Soon after, she slowed up, and when he came level, grinned at him with what must have looked ferocious insistence. ‘We must help each other, mustn’t we? whatever the outcome.’
He answered, ‘Yes’ with a detachment which hardly reciprocated the sentiments she had intended; nor did his stare, from behind the curtain of sweat, suggest that she was part of his vision.
Yet a little distance farther they put their arms round each other, as of one accord, hobbling, staggering, on.
She told him, ‘Even in mid-summer you could draw a bucket of water from the well under the sycamore that would take the breath out of you. Pa found the well. He had diviner’s hands. The twig would bend for me too, but not regular.’ She sighed. ‘It was the coldest water.’
When here they were, walking over these blazing stones. The bird laughing.
‘Did I ever tell you, Jack, how I walked all the way to St Hya’s and let meself down into the pool? In they days people went to the saint for all kind of sickness. What I went there for I dun’t remember not at this distance. Or if I were cured. I dun’t believe a person is ever really cured of what they was born with. Anyway, that is what I think today.’
In fact she was thinking of the engraving in the book she had found in Mr Roxburgh’s library, in which the inhabitants were shown escaping from the Cities of the Plain. Whatever had happened the couples were holding to each other as desperately as she and the convict, and every bit as naked. Because of the nakedness she had not asked her husband to explain the situation.
Now, as they escaped from one hell into what might prove a worse, however fulsome their reception at Moreton Bay, this man was leaning on her so heavily she hoped she was not a similar drag. She no longer believed in physical strength; it was the will that counted.
‘Do you think you will undertake the voyage Home after we have reached civilization?’ Her teeth were clicking like pebbles inside her mouth. ‘Or perhaps you would find the associations too painful.’ If her grip loosened, her arms slithered papery up and down his ribs. ‘Sydney, we are told, is going ahead. I am inclined to advise Sydney. Set yourself up in some safe business with the reward they’ll give you. My husband will contribute to it handsomely — of that you may be sure.’
What she was thinking, doing, saying, she did not know — perhaps dying on her feet, had a breath of cool not come at them through a gap in the scrub ahead.
When they emerged from the trees, there was a field with rows of methodically hilled plants, and but a short distance beyond, the house, and the more imposing barn, each built of roughly hewn timber slabs.
‘There, you see? Just as we planned!’
In speaking, she turned towards him, but did not recognize Jack Chance the convict: some demon had taken possession of him.
‘Ah, Ellen, I can hear ’em settin’ up the triangles — in the gateway to the barracks! They’ll be waitin’ for me!’
Immediately after, he turned, and went loping back into the bush, the strength restored to his skeleton.
Her torn hands were left clawing at the air. ‘JACK! Don’t leave me! I’d never survive! I’ll not cross this field — let alone face the faces.’
But she did. She plodded gravely across the rows of tended plants as though they had been put there, cool and sappy, for the comfort of her feet.
‘They are — teddies?’ She sighed unnatural loud before reaching a track which wound down along a hillside towards the barn. Ruts and hoof-prints had set like iron. She fell among the cow-pats and crawled farther, a lopsided action dictated by the ruts, until halted by the barn and a pair of man’s boots, the latter serviceable in the extreme, as grey and wrinkled as the earth in which they were planted.
Mrs Roxburgh could not have explained the reason for her being there, or whether she had served a purpose, ever.
8
‘Naked?’ The voice was just discernible; it was a woman’s, and of a tone she had not thought to hear again.
She heard shoes approaching, spattering over bare boards, then retreating as soon as a door squealed.
She lay with her head in the dirt because she could not raise it; the flies were busy settling, partly on blood, partly on the moist cow dung with which her arms were smeared.
Then the shoes were returning, the door squealed a second time, and she was enveloped in what could have been a cloak, or simply a coarse blanket.
Mrs Roxburgh was most grateful for whatever it was, even more for the woman’s voice. ‘There, dear! You are here. Nobody will want to know what ’appened till you’re ready to tell.’
Swaddled in the voluminous garment or harsh blanket, as well as what sounded like the woman’s genuine concern, she thought she might never want to ‘tell’ (you cannot tell about fortitude, or death, or love, still less about your own inconstancy).
Mrs Roxburgh said, when she had sufficient control over teeth jaws, limbs, to be able to risk her voice, ‘I will only want to sleep and forget,’ when she knew from experience that she was aspiring to the impossible.
‘That you shall,’ the vast woman answered, gathering up her new child.
After which the child was dragged, if solicitously (the owner of the wrinkled boots might have been adding his support; she could not be sure) on this latest stage of her journey.
‘We must all help one another,’ Mrs Roxburgh giggled as her toes came in agonizing contact with a splintered step, ‘mustn’t we?’ Then she was hoisted over the threshold.
‘Yairs, yairs,’ the woman agreed; heat and hardship may have flattened the voice but without destroying conviction and kindness.
Mrs Roxburgh bowed her head beneath a weight; in all memory a house had never seemed so stuffy or so dark. With the remote hope of catching a glimpse of sky between twigs she would have glanced upward, but the operation defeated her. Perhaps she would remain for ever downcast, and those who like to think the best might mistake an affliction for humility.
This woman would, who remained all around at the same time as she was giving orders in the distance. ‘No, no, Ted! I can bring the tub meself — but not carry the full kettle — and not the bucket of cold neither. We mustn’t scald the poor soul.’
They had sat her to wait upon what her fingers slowly discovered in the dark to be a leather throne, its woodwork carved, but very roughly, with a leaf-pattern. Was she worthy of her throne? Horsehair pricking through her coarse robe suggested she might never be.
Mortified, she hung her head lower still.
The tub had been dragged towards her, or so it sounded, across the boards. Water hissed furiously on being poured into tin. Over and above her heavy woollen robe, the pains she was suffering, her shame, the love and gratitude she had never adequately expressed to anybody, she was now enveloped in a cloud of steam.
‘I do not — think I can—bear it!’ she cried.
The male boots were retreating as though in fright.
‘I’ll water it down,’ the woman promised. ‘You’ve nothing to fear now, love.’
She would have liked to think so; she would have liked to find the woman’s hand and kiss it for a promise made in the face of human experience.
Only the woman, since they were alone together, was too busy disrobing her patient. However silent her nurse’s unbelief in what she saw, Mrs Roxburgh heard it.
There began a great soaping, she could smell it, and then a flannelling, which made her suddenly leap, and withdraw unsociably into a corner of her pricking throne.