A Fringe of Leaves (41 page)

The morning which followed was so gently perfect, compounded of birdsong, shifting leaves, and speckled light, she hoped he would not in any way attempt to destroy it; in fact she went so far as to pray that the next stage of the journey to which they were committed might be postponed.

She looked at him to see whether he had intercepted her prayer as sometimes he happened upon her thoughts.

Far from meddling with her thoughts and prayers, he was looking so remote that she more than likely did not exist in the world to which he had withdrawn. It was a state of affairs which her present limpid frame of mind found altogether agreeable. She liked to believe that rest and their feast of emu meat had restored to him what she remembered as authority and strength, and was even persuaded that she saw a nobility transcending the convict’s origins and fall from grace, to contradict Garnet Roxburgh’s opinion of ‘these miscreants, the sweepings of the London streets’. She realized with resentment that in the eyes of her brother-in-law she must stand equally condemned, since unrestricted association with the convict made her his accomplice.

Oh, but the injustice, Mrs Roxburgh might have pleaded in her own defence, in such brutal circumstances.

And she had loved this man, even if she also pitied and needed him. She did still love him.

‘Love’, the old thing reminded in a more than usually tremulous voice, ‘love’ is selfless, never sensual. Ellen was unable to contribute to a conversation the subject of which was so vast that it could not be understood except by the instincts.

She raised her arms. It was love, whether selfless or sensual, which had restored the youthful skin to her breasts, the hollow in a smooth, leaf-patterned flank; the tendrils of hair singed off ritually by her black mentors were again stirring in the armpits.

Her face she was unable to see, unless when she turned it towards him, and it became reflected in his.

Illusions of beauty and suspended time increased as the day declined. Birds balanced on trapezes slung between trees grew accustomed to the presence of intruders and descended seemingly by ropes of light. Still in mid-air, some of them were catapulted skywards by anxiety, others landed, flitting and flickering, themselves like brown leaves as they foraged over mould and in the crevices of shed bark.

Growing restless in the later afternoon, she got up and wandered off on her own, without any explicit aim, and burst through the thicket upon a sheet of water strewn with lilies. In this instance the beauty of the flowers conflicted with knowledge acquired during her enslavement by the blacks, but without giving further thought to it, she plunged in, and began diving, groping for the roots as she had seen the native women. However clumsy and inexpert, she was determined to make a contribution by bringing him a meal of lily-roots.

This was how he found her, breathless, goggle-eyed and half-blinded as she surfaced, hair plastered, shoulders gleaming and rustling with water.

He squatted at the water’s edge beside her heap of lily-roots. ‘When I rescued a lady,’ he shouted, ‘I didn’t bargan for a
lubra
.’

‘Wouldn’t go hungry, would ee?’ she called. ‘Even if tha was a gentleman.’

After which he slipped in, and was wading towards her as she retreated. It was sad they should destroy such a sheet of lilies, but so it must be if they were to become re-united, and this after all was the purpose of the lake: that they might grasp or reject each other at last, bumping, laughing, falling and rising, swallowing mouthfuls of the muddy water.

In the gaps between mangled lily-flesh he made the water fly in her face by cutting at it with the flat of his hand. She could not imitate his boy’s trick, but followed suit after a fashion by thumping the surface and throwing clumsy handfuls at him.

He caught her by the slippery wrists, and they kissed, and clung, and released each other, and stumbled out. Their aches were perhaps returning. He stooped and stripped a leech off her.

While they were lying on the bank resting, happily she would have said, her restlessness took her again as her eyes started roving over the branches of a tree a short distance from this sheet of provident water. She remembered how the blacks had fired her to climb a tree, to drag a possum out of a hole, and how, as she grew hardened, she swarmed up trees regularly in search of birds’ nests and wild honey. Much of this experience had been difficult and abrasive, when here was a tree furnished with branches almost as a ladder with rungs.

She could not resist it.

Jack the convict, her saviour-lover, must have been dozing. His hand gave like a weakened lock to allow her her freedom. She moved carefully, remembering, when she did not care to remember, that other hand on which she had trodden unintentionally. She did not wish to hurt this sleeping man who depended on her, and whom she truthfully loved.

She was soon climbing, breathing deep, planting her spongy, splayed feet on sooty rungs. She was rejoiced by the solitary nature of her undertaking at the same time as it released tremors of guilt from her. She continued climbing, and as she rose the sun struck at her through the foliage furbishing her with the same gold.

‘Hey! Ellen!’

Jack Chance too, was climbing, but she hardly dared look back in the direction of the ground. She was afraid of falling. (Or was it the broken hands? the rotted teeth?)

The branches immediately affected by her climb were vibrating and undulating round her like tasselled fans. Together with light and air, they were the allies of her recklessness. She was only half-aware when torn by the spikes with which the black trunk was armed. Once or twice she felt for her girdle of vines to assure herself that it held. At one point she dared glance down, and there was the ring jiggling on its cord, and not so far below her the crown of the convict’s head, darkened by water except where a whorl at the centre exposed the tanned scalp beneath.

Her throat contracted, was it from pity alone? The fact that she could outclimb the man made her less dependent on him. She experienced a second spasm which she could not pause to interpret; she was far too close to the tree’s crest. She had stuck her head out between the branches, and was clinging reeling and breathless before an expanse of haze.

Had she been alone she might have hung there indefinitely, swayed by the tree and her exultancy, but in the circumstances felt bound to warn, ‘Better climb no higher, Jack. Between us we may snap something.’ The common sense of it made her sound irritable.

He did not accept her advice, but seemed to become more stubbornly determined to stand beside her, or else to bring them down in a simultaneous descent, in a blaze of light and cataract of green, to be driven deep into the earth, still together.

‘Jack!’ Mrs Roxburgh shouted; it was becoming an order. ‘I forbid you! Such foolishness!’

Even so, he would not stop, and in her anger she descended to meet him. She must have stubbed part of his face with a toe, but she did not regret it. She would not have cared had she put out one of the brute’s eyes. She had no wish to die—not if her beloved, lawful husband were to expect it of her.

Upon arrival at the convict’s level, she panted, ‘Do you want to kill us?’ At that height the mast between them was still pliant enough to sway, though less alarmingly.

Exertion had dulled his eyes: they had never looked paler, nor more extinct. ‘Why—if you love me,’ she breathed, ‘will you not believe in my gratitude—and love?’

But she could not restore lustre to his eyes; perhaps it was the mention of gratitude. Though running sweat, his skin felt cold, which she now tried to warm, after sidling round the mast, by pressing against him as far as she could, by chafing, moulding with her free hand a flank, a shoulder, the sinews of his neck.

‘Jack?’ His lips were cold, and at their thinnest.

So Mrs Roxburgh frowned and sighed, and in her distraction looked out through the foliage.

‘Why,’ she cried, ‘that is surely a barn! Or a house, is it? Not that many miles off. Isn’t it a ploughed field? Oh, God be praised! It’s over!’

Before the tears rushed out of her eyes she had identified the cocoons or maggots which become sheep on consideration by one who has lived amongst them.

‘Aw, Gore!’ Ellen Gluyas bellowed; and blubbered softer, ‘Dear
life
!’ She had scarce undone the withy hurdle before they came pushing, scuffling past, their fuzz of wool teazing memory.

He was looking where she had directed his attention. ‘That’s a farm all right—at several hours walk, I’d say. That’s Oakes’s, I reckon. And beyond, in the distance, you can see the river. There was never such a vicious snake as Brisbane River.’

His voice might have sounded too flat, too evenly measured, had she given thought to it, but she could not wait to feel the ground under her feet. She slithered down. She was distressed thinking of her hair, still short enough to suggest it had been cropped as punishment for some crime she had committed.

‘Do you suppose they’ll take us for human beings?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked when he had rejoined her.

She could not stop touching her hair, her arms, her lashless eyelids, while he withheld from her the reassurance for which she was hoping. They reached the camp in silence.

Although evening was approaching, it was darker than it should have been; the light, the air foreshowed a storm.

‘At least we have food left over,’ Mrs Roxburgh pointed out. ‘We shall need all our strength for the last lap. Shouldn’t we eat before starting?’

‘Can’t you see there’s a storm’ll break at any moment?’

‘I’m not afraid of storms. There’s been too many.’ She had begun tearing at the left-over emu. ‘Eat!’ she commanded. ‘There’s plenty.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ he mumbled back.

Although tonight she first adopted a finical attitude towards her food, Mrs Roxburgh was soon gobbling the sinewy meat after wiping off a swarm of ants and any maggots. ‘All our strength,’ she repeated between mouthfuls.

He sat neither eating nor watching.

‘Oh, Jack,’ she called from a full mouth, ‘you are not—sulking, are you? Or is it the storm? Surely a man cannot be afraid of thunder and lightning?’

He did not trouble to answer.

Remorse pricked her for taunting him when she was pretty sure of the reason for his silence. She could never match his delicacy.
Gluyas’s Ellen a regular gobble-gut—and otherways greedy slut
. Self-knowledge caused her first to gulp, then to hiccup unmercifully.

The hiccups became downright violent when she noticed an aged aborigine standing at no great distance. He must have discovered them by accident. Too old and too frightened to effect an immediate retreat he was now fearfully observing them.

Jack Chance lost no time, but tried to make the stranger feel at home by talking with him. The old man replied only by desultory murmurs.

‘What does he want?’ she rasped between her hiccups.

The convict did not interrupt his attempts at conversation. If the aborigine kept his silence, he appeared gravely entranced by his vision of food.

Presently the convict hacked off part of the carcase with his axe. The old man silently accepted the meat, hid it under his bark shift, and left them by walking backwards.

In her nervous state Mrs Roxburgh was exasperated. ‘What did he
say
?’

‘We couldn’ understand each other good. His tribe is camped farther to the west. So it seems.’

‘But we should have held him!’ Nobody could accuse her of thinking ‘killed’ because they could not read her thoughts, or if they were to, she had grown, most understandably, agitated. ‘Now he will go back, and they will come and murder us unless we make a start at once.’

He reminded her that the blacks feared to travel by night, and that the storm would make them even less inclined.

She might have been convinced and pacified if her opinion of herself had not sunk so low. It was the hiccups too, which continued to rack her, and the swags of cloud billowing black almost upon the crests of the trees, and the wind which had risen, threatening to snap any but the stoutest trunks. She wished she was still the girl who understood the moods of nature through close association with them, or the lady she had studied to become, acquiring along with manners and a cultivated mind a faith in rational man (whether a condemned felon, or even that fragile gentleman her late husband answered this description, she was not sure). In the circumstances Mrs Roxburgh could only crawl inside a bush shelter and hope that Divine Providence would respect her predicament. She might also have wished to remain alone, but could hear Jack Chance the convict crawling in behind her.

Soon afterwards the wind fell. The rain which took over from it lashed at the dry earth and at the twigs and ineffectual leaves overhead. It was not long before the nakedness of the creatures huddled together inside the hut was completely sluiced.

During a pause in the watery onslaught Mrs Roxburgh ventured, ‘We shall never sleep, Jack. We’ll be too soaked and wretched for that. It would be more reasonable to push on and reach the farm.’

Curled on his side, he ignored her.

‘If there is a moon.’ She could not remember how much of a moon they might expect.

What she did see was the lamp standing on a farmhouse sill; she heard the people getting out of bed, running to the door, welcoming one of their own kind.

She chewed at a thumb-nail until she found herself biting on the quick.

‘You’re no company,’ she complained, ‘when we’ve every reason for celebrating.’

At least the rain had poured itself out; the storm was passing; a steely glimmer instead of total obscurity should have heartened the survivors in the hut.

Mrs Roxburgh had survived so much, she yawned and said, ‘I believe I look forward more than anything to my first mouthful of tea—from a porcelain cup.’ Then, to jolly her servant, she asked, ‘Do you enjoy your tay, Jack?’

He could only bring himself to mump, ‘It’s too long since I tasted what you’d call tea. At the settlement, ’twas no more ’n green stuff—sticks—if the crowminder ever smuggled us a pinch.’