Girl of Shadows (46 page)

‘On Friday’s leg?’ Harrie asked, startled.

‘Why not?’ Leo replied. ‘You drew it on paper.’

‘I’m not sure I can.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a lily liver.’ Friday lay face down on the bench. ‘If you go wrong just rub it off and start again.’

Harrie glanced hesitantly at Leo, who nodded. ‘Go on. I have to duck out. Seem to have run out of tobacco.’

‘Send Walter,’ Harrie said. She could hear him in the other room, scraping dishes and sloshing things about in the washing-up basin.

‘He’s busy. Back soon,’ Leo said cheerfully on his way out the door.

Harrie dithered for a minute, then finally asked, ‘Just the outline?’

Friday nodded, her head on her arms.

‘Which one?’

‘Number three,’ Friday said, referring to the numbers on the new series.

Harrie sat on the stool, glanced at the flash once, selected a pen, dipped it into a pot of India ink, and began to draw. To her
surprise, drawing directly onto skin was as easy as it was on paper. In no time at all she’d finished. The image extended from just below the back of Friday’s knee to about three inches above her ankle, the outstretched wings wrapping around her calf and almost touching on her upper shin.

‘It’s quite big,’ Harrie said. ‘But it has to be, to get in all the detail.’

‘Good.’ Friday sat up.

Harrie warned, ‘Don’t smudge it.’

Friday lifted her skirt above her knees and extended her leg along the bench, slightly bent, keeping the fresh ink above the cracked and worn leather. ‘You’re not going to see Matthew soon, are you?’

‘Matthew? Why would I visit Matthew?’ Harrie tapped the excess ink off the pen’s nib and carefully put it down.

‘I don’t know. But we need him to go to the bank for us.’

‘God, it’s this Sunday night, isn’t it? Do you want me to come with you?’ She desperately hoped Friday wouldn’t say yes but she had to offer. She didn’t like the idea of Friday being all alone with that horrible man.

‘Actually, strangely, I
don’t
feel like facing Furniss by myself,’ Friday said, ‘especially not in a stinking graveyard on the stroke of midnight, but there’d be no point you coming. Last time I just handed the money over, he said something smart-arsed about saving for the next lot, and I left. It only took about two minutes. And the graveyard’s just up the street from the police office. I can always scream my head off if he tries anything. Very brave of you to offer, though. Sarah offered, too.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. Two hundred pounds, though. Fucking Bella. We’re going to be left with just about nothing.’

‘I know. It’s Janie and the babies I feel bad for. They’re the ones who are going to miss out.’

Friday scratched her armpit. ‘Well, we’ll all just have to work even harder, won’t we? I don’t mind giving more. It’s only money.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. I give just about everything I earn as it is. And I’m happy to do that, I really am, but I can’t give what I haven’t got.’

‘Try not to worry, Harrie.’

‘I do try. But sometimes I can’t help it, Friday. I really can’t.’

Sunday, 10 July 1831, Sydney Town

Friday hurried up George Street, the little bag containing two hundred pounds in English tenners tucked safely inside her jacket. The night was cold and the wind just this side of bitter, though at least it wasn’t raining. There was no moon at all, however, and she’d stumbled badly on the uneven footway twice. Insipid light spilt from the occasional house window, lamps shone at the barracks gates and farther up the hill at the gate of the police office, but the market sheds were as black as coal, rearing up to her right and blocking the scatter of stars in the velvet sky. Somewhere not far behind her a dog barked. She had a lantern but dared not light it, not here on the street where someone might follow her into the burial ground, and rob her.

Ha, that would be funny, wouldn’t it? Getting robbed of two hundred pounds when she was on her way to hand it over to Amos sodding Furniss?

She would light the lantern, though, once she was behind the high stone wall that bordered the old graveyard. Nothing —
nothing
— would tempt her to wander around in there in the pitch dark.

She ducked down Druitt Street and followed the wall until she came to a gate hanging half off its hinges. Pausing to wrap her woollen scarf around the lower half of her face against the smell, she lifted the gate to one side and stepped inside the abandoned burial ground.

It had been declared full ten years earlier, closed, and thoroughly neglected since. Sydney Town’s more recently deceased were now interred in the Devonshire Street cemetery, leaving behind
in George Street two thousand corpses gouged into two acres of unyielding clay. Effluvia seeping up through the ground brought with it an appalling stink, especially in summer, as though the dead themselves were protesting their abandonment. Passers-by used the grounds as an open privy, stray animals wandered among the graves, and vandals had smashed headstones and monuments, broken open vaults and tombs, and, according to gossip, robbed them. The old graveyard was a foul place, and nobody went there — unless, it was said, they were up to no good.

Friday crouched in the shelter of the wall and lit her lantern, adjusting the darkened mantle so that only a thin beam escaped, just enough to light her way. God only knew where Furniss would be waiting. The burial ground was huge, particularly in the dark, and she had no desire at
all
to go plunging into some poor, rotting soul’s open grave. He would probably sneak up and scare the shit out of her, just for the fun of it. She was starting to wish now that she had brought someone with her. Not Sarah or Harrie —
especially
not Harrie, not here — but perhaps Jack, like last time.

She set off for the centre, picking her way around yawning black holes and sunken troughs in the mean, patchy grass, grey and dead in the lantern light, heading for the outline of a vault, a crumbling black shape against the night sky. Furniss would see her coming; let the bugger come to her.

Feeling a tickle of awareness on the back of her neck, she spun around. Was he behind her? She raised her lantern, but saw no one, only shades of black blending into one another. Prick. He was playing with her. Then, off to her left, she heard a whistle.

‘Hey, girlie!’

She turned again and there he was, a shadow materialising from the darkness, his hat pulled low so she could see little more than his leering, gap-toothed smile. But she knew it was him. She could
smell
the arseholery coming off him.

He held out his hand, palm up.

She withdrew the bag containing the money from her jacket and hurled it at him. He caught it and laughed.

‘Bastard!’ Friday hissed.

‘Slag,’ he shot back.

‘Who told Bella about our money?’ Friday demanded. ‘It was bloody Lou, wasn’t it?’

But Furniss was already turning away.

‘Oi!’ Friday shouted after him, her voice echoing eerily across the burial ground. ‘
Oi!
’

He’d gone, dissolved into the darkness again, like pond scum.

Shaking violently, Friday swore and made herself unclench her fists. The handle of the lantern had cut into her palm, and, now that she thought about it, it hurt. She stood very still, her head down, arms slack, and took several deep breaths to calm herself. She couldn’t afford to go berserk here — she’d fall into a grave or something and hurt herself.

Slowly and carefully she made her way back to the gate and let herself out. The money was gone and that was that.

She sighed again, a great, ragged heaving in and out of breath, and told herself things could be worse. Adam was back, Gellar was dead and this time they weren’t guilty, Harrie was talking to James, and she … well, she was just the way she always was. Not happy, not sad. Just Friday.

She’d have a few drinks. That would make her feel better.

From his hiding place behind a crooked headstone he watched as she left, her lantern scribbling a skinny beam of light across the ground at her feet. His heart was still thudding madly with a mix of nervous anticipation and raw, simmering rage, and when the bastard had been talking to her he’d wanted to leap out then and there. But he’d made himself wait, because he didn’t want to get her into even more trouble. He didn’t want to get any of them into trouble, but especially not Harrie.

Now, though, he could do what he liked.

He made a gesture of quiet, made sure the message had been received, and set out after Furniss, darting on fleet, bare feet from stone to stone, ducking behind the ruins of tombs and low vaults, and quickly reached the far wall bordering Bathurst Street. Furniss was almost at the gate, whistling to himself as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

Walter slid the knife out of his jacket pocket and stepped up onto a lurching gravestone, his toes gripping the edge like a monkey’s.

‘Furniss, you rotten bastard.’

Furniss spun around, eyes wide.

Walter launched himself, driving the knife as hard as he could into Furniss’s chest. Furniss grunted once, staggered and crashed against the wall, his arms flailing wildly as he fell on his side. Clifford bit into the man’s ankle as Walter rolled away, the knife still gripped in his hand, then he leapt to his feet and stabbed again. And again and again and again, until Furniss stopped moving.

‘Clifford, drop him.’

The little dog backed off, taking a mouthful of cloth and flesh with her.

Furniss’s hat had come off and his eyes were open, but no longer saw anything. His blood, bubbling and oozing out of his chest, looked black. Like his heart. While Walter watched, the filthy flow slowed, then finally stopped altogether.

He hoicked up a good gob and spat on the dead man’s face.

Then he wiped his sticky hands on Furniss’s trousers, went through his pockets until he found Friday’s money, and slipped the little bag into his own pocket.

He hesitated, then bent over and vomited.

Suddenly feeling very shaky, he wrapped his arms around himself.

After a minute he said, ‘Come on, Cliffie, let’s go.’

The characters in this story are all fictional, except for the ones already in the history books.

To my knowledge, the real Francis Rossi, police magistrate and superintendent of Sydney’s police, never had anything whatsoever to do with any brothels or madams during his time in New South Wales. Also, that Francis Rossi should not be confused with the Francis Rossi in Status Quo.

The subtitles for parts one, two and three of this story come from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘Haunted Houses’.

A note on ghosts, as readers might wonder at the gullibility of some of my characters. While the British public’s belief in fairies and the like may have faded by the nineteenth century, and witches had in general been downgraded from the devil’s handmaidens to wise women, there was still, apparently, an enduring acceptance by a good number that ghosts were real. Perhaps it was because death was ever-present. The infant and child mortality rate was very high, and diseases we don’t have to worry about now could take loved ones in a matter of days. The occasional reappearance — real or imagined — of those snatched so suddenly and unfairly from life may have helped to lessen the pain of such loss.

Cultural expressions of death and mourning really took off in the latter half of the eighteenth century, quite some time before the commonly assumed heydey of mourning during Queen Victoria’s
reign. There were strict social rules (especially for the rich), special clothing, textiles, jewellery, literature, art, complicated burial practices and eventually, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even new religions such as spiritualism. With this great emphasis on death, it is no surprise that focus and belief extended beyond the earthly trappings of mourning to the metaphysical world.

For those who subscribed to the existence of heaven and hell there was also purgatory, where the souls of the tormented were trapped, hence tales of unhappy apparitions wandering about on our plane. But for those without the comfort of religious beliefs encompassing an afterlife, the idea of ghosts might have offered tempting relief from the stark and final reality of death.

And as Matthew Cutler says, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth.’ Or was that William Shakespeare?

One of the good things about writing a historical series is building up a nice little reference library. Particularly useful for this second book, and nearly thumbed to death already, have been FB Smith,
Illness in Colonial Australia
(Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd, 2011), and Frank Bongiorno,
The Sex Lives of Australians: a history
(Black Inc., 2012). Both are entertainingly written, extensively researched and bursting with fascinating details for writers like me.

For matters concerning nineteenth-century bling, Duncan James,
Antique Jewellery: its manufacture, materials and design
(Shire Publications Ltd, 2007), and Charles Jarvis,
Jewellery Manufacture & Repair
(N.A.G. Press Ltd, 1978) — both with very handy diagrams — were indispensable, and
Georgian Jewellery 1714–1830
(Antique Collector’s Club, 2007), by Ginny Redington Dawes with Olivia Collings, provided endless inspiration (and wasted hours drooling over the stunning photographs).

Information on early nineteenth-century European tattoos is a bit thin on the ground, but Steve Gilbert,
Tattoo History: a source book
(Juno Books, 2000) was useful, and
The Japanese Tattoo
(Abbeville Press, 1986), by Sandi Fellman, gave me lots of ideas for Matthew Cutler’s arm ink.

Floorcoverings in Australia 1800–1950
(Historic Houses Trust, 1997) is a book I’ve consulted far more than I thought I would, and
a skinny little tome called
The History of Port Macquarie
, written by C.T. Uptin in 1958 and revised in 1983 by the Hastings District Historical Society, which I bought when visiting the excellent Port Macquarie Historical Museum, also turned out to be very handy, especially the plan of the penal settlement in 1830.

This last one isn’t actually a book, but a set of notes to accompany a seminar presented by romantic suspense author Bronwyn Parry at 2012’s Romance Writers of Australia conference. Bronwyn’s subject was ‘The most perfect cloth: dress fabrics for Georgian and Regency characters’. It was a fascinating seminar and I’ve gone back to those notes again and again. Thank you, Bronwyn!