Beyond the Horizon (26 page)

The caravan set off from the hilltop in the late afternoon, leaving Gruber and Peabody standing forlornly watching them depart. Matthew knew that he would never see the two KKK men again.

*

Paris was a city that had thrown off the shroud of gloom with the announcement of the Armistice. Tom had been able to secure a forty-eight hour pass and he wasted no time in getting himself back to the street where he had last seen Juliet. This time Paddy had insisted on coming with him, and both men, dressed in uniform and slouch hat, mingled with the men of many nations who were seeking alcohol and women in this part of the city.

Tom was fortunate that Paddy had a decent grasp of the French language, picked up during the war, and acted as his interpreter when Tom questioned shopkeepers about Juliet and Smithers. Most shrugged, but the owner of the café where Tom and Chason had gone for breakfast knew both.

‘He says that the woman you ask questions about has gone from here with Smithers,' Paddy said. ‘The gendarmes were closing in on him and he took the girl with him.'

‘There must be someone who knows where they went,' Tom said desperately.

‘Maybe the madam of the brothel where Juliet worked,' Paddy suggested hesitantly, knowing what this inferred.

‘Okay, we speak to her,' Tom said, grim-faced, and they set off.

Entry to the brothel was secured with a hefty wad of francs; as the premises had been designated for officers not enlisted men, but now the war had ended the qualifications for entry had been lowered – all anyone needed was money.

Paddy approached the madam, a hard-faced woman in her late fifties, and explained that they were looking for a Mademoiselle Juliet Joubert.

‘I speak English,' the woman replied haughtily. ‘Juliet worked for me as my cook and cleaner – until she got herself too much with baby to work any more. I fired her and the lazy man, Smithers. I do not know where they are. One of my girls, Denise, thinks they have taken a ship to England.'

So Juliet had not been forced to work as a prostitute, Tom thought with great relief.

‘What do we do now?' Paddy asked as they left the brothel and pushed their way through the crowds on the narrow cobbled street.

‘The army will probably send us to Blighty before we return home,' Tom replied. ‘I'll search for Juliet in England.'

A week later both Paddy and Tom found themselves standing in line on the docks of London, awaiting processing for a berth on a ship home. They were given three days' leave and, again, Tom did not waste time.

Using his back pay he bribed a fellow Paddy knew in Customs and Immigration to ascertain whether either Smithers or Juliet had entered the country, but the department had no documentation in either name. The world was a big place, and Tom despaired that the woman he loved could be anywhere now that shipping lanes were free of the dreaded U-boats. He knew he would not be allowed to remain in England and would have to go home to be honourably discharged from the army. Besides, he wanted to recover the missing fragments of his past back in Australia.

Within the week Tom had boarded a troopship steaming home to Australia. Juliet was lost to him for now but not the nightmares of war or of his lost memory. He was a stranger sailing to a strange land, and all he knew was that he had enlisted in Queensland with the origin of his race being listed as Indian. When he was demobbed he knew he would once again be another blackfella to the society that only prized his abilities to fight and kill their enemies. Tom was not sure where he would go and what he would do when he returned. At least working the cattle properties of Queensland his colour did not matter and it said on his papers that he was once a stockman.

At nights aboard the ship in the crowded quarters below decks Tom would slip into a troubled sleep to dream of a strange cave and see the face of an old Aboriginal man whose name he somehow knew was Wallarie. What the dreams meant, Tom did not know. Nor did he know where the old man and the cave were. Australia was a big country and Queensland a big state.

Part Two

1919

Peace and Pestilence

25

G
eorge Macintosh had received disturbing reports from Melbourne that the influenza outbreak killing so many around the world had reached the shores of Australia. The insidious disease could strike down a young and healthy person in the morning and by the time the sun set they would be dead, drowned in their own bodily fluids.

George called to his manservant to fetch Mrs Macintosh.

Louise appeared in the dining room.

‘What is it, George?' she asked when she saw the serious expression on his face.

‘Those damned returning soldiers have brought that Spanish flu to us,' he growled. ‘I think you should reconsider joining Giselle at Glen View for the Christmas break.'

Louise sat down at the end of the table and considered what her husband had said. ‘She will be very disappointed. I have not seen my dear friend for such a long time.'

‘War news seemed to overshadow news about the sickness killing so many overseas that now it has appeared in Melbourne I think we would be better staying here until it passes. I do not like the idea of being exposed to the public who could be carrying the wretched disease. Besides, we have my son's safety to consider and travelling could expose him to the disease.'

Louise could not argue with her husband's reasoning, and agreed that they would put off the trip until the epidemic had passed. She knew Giselle would be disappointed, but Donald's health was her main concern. How ironic it was, she thought, that peace had brought in its wake the apocalyptic horseman of pestilence.

Tom Duffy celebrated the new year drunk in a gutter of a Brisbane street. He had been discharged with a record of distinguished service, but as soon as he had taken off his uniform and bade farewell to his battalion comrades he had became once again one of the lost generation of mixed blood in his own country.

Tom had been able to procure the beer through a sympathetic returned soldier as he had been refused service by a publican who had told him it was against the law to serve alcohol to blackfellas – even ones that did not look or act if they were blackfellas. The publican had not been interested in the fact that Tom held the Distinguished Conduct Medal – as pointed out by the returned soldier with him – and both men had been forcibly ejected after a brawl. The white soldier had bought beer from a pub down the road, then the two men had gone to a small park along the river and drunk until they were oblivious to the civilian world around them.

Tom was awoken in the morning by a savage kick in the ribs. When he opened his eyes he was staring up at two blue-uniformed policemen glaring down at him.

‘Get up, blackfella,' the older police officer said. ‘You're off to the watch-house for being drunk in a public place.'

Tom, groggy from the effects of the night's binge, did not resist and was marched into the city to the watch-house where he found himself standing before a stern watch- house keeper.

‘Empty your pockets on the desk,' he ordered and Tom did so. He had some small change, which he took out, and had been carrying his medals for bravery. When Tom put them down beside the coins the watch-house keeper picked up a medal and examined it.

‘Who did you steal this from?' he asked angrily. ‘This is a medal given for courage. How did a blackfella get this?'

‘It's mine – they both are,' Tom mumbled, his head ringing with the ache of a hangover. ‘You will see my name is engraved on the edge – along with my regimental number.'

The watch-house keeper turned the medal on its edge. ‘Tom Duffy it says is the owner of the medal. What is your name?'

‘Tom Duffy.'

The expression on the watch-house keeper's face softened and he looked closely at Tom. ‘You served in the war,' he said. ‘My son was killed at Mont St Quentin last year. He only had to survived a couple of months more and he would have come home to me and the missus.'

‘A bastard of a hill,' Tom said. ‘The Huns had their best waiting for us there.'

‘I didn't know blackfellas were allowed to enlist,' the watch-house keeper said.

‘As far as I know I was enlisted as an Indian, and that's all I remember about my life in Queensland,' Tom explained. ‘I copped a head wound last year and it made me lose my memory.'

The watch-house keeper handed the medals back to Tom. ‘It's against the regulations but I don't believe a man should be parted from something he earned for his country. I'm sorry that you've ended up in this place but I'll make sure you get a cell for yourself instead of joining the others in the drunk tank.'

Tom was grateful for the man's compassion. After the paperwork was complete he was escorted to a dingy cell but at least he had privacy to lie down on the concrete floor and sleep off his hangover. In the afternoon he was released, but he had nowhere to go.

For the next few weeks he wandered aimlessly, cadging beer and getting drunk. He was lost in a world unfamiliar to him, and there were days when he yearned to be back with his cobbers in the battalion, even if they did have to live under the terror of active service in the front lines. When he slept it was not a respite from his new life. The shells rained down and the chatter of machine-gun fire caused him to cry out and thrash around under the night skies. His money from his army pay was running out, and soon he would be just another destitute man on the streets of this city. Brisbane was no bigger than a large town really, and it was struggling with the terrible flu epidemic taking a toll on its population. Tom was almost oblivious to the faces in the streets masked against the spread of the dreaded illness; the alcohol kept him in a blurry half-world where he didn't need to think or feel or remember.

One afternoon, as Tom stumbled along the banks of the Brisbane River, he met an old Aboriginal man who asked him for beer and tobacco. Tom slumped down beside the old man, who was dressed in rags and had grey stubble on his face. The old Aboriginal still had the black skin of his people and in his fractured English he told Tom he was from central Queensland and had drifted south when his people went to the ancestor spirits through disease and the whitefella's alcohol.

The sun was sinking and Tom had one bottle of beer left, which he passed to the tribal man along with his pouch of tobacco.

‘Thank you, brother,' the old man said. ‘Where you from? What your people?'

Tom rolled himself a cigarette and stared across the river where a cargo steamship was anchored in the muddy waters. ‘Don't know, old man,' Tom replied. ‘Been away too long fighting the whitefella war.'

The older man took a swig and handed the bottle back to Tom. ‘You bin look like a Nerambura blackfella,'he said. ‘Your people all gone now – 'cept Wallarie.'

Tom started at the mention of the name so familiar to his dreams. ‘What do you know about the blackfella, Wallarie?' The old man licked the edge of a thin cigarette paper and rolled it up around the tobacco. ‘Wallarie older than me,' he replied. ‘He bin live up in the brigalow scrub, where he sometime turn into a big eagle and fly away. He bin live in the sacred cave of the men at a place the whitefella call Glen View. I met Wallarie long, long time ago and we hunt together. He bin got a whitefella sister, Kate Tracy, who kind to me when I go to whitefella town of Townsville.'

Townsville – the name was familiar to Tom but he was not sure why. ‘Brother, you keep the bottle and baccy,' he said, rising to his feet.

‘Where you go, young brother?' the old man asked.

‘I'm going home . . . I think,' Tom replied. He would use the last of his money to purchase a fare on a boat going north, and then he would seek out the place with the vaguely familiar name of Glen View. Maybe there he would find out who he was and why this sacred cave haunted his dreams.

The old Aboriginal watched Tom walk away and chuckled. Hadn't Wallarie come to him in a dream and said that a brother who had been in the white man's war would meet him in a place near water and give him gifts? Old Wallarie was never wrong, and so he had met the Nerambura man who was lost but was now going home, just as Wallarie had predicted.

The postman came to Glen View on his weekly rounds. He drew up his horse and sulky to take to the homestead the bag of mail that connected the isolated property to the civilised world.

Giselle met him at the front door. ‘You don't look well, Herb,' she said when she noticed that he was pale and shaking.

‘Just a bloody cold, Mrs Macintosh,' he said. ‘I'll be all right in a day or two.'

Giselle frowned. It was obvious to her that Herb was seriously ill, and she begged him to stay and rest, but he insisted he would come good that evening when he camped over at the next homestead. Giselle watched as he took hold of the reins again and clucked his horse to move on into the hot haze of the early afternoon.

Two days later Giselle started to feel ill. She had trouble breathing and so did Angus MacDonald, the stalwart servant who had followed his best friend Patrick Duffy on the desert campaigns in Egypt almost forty years earlier.

Karolina Schumann sat by her daughter's bed throughout the night and cooled her fevered brow with a wet cloth. From time to time, Pastor Karl von Fellmann came to sit with Giselle and Karolina.

‘It's the flu,' he said quietly in the early hours of the morning. ‘I will pray for her.'

The sun was rising on another sweltering day when Giselle opened her eyes. Karolina watched as her daughter turned her head and looked to the window where the first rays of the sun were softly kissing the earth before they became a savage bite.

Her smile was weak and she reached out to something Karolina could not see. ‘Alexander,' she croaked. ‘You have returned to me.' The weak smile turned to a glow and then Giselle suddenly struggled for breath.

Karolina leaned over her daughter, frantic with grief for what she knew was coming. She wrapped Giselle in her arms and rocked her as the young woman's life left her. Her daughter was dead.

In the room next door David burst into a crying fit while his grandmother held her dead daughter's body to her bosom. Elsewhere in the house Angus MacDonald fought his last battle and passed from the dry lands he had come to love to the cold, misty hill and heather of his childhood in Scotland. His old friend Hector MacManus sat by his bed and watched him die.

Hector struggled on the next few days, managing to ward off the sickness that would take over ten thousand Australian lives before it abated. But within the week, new graves were dug to bury the dead of Glen View.

Pastor von Fellmann and Karolina had escaped the epidemic and now stood by the graves of Giselle and old Angus MacDonald. The Lutheran pastor found a passage from the Torah to recite over Giselle's grave while David clung to his grandmother's long skirt, staring with confused eyes at the mound of red earth.

That night Karolina sat on the small verandah of the missionary house, her grandson asleep in her lap, and gazed up at the sky brilliant with sparkling light. Karl brought her a coffee and they sat side by side, absorbed by the vastness of the universe.

‘Old Wallarie says that each star is a person's soul,' Karl said gently. ‘That would mean the brightest we can see is Giselle.'

Karolina turned to him and reached out in the dark to touch his arm. ‘The people of this land understand a greater and simpler spirituality then we give them credit for. We come from the very earth itself and to the earth we return.' She ran a hand tenderly over David's head, staring at his sleeping form for a long moment. ‘But it is the living that I must look to now. David is an orphan by law but I am his next of kin. He will stay with me.'

‘Are you sure this task is not beyond you?' Karl asked cautiously.

‘He is my flesh and blood,' Karolina said, turning her sad smile from David's sleeping form to Karl. ‘He is a wonderful little man, and I wished that in his life I had been a little less hostile to his father.'

‘War took Alexander's life. Now pestilence has taken Giselle. We can only pray God protects us from any other plagues.' Karl sighed. ‘We will have to contact Mr Duffy in Sydney to inform him of Giselle's passing, and see if we can receive financial assistance from the Macintosh estate.'

‘That evil man, George Macintosh, he will never approve support. But I do not care. I have means to raise David in the manner he was born to,' Karolina said. ‘I still have my plantation in New Guinea and my late husband's financial estate. David will not be a beggar at the Macintosh table. He will be independent – until he comes of age and returns to take his rightful place at the head of the family.'

They fell into a silence and sat sharing the serenity of the night far from the comforts of civilisation.

It took a week for the glorious news to reach George Macintosh. His sister-in-law was dead. Sadly, her brat had not died with her, but at least it spared him the headache of plotting a double murder. The boy was very vulnerable now, and George had a perfect excuse to travel to Glen View – he must see to the boy's future now his mother was dead. And see to it he most certainly would. George was at home, seeing to some business matters that required utmost privacy. A few friends had accepted an invitation for tennis and afternoon tea and they were due to arrive soon. He yawned at the prospect; he would have much preferred to be in the bed of the girl he had procured to take Maude's place. Mavis was a year younger than Maude and came from an impoverished family; the mother had lost her husband to the war and had seven children to feed. The girl was the oldest and George had discovered her through his agency that rented out his houses in the inner city. It did not take long for the handsome and charming George to discuss with the widow her options of being put out on the street because she could not pay the increased rent or sending her eldest daughter to live in a flat he owned in order that she look after his domestic needs when he was away from his family home overlooking the harbour.