Kiwi Wars

Garry Douglas Kilworth
was born in York into a military family. He spent seventeen years in the RAF before embarking on a dual career working for an international telecommunications firm and writing and now is the author of some fifty novels. He has won the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and twice shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Other titles in this series by Garry Douglas Kilworth

Soldiers in the Mist
The Winter Soldiers
Attack on the Redan
Brothers of the Blade
Rogue Officer
Kiwi Wars

Kiwi Wars

A Fancy Jack Crossman Adventure

Garry Douglas Kilworth

Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in Great Britain and the USA by Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2008

This edition published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

Copyright © Garry Douglas Kilworth, 2008

The right of Garry Douglas Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47210-924-8 (ebook)

Cover design by JoeRoberts.co.uk

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This novel is for my good friend Major John Spiers, who was at the time of the work’s conception the curator of the Light Infantry Museum in Winchester. (He is now Rifles’ Secretary, Property and Heritage.) His name has often appeared in my acknowledgements for the research material he has provided. He also suggested that the Maori Wars might make for a different, and interesting, Crossman novel.

John also supplied much of the historical material, but is in no way responsible for any errors in this work. I like to think I can get things wrong without any expert assistance.

One

1851, Australia

T
hree sailors slipped over the side of the moored British man-o’-war into a stolen skiff to sail across the bay to the harbour of the small Australian port of Melbourne. They had contrived to serve watch together in the early hours, to provide themselves with this opportunity of jumping ship. The officer of the watch, a Lieutenant Urquart, was standing fast asleep with his head on the rail of the quarterdeck. Urquart was famous for his catnapping. By the time he lifted that sorry head of his, he would be in the deepest trouble of his so-far short life.

‘Watch the prow,’ whispered Danny, urgently.

He was too late, the stolen skiff’s front end bumped against the ship’s hull, not loudly, but with a definite thump.

‘What?’ called the officer above, obviously waking from his doze. ‘Who’s there?’

The three men in the skiff swiftly manoeuvred the boat around and under the stern of the man-o’-war. There they waited with hearts beating fast, knowing that directly above them was the captain’s cabin. They could hear that very man snoring like a pig with a blocked snout. Urquart’s footsteps sounded on the deck. The three sailors followed them with their ears, knowing he had walked to the port side. There he would be searching the surface of the sea, looking for a log or whatever he imagined had made the noise. If they were caught the least they could expect was a term in the brig. Most likely it would be a flogging.

For the next few minutes all that could be heard was the lapping of wavelets against the hull of the great ship. Then the footsteps travelled again, probably to the quarterdeck, where the lieutenant would again rest his head on the rail. Urquart was nothing if not consistent in his habits.

‘What now?’ hissed Striker.

Abe said, ‘Wait.’

They stayed where they were, holding on to the anchor chain for the next quarter of an hour.

‘All right,’ Abe murmured. ‘He’ll be off again now.’

They pushed off, out into the bay. All three looked anxiously at the man-o’-war for the next few minutes, as they slid across the quiet waters, but it seemed Urquart had indeed returned to his slumber. There was another seaman with him, a sailor by the name of Longfield, but he too had no doubt succumbed to the invitation of the sandman.

The dawn came up over the waters of the huge natural harbour which curved like a giant fish hook around the small skiff. To the east were green hills, to the further west a flatter drier landscape. Ahead though, was the welcoming mouth of the Yarrow River. It was towards this stretch of fresh water the three sailors were heading. They did not intend to touch land, but, tacking through the other quiet ships which littered the harbour, they were desirous of sailing upriver towards gold country. It was a source of bitter disappointment to them that they could not go directly to the goldfields, where daily fortunes were being made, since they had no money. They did have a stolen ship’s mainsail, which would stake them once they were there, but they had no provisions for the journey. They needed a horse or donkey to carry the canvas, since they could not sail all the way to Ballarat, their eventual goal.

They passed rather too close to a frigate where the officer of the watch was far more alert than Lieutenant Urquart. Striker gave the officer a friendly wave, relieved to see that it was a visiting American vessel and not a British ship. The officer, hands locked behind his back, merely returned Abe a hard stare.

‘Bloody gentry,’ muttered Striker, ‘same everywhere.’

‘They don’t have no gentry in the United States,’ stated Danny in his thick Irish brogue. ‘They’re a republic.’

‘Oh, they have gentry all right,’ Abe said, getting in on the conversation. ‘They just don’t call ’em lords and ladies. It’s a fact of human nature to have your high brows and your low. That one there, he comes from a family that don’t speak civil to Chinamen, you can be sure of that. He’ll have servants in the kitchen, same as our lot.’

‘Was you in service, when you was a landlubber?’ asked Danny of the leader of the group.

‘Me?’ cried Abe in a shocked voice. ‘I never served no one nothin’. I’ve got my pride. I was a lengthsman, me. Since I was fourteen.’

Danny, being Irish, did not know what a lengthsman was and requested more information.

‘Why,’ said Abe, loosening the sheet and letting out more sail as the wind dropped, ‘it’s a workman for the council who looks after a length of greensward and ditching. I had five miles on it, ‘tween Rochford and Hockley, in the county of Essex. Scythe and spade was the tools of my trade. I cut the verges with one and kept the ditches clear with the other. That and help the sexton dig his graves. I’ve shovelled earth on many a gentry’s corpse, I can tell you. I s’pose that’s servin’ ’em in a manner of speakin’, but all I’ve done for ’em direct is throw the dirt of county on their dead faces. All I ever intend doin’ for ’em, what’s more.’

Abe was tall and lean, with a huge scar that ran from the corner of his right eye down to the tip of his chin. The scar came from a knife fight with a Lascar seaman in a Liverpool tavern. He wore it proudly, as if it proclaimed him to be a man to be reckoned with. Privately his shipmates said they would be more afraid of the man who gave it to him. Still, it looked gruesome and worried them enough that they gave him a wide berth when he was in a temper.

The three made it upriver for five miles before they abandoned the skiff. Striker wanted to sell it to get money for provisions, but such a sale would have attracted too much attention, and they could not afford to be detained while their non-existent credentials were checked by the purchaser. Instead they lugged the mainsail, and the sail from the skiff, a further mile along the bank and hid them in some bushes. Then Danny led them to a tree-fellers’ camp he had been told about by some Victorian sailors. Here they joined a self-employed gang of men who cut and sold eucalyptus wood for the boilers of the paddle steamers that plied their trade up and down the Yarrow.

‘See them gum trees down by the water’s edge, them’s river reds,’ explained one of the gang to the three sailors. ‘Them others, further back on the drier parts, them’s black box. River reds burn to charcoal, but black box goes down to dust. They wants both types of wood, see – they needs a mix. And a warnin’ on the river reds—’

At that moment an explosion occurred on a paddle steamer that was about quarter of a mile downriver. A look of satisfaction spread over the faces of the cutting gang. They nodded to each other in grim fashion as they saw that the steamer’s paddles had come to a halt and the boat was drifting on the current.

‘What’s that?’ asked Abe. ‘What’s happened there?’

‘Captain of that there vessel,’ said the same man who had been explaining about the types of wood, ‘went off without payin’ us our dues.’

‘And?’

‘And so we packed some gunpowder in a hollow log.’

Abe laughed. ‘I like that. They threw it in the furnace without knowin’ its content?’

The rest of the gang smiled. ‘Just so,’ said the second man. ‘It’ll remind the captain of his debt. They won’t not pay us again. That engine’ll cost a tidy penny to get put right. Now, as I was sayin’, don’t stand at rest under the river reds. They call ’em widow-makers here. Boughs break and drop without a warnin’. Here watch.’

The sawyer hefted a log into the water and it sank quickly to the bottom of the Yarrow.

‘Heavy enough to defy nature,’ said the man. ‘Imagine that coming down on your back.’

The three sailors only stayed with the cutting gang long enough to earn money for provisions. Then they struck inland for a short way to hire a beast of burden. They found a man willing to let go of an old camel called Bessie. Bessie was brought, not without protest for dromedaries are belligerent beasts at the best of times, to the spot where they had hidden the sails. They loaded her up and then set out for Ballarat, the town that served the goldfields.

It was about six o’clock in the evening as three sailors and a camel entered the Victorian town. The camel was thirsty and so were the men. They tied the beast to a tree by a long piece of ship’s rope and left it to drink from the town’s lake. They themselves entered an eating house and ordered steaks and beer. The fare was eye-wateringly expensive. The cutting gang had warned them of the prices on the goldfields, most of them having tried their luck themselves before deciding that a steady job was more lucrative.