The Night They Stormed Eureka (4 page)

‘Nay,’ she said at last. ‘You’ve a right to the truth. I don’t want to lie to you, deary. Never to you. Ma died o’ the gin and the cold. I was ten when they sent me from the workhouse to the palace. That were afore Her Majesty were queen, o’ course. Worked me way up from tweenie to kitchen maid. But a girl don’t get to be more’n kitchen maid in a palace, no matter how good her teacakes are — an’ I had more good cooking in my little finger than six of those men chefs put together.
Monsewers,
they calledthem, except for one who was a
sahib
what made the curries. Couldn’t make a Dundee cake between the lot o’ them.’

Sam frowned. ‘So that’s why you came here? To open your cook shop on the diggings?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’ Mrs Puddleham straightened her skirts, avoiding Sam’s eye.

She wasn’t lying. Sam was pretty sure Mrs Puddleham would keep her word about that. But there was a lot she wasn’t saying, too. It took months to sail to Australia from England these days, didn’t it? Probably a lot of money, too. Had the Puddlehams saved up enough back at the palace to get them here?

No, there was too much pain in Mrs Puddleham’s face for that to be the whole story.

And who was Lucy?

But before she could ask any more questions Mrs Puddleham stepped carefully away from the wet patch on the ground, holding her skirts up high. ‘Come on, deary. We’d best be going. Mr Puddleham will think we’ve had to pee a river, we’ve been so long away.’

They walked back through the trees together.

Sam trudged along the track. The sun danced high and hot above the trees. How far away was this farm, anyhow? She wished she had her watch, though she supposed it would look strange to the people here.

Excitement was draining away, leaving weariness instead. Tired from lack of sleep. Tired from shock. Tired from strangeness. Too tired to think much, even, which was good. She didn’t want to think, just let the world flow by. Let Mrs Puddleham look after her, tell her what to do …

She glanced at the Puddlehams, plodding along beside her. They were the only familiar things now in this world, the only anchor that she had.

One minute they were wandering through trees. Then they turned a corner, and the farm was in front of them.

It wasn’t much of a farm, just a clearing in the bush. There weren’t even proper fences, just two paddocks with wooden railings around them. There was a hut made of saplings stuck together with cracked clay; it had slabs of wood for a roof and windows with ragged hessian instead of glass. Dead trees lifted leafless branches, like they’d got a plague. Sheep the colour of dust and rocks grazed underneath, along with a couple of bony cows.

A boy sat on a log, apparently seeing the sheep didn’t stray, though he had a book on his lap. He stood up as they approached. He was about Sam’s age, barefoot and ragged-trousered. His garments had been cut down from an adult’s clothes, and he wore a wide hat like the men they’d met before. He had brown skin, and brown eyes that stared sullenly at Sam and the Puddlehams.

‘Suppose you’re after more bleedin’ mutton,’ he muttered, shoving the book under the rope that held up his trousers.

‘Language! You show some respect, you whippersnapper.’ Mr Puddleham’s face flushed with sudden anger.

The boy stared at the ground. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘That’s better. You think again before you use words like that in front of a white woman.’

White woman? Sam blinked. But this was the past. Brown skins, white skins mattered back then. Now. And the brown of this boy’s skin was more than tan from the sun.

‘I think more’n you. All youse think about is bleedin’ mutton,’ muttered the boy behind them, as they began to tramp across the paddock, Mrs Puddleham pushing the wheelbarrow between lines of dusty cabbages towards a man tipping a thin stream of water onto seedlings from one of a pair of buckets on a pole across his shoulders, while a brown-skinned woman in a faded skirt and sacking apron used a long-handled tool to hack at the ground.

‘Da! It’s them Puddlehams again.’

The man put the bucket down. He was as short as Mr Puddleham, a battered potato of a man, his mouth twisted in lines of old bitterness. But he smiled when he saw who it was.

‘Ah, Mr Puddleham, sir, and Mrs Puddleham too.’ There was a lilt in his voice. Irish, thought Sam. ‘You’re after supplies again, is it?’

‘We are, Mr Higgins,’ said Mr Puddleham.

‘Well, and wasn’t I killing a sheep this morning? I must’ve known youse were comin'.’

The woman stood behind him, her brown eyes watchful. Neither the Puddlehams nor Mr Higgins acknowledged her.

Suddenly she began to cough, a deep bark that took over her entire body. And now Mr Higgins turned to her, supporting her till the spasm was over. He reached into his pocket and drew out a scrap of cloth, and dabbed the blood from the corner of her mouth, then stood back. She smiled at him, and nodded.

‘You right now, Martha?’

‘I’ll be fine.’ She laid a hand on his arm. The voice was almost a whisper, but the English clear and educated.

‘Ma?’ The boy stood by the paddock railing. His mother tried to smile at him reassuringly. ‘Could you get the Puddlehams their potatoes, George?’ Her words came in strange pants, as though there wasn’t quite enough breath behind them. ‘I’m sure they want potatoes as well as mutton.’

‘An’ onions. An’ carrots if you got ‘em, and some of that savoury too. Don’t suppose you got pumpkins left? Or a couple o’ apples?’ Mrs Puddleham spoke to Mr Higgins, not his wife. ‘Be lovely to make Sam some o’ me apple dumplings.’

‘No apples left, nor pumpkins. Cherries in a few weeks, if it don’t rain too much,’ said Mr Higgins temptingly. ‘Lovely big ones they’ll be. Maybe a few peaches too, an’ nice new beans.’

‘An’ a lovely big price an’ all. Ah well, just give us what you got.’

‘I’ll take yer barrow.’ The boy handed his book to his mother. She wiped her hands on her apron before she took it. Her fingers were long and thin.

‘Can I help?’

He looked back at Sam, surprised. ‘If ye like.’ His voice had the same lilt as his father’s.

For a moment it looked like Mr Puddleham was going to object. But then he nodded.

Mrs Puddleham beamed, this time at the dark woman too, as though she needed to spread her joy across an audience of more than one. ‘This here’s our son, Sam, what’s up from Melbourne to join us.’

‘Aye, and a grand lad he is too,’ said Mr Higgins. He stared at Sam, then at his own son, his expression impossible to read.

The boy noticed his father’s look. He grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and jerked it towards a shed. It was the flimsiest building Sam had ever seen, just sheets of bark tied to a rough framework with strips of leather.

The boy glanced round at her resentfully. ‘Didn’t know the Puddlehams had a bleedin’ son.’

‘Mmm,’ said Sam. ‘What were you reading?’ she added curiously.

The boy nudged the wooden door open and pushed the barrow inside. ‘Ye’d not be interested.’

Sam followed him inside. ‘I might.’

‘It’s called
The Great Dialogues of Socrates
.’ The boy pronounced it ‘So-Krates'. ‘Da swapped it for a jar of hooch from this old cove called the Professor,’ he added.

‘You mean “Socrates"?’ Sam pronounced it the way Mrs Quant had, back in history class. For a moment the world shivered again, then was still.

The boy stared at her. The sunlight coming through the shed’s bark walls striped his face black and gold. ‘Ye knows the book?’

‘No,’ said Sam honestly. ‘But I know a bit about Socrates. He lived in the world’s first democracy, didn’t he? In ancient Athens.’

‘That’s him.’ He looked down at the heap of potatoes, not at her. ‘It’s a funny book. Not like a newspaper, nor the Bible neither. Some of them words is hard to understand.’

‘I bet they are,’ said Sam.

He looked up at her again. Sam could see the relief in his face, as though he’d thought she might laugh at him. ‘There’s this bit in the book,’ his voice was eager now, ‘where they makes this Socrates cove drink a cup o’ poison ‘cause he taught the young people to ask questions, to wonder if what the grown-ups did was right or wrong. Imagine a cove wanting young ‘uns to ask questions! But Socrates said the unexamined life ain’t worth living.’

The boy bent and threw a half-rotten potato out the shed door with one strong flick of his wrist. ‘Reckon my Da would have handed him the cup. Not one for answering questions, my Da. Didn’t think I’d never meet anyone else who knew about Socrates —’ he pronounced it correctly now ‘— ‘cept maybe the cove what sold the book. You know him?’

Sam shook her head. ‘I just got here. Doesn’t your teacher know about Socrates?’

The boy’s eyes blazed at her. ‘You tryin’ to be funny?’

‘I — I don’t understand …’

‘What sort of school takes the likes o’ me?’

‘I didn’t think. I’m not from around here, remember?’ she added.

‘Half-castes got schools where you comes from, do they?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam honestly. ‘But it’s a long way away,’ she added.

‘England, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘Fat lot o’ good that is to me. Ma taught me to read — she got taught by this old cove they called the Native Protector when she were young. Da can write his bleedin’ name, but that’s about it.’

‘But he bought you a book,’ said Sam softly.

‘Aye. He did that. I’m George,’ he added.

‘Sam.’ She hesitated, then held out her hand. Boys would shake hands with each other in these days, wouldn’t they? she thought, as George’s hand slipped into hers. It was bigger, and callused from work.

‘You don’t have any books, I suppose?’ George’s voice was a bit too casual as he began to throw potatoes into one of the sacks in the barrow.

Sam shook her head.

‘But ye’ve been to school?’

Sam nodded. ‘For,’ she calculated, ‘nine years now.’

‘Lucky b—blighter.’ He grinned in sudden friendship. ‘You’ll get on fine at the diggings, I reckon. Da brings me newspapers sometimes. There’s lots o’ coves with book learning there, all talking about democracy and stuff. Coves from California and Ireland and places with funny lingos where they tried to get rid of their kings. Da saysthat every man who backed a losing cause in Europe, trying to get rid o’ kings, has come to dig for gold instead.’ George threw another potato into the sack with greater force. ‘Wish Da’d let me go to the bleedin’ diggin’s. Bet I’d find a bleedin’ nugget big as a rat. But he says there’s more money in spuds than gold. How many sacks you want?’

‘Oh … the usual.’

‘Two then.’ He began to heft the sacks into the barrow. ‘Onions? Carrots?’

‘Er, yes.’

George threw a few carrots and a big string of onions, tied together by their wilted tops, into the barrow too, then lifted its handles again.

‘If ye want to read my book ye can borrow it.’ The words came out in a rush, as though he was offering the greatest treasure of his life. ‘Just read it here, mind,’ he added hurriedly. ‘Next time ye come to get supplies. I don’t mean ye can take it away.’

What sort of world was it where a book could be so precious? Sam had thought she knew about hunger. For the first time she had a glimpse of a hungry mind.

‘I’d like to read it,’ she said quietly. ‘We could talk about it, maybe.’

‘Mebbe.’ The hope in his expression in the dimness of the shed said more than words.

The afternoon shadows stretched blue fingers through the trees. Mr Puddleham pushed the wheelbarrow, filled with the sacks of potatoes and a bloody shape that looked like a whole sheep wrapped in red-stained sacking. Sam felt sick every time she glanced at it. Mrs Puddleham carried the food sack, now filled with carrots, as well as a bouquet of tough-looking stems and tiny green leaves, with a strange fragrance even stronger than the smells of unwashed clothes and dead sheep.

Sam trudged next to them, the string of onions slung over her back, trying to enjoy the silence of the bush around them again, the flicker of light through the trees. She still didn’t have any idea where they were going.

In movies there was always a newspaper blowing about so you could check the date. But there wasn’t even a breeze under the hush of gum trees, much less a tumbling newspaper. The gold rushes had lasted for decades, hadn’t they? She tried to remember Mrs Quant’s words, the pages in the history book. They’d started in New South Wales in the late 1850s, but then there’d been rushes in Victoria and Queensland too. They could be anywhere. And almost any
when.

She stared around, trying to find some clue. The trees were a dappled wall around them, too tall to even see if there were mountains in the distance. Suddenly something moved on one of the branches. Sam grinned, despite her weariness.

‘A koala!’

‘No good eating on them bears, lovey. Is there, Mr P?’

Mr Puddleham didn’t reply. His face was red. His small body strained as it pushed the wheelbarrow.

How far do we have to go now? wondered Sam. The shadows were thickening into darkness. Did the Puddlehams have a hut like George’s? How many rooms were there in a hut like his? Maybe the Puddlehams had a house like she’d imagined, with a verandah and a spare room with a soft bed. They had feather mattresses these days, didn’t they? That sounded soft.

She sniffed. She could smell something. Like that zoo, with its huddled animals in small cages. A smell of dirt and droppings. But not animals this time, she realised. This smell was people. Unwashed bodies and wood smoke.

She peered through the trees. Were those white blotches in the distance tents? There was a pale line, too. It took a moment to realise it was a road — a wider one than the track to the farm. Soon she could make out men tramping along it, with bundles on their backs, pushing wheelbarrows or leading horses, heads down and almost staggering under their bulging packs.

Wheels rumbled in the distance. Men moved to one side out of the way to let a canvas-covered wagon pass; it had big wheels and straining horses, just like in a cowboy movie. She almost expected an arrow to twang past as the ‘Indians’ attacked.

But it didn’t. The wagon rumbled into the distance as the three of them turned from the track onto the road.