Girl of Shadows (45 page)

‘What shitty weather,’ Friday remarked.

They had a pie each, Sarah had an ale, and Friday ordered more gin. Closer to midday the pub began to fill, the room grew warmer and smoke from other pipes added to Friday’s.

Sarah didn’t feel as cold now, though she still shuddered uncontrollably every few minutes — she was getting heartily sick of it. It was her nerves, grabbing her by the neck and shaking her. She should be feeling deliriously happy because her man was coming home, but she wasn’t. What if he wasn’t on this ship? What if a ship came in tomorrow and he wasn’t on that one either? Or the one next week? What if he never came home?

‘Cheer up, love,’ Friday said. ‘It could be worse.’ She laughed. ‘I said that to Harrie once, in Newgate. She went all bristly, you know the way she does sometimes? And she said, “How could it be worse?” And I said, “Well, you could be swinging.”’

‘I bet that helped.’

‘No, actually, it didn’t.’ Friday’s face sobered. ‘You know, I was bloody sure I was for the gallows, that last time I went up in front of the magistrate.’

Sarah nodded; she’d had the same bowel-churning fear, even though her crime was no longer a hanging offence.

‘But look at me now,’ Friday went on. ‘Look at us! This is bloody paradise compared to what we had at home. Well, not today it isn’t, it’s pissing down. But I’m making tons of chink working for a good boss, you’re married to a decent professional man and doing what you love, and Harrie’s doing her drawings and dressmaking and being chased by a man who thinks the sun rises and sets on her.’

Sarah stared at her, her face expressionless.

Friday stared back. ‘On the other hand, Rachel died, I
hate
my job, Adam isn’t actually back yet, Harrie’s losing her mind, and we’re being blackmailed by a cast-iron bitch. But you can’t deny we
are
eating well.’

Sarah smiled slightly. ‘That’s true. I’ve put on weight.’

‘You
had
. Now you look like a pipe-cleaner again.
I’m
the one with the arse like a beer barrel.’

‘A fabulously curvaceous beer barrel, though.’

Friday put her hand on Sarah’s clenched fist. ‘He’ll be home soon. You just have to hold on a little bit longer.’

‘I know. Thanks.’

At a little after two o’clock the driving rain eased, though it didn’t stop completely, and three ships sailed into the cove, one after the other. Two furled their sails — no easy task in the high wind — and dropped anchor while the third tacked closer to the western shore. By this time Sarah and Friday were standing as close to Campbell’s Wharf as they could get, it being private property, holding on to their hats and squinting against the sea spray.

Two watermen swaddled in voluminous oilcloth coats launched a boat from the shore to the ship and a long cable connected to the vessel’s capstan was rowed back and attached to the wharf.
The sails on the ship were furled, crewmen heaved against the capstan, and, after what felt to Sarah like hours, the ship was warped in. When the bow was almost touching the wharf, crewmen threw more ropes to waiting lumpers, who threaded them through blocks, heaved mightily and manoeuvred the ship around one hundred and eighty degrees so that at last she came to a restless, creaking halt alongside the wharf, facing out into the cove.

There was a further delay while the ship was more firmly secured, and the gangway locked into place. A man moved onto it; Sarah’s heart lurched and goose bumps broke out all over her, but it wasn’t Adam. Too tall.

‘I’m going up,’ she said to Friday.

Friday nodded. ‘I’ll be here.’

Sarah wrapped her saturated shawl more tightly around her shoulders and, picking her way through the mud, stepped onto the rain-sodden boards of the wharf.

One of the lumpers intercepted her. His hair was plastered to his head and he didn’t look pleased to be out working in the rain. ‘Sorry, missus, private property, order of Robert Campbell.’

‘I know. Has this ship just come from Port Macquarie? I believe my husband is a passenger.’

‘Port Macquarie yes. No passengers, but. Just crew.’

‘You wouldn’t know. This was a last-minute arrangement,’ Sarah insisted.

‘Here’s another one. Bugger off.’

‘Bugger off yourself. My husband’s on that ship. Will you just —?’

Then Sarah caught sight of him, leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway, staring down at her.

She dodged around the lumper and sprinted along the wharf, her boots thumping on the boards and her bonnet flying off and swooping into the sea.

He met her at the bottom of the gangway and caught her in his arms and, oh God, he was very thin but it was him, it was Adam, she had him back!

Friday watched them from a distance, trying to decide whether she was happy for them, or jealous. Probably happy, given she was dabbing at tears. Or perhaps it was a bit of both. And that was all right, wasn’t it?

She moved to the water’s edge and poked with her soggy boot at shells washed up by the waves. Torn off the rocks or churned up from the seabed by the rough weather, perhaps? They ponged something terrible, and she wondered if some still contained their occupants, going over now they’d died. Then she noticed something else, a clump of rubbish, bobbing about just beneath the wharf in about three feet of scummy water. She wandered along the beach for a closer look.

The smell got worse, like badly gone-over meat and brine and Billingsgate fish market all mixed up together, and the clump took on a vaguely recognisable shape.

‘Sarah,’ Adam breathed. ‘Oh my bloody God, Sarah.’

She leant back from his embrace. His skin was pale and his eyes sunken and underlined with shadow, but he was smiling.

‘Oh, my love, what did they
do
to you?’

‘Well, I’ve certainly eaten better.’

They gazed at each other, oblivious to the rain, then giggled hysterically and hugged again, hard enough to squeeze the life out of themselves.

‘I missed you so much, Sarah. I’d almost given up.’

‘I missed you, too. Horribly. And I thought you
had
given up. Your letter, it … made me sad. And bloody angry.’

‘Five years, Sarah. It’s a long time. I didn’t want you to feel you had to wait for me.’

‘You stupid man,’ Sarah said, but she said it gently.

‘Are
you
all right? You look exhausted.’

‘It’s been a hectic couple of months, Adam. Did you get
any
of my letters?’

‘Not allowed them. Nearly broke my heart. I knew you would have written.’ Adam pushed back his wet hair and wiped the rainwater out of his eyes. ‘How did you get me released? The first I knew of it was the commandant telling me he had a letter from Rossi saying my conviction had been quashed. It
was
Gellar who framed me, wasn’t it? How did you prove he did it? And where is he? I’ll bloody well
kill
him.’

Friday shouted up to one of the lumpers, ‘Oi, I think there’s a floater down here!’

The man stopped what he was doing. ‘What?’

‘A corpse. A body, in the water.’

The man swore and fetched a boat hook. ‘Show me.’

Friday did.

Wading into the sea up to his knees, the man hooked the body, tugged violently until it detached itself from the barnacle-encrusted pile on which it had become snagged, and dragged it out from beneath the wharf and up onto the wet sand.

Sarah said, ‘You’ll have to find him first. No one’s seen him since Rachel’s ghost scared him into confessing he set you up. She was, er, manifesting as a bat at the time.’

‘What?’ Adam looked horribly confused. ‘Sarah, what on earth’s been going on?’

So Sarah summarised what had occurred while he’d been away, though she left out the advances Gellar had made towards her; that would only hurt him and he would blame himself.

When she’d finished he pulled her to him and they hugged once more, but this time the embrace was less frantic, and weighted with
the knowledge of how close they’d come to losing almost everything that mattered to them.

He pulled back and cupped her cheek with a cold hand. ‘Thank you, Sarah. I owe you an enormous debt.’

‘You don’t owe me anything. I think we’re even now, don’t you?’

He kissed her forehead. ‘Sarah, we’ve always been even.’

A raucous bellow floated up from the beach: ‘
Hey, you two lovebirds!
’

‘Is that Friday down there?’ Adam squinted against the rain.

They walked arm in arm to the edge of the wharf. Below them, on the sand, a small crowd had gathered around a tangled heap of rags and seaweed lying half in and half out of the water.

‘What is it?’ Adam asked.

Sarah shrugged. Then the wind changed direction slightly and they cursed and covered their noses.

Friday shouted, ‘
Come and have a look!
’

They did. The corpse was in a dreadful state. Bloated to the extent that buttons on the remaining clothing had burst and seams had ripped, the skin was bleached to a spongy, whitish-green. The corpse’s dark hair lay in wet fronds across a pallid forehead and the eyeballs, parts of the lips, eyelids and nose had been nibbled away by hungry crabs and fish. As they watched, a small eel slid out of the mouth.

‘Ew,’ Friday said, fascinated.

In fact there were two mouths; one where you’d expect, and another gaping slash across the throat. No little sea creature had done that. The smell was appalling, now they’d got it out of the water.

‘Anyone recognise him?’ someone asked.

Sarah, Friday and Adam said absolutely nothing.

Friday arrived at Argyle Street feeling, and no doubt looking, like a drowned rat, but she knew Mrs H would be eager to hear how
the reunion had gone. The girls would be, too. It had been the talk of the brothel. Everyone thought it was so romantic: Sarah, a lone, determined figure, waiting on the wharf in all weather for her beloved to return from exile. No matter that he’d be hopping with lice, four stone underweight and suffering the shits from the rubbish food. That wasn’t the point.

She stuck her head into the parlour, noting the presence of Connie, Molly, Vivien and, unfortunately, Lou. The fire was crackling away invitingly and she was very tempted to stand in front of it, damp skirts hoisted, warming the backs of her legs.

‘Is he back?’ Connie asked excitedly.

Friday nodded.

The girls all clapped and hooted with delight, even Lou.

‘Was it lovely? Did you cry?’ Vivien demanded.

‘I did.’

‘Oh, that’s so nice,’ Connie said, watery-eyed herself. ‘A happy ending.’

‘Where’s Mrs H?’ Friday asked.

Molly said, ‘Office, I think.’

Friday knocked and let herself in. ‘He’s back,’ she said.

Elizabeth closed her ledger. ‘Well, that’s wonderful news, isn’t it? And not too worse for wear, I hope?’

Friday made a see-saw motion with her hand. ‘Nothing a few decent feeds and some time with Sarah won’t fix, though. But something else a bit odd happened. When the ship docked at Campbell’s it dislodged a body from under the wharf. Quite a rotten one.’

Elizabeth put down her pen. ‘Whose, dare I ask? Could you tell?’

‘Jared Gellar’s.’

‘Really?’

‘His throat had been cut.’

‘I can’t say I’m bothered.’ Elizabeth poured fine sand from a porcelain sandbox onto the fresh ink in her ledger. ‘Serves him
right, in fact. Poor Sarah. She was by herself in that house and he was stalking her and wearing her down and thinking he could just help himself. It just isn’t right. Who did it, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know.’ Though Friday knew
exactly
who’d killed Gellar.

‘It wasn’t Sarah, was it?’

‘Honestly, Mrs H, what a thing to say.’

‘No, you’re right. He did push her, though, didn’t he? But I don’t suppose it matters who murdered him, as long as he’s dead. All’s well that ends well.’

‘I bloody hope it’s ended. His stuff’s still mouldering on Sarah’s porch, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the cops poking round.’

Elizabeth blew the excess sand off her ledger. ‘Well, all I can say is bloody good riddance.’

July 1831, Sydney Town

The police did knock on Sarah and Adam’s door. Someone had come forward to identify Gellar’s body, and to advise them that for the past four months Mr Gellar had been living at the home of his associate Mr Adam Green, a jeweller in George Street, having agreed to manage Mr Green’s jewellery business, and supervise his convict wife, while Mr Green was serving time in the penitentiary at Port Macquarie.

Sarah told them that approximately five weeks earlier, after writing a confession to the effect that he had framed her husband, Jared Gellar had left her house and had never returned for his belongings. Yes, she had been extremely shocked by his confession: no, she did not know where he’d gone after that. She had been as horrified as everyone else to learn he’d been fished out of the harbour.

And yes, since Mr Gellar had gone she’d been supervised by Dr James Downey, who had been living with her — in separate quarters, naturally — and she had the papers to prove it. As Captain Rossi — yes,
that
Captain Rossi, superintendent of police and police magistrate — had
personally
arranged for her husband’s
release from Port Macquarie on the grounds of unlawful conviction as the result of fraud perpetrated by another followed by unlawful imprisonment, Mr Green was now home and Dr Downey had returned to his own residence. Was there anything else she could help with? Only she didn’t want Mr Gellar’s belongings on her porch any longer. Would they please take them away?

Friday had just finished telling Leo all this when Harrie arrived at his shop with a set of flash she’d recently completed. Angels, this time, with bats’ wings, all looking suspiciously like Rachel, and based on the very first sketch she’d done for Leo before he’d hired her. Friday, visiting Leo to begin the outline of a new tattoo to cover the scar on her calf, decided on the spot that was what she wanted.

‘In that case, Harrie can draw it,’ Leo said.