Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1 (9 page)

She sighed and made a silent wish that her oldest brother Angus would soon take over the management of Glen View. Then her father might return to Sydney to spend more time with his family.

A cold breeze whipped up a salty spray, splashing Fiona. She shivered and in the chill was an echo of something strange and dreadful. She suddenly felt faint and swooned. Penelope noticed and inquired if she was ill but Fiona gave a reassuring answer that her corsets were just a little tight. The restrictive corsets had a bad habit of cutting the blood supply causing young ladies to faint on occasion. The explanation seemed to satisfy her cousin’s concern for her welfare.

EIGHT

A
ll was not well at the Erin Hotel.

Michael and Daniel exchanged questioning glances as they hung their rain-soaked coats on wooden pegs on the back of the battered kitchen door. The loud and booming voice of Francis Duffy echoed down the narrow hallway from the hotel’s dining room and his angry tirade was occasionally interrupted by the softer and more reasonable tones of Bridget, his wife.

Max Braun, the cellarman, slopped at gravy on a tin plate with a chunk of fresh bread as he sat at the kitchen table. He grunted a welcome to the two young men as he wiped away remnants of spilt gravy from his chin with the back of a gnarled hand and was seemingly oblivious to the angry scene taking place in the dining room.

The big German was an imposing figure. A former sailor from Hamburg, he was Michael’s height and somewhere in the huge frame was muscle that had long disappeared behind bulging fat as an inevitable result of Bridget’s excellent and copious meals. His head, which was a mishmash of scar tissue, seemed to be connected to his shoulders, such was the thickness of his bull-like neck.

‘What’s happening, Uncle Max?’ Michael asked, as he stood in front of the wood stove to warm his hands. ‘Why is Uncle Frank angry?’ Steam rose off his shirt, filling the kitchen which was only just big enough to hold a table and six chairs crammed uncomfortably close to the stove.

‘Schlechte. Neuigkeiten,’
Max answered in his native tongue then switched to English although he knew Michael spoke German well enough. ‘Best you stay away from Mister Duffy.’ He gave a loud belch before scraping his chair away from the table and heaving his big frame to his feet.
‘Die kleine Katie ist geschwangert,’
he added coarsely to describe Michael’s sister’s delicate condition.

Michael felt his face drain of blood. Katie pregnant! She was only sixteen . . . and unmarried! ‘Who . . . who is the father, Max?’ he asked and blurted, ‘It’s that bastard O’Keefe.’

Max nodded.

‘Ya. I vill break his neck . . . the no goot svinehund.’

Michael knew that his threat was not idle. The big German was prepared to kill the defiler of his beloved Katie as he had a special fondness for both Michael and Kathleen Duffy. To him they were his adopted children. A special link with their father, the big Irishman Patrick Duffy, who had saved his life that terrible day of the Eureka massacre. And over the years both Michael and Katie had grown to adopt him as their ‘uncle’.

‘You won’t have to break his neck, Uncle Max,’ Michael said quietly as he clenched his fists. ‘I will. But just enough so that he will still be well enough to marry Katie.’

Max nodded. ‘She is your sister. Und it is vight you do this . . . For her honour, mein friend.’

Despite Max’s warning to steer clear of Francis Duffy in his anger, Michael and Daniel entered the lion’s den. The dining room was not a large or elaborate room. The few tables in the small room were pushed close together to economise space. The first impression that struck the visitor to the dining room was the pleasant odour of wax that wafted off the highly polished floor and big cedar sideboard adorned with neat rows of cruet sets. Expensive Irish linen and the cutlery for the morning breakfast covered the table tops. The Erin Hotel enjoyed a reputation for some of the finest accommodation money could buy for travellers visiting Sydney. And part of the attraction was the high quality of the meals served in the dining room and in the main bar.

A large candelabra on the centre table flickered as the door was opened and the two young men stepped as unobtrusively as possible into the room. The table with the candelabra was central to the three people already gathered in the room, each of whose faces reflected different expressions of emotion caught in the candles’ soft light. Bridget Duffy sat showing concern while her husband’s face expressed a black anger and Katie’s look was that of defiance, as she stood behind her aunt, gripping the back of Bridget’s chair. Kate had a strong face that would mature from girlish pretty to womanly beautiful as the years passed in her life. It was a face framed by lustrous and wavy dark hair that spilled over her shoulders almost to her waist. Like Michael, she had expressive grey eyes capable of speaking her thoughts. Although Michael had never thought of her as an attractive girl – as brothers are prone not to do – he knew other men found her striking.

A short silence fell as the three around the table turned to view the two young men. ‘Max told us the news,’ Michael said.

‘Did he tell you who the father is?’ Francis Duffy thundered. ‘Did Max tell you about Kevin O’Keefe being the father?’

‘I guessed as much, Uncle Frank,’ Michael answered calmly. ‘Who else could it be?’

‘Oh! And you are all so sure Kevin O’Keefe is the father of my child,’ Kate flared. The men were carrying on as if she were not even in the room with them. ‘I don’t remember anyone asking me who the father is. It might be the Chinese market gardener down the road for all you men know.’

Her furious outburst caused all the men in the room to blanch. With horror all three men stared at her and she smiled wickedly now that she had their attention. ‘I will put your minds at rest. Kevin
is
the father of the child that I carry.’

But this was not a consolation to Francis Duffy as the Chinese market gardener who delivered vegetables to the hotel might be a preferred husband to the son of convict parents. The fact that O’Keefe’s parents had been Irish convicts, even if they were of the True Faith, did not compensate for their lowly social status in the colony. There was an ingrained snobbery among free-born colonialists and immigrants about such matters. It was Frank Duffy who raised the painful and socially embarrassing issue.

‘Katie, you know O’Keefe is of convict stock,’ he said. ‘How could you allow yourself to get . . . umm . . . with child to him. You could have had the choice of marrying any young Irishman in Sydney. Any young man from a good freeborn family.’

Her bitter laugh echoed in the near empty dining room. ‘Have you ever thought that possibly I might love Kevin O’Keefe himself? That I care little for what his parents were. Not that it should matter, anyway. Some of the wealthiest and most respectable citizens in the colony were once convicts, Uncle Francis. Does anyone hold that against them? What if the British had caught my father in Ireland for his activities? What if they had transported him as a convict? Would that make me or Michael any different?’

Francis coughed behind his hand. Yes, Patrick had come close to being caught on many occasions. What Kate said was true. But it was hard for the Irish publican to shake the bias against those of convict blood. And yet many of the good customers of the Erin were themselves men who could show the scars of the cat on their backs and tell stories of lashings that took so much meat that the guards’ dogs had feasted on the bloody flesh at the base of the cruel triangle. They were good men all the same.

He felt his anger dissolving when he stared across at his wife holding Kate’s hand protectively in hers. He knew full well that his wife had sided with her niece from the beginning and there was little a man could do against one woman’s opinion, let alone two. ‘Is O’Keefe going to marry you?’ he asked gruffly.

Kate could see from her uncle’s demeanour that he had conceded defeat but she also knew that he would have to bluster for the family’s honour in lieu of her father, absent somewhere on the Queensland frontier. It was the way of men, to fume and bluster on matters that had no real concern to them, other than a stupid male thing about honour.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered quietly. ‘He does not know about my condition.’

‘Jesus, Mary and . . . !’ Michael checked his blasphemous outburst.

‘
Michael!
’

‘Ah, sorry, Aunt Bridget,’ he apologised meekly before continuing. ‘O’Keefe got you this way and he doesn’t know! Katie, do you know what sort of man O’Keefe is? Do you really know?’

‘I have heard talk, Michael. But I also know Kevin is a good man who just needs a woman to love and look after him. He will change when we are wed,’ she answered without rancour at her brother’s well-intentioned if not tactful question.

Oh yes, she had heard the stories about Kevin O’Keefe, but they were only stories spread by jealous women he had scorned.

Kevin had come to work for her Uncle Frank a year earlier. She vividly remembered the first time he had stood framed in the doorway of the kitchen with his cap in his hand and his flashing eyes, and the way his slow warm smile settled on her. She thought she would faint. Kate knew from that instant that he was the man born to love her as she would him and as the months went by she found herself finding excuses to be around him at the hotel. He could make her laugh with his easy charm and make her feel special with his gentle words. In many ways Kevin reminded her of Michael: tough, gentle and handsome.

Soon she could do nothing but daydream about being in his arms. She had vague swirling thoughts about love that began to focus on the power of his body. And then one day she found herself in the cellar of the hotel alone with Kevin. He was stripped to the waist hauling the heavy wooden kegs and was not aware she stood watching him. She remembered so well the way the muscles rippled in his shoulders and arms as he strained to lift the kegs. He turned and his eyes met hers – he wanted her and it was only a reflection of her own desire. They moved closer together and stood facing each other until with gentle, lulling words he began to undress her. His power was mesmerising. She let him do what he wanted, for she wanted his touch.

The pleasure was all that she could have imagined and when it was over Kevin confessed his love for her. The visits to the cellar became frequent and their lovemaking, snatched amongst the big wooden kegs, exquisite. She had felt their love sealed forever in the sharing of their bodies, and now even more so by God’s gift they had created together.

Michael’s father had warned him that Kate was her mother’s daughter – headstrong and stubborn. Michael also knew that his mother had defied all the rules of her society to elope with a wild young Catholic rebel and bear him two sons and a daughter.

Patrick Duffy and Elizabeth Fitzgerald had been an unlikely pair; she, the daughter of a Protestant landowner who was descended from French nobility and he, the son of an educated Catholic Irishman who reared his sons on the bitter and bloody ideas of rebellion. Was not history repeating itself with Kate’s decision to marry a man not socially acceptable to the Duffy clan?

But Patrick Duffy had been a man with a noble cause, whereas O’Keefe was flawed. His only cause was the pursuit of women and gambling. It was not hard to like O’Keefe who had natural charm and a quick wit. He was also a man who could use his fists which Michael respected about him. He might have a reputation as a womaniser but he was also a man’s man.

The regular patrons of the Erin had often discussed the possibility of an organised bare-knuckle bout between the two men. They were matched in size and weight and both had reputations as the best bare-knuckle fighters around Sydney’s Irish areas.

‘Well, I suppose the matter is settled then,’ Frank said, as he fumbled in his vest pocket for his old briar pipe. ‘I suppose we will have to get a letter to Pat and Tom up in Queensland. Pat will be pleased to hear that he is soon to be a grandfather,’ he could not help adding. ‘Even if it is the son of a convict father.’

‘He will not be the son of a convict father, Francis, and you very well know that,’ Bridget snapped angrily. ‘Kevin O’Keefe is as freeborn as any Duffy. And Kate’s child will be a freeborn Australian.’

‘An Irishman,’ he rebutted. ‘The boy will be born an Irishman. His father is Irish and so is Kate.’

Daniel smiled. ‘Mother is right, Da,’ he said. ‘Kate’s child will be an Australian. Kevin was born in New South Wales and so will be Katie’s child.’ Francis frowned at his son’s statement of nationality. To him, Ireland was ‘home’ and this new country was just an extension of Ireland.

‘You are both wrong,’ Kate said, cutting across the two men’s discussion on birthright. ‘My child will be a Queenslander.’

‘What!’ Frank gasped and she serenely sailed on, ‘As soon as Kevin and I are married, I intend to journey to Queensland to start a business there with the money Da has set aside for me.’

Her second startling revelation, following the first concerning her pregnancy, caused even Bridget to stare at her aghast. Queensland! The new colony was a land of savage natives and little civilisation. Had not the explorer, Mister Kennedy, been speared to death by the savages? Did not the German explorer, Mister Leichhardt, disappear with his expedition in the wilderness of that terrible place? Not to mention the ill-fated Messrs Burke and Wills’ expedition. No, the Queensland colony was no place for a pregnant young woman who had known only the civilised comforts of Sydney. And besides, Kevin O’Keefe was no bushman. He was city-born and raised. She shuddered at the thought of Kate on the frontier. She had given her support – albeit reluctantly – to her proposed marriage, but this was a different matter altogether.

‘Katie, you cannot go to that terrible place in your condition. It’s unthinkable,’ she said quietly but firmly.

‘Other women follow their men, Aunt Bridget. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because in this case, O’Keefe would be following his woman,’ Michael interjected cynically. ‘It’s a rather unusual situation.’

Kate did not see the situation in the same light as her brother. Kevin was a strong and healthy man who could adapt to the new way of life she had in mind for them and it did not cross her mind that it was
she
who was making decisions usually made by a man. ‘I don’t expect Kevin will be out in the bush,’ she said confidently. ‘I have plans to start a hotel that will be the best in the new colony. That means we will be in a town and not in the bush.’

‘Kevin is not a publican,’ Francis noted. ‘He has no real experience in running a hotel.’

‘I will teach him,’ Kate replied defensively. ‘Growing up here, I have learnt a lot from you. I know how you keep books and how you manage a bar and I probably know more than Daniel and Michael put together.’