The Gold Seekers (33 page)

He made to take his leave, but Dickon gripped his arm, shaking his head vigorously. He had made a second sketch, Luke saw, and was offering it for inspection. This was much less detailed than the one he had done of Morgan. A smudged blur suggested trees bordering the road; a figure on horseback, leading a second animal, was sketched in below the trees, and … Luke bit back a gasp of surprise as Dickon’s charcoal-stained finger jabbed at the outline of a man’s figure, crouched low down among the trees, which he had initially overlooked. There was a rifle in the second figure’s arms, raised to the level of its shoulder and aimed, beyond possibility of doubt, at the rider below.

Dickon bared his teeth in a mirthless smile and pointed first at the figure with the rifle and then at himself.

“You?” Luke questioned in some bewilderment. “And the major, Major—what did you call him? Lewis?” Dickon nodded. “Because you were certain that he killed your old aborigine and—” Understanding dawned. “No one believed you?”

Again a vigorous nod of assent, and for a moment Luke’s hopes rose. If Jasper Morgan had been wounded, then perhaps … “Dickon,” he demanded sharply, “did you hit him?”

Dickon shook his head disconsolately, making signs that appeared to mean that his target had been too far away and too fast-moving for accurate aim.

“Don’t worry, Dickon,” Luke offered with grim determination. “I’m going after him, and I won’t rest until I find him, I give you my word.”

Dickon hesitated for a long moment, as if deep in thought. Then, finally coming to a decision, he went to the tallboy and again took out the Colt in its linen wrapping. He thrust gun and wrapping into Luke’s hands, smiling his familiar, guileless smile, and since there was no mistaking his meaning, Luke accepted the unwelcome gift, but with a reluctance he could not hide.

“This is between our two selves, Dickon,” he cautioned. “We will not speak of it to your people, either of us, you understand? There is no need for them to know.”

And it was best that they should not, he thought; Jasper Morgan was his affair, not theirs—and least of all Elizabeth’s. To his relief, when he rejoined the Tempests and their guests and announced his intention of leaving Pengallon, they appeared to take it for granted that Mercy’s wedding to Claus Van Buren was the reason for his departure. He did not contradict their assumption.

“Come back to us, Luke,” Rick Tempest invited, “when the festivities are over. There will always be work for you here and, I promise you, a warm welcome from us all.”

Luke reddened as he heard Mrs. Tempest echo her husband’s kindly suggestion. “It’s likely that I shall have to go to Victoria, to the new goldfields,” he evaded, anxious not to carry his deception too far, yet more reluctant than ever to admit to the truth. He sensed Elizabeth’s eyes on him and hated himself for being the cause of the disappointment he read in their candid blue depths. “There is a—a man I have to find,” he went on awkwardly. “One with whom I was in partnership in California. I was looking for him when I came here—I’d heard he was somewhere on the Turon. But he had gone. I—that is, I have a debt to settle with him, and I cannot be free until the debt is settled. I know now that the likelihood is that he has sailed for Port Phillip. If he has, then I must go after him.”

“A debt of honor, Luke?” Edmund questioned, an odd note, almost of doubt, in his voice. “Or something else that you’ve just now remembered?”

Luke had a sudden, sickening vision of Dan’s dead face and then of the bodies of his two young Australian partners, uncovered from the wreckage of their mine at Windy Gully. A debt of honor, he thought—oh, yes, surely it was that! His conscience would give him no rest until he paid it, and he knew, in that moment, that if he found Jasper Morgan, he would kill him. Perhaps with the Colt Dickon had given him —the weapon Morgan had used to take four lives.

“A debt of honor,” he echoed hoarsely, seizing on Edmund’s words like a drowning man clutching at a straw, and hoping that somehow they would carry conviction. He met Elizabeth’s gaze, his own mutely pleading, and then turned back to her father. “If you will bear with me, Mr. Tempest— if you will permit me the time I need, sir, I should like nothing better than to enter your service. I’ve been happy here, happier than I have ever been in my whole life. You have all been more than good to me. I—I’ll come back, I—I swear I will, however long it takes.”

Elizabeth said nothing; she lowered her gaze, leaving her father to answer for her, and he did so with typical generosity.

“You know your own business best, Luke, and if it is a question of honor, I will not seek to dissuade you. My offer stands. Take what time you need, and come back when your debt is paid. You’ve money due to you in wages, and there will be a bonus for your help in saving my beef herd. I’ll square up with you before you leave us.”

For all that, her family closed protective ranks about Elizabeth. Luke was not permitted a moment alone with her, and when he prepared to ride off the next morning, her mother stood at her side, an arm resting lightly about the girl’s slim shoulders. She waved, as they all did, to him and to Justin Broome and his son, who set off in the opposite direction, heading for Tambaroora Creek to complete their own search.

Luke’s heart was heavy as he turned his back on Pengallon and kneed his horse into a trot. It would take him five days, at least, to reach Sydney, and he found himself wondering, a trifle belatedly, whether he would be in time for Mercy’s wedding to Claus Van Buren, his flagging spirits lifting a little at the prospect.

He was in sight of Bathurst Town when, without warning, the drought broke in a slashing rainstorm that soaked him to the skin. In the midst of it Dickon caught up with him, as drenched as he was, to jerk his big horse to a standstill in a flurry of churned-up mud.

Beaming, he took a folded scrap of paper from inside his shirt, gave it to Luke, and motioned him to take shekel under a tree in order to read it.

The note was brief, but Luke could scarcely restrain himself from shouting his happiness aloud as he read it.

“Please do come back, Luke,” the note read. “I shall be waiting for you, however long it is.”

The signature was blurred by a sudden gush of rainwater from the leaves above his head, but it was still decipherable as “Elizabeth.”

He could not reply to it, for he had neither pen nor paper Luke realized, and he was tempted to abandon the chase for Jasper Morgan and turn back. But Dickon, still smiling a him benignly, offered his sketch pad and a lump of charcoal

Luke, his throat tight, contrived to scrawl the words that came from his heart: “I love you, Elizabeth. I will come back.”

Dickon took the pad from him, thrust it into his saddlebag and made off, the sodden cabbage-plant hat lifted in a farewell salute.

Luke waited only to read Elizabeth’s note once again and then rode on, his heart singing.

Mercy felt as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Confession had not been easy, but the presence of the Reverend and Mrs. Nathan Cox—invited to Sydney so that Mr. Cox might conduct the wedding ceremony—had helped her unburden herself.

She could not have married Claus with such a secret on her conscience, she had told herself, yet again and again she had put off telling him, dreading that were he to learn what her past had been, he might decide that she was unworthy to be his bride.

But instead of the bitter condemnation she had feared, Claus had shown compassion and a wonderful measure of understanding, taking her gently into his arms to assure her that he loved her.

“You are all I have ever dreamed of in a woman, my sweet Mercy. Believe that, for it is the truth! And if the world treated you cruelly, and if a callous and evil man took advantage of your innocence, how could I blame you for it? We are none of us perfect, I least of all.”

He had looked at Alice Cox, serene and beautiful, for all her graying hair and work-bowed shoulders. “Alice will bear me out, will you not, my dear? When we first knew each other, I was virtually a slave in this house, whipped and humiliated. And Alice had been sent here to serve a sentence of seven years for borrowing a few yards of lace from her employer! We made our escape on a carriage horse, purloined from the stables under cover of darkness, both of us in infinite danger of being apprehended as runaways and flung into jail. We owed our salvation to our providential meeting with my good friend and longtime mentor, Nathan, on the road.”

“Where I,” the Reverend Nathan Cox finished for him, “had lost control of the recalcitrant animal I had hired to convey me to my destination, and was far from certain where my destination was. Claus, who was then about twelve years old, informed me solemnly that he intended to wed Alice, so that she might thus obtain her freedom!” He smiled across at his wife. “I became instead her bridegroom, and when eventually I was appointed to the church school at Windsor, Claus enrolled as one of my pupils.”

“The brightest and best,” Alice put in fondly.

“Indeed, yes,” her husband agreed. “As you may see and judge for yourself, Mercy, the good Lord took pity on us and intervened in our favor. He gave me my beloved wife and six fine sons and daughters, and Claus an inheritance, from which he has built a great trading enterprise. Now, as final proof of His beneficence, He has brought you to share our lives and become wife and helpmate to Claus. The manner of your coming and what went before it are of small account, my child. Suffice it that you are here.”

He had spoken lightly, even humorously, yet with an underlying gravity that gave substance to his words, and she had taken comfort from them, Mercy recalled. Now, with Claus entertaining Nathan and a number of his male friends and associates on board the Dolphin, she was with Alice in the house in Bridge Street, the night before her wedding, and they had talked long and earnestly together, like old friends rather than strangers, the difference in their ages and backgrounds offering little impediment.

Alice had spoken of her early days in the colony and— without either bitterness or self-reproach—of the time when Nathan had been appointed chaplain to the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, when, in the words of the Governor of the period, “punishment short only of death” had been the lot of all who had been sent there as convicts.

“The women were ordered to evacuate the settlement,” she said, and for all the lapse of years her eyes filled with tears at the memory. “The officers’ wives, as well as the wives and children of the poor wretches serving their sentences on the island. I was with them when they were taken away, and all of us were brokenhearted, because the women

had been the one civilizing influence, the children the one source of joy and hope. I rebelled when I was back in Sydney. … I permitted a newspaper to publish the diary I had kept. It cost Nathan his appointment—that was inevitable, of course. But he never blamed me, and thanks be to God, the Governor’s lady arranged for him to be given the living in Windsor and the church school, which was in need of a teacher.”

“And you are still there?” Mercy questioned. “Not at the same school. Thanks to Claus—our dear, generous Claus—Nathan is head of two schools now: the grammar school, and a fine school for the native children, founded originally by Governor Macquarie—the Native Institution at Parramatta.” Alice stifled a sigh. “Governor Macquarie’s intention was to found an independent settlement for the aborigines in the bush, where they could be educated and instructed in husbandry and stock raising, yet be free to come and go as they pleased. It was to be called Macquarie City, but … it failed for many reasons, and for years there was no native school of any kind. Ours is an attempt to carry out the old Governor’s wishes and those of the Reverend Robert Cartwright, who originally planned it. Nathan first worked with Mr. Cartwright in Windsor, you see, and it was he—God rest his soul—who married us. I like to think it would please him, and I hope against hope that it won’t fail.” She spread her hands in an odd little gesture, almost of resignation. “So many of our good intentions meet with failure here, Mercy. Looking back, I find myself wondering whether we have made progress at all. Sometimes I despair. The dark people are still badly treated, robbed of their land and even persecuted, and although transportation has ceased, Norfolk Island still exists, and conditions there are only a little better than when I wrote my diary. True, the other terrible penal settlement at Moreton Bay is closed and the land opened for agricultural settlers, but in Van Diemen’s Land there is another hell on earth for convicts— Port Arthur. And now the gold seekers have come, in their thousands, to despoil the pastoral prosperity built up with such effort and sacrifice over so many years.”

“Claus told me that there is talk of closing the Norfolk

Island prison,” Mercy offered, thinking to console her, “and giving the island to the Bounty mutineers’ descendants from Pitcairn.”

“Yes, I have heard the talk,” Alice acknowledged. “And I pray that it will be translated into action.” Her smile returned abruptly, and she took Mercy’s hand. “Dear child, I should not have permitted my tongue to run away with me. This is your wedding eve, and that is a time for hope and good cheer. You will be marrying one of the best and finest men I know, Mercy. Claus has waited a long time to take a wife, and for his sake I am truly glad that he has found you. Make him happy, Mercy, for he deserves happiness.”

“I shall do everything in my power to give him happiness,” Mercy promised. “I—I know how fortunate I am. But—” She hesitated, looking into Alice Cox’s unlined and still youthful face. “Saleh told me once that Claus loves me because I resemble you. I—I hope I do, Mrs. Cox, and that I can be like you. But—”

“Oh, my dear!” Alice exclaimed. “That simply is not true. Saleh, for all his age and wisdom, is quite wrong. I was a mother to Claus when he had no one else who cared what happened to him. A mother or an elder sister, perhaps, since I was not much older … and he was only twelve when he offered to wed me. You are different; you are to become his wife and, I am quite sure, in your own right and because you are you. Do not, I beg you, try to be anyone else, Mercy. As Claus reminded us, we are none of us saints, you know. Certainly I’m not. I rant and rail against the fortune hunters and the gold diggers and weep for the harm I fear they will do to this land, but two of my sons are among them. The elder was to have taken holy orders, like his father. He left for the Turon three months ago.”