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The twins wouldn’t go to sleep.
‘Tell us what it says,’ Karel said. ‘It’s not fair – I found it.’
‘Shh,’ Jordan warned him. ‘You’ll wake up Dad and her.’
Karel’s brows knitted together. ‘Why do you hate her so much? She’s all right.’
‘Yeah,’ Bree piped up. ‘She put a sticky plaster on my knee yesterday.’ The little girl squirmed out of her sleeping bag and presented her knee. Sure enough, there was a plaster stuck to it.
Jordan shook her head. ‘She’s an idiot.’
Two pairs of eyes blinked at her in the weak light from the torch. Jordan hoped someone had packed spare batteries. Taffy grunted in her sleep and turned over.
‘Don’t you understand?’ Jordan continued. ‘She was seeing Dad when he was still married to Mum. If it wasn’t for her, Mum wouldn’t have gotten so hurt.’ She glanced around at the tent, listened to the heavy silence outside the tent. ‘We wouldn’t be out here in this horrible place, either.’
‘But then we wouldn’t have found the book,’ Bree said.
‘I wouldn’t have found the book,’ Karel corrected.
‘I would have found the book sooner or later anyway,’ Jordan said, shining the torch down on the book in question.
‘Well, I found it,’ Karel said. ‘And it should be mine.’
‘You can’t read it,’ Jordan pointed out.
‘You probably can’t either,’ her brother said. ‘You haven’t read any of it yet.’
‘Well, shut up so I can have a look, then.’
They all fell silent, except for the dog, who broke wind, then rolled over onto her back like a dead beetle. Jordan peeled open the leather cover and smoothed a hand over the first page of writing, squinting at the brown ink. Amazingly, the first few pages were in English. Jordan didn’t know why.
‘What does it say?’ her brother asked.
‘Shh, I’m trying to read it.’
‘I said you wouldn’t be able to, either!’ he crowed.
‘God, you’re annoying. Shut up and go to sleep.’ Jordan bent back to the book again. There was a date at the top and she frowned over it. ‘This is really old. It’s a diary, I think.’
The others waited for more. She ran a finger over the spidery scrawl.
9th April 1889
The claim is rich, like I thought. Every day more and more gold just falls into my hands. Enough so that I am a rich man already. But I am also a greedy one. I will be the first to admit that. Which is why I told only my wife about the whereabouts of the claim. I refuse to share. I have a family to consider, back in the city. Just a few more months here, and we will have enough to support us in style for the rest of our God-given lives.
I’ve built a house. Mostly as a way to while away the evenings. I could not bring in the supplies without revealing my claim, so it is built of local rock. And a mud cement I devised myself. I am rather proud of my efforts. A necessity, as my canvas tent was not holding out the weather, and there are some fierce thunderstorms in this area, even in the hot summer months.
Jordan stopped reading and closed the cover of the book, bending close to examine it. ‘It’s a diary,’ she said. ‘And I think it was written by our...’ She thought for a moment. ‘Great-great-grandfather. Maybe even back before that. Like six “greats” or something.’ She nodded towards the tent flaps. ‘That’s his house out there.’ A slow smile spread over her face.
‘We have to tell Dad,’ Bree said.
Jordan snapped the book to her chest, clutching it there and shaking her head. ‘No. This is our secret.’ She looked from one twin to the other until they nodded. ‘We tell Dad, he’ll take it off us, and we’ll never get to read it. You want me to read it to you, don’t you?’
‘Will you read some more now?’ Karel asked, and Jordan cleared her throat and opened the book again. It was hard to figure out the writing, but she thought she was getting used to it already.
She cleared her throat. ‘Just a little more, okay?’
I did not expect the luck of finding suitable building materials out here, but I know I will truly appreciate them come the unseasonable months. Mei is expecting me back in town before winter, but there is much more gold here. I have never seen a claim so rich! When it comes time to leave, I shall be hard pressed to carry it all. I exaggerate, of course, but swear I have almost a pound. Mei will be well pleased with my return! Surely she will not begrudge me extra months when I am making our fortune. I even write this laboriously in English to be ready for business in the city!
But it is a strange part of the country. There is no birdsong, and at times, I feel as though I am being watched. I cannot fathom the lack of birds. Travel a mile in any direction and the birds are deafening in the trees, fighting and squabbling and singing as birds do. Yet, here, it is quiet. It lends an air of dis-ease to the place.
But it grows dark and my body is greatly fatigued, though how pleased I am to be writing this from inside the stone walls of my little house.
There was silence in the tent when Jordan let the last words fall from her lips. She looked at the younger children.
‘I think that’s enough for tonight,’ she said.
Neither of the twins complained. Bree’s eyes were wide pinwheels in the shadows of her face. ‘I didn’t hear any birds outside either,’ she said.
Karel shook his head. ‘None,’ he said.
Jordan slipped the book under her pillow. Tomorrow she would find a better hiding place for it, but she suspected she might want to read some more once the twins were asleep. Funny how there hadn’t been any birds here way back then either.
‘There’s probably a reason for it,’ she said. ‘Some natural thing we just haven’t thought of yet.’ The twins looked a bit happier when she said that, but Jordan couldn’t think of any natural explanation for the lack of birds on this stretch of the river. She could only think of bad reasons, and remembered how she’d felt when they first got here.
It was a bad place. That was what she thought. That there was something wrong with it.
Sometimes she knew things like that. Just...knew things. As though she could read things in the air. The trouble was, she didn’t always understand what it meant. She remembered thinking this was a bad place, but she didn’t have any idea why, except that when she’d first stood in the clearing, the air had tasted bad, and it had been very thick, as though too many things had happened and the memories were still there, all bunched up in the very air like invisible clouds.
She wasn’t good at explaining it, even to herself. Which was why she was seeing the psychologist. Her mum thought there was something wrong with her. She’d never come out and said so, but she’d made the appointments with the psychiatrist, hadn’t she? First the psychiatrist, then when all the tests came back clear, and Jordan didn’t have epilepsy, then came the appointments with the psychologist instead. Which mean a lot of sitting around, uncomfortable, and trying to explain things that had no explanation.
Jordan switched the torch off and lay down, wondering why they’d had to come out here and sleep on the lumpy ground. The twins were snuffling as they went off to sleep, and Jordan nudged Taffy with her feet, wondering what else the diary had to say. She listened to the night, sitting silent over the tent, and after a few minutes, when she was sure the twins were asleep – Karel was snoring – she sat up and wriggled free of her sleeping bag. She needed to pee, she told herself, and groped around for the roll of toilet paper that was somewhere near the tent flaps.
Taffy raised her head and snuffled in the darkness, wondering what Jordan was doing.
‘Come on, girl,’ Jordan whispered. ‘I just want to check, okay?’
It was pitch black outside, the sky above a blanket of wet clouds covering the stars. Or maybe there were just no stars here, like there were no birds. It wouldn’t have surprised Jordan. She glanced in the direction of the tent her father was sharing with Teddy, but there was no sound coming from it. Leaning back, she threw the toilet roll back in the tent. There was no use pretending. She was going to look around the little stone house. See if that was why she’d gotten the bad feeling when they arrived. If it was the house.
She tried waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it never changed, just seemed to grow heavier on top of her, until it felt like she was wearing it. Her thumb pressed the button and the torch came on. That was better. Another glance at the other tent, but still no movement. They must have gone to sleep in there.
Taffy gave a soft whine, and Jordan pressed her fingertips to the dog’s warm fur. ‘Just to the house,’ she whispered. ‘Then back to bed, okay?’
She could hear the river. It muttered over the stones in the darkness.