It was on Thornhill’s return from that trip to Sydney that things began to change.

It took them some time to realise that a crowd of blacks was gathering on the point. They came down from the ridges in twos and threes, the men walking in that deliberate way they had, burdened only with a few spears. The women came after, each with a baby on her hip and a long bag hanging from her forehead down her back. Others came in canoes, drifting up or down the river with the tide, the little slips of bark holding a man and a woman, with a child between, and the water by some miracle not coming in over the gunwale.

They came, and they did not seem to go again. Where one feather of smoke had lifted into the sky around the point, now there were many smudged together. Where the Thornhills had occasionally heard a shout or the cry of a child, now they could hear voices all the time, things being chopped with a dull thudding, and the sounds of women calling that came to them on the breeze. There were more kangaroos than there had ever been, and every day groups of blacks could be seen coming back with an animal swinging between them slung on a stick.

The mood at the hut became a little thoughtful. No one liked to meet anyone else’s eye. Even the children became silent and careful. Sal kept them close under her hand. Thornhill went about his business, cutting down another tree near the hut and standing over Ned and Dan while they broke it up to burn. But he found himself stopping as he worked, listening for sounds beyond the clearing.

Sal had made the mark that meant they were into the month of February of the year 1814. It was the steamy height of summer, the cobs of corn growing almost visibly. Every morning the sun came up already in its full heat and filled the valley so there seemed no air left to breathe. Night brought no relief. The valley began to feel like a funnel in which the Thornhills were trapped with their black neighbours. Thornhill knew that Swift and O’Gorman were waiting up at Ebenezer for the Hope to come and collect their potatoes, but from day to day he postponed the trip.

One afternoon he set the men to widening the track down to the river and slipped away. No one saw him as he made his way up behind the hut and onto the rock platform, following it around the point, past the fish and the boat in the rock, until he was directly above the blacks’ camp.

It was a shock when he looked down through the trees. Where there had been half-a-dozen adults and a handful of children around one little fire, now there were more blacks than he had ever seen together at one time. There was a settlement of humpies crowded close to each other, and campfires everywhere. The people themselves were as hard to count as ants, moving around, disappearing into the shadows and reappearing again.

On one count he got to forty. That was enough.

He went back to the yard where the family was trying to make themselves cool in the shade. Just having a bit of a get-together, he said airily. Same as we might ourselves.

Sal, knowing him so well, heard something in his tone but said nothing. She went about her business, wiping Mary’s face clean with the flannel, concentrating on getting every speck of dirt off. I got a few jobs for you up here this afternoon, Will, if you would, she said, looking up at him. Don’t go back down the corn patch. Her voice was light, but he saw Mary’s eyes turn to her sideways, her chin still held firm in Sal’s fingers while she worked away with the flannel.

Are the savages coming for us, mumma? Bub asked, quite matter-of-fact. Silly thing, Sal cried, they ain’t coming nowhere for nobody, and started on his face with the flannel so he said no more.

Thornhill went into the hut, feeling the heat radiating down from the bark roof, and got the gun down from its pegs. He looked along its length and checked that the powder was still dry, the shot handy in its bag. Peered down into the circle of darkness that death could come out of. When he heard Sal approaching the door, he quickly put it back on the wall. But she knew. She looked at him standing with his hands empty and her eyes went to the gun on its pegs. He saw her start to say something, and cut across it. Nest of damn spiders in the barrel, he said.

They had their meal early that night. There was a feeling of needing to be ready.

Thornhill did not ask himself, ready for what?

It was only just dusk when Sal got the children into bed and sang to them. When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch. When will that be, say the bells of Stepney. I do not know, says the great bell at Bow. Her voice sounded parched. He heard in it a quaver of tenderness.

Or perhaps of fear.

The two of them sat up late over the last of the fire, watching in silence as the draughts flickered over the coals. In their corner the children snuffled and sighed. Dick flung himself over and called out something in a blurred voice. From the lean-to Ned was snoring with a noise like a shuddering saw. They heard him cough, could imagine Dan turning him over, and in the silence that fell they could hear the sounds coming from the camp.

At first it was a sharp clapping, insistent as a heartbeat. Sal turned her face to Thornhill’s. In the firelight her eyes were pools of shadow but he saw how her mouth was tight. Before he could think of reassurance, the singing started: a high strong wailing of a man’s voice, and other voices in a kind of drone underneath. It was not a tune, nothing cheerful that you might listen to like Oranges and Lemons, more a kind of chant as you might hear in a church. It was a sound that worked its way under the skin.

Thornhill tried to speak up loud. Having a bit of a sing-song, he said, but his mouth had gone dry. He tried again: Like that Scabby Bill. Remember Scabby Bill? Of course she remembered him. But she knew, as well as he did, that this authoritative chorus of noise was very different from the thin song that Scabby Bill had managed in return for a mouthful of liquor.

He had to force himself not to whisper. They’ll get sick of it by and by.

Out there, between the cracks in the walls, the night was as black as the inside of an ear. The huge air stirred, full of hostile life. He imagined it: the blacks creeping up to the hut, silent as lizards on their wide quiet feet. They might at this very moment be peering in at them. The noises were getting louder, the sort of sound it would take an army to make.

The words not said were like a creature pacing up and down between them.

Now Ned and Dan, woken out of their sleep, came in. Ned went over to the lamp and stood beside it as if the glow would keep him safe. They coming to get us, Mr Thornhill, he said.

Hear them laughing, Dan added. They can’t hardly wait.

It was true, they could hear distant laughter. Thornhill felt fear cold on his skin at the picture in his mind of them preparing their spears with a butcher’s glee, how sharp they were, how quick they would kill a white man.

Ned’s voice was on the edge of panic. They coming to spear us in the guts, ain’t they, and Bub’s voice came quavery, Don’t let them spear me Da! He could hear Johnny catch the fear and set up a snivelling that set Mary off too. Sal went over to where they lay and wrapped her arms around them.

If they’d a wanted to spear us they’d a done it ten times over by now, Thornhill said. Then he thought that might not be the best argument to follow. We got no call to worry, he announced, but no one seemed convinced.

Now Willie was speaking up. They get away with it, we’ll never see the end of it, Da, he said. We best show them good and proper. To Thornhill’s ears, the words had a secondhand feel about them, borrowed from someone else. Smasher perhaps, or Sagitty Birtles.

He saw the boy anew: a mulish skinny lad who had outgrown his strength, all bony neck and bat-ears and a mouth that was trying to be strong. Willie stood squinting at him, scratching the back of one leg with a long bare foot. Get the gun, Da, whyn’t you get the gun?

But Dick had got up from the stool and faced up to his brother. Ain’t no call for the gun, Willie, he said. They just having a get-together, like Da says. Willie grabbed his shoulder and shook it. Bulldust, he cried. Bloody bulldust that is, we got to get the bloody gun.

Shut it the both of youse! Thornhill heard his voice filling the hut, and the boys said nothing more. Then Dan spoke out of the shadows near the fire. I got the knife here in my hand, he said, his voice rasping on his fear. Them buggers come close, they get it in their black guts.

After he had spoken, the high indignant voices and the rattle of the sticks seemed louder. The hut had become a compressed cube of fear.

Standing by the half-open shutter, Thornhill remembered the nights in Newgate, listening to the beating of his own heart, not able to stop himself waiting for the next beat, the next, and the next, and trying not to wonder how many heartbeats he had left. He was stifling in the hut, could not bear the closed-in feeling. It was too much like being in a coffin deep in the earth.

He started to speak, fell over the words, coughed, tried again: I’ll just take a look. His voice was thin in his own ears. Make sure they’re not up to no mischief.

~

It was a relief to be outside in the fragrant night. A full moon rode in the sky, dimming the stars and lighting the forest in shades of grey. Under the noise from the point, the place was going about its business, ticking and whirring secretively. Something rattled in the dry bark near the woodpile and the black shape of a bird swooped over the clearing.

Glad of the moonlight, Thornhill made his way up to the shelf of flat rock and around towards the camp. He wanted to be unseen, but he knew how his shirt, dingy though it was, must stand out bright against the trees. His skin, that inescapable envelope, glowed white and dangerous. He tried to move without making a sound, but by moonlight his familiar place had become somewhere else. Rocks came at him unexpectedly, trees were not where they were by day. He stumbled along against the grain of the place until, from behind the powdery flank of a paperbark, he could see the camp. No one turned or pointed. If the blacks knew the white man was there, they were not concerned.

They had a huge blaze going at the centre of their camp. He could see the firelight illuminating the trees from beneath, flickering on the skin of the trunks, making a cave of light. Figures passed in front of the fire so it winked on and off.

A circle of men stamped and jumped around the fire, and one sat at the side with his legs crossed and his face tilted up, singing in that way that made everything urgent. They were striped with white, their faces masks in which their eyes moved. The firelight made them insubstantial, webs of light dancing.

Women and children sat around them clapping sticks together to make that brittle pulse underlying the song. The women’s long breasts were outlined with white, with a collar effect around the upper chest that was absurdly like the neck of Sal’s bodice. Their faces, like those of the men, were barred with white. The children were painted too, even the smallest of their faces. It was only a bit of pipeclay, but it gave them the look of the very earth made human.

War paint, he thought. They’re doing a bleeding war dance. He was surprised by the calmness he felt at the idea, and realised he had been expecting this moment for a long time.

The dancing was recognisable as being from the same world as Scabby Bill’s, but it was as little like his as Thornhill’s warped hat was like the Governor’s plumed tricorn. Scabby Bill had danced with his eyes nearly closed, his face blank, absenting himself from the moment. These men danced with their eyes full of light from the fire, the lines of white on their bodies twisting with life.

After a moment Thornhill recognised Long Jack. He crouched with the others, his spears in his hand, then leaped with a powerful spring and came down again stamping his feet and scuffing the dust up into the air. Jack was no longer a man, but a kangaroo made human.

To the man listening behind the tree, there was no more sense to the sound than there was to an insect’s drone, no sense of it having a beginning or an end. But then the sticks all stopped on the same instant, the voice of the singer gave a final flick and was silent. He realised it was the same as the way everyone in church stopped singing at once, because they knew that they had got to the end of the hymn. Watching from behind the paperbark, Thornhill was the only one who did not.

They started up again, with a different beat this time. Now there was one old man dancing alone, his feet stamping into the ground, so that the dust flew up around him, glowing with light: Whisker Harry. His body was sinewy with muscle, turning into the dance like a fish in a current. The pounding of his feet seemed the pulse of the earth itself. When he began to sing, he threw the song up into the air, its long crooked line the sound of the blood in the veins of the place.

Thornhill saw that this person was not Whisker Harry, who existed only in the minds of those who had given him that name. This man, dancing in his white paint, wrapped in a mystery of song, was another person entirely.

The others watched, clapping one stick against another. He saw that they were not simply watching a man dance, as people might sit at the Cherry Gardens and watch folk do a jig. There was a drama alive on their faces. There was a tale that they all knew being told in the language of this dance. It was like Christmas at St Mary Magdalene: everyone in the church took pleasure in the telling of the nativity, the same from year to year.

This old fellow is a book, Thornhill thought, and they are reading him. He remembered the Governor’s library, the stern portraits, and the rows of gleaming books with their gold lettering. They could reveal their secrets, but only to a person who knew how to read them.

Watching the power in this man’s thighs as he thudded his feet into the dust, Thornhill remembered that he had slapped him and scolded him like a child. It had been a mistake, and it frightened him now. Whisker Harry was not just a stubbly fellow with an old man’s spindly shanks, as unimportant as the almsmen at the Watermen’s Hall, doddering along for their bowl of gruel. This man was old in the same way the Governor was old. A man should no more push and slap him than he would the Governor with his shiny sword hanging by his side.

The steady clapping of the sticks and the rise and fall of the wailing voice beat back from the cliffs, muddled and multiplied, a river of sound bending over its stones. Thornhill stood behind the tree, feeling drawn deep into the sound, the beat of the sticks like the pumping of his own heart.

~

When he got back to the hut, Dan pulled him in. Get the bleeding door closed for pity’s sake, he cried. And the bar up quick.

It was stuffy inside. The lamplight flickered on their faces as they turned to him. How many of the buggers is there? Dan said. A hundred, two hundred? His voice had gone thin, frightened of the answer it might get. No more’n a dozen, Thornhill announced. Maybe not so many. But this lie sounded as hollow as a quart-pot.

Sal had got the children up and dressed. They were all crowded around the table on which the slush lamp gave off its smoky light: Ned and Dan, and the children wan in its light. Only Dick was not around the lamp with the rest of them. He lay on the mattress, staring up into the rafters.

On the table Sal had set out everything they owned: the pannikins, the teacups, the knife with the broken tip, her other skirt neatly folded. There was Willie’s pocketknife and a bonnet she had just finished sewing. There was the bag of flour, the smaller one of sugar, and the hand-mill for the hominy. They were laid out on the table as if on a shop counter.

They’ll leave us alone, Will, if we give them what we got, she said. Just let them help themselves. Mrs Herring done it one time. Her voice was very matter-of-fact, as if she had often dealt with savages. They got no call to do us no harm.

In the shadows, someone went huh in disbelief. Thornhill thought it might be Willie and turned on him, but the boy stared back expressionlessly.

Ned spoke up: We kin shoot the buggers, cain’t we? His voice was uncertain. But Dan cut across him, his voice gone high as a woman’s. They’ll burn the place, he cried. Flush us out like possums.

It was a relief to channel fear into movement. Thornhill took a step across the room to Dan and belted him on the side of his head. Shut your gob, Dan! he shouted. He forced himself to speak calmly: Let them know what we got, that’s all we need to do. He took the gun down, and Willie was beside him straight away handing him the bag of shot, the pouch of powder, the ramming-rod.

He felt everyone’s eyes on him as he loaded the gun. He knew, as perhaps they did not, how pointless a thing it was. He could go through the rigmarole of loading it up and squinting along its barrel and firing. But after that, what? He could imagine the fumbling panic to reload: to ram home the shot and the wadding, pour the powder into the pan, cock the flint and fire.

In the time it took to do all that, they would be pincushions, if that was the way the blacks wanted it.

He felt a bubble of laughter press upwards, and forced it back down. He saw with surprise that his hands were steady as he poured the powder.

Then he went to the shutter, pushed it open and stuck the barrel out blindly into the night. Put this in yer pipe and smoke it, he shouted. The recoil was a blow into his shoulder that made him stagger and he was blinded for a moment by the flash. The explosion blasted his eardrums.

He lowered the muzzle and listened to the endless echoes of the shot bound and rebound, rumbling away down the river between the cliffs that hemmed them in. That’ll keep them off, he said, and closed the shutter like a man with a good job done.

But down on the point, the clapping and the singing did not miss a beat. Thornhill imagined the blacks down there, hearing the shot, turning back to the dance with their faces stern. He imagined Long Jack, his face a landscape in itself, gazing up towards the hut, listening.

~

For every night of that week, the blacks danced and sang. All those nights, the cliffs echoed with the sharp chips of sound from the sticks, while the people in the hut lay listening, their possessions outside the door, covered with dew in the morning but untouched. After that first dawn, when they awoke amazed to be unspeared and unscalped, the fear was less. Whatever was happening, it did not seem to have anything to do with the family in the hut, but was some imperative of the blacks themselves.

Then they disappeared, as quietly as a tide going out, leaving only the usual handful of people coming and going in their unhurried way.

The Thornhills tried to go about their business, but nothing was the same. In the hut, so few: two men, a halfwit and a stripling. A woman and four infants. And the gun hanging on the wall, nothing but a machine for noise and hot air. Thornhill had known all this before, but now he could not forget it, even for a moment.

Sal knew it too. Something in her had shifted. He did not hear her humming any more, and came across her sometimes staring at nothing, a crease between her eyebrows. When the women trailed past the hut on their way into the forest, she waved and smiled, but kept her distance. She did not go over among them anymore, and no more bowls and digging-sticks were added to her collection.

~

It began to seem a dangerous innocence to have only one gun, and only one man who knew how to fire it. Thornhill bought three more guns from John Horne up at Richmond and made pegs for them to rest on, one on top of the other up the wall. Then he spent a day showing Dan, Ned and Willie how to fire the things.

To his amazement, Ned proved a natural with the gun. Clumsy with everything else, he was deft at pouring the shot into the barrel and tamping it down. He hardly seemed to take aim, and there was the block of wood they used as a target tumbling off the fencepost again. Ned had at last found something he was good at.

Dan was awkward, dropping the ramming-rod, spilling powder everywhere, could not seem to get the hang of pressing his cheek against the butt and fitting it into his shoulder. The block of wood was never as much as scorched by any of his shots. He preferred the idea of a club he could swing in his hand. He spent a morning in the forest, coming back with a stick that had a hard bulge in one end, and spent his evenings whittling away until it was weighted and shaped to suit him.

When it came his turn to try the gun, Willie was pale. He wiped his hands down his britches. Thornhill saw that his hands were shaking as he poured the powder onto the pan. You’re only a lad, Willie, he said. No call for you to do nothing. But the boy was determined. The first time he did not push the butt firmly enough into his shoulder and when he pulled the trigger the gun gave him a blow that sent him tumbling backwards. But he was up in a moment, grim-faced, to try again.

Thornhill knew that four guns, and three men who could use them, would not be enough if the blacks came for them. But that outline, man plus gun, was something they knew to fear. The hope was that their fear would do the trick, rather than the gun itself.

He could not forget the way it had felt in the nights of the war dances, to know how close the wall of forest crowded down. A spear could sail out of the trees and strike a man down without him even seeing the hand that threw it.

He determined to clear a space around the hut. But how wide would such a moat have to be? He cut down a stalk from one of the grass-trees and felt something of a fool, standing with his spear in his hand and everyone watching. Sal had a look on her face he could not read as she stood in the door of the hut.

Do I make a good savage, lads? he asked, trying to make a joke of it, and even Ned had the wit to laugh. Thornhill turned himself side-on, the way he had seen the blacks do, to gather together the muscles of his chest and shoulders. He felt the spear leave his hand and pictured it curving smoothly through the air, the way theirs did, and landing tip first in the ground. But his stick only wobbled, and skidded along the dirt a few yards off.

He turned to the watching men and laughed. See what I mean, he called. Up at the hut Sal watched. No call to get ourselves fussed. He did not share with them the way his shoulder hurt.

Now Dick was picking up the spear, hefting it in his small hand. He seemed hardly to be trying, but there the thing was, singing along the air and skewering the ground a good fifty yards away, far in among the trees.

It was easy to see it was not the first time Dick had thrown a spear, or even the twenty-first or the hundred-and-first. Thornhill saw on his face that the boy realised what he had told them, but this was not the moment to take him to task. This was the moment to realise how far a spear could travel, even when thrown by a skinny boy not yet eight years old. That could wipe the smile right off a man’s face.

He paced out the distance the spear had gone, added another few yards, and got them to work. Every tree—apart from the one on which Sal marked the weeks—was hacked at with the axe until it fell. Every bush was grubbed out, every loose rock was rolled away and the whole lot fenced. As far as this bumpy land could be, a protective circle around the hut was flattened. Nothing remained that any man could hide behind.

They won’t try nothing on us now, he told them. He could see Sal watching his mouth make the authoritative words, and could not meet her eye.

He had made something of this place. He had cut down trees, got rid of bushes, chopped out the tussocks that were big enough for snakes to make a home in. With each day that passed, a little more progress could be measured: one more tree cut down, one more yard of bushes cleared, another length of fence.

He loved the thing a fence did to a place. The tidy square of ground inside a fence had a different look from the ground outside it. A fence told a man how far he had travelled, and beyond the last length of fence he could see where he might go next.

There was this about it, though: no matter how much a man did in this place, the everlasting forest could not be got rid of, only pushed back. Beyond the patch of bare earth he was so proud of, the river-oaks hissed and the gumtrees rattled and scraped the way they always had. Up above the cliffs a flock of birds, black against the heat-bleached afternoon sky, heeled and veered together like a scarf flying in the wind.

~

The idea of Smasher’s biters had become more interesting to Thornhill. He was not looking forward to Smasher gloating, but swallowed his pride one calm Sunday at the beginning of March and took the skiff downriver.

He could hear the dogs long before he could see the hut. Their barking echoed raggedly around the valley. As he walked up to the hut they lunged at him on the ends of their chains. He gave them a wide berth, skirting round to where Smasher was clearing bushes off another few yards of land.

Smasher straightened up, watching Thornhill. His face was sour and pale under his hat like a man not eating any greens.

Thornhill did not waste time on pleasantries. Want to buy a couple of dogs off you, he said, straight off. But Smasher wanted to spin it out. Savages come visiting I hear, he said, his smile full of gaps. Won’t leave you be after all, that it? but Thornhill did not wait to hear him out. Couple a bitches and a dog, five pound, take it or leave it. Smasher pretended to consider, scratching his jaw so the stubble rasped. Thing is, lot of call for my dogs just now, he said. His narrow face was rubbery with triumph. I could say not less than ten pound, Will, and cheap at the price.

But Thornhill would not be sneered at. Guineas, Smasher, he said. Five guineas my last word, and turned, was walking back towards the boat when Smasher gave way, as he knew he would. Got to stick together, he called, and Thornhill looked back.

Smasher was a sad skinny figure, standing crooked on his crooked bit of land, his trousers flapping ragged around his ankles, his bare feet caked with dirt, sweat streaked down his face. Give us the five guineas then, he called. One white man to another.

~

On their way back to the hut for Thornhill to pick out his dogs, Smasher shouted over their barking: Got something to show you. Some sly excitement in his voice made Thornhill hesitate but Smasher edged him into the doorway.

After the brilliance of the sun it was hard to see much inside, just a shadow split with bands of brightness where the light came in between the sheets of bark. But there was some sense of movement in a corner, and a powerful smell, part animal, part something gone rotten. As his eyes adjusted Thornhill could make out something, a mattress was it, with a thin hot ribbon of sunlight, and beside it a dark shape. There was the clink of a chain, and another breathing, not Smasher’s and not his own. He thought it must be a dog, but in the moment of the thought he saw that it was a person crouching with a stripe of sunlight zigzagging down its body: a black woman, cringing against the wall, panting so he could see the teeth gleaming in her pained mouth, and the sores where the chain had chafed, red jewels against her black skin.

Smasher pushed past Thornhill and shouted, Get your idle black arse out of there. Thornhill saw the whip catch her around the small of the back as she stumbled outside. In the sunlight her skin was flaky and grey. She stood holding up the chain that joined her ankles.

Under that sun, so white-hot it seemed to make things dark, Smasher was a puny man with a whip at the ready in his hand. He was smiling a small wet smile. Black velvet, he said, his tongue flickering out around his lips. Only kind of velvet a man’s got round here, unless that old Herring piece takes your fancy, which she don’t mine. When he had enough of laughing at the idea of Mrs Herring, he came up close to Thornhill. She done it with me and Sagitty, he whispered. Back and front like a couple a spoons.

For a terrible vivid instant, a scene lit by lightning, Thornhill imagined himself taking the woman. Could feel her skin under his fingers, her long legs straining against him. It was no more than a single hot instant, the animal in him. You game, Thornhill? Smasher was asking. Only watch out, she got claws like a poxy cat. Thornhill could not find any words, managed only to shake his head and turn away.

Smasher took flame as if he had been waiting. Too good for a bit of free fanny, are you? he shouted, and spat out of the side of his mouth. The spit glittered as it arced through the air and fell on the dirt. When even your precious Thomas Blackwood has a black bitch.

Thornhill was seized with a desperation to get away from this airless place. If he did not he would stifle to death there and then. Damn your eyes, Smasher, forget them dogs, he shouted harshly. Smasher’s tight smile faded. Give us just the five then, he said, but Thornhill did not want the dogs now, not at any price. They were maddening him, snarling and barking, their teeth shining with spit, their muscular tongues working in and out of their long throats.

It was a relief to shout. I said forget the dogs! Shouting let something out, burned it off. He heard his voice echo from the ridges. Felt that the whole place, every tree, every rock leaning down the slope, was listening.

But Smasher was not impressed. Takes a certain kind of a man, don’t it, he said after a while. To handle them dogs. His tone was conversational. Maybe you ain’t that man, Will Thornhill.

As Thornhill got into the skiff and heaved at the oars, forcing the boat along, he turned his face away from Smasher. The greasy smoke hung low over the water.

~

Imagining the moment of telling Sal about what he had seen—even thinking the words in his own mind—filled him with shame. It was bad enough to carry the picture in his memory. Thinking the thought, saying the words, would make him the same as Smasher, as if Smasher’s mind had got into his when he saw the woman in the hut and felt that instant of temptation. He had done nothing to help her. Now the evil of it was part of him.

~

If he picked his time right, when every man on the river was getting in his harvest, a trader with a boat full of reaping hooks could do well on the Hawkesbury. Thornhill had bought ten dozen at the beginning of February and had sold the lot by the steamy first week of March, even the one with the split handle. Now he was gliding down on the tide by moonlight, the Hope riding high and skittish on the water.

For the sake of a quiet life he always agreed with Sal when she reminisced about the way things were back Home. He agreed that the light was too harsh here, the days too hot, the nights too cold. There were too many snakes and things that stung. It was the end of the earth, with the nearest neighbour an hour away in the boat. He never tried to explain to her that, in spite of the mosquitoes and the brassy sun, the Lower Hawkesbury had its consolations.

The river was all silver and black in the moonlight. Above the cliffs a waxy moon floated over the frayed horizon of trees, making the stars pale in its light.

Night on the river could be sweet, and part of the sweetness was how well it was known to him. He could see the rounded hump of his point along the metallic water, the way the ridges dipped and rose over the valley of the First Branch. They were as familiar to him now as Wapping Stairs and Swan Wharf had been.

He was calmed, full of pleasure as he sat in the stern of the Hope, feeling the river push back against the tiller like another person. He had thought to die a kind of death in coming here, but was beginning to see that a man did not have to be Jesus Christ to rise from that particular death.

He took his time making the Hope fast, reluctant to leave the night. On the way up the slope he paused beside the corn, listening to its little secretive creaking sounds in the moonlight. Like everyone else’s, his was ready to harvest. The cobs with their soft gold tassles had flourished in the heat of these summer days, growing five and six on a plant, wealth on a stalk, crowding around him with their papery rustle.

They would harvest in a few days and, at ten shillings the bushel, they would make a good few pounds. Easy money, when all he had done was stick a peck of seeds into the earth and wait.

~

By night the hut was no longer a box sitting hard on the dirt but a loose container of yellow light streaming out between each sheet of bark. Where it poured from the doorway onto the ground outside, it made the bloodless moonlight seem another kind of darkness.

He knew how it felt to be in there with the fire leaping up the chimney and the lamp on the table: safe, enclosed. But from out here it was obvious what a frail and porous thing the hut was. The bulge of the ridge dwarfed it and the breeze smothered the sounds of the people sitting in their hot yellow bubble.

He knew that Sal had callers: he’d seen the boats drawn up at the landing-place. As he came closer he could hear the rumble of men’s voices from inside.

He had not spoken to Smasher since the day, two weeks ago, when he had seen the woman in the hut. Turned away when he sailed past Smasher’s Arm. He let Andrews from Mullet Island do the trade in Smasher’s lime now. He had tried to put the picture of the woman and the red jewels of blood on her skin away in some part of his memory where he did not have to see it.

A person coming in from the leafy smell of the night was like to suffocate in the hot stink of men and rum, and be blinded by the dirty light of the lamp. Smasher was there with Missy at his feet. Sagitty had brought his neighbour George Twist, an angry stumping man with legs bowed from rickets and his hat jammed down tight over his eyes night and day. Loveday’s gawky length was slumped over the table and Mrs Herring sat up prim on the other side. In the corner beside the chimney Blackwood sat cupping an elbow, his face half-hidden by his hand.

At the sound of the door opening Sal turned, fright on her face. Loveday turned too, in an exaggerated way, drunk enough to have become a clumsy machine. Here is your breadwinner, Mrs T, he said, and Smasher did not miss a beat, coming in on top of him. Crumb-winner, more like, he shouted, and that got them started. Sagitty thumped on the table with his hand, he thought it was so funny, and laughed with a strange high noise that could have been sobs. Thornhill saw what he had not seen before, that Sagitty was something of a lickspittle to Smasher. Like a couple a spoons.

Sal poured her husband a tot and gave it to him. They got Spider, Will! she said. Smasher, tell him about Spider. Smasher did not need any encouraging to tell the story again. Mrs Webb had been alone with the children on that sad chip of civilisation called Never Fail. Webb was away down the river borrowing a reaping-hook, his own having been stolen by the natives the week before.

When Webb was on the place, he did not let the blacks come within his fences, ran out with the gun if he had to, to make them leave. But with Spider away, Sophia Webb had let them come right up to the hut, and they charmed the silly woman, too softhearted for her own good. One of them got her talking at the door, capering about and playing the fool, so that she gave him a dish of tea and a doughboy to go with it. Meanwhile half-a-dozen of the others were busy out of sight down in the field, and while Sophia Webb was pressing another doughboy on her new friend they had stripped every last cob.

Telling the story again, Smasher was blotchy in the face with anger. Whyn’t she ask them in to have a little kip in the bed while she were at it? he said. And a puff of her man’s pipe and a sup of his rum? He was so entertained by his own wit that the few teeth in his mouth could have been counted. But Thornhill could see he did not find it funny. His laughter was just another way of being eaten up with rage.

The widow Herring was speaking up from over by the fire, chuckling around her pipe as she spoke. Poor booby, she were taken in just like old Mr Barnes in Hatter’s Lane, she said. My brother Tobias kept him gabbing at the door and I slipped in behind. Fingered a card of ribbon off of his counter, got a half-crown for it later. She puffed away, smiling. They do got a charming way about them when they please.

I ain’t got no cards of ribbon, Mrs Herring, Sagitty said. He could not hide a shake of anger in his voice. I had four bags of wheat, just into the bags and that, buggers come and robbed me. George Twist had caught alight at Mrs Herring’s mildness, too. Asking for trouble, ain’t they, he said, his chin sticking out as he looked around waiting for anyone to disagree.

Twist was never a happy drunk. He had hogs up on his place and was a good customer, buying as much salt and as many kegs as Thornhill cared to bring him, and shipping the pork out on the Hope. Just the same, Thornhill could not warm to him. He had never told Sal, but Twist was famous for the fact that one of his hogs had killed his youngest infant, and rumour on the river had it that he refused a burial on the grounds that the hog might as well finish what he had started.

There was more to the story about Spider. He had come back with the reaping-hook while the blacks were still there. He had the gun with him and got off a shot, but the blacks overpowered him while he was trying to reload. One stood over him, daring him with his spear, while they made Sophia cook them every egg the hens had laid, scoffed all the pork, and ate their precious store of sugar out of the bag in handfuls.

They did not molest her, poor toothless skinny woman that she was. Even Smasher did not suggest that. But they put on the few clothes the Webbs had: Sophia’s good bonnet with the pink ribbon, the shawl that had been her mother’s, Spider’s spare shirt. Shiny with pork-fat, they capered around in these, jabbering away as if a bonnet with a pink ribbon were the best joke in the world. Finally they carried away everything that could be carried away: the axe, the spade, the box of tea, the pannikins, even the little girl’s rag doll that one of them fancied.

Webb’s oldest, a surly freckled boy, kept saying, Stop them, Dad, stop them, but his father could only stand there watching everything go. The boy burst into angry tears.

The last one turned and called something over his shoulder that made the others laugh. Wiggled his black arse at them as they stood in the door of the denuded hut, wiggled it and slapped it mockingly. It was a detail that Smasher enjoyed telling, demonstrating with his own arse and his own hand. Ned watched with his mouth open.

The message was clear, and Spider had decided not to wait for another. He would turn his back on Never Fail. He was going to try his luck at Windsor, where the blacks could not get into the township. Set up a public house there and sell Blackwood’s liquor. He would let other men grow the corn and deal with the blacks.

Loveday was so drunk he had gone rigid, not blinking, one hand holding his pannikin, the other clenched on the table like a man having his portrait painted. But suddenly he thundered across the room so that everyone looked around: No set of people in the known world were ever so totally destitute as these are of industry and ingenuity! Ned nodded, looking solemn as befitted the grand phrases. Their innate indolence renders them inattentive to the very means of subsistence.

But the story was Smasher’s and he was not going to be bested by any ragged gentleman with a mouthful of words. Meaning they are lazy thieving savages, he interrupted, but Loveday for once stood his ground. He belched, slapped his hand on the table for attention and went on, unstoppable as a tide. Our sable brethren, lazy savages as you so rightly call them, reap by stealth and open violence the produce of a tract they are themselves too indolent to cultivate. His eyes were unsteady in his head but the phrases rolled splendidly out of his mouth.

Thornhill looked into his rum, silenced by so many words. Smasher whirled around, miming a gun to his shoulder. They understand this lingo all right, Parson, he shouted. Sagitty held up his pannikin in a toast, but stopped it on the way to his lips, struck by a thought. Keep back a couple of them gins eh?

Mrs Herring sniffed. Mind how you speak, Smasher Sullivan, she said sharply. There’s those of us don’t fancy it one bit.

At this a silence fell around the table. Smasher smirked at Thornhill. Thornhill licked his lips and looked away. He wondered if all of them had been invited to share that woman who crept along the wall in chains. Sagitty was smoothing the beard around his mouth smiling.

Ain’t no one listens to an old woman, Mrs Herring said. But I tell you straight, you are heading for your come-uppance, Smasher, carrying on like you do, and you too Sagitty Birtles, don’t think I don’t know what goes on. And stuck the pipe back in her mouth hard, as if putting a cork in other words she would like to say.

Across the room, Thornhill felt Blackwood watching him. There was something insistent about it, a challenge. He made his face show nothing at all, looked away, rubbed at his eyes. There was so much smoke in the room a man could hardly see.

Loveday held up a finger for attention and declaimed It is a well-attested fact that the blacks have no word for property. He was going to go on, but Smasher rode over his light dandified voice, and he subsided back into his pannikin. Got two of the buggers on their way to Darkey Creek last week, Smasher said, then took a bite of one of Sal’s baps and spoke through it. Picked ’em off like a squire with a brace of grouse. He looked around but no one spoke, and went on through a mouthful of crumbs. Only thing them savages is good for is manuring the ground. The flour on his lips gave them a scaly diseased look. He said it again. Make real good manure. Bring the corn on a treat.

Thornhill saw him glance at Blackwood and if provoking him was what Smasher wanted, he had succeeded. Blackwood was on his feet, a big man in a small room, enlarged with rage. You, Smasher, he shouted, then stopped, his massive arms folded across his chest and his face like a stone.

Thornhill was afraid that Blackwood had gone wordless, the way he did. If that happened, Smasher would be on him in a second. But Blackwood went on in a voice that shook with feeling. By Christ Jesus, he said. One of them blacks is worth ten of a little brainless maggot like you. The room was silent, everyone sobering on the spot, the laughter dying in their throats. No one had ever heard Blackwood profane before, or heard that steel in his voice.

He came right up to Smasher, his face grim. He seemed about to hit him but turned with a grunt of disgust and was out the door, into the night, before anyone realised what had happened.

That bastard going to be real sorry he said that. The rage in Smasher’s voice was tamped down like one of his fires.

Thornhill stared out at the black rectangle of the doorway. Followed Blackwood in his mind, down the track, onto his little dory and along the First Branch. He imagined Blackwood sitting in the stern, winding his way into that closed moonlit landscape of ridges and cliffs. Up there, the blacks would be expecting him. He would go into his hut, blow the fire back to life and sit watching the flames blazing under the kettle.

Perhaps the woman would sit there with him, even the child as well. It was a girl, he thought, but he had only caught a glimpse.

~

The attack on the Webbs was one of many outrages and depredations that March of 1814. They erupted up and down the river, always in a different place. It seemed that every man with a crop waiting to be harvested had an encounter. Fields were set on fire, huts were burned down, spears were flung at men out with their reaping-hooks. Farmers had to start again with another lot of seed, hoping to get a new crop before winter, or they abandoned the whole thing, walked off their places, and went back to Sydney.

As a result, business was bad for William Thornhill. No one needed the Hope when there was nothing to take to Sydney. No one had the money to buy calico or boots. Thornhill tied up the boat and waited for better times. He was glad of the excuse. It was a time when a man needed to sit tight on his holding and keep a sharp eye out for trouble. He acted untroubled, a man who could rise above any setback. He made a big thing of picking the corn from that first patch, enough for a couple of meals, letting Dick and Bub eat their fill as payment for all those buckets of water. But underneath his good cheer there was a hard knot of worry.

~

His Majesty in London, embodied in the person of His Excellency in Sydney, did not especially care about the emancipists who grubbed in the dirt on the banks of the faraway Hawkesbury. But to make a fool of one white man was to make a fool of them all. In its own stately time, the mighty instrument of the law swung against the blacks. His Excellency issued a warrant. His Majesty had shown patience and forbearing but was, reluctantly, obliged now to take action against the native raiders.

His Majesty’s instrument in this case was a certain Captain McCallum, late of Shrewsbury. He came down from the garrison at Windsor with his men in one of the Government longboats and tied up next to the Hope. Thornhill’s Point was a convenient starting point for the campaign he planned.

Waiting for him in the hut, Thornhill could hear the flat sour sound of the little drum marking his approach. It was clear that the captain was a man careful of his dignity.

He swept into the hut, unfurled his map on the table and began to explain his plan to the soldiers with him. They were like insects in their red coats with the black bands crossing their chests, their plumed caps. Their sweating faces held in by their chinstraps did not reveal what they thought about the captain.

Thornhill stood by the doorway with Sal beside him, the children squatting on the floor. His private thought was that the answer to the native problem did not lie in anything the Governor might do. That man, in his red coat and his gold braid, was as irrelevant to what was happening on the Hawkesbury as was the King, or even God Himself.

But Captain McCallum had worked out an ingenious stratagem that he was sure would trap the natives down on Darkey Creek. He had a way of saying the name of the place as if it were ridiculous or amusing. There was nothing amusing about Darkey Creek. It was a little place along from Sagitty’s, no good to a white man, being a gloomy cleft where a narrow arm of the river ran between ridges so steep that the sun only shone in at noon. Word was that natives who were driven away from the farms were taking refuge there. Thornhill had seen the canoes, slipping in and out where the creek joined the river, had seen the smoke from their campfires drifting up between the spurs. As far as Thornhill was concerned, Darkey Creek was a useful kind of cupboard, where the blacks could be forgotten about behind a closed door.

For Captain McCallum, though, the narrow cleft of the place suggested other possibilities. He was planning a pincer-movement that involved what he liked to call a human chain. The idea was that the troops would link arms and proceed along the cleft for its full length, driving the natives ahead of them.

As one might drive sheep, the captain explained.

Captain McCallum was a gentleman and had a gentleman’s strangled way of speaking, as if someone had him round the neck. Thornhill found him hard to understand, but this was not turning out to be a problem as Captain McCallum did not even glance at the Thornhills. They were, after all, emancipists. He had refused a drink of tea from Sal, would not take even so much as a drink of water in spite of the heat.

He demonstrated on the map how the natives would be penned in against the end of the gully, where cliffs rose up sheer. There, His Majesty would dispense justice.

He reached under the table and with a conjurer’s flourish brought out a canvas bag. The Governor has personally issued me with six of these bags, he said, and cleared his throat modestly. He told me, that he has every confidence that we will bring them back filled. If he had expected a roar, or even a murmur, of approval, he was disappointed. The men in their red coats shuffled, shifted, breathed, but said nothing. He glanced around at their expressionless faces. Thornhill could see him decide that he needed to be more explicit. Six bags, do you see, six bags for six heads.

The room was silent as everyone watched him hold up a bag to demonstrate how the drawstring could be pulled tight. Thornhill saw Dick craning to see, his mouth open in disbelief.

On the map, Captain McCallum’s plan looked childishly simple, and on the map it was easy to imagine it: the human chain, the proceeding, the justice being dispensed. The map was correct enough. There was the river, hooking around the point at Thornhill’s, and Dillon’s Creek another mile along, with Sagitty’s place drawn on as a square, and just before that, the crooked line of Darkey Creek. The cliffs at its end were indicated by henpeckings on the paper. The map was correct, and there was no arguing with the captain’s logic, the elegance of the pincer-movement and the human chain.

But Thornhill had been there and knew that the map was correct only in its generalities. He knew that, in the real world, the ground that McCallum indicated as being where the human chain would proceed along the creek, was an exhausting jumble of trees, bushes and boulders. The hillsides bristled with fins and plates of rock, the gullies were full of mangroves and reeds in mud thick enough to swallow a man. Every tangled vine, sprawling root and whip-like bush would resist a single human, let alone a detachment, passing through. Mosquitoes would eat them alive, leeches slide down into their boots no matter how tight-laced, ticks would drop into their hair and burrow into their skin, and they would be forced into a series of exhausting detours that would increase the journey along the cleft by ten or twenty times its distance on the map.

Captain McCallum, not long from Home, his rosy cheeks already blistering in the colonial sun, could not be expected to know any of that. He had been taught to think in terms of an army taking up a position and confronting another army. The problem was, there was never any army here, only those ambiguous figures that vanished when a man looked at the movement they made. They were too cunning to have anything as vulnerable as an army, for they knew what the Governor and Captain McCallum did not: that an army clumping along was as exposed and vulnerable as a beetle trundling over a tabletop. It was those invisible bodies that would win battles here, hurling a sudden rain of spears from nowhere, and disappearing so there was nothing to shoot at.

From his spot over by the door, and against his better judgment, Thornhill decided to speak. If I was to put my oar in sir, he said, it is pretty rough going thereabouts. He felt Sal straighten her shoulders and stand tall against him in support.

McCallum stared at him glassily for a moment, glanced at Sal, looked away from them both. Thank you for the warning, Thornhill, he said, addressing a portion of the wall above their heads. He was very brisk about it. I would not expect you to have had experience of a fully-trained corps of soldiers. His look hinted—except in your capacity as felon. We are a disciplined fighting machine, Thornhill, and are used to rough going, as you call it.

Thornhill felt Sal go tense with indignation and hoped she would not speak. Quickly squeezed her hand to warn her. He heard her give a breath through her nose that was a close cousin to a snort, but she said nothing, and they listened while McCallum recited a speech he had clearly planned well ahead of time. This colony rests on a knife-edge, men, he announced. It is up to us to hold the line against our treacherous foe.

At this point it seemed that Captain McCallum might have forgotten the rest of the phrases he had prepared. There was a long pause before he added, I trust that every one of you will do his duty to his King and his country. It looked as though he expected someone to call out Hear, Hear, but the roomful of people simply stared at him. As for Thornhill, King and country had never done too many favours for him. He coughed, and McCallum shot him a sharp look.

~

When McCallum returned a week later he had deflated like a bladder. The collar of his red jacket was half torn away so it flapped loose at the side of his neck and one sleeve was ripped as far as the shoulder. Both knees were wet circles of mud, his cap was gone, his hair was falling into his bloodshot eyes and his face was livid with mosquito bites.

He said nothing to the Thornhills, keeping his chin up and his eyes elsewhere. Later his underlings, enjoying Sal’s johnny-cakes after their time in the wilderness, spoke freely. It appeared that they had made the human chain, had proceeded, had done the pincer-movement and so on up the valley of Darkey Creek. After tremendous obstacles involving mud up to their waists, ridges and gullies in a series of walls, after every difficulty of snakes, spiders, leeches and mosquitoes, they had arrived at the cliffs, expecting to see the natives they had driven before them trapped there, cowering. There was not a single native, not so much as a dog. But dozens of spears had sailed out of the forest and trapped them, just the way they had hoped to trap the blacks.

They fired blindly into the bushes, but three redcoats lay dead, and four others wounded, before they were able to drive the blacks away.

~

The failure of Captain McCallum’s expedition did not stop His Excellency, it only made him turn to another instrument. Redcoats with pincer-movements having failed, he prepared to unleash the settlers themselves. A Proclamation was printed in the Gazette which Loveday read out to a gathering at Thornhill’s.

The hut was full. Smasher, George Twist, Sagitty, Mrs Herring. Even Blackwood had come to hear what the Governor had in mind. Dan and Ned squatted by the door and the children, big-eyed with the moment, were crowded onto the mattress out of the way.

The page had been handled so often that the paper was fluid as fabric, the words fading off the page. Loveday’s voice took on extra depth, being the Governor. March the twenty-second, eighteen hundred and fourteen, he started. The black natives of the colony have manifested a strong and sanguinary spirit of animosity and hostility towards the British inhabitants.

Sagitty had already had a skinful before he arrived at the Thornhills’ and called out bitterly, Meaning, they stick a spear in you any time they get the chance, but Blackwood took no notice. Just get on and read the poxy thing, will you? He stood near the door, had refused a tot of rum or a stool to sit on. It was clear that he was only here because he could not read the Governor’s proclamation for himself.

Loveday read on in a fluty voice: On occasion of any native coming armed, or in a hostile manner without arms, or in unarmed parties exceeding six in number, to any farm belonging to British subjects, such natives are first to be desired in a civil manner to depart from the said farm.

Loveday was enjoying himself, mellowed by liquor and a hut full of people listening to him, but Smasher could not let him have the floor. Civil manner on the end of my gun, he interrupted, his eyes glittering small and dangerous in his flushed face. But Loveday was in full flood now and would not be stopped. He held up a hand and raised his voice: And if they persist in remaining thereon, they are then to be driven away by force of arms by the settlers themselves. He stopped and looked around at his audience. Put plain, you may shoot the buggers any time you get the chance, he said, and in one draught drained the pannikin by his elbow.

Give it here, Mrs Herring called out. Give it along here to me, and Thornhill saw she did not believe that Loveday had read the thing right. Loveday passed her the paper and she signalled Sal to help her. The two of them bent close over the words, spelling them out to each other in whispers, their fingers running along the lines of print. Thornhill saw them reach the end of the piece and look at each other. Mrs Herring had laid aside her pipe for once and her mouth was dour.

Sagitty, flushed with liquor, called out, Devil take that one-at-a-time shit. Give ’em a dose of the green powder. But now Smasher was on his feet, his voice filling the hut. Think I need any bit of paper from the damned Governor? He pulled something out of his britches pocket and laid it on the table beside the lamp, something like a couple of leaves tied together with a strip of leather. What’s mine is mine and I ain’t never waited for no by-your-leave.

Sal, near him at the table, reached out to touch one. From across the room, Thornhill saw her eager face in the lamplight and knew that whatever the things were, they would not be anything as innocent as leaves, but could not get across the room in time. He saw her face contort and her hand flick the thing away as if it had bitten her, heard her cry out in disgust. Get them out! she cried. Out! Smasher! Before them kids see!

They were a pair of human ears, dark brown, hacked off rough. Where the blood had dried it had crusted almost purple, like any other meat left out too long.

Smasher laughed and picked them up from the floor. All right, missus, he said, no need to get yourself fussed. The children were craning to see, but Sal got over to them and tried to block their view.

Smasher watched Thornhill, taunting him. Got a bob for the head off a feller in Sydney, he said. To measure and that. He picked up the pair of ears and shook them together. Got to boil it up real good first. Get it nice and clean.

They all contemplated the boiling-up of a human head. Thornhill forced his face to be a stone. The thing about Smasher was, it was hard to know when he was boasting and when he was in earnest. In either case, Thornhill wanted him gone.

He could see Sal’s face in three-quarter, her mouth rigid. He had kept so much from her. Now, in one moment, all that was undone.

Sagitty released a long expressive belch. It seemed to activate Loveday who called out, Pickling. The word was unclear and he said it again, very loud: Pickling. He looked around at everyone watching him and went on. Better than boiling, Smasher, my good man, he said. For the scientific—he missed the word, tried again—for the scientific gentlemen. His hand resting on a cushion of air to steady himself, he turned his whole body to Smasher as if he did not trust his head alone to swivel. Pickling retains a greater degree of data, he said with elaborate clarity, and abruptly arrived at the next stage in the stations of his drunkenness, a stupor from which he would not be roused.

Smasher reclaimed everyone’s attention by showing how he hung the ears from his belt with the leather strip. For good luck. There were times when Thornhill could almost find it in his heart to feel sorry for Smasher, his greed for the admiration of other men was so naked.

~

Smasher was still fiddling around with the ears on his belt when Blackwood burst across the room at him. At any time Tom Blackwood would have been more than a match for Smasher. He grabbed him around the neck and forced his head down onto the table, squeezing words out from a tight-clenched jaw. You damn little maggot! Still holding him around the neck, he jerked him upright and ran him backwards into the cornerpost so the whole hut trembled. Smasher jolted with the shock of it and scrabbled with his feet, but Blackwood’s arm kept him up off the ground as he said, You had this coming a real long time Smasher, and punched him, the weight of his whole body against Smasher’s face.

Smasher’s head snapped sideways but his eyes were still open, fixed on Blackwood, and he was trying to speak. Blackwood sent his fist into his face again. Everyone in the room heard the crunch. Blackwood let go and stepped away from him. Smasher stood swaying, his hands up to his face, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, crying out wordlessly like a baby.

Now Sagitty and Twist were on Blackwood, and Thornhill too, taking hold of his arms, feeling the muscle hard under his shirt. Blackwood shrugged them off and in a few strides was out of the hut. They all listened to his heavy footfalls going back down the path.

When he had gone, Smasher whispered through the blood in his mouth, Give us a tot, will you, after a man been damn near killed. Sagitty slopped out a pannikin and Smasher drank it down like water. His lip was split in several places and he had lost his few remaining front teeth. His voice came hoarse and reedy and at every word Thornhill could see the blood on his lips stick together and pull apart again. That bugger’ll be sorry he done that, he said. With the back of a shaking hand he wiped at his mouth and took another drink. They all going to be real sorry.

~

When everyone had gone the Thornhills lay down to sleep, but it did not come. At last Sal spoke, as he knew she would. We maybe better go, Will, she said quietly.

He whispered back, Go where, where have we got to go? He heard her snort in disbelief. Home, Will, where else would we go. Sell up and go.

It ain’t five years yet, only half a year! That was his first response, but even as he spoke he knew this was not a matter of keeping to the letter of a promise. We ain’t got enough, Sal, he went on quickly. Nowhere near! She propped herself up against the wall to see his face. How much then, Will? she said. How much is enough?

But he would not put a number on it. I ain’t going back to a lighterman’s life, he said. He felt indignation rise up in him, pressed it back, made himself speak with no more passion than if they were discussing the weather. Remember Butler’s Buildings, he said, and he could feel her remembering: the heaps of musty rags where they had slept and the fleas that rose from them in clouds, the bugs that nipped all night. Butler’s Buildings was a place she could still smell.

Yes, Will, she said, and he saw she was ahead of him, had known what he would say. What about this then, we go to Wilberforce or one of them other towns where the blacks don’t come. Business can go along just as good from there.

He was silenced by surprise, that she had thought the thing out so carefully. Like any good haggler she had been cunning enough to start with the highest price, so as to make a show of coming down to what she had meant to pay all along. She turned to him, her face indistinct in the near-dark. Get the Pickle Herring going again like we had back in Sydney. Be making money hand over fist.

It startled him: she had been thinking over their choices, and seemed to have arrived at something of a certainty. Look Sal, he started. He heard his blustering tone and quietened himself. He was talking about the most unimportant thing in the world. If they was going to do anything, they’d of done it by now. He touched her ear, where the firelight caught its softness. We said five years, remember. We got the worst part behind us. She stretched a leg out against his and said nothing, so he went on. They got their place, we got ours, he said. We don’t give them no grief. Plus they know we got the gun.

She lay back down under the blanket and after a moment he heard a long sigh from her. I don’t want that Smasher showing his face here no more, she said. That man’s going to bring down trouble on the whole lot of us. He heard a darkness in her voice. It was the sound of someone who was prepared to yield, but against the grain of what she believed.

He felt a misgiving that he had convinced her. Another sort of woman would have cried, shouted, forced him in the end to go to Wilberforce. He loved her for not being that woman, but he knew she was right: trouble was coming.

He could not turn his back on this place. How could he bear to go on passing in the boat and see some other man there? It would feel like giving up a child.

He listened for Sal to fall asleep, but she did not, only lay on her side facing him. But not touching him, thinking her own thoughts.