The Denniston Rose (16 page)

‘Angel! For God’s sake listen! Your house and husband may be burned but your daughter is alive and in need, if you care.’

‘My daughter! My daughter!’ screams Eva. ‘And you? Is it not yours too? Take her, then.’ She picks up a clod and throws it, like an angry child, at Con. She reaches down for another. Brennan and Michael stop their howling and gape to see her mad antics.

Con turns away, sheltering Rose from the onslaught.

‘I will take Rose to a safe place,’ he says. The mother continues her barrage as Con, walking soft as a cat, heads back across the Camp. The boys, silent now, cling to his coattails, one each side. Behind him Con hears Eva screaming on. Curses or laments you couldn’t tell.

The hut has caved in and the fire is dying but Rose’s mother will not leave the burning husk or Jimmy’s body inside it. Young Brennan, looking back, sees Rose’s mother snatch a charred pole from the wreckage and poke the embers as if she’s fishing in a red sea. Sparks shoot up. Eva screams and dances like a dervish.

At the Camp and the Bins there is more smoke now than fire. A skeleton of building is exposed towards the front of the Bins but the main bulk is safe. Josiah’s gang have isolated a small pile of smoking coal, shovelling it to one side where it may safely burn itself out. Half the shacks at the Camp are smouldering ruins, sheets of iron and charred beams sticking up at crazy angles out of the ashes. Con’s great log cabin still stands, though one corner is charred. The Camp people stand near it in the smoking air, as if gathering around a hearth for comfort.

‘Jimmy Cork is gone,’ says Con the Brake to Tom. ‘The mother is still there — mad, you know, but unharmed.’

Suddenly rain falls: steady, cleansing, roaring rain. The people groan with pleasure.

Bella Rasmussen, the apron over her huge belly black with soot, comes out from the house with a kettle of tea. She sees Rose lying in Con’s arms.

‘Rose!’ shouts Bella.

‘She is burned but not in danger. I am taking her to Totty. You have enough here,’ says Con. He has difficulty looking Bella in the eye.

Bella reaches out to touch Rose but stops and draws breath at the sight of her face. It is streaming with rain, the skin floating downwards off a flaring cheek.

‘Oh, Rose,’ says Bella, ‘my Rose of Tralee.’ She beats her fists against her apron. ‘Take her up quickly to your place, Tom. It is chaos here. Tell Totty to bathe the face all night with a soft flannel cloth in a solution of carbonate of soda. I will come in the morning.’ Tom takes the still bundle from the big brake-man and walks into the sheeting rain. Michael and Brennan follow behind like dogs, but Bella calls Brennan back.

‘Where’s your Dad, then?’

Con growls, ‘They are all up at the Bins, all the miners, saving Company property while people’s houses burn.’

‘The Company is your livelihood too, man,’ says Bella.

Con glares. ‘Down here it is lives, not livelihood. Which is more important?’

‘Good God, husband, you would start up an argument on your way to hell! Where’s that Brennan?’

‘Here,’ says Brennan.

‘Ask your father if he would send a message to Granny Binney to come in the morning if she can make the trip. Her ointments are needed for Rose’s face.’

‘Aye,’ says Brennan.

‘Well, go on then, boy. Your father will be frantic.’

‘What about Rose?’

‘Rose will live, but her face will be less scarred for Granny’s curing.’

‘But where will she live?’

‘We will see to that, Brennan. Rose will never lack for a roof.’

‘What about her mother then?’

‘Go on, off you go, this is no time for conversation! You are worse than Mr Rasmussen.’

Brennan stands. ‘But …’ he says.

Bella Rasmussen looks at the boy. Brennan stares at the ground. The stubborn line of his brow is set, his hair plastered, stocky legs rooted.

‘Brennan,’ says Bella more gently, ‘you did well, you and Michael, to look after Rose. Now leave it to others.’

She takes him by the shoulders, turns him to face the Bins and pushes between the square little shoulders. He starts walking.

Bella picks up her kettle of tea. ‘Come in, come in then,’ she says to the waiting homeless. ‘Though I’ll have no soot tramped in on my clean boards. Leave your boots in the rain. And Billy?’

Billy Genesis is cheering himself up with a swig or two. He looks at Mrs C. Rasmussen over the rim of his tin mug.

‘Billy Genesis. Your friend is burned, his body still lying and his widow in need of assistance. You are a good distance away from your next drink, my fellow. Drag Lord Percy away from his charred cabbages and see to it!’

Billy’s eyes are thoughtful. ‘Mrs C, you are quite right. I will see to it.’

‘And I,’ says Con the Brake, draining his hot sweet tea and clapping Billy Genesis on the shoulder, ‘will see to
you
!’ Con propels the stumbling man out of the yard and over smoking ashes towards what was the Cork end of the Camp.

EVERYONE HAD A different theory about how Jimmy Cork died. He was burned — no doubt about that. But why he didn’t get out of the hut was open to debate. Jimmy might have been uncertain on his pins, but even a lame man can move in an emergency. There was warning enough. Even drunk, Jimmy could crawl. Billy Genesis reckoned Jimmy had been on Straw Nugget’s sly-grog and that his breath ignited, boom! from the first spark; that he burned from the inside out, as it were.

Some believed he had a horde of gold hidden under the floorboards and that the boozy bugger wouldn’t leave it. How else did he get the money for drink? And where was the horde now? More than a few were seen heading for the Cork end with a pick and shovel.

Bella thought Rose’s mother could’ve clocked Jimmy so hard
over the head in one of their endless battles that he was too dizzy to crawl free, and that Rose’s mother was gone crazy with guilt. Who but a crazy woman would go and live with Billy Genesis? Worse than crazy when you consider she had a daughter.

Tom Hanratty said it was suicide. He said Jimmy Cork would never have the backbone to take his own life squarely, but that he would take the opportunity, when it was in front of his nose, to give up.

For once, Con the Brake had no theory at all.

The truth never came out, as far as anyone told.

Rose’s mother stayed sitting in the ashes all that night and half the next day, looking like a charred stump herself she was so still. Finally she let Billy and Lord P haul her upright and went home with them, all three in the one hut until Lord Percy rebuilt.

The funeral was unusual, even for Denniston. Rose’s mother, who hadn’t said a word up to now, came up rock solid when coffins and the graveyard down in Waimang were mentioned. Jimmy’s body wasn’t going to some distant graveyard and that was that. She gathered brush and some of the scattered charred timber from the fire. She built a new fire over Jimmy’s body right there where the house had been — wouldn’t let a soul touch him. The smoke rose thick and acrid because of the rain and the chickens and because of Jimmy himself. A black funeral pyre. Most of the Camp were standing there, at a distance, behind Rose’s mother, who stood alone.

Con the Brake dug Billy Genesis in the ribs and told him to make use of his one accomplishment, so Billy cleared his throat and said in his queer grating voice:

‘“And Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt.

‘“And all the house of Joseph and his brethren and his father’s house: only their little ones and their flocks and herds they left in the land of Goshen.

‘“And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen: and it was a very great company.

‘“And they came to the threshing-floor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and a very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days.”’

Then Con the Brake told Billy that would do, so he stopped.

When the ashes were cool Eva Storm scraped around in them for Jimmy’s bones, and for other things, who knows? She found the bones at least, put them in a clean flour sack, tied it tight with twine and gave it to Billy Genesis. She told him to throw the bones as far as he could into the gully, in the direction Jimmy always looked when thinking of his gold. Billy drew back from the sack as if it contained snakes or a wild dog, which people noted and whispered about. Was it guilt? In the end it was Con who grasped the neck of the sack in one huge paw, swung it once, twice, around his head and then let go.

He and Eva watched it rise, twisting against the sky, due east, and then plummet, like a shot bird, down into the great trees far below.

Then Eva went up to claim Rose, who had all this time been lying and moaning in one of Hanrattys’ guest-rooms, her face smeared with carron oil and then floured as Granny Binney had instructed.

THE FIRE? POOR Jimmy’s death? No no, my friends: you will not draw me on that. Call it Act of God and move on. Up there on the Hill, theories were plentiful, facts sparse. After the fine sport of invention had palled, no one much cared about the truth, Jimmy being who he was. So say he died. Of burning.

Consider the ones left alive. Consider my true bad luck. Not Jimmy’s death so much, which could only be a blessing, but the timing of it. That fat bag of flour, Bella (who called herself Rasmussen), was finally got pregnant to my Con, and both of them oily with the joy of it all. Six months earlier and I wager you my man would surely have walked off that black plateau with me on his arm. There was a moment, I tell you!

Consider also the gold. My bad luck kept its grip. All day and night I scraped and scratched around that burned hut, but Jimmy
had the last laugh there. In my bones I could feel his stash whispering to me, but where? Where? Nowhere that my tired eyes could seek out.

So. No money, no house, no chickens. And for the moment, no Con. My only and single asset is Conrad’s daughter, Rose, who is good now and then as a lever with Con for a bit of food.

Now. It will do no good to look sideways at me and throw hands in the air over Billy Genesis. A woman in such a situation has no choice. None. If no good man is on offer then take a bad one. Or two. Billy Genesis at any rate was a small step up on poor Jimmy, or so I thought. One: he had a job. Two: his spirits were higher. Three: I will not mention in mixed company but my drift is clear, no? Against the man, an entire book: ugly, bad-tempered and free with his fists, a drunkard, breath to knock you down at ten paces, and wandering eyes when it came to the girl. To be true, more than wandering eyes, but what could I do? What choice did I have? I could shout, take a poker to the man, but could I change the man’s nature? I could not. Well, Rose had to learn some day the way of the world. Sooner or later, given her start in life, she had to learn to get along, and she was sharp enough to learn quickly. It was painful for a mother, yes, but in those days what was not painful? So no wagging fingers and long faces please, or my story finishes right here.

That scarred blacksmith Billy beats no bush but comes to a point smartly, which I like about him.

‘Woman,’ he says, the day after the fire, standing over me, his feet planted in rubble and me filthy from scratching in the embers, ‘I know what you are after. You lust after Jimmy’s gold, it is writ like the finger of God in your face, and I have the same lust.’ Here he winks and digs me with his beefy elbow. ‘And a lust or two of another variety! What say we pool our knowledge and see what profit might come of it?’

‘What do you know, then?’ say I.

‘Aha. I am not so foolish as to spurt out a valuable commodity without some payment in return.’

He taps his fat nose as if he is some sage, which he most surely is not. But he has the air of a man who knows something, so I stand up from the ashes and prepare to do business.

‘Well and I know a secret or two with gold at the heart,’ say I. ‘So what is in mind here?’

‘In mind is you in my bed and keeping house for me.’

‘House? What house? You live in a pigsty.’

‘I will set to and build it better. The Company will help with materials. A blacksmith is not so easy to come by.’

‘And?’

‘And I will feed you and your child. And we will seek Jimmy’s gold source.’

‘Equal shares?’

‘Well, now.’ Billy looks shifty. ‘Equal is man’s talk. And I am feeding two mouths, both female. Equal will depend.’

‘On what? Spit out the terms, Billy. I am no tender baby here, but tougher than you and smarter.’

‘On favours, and how pleasing they are.’

Well, how am I to know the favours include Rose? And if I knew, was there another choice?

So we shake hands like men and Billy quotes from the Bible something about ‘cleaving’ and ‘knowing’ and plenty of ‘unto’s and in Billy’s poor sick mind I am now bound to him.

One piece of business first though, before the new regime. The business was Jimmy’s remains. Oh those church ladies and proper gents up there put on faces sharper than knives when I refused to send the body down the Incline. What body? A charred and stinking mess, poor Jimmy was. Better to finish the job. There’s
plenty of countries where they burn their dead right out in the open so everyone can see that the right body is going up in flames. Plenty, no? But these people ran their lives in straight lines carved deep and unbending like wheel-ruts. No change possible. They brought Mr Carmichael down to talk to me.

‘Mrs Jimmy Cork,’ says he, always polite when death is around, ‘we must take the body down for a proper burial.’

‘Oh,’ says I, ‘Jimmy’s proper now, is he, now he’s dead?’

‘You are upset,’ says he, but he will not approach close, as if I am a wild beast to be wary of.

I tell you, I am suddenly sick of the lot of them. Tired and bone-sick. ‘Go about your little ways and leave me to mine!’ I scream. They will not dare to come close, or do not care enough to make the effort. I light my little funeral bier and the body smokes and stinks. My man Con stands nearby. He understands. It is he who throws the bones far, away and off the plateau, and my heart is eased to see them fly.

At the time, my friends, I am not in the mood for speeches, you understand, with my own luck so low. I give you a word now, for Jimmy Cork: Jimmy was a loser and a weak man, but we had some good moments. If dice had fallen another way he would have been someone of note in this country, be sure of that, the way he talked and knew of history and governments and the workings of the mind. Jimmy was a dreamer whose bad luck, you might say, was that he found the motherlode. Found and lost it. The dreaming of it suited him better, do you see? The shining hope, before he found the real colour. No? We all know it. The practical side, when the dream turned real, was too much for him, poor sod.

So, then, that was Jimmy. My story continues. And a sorry chapter it is, so I’ll make it short. Who can argue with dice? Your
luck runs crossways, you move on and prepare for the next roll. In this, Rose features.

My daughter has been sharp, which is good, but has tricked her mother, which makes me spit with rage. For Billy Genesis has told me a thing or two.

After the throwing of the bones he takes me by the arm, rough, but claiming me. He has seen my look towards the big man Con.

‘Now,’ says he, ‘one: your pretty daughter is a thief.’

‘Oho,’ says I, sharpish. ‘It takes one to know one.’

‘Two: she has found Jimmy’s stash.’

That set me back. Rose being only seven years old.

‘Three: I have found
her
stash and hid it safely.’

That my own daughter should have such secrets from her mother! I wait in silence for a four, but Billy has done. He hauls me away from the gawking funeral crowd to the little overhang of rock that was once part of Jimmy’s hut. A sheet of iron forms a porch of sorts, a pile of charred debris a windbreak to the north. I don’t like it. Too close to uncomfortable matters. But this, he says in his new master’s voice, is to be our home until he has rebuilt.

Billy grins at me with his good eye and comes up close. Phaw! That man’s breath! Hot he is, which I have known before, but with it something nasty now: a new edge to the set of his mouth; a heat that is more rage than desire; his blacksmith’s hands clenching me, all cruel strength, not even one tot of loving. This man thinks he owns me, and the very idea pumps him up like his own forge fire.

‘Now!’ he says. ‘Now, then.’

He takes me with a brutishness lacking any style at all. A thing I detest. Where is the advantage for the woman? (Any man sitting around this fire who harbours ambitions take note.)

Well, it is over quickly at least, and Billy is for a while a quieter man. We discuss gold. I tell him of Jimmy’s first discovery and of his
belief that the source outcropped on the cliff close to one of Banbury mine’s air shafts, but that the fall-in had blocked his passage. Billy’s eyes gleam. He has access to the mine for shoeing the horses and could maybe scout a different route through the maze of tunnels.

To be honest, I think him a fool. The source will likely be embedded in quartz or rock and require proper mining. What hope is there of carrying on a noisy operation within earshot of an army of belligerent English miners?

‘None!’ I say to this dolt. ‘You are as mazy as Jimmy.’ Which earns me a clout on the ear. Just let me get back my strength, I think, and we’ll see. But for the time I divert the man to thinking on Jimmy’s existing stash and the possibility of retrieving more from the same place.

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ intones Billy. ‘Meaning the stash is spent all but a few pennyweight. Rose took half and left half and neither would keep a man in drink more than a month. But,’ says he, with a thoughtful look in my direction, ‘I will climb to this place you talk of and take in the lie of the land for myself. Why in the name of fortune Jimmy didn’t take me there earlier to be his arms and legs I cannot fathom.’

Well, friends, we can all guess why. I can read betrayal all over the man’s face myself. No doubt Jimmy Cork, who was no fool, whatever his other faults, could read the same signs. Already I am making plans. This Billy Genesis will not do for long.

Now. Soon it is time to collect my Rose, who is up at Hanrattys’ like a little lady, her good looks spoiled by the flames that killed Jimmy. Maybe a lesson to her.