Daughter of the Regiment (9 page)

Angie slid into the water behind him and stroked slowly out to the rock in the middle of the swimming hole, just submerged below the water. She held onto it with both arms, idly kicking to keep herself horizontal. ‘You know it’s funny,’ she said, after a while.

‘What’s funny?’ Harry still watched the clouds.

‘When you first slide in you think your toes will drop off with cold. Then after a while your body sort of gets used to it. You know …’

‘Yeah.’ Harry knew.

‘Will you miss all this when you go away?’ asked Angie a few minutes later.

Harry rolled over. The spell was broken.

‘I don’t know if I am going,’ he said shortly.

‘But Spike said …’

‘I don’t care what Spike said. I haven’t made up my mind.’

‘It’s a good school,’ said Angie slowly.

‘Yeah.’

‘But I suppose you’ll get homesick. I will I bet if I get into St Helen’s.’

‘It’s not that.’ Suddenly everything seemed clear, clear as the swimming hole and just as cold. ‘I … I’m afraid I
won’t
get homesick. That I won’t miss this place.’

‘But …’

‘Everyone says how great the school is. How much fun you have down in the city. All the other kids, all the things you can’t study here. I’m afraid I’ll like it too much. That when I come home I won’t love it any more. And I
have
to love this place. It’s who I am … and if I change I don’t know who I’ll be …’

Angie was silent.

‘Sorry,’ said Harry at last. ‘That sounded dumb.’

‘No, it didn’t,’ said Angie. ‘I understand, I think.’

A goshawk swooped above them suddenly, its shadow flickering across the pool. It seemed about to grab a fish beneath the water; then saw the children, and twisted up and through the trees instead.

‘Come on,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll race you to the other end.’

The end came unexpectedly.

The day was cool, the mist hanging above the hilltops seeping down in an almost imperceptible wet haze. The chooks ruffled down in dust baths as though seeking the warmth stored in the soil, or pecked about the stones in Mum’s rockery at the edge of the garden.

They’d seen Cissie twice during the week. Both times she’d been reading. Once, a book, thick with a red cover, but held away from them so they couldn’t see its title, and the other time a letter. Or it had looked like a letter. As Angie had pointed out it might just have been lessons she was supposed to learn, or poems, if she still tried her hand at poetry.

There wasn’t really much chance she’d be there today, thought Harry, watching Wild Thing being chased by Hazelnut around the flat. Wild Thing had a beetle and Hazelnut wanted it … Harry stepped inside the chookshed and crossed over to the hole.

There was no mist in the world within the hole. The sky was clear, the tree trunks dappled brown and red as though there’d recently been rain.

As Harry watched, Cissie stepped into sight. She wore a bonnet, pale straw with ribbons hanging on each side. She looked no older than she had the last time he’d seen her.

Cissie stepped silently onto her rock and sat down. She looked at the pool, at the trees and the sky. She spoke to the face, the gnarled face of bark and ancient sap, on the trunk of the red gum tree that leant across the bank.

‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ she said. She trailed her hand across the water. The waterlilies bobbed in the ripples. She looked up at the tree again.

‘I know it’s silly saying goodbye to a tree, and to the creek and to the wind. But I’ve got to say goodbye to someone. They’re all packing and seeing to their uniforms and no one has time to take me down to the farm, so I can’t say goodbye to Dan and the others. I don’t even think they know yet that the garrison is being withdrawn. The boat only came last night.’

She paused again and shut her eyes. For a moment Harry was afraid she’d say the rest of the goodbye in her mind, but after a moment she opened her eyes and spoke again.

‘I’ll miss you so much,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how I’ll miss you. They don’t understand, back at the garrison. They don’t understand how you can love a place so much it’s part of you. They say I have to go home, now that the regiment has to leave here. England isn’t home. This is my home, but no one understands.

‘They think I should be happy to go. I’ll see snow and daffodils and live in a nice house instead of barracks. They think now my cousins have written and say they want me I shouldn’t be afraid.

‘I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything! But you are all I’ve got—all I’ve had of my own for so many years. Why is it so silly to love a place as you’d love a person? If I leave you it’ll be as though my heart is wrenched right out of me!’

Was she going to cry? wondered Harry. But her eyes were dry and bright. It was as though she didn’t want to waste her last time here with tears. Tears might blur the world, and she wanted every memory to be clear.

‘I wanted to beg them to let me stay, stay with Dan’s family, but of course I can’t. I haven’t any money to pay them for my keep and the farm’s not paying yet. They’ve got too many children of their own to take another.

‘If I could stay with a family in Sydney maybe it mightn’t be so foreign, so strange … or even in school there, then one day, somehow, I might get back here … but there aren’t any schools for girls in Sydney, or not the sort they’d be prepared to leave me in, and no money anyway …

‘I didn’t say anything. They’ve been so kind. None of them my family, but all of them have made me theirs. They’re all so happy at their recall. They’ll see their wives and families, the places they love, where they grew up. The bluebell wood, the shaggy ponies, old Sam’s public house—the tiniest in England, Captain Piper says—badger hunting, chestnuts … all the things that they remember.

‘Let them think that I’m happy to go back, that I’ll be glad to be living with my cousins. That’s the best way that I can thank them now.’

There was another pause.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

Wild Thing had eaten her beetle. Smokin’ Joe and Sky Maze hesitated at the door, then trotted in to peck at the chicken pellets in the feeder on the wall.

Harry walked across the flat and up the stairs. The house was empty. Dad was off at a sale somewhere, and Mum had gone as well.

The phone was in the kitchen. Harry picked the receiver up. It felt cold to his touch. He dialled the number carefully—8, 6, 3 …

‘Mrs Lucas? It’s Harry. Could I speak to Angie please?’

‘Angie, it’s me. Something’s happened. Something terrible has happened. Do you think you could come down?’

‘But she can’t have gone!’ cried Angie, for what seemed the hundredth time. ‘They must have realised that she was upset, even if she wasn’t going to tell them. They must have noticed
something
wrong. They
must
have let her stay.’

‘Stay where?’

‘At that boy’s place. Daniel’s. Or even down in Sydney.’

‘She had no money.’

‘One of them could have paid for her.’

‘Why should they? They weren’t related to her.’

‘But she loved them! She must have loved them! Sergeant Wilkes and Captain Piper and all the others—they must have loved her back.’

‘Maybe they did,’ said Harry slowly. ‘Maybe none of them had enough money to pay for a kid to stay in Australia. I don’t suppose they were paid a lot back then and they’d have families to support, back in England. And they’d have said to each other, “Well, she has people who’ll look after her. Nice people more than likely.” Cissie said they had a big house. They had more money probably than anyone at the garrison. The soldiers might have thought she’d be homesick for a while, but once she had other kids for company and proper lessons, a governess maybe …’ Harry’s voice trailed off.

‘Then she’d forget,’ finished Angie.

Harry nodded.

‘I don’t think she’d forget,’ declared Angie. ‘I think this place was too much part of her. I think she’d remember. And I don’t think she left. She can’t have! I think she would have found some way to stay.’

‘But how?’

‘I don’t know. But we have to keep on looking. We have to find out, Harry. We can’t stop now. We have to see.’

‘But what if there’s nothing! What if we look for years and never see anything at all.’

‘I …’ Angie stopped. ‘Harry. We’re all she has. Even if she doesn’t know about us—even if she never will. We can’t abandon her. We have to be here for her—just so there’s someone waiting …’

‘But it can’t make any difference now!’ cried Harry. ‘It’s lost. It’s gone.’

‘It hasn’t gone!’ said Angie passionately. ‘It’s still there through that hole. Even if we can’t see it! It’s the past and the past is still here with us, all the time.’

‘But you can’t change the past!’ yelled Harry.

‘But, but, but … you sound like a chook,’ flared Angie. ‘Harry—do you
want
to leave her? Do you
want
to stop watching?’

‘No,’ said Harry.

Suddenly all his anger was gone. He wasn’t angry at Angie anyway. He was angry at … at nothing. At everything. At the past for being so untouchable, at school next year and at the future for being so unknowable. Angry at himself, maybe, for being powerless when someone he cared about was being hurt, so very far away.

‘You’re right,’ he said at last. ‘We’ll keep on watching.’

‘Angie?’ Harry peered through the chookhouse door. ‘I brought you down some cordial. It’s pineapple. I hope that’s okay.’

Angie lifted her eyes from the hole. It seemed to pulse today, dark and light and dark again. Harry wondered if there was wind on the other side, blowing the clouds across the sun.

‘Thanks,’ said Angie. ‘It’s okay. I like pineapple.’ She crawled out from underneath the perch and took the glass.

‘See anything?’

Angie shook her head. ‘I’d have called you if I had. Just a fish jumping at some insects. And there was a black snake, too. But not Cissie. Not people at all.’

That’s all they’d seen all week, thought Harry. Wallabies … and once a kookaburra laughing at the wind. But never Cissie, or anything that might tell them where she’d gone.

‘They must have all left,’ said Harry slowly. ‘The garrison withdrew. That was the last time she was able to come to the creek …’

‘But there must be someone left!’ cried Angie.

Harry shook his head. ‘My great-something-grandad took up this place in the 1840s, and there wasn’t anyone here then. Not even any Aboriginal people. They’d all got sick or something, I can’t remember what. But I remember Gran saying it was years before they started to come back down here again.’

Harry crouched down with his back against the doorjamb.

‘There’s no point us keeping watch anymore,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We just have to face it. We might watch the hole for twenty years and not see anyone.’

‘But time doesn’t pass in the hole like it does here!’ protested Angie.
‘Years
have gone by there since you first saw Cissie. Maybe years have passed there now.’

Years without Cissie, thought Harry forlornly. He shook his head. ‘She’s not coming back no matter how long we look. No one is coming back.’

‘But we can’t just leave her like this!’ cried Angie.

‘We’ve got no choice,’ said Harry. ‘She’s gone, Angie. And no matter how long we look we won’t find her.’

‘It’s like … it’s like we’re abandoning her!’

‘We’re not abandoning her, Angie. We’ll still think of her—hope for her. But we just have to face it—no matter how hard we hope, how much we look through the hole, we’re never going to know what happened to her.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ persisted Angie. ‘It must be somewhere. In a history book …’

‘Who’d put a kid like Cissie in a history book. History’s all wars and exploration …’

‘But there must be some way we can find out what happened to her. Maybe, maybe there’s records down in Sydney. You know, of passengers on boats and things. We could look up the passenger lists and see if she left.’

‘But we don’t know what year!’

‘We can find out! They must know at the museum when the garrison was withdrawn—that’ll give us the year—then if we check all the ships.’

‘But how?’ asked Harry.

‘I don’t know! But someone must know how to do it. Even if we have to go down to Sydney … we can’t just leave her there, Harry. Not all alone.’

‘She’s been alone for over a hundred years,’ said Harry quietly. ‘She never knew we’d been watching her. She never knew we cared about her …’

‘She must have known,’ said Angie stubbornly. ‘She must have felt it. I bet that’s why she kept coming back here, to the spot where we saw her. Because she sensed there was someone there who cared about her, who loved her, who cared what happened to her.’

‘Don’t cry,’ said Harry finally. He wondered if he should put his arm round her, but he was too embarrassed.

‘I’m not. It’s just dusty in here, that’s all.’ Angie rubbed her eyes roughly with the back of her hand, leaving grey smudges across her cheeks. ‘I’ll ask Mum if I can go and stay with Aunt Cassie down in Sydney next holidays. She did history at the Uni. She might know how to find out things like that.’

‘Okay,’ said Harry. After all, she might just find something out. Maybe there
would
be a record of Cissie.

‘We could write to the regiment in England, too,’ he offered, trying to smile. ‘Maybe it’s still going on. I mean, don’t they have regimental histories and things like that? Maybe there’s someone in England who knows.’

‘Sure,’ said Angie stubbornly. ‘There are lots of things we can try.’

She didn’t meet his eyes.

She knows it’s no use, thought Harry. Cissie was just a kid over a hundred years ago.

No one would keep records of a kid.

Cissie had vanished. They would never know where she had gone.

The paddocks shimmered on either side as the bus wound down the spaghetti road. Spike grabbed his bag as the bus slowed down, then tossed Angie hers. She glanced at Harry and hesitated.