29

My wild horse became the joke of Momba Station for the better part of that year. Yandi and a string of other young black stockmen attempted to take the devil from her. Their confidence in their horsemanship was supreme, they rode her bareback with just a rope halter, though they had to blindfold her to get on, and when they were thrown they got up howling with laughter, except for one who suffered concussion. White stockmen tried to tame her, and any travelling horsemen who came through, including two lean prospectors with the hollow eyes of Old Testament prophets.

‘Having a go at du Barry’ became station talk for testing valour. ‘Mate, he’s game enough to have a go at du Barry.’

At last Willy Suttor took me aside and told me to try to sell her after giving any prospective buyers warnings about her nature. ‘You should get fifteen or twenty shillings, I think – twenty shillings for some reason doesn’t sound as extortionate as a pound even though they are the same amount. Not that du Barry,’ he continued with a smile, ‘does not hold a high place in all our affections . . .’

But I delayed, partly out of pride at getting a fiftieth of what I’d paid. I came close to offloading her to a surveyor who was short of a team. I tried to forget her. There were more important lessons to be learned that year.

It struck me early that I should approach Edward Bonney, without acquainting him with the insults Fremmel had directed his way. But Fremmel had ill will to us all, and Edward did not.

Two days after I got back, I went to Edward Bonney’s office, which was, as befitted the elder brother, more spacious than Fred’s, its bookshelf stocked with nearly as many blue leather-bound, gold-leaf entitled stud and stock books as a solicitor’s office might be with red-leathered books of case reports.

‘How is that disastrous horse of yours?’ he asked.

‘Still disastrous, Mr Bonney,’ I admitted.

‘You acknowledge it like a true man, Dickens,’ he assured me. ‘We’ve all been fooled by horses in our day. That’s why we take such delight when it happens to others. Have a seat.’

I was cheered by his consolation, which was amiable and brotherly.

I told him I must speak to him because I had been approached by Mr Fremmel.

‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Yes? And what is that priest of Mammon up to?’

‘He is convinced you have a letter from Maurice, his nephew. He offered me inducements to get hold of it, together with its postmark. I told him, and it is the truth, that I did not know one way or another if Maurice had written to you or if you are friends. Then he went on to –’

‘He told you he could help you in so many ways and he may have even extended the offer to your brother,’ said Edward, finishing my sentence.

‘He said he could even thwart my brother Alfred’s plans.’

‘The man thinks he’s the Holy Roman Emperor.’

‘To have him and du Barry in the one day made it a bleak journey home,’ I admitted.

‘But he does have the power to help you,’ Edward declared. ‘And to harm you. This is Lilliput on the Darling, where giant dreams can be impeded by minute men. Where dreams that are vaporous and big can be brought down to earth by little creatures like him, carping on interest payments.’

I nodded, surprised by the depth of his abomination for Fremmel. ‘I can pay him no heed, but I fear what he might do to my brother,’ I admitted.

‘Yes, I understand that,’ he said, thinking. Then he looked me in the eye. ‘I realise I am lucky that you came to me instead of searching for the thing and perhaps finding it and passing it to that slimy being. You don’t boast of loyalty, Plorn, but you possess it.’

I was flattered. Such a speech directed my way was unaccustomed.

‘I am a friend of Maurice, and he is the best of young men, if over-enthusiastic,’ Edward continued. ‘I have confessed my tendencies to you. My friendship with Maurice was above all that. He is now embarked on a journey of honour and compassion – over everything else, it’s that. I wouldn’t like at all for his uncle to know where he is.’

All very well, I thought, but . . .

‘And I know that’s all very well,’ he said as if in echo. ‘Look here, Dickens, I think we may be able to satisfy everyone’s hopes and at the same time protect everyone we would choose to. Have you met Heatherley out in the Cobrilla paddock near Peery Lake?’

I told him I hadn’t.

‘Heatherley did fourteen years in Van Diemen’s Land as a forger. Take Yandi or anyone you like to fetch him in. We are in need of him.’

I noticed how he had said, ‘Yandi or anyone you like . . .’ As if Yandi was no longer an essential person to him.

I found Yandi, who did seem a happier soul now that his initiation was accomplished. He called cheerily to other darks as we left, saying, ‘Mr Dickens and me are off to find that Heatherley feller.’

Yandi was a useful guide. Fred Bonney had boasted, like a proud uncle, that the Paakantji did not have maps but they had songs, and as they travelled they mentally recited the song and compared it to hills and watercourses or sumps round about to find out where they were. He’d told me, ‘If you ever hear a Paakantji say he knows the song for the country, you can be at ease. You’ll never get lost.’

The country over which we rode on the way to Cobrilla was undulating, with revelations beyond most low ridges and now and then a treasure – a waterhole, or mulla mulla grass with white cones of flowers, or the vivid purple blooms of the parakeelya desert bush in the midst of red soil. For I too was acquiring a map of this country. I could tell a clump of cow Mitchell grass from Queensland bluegrass and from neverfail, the grass that defied droughts.

We got to the gate into Cobrilla paddock late in the day, and advanced into a basin full of saltbush to Heatherley’s hut. He was not there but rode in at last from inspecting Cobrilla’s western boundary. He was a man in his late thirties, I would say, tall but with an apologetic stoop and amply bearded. He didn’t seem surprised when I told him I’d been sent to fetch him by Edward Bonney.

It was getting cold in the manner of this desert country, and he invited us into his hut to eat dinner. Several crayon sketches of the countryside were pinned on the walls, along with a watercolour of what looked like the Lake District back home. It looked recent so was possibly done from memory. When I praised the drawings he’d done of the Mutawintji mountains and the Cullowie artesian springs, all he replied was, ‘Learned a mite of draftsmanship once.’

After dinner, Heatherley offered me his bed for the night, but I liked my swag, the glint of my own fire and the southern hemisphere sky thick with so many constellations.

The next morning we left early, when the hills were pure fawn edges in the clearest early light. Whatever the day came to deliver, this country looked newborn each morning and in winter, with frost or condensation, glinted forth promises it might not keep.

I asked Heatherley if the priest or Cultay had come through Cobrilla on their search for Barrakoon.

‘I wouldn’t have objected to seeing a priest,’ said Heatherley, ‘my old mother being of that persuasion. But no.’

I delivered him to Edward Bonney’s office a little before noon, and waited in the dining room for a glimmer of enlightenment as to why Edward had sent for him by way of voices overheard through the closed door.

After a while Edward emerged, his manner secretive but jovial. He thanked me for fetching Heatherley and said, ‘This is to be a confidential matter between us. Are you happy that it be so, Plorn?’

I said of course, and he said I had always been a properly discreet chap, and that since I had come to him with news of Fremmel’s machinations, I deserved an explanation. ‘Come here and have a sherry with me at five,’ he suggested. ‘Willy Suttor’s got the right materials for Heatherley, so he’ll be over there by then. I’ll tell you all in confidence. Very well?’

Naturally enough, I agreed, believing Edward Bonney had no interest in me in terms of his ‘tendency’. Meanwhile, I went over to the blacksmith’s shop and found Larkin and his assistant crafting a metal gate frame.

Larkin, child of convicts, carried that quietly intoxicating air of a man who had found precisely his time and place and companions.

‘Have you heard from the priest?’ I asked Larkin.

‘I don’t think he’ll ever send me news, Mr Plorn. But one of the Afghan camel drivers who was here recently saw Father Charisse trailing behind Barrakoon’s people on the road up near Mount Browne. I asked did he have a horse, and the Ghan told me, “No horse, sahib.” Walking, he said, and looking thin. Probably had gut problems from some of the food.’

We let our minds play on this image of the cassocked monk keeping up with the ruthless pace of a clan of darks on their travels.

‘A strange choice for a priest to make,’ I said.

‘If I were him, I would stay with my own people,’ Larkin replied, ‘which is certainly the way things are normally done. But he has a different wisdom.’

We thought about the monk, and of how far from the normal exercise of clerics like the Reverend Rutledge in town he had strayed. It was a strange comfort to know Anglicans were not tempted to anything as extravagant as Father Charisse was chasing.

‘I hope they give him a second kangaroo skin against the cold at night.’

‘My wife gave him one of the quilts,’ said the blacksmith. ‘The thing is, he can claim to be the apostle to the Paakantji . . .’

It struck me that it was midsummer in England and I wondered if the guvnor had enough time to enjoy himself at Gad’s Hill. Falstaff’s Hill just by it. The Medway behind, the Thames before. A place not far from where the guvnor had grown up, in Chatham. It seemed Father had always wanted to live on that hill. We were required to memorise Falstaff’s speech from Shakespeare: ‘But, my lads, my lads, tomorrow morning, by four o’clock early at Gad’s Hill, there are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses. I have visors for you all; you have horses for yourselves.’

Aunt Georgie said once, casually, that this speech from Henry IV added hundreds if not thousands to the value of Gad’s Hill as far as Father was concerned. The guvnor seemed, every chance that he got, to call it Shakespeare’s Gad’s Hill, and he would not have been as proud of Gad’s Hill had it been the scene of a tragic event in Shakespeare as he was that it was a sportive one, in the spirit of the place.

I couldn’t remember much of my childhood before he owned it, and it was associated with those particularly rich, full times of which I wanted to remind Alfred; when it was full of people and we children all ran mad in the garden. And Uncle Henry Austin helped him build a wonderful tunnel under the road into the area we called the Wilderness, on the other side, where he had his little chalet.

In the spirit of these memories, I wrote to Aunt Georgie to find out how the summer was progressing, and then to Mama at Gloucester Terrace, boasting a little of my colonial accomplishments.

By the time I’d finished writing to Mama it was nearly five o’clock. Edward welcomed me into his office and poured us each a glass of port, saying, ‘Heatherley’s labours kept him late into the day and he will rest tonight with Willy Suttor and be off home to Cobrilla paddock tomorrow. It is fortunate for my brother and I that British society, combined with the penal history of the colonies, generates an army of reclusive men, and Heatherley is yet another of them.’

He paused briefly and then said, ‘I did receive a letter from Maurice. It is a confidential letter between him and me. But now, Heatherley is a remarkable fellow with remarkable gifts who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for forging elegant bills of exchange and promissory notes. He arrived in Tasmania on the heels of some Canadian and American rebels who had taken part in an uprising in Ontario. Our consul-general in New York warned the government that an American plot was afoot to rescue some of the rebels by having whaling ships rendezvous with them. Letters to the prisoners from the conspirators – friends, that is, of the prisoners – were intercepted, as were replies from the American convicts. So the authorities in Van Diemen’s Land promised Heatherley his ticket-of-leave if he forged new letters, which he did. These caused a number of the prisoners to be arrested for attempted escape when they arrived at the wrong point on the coast to be picked up by their rescue ships, while the whalers likewise hove to at a false meeting place and ultimately continued their voyage without a single escapee to their credit.

‘So I’ve asked Mr Heatherley to use his magic with Maurice’s letter, interspersing what Maurice wrote with false information. He has also aged and marked an envelope with an Adelaide postmark, since postmarks are one of his skills as well. I hope you get the same small thrill of subversion from it as I do.’

I smiled.

Edward told me I could use one of the drovers to deliver the revised letter to Mr Fremmel with a note to him saying I’d found it inside a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in Mr Bonney’s office. Edward sent me into the office, and there it was in the Golden Treasury. The envelope prepared by Heatherley had the slight furriness around its edges that oft-handled and specially stored envelopes have. When I came out of the office again Edward Bonney winked at me, in a modestly triumphant frame of mind. ‘It’s dangerous to cross Mr Fremmel, but it’s dangerous to cross the Bonneys too,’ he said. ‘I’ll always be grateful to you, Plorn.’

Beneath my excitement I did feel a little like a man on a rock ledge, fascinated by the prospects before me but uncertain of how secure my footing was. But one day, when the time was ripe, I would have a splendid story to tell Alfred, perhaps in his stock and station agency in Hamilton, Victoria, should that come to pass.

Just after Clough turned his horse to town with the forged letter and envelope, enclosed in a larger envelope still, I saw Heatherley move out from the store, grateful to be returning to Cobrilla.