The Secret River (32 page)

Across the room, Thornhill felt Blackwood watching him. There was something insistent about it, a challenge. He made his face show nothing at all, looked away, rubbed at his eyes. There was so much smoke in the room a man could hardly see.

Loveday held up a finger for attention and declaimed
It is a
well-attested fact that the blacks have no word for property
. He was going to go on, but Smasher rode over his light dandified voice, and he subsided back into his pannikin.
Got two of the buggers on their way to
Darkey Creek last week
, Smasher said, then took a bite of one of Sal’s baps and spoke through it.
Picked ’em off like a squire with a brace of
grouse
. He looked around but no one spoke, and went on through a mouthful of crumbs.
Only thing them savages is good for is manuring the
ground
. The flour on his lips gave them a scaly diseased look. He said it again.
Make real good manure. Bring the corn on a treat
.

Thornhill saw him glance at Blackwood and if provoking him was what Smasher wanted, he had succeeded. Blackwood was on his feet, a big man in a small room, enlarged with rage.
You,
Smasher
, he shouted, then stopped, his massive arms folded across his chest and his face like a stone.

Thornhill was afraid that Blackwood had gone wordless, the way he did. If that happened, Smasher would be on him in a second. But Blackwood went on in a voice that shook with feeling.
By Christ Jesus
, he said.
One of them blacks is worth ten of a little brainless
maggot like you
. The room was silent, everyone sobering on the spot, the laughter dying in their throats. No one had ever heard Blackwood profane before, or heard that steel in his voice.

He came right up to Smasher, his face grim. He seemed about to hit him but turned with a grunt of disgust and was out the door, into the night, before anyone realised what had happened.

That bastard going to be real sorry he said that
. The rage in Smasher’s voice was tamped down like one of his fires.

Thornhill stared out at the black rectangle of the doorway. Followed Blackwood in his mind, down the track, onto his little dory and along the First Branch. He imagined Blackwood sitting in the stern, winding his way into that closed moonlit landscape of ridges and cliffs. Up there, the blacks would be expecting him. He would go into his hut, blow the fire back to life and sit watching the flames blazing under the kettle.

Perhaps the woman would sit there with him, even the child as well. It was a girl, he thought, but he had only caught a glimpse.

~

The attack on the Webbs was one of many
outrages and depredations
that March of 1814. They erupted up and down the river, always in a different place. It seemed that every man with a crop waiting to be harvested had an encounter. Fields were set on fire, huts were burned down, spears were flung at men out with their reaping-hooks. Farmers had to start again with another lot of seed, hoping to get a new crop before winter, or they abandoned the whole thing, walked off their places, and went back to Sydney.

As a result, business was bad for William Thornhill. No one needed the
Hope
when there was nothing to take to Sydney. No one had the money to buy calico or boots. Thornhill tied up the boat and waited for better times. He was glad of the excuse. It was a time when a man needed to sit tight on his holding and keep a sharp eye out for trouble. He acted untroubled, a man who could rise above any setback. He made a big thing of picking the corn from that first patch, enough for a couple of meals, letting Dick and Bub eat their fill as payment for all those buckets of water. But underneath his good cheer there was a hard knot of worry.

~

His Majesty in London, embodied in the person of His Excellency in Sydney, did not especially care about the emancipists who grubbed in the dirt on the banks of the faraway Hawkesbury. But to make a fool of one white man was to make a fool of them all. In its own stately time, the mighty instrument of the law swung against the blacks. His Excellency issued a warrant. His Majesty had shown patience and forbearing but was, reluctantly, obliged now to take action against the native raiders.

His Majesty’s instrument in this case was a certain Captain McCallum, late of Shrewsbury. He came down from the garrison at Windsor with his men in one of the Government longboats and tied up next to the
Hope
. Thornhill’s Point was a convenient starting point for the campaign he planned.

Waiting for him in the hut, Thornhill could hear the flat sour sound of the little drum marking his approach. It was clear that the captain was a man careful of his dignity.

He swept into the hut, unfurled his map on the table and began to explain his plan to the soldiers with him. They were like insects in their red coats with the black bands crossing their chests, their plumed caps. Their sweating faces held in by their chinstraps did not reveal what they thought about the captain.

Thornhill stood by the doorway with Sal beside him, the children squatting on the floor. His private thought was that the answer to
the native problem
did not lie in anything the Governor might do. That man, in his red coat and his gold braid, was as irrelevant to what was happening on the Hawkesbury as was the King, or even God Himself.

But Captain McCallum had worked out an ingenious stratagem that he was sure would trap the natives down on Darkey Creek. He had a way of saying the name of the place as if it were ridiculous or amusing. There was nothing amusing about Darkey Creek. It was a little place along from Sagitty’s, no good to a white man, being a gloomy cleft where a narrow arm of the
river ran between ridges so steep that the sun only shone in at noon. Word was that natives who were driven away from the farms were taking refuge there. Thornhill had seen the canoes, slipping in and out where the creek joined the river, had seen the smoke from their campfires drifting up between the spurs. As far as Thornhill was concerned, Darkey Creek was a useful kind of cupboard, where the blacks could be forgotten about behind a closed door.

For Captain McCallum, though, the narrow cleft of the place suggested other possibilities. He was planning a pincer-movement that involved what he liked to call a human chain. The idea was that the troops would link arms and proceed along the cleft for its full length, driving the natives ahead of them.

As one might drive sheep
, the captain explained.

Captain McCallum was a gentleman and had a gentleman’s strangled way of speaking, as if someone had him round the neck. Thornhill found him hard to understand, but this was not turning out to be a problem as Captain McCallum did not even glance at the Thornhills. They were, after all, emancipists. He had refused a drink of tea from Sal, would not take even so much as a drink of water in spite of the heat.

He demonstrated on the map how the natives would be penned in against the end of the gully, where cliffs rose up sheer. There, His Majesty would dispense justice.

He reached under the table and with a conjurer’s flourish brought out a canvas bag.
The Governor has personally issued me with
six of these bags
, he said, and cleared his throat modestly.
He told me,
that he has every confidence that we will bring them back filled
. If he had expected a roar, or even a murmur, of approval, he was disappointed. The men in their red coats shuffled, shifted, breathed, but said nothing. He glanced around at their expressionless faces. Thornhill could see him decide that he needed to be more explicit.
Six bags, do you see, six bags for six heads
.

The room was silent as everyone watched him hold up a bag to demonstrate how the drawstring could be pulled tight. Thornhill saw Dick craning to see, his mouth open in disbelief.

On the map, Captain McCallum’s plan looked childishly simple, and on the map it was easy to imagine it: the human chain, the proceeding, the justice being dispensed. The map was correct enough. There was the river, hooking around the point at Thornhill’s, and Dillon’s Creek another mile along, with Sagitty’s place drawn on as a square, and just before that, the crooked line of Darkey Creek. The cliffs at its end were indicated by henpeckings on the paper. The map was correct, and there was no arguing with the captain’s logic, the elegance of the pincer-movement and the human chain.

But Thornhill had been there and knew that the map was correct only in its generalities. He knew that, in the real world, the ground that McCallum indicated as being where the human chain would proceed along the creek, was an exhausting jumble of trees, bushes and boulders. The hillsides bristled with fins and plates of rock, the gullies were full of mangroves and reeds in mud thick enough to swallow a man. Every tangled vine, sprawling root and whip-like bush would resist a single human, let alone a detachment, passing through. Mosquitoes would eat them alive, leeches slide down into their boots no matter how tight-laced, ticks would drop into their hair and burrow into their skin, and they would be forced into a series of exhausting detours that would increase the journey along the cleft by ten or twenty times its distance on the map.

Captain McCallum, not long from Home, his rosy cheeks already blistering in the colonial sun, could not be expected to know any of that. He had been taught to think in terms of an army taking up a position and confronting another army. The problem was, there was never any army here, only those ambiguous figures that vanished when a man looked at the
movement they made. They were too cunning to have anything as vulnerable as an army, for they knew what the Governor and Captain McCallum did not: that an army clumping along was as exposed and vulnerable as a beetle trundling over a tabletop. It was those invisible bodies that would win battles here, hurling a sudden rain of spears from nowhere, and disappearing so there was nothing to shoot at.

From his spot over by the door, and against his better judgment, Thornhill decided to speak.
If I was to put my oar in sir
, he said,
it is pretty rough going thereabouts
. He felt Sal straighten her shoulders and stand tall against him in support.

McCallum stared at him glassily for a moment, glanced at Sal, looked away from them both.
Thank you for the warning,
Thornhill
, he said, addressing a portion of the wall above their heads. He was very brisk about it.
I would not expect you to have had
experience of a fully-trained corps of soldiers
. His look hinted—except in your capacity as felon.
We are a disciplined fighting machine, Thornhill,
and are used to rough going, as you call it
.

Thornhill felt Sal go tense with indignation and hoped she would not speak. Quickly squeezed her hand to warn her. He heard her give a breath through her nose that was a close cousin to a snort, but she said nothing, and they listened while McCallum recited a speech he had clearly planned well ahead of time.
This
colony rests on a knife-edge, men
, he announced.
It is up to us to hold the
line against our treacherous foe
.

At this point it seemed that Captain McCallum might have forgotten the rest of the phrases he had prepared. There was a long pause before he added,
I trust that every one of you will do his duty to his
King and his country
. It looked as though he expected someone to call out
Hear, Hear
, but the roomful of people simply stared at him. As for Thornhill, King and country had never done too many favours for him. He coughed, and McCallum shot him a sharp look.

~

When McCallum returned a week later he had deflated like a bladder. The collar of his red jacket was half torn away so it flapped loose at the side of his neck and one sleeve was ripped as far as the shoulder. Both knees were wet circles of mud, his cap was gone, his hair was falling into his bloodshot eyes and his face was livid with mosquito bites.

He said nothing to the Thornhills, keeping his chin up and his eyes elsewhere. Later his underlings, enjoying Sal’s johnny-cakes after their time in the wilderness, spoke freely. It appeared that they had made the human chain, had proceeded, had done the pincer-movement and so on up the valley of Darkey Creek. After tremendous obstacles involving mud up to their waists, ridges and gullies in a series of walls, after every difficulty of snakes, spiders, leeches and mosquitoes, they had arrived at the cliffs, expecting to see the natives they had driven before them trapped there, cowering. There was not a single native, not so much as a dog. But dozens of spears had sailed out of the forest and trapped them, just the way they had hoped to trap the blacks.

They fired blindly into the bushes, but three redcoats lay dead, and four others wounded, before they were able to drive the blacks away.

~

The failure of Captain McCallum’s expedition did not stop His Excellency, it only made him turn to another instrument. Redcoats with pincer-movements having failed, he prepared to unleash the settlers themselves. A Proclamation was printed in the
Gazette
which Loveday read out to a gathering at Thornhill’s.

The hut was full. Smasher, George Twist, Sagitty, Mrs Herring. Even Blackwood had come to hear what the Governor had in mind. Dan and Ned squatted by the door and the children, big-eyed with the moment, were crowded onto the mattress out of the way.

The page had been handled so often that the paper was fluid as fabric, the words fading off the page. Loveday’s voice took on extra depth, being the Governor.
March the twenty-second, eighteen
hundred and fourteen
, he started.
The black natives of the colony have
manifested a strong and sanguinary spirit of animosity and hostility towards
the British inhabitants
.

Sagitty had already had a skinful before he arrived at the Thornhills’ and called out bitterly,
Meaning, they stick a spear in you
any time they get the chance
, but Blackwood took no notice.
Just get on
and read the poxy thing, will you?
He stood near the door, had refused a tot of rum or a stool to sit on. It was clear that he was only here because he could not read the Governor’s proclamation for himself.