it will be dark.”

With both hands, she swept up the remnants of her secret things—her charms and baubles, her trinkets and wool—and crammed them back into her tobacco tin.

Quinn held up his hand to admire the ring.
Gold were the Gods
, he thought,
their radiant garments gold, and gold their armour
. “Where did you get this?”

But she had slipped away. From next door he heard the hollow
clunkety-clunk
as she angled the broken floorboards into place over her crawlspace. He checked his revolver and set off.

By the time he was in sight of Jim Gracie's cottage, a hot wind had sprung up. He stood at the bottom of a shallow rise that led to the house, in wheat grass that was golden in the dusk light. It was as high as his hips and swayed like a silken congregation in the breeze. He raised his hat to wipe his brow. He felt sick and was possessed by the feeling that, with a slight effort of will, he could allow himself to be borne away, featherlike, on the late northerly. Would that it were so.

After several minutes he became aware of a shuddering, as if the earth were atremble, but soon realised the sensation was, in fact, in his own body, all along his intestines and deep in his knees. His hand began to shake, then his entire arm. Fear, then. Just human fear. It was a sensation he recognised from his years at war, as familiar as the boom of the sixty-pounders and the stench of mud.

He was aware of the lengths of wool beneath his grubby shirt, and of the leather phylactery that bumped against his ribs. He did feel somewhat protected by these girlish charms; after all, there was no doubt Sadie knew strange things of the world.

Emboldened, he walked up the hill, slipped between the wooden fence rungs and crossed Gracie's dirt yard with its chickens pecking at blackened corn roots. The man wouldn't even be home yet. The cottage was stone, with a bark roof. Empty tins and jars were scattered in the yard beneath a large gum tree that offered a piecemeal shade. He mounted the few steps to the veranda, opened the door and stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

Even with the door open the interior of the cottage was dark. The only window was covered by a tattered lace curtain. The air was muggy with dog sweat and dried meat. Something shifted. A thin figure materialised blinking from the darkness. It was a man.

“Who the hell are you?” the man said.

25

T
here was the frenzied scratch of canine toenails on floorboards. The floor whirlpooled around Quinn's feet as dogs nuzzled and sniffed at his calves.

“Are you Mr. Gracie?” he asked in a weak voice.

“I am,” came the suspicious reply.

Jim Gracie was sitting on a low bunk by the wall. He was a raggedy man, with forearms like twists of rope. Quinn was rooted to the spot with fear and indecision. For a moment, he thought he recognised Gracie; he was sure the fellow would know he was not Thomas Fox. The idea was idiotic. His revolver was jammed in the waistband of his trousers, but he was unable to move and feared that his breath would fail. The sensation passed. No. The man was as strange to Quinn as, hopefully, he was to Gracie.

The tracker leaned in and inspected him with murky eyes before turning his attention to his dogs. He aimed a vicious kick at one that sent it slinking into a corner. He turned back to Quinn. “Who are you?”

Quinn wiped his dry mouth.

“You're a bloody quiet fella.” Jim Gracie's hand butterflied in the air, displaying a palm dark with grime. “The dogs always tell me when someone is coming, not that that happens much. Must have flown here like a bird … or an angel. Are you lost?”

He shook his head.

“Then where you going, mate? Nearest town is a mile that way. The town of Flint. Don't want you here that's for sure.”

The fellow was agitated, perhaps even afraid. Quinn found it difficult to understand his somewhat clotted manner of speech. One of the hounds reappeared and sniffed about their feet. Quinn was seized by a coughing attack. His chest felt thick with burning coals.

“Do you have any water, sir?” he asked when he could speak again. “Please.”

Gracie hesitated but, complaining to himself, got off his bunk and poured some water into a battered tin cup. Quinn straightened to drink.

The tracker stepped back and shielded his nose and mouth with one hand. “You don't got that disease, do you, mate?”

“No. I don't have influenza, if that's what you mean.”

“Bloody Bolsheviks.”

Quinn gulped again. “What?”

“People that started this whole thing. Put frogs and spiders in the water up in Sydney, dead people, you name it. Bastards.”

“I was gassed in the war.”

“Oh, yeah. Heard about that. They reckon the world's ending. The fella at church—Mr. Smail—said so. Locusts as big as horses, with girls' long hair. Dragons, a lamb. He told me God was waiting for us in the clouds. Our Father. Blood from the sky and all that. War.” He said something further and crossed himself. “What you reckon?”

Quinn shrugged. He was still standing in the doorway and had again begun to doubt the wisdom of this visit. Gracie was mad. Although it was almost dark, he saw the cottage was neat aside from the clutter of poverty. There was a roughly hewn bench opposite the low bed. The walls were plastered here and there with sheets of yellowing newspaper. On the table in the middle of the room was the enamel jug from which Gracie had poured his water. The two stinking dogs blinked in the gloom, their forms almost invisible against the earthen floor.

Gracie asked him something.

“What?”

“What you reckon happens to all them dead fellas in the war and that?”

Quinn made a helpless gesture with his hands. This wasn't the moment for a theosophical discussion.

“That Smail says they in heaven but I don't reckon heaven can be
that
big.”

The man had a point. So many dead. What with the war and the epidemic, the recently dead must outnumber those still living. No doubt they move among us, Quinn thought.

Gracie snatched his mug away and put it back on the table, clearly wishing to draw their little conversation to a close. He lit a pair of candles, their light meagre. “You want to be careful walking about in them hills. There are old mine shafts. It's risky. Fall down one of them and you're done for.” With that he turned away to fiddle in the gloom.

Quinn remained in the doorway. “I need to talk to you about a girl.”

The tracker stopped what he was doing, murmured and swung around. Quinn now saw it was a rifle he had been tinkering with, a battered Lee-Enfield, by the look of it. Gracie shuffled back to Quinn on his bare feet. His eyes glittered. “A girl, you say. What sort of girl?”

“My sister. She's been living up in the hills.”

Gracie stared at him as if he had uttered something preposterous. “Your
sister
?”

“Yes. She's been up there since our mother died from the influenza.”

“I been told about her.”

“What have you heard?”

The fellow ducked his head, muttered.

“What was that?”

“I know the constable is worried about her. Said she needs saving. I thought you was him. I thought he'd come around as soon as he could. He wants me to … to help him find her. To take care of her, mind.”

Quinn slapped at a mosquito feasting on his neck. “No. There is no need anymore. I am her brother, Thomas. I'll look after her now. This is why I came here, to tell you this.”

“You're Thomas? You're different than I recall.”

“I was injured in the war.”

Gracie considered him. “You need to tell Mr. Dalton, not me, he's the one who decides. He makes me help him. Anyway, her brother is dead in the war. That's what Mr. Dalton told me ages ago, even before I went to Bathurst. We'll find her. The dogs'll sniff her out.” He raised the tips of his fingers to his nose. “Girls that age have a particular smell about them. My boys can find anyone, anywhere.”

Quinn had begun to feel unsteady. The room blurred. Gracie was peering at him and speaking in a language he could no longer understand. The flickering candles bathed the room in an unearthly light.

The tracker pressed the tin cup again into Quinn's hand and wrapped his fingers around it. Quinn drank. Something hot and bitter seared his throat. Alcohol. The liquid prompted him to cough. He gagged but drank more. Gracie dragged a chair across and sat Quinn on it.

It was several minutes before he could focus or make sense of anything. The empty cup was in his hand, and Gracie was sitting on an upturned metal bucket, staring up at him. Quinn placed the cup on the table. The alcohol had stopped burning quite so fiercely and instead a benign warmth seeped through his innards. “What do you call that stuff?” he asked.

Gracie's face lit up in a smile. “No name. Just grog. Bloke out near Gray's Creek cooks it up. Good, isn't it? Now, you sure about your sister?”

“Of course.”

“She's a young thing, maybe twelve or thirteen years old?”

Quinn adjusted himself on the wooden chair. “Sadie? Yes.”

“She's the one, alright.” He became thoughtful. “Sadie, eh? Poor girl. That Mr. Smail at church says the disease is our own doing. The Lord smite people with a great plague until we all be destroyed. We been bad and we're going to pay. He's probably right.” He clicked his tongue. “So, you're going to look after her? Good.”