The Secret Fate of Mary Watson (33 page)

My head is whirring with the subterfuge of it all. ‘Percy had no intention of coming back to take Ah Sam and me off the island, did he? He just thought to leave us here for Ah Leung to take care of, or the blacks?’

Roberts looks rueful. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had to keep such bad company for so long.’

‘So you intend to let Percy and Charley continue to do what they’re doing?’

‘Oh, they’ll be dealt with when the conditions are right. When they are of no further use to us, or else the French have abandoned them.’

There’s a sudden chill in the air. The old Roberts is back, complete with shards of obsidian in his gaze.

I finish peeling one potato and start on another. ‘Why didn’t Percy catch on sooner, after the first drop, that things weren’t going to plan?’

‘Because it
did
go to plan. As far as he could tell, anyhow. What I told you in Cooktown was the truth. There were delicate manoeuvres relating to French spies in Cairo. Boule and Fuller were told to cool their heels, play the game. Not to make a move until they had word to go.’

‘You seem very sure I wasn’t in league with them.’

A look passes between Roberts and Ah Sam. I feel anger flushing the skin on my neck.

‘I see. Ah Sam was watching me all the time, wasn’t he? Not looking after me so much as monitoring me.’

Ah Sam looks insulted. ‘I look after you, missy.’

I push the finished potatoes aside, put my elbows on the table and rub my eyes. From what high moral ground can I fling my accusations? So they both lied to me. My whole life, since I met Percy in Brisbane, has been a lie. I look up dully.

Roberts glances over to the shelf in the corner, with its jars of fishhooks and insect-ridden flour, as though summing up what my life here has been like. ‘How are you going to stop your husband looking for you and your son if the house is empty when he returns?’

I stand and walk over to the shuttered windows, rest my hands on the bench. ‘I don’t know.’ I try for neutrality, but manage to sound resentful. I need time to think. Time to sleep.

‘Be ready to leave at dark tomorrow night,’ Roberts says. ‘Until then, I’ll get the men to take the junk up the coast. There’s a cove half a mile north that’s secluded enough.’

‘Where’s your steamer?’ I ask.

He gives me a pitying look. ‘I’d hardly advertise to all and sundry that I’ve set anchor off Lizard Island now, would I?’ He glances at Ah Sam, who grins back. ‘Ah Sam’s connections come in handy sometimes. Though, no doubt, there are some disgruntled John Pigtails down the coast wondering what happened to their old junk.’

‘Oh, I forgot.’ I turn to face him. ‘I have a surprise of my own. Then again, maybe you know about her too.’

‘Her?’

‘There’s a dead woman and her baby in Percy’s hut. The one just up the beach. Ah Leung’s body is in the hut beyond it.’

He gives a low whistle. ‘Starting a makeshift mausoleum, are we? Who is she, do you know?’

‘One of Charley’s girls. The baby is Bob’s. She was sick when she arrived in a rowboat looking for him. Typhoid, I think. The baby was already … gone. Ah Sam found her body this morning, after Ah Leung was killed.’

‘It’s a wonder the blacks didn’t make off with her.’

‘Maybe they knew what she died of and didn’t want to catch it. As for Ah Leung, Ah Sam locked him in their hut so that they couldn’t get at him.’

‘Ah.’ Something clears in the Captain’s eyes.

‘The bones. They need to be shipped back to China.’

Ah Sam nods solemnly, then looks at the floor. ‘Very bad otherwise, boss. Spirit wander, always.’

Strangely enough, I’m too exhausted to sleep. It’s ten at night. Ah Sam seems to have roused himself. He’s lit his opium pipe and he’s sitting at the table with his mah jong tiles. The ivory blocks click as he uses the fingers of his good arm. He’s playing an improvised game for one, based on the different suits: bamboo, character, honour, flower.

My knitting needles clack: plain two, purl two.

After I fed the crew a stew of potatoes and carrots, some meat and bread, all but half-a-dozen armed men rowed back to the junk and sailed north to the secluded hiding spot. Captain Roberts is here in the house, with his gun, asleep in the rocking chair. Ferrier’s in his cradle, snoozing. Purl one, plain two. A branch is scratching on the roof: the sound of someone trying to strike the same match over and over. And, in the distance, the boom of the reef, like my own pulse to me now. But no stealthy tread of the blacks. No singing. With so many guns around, they seem to have withdrawn.

Ah Sam mumbles something to himself in Mandarin. Captain Roberts shifts his weight and the rocking chair squeaks.

If Ferrier and I did disappear from the island, how would the world see it? As Bob’s fault? Would they imagine him absent-minded at best, cruelly careless at worst, to leave his young wife alone with a baby, two Chinamen, no boat and cantankerous blacks just over the hill?

Plain one, purl one.

How would Fitzgerald and his incompetent crew determine what had happened to us?

I remember something then: the diary I bought in Cooktown, as any young pioneer wife should. In dutiful fashion I’ve written in it regularly since I’ve been on the Lizard. It is an alibi of sorts, for public consumption: full of boring whiffs of authenticity; domestic trivia by the pint. A litany of poultry: deaths, eggs and hatchings. Ginger cakes. Wind directions. Passing boats and newly dug privies.

Ah Sam looks up from his tiles, the opium pipe in the corner of his mouth. And, just like that — call it inspiration or my Cornish third eye — the pieces start to fall into place.

Ah Sam, the baby and I could escape in the tank used for boiling the sea slugs. The stirring paddles would suffice for oars. We would take what water we had, which would not be enough unless we made landfall and found more.

I think of the small period of thirst that Ah Sam and I have just experienced. What if that sensation of dry mouth and dizzy head grew worse for days and days until finally we succumbed?

Dying of thirst. What a terrible, epic way to go.

Plain one, purl two.

It’s the next day and I’ve been listening to the bird sounds of dawn for a while before Roberts wakes. Finches with their fussy calls, pecking the morning open. The deep half-grunts of gannets out to sea. I will miss the birds.

I’ve fed the baby and am in the main room when Roberts opens his eyes. His beard has a life of its own, poking out like a chimney brush.

Ah Sam, much recovered, is rubbing tea leaves together in his palms to release their aroma. He scatters them from his closed fist into the boiling billy on top of the kerosene stove he’s set up on the table. Gives them a few minutes at a rolling boil, then lifts the billy off with a piece of cloth wrapped around the handle. He rotates it three times on the table to brew.

Roberts takes a sip of the tea Ah Sam hands him, wincing at its bitterness, while I pace the room, trying to keep up with my thoughts.

After I tell him, Roberts sits scowling and thinking, blowing occasionally on the surface of the tea. Naturally enough, I suppose, he isn’t keen on my idea. But I feel he has a debt to me. I’m owed something more than money for my trouble. I would do it all alone, but I need help with the details. Specifically: his nautical knowledge. Where would our journey in the slug tank take us, given the currents and likely wind directions at this time of year? Where might we make landfall? What might be our final resting place if we failed in our mission to reach the mainland?

Ah Sam nearly has a fit. The old horror rises up in his eyes, even though I’ve explained the necessities of the situation.

Roberts finally comes down on my side. He fishes a gnat from his pannikin with a finger and observes evenly, ‘Ah Sam’s right. It’s not wise to interfere with Chinese customs. Maybe you could just leave him on the island — with a note pinned to his pyjamas for the blacks, asking nicely if they’ll leave his bones in a pile when they’re done.’

This more immediate threat chases away the old one in Ah Sam who gives a rough shudder of resignation and I know that it will be done. Roberts’s crew can do the preparations. I’ll advise them on what is needed.

We spend the morning planning the details.

Roberts only once tries to stop me. He looks up from under his brows. ‘Are you sure you won’t just come with us without all of this folderol? I can arrange for a new identity for you and the baby.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. If Bob even imagines we’re still alive, he won’t rest until he finds us.’

He nods. ‘I’ll tell the men to help you, then. But be careful. Take a gun. The blacks haven’t quite given up and gone away. Have you seen your smoking shed lately?’

I shake my head.

‘They’ve drawn their witchcraft all over it,’ Roberts says. ‘And decorated the ground in front with a dead dog.’

With all that’s been going on, I haven’t spared Sylvester a thought.

‘What do you think they’ll do when we’ve gone?’ I ask.

Roberts gets to his feet and reaches for his cap on the table. ‘Loot the place. If you’re leaving anything you want found in the house, you’d better put it somewhere out of the way, where it won’t be destroyed.’

I arrived on the island in the dark, and I’m leaving the same way.

I have such a feeling of
déjà vu
. I remember the night when Carrie and I first landed on the Lizard; the strange thought that came to me when I saw the slug tank squatting over its cold firepit: the Owl and the Pussycat and how they went to sea in their beautiful pea-green boat. Both Carrie and Bob scoffed at me then. But now, as the slug tank bobs in the water on a gentle swell, it all seems so right — inevitable, even.

Night’s fallen softly and the sky above is heavy with the anchor of the Southern Cross. Phosphorescence sparks moss-green under the water. A new moon hangs like a bauble of pale resin in a dark hive. The horseshoe of beach glows as we move away from shore, but already the little limestone house I’ve lived in for sixteen months is just a shadow. I can just make out the smokehouse, with its eerie artwork, an insignificant smudge. Only Cook’s Look still seems real, looming above the island like a single overwhelming idea none of us has quite deciphered.

Hard to make out from here, but I think I see two black men standing at the water’s edge at the northern tip of the beach. Watching.

They make no attempt to follow in their canoes. Which answers the question that tormented me for so many weeks and months. It was never my death that they wanted. They could easily have killed me that last night I climbed Cook’s Look.

All they ever wanted was their island full of lizards.

We reach No. 5 Howick at about midnight. I let Ah Sam and Roberts’s crew arrange the scene by lantern light. Ah Sam, thank
goodness, has been helpful. He alone knows the etiquette of how a Chinaman takes himself away to die. The head resting on the small wooden box. The quilt pulled up neatly to the throat. As though the body, he told me, the fear still in his eyes, is just asleep and waiting to be woken in the flowery land.

I stand at the railing of the anchored junk, swatting mosquitos, watching the lights of the bobbing fireflies on shore. I go through the tank’s contents in my mind. The revolver, the baby’s things, an umbrella to keep the sun off through the day, our few tins of remaining food. In a small box: my clothes, jewellery, watch and piddling amount of money Bob left me. Most importantly, a record of our imaginary journey: a diary written in pencil, wrapped in waterproof cloth.

Captain Roberts invites me to come ashore and inspect the handiwork, but I decline. Call me superstitious, but I want to stay safely away from my own death. From Ferrier’s death (he’s tucked up in a crate made into a makeshift cradle below deck). From Ah Sam’s. I feel afraid. Strangely empty and afraid. Those bodies — Ah Leung’s, Laura’s and her baby’s — could have so easily been ours.

I do not want to see our epitaphs made flesh.

In a small time-stopped moment, like a photograph, I visualise Ah Sam lying on a small beach, his head resting on the wooden opium box, his quilt pulled neatly up to his chin. And there I am, in a green-tinged open coffin in the mangroves, the box at my left elbow; and, inside the box, my diary of our last days. I’m not yet lifeless but I’m terribly thirsty. The sun is hot. My baby’s dying of dehydration on my chest.

I make an involuntary noise and come back to the present with a jolt. I tell myself, it didn’t happen that way.

I’m not ungrateful to Laura and Ah Leung. Though both past redemption in their respective ways, they’ve given Ah Sam and me the future. It’s only Wilfred I feel a pang for. So small and innocent. Just like Ferrier. There, but for the grace of God, goes my own baby.

I rub my ring finger, feeling the slight indentation where my wedding ring once circled it. When I handed it to Roberts to put on Laura’s finger, I’d noticed the white worm of skin beneath it and thought to myself, ‘Soon enough it will fade.’ And so will Mary Watson. She’s there in the tank, wearing her brown dress, her belt, her wedding ring. Her much beloved child, asleep forever on her chest.

3RD OCTOBER 1881

It’s a beautiful morning, the sky a lapis-lazuli blue, like some Renaissance religious painting; not a single blot of sin to mar it. It’s almost as if the universe is co-operating in my plan. The rainless sky matching up with accounts of no rain in the tank-diary entries.

I’ve been standing at the rail almost since dawn, just watching. Ferrier’s snoozing in my arms. Roberts came by twenty minutes ago and pointed out a small dark spot on the horizon,
Blackbird
, waiting for us. We should reach it by noon. Soon it will be time for me to go below. Push my hair under a sailor’s cap. Dress in the ragged pants and shirt that is uniform for the rest of the crew. Just until we’ve passed the danger of encounter with other boats. Until we reach Sydney, where no one knows me. Where Ferrier and I can disappear into the crowd.

Ferrier wakes and starts squirming. I hold him up to my face in the sunshine, blow gently on his belly where his nightdress has bunched up. I’m letting the sunlight bathe his skin as long as possible. Soon enough he’ll have to stay below deck until the danger of us being recognised has passed. The water cleaves beneath us in a series of smooth, clean swishes. We’re making good time.

Ah Sam approaches and stands next to me, smiling with his eyes. We both look out to sea.

‘After we dock, Ah Sam, will you go back to China?’

He nods and adjusts a grimy sailor’s cap with one of those hardworking hands.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. And I will. ‘You’ve been a good friend.’

‘Will you go to Mister Green?’ he asks.

I think of the address in my pocket. The two shells carefully wrapped and packed away. ‘Yes. If he’ll have me.’

Captain Roberts has offered me work. A more sedate job, encoding and decoding messages. He thinks I’ll be good at it. But the work’s in Sydney. That’s not quite where I want to make a new start. And, in any case, I’ve had enough. Ferrier’s growing fast. He’s survived the Lizard, small thanks to his mother. I need to settle somewhere, somehow, where he’ll be safe and happy.

My arms ache from holding him close for so long.

‘Here, will you take him?’ I say to Ah Sam.

Ah Sam holds Ferrier with the ease of long practice. His shoulder doesn’t appear to bother him as he holds the baby out and over the rail. Ferrier squeals with delight at the sparkling water rushing by, the foam flying from the hull. I notice then just how far the baby is from safety. Just one slip. One cramp in
Ah Sam’s hand. One stab of pain in his sore shoulder and he might inadvertently let go. Ferrier’s blowing bubbles above the churning water, his chubby legs riding a bicycle of air.

My voice is shrill. ‘Don’t do that, Ah Sam! I’ll die a thousand deaths!’

He’s never laughed before in my presence. There’s an alarming shriek in it, his eyes close tight and his whole face twitches. Then I’m laughing myself, realising what I’ve said.

When he recovers himself, he pulls Ferrier back in and hands him over. The baby squirms in my arms and starts to cry. His little arms are reaching for the Chinaman. He wants to do it all over again.

The last words Roberts said to me as we boarded the junk still linger. ‘You know you’ll be remembered as the brave heroine of Lizard Island.
She fought off the blacks and took to sea, indomitable, undefeated. Only to die of thirst
. They’ll say it with great solemnity.’

‘A pity I won’t be around to enjoy the celebrity,’ I’d said dryly.

Truth is, I don’t want to be a symbol of the struggle between black and white. I don’t think the natives should be punished for what they haven’t done. But I could think of no other scenario. No other way.

One day, however, I might tell the real story.

Later, when I lie on my small berth staring at the overhead, I realise I may, unwittingly, have begun already to tell the truth. I made a mistake in the tank diary entries: I’ve prefaced them with September dates when it is in fact October. Why? Tiredness perhaps? Not carelessness, surely, after all that I’ve been through? Will any harm come of such a small act of self-sabotage?

Perhaps I secretly want someone — fifty years, or a hundred years from now — to look more closely at the evidence and to wonder.

Maybe some part of me wants the truth to be known.