Nanberry (24 page)

CAPTAIN ANDREW WHITE

S
YDNEY
, 1823

He had forgotten the smell of gum trees.

Captain Andrew White of His Majesty's Royal Engineers, a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, stood at the rail as the ship glided across the smooth waters of the harbour. He had forgotten the way the land slipped a thousand tiny fingers towards the water, shining like the waves were scattered with diamonds.

England was behind him: years living in his father's house, years of boarding school with its cold baths, burnt porridge and floggings, years studying engineering at military college, the horror of Waterloo, a killing field where bodies and severed limbs lay among the mud.

He had survived.

Now he was coming home.

Yet how could a land be home when you hadn't seen it since you were seven? His early childhood seemed like a dream now.
Had he ever been that barefoot lad, running down to the harbour? And fishing with spears? Was it even real? There had been an angel too.

He smiled, and shook his head. A small boy's dreams.

And yet some of the most unlikely things had been real. A brother with black skin, who had taught him how to swim. Nanberry had been real: his mother spoke of him sometimes in her letters. She'd sent him a throwing stick one Christmas, a gift from Nanberry. Andrew smiled at the thought of using a native throwing stick in front of his fellow officers.

No, that part of his life was secret. A ghost life: the ex-convict mother; the black brother; the even worse secret — his parents hadn't been married. His father had advised that they let everyone think his first wife had died, that Andrew was his legitimate eldest son.

But the ghosts had kept whispering to him — the blue of the mountains, the smell of the smoke. Home, they whispered. This land is home.

The Scots called it your calf country — the land where you were born, that gave you life. You never forgot it, they said. Andrew gazed about him at the white-trunked trees around the harbour. Was this really home?

The sails flapped above him as the ship turned into another twist of harbour, the wooden hull creaking, the sailors yelling as they hauled at ropes. He stared. That couldn't be Sydney Cove!

He'd left a huddle of huts creeping up the hills. He'd come home to a city.

Where there had been cabbage-tree huts, there were stone warehouses, stout cottages, and wharves not with one poor vessel hired to ship convicts, but ship upon ship. Suddenly he could smell the oil: whale oil, seal oil, the stench of burning blubber. How many whaling ships must use this harbour now?

But there were other ships too. There was at least one other passenger ship — he could see ladies with bright parasols on the deck. Another that might be a convict hulk …

It was … big.

If only Father could see this, he thought. His father believed that nothing could come from New South Wales but dirt and squalor, that it was merely a huddle of captives at the bottom of the world.

But it was beautiful, thought Andrew, remembering the birds and playing in the waves. It was beautiful when I was a child. It's still beautiful now.

He stared as the shore grew near, as though he might see his mother's face among the crowds on the wharf. But that was impossible. She didn't even know he was coming. The first ship that could have brought her a letter was this one. She would be at her home in Liverpool, with his stepfather. His stepfather was magistrate now, one of the wealthiest men in the colony. But Nanberry …

Andrew breathed deeply, trying to find the tang of gum leaves again. Home.

It was strange to feel solid ground under his feet. The world still shifted from side to side.

There was no chance of taking a carriage to Liverpool today, not till his luggage was brought ashore. He found a hotel not far from the wharves — a good one, with a bedroom to himself, a feather mattress and clean sheets. A fire burnt in the fireplace. He sniffed, the scent of gumwood suddenly almost unbearably lovely after the sour coal fires of England.

He went downstairs to the taproom and ordered dinner, then stepped out of the door and looked around.

Once again he was shocked at how …
substantial
everything was. The old huts and cottages had looked as though one big southerly could blow them away along with all the white people on the continent. These grand stone buildings and broad streets and solid warehouses would be a credit to any city in Europe. Even the streets in this part of town seemed to go in different directions from those he remembered, though of course they hadn't even been streets then. Just paths through the mud. This might have been a different town entirely from the place he'd known as a child.

At last he decided to go uphill, and south, to try to find the house where he'd been born.

The street sellers' cries rose around him as he walked along the footpath, ‘Pies! Hot pies! Oyster pies!'; ‘Who'll buy my lavender? Sweet lavender!'; ‘Fisho! Fisho!'

They were the same cries you'd hear in any English city, and the same accents too. It was almost possible to forget that this was still a place of punishment … Then he saw them: a line of lags in convict grey, chains linking their ankles as they shuffled up the road.

A passing man saw him staring. ‘Road gang, most like.'

‘They look half starved.'

The man shrugged. ‘Well, that's government work for you.' He tipped his hat politely, and walked on.

Andrew kept walking too. But it was impossible to find the house or even the street. Either it had vanished or his memory — a seven-year-old's memory — wasn't good enough to find it. Instead he walked down to the harbour, not to the wharves, but to one of the coves, a little way beyond. Suddenly he was a boy again. These were the rocks where he'd speared fish with Garudi. It hadn't been a dream, after all. The waves were the same, slapping against the rocks, the white spray.

But no Garudi. No black limbs outlined against the startling
blue of the sky. How could he have forgotten this sky? What had become of Garudi? Is there even, he wondered, any way to find out?

He walked slowly back to the hotel. The dining room was full of men like himself: solid respectable men, ships' captains or merchants perhaps, with money for good food and lodging. There were no women — even the servers were men, pockmarked and brittle-toothed. Old lags, he supposed. But at least they had food here, not like the poor wretches working the roads.

Faces turned to look at him as he came in. He heard a mutter: ‘Waterloo.' The news must have come from the ship already. Andrew was used to the awe that people showed to any Waterloo veteran now.

Every man who had survived the Battle of Waterloo was a hero. They had saved England — and all of Europe — from Napoleon. No man who had served at Waterloo had to pay for his own drink in any hotel in England. But in truth he recalled little about the actual battle.

Instead there were memories of small things: grimly focusing on scraps of paper in front of him, trying to sketch maps of what troops were moving where to send to the commanders; seeing a redcoat scream defiance as he charged at the French soldiers with his bayonet, only to realise that the Englishman's left arm was a bleeding stump … and yet the man kept on, running a Frenchman through before he collapsed; the messenger boy who had brought news of one of the battle's shifting tides, standing there at attention till he fell dead, the blood soaking the back of his red jacket.

He forced his mind away. There would be no more battles for him. But he had come back to his mother a man of substance, with the prize money from Waterloo and the rank of captain. His stepfather might be wealthy, but Captain Andrew White needed no man's charity.

Supper was roast beef and greens. The beef was tough, but the slices generous. Fresh meat and vegetables were good after the months of shipboard salt-meat stew. He smiled at the memory of his father's parting words. ‘Make sure you eat plenty of fruit, lad, and buy more, fresh and dried, at the Cape to see you through the rest of the voyage.'

Would he ever see his father again? His stepmother? His half-brother and-sisters? Had he really done the right thing, coming back here, to the end of the world?

‘There's apple pie, sir, and cheese if you'd like it.'

‘Both, please.'

The serving man nodded, and left behind a stink of rum and sour breath.

It was still early when he went up to bed, hardly dark. The hotel was lit with whale-oil lamps, not the beeswax candles a hotel like this might have back home.

No. Not home. This was home now. Or was it?

The bed was soft at least. The feather mattress had been well aired.

Slowly the noise of drunks singing and the street yells faded. It was hard to sleep in a bed that didn't sway. He watched the moon through the window: a window with real glass, not wooden shutters.

Rrrrhhrrr!

The shriek had him sitting upright, his heart pounding. What was it?

The noise came again.
Rhhhhtt! Skrrrikkk!

Andrew shoved the window open and looked out.

Something small and furry ran along the hotel's back fence, then jumped up onto the scrap bin. The creature stood upright, then snarled again at its opponent, hidden in the shadows.

Shhhhkkkkttt!

Andrew laughed. A
bungu
in the moonlight. He had forgotten the word till now. All at once his memories felt real.

He'd hoped to leave at dawn. But it would take all day, it seemed, to get his trunks unloaded from the ship. He sent the porter to hire him a carriage. He'd rather hire a horse, but he didn't know where to go in this strangely big colony.

He needed to find a grave.

It was where his mother's letter had said it would be, under the trees of an orchard, overlooking the silver water of the river. Two wooden plaques marked the spot among the daisies in the grass — English daisies under English trees.

He bent down to read the words.
Bennelong, King of the Wangan
. The other plaque read:
Nanberry White, Chief of the Cadigal
.

Chief? King? He had never heard his brother use either of those terms. But he had been so young when he left. What use were the memories of a child?

He remembered the warmth of his brother's hand in his. He remembered the hornpipes and the laughter. He even remembered how to trap bandicoots and climb an o'possum tree. But the little he knew of the last years of his foster brother's life came from his mother's letters: written by a scribe in the early years, then by Rachel herself as her handwriting became more fluent.

Nanberry had stayed less and less in the room that was still kept for him, with a good English suit and hat so he could dine with them respectably. But at least once after every voyage — or before one — he would call in, always bringing gifts of honey, fish or o'possum fur to trim a cloak.

His brother had been in battles with other natives. Once he had been badly speared in the leg but rescued by his friends from
the crew of the
Reliance
. He had even accompanied Matthew Flinders in the
Investigator
, on an expedition to map the coastline of the entire continent, but had left, sensibly, when the boat had looked as though it was going to break up in the next big wave …

‘You looking at the King's grave?' The woman's dress was filthy. She stank of rum. He wondered what her crime was, why she'd been sent out here, then realised that like him she might have been born here.

‘The King?'

‘Old Bennelong. Right old rum artist they say he were. A real savage.'

‘Did you know him?'

‘Me? Do I look that old? Nah, but people talk.'

Andrew doubted whether they talked much sense. His mother had written that Bennelong had ‘gone bush' soon after he'd come back from England. She'd mentioned that in the last months of his life he had been ‘sadly addicted to the drink'. Andrew wondered if Bennelong had used alcohol to blot out the pain from his many wounds. He'd known old soldiers who did that. Scars that ached before it rained. Memories that ached even more.