The Secret River (14 page)

At low tide the point was lined with mud. This was not the same as slimy Thames mud, but a rich brown that looked good enough to eat. Beyond the mud were the rushes, higher than a man, packed as tight as the bristles of a broom, topped with feathery plumage. They were alive with little round brown birds, something of the order of a robin. He could hear them in there making their calls: ca chink pee pee pee wheep! Wheep!

Other birds, as bright as soldiers, stalked across the mud on long hinged legs. He watched, not two yards away, as one of them broke off a reed with its claws, holding it so its beak could strip off
the outer sheath and eat the pale stalk within, one bite at a time, like a lady with a finger of asparagus.

The reeds protected the point on one side, dense mangroves on the other. Beyond the slope of the gentlemen’s park, the land tilted and became a wall of jumbled rocks and scrubby woods. But between the river and the ridge there was plenty of good flat land. A hundred acres? Two hundred?

Whatever it was, it was enough.

Each time they passed the place he looked for the thing he was dreading: the dug-over patch of ground where some other man’s corn was growing, the square of some other man’s hut. Each time there was a moment’s relief, but then the dread returned.

The thought of that point of land became a private thing, a bead of warmth in his heart.

~

Blackwood was more jovial these days than Thornhill had ever seen him. He was planning to sell the
Queen
, retire to his farm
away
a ways up
, and make do on what his moonshine brought in.
Plenty
of wood, plenty of water, plenty of tucker
. Blackwood shrugged when Thornhill was surprised.
I got all I need up there, and none of the aggravation
I can do without
.

But he seemed to want to see Thornhill right before he disappeared into the valley of the First Branch, and seeing him right meant making sure he got his pardon.

The ticket of leave was a way to make men work, but a full pardon worked even better. Those who were already free and who had the benefits of servants assigned to them did not agree, but for the moment the Governor was handing out pardons as if they were two a penny.

Which in a manner of speaking they were. Blackwood knew a man of the cloth, a Reverend Cowper, who was prepared to
vouch for the good character of anyone with a few quarts of Jamaican about him. Blackwood boasted that the term of his own natural life had turned out to be five years. It could have been less, he said, except that the blooming keg had tipped off the barrow and busted and he had to go back for another.

Blackwood told Thornhill how to get the petition written out by a fellow named Nightingale, a broken-down gentleman far gone in rum, who had a way with a fine phrase and wrote a good hand. He sat at one of the rum-stalls down by the stream with a quill and an empty inkbottle before him. A man who needed a petition for a pardon supplied his own paper and a jar full of ink, and a quantity of rum. The precise quantity was a matter of judgment. Sober, Nightingale was no good to a man, his hand shaking like a fiddler’s and his eyes small with shock. But if he was given too much, rum oozed out of his pores and the pen fell from his fingers. There was a short time between the first pannikin and the promise of the second, that had him waxed just right to do the job.

At the bottom of the fine curly letters, red ink as well as black and flourishes top and bottom, Nightingale left a gap and pointed to it with his trembling finger, saying
William Thornhill his mark, there
if you please
, and Thornhill took the quill. But instead of scratching a cross, he scraped his way along the letters Sal had taught him. He crushed the nib too hard against the paper, so there was a blob and a spatter, and he had forgotten how to make the small letters, so they were nothing more than a crooked line like a worm on a fishing hook. But the W and the T stood out clear. William Thornhill.

~

In December of 1810, four years after he had arrived, Thornhill and a dozen other hopefuls took a place on the
Rose Hill Packet
and sailed up the Port until it narrowed into a river they called the
Parramatta. At the head of that river, on Rose Hill itself, was the Governor’s house. It was a square stone box that sat above the ramshackle convict huts like a gentleman comfortable on a chair. The petitioners were taken into a large-windowed drawing room, its walls covered with portraits of whiskery gentlemen and rows of books gleaming with gilt. His Excellency stood in a fall of sunlight from one of the tall windows, blinding in scarlet and gold braid, the cockaded hat shading his face, his feet on a small square of red carpet.

At the other end of the room the lags stood with their caps in their hands. The Governor’s Scotch accent was so strong that Thornhill only understood his weighty words in part, and occupied his mind inspecting the nearest portrait, a man sitting sideways at a little table with a book in his hand against a dark background. He wondered what he himself would look like sitting at a little table with a book in his hand and rich brown gravy all around. Would he appear as substantial as this gentleman, or did a man have to be born to it?

When his name was called,
William Thornhill, Alexander transport,
life
, he stepped forward smartly. He shook His Excellency’s white-gloved hand and heard himself pronounced
Absolutely
Pardoned
.

Counting from the moment in the Old Bailey when the judge had snatched at the cap falling off his wig and delivered the sentence, the term of William Thornhill’s natural life had turned out to be four years, five months and six days.

Back at the Pickle Herring, he and Sal toasted each other. It seemed only right to celebrate the Governor’s pardon with the Governor’s own brandy. He could feel its warm fingers inside his chest and saw the flush rise to Sal’s cheeks.
My word but His
Excellency does himself proud
, she said, and took another mouthful.
And may he live long to enjoy it, having freed my man
.

Her face was brown from the hard sun, and there was a
toughness to her now that came from humouring drunkards while trying to watch the children: Willie and Dick running wild around the settlement and Bub staggering after them on his skinny little legs, crying to them to wait.

She leaned towards him across the table, so close he could see how the skin was white along the lines raying out from the corners of her eyes. The lines—from so many days of squinting into the sun—gave her a look of laughter that made him want to take her right there, against the wall, and hear her panting into his ear. As if she could read the thought in his eyes, Sal brought her face even closer and squirted her brandy straight from her mouth into his, so he felt the spray of it on his face.

~

With Blackwood getting out of the packet trade, Thornhill had to look for something else. He had in mind to get a skiff of his own. There was a man in Cockle Bay made one-man craft along the lines of a Thames wherry, and something like that would let him go back to working around the ships in Sydney Cove. With such a small boat he would have to work in a small way, but if he owned it himself he would do well enough not to have to thieve. He would make a good steady living, nothing grand, but reliable, and no risk of Van Diemen’s Land.

By and by he would have another conversation with Sal. He had frightened her, talking about the land too sudden, not working out how it might all be done. He had to go slower, that was all.

He and Sal got out the box from under the bungwall and by the light of the slush lamp they counted the money. Thirty-five pounds. It was more money than they had ever owned. If he could make do with secondhand oars, it was enough for one of Walsh’s skiffs.

Sal weighed the coins in her palm, let them pour from one
hand to the other. Held one close to the lamp, tilting it to see the gleam where a thousand hands had made it their own.

Will
, she said, and he looked at her. There was something new in her tone. He saw how, in the lamplight, the centre of one brown eye was smaller than the other.
That Blackwood
, she said.
I
seen in the Gazette where he’s selling off the Queen
. He nearly asked her what that had to do with Walsh’s skiffs, but waited.
A hundred and
sixty he’s asking but he’d take less
. She was thinking her thoughts out loud.
We oughter buy it off of him
, she said.
Make our pile like he done,
quick-smart
.

Thornhill’s eyes went to the heap of coins on the table, but she was ahead of him.
Borrow the rest
, she said almost in a whisper,
off of Mr King
.

He could not believe he had understood her right, but when he looked into her face she was ready for him, smiling.
Couple of
years of the packet trade, we’ll pay the lot back
, she said. He felt his mouth open in astonishment and she rushed on, thinking he needed reassurance.
I done the sums, Will, it will work out
. She was leaning across the table, urging him, coaxing him along.
Then we’ll
be right to go back. Home
.

He could have laughed aloud. All this time he had been nursing his secret dream, and it turned out she had been coddling a dream too. Hers had an altogether different end, but the miracle was that it had the same beginning.

She did not guess his thought, was going along the track of her own. She glanced at him, her eyes gleaming.
Couple of years is
all, Will, then we’ll be right. Home, Will, imagine that!

He nodded as if he was thinking about Home, and when she leaned across the table to take his face in her hands and kiss him, he kissed her back hard enough to surprise her.
Yes
, he said.
I’ll see
King tomorrow
. But he was not thinking about how soon they could go Home. The calculation in his mind was how soon he could get set up in the Hawkesbury trade, so that it would be the most logical
thing in the world to need a base on the river: in short, when he would be able to stand on that point of land and know it was his.

~

It was a hundred and fifteen pounds they needed, as well as what was in the box. It was a huge sum, almost so big as to be unreal, not actual money but just sounds in the mouth. Back Home he would never have taken such a step. Not even thought of it. But in this place, if a debt could keep a man awake at night, it could turn him into a man of property. Mr King agreed to the loan, and shook hands with Thornhill as if he had in that moment become an equal.

He knew the
Queen
well: an open sloop of nineteen feet, half-deck fore and aft and plenty of room in the hold. She was as clunky as a bathtub, all blunt bow and broad in the beam. She was a cranky sailor short-hauled, and had an awkward way of broaching in a following wind. But she was built strong, and was brave in a blow.

Thornhill had to down a tot before he could nerve himself. Even then, he watched his hand trembling as he signed the paper.

~

Sal came down to Sydney Cove to admire the boat. She was in the family way again, and was so far along she had to straddle the coil of rope he gave her to sit on, her legs apart to ease her growing belly.
Queen is a funny kind of name
, she said.
Da’s boat,
remember, he called it the Hope
. She smiled up at Thornhill, squinting into the brightness of the sky behind him.
Which is pretty much what
we got to do, ain’t it, not to mention pray?
He loved to see her face light up with that old smile, remembering.
It had a red stripe, Da were real
particular about that stripe
.

The next time she came down to the Cove, the new baby in her arms, he and Willie had painted out the old name and put the new one in its place, the letters copied from a piece of paper
provided by Nightingale. The red stripe, just below the gunwale, looked well. He could see why Mr Middleton had been particular about it. To make the thing perfect, they even painted the same line around the skiff that Blackwood had thrown in as part of the deal.

The
Hope
was made for a father and his son. Willie was going on eleven and as handy as most men. He took after his father, a big boy with a tangle of hair squashed under his cap. He was a tough one. When one day his finger got itself wedged in the thole-pins, and the oar pushed back against it, his face went the colour of dirty clay but he did not make a sound. Thornhill saw the muscles in his jaw straining to keep the pain in, so the lad seemed almost to bulge.

Thornhill recognised himself in the pain, and in the force that kept it silent.

Willie had gone with his father to Mr King’s to sign. He was old enough to know what the promise to pay a hundred and fifteen pounds could mean. He loved the
Hope
, having the salt wind in his face. He never minded a bit of hard work, and the father and son came to know each other as they stowed cargo or baled water together.

For the whole of the year 1811, Thornhill and Willie and the
Hope
went wherever men needed the services of a boat, but especially worked the packet trade to the Hawkesbury and back. At Green Hills, that steamy collection of farms, the hold filled with corn, wheat, turnips, melons. At Sydney it emptied and refilled with anything the farmers might want: rope and nails, hoop-iron and hoes. The
Hope
was never empty, and at each exchange a little money stuck to William Thornhill’s fingers.

Others had bigger boats, better boats, but no one in the colony could come near William Thornhill and the
Hope
. In all weathers he was out on the water, sometimes with Willie but often alone. Night or day, it was all the same. While others slept, he would get
the boat loaded in the dark, row through the night against the tide and be on the way back while they were just getting the sail up. On the return journey from Green Hills to Sydney, other boats dilly-dallied in Broken Bay for gentle seas before they made the run down the coast to Port Jackson. Not Thornhill. He would set out in seas that hid the
Hope
to its mast-top.