Dorothy Eden (5 page)

He did not turn the corner beneath the street light, but walked on. He was fifty yards away when the shot rang out, followed instantly by a scream.

Those were sounds he could not ignore. He turned on his heel and began retracing his steps, running. Another person, or persons, was running, but in the opposite direction. If he was not mistaken it was the two men who had been making a joke as they turned the corner. He could hear their footsteps fading in the distance.

A feeble shaft of light shone on the street from the open door of one of the deplorable shacks. Gilbert could see a woman kneeling in the doorway and something lying half in the passage, half on the dusty path.

At first he thought it was a dog. More accurately, he hoped it was a dog, though that was a wild hope. The shape turned face-wards to the night sky was that of a grey-haired man, and he appeared to be dead.

Gilbert pushed the kneeling woman out of the way, and felt inside the man’s jacket. His fingers came away wet and sticky. He put his ear to the man’s breast.

‘Fetch a light,’ he said.

With a small gasp the woman rose and went inside. She came back in a moment with a lighted candle. Gilbert moved the frail flame across the upturned face, and observed unemotionally that it was exactly the same colour as the tallow candle.

He had seen enough dead men. This one looked as if he would not have been far from his natural end in any event. He was as thin as a starving dingo.

He stood up slowly, giving the candle back to the woman.

‘What happened?’

She was not crying, he observed with detachment. Although still breathing too fast, she told him quite lucidly that she had been coming home from the public house where she worked in the kitchen when two men had followed her. They had thought she was a street woman. When she refused to stop they had shouted abuse at her, and began to pursue her. She had thought she was safely home. She had wrenched open the door, calling to her husband, and he had come at once.

He had stood in the open doorway shielding her. He was only a thin small man, as Gilbert could see. And one of the men had taken out a pistol and shot him. Just like that. The man, both of the men, were drunk. Though not so drunk that they couldn’t run off like weasels.

‘This is your husband?’ said Gilbert. He was surprised. Her father more likely, he would have thought.

‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘He’s been through a lot. Seven years in Van Dieman’s Land. It’s aged him. He’s only forty-six. Was,’ she added belatedly. For the first time her voice trembled. ‘Is he really dead, sir?’

‘I fear so. But we’ll get a doctor.’

‘A doctor! In these parts at this time of night!’ The woman’s voice was stiff with contempt. ‘Why, there hasn’t been even a door opened to see what the noise was about.’

‘Have you any decent neighbours?’

‘Oh, yes. They only don’t want to stick their noses into trouble. There’s Mrs Murphy in there.’

She pointed, and Gilbert stepped over the rickety fence that divided the two houses.

‘I’ll rouse her. You can stay with her while I go for a doctor. And I promise you one will come.’

The woman’s head went down and the tumbling hair fell round her face. She was crying, though silently. Only her heaving shoulders indicated it.

Gilbert patted her shoulder perfunctorily.

‘You’ve been splendid. Don’t give in now. I’ll be back soon.’

He had to rouse his friend Doctor Philip Noakes who had just gone to bed after attending a dinner party.

‘Did your host offer you a decent wine?’ Gilbert asked. ‘Don’t answer. I can see it by your bleary eye.’

‘Port. It went round too deuced many times. What’s up? Did your bride arrive? She’s not ill, is she?’

‘Eugenia is in the best of health, I am glad to say. No, this is a poor wretch shot in the Rocks district. Dead, I think. Be a good fellow and come along.’

‘To rouse the dead? That’s a wasted journey. What happened?’ Dr Noakes squinted forward at Gilbert. ‘You’re not involved, are you?’

‘Good God, no. I was only passing.’

‘That’s a blessing. I don’t suppose your bride would take kindly to that sort of thing on the night of her arrival. Well, I suppose I must come. Though what you’re doing playing Good Samaritan I can’t imagine. It isn’t exactly a role that fits you like a glove.’

Philip Noakes was one of Gilbert’s best friends. He had been a ship’s surgeon before settling in Australia permanently. Gilbert would have taken Eugenia to the Noakes in preference to the Kellys, except for Marion Noakes. She was a disgruntled, outspoken Englishwoman who had hated the country from the moment of her arrival. Gilbert did not intend having his wife exposed to that sort of acid fault-finding on her first day in Sydney.

But Phil was one of the best. He drank hard, and worked hard. He was plain-spoken, honest, and a dedicated fighter for the rights of the convicts. More than once he had made himself unpopular for exposing sadistic masters. There had been an unpleasant scandal about the death of a labourer subsequent to a flogging. The employer who had administered the punishment was one of the newly rich landholders, a man with influential friends. For a few days it had been a toss-up who would emerge with his character in shreds, the man who had wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails or Phil Noakes, the convict-lover as he was beginning to be called. Fortunately the newspaper
The Australian
had taken up the case and had made a fervent plea for justice and the simple facts of humanity. Where did fair punishment end and murder begin?

The guilty station holder left the colony, and Doctor Noakes was called on to work harder than ever among a long and diverse list of patients to justify his defence of what he called the ‘ragtag and bobtail’ victims of an unfair social system. Which pleased his wife even less than her forced residence in such a crude country.

There was nothing he could do, when he reached the scene of the tragedy, but pronounce death from a gunshot wound and suggest that the bereaved wife came down to the barracks and tell her story to the officer on duty.

She agreed quietly. She had regained her composure. She smoothed her hair and put on a bonnet. The door of the humble cottage was closed on the dead man, and with Gilbert and the doctor on either side of her, she walked down the street to the barracks.

On Doctor Noakes’ questioning, she said that her name was Molly Jarvis, she had been married to Harry Jarvis, the dead man, only six months. He had had bad lungs and probably hadn’t long to live, but he had thought that marriage might give her a little protection. There was no other kind for a woman in her position, was there?

Yes, she said defiantly, she had come out on a convict ship eight years ago and had only recently got her freedom. She was the cook at the ‘Seven Bells’, a bad enough place to work, but she had never gone on the streets. Those men tonight had thought she was a prostitute, and had been furious when they found she was not. No, she had never seen them before and couldn’t describe them since it was too dark, and she hadn’t seen their faces. They would escape scot-free while poor Harry lay dead. Men always escaped, didn’t they?

This was said without bitterness, merely as a statement of fact.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Doctor Noakes drily, and Gilbert looked at the young woman, trying to see her face beneath the prim black bonnet. Her voice intrigued him. It was not altogether a lady’s, but neither was it a servant’s. His guess was that she had worked in some place where she had learned to improve her speech. But what he liked most was her self-discipline. Whatever rage and grief was burning inside her, she was able to speak quietly and logically.

So she had a grudge against men, had she? Well, that was common enough among women in her situation. It was her quietness that was uncommon. She didn’t indulge in hysterics or vituperation. She was a rare one, indeed. Both he and Philip agreed on this when they left her in the care of a sleepy sergeant of police.

Doctor Noakes was dead tired, he had begun the day at five with a confinement, and Gilbert was remembering his original destination, a call on the curator of the botanical gardens.

It was after midnight now. Too late to do anything but go to bed.

Yet he couldn’t sleep because he began to wonder what crime had led to Molly Jarvis’s transportation. Not that it should concern him. Nevertheless speculation about it, and the shock of the crime he had witnessed, gave him a restless night.

The morning was utterly lovely, without a breath of wind stirring, and the sun radiant over the blue waters of the harbour. Heat would follow. But now everything glistened. Birds screeched and warbled, the noisy parakeets, the bell-like notes of the black currawongs, an aggressive contemptuous cacophony from a flock of kookaburras.

Gilbert hoped Eugenia was listening, enchanted with her first Australian morning. He imagined her at the open window in her nightgown, her loosened hair falling about her face. Then, without any bridging thought, he was seeing, abruptly and shockingly, Molly Jarvis sitting over her dead husband.

But she wouldn’t be doing that, would she? She would have spent the night with the neighbour, Mrs Murphy.

All the same it wouldn’t come amiss if he were to pay her a visit and see what had been the outcome of the night’s affray, what arrangements had been made for the burial of her husband, for instance. An ex-convict’s funeral was a furtive affair at best. He might be able to arrange for a decent coffin which the widow could follow to the cemetery. It was a pity that he didn’t have an influential friend among the clergy, as he had among the medical profession.

He felt bursting with vigour and optimism himself on this sparkling morning. It seemed unfair that other people were in trouble. He would call on Molly Jarvis, and then present himself at the Kellys for breakfast and another meeting with a rested and refreshed Eugenia. Later he would supervise the bringing ashore of the crates of furniture and china, and have them set off by bullock waggons to Yarrabee. It was going to be a busy day, a fine successful invigorating day.

But Molly Jarvis first.

He found her in the cottage which was even more wretched by the light of day. She answered his knock, and stood in the doorway staring at him.

Her eyes were a warm chestnut brown. Her pale hair was brushed back neatly and pinned in a luxuriant knot at the base of her neck. Her lips were curved and full. The drab dress she wore showed a charming rounded figure. By George, she was a beauty. But not a friendly one. Her voice was inimical and suspicious as she asked who he was.

‘Where are your eyes, Mrs Jarvis?’ Gilbert said in amusement. ‘I was here last night. I brought the doctor.’

‘Oh, you’re the gentleman.’ Her voice remained suspicious. ‘What do you want?’

‘I came to see if I could be of any more help. You were in bad trouble. What did the sergeant say?’

‘The same as me. That you might as well look for a needle in a haystack as find those two murderers.’

‘They’ll make enquiries about who was drinking in the “Seven Bells” last night. They should be able to narrow things down.’

‘But those men weren’t drinking there. They were just passing as I happened to come out to go home.’

‘That does make it difficult, I agree. Apart from that—what about the funeral?’

Mrs Jarvis pointed over her shoulder. ‘He’s in there, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

‘You spent the night here?’

‘Why not? I’m not afraid of a dead man. Especially my own. The authorities will bury him. He won’t mind that. He would say that he was entitled to it, anyway, for all they did to him.’

‘And you, Mrs Jarvis? What will you do now? Go back to the “Seven Bells”?’

Her lips tightened. She half nodded, but there was a flicker of fear in her eyes. She must have been aware of it and was ashamed of it, for she said aggressively, ‘What else?’

‘I have a property at Parramatta. I need servants.’

The words were out before he knew that he had intended to speak them. But no, that was not entirely truthful. The vague thought had been in his mind ever since he had left her last night.

What he didn’t expect was that Molly Jarvis should shrink back from him into the dark passageway.

‘What sort of servants, sir?’

‘Why, a cook and housemaids. My name’s Massingham. I’ve just built a house for my wife. I’ve waited for her arrival before engaging an indoor staff. I thought it only fair that she should see and approve of them. How good a cook are you?’

The brown eyes, enormous, were looking at him out of the gloom

‘You’re married, sir?’

‘No, but I’m about to be. My bride, Miss Lichfield, only arrived yesterday. And you would oblige me, Mrs Jarvis, if you wouldn’t behave as if I am not to be trusted. I am making you a perfectly honest offer, and if you must know why, it is because I like your appearance, and I admired the dignified way you behaved last night. Also, I need some good servants.’

‘Your wife—how will she like an ex-convict?’

‘My wife will have to grow accustomed to the way of life in this country. But I’ve already told you—if she doesn’t approve of you there will be no question of your coming to Yarrabee. I am making only a tentative offer.’

Gilbert smiled, knowing how persuasive his smile could be. Besides, he was speaking the entire truth. Meritorious as Mrs Jarvis appeared to be, he would not dream of employing her if Eugenia objected.

Or would he?

‘Come in,’ she said abruptly. She disappeared into the gloom of the windowless passage. Following her, Gilbert saw her at the door of a lean-to kitchen.

‘My husband’s in there,’ she said, nodding to her left. ‘And the other room’s the bedroom. I hope you don’t mind the kitchen. Or we could sit with Harry. He won’t hear.’

Was that a macabre joke? No, it wasn’t, for the serious brown eyes looked at him with their devastating desolation.

Suddenly he was wishing that he had met Molly Jarvis six months before Eugenia’s arrival. He might have succeeded in changing her mind about men.

Anyway, here they were in the tiny already hot kitchen which must be a furnace by midday, and on the other side of the flimsy wall a dead man’s nose pointed at the ceiling.