The Secret River (21 page)

He had to take the risk, and pray for fair winds to speed the
Hope
to Sydney and back.

Sal put a brave face on it, knowing as well as he did how little choice they had. As the
Hope
streamed away on the tide, she stood with the children on a rise that gave her a view right down the reach, holding up Johnny’s plump little hand and waving it with every appearance of good cheer.

He waved back, but as the
Hope
slid down the river, all he could see was how vulnerable Thornhill’s Point was. The hut was hardly visible in its patch of beaten ground. Around it were the bulges of the forest, shadowed even in the brightest sun, a tangle of light and shade, rock and leaf.

When the first point hid the figures from view he turned away. He realised he was sweating with the knowledge of how fragile their hold was on the place. Riding the
Hope
as hard as it would go down the coast, he was haunted by what a frail figure Sal had been, standing on the rise and bravely waving.

~

Off the Government Wharf the
Scarborough
transport lay black against the bright water. Shouts carried across to Thornhill as he stood on the wharf, and the flat clank of chains as the convicts were mustered on deck. He remembered how it was to be brought up from the darkness and stench to the sunlight, like a white grub revealed in rotten wood. It was too easy to remember: some things went too deep to fade.

But the memory belonged to another life that had nothing to do with this airy spring morning, points of light sparkling off the water and the fine salt of the breeze around his face. In that other life, this teasing dance of light or that immense forest with the breeze sighing through it would have seemed nothing but a fancy.
Yet here he was: William Thornhill, almost-owner of the sloop
Hope
, a man with a hundred acres he called his own.

It was a nasty surprise to find that Captain Suckling, late of the convict transport
Alexander
, was down on the wharf in his silver-buttoned waistcoat. Thornhill had heard he had been given land, the way gentry were, with a piece of paper to make it theirs rather than the sweat of their brow. But fortunes were made and lost quick in this place, and Suckling—too proud to work his land himself, and too fond of a drop—had lost his. He was now nothing more than a minor functionary of the Commissioner of Convicts.

A mass of tiny broken veins covered his cheeks and his eyes were an old man’s, set in rheumy sockets. His nose had become a swollen red thing, a separate organism that had taken up residence on his face. His jacket was fraying round the cuffs and his shirt had no collar.

In his hand he had a ledger with the names—the same ledger, or one just like it, in which Thornhill’s name was forever written. He glanced at Thornhill as if he were of no more account than a bollard, flicking at the flies with a long soiled handkerchief.

Then their eyes met, and Thornhill saw that Suckling was still sharp enough to remember him. He stood straight and looked Suckling in the eye, reminding himself of the pardon he had in the tin box.

Suckling spoke loud, the booming voice of a man who had shouted orders most of his life, careless of who might hear:
Thornhill is it not, Alexander transport?
and flicked about himself importantly with the handkerchief.

Thornhill did not answer, glanced away, hated himself for glancing away. Suckling smiled a neat little smile.
I never forget a
felon’s face
, he said.
William Thornhill,
Alexander transport
. His voice was rich with satisfaction.

Thornhill made himself stony, watching as a fly landed on Suckling’s jaw, where there was a gleam of soap lather, and began
to climb up into a nostril. Suckling snorted and flinched.
Stand
back, man
, he cried, and flapped peevishly around him. The flies lifted and settled back on his hair, his forehead, that irresistible nose.
Back man
, he cried again.
Get back
. He shooed Thornhill away with both hands as if he were a dog.
Stand back for God’s sake,
man
, he shouted.
You harbour the flies so!

In an instant the glories of Port Jackson became a prison once more, the sunlight lost its colour, the closed-in township became a poisonous place where a man might choke to death. He could buy the pardon, he could get the land, he could fill his strongbox with money. But he could not buy what Suckling had. No matter how shabby Suckling became, no matter how far gone in drink, he would always be able to hold his head up high, a man who had never worn the stripes.

Suckling stared at Thornhill, daring him to answer back, but he made himself wooden, as he had learned to do in that other life, on the
Alexander
. He had thought the man who knew the knack of absenting himself from his body was dead. It was an old pain returning to find that William Thornhill, felon, was waiting under the skin of William Thornhill, landowner.

He took a step back and had a sudden sharp memory of his binding at the Watermen’s Hall, shuffling backwards towards the fire until his britches were nearly alight. He had thought then that it was all part of the price a boy paid for getting up in the world. It seemed that a man had to go on paying.

~

The felons were being pushed and prodded over the plank onto the wharf and stood bowed under the ferocity of light, awkward in their irons. Their heads had been recently cropped so their necks were pale like sprouted potatoes, the scabby skin showing where the shears had bitten too deep. They stood on the wharf in a tight bunch, afraid of so much space.

Thornhill had looked forward to this moment. He had pictured how he would stride and point at the men he wanted. But he hung back now, so he would not have to face Suckling’s smirk.

The Governor’s man had already creamed off the prisoners with skills: the carpenters and builders, the sawyers and farmers. Now the gentleman settlers, with their braying voices and their coats that fitted as if they had been born in them, were singling out the strong ones and the ones on whose faces life had not laid too hard a stamp. Then the emancipist settlers made their choices, and there was not much left when Suckling was beside him again out of nowhere.
Take your pick, Thornhill
, he said, and made a shopkeeper’s expansive gesture. His smile was yellow in the blaze of sun.
Feel free, won’t you?
he said, and gave
free
a little lingering weight.

The two that Thornhill chose were the best of a bad lot. The one who called himself Ned, no other name forthcoming, was a dim thin soul with a long jaw like the heel of a foot, and a wet red mouth and eyes too far back in his head. He reminded Thornhill of poor Rob back in London, a few bricks short of a load, but he seemed willing enough. The other had been a barrow-boy at Covent Garden, he said, although he was no longer a boy. He was haggard in the bright glare of the day.

They were a miserable enough pair. But his own.

The barrow-boy was squinting at him through the painful light.
Why, Will Thornhill, is it?
he said, coming up closer so Thornhill caught the smell of the ship on him.
Will! Dan Oldfield, remember?

Thornhill looked at him: the gaunt face, black whiskers beneath the milky skin giving him a starved look, the mouth, starting a grin, ajar on gappy teeth. He remembered Dan Oldfield now. He had seen his father laid out dead on Herring Wharf full of river-water. He remembered the hunger they had shared together, and the cold, and the way they had stood one day pissing on their own feet, just for the moment’s warmth of it.

The old place sends its regards, Will
, Dan cried. His voice was louder than necessary.
Wapping New Stairs ain’t the same without our
Will Thornhill!
In the face of Thornhill’s lack of response, his smile was stiffening.

Thornhill spoke as mildly as a man might who has nothing to prove.
Forgetting your manners are you, Dan Oldfield
, he said, and saw the grin close down. He thought of the way Suckling smiled, not showing any teeth, and tried it himself.
It is Mr Thornhill, Dan
, he said.
You would do well to remember
.

Dan looked away, blankly, at the headlands across Port Jackson, the thick-packed bush, the trembling silver of the water.
Mr Thornhill, then
, he said, his voice emptied of expression. Thornhill watched him staring down at the water, where shafts of sunlight sent pale fingers into the glassy green depths, saw the way he was clenching his jaw. He kept shading his eyes with one hand, then the other, his head down. The sunlight showed how thin the wisps of hair were on his pointed head.

Thornhill remembered how he had stared down at the water in just that way, the day the man with the beard full of bread-crumbs had assigned him to Sal. It was a way of not being present at what was happening. Staring into the depths of the water, a man could become a fish, or the water itself.

He knew what it was like to be Dan. That was the trouble. He might be entitled to stand in power over him, but in the eyes of men like Suckling, he and Dan Oldfield were the same. He saw what he had never seen before: that there could be no future for the Thornhills back in London.

He remembered the way he himself had once thought about men who were transported: they had something like the pox and ought to be avoided in case it were catching. Even the barrow-boys at Covent Garden might feel they were above a man who had once had the leg-irons around his ankles. Certainly the well-fed gentlemen in the Watermen’s Hall, safe behind their acre of
mahogany table, would not care that a man had his pardon. No matter how much gold he might have about him, they would never trust a wherry or a prentice to a man who had been a guest of His Majesty.

What was worse, he saw in that same airless moment that the children of a man with the taint would be tainted too. So would his children’s, and his children’s children. Their very name—Thornhill—would carry the taint. He pictured them, a row of pink faces in white lace bonnets, the sons and daughters of his children, floating off into the distance in their cots. But blighted, a shadow over their faces.

Now he understood, as he had not before, why Blackwood’s mouth had always grown soft when he pointed his boat up the river and coiled his way deep into the land. The Hawkesbury was the one place where no man could set himself up as better than his neighbour. They were all emancipists in that private valley. There, and only there, a man did not have to drag his stinking past around behind him like a dead dog.

~

Sal had known Dan Oldfield in London too, and like Thornhill she did not let him presume on the past. Dan and Ned had to share the hut with the Thornhills that first night, and it was close quarters with all of them in there. The newcomers had a square of dirt with a few bags spread out on it, hard up against the Thornhills’ bags.

By God, Sal
, Dan said, kicking at a corner of bag.
Ain’t this snug
. It was as if Sal had been waiting.
You had best call me Mrs Thornhill
,
Dan
, she said, quite loud so there could be no mistake. Dan said nothing, but gave her a look under his brows, and she began to bluster a little.
It will work out best that way
. Thornhill, watching from the doorway, heard her remember some dandified words she must have heard somewhere.
It will work out more satisfactory
, she said, and then remembered another phrase.
I think we will find
.

He thought of the pleasure they had both taken in playing the game of master and servant, in the early days in Sydney. This business with Dan was another kind of pleasure altogether, and no game. The reality was that they had power almost of life and death over Dan Oldfield, and something in them both was enjoying it. His own pleasure in it, as he had bullied Dan on the wharf, had come as a surprise to Thornhill: he had not known that he had it in him to be a tyrant. A man never knew what kind of stuff he was made of, until the situation arose to bring it out of him. Sal’s evident satisfaction in being called Mrs Thornhill by a man she had shared stolen roast chestnuts with was another surprise. He saw Dan flick a quick look between the two of them, as if wondering to himself what it was about New South Wales that could bring about such a change.

In Sydney he had got two gifts for Sal: a few hens and a skinny rooster in a wicker cage, and an engraving of Old London Bridge glassed and framed. With a forefinger on the glass she traced the lines of the streets as if walking along them in her mind. When she turned to him her eyes were full of tears.
Will
, she said, her voice snagged on a sob,
you know me that well, there’d be
no hiding nothing from you
, taking his hand and squeezing it hard. He could feel hers, rough in his, the hand of a woman who never stopped working.
It’s a treasure, Will
, she said,
and you are a dear to
think of it
, and he saw that she had heard what the engraving was saying:
I have not forgot my promise
.

He hung it on a wooden peg wedged into a hole in one of the hut’s uprights.
Where I can see it first thing when I wake up, Will
, she said. When he came in later he saw that she had run a cord through the bit of roof-tile and hung that from the peg too, so it was suspended below the engraving.

That night, after the wick in the saucer was snuffed out, they all lay together in its smell of burned fat, packed into the hut like kippers in a box. Thornhill could feel Sal stiff beside him, with
Dan not a yard away, hands behind his head.

The solitude they had enjoyed up till now, although not without its problems, was a gift they did not quite know how to do without.

Ned fell asleep straight away. After a time of deep noisy breathing he began to mutter from a dream, turning and scuffling on the bags. Then they heard him get up and stand like a horse asleep on his feet saying thickly,
Fleming get away out of it Fleming
. With an angry grunt Dan got up and pushed him back down on the ground, and he slept soundlessly at last.