A Fringe of Leaves (43 page)

She was pretty certain her instincts and her desperation would have taken her in a straight line to the farm they had sighted the evening before, but the strain had begun telling on her.

So she paused and waited for him. ‘Are you tired?’ she asked, her solicitude mingled with expectancy.

‘I’m not by no means fresh.’

The rims were sagging under the bloodshot eyes. How would those who had not known him as a man, leave alone returned his embraces, receive this shambling human scarecrow?

Constant preoccupation with the inevitable made her twitter. ‘Do I look a fright, Jack? My awful hair!’ It worried her more than her nakedness, for hair is a curtain one may hide behind in an emergency.

‘I reckon there’d be those who wouldn’ know you.’

He wiped her mouth, and kissed her on it. It would have seemed no more unnatural than on the other occasions had she not been about to re-enter what is commonly referred to as civilization almost as naked as a newborn child.

It was here that Mrs Roxburgh looked down and saw that she had lost the vine she had been wearing as a gesture to propriety; worse by far was the loss of the wedding-ring threaded upon her fringe of leaves.

She began to cry and teeter. ‘We must go back! D’you suppawse I left ’n at the waterhole? Or hut?’ She could not remember. ‘Could only be one place or t’other. My ring!’ she moaned.

‘You are carryin’ on like a imbecile,’ he told her.

If she were, she was also too tired, battered, ugly before her time, frivolous even at her best moments, or perhaps but the one against whom circumstance bears a grudge.

So she said, ‘You ent ever goin’ to understand. My weddingring!’ and started turning in her tracks.

‘What’s in a ring that’ll bring back yer husband?’

She was already walking away from him; she hated this convicted murderer.

‘And ringless didn’t prevent you an’ me becomin’ what we are to each other.’

The truth in his insolence did not make her admit defeat; he had to run after her and start hitting her about the head with his open hand. ‘If you wanter be taken by the blacks, then go, and good luck an’ riddance to yer!’

She fell down, and he sat beside her, waiting for her to recover her wits.

‘You’re very often right, Jack. I wish I could always appreciate it.’

He was looking at her with an exhausted helplessness in which she shared.

But roused herself.

‘It can’t be much farther on,’ she said, although the distance they had covered since escaping might prove to be the least part of the journey; she almost hoped it would.

When they were again on their feet she limped forward, taking the lead, as she sensed he expected of her. She must have looked a sight: her lacerated feet were causing her the greatest pain; the damp and cold of the night before were at work in her bones; the sun, as always towards the middle of the day, was becoming their chief torturer. The fluctuations of the landscape before her suggested that she might be launched upon the early stages of a fever.

Soon after, she slowed up, and when he came level, grinned at him with what must have looked ferocious insistence. ‘We must help each other, mustn’t we? whatever the outcome.’

He answered, ‘Yes’ with a detachment which hardly reciprocated the sentiments she had intended; nor did his stare, from behind the curtain of sweat, suggest that she was part of his vision.

Yet a little distance farther they put their arms round each other, as of one accord, hobbling, staggering, on.

She told him, ‘Even in mid-summer you could draw a bucket of water from the well under the sycamore that would take the breath out of you. Pa found the well. He had diviner’s hands. The twig would bend for me too, but not regular.’ She sighed. ‘It was the coldest water.’

When here they were, walking over these blazing stones. The bird laughing.

‘Did I ever tell you, Jack, how I walked all the way to St Hya’s and let meself down into the pool? In they days people went to the saint for all kind of sickness. What I went there for I dun’t remember not at this distance. Or if I were cured. I dun’t believe a person is ever really cured of what they was born with. Anyway, that is what I think today.’

In fact she was thinking of the engraving in the book she had found in Mr Roxburgh’s library, in which the inhabitants were shown escaping from the Cities of the Plain. Whatever had happened the couples were holding to each other as desperately as she and the convict, and every bit as naked. Because of the nakedness she had not asked her husband to explain the situation.

Now, as they escaped from one hell into what might prove a worse, however fulsome their reception at Moreton Bay, this man was leaning on her so heavily she hoped she was not a similar drag. She no longer believed in physical strength; it was the will that counted.

‘Do you think you will undertake the voyage Home after we have reached civilization?’ Her teeth were clicking like pebbles inside her mouth. ‘Or perhaps you would find the associations too painful.’ If her grip loosened, her arms slithered papery up and down his ribs. ‘Sydney, we are told, is going ahead. I am inclined to advise Sydney. Set yourself up in some safe business with the reward they’ll give you. My husband will contribute to it handsomely—of that you may be sure.’

What she was thinking, doing, saying, she did not know—perhaps dying on her feet, had a breath of cool not come at them through a gap in the scrub ahead.

When they emerged from the trees, there was a field with rows of methodically hilled plants, and but a short distance beyond, the house, and the more imposing barn, each built of roughly hewn timber slabs.

‘There, you see? Just as we planned!’

In speaking, she turned towards him, but did not recognize Jack Chance the convict: some demon had taken possession of him.

‘Ah, Ellen, I can hear ’em settin’ up the triangles—in the gateway to the barracks! They’ll be waitin’ for me!’

Immediately after, he turned, and went loping back into the bush, the strength restored to his skeleton.

Her torn hands were left clawing at the air. ‘
JACK
! Don’t leave me! I’d never survive! I’ll not cross this field—let alone face the faces.’

But she did. She plodded gravely across the rows of tended plants as though they had been put there, cool and sappy, for the comfort of her feet.

‘They are—teddies?’ She sighed unnatural loud before reaching a track which wound down along a hillside towards the barn. Ruts and hoof-prints had set like iron. She fell among the cow-pats and crawled farther, a lopsided action dictated by the ruts, until halted by the barn and a pair of man’s boots, the latter serviceable in the extreme, as grey and wrinkled as the earth in which they were planted.

Mrs Roxburgh could not have explained the reason for her being there, or whether she had served a purpose, ever.

‘
Naked?
’ The voice was just discernible; it was a woman’s, and of a tone she had not thought to hear again.

She heard shoes approaching, spattering over bare boards, then retreating as soon as a door squealed.

She lay with her head in the dirt because she could not raise it; the flies were busy settling, partly on blood, partly on the moist cow dung with which her arms were smeared.

Then the shoes were returning, the door squealed a second time, and she was enveloped in what could have been a cloak, or simply a coarse blanket.

Mrs Roxburgh was most grateful for whatever it was, even more for the woman’s voice. ‘There, dear! You are here. Nobody will want to know what ’appened till you’re ready to tell.’

Swaddled in the voluminous garment or harsh blanket, as well as what sounded like the woman’s genuine concern, she thought she might never want to ‘tell’ (you cannot tell about fortitude, or death, or love, still less about your own inconstancy).

Mrs Roxburgh said, when she had sufficient control over teeth jaws, limbs, to be able to risk her voice, ‘I will only want to sleep and forget,’ when she knew from experience that she was aspiring to the impossible.

‘That you shall,’ the vast woman answered, gathering up her new child.

After which the child was dragged, if solicitously (the owner of the wrinkled boots might have been adding his support; she could not be sure) on this latest stage of her journey.

‘We must all help one another,’ Mrs Roxburgh giggled as her toes came in agonizing contact with a splintered step, ‘mustn’t we?’ Then she was hoisted over the threshold.

‘Yairs, yairs,’ the woman agreed; heat and hardship may have flattened the voice but without destroying conviction and kindness.

Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head beneath a weight; in all memory a house had never seemed so stuffy or so dark. With the remote hope of catching a glimpse of sky between twigs she would have glanced upward, but the operation defeated her. Perhaps she would remain for ever downcast, and those who like to think the best might mistake an affliction for humility.

This woman would, who remained all around at the same time as she was giving orders in the distance. ‘No, no, Ted! I can bring the tub meself—but not carry the full kettle—and not the bucket of cold neither. We mustn’t
scald
the poor soul.’

They had sat her to wait upon what her fingers slowly discovered in the dark to be a leather throne, its woodwork carved, but very roughly, with a leaf-pattern. Was she worthy of her throne? Horsehair pricking through her coarse robe suggested she might never be.

Mortified, she hung her head lower still.

The tub had been dragged towards her, or so it sounded, across the boards. Water hissed furiously on being poured into tin. Over and above her heavy woollen robe, the pains she was suffering, her shame, the love and gratitude she had never adequately expressed to anybody, she was now enveloped in a cloud of steam.

‘I do not—think I can
—bear it
!’ she cried.

The male boots were retreating as though in fright.

‘I’ll water it down,’ the woman promised. ‘You’ve nothing to fear now, love.’

She would have liked to think so; she would have liked to find the woman’s hand and kiss it for a promise made in the face of human experience.

Only the woman, since they were alone together, was too busy disrobing her patient. However silent her nurse’s unbelief in what she saw, Mrs Roxburgh heard it.

There began a great soaping, she could smell it, and then a flannelling, which made her suddenly leap, and withdraw unsociably into a corner of her pricking throne.

‘There, there! Gently!’ said the woman, and modified her actions in accordance. ‘What is your name, love?’ she asked.

‘Ellen.’

‘Ellen what?’

There was the slip-slop of dreamy water, the passage of a sweating, soaped flannel.

The woman did not press for an answer. ‘I am Mrs Oakes,’ she informed instead. ‘And my husband—Ted Oakes—was a sergeant in his day. We come here with the first contingent. We was Wilshur folk. Ted received a grant for ’is services, and that is ’ow we is farmin’ beyond Brisbane River.

‘It’s a good life,’ she added, in case her patient might not believe.

Ellen Gluyas was only too ready. She sat whimpering in the dark house, moved by all that her senses recalled, through creaking boards and warm flannel, somewhere the smells of milk and smoked bacon, and was it—yes, it was raw wool. Outside, cows’ hooves were thudding homeward down a hard path. She thought that she might not be able to endure this onslaught by the present on accumulated memory.

‘Will we sit you right in the bath, Ellen?’ Mrs Oakes inquired.

Ellen shook her head. She was afraid that, if she spoke, a bubble might shoot out of her mouth instead of words.

‘Well, not yet perhaps,’ Mrs Oakes agreed. ‘Everythin’ gradual like.’

She would have been at a loss after that had her patient not informed her, ‘I lost my wedding-ring, which I brought almost here, threaded on a vine, carrying it all the way from the wreck.’

Mrs Oakes was at once suspended. ‘You’re a survivor’, she asked, ‘from the wreck we’ve ’eard tell about? From the
Bristol Maid
?’

It had become too terrible to answer.

‘Are you Mrs Roxburgh?’ the woman asked.

The patient shook her head. ‘You won’t persecute me? And string me up to the triangles? No one will believe, but a person is not always guilty of the crimes they’s committed.’

‘Come, love, you mustn’t work yourself into a state. Nobody’s goin’ to persecute you.’

‘Not when I’m guilty? Not wholly—but part.’

In the silence which followed, except for the stirring of water and the squeezing of a flannel, she ventured to add, ‘I am not Mrs Roxburgh, whatever you may think. I am Mab, but can’t tell you her other name.’

Mrs Oakes must have stolen away, for Ellen overheard soon after, ‘When the boys come in, John must take a fresh horse, Ted, and ride to the settlement, and tell as we have a survivor, and ask what we should do. ’Tis the one they call Mrs Roxburgh, an’ the poor thing deleerious.’

From the grumbles and the shuffles, Ted Oakes must have wished they had not been saddled with any of this. It was his wife who appeared the sergeant.

‘It’s our duty,’ she reminded, ‘and now come and give me a ’and to lift ’er on the bed.’

They hoisted Mab to higher than she had been accustomed. She lay squirming amongst the wool and feathers.

‘Do tha want to suffocate me?’ she cried.

But settled after a pat or two.

The boys must have returned home. She heard male bodies fling themselves down on benches, questioning, then groaning and protesting, as they slurped at some kind of pottage. She heard fists slammed against a table, and after an interval, the angry hoof beats of a horse urged too abruptly from a walk into a canter.

Mrs Oakes brought a yellow candle, then another, which did not so much illuminate the darkness as obscure any part of the room which lay beyond their vicinity.

‘What would you like to your supper?’ she asked, as though she might produce any manner of delicacy.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, fretting her head against the feather pillow. ‘If I can remember, my maid will bring me it on a tray.’

Mrs Oakes did not wait, but went and fetched a bowl of something.

‘There!’

She spooned a mess, soft, sweet, and bland, into the patient’s mouth. It made Ellen cry, even as she masticated and swallowed: she was not equal to the memories it evoked. For that reason she was soon fed, and clamped her jaws together whatever ideas her nurse had.

‘This way we’ll never get you better.’ Mrs Oakes sighed.

She left the room with the tepid bread-and-milk barely touched.

Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the light Mrs Roxburgh took advantage of her nurse’s absence to explore the room from where she lay. It was of an altogether gaunt appearance, its walls of unadorned grey slab. As far as she could distinguish, the few sticks of furniture could never have possessed any but the humblest virtues. What might have passed for embellishment was of such a rudimentary nature it must have been done to occupy the craftsman rather than to beautify a chair or cupboard. Because her own furniture came crowding round her, the whole rout of barley-sugar or fluted legs, explosive silks, chiming crystal, under the brooding swags of cynical brocade, she closed her eyes. (In any event, none of it was hers, less than ever since she had elected to go dredging the sewers.)

When her eyes were again opened she noticed between shutters left ajar a face darker than the night around it.

She might have shrieked had not her nurse been standing by the bed.

‘Have they come for me?’

‘Who?’

‘The blacks!’

Mrs Oakes said, ‘That is Jemmy. I would trust ’im—and all of our natives—if Ted and the boys were gone a month.’

It was innocence on Mrs Oakes’s part. Mrs Roxburgh did not believe she would trust anybody, whatever their colour. She would not trust herself, she thought.

Suddenly she began to shiver. ‘Do you suppose they’ll be gone a month?’

‘Why—no!’

Mrs Oakes latched the shutters after slamming them to.

She felt her patient’s brow and went and brought some bitter-tasting stuff.

When she had extricated herself from the relentless and evilsmelling spoon, Mrs Roxburgh gasped, ‘My husband was an invalid.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Yes.’

Mrs Oakes laid the spoon in a saucer.

‘Delicate though he was, Mr Roxburgh would have made every effort to save me—had not those blacks murdered him.’

‘Tt! Tt!’

‘Poor Jack! My dearest husband!’

‘Don’t fret yourself, pet. I’ll stay ’ere beside you. No one will harm you—unless it be a dream. I can’t prevent dreams, can I? only break up the attack when I see it takin’ place.’

Mrs Oakes was arranging herself on the leather-and-horsechair throne.

Mrs Roxburgh raised herself amongst the feather pillows. ‘They’ve murdered Mr Roxburgh, but will the whites—kill Jack?’

Mrs Oakes decided to doze.

The same limping, waterlogged boat brought them to the shores of morning, Mrs Oakes’s large face misshapen from resting on the leather gunwale, Mrs Roxburgh’s limbs probably for ever rusted, her lips so tightly gummed she could not masticate the air.

Mrs Roxburgh informed her fellow survivor, ‘On most of these islands there’s shellfish aplenty, but see that you don’t tear your hands. And water—can we but sop up the dew with our handkerchiefs.’

Mrs Oakes was putting up her hair by instinct. ‘What I’ll bring you will put more heart into you than any rotten whelks—unless you don’t
fancy
a fresh egg, an’ cup of milk warm from the cow.’

Mrs Roxburgh did not refuse what she felt she should have denied herself, considering.

By the time Mrs Oakes brought her offerings Mrs Roxburgh had persuaded herself that she was justified in accepting them. ‘With his spear and net, he need never
starve
, I’m thankful to say. Otherwise, how should I swallow this egg?’

‘I don’t rightly know, dear,’ Mrs Oakes replied; she would have liked to, none the less.

A mouthful of egg revolved on Mrs Roxburgh’s tongue as she ruminated on the sounds which reached her: hens drooling at their morning work, hornets vibrant inside a wall, a calf which must have been deprived of the teat. After the nurse withdrew, the patient dozed, while the hours twittered away. If she opened her eyes, nothing was so insignificant that it failed to amaze. She would stare at the whorl in a worn floor-board, the necklace of wax on an extinct candle, a pool of light lying thick and yellow as the egg-yolk of earlier, until drowsiness possessed her afresh.

From the heaviness surrounding her she judged that it must have been towards noon when she heard the sound of hooves in the yard, and first one, then a second dismounted rider, who proceeded to exchange indistinct remarks.

Whatever was in store for her she hoped she might acquit herself convincingly.

Spurs were soon ajingle in the passage, which shuddered at the same time with what she had come to recognize as her nurse’s approach.

Mrs Oakes’s honest cheeks were glowing with heat and pleasure, as well as relief. ‘This is Lieutenant Cunningham, dear, surgeon to the garrison. Now we can be sure that you will get the best attention this side of Sydney.’

‘Mrs Roxburgh?’ The young lieutenant’s voice rang out in a determined effort to assert his rank and sex.

The gong sounding in her head so bemused her she could not have denied the worst accusation.

The surgeon picked up her wrist which, by that shuttered light, might have been a scroll of sloughed bark. She could feel him slightly trembling. His practical profession’s abstract side allowed him, while taking her pulse, to display a certain mystical detachment and avoid looking at the patient’s face.

For the moment she was free to investigate her visitor. Where her nurse was red, the doctor was pink, not yet cured by the climate she supposed. There was an edging of white where his neck joined the collar of his tunic. From its glimmering in the darkened room, she took this white band to be skin. It added something unprotected and tender to the young man’s general appearance, and this, together with the deferential, slightly tremulous hold on her wrist, led her to suspect that the lieutenant had never yet experienced passion.