CHAPTER 33 
Under the filmy light of early morning they load the boat with provisions. It would do them no service to have all and sundry watch them go. A lone lugger sailing out so late in the season? Tongues would certainly talk.
As they work, it doesn’t take long for Eliza’s discomfort to show. She can barely look at the water smacking like a flat palm at the bottom of the boat. Its force reminds her of a story her father had once told. How a diver had become so overwhelmed by a shoal of herrings he almost drowned. The fish had emerged like a cloud while he walked the seabed and soon engulfed him with their tiny, frantic bodies. They glued themselves to his helmet, swarmed his chest, his back. As he tugged on his lifeline, more fish arrived—bigger ones, pursuing their prey. When the diver came to the surface, he was consumed by a deadly mass, his copper helmet beset by thrashing creatures.
Under the weight of a rice sack, Eliza squeezes her eyes shut and takes a breath to still her nerves. If she does not acknowledge the water’s presence, she can imagine that it is not really there at all. She can forget what it is they are really about to do.
“Thirty-five-foot from stem to stern.” Axel wades through the shallows with a grin. He’s in his sailing clothes—loose-necked shirt and moleskin trousers. His shoulder is healed enough not to need the sling now. But it still causes him pain and she catches him, occasionally, rolling his stiff arm. The day is warm but the morning breeze makes the trees shiver. “Twelve tons, jarrah planked, laminated frames.” She nods but cannot muster a smile for him. “All hacked from bush timber. Cajeput or karri, it must be. Shallow draught so the divers can easily come aboard in their suits. Designed to drift with the current. Simply marvelous artistry from the Fremantle builders.”
Sandpipers leave forked prints across the surrounding mud. In the bushes, honeyeaters hop on restless feet. Eliza looks beyond them to the low-slung town, the red pindan glowing gold under the rising sun.
“We’ll only clear the bar at high tide,” announces Axel. “Get it wrong and we’ll find ourselves stuck on a lee shore, or dashed on the shoals. Foiled before we’ve even started. Then we’ll really look like fools!” Eliza raises an eyebrow dryly. “But we’ve got all the provisions in the forehold and plenty of water in the tank, so we’re good once the sea allows it.” Over his shoulder, Eliza sees a white-necked heron perched on a mangrove tree. Its bold yellow eye watches them unflinchingly.
When the tide eventually lifts the lugger, Axel and Quill let loose the mooring line, and as the boat slips easily through the channel, Eliza’s eyes move slowly across the bay and up the beach. They take her across the dunes and over the belts of brittle spinifex grass, making their way to meet the rippling iron of the town. She thinks of Balarri out there in the landscape, stalked in the bush by two men on horseback. She pictures the bungalow, sitting patiently on its stilts and within it a polished calendar clock. With every second it makes its message known: Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
Soft splashes come over the gunwale as the bow dips to cut through the turquoise water. Soon the town is only a brushstroke on the horizon; eventually it threatens to slip out of sight entirely. She must get higher; she cannot leave it behind, not quite yet. She puts a bare foot on the gunwale, grasps hold of the rigging, and hauls herself upward. Bannin is merely a hairline crack now. The wind pulls at her sleeves. Her skirts billow out behind her.
“Are you quite all right?” Axel blinks up at her, and she steps heavily down to the deck. “Come, the wind is picking up,” he says.
The boat rolls gently as it cuts through the waters, making its way out to the open stretch of the sea.
You’ll get used to it soon enough,” Axel calls across the deck as Eliza sways at the halyard. Quill is busy inspecting an old air pump through the hatch. “We’ll find your sea legs yet.” She is not so sure of that.
Looking out onto the water, she imagines her father and her brother out at sea, easy limbed, no doubt, and soothed by the swaying. She wishes she were as fluid on the water as the gulls. Her eyes move across to the dinghy, parbuckled to the ship. It looks so small there. So breakable. If her father can set out in one of those, she can surely do this.
After a few hours she relaxes, shuffling along to the rail to peer down into the water. Everything seems so astonishingly close, the lugger so low in the water you could tickle the fish with a finger. Barely three feet below, jellyfish pass like transient clouds. A sleepy turtle, basking on the surface, raises its periscope head before disappearing with a ripple. When sharks arrive, they do so in a pack, their strong bodies crisp in the glassy water. They don’t so much move as dance, a liquid sway from tip to tail. Beyond them, in a fleeting flash of silver, fish launch themselves from the water, returning to the surface with a smack.
In the afternoon she sits alone in the shade of the sails, lulled by the singing of the wind in the stays. She sips a cup of sweet tea and thumbs her way through her father’s diary, studying every illustration, hearing his deep voice in every word. The gulls flank the boat closely, keeping welcome company. They barrel incessantly into the welter of spray, emerging with tiny fish that wriggle in their beaks. Axel is at the helm, alternately eyeing sails and compass. Quill heaves pots around the deck, preparing food for the evening’s dinner. Eliza looks at the apprentice, considers for a while; she is uncomfortable knowing so little about him. She goes across the boards and settles onto a tarpaulin. Quill quickly returns her smile but does not stop the work at the pots. Eliza smiles again, then shakes her head; she has already done that. How best might she begin their conversation? She has not much experience of talking to children, although Quill seems so at ease on the boat he might be mistaken for a man.
“You enjoy your work with McVeigh?” she finally asks.
“Aye.” Quill nods, taking a blade from a pocket and sawing the top off the sack. She wonders if the apprentice has any memory of being mothered. Whether Quill’s mother would sing as her mother would, whether Quill too can recall her scent or softness of touch.
“Well… what do you like best of it?”
Quill gives her a brief, upward glance. A few grains of rice spill onto the deck.
“Cricket.”
“Cricket?”
Quill nods. “Father McVeigh’s a fine batsman. He’s teaching me all he knows. We play it at the camp too, there’s some skillful bowlers there.”
Eliza had never really understood the appeal of the game; so much waiting around. But the pearlers treat cricket as a way of life during lay-up, and the whole town gets involved. All stripes of men.
“I like reading the books too,” Quill continues. “There’s a lot to be learned from books.”
Eliza smiles inwardly at the earnestness.
“Is that how you have learned so much of languages?”
Quill scoops out the rice with slender palms, forms fists with them and slowly unclenches, allowing the grain to filter neatly into the pot. “That’s right, miss, it helps, but I learned most things out on the luggers.” She imagines the apprentice in conversation with the many different types of men that make up the crews. Do they resent it, the presence of a child with such a mind?
“They make out like it’s English that’ll get you furthest here.” Quill runs a hand over a damp forehead. “That’s the language of power in these parts, we’re told. But it’s not really.” Quill shakes the pot. “It’s all the other ones, the ones been spoken for ages. There’s hundreds of them. Father McVeigh and I have been making a list of all the words we hear. We have to guess the spellings but he says it’s important to make a record of things that’ll soon be gone.”
When darkness becalms the sea, they anchor the lugger for the night. Thick clouds obscure all but a few bright stars, and by the light of the lanterns they eat in companionable silence. Once the dishes have been rinsed, Quill sets out the tarpaulin and clambers onto it. Axel stands and makes his way to the aft, settling against the cabin as he opens a book. He nods at Eliza to follow. She steps carefully across the planks and sits beside him.
“Any good?” she asks. Its cover looks old and worn. He cracks the spine and the title Purgatorio creases in half. Quietly, he begins to read aloud.
“Night, circling opposite the sun, was moving together with the Scales that, when the length of dark defeats the day, desert night’s hands; so that, above the shore that I had reached, the fair Aurora’s white and scarlet cheeks were, as Aurora aged, becoming orange.”
Eliza looks up to the stars, hanging low like fallen angels. Her knees kiss Axel’s now and then, rocked by the movement of the water. The minutes trickle by as Quill’s gentle sleep noises rise and fall in the air.
“Bet you didn’t think you’d end up here,” Axel says, placing the book down.
“Australia?”
“No.” He smiles. “On a lugger in the middle of the ocean.”
She smiles and drops her head. “No, I don’t think I could have quite foreseen that.”
“Why did you end up in Bannin, though?” He shifts his weight so he is facing her. “Was it your father?”
She turns to face him. “Actually, it was my uncle.”
“Is that right?”
“He and my father have always been close. We weren’t wealthy when we lived in England, but Father made a living in the factories. He was restless, though, desperate to make a name for himself as a businessman. He’d take what funds we did have and place them into new ventures. They were always outlandish, things no one else would touch: flying machines, protective eyewear for chickens, trapdoors for coffins should someone be buried alive.” Axel raises an eyebrow. “Mother sometimes got frustrated but Father argued there was always food on the table.” Eliza shifts her legs. “It changed one day; he placed his money into an ambitious deal that went sour. He has always been a passionate man and can be… spontaneous with his decisions. If you were being unkind you might call it erratic. Fanciful, even. As it turned out, he’d been hoodwinked and the gentleman in question disappeared with the entirety of the investment. We didn’t know it but he’d placed everything we had into that deal. Almost overnight we lost it all. I was only young; I can’t recall the details. But in the end, Willem used his savings to get the whole family out here—us, him and Martha, out to Bannin Bay, to build a new life.”
“I had no idea.” Axel nods. “Your father certainly has turned his prospects around.”
“What about your family?” she asks. “You rarely speak of them.”
He looks at her but says nothing, tossing the question away with a shake of the head.
“We’re out here, searching for my father,” she urges. “You know about Ned, about Thomas, my family’s path out here. What about you?”
He sighs.
“It’s only fair, go on. Do you write to your parents often? I bet they love hearing about your adventures.” She wills him on with a gentle nudge of her shoulder.
“Not quite.” His words are clipped.
Eliza pauses, confused. “I thought you said your father was a trader? You must have had a nice life back in Germany.”
He moves just a fraction away from her. It’s not much, but it’s enough.
“I’m not close to my family like you are,” he says uncomfortably. “I’ve no siblings. No cousins. My parents and I, we don’t speak a lot.”
“Why not? It is with their wealth, I presume, that you are able to travel as you do?”
Axel exhales sharply, and looks out to sea. “If you want the truth, my father squandered any inheritance I might have had.” He shifts and crosses his legs. “He drank it away. Every other penny swallowed by the gambling halls.”
“I’m sorry.” She eyes him cautiously. His quiet anger is unfamiliar.
“It’s all right. He got what was coming for him. That’s what my mother always said anyway.” He shakes his head. “I’m not sure I was ever told the specifics but some venereal disease, it sent him mad after a time. They took him into an institution in the end. From what I can tell he’s still alive, just about. I haven’t had any news otherwise, so…”
“Axel.”
He shakes his head sharply. “He was not a nice man. An adulterer. Rough-handed. He could be violent; he did not treat me and my mother well.”
She allows his words to settle. He had lied, then, when he first told her of his family, when he’d said his father was a trader. She supposes she might have done the same in his situation. “Your mother, at least. She must wonder how you are?” she asks.
“She left when my father was taken ill. The shame was too much for her; she could not bear the whispers. I received one letter, a couple of years later, to say that she was to be remarried to a naval officer. I never heard from her again.”
“How old were you when they left?”
The hollows of his cheeks have sucked up the shadows. “Perhaps I must have been fourteen or so. I’ve been working for myself ever since, making my way from place to place. It provides a remarkable sense of adventure and the nagging assurance that one never truly fits in anywhere. That’s why, I suppose, I’m in the constant act of moving on. Perhaps someday I’ll find the right spot and settle, but for now…” His voice peters out.
The water around them glistens like oil. Eliza nods slowly. She is not the only one with ghosts in her past.
“I’m glad we met,” she says.
“Yes,” says Axel, moving to close the gap between them again. “I think perhaps we were both a bit lost.”
They stay that way for a while, sitting together but minds apart. Eventually, Axel sucks in a lungful of air, stands, and slaps his legs. “Now, Eliza, I have a very important question for you.”
“Anything.”
“I think we should have some more rum, don’t you?”