Not surprisingly, her wish remained ungranted. The children cleared their faces of smiles, and they marched on.
At the camp they found the men had already departed on the day’s errand, while the women were at work dismantling the huts for setting up, it eventuated, at no great distance from their former site. The women had little but scowls and pouts for the recalcitrant slave, whom they loaded with the heaviest sheets of bark and thickest swatches of leafy thatching. However capricious the present manœuvre she carried her loads willingly enough, grateful for her reinstatement in the community to which she belonged. (Only at evening she discovered the reason for their arbitrary move: fleas are less predatory on virgin ground.)
Later in the day a troupe of females and middle children proceeded by instinct or pre-arrangement to the beach, where fishermen had been casting their nets. A hush had fallen upon the men, some of them immersed up to their heads, others but waist-deep in water, like stanchions to which the nets were attached. The women, if incapable of silence, chattered in subdued monotone like birds at roosting. Less controlled, the children scampered around and about flinging handfuls of wet sand which the sun transformed into arcs of light.
Suddenly even the children were stilled as they noticed a shuddering of the water some distance offshore. This barely visible disturbance of a calm sea, like the very slight agitation of a sheet by innumerable hidden bodies, was moving ever closer to the mouth, then into the belly of the net, the outline of which could be traced from the black blob of one motionless head to the next, and closer inshore, the more exposed human stanchions. When a distinct collision took place underwater. Single fish, mercurial enough to appear as liquid as their element, leaped briefly above the surface. There began a frenzied shouting, and hauling on the net. Women shrieked, children squealed, as all dashed into the mild surf to join in dragging the net to land, when they were not dabbling their hands after an individual catch of slippery and, in most cases, elusive fish.
Not until the beach could the extent of their haul be estimated, as the men, all ribs, lungs, and teeth, stalked glistening around their slackened net with its silver swag. As for the ecstatic women, they were already stuffing their holdalls. Children playing with escaped fish squeezed them to make the milk shoot out of soft roes.
The slave had no part in any of this, unless when a fishy opalescence clashing with a transparency of light induced in her a certain drunken tranquillity. No doubt hunger, revived by the scent of roasting flesh, would overcome revulsion from the sight of fish twitching and dying round her on the beach.
She was in fact already brought halfway back to her senses by the full ‘dillis’ with which her masters were loading her. She was soon staggering under the weight — of food which is, after all, life, as she had forgot while sipping chocolate and without appetite nibbling macaroons at Birdlip House Cheltenham.
Arrived at the camp, she dumped her load, and was immediately sent back for more. It occurred to her that she had been free all day of her loathsome charge, the pustular child, and that the mother had not come to the fishing. On their return from the beach, the expression on the woman’s face had been one of puzzled grieving, while the child lay inert outside the hut, like a stricken animal for which little can be done beyond dispatching it, as Ellen Gluyas knew.
In this case, approaching death actually quickened life in the living. Mrs Roxburgh knew that she had wished for the child to die. Perhaps for once her wish was being granted. Yet from looking at the unknowing mother, she was not able to rejoice in what amounted to her own evil powers, and wondered whether she could expect for herself some form of appropriate retribution.
While she was returning to the beach her mother-in-law came into her thoughts, and she was pleased to have her company. Old Mrs Roxburgh had always hoped that the clothes she possessed would see her out. As might have been expected, she was dressed in her brown kerseymere of several winters, over it the black bombazine spencer she had worn in mourning for her husband. It was hardly the hour, and the wrong season, for a parasol, but thus she might have held its great pagoda of lace and muslin tilted against the antipodean sun to protect a complexion which was still her pride.
‘I shall not delay — or embarrass, I hope — if I walk with you. I should like to see my son.’
‘I haven’t seen ’n sence several days.’
‘You haven’t—what?’ Shock made the old thing forget herself. ‘You haven’t forgotten all you have been taught?’
‘The words’, Ellen could only mumble, ‘seem to be falling away.’ This was what she truly feared in the event of long association with the blacks.
‘But are you not keeping up the journal? I only suggested it to help you learn to express yourself.’
‘Oh, the journal — it’s lost!’ Now she was crying. ‘We both lost them before — before Mr Roxburgh died.’
‘It was not Austin who died, but his brother. You forget they buried Garnet in Van Diemen’s Land.’
The old woman was looking at her so keenly out of her white-kid face, where Ellen noticed for the first time a little patch of rouge, dry and peeling, on each cheek. The expression of the eyes and the two patches of dry rouge made her wonder whether her mother-in-law were less innocent than she had appeared hitherto.
‘And where is your garnet ring, Ellen?’ the old creature persisted.
Although her glance was directed at the blackened hand to which the ring belonged, she showed no interest in the more noticeable tatters of flesh or the wedding-ring which its owner felt the fringe of leaves no longer concealed adequately.
‘I gave the garnets to a person who claimed to be in greater need of them than I.’ Mrs Roxburgh constructed her sentence along lines which she felt might appease her mother-in-law.
But in any case, the next instant she dismissed from her mind an inquisitor she had so unwisely introduced, and thrust her way through the grey scrub upon the same expanse of sand and light where the blacks were still sorting fish.
Again she became their beast of burden. As they loaded her back and sides, she took it they were not unkindly disposed, by their ingratiating show of teeth, rumbustious laughter, and possibly, jokes.
One of them went so far as to smack her rather hard on the bottom.
‘Aw, my life!’ she shouted in the tongue they might have understood. ‘As if I dun’t have enough to put up with!’ She could not give over what were by no means counterfeit giggles.
(Although she would not have admitted it to her mother-in-law or any lady of her acquaintance, or confessed it to Mr Roxburgh, leave alone Garnet R., she had always preferred the company of men.)
Back at the camp, the women were busy scaling fish, using the sharp blades of shells. They took no notice of the arrival of the laden donkey, herself smelling by now as rank and fishy as the commodity she had been carrying.
At the entrance to the hut of the family to whom she was assigned, a ceremony was taking place. A wrinkled, elderly man of evident importance was squatted beside the sick child, weaving signs, making passes in the air above the prostrate body. The family expressed their gratification when at last the physician — conjurer drew a small brown stone, or unpolished crystal, out of the patient’s mouth. There were cries, there was hand-clapping. Only the slave could not bring herself to join in their celebrations, for her own encounters with death showed her that the child was beyond cure.