Alice watched as Mr Fitzgerald leaned over the well, supporting himself on his forearms and leaning out far more than could be safe or sensible.
‘Are you sure that’s safe?’ she called, not wanting to distract him at a crucial moment, but equally not wanting him to fall down the old stone well.
‘It’s dried up,’ was the reply, distant and echoey as he spoke into the well. Instead of standing back up, Mr Fitzgerald proceeded to lean out even further, gripping the wooden strut above his head that had a hook to attach a bucket and rope to.
‘If it has dried up, stand up,’ Alice muttered, feeling the unwelcome clamouring of her pulse around her body. She felt nervous of confined spaces and even just imagining the man in front of her plummeting into the narrow well made her feel on edge and out of control.
‘This well hasn’t been dry for twenty years,’ he said, leaning so far his feet were almost off the ground.
‘For the love of—’ Alice said, her words cut off by the loud crack as the wooden strut Mr Fitzgerald was holding on to splintered. She leaped forward, not knowing what she was planning to do. It wasn’t as though she would be able to hold Mr Fitzgerald’s weight and pull him out of the well, but she dashed to him all the same.
He’d toppled over, the momentum of his body after the wooden strut had given away flipping him over completely, but as Alice nervously peered into the well she saw his face grinning up at her.
‘You should be dead,’ she muttered, eyeing first the snapped wooden strut and then the plummeting depths of the well below him.
‘You almost look concerned for me, Alice,’ he said as he started to pull himself up.
She had been concerned. Although she’d lost some of her humanity during the past couple of years, it would seem her compassion was still burning away under all the fear and desire for self-preservation.
‘Do you need a hand?’ she asked. Her heart was still hammering away in her chest even though Mr Fitzgerald seemed unconcerned. And he was the one dangling out over the fifteen-foot drop.
He flashed her another smile and with an almighty heave pulled himself up over the lip of the well and rolled forward on to solid ground.
‘There’s no need to show off,’ Alice said, trying to hide her profound relief that he was out of the well and no longer in danger of falling into its confined space.
‘I thank you for your concern,’ he said, standing and brushing himself off. Although he’d saved himself quite spectacularly she was amazed to see he wasn’t more shaken up by the incident. He might have pulled himself from the well easily, but when the wood had splintered and snapped he’d been in real danger of falling all the way to the bottom and ending up a mass of broken bones.
‘That was foolish,’ Alice said, knowing she shouldn’t speak to her employer in that way, but unable to help herself.
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps a little, but I needed to make sure the well itself has actually dried up rather than something falling down and covering the water.’
‘And has it?’
Mr Fitzgerald grimaced. ‘Yes.’
Alice knew next to nothing about farming. Her father had been a clerk and although they’d lived out in the countryside they had only owned a horse and a couple of pigs. As soon as she’d been old enough Alice had left the rural way of life behind, fleeing to the big city for what she’d hoped was a life of excitement and opportunity. Even since arriving in Australia she’d stayed in Sydney, never venturing into the countryside until Mr Fitzgerald had scooped her up just over a week ago. She didn’t know how serious it was that the well had dried up—if it was a minor inconvenience or a major disaster—but from the look on Mr Fitzgerald’s face it wasn’t something to be taken lightly.
‘Surely it’s dry because we haven’t had much rain,’ Alice said quietly. Mr Fitzgerald was staring off into the distance with a troubled expression on his face.
It was November and back home it would be one of the wettest and coldest months of the year. Alice had always hated November with its grey skies and short, dull days, but now she was stuck in Australia she often found herself daydreaming about the dreariness of the English weather. At least if she was under an overcast November sky it would mean she was back home.
They both looked up at the cloudless sky. Thinking about it, Alice realised it hadn’t rained for weeks—no wonder everywhere was so dry and dusty.
‘Probably,’ he said. ‘Although these are old wells, they tap into the aquifers...’ He paused, noting her expression. ‘It means that they don’t rely on the rainwater to fill up.’
‘But surely some of the water comes from the rain?’
‘It depends if the wells are covered or not. The groundwater, the water you get in the wells, is cleaner, purer, than the water that falls as rain or flows in the rivers. It’s been filtered by the rocks over years and years.’
‘I don’t understand why the well would run dry, then,’ Alice said, frowning.
There was a long pause as Mr Fitzgerald looked out into the horizon. ‘Neither do I,’ he said, ‘but I know someone who might.’
George swung himself back up on to his horse, pulling the hat that had fallen back across his shoulders back on to his head. The sun was ferocious this time of year and he knew that his skin had lost some of its natural protection, some of the deep tan, in the time he’d been away from Australia. The last thing he wanted was to get burnt.
Glancing across at Alice, he saw her pink cheeks and nose and couldn’t help but smile. Now they were shielded under the large bonnet she’d brought with her, but no doubt her skin was still adjusting to the strength of the sun here.
In profile, with her blue eyes staring out over the dusty fields, she looked beautiful. Unlike the ladies of London he’d been socialising with these past couple of years she wore her hair loose, the gold-red strands curling around her shoulders in natural waves. In the sunlight it glimmered like a precious metal and George had the urge to reach out and check it was real.
‘Would you like me to take you home first?’ he asked. The ride would be long and the sun was especially hot. It was a lot to ask of someone to be out in the heat for such a time.
Immediately she shook her head, then seemed to consider a moment.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
He had to hide a smile. Alice was suspicious and untrusting, but for a moment she’d put her welfare in his hands out of choice rather than necessity. It might have only lasted a moment, but it was a start.
‘To see a man who knows more about this land than anyone I’ve ever met.’
She frowned for a moment, as if considering her options.
‘You mean an aboriginal man, don’t you?’ she asked eventually.
He nodded. ‘Djalu is one of the wisest men I know.’
‘Is he dangerous?’
George smiled, thinking of the wizened old man who didn’t know how old he was, but told everyone he must be over a hundred.
‘No, not dangerous. Not dangerous at all.’
‘And he can speak English?’
George nodded. It had amazed him, too, the first time he’d met Djalu, to hear clear and fluent English coming out of a mouth that had such a different native language.
Alice seemed to consider for a moment, as if weighing up her options, then nodded. ‘I would like to come.’
He felt inordinately pleased and had to school his face into a neutral expression to stop the pleasure showing on it. Perhaps it was the loneliness that had sneaked up on him during the long voyage home or perhaps it was the knowledge that his two closest friends had moved on somewhat with their lives, but he found he was enjoying Alice’s company more than he should. He needed to remind himself she was a convict worker, nothing more. A convict worker who already thought the worst of everyone. He needed to keep his distance.
They rode over the dusty fields, sticking to the perimeters of those that were used for crops, only riding through the centre of the large open spaces George had cultivated for his thousands of cattle. As they rode in the distance they saw some farm workers, toiling away in the beating sun, but no one close enough to greet.
It took an hour and a half to reach Djalu’s house, a neat wooden hut with a fresh coat of paint on the door. The old man himself was sitting in a comfortable-looking chair just outside the door in the shade of a eucalyptus tree.
‘Australia’s prodigal son returns,’ Djalu said in greeting, a wide smile stretched across his face. ‘I was worried you might have found something to keep you away. Especially when those two convicts came back two years ago.’
Although he, Robertson and Crawford had all set sail together for England, circumstances out of their control had meant both George’s friends had cut their trips short and boarded ships for Australia long before George had been ready to come home.
‘Mudga dhurdi,’ George said in greeting, causing the old man to open his mouth wide and begin guffawing with laughter.
‘Your pronunciation hasn’t improved in your absence,’ Djalu said with a shake of his head. George saw the old man turn his gaze on Alice and waited as he looked her up and down, smiling genially all the time. ‘Your wife is far too pretty for you,’ he said after a few moments.’ He turned to Alice. ‘You’re far too pretty for a rugged old man like him.’
‘She’s not my wife,’ George said at the same instant that Alice spoke up.
‘I’m not his wife.’
Djalu looked at them both for a long moment, then shrugged. ‘It is a shame. Fitzgerald is always alone.’ He turned his attention back to George. ‘It is not good to be alone in this world, my friend.’
It would not do to point out the old man was alone. Over the years George had found out a little of his history. It wasn’t pleasant or comfortable. Djalu had always lived in the area, travelling and living off the land as the native people of Australia had been doing for centuries. His stories told of how he’d been there when the first fleet had arrived, been dazzled and awed by the arrival of a shipload of Englishmen. Then in the smallpox outbreak that followed he’d lost his wife. Disease after disease, new to his tribe, had ripped everyone he had ever loved from him within ten years of the English landing at Botany Bay.
‘Would you care for some bark tea?’ Djalu motioned for George and Alice to sit, pointing at the only other available seat, a roughly hewn wooden bench that would only just fit both of them.
Alice hesitated for a moment, glancing at George, then perched herself on the very edge of the bench. George sat down next to her, doing everything he could not to touch her, but his legs brushing against her anyway. It was warm even in the shade of the tree and George shrugged off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and running a hand around the back of his neck to try to cool himself. Next to him he could feel the heat coming off Alice’s body and he wondered how uncomfortable she must be in the tight constraints of her dress. An unbidden image of her loosening the ties at her back and letting the dress drop down to her hips popped into George’s mind. In it she was looking over her shoulder at him enticingly.
George almost laughed—he couldn’t imagine Alice ever looking at him like that. He glanced across at her, hoping she couldn’t sense the subtle change in his demeanour. He needed to stop having these inappropriate thoughts, otherwise he was just as bad as she’d imagined him to be. Just as lecherous as all the other men who’d tried to take advantage of her. Just as bad as his father.
‘Mr Fitzgerald won’t bite you,’ Djalu said, frowning at the stiff way Alice was leaning away from George. ‘He’s a good man, not like those brutes on the ships.’
George was always amazed at how perceptive the old man was. In just a few short minutes he’d analysed Alice’s behaviour and come to the correct conclusion.
Glancing at him, Alice gave a wary smile, but George could tell she was looking to see if he’d taken much notice of Djalu’s comment about the ship. Feeling the first stirrings of anger, he wondered what she’d been through on the transport ship, wondered just what she’d had to suffer during the long months at sea.
‘I knew a woman a long time ago,’ Djalu said as he poured out the steaming liquid. ‘She was one of the early female convicts. Never said exactly what had happened on the transport ship over here, but she once told me that she had lost all faith in human nature during the voyage.’ His voice was quiet, soothing, and Alice was looking down at her hands, staring at the redden skin, chapped from her work in the laundry.
As he watched a fat tear dropped from one of her eyes and fell on to her fingers. She brushed it away quickly, not looking up so she wouldn’t have to meet his gaze, and in that moment George vowed to himself that he would do whatever it took to show the woman next to him that there were good people in the world.
Djalu handed over the two cups and Alice murmured her thanks, still staring down at her hands.
‘Look at me,’ the old man said, ‘talking about things I have no business prying into. You came here with a question.’
‘The well at the edge of bottom field has dried up,’ George said. ‘I understand it has been a dry couple of months, but even so...’
‘Not just a dry couple of months,’ Djalu said. ‘It has been a dry few years.’ He shrugged, ‘There’s been rain, a little here, a little there, but nowhere near as much as there should have been.’
‘The water table has dropped,’ George said, feeling the beginnings of dread start to form in his stomach. Everything he did, from growing crops to keeping cattle, needed water. And although Australia was warmer than England, during his lifetime they’d never had too many issues with rainfall and water supply. Whenever he thought of his land, the rolling fields interspersed with corpses of trees, it was green and verdant in his imagination. Not sun scorched and dusty as it was now.
‘We may have rain in the next few weeks,’ Djalu said with a shrug, ever the optimist.
‘Have you ever known it to be this dry?’
George watched the old man as his eyes moved leisurely from side to side as if he were reliving the years of his life in his mind.
‘From 1770 to 1773,’ he said after a minute. ‘It was worse then. Three years with hardly any rain. We had to move around much more than usual to survive.’
‘But the land recovered?’
‘It recovered. Just like it will this time. But whether that will be in a few months or a few years it is hard to know.’
George nodded slowly. They would have to wait out the drought and, in the meantime, come up with ways to keep the livestock watered and the crops growing.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the older man. George stood and Alice followed, but Djalu held up a hand, motioning for them to wait for a moment.
‘I have something that might interest you,’ Djalu said. He ambled inside his house, coming back out after a few moments, handing George a delicate stem with a brilliant red, strangely shaped flower on it. ‘The desert pea plant,’ he said. ‘I thought you could add it to your collection. I found it on one of my trips out into the desert.’
‘Thank you.’
They remounted their horses and only when they’d waved goodbye to Djalu from a distance did George speak. He’d seen how uncomfortable Alice had been when his old friend had mentioned the horrors some women endured on the transport ships and he hated the haunted look in her eyes even as she thought of it now.
‘Djalu is a good man, dependable,’ he said slowly. ‘He knows this land better than anyone else I know.’
Alice nodded.
‘And he’s seen people come and go, from his own tribe and others, and settlers and convicts.’
Again Alice nodded, but still didn’t speak. George tried a different approach.
‘Do you recall the two men who visited the day you arrived at Mountain View Farm? Robertson and Crawford.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re my two closest friends. Two good men...’ He paused, looking over at Alice. ‘They were both convicts when I first knew them.’
He saw the surprise register on Alice’s face. Although most of the ex-convicts who’d served out their sentence settled in Australia and made a life for themselves, not many were as successful as Robertson and Crawford. Between them they owned at least five thousand acres and probably had bought more land in the time he’d been away.
‘They were transported as young boys, worked for a couple of years building roads in Sydney and then ended up as convict workers on my father’s farm.’ He thought back fondly to the days of their youth when the three of them had run wild around the Australian countryside, looked on indulgently by his father.
‘Robertson was ten when he was convicted and Crawford twelve, they were only children. They don’t often talk about their time on the transport ship, only to say it was the worst part of their entire sentence, worse even than the back-breaking manual labour of building roads.’ He paused and saw the pain behind Alice eyes that she was trying to hide behind a stony expression. ‘I just want you to know that you’re safe now,’ he said quietly. ‘You have a job here for as long as your sentence lasts. There’s no one to force you to do anything you don’t want to, no one to take away what should only be yours to give.’
For a moment he thought Alice wasn’t listening, she was perfectly still on the back of her horse, looking more like a statue than a living, breathing woman. Then she turned to look at him and he saw the tears glinting in her brilliant blue eyes.
‘I’m not sure if I can believe you’re real,’ she said quietly.
George smiled, waiting for her to say more.
‘It feels like this is all a dream and at any moment I’m going to wake up and be pulled back to that whipping post and my awful life in Sydney.’
‘I won’t let that happen, Alice.’
She regarded him again and he saw one of the tears roll out of her eyes and on to her cheek. He wanted to lean across the gap between them and wipe it away with his thumb, but he knew he couldn’t do something so intimate. Alice raised her fingers to her face, drying off the tears and shaking her head ruefully.
‘I don’t cry,’ she said, a rueful tone to her voice. ‘Even on the transport ship I didn’t cry.’
‘Did someone hurt you on there?’ George asked. The last thing he wanted was to make her live through her nightmare again, but he had the feeling she was about to start opening up to him.
She nodded, looking down at her hands where they grasped the reins.
‘They don’t separate the men and the women,’ she said quietly. ‘I’d heard rumours when I was in gaol, waiting to be put on the transport ship, but I didn’t quite believe them. When we were thrown down the hatch into the bowels of the ship I couldn’t believe my eyes.’
‘Someone attacked you?’ George asked gently. He knew it wouldn’t have just been someone, there would have been a pack mentality.
‘They did. As soon as the guards had closed the hatch and we were left on our own it began.’ Her voice had gone quiet as if the pain of remembering was too much for her. ‘There were ten women. Two were old, too old to be of interest. But as soon as the ship began moving all eyes were on the rest of us.’ She shuddered and George felt the urge to gather her in his arms, but he knew physical contact was the last thing she would want while remembering this horrible ordeal.
‘There was this one man, he had such an evil look in his eyes—’ She broke off for a moment. ‘He kept staring at me and moving closer and closer. He whispered that he would look after me, save me from the other men.’
George felt a hot surge of rage at the idea of Alice suffering like this. She might have committed a crime, but no woman deserved to be punished so awfully.
She shook her head. ‘I probably should have accepted.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘I had a long piece of wood I’d sharpened to a point while I was in gaol, just in case the rumours about the ships were true. When he...’ She swallowed, composing herself before continuing. ‘When he put his hands on me I stabbed him in the stomach as hard as I could.’
George blinked in surprise. It hadn’t been how he’d feared the encounter would end.
‘Did he die?’
Alice shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. He lashed out a couple of times and then was pulled back by some of the other men. Later that day when the guards came to give us our rations he was taken up on deck to have his wound seen to. I saw him at a distance after that, but he must have been put in one of the other compartments.’
‘Did anyone else try to...?’ George asked.
He saw the pain flash before her eyes and knew there must have been some other incidents.
‘Mostly I gained a reputation as someone to be left alone,’ she said and George had to wonder at the significance of the mostly. ‘But I did have to sleep with one eye open.’
‘Not a pleasant crossing, then?’
‘Without a doubt the worst experience of my life.’
They rode on in silence for a moment, both lost in Alice’s recounting of her time on the transport ship.
‘I meant what I said,’ George said quietly. ‘You have a safe place here with me for the remainder of your sentence. Mrs Peterson can use your help and you won’t need to worry about your safety.’
‘Thank you,’ Alice said quietly, raising her eyes up to meet his. In that moment George felt something squeeze inside his chest and he knew he needed to look away, but the intensity of her gaze was difficult to break. ‘It’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.’