The Devil's Eye (18 page)

The dream was of falling endlessly, and when Willie Tanna opened his eyes he was still falling. Lights flickered in the dark. He thrust a hand out and felt the wet deck, and the sound of rushing air and water comforted him for a moment with the belief that he must be under sail, but he could see nothing that gave him a sense of where he was.

A lantern materialised above him, Sam’s face came and went in the arc of light.

‘Don’t move,’ Willie heard him say.

But the world itself was heaving. Willie tried to stand and was thrown against the ladder at his back. So, he was below decks.

He reached behind and grabbed a rung and pulled himself up. With one hand he opened the hatch and in a flash of white light a great ghost of spray rushed at him, the crew behind screaming for him to climb back down.

He heard Sam below yell, ‘
The Lord hath His way in the whirlwind and in the storm
, Willie.
And He will not at all acquit the wicked.
’

‘Go to hell then,’ Willie yelled back, as he raised his head out into the wild night. The sea’s blackened mouth was flecked with foam. And then he was looking at the sky. Lightning caught at the ragged scales of clouds.

Someone grabbed his legs and he was pulled back beneath the deck and the hatch closed above him. He slumped to the floor and by the swinging lantern light saw blood dripping from the end of his fingers. He traced the red rivulet up his arm. He put his hand to his head and felt the edges of his split scalp, an inch long, no more, just above the ear. There was no pain at all.

‘I’m all right,’ he said to himself.

Sam’s face reappeared close. ‘Not if you don’t accept the Lord Jesus as your Saviour before you die.’

‘What are you all doing down here?’ he shouted at the faces of the crew that came and went in the darkness. Charley was chanting the same phrase, over and over.

Sam said, ‘It’s our day to die.’

The door opened and Daniel Jones tumbled down the steps and lay motionless on the floor in a dark pool, his face ghastly lit by the lightning, until the door closed.

Tommy had followed, and now bent over the bosun and grabbed his shirt.

‘The boom’s cracked his head open,’ said Tommy as he dragged him away down the corridor.

Maggie, in her misery, followed them, after making sure Alice was still asleep and bound firmly in. Tommy put Jones into a hammock beside the sick Japanese diver whose name Maggie found she could not remember. She was ashamed that she’d forgotten about the man when the storm began.

She went to him. He looked terrified, but there was nothing she could do for him. She squeezed his arm and tried to smile.

Tommy said he had to go, the captain needed him. He whispered to Maggie, ‘Bandage Mr Jones and leave him. There’s nothing more you can do.’ He left.

The sick bay was airless. There was no hope of opening a hatch, and whatever was loose in the cabin was at the mercy of some monstrous force.

Maggie was thrown against a wall, and slumped to the floor. The medicine chest was strapped into a corner and Maggie lurched towards it. She captured it, but it was locked. She rested her head against the lid for a moment. The key was in Porter’s cabin.

She forced herself back down the corridor, almost overcome with nausea. In her cot, Alice moaned softly.

She found the key on its hook and made her way unsteadily back down to the sick bay. A violent jolt drove her into the deck and a picture that had been screwed to the wall crashed beside her and immediately slid away.

She crawled to the medicine chest and set about the lock with the key. Nothing in the world stayed still any more. She placed one hand on the lid to steady herself while the other stabbed the key at the lock. When she finally opened the chest, she was thrown to the floor again and feared the contents would all spill out, but straps held the chest tight to the floor and the contents were tightly packed.

The lantern began to swing with some regularity and Maggie pulled herself up to lie on top of the chest. The smell of chemicals from the pharmacopoeia made her stomach heave, and she closed her eyes for a moment.

She found a bandage and gauze and pulled herself up beside Jones’s swinging hammock. She could see in
the wild yellow lamplight that the boom had struck him above the ear, a terrible blow that she dared not touch. The skin had split and the hair was matted with blood that still leaked in a thick stream like molasses.

Jones opened his eyes for a moment and blinked at the ceiling. ‘Oh, I am full of this,’ he said.

‘Me too, Mr Jones,’ said Maggie.

Jones rolled towards her and vomited copiously down her dress, and Maggie retched onto the floor herself. When she turned back, Jones was trying to raise a hand to his mouth, but the effort seemed to be too much.

Maggie put a hand to the man’s forehead. It was cold and damp. She eased his head to one side as Jones murmured, ‘Get that bloody shell forward.’

Maggie lifted Jones’s head as gently as possible, held the gauze to the wound and passed the bandage under his head three times.

It was as much as she could do, and she knew it would have little effect. She didn’t need to feel the skull for fractures. Even bandaged, she could see that Jones’s head had been flattened on one side. He’d lost a lot of blood, but the bleeding had slowed.

A small amount of blood had also trickled from Jones’s nose and he’d bitten his tongue.

‘Well, Mr Jones, I think you might live,’ she said aloud, as if it was a joke.

‘Light the fire will you, Pedro. It’s damned cold in here,’ he mumbled.

Behind her, Maggie heard the Japanese man say something. He was staring with horror at the bloody hammock.

The schooner gave one long roll that ended in a shudder, and Maggie stumbled backwards while holding on to the hammock. She found a belt that had been set aside for the purpose of strapping patients to their hammocks, and made Jones secure.

He mumbled, ‘Huracan. The God of Evil is about.’

She looked into that face, the eyes closing, the breathing shallow but steady. Being stunned might be a blessing for the man. Maggie had no idea what else to do.

Maggie turned to the Japanese diver and, with little hope that the man would understand, said, ‘Please watch Mr Jones. Sing out if he gets any worse.’

And then she crawled back down the corridor. She heard her baby crying in her cabin.

‘I do like a good storm,’ said Dr Walter Roth, lying with an elbow on his saddle.

‘This isn’t a good storm.’ Constable Jack Kenny peered through the tent flap at the vegetation flying through the air.

‘What’s it like out, then?’ asked Roth.

A flash of lightning lit the clearing, the troopers’ tent, the miserable horses and the flailing trees. The vicious crack of thunder made him flinch.

‘Savage.’

He closed the flap. The flickering light that seeped through the canvas made the Protector look like a reclining ghost. Kenny yearned to be left alone with his thoughts, to consider Roth’s revelation about Hope, but the man would not stop talking.

‘As a boy, you know,’ said Roth, ‘summer storms always came directly at me. You ever think that as a boy? I took it for granted that everything was for my benefit, that I was the centre of nature’s attention.

Never occurred to me that I wasn’t or that anything bad could possibly happen. I blame my doting parents.’ Kenny was only half listening.

‘It’s a curse,’ said Roth, ‘to be loved so completely that one is not even aware of it. Boyhood for me was an insipid blur of warm feelings. Can hardly remember it because nothing traumatic happened. Didn’t even suspect that life could be cruel until I went to Oxford.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘Damned right, Jack. I’ve been cheated.’

Roth was goading him. Kenny asked, ‘Are your parents still alive?’

‘No. I see what you mean, but suing them is out of the question.’

Roth tried for a short time to strike a match.

‘It might as well be raining
inside
this damned tent,’ he said, and Kenny heard him throw the tin down. ‘What about when you were a boy? What do you remember at…where was it that you grew up?’

‘Coldstream.’

‘That’s right.’

Roth began humming, and then started singing, ‘
But of all the world’s great heroes, there’s none that can compare, With a tow, row, row, row, row, row, to the British Grenadiers
.’

He stopped abruptly and said, ‘What are your memories, as a child?’

The wind roared, but the lightning had stalked off for a while. Kenny had a vivid image of his father’s garden.

‘There was a storm on the farm once. And I remember galloping around the vegetable garden until my mother came out and dragged me inside.’

Roth slapped his leg. ‘That’s what boys do, don’t they, by God! Gallop around in a storm. And when they grow up they go to war. Or join the Native Police. And what do our women do? Try to haul us back.’

Kenny opened the flap again. Another series of lightning pulses revealed a large branch tumbling across the clearing, the horses shrunken even further into themselves, the dark face of Euro at the opening of the troopers’ tent.

Kenny shut the flap and sat back in the dark. He remembered his childhood as a happy one, despite the hardship. Or perhaps because of it.

‘If someone drags you out of the storm, I’d say that’s an act of love,’ he said.

‘Of course it is. A good beating can be an act of
love.
Doing something for love can justify any outrage.’

Kenny heard Roth rummaging through a saddlebag and the top of his hipflask being unscrewed. He felt it bump against his shoulder, and he took it from Roth’s hand, sipped, and passed it back. The wind roared with renewed force.

‘Why are we here?’ said Roth, echoing Kenny’s thoughts.

‘
You
are not supposed to be here.’

‘But I bet you’re jolly glad I am.’

Kenny said nothing.

‘I’ll tell you why
you’re
here,’ Roth continued. ‘You’re the protector of colonisation.’ He paused, as if Kenny might deny it. ‘You, Constable, are clearing the way for the grazier, the pearler and the digger. You and I know that you’re not here to investigate a spearing. You don’t even know if the man you’re looking for exists. There’s probably no victim, no motive, no weapon, no crime. You’re here simply to scare the savages off so we British can make money.’

‘And you’re here to stop me?’

‘No,’ said Roth, sounding almost miserable in the dark. ‘Our methods differ, but in the end our purpose is the same…Here’s luck.’

Kenny heard Roth take a swig. There was nothing in Roth’s little speech that surprised him or that he disagreed with. If Roth was trying to prick his conscience, he was wasting his breath.

‘Did I tell you about Topsy? Little half-caste girl I came across last year?’ Roth seemed to be growing more maudlin. ‘She was about ten or eleven years old, although she looked all of six. Almost white. Not as light-skinned as Hope, though. Not white enough to pass off as a white child. She’d been living with a European guardian; I won’t say who because you’ll know him. She could read and write, and do arithmetic. Her guardian, regrettably, although for reasons that are also quite understandable, let her associate with her mother, who was working on a station at Torrens Creek. And then the mother found a new boy and, of course, one day she
took Topsy to town. Month or so later…well, you probably know the story. The mother and the boy are demoralised by opium and people come to me complaining about this child sleeping under their houses. When Topsy was taken into custody I found her with venereal.’

‘I do know the story.’

‘She died a month ago.’

Kenny didn’t know that. Now he was thoroughly depressed, too.

Roth was quiet for a while. ‘If we’d taken her away from her mother and sent her to Cape Bedford, or placed her with a good family, I believe there would have been a happy outcome.’

‘If we hanged every damned opium seller, the outcome would be happier.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Roth. ‘But don’t you blame the mother?’

‘Of course I do. I blame everyone. And what good did you do? You’re to blame, too.’

‘You’re absolutely right. Hang us all, then,’ said Roth.

‘I’ll drink to that.’

The rain had eased a little. Kenny considered making a dash to see how the horses were faring, but instead lay back on his camp cot listening to the drum of the rain on the canvas, the roaring sea and the wind outside the tent.

He closed his eyes. Hope Douglas drifted through his thoughts, smelling of carbolic and starch.

‘What was her reply?’ he heard Roth ask, but distantly.

Kenny reached out into the dark, grabbed Roth’s flask from his hand and took a mouthful. ‘She said yes.’

The wind roared again with a full throat.

Kenny’s father had warned him that a Catholic boy was always too quick to marry. He would say, ‘The church is God’s curse on the Irishman, so it is. We marry in haste to bed a girl and then suffer at our leisure, Jack. No wonder the Irish drink.’

At the Eight Mile, John Kenny senior would now be calling from his bed, ‘Are ye there, Sarah?’ and Sarah, unmarried, would bring him his glass. In the kitchen, standing in the pantry, she’d help herself.

He had brought them to that place, God forgive him. And now his final act of betrayal would be to marry a black woman and send them back to New South Wales.

Kenny started awake as something heavy hit the tent, sending a spray of drops over his face.

He found a match and struck it.

‘How the devil did you do that?’ asked Roth.

Jack lit a candle and then passed the glowing match to Roth, who used it to search for his misplaced cigarette.

Drops were forming streams on the inside of the tent and racing each other down the grey canvas, across a map of black mould.

The wind roared through the treetops, and small branches began hitting the side of the tent. Kenny opened the flap and saw the troopers’ tent aglow from within and shaking.

Euro emerged to push a loose tent peg into the ground, and then crawled back inside.

The squall roared in from the sea and as a lightning bolt hit the ridge with a deafening crack, the troopers’ tent collapsed. It tumbled away, leaving four men sitting in the middle of the clearing.