The Potato Factory (84 page)

Ikey had never seen Mary cry, but now she sat at the kitchen table and wept as she slowly spilled out the story. She blamed herself for letting the boys go, though Jessamy reminded her that they had roamed the slopes since they were four years old and the mountain was, in every sense, their own backyard.

At midnight Ikey left Jessamy asleep in an old armchair and Mary seated at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. Although she was tired and distraught almost beyond thinking, the ever-practical Mary had devised a rescue plan. She would make her appearance at Peter Degraves'  saw mills  at seven o'clock the following morning, when the timber cutters set off to work the slopes. But first she would call at the Degraves home and ask him for permission to pay his men a day's salary to send up a search party for Tommo and Hawk. They would set off from Strickland Falls so that if the children had spent the night safely in the hut on the summit they would be met along the path, not more than an hour and a half after first light. At this point the search would be over and the men, already on the mountain, could return to their work.

Mary was not foolish enough to suppose that this permission would be easily granted, for while her past employer was by the standards of the time a good man, he was tough and she knew he would expect her to pay for the value of the timber not produced while his men carried out the search. The loss of Tommo and Hawk would not be seen by him as a matter of great importance. Mary was of course, perfectly willing to meet his demands. The cost of a day's work of a hundred timber cutters would exhaust her available liquid resources, and possibly put her in debt to the brewer, but she cared not in the least about this.

Having resolved what to do at first light, she fell into a fitful sleep at the kitchen table only to be wakened an hour before dawn by Ikey.

'Come, my dear, I have brought help!' he said, shaking her gently by the shoulder.

Gathered in the street outside the Potato Factory were more than a hundred people. A more motley collection of the hopeless and forlorn would have been difficult to find anywhere in the South Seas. None among them would ever voluntarily have put one foot on the lowest slopes of the great mountain.

They were the drunks and whores, gamblers, pimps, touts, publicans' cellarmen, barmaids, whalemen and jack tars as well as other assorted human scrapings from the Hobart waterfront. Ann Gower, now the owner of a waterfront bawdy house, had taken a donkey cart and loaded herself upon it together with a large tea urn, so that she, too, might help.

Mary took one look at the crowd and knew Ikey must have finally gone senile. Though she perceived a handful of jack tars young enough to be useful, if the vast majority of this scraggy lot set foot upon the mountain, even on a cloudless summer day, few would return with every limb intact or even their lives, and most would be incapable of reaching the first tree line.

'Whatever has possessed you, Ikey Solomon?' Mary cried.

'My dear, I had thought to find some stout lads who might be persuaded to take on the search, but it is a great compliment to you that many felt that they should themselves come!'

After the initial shock, the sight of Ikey's caring volunteers lifted Mary's courage enormously. She thanked them for their generosity of spirit, but pointed out that the mountain was a dangerous and foreign place for most of them, and that they would more easily lose their own lives than help to find Tommo and Hawk.

She told them of her plan to use the timber cutters who worked the mountain slopes for Mr Peter Degraves' saw mills. If he should lend his support as she hoped he might, the mountain would be extensively searched before the day was out.

In fact, Mary knew that the mountain could not be thoroughly searched in a week or a month, and if Tommo and Hawk had fallen down a precipice they might never be found.

'You have shown me a great honour,' Mary concluded, 'and I am most touched by your concern. I thank you from the bottom of me heart.'

People among the assembly shouted their encouragement and started to disperse when Ann Gower stood up in the cart. 'Oi!' she shouted, waving her arms to indicate that they should gather around. The crowd soon assembled about her, and waited for her to speak. 'You all knows who I is, and if ya don't, why not?' she bawled out. There was a ripple of laughter and she waited for it to die down. 'But Mary Abacus some 'ere knows only fer the decent beer she sells, but also knows 'er as a good woman. But she be more'n that, and I should know! Mary Abacus be the salt o' the earth, no better woman may be found on this island nor any ovver place I knows of!' Ann Gower paused and looked around her. 'Now we knows 'er brats what's lost ain't 'ers born, and we knows 'ow they come about. But that don't make no difference and even that one be black, that don't matter neiver! What do matter is that she loves 'em, and if we can't 'elp to find 'em because we not the sort to take to mountain climbin', we can pass the 'at around to pay for a few stout lads what knows the mountain and can make a search!'

She opened her handbag and took out ten shillings. 'Two shillin' be a good wage for a day for a timber cutter, so I now pays for five o' the buggers. Who's next?' Ann Gower pointed to Bridget from the Whale Fishery. 'Bridget O'Sullivan take orf ya bonnet and use it as an 'at, there's plenty 'ere what's mean as cat's piss, but they'll 'ave trouble denyin' a pretty girl like you!'

Very soon Bridget had collected a total of three pounds and sevenpence from the crowd. Ann Gower gave it to Mary, who knew well enough not to protest. It was a gesture of respect, and she accepted it for the generosity of spirit it represented.

Mary looked at the crowd with tears in her eyes. 'Thank you all,' she said simply. Turning to Ann Gower she smiled. 'You're a good woman, Ann Gower!'

Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. 'Don't ya go ruinin' me repitashin, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore and ya knows it!' She turned to the crowd. 'C'mon, folks, it be sun-up soon, time to go 'ome to bed!'

Peter Degraves agreed readily to Mary's request but put only sixteen of his men to search the mountain, sensibly pointing out that the boys would only have covered a small section of the mountain to reach the summit and that sixteen men could cover this thoroughly. He accepted that she should pay them their daily wage though he did not ask her for compensation for the two days of sawmill profits he would lose because the men were taken away from their work.

'I'll write it off to good labour relations,' he laughed, Mary's earlier labour reforms at the Cascade Brewery had been maintained, and Degraves knew that he had been repaid a thousand times over by the loyalty and the honesty of the men who worked for him.

After two days the men had thoroughly searched the mountain and had not found the slightest sign of the two boys. Further searching was not practical. The mountain might hide their bodies for years if they had fallen down some deep ravine, but because it was assumed that Tommo and Hawk would have been in the area facing Hobart Town and near the top of the mountain, this was where the search was focused. Eventually Mary conceded that nothing more could be done, though she personally spent the next two weeks alone on the mountain still desperately searching for her children.

Once she found a trap set for wood pigeon typical of the kind the boys might make, and on a thornberry bush adjacent to it she discovered a tiny tuft of opossum fur. Her heart started to beat furiously. After two days of calling out the boys' names her voice had ceased to function, and now she searched grimly and silently, entering small ravines and squeezing through rock formations terrified that at any moment she might come across the broken bodies of her sons. She was badly cut and scratched about and when she returned at night her clothes were often ripped to shreds. She ate little and her eyes became sunken, and her anguished silence made people begin to think she had gone mad.

Ikey and Jessamy Hawkins tried to comfort her, though they, too, were distraught, and the men who worked at the Potato Factory walked about in silent concern when she appeared.

It was during these two weeks on the mountain that Mary slowly became convinced that Tommo and Hawk had been abducted. At first she told herself this notion was absurd. Who would do such a thing and for what purpose? There could be no possible value in the kidnapping of two small boys. The beer barons and spirit manufacturers who had cause to dislike her were a possible explanation but, she knew, a poor one. They would not damage their own reputation with the public by so gratuitous a revenge. Wild men? This seemed more likely but, if so, they would by now have demanded a ransom.

Yet the feeling persisted and by the end of the fortnight, without any logical reason, other than that the bodies of Tommo and Hawk had not been found, Mary was certain that they had been abducted. She stopped searching and started to evolve a plan.

For some months Mary had been working on a new ale. She had tested it on a number of her customers, who found it most pleasing to the palate. Mary now had acceptance of her bottled beer throughout the colony, and she was also shipping it to the new village of Melbourne on the mainland. She now decided to call her new beer Tomahawk. Upon the label she placed two arms, a black and a white, gripped in the manner of arm wrestling and directly under the inverted 'V made by the two arms was a picture of the head of a Red Indian chief. Around the perimeter of the oval-shaped label were the words: *
Pale Ale * The Potato Factory * prop. Miss Mary Abacus *

Directly under the Indian chief's head appeared the words:
Fifty Pounds Reward!
and under this the injunction:
(see back).
At the back of the bottle Mary placed a second label in the shape of a glass. It contained a crude sketch of two small boys, one black and the other white and the following words in the shape of a wine glass.

KIDNAPPING!!

FIFTY POUNDS REWARD!

For information leading to

the recovery of the two boys

answering to the names of

Tommo & Hawk Solomon

and who are identified in

person by Miss Mary Abacus,

or Mr Ikey Solomon as same.

Tommo be small with blue

eyes and fair hair. Hawk be

black of skin and Negro

appearance. Both be 7

years old.

NO

QUESTIONS BE

ASKED OF PERSONS

ASSISTING IN RECOVERY!

Mary hoped that one of two things might happen. That someone might have seen Hawk, a black boy and therefore a curious sight, in the company of Tommo, a white one. Or that the kidnappers might attempt to claim the reward. It was, after all, a fortune, three times the yearly salary of a labourer or farm worker, and would also prove a tremendous incentive to a bounty hunter.

It did not take long for the disappearance of Tommo and Hawk to be known throughout the entire colony, and it was shortly afterwards that Ikey received a letter from his son David in New Norfolk asking him if he would come to the river town on a matter of extreme urgency. Ikey was glad of the excuse to go. Hannah had not contacted him in more than a year, and she had forbidden him to visit her. Her de facto George Madden had greatly prospered in the barley and hops business and Ikey, who was more and more conscious of his mortality, was terrified that she was prepared to wait until he was dead, whereupon she could claim the entire contents of the safe in Whitechapel and eventually find a way to open it.

David had been in contact with Ikey on two previous occasions. At other times he had sent Ann and then, on the last occasion, young Sarah was despatched to visit him with the excuse that they cared greatly about his welfare and wished to see him cared for. Sarah, who had little recollection of Ikey's perfidious nature, decided to remain with him and now shared the cottage in Elizabeth Street. This suited Ikey very well. His daughter made no demands on him, and she washed, cooked, and generally looked after his domestic affairs.

On each of his visits, David appeared to be warm and friendly and acted as though their stormy past had been entirely forgiven. There was much talk of blood being thicker than water, and the suggestion that an eventual reconciliation seemed quite possible with Hannah. It was obvious to Ikey that the boy had a good business head on his shoulders and had learned well the duplicity of effective persuasion.

However, he had soon enough perceived the motive behind the visits of his son and two daughters. David had by now been in the employ of George Madden for some years and there was talk of a partnership. Not long after she had arrived, Sarah let slip that the offer was far from generous, and was inspired by a great deal of nagging from Hannah. Apparently George Madden didn't wish to share with her son any part of his burgeoning empire, but wanted to keep peace with the formidable Hannah, so he had made the partnership offer on the proviso that four thousand pounds was paid. It was more than someone of David's means could ever possibly hope to raise, though it was still a fair offer for a partnership in such a prosperous business enterprise.

Ikey felt certain the urgent request that he should visit New Norfolk was attached to the matter of the White-chapel safe, so he was much encouraged by David's note. That Hannah's avaricious hand would be in it somewhere he had no doubt.

Ikey was met by David at the New Norfolk wharf and taken to his lodgings, a small cottage which he occupied with Ann. She was at her place of work but had cooked a mutton stew and left fresh curds for Ikey's supper, the supposition being that he would not take the afternoon ferry but would stay overnight.