The Secret Fate of Mary Watson (16 page)

The first thing I hear are the three tethered dogs barking somewhere to our right in the darkness. Bob’s already told me they are here to warn the homestead if any blacks approach. After the sand, there is coarse gravel underfoot. Then the house, sixty yards up from the beach on a grassy knoll. Squat, no-nonsense. Made of limestone blocks, like a neat little cell. Bob opens the heavy door, lights a match. The scar on his face strikes out like a shiny copper blade. Rough benches loaded with old newspapers. Fish traps. Packets of hooks. There’s moonlight coming through the far wall. Sharp leaves of light pierce cracks in the mortar, like the ivy-patterned, pressed-metal ceiling back in Cornwall. A slop of playing cards spilled over the surface of a trunk. A tobacco tin’s upturned lid, filled with coins. Last year’s flyspotted calendar discarded on the floor. A ball of twine with a large needle sticking out of it sits atop the collapsed lung of a sail in the corner. The house reeks of locked-up earth and shellfish. It wouldn’t have hurt him to clean up a bit.

I take a deep breath.

‘It’s a mess, all right.’ Bob rubs his mouth.

Carrie’s voice comes out of the shadows. ‘But it’s so small. And where will we sleep?’

‘There’s a wash bucket behind ye.’ Bob’s turning to leave. ‘I’ll unload the beasts. The rest can wait till daylight.’ And then he’s gone.

‘Mary?’

‘Shh, Carrie. What’s that noise?’

‘It’s the ocean sloshing in my boots.’ She looks at me flatly. The lamplight catches her cheekbones, hollowing the flesh beneath.

‘No, something else. Like singing.’

The sounds of the dark outside are mostly muted. There’s the fizz and swell of sea in the background. The breeze, lisping to the closed window shutters. Something with ‘S’ in it. Solitude? Isolation? I hear one of the pigs give a clotted snort in the distance. Virgin Mary’s pup howls for its mother. The dogs onshore respond with barking.

‘Smelly old island,’ Carrie says. ‘What about our valises? They’re still on the boat.’

I shake my head to clear it, ignoring her melodramatic shivers.

‘You heard Bob. Only the animals are coming off tonight. Until then we make do.’

The wash bucket he had pointed to has only a few inches of water in it. Another, next to it, holds dirty shirts fermenting in what smells like a mixture of swamp water and molasses.

Some noise makes me turn to the open doorway. Percy’s Chinaman lurches inside. Those ugly, chicken-feet hands hold a tray in front of him. He’s discarded the cane, but his foot is still bandaged. He drags the leg stiffly along beside him, flinging it out in a half-circle, then putting his weight down on the ball of the
damaged foot when he needs to. A grim reaper with a skin-and-bone scythe.

I hold my breath for a few seconds. We stare at each other. A port-wine birthmark around his left eye is the colour of old blood in the kerosene light. It wasn’t visible on the poster, but then his face had been in profile. His skin, apart from the eyepatch of discolouration, is smooth and alabaster, darkening slightly at his forehead where the hair’s been shaved back to line up with the edge of a skullcap. There’s that all-too-familiar enigmatic expression of every Chinaman I’ve encountered. But in these calm waters, a few fins circle lazily.

I look down to the food. A brownish mess of vegetables with fried eggs on top. I wonder if it’s poisoned, but decide it’s not. That wouldn’t be his style. He’d rather lie in wait for me. Slit my throat when I’m not looking. He’s had practice with the Chinese shopkeeper, after all.

Bob comes back in. ‘Mary. This is Ah Leung. Ah Leung looks after the garden. Ah Sam, the house.’

‘Where is Ah Sam, then?’

I don’t take my eyes off Ah Leung. I hope my tone makes it clear that I don’t want him here.

‘He will be at hand soon. He’s helping unload.’

‘Ah Leung.’ I acknowledge the Chinaman coolly.

The head lifts briefly, but he doesn’t speak.

Bob claps his hands a few times and Ah Leung backs out of the doorway, head bowed more in insolence than deference. But Bob doesn’t seem to notice.

I find some enamel plates, share out the food, and hand Bob a plate and a fork from the box on the table. The stools are still wet so we sit on upturned crates.

‘Could you fetch the canvas cot for Carrie?’ I ask.

Bob frowns, then speaks around a mouthful of cabbage. ‘I told ye, no more’s coming off tonight.’

I look at the stained mattress on the floor.

Carrie’s eyes widen. ‘Mary, we can’t all sleep together!’

I’m too exhausted to argue. ‘Apparently, we can. You’ll be one side of me, Bob on the other.’

He makes a grunting noise as if even this is too pretentious for his liking.

The eggs are congealed, the vegetables cold, but we eat anyway. I spear a vegetable I can’t identify. Some sort of spinach, but stringier. Everything’s doused in soy sauce.

‘Do you know much about Ah Leung?’

Bob looks up, a smear of yolk on his chin. ‘John Pigtails are all the same to me. Why do ye ask?’

I chew a piece of egg. ‘No reason.’

So he knows nothing about Ah Leung’s past. I wonder, should I tell him what the Chinaman has done? I’ll bide my time, I decide. Ponder first which way the information might be turned to my advantage.

Bob locks us in for the night with a thick, horizontal plank of wood that fits neatly across the middle of the door. There’s a round hole at eye height.

‘To keep us in or something out?’ I question him.

I already know the answer. The opening is the perfect size and shape for a rifle barrel.

‘It doesn’t hurt to be ready.’ He doesn’t say ready for what.

There is a banging noise outside. A metallic clang and a cry. An angry exchange in the seesaw intonations of Mandarin.

While I wash up the dishes in an inch of clean water, Bob rigs up a curtain so that, when Carrie does get her cot, she’ll have a
makeshift bedroom. She peels off her boots and hose, then perches on the edge of the mattress. Exhaustion’s visible in two smudges under her eyes and the slope of her shoulders.

‘Are you all right, Carrie?’

‘I’m tired. I want to lie down.’

The fight’s gone out of her. I see an old woollen coat hanging by a hook near the door and fetch it. When I come back, she’s on her part of the mattress. Bob lifts an eyebrow as I wrap the coat around her, tucking her in on both sides. She looks up at me mutely.

‘Better?’ I ask.

‘Can you help me unhook my petticoats? I’ll use them as a pillow.’

I reach discreetly under her skirt and loosen a tie at her waist. ‘Wriggle a bit. There.’

The calico’s still warm from her body, smells like violets and talc. She scrunches and then positions the material under her head.

‘I haven’t combed out my hair.’ Her eyes are closing.

‘It doesn’t matter, dear. We’ll do it in the morning.’

I push a strand away from her forehead, then stand and walk over to where Bob’s rolling his medicinal balls slowly around in his left palm.

I keep my voice low. ‘You could have told me we wouldn’t be getting anything from the boat. We might have grabbed our nightgowns and valises at least.’

‘Ye must get used to roughing it. There’s no bobby-pin shops out here.’ He lifts his head in Carrie’s direction.

I turn away, mutter under my breath.

‘What did ye say?’ He pulls me roughly around.

‘Shh. Let me go.’ I shake him off.

His eyes narrow to slits. ‘It’s my roof. I’ll yell it off if I’ve a mind, ye got that? And watch yer mouth. No mumbling behind a man’s back.’

I’m not in the mood for his hair-trigger pomposity. I can hear that distant, thin, nasal vein of singing under the obviousness of our voices. ‘Are there blacks on the island?’

He shakes his head then glares at me, unwilling to abandon his rancour.

‘But I can hear them.’ I cock my head a little more.

‘I would know if they were.’

He sounds so sure. Maybe he’s right and it’s all in my head. Is it possible to have a third ear as well as a third eye?

Bob picks up his pipe, the scarred side of his face the colour of liver. ‘First chance I get, I’ll teach ye how to shoot. Meanwhile don’t tell me to be quiet in my own house!’

4TH JUNE 1880

I can hear the breeze sweeping sand from the doorstep when I open my eyes. Carrie has inched halfway down the mattress, and Bob’s gone altogether. I’m staring at an impressive spiderweb in the corner, large as a ship’s wheel, when Percy steps into the house unannounced.

I motion with a finger on my lips for him not to wake Carrie, then slip out of bed still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I follow him outside and we face each other on the packed earth that serves as a verandah. He has a bruise the size of a fist turning sallow on his left cheek.

‘What happened to you?’ I ask.

Isabella
is small in the distance. The ant-sized man on board must be Bob, passing a box over the side to a pair of black palms. He’s using three Kanakas in the same way he used the stools last night. Each item drifts hand to hand above the water, in the bright
sun, until the last man on shore stacks it with the other cargo above the high-tide line.

Percy looks over my shoulder to Carrie. ‘Three in a bed, eh, Mrs Watson? That’s a bit adventurous, even for these parts. What do the Frogs call two strumpets and a businessman?
Ménage à trois
?’ His pronunciation of the French words is impressively authentic.

‘There was scarcely a choice,’ I say tightly. The salty air’s spinning my loose hair. I tuck a lock behind one ear. ‘Once Bob gets Carrie’s canvas cot set up, I’ll find a way to give us all some privacy. What about you? Did we kick you out into the cold?’

It’s clear that more than one man has been living in the house. All three of them probably: Bob, Percy and Porter Green. The spoor of male habitation is everywhere.

‘There’s a wooden shed further up the beach that suits me well enough.’ He points to the right. ‘You must visit sometime. I’ll attempt to provide a cup of tea. Green’s done the same, only further away still.’

‘Where is Porter?’

‘On the south side of the island, floating logs of red mangrove around for the smokehouse.’ In the crisp morning light, his eyes are the colour of old linen embroidered with emerald thread. I look again at the bruise souring around the edges.

‘Did you and Bob get into a fight?’

‘Over you, Mrs Watson? No.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’

‘What should I call you?’

‘Mary.’

‘Well then, Mary. And you must call me the man who restrained himself on your behalf. You’ll have noticed your
husband came to your marriage bed in one piece, or as close as he’s ever passed for it.’

‘Should I be grateful? You had little choice in the matter, I imagine. You might not think much of me, but I’m a better bet at the moment than a crippled Chinaman.’

‘
Touché
. I can see that flattery will get me nowhere.’

‘It might. If I sensed you meant it.’

I look down to the water again, past the lugger. The Pacific unfolds like a blue cloth, pleated in white further out. The air, to my Cooktown lungs, has the strength of smelling salts. I rub my arms. It’s cool this morning. Ah Leung lurches past with a bucket in both hands. It’s painful to watch that Quasimodo gait, his conical hat bobbing above him. He doesn’t acknowledge me. I wait until he’s around the side of the house and out of hearing range.

‘Where’s he going?’

‘There’s a pandanus swamp and the farm about a quarter of a mile away. He’s gone to fill the bucket for our tea from the freshwater spring. I hope you’re not too thirsty — with his injury, it takes him a while to manage it.’

‘What happened to his foot?’

‘Gangrene. If you think Cooktown is a cesspit in the wet season, try being on the Palmer. Dry creeks turn into torrents. They throw the diggers who die of typhoid and dysentery into the flood, and the bodies float downstream, contaminating the water. You know the Chows only wear those ridiculous slippers? Ah Leung cut his foot and it got infected. When he smelled the putrid flesh, and saw his toes had turned black, he cut them off with a cleaver.’

I shudder. ‘That’s where you caught up with him, the Palmer?’

‘That’s right.’ Said a touch too carefully. ‘I tracked him down
to a deserted blacks’ camp near Big Oaky Creek. He’d made himself a bark humpy and was living off Palmer River soup.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Weeds boiled up in muddy water.’

Something’s not quite adding up in my mind, despite Percy’s dramatic re-enactment.

‘All along you’ve been so keen to find him, which suggests he’s worked for you in the past. Why didn’t he try to contact you so that you could hide him somewhere, or bring him to the Lizard even earlier? Who knows … maybe you commissioned him to kill that shopkeeper. In which case, the least you could have done was provide cover for him.’

‘You have a vivid imagination.’ Again, that too-controlled response. He’s no intention, it seems, of explaining himself.

‘At any rate, keep him away from me. I want nothing to do with him.’

At last, Percy looks me in the eye. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve had a run-in with the staff already.’

He lights his pipe. The smoke rises in a thin taper past his squinting eyes. Then he, too, stares out to where the
Isabella
is a bobbing speck in the far distance. The sky above is a smoky blue: like the tip of a kerosene flame. The white dots of a couple of seagulls float inside it.

‘I haven’t exchanged more than a single word with him,’ I say. ‘I just don’t want him hovering over me like a crippled vulture.’

Percy sucks on his pipe. Then pulls it out to inspect the tobacco. He taps his front teeth lightly with the bowl.

‘You’ve become quite peremptory since your promotion. Or is it marriage that’s given you this extra pluck? You can’t go running behind my back to Roberts out here.’

Now there’s an unpleasant hardness in his gaze.

‘I’ve never gone running to him — unless you were nowhere to be found.’ I challenge him to argue the point.

His bottom lip twitches. ‘You’ll have to deal with Ah Leung, whether you like it or not. He’s in charge of the garden. If you want him to bring you vegetables, you’ll have to engage with him in at least a semi-pleasant manner.’

‘I’ll fetch my own vegetables,’ I say.

‘Really? And watch while he cuts off a head of cabbage with his big glittering cane knife? The farm’s a long way from the house. No one would hear you scream.’

‘Your attempts to scare me are so obvious as to be ridiculous.’

Carrie has wandered to the doorway and stands blinking slowly in the light. Her hair looks like small mice have made a nest in it. She yawns.

‘Percy Fuller, my sister, Carrie.’

‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ He’s looking her up and down.

She takes a step out the door to stand behind me. ‘Mr Fuller. I’m not at my best.’

‘You look fine to me.’ So fine, it seems, he doesn’t bother breaking his gaze to address me. ‘About that oriental issue, Mary. A woman has nothing to worry about if she just does her job properly. But I’ll keep an eye on the matter.’

‘You’ll have to detach it from my sister first.’

His head makes a measured turn towards me. ‘Pretty things should be looked at, not hidden away.’

He turns and walks towards the beach, then calls over his shoulder. ‘You and your sister should explore a bit. Wander over to the farm, maybe up to Cook’s Look. That’s where the good captain surveyed his passage through the reef.’ He points to the
hill almost directly behind the house. ‘It’s only half a mile or so. You can see from here to tomorrow on a good day.’

‘We’ll take it on advisement.’

When he’s shrunk to just a kink in the shimmer, Carrie stretches her arms up. She turns a couple of times and lifts her face to the sky. ‘What was that about an oriental issue?’

‘Oh, just a general discussion about Chinese women on the mainland doing piecework for half the wages that European ladies can manage.’

‘Percy’s a nice man. Handsome, too.’

‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I sound sour to my own ears, like a crotchety old spinster with lemon juice squirted in the milk of my voice.

‘It’s so lonely here.’ She’s looking out over the patches of shrubby bush, the grey granite stones.

Lonely? Well, isolated, at least.

‘Look, an eagle!’ Carrie says.

A huge bird is above us, surrounded by zigzag tips of light. The shadowy wingspan must be four feet across and barely tilting as an updraught holds the muscular ballast of its body steady. A small snake wriggles in its beak. Cruel hooks curl beneath.

As it floats slowly over the house, heading for Cook’s Look, I consult the list of superstitions in my head, but draw almost a blank. Something from
The Iliad
? Didn’t Zeus send the bad luck of an eagle with a serpent in its beak to the Trojans?

Whatever the message, good or bad, it’s further away now. A ragged hole heading straight for the sun.