Tiger Men (34 page)

Doris was momentarily confused for she’d heard that Michael’s courtship of Amy Stanford had proved unsuccessful. She was delighted to discover that she had been wrongly informed.

‘That is wonderful news,’ she said and her grasp became even more fervent, ‘my sincerest congratulations. You must both be very happy.’

Dear God in Heaven, Mick thought upon registering the confusion, she thinks I’m marrying Amy. ‘No, no, you are mistaken,’ he found himself stammering in his haste to correct her, ‘you are not acquainted with this particular young lady.’ He wished now it had been Jefferson who had answered the door: things were becoming altogether too complicated.

‘Oh.’ What an extraordinarily speedy chain of events, Doris thought, although perhaps the young lady in question was his previous fiancée who had now had second thoughts after breaking off their engagement. In any event, she told herself, it was none of her business. She could not, however, resist the opportunity to offer sound advice. Indeed, as his friend she considered it her duty to do so.

‘Forgive me, Michael,’ she said, ‘but I simply must point out that as you are about to embark upon the commitment of marriage, your employment is of tantamount importance. If you are considering offers from other prospective employers, I do beg that you speak to Jefferson first. I know he has great plans for your advancement.’

‘I have received no offers from other prospective employers,’ he said stiffly. She had relaxed the firmness of her grip upon his hand and he was finally able to wriggle his fingers free. ‘My circumstances have, however, changed considerably. I have come into an inheritance.’

Doris was puzzled. Michael appeared most uncomfortable. In fact he was positively squirming and couldn’t wait to get away. Why? ‘An inheritance,’ she said, ‘that is good news, surely.’ And why is he unable to look me in the eye? she wondered.

‘Yes, it is very good news.’ Mick hated Doris Powell at that moment. How dare the woman stand in judgement of him. How dare she make him feel guilty. ‘I have new responsibilities now, new obligations. It’s all there, in the letter.’ He gestured at the envelope. ‘Jefferson will understand, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, I’m sure he will.’ Doris understood. With a sudden flash of insight Doris understood everything, and she wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. ‘I take it you will be leaving us?’

‘Yes, I shall, that’s right, circumstances beyond my control.’

‘Then I wish you well, Michael.’ Again he refused to meet her eye. ‘Jefferson and I both wish you well.’

‘Thank you, Doris.’ He left hastily.

She did not stand on the verandah and watch as he walked down the path. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

Jefferson returned home in the early evening. Doris waited until he’d greeted George and Martha, then she sent the children off to wash for dinner and handed him the envelope.

‘Michael has resigned,’ she said.

He sat at the kitchen table and read the letter, which was brief and to the point. ‘He has given no notice,’ he said, passing it back to her, clearly bewildered. ‘He says that due to circumstances beyond his control he now has fresh obligations.’

‘Yes, so he told me, the very same words. He’s come into an inheritance I believe.’ Doris sat beside him, skimming the letter. ‘He doesn’t mention it here. I wonder what it is.’

‘It’s a pub in Wapping.’ She looked at him in blank surprise. ‘Rumour has it Ma Tebbutt left the Hunter’s Rest to Michael.’

‘Where did you hear that? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t know myself until barely an hour ago. It was the talk of the bar at the Shipwright’s Arms.’

The Shipwright’s Arms, just a block away on the corner of Colville and Trumpeter Streets, was a favourite gathering place for the workers from the local ship-building yards and Jefferson, although not a drinking man, made a weekly habit of calling in for an ale with his friends and workmates.

‘It’s evidently been the talk of the bar for days now,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really believe it – I thought that surely Michael would have said something.’ Jefferson shook his head, confused. ‘Why did he not tell me, Doris?’

‘There is a lot he did not tell you,’ Doris said. ‘He did not tell you also that he is shortly to marry.’

‘To marry? Really? But I would have rejoiced in the news. Why would he not tell me he was to marry?’

‘I believe he was too frightened.’ Doris felt the stirring of something close to anger. Jefferson was far more than confused. She could see the disappointment and the hurt in his eyes. How dare Michael, she thought.

‘Frightened of what? I would wish him only well, Doris. Surely he must know that.’

‘He knows that he is deserting you, Jefferson, that’s what he knows.’ Doris’s temper suddenly flared and she leapt into attack. ‘He never intended to remain loyal to you, that’s why he’s frightened, he knows that he has betrayed your trust. He is a shallow man who believes he no longer has any use for you and so he has moved on.’ Doris in anger was formidable. ‘Michael is an opportunist, Jefferson, and he always has been. I should have known better than to suggest him for the position. We should have hired a ticket-of-leave couple as you’d always intended. You should never, never have listened to me.’

‘My goodness gracious, what brought all this on?’ Jefferson found himself wanting to laugh. She looked like a ferocious terrier.

‘I’m sorry.’ Doris calmed down, aware of his amusement and feeling rather foolish. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, please do forgive me.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘I’m angry with myself really, not Michael,’ she said, gratified to see he no longer looked hurt, and thankful that her ridiculous outburst had at least proved a distraction. ‘I believe Michael cannot help who he is. That is probably his cross to bear and in a way I feel sorry for him. But I should have known better than to succumb to his charm.’

‘If your assumptions are correct, and it would appear they are, then I am indeed surprised,’ Jefferson admitted. ‘I am so easily deceived, as we both well know, but you, my dear have always been such an astute judge of character.’

She shook her head wryly. ‘Women with children are the most susceptible of all, Jefferson. Mothers are blind to any shortcomings in those whom their children choose to love.’

Jefferson laughed. ‘Then I suggest we lay the blame upon Martha and George.’

As if on cue, George swooped into the kitchen closely followed by Martha, both ready for dinner.

‘We will need to find a new manager now,’ Doris said as she stood, ‘and just when you are so busy –’ She drew breath and grasped the edge of the table to steady herself as the child in her belly kicked.

‘Is it kicking again?’ Martha froze, her little currant eyes trained upon her mother’s belly.

‘Yes,’ Doris answered.

‘May I listen?’

‘Of course you may.’

Martha climbed up onto the bench and placed her ear against her mother’s swollen stomach. She solemnly believed she could hear the child in the womb. Even when there was no movement, she swore she could hear it breathing.

Jefferson stood and both he and George placed their hands upon Doris’s belly. They all felt the baby as it kicked.

‘We will find a new manager tomorrow, my dear,’ Jefferson assured her, and Michael O’Callaghan disappeared into yesterday. ‘It has to be a boy,’ he said. ‘Kicking like this it just has to be a boy.’

*

Doris gave birth in June. They named the boy Quincy after John Quincy Adams, the man considered by Jefferson to be one of America’s greatest diplomats.

Nearly five months later, in the early days of summer, Eileen O’Callaghan gave birth to the first of her daughters. She and Mick called the little girl Mara.

It was two days after the birth of Mara O’Callaghan that Geoffrey Lyttleton committed suicide. He had been in mental torment for some time, although no-one knew why. As he left no note his family could only grieve and wonder.

A
N EXTRACT FROM
‘A T
IGER’S
T
ALE
’,
A
WORK IN PROGRESS BY
H
ENRY
F
OTHERGILL

O
ATLANDS
, T
ASMANIA
1884

Mrs Violet Walcott, seamstress, had little time for the Sweeney boys. They were oafs, in her opinion. From her seat in front of the general store, she watched them gallop up High Street to the front of the inn where people were already gathering to watch. They were waving the heads of the wretched animals jammed on the ends of their wooden pikes and whooping and hollering like banshees. Violet detested tigers herself, but she didn’t think it proper to display their heads to the whole town as if they were those of murdering bushrangers. They were only dumb animals after all. Killers they may be, but they knew no better.

Arthur Sweeney followed his boys up the street in his dray and halted his weary nag in front of the inn. He was grinning from ear to ear as he pulled back the calico cover and displayed to the gathering throng the decapitated corpses of a dozen or more dead thylacines, several barely half grown.

‘I know Squire Jordan’ll pay me fine money for this here catch,’ he shouted to one and all. ‘He put up the reward notice on the front window of the bank, you all seen it, ten shillings for each tiger, and I just know he’ll honour that promise, for he’s a fine and trustworthy gentleman is the Squire.’

Violet Walcott snorted indignantly. Arthur Sweeney was a low-bred cur of a man who’d steal his mother’s funeral savings to satisfy his thirst for liquor. How dare he infer that Squire Jeremy Jordan, a good and Christian man of fine family, might not honour his offer to pay a bounty. And besides, Violet thought, Sweeney would have collected a handsome sum already. He would have sent his boys around to half the farms in the district displaying those heads on sticks. The sheep farmers were so obsessed with wiping tigers from the face of the earth that each and every one of them would have congratulated the lads and given them five shillings a piece.

‘He’s got a dozen or more of the foul creatures in that dray, Mrs Walcott,’ the Reverend Wilberforce said as he sat in the seat beside Violet’s. ‘The Squire will be most pleased. His flocks have been decimated in recent weeks. Fourteen or more lambs taken, or so I’ve heard say.’

Young Elspeth Pertwee, standing nearby, recalled how as a small child she’d played with the Latham children, whose family kept a tiger as a watchdog. She’d seen them frolic with the animal and stroke it affectionately and indeed she had patted the thing herself. The tiger had behaved no differently from the domestic house-dogs and Elspeth was not at all sure it was the vicious sheep-killer Mrs Walcott and most of the town’s people declared it to be. But she knew better than to say anything. She was apprenticed to Mrs Walcott and was lucky to have such a highly valued position.

‘It is indeed an intolerable situation, Reverend,’ Violet said. ‘The sheep farmers must unite and pressure the people in power to do something about the scourge before there are no sheep left to shear.’

‘Well,’ the Reverend leant in to murmur confidentially, ‘I’ve heard tell that might be in the wind in the not too distant future.’

‘Do tell.’ Violet Walcott loved the whispered word.

‘Mister John Lyne, a well-known and highly respected politician, is said to be lobbying even as we speak, raising support for a government bounty to be introduced on the cursed animals.’

‘He’ll be a hero around these parts if he does, Reverend,’ Violet nodded sagely, ‘for the tiger is the scourge of the farmers. If he brings about the creature’s downfall then all good to him, I say, and God bless him.’

‘Amen to that, Mrs Walcott, amen to that.’

H
OBART,
1895

T
he second half of the nineteenth century was a turbulent period in the colonies of Australia. Economic boom and bust was the order of each decade. Men made and lost fortunes overnight, women sought equal opportunity and the right to vote, and immigrants arrived from all four corners seeking gold, freedom and the rights of man.

As a new century beckoned, the nation of Australia loomed large. A proposed constitution and amalgamation of the colonies was discussed at the Corowa Conference of 1893 held by Sir Henry Parkes, premier of New South Wales, and other notable colonists from across Australia. It marked the beginning of the march towards Federation.

The Industrial Revolution did not fail to change the smallest continent, buried though it is in the wilds of the Southern Ocean. The gramophone, the fountain pen, barbed wire, corrugated iron, the typewriter, the telephone and dynamite, the farmer’s friend, courtesy of Alfred Nobel, all reached the shores of the Antipodes.

Australians, despite periodic financial and environmental setbacks, lived comfortably on the sheep’s back and Tasmania in particular prospered. No more a penal colony Tasmania was now a sophisticated environment, its major cities leading the colonies into modernity. By 1893, Hobart, with a population in excess of fifty thousand, had established a fully electric tram service and, in 1895, Launceston introduced electric street lighting. Both were firsts for the Southern Hemisphere. But Tasmania, now known as ‘the Apple Isle’, was destined to lead the way on a far broader stage. Outstripping their inter-colonial competitors, a clique of Tasmania’s businessmen and entrepreneurs were making their mark upon the international market. The Apple Isle was on its way to becoming the fruit bowl of Europe.