The Resurrectionist (24 page)

O
N THAT FIRST DAY
, as they led me from the ship onto the dock, I do not know what I had thought might lie ahead. Four months by wind and sea, halfway across a world, and yet I had no care for where I had arrived, all things seeming equally flat and unprofitable.

After the dimness of the hold, the creaking coffins of the beds in which we lay, the light of the day seemed impossible, the flashing water and the shrieking birds cacophonous. We were ragged and pale, our bodies wasted by the months beneath the decks, and as we stumbled and shuffled up through the streets in our chains, the people turned and stared. I had thought they might jeer, but they did not; indeed, beyond a boy who ran beside us, pulling at our sleeves and murmuring offers of meat or bread or liquor for a shilling, scarce a word was uttered in the time it took us to pass.

Though I had been almost five months in their company I had no friends amongst those men I marched beside, each dragging his feet beneath the weight of our bonds. Another
man perhaps might have found friendship there, yet I had no taste for it. And so as we lay upon our beds in the Barracks I could only listen as the others schemed and speculated upon what fate awaited them.

That I could read and write I had made no mention of, and so I thought I would be bound to the service of the colony, a government man, condemned to burning lime or digging coal. Though this was the fate most abhorred by the other men it held a sort of power over me: to be made the lowest amongst the lowest had a sort of morbid symmetry.

Yet I was not bound to the colony, but rather to a grazier called Tavish. This news came only with the order that I rise from my bunk and shuffle to the yard, where, with five men I did not know, I was set to walk behind a wagon bearing provisions north. Though we had a hundred miles or more to walk, across hills and valleys, streams and rivers, the chains were not taken from our legs, lest we should try to escape, and so we stumbled, hungry and thirsty, our ankles chafed raw by the shackles, our backs burned red by the sun overhead.

Though there are masters who treat the men assigned to them decently, Tavish was not one of them. He had been a soldier once, and I am sure in that life too he was hated by the men who served under him. Handy with a whip, he took delight in tormenting those bound to him, as if by making beasts of us he answered some absence in himself.

His land lay south of Newcastle, amongst the lakes and marshes, and he worked the property with his son, the man responsible for our enforced march. Though the earth thereabouts was sandy, and poor, it was their intention to open the country, so it might carry sheep, and cattle, and to this end we were set to clearing it. The work was brutal but neither Tavish nor his son seemed to care, feeding us barely enough to keep life and soul together, and driving us until we fell.
They had no right to do this we knew, yet we had no place to go, no authority who might help us.

But those cruel months somehow wrought another change in me. Out there, where the hills sloped down into the water, and the sunlight fell like glass, I found a measure of quiet I had never known. Often I would pass whole days alone, or simply in the company of those others bound with me, and though the work was hard, we each of us were glad of the space and air. Sometimes as we worked I would grow conscious of other life nearby, egrets and water birds, until there came one day in particular when I turned to see a grey heron, moving with liquid steps across the pools not far away, its long neck poised and ready to strike. I know it saw me, for it fell quite still, watching me warily, the two of us held there in that moment for what seemed a heartbeat or an eternity before at last it turned away, stepping off across the water with an unhurried pace. Only then did I feel the breath leave me in a rush, and realise I had been holding it.

In time I learned to move quietly enough to avoid the interruption of the lapwings, whose shrieking cry can send every bird for three hundred yards clamouring into the air; and I began to learn the habits and manners of the birds that lived here on every side, the kingfishers and lorikeets, the whipbirds and wattlebirds and honeyeaters. To watch them rise upon the wing, to watch that lightness of form, was itself a kind of freedom to me, yet this was not all I saw in them: I saw something sharp, and dangerous, creatures who lived outside the realm of man, torn by hunger, and desire, a different Creation.

Perhaps that would have gone no further, had Tavish not come upon a bundle of paper. Like many masters who take pleasure in the ruining of those men bound to them in the colonies, Tavish sought often to make what pay he must to us in kind, and then in goods of no use or value to those who lived as we did. This paper no doubt seemed to him to be
such a thing: what good could we make of it, we who could not read or write even the names we called our own. The others cursed his name, and were for burning it, but I argued that we keep it, and, giving up a ration or two, took also what the others had been given.

From the housekeeper I bought a pen, and ink, and some pencils, thinking perhaps to keep a record of my days. And so at first it was a journal, a chronicle to remind myself that I was really here. Yet the notes I made were of so little consequence, tired lists of trees felled and stumps dug up, of fences built and trenches dug, that instead, piece by piece, I began to write about the birds. Describing them, counting their numbers, enumerating their habits as I came to know them from proximity. It was not science, or not quite, for in these words I found a sort of poetry, as if in them I might capture something that eluded me, an inner thing whose presence was wrought in the birds’ living heat. I do not know what I thought these words might be, simply that there seemed in their making some secret I needed to unravel. Soon words turned to images, and clumsily at first I tried rendering their likenesses. Not with wholes at first, but with smaller things: the speckled eggs of the moorhens on their platforms of reeds; the feathers of the pelican; the open wing of a swallow, fallen dead from flight into the grass.

But in those I worked beside my journal drew a different reaction. One might suppose amongst men such as ourselves all would be made equal, yet we were not, nor had we ever been. Sometimes as we lay not far from sleep, our bodies aching from the day, they would speak of the homes they had left, of streets, and women and sons and daughters left far behind. Of the six of us I was the only one with a mere seven years: these others had sentences of fourteen, and twenty-one, and there were two who might never return, and as they spoke of home I heard the true meaning of this exile we
shared, their voices rising in that anonymous dark soft and dreamlike with no trace of anger, as if they were wary lest they sully these things with that. Of we six, only I never spoke of my life before, and though none would ever demand of me that I reveal myself, my silence set me apart. Yet the revelation that I could write, and draw, seemed to come almost as a betrayal of some unspoken trust. I felt them withdraw, shrinking back from me and away.

After two years on Tavish’s farm my labour was sold to another, a man called Donaldson, who had a farm near Liverpool. I passed three years there, then I was sent to work for Bourke. And in Bourke I found a man who sought to understand this country too, who had made a study of its animals and plants. Somehow he heard of my note-taking, and one day he called on me in the quarters where we convicts slept, asking if he might look at what I had done. Until then I had shown no one the work, but I opened it, and handed my notebooks and sketches to him. He turned through them carefully, as I stood stiffly by, my cheeks hot and my stomach light. And then at last he turned to me, and told me I had a gift for drawing.

Though it pleased me to have such compliments, I felt exposed somehow.

It was at Bourke’s suggestion that I first took commissions for specimens. In my last year in his service he had come to me one afternoon, bringing with him a letter, and asked me if I would earn an easy pound or two. He was my master then, and so I accepted his offer. I winced at it, the sound of the gun, the concussion as the bullets struck the birds, their spinning tumble earthwards. In those first months each death seemed a part of me, and yet I learned to steel myself to it. They are all architecture, these birds, light as paper on the wing, warm as air. With their bodies in the hand, I learned, one might draw them more carefully, and so this act of violence might itself be something closer to love.

I
T IS
M
RS
B
OURKE
who tells me of Mrs Robertson’s anger at me.

‘We did not speak the other night,’ she says, seating herself opposite Joshua and me.

‘I am sorry for that,’ I reply. ‘You seemed more than occupied.’

‘What did you think of the entertainment?’

‘Miss Honoré was most pleasing,’ I say.

‘And Miss Winter?’ she inquires.

‘She played well, I thought.’

Mrs Bourke smiles and turns to Joshua. ‘Might you fetch Miss Lizabet for me?’ she asks. Joshua stands, leaving the two of us alone.

As he heads out the door Mrs Bourke watches him affectionately. In the last six months he has grown as many inches, and he is uncomfortable with the fact of it, awkward and difficult.

‘I am told you have made an enemy,’ she says once he has gone.

‘Of whom?’ I ask.

With the candid look that I admire in her she says, ‘Mrs Robertson.’

‘Indeed.’

‘You knew then?’

‘Not that she had spoken against me.’

Mrs Bourke nods. ‘I have heard it from two friends. She will not say what it is you have done, only that she will not have you in her house again.’

‘I am sorry for that,’ I say.

When she speaks again her voice is quieter.

‘Joshua is nearly fourteen,’ she says. ‘His father will soon want to take him more under his wing.’

‘I have expected as much,’ I reply.

‘You do not approve?’

‘I think he is a boy not suited to the life he must make his own.’

‘His father cares for him.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ I say. ‘You mean then to terminate my position here?’

She shakes her head. ‘No. Only to tell you it will not be forever.’

W
ITH OUR NEXT LESSON
whatever bond it was we found when last we met seems to have abandoned us. Miss Winter is ill at ease and seems troubled by my presence. Not once but twice I suggest we take ourselves away from the house, so we might sit once more in the open air, but both times she pleads the weather’s inclemency, the threat of approaching rain. At first I think I have offended her, and carefully I seek to find some suggestion of what I have done. Then Mrs Blackstable appears, busy with some silverware in a cabinet. Irritated I turn, meaning to remind her of my injunction that we not be disturbed. But Miss Winter lifts a hand.

‘Please, Mr May,’ she says. For a moment she meets my eye, then shaking her head she goes back to her drawing, and I understand. By the cabinet Mrs Blackstable has paused in her work, and is watching us: seeing the way Miss Winter’s attention fixes on her drawing she goes back to the business of the silverware.

I do not speak again until she is gone, just sit willing her
to leave. Only when I hear the sound of her feet receding down the hall do I rise, and crossing to where Miss Winter sits kneel down beside her.

‘I am sorry if I have caused you pain,’ I begin, but she lifts a hand, dismissing my words.

‘You are not the cause of it.’ She looks at me. Gazing into her grey eyes I feel a need to hold her so powerful I do not think I shall be able to resist it. But after a moment she looks away.

‘Do you never wish to be free of this place?’ she asks, with sudden vehemence.

I shake my head. ‘I have nowhere else I might go,’ I say, ‘not any more.’

She looks as if I have disappointed her somehow. ‘Yet I have done nothing,’ she says, ‘and I am imprisoned here as surely as the rest of you.’

‘I am not a prisoner.’

‘It is all a prison, can you not see that?’ she demands, turning to me. Without thinking I reach out, and touch her cheek, but she does not melt or bend. At last she covers my hand with her own.

‘This cannot be,’ she says, and taking my hand she places it back in my possession.

A
S
I
OPEN THE DOOR
I feel it, the creeping sense that another has been here. A heavy silence in the air, the space inside the room still as the surface of a pond after drowning. The room looks as I left it, its contents undisturbed, the remains of my breakfast upon the tabletop, my gun above the fireplace. Yet I cannot shake the certainty that someone has been in here, looking for something. In the next room, which serves as my study, my papers lie much as I left them, books and painting albums still where they were. On the bench the mounted skin of a lorikeet stands arranged for painting: placing one hand on it I run my eyes across the shelf, where the materials for preservation sit. Arsenic, and scalpel blades. Beneath my fingers the lorikeet’s feathers are soft, and lifting my eyes again I gaze out, through the window at the trees.

Then quite suddenly I hear a sound, a foot placed carelessly upon a board, and turn quickly, one fist already clenched, only to find Winter standing there.

‘You choose to live in some seclusion, Mr May.’

‘I do not care for visitors, as a rule,’ I reply.

‘No,’ he says, ‘I see that. The house is Bourke’s, is it not?’

I nod, and Winter steps forward, into the doorway. ‘I thought to see these images of yours,’ he says.

‘Indeed?’

‘What did you think I sought?’ Winter asks, glancing round.

I shake my head. ‘I do not know.’ Uneasily aware of the meagreness of the things I call my own I watch him take in the bare walls, the simple table and chairs.

‘These are yours?’ he asks, stepping past me into the room and pausing before a small pile of papers. On top there lies the image of a honeyeater upon a grevillea. As he speaks he looks up: seeing me nod he turns back to them, slipping the image aside to expose the one underneath, and then the next, pausing each time to inspect with the same quick, closed attention, examining and dismissing each in turn. There is a tightness in my belly and throat, a sense I am intruded on.

‘Would you have a drink?’ I ask, uncomfortably.

‘No.’ He sets down the last of the drawings. Then he moves slowly about the room, examining each part of it in turn.

‘Is there something you would discuss with me?’ I ask, and at this last he turns to me.

‘No doubt you know something of my sister’s past,’ he says. I say nothing. Perhaps taking my silence as agreement he continues.

‘The reputation of a woman who has such a past is a fragile thing, Mr May, ever subject to gossip.’

‘What is it you imply?’ I ask, perhaps too hotly. Winter does not flinch.

‘You would do well to be careful not to give cause for others to take interest in her.’

I wish at that moment that I might throw an accusation back at him, but to do so would only be to give up all hope of seeing her again.

‘I am a man of some substance,’ he says. ‘The errors of my sister’s past might yet be corrected by an appropriate union.’

‘I would think that should be a matter for her.’

‘Much is forgotten here.’

‘I do not think I understand.’

At first he does not answer.

‘Why is it you live alone here, Mr May?’ he asks at last. ‘What is it you are hiding from?’

‘I do not grasp your meaning.’

‘It is only that we all have secrets, things we would rather were left in the past.’

When I do not answer he takes up his hat and smiles.

‘We understand each other then.’

He leaves me there, disappearing on his horse along the path into the dusk. Alone again I should feel released, but instead I am unsettled, my privacy and the refuge of my home somehow violated. Angry too, at him, at myself, though whether for her sake or for my own I am not entirely sure. Bound in cotton on the sill is a pair of honeyeaters, caught this morning just after dawn. Then they were warm; in the hours since they have turned cold, their bodies gone stiff, and wretched, their tiny legs bent back in the death grip of their kind. They must be cleaned, and quickly too or they will spoil, and so, hoping to put these feelings from my mind, I light a lamp.

I work quickly, my hands moving with the knowledge of a task done so often it comes almost without thinking, calming me: the knife along the belly and around, the skin peeled away from the flesh, careful not to damage it, arsenic
rubbed inside the skin to cure it. They are so small, these birds, so light, their twig-like legs so thin it can touch me like grief to see them caught thus in death.

Outside darkness comes, and yet I do not stop, my hands moving on. Packing them away and then taking down pen and sheet I begin to draw, my eyes straining in the yellow light of the lamp. Ordinarily it brings me some measure of quiet, this work of mine, but tonight I work almost angrily, the pictures that I make jagged and filled with pain. Though the clock ticks and chimes on the mantel I do not notice the passing hours, and it is almost midnight when I stop, my hands and back knotted, the room shadowed. Outside the wind has risen, and on every side the bush moves with a sound like water, or waves. Though the knowledge that my home has been intruded on presses in, my mind is not drawn to that, but back to Miss Winter, her distress. What should I have said to her? That this life is so thin, so small, it might be lost in a moment without thought? That the worst prisons that we build are not of stone, or even space, but of our own making? That nothing done may ever be truly undone?