The Secret River (36 page)

It was only a matter of enough tomorrows.

Smasher was speaking so low, the men had to lean in to hear him.
Ain’t none of them at Darkey Creek no more
, he said.
Sagitty saw to
that. But there’s a whole bleeding camp of them up at Blackwood’s
. He spat the name out as if it tasted bad.

Thornhill felt something inside him slow down.

We can get there tonight
, Smasher said.
Settle the lot of them by breakfast
. The men were turned in to Smasher, watching his mouth as it made the words. Something in his tone made them want to listen, want to follow. Ned laughed his high whinnying laugh.
Get meself
one of them’s fingers
, he shouted.
Use it for a pipe-stopper
, and Smasher nodded, but only as a way of going on with what he was saying.
We got to finish the job
, he said and drank off the rest of his glass, thumping it on the counter for Spider to fill again.

The men closed in around him and there was a sound of agreement from many throats. It was not the voice of any one man but the voice of the group, faceless and powerful.

Thornhill said nothing. Looked into the liquor in his glass, watching it run greasily around as he swirled it.

Sterminate them
, Smasher said.
No one going to come straight out and
say it but ain’t it the only way?

When Thornhill glanced up he found that Smasher was watching him, and the others were looking where Smasher was looking. Smasher enjoyed the moment. Then he said, as if it were the least important thing in the world,
Only thing is we got to
have the Hope to get us up there
.

Thornhill heard Ned breathing loudly through his mouth. He could feel them watching him, those familiar faces: Ned, Dan, Loveday, George Twist with the eternal hat down low over his eyes, Spider with his now-prosperous cheeks. They seemed the faces of strangers, dark-grained and seamed in the smoky lamplight.

The mood in the room was becoming wicked. He felt it tugging at him the way a pannikin of liquor might, to get his mouth around it and feel it warm in his chest. There was a dull ache across his forehead and he wanted to be gone, but the thought of getting Dan and Ned into the boat was too difficult.

Loveday was waxed enough for eloquence. He held up a hand and intoned,
We must grasp the nettle, painful though it may be,
or else abandon the place to the treacherous savages and return to our former
lives
.

There was a silence in which they all thought of their former lives.

Dan was beside Thornhill, his cheeks shining with the heat of the rum. He leaned in so close Thornhill could hear the air through the gaps in his teeth.
Get rid of the blacks and she’ll stay, Will
, he whispered, and leaned back to watch him slyly.
Ain’t no other way
to hold her
.

It was what Thornhill knew, and he hated Dan for putting it into words. Unless the blacks were settled, Sal would leave Thornhill’s Point. It was as stark as that.

How could he choose, between his wife and his place? Making things so that she would stay was worth any price.

Smasher was watching them with a knowing smile.
Nobody
won’t never know, I swear
, he said.
Not our wives even. Not anyone other
than us. And we ain’t telling
.

Thornhill drank off the rest of his glass and spoke quickly, without letting himself think:
Tonight then, and be home by breakfast
. His voice sounded like another man’s, more sure of itself than his own could be.

But not a word, any of youse
, he said.
Word gets out we done it, I come
and slice out the tongue that blabbed
.

~

Half crazy with liquor and high feeling though he was, Smasher had thought the thing out better than Captain McCallum. There was a daintiness of thinking to Smasher, Thornhill realised, that would have been better employed if his life had been different.

Smasher knew that the tide was running out that night, and it could get a boatful of men down as far as Thornhill’s Point, where the First Branch angled off the river. They could drop anchor there and wait until midnight when the tide would turn. About then the moon would rise, so that a boat could be worked silently up the First Branch on the flooding tide. They would tie up just short of Blackwood’s so his dogs would not smell them. Then all they had to do was wait for the first light of day.

No one put into words what would happen then.

At the Windsor wharf, Dan and Ned pushed the
Hope
out into the river. Under the weight of a dozen men it rode low but they made quick time with the ebbing tide. On Smasher’s instructions they put in at various settlements to tell the story of Sagitty again and pick up another man or two: bony old Matthew Ryan from Wheelbarrow Flat, John Lavender and his brother from Portland Head, Devine from Freeman’s Reach.

They swept down past Half Moon Bend, past Cat-Eye Creek, past Milkmaid Reach, and by the time he could see the ridge above his own place, distinctive even in silhouette, there were seventeen men aboard. Just there, at the entrance to the Branch, they dropped the anchor-stone to wait for the turn of the tide.

Thornhill sat up on the stern deck looking down the length of the boat, where his passengers were sprawled against each other, dozing. He knew all of these men, had laughed with them over a drink, haggled with them for their wheat and pumpkins. By and large he had never considered them to be bad men.

And yet their lives, like his, had somehow brought them to this: waiting for the tide to turn, so they could go and do what only the worst of men would do.

Over there, not half a mile away across the water, Sal would have put the little ones to bed.
London Bridge is falling down, falling
down, falling down
. She would have cooked up enough damper for the next day and put the bundles by the door so there would be no delay when Thornhill returned. He strained to see the light from the hut, but it was hidden by the rise of the point. Willie would have banked the fire with clods to keep it alive all night, so she could make them a last dish of tea before they left in the morning. He would have put the bar up in its brackets on the door and got the gun ready primed. Sal would have lain down at last with Mary wrapped up beside her. She would not have slept.

She would have guessed more or less what had happened at Sagitty’s, and that Thornhill had gone upriver. But she would not guess that her husband was so close at that moment that, if he had stood up and hullooed across the water, she would have heard him.

How had his life funnelled down to this corner, in which he had so little choice? His life had funnelled down once before, in Newgate, into the dead-end of the condemned cell. But the thing that lay ahead of him there had been out of his hands. There was a kind of innocence in waiting for Mr Executioner.

The difference with this was that he was choosing it, of his own free will.

The noose would have ended his life, but what he was about to do would end it too. Whichever choice he made, his life would not go on as it had before. The William Thornhill who had woken up that morning would not be the same William Thornhill who went to bed tomorrow night.

He could not stop gnawing away at the thing.

He and Sal could argue the toss for the rest of their lives. She would not stay, he would not go.

It was like a knot in old rope, he thought, hard as a fist. There was no point trying to tease it out: it was just a matter of getting hold of a good sharp knife. He glanced at the cliffs, a dense wall against the sky. There were times he felt those cliffs were going to fall on him and blot him out. Above them, the moon had risen and was sailing between shreds of cloud, a pale plate in the sky, dimming the stars.

The boat shifted under him, swinging around with a shudder as the tide turned under the keel.

They would need to have their story ready. Yes, they had gone to have a parley-voo with the blacks. Yes, they had shown them their guns. They had even fired over their heads. The blacks were not stupid. They had got the hint. They had dispersed.

If there was any doubt cast on the story, the very absence of the blacks could be brought forward as evidence of its truth.

It always hurt to cut good rope, but once the thing was done no one would complain.

He hauled up the anchor-stone, dripping silver in the moonlight. The water seethed with the mingling currents of the tide coming in and the river flowing out. He leaned his weight on the tiller and slowly the tide grew stronger than the river, pushing the
Hope
up into the opening of the Branch.

At the first bend, when the main river was shut out behind
them, the air seemed to become closer, more watchful. The moonlight was so bright that he could see every leaf of every mangrove on either side. The water glinted blackly.

Thornhill tried to put from him the picture he carried in his mind: the blue water of the lagoon, ruffled in the breeze. Blackwood standing at the door of his hut. The thread of smoke from the cooking fires. The woman coming towards them, cocking her head in the same way Sal did. The child, pale beside her, who had never seen the world beyond the lagoon.

It was easier to think of Sagitty. He could still smell the blood on his coat and hear the cry that had echoed through Windsor while the men in the Maid of the River stood with their glasses halfway to their lips.

He made himself go over it again. The sound that came out of Sagitty’s mouth when they moved him. His white knuckles around the spear. His imploring eyes before Thornhill covered them with his handkerchief.

They made a line fast around a mangrove just short of Blackwood’s before settling again for another few hours’ sleep. Loveday’s old double hunter said it was two o’clock in the morning. By a miracle the dogs had not heard them.

As the dawn began to make shapes, Thornhill could see Ned crouched against the half-deck, his chin sunk on his chest, and hear his familiar snores. Smasher was alert, moving from man to man and whispering. He came to Thornhill last.
Get the men first
, he hissed.
Then we clean up the breeders
.

In the first dim light, the men slid over the side of the
Hope
and waded to the shore. Beyond the shifting mass of the river-oaks Thornhill could see the lagoon, where the blacks had their camp.

He stood on the bank, holding his gun. It was possible—more than possible—that the blacks had heard them long ago on the river, in spite of all their efforts to be quiet. The skin on his back crawled, imagining the spear.

Nothing moved as they approached the camp.

On every side there was only the tangle of forest, the stiff lacework of bushes, the shadows swaying, where a hundred warriors could be lifting their spears to their shoulders. He would never know till he felt one in his body.

Once he had imagined a man in those tangles he could not get the idea out of his head. He spun around, but then his back was facing another piece of forest. Whichever way he turned, it would make no difference. It would be the same whether the spear entered his body between the shoulderblades or between the ribs.

At that moment a gun went off with a colossal report. His heart constricted and he whirled around. There was a black! In among the bushes! He fired, the gun jerked him backwards, he staggered, recovered, looked. The figure stood as it had stood before, its arm raised, a fire-blackened tree still gesturing with its branch.

Everyone was shooting now, not at the bushes but at the humpies. He saw Smasher run over to one and stoop to glance in before firing through the opening and jumping back. A man came out of the humpy so fast he tore it open like a leaf: ran out, took a step or two, then fell to the ground with the side of his head a mass of bright blood. Behind him a woman and a child flung aside a possum-skin rug, the woman grabbing the child round the middle. But she had taken no more than a step towards the forest before George Twist was on her with his sword and, as Thornhill watched, her back and shoulder opened up in a long red stripe. She dropped the child and whirled about to pick it up again but John Lavender was there first with his sword and with one mighty swipe took off its head. It fell near his boot and he kicked it away.

A dog snarled and snapped at Devine who shot right into its threatening jaws. It convulsed, its back legs collapsed, and lay tossing its head, its mouth smashed.

Lavender’s brother and Spider and Matthew Ryan had surrounded a humpy, were breaking it apart with the butts of their guns. Black Dick burst out of it with his curved club, lifted his arm and brought it down on Ryan who twisted into a heap on the ground. Black Dick turned to Spider with his arm raised again, but Dan ran up and hit him on the back with his club so hard he seemed to bend under it, and the next moment Lavender was standing over him with his pistol held in both hands firing straight into his chest.

Another black was running with a spear up at his shoulder towards Smasher, who had his powder-horn out to reload, but from across the clearing Loveday took an uncertain step towards him, stumbling in his over-large boots, and fired with his head turned away from the report and his face squeezed up, and the man fell with his knee a flower of blood.

Twist ran in front of Thornhill to a broken-in humpy where a woman was trying to shelter under a fallen sheet of bark. Thornhill could see her pushing the limbs of a baby under the possum-skin rug but Twist got her by the hair, yanked back her head, and sliced across her neck as if she were one of his hogs. She got to her feet with the baby pressed against her, shielding it with her arm, a hand to her throat where the blood was pumping out, calmly walked a few steps, then folded down into the ground and toppled over sideways.

Ned was squinting, legs wide apart and his mouth open too, along the barrel of his gun. He fired at a woman running awkwardly with a child in her arms. Thornhill saw how she was pushed forward by the force of the ball, as if by a blow in the spine. Her feet could not keep up with her body hurtling forward, her head snapped back. She tripped, almost danced for a moment to stay upright, the child still tight in her arms, across her chest. She half turned to see what had happened to her—he saw her face, her eyes wide, astonished, her mouth open as if to
ask a question—and as she turned, her knees going out from under her.