This Golden Land (28 page)

     Yes! she thought deliriously. Stay with me. It will be heaven. "You have to go," Hannah said breathlessly. "You know that. It's your calling." Because if you miss this, and other expeditions do not come along, how long will it be before regret turns to resentment?

     He cupped her face in his hands and looked into her mother-of-pearl eyes. "Then come with me, Hannah, on this great adventure! We are going to make historic discoveries!" But in the next instant he knew he couldn't ask her to come on a journey that was going to be fraught with danger. And it would be highly improper. If they were married . . .

     With great reluctance, Neal took up the reins and goaded the horse into
a trot, and presently the Australia Hotel came into view, where Fintan was chatting with the stable boys. As Neal helped Hannah down from the buggy, there were so many things wanted to say to her.
I will capture the wonders of Australia with my camera and lay them like treasure at your feet.

     "I can't leave you again, Hannah," he said quietly as they stood in the sunshine.

     Hannah wanted him to take her into his arms once more, but they kept a respectable distance between themselves, as Liza Guinness and Edna Basset had come out to watch. "You must go, Neal, and I must stay. We are both called to things which we must do. And that is what will be your greatness. You will make wonderful discoveries. You will be in the history books."

     "I didn't think it was going to be this hard."

     "My father had a saying: most people are ready to carry the stool when there's a piano to be moved."

     "A wise man," Neal murmured. There was so much more. He wanted to say, I love you, he wanted to shout it, carve it in tree trunks, tell strangers on the street. But an old pain—perhaps two old pains, the first being his mother, the second Annabelle—stopped the words on his lips. Intellectually, he knew Hannah would never reject him, never hurt him. But living with the fear of it for so long had conditioned Neal to keep silent about his feelings. When I come back, he told himself, when I have proven my greatness to Hannah, as she predicts, then I will be free to shout it to the world that I am in love with Hannah Conroy.

     She watched him ride off northward along the road that would take him past the farthest outlying farms and homesteads, beyond the boundaries of explored territory and into the mysterious Outback. Hannah trembled with fear and excitement. What was Neal going to find out there in the Great Unknown?

S
O ME AND MY MATES ARE PLAYING CARDS IN
R
IORDAN'S PUB
," Jamie O'Brien said as he tipped back in his chair and studied the cards in his hand. "When all of a sudden, Paddy Grady jumps up and says, 'Muldoon, yer a bloody cheater!'"

     Jamie discarded a card, slipped the new one into his hand. "'Now Paddy,' says I," Jamie continued, his four companions listening. "'Faith, that's a terrible accusation. Have you any proof that Muldoon cheated?' 'I got proof,' says Paddy. 'Muldoon just discarded a three, and the hand I dealt him was a pair o' sevens, a ten, a deuce and a queen!'"

     The others laughed, but when Jamie put down his cards, fanning them out, their laughter turned to groans. O'Brien had won again. As the men threw down their cards and rose from the table, Jamie consulted his pocket watch. Five-thirty. The pub would be closing in half an hour. In a few minutes there would be a rush at the bar for the "six o'clock swill."

     As the others lined up for a last beer, Jamie discreetly pocketed the two cards he had had up his sleeve, just in case. Puffing on his long, thin cigar
and nursing a whiskey while a fiddler played a lively Irish jig, Jamie surveyed the noisy patrons at tables and leaning on the bar. They were a familiar mob, even though he didn't know their names; he had seen their likes in every drinking establishment from Botany Bay to Fremantle. They were working class types, the men who patronized this pub built of clapboard and spit—seamen and stevedores, dock laborers and itinerants. And except for Sal, the barmaid, there were no women.

     There were no gentry either. The land surrounding Adelaide's river was mostly swamp, and so the city itself had been built six miles inland, requiring a carriage or horseback ride for anyone coming and going to Adelaide by ship. The harbor with its forest of masts and spars and rigging lay just down the road from this pub. Across the way, a modest wooden church was propped on posts over a swamp, with a sign that identified it as "St. Paul's-On-Piles."

     It wasn't the worst pub Jamie had visited. He might not have seen the world, but he'd seen Australia. Ever since he escaped from a road gang four years prior, he'd been on the roam, moving from town to town, stopping at ports and settlements, finding work here and there, managing a few lucrative swindles, staying only long enough before his real name was known. He even got as far north as Port Hedland once, where he linked up with a pearling boat and lived a spell with the danger of getting eaten by sharks. Then he hitched a ride on a fishing vessel heading down to Carnarvon, working on the boat and getting paid at the end of it. From there he searched for gold in the Coonardoos, and when that didn't work, he joined a traveling circus. "Go a round with the Fighting Irishman," was the pitch outside the boxing tent. But the locals never won because Jamie was too tough and too fast for them.

     As he counted his winnings, he entertained the two thoughts that had been foremost in his mind these days: buried treasure, and the pretty little midwife he'd encountered a year ago in Lulu Forchette's garden.

     After that chance meeting, Jamie had left Adelaide when a swindle had gone bad and the mark had gone for the police. But now he was back and heading north into country no white man had ever seen, and the notion of finding the midwife had entered his mind.

     She had not reacted when he had told her his name. Most women who had heard of Jamie couldn't resist hearing tales of his con games and how he relieved certain wealthy citizens of their money. Jamie didn't consider himself to be a real criminal. "An honest liar," was what he called himself. And he always assured the particular lady he was wooing that he lived by two strict rules: he never stole from anyone poorer than himself, and he never cheated anyone who didn't deserve it.

     He thought now about the pretty midwife as she had stood in the moonlight, calm and poised as if they were at a church social. She had a forthright gaze. Honest. No guile or flirtation. No embarrassment, no apologies for being in a place where she should not have been. What would she think of his profession, the harmless swindles he pulled on self-important men who deserved to be bilked out of their money? Would she find his tales irresistible?

     Jamie thought of the adventure he and his mates were about to undertake. "Plains of fire," the Aborigines called it. A wilderness that was hotter than blazes where not even the blackfellah went. It would be nice to have a send-off in the company of the lady he had met in Lulu's garden. It could be interesting to have a little wager with himself, to see how long it would take for Miss Conroy to succumb to his charms.

     "Hey!" came a shout from the bar. "Can't you read? The sign in the window says no dogs, women or Aborigines allowed!"

     Jamie turned to see a black man, very old and dressed in rags, hovering uncertainly in the doorway. He was saying something and gesturing toward his open mouth.

     "Ah, Bruce," came another voice, "the poor sod's hungry."

     "I don't care! We got laws in this country. Can't give no liquor to an Abo. Go on, get out!"

     The old man didn't move, but held his hands out, pleading.

     The one called Bruce, a dock worker with beefy shoulders and a red face, strode to the door and, towering over the white-haired black man, said, "Whatsa matter? You no speakie English?"

     "Givem food, boss," the old man said quietly.

     "Give you food! Where do you think you are? Get a move on."

     "Joseph plenty hungry."

     "Joseph is it? So where's Mary?"

     "Ah, Bruce," the fiddler called, having ceased his merry tune, "leave him alone."

     "Gotta teach these people their place," Bruce said, reaching out and shoving the old man so that he stumbled and fell against the door jamb. "So whatsa matter?" Bruce continued, warming to his bullying, curling his large hands into fists.

     "All right, mate, that's enough."

     The big dock worker turned to see Jamie O'Brien standing there. "Stay outa this you God damn mick."

     Jamie lowered his voice. "I think you oughta watch your language when there's ladies present."

     "What!" barked Bruce, glancing toward the bar. "You mean Sal? Sal ain't no lady!"

     In a move so quick no one saw it coming, the lean and wiry Jamie O'Brien had fat-bellied Bruce by the arm and was twisting it up against his back. Bruce gave a shout. "Yer breakin' me arm!"

     "Apologize to Sal or I'll snap it right off."

     "Ah," groaned the bigger man, "I'm sorry, Sal."

     As Jamie pushed him out the door, sending Bruce tripping down the wooden sidewalk, Jamie called back to the pub's owner, "You oughta pay more attention to who you let into your establishment, Paddy. They'll attract flies." And everyone roared with laughter.

     Jamie turned to the old Aborigine who was still standing there. Joseph had cloud-white hair that made his black face seem blacker. He held his head high, his chin jutted out beneath a long white beard. And from beneath a heavy brow ridge, deep-set brown eyes watched steadily. Jamie reckoned Joseph had been an esteemed elder in his day. "You don't want to be coming to places like this, old man," Jamie said. "It's not safe for you."

     "Gottem no money, boss."

     Jamie's heart went out to him. The elder had clearly been "detribalized"—he spoke pidgin English, wore cast-off clothes, and reeked of sly-grog gin. Jamie was seeing more and more like him. Lured by the white man's ways, they came to the towns where they lived in shacks on the fringes
and caught white men's diseases and drank illegal liquor and eventually forgot the laws and customs of their own people.

     Poor bastard, Jamie thought. He knew that when the Aborigines saw the first white men come ashore sixty years ago, they thought the newcomers were spirits of dead ancestors, and so they welcomed them. When the white-skinned spirits did not understand the native language, and were ignorant of customs and culture, the Aborigines thought death had wiped their memories. As the white men began to learn the Aborigines' language, the natives believed the white-spirits were remembering their native tongue. It was not until too late that the natives realized these were not ancestral spirits at all but merely men.

     "Go back to the mission, old man. They'll feed you there."

     "Don't like mission, boss. Teach blackfellah Jesus, make him forget Dreamtime."

     "Here you go, old man" Jamie said quietly, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a few shillings. "Get yourself something to eat. And go back to where you came from, if you can."

     As he watched the old Aborigine shamble away, Jamie recalled hearing someone say that it was being reckoned that the Aborigines had been on this continent for thousands of years, possibly as many as thirty thousand. Jamie thought: fancy that. Thirty thousand years of living here, and then the white man comes and sixty years later their way of life is all but gone.

     A red-haired man came in then, short and scrawny, wearing a dusty black suit and a dusty black stovepipe hat, his freckled face bisected nearly in half by a scar left by a knife attack. "It's all set, boyo. I've found a bloke who'll outfit us and carry us up the gulf to the end."

     "Change of plans, Mikey. We're going to make a stop in Adelaide."

     Mike Maxberry stared at his friend, and then shook his head. Judging by the cheeky grin on O'Brien's face, it must have something to do with a sheila.

H
ANNAH HAD A BAFFLING MYSTERY ON HER HANDS.