The Secret River (37 page)

A black stood in front of one of the humpies with a spear up at his shoulder and was beginning the coil of his body to launch it, but there was a shot and he gasped like a man about to sneeze. He threw the spear but was collapsing as he did and it dropped to the ground.

All over the clearing men fired and reloaded and swords rose and fell and came up all over blood in a din of screaming and roaring and the high panicked cries of children. After that first shot, things had moved too fast around Thornhill. He pointed his gun at blacks as they ran but the muzzle was always too late. He stood turning in the clearing, the thing up against his shoulder, watching.

There was a shout, and Tom Blackwood in his undershirt and socks, gun up to his shoulder, was aiming straight at Smasher and roaring,
Get back away, Smasher
, and running at him, but Smasher had his whip and without raising his arm he flicked it at Blackwood underhand, one flick and then another. Blackwood reeled back, dropped the gun on the ground, his hands to his eyes. He tripped, flailing at the air with his arms, toppled backwards over a log and went down so heavily the ground seemed to jolt.

Thornhill opened his mouth to call out, but Blackwood was on his feet again, his hands still up at his eyes as he stumbled on one of the bodies, fell heavily, struggled to get up. Thornhill could hear now that he was roaring just one word.
No, no, no, no, no
.

Then Thornhill felt a blow on his hand where it held the gun so that he dropped the thing, and heard a great bellow from Dan, pointing at the bushes. As Thornhill turned, a blow to the side of his head made everything go dark behind his eyes. He bent for the gun and was knocked over by another rock in the small of the back. For a moment he was sprawled with his face in the dust, helpless as a beetle. He heard Ned screaming, high like a girl, that
they had got him in the damn nuts, he would kill them buggers as God was his witness.

Thornhill got to his feet and put the gun up to his shoulder again, seeing more rocks coming out of the forest. The place was spitting parts of itself out at them. He could feel something slick running into his eye and his hand came away crimson with blood when he touched his face. Ned was shouting, his face twisted, furiously tamping down another shot. Thornhill could not hear the words, only saw the frantic movements of his arms. Loveday was scrabbling to reload too, the hair flopping into his eyes and his hands shaking as he tried to pour the shot into the gun and look around at the same time.

The clearing, squeezed between the lagoon on one side and the ridge on the other, was a trap.

There was a breathy whistle and he saw a shadow cutting through the light and piercing the ground beside his boot, becoming a spear still quivering from its collision with the dirt. He turned to it, stilled with surprise. There was a moment in which he might have been waiting for it to speak.

Another spear flew from the trees and struck Devine on the shoulder. He screamed like a woman, grabbed it with both hands and wrenched it out in a frenzy. Thornhill looked and where the thing had come from was a boy at the edge of the clearing, a heavy spear in both hands. His small face was broken open on a cry of fear and rage as he launched it with his whole body. It seemed to move too slowly to do any damage, but there was Twist down on his knees with it dangling from the side of his head, the brim of his hat impaled along with the ear.

Thornhill got the gun up at his shoulder but he was too slow again. The place where the boy had been was empty, only the trees looking back at him.

Then Whisker Harry, wiry and fragile, calmly stepped out from them. Thornhill could see his arm trembling as he fitted the
spear into the thrower and got it up to his shoulder. His face contorted with effort as he leaned his body back to launch the spear.

The gun was still up at Thornhill’s shoulder, his finger was against the trigger, but he could not move, a man in a dream. He was aware of issuing orders to his finger to pull back on the trigger, but nothing happened.

He watched as the spear left the black man’s hand. Across the clearing Smasher took a step forward as if to catch it. When he stopped short, the spear was vibrating out of his chest. His hands went to it and he stood in the chaos, the spear coming out of his chest like some terrible mistake.

Thornhill could see his mouth making words although he could hear nothing. Smasher was walking towards him, holding the spear off the ground with both hands. He came so close to Thornhill that the end of the spear brushed against his arm, and stood staring at him without seeming to know who he was.
Lord
Jesus and Holy Mother of God
, Smasher said. A small amount of bright blood was beginning to ooze into the shirt around the spear.

There was an impulse to wrench it out, make everything the way it had been before. But Thornhill knew what happened when a spear was pulled out of a man. He went on standing, the gun to his shoulder and a great emptiness in his being.

Smasher was rasping as if the wood in his chest had got into his voice:
Jesus Christ Almighty, Jesus Christ Almighty
.

And there was the old man looking at his spear in Smasher’s chest. He made no move to throw another or to take cover. He simply stood watching, his face stern.

The gun went off with a puff of blue smoke and a pop that sounded puny in all this air. He thought he must have missed, for Whisker Harry was still standing there with that look on his face, as if nothing could touch him.

The old man bent slowly forward until he was on his knees, holding his belly. It seemed the longest time that he stayed like
that, as if by becoming a rock or tree he could eject the thing that had entered him.

A fly was around Thornhill’s face and he brushed it away. He closed his eyes. Like the old man on his knees he felt he might become something other than a human, something that did not do things in this sticky clearing that could never be undone.

Now the old man was bending in on himself, holding his middle in that polite way. He lay on the dust. Blood came from his mouth, just a trickle like spit, but so red. He knelt in the dust and kissed it with the blood from his mouth.

When he straightened his body so he was lying on his back, Thornhill could see the wound. There was something in there moving like a lip. It pulsated, a small evil animal inside him.

It seemed impossible that anyone with such a thing in his flesh could go on living.

Thornhill could only hear his own ragged breathing. At last he lowered the gun and laid it carefully on the ground. He heard a fly buzz past his ear. The first rays of the sun were slanting in through the trees, laying stripes of colour along the grass. He listened for the blacks running through the forest, but even the humming things in the grass had fallen silent.

Every tree, every leaf, every rock seemed to be watching.

Black bodies lay among the ruins of their humpies. He saw the big body of Black Dick, laid out full length with the flesh of his chest torn open by a ball. Near him, with half his head shot away, was Long Jack, who had once been Long Bob. A woman lay in a pool of sunlight, sleeping with her sleeping baby beside her, except for the way her head was twisted, attached to her body by only a strip of ragged flesh. The back of the baby’s head was crushed purple.

Whisker Harry lay where he had fallen so neatly.

From under a body the wail of a baby filled the clearing. Dan went over with the club in his hand. Thornhill saw his face,
absent, like a man mending a piece of harness by lamplight. He struck once, twice, and the cry stopped.

Blackwood lay spreadeagled in the remains of one of the humpies. His hands still covered his eyes. Under them his face was streaked with blood, his mouth an inhuman square.

Someone had taken Smasher by the elbow and was leading him over to the shade. He would not let go of the spear. The end of it flexed with each step he took, like some grotesque ornament. The spear had gone right through. When they ripped the shirt off, they could see its barbed tip sticking out of his back. He was too shocked even to cry out. Once in the shade he stood swaying. Refused to sit. Pushed away Spider who was coaxing him to lie down.

George Twist moved to help him hold up the spear but Smasher waved him away. He stared at nothing, concentrating on holding the spear steady, a man whose world had shrunk to the feel of his hands around a length of wood. At one corner of his mouth a small line of bright blood ran out and in the same moment his knees appeared to hinge under him so that he sat awkwardly on the ground. Blood was coming out of his nose, and when he coughed with a wet sound, more poured out of his mouth. The flies drank at the place where the inside of a man had been opened up. One hand made a gesture as if he wanted to say something, but he dropped forward as far as the spear would let him and hung there, dead.

The sun hardened around them. The clearing had a broken look, the bodies lying like so much fallen timber, the dirt trampled and marked with dark stains.

And a great shocked silence hanging over everything.

R
ains fell, season after season, and the sun slid up over the ridges as it had done since the beginning. The river filled and shrank with tides and floods, trees grew and died and melted back into the dirt that had given them life. Ten years made no impression on the shape of the river, of the convoluted ridges that hid it. Only down on the flats was there change, and that was mostly a matter of names.

A man called Millikin lived on Smasher’s piece of ground, now Millikin’s Inlet. Where Mrs Webb had stood laughing while the natives made off with an acre of corn, Benjamin Jameson had harnessed the creek and called the place Jameson’s Mill. Mrs Herring was one of the few left of the old neighbourhood, still on her place along at Cat-Eye Creek, but she had become something of a recluse. William Thornhill had bought Sagitty’s old place, plus another hundred acres that went from the headwaters of Darkey Creek all the way down to the river. It was not called Darkey Creek now, but Thornhill’s Creek.

With no more trouble from the blacks, new settlers had taken up land on every bend. Unmolested, their crops and families flourished, and trade on the river was good. Thornhill had repaid King his hundred and fifteen pounds, with interest, and borrowed
more: nearly three hundred pounds, to have a vessel purpose-built for trade. The old
Hope
and the new
Sarah
never stopped. In winter, when trade was slack on the river, the
Hope
went for coal from the new penal station at Port Stephens, and the
Sarah
, captained by Willie, went further afield getting the cedar wood that the settlers called red gold. From the place at Thornhill’s Point—expanded to three hundred acres, and carrying hogs and beef as well as grain—the Thornhills victualled the Government chain-gangs making roads in the area. They had plans for a third boat in which to make the crossing to New Zealand for the fur-seal trade, twenty pounds a pelt.

For the newcomers, William Thornhill was something of a king. When he was not on the river, he sat on his verandah, watching with his telescope everything that went by on the river. His wife had become something of a queen, celebrated for her Christmas entertainments, complete with Chinese lanterns and string bands.

~

The Irishman Devine had built a fine stone house for Mr Thornhill, although it seemed that the proper thing was to call it a villa. The word had a tone about it that Thornhill liked, even though it came awkwardly to his tongue. They had named it Cobham Hall. It was Sal’s idea, but they both enjoyed the private joke.

He had stood up on the rock with the fish carved in it and pointed at where the house would go. Devine, a man who knew which side his bread was buttered, was full of admiration.
I would
of picked this spot myself, Mr Thornhill
, he said.
Just this very eminence
.

Thornhill had never grown tired of being called Mr Thornhill. Never heard it without a pulse of pleasure. He did not so much enjoy the way Devine threw
eminence
about when what he meant was plain
hill
.

Devine was full of ways to make the place a fortress. The eminence itself was the start of it:
A hundred of the buggers could not cut
you off here, Mr Thornhill
, he had assured. The walls were to be of stone, half a yard thick. At the back and the sides they rose up to the roof unbroken except by one low and deep-set door.
Put a man
at that door
, Devine said.
He’d
pick them off like flies
. He had contrived an ingenious mechanism within the staircase so that it could be hinged up after the manner of a drawbridge, with convenient slits the size of a gun-barrel. Behind the house, the hillside had been stripped of every bush. There was nothing that a man might hide behind.

The finished place was not quite what Thornhill had pictured. Something was wrong with the way the pieces fitted together: some were too big, others too small. The front door was a quality piece of joinery, but too wide for its height, and the arched fanlight over it had a slipped keystone like a crooked front tooth. The semicircular stone steps going up to the verandah were exactly what he had drawn—the ones he remembered from St Mary Magdalene in long-ago Bermondsey—but translated from paper to stone they had become dwarfish and awkward. A cricket had taken up residence somewhere behind them and chirruped all night.

He had pictured lions on the gateposts, rearing up with their teeth showing as had the ones at Christ Church. It was some other, hardly recognisable William Thornhill who had once hurled a handful of mud at them. He had ordered them from London, a hundred guineas the pair. When they arrived, they turned out to be a more domestic type of creature. Rather than snarling at interlopers, they lay on their haunches, paws spread, like tabbies in front of the fire. But he would not show his disappointment in front of Ned, still with him after so long and still stickybeaking when he should have been chipping the corn.
Just what I ordered
, he announced.
Just the thing
. Sal caught his eye and saw it all in that
glance: his disappointment, his pride. Gave him the smallest of smiles, gone before anyone else had a chance to see it.

He had the lions put high on the gateposts so they could not be seen well. They were not what he had planned, but there was no mistaking their message:
Watch your step, you are on my place now
.

Cobham Hall was a gentleman’s residence. Did that mean he was a gentleman? There were moments when he felt this must all be an elaborate dream. He would not have thought that William Thornhill could ever have any relationship with a house like this except that of trespasser. But if a man had enough by way of money, he could make the world whatever way he wanted. No wonder those men in his wherry, all those years ago, had had such an air of serenity. They took their ease, gazed about them, while the boatman bent to his oars. He knew that feeling now: the feeling that whatever a man wanted, he could have.

Under the house, covered by the weight of Mr Thornhill’s villa, the fish still swam in the rock. It was dark under the floorboards: the fish would never feel the sun again. It would not fade, as the others out in the forest were fading, with no black hands to re-draw them. It would remain as bright as the day the boards had been nailed down, but no longer alive, cut off from the trees and light that it had swum in.

Sometimes, sitting in the parlour in the red velvet armchair, Thornhill thought of it underneath him, clear and sharp on the rock. He knew it was there, and his children might remember, but his children’s children would walk about on the floorboards, and never know what was beneath their feet.

~

Sal had long since stopped making marks on the tally-tree, and the lines she had already drawn had grown over, swallowed into the fabric of the trunk. Sometimes she still said,
When we go Home
, and she still kept the old bit of roof-tile in her workbox. But there
was never a time put on that
when
, and
Home
remained a comfortable but distant idea. He let the phrase go when she used it, turning the conversation elsewhere: a fine pony he had his eye on for Mary, or the grant of land he had got for Willie up on the Second Branch.

He did not spell out to her what they both knew: that they were never going to return to that Home. Too many of the important parts of their lives had happened here. Their children, for a start. For them, Home was nothing but a story. If they were to go to London they would be outsiders, with their sunburnt skin and their colonial ways. They might see London Bridge and hear the great bell of Bow, that Sal had told them about. They might even see Cobham Hall and its grape arbour. But they would be places with a shrunken look about them, places from a story that belonged to someone else.

As every twist of Crucifix Lane had once been known in his own body, this place was known in theirs. In sleepless nights it would not be that foreign river called the Thames that they would follow down through the bends into sleep, but their own Hawkesbury. They would hanker for these astringent smells and this hard-edged sky. For them, the strangeness would be to spend their lives in the crush and crowds of the Borough, and terror would be to be buried in the sour wet soil of the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene.

Sal had never said it in so many words, but she would not leave them, those native-born children.

So, rather than taking them Home, she had made Home here, and Thornhill had gone along with it in every way he could think of. He made sure she had all that Home had promised: a couple of sprung armchairs in the parlour and a sofa to go with them, a girl to cook and clean and another to do her washing for her, a paisley shawl from India with a peacock on it that had cost what he would have worked for a year to make on the Thames.

And a pair of green silk slippers. The slippers were a private thing between himself and his memory. She laughed when he gave them to her.
What am I going to do with silk slippers, Will?
But she had not complained when he put them on her feet that night, and took her in them for the pleasure of feeling them up around his ears. The complicated satisfaction it gave him was something he did not try to share with her.

As it had been her idea to call the place Cobham Hall, it was also her idea to have a high stone wall around the entire garden. He did not ask her whether Cobham Hall also had such a wall, but gave his instructions to Devine. It was his suspicion that it had not, and that her desire for one here was something else. But it was one of the things that remained unasked between them, and unanswered.

That wall—higher than a man, and with only one gate in its perimeter—kept out everything except what was invited in. It pleased Sal, and he did not begrudge the money, because it pleased him too. He had so often been on the wrong side of such a wall.

Within the wall the ground had been cleared and levelled for Sal’s garden. On that bleak rectangle a garden along English lines was planned. Daffodils and roses were planted. Paths were marked out with string and laid with crushed white sandstone in lieu of gravel. It glittered harshly in the light, but it divided the garden up into squares in the way she wanted. Between the garden and the house there was to be a lawn and, on Devine’s advice, expensive turf was imported from Ireland. She would be safe behind it, he promised, because it was a well-known fact that no snake would ever cross Irish turf. He placed a long-fingered pale hand on his chest, where his Irish heart could be assumed to beat, and the deal was done.

Most of all, she had longed for trees: real trees, she insisted, with proper leaves that fell off in the autumn. She showed him
where she wanted them, in a double row up from the river all the way to the house. He guessed what she saw as she looked down the slope: the carriageway at Cobham Hall, a whispering green tunnel that cast dappled shadows on the ground. He did not mock her for it. A person was entitled to draw any picture they fancied on the blank slate of this new place.

Jerome Griffin in Sydney was an enterprising fellow who was making a good thing for himself out of poplars for homesick ladies, his being the only poplars on this continent, and Thornhill bought up his entire stock. The delight of laying about him with his money was one he did not think would ever grow stale.

Twice a day, morning and evening, Thornhill saw Sal urging Ned and the other men—they had seven servants now, as well as three girls in the house—to refill the water cart and give the new plants yet another bucket of water. Her day became a battle against the sun that would draw the moisture out of the ground, the hot wind that would dry the leaves.

In spite of her care the garden did not thrive. The roses never put their roots down. They clung to life, but were little more than stalk. The daffodils were planted but no trace of them was ever seen again. The turf yellowed and shrivelled and finally blew away in wisps of dry straw.

The only plant that flourished was a bush of blood-red geraniums that she had got as a cutting from Mrs Herring. They gave off a musty sort of smell, but at least they provided a splash of colour.

Of the two dozen poplars they had planted, most became nothing more than twigs after a few weeks. Sal could not bear to pull them out of the ground. When the wind blew, the corpses swivelled loose in the ground in a parody of life.

She loved the survivors all the more for the deaths of the others. At dusk she would go down and stand in the triangle made by the three remaining saplings. Their glossy green leaves
twittered and shivered together on their long stems. He watched her sometimes, standing among them. Watched her pick a leaf to feel its cool familiar silkiness, hold it up to the sun to look at its secret veins. She would touch the tender new growth as she touched the cheeks of the children and sometimes Thornhill thought she talked to them as she stood in the dusk fingering their heart-shaped leaves.
Bury me here when I go
, she told him.
So I can
feel the leaves fall on me
.

She moved more slowly these days, but was at peace. She had had one more baby, another girl that they christened Sarah but always called Dolly for her pretty face and fair ringlets. After Dolly, Sal had grown stout on the good living they could afford. He watched her walking along one of the gravel paths. He had not thought his cheeky young wife would come to be this placid matron, fat with smiles.

He was slower, too. The pads of muscle around his shoulders were growing soft and the calluses on his hands, that he had always thought he would take to his grave, were nothing more than a thickening of the skin.

~

A portrait,
William Thornhill of Thornhill’s Point
, hung in the parlour, where it could remind him of the person he had become. There was another, too, but it was hidden away under the stairs.

That first portrait had been an unhappy experience. The painter was fresh off the boat, with a nice houndstooth jacket only a little threadbare as to cuffs, a distinguished head of silky hair and a tripos from Cambridge. Thornhill did not ask further, having no idea what a tripos from Cambridge might be, but the man seemed a gentleman. He would have the best, whatever that was, pay top price, so everyone would know that his money was as good as the next man’s.