Pearl in a Cage (20 page)

Jenny returned home in the spring of 1927 and Elsie missed her. Two small children played more contentedly than one. Joey was three years old, his birth registered in some city office. Gertrude said Elsie's birth may have been recorded at the mission, but Elsie didn't want to go there to find it. She had a sister, Lucy, who was older, who may have known her birthday but like their daddy, she'd gone.

Elsie now shared Joey's birthday, on 17 July. She may have been sixteen. She was no more. A pretty, dark-eyed girl with a mop of tight black ringlets hugging her head like an astrakhan cap, her hands fine and birdlike, but unafraid of work.

She'd taken Joey with her to the shed while she got the copper burning.

He missed his playmate and wanted Elsie to play. He liked hiding underneath the big old wooden wash trough. She called into many odd places before pouncing on him. He came out laughing, something grasped in his hand.

‘What you got there, Joey?'

His hand hidden behind his back, he wanted to continue the game. She tickled him until he gave up his find. Then no more laughter.

‘Where'd you find that?' She could see gold through the crust of red dirt. She cleared a little soil from it between her hands. ‘Where'd that come from, Joey boy?'

‘Dat mine,' he said.

‘That's Mum's, more like it.'

Gertrude was down at her boundary with wire and pliers, attempting to encourage another year or two from her gate. She stopped twisting wire, dropped her pliers.

‘It's that brooch!' she said, taking it, rubbing it with her thumb. ‘It's that woman's brooch. Where did you find it?'

Joey had pointed in under the wash trough when Elsie had asked the same question. She knew little of what had gone on the night of Jenny's birth. She remembered waking to Gertrude's house filled with strangers and movement and light when there should have been no light. Remembered the baby crying. If she'd heard talk of the brooch, she'd forgotten. She stood close, watched Gertrude tap and blow soil from it, rub it against the leg of her trousers.

‘It must have been on that coat. It must have fallen down behind the trough when I tossed everything in to soak that night. Or it's been on the floor and I've kicked it under the trough.'

Gertrude couldn't believe it was found, couldn't believe what she held in her hand either. Those diamonds looked real and some of them were big. And the ruby set dead centre was as big as a hen's eye. It was a beautiful thing. She considered riding into the town with it there and then, but her boundary gate was falling apart, so Elsie took the brooch back to the house and placed it in a bowl on the mantelpiece where it remained until Friday.

 

Ogden and his wife had never seen anything like it. The brooch was a good inch and a half in length, an elongated oval with fancy goldwork around the edges and rows of red and white stones circling out from a central ruby. No wonder at all that it had caught the eye of Norman's relative.

‘She was on that train all right,' Ogden said. ‘She was coming up here for some reason, though why she'd walked four miles from town, I don't know.'

‘Folk fall from trains. I read of a case a while back where someone opened a train door thinking they were coming into a station. It's easy enough to lose your balance when you're carrying.'

‘No unclaimed luggage was ever turned in.'

‘If this had been found when we found her, someone would have recognised it,' Gertrude said.

‘I've got the name — somewhere — of the chap who reckoned she could have been his absconding wife, back when that newspaper story came out.'

Mary returned to her kitchen and Ogden and Gertrude walked down the verandah to his office. A half-grown boy was in there reading. Ogden evicted him, closed the door behind him.

‘A man doesn't put a lot of thought into how he's going to house and feed his kids when he has seven,' he said. ‘He doesn't consider the boots they'll wear out, the space they'll take up.'

‘They come in small packages, Ernie.'

He opened drawers, rifled through them and slammed them shut. What he sought was somewhere, but near four years had passed since that night and a lot of junk could pile up in four years. Things changed. His oldest boy, fifteen then, was now going on nineteen and working in Melbourne. His youngest, three at the time and taking up little space, was seven and making his presence felt.

He tried his desk drawers. ‘Hallelujah,' he said, withdrawing a large manila envelope which he upended onto his counter. The embroidered purse was in there and six or eight sheets of paper. Gertrude reached for the purse to look again at the few items found on the woman, while Ogden scanned the papers until he found what he was looking for.

‘That's him.
Albert Forester. No fixed address. Enquired after identifying jewellery
.'

He offered the paper and she glanced at it, expecting more but only finding those few words.

‘He didn't describe the brooch?'

Ogden scratched at his neck. ‘From what I recall, he didn't specify what jewellery. The chap who spoke to him reckoned he was out for what he could get. They tried to get an address out of him, some place where he might be contacted, but he told them he'd been travelling, attempting to find his wife, that he'd contact them again when he found accommodation.'

‘He knew there was a baby?'

‘It was in the newspaper at the time. That's what convinced the chaps who spoke to him that he was a fraud. The fellow I spoke to said that Mr Albert Forester showed as much interest in the infant as a louse might show in vinegar. He was after jewellery. A man with a missing wife doesn't ask about her jewellery first and the offspring later.'

‘Would it be worth getting John McPherson to photograph the brooch and get it in the papers?'

Ernie was pinning the brooch to the stranger's handkerchief. ‘Start advertising this,' he said, ‘and you'll have Albert Forester and every other louse in Melbourne up here claiming it — and claiming that little girl too.'

Gertrude didn't want anyone claiming that little girl. It had been hard enough losing her back to Norman. She watched brooch and handkerchief placed into the purse, watched Ogden fold the sheet of writing paper, fold it small enough and slide it in beside the handkerchief, place the purse into the manila envelope and the envelope into the drawer.

‘As far as I'm concerned, Trude, the purse, and what it contains, belongs to that little girl and to no one else. Case closed,' he said and he closed the drawer.

 

A week after the brooch was found, Squizzy Taylor, a notorious Melbourne gangster, was gunned down in a Carlton house and Mrs Ogden's firstborn son lodging in the same street — and the woman he lodged with knew the woman who had been caught up in the gangsters' vendetta.

‘What if he'd been walking by when it happened, Ernie? What if he was dying in hospital and we couldn't even get a train down to him until tomorrow? I tell you, I can't stand having him all the way down there, never knowing where he is or what he's doing.'

In November they found out what he was doing. He was gambling. He won ten quid on Trivalve in the Melbourne Cup, and while his mother bewailed his gambling ways, he sent a telegram to his seventeen-year-old brother to be on Saturday's
train. He'd got him a job. And then there were five, and Ogden's fifteen year old itching to go with his brothers.

Vern's offspring were at school and university in Melbourne. He saw them two or three times a year. In December of 1927, he travelled down by train and brought them home in his new car, his daughters in the rear seat, his son at his side. His daughters were not willing passengers. They preferred Melbourne. His son was carsick.

There was little entertainment in Woody Creek. He took his family to the school concert where his daughters sat in silence through two hours of boredom while Noah built his ark and filled it. Ogden's nine year old played Noah, in a long black coat and cottonwool beard. Cecelia was one of the giraffes, and tall enough. The highlight of the night was the Macdonald twins who played front and backside of a donkey.

Norman was there with Jennifer. Life had been easier before he'd brought her home. Cecelia resented competing for his time. His arm still ached if he lay on it, but it was strong again. He no longer expected Amber to step down from each Melbourne train, though the sight of a slim pale stranger alighting could still set his heart lurching like a frog in a pool of sludge.

Each Friday, Gertrude delivered her jams and eggs, her fruit and vegetables to Norman's kitchen and stayed on to iron a few things, cook a meal and bake a batch of oatmeal biscuits. From time to time, the church ladies brought around some offerings; occasionally Maisy delivered a cake. They managed. They ate a lot of sausages and potatoes. The house grew in untidiness — the kitchen floor was more often than not sticky with spills, book covers and newspapers frequently stuck to the kitchen table, pencils were occasionally washed up with the knives and forks, but they managed.

Sissy made slow progress with her reading, her mind at times a locked door to Norman, her uncomprehending stare defeating. He blamed himself, blamed his lack of early involvement with that daughter.

There had been no such lack of involvement with Jenny. At times he feared he may be straining her young mind, but she enquired so he replied.

During the evening meal, and in the hour following it, his kitchen became a schoolroom. This had been his habit prior to Jenny's return home and Norman was a creature of habit. As the months passed, he'd become aware that his instruction, prepared for his nine year old, was being more readily absorbed by his four year old, who could, in the blink of an eye, reduce his convoluted information down to the central core and occasionally slip it in some back door to her sister's mind.

To those who have no use for it, learning to read is a trial. To the seekers of answers, reading is only a code waiting to be broken and the keys to that code all around.

Jenny was such a seeker.

 

Maisy was a mother to Norman's girls. She had ten of her own and barely noticed the two extras. They played in the park beside her house, in her backyard. She fed them if they were there at mealtimes, kept her eye on them when they ran back across the road to the station, or told her older girls to keep an eye on them.

Jessie, her youngest daughter, was Sissy's age and an average scholar. Her twin sons were fourteen months Jessie's junior. There was little more than a year between any two of Maisy's brood.

They were playing school in the backyard on a hot January morning midway through the long school holidays, when each child, admit it or not, was beginning to look forward to the daily routine of school.

The twins were eager to return to the battleground of the schoolyard; they had no use for books — they couldn't read — which didn't mean that their sisters could make fools of them by getting a four year old to read their Christmas book.

‘Show-off,' they chanted. ‘Show-off.'

‘If you won't play properly, then you can't play,' Maureen, the senior Macdonald daughter said.

Sissy didn't like playing school, or Jenny. She added her voice to the chant. ‘Evil show-off. Evil show-off.'

The Macdonald girls walked away when the twins started picking plums and throwing them. Sissy, once the girls were
out of sight, picked up fallen lemons and threw them. Lemons hurt when they connected. Jenny would have run to Norman if the twins had let her out the gate. They held it shut. She knew another way, between two broken fence palings. She scuttled through, but they saw her in the park and chased her with sticks, so she went the other way, ran all the way up the road and down the lane behind the police station, then down the road towards Charlie's railway crossing. From there she could run down the railway lines to Norman. Except they were waiting at Charlie's crossing and they had more lemons.

She ran out towards the slaughteryards, then across someone's paddock to the railway lines, aware that she wasn't allowed to be down here by herself, but Sissy and the twins weren't allowed to be chasing her and throwing things at her either.

‘I'm telling Daddy on you,' Sissy yelled.

Jenny pretended she couldn't hear her, as Norman had advised; she continued walking down the centre of the lines.

‘I'm telling Daddy you went over Charlie's road. I'm going back to tell him right now, you evil show-off.'

Jenny walked until Sissy stopped yelling, and when she turned around to see if she was coming, she couldn't see her, but she saw something else, something she'd never seen before. Those train lines looked exactly like a giant had ruled them on the ground with his grey lead pencil, like he'd marked Woody Creek exactly in half!

 

They'd been placed down when the town was little more than hotel and general store. Desperate to get from A to B, railway surveyors gave no thought to the settlement's possible expansion, but laid the lines parallel to the only street, then, for convenience, placed the station a stone's throw from the hotel. No one had expected the town to grow as it had. This was farming country, wheat and wool country. But the railways had offered ready transport to the city and there was a forest surrounding the settlement, a forest begging to be harvested.

Old man Monk had owned a hundred acres of forest. He'd set up the first pit mill. Others had followed. Timber-getting
required many labourers, labourers required wives, wives had kids, required or not, and kids required education.

The town fathers ran out of space in the main street, north of the line, and when the more substantial structures came, they set them south of the line. The two banks were in South Street, the town hall, post office, police station, Norman's house, George Macdonald's house. The hotel, café, butcher, newsagent, boot shop and bakery were in North Street, Blunt's drapery on the eastern corner of North Street, Fulton's feed and grain store on the corner of South Street, Blunt's crossing between them. Charlie and Jean White's grocery store sat on the western corner of South Street, and on the other side of his crossing the Methodist church claimed the North Street corner.