Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1 (18 page)

It was almost dawn when the
Eagle
cleared Sydney harbour. She punched into the rising waves of the hissing sea and plunged bow first into the rolling troughs while the young man continued to stare back at the slowly disappearing headlands that blazed orange under the glare of the rising sun. It would be a hot and muggy day in Sydney when the sun rose, he thought sadly. The pub would do a good trade.

‘Cap’n says you can join him for coffee.’

Michael turned to the sailor who had a toothless grin and a wizened face which mirrored his lifetime before the mast. ‘Thanks,’ he replied and he took another gaze at the disappearing land. ‘We headed for America?’

‘No, mister. We sailin’ for New Zealand.’

‘New Zealand,’ Michael echoed with no expression.

‘Yeah, New Zealand. But I wouldn’t want to be stayin’ there too long if I’se was you,’ the old sailor said conversationally. ‘Them big cannibals . . . Maoris theys calls them . . . is bustin’ fer a fight with the Limeys an’ I’d be puttin’ my money on them Maoris. They is one hell of a fightin’ man when they get goin’.’ With a cackling laugh the old sailor, bow-legged from his life at sea, made his way back to the bow.

Drifting pillars of smoke from fires burning on South Head marked where Australia lay off the clipper’s stern as Michael watched the mainland disappear below the horizon.

He waited until even the pillars of smoke were gone from sight, then picked his way along the rolling deck to the captain’s cabin.

Ahead of him lay the islands of New Zealand and an uncertain future. Behind him lay Australia and the person he had once been. A person he could never be again.

Jack Horton came in the early morning and his hammering on the front door woke not only Granville, but also Penelope.

An angry maid, wrenched from her sleep by the din, answered the door with threats of summoning the police. But Horton simply pushed the frightened woman aside. As he forced his way into the house, she shrank from the blood-stained man with the foul breath who stood belligerently in the hallway glaring at her.

Granville appeared in a dressing gown at the top of the stairs holding a .32 calibre pistol levelled on the intruder and the cowering maid breathed a sigh of relief.

But instead of threatening to shoot the evil-looking man, he gestured Horton to follow him to the library. The servant shook her head as she pulled her dressing gown around her throat and toddled back to bed. It was nearly five o’clock and she could only expect another half-hour’s sleep before she rose to start her day’s work around Mister White’s house.

Granville closed the door of the library. In her room, Penelope quickly threw a shawl around her shoulders. She padded cat-like down the hall to eavesdrop. Outside the library door, she could hear the muffled conversation of the two men. After a brief and heated argument, the door opened and both men came out of the library.

They did not see Penelope as she had returned to her room only moments earlier when she realised the conversation was over. But not before she had heard enough to learn of Horton’s failure to kill Michael Duffy.

Horton left the house and returned to The Rocks. He was weary, as he had spent a long time being grilled by the traps before going to Granville’s house to report on the events of the previous evening. Despite Horton’s failure, Granville confirmed the deal they had concerning his job on the
Osprey
. He still had nightmares about a razor-sharp knife inches from his groin.

At the breakfast table, Granville was unusually quiet as he sat staring at the newspaper. Penelope sat across the table from her brother and smiled to herself. It did not surprise her that Michael had escaped her brother’s trap. She felt a small amount of savage pleasure. After all, he was surely a dangerous man. She could hardly contain the delight that she felt for the visibly shaken demeanour of her despised brother.

‘Pray that Michael Duffy never finds out that you tried to have him killed, dear brother,’ she said casually as she nibbled delicately on a slice of toast. ‘Or he might return the favour one day.’

Granville blanched with absolute fear. Not for the fact that his sister knew of what had transpired between himself and Horton, but for the fact that she had reminded him the Irishman was still alive and might learn of his role in the botched conspiracy to murder him. Duffy had now become his worst nightmare and he knew his life would never be safe while the young Irishman lived.

‘I don’t think it is likely he will ever know of any such thing, dear sister,’ he snarled. ‘Especially from you, if you wish to have this house to yourself.’

‘Oh, I can promise you my silence,’ she replied with a smile, ‘if you abide by the pact we have made. And I will still help you obtain Fiona’s hand in marriage, for that matter,’ she added and noticed the expression of relief flood his face.

‘You do that,’ he said as he rose and placed the newspaper on the table, ‘and I can promise you that you will have my undying gratitude.’

She watched him leave the dining room and glowed with a contentment. Dear brother, she thought. If you only had the slightest inkling of what lay ahead of you.

WHISPERS ON
THE WIND

1863

SIXTEEN

Officer Commanding    

Native Mounted Police 

Rockhampton Barracks

22 February 1863         

Sir,

I beg to report . . .

P
erspiration from Mort’s hand smeared the paper and obliterated the words which dissolved and formed a watery inkblot. Sweat ran in rivulets down his chest under his heavy police jacket as he cursed the stifling heat.

With an explosive outburst of temper, he hurled the nib pen at the wood slab wall opposite his desk. A tiny lizard scuttled for safety as the pen hit the wall, spraying a fine mist of dark ink across the wooden floor. In his rage, he swept the blank pages of the report from his desk.

Lieutenant Morrison Mort was not a happy man. The infernal heat, the acrid smell of bushfires and the existence of Tom Duffy plagued him in the silent hours of the night and he cursed his decision to leave the colony of Victoria for a position with the Native Mounted Police on the Queensland frontier.

Upon his return from the western patrol, he had learned who the third man was and that he was no less than the son of the Irishman he had murdered. The intelligence had come to him through the routine inquiries carried out by Sergeant James in Rockhampton. The inquiries had not been sanctioned by him, as some things were better unasked and therefore unpublicised. Solomon Cohen, the storekeeper who had provisioned the teamsters for the Tambo trip, had told the big sergeant about Tom Duffy. The picture drawn of Duffy by the Jewish storekeeper did little to allay Mort’s fears. Cohen had described Tom as a tough bushman who could easily live off the land. He had been taught well by the old Aboriginal who had travelled with the Irish teamsters. Worse still, Duffy had a reputation as a man no one in their right mind would want to cross.

Mort eased himself from his chair, stretched and walked over to the only glass window in his office. He stared out into the hot night. Distant bushfires burned with a deceptively soft glow on the horizon and he found himself looking at his own reflection in the windowpane. He saw a man he knew women found irresistible and he laughed silently. For the person in the reflection was another man, a man who functioned as an efficient commissioned officer of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, and was well thought of by his superiors both in Queensland and Victoria. A man the ladies vied to be in company with at social gatherings because of his brooding charm, dashing good looks and conversation.

‘Fucking whores! All of them,’ he snarled. The fever was on him this night and he knew he must have a woman to ease his pain. Oh, so little did they know of his pain! For the thirty years of his life he had carried the unforgivable betrayal of his mother’s love. He counted thirty years because the betrayal had been with him from birth.

He turned his back on the reflection and stared at the sword hanging on a rack on the wall behind his desk. It was an infantry sword that he had won in a game of cards from a young subaltern of the Fortieth Regiment just days before the attack on the Eureka Stockade. Mort had carried the sword into action that hot summer’s morning in the year of 1854 at the Ballarat diggings and on that day he had found the sword was the true extension of his manhood.

Long and straight, with a sharp point, it was designed to impale rather than hack like the cavalry sabre. The infantryman’s sword was a weapon where the man who killed with it was for a moment joined to his victim as they died. A moment of awesome adrenaline-surged power where the executioner and victim looked into each other’s eyes.

He slumped in the chair behind his desk and stared morosely at the paper he had scattered on the floor of his office in his rage. Maybe tomorrow he would write the report. The curse of his murky and violent past was with him, with its terrible grip in the present. He had grown up in the infamous Rocks of Sydney Town but he had broken with the area when he ran away to sea to eventually earn his mate’s ticket as a first-class mariner. But his past was always with him as a curse that haunted him with the memory of a prostitute mother who had sold him as a six-year-old boy to a syphilitic drunken sailor for the price of a bottle of gin. Oh how she had laughed in her drunken stupor as he screamed in pain for her to stop the man hurting him.

In the filthy rat-infested room that backed onto a tannery, he had been ravished as his mother watched, and she had shouted raucous encouragement to the sailor grunting over the young boy. And there were many nights that followed when the men used him, while his mother took their money and laughed at his pain. They had used him in obscene ways that his mind had long tried to block out, ways that continued to haunt him regardless of his efforts to forget.

But a day came when he could take no more and he had hacked his drunken mother to death as she screamed for mercy in that putrid little room.

The investigating police attributed her grisly death to an unhappy customer and did not suspect the ten-year-old boy who stood stony-faced in the corner, watching on with cold blue eyes. A particularly sadistic assault, one of the policemen had said, as he squatted to examine the mutilated body. The bastard’s cut her mouth up with something sharp. Young Morrison Mort knew she could never laugh again at his pain, and nor would any other woman in his life.

From a career as a mariner he had deserted his ship in Melbourne to join the goldfields police, where the graft provided a lucrative income for the smart and enterprising. His years of slogging self-education at sea had paid off with a rapid promotion to the rank of sergeant, and he was recognised by his superiors as a ruthless and intelligent man able to command others under difficult conditions.

After the massacre of the rebel miners at the Eureka Stockade, he remained in the Victorian police force before resigning to transfer to the Native Mounted Police of Queensland as a lieutenant. For Mort, the transfer was a necessity and not an opportunity, and the mutilated body of the little girl was never found in the bush where he had buried her outside Melbourne.

The hesitant knock at the door brought him out of his morose recollections. ‘Enter,’ he bawled and the door opened to reveal Trooper Mudgee standing with a young Aboriginal girl. He shoved her through the open door and she stumbled into the room to stand in front of Mort’s desk. She wore a dirty cotton dress that clung to her skinny body and Mort guessed she was around ten years old.

‘Me get gin for you, Mahmy,’ the trooper said as he came dutifully to attention.

‘Very good, Trooper Mudgee,’ Mort acknowledged softly, as he gazed at the trembling girl staring with large frightened eyes at the floor. ‘You tell no one about the darkie girl you got me tonight, and I promise you will get Corporal Gideon’s stripes before the year is out. Tell anyone about this gin, and I promise you I will know and will flog you until there is no skin left on your back. You savvy well?’

Trooper Mudgee nodded. ‘Yessa, Mahmy. My word, Trooper Mudgee tell no one ’bout this gin.’ He knew well that the
debil debil
on the other side of the desk was more than capable of promoting him to Corporal Gideon’s job – or flogging him to death.

‘Very good, Trooper. You are dismissed,’ Mort said. The trooper saluted, executed a regulation about-turn, and left the office.

When he had gone, Mort rose from behind his desk to go to the frightened girl and with a strange faraway look in his eyes, he pulled the dress over the terrified girl’s head. She knew not to resist, as Trooper Mudgee had told her of the white man’s terrible wrath if she did so.

The dress fell to the floor and she stood trembling and naked as he came behind her and ran his hand slowly down her stomach. She winced and attempted to pull away. ‘Don’t move, slut,’ he barked in her ear as tears of pain ran down her face. ‘You are nothing,’ he said as he used his free hand to unbutton his trousers, allowing them to drop around his ankles.

He stepped out of the trousers then rummaged in the drawer of his desk and found the two articles he required to complete his task. He smiled. The girl’s trembling turned to an uncontrollable shaking as he stuffed a rag in her mouth and expertly lashed her wrists with a leather thong. He pushed her roughly face down across the desk and mercifully she did not see him reach for the sword hanging on the wall. Had she known what he was about to do to her she would have fought with every ounce of strength in her tiny body.

Sweat glistened on Mort’s face reflecting the fever in his twisted mind as he stared with drooling pleasure at the opening between her legs. The fever was at a pitch and needed quenching!

Her long scream of agony was muffled by the rag thrust deep in her throat, and the sword entered deep inside her.

Sergeant Henry James had never had a trooper desert on him before.

He stood in the scrub staring down at the cause of the trooper’s disappearance. Seeing the mutilated state of the young Aboriginal girl’s body, sprawled in the red dust not far from the barracks, he could see why Trooper Mudgee had not wanted to face white man’s justice.

Corporal Gideon stood behind him a short distance away, holding the reins of their mounts, and spat with disgust. ‘Bad bastard, my word, Sar’nt Henry,’ he said, reflecting on the horrific wounds to the young girl’s gaping and bloodied mouth.

‘Looks like he used a knife on her,’ Henry said as he squatted and rolled the corpse over, causing a cloud of flies to buzz angrily in their protest at being disturbed. Henry gagged. ‘Jesus! Look at that!’

Gideon shook his head at the sight of the mutilations to the girl’s vagina. ‘Blackfella got a
debil debil
in ’im,’ he said sadly.

‘Maybe Trooper Mudgee has been around whitefellas too long,’ Henry said softly as he spat in the dust. According to Mister Mort, Trooper Mudgee had been the last person to see the girl alive, which made a fairly straightforward case for a warrant to be issued for his arrest.

Henry rose and limped back to Corporal Gideon. ‘Get some of the gins at the barracks to come out and do something with the body,’ he said as he reached for the reins of his horse. ‘You say she was one of the girls taken in a dispersal last year?’

Gideon nodded. ‘Gin come from a Maranoa tribe,’ he said. ‘Got no ’lations here, Sar’nt Henry. Got no one to sing for her.’ Henry swung himself into the saddle and cast a last look back at the dead girl who was once again covered in flies.

‘No matter. Just give her a decent burial anyway,’ he said as they rode away.

Lieutenant Mort was satisfied at the report that his sergeant had submitted on the murder of the Aboriginal girl. It was brief and it clearly identified the murderer as the Aboriginal trooper who had deserted the troop. And why wouldn’t he desert, when he had been the one who had dumped the girl’s body, on Mort’s orders. The stupid man had been drunk when he took the body away, and had not left her in the river for the crocodiles as Mort had directed.

As slow as he was, Trooper Mudgee had been able to put two and two together very quickly when the young girl’s body was found by the Aboriginal women from the police barracks. He knew his word against that of a white officer would count for very little in a white man’s court of law.

Mort hummed a tuneless melody as he poised the nib of the pen over the half-completed sanitised report on the November dispersal at Glen View. Outside his office, Sergeant James drilled the police troopers on the dusty clearing that was the barracks parade ground. Curious and wide-eyed Aboriginal children mimicked the troopers’ actions with sticks used to imitate the police carbines. A thin blue haze of smoke lay in the still hot air from the bushfires that had raged in the hills around Rockhampton. Eventually the clouds over the hills would billow into heavy rain-bearers which would break on the parched and burnt landscape to wash away the smoke and ash. But for now, the heat was a tangible thing to the sweating troopers.

‘Preeesent h’arms!’

Henry glared along the rank to ensure that the men did not waver as they held the carbines thrust forward and vertical. They stood stone still, staring directly ahead as they had been trained to do, and they waited with muscles aching for the command to ‘order arms’. But Sar’nt Henry seemed to be in a trance . . . as if his spirit had deserted him and flown away.

They watched him staring vacantly at the bark hut that was the office of the
debil debil
Mahmy on the far side of the parade ground. Something about the death of the Aboriginal girl nagged the sergeant and he now regretted submitting his report so quickly to Mort.

A strange and illogical suspicion had crept into his thoughts as he drilled the police troopers. It was a stupid suspicion, and he dismissed the foolish notion that his commanding officer might have murdered the girl. After all, Trooper Mudgee had deserted, and that seemed to confirm his guilt.

He shook his head and returned to the present reality of the parade ground. The Aboriginal troopers sighed with relief when he bellowed out the command to order arms.