The Secret Fate of Mary Watson (3 page)

‘I didn’t mean to imply that I was opportunistic. I merely suggested I would be adept at creative interpretations of the law, should I be that way inclined.’

I groan inwardly. Fool! Who else but me could pluck, stuff, truss
and
cook my own goose in a mere few words.

‘And I didn’t intend to imply you have criminal tendencies. I merely observe that the marriage of a sharp mind to an open environment like Cooktown is likely to produce fair offspring in the form of … new ideas.’

His own phrasing has more than a whiff of the artful dodger about it. But how can I say what I’m thinking without jumping a gun he hasn’t so much as loaded?

I glance over at the Frenchman in his too-tight waistcoat. ‘Cooktown is so very far away. And I’ve heard that everything is twice as expensive up north. How would I survive, let alone avail myself of these so-called new ideas, on the few shillings a week I’m likely to make playing piano?’

Two streams of smoke ride the humph noise he makes with his nose. ‘I see. Your desperation has its conditions.’ One sea-cracked finger plays with his bottom lip. It’s a nice lip, not fleshy like Wilson’s, nor tight as a drawn-shut purse like Charley Boule’s, nor carved of rock like Samuel Roberts’s. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’m not particularly interested in improving the quality of Boule’s entertainment. I do, however, sometimes pay for information. Useful information. Cooktown is the gateway through which all captains and crews must pass to reach the far north reef passage. And French Charley’s is often the first port
of call for them when they reach Cooktown. A skilled observer can learn a good deal in a short time if he … or she … pays appropriate attention. Such as you demonstrated upstairs. If you prove reliable, and discreet, you’ll do quite well. Nothing illegal
per se
. Comings and goings, arrivals and impending departures, perhaps the occasional overheard conversation. The region’s shipping is … of interest to me.’

‘Why would a sea-slug fisherman be concerned about boats passing through Cooktown?’ My mouth opens involuntarily as a whole new slew of pennies drops into the slot. ‘You’re the one involved in smuggling. That’s what you do with your lugger when you’re not catching sea-slugs.’

He bends forward conspiratorially. ‘Yes. You’re on to me. I bundle up young girls who talk too much, smuggle them north and straight into the arms of fat Mandarins in Shanghai. They pay a good price and, incredibly enough, once they take possession they even remove the gags. Maybe it’s because they’re deaf from all those firecrackers.’

I give him what I hope is a withering look, then glance at the Frenchman again. He’s noticed the attention we’re paying him and, for a second, my eyes lock with his.

‘Just one more question,’ I say. ‘Do you work for, and therefore would I, ultimately, be working for, Samuel Roberts?’

‘You don’t need to know that.’

‘I do,’ I insist. ‘I need to know where my loyalties lie.’

This is a reasonable request and he must know it. Being aware of who the big boss is doesn’t make me any the wiser about the business.

‘All right then. Yes.’

So one piece of the puzzle resolves, at least.

‘Would I also be working for Mr Boule — in the same line of business, I mean?’

‘That’s more than one question. But, no. Not if you know what’s good for you. Roberts doesn’t tolerate divided loyalties.’ There’s something ironic twitching around his mouth. ‘You play piano for Boule, that’s all.’

The room’s emotional temperature has dropped several degrees. I don’t dare look over to Roberts’s table again in case he somehow knows what we’re discussing. In case he’s staring at me with that same frigid malice he turned on Cobweb upstairs. But now, at least, I know the hierarchy of their mysterious business. Percy is an underling of Roberts’s, and I would be an underling of Percy’s. And Charley Boule is very firmly out of the picture. That is, If I Know What’s Good For Me.

I realise then it’s not quite enough information to allow me to sell my soul, no matter the wages.

‘Why would it be traitorous for me to have dealings with Charley Boule? Who is Samuel Roberts working for?’

Percy puts his glass down firmly on the table and makes to stand. ‘No. If you can’t manage your curiosity by knowing when to turn it off, you’re no use to us.’

I put my hand out to stop him. ‘Wait. I’m sorry. But don’t you see? The kind of intelligent observance you want from me is at odds with your request that I just blindly follow where I’m led, like a donkey. I won’t do anything against my scruples. If you ask me to trust and be trusted, you have to give me more. If I were to hand over my unswerving loyalty for less, then I wouldn’t be honourable enough to rely on, would I?’

I’m not sure that my tortured argument makes sense, and, by his crumpled forehead, neither is he. But it seems to do the trick.

He chews his bottom lip lightly with his teeth. ‘Are you loyal to the Empire?’

‘Of course I am.’ I’m indignant that he has to ask.

‘Then you are, in principle, already loyal to Roberts and to me. That is all I am at liberty to tell you.’

I nod ‘Good enough. And Charley Boule is a Frenchman. Therefore …’

‘Enough political sleuthing!’ The shutters come down in his eyes. ‘Boule has his own fish to fry, and plenty of pans to do it in. He minds his business. You and I take care of ours.’

‘Yours being the sea-slug business.’ I emphasise the last three words and his eyes flicker with annoyance.

‘Quite. You’ll need to report to me: who is in port, what cargo they’re carrying, what they happen to chat about when they’ve a few drinks under their belts. There will also be notes that you’ll receive and then pass on. Everything will resolve when you are in place. But one last warning before you commit yourself. You won’t survive very long if you don’t learn to pull on your own reins. This is not so trivial as a poker game.’

I nod with my lips compressed. I’d make the motion of buttoning them together with my fingers, if I didn’t imagine it would annoy him further.

‘Do you or do you not want the job on the terms I’ve laid out?’ he asks.

Something behind my ribs feels trapped. The wings of my bravado under a fly-swatter? It’s not too late to back out. I can find another job. The risks are high, my chances uncertain.

But I’m excited. These are the cards I’ve been dealt and they’re good ones. If I fold, Mrs Menzies still wants the week’s board. If I win, I need never kowtow to the likes of her again. Do I trust
myself to open my mouth now? What will I say?
Thanks, but penury is safe and I’m used to it?

I undo the voice buttons. ‘Of course I want the job.’

‘Well, come and I’ll introduce Charley Boule to his new piano player.’

‘What if he doesn’t think I’m suitable?’

‘My impression is he hasn’t exactly been overrun with applicants.’

I straighten my collar. Take a last sip of my drink. He has one more point to make.

‘Boule can be persistent, but your loyalty and discretion are everything. Your eyes and ears belong to Roberts and me. If I find out you’re making a bit more pocket change on the side spying for him …’

It occurs to me that Charley Boule, having seen us talking, might feel he’s being manipulated into hiring me. But Percy seems so sure I’ll be welcomed with open arms I dismiss the thought, for now.

I take a step. He puts a clamp-like hand on my arm.

‘I’m not quite done, Mary Oxnam.’ His voice is an inch from my ear. ‘Don’t go over my head to the good captain.’ His eyes flit in Roberts’s direction. ‘You report to me. Do you understand?’

‘Anything else?’ I ask tightly.

He reaches into his pocket and extracts a pound note. ‘To pay your landlady.’ He holds it out.

I slip it into my purse.

‘I could enjoy being a kept woman,’ I say flippantly, but he’s already turned away.

Spring, 1879

8TH NOVEMBER 1879

Eight o’clock on a Saturday night at French Charley’s, and the place is jumping like spring fleas on a stray dog. Smoke haze. Flashing thighs. Disgruntled prospectors back from the Palmer River. They have no fire in their throats other than heartburn from fermenting possums, grubs and boiled grass, and all are drinking steadily, not fussed that the rum’s been doctored with laudanum and plug tobacco. Prostitutes in unlaced corsets bend over their tables like swaybacked mules. The room around them shimmies and sways with its cheap velvets and tinny chandeliers. The fool’s gold of paid companionship.

I’m wrist-deep in Strauss, my feet pumping the piano pedals. My mind’s eye’s riding a bicycle away from this place. I watch the dream-like scenery bounce by: a scattershot of gold-diggers, a thousand black snakes, ten thousand gum trees, each with a
wild Myall hiding behind it. And over the lot, the great, dripping damper of the sun.

Dimly, above the music and noise of conversation, I can hear the hollow, knuckle-on-bone thumps of a fist fight out in the street. I don’t stop playing. Don’t bother turning. It’s a nightly occurrence. It could be grog, a woman or a gambling debt that threw the first punch. Cooktown generously encourages all three preoccupations. Twenty hotels with a liquor licence, twenty more sly-grog shops, three opium dens, ten joss houses, countless gee fah and pak-a-pu shanties. And then there’s greed, holding both pockets closed while simultaneously trying to pick someone else’s. If all else fails: the wet season squatting over the chamber pot of the town is reason enough for a punch-up.

Charley Boule’s garlic breath drags me back to the present, plants me firmly on the hard seat in a wide room brittle with the girls’ lacquered laughter. He’s apparently noticed my spirited playing. ‘Pianissimo,’ he murmurs in my ear.

As usual, my suave French employer wears his too-tight waistcoat. It’s a vanity he won’t relinquish despite the sultry weather and the risk of torsion in his vital organs. A swollen swamp of cognac and rich sauces gurgles in the cauldron beneath the material.

‘What does it matter if I thump the keys?’ I ask. ‘No one’s listening anyway.’

The blood’s sunk from the diggers’ eardrums to what’s between their legs. And the girls’ attention is in the same general area: just a little left of centre, in the pocket where the nuggets are.

Charley clicks his tongue. ‘Subtleties of culture,
chérie
. They escape you entirely.’

‘Not entirely.’ I look sideways at him. ‘Not much escapes me, Charley. What will happen to that prospector? The one your two standover men dragged outside half an hour ago?’

‘They are my friends and protectors,’ he says mildly, inspecting his fingernails. ‘Name-calling is not nice. Did your mother never teach you that?’

He places a damp hand on my arm. I look down to a garish gold ring. Nails clipped on a perfect horizontal; the ugly knobs of knuckles half an inchworm’s length away. I shake him off.

‘So that’s why you threw him out, because he was calling you names? Let me see. French sack of bilgewater was one, wasn’t it? And what was it he said he would do after he’d run you through with a knife? Feed scraps of your Froggy hide into the stamping machine you sent him out to the goldfields with.’

He sighs. ‘Efficient, those little ears of yours. A pity they do not work for me.’ He smoothes his moustachio on one side and then the other.

Percy was right. Charley is persistent, and patient. I’ve been testing a theory over the last few weeks; amplifying my insolence with every night that passes. He accepts it all, showing remarkably little irritation. He wants something from me, all right, and he’s prepared to wait for it.

‘You have my fingers,’ I say, a delicate injury in my voice. ‘Why would you need my ears?’

He looks down at my big hands. ‘Ah, yes, your fingers. Alas, they appear the most useless part of the animal, if your playing is anything to go by. Do not gossip about the prospector,
chérie
. A slight misunderstanding, that is all. Charley Boule, in his generosity, tries to help those less fortunate. Such charity always backfires on the selfless.’

‘Of course.’ I nod, as though a curtain has parted. ‘It’s a translation problem! Now that you’ve pointed it out, it seems so obvious. You see, what you call charity in France, we call loansharking here in Australia.’

His face goes an unflattering shade of pink, but he doesn’t explode. ‘I do not understand your ridiculous expression. Stop pounding those keys like a wounded kangaroo. This is a salon, not a dance hall.’

‘Yes, Charley.’

I obediently slow the pace, turn my eyes back to the piano, so that he’ll walk away. My little experiment in stretching a Frenchman until he snaps has been interrupted by something more important. I’ve just seen one of Percy’s contacts in the periphery of my gaze. A crewman who almost certainly has a note for me.

Charley waddles off. The gaunt-looking sailor approaches the piano. Nothing untoward in that. Many do, requesting a favourite tune. I keep playing as though I haven’t noticed him. Wait for his words.

‘Do you know the
William Tell Overture
, Miss Oxnam?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I say. ‘But my favourite is
Life is a Dance
.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he sighs. ‘
Das Leben ein Tanz oder Der Tanz ein Leben
.’

‘Indeed. So much better than
The Last Waltz
, wouldn’t you say?’

The preliminaries have been dealt with.

‘Do you have something for me?’ I relax into the music, turning the page of the score with a snap of paper.

‘Yes.’ And then louder: ‘I’ve so enjoyed your Strauss, Miss Oxnam. Please accept a tip.’

His right hand reaches across the top of the piano and a few
pennies clank into the change dish perched there. He steadies himself with his left hand, which drops a folded paper behind the upraised keyboard cover. He doffs his hat and moves away.

I’ve finished my shift, having unobtrusively collected the note from behind the keyboard cover. Now I’m following the patches of gaslight along Charlotte Street. On my right, a decaying drift of jasmine. On my left, warm exhalations: hops, sweat and damp smoke coughed out through the mouths of open hotel doors. I dodge lewd suggestions, bold hands. Even plain girls are pretty in the drunken dark. Outside the Great Northern, a quick sidestep saves me from yet another fight tumbling into the street, the jerky dance spurred on by a string-pulling crowd in the doorway.

I slip across the road towards the night beyond the town. Charlotte Street is muddy from recent rain. I do my best to avoid the worst of the puddles, holding up my skirt in one hand. A yolk-yellow moon hangs low in the cloud-sling of the sky, and a light breeze brings to my nose a whiff of the lavender oil I’ve rubbed onto my skin to deter mosquitos. But the Mediterranean can’t compete for long with the tropics’ sweet rot and cloying jasmine soon muscles in again.

How romantic it sounds: a secret tryst at midnight, on the banks of the Endeavour River. I’m to meet a handsome man, as I do every month on the eighth. Pity it’s work and not play. Even so, I smooth back my hair, bite my bottom lip to bring some colour to it, as though he’ll be able to see me in the dark.

I scramble down the bank. Debauched sounds of cursing and laughter follow me, faint ghosts of themselves, tearing voice-strips off the edges of the air. In the distance, beyond the river and over the ocean, a purple razor of lightning is sharpening itself, back
and forth, on the leathery strop of the horizon. The night turns sickly white for a brief moment, then blackens again. On that edge between cold light and nothingness, between dark trees and the cream between them, I think I see movement to my right. I’m used to Percy’s — or are they Samuel Roberts’s? — spies. They follow me constantly. My room at the boarding house is searched regularly. The vase I keep on my writing desk to check has been moved minutely when I’ve been out. At least three times, probably more. But whatever evidence of betrayal they’re looking for, they won’t find it.

I pass the massive bauhinia tree where I leave the coded notes I’m given at French Charley’s. I presume one of Percy’s elves descends to spirit the mysterious missives away, decode them, and pass them on to another elf like myself. The maw in the side of the bole gapes threateningly. I never stick my hand inside without imagining a snake curled up in the dark, ready to strike. And yet the routine has become, if not monotonous, then predictable.

Tonight, I go further. Small twigs and leaves crack under my boots. Fruit bats rustle overhead, squeaking. They make me think of funerals in the rain. Each of them a rat-faced undertaker shielded by a black umbrella of wings. I shiver just a little when I feel a hand on my arm.

‘Mary.’ A familiar if disembodied voice.

I turn. The bowl of his pipe glows red, a single fevered eye.

‘Percy.’ I smell his pine cologne, say the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Is one of your men following me?’

‘Maybe.’ He’s calm. ‘What of it?’

Should I ever need evidence of how small a cog I am in the machine …

‘What do you have for me?’ he asks.

We sit together on a log, close to the river. I can hear the slow pant of water on the bank. I keep my ears open for the stealthy plod of crocodiles, feel the bark beneath my thighs dig in.

I tell him what gossip I’ve heard over the past month. About the captain of
Desperance
meeting with one of the town’s corrupt businessmen down near the docks while his packhorses were loaded. A delivery of hundred-years-old eggs from China to Charley’s three weeks ago in the middle of the night. Percy says nothing. He stretches out his long legs and listens, his pipe resting in the corner of his mouth. I mention Charley’s lucrative sidelines: his small-time smuggling rackets through the far north reef passage; his habit of supplying destitute diggers with the means to go into the goldfields and work a claim, followed by extortionate demands when they come back into town. Lately, though, they come back with only scratchings. It’s getting harder for Charley to extract his pound of flesh.

‘Hmm. Keep an eye and ear on Boule’s grand plans,’ Percy says. ‘Roberts particularly wants to know if he’s planning another gold-prospecting expedition to New Guinea.’

‘Another?’

He shifts a little on the log. As though I’m on the other end of a seesaw, I have to adjust my feet on the ground or else be tipped off.

‘He funded an expedition earlier this year. Sent a schooner loaded with experienced prospectors and equipment north to Port Moresby. Apparently some missionary had found alluvial gold about forty miles inland, and Boule thought he would get in on the ground floor. Make a killing.’

It sounds like something Charley would do. I’ve heard him and his cronies at night in his backroom, speculating about the
white colonisation of New Guinea. Nothing on a small scale, of course: Charley wants to revive the lost utopia of Louisiana. Sees himself relaxing on a verandah, sipping sloe gin delivered by a dusky, bare-breasted maiden, while the tamed natives work in his sugar plantations.

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Did they hit a lucrative seam?’

‘No. Dysentery and malaria put the kibosh on the whole operation. But Boule won’t give up so easily.’

Something puzzles me. ‘Didn’t you say Captain Roberts took medicines up to the new seam in New Guinea? Surely there was quinine available? Why would Charley’s prospectors contract malaria?’

‘Just because a medicine’s available doesn’t mean that it’s
available
.’

‘So Captain Roberts withheld the medicine from Charley’s men?’

‘You’d have to ask Roberts about that. I’m not particularly interested in the business in New Guinea. My focus is on something else. But I know enough to say that Roberts wants to keep Boule away from anything north of Cape York.’

No use asking questions about the ‘something else’ he’s interested in. I’ll just get the speech about loyalty, repercussions and the dangers of curiosity. Again. So I latch on to another comment that he made.

‘You say I’d have to ask Captain Roberts about Charley and New Guinea, but I can’t, can I? You’ve told me not to approach the man.’

‘I told you not to go over my head,’ he corrects me.

I see it as a minor difference. Not that I’ve had to restrain myself to any notable degree — I’ve only seen Captain Roberts
twice in the past six months. Once in French Charley’s, much to Charley’s discomfort. And once down at the ASN Company’s wharf as I was passing, his huge black head bent forward as he listened with attention to a man I didn’t know. I tried to catch his eye as I passed, but failed. He was clearly deep in thought about something, lifting the bottom of his long beard up with one hand, then letting it sink again; as though weighing a handful of seaweed.

‘I’m not permitted to know about the new venture, of course?’

I don’t expect an answer. But fortune favours the brave, and I sense tonight the string has been loosened slightly on Percy’s pouch of secrets.

‘One thing at a time,’ is all he says.

The sky rumbles in the distance, and there’s some teeth-edge energy in the heavy air. We’ll get a storm before very much longer.

I remember the note then and reach into the pocket of my dress for it. Percy takes it from me. Our fingers connect, briefly. He slips the paper into the top pocket of his shirt.

‘You’re doing a good job, Mary.’ I wonder if I imagine a slight reluctance in his voice. ‘Roberts is happy with your performance.’

I flush all the way along my cheekbones. One more try, I tell myself, and then I’ll give up — until our next meeting, at least.

‘I could be more useful. If only I knew a little more about what to listen for.’

I’m not sure what I expect from him, but it’s not what he says next.

‘It seems, against my better judgement, that you will. And sooner rather than later.’

My pulse speeds up. I must stay calm. This is my chance at promotion.

‘How so?’

He breathes out deeply. Empties the tobacco from his pipe with a few taps on the log.