Musk & Byrne

PRAISE FOR FIONA CAPP That Oceanic Feeling ‘That Oceanic Feeling is quietly magnificent.’ —Simon Hughes, The Australian ...

Author: Fiona Capp

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PRAISE FOR FIONA CAPP That Oceanic Feeling ‘That Oceanic Feeling is quietly magnificent.’ —Simon Hughes, The Australian Financial Review Magazine ‘It is a brave, intelligent and heartfelt piece of writing.’ —James Bradley, The Sydney Morning Herald ‘That Oceanic Feeling is . . . a book which subtly explores elements of the Australian identity found in surfi ng culture . . . Read this book and you hear waves break on the shore.’ —Christopher Bantick, The Canberra Times ‘Unsentimental and deeply thoughtful, one can almost smell the salt-sea rising from the pages of this beautiful book.’ The Age ‘. . . sensuous seascapes, evocative landscapes and meditative mindscapes . . . This is a beautiful, inspiring memoir about overcoming fears and realising dreams.’ Good Reading The Last of the Sane Days ‘Sane Days . . . is a melding of mind and body that resounds with echoes and codas, ironies and intimacies.’ —Murray Waldren, The Weekend Australian ‘This is a fascinating novel, exploring complex themes with eerie accessibility.’ Sunday Life! ‘Once you start reading this beautiful novel, the outside world is forgotten.’ —Fiona Basile, Geelong Advertiser Night Surfing ‘In economical, crystal-clear prose the author captures the tension between the villagers and the rich summer crowd, the sunburned drift and salty ennui of small coastal resorts and the exhilaration and dark dread of surfi ng the big waves in a deadly rip . . . Subtly erotic and tense, Night Surfing is an excellent fi rst novel about hope and fear and second chances.’ —Susan Geason, The Sun Herald

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Fiona Capp is the author of Writers Defiled: Security Surveillance of Australian Authors and Intellectuals and two novels, Night Surfing and Last of the Sane Days, all of which have been shortlisted for prizes. Her memoir, That Oceanic Feeling, won the 2004 Nita B Kibble Award for Life Writing and the 2004 Australians Studying Abroad Travel Writing Prize. She lives in Melbourne with her partner and son.

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First published in 2008 Copyright © Fiona Capp 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Capp, Fiona. Musk & Byrne/author, Fiona Capp. ISBN 978 1 74175 393 6 (pbk.) A823.3 Text design by Lisa White Typeset in Bembo by Midland Typesetters Australia Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To my niece Rebecca Wilson, and In memory of her son Jack

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Prologue 1871 As the last train of the evening pulls out of Wombat Hill station, a woman dressed in black is left standing on the platform like a lone figure on a stage. For a moment, she appears confused. Has she got off at the wrong stop? With a sigh that faintly echoes the hiss of the departing train, she moves towards the stationmaster who is waiting with outstretched palm. The man raises his hat and mutters ‘Good evening’ but the woman does not meet his eye as she presses the ticket into his hand and slips out into the street beyond. Clutching her ticket as evidence, the stationmaster watches her go: this veiled stranger, this woman in the garb of mourning who has arrived alone and been met by no one, at such a late hour. The woman hurries up the main street, avoiding the yellow pools of the gas lamps. At her back, she feels the stationmaster’s lingering gaze and can almost hear his mind ticking over. She knows that by tomorrow morning word will be 1

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racing across the countryside like the shadow of a cloud. Jemma Musk is back. Jemma pauses to look at the sleeping town. Once a haphazard outgrowth of the gold rush—a random accretion of houses, institutions and shops—it now appears to have sprung up fully formed, as if in the same almighty convulsion that created the hill on which it sits. But to Jemma it might be a ghost town, a place haunted by what was gone. She contemplates the years rushing by, the people who will come and go, and the calm indifference of the buildings which will outlive all who inhabit them. As her footsteps echo through the night, she wonders what she is doing here, picking her way through this memorypocked landscape. She carefully avoids Manotti & Curle’s Aerated Waters in case Celestina happens to be up late in the tearoom, but can’t resist passing the shop where Gotardo worked as a bootmaker in those painful months before she fled. Peering through the glass, she searches for his workbench and tools only to find that it is now a bureau for Cobb & Co. Suddenly, it is not the past that threatens so much as the present, the possibility that things may not be as she had assumed, that Gotardo may no longer live in the town. That he, too, might have gone away. It has become too cold to linger. Jemma had forgotten how the temperature plummets at night. She curses the flimsiness of her taffeta skirt and bodice with its decorative, useless jacket. Why hadn’t she brought a coat? Pulling her woollen shawl about her shoulders, she hurries on down the hill and away from the township with the Milky Way reeling overhead. 2


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When the farmhouse finally comes into sight—lit up by a lamp within—a ghostly little hand slips itself into hers and leads her through the gate and up the front path past the pergola. Jemma imagines she can hear snatches of song and a small voice saying, Mama, look! And so it is that a lost time erupts, tearing through the night’s fabric as Jemma grips the veranda post before reaching out to knock on the door.

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Part One 1 Towards noon, one hot January day in 1868, Jemma Musk is walking with her sketchbook through the ragged Hepburn forest when she comes upon a family having a picnic on a ridge. They make a pretty tableau—a smartly dressed woman under a parasol, her dapper husband in a bell topper hat and their young daughter in her frilly Sunday best. In the searing midday light they look like cut-outs, not quite real. They say they do not mind if she takes their likenesses, as long as she does not mind if they occasionally move about. Settling herself against the treacle-dark trunk of an ironbark, Jemma lets her hand rove across the page. She does not think about what she is doing, aware only that she wants to capture the unreality of what she sees. Swirls of ochre dust eddy around her feet but Jemma does not notice the wind until it picks up one side of the tartan rug on which the family sits and tips the child’s cordial onto the dirt. In an instant, a black rim of ants appears around the yellow pool. The linen 5


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napkins go winging across the stony ground, and when the man leaps up to grab them, he scatters the china plates and sends sandwiches flying. All the while, Jemma’s hand moves in a blur as she sketches this sudden flurry, this scene of outdoor domestic harmony transformed into disarray. Their backs to the swollen pewter clouds massing along the horizon, the family struggles on with the picnic, their food peppered with grit. Jemma sees the cool change rippling towards them like a wave across the treetops. The wind plucks the child’s bonnet from her head, its silky pink ribbons fluttering a desperate farewell. The woman scolds and the girl begins to cry. While the man is off in pursuit of the bonnet, an explosive gust finds its way under the child’s wide-hooped crinoline, fi lling out the skirt and lifting her into the air. The woman’s cries alert her husband, who turns to see his dumbstruck daughter momentarily aloft, poised mid-air above the ventilation shaft of an abandoned goldmine. From her vantage point further up the ridge, it is evident to Jemma that none of them can reach her in time. Another tableau—a hatless man and a woman with windswept hair beseeching the sky as the small figure of a girl floats angelically by. Almost independent of her will, Jemma’s hand continues to dart over the page, inscribing black lines that will capture the child before she is swallowed up by the earth. As the parents scramble across the hard ground, the gust subsides, speeding the girl’s descent. Her feet are disappearing into the hole when something miraculous happens. The child’s crinoline puffs out like the dome of St Peter’s and settles around the mouth of the shaft, suspending her there. 6


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Half in this world, half in the next. The child is so stunned she cannot utter a sound, the wire hoops of her petticoat trembling under her weight. Her mother screams at her daughter not to move a muscle, then throws herself across the space between them, seizing the girl by the wrists as the hoops give way. Released from her trance, Jemma drops the charcoal and tosses her sketchbook aside. She hurries down the ridge and across the rocky ground towards the huddled family, only to find herself unwanted; an outsider at the closing of ranks. The reproach in their eyes says it all. She can see it is futile to protest. She has dared treat this freak event, this near-fatal caprice of nature, as a fit subject for art. How can she explain? Reluctantly, she returns to her satchel, packs her sketchbook away and melts back into the forest. During the two-mile walk home, Jemma’s swollen feet grow sore and hot in her tightly laced boots and she welcomes the harsh wind on her face. Before arriving in the district, she had heard about rich volcanic soil as red as blood; about acres of orchards, potatoes, strawberry gardens and pastures thick with clover; about mineral springs gushing from rockbeds in densely wooded forests and fern-fi lled gullies awash with chartreuse light. But the road from Melbourne that took her through the southern goldfields had revealed a scene closer to the outer circles of hell: the spewed-up clay of mullock heaps, the gaping mouths of abandoned mines, the earth stripped bare of all but the lowest scrub, the corpses of deserted settlements and makeshift shanties, mile after dispiriting mile. Then, just as she had begun to despair, the stagecoach had entered an avenue of Oriental plane trees, a 7


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long, luminous colonnade out of which they emerged to find themselves in the elegant town of Wombat Hill, overlooking a fertile plain. Now, as she climbs over a rise, the town comes into view through the bony swaying branches of the eucalypts. The new brass bell in the fire station tower catches the mid-afternoon sun and blazes like a ball of fire. Halfway up the hillside on which the town is perched, the three churches huddle together. Below them sits the fortress-like Mechanics’ Institute, the town hall with its Corinthian columns and the sombre facade of the bluestone courthouse. The main street is almost deserted except for a few men lolling in the shade of the wide verandas and some dogs fighting over scraps in the gutter. Soon, she can read the signs on the shops—Brabant’s Emporium of Empire Goods, Geo Jay’s Ginger Beer & Cordial Works, Mrs Blanchard’s Servants Registry, Maximilian Helburg’s Dancing School, Langbein’s Steam Coffee and Spice Works. On the far side of town gleams the white stucco of the Locarno Guest House flanked by Mozzi’s Macaroni Factory, the Swiss-Italian bakehouse, the orchards of cherries and plums giving way to neat rows of vines on the rocky slopes. She stops to savour the patchwork of human settlement and the faint aroma of Sunday roast. Pretty indeed, but how sleepy! With a pang, she thinks of Melbourne’s brash theatres, its smart boulevards and jewel-box arcades. There are, though, some compensations for being in the middle of nowhere: the wide vistas here please her artist’s eye, as do the oceanic swell of the southern sky and the shimmering, far-flung horizons. And, as much as she can tell after two weeks, the Rutherfords are pleasant employers, their 8


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daughter Caroline an undemanding charge. Most important of all is that she can pursue her art in the afternoons when Caroline is out paying calls with her mother or taking piano lessons. Jemma is determined to save the necessary funds for her passage to Europe and follow in the footsteps of Miss Adelaide Ironside, a young Sydney artist who studied in Paris and is now settled in Rome, and whose paintings are fetching good prices in London. According to the papers, she is on the verge of major success. That Jemma has none of Miss Ironside’s advantages, no family to support and encourage her, no reputation to precede her, is not something she cares to consider. What she envies Miss Ironside most is her personal acquaintance with Mr John Ruskin, who was Jemma’s first and best teacher, and who speaks to her with more intimacy and good sense through the pages of The Elements of Drawing than any of her subsequent tutors, who have had the advantage of observing her work. Whenever she opens her Ruskin, his voice rises from the pages, deep and sonorous, addressing her directly, as if he is right there in the room. Since her father’s death, she has come to rely on Mr Ruskin more than ever— not so much for instruction as for the paternal reassurance of his smoothly rolling sentences and his calm certainty that to paint or draw is to confront the mystery at the heart of all things. This is his third law of good drawing, as important to Jemma as anything Newton might have divined; the law that nothing is ever seen perfectly but only in fragments and under ‘various conditions of obscurity’. Every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, he told her, was a lesson in the difficulty of 9


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discerning clearly or judging justly ‘the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men’s actions or spirits, which we first think we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn.’ Jemma thinks of Mr Ruskin now as her path home takes her past the cemetery where a hawk is hovering on a wind current, its eyes fi xed on the ground. Had she been like a hawk, preying on the child? She opens her sketchbook again. She re-examines the drawings and catches her breath but cannot regret them. She has seized the fugitive moment, as Mr Ruskin urged. The child lives, the moment is gone, only the drawings remain with their vision of reprieve. How many are granted that chance? Her father had not been so lucky, and yet most would consider his a natural death. What, though, was natural about dying alone? She had returned home one evening after a day’s teaching to fi nd him face down in the paddock behind their weatherboard cottage, a wilted bunch of buttercups clutched in his hand and the big, grey magpie he had been feeding all winter perched on his head, reproving her with its mournful warble. The night before, she had been woken by the creak of floorboards and had risen to find him pacing the lounge room in his nightshirt, one hand clutched to his chest. He let his hand drop when he saw her. They stared at one another in silence as the grandfather clock began its agonising chime. Dark hammocks of skin hung beneath his eyes; his spine curved under some unseen weight. He seemed to cringe, as if he longed to hide, to curl up in a small, dark space. ‘Indigestion,’ he said, forcing a smile. 10


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But she had seen the fear in his eyes. Even then, she had been unable to believe that this great bear of a man could possibly die. This man who had never been sick, who doted on her with such tenderness, whose company she loved so dearly she could not imagine finding a husband to match him. He may have raised her as a freethinker but she had managed to reach the age of twenty-two with her faith in his immortality intact. Then to see him lying there on the grass, felled like a tree. ‘Papa!’ she cried, sinking to his side and rolling him gently over. She gasped to see his open, marbled eyes. All expression gone. His heavy body indifferent to the world. His silence was terrible; more final than anything she could have imagined. As she knelt over him, her tears falling on his mottled cheeks, part of her stood back and noted the shape of his fallen body among the buttercups, and the bird keeping vigil, and the violet light of early dusk slowly dissolving into evening mist. This part of her has stood back from life ever since. Taking her lead from Mr Ruskin, she has come to believe that it is only by breaking objects down that you can see them properly and put them back together in new ways. Only by doing violence to the smooth surface of things can you capture the fragility of the moment, the way life hovers on the brink of extinction. And so she has thrown herself into her art and with the arrogance of youth tells herself that she has endured the worst and that nothing can touch her now. In the weeks following the picnic, Jemma completes a series of paintings culminating in the reunited family, their unspoken 11


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fury turned upon her as they gazed out from the canvas. During this time, word of the incident spreads through the district, along with reports of the young governess who sketched the whole drama. While Jemma is still finding her way around Wombat Hill and settling into her new lodgings, another shadowy Jemma with a life of her own, a figment of rumour and speculation, is making her debut in the parlours and drawing rooms of the town. What kind of woman, it is asked, would continue to draw while a young girl brushed with death?

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2 The night before Gotardo Voletta leaves the alpine village where he has spent the first twenty-five years of his life, he dreams that he is already at sea. They are becalmed and a mist has descended. When it lifts, the sea is frozen over, holding them fast. There is nothing to do but leave the ship and strike out across the solid waves in hope of sighting land. Then a warm wind springs up and the ice begins to heave and crack. He knows the smell of that wind, the föhn from the warm south that heralds a false spring. The föhn with its sweaty, hot breath that tricks the buds into opening before their time, the delicate new blooms chilled within days by the cold wind from the west that always snaps at its heels. All he can do is scramble across the ice with the cows stampeding behind him and falling between the ever-widening gaps. He wakes to the sound of shuffl ing and lowing beneath the house as if the cows sense what is in store. Gotardo looks around his small room lit up by the moonlight and inhales 13


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the aroma of roast chestnuts and dried tobacco and the faint cinnamon of last year’s sausages wafting up from the kitchen. He has never really noticed how good it all smells. He climbs down the ladder and sits by the still-glowing coals of the fire. Although his hands and face are warm, the early-morning chill creeps up his spine and makes him shiver. He knows he will never come back. Later that morning, he watches his mother in her fête-day best lay the table for their last meal together. The raw silk of her gathered skirt constantly rustles and murmurs, as if giving voice to the sadness she cannot utter as she silently mourns for the last of her sons. The youngest and brightest of her three boys, Gotardo had been singled out early by the village priest as a promising candidate for the monastery, much to his mother’s delight. He had learned Latin and a little Greek, and the history of the crusades, and is able to recite whole books of the scriptures off by heart. But then his sister, his darling little Maria, had died of scarlet fever and the priest refused to say a prayer for her soul until he was paid his dues. It cost them a cow to have the litany read aloud in the lowest of tones—to have it sung was beyond their means. His parents accepted it as the way of the world but Gotardo could not hide his disgust. He would rather the company of cows than the forked-tongued men of the church. Gotardo knows that every day after his departure, whenever his mother steps across the threshold of their stone house, no matter how exhausted she is from thrashing dried chestnuts or lugging goods like a mule for the landsmen, she will touch the wooden carving of Saint Gotthard above the water trough and pray to his patron saint to keep him 14


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safe. She has never journeyed beyond Locarno and is afraid that he will go the way of his brothers and disappear into the outer darkness. For three years there has been no word from Aquilino or Battista. Whenever a letter arrives in the village from the meadows of gold, his parents go eagerly to the square hoping for some mention of their sons. If not for their cousins Pliny and Celestina, who keep track of the brothers’ doings, the family would have presumed them dead. So many have gone, some disappearing without a trace, a few returning wealthy men with fantastic tales of rivers of gold, of tent cities appearing and disappearing overnight, of Chinamen with long black plaits trailing down their backs, of nuggets just below the surface like giant truffles waiting to be unearthed. When the crops failed for the second year in a row, Gotardo knew his time had come. His father was no longer strong enough to go south to cut stone in the spring, and they could no longer afford the rent on the pastures in Locarno. And without the winter pastures, the cows were sure to die. Events had forced his hand, but Gotardo was secretly happy to leave. There was no future in the valley; everyone knew it. Even the priests were leaving, their congregations so diminished that they had no choice but to follow their runaway flock. Gotardo was not going to scrabble in the dirt for chunks of mineral and glittering dust like most of the other men, though. There was a flourishing town of his people, the Ticinese, in the middle of the Victorian goldfields. Where there were towns, there was always demand for fresh milk and cream, and already he had plans to sell his finest cheeses under the label of ‘Swiss Gold’. 15


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His father takes his place at the head of the long wooden table. He, too, has dressed for the occasion, wearing his best scarlet vest and chamois trousers. Where Anna Voletta is silent in her grief, Pietro is full of false cheer and last-minute advice on handling the cows during the long overland expedition to the port of Naples. Gotardo’s betrothed, Felice, quietly joins them, adding her own dish of mushroom and saffron risotto to a table already groaning with food: polenta topped with stewed kid, roast chestnuts and potato in garlic butter, a bowl of figs, peaches, mulberries and pears in sweet wine, and, of course, cured sausage, bread and Gotardo’s own cheese. At the very centre of the table, a special delicacy: a dozen of the snails his mother has kept on beds of sawdust and fattened with leaves until their shells are glossy and thick. Felice sits in silence, passing the dishes back and forth and eating almost nothing, her complexion more waxy than ever. Occasionally, when she takes a deep breath, everyone else holds theirs, waiting for her to speak. She looks at their expectant faces, wanting to say something memorable, wanting to remind Gotardo of their first kiss in the nearby wood and the walk home at dusk through the ankle-deep snow, shyly holding hands. Or of the days they climbed with the goats to the upper slopes of Mount Gotthard and shouted each other’s name and heard the mountain reply. But each time, the futility of words defeats her. She looks down at her plate and tells herself she must be patient and trust that Gotardo will keep his word. Much as he tries, it is hard for Gotardo to remember the smiling, plump-cheeked girl he fell in love with. Her expression is always resigned and she has grown so thin that, 16


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whenever he looks into her sunken eyes, he can’t help seeing the skull beneath. Even if there had been the money for her ticket, they all know she could not survive the long journey over land and sea to the other side of the world. Gotardo tosses back the grappa, deeply ashamed of the relief he feels. He talks as if he will be back home with his brothers in tow in a matter of years, a tidy fortune between them. And then, what a marriage feast will be held! They all watch him sorrowfully, no one believing a word he says. Gotardo blows his horn, as much in farewell as to summon the herd. The cows fall in behind him on the mountain path, their bells murmuring like running water as they begin to make their way down to Locarno. Whenever he turns to check their progress, they fi x their doleful eyes on his face as though they have an important question to ask him. As always there are the laggers, the gluttons who cannot drag their noses from some patch of grass. He knows, though, that he has only to call their names and they will come to him, the one who brings them to pasture and guides them back up the mountain in the early spring. Only this time, there will be no return journey, no going back to the dead-end valley of his youth. He glances up at his village and can just make out his parents and Felice, three small figures standing in the middle of the road with the mountain looming behind them. He raises his hand in a final wave before disappearing around a bend. When he thinks of Australia he thinks of Locarno. The upper slopes of his narrow valley are grey and rock-strewn and forever in the shadow of Mount Gotthard, but Locarno 17


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is sunny and lush with vegetation, the air tingling with the fragrance of fruit blossom, gardenia, acacia and the riotous wisteria that hangs like ripe grapes from the many pergolas by the side of the road. Beyond the groves of olives and pomegranates, like the ocean he will soon be crossing, lies the dreamy expanse of Lake Maggiore with its beckoning, distant shores. Gotardo is never lonely when he is with his beasts. Unlike sheep, which are fl ighty and mob-minded, and goats, which are skittish and stubborn, cows make steadfast and reliable companions. As he drives them south, he often walks with his left hand resting on one of their rumps and his right hand holding a volume of Ovid which is attached to his belt by a fraying length of twine. He keeps to the coast road to avoid the prickly spine of the Apennine Mountains and notices how, as each week passes, he can feel the cows’ rump bones jutting a little more sharply. By the time he spots the flattopped cone of Vesuvius, the cattle are more bone than flesh, and in serious need of rest and agistment. Gotardo’s feet are horribly blistered but he is otherwise in good shape. He has just finished reading Metamorphoses and feels confident that he, too, has embarked upon a tale of transformation. The short trip across the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar and up to Liverpool is supposed to be the easy part, but the square-rigged sailing vessel the emigration agent has booked him on is so old and creaky and prone to rolling that he spends the whole voyage laid flat in his bunk, vomiting whenever he tries to stand. He has never known an illness as debilitating as this watery sickness. He pays a deckhand 18


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to feed his bellowing cows in the hold. There is no need to milk them as they have all dried up. Gotardo lies in his bunk, hungry yet unable to hold down food, fretting about the long voyage to Australia. Apart from wondering how he and the cows will survive it, he fears that if the milk does not flow he will not be able to meet his end of the bargain. His ticket is to be paid for in milk provided to passengers during the voyage. At the port of Liverpool, when he learns that he is booked on the Great Britain—a massive new, iron-built, ocean-going steamer (with sail power) that has been known to cover the distance to Melbourne in less than seventy days—and that the cattle will be housed in holding pens to stop them from being flung about in rough seas, Gotardo’s eyes well with relief. As the ship churns its way down the Mersey, he drinks grappa on the deck with a group of Italians and Swiss until nightfall. They watch the full moon bob up from below the horizon like a luminous Indian rubber balloon adrift in the sky. It defies all understanding how this distant globe can be pulling at the water beneath them, making it go this way and that. Some nights, the moon is little more than a rind of cheese and then it slowly swells again and spills its milky path of beckoning light across the water. Gotardo is glad not to be on the road; glad to be transported by wind and wave and steam; and to know that everything— except for the care of his cows—is out of his hands. He fi nds he cannot think about the past, his parents and Felice, or about the future, his brothers and his cousins whom he has not seen for so long. Nothing else seems to exist but the floating world of the ship, the colossal sky and the endless ocean. As 19


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the universe opens up around him, his mind expands into the surrounding space. He feels himself growing alert to new meanings, new ways of thinking and seeing the world. Once they have crossed the equator, he studies the strange new sky with its unfamiliar constellations, trying to identify—out of the many possibilities—which diamondshaped stellar arrangement is the Southern Cross. Towards evening, he loves to watch the yellow-headed, broad-winged birds that have become more common as they approach the coast of Australia, birds which ride the wind currents above the waves, skimming the water in exhilarating swoops. The weather has been fair for most of the voyage and no one is prepared for the change that greets them in Bass Strait. Everyone on board is in a festive mood, knowing that they are soon to make landfall. A band is playing and there is singing and dancing. A cheer goes up as the passengers mistake the bluish shapes on the horizon for land. The shapes keep swelling like tumours, the sky darkens and a wind springs up, a southerly buster that tears at the sails so savagely they have to be lowered in great haste, some in shreds. Gotardo staggers down below to check on his cattle and falls asleep on a pile of straw. When he wakes the storm has passed. It is morning. He hears cries and whistles coming from above. He hurries on deck to join the crowds pressing around the iron railing as the Great Britain enters the forest of masts and funnels and furled sails at Queen’s Wharf. He peers across the grimy docks, the air rancid with seaweed and rotting fish, towards the dark, squat forms of the city and concludes that he is not seeing it from its best aspect. This is a rear-end view, the tradesman’s entrance, he tells himself, as most docks are. He should not be 20


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too hasty in his judgements. It was foolish of him to expect that Melbourne would look anything like Locarno. Gotardo stands on the wharf waiting for the other passengers to disembark. The sky was overcast but now the clouds are parting and he is looking forward to being on his way. As soon as the captain gives the word, he will return to the hold and begin the precarious business of coaxing his cows down the gangplank. Porters rush forward to carry luggage to waiting cabs; there are shouts and cries of greeting, people laughing and hugging and weeping. Nearby, a little girl in a lavender dress and matching bonnet has plonked herself down on a hat box and is wailing, ‘I want to go home!’ Gotardo is enjoying the bustle and does not notice two men approach. Suddenly they are right beside him, their faces half-hidden behind bushy beards and battered hats. He turns and nods, wondering why they are standing so close. ‘Can I help you?’ he says in his best English. The two men exchange looks and laugh. The taller one, with a large beaky nose that is vaguely familiar, shoves Gotardo in the shoulder and says in dialect, ‘What kind of greeting for your brothers is that?’ Gotardo looks at the men incredulously, unable to hide his shock. His brothers have always been rough at the edges but in the years since he has seen them, this roughness has hardened into something much wilder; something that gleams in the whites of their eyes. He opens his arms. ‘Aquilino! Battista! I don’t believe it!’ The brothers laugh awkwardly and slap his back, scraping their whiskery faces against his fresh-shaven cheeks. As 21


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they pull away, Gotardo sees them eyeing his clothes. He is wearing his best outfit, his silk waistcoat and serge trousers, and has even polished his boots. Although the cows are still to be driven sixty miles to the goldfields, he wanted to arrive in style, to give outward expression to the new person he feels himself becoming. To start afresh. ‘Faun-boy’s all grown up,’ Aquilino says to Battista. ‘Out to impress the ladies,’ Battista grins. Gotardo stares at his polished boots. He had forgotten how small his brothers could make him feel. And that nickname. When he was young, he’d thought it affectionate. And perhaps it had been, inspired as it was by his long-lashed, startled brown eyes. But as he got older and grew more bookish— above himself, his brothers thought—they made it clear the name was a taunt. In their eyes he was only half a man. There had been a time when Aquilino, as the oldest, had taken it upon himself to teach his little brother things he thought a boy ought to know: how to shoot wild geese, how to raid a nightingale’s nest, how to skin a squirrel. But Gotardo had been so reluctant, Aquilino had given up in disgust. Battista proved a much more enthusiastic accomplice. After that, his brothers didn’t bother to include him in their adventures or games. But they are adults now, Gotardo tells himself. Things need not be like that anymore. ‘It was good of you to come.’ Aquilino shrugs it off. ‘We had business in town.’ They only realised this morning, after making inquiries, that Gotardo’s ship had docked. The brothers stand with their hats in their hands, looking around the wharf. Gotardo wants to ask about their business, 22


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but as Aquilino has ventured nothing, he doesn’t dare; he has always been more than a little afraid of them. Three long years of silence hang between them. He wants to ask them why they haven’t written. To tell them how anxious their parents have been. To find out what they have been doing and how they have fared in their search for gold. Pliny’s letters gave only bare details. Aquilino and Battista have shares in a mine in Wombat Hill; they like to drink and gamble; they keep to themselves. Battista spits on the stone at his feet and squints fiercely up at the sun. Aquilino shifts uneasily on the spot, occasionally glancing at Battista as if goading him to speak. ‘Mama and Papa are well?’ Battista says finally. ‘As well as can be expected.’ ‘And did they send anything with you? For us?’ Gotardo’s spirits sink. So this is why they have come. They need money. ‘Only their love.’ ‘Is that so?’ Aquilino erupts. ‘But you have come with the whole herd, have you not? When Battista and I arrived here, do you know what we had between us? Five pounds! Everything we have, we scrounged and scraped out of this hard, bloody earth.’ His boot strikes the stone paving. Gotardo is mortified. It is true. His brothers have always had it harder than him. Because he was the scholarly one, he had stayed at school while his brothers went south to cut stone with their father. Because of his learning, his parents deferred to him in a way that they never did with his brothers. And now, he has arrived with his family’s most valuable asset, a ready-made income. No wonder Aquilino and Battista are angry. And yet how can they be surprised after three years and not a word from them? 23


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‘Surely we can run the farm together?’ he ventures, even though he knows it is too little, too late. ‘When it starts earning, you will get your share.’ But his brothers have lost interest. Even as boys, they had never liked milking the cows, had much preferred being out on the slopes, hunting or fishing or chopping down trees. He is suddenly reminded of their parting remarks before they left the village. ‘Don’t let that priest make you soft in the head,’ was the last thing Aquilino had said to him. Battista had muttered something about it being too late. ‘Forget it, faun-boy. We can look after ourselves,’ Aquilino says. They have made their point and now they want to be off. Gotardo must accept that they will always resent him. The passage of years and a new country can make no difference. It is one of those iron-clad laws, the kind that wreak havoc in myths. With a sly smile, Aquilino inquires, ‘So where is Felice?’ ‘She’s still unwell. But the doctors say she has a strong constitution. I hope she will join me as soon as she can.’ His brothers raise their eyebrows and say nothing. They slap his shoulder again. ‘We’ll see you on the road, little brother. Watch out for bushrangers. The place is crawling with them.’ Gotardo can still hear their laughter as they disappear into the crowd. He stares across the docks to the glazed grey chop of Port Phillip Bay. He had started the day so full of excitement and hope. So proud at having got this far with his herd and only one loss. But the past isn’t so easily escaped.

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3 In the garden behind Pliny Serafini’s large stone house, a pig, tethered by the trotters, hangs upside down from a pear tree in readiness for the knife. The pig would have been dispatched a month ago if Pliny had not delayed the killing so that a feast might be held to mark the arrival in Wombat Hill of his childhood friend and cousin, Gotardo Voletta. Side by side, the two men are a study in contrasts. Pliny is like a beanpole, his sleeves and trousers always too short, while Gotardo is small and muscular, his solidity softened by a head of thick, dark curls. The belting heat of midday has passed but the air is tinder dry, with not even a hint of a breeze. Bees drone in the lavender bushes that form a hedgerow around the large garden; in the orchard, clouds of gnats hover over the mushy corpses of fallen fruit. Pliny holds out the knife to Gotardo. With a small bow to his host, Gotardo rolls up his sleeves and positions himself behind the pig, then grasps it by the ears and pulls back the 25


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head to expose the neck. Sensing its fate, the pig unleashes an ear-splitting squeal not unlike that of an hysterical child. In the shade of an almond tree, watching with a wooden smile, is Jemma Musk, armed with her charcoal and paper. To distract herself from the impending event, she counts the number of guests—nine adults and eleven children. She studies the gnarled, varicose roots of the almond tree which make her think of the etchings of Gustave Doré in her edition of The Divine Comedy. But then comes the flash of silver in her peripheral vision, the blade swooping down, and she cannot resist. A brilliant spurt of blood erupts from the jugular and a fountain of vermilion gushes into the bucket below. Everyone looks on with satisfaction; even the children shriek with delight before racing off after a piglet to play their own game of mock-slaughter. Everyone, that is, except Celestina Manotti, sister of Pliny and Jemma’s only friend in the town. As the children gallivant around the garden, she remembers how she would bury her face in her mother’s skirts and the nightmares afterwards; the shame she felt because she couldn’t laugh as the other children did. While she is hardened to it now, it still baffles her that Jemma would willingly subject herself to this spec– tacle; that she would want to draw it. Celestina watches, torn between wonder and dismay. Wonder at the concentration and skill that is transforming the creature’s death into a work of art. And dismay that Jemma can so detach herself as to appear utterly unmoved. She thinks of the rumours circulating about her friend, rumours that fi ll her with indignation despite the grain of truth they seem to contain. Jemma looks down at what she has done. A pig with a 26


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grinning throat has appeared on the page in front of her. The pure, almost human, terror of the creature’s dying squeal is something she won’t readily forget. Nor is that fountain of blood. Since her father’s death she has been drawn to scenes like this—indecorous, shocking; she can’t seem to help herself. There is a truth in them that she can no longer find in the vases of flowers and delicate botanical specimens she once happily painted. When she looks back on those works, she is struck by their innocence and serenity, and by how she has changed. How much darker her vision of life has become. One only has to look around the goldfields to be reminded that violence and death are never far from the surface. And yet, as a woman, she is supposed to turn the other way, to dedicate herself to beauty without regard to truth. Every time she brings out her sketchbook and charcoal, she finds herself at odds with the world. What keeps her going is the knowledge that she is not alone. Until her father’s death, they had made a habit of visiting the State Library every week to read the overseas papers. Jemma always went first to the latest edition of Le Monde to keep up with the exciting developments in the battle between the artists of the French Academy and a young group of painters who wanted to break with the old teachings of the École des Beaux-Arts. Whenever her tutor chastised her for showing a life model’s defects rather than observing the proportions of classical form, Jemma felt herself to be in sympathy with the young French rebels. Even now, the wood engravings from Le Monde remain vivid in her mind: scenes of Courbet’s studio full of young artists defiantly shunning the masters of the old school, or gatherings of artists in Parisian cafes passionately arguing about the importance of painting the 27


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world as it is, not as it ought to be. She longs to see the works she reads about, to be in the thick of this ferment. Only then, she tells herself, will she be among like minds. The cries of the pig are still in her ears when one of the most exquisite sounds Jemma has ever heard pipes up from beneath their feet. A head appears from the dark cavern of the wine cellar near the kitchen as Marina Serafini, Pliny’s sweet-faced wife, emerges with a large dish of cold meats, cheeses and olives. Her ample chest swells beneath her blouse as she gives herself up to a melancholy folk song which brings instant tears to the eyes of the assembled guests. Jemma watches as Pliny’s friend, Gotardo, drops the knife and dashes forward to relieve Marina of the platter and—as if the whole thing had been orchestrated—suddenly joins her in the song. Still spattered with blood, he stands at her side and they sing like a practised duo, looking into each other’s eyes as they reach a crescendo and linger on the final note until the applause from the guests drowns them out. Amid the clapping and cheering, Celestina explains that Marina is well known in the district for her exceptional voice and that she sometimes gives concerts under the name of Signora Serenissima at the local hotels—most of which are run by Italians or Swiss who, in fact, run almost everything in the town connected with food and drink. An old man in a magenta vest has taken up an accordion and is playing a lively dance tune while the other men clap in time; humming and swaying along, the women set the table and arrange the chairs in the shade of a long pergola overhung with plump red grapes. Tall like her brother and emphatic in speech, Celestina strides among them giving directions like 28


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an impresario preparing for an opening night. The theatricality of it all is so infectious and so unlike anything Jemma has ever been party to, that even before she has drunk her first glass of wine she is feeling light-headed and emboldened to try out her rusty Italian on the other guests. As she does, she is aware how speaking another language brings her out of herself, makes it possible to become someone new. Celestina meets her eyes with a smile. ‘Didn’t I tell you it would be worth it?’ She worries that Jemma is too inclined to keep her own company. The first time they met, she had sensed a deep solitariness in this young woman. Something about the erect way she held herself, the way she stood apart from the crowd. They were at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, both of them in front of Eugene von Guerard’s Mount Kosciuszko. Celestina made a remark about her love of the mountains, how they reminded her of where she grew up, and the two women fell into conversation about the comparative virtues of mountain scenery as opposed to the more quiet, pastoral landscapes that were now in vogue. Celestina confessed that she might never have looked twice at a painting—as neither of her parents had done—if it hadn’t been for a chance meeting with the remarkable Mr Eugene von Guerard, who had been a passenger on the same ship that brought her family to Melbourne in 1852. She was wandering the upper deck one morning as they were crossing the equator, when she found him sitting at his easel peering keenly at what appeared—to the twelve-year-old girl—to be empty space. There was no land in sight, the ocean was grey and flat, the sky overcast. She couldn’t see what would 29


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possibly interest him until he began talking about the shifting colours of the water and the ever-changing landscape of clouds. There was grandeur to be found in even the most monotonous view if one opened one’s eyes to the weather, the texture of things and the play of light. Each day she would visit him to see how his work was progressing and was soon enthralled by the magical effects achieved with a few strokes of charcoal or daubs of paint. He used stale crumbs of bread to rub out pencil, claiming it was better than Indian rubber because it damaged the paper less. And because of the crumbs, there were always gulls hovering near by. ‘I felt like one of those gulls,’ she told Jemma. ‘Picking up scraps of knowledge. I have no illusions about my own talents. But I will always be grateful to him for showing a girl from a poor mountain village how to appreciate art.’ Celestina shot a quick glance at the young woman. ‘And you, my dear. I have a suspicion that you might be a painter yourself.’ Jemma smiled shyly. ‘What makes you say that?’ Celestina pointed to the bottom of Jemma’s plain muslin skirt. On the right side, almost hidden by the folds, were splashes of paint, Prussian blue and cadmium orange. ‘Oh dear!’ Jemma laughed, warming to this sharp-eyed woman. ‘I had no idea.’ Celestina said that she would like to see Jemma’s work. If she wasn’t busy, would it be possible that afternoon, after a bite of lunch? ‘I couldn’t. Not after all these wonderful works.’ But Celestina would not be fobbed off. As soon as she entered the small studio in East Melbourne, she knew that 30


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her instincts had been right. This young woman could paint. Celestina kept returning to one particular painting and finally announced that she had to buy it. It was a small work, in oils, of an empty paddock; the paddock, she would later learn, where Jemma had found her dead father. There were no figures in the scene—just some flattened buttercups and a large elm in the middle distance and a solitary magpie. Celestina said she would hang it in the tearoom she ran with her husband, Manotti & Curle’s Aerated Waters, in the main street of Wombat Hill. In time she planned to open a gallery where she would exhibit the work of a new generation of colonial artists. Paddock With Buttercups was her first acquisition. They had been friends for almost a year—corresponding regularly and meeting up on Celestina’s occasional visits to the city—when Jemma complained to Celestina that her teaching position at Mrs Sands’ Ladies’ College was sapping all her energy and leaving none for her art. (That she wished to escape the attentions of an unwanted suitor was left unsaid.) Celestina made it her mission to find Jemma more suitable employment, which is why Jemma now finds herself resident in Wombat Hill, and at this very moment watching the guest of honour, Gotardo Voletta, complete the ritual he had begun an hour before by opening the belly of the beast and letting the viscera tumble into waiting hands. The women have gathered by the well to clean the intestines which will serve as sausage skins. Through the milky membranes Jemma can see bluish bulges of half-digested food mixed with bile. Celestina and Marina wave her over, and together they are a chorus she cannot resist. Warm with wine and good company, Jemma takes a seat and watches as 31


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Marina cuts a length of intestine and demonstrates how the muck is eased out by swift pulses of forefinger and thumb, before they are washed. Jemma concentrates on the movements necessary to complete the task and is surprised at how quickly the smell of the entrails and the acrid fumes of the burning bristle cease to bother her. What would have been a repellent chore only hours ago has been transformed into a timeless ritual by which she is welcomed into this community and made to feel she is one of their own. Marina feeds the pork through the mincer and combines it with the already ground beef, herbs and spices and enormous quantities of pungent garlic before the intestines are attached to the sausage-maker. ‘Silence everyone,’ she announces. ‘We are about to begin.’ The guests crowd in, wine in hand, as Marina turns the handle that forces the mince into the swelling skins. A cheer goes up as the first of the year’s bullboar sausages takes shape. As he joins in the cheers, Gotardo studies the young governess standing at Marina’s side. She is clearly not one of his people and he would swear that, despite her fair hair and fair complexion, there is a trace of the East in her. At first, she struck him as reserved and aloof. It was only when they spoke briefly across the table that he glimpsed something ablaze in her eyes, something unexpectedly fierce. And clearly his first impression was wrong. When he saw her sitting under the almond tree he didn’t pick her for the kind of woman who would be willing to bloody her hands. Pliny joins him and, after silently contemplating the string of new sausages, solemnly passes Gotardo a glass of his finest red. 32


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‘Welcome home,’ he says and they laugh at the strange truth of it. It is lucky, he adds quietly, that Gotardo wasn’t here two weeks ago. What was supposed to be a wedding for his nephew ‘Sunny’ Serafini had turned into a wake after the boy was cut clean in two by a snapped wire-rope when he was clearing stumps on his land. Pliny points to a young, chalk-faced woman sitting in a wicker chair at the far end of the veranda, away from all the rest. Never looking up from her lap, she works at a piece of embroidered linen which was to be part of her trousseau. ‘Hasn’t spoken a word since it happened,’ Pliny says as he taps the bowl of his pipe against the wall of the house. Even from where Gotardo stands he can see how tightly the young woman is clutching the needle, her knuckles as white as the bleached cloth on which she is stitching. ‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Pliny adds, with a meaningful glance at Gotardo. Gotardo knows full well what Pliny is getting at. He hasn’t told anyone about Felice; the moment hasn’t felt right. Only his brothers know of the engagement and he can’t help feeling relieved that they are out of town, on business in Ballarat. Pliny says they are always caught up in some money-making scheme or another. Since his arrival in Wombat Hill, Gotardo has hardly laid eyes on them. Pliny puffs thoughtfully at his pipe. ‘A good thing you’re not going down the mines.’ Already Gotardo has heard too many grim stories of cave-ins and foul air. Hardly a day goes past without someone getting gassed or crushed. No, not for him those dark, dank 33


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tunnels. Pliny has offered to sell him a neighbouring block of a good ten acres—enough to provide pasture for the cows—and with his friend’s help, and perhaps even that of his brothers if they are inclined, he will soon start building a house. When the sausage-making is done, the men bring out the bocce balls, locally fashioned from hardwood roots, and gather by the bocce track that Pliny has raked in the gravel near the veranda. Jemma is struck by the slow-motion grace with which even the oldest of them half tosses, half bowls the ball and then follows it up the track to urge it on. The children, meanwhile, head for the waterhole in the gully. Here, a fast-flowing creek widens and slows as the creek bed deepens to form a green waterhole edged by ferns and tall eucalypts. Jemma and Celestina and the other women follow the children down the hill and sit on the banks with their feet in the shallows, talking and laughing, while the children jump from a nearby rock, their bodies making explosions of water before they sink from sight and magically resurface somewhere else. After a time, the men retreat to the cool gully also. Gotardo kneels by the water and splashes his face, then removes his boots, relishing the slick mud between his toes. Marina begins to sing again and, as her voice soars above the farm and the vineyards, the orchards and vegetable garden, the dairy and the cheese house, above the surrounding paddocks and goldfields, the waterwheels and poppet-heads, above the town and the church spires and into the vast antipodean sky, Gotardo sighs with contentment. He could never have imagined it would all unfold so smoothly. Only one cow lost 34


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on the overland and oversea journey and now the rest are fattening nicely in Pliny’s pastures and the milk is flowing again. Thanks to his cousins, he has settled into the town with remarkable ease. If his brothers refuse to share in his good fortune, how can he be held responsible? He closes his eyes, listening to the song and the cries and splashes and the occasional bell-like notes of some bird he cannot yet name hidden high in the trees. When he opens them he sees that his cousin Celestina and her friend, Jemma Musk, have slipped quietly into the water further upstream, partly screened by overhanging bushes. Their white chemises and bloomers puff out behind them as they move with slow, easy strokes. The women are laughing and gliding through the deep green shadows and patches of sunlight without sign of effort or strain. Just watching them makes Gotardo feel heavy and hot as he sits there on the bank in his rolled-up shirt sleeves and rough trousers. He remembers a time in Locarno, on his way to bring the cows back from their winter pastures. He was walking along a path that meandered around the lake when he heard shrill laughter among the trees up ahead. About to enter the water was a group of young women from the lakeside villas in bloomers and frilly smocks, their hair hidden beneath oiled silk caps. Mesmerised, he watched them ducking and splashing and performing gymnastics, the water glistening on their bodies like silver scales. He noticed one girl in particular who had left the group behind as she stroked calmly out towards the horizon like a creature born to the lake. Gotardo was afraid of the water and could not swim a stroke. As he watched her gliding away, as if she were swimming to Italy, 35


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he knew what it meant to long for what he could not have. He sat down on a mossy rock, not caring to hide. If the young women bothered to notice him, they would see a goggleeyed rustic in a leather jerkin and nothing more. They would return to their fine villas under the shade of their parasols without a backward glance. When their lesson was over, they had scrambled up the grassy bank and into the bathing temples, their wet costumes clinging to their youthful bodies like eager hands. After that, the lake had never looked so empty as it lapped quietly at the shore. When Gotardo looks again for Celestina and Jemma, they have disappeared around a bend in the creek.

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4 Mildred Evans, the housekeeper at Rutherford Park, is waiting in the foyer when Jemma slips in the door just after sundown that evening. As soon as she sees the expression on Mildred’s face, a mixture of pity and impatience, Jemma has a premonition of what is to come. ‘Mr Rutherford wants to see you in his study.’ ‘Did he say why?’ Mildred draws herself up. ‘That’s not my business, Miss Musk.’ Jemma says she will be with him as soon as she has washed her face and changed her blouse. She doesn’t mention that her bloomers and chemise are still damp from the swim. She and Celestina had lain on the grass in their petticoats, their underwear strung on low branches to dry. Celestina talked of how happy she was that Jemma had enjoyed the party, how she hoped that Jemma would feel herself part of the family, especially as she no longer had one of her own. 37


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‘My poor orphan,’ Celestina liked to call her, and Jemma would laugh and insist that one couldn’t be an orphan at the age of twenty-three. Beneath her laughter, though, was the low hum of a sadness that had been with her since she first became conscious of her father’s grief and his silent worship of his dead wife. He had been under great pressure to remarry, for her sake, if not for his own. But he had resisted. If Jemma had a certain disregard for what people thought was ‘right’ and ‘proper’, then she had got it from her father, who had shown her the importance of knowing your own mind and heart. As they were dressing, Celestina mentioned that her cousin Gotardo was looking for an English tutor. His English, while acceptable, was rather old-fashioned because he had taught himself from the King James version of the Bible. Jemma giggled as she pulled on the damp bloomers. ‘You mean he doth speaketh like this?’ ‘I have heard him say “thou” and “thee”.’ ‘It would be a shame to correct him.’ ‘What do you think about lessons? He can pay and it would only be a few hours a week.’ Jemma had turned the idea over in her mind but thought that she really couldn’t spare the time. She had, after all, taken up this position in order to have more time for her art—and besides, she suspected that Celestina was up to something. Now, as Jemma turns towards the staircase at Rutherford Park, Mildred says in a raised voice that Mr Rutherford had insisted that Jemma see him as soon as she came in the door. ‘He has been waiting for some time, Miss Musk,’ Mildred adds, as if in warning. 38


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Jemma is tempted to suggest that perhaps he can wait a little longer. Sundays are supposed to be her day off. She pats her hair and brushes down the front of her dress, then follows Mildred down the hallway to Mr Rutherford’s study. Mildred knocks and ushers Jemma in, then quickly leaves. Mr Alfred Rutherford rises from his seat behind a large leather-topped desk, the expanse of which is empty except for a blotter, an ink pot and a lamp. He is a small man with a pinched expression and a large waxed moustache that looks too heavy for his face. Jemma has noticed that he is fond of top hats, no doubt because they added a good few inches to his height. She suspects he does not realise how the desk dwarfs him; how, instead of conferring authority, it makes him look shrunken and even a little afraid, as if he is cowering behind it. He gestures for her to take a seat and resumes his own. His fingers fidget slightly, looking for something to fasten on. As the manager of the town’s only bank, he is used to holding documents which support and give weight to whatever decision he chooses to make. But there is no document in this case, there are only ‘verbal reports’, commonly known as rumour and gossip. Alfred Rutherford is not about to admit that he bothers with or gives credence to gossip—which is, after all, the purview of women. But if one hears of a serious incident from a reliable informant, if one is dealing in trustworthy intelligence, that is another matter. A very good friend of his heard word through his sister of an incident that had occurred 39


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a few days before; an incident of a disturbing nature that involved Miss Musk. An incident in which she had behaved in a way that reflected badly on herself and therefore on him, as her employer. ‘It was reported to me that you were witness to a strange happening that almost resulted in the death of a young girl. That this girl was hovering between life and death, precariously perched over a mine, only her dress preventing her fall. And that instead of rushing to help as any decent person would do, you sat there and drew the incident, leaving the poor child to her fate!’ Through the arched windows behind Mr Rutherford, Jemma can see the well-established garden and, beyond it, a series of low hills, the highest of which is the eroded cone of Mount Franklin, where the last of the sunset streaks the horizon with great zigzags of crimson and gold as if the extinct volcano has burst into life. The colours are so fiery, so vivid in the deepening gloom, that for a moment she is aware of nothing but the view and the sense of night drawing on and the crickets quietly thrumming in the earth. Then Mr Rutherford clears his throat, reminding her that she is expected to defend herself. ‘There was nothing I could possibly have done for the child. I was horrified when I saw what was happening. But I was too far away.’ Even as Jemma says this, she wonders if it is true. Is she excusing herself? Perhaps she is as morally flawed as everyone seems to think. ‘I did go to offer my help. But it wasn’t wanted.’ She can hardly say that along with horror there had been fascination; nor can she speak of the overwhelming urge to 40


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capture the moment before it was gone. As much as she might question whether she ought to have done it, the compulsion had been greater than any of her qualms. ‘That may be,’ Mr Rutherford says, his hands now clasped on the vast, empty desk in front of him. ‘But you kept on drawing. You drew the whole incident. Hardly a proper thing to do, Miss Musk. Exploiting this family’s misfortune by turning it into a spectacle. How can I entrust my daughter to the care of such a cold, unfeeling woman?’ Jemma looks steadily at her employer. ‘Perhaps if I show you the paintings I made from these sketches, you can judge for yourself whether I have done something wrong.’ With the sun below the horizon, the room has darkened. Alfred Rutherford reaches for the oil lamp and turns up the wick. The flame flares, sending shadows swimming around the room. The young governess’s boldness, her refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing, is not what he had anticipated. He chews on his cheek and tells her that he isn’t interested in seeing her paintings. They are beside the point. Jemma thinks about the final work in the triptych, the family huddled together, the mother staring out of the canvas with a look of savage reproach in her eyes. She had hoped the power of the story itself—life snatched from the brink— might be enough to make him see the value in it, but it would probably just confirm her guilt. And Mr Rutherford clearly has no feeling for art. There isn’t a decent painting in the whole house. ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘I know the family in question. Mr and Mrs Fitzgibbon belong to one of our town’s most eminent families. I have 41


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since spoken with them to confirm the story. They were deeply shocked by your callous disregard for their daughter’s plight, and felt there was something unnatural about it in a young woman. I defended you as best I could, given that we have been acquainted barely a month. I told the Fitzgibbons that I would not have employed you if I had not been convinced of your good character; that I had observed you with my daughter Caroline and had been impressed by your intelligence and good temper.’ Rutherford has left his desk and is now leaning on the mantelpiece. As if put at ease by his own benevolence, he assumes a more avuncular tone. Coming from Melbourne, there are perhaps things that she does not yet understand about the town, he says. Fifteen years ago, it had barely existed, was little more than a ramshackle outpost of canvas tents and fl imsy shacks of ill-repute. Because the settlement was off the main highway, it had been a convenient refuge for bushrangers and horse thieves and murderers lying low. He hardly needed to impress upon her what a rough and violent place it had been, full of desperate, wild-eyed men. It took a certain type of person, a man of vision, to imagine what might emerge from this chaos, to foresee solid bluestone foundations rising out of this mud. With so much money in circulation and nowhere safe for its storage, the need for a bank had been great. Yet to open one, as he had done, had been a dangerous, high-risk venture. People like himself and Mr Fitzgibbon had worked hard and long to civilise the frontier, had daily risked their lives to make the town the solid, respectable place it had become; a place that was safe for their wives and children; a place 42


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where every citizen recognised their duty to abide by the law and uphold the values of civility which had been so hard won. Rutherford steps back behind his desk and leans upon it. ‘Admit that it was irresponsible to do what you did. Apologise to the girl’s parents. If you do this, we will say nothing more about it. Caroline is very fond of you and I have no wish to disrupt her education.’ A small smile of satisfaction hovers at the edges of his lips. ‘Well, then?’ Jemma digs her fingers into the upholstery of the chair she is sitting on. It is not hard to see his point of view. Not hard to appreciate why the parents of the girl might seek an apology from her. If they were to see the paintings, though, she suspects that no apology would ever be enough. She had rendered too faithfully what she had seen: the father’s swollen nose and bulging eyes; the mother’s hair gone wild, her mouth an open gash. There is no hope of exhibiting the paintings now. At least, not in the district. And in the end, it is true, as Mr Rutherford claims, that the paintings are beside the point. To claim them as justification is akin to saying that any behaviour is acceptable in the name of art, and this is not something she honestly believes. And yet, what has she really done? Nothing but continue to draw because there was nothing else she could do. And she was too far away, she mustn’t let him make her doubt herself. It was not her fault that the wind had ruined the picnic and almost swept away the child. She is not responsible for the capricious violence of nature. She has been made a scapegoat. That is the truth of it. Her hair is prickling at its roots. She tells herself to stay 43


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calm. An apology is a small price to pay if it allows her to keep her job—and keep Paris within reach. She is about to speak when Mr Rutherford’s impatience gets the better of him. ‘You must remember, Miss Musk, that a bank manager is a man of influence. And that if a bank manager in a town such as this finds it necessary to dismiss one of his employees for poor conduct, that employee will not be welcomed into other homes. A young woman in your position must look to her reputation. You have no family, no other means of support. Without the goodwill of people such as the Fitzgibbons and myself, one hesitates to think what the future might hold for you.’ Jemma is on her feet before she knows what she is doing. She had been about to apologise. But now he has gone too far. Why should she disavow who she is? Let people say what they like! She is not going to live in fear of their censure. She has always known there is a price to be paid for the detachment required of art; that every painting is a potential transgression of the laws by which most people live. That if you are too serious about what you do, if you treat it as a vocation and not just one of many accomplishments a young woman should acquire, you will eventually be called to account. Her only crime has been to snatch from oblivion one of those unforeseen moments that nothing can prepare you for, and hold it up for examination. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rutherford—’ Her voice trembles. He smiles in anticipation. ‘—but I can’t do what you ask.’ 44


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Alfred Rutherford’s face freezes. The whites of his eyes gleam in the lamplight as surprise turns to cold fury. He touches the ends of his moustache as Jemma imagines he would do when foreclosing someone’s account. ‘I expect you to have your bags packed by the morning.’

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5 In a rented room at the back of a small red-brick terrace in South Melbourne, Marcus O’Brien reaches his hand into a birdcage and extends his index finger for a canary to hop from its perch. When he feels the small claws close around his finger, he withdraws his hand and places the bird in another cage. After he has cleaned the first cage, and replaced the seed and water, he returns the bird. He waits for it to start twittering. This usually modulates into something more melodic, the opening bars from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, or the lullaby Marcus taught it, that he remembered from childhood. He hadn’t tried to teach it words, as some of the other canary fanciers did. All he wanted was for the bird to sing. The bird jumps from perch to perch and pecks at its food. Marcus has done everything he can think of, and nothing has worked. No one told him that a male might go silent when robbed of its mate. No one who knows anything about canaries has heard of such a thing. Marcus O’Brien blames the 46


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heat. It was the heat that killed the female a few days back and maybe it’s the heat that has drained the male of its song. Until the female’s death—he doesn’t like to give them names—the male had been a prize singer, especially as the mating season approached. The only time you could shut him up was when you placed the hood over the cage of an evening. Marcus has purchased a small perfume atomiser and sprays the bird regularly with water to keep it cool. He is afraid that if this heatwave continues, he will lose the male as well. His room is a hothouse, with only one high window that never catches the breeze. He would take the cage with him down to the beach, would even risk running into one of the other officers from the station, if it were worth it. But they’re sensitive creatures, these birds. A sudden loud noise, a group of louts brawling or a screeching child, and it could drop dead just like that. If anyone had told him a few years back that he would become a canary fancier, he would have laughed. He has learned to accept that the world is divided into those who keep birds and those who don’t, and that it’s not until you’ve got a bird of your own that you understand. All along the Esplanade, people are moving listlessly beneath the gas lamps. They turn their faces to the glittering black bay, hoping for a breath of wind. As he walks across the beach, Marcus O’Brien can see the dark humps of embracing couples lying on the sand like creatures washed up by the tide, can hear their whispered sweet nothings and moans. If he’d been wearing his uniform, he could have scattered them with a single glance, the way he did his first day on the beat when he came across two lovers in a laneway. It had stunned him, that there could be such power in a look. 47


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Tonight, though, he is happy to be off-duty and go unnoticed. He raises a bottle of beer to his lips and steps onto the jetty. At the far end, two fishermen sit with their legs hanging over the edge, lanterns at their sides. Beyond them lies the velvety darkness of Port Phillip Bay. He nods to the fishermen and leans on a bollard, staring out into the night. Whenever he comes here, he is conscious of searching for something. Not exactly an object; more a state of mind. Whatever state it is that makes a canary sing, that makes it trill and chirrup, whatever irrepressible impulse makes the notes overflow from its tiny chest. He would like to know that kind of joy. Whenever he thinks of his life, he thinks of his small dark room. And the one point of light in it is his golden canary singing in its cage. He can’t stand his room on nights like this, especially now that the male has turned mute. The landlady shuffl ing about upstairs, constantly clearing her throat. He would rather listen to the water splash on the pylons and watch the faint lights of Williamstown fl ickering across the bay and turn his back on the city with all its lowlife and pretend it’s not there. The hard part is putting his mind off-duty. When he first started out in the police force, there was always Erasmus Musk to talk to after a difficult day. His old headmaster, an avid reader of mysteries and the Police Gazette, loved all the details of Marcus’s work, the inside story on the investigations dominating the papers, all the goings-on in the underworld. The demimonde, Erasmus Musk liked to call it, in that deep, fruity voice of his. The first time he used the word, Marcus hadn’t known what it meant. But it pleased him to possess intelligence that was valued by a man he so admired. 48


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He thinks of those evenings spent in Erasmus’s parlour over a glass of brandy or scotch. One day they were talking about a hold-up when Erasmus leaned forward and said quietly, ‘You be careful now, Marcus. Don’t go taking unnecessary risks.’ Marcus took a quick swig of his drink to wash down the lump in his throat. This was what having a real father would have been like. One who didn’t bash you as soon as look at you. One who wasn’t consumed by grog and the conviction that everyone had done him wrong. Marcus knows that he too might have gone that way if it hadn’t been for Erasmus Musk. But the best thing about those evenings was knowing that, at any moment, Jemma Musk might walk in through the door. Might bend to kiss her father, and then turn to Marcus and extend her hand in greeting. And for a second or two, he would feel her cool hand in his, her fine-boned fingers and the soft cushion of her palm as he held her eyes. Every time, a galvanic charge would jolt him, as if some force were travelling between them. He was sure she experienced it too. The first time Erasmus had introduced them, he said, ‘Marcus, this is my daughter, Jemma,’ and it had seemed to Marcus O’Brien that the old man was offering her to him. Here is my daughter. Take her. Look after her when I am gone. As miraculous as it was, that he—a boy from the slums of Fitzroy—should be chosen, Marcus had no doubt it was so. Early on, during one of his regular meals there, Marcus remembers Erasmus Musk saying to his daughter with a smile, ‘You might find it hard to imagine, my dear, but young Constable O’Brien was an absolute demon at school.’ 49


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The teachers had wanted to expel him for disrupting their classes but Erasmus saw promise in the boy. He told him that if he put his mind to his schoolwork, he would one day make a fine recruit for the Victoria Police. No one had ever told Marcus O’Brien that he had any future at all, and although it seemed an unlikely proposal, old Erasmus’s instincts proved right. The power of the idea took hold of him and he knuckled down. Jemma had sat scrutinising him across the dinner table, as if she were trying to picture him as a boy in short pants causing chaos in the classroom. ‘I’ll think of you, Constable O’Brien, when I am at the end of my tether with my more troublesome girls. I sometimes wonder what will become of them.’ They all laughed easily, the way Marcus imagined a proper family might, and he had felt sure that he was not mistaken about Jemma’s feelings or her father’s designs. The honesty of the exchange, the playful affection. All of it spoke of a deeper understanding, of something that was meant to be. He used to worry that his origins still showed, especially when it came to the cutlery or the nasal twang of his vowels, but since he’d taken elocution lessons, his confidence had grown along with the polish in his voice. ‘It gives me the greatest pleasure, Miss Musk,’ he replied, ‘to know that I will be in your thoughts.’ Marcus isn’t aware that he’s groaning aloud until one of the fishermen shoots him a look. He had promised himself that tonight he would not think of her, that he would breathe the sea air and drink in the stars and let his mind be soothed. But 50


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he can’t seem to help himself. He knows he is approaching dangerous territory. At these moments, he wishes he’d never met old Erasmus. Because then he’d never have met Jemma and he wouldn’t be tormented by thoughts of her night and day. What started out as an itch he couldn’t stop scratching has become an open, festering wound. All his waking moments— when he is not distracted by his work or his birds—are spent obsessively fingering the wound, replaying over and over their encounters and conversations. What torments him most is his memory of their last meeting, when he lost control and let the demons out. There is a sharp cry from one of the fishermen. Marcus looks up to see the man lunging for his rod, then whipping it out of the water and swinging it over the jetty in one smooth arc. A soft, fluid form lands slap on the wood. In the light of the lantern, something black gushes out of it. The creature doesn’t fl ip about like a fish. Some of its mucousy tentacles move sluggishly, their suckers seeming to gulp at the air. He has caught plenty of fish but Marcus has never seen a squid straight from the water. Its bulbous head lies slumped to one side and at the base he can see a large black eye. There is something about the eye, its heavy-lidded knowingness, that makes Marcus wonder what is passing through that bulbous head. What does it make of being plucked from its watery home into the warm night air, the shock of discovering that your world is not as you thought? That you have been tricked, baited and discarded? As if in answer, the creature begins to change colour. It was pale, almost translucent when it first landed on the jetty but now it is turning bright orange. As he watches, it changes again, goes from orange to brown to 51


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deep purple. Very slowly, the colour fades, as does its life. Marcus stares at its unseeing eye. The fisherman bends down and casually yanks a savagelooking hook from its orifice and drops the dead squid into a bucket, before preparing the line once again. Marcus drinks the last of his beer. He stands up to go, his fist clenched tightly around the neck of the bottle. The bright orange squid flashes in his mind, quickly followed by the image of a dead female canary lying on the bottom of its cage. He had been feeding it paprika to make its feathers turn orange. It wasn’t supposed to do any harm. Before he knows what he’s doing, he has thrown the bottle through the air. There is an explosion of shattering glass. Marcus wills himself to take a deep breath. This does not need to happen, he thinks. He is not some spineless creature who gives up without a fight. He must remember who he is. That he is Constable Marcus O’Brien. That he has the power and authority to make things right—if he is patient and careful and does not lose hope. Erasmus Musk believed in him. He must not forget that.

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6 As is the way of dreams, there is no clear beginning and no satisfying end. Jemma is out in the bush in the middle of a storm. She has taken refuge under a large old blue gum when lightning strikes a nearby tree. There is an explosion as the sky splits open and when the smoke clears, a charred skeleton is all that remains. She looks at the canopy above her, knowing the danger she is in. Although it goes against all instincts, she forces herself out into the open, out into the pelting rain. Jemma wakes with a start, surprised to find herself dry. Sensing that something has changed, she goes to the bedroom window and pulls back the curtain. In the washedout morning light, she gasps at the broken branches strewn across the lawn like limbs on a battlefield. The garden beds lie flattened. Every bush and small tree is bent over or snapped. Weighing on it all, like rocks hurled from the heavens, are glittering white globes of hail. So, she thinks, the storm in her dream was real. 53


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She dresses quickly, shivering and wanting to be gone. Although it is still early, she can hear voices and feet hurrying up and down the hallway, and sudden cries of exasperation and Mrs Rutherford’s sharp tones echoing up the stairwell. In the kitchen she finds Mildred and one of the maids on their hands and knees mopping up water that had come down the chimney and through a broken window during the night’s deluge. Jemma said her goodbyes and went in search of Caroline, to whom she felt she at least owed an explanation for her departure. Upstairs she discovered a trail of buckets catching drips from leaks smashed in the roof by the hail. Caroline was not in her room or in the parlour and, as Jemma had no wish to encounter either Mr or Mrs Rutherford, she wrote the girl a note and left it on her dresser. She asked Mildred to store her luggage and art equipment until she could have it picked up, then, clutching only the three incriminating paintings, she left the house. Beyond the high hedge, she found herself in a changed landscape. The house was halfway up Wombat Hill and afforded a good view of the main street and much of the town. When Jemma had first arrived in the town, the layout had brought to mind a medieval configuration of the circles of heaven and hell. At the top of the hill were lush botanical gardens full of European and exotic plants. Just beneath this paradise were the mansions and stately homes of the town’s most affluent families. Around the level of purgatory was the main street, dominated by commerce and public institutions. As one sank lower, the houses were made of wood and were small and poky. The circles of hell began with the mullock 54


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heaps and abandoned shafts close to the creek, and then descended into the swampiest lower reaches of the town, where the Celestials had their market gardens and shanties which appeared, as far as Jemma could see, to be completely submerged. Now the storm has blurred the boundaries of this neatly ordered world; visited chaos upon it all. She makes her way carefully along the muddy road which is strewn with branches and the occasional sheet of corrugated iron which has been ripped from roofs. Everywhere windows are shattered, once well-established gardens swept away, leaves stripped from branches and small trees uprooted. Veranda posts have been felled, leaving whole structures to lean precariously. It isn’t until Jemma sets eyes on a series of telegraph poles near the post office that have sunk all the way up to their wires that she begins to think about what is going on beneath her feet. She has heard Celestina speak of a tunnel that runs directly under the main street and how the whole town is built on a honeycomb of mines. The solid bluestone foundations of the town of which Mr Rutherford had spoken are only as solid as the earth below, which, it now seems, is being undermined from every direction by those in pursuit of gold. The ground feels dangerously spongy as Jemma half walks, half slithers across the slick clay surface of the oncemacadamised road that is now scored with rivulets. For a brief moment, the sun breaks through a patch of cloud and casts everything in a lurid, post-storm glow. Manotti & Curle’s Aerated Waters is one of the luckier premises on the main street. Its veranda posts are still standing and none of its windows are smashed. At the foot of the steps 55


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that lead to the veranda, however, a large crater has opened up. Celestina’s husband, Carlo Manotti, is bent over the hole, fi lling it with bags of sawdust and crushed rock. He looks up and nods at Jemma, his round face ruddy with effort. She asks about the damage. Carlo glances up and down the main street at the broken windowpanes and twisted veranda posts. As laconic as his wife is voluble, he laughs grimly. ‘We got off pretty lightly, I’d say.’ Inside, Celestina is mopping the tiled floor. Jemma picks up her skirts to reveal her muddy boots. ‘Should I take them off?’ ‘Don’t bother. There were rivers of mud here earlier. And we’ve been lucky.’ From behind the counter, Celestina takes the soda fountain and sends a jet of the bubbling water into a glass with some sarsaparilla. She and many of the guesthouse owners have been worried for some time about the damage done to the mineral springs by the mines. The storm has only added to their concerns. If nothing is done soon, she says, the only aerated water she’ll be selling will be from these soda machines. From a bucket full of hailstones the size of cricket balls, she plucks a few smaller balls and drops them into the drink. When they first fell from the sky, some of them had been four inches across and weighed a pound. Celestina points to the fist-shaped dents in the veranda roof. People are saying that birds have been struck down in the air, chooks brained in their yards and livestock concussed and badly bruised. Did Jemma notice the ground trembling during the night? It was water flooding through the tunnels and mines. Word is that at least twelve miners have drowned. 56


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And down by the lake, most of the Chinamen’s houses are under water. Jemma takes a sip from her glass and examines the bobbing lumps of hail. ‘I seem to have joined the ranks of the homeless.’ Celestina sighs. She had heard Mrs Salter and Mrs Raddle from up the hill talking over their Devonshire tea the other day and had pieced together what had happened. It was obvious from the tone of the conversation that it was only a matter of time before Rutherford heard of it too. She hadn’t said anything to Jemma because there didn’t seem any point making a fuss about something that couldn’t be changed. From the early days of their friendship she sensed that Jemma was someone for whom life would never run smoothly. She is too uncompromising and it rubs people up the wrong way. Celestina wishes Jemma was a little less proud. ‘He dismissed you?’ ‘He said I could stay if I apologised.’ Jemma looks pleadingly at her friend. ‘But I couldn’t.’ ‘You couldn’t?’ ‘I was about to apologise. But then he theatened me. He told me I would have no future in the town if I didn’t do what he said. Who is he to tell me how to live? I’m sorry for having offended the parents of the child but I’m not sorry that I made the drawings.’ She props the paintings up against the counter. Celestina is silent as she studies the triptych. She stands hugging her chest, her eyes fl icking from one panel to another and back again. Finally, says, ‘I can see why you’re not sorry. But I can also see why the family were angry.’ 57


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‘That’s most objective of you.’ ‘Oh, Jemma. You do want me to be honest with you, surely? You know I love your work.’ ‘Well, have them. You can hang them here.’ Celestina gives a pained sigh. Before she can reply, Jemma says, ‘I know you can’t. It would kill your business.’ ‘Don’t be bitter’, Celestina begs. ‘It would make things worse for you. But you must stay with us for as long as you want.’ She glances back at the paintings, still troubled. ‘Their strangeness is not just the subject. Where are the contours? Everything seems ... shattered.’ Jemma remembers the eerie light that day, when the wind whipped up the dust, making the landscape look as if it were a mass of shifting particles. ‘You should have seen the light. All I’ve done is paint what I saw.’ ‘Other people don’t see things the way you do.’ Jemma’s eyes flash. ‘I can’t help that!’ More quietly she adds, ‘But who will buy them?’ Celestina is wondering the same thing. She tries to be cheerful. ‘Don’t worry about that. Think of Paris!’ Jemma stares out the window at the ravaged main street. She thinks of all she has read about the ‘Salon of the Rejected’ in Paris. How the public had laughed at these officially repudiated works even though some of the most promising young artists in France were hung there. She would be proud to be in their company. At least there, the rejected were given a chance. She had even toyed with calling her triptych Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe after the work by an exciting new 58


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painter called Edouard Manet that had caused such a stir. She had even imagined meeting this Mr Manet and winning his praise! The foolish things one entertains in daydreams ... Paris feels so remote at this moment she can hardly believe that she’d ever thought it possible.

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7 ‘Talk to me,’ she says to him. Gotardo doesn’t know what to do with his hands; they feel so big and oafish. Peasant hands. He hides them on his lap under the table. She wants to hear him speak English but it is not easy to talk about nothing in particular on demand, especially when he is nervous. He is glad that Pliny and Marina and the children are not around to laugh at him. Slowly she coaxes words out of him—about his dead-end valley and his parents and his long journey with the cows to the colonies. He does not mention Felice. He starts to relax as he realises that she is genuinely interested in his experience; that for her, his story is the kind of adventure you would read about in a book. He tells her how surprised he was at the dustiness of this country. How, on the road from Melbourne, he and his cows seemed to move in a perpetual, buzzing cloud of dust and fl ies. And how footsore he was when he fi nally arrived here at Wombat Hill! 60


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For some reason Miss Musk looks amused. ‘There is something wrong with my English?’ he asks. ‘Nothing wrong. But certain words are—’ She searches for the right way of putting it. Then, remembering that he knows some Greek, she says, ‘Archaikos.’ ‘Archaikos!’ He laughs. His English is archaic. Antique. No wonder people look at him the way they do. He should have realised. She reassures him that there is no problem with his command of grammar and that his vocabulary is quite impressive. But he will need to work on his pronunciation and colloquial speech. For the next hour Gotardo sits in the Serafinis’ parlour trying to get his mouth around a long list of words and phrases that sound nothing like the way they are spelled. He had thought, before Miss Musk arrived, that he would find it hard to concentrate in her presence, that he would be contantly distracted by the memory of her swimming in the stream. But he has been so absorbed in proving himself, his eyes glued to the page in front of him, that he has hardly given her a second thought. Having worked his way through a difficult passage of text, he looks up at her now for approval, but she is leaning back in her chair, eyes closed in what he assumes is impatience or even disdain. Even the way her pretty nose turns up at the tip suggests that she is bored. Suddenly he is fed up with this bitten-off language. Truncated. Always holding back. Like the people themselves. He tries to repeat what she says, cutting the sentences into neat little parcels, being careful not to pronounce those silent es that sit 61


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waiting to trip him at the end of so many words. But he still can’t get it right. It doesn’t occur to him that she might be savouring the sounds he makes, the way he breathes life and desire into worn-out phrases and figures of speech. When she opens her eyes, Jemma sees something that makes her laugh out loud. Gotardo thinks she is laughing at him until he realises that she is looking over his shoulder. At the parlour window is the face of a cow, its damp nose pressed up against the pane, the bubbles in the glass rising from its mouth as if it is under water. Gotardo jumps up, arms waving as he yells in rapid dialect to the eavesdropping beast. The cow obediently turns around and trots back to the rest of the herd which is grazing in the paddock next to the house. ‘That Isabella!’ He settles back down at the table. ‘She always wants to know what I’m doing.’ ‘She seems to understand what you said to her.’ ‘They understand more than you would think.’ Whenever he tries his English out on her, though, she just looks at him dumbly and refuses to budge. He can’t help feeling it as a rebuke to his command of this new language, even though there is no reason why she should respond. He shoots Miss Musk a quick look. ‘Perhaps you’ll have to teach Isabella too.’ Jemma pretends to be indignant. Then she remembers something she thinks will amuse him. She tells him there is a poem she would like to read him. Gotardo tenses, fearing that he will not understand it. Give him poetry in his own language and he is perfectly comfortable. The best thing about learning Latin was reading Ovid—until 62


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the priest found out and gave him a beating for opening such an ungodly book. And he has always loved the Psalms. To his relief, the poem is not difficult. It is by a man named Wordsworth, which strikes him as a good name for a poet to have. The poet is wandering lonely through the countryside when he comes across a field of golden daffodils. Ten thousand of them dancing in the wind and stretching all the way to the sea. Afterwards, when the poet is back at home on his couch, perhaps with his eyes closed, the image of them flashes upon his ‘inward eye’ and his heart dances once again. When Jemma finishes reading, she tells him a story about how the poem was written. The fi rst line was going to be, ‘I wandered lonely as a cow.’ But Wordsworth’s friend, another poet, said cows were herd animals and didn’t wander off on their own. So he changed the cow to a cloud. ‘Of course, the story might not be true.’ Jemma doesn’t care if it’s not. It is still a good story. Gotardo shakes his head with mock disapproval. ‘He was wrong about cows, the other poet.’ ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Jemma smiles. ‘I did wonder how much Mr Coleridge really knew about cows.’ He would like to tell her about his love of Ovid and how he used to read when on the road with his herd, heading down the mountain to Locarno or back again. He would like her to know that he is not a country bumpkin—that he appreciates great literature, and that he is familiar with the ways of the human heart; the darkness as well as the light. Something about her inspires him to be bold with her. But he is afraid that these tales of gods defi ling mortals, of daughters lusting after their fathers, of mothers ripping their sons apart, 63


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of men turned into women, and of fathers devouring their children are not fit for polite conversation. Only when she is about to leave does he pluck up the courage. He apologises in advance, then makes his confession. To his relief, she laughs. She says that no one is offended by the classics! Of course, if one wrote about such things happening today it would be a different story. Jemma marvels at the thought of it, a Swiss dairy farmer walking a mountain path with his head buried in a book. The walk from the Serafinis’ farm to the township is a good mile uphill but the day is mild and Jemma is happy to stretch her legs. She has been conscious, lately, when walking through the town, of glances and sidelong looks in her direction, of women stopping their conversations to stare at her as she passes. At first, she told herself she was imagining it, that no one knew her so why would they be talking about her? Now she can’t tell how much of it is in her mind and how much is actually happening. She avoids the main street whenever possible and takes the backstreets—a habit which, if observed and noted, will no doubt reinforce general opinion that there is something dubious about her. One could be an outsider in the city and still feel quite at home, but here in the country it is different. So new is the town and so conscious are its inhabitants of its lowly origins, that respectability is all. After her father’s death, Jemma had welcomed the chance to leave Melbourne, even if it were a temporary measure until she saved enough money to make the journey to Europe. The house had been so painfully empty and silent that she had no desire to remain there. The garden, which 64


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had flourished under his care, was going to ruin. When the bougainvillea died she knew she couldn’t stay any longer. The vine had been one of his special projects. He had taken the bell jar that covered his stuffed pheasant and put it over the struggling plant to create a miniature hothouse. The vine thrived and within a year its delicate orange and pink flowers were cascading down the side fence. As Jemma watched the plant slowly wither in the months after Erasmus died, she felt helpless to stop it. Without his love to nurture her, how was she to care for anything else? She does not know what she will do now. She cannot face going back to Melbourne. Yet her prospects in Wombat Hill are decidedly grim. None of the three private schools in the town to which she has applied for teaching positions have replied, even though she knows that at least two of them are looking for instructors. If she did not have her art she does not know how she would bear it. Then it occurs to her that if she did not have her art she would not be in the position she is. But neither would she be the person she is. So there is no escaping it. She thinks of Mr Voletta, how grounded he seems even though he has just arrived in this country. His excited talk of his plans—the dairy and the house he will build, the cheeses he will make—and the opportunities this country offers. She can’t help envying his certainty, his sunny outlook, his belief that everything will turn out for the best. She has never taught an adult before. Teaching young women could be tiresome or delightful—depending on one’s charge—but it was generally a serious affair. It is pleasant to be teaching someone with whom she can share a joke without fearing 65


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that it might be unfitting. And she cannot deny that there is a certain frisson to the arrangement, talking as one adult to another, and discovering that language is really no barrier. This thought pulls her up. No barrier to what, though? Instead of pursuing the thought, she thinks about his request. Her first commission. He wants her to paint him a picture—a pastoral scene of his herd to hang in his new house when it is built. When she asked him if Celestina had been talking to him, he blushed and said that Celestina had told him of her situation but that the painting was his own idea. Jemma is still thinking about Gotardo when she hears her name being called in a voice that she instantly recognises. She fl inches as she looks up to see a policeman on a sleek ebony stallion smiling at her from the saddle. He does not dismount but sits looking down at her, saying, ‘Well fancy this!’ Jemma cannot speak. Her stomach is in a cold, hard knot. What is he doing here? The last time she saw Marcus O’Brien was six months ago in the Fitzroy Gardens, not far from the cottage where she and her father had lived in East Melbourne. It had been a crisp, spring morning and they had strolled around the perimeter of the gardens and then stopped in the shade of an elm where he had taken her hand and asked her to be his wife. When her father had been alive it had been easy for Jemma to believe that Constable O’Brien’s regular visits to their house were purely to pay his respects to his old school headmaster, of whom he seemed genuinely fond. The two men would sit in the parlour, by the fi re if it were cold, and talk about the latest intelligence on notorious bushrangers like Ben 66


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Hall and Johnny Gilbert. One afternoon in May 1865, the constable had arrived at their house with a bottle of Scotch whisky to celebrate the death of Hall, the country’s fi rst official outlaw, who had been gunned down by the police in Forbes the day before. O’Brien stayed for dinner that night and talked of nothing but Hall and his exploits, a number of which had left the police force looking like fools. (Particularly galling was the time three policemen were captured by Hall’s gang then stripped of their uniforms and left tied to trees.) It struck Jemma that these acts of humiliation seemed to enrage the young constable more than any of Hall’s robberies. Jemma could understand why her father was proud of what Marcus had made of himself. How he had defied the doomsayers, all those who had written him off as hopeless and destined for the wrong side of the law. Her father was a firm believer in the power of education to free all men from the bonds of class, and Marcus was his proudest achievement. He could be lively company, although it sometimes seemed to Jemma that he was trying too hard. She would later recall his sensitivity to rebuffs and how, as he grew lean and lanky, he developed a certain hollowness in his cheeks, emphasised by sideburns that followed his jawline and formed a neat little beard at his chin. But most of the time, this hollowness was counteracted by a ready smile. If Jemma were painting when he dropped by, he would knock at the studio door and ask if she minded being disturbed. He never tried to flatter her with lavish praise of her work. Instead, he would lean on the doorframe and tease her in a brotherly way about the expressions she 67


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pulled when she was concentrating on her work, and then offer a thoughtful remark that suggested appreciation without saying as much. At some stage, Marcus began asking her to walk with him around the gardens or to accompany him to the theatre. She ought to have realised then what his intentions were. But she had never thought of him as anything other than one of her father’s protégés and a family friend. She had not meant to be condescending. She was young and absorbed by her artwork and by her art tutor, Monsieur Foussier, who had shocked and then enthralled her with his uninhibited analysis of the female form. He loved to pour scorn on the hypocrisy that allowed an artist to paint a female nude and yet forbade ‘respectable’ women to expose the slightest skerrick of flesh. One day, in a mood of reckless defiance, emboldened by Monsieur Foussier’s talk of how different things were on the Continent, Jemma offered to model for him—if he would do the same for her. ‘Of course,’ she added, hoping to sound more worldly than she actually felt, ‘life modelling does not mean a commitment for life.’ His expression did not change, except for the smallest of smiles. ‘Touché, Mademoiselle. I am glad we understand each other.’ Monsieur Foussier had the palest skin Jemma had ever seen in a man, and when the room was dim he seemed to glow like alabaster; like Michaelangelo’s David come to life. It gave her the most exquisite thrill and feeling of power to run her hands down his smooth torso and thighs and to watch him rise. And then to draw him that way. She did not love him, 68


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but she loved the way he stirred deep urges that she had not known she possessed. The knowledge that their time together was limited only added to its pleasure, as did the grave danger of being found out. And when Marcus arrived at the house unexpectedly one day, they almost were. They threw on their clothes at the sound of footsteps approaching up the front path, but Jemma could not hide the flush of her cheeks and the elated glow in her eyes. ‘Marcus! You’ve caught me in the middle of a class.’ She ushered him into the parlour, asked him to excuse her, and quickly saw Monsieur Foussier to the door. When she returned to the parlour, she found Marcus staring into the fire, both hands gripping the mantelpiece as if he wanted to rip it down. He spun around when she entered the room and demanded to know what she was up to. Jemma stiffened. He had no right to speak to her this way, no matter what he suspected. Raising her chin, she said, ‘You are not my brother, Marcus. I bid you remember I am not answerable to you.’ ‘Your brother?’ he hissed. His eyes flared for a moment, then the anger was gone. His shoulders slumped. ‘I’m a fool, Jemma. Can you forgive me?’ Marcus looked so appalled with himself that Jemma was stricken with guilt. He was concerned for what her father would think, and what it would mean for her if word got out. She ought to be grateful to him for bringing her to her senses. As soon as her father arrived home, she told him she no longer needed art lessons. She was beyond that now. 69


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The next time Marcus visited, he brought her flowers. Jemma took the gift as contrition for his temper and pushed away all thought of the incident. As soon as she had the money, she would be gone. In Paris, she wouldn’t have to live in fear of her reputation. In Paris, she could be anyone she chose. After her father’s death, he organised a police cortege for the funeral procession from the church to the cemetery in Carlton and then boldly took her arm as they approached the graveside, as if to claim her. He knew of her intention to study in Paris but seemed to assume that her plans had changed. His presumptuousness stunned her until she stopped to reflect on how warmly Erasmus had welcomed him into their home and what Marcus must have understood this to mean. If, on that spring morning when she refused his offer of marriage, he had denounced her for misleading him, it might have been understandable. It was true that she had been blind to his feelings. But instead of raising his voice, he lowered it; injected it with such ice-cold intensity that she felt as if he were holding a blade at her throat. So, she really was a whore, he said. She dallied with men, played with their feelings and bestowed her affections when the mood took her, then tossed them aside when she’d had her fi ll. He knew about her lover. If she wanted to be one of these modern women who scorned society’s values, then she could hardly expect to be treated as a lady! Didn’t she know, he breathed, that her father had promised her to him? Jemma lurched backwards, clutching her closed parasol in self-defence. The violence of his transformation from smiling suitor to bitter adversary was so chilling she could hardly believe it was happening. There had been flashes of anger 70


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before, but nothing that had prepared her for this. She had thought she knew him. But clearly she did not. And then, just as abruptly, the old Marcus was back, horrified by what he had done. He sank to the grass, clutching at her skirt and begging for her forgiveness. Jemma yanked the skirt from his grasp. She could hear him calling out to her as she fled across the park. She feels that chill again as she looks up at him on his horse. And now that he has stopped smiling, she is struck again by the dark hollows of his cheeks. To her relief he lifts the reins in readiness to move on. ‘Did you know I’ve been transferred? I expect we’ll be seeing more of each other.’ Then he presses the horse’s flanks with his heels and, with a fl ick of the reins, continues on his way down the main street in the direction of the mineral springs. Jemma is glad that Celestina’s shop is close by. She goes straight to her bedroom upstairs and closes the door. But nothing can shut out the memory of Marcus O’Brien looking down at her from his horse, stalking her with his eyes.

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8 The one thing Jemma looks forward to now is her weekly meeting with Mr Voletta. It pleases and calms her to think of him: his open, smiling face; his solidity and quiet strength. She is starting to feel confident that he is someone whom she can trust, someone who will not make demands on her and who will accept her as she is. With the passing of the weeks, the formality of lessons has given way to the intimacy of conversation and the pleasures of exploration. More often than not, they talk about Europe; about the mountains where he grew up, about Locarno and the other countries he has seen. He tells her about the artwork he saw on his journey to Naples, the frescoes in small village churches along the way. Once he arrived at the port city and the cows were loaded onto the ship, he had time to wander the Capella del Pio Monte della Misericorda where he found paintings by Caravaggio and Luca Giordano. He insists that he knows little about art but Jemma can tell from what he 72


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has told her that he deliberately sought out places where the works of the masters were displayed. If she cannot yet afford to go there, at least she can conjure up the old world through his eyes, and talk to him of her plans. One afternoon they are at Celestina’s tearoom when Gotardo notices that Jemma is not her usual self, that she seems tired and withdrawn. When he remarks upon it, she agrees that her spirits are low. Gotardo hesitates. ‘May I ask what is troubling you?’ She cannot bring herself to speak of Marcus O’Brien. Since he arrived in the town she has been finding it hard to sleep; whenever she goes out, she is on edge. She had thought that episode of her life was behind her. But she is beginning to understand how frighteningly easy it is to misread others, to assume that people see the world, and feel, as you do. And how wrong you can be. She thinks of Mr Ruskin, how he understood the difficulty of seeing clearly or judging justly ‘the rents and veins of the human heart’; how little one actually grasped of the world and people around one. Absorbing only impressions of the moment, of nature and of human nature, and how these impressions were often not insights but only reflections of one’s own longings and fears. She is silent for so long, Gotardo says, ‘Is it about Paris?’ Jemma laughs ruefully. ‘A foolish dream, Mr Voletta. I am starting to think that this tearoom is as close as I will ever get to the inside of a Parisian cafe.’ Gotardo leans forward, his elbows rocking the table. ‘There are other ways to be an artist, Miss Musk. You do not have to go to Paris! Think of the artists who have left 73


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Europe to come here, and the freedom they have found. Where I am from, we are not only trapped by poverty, we are trapped by the ways of the past. And besides, what is not possible now may be possible later. You are still young!’ Jemma stares at him, full of wonder. He is right. She had refused to see it. She was too fi xed on the idea of escape and the fantasy of life over there. But she can’t spend her life running away from Marcus O’Brien or imagining that her life will magically transform as soon as she sets foot in France. Mr Voletta has the gift, as her father would have put it, of perspective. Of putting one’s dreams and fears into a larger frame. It wasn’t until her father died that she understood how important his encouragement had been, how much she relied on it to maintain her belief in herself. Where another kind of father would have told her to stop daydreaming, to find herself a husband and settle down, Erasmus Musk had fed her sense of vocation in every way he could. ‘You remind me so much of my father, Mr Voletta. I wish you could have met him.’ She wants to touch his thick, dark curls and his glowing olive cheeks. Is this the way love dawns? With this dizzying rush of excitement for what the future might hold, and the realisation that one need not struggle alone? ‘To raise you, Miss Musk, he must have been a remarkable man.’ He looks across at Paddock With Buttercups, which is hanging on the opposite wall. ‘Where there is talent, it should be allowed to flower. This is something I have always believed.’ ‘And I am grateful for your commission. I should warn you that the last painting I did caused an uproar.’ 74


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Gotardo waves his hand, makes a dismissive boh!, a sound Jemma has heard Celestina use. ‘Small minds, Miss Musk. I come from a tiny village. I know what people can be like. One ignores them and gets on with one’s life.’ ‘Mr Voletta . . .’ ‘Gotardo, please.’ ‘Gotardo,’ she says softly, rolling the word around in her mouth. He is named after a mountain. He would be her rock. ‘I want to thank you.’ The sky is a patchwork of blue and white. Occasionally Gotardo glances up at the clouds and remembers the story of the poem Miss Musk read to him. When he is tramping across the dew-covered paddocks in the early morning search ing for cows that haven’t come in, or when he is walking through the bush in the evenings collecting firewood, he thinks of himself wandering ‘lonely as a cow’. Without fail, it makes him smile. There is a playful quality to her seriousness that inspires him to believe that she is capable of understanding him as Felice never could. She has been working on the painting for three weeks now. To begin with, she sat on a small milking stool at the edge of the bottom paddock, studying his herd through narrowed eyes and sketching very fast. She would lose herself so completely in the work that she would not hear him approach and would look up, startled, when she realised he was there. Sometimes, when he is out amongst the herd for one reason or another, he feels himself becoming an actor striking poses, no longer able to be himself. Even when he is in the paddock at the top 75


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of the hill, working on the foundations of the house with Pliny and his brothers, he can feel her scrutiny. She told him to forget she was there but this is an impossible request. As he works on the house he cannot help imagining her in it, dreaming that it might also be hers. He has modelled the plans for the house on Pliny’s—with some extra additions— and has shown her his rough drawings of what he has in mind. It will have two rooms on the ground floor and two upstairs. In the kitchen and living area there will be a large fireplace that can bake a dozen loaves at a time and in the kitchen will be a sink carved from a block of polished sandstone. Beneath the kitchen will be a large cellar for wine and cheese and anything else that needs cool storage. Upstairs will be two bedrooms. Instead of the skillion which functions as Pliny’s dairy and cheese house, he will have a separate dairy built with the stables attached. And the stables will have a flagstone floor so that he can milk the cows without wallowing in mud. When the sketches are finished, Jemma begins on the canvas. It is almost dusk when Gotardo comes down to the bottom paddock from the hill where he has been working to ask her if she will join them all at the Serafinis’ for dinner. Instead of quickly covering the canvas with a cloth, as she has previously done, she waves him over with a small smile. ‘I have taken some liberties,’ she cautions. ‘If you’re not happy, it can be changed.’ She gestures that he is free to look. Gotardo’s first impression is of the quality of light, something he had noticed as soon as he arrived here. The 76


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glaring whiteness of it, harsh and pitiless when compared with the gauzier northern light, yet at the same time given to mirage-like effects that turn dusty roads into distant waves. Half of the painting is a vast, stark blue sky with a teasing puff of cloud and a wavering heat haze on the far horizon. Beneath this sky are purplish hills in the distance, and in the foreground the paddock where his cattle are grazing, their familiar box-like figures gathered—some standing, some sitting—in the shade of a big, old blue gum. All is as he had anticipated, except for the middle distance, which features the hill on which he is building. Instead of the stone foundations, she has painted the finished house. He peers closely at it, marvelling at the impression of dry stonework that is the signature of the Swiss-Italian builder— but even more startling is the fact that she has painted what he had in his mind. Or, more precisely, what he had dreamed, for the whole work has the indistinct quality of a dream. There are no sharp outlines. Just as the late-summer air vibrates with the sound of cicadas, so too does the horizon hum with light. The house itself is more exact: the two storeys, the steep slate roof, the wide veranda with a pergola, the dairy and the stables. He is so delighted that he starts to laugh and slap his thighs. He can barely stop himself from taking her in his arms. The impulse to paint the unbuilt house had surprised Jemma almost as much as it does Gotardo. Creating a home is not something she had ever felt the need to do. Her father was her home when he was alive: the smell of his pipe which always clung to his clothes and beard; the sound of him singing snatches of opera that he loved; the sight of him in 77


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the backyard with two or more old magpies feeding from his hand. Every evening, they would sit in the lounge with a glass of sherry and talk about the events of the day. What made his absence tolerable was her dream of sailing away to a new life and a new home in Europe where her talents would be recognised and she would feel she belonged. But she understands now that love can take one in directions one never expected to go in, and that there are other ways of living that dream. Jemma watches Gotardo with growing amusement. He picks up the painting as if he is about to hug it. Then he carefully places it back on the easel and turns to her. Until this moment, she hasn’t let herself think about the consequences of what she has done. At fi rst, she told herself it was an interesting exercise: conjuring up the house from the rough plan he had showed her. As the house took shape on the canvas, she began to imagine it as a place she could see herself living and being happy in. A house of love. A pastoral idyll surrounded by green fields, grapevines and orchards; a place of contentment and joy in which her art could flourish. Along with the dairy and stables at the rear, she has included a third building—although no one else viewing the painting would be able to make out the shadowy outlines with vines and flower beds obscuring it. A studio. Emboldened, Gotardo reaches for her paint-spattered hands. His dark eyes are wider than usual as he looks at her, hopeful yet afraid to speak. Jemma knows what is coming and is ready. Yes, she says to herself, I will and I do. 78


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From the Serafinis’ kitchen, Celestina can see the two of them standing in the paddock below, their silhouettes etched into the dusk. She has been watching the scene with growing excitement but dares not tell Pliny or Marina what she suspects. She tries to read the expression on Jemma’s face but they are too far away. It is only when Gotardo throws his arms around Jemma and buries his face in her hair that Celestina is sure the question has been asked and answered affirmatively. Celestina goes to the door and waits for them on the veranda, her dear cousin and her dearest friend, who are now climbing the path towards her, hand in hand. He warns her that they can be gruff. (She will later come to think of them as the Brothers Grim.) The brothers have been living rough for so long that they don’t realise the impression they make. Since they discovered he is courting Jemma, he can barely get a word out of them. For this reason it is important that he introduce his betrothed to them as quickly as possible, before they hear of the engagement from someone else and happen to let slip word of Felice. If they want, they could easily hurt him. His palms are sticky as he and Jemma wait for them at Pliny’s front gate. The brothers, along with five others, have spent the afternoon in pursuit of a white kangaroo which had been spotted the day before near Chokem Gully. Gotardo and Jemma can see the men tramping up the hill: a bunch of wild-eyed, ragged-looking hunters without even a dead possum between them. He points to the two raw-faced men 79


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with unkempt beards at the rear of the party. They are sure to be in foul moods made worse by an afternoon’s drinking. Eager to be done with it, Gotardo waves his brothers over to the side of the road and introduces them to Jemma, explaining what transpired between them just an hour ago. The brothers grunt something to Gotardo in dialect which Jemma can’t understand, and then they offer their congratulations to her with such sardonic smiles that she can’t help wondering what is going on. Like a blackly comic duo from a puppet show or commedia dell’arte, they slip into what seems to be a well-rehearsed routine. This time, they are speaking more slowly and Jemma—having picked up some dialect from Gotardo—is able to follow. Battista is theatrically complaining to Aquilino about the shortage of Ticinese girls in the town and declaring that he won’t settle for less. Jemma watches Gotardo bristle and struggle to bite his tongue, caught between brotherly obligations and his desire to defend her. But there is no reason, she thinks, why she should not speak. As if she is merely making conversation with no idea of what has transpired, she remarks on the large number of Italian men in the district who have English or Irish wives. The two brothers exchange startled glances. ‘I suppose they have no choice,’ Battista finally replies. Then he adds, with a hard look at Gotardo, ‘Some have more choice than others.’ When Aquilino and Battista have gone on their way, Gotardo takes Jemma by the hand. ‘They’ll think you’re trouble.’ 80


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‘I shouldn’t have spoken.’ Why did she do it? It wouldn’t have been hard to keep her mouth shut. And better for them both in the long run. Gotardo shakes his head slowly and grins. All his life he has put up with his brothers teasing him, their nicknames and their jibes. If he is honest, it was worth every moment.

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9 When Marcus O’Brien thinks of his life now, he does not think of a small dark room. He thinks of the sunny, wooden cottage he lives in on the western side of Wombat Hill. In the evenings, when he is off-duty, he sits on the back porch overlooking the tablelands of Elevated Plains and imagines Jemma at his side as they watch the sun go down. He does not doubt that he has made the right move. Within days of his arrival, his canary began singing again. Since then, he has bought a new female and will start breeding in the spring. There are many miners in the district who would pay a good price to have a canary down their mine. He knows from past experience with breeding that you have to be patient. You have to watch and wait for the signs that the male and female are ready. The female tearing up the paper on the bottom of the cage to make a nest. The male bursting into song when his cage is placed next to hers. The birds ‘kissing’ through the bars. If they are brought together too soon, they will fight. 82


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Marcus O’Brien has always been good at biding his time. As a boy he endured daily beatings, watching his mother suffer the same, biding his time until he had the strength to stand up to his father. When he was fifteen, a skinny lad but armed with youthful reflexes that his father had long since drunk away, the moment arrived. Paddy O’Brien didn’t even see it coming when Marcus’s left hook laid him out cold. The only regret Marcus felt as he stared down at his father spread-eagled on the kitchen floor with blood smeared across his cheeks was that he hadn’t done it sooner and saved his mother a lot of grief. He had bided his time at school, too, giving the teachers and other students just a small taste of what he endured at home. Once he’d laid his father out cold, though, no teacher was going to tell him what to do. The thing about old Erasmus Musk was that he didn’t try to threaten him, simply took him aside and said that he had it in him to be someone, if he was prepared to work. Which meant more biding time at school, but Marcus knew by this stage that this was something he was good at and that, in the end, it was a discipline that delivered results. So now he is biding his time once again. He does not know how events will unfold but he has no doubt that his destiny lies with Jemma Musk. The ease with which he was transferred here to Wombat Hill reaffirms his belief that it was meant to happen. Jemma once told him that she admired his tenacity, the determination it had taken him to prove his teachers wrong. Well, he will show her just how much resolve he possesses. He has heard that she is being courted by a dairy farmer, one of the many dagos who inhabit the town. He 83


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can’t believe she will settle for a Swiss peasant, not now that she knows he is here. He will show her that he has reformed himself and she will realise that it was meant to be. Two months after his arrival at Wombat Hill, Marcus O’Brien’s patience is rewarded when the off-duty constable enters the First Colonial Bank just before closing time to find himself in the middle of a robbery that will see him hailed as a local hero and written up in almost every paper in the state. He has just taken his position in the queue and is exchanging pleasantries with the local blacksmith when the man behind him pulls a handkerchief over his nose and waves a gun in the air. Another man, similarly attired, rushes forward and holds a pistol to the head of the teller, announcing that he will fire if anyone makes a move. It is immediately clear to Constable O’Brien from the men’s agitation and the old single-action pistols they are brandishing that they are a couple of amateurs, possibly pulling their first job. They have even forgotten to check if anyone is armed. O’Brien lies on his stomach as ordered but manages to manoeuvre his left hand into his jacket, beneath which he keeps his revolver strapped in a holster. He grips the butt of the gun and waits as the ashenfaced teller stuffs notes into a cloth bag. Sweat beads on the men’s foreheads as they shout at the teller to hurry up. When an unsuspecting, would-be customer rattles the bank’s locked front door, the two men swing around, guns aimed at the noise. Seizing the moment, O’Brien rolls over and, in rapid succession, shoots each man in the back of the head. He later tells the papers how he used to spend his weekends as a boy shooting rabbits and foxes down by the creek near 84


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where he lived in Fitzroy, and how he was known in the neighbourhood for his deadly aim. (He decides against mentioning the fine collection of revolvers he has acquired, including an American Colt and a Whitney, both .36 calibre, and an English Tranter .442, the exact model that was used by the Special Constables who shot Ben Hall.) For weeks afterwards, he cannot walk through the streets of Wombat Hill without people rushing up to praise him for his bravery. Shopkeepers offer him gifts from their stock, publicans serve him free drinks, young women give him inviting smiles. He is promoted to the rank of sergeant and the mayor presents him with a medal for services to the town. He is asked to speak to the monthly meeting of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows and the Ladies’ Guild. He imagines himself returning to his old school, imagines the very teachers who said he would come to no good eagerly approaching him to shake his hand. Above all, he imagines Jemma sitting at her desk, writing him a note in which she asks him to forgive her and pledges her undying love. Weeks go by and he hears nothing from her. Twice a day he passes Manotti & Curle’s Aerated Waters in the hope of running into her. He finds himself becoming agitated, finds that he has lost the art of biding his time. He is beyond that now. He is too well-respected to be left waiting like this. Then, one day around noon, he spots her leaving Brabant’s Emporium. By good fortune, he has just had his uniform cleaned and pressed, and he’s pleased with the way the tunic, secured at the top by one brass button, hangs from his slim frame. He knows he cuts a fine figure and it has put him in 85


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a good mood. How could she fail to be impressed? With his new ranking, he is one of the most powerful and admired men in the town. Jemma is raising her parasol when she sees him approaching up the dusty street. She would like to disappear but there is nothing to be done. He lifts his cap and smiles warmly, tells her how well she looks. His manner is gracious, and although she is still wary, she can’t help hoping that they will be able to put all the unpleasantness behind them. But then his eyes fall on the white braid and lace netting, which she has just bought for her wedding veil, draped over her arm. The dazzling whiteness speaks for itself. Jemma can tell he is afraid to ask. ‘I am getting married, Marcus,’ she says quietly, ‘in three weeks’ time. Will you wish me well?’ Something happens behind his eyes. Jemma has seen it before. A kind of fermentation, a bubbling up of rage which he is powerless to curb. Even his irises seem to change colour. ‘Surely you read the papers?’ he demands. ‘The robbery, of course! I heard all about it. You were very brave. I’m sure my father would have been proud of you.’ His voice is low and hoarse. ‘I want you to be proud. Don’t you know that I have women approaching me in the street?’ Jemma wishes he could enjoy the attentions of these other women. Why does he have to insist on hers? She cannot reply as he wants. She pities him and is afraid of him. She knows her silence is cruel, but doesn’t know how to fi ll it. She can see his jaw muscles working as he struggles to control himself. 86


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‘Your father would not want you to marry this peasant. You won’t be happy, Jemma. I know you better than you think.’ As she walks away he keeps pace at her side, his whole body rigid. He inclines his head towards her, as if to speak in confidence. ‘And you know me, Jemma. I won’t give up.’

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10 The evening before the wedding, the sky is a delicate pink, the clouds like spun sugar—a good omen, according to Gotardo’s people, for the following day. It seems to Jemma that they are always looking for omens, both good and bad. And in searching, never fail to find them. Jemma cannot sleep and has only just drifted off when Celestina is shaking her shoulder, urging her to get up. It is still dark outside. She sits at the dressing-table mirror in the lamplight as Celestina fusses about her, fi xing her hair and face. As Jemma watches the bride appearing before her, she wonders can this really be her? The veil has been attached to a circular crown of tiny pink roses which Celestina is now lowering onto her hair. The sun rises over Babington’s Hill, the bells of St Peter’s ring out. Celestina sighs happily. ‘Just look at you.’ 88


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Jemma studies the finished work. She is surprised by how serene she looks and hopes this is the beginning of a deeper transformation. It is still hard to believe what is happening. Since she and Gotardo announced their engagement, everything has been out of her hands. Celestina, who knows how these things must be done, has taken charge, along with the Serafinis and various other families whose inter-connections Jemma is yet to decipher. At six o’clock, there is a knock on the door of the tearoom. The ritual is an old one and Celestina has warned Jemma to be prepared. ‘What do you want?’ Celestina demands. From the other side of the door Gotardo declares that he has come for his bride. After a playful exchange, Celestina opens the door and Gotardo steps inside, trailed by a noisy crowd of relatives and friends. As soon as he sees Jemma he stops. He still cannot believe his good fortune. She has never looked so lovely. Solemnly, he raises his arm for her and with day breaking over the town they lead the procession along the main street and up the hill to the church. It is only as the sharp morning air begins to penetrate the light fabric of her dress that Jemma shivers and thinks of Marcus O’Brien. She glances down at Gotardo’s arm fi rmly supporting her own. Surely O’Brien will not endanger his job or his newly acquired celebrity by disrupting the ceremony? But it is still possible that he will make his presence felt in one way or another. As they round the corner into Tuck Street and begin the steady climb towards the church, she searches the faces in the crowd. 89


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Jemma can hear the organ now, its mighty chords tumbling over each other in a great waterfall of sound. They enter the large stone church. She looks down the aisle towards the priest waiting for them at the altar and quickly surveys the congregation. Marcus is not there. She tells herself she need not worry anymore. The heavy wooden doors close behind them and Jemma lets herself be swept up in the ceremony. Just as they are approaching the priest, she experiences the strangest sensation, as if her father were standing at her side. She can smell the tobacco on him, can feel the overwhelming presence of his love. The apprehension is so strong that she dares not look at the man holding her arm. Instead, she watches the dust floating in a shaft of light and marvels at the power of the heart to resurrect what is gone. The priest begins to speak, and she glances to her right. Through the gauze of her veil she sees him, Gotardo, turning to her with a beatific smile. Morning sun streams in through the stained-glass windows. The priest murmurs in Latin and raises his hands. His voice rises and falls. Then Gotardo is lifting the veil and kissing her. And suddenly they are husband and wife.

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Part Two 11 From the lookout tower on Wombat Hill, Nathaniel Byrne—a geologist from the Victorian Geological Survey— is examining the surrounding countryside, a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes. He barely registers the buildings of the town at its foot, an infant outcrop of civilisation, a splitsecond in the great span of the earth’s existence. He knows that the oldest cities of Europe, even the pyramids of Egypt, are ephemeral structures that will return to the sands on which they are built. He is contemplating a time so far back that most people shrink from the thought. A time when the landscape around him and beneath his feet moved like a living creature, growling with life and spurting out columns of smoke and clouds of ash and white-hot lava that flowed in molten streams to form the rich basalt plains that are now tilled for potato and corn. It is nothing for his mind to slip back seven hundred million years, to when the dead volcanoes that lie in almost every 91


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direction and give the landscape its distinctive conical humps were spewing up gold from the mantle and laying it down in crustal rocks, later to be exposed by erosion. The gold from these reefs was then washed into river beds. To the miners these facts are as tantalising as a bedtime story about hidden treasure, knowing as they do that these river beds were then twisted and buried by later volcanic eruptions, submerging the gold in deep leads that can only be reached by back-breaking shafts sunk hundreds of feet into the earth. After a decade and a half of panning and fossicking and digging, most of the surface gold is gone. Easy pickings are few. Nathaniel Byrne’s marine blue eyes glide from the steep, fern-fi lled gullies and rich basalt plains to the more ravaged tracts of the landscape where the goldfields lie and where the charcoal burners and fencers and woodcutters have stripped the lands clear of all but the most stunted trees. He tries to imagine how it will look in one hundred years from now, to venture into the future the way he has always been able to slip into the distant past, as if easing into a dark, deep waterhole on a summer’s day. But something makes him falter. That deep pool wavers and evaporates. The future has no contours, no trace elements, it throws back no reflection. It is a hazy brew of possibilities and statistics, of speculation, fear and hope. He is inclined to think it might be a myth, a necessary illusion, an uninhabitable space between the present moment and death. And complicating the whole equation is the unpredictable human factor, a factor that barely impinges on his usual deductions. This volatile element makes him uneasy, makes his mind seize up. Instead of bounding ahead millions of years, 92


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he inches forward decade by decade, increasingly plagued by the feeling that something has gone awry. Before him looms the spectre of wraithlike grey box and yellow gum struggling for a foothold in the bare, hard-baked earth; of mines that remain unfi lled but for the rotting carcasses of dumped stock haloed by buzzing fl ies. As the vision grows darker, he chides himself. What is one hundred years or so in the grand scheme of life? Just a few generations of men and women, lives that count for nothing in the vast span of geological time. But then a thought, which has been silently lurking, rears up in ambush. These are generations whose members might owe their existence to him, to the chance eruption of his unguarded desires. It is not a thought he has any wish to pursue. He is not one of those men who carelessly scatters their seed, wantonly spawning bastards he will never know or for whom he may be called to account. No one is going to tie him down. Even when he allows himself to be enticed upstairs at the Red Lion by Betsy or Emmaline or the dark-eyed one who calls herself Lola Montez, he never takes the chance. Uses a rubber or fires it over their heads. The bemused women marvel at his powers of control. One time, when Betsy asked him what he was afraid of, he immediately swung off the bed and pulled on his moleskins. Without a word, he buckled his belt and tucked in his shirt. Only as he reached for the hat that hung on the wooden stand near the door did he makes his feelings plain. She was never, he told her coldly, to ask him that again. When Nathaniel was a boy he would often come to the top of Wombat Hill (there was no lookout tower then) in the hope 93


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of spying his father, a hawker who spent most of his time on the road. He would spend whole afternoons watching and waiting, alert for a lone traveller kicking up dust in the distance. This waiting gave him time to study the lie of the land, to slowly decipher its history and imagine what lay below. When a familiar-looking figure appeared, he would search for telltale signs—the distinctive hobble of his father’s horse, the canvas-covered wagon stacked with haberdashery, the battered cabbage-tree hat. Those brief periods when his father was in town, Lang Byrne would show Nathaniel how to pan for gold in the creek that ran through their paddock. Sometimes chips of blue or red stone would appear among the gravel along with the flakes of gold. His father reckoned they were worthless and tossed them away, but Nathaniel would fossick through the rejected muck for the colourful gems. He did not care that his father called him a bloody-minded mule. The gems were more beautiful than gold. He began to haunt the diggings and, while most of the men were tight-lipped about their finds, a few of the older diggers would sometimes beckon him over and flourish a small vial or bottle of water and gravel with flecks of gold. It always seemed to the boy that there was more glitter in their eyes than in those jars. He asked the miners to put aside any gems they might come across instead of tossing them onto the mullock heaps. On a good day he could return home with a handful of blue and red chips as mysterious and mouth-watering as a sticky lump of his favourite confectionery, Castlemaine Rock. As he learned more about rocks and what formed them, he began to understand that gems could tell him much more 94


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about the depths of the earth than could be gleaned from gold. The stones contained tiny crystals of other minerals, trace elements which told the story of where they had been and what company they kept. By the time he had finished studying at the Ballarat School of Mines, Nathaniel’s deep vision was so well developed he no longer saw the mere contours of landscape, the surface features perceived by the ordinary eye. When passing the cemetery he would speed up and look the other way, unable to banish the grim images that sprang to mind, the cross-section of dirt and bodies and coffins in various states of decay beneath the headstones and granite angels with fingers probing the sky. Nathaniel Byrne drops the binoculars from his eyes when he catches sight of Magistrate Rufus Gleeson emerging from the Athens Hotel after a liquid breakfast before the morning session. He does not want to think about last week’s case, the trouble it has caused him. He has been warned by his superiors at the Geological Survey that appearing as an expert witness for Celestials is unadvisable and could imperil his job. He is severely tempted to throw it all in and devote his energies to mounting the inland expedition he has been plotting for years. It occurs to him that if he quit, he could still act as a geological expert, although there are certain members of the Survey who would no doubt do their best to thwart him. Why should he be forbidden from appearing on a Chinaman’s behalf? For years his mother has bought her vegetables from the market garden run by Ah Yong. It is his brother, Ah Sen, who was charged with selling spurious gold, perpetrating a crude form of alchemy in which an amalgam 95


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of gold, copper and silver was passed off as high-quality gold. Nathaniel knew, even before the case began, that the magistrate was unlikely to acquit. But having studied the evidence he strongly believed there was room for doubt. As he told the court, pure gold did not exist and the percentage of alloy varied, as did the colour of the gold itself. The reddish tinge of quartz gold indicated the naturally occurring presence of copper, while alluvial grains took their pale greenish hue from a natural admixture of silver. The truth, he told the magistrate, was in the rocks themselves. The magistrate was unimpressed. ‘It is not for you to determine the truth of the matter, Mr Byrne. I am the one who must weigh up these scales.’ And now Ah Sen is serving two years of hard labour on a road gang at Mount Alexander. Nathaniel Byrne is about to climb down when he notices a woman in a wide-brimmed straw hat walking at a brisk pace up the hill in the direction of the gardens. Occasionally, she glances up at the tower, almost as if she senses that she is being watched. Her purposeful and energetic strides make him wonder if she has an assignation, someone she is looking forward to meeting. A lover perhaps. He lets out a small laugh at the way his mind works. He holds it as an article of faith that everyone has a secret life of one kind or another. Most people, he believes, either fail to recognise it or can’t bring themselves to admit it, even if it haunts their dreams. There is, he believes, no great difference between studying what goes on in the earth and what goes on in the mind of man. In both cases, the real story lies hidden in subterranean depths and one must learn to read the signs these depths throw up. 96


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But then, perhaps she is just going for a walk after all. Much as it would please him to confirm his suspicions, he cannot afford to linger. He is already late for a meeting himself, although not one he has any desire to rush to. A meeting with the chief geologist of the Survey is never good news. At the foot of the lookout tower are the Botanic Gardens, the town’s proudest feature, where the winter flowers are in full bloom. Nathaniel doesn’t notice the voluptuous red mouths of the rhododendrons, the garden beds thick with masses of pink azaleas or the camellias shedding their delicate petals at his feet. He is too busy mulling over the prospect of another dressing-down or possibly something more serious. By the time he has reached the bottom of the hill, he has forgotten all about the woman in the wide-brimmed hat.

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12 It is cool and dark inside the tower, especially after the brightness of the midday sun. Jemma’s footsteps ring out as she climbs the spiralling stone staircase. She breathes hard, determined not to stop, not until she reaches the top. When she emerges into the daylight, she blinks and can’t help smiling at the sudden expanse around her, the feeling of elevation and space. The sky, the rim of the earth. It is like coming up for air after swimming under the water and having forgotten what the world beyond the surface is like. It’s a year since she was last up here—not long after she arrived in the town—when she was another person living another life. Turning in a slow circle, she takes in the view. The volcanic hills, the dusty blue forests, the bright fields of corn and the orchards, the town itself directly below and the silver streak of the train tracks weaving in and out of sight. She searches the middle distance, travelling out from the township and along the dirt road that leads down to a 98


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farm on the outskirts: the ten acres of earth where she now spends most of her days. The new country where she is an immigrant learning its ways. It is good to have this distance to take it all in. She has not been out roaming for months now, not really since she was married. Looking down on it all, she can almost see the past eight months unfolding beneath her. Can see herself wandering the paddocks, feeding the calves of a morning, or in the garden bending to dig and plant, and telling herself over and over that this place is hers. She can see herself in the house, walking from room to room and always pausing in the parlour, in front of the painting she made of the house before it was built. Whether through coincidence or design, it looks remarkably like the finished dwelling, the place that both she and Gotardo conjured out of their dreams. Sometimes Gotardo sees her studying the painting and comes to her side and takes her hand. ‘Do you find it hard to believe?’ he asks. Jemma smiles. ‘That we are here, together?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Sometimes I do.’ ‘But you are happy?’ Jemma looks at him. ‘I am happy.’ She knows that he worries she might have regrets about marrying a dairy farmer. He worries about the strain of the milking, the arduousness of rising at dawn. The mud and the muck. In the early months of their marriage, Gotardo insisted that he could do it alone. Milk the herd, load the pails onto the cart and make the deliveries in time for the townsfolk to have fresh milk and cream with their porridge. Then there was the butter to be 99


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churned and the cheese to be pressed. And this was only a fraction of what had to be done each day. He worried, too, that he had not yet finished her studio, which was still a mere skeleton, a wooden frame. Jemma had watched exhaustion creep over him and knew it could not go on. One morning, after he rose as usual at dawn, she lay listening to the dull, distant thump of the quartz-crushing machine at Strike-A-Light reef. Soon she heard the plaintive tattoo of Gotardo’s horn, the muted chimes of the cow bells as the herd came in for the milking, and then the low rumble of his voice as he corralled them into the shed. Throwing back the quilt, she dressed quickly and followed his footsteps across the paddock where mist was still hovering over the frosty grass. She found him in the milking shed, crouched on a stool like an oversized child, his forehead pressed to the cow’s flank as if bent in prayer, his powerful shoulders barely twitching as his hands tugged and squeezed. She watched his expert fingers, and smiled at thought of his touch. He looked up, astounded, as she entered the stalls. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I am a painter, Gotardo, I use my hands. I’m not afraid of work.’ And so he had showed her how it was done. How to hustle a milked cow from its stall and call in the next one by name. How, if her hands were cold, she could warm them on the cow’s belly. How to tug firmly at the teats and draw down the milk. From her eyrie on Wombat Hill, Jemma can see herself earlier that morning, walking across the dew-stained flagstones 100


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between the house and the milking shed just after dawn, an empty pail in each hand. Can hear the early jets of milk, sharp and high-pitched as they hit the sides of the pail. Can feel herself finding a rhythm, the milk frothing, the pitch deepening as the pail fi lls. She is learning, slowly, although the cows will never respond to her touch as they do to Gotardo’s. Sometimes she feels them fl inch from her, as if they sense her ambivalence, her impatience, her desire to be back in bed. Jemma watches herself emerge from the shed and follow the gravel path around to the back door where she enters the kitchen and begins kneading the waiting dough for the morning’s bread. While it is baking, she helps Gotardo load the milk pails onto the cart. They return to the parlour and snatch a quick breakfast before the deliveries are made. Jemma remains in the kitchen after Gotardo has gone, her hands stained bright red as she peels and cooks the latest batch of tomatoes, bottles them and seals the lids. Sometimes she lines up the preserves on the windowsill—the red tomatoes and the green peppers, the bottled lemons and tangerines—just to see them glow in the morning sun. And here is Celestina coming up the front path—there is always someone dropping around—with a basket of fruit and vegetables in the crook of her arm. They sit out on the front porch and dice turnips and carrots for minestrone, and talk about Celestina’s children and how the tearoom is going and the upcoming exhibition in Melbourne of modern European works. Then Celestina asks, in her forthright way, for Jemma’s thoughts on married life. Having lived alone with her father, it hadn’t occured to Jemma until she was married that she had no experience or 101


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idea of what a marriage could or should be. She now finds herself wondering how her parents spoke to each other, what they said, how they touched. She thinks of how Gotardo will come up behind her when she’s standing at the sink and put his arms around her and press his face into her hair. Or how they will sit in the evenings reading in companionable silence. These are the moments that she cherishes the most. But she has not just married a man! She has married his whole community, a people of such industriousness it sometimes exhausts her to contemplate what is expected of her. But she can hardly tell Celestina this. Instead she laughs. ‘All these feasts and saints’ days. I have never eaten so well or drunk so much wine!’ Celestina looks at her quizzically. ‘All is well then?’ ‘Oh Celestina,’ Jemma hears herself add, ‘how could I not be happy with Gotardo? He’s the best, the kindest of men.’ When she steps out of the tower, he is there. As if he has been waiting. ‘Jemma! What a lovely surprise!’ Marcus O’Brien takes her hand and bows over it, all smiles. Jemma stares at the fox-red whorl of his crown. She manages to stop herself from pulling away. Although she has seen him occasionally in the distance when out shopping in town, she hasn’t spoken to him since the day he told her he wouldn’t give up. He gestures for her to join him on a nearby bench beneath a large pine. She glances around the gardens, hoping they are not alone. ‘Don’t be wary of me, Jemma. Please. I am truly sorry for the way I’ve behaved. Can we put it behind us? Can we start 102


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again?’ He hurries on before she can answer. ‘All I want now is to make peace.’ The air smells of pine needles and dust. Her instinct is to suspect him. Yet his face is so naked, his voice so abject, she hopes against hope that he has come to his senses and accepted the way things are. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her days avoiding him. If they can be civil with one another, she will not have to live in fear of him seething. And it is understandable that he wants to get on with his life. ‘I want that too, Marcus,’ she says carefully. He grins broadly, once again the disarming schoolboy determined to prove the world wrong. ‘We are friends, then?’ Jemma lets herself smile. They sit in silence until Marcus says, ‘I often think of your father.’ Jemma stares through the shrubbery to the hills beyond. This, she knows, is the truth. He is the only person left in her life now who had known her father. For this reason, if no other, it is worth the risk of taking him at his word. Marcus reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a silver hip flask. Jemma remembers it well. It used to be her father’s. Erasmus gave it to Marcus when he was accepted into the police force. He studies the inscription for a moment and then unscrews the lid and offers her a drink. When she shakes her head, he raises it in front of him. ‘To Erasmus Musk, one of God’s gentlemen!’ She watches him take a mouthful. He winces with pleasure, then turns to her, suddenly serious, and says, ‘I owe 103


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him everything, Jemma. My father was such an old bastard. Don’t worry, I won’t get maudlin. I just wanted to mark the occasion.’ Jemma is not yet confident enough of Marcus’s motives to feel comfortable discussing her father. It could raise painful memories and misunderstandings. A bird begins singing in a nearby tree, a pretty five-note tune that reminds Jemma of a woman she once knew who had perfect pitch and could identify every note a bird sang. She mentions it to Marcus by way of diversion. To her surprise, his face lights up. He tells her that he keeps canaries and breeds them. And what wonderful singers they are. How you can teach them simple melodies, instrument sounds and even wild bird calls. He explains how Continentals favour the frilled breeds with long, twisted feathers or the oddities like the Belgian Hunchback, but that he prefers the American varieties that are bred for their voice. Jemma watches him as he talks, the way his face softens. She would never have picked him as the bird-fancying type. He has even developed the fanciers’ obsession with every last detail. He talks about the intricacies of breeding, about the excitement of watching eggs hatch. He glances at her sidelong. ‘There are some who think it natural for the male to beat the hen. They are fools. I would never allow it.’ ‘I am glad to hear it!’ Jemma laughs uneasily. It occurs to her that he might be making an oblique reference to her marriage. Does he think that Gotardo beats her? Is this his idea of Continental men? Is he encouraging her to confess? She decides she is imagining it. He is just obsessed with his birds. And for this, she ought to be grateful. 104


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‘Enough of birds!’ Marcus says suddenly. ‘I am boring you. Do you remember, Jemma,’ his elbows now resting on the back of the bench, ‘when we used to take those walks back in East Melbourne? You were always talking about going to Paris.’ Jemma doubts he ever cared for her plans—especially as they flew in the face of his. Paris is a subject that she tries not to think about. It wasn’t the place that mattered so much. It was the prospect of finding herself among like minds, of being able to explore new ideas without feeling so alone. ‘I have become less single-minded, I suppose,’ she says. ‘When one is young, one always dreams of elsewhere.’ ‘And there is nothing to stop you painting here.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘Although, you have other responsibilities now.’ Jemma stiffens. She picks up a bruised white camellia petal that has blown onto her lap. She doesn’t like the direction the conversation is taking. In the future, she will have to be more careful. His motives will always be murky. She drops the petal on the ground and stands up. ‘It is getting late, Marcus. I have to go.’ He takes both her hands and holds her gaze. ‘I am so glad we understand each other, Jemma. I knew we would.’

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13 As the cart trundles down the slope, Gotardo doesn’t bother to hold the reins. The horse knows its way and knows where to stop. He closes his eyes and lets his mind drift. He is still bothered by his encounter with a reporter from the Wombat Hill Advocate and the article the young man wrote. He had not expected to read a story about a man he barely recognised. The journalist seemed to think that Gotardo must have some secret, some special way with animals, not to mention superhuman strength to have brought his whole herd from Switzerland without losing a single beast, even though Gotardo had told him otherwise. He should have known from the young man’s enthusiastic references to The Odyssey and other such epics that he planned to write about heroic deeds and mythical feats. The new colony was in need of heroes and this young reporter saw himself as being in the business of fashioning them out of whatever raw materials were at hand. ‘I have no secret,’ Gotardo had insisted. ‘Just 106


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years of experience, hard work and good fortune.’ But it made no difference to what the young man wrote. As a consequence of this newly bestowed reputation for animal husbandry, his morning milk round now takes him twice as long. The local farmers and the townsfolk have begun seeking him out for advice on treatment of their livestock and horses and even their domestic pets. Everyone is worried about the growing number of feral dogs, many of which are huge mastiffs brought by city prospectors to guard the piles of gold they expected to find. When the dogs became too costly to feed, their owners abandoned them to the streets and countryside where they prowl in restless packs, terrorising cattle and horses and savaging sheep. After the deliveries have been made and the livestock attended to, Gotardo stops at the post office, hoping for a letter from his parents or Felice. It has been eight months since he wrote to inform them of his impending marriage and to ask Felice for her forgiveness. Their replies ought to have reached him by now and the longer he waits, the more reproachful their silence becomes. He has warned his brothers that they are not to mention the subject in front of his wife but it makes him uneasy to be in their power. Whenever he is with them, he is always on edge, always fearful of what they might say. For all the attention it has brought him, he can take no pleasure in the item published in the Advocate. ‘Not quite the whole story, was it?’ Battista had said. The postmaster shakes his head. He expects the Continental mail later in the week. Gotardo leaves empty-handed but with his mind made up. He cannot remain silent any longer. He is going to make a clean breast of it, tell Jemma the simple 107


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truth. Then he can look his wife and brothers in the eye and have nothing to fear. He whips his mare into a quick trot and although the cart swerves over the corrugations in the homeward track, the reins move loosely through his hands. Apart from threads of white cloud hovering in the gullies, the mist has evaporated and the sky is the softest of blues. He will speak to her this evening after a fortifying glass of grappa. The meal over, Gotardo lingers by the fireplace prodding at the burning wood before adding a fresh log of red gum. The glowing coals shatter under its weight and sparks shower the hearth. He adjusts the fire irons, picks up scraps of bark from the carpet and tosses them into the grate. There is a scuttling across the roof. Outside the window a possum rasps and hisses like a fiend. Through the pane he can see its unblinking amber eyes. Jemma sits opposite him in a pool of lamplight, reading the Advocate. Still Gotardo says nothing, his fingers pressing his temples as he grapples for the right words. But the only words that come to him are Felice’s, from a letter that had been waiting for him when he arrived in Wombat Hill. It was the very first letter she had ever written and she was full of wonder that ‘these marks on the page—which you so patiently taught me—will send my thoughts and my love to the other side the world. And how I envy my words. For they will be with you long before I!’ He is not a pious man but he has always thought himself to be fundamentally good. It is not in his nature to dissemble or be secretive. Yet something paralyses him when he ought to speak. Night after night he dreams he can hear Felice calling out to him, as they used to do when they climbed the 108


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upper slopes of Mt Gotthard, her voice echoing through the valley. Or, he will be back in his village where the church bells are tolling for a funeral procession. He wakes in a sweat, his ears ringing with this mournful refrain.

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14 Jemma first hears the voices underground when she is passing a stretch of paddock that Gotardo has prepared for a vegetable patch, midway between the house and her new studio. The vegetable patch has been cleared of its latest crop and is nothing more than a large swathe of ploughed soil waiting to be sown. Yet now, as she stares at the moist, friable earth, it could be a family-sized, freshly fi lled grave whose occupants were too hastily interred. Half expecting to see a hand break the surface and claw desperately at the air, she stops and listens, sifting through the single-note call of the bellbirds and the warbling magpies for sounds of human life beneath the ground. Hearing nothing more, she cautiously continues on to the studio and pushes open the door. In one corner a blank canvas rests on an easel waiting for her to begin. The studio is flooded with light from the series of arched windows installed according to Jemma’s specifications. For months she 110


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has dreamed of this space and the solitude that comes with it, the sense of stepping out of the daily routine and into another dimension. Now that she has it, all she wants to do is sit and look out the window and breathe in the smell of freshly cut wood and let the furious activity and emotion of the past year settle within her. She will know when she is ready to paint. She sits in an old wicker armchair facing the back paddocks and the nearby hills which come to an abrupt halt with the darkly inviting ranks of the Wombat Hill forest. One of the things she likes to do is close her eyes and then, when she opens them, try to see with the eyes of a child. She lets the patches of colour imprint themselves on her mind and notes how they change with the changing light. Jemma wonders how she might do justice to the jolting shifts in mood this view inspires. It is a scene both pastoral and primeval, settled and unsettled, familiar and strange. The grazing black and white cows in their pasture; the towering eucalypts wreathed in tattered ribbons of bark. And then there is the unseen dimension—what lies below. A honeycomb of tunnels runs deep into the hillsides throughout the whole district. Much of her time is spent pondering how to bring this subterranean industry into her paintings, how to make these voices seen. Later that day Jemma is at the kitchen trough washing the dishes and looking out over the yard while Gotardo drives the bullock dray over the soil of the vegetable patch in preparation for planting. The bullock plods backwards and forwards across her field of vision and she barely registers its presence until Gotardo suddenly cries out and lurches drunkenly from his seat. He is still holding the reins as the bullock dives headlong into the earth, as if summoned by a 111


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call from the underworld, the dray following the bullock’s descent into the gaping ground. As the cave-in tears across the field like a sizzling fuse, Gotardo manages to jump clear of the dray just in time, his fall cushioned by the freshly turned earth. When Jemma reaches her husband, he is on his knees staring with disbelief at the deep cavity into which his bullock and dray have plunged. Jemma and Gotardo are taking afternoon tea in the shade of the vine-covered pergola in the front garden when a man rides up to their gate and swings off his horse in a graceful arc. They watch him fl ing the reins over the gatepost to tether the mare, adjust the angle of his wide-awake hat and begin the long saunter up their front path. His legs are slightly bowed, yet he moves with surprising ease for a man whose sinewy body looks as if it were chiselled out of rock. They have been expecting him all afternoon. Jemma coughs and the man looks startled until he spies the two figures halfhidden in the greenery. The man hastily removes his hat. ‘Nathaniel Byrne from the Geological Survey. You reported an incident.’ They escort him to the back paddock, explaining what happened and pointing at the ground that has slumped into a long pit of unknown depth. ‘The edges are still falling away. I didn’t think it wise to look too closely,’ Gotardo says. ‘And the bullock?’ ‘No sign or sound of it. The poor beast must have broken its neck. Which is for the best, as we could not have dragged it out.’ 112


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‘I’m ashamed to say,’ Jemma ventures, ‘that I didn’t tell my husband about the voices I heard the same day beneath the vegetable patch. It never occurred to me he was in any danger. That he might be ploughing his own grave!’ Jemma is uncomfortably aware of the geologist’s intense blue gaze. His eyes make her think of the sea. She has still not grown used to saying ‘my husband’, for the possessive pronoun suggests she has a claim on him that she does not feel. To love is not to own. What negligent impulse had made her forget to tell him about the voices? It bothers her because she is not normally vague, quite the opposite, although lately she has started to wonder what is wrong with her brain. For some weeks she has not been herself. Gotardo places his arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘How could she have known what these voices meant?’ The geologist glances at the couple—a handsome pair, he thinks—before scanning the site. ‘Indeed. Who would expect miners to be such fools? Most know they are courting death if their tunnels run too shallow. But there will always be those foolhardy enough to think they can get away with it. Or those who simply don’t know what they’re doing.’ Gotardo does not mention that his brothers are shareholders in the mine that runs beneath the property and that they have been working the lead. It makes him wonder where else their tunnels run and how shallow. He recalls the tight rolls of ten-franc notes and Chinese coins that he wedged in the mortar of the house’s foundations. They were meant to bring good luck. ‘Is the house in danger, do you think?’ ‘I’ll talk to whoever operates the mine. Find out where it 113


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runs. Lucky no one was down there when it happened. There isn’t much I can tell you from inspecting your paddock. All you can do is fi ll it in. I’d find another spot for the vegetable patch if I were you.’ ‘In my opinion,’ he adds, ‘the cave-in is a symptom of a wider problem throughout the district.’ ‘And what problem is that?’ Jemma asks. ‘Lack of foresight and regulation. Surely you remember how the tower of St Peter’s collapsed in a quivering heap when the church’s foundations were undermined by the tunnelling of the Haphazard Co. pursuing the great township alluvial lead?’ Gotardo shakes his head. ‘We were not living here then.’ ‘Needless to say,’ Nathaniel Byrne tells them, ‘the name of the company is all too apt.’

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15 Jemma gives herself up to the motion of the train. She is reminded of the excitement she felt as a girl when her father took her to the fairground and she saw a man swallow fire. The prospect of a whole day to spend at the Great Exhibition has even distracted her from how unwell she feels. From the opposite seat, Celestina is telling her about the recent meeting at the Locarno Hotel, where a petition was drawn up to submit to the council about protecting the mineral springs from destruction by mines. The meeting was well attended but they need someone with scientific expertise to give weight to their case. ‘There is a Mr Byrne at the Geological Survey who might help you,’ Jemma says, picturing the geologist sauntering up their garden path. They take a slow curve and the shiny black engine comes into view, arabesques of smoke trailing from its funnel. The 115


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train rocks gently from side to side. Jemma closes her eyes as a wave of nausea washes over her, making her swallow hard. She lifts her hand to her forehead and tries to compose herself but it is too late. Celestina is staring keenly. ‘Jemma?’ ‘It’s nothing. I feel a bit sick.’ As well as the nausea she is constantly exhausted. Some days, it is all she can think about, this longing for sleep. She is finding it almost impossible to get up in the mornings. Yesterday she slept so late Gotardo was left to do the milking alone. ‘Have you been to the doctor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And?’ ‘It wasn’t meant to happen like this!’ ‘Do you know how many women have said that?’ Jemma tells Celestina that, when she was leaving Dr Borsa’s rooms, she ran into Mrs Henning from the Ladies’ Guild. Mrs Henning, who is a well-known gossip, had glanced surreptitiously at her belly, and whispered to her that she must now look aghast at those paintings she did. The ones of the little girl in distress. ‘What did you say?’ ‘I was so stunned by her presumptuousness I couldn’t speak. Then I told her that, on the contrary, I would do it again. Then it was her turn to look aghast.’ Jemma laughs mirthlessly and before she knows it, she is in tears, thankful there is no one else in their car. Celestina pats the empty seat beside her. ‘Come over here, Jem.’ 116


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Jemma lays her head on her friend’s shoulder. ‘I must be lacking something, Tina, but I have no feeling for children. They annoy me. Sometimes I don’t even like them!’ Celestina lets out a big, knowing laugh. ‘Every parent has felt like that.’ ‘But you wanted them. You wanted children.’ Jemma has never known this urge. Her only experience of children has been her students, all girls of finishing age. Babies positively terrify her. ‘They are sweet when they smile and burble. But when they wail, I can’t stand it. I look at a fine painting and I feel such affinity. I know how the artist created this effect of light or that mood of sublimity. I can see his mind at work, his hand guided by centuries of tradition and thought. When I look at great art I am transported into a state I can hardly describe. But when I look at a child, I understand nothing. No doubt Mrs Henning will be delighted to know that I am as callous and cold-hearted as she and her circle have always claimed. Gotardo believes that once the child is born, I’ll change my mind.’ ‘And you will,’ Celestina reassures her. Jemma searches her friend’s face. ‘But surely it is wrong to bring a child into the world when you feel the way I do?’ Celestina can’t hide her shock. ‘What are you saying?’ The train jolts and comes to an abrupt halt. The two women lurch forward, steadying themselves on the seats opposite. Their bonnets—which they had removed and put on their laps—shoot to the floor. It is apparent from the view out the window that they are approaching the eternally cloud-shrouded surrounds of Woodend. But for some reason, they have stopped in the middle of a forest, half a mile from the station. 117


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The women pick up their bonnets. Jemma returns to her seat. She had thought there was nothing she could not say to Celestina, that they were sisters in all but blood. But this is a matter that could divide them if she let it. As the daughter of an agnostic freethinker it is inevitable that she will see things differently to a daughter of the Catholic church. ‘You misunderstand me,’ Jemma says. She isn’t really sure what she meant, she just needed to say it aloud. To pose the question. There are many other fears that she cannot bring herself to utter. Her horror that she will become muddleheaded and cow-heavy, her breasts swollen like the udders she milks each morning; that the suckling child will drain her of inspiration and the stamina to paint. She finds herself dwelling on her own bloody birth and her mother’s death, an event so painful that her father never spoke of it except to tell her that her mother had died from a haemorrhage two days after Jemma’s first cry. Celestina reaches forward and takes Jemma’s hands. ‘You and Gotardo will be happy. You will be good parents. Believe me, I know.’ They smile at one another awkwardly. The train starts moving again. For the rest of the trip, their conversation is circumspect. They talk of what they expect to see at the exhibition. There will be works from London and Paris, as well as paintings by colonial artists. For Celestina, the prospect of a room full of von Guerards and of possibly meeting the man himself again after all these years is pleasure enough. Jemma is looking forward to the works by Mr Turner—Ruskin’s favourite— about whose swirling, incandescent skies and wild, vortexlike seascapes she has heard so much. 118


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Jemma closes her eyes as tiredness overwhelms her. When she wakes, they are pulling into Spencer Street station. After the exhibition they take an omnibus to the Royal Botanic Gardens. They stroll by the lake and throw bread to the ducks, then sit in the shade of a large Moreton Bay fig. They are on a hill which provides a good view of the city. In the foreground, the river snakes by. Beyond it looms the metropolis which, from this distance, looks surprisingly substantial, as if it has been there forever. Row after row of respectable brick homes with neat slate roofs and, towards the centre, the grand white edifices of public buildings and church spires bathed in afternoon light. Jemma can imagine it all in a frame. Visiting an exhibition always does this to her, puts every view inside a frame. It is like stepping out of the theatre after watching Shakespeare to find everyone is speaking in iambic pentameter. To her surprise, she was not as taken by the Turners as she had expected. For all the brilliant effects of light on cloud and water, there was a lurid, apocalyptic quality to many of his works that felt overblown. She might have left disappointed if it had not been for the single work of a French painter she had not heard of whose name was remarkably close to that of Mr Manet and whose work (also called Déjeuner sur L’herbe) was causing almost as much of a stir here in Melbourne as Mr Manet’s had in Paris. A large crowd hovered around the work, drawn by the furore the painting had caused in the press, with critics and politicians demanding to know why it had been exhibited when, in the words of one local critic, it might have been painted by a blind man, such was its ‘shoddiness’ and ‘lack of precision’. The 119


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most common objection from the public was that it appeared unfinished and they were sure it was some kind of superior joke being played on them, as if the Frenchman thought he could dash off this blurred-looking, roughly painted work and con the British colonials into thinking it art. Jemma stood in front of the large canvas for a long time. She barely noticed the people gasping and laughing and making disparaging remarks. From the first glance, she was spellbound. She saw immediately that the painting was itself the record of such a glance, a fleeting look. At the same time, it seemed to keep unfolding, as if it were fluid, as if it were life unspooling before her eyes. A man lounged in the foreground, conversing with two women sitting on the picnic cloth that was stretched out beneath a birch tree, the variegated trunk of which bore, if one looked closely, a heart with an arrow etched into its bark. Finely dressed picnickers stood to the left under a shimmering canopy of leaves that so exquisitely suggested filtered sunlight, Jemma could almost feel the warmth of it on her arms and face. Although all the figures were still, there was nothing static about them. One of the seated women was reaching forward to lay down a china plate which, Jemma suddenly realised, was the centre of the work, the small sun around which all the other figures and the scene revolved. Her head whirled with the subtle movement of it all, the scintillation of visible brushstrokes and the interplay of dark and light. The momentous ordinariness of it. And a man, casually leaning against the tree, that made her think of her father, made her ache for all the lost moments they would never share. This, she said to herself, was why she had dreamed of France. 120


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When Celestina joined her in front of the painting, Jemma waited eagerly for her response. Observing her friend’s rapt expression, Celestina began cautiously. ‘He’s attempting something new, I can see that. And there is a pleasant mood about it.’ But the truth was it struck her as messy and unsatisfyingly incomplete, although she would not go so far as to condemn it, as others were doing. Jemma said nothing. There was nothing to be said. If Celestina couldn’t see how extraordinary it was, what was the point in trying to persuade her? Jemma had hoped that they would spend the afternoon and the journey home happily discussing the exhibition and she had been saving up a special insight: that the French painting was a remarkable illustration of Ruskin’s third law of drawing. With its fi ltered light and shifting shadows and ‘transparent infinitude of foliage’, it showed how one takes from a scene a general impression, a sensation that is both realistic like a photograph yet not as precise or exact. Reminding one always of all that escapes one’s vision, all that remains veiled in the shadows. A lesson in how one sees, not what is seen. But now their journey would be silent. They would both avoid speaking of it, the painting that everyone else was talking about, just as they would avoid any reference to Jemma’s feelings about having a child. Jemma thinks of it now as she sits in the park, the kind of park with shaded grottos in which such a picnic could happily take place. She lets her eyes relax so that everything is momentarily out of focus, a soft haze of colour and light. People promenading by the lake move in and out of her vision. A woman in a burgundy taffeta dress with a pronounced 121


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bustle strolls by and removes her cape, as if to better display her exaggerated shape. The brightness of colonial fashions was often derided as gaudy by visitors from Home. But Jemma doesn’t care. The more colour the better. She sees it slathered thick with a palette knife. As the woman passes into the shadow of a tree, Jemma notes the way the blue of the sky is reflected in her face and how her figure merges with the grass and the lake and the path. There was so much watching and thinking and painting to be done and so little time; her dresses tighter by the day. She knows she must stay calm, must remember that when she closes her eyes in the evening, the extraordinary painting will be there, waiting for her whenever she needs it. That she will carry it with her always. Like a gift. And like a secret that can’t be shared.

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16 Every morning at seven o’clock, Marcus O’Brien climbs the tower in the Botanic Gardens and trains his binoculars on the northern outskirts of the town. It is not hard to find what he is looking for. He focuses on the stone milking shed, waiting for Jemma to emerge and help the Swiss peasant load the pails onto his cart. She is looking tired these days. In recent months she has started to move more slowly as her belly swells beneath her skirt. This is a complication he had not foreseen. It was not part of his plan, not part of their understanding. But Jemma cannot be blamed. These peasants are like animals; she would not have been able to escape his demands. For all his indignation, her swelling stirs him. He imagines lifting her skirt to cup her bare belly as he forces himself between her thighs, flooding the child with his seed and making it his. A flock of parrots explode into the air from a nearby tree, fi lling the air with their raucous cries. 123


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After a long wait, it is not Jemma whom O’Brien spies leaving the milking shed, but the peasant. With a scowl, he stretches out his right arm at eye level and carefully aligns his pointed finger with Gotardo’s head. He cocks and takes aim. After emptying the cartridge, he blows the smoke from his fingertip and packs the imaginary gun away. One morning, Jemma doesn’t appear after the milking, nor does she appear the next morning or the next. A week goes by and Marcus O’Brien watches the Swiss peasant load the milk pails onto the cart alone. Alarmed, he takes up his morning vigil from the field behind the house. He lies in the long grass from where he can see into the kitchen when the back door is open and is finally rewarded with the sight of her, her face flushed with effort as she raises a wooden hatch in the floor and lowers herself into the cellar below. Jemma does not like enclosed spaces but the summer heat is too much for her. Much as she loves painting outdoors, she can no longer bear the brightness and the buzzing air. In the light of the kerosene lamp, she sketches bottles of homemade grappa and pickled vegetables, barrels of wine and waxed rounds of maturing cheese, grimly aware of the affinity she now shares with these vessels brewing with life. The more she grows conscious of the life inside her, the more she thinks about the mystery in ordinary things. With the clay earth around her she can smell the moist roots of existence and hear the wine fizzing in the vats. Sometimes she swears she can even hear faint vibrations, the distant ringing of pick against rock. Every day she sketches and paints. She works frantically yet remains unsatisfied with everything she produces. Each still 124


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life she paints is a world closed upon itself, an enigma. When she stands back and studies these works, she is amazed by their air of repleteness, and can hardly believe that it was she who painted them. It baffles her that her work can be so at odds with the turmoil she feels. Whenever she goes to the shops, people lay hands on her belly, as if she has become public property. The women give her advice and make knowing allusions to ‘what must be endured’ in order to bring a child into the world. Each time the ordeal of giving birth is raised, Jemma thinks of her own mother and is fi lled with dread. As soon as Gotardo’s cart has disappeared over the hill in the direction of the town, Marcus O’Brien makes his move. He has bided his time long enough. A little shock will help open her eyes to the true nature of these peasants. How primitive and possessive they can be. How, given the chance, they would lock their women away. By mid-morning even the cellar has become oppressively warm and rank with the smell of overripe cheese. When a dizzy spell comes over her, Jemma hankers for fresh air. She climbs up the ladder and pushes against the trapdoor, only to find it jammed. Yet she was sure she had left it open. Gotardo must have closed it, forgetting she was down there. Not long ago, the floorboards above had creaked under his weight as he moved about the house. But now the boards have fallen silent; he must have gone out to the paddocks or into town. She pushes against the trapdoor with both hands, balancing precariously on the ladder as she pounds and calls. Again, 125


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there is creaking above. Perhaps Gotardo is back. She renews her attack on the trapdoor. The creaking stops, as if someone were standing right above her in the kitchen, standing on the trapdoor and listening. She calls out Gotardo’s name and waits for him to open the door. A few more small creaks follow and then nothing. Why did he walk away? Surely he could hear her cries? She wonders if he is angry with her, if he wants to punish her. But that is impossible; Gotardo would never be so cruel. She thinks of the murder case that is in the papers, the McQueen woman who was ravished and murdered and then hidden in a cellar. Perhaps the same murderer has locked the door and will, at any moment, return to finish her off. She knows these are wild thoughts but the lamp has started sputtering and she is afraid of being trapped in the darkness. She will have to find some more kerosene before the lamp goes out. In her hurry to get down, she loses her footing. The ladder rocks backwards and almost overbalances. With a cry, Jemma throws her weight forward. The ladder wobbles and could go either way before it tips in her favour and steadies against the mouth of the trapdoor. She gasps and rests her head on the wooden rail, two hearts beating furiously inside her. It is dark now but she is calmer. When she is able, she climbs slowly down the ladder, testing each rung with exaggerated care until she feels the hard earth beneath her. With a faint moan of relief, she stretches out on the damp earth floor and closes her eyes. She dreams that she is her old self again, riding her mare through the dark corridors of the Wombat Hill forest and out into the blazing light of the basalt plains beyond. 126


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The creaking of the trapdoor wakes her. The cellar is flooded with light. Gotardo is bending over her, tenderly calling her name. Why, she asks him later, did he close the cellar door, knowing that she was down there? He tells her the trapdoor was open when he left the house.

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17 ‘So you are determined to go?’ Gotardo asks wearily. She seems to have lost all sense of how she appears to the world. The sight of a pregnant woman late in her final term sitting in on such a grisly court case. People will talk. Jemma has been following the investigations with particular avidity and poring over the Advocate for fresh reports. It is all anyone in the town talks about now that the inquest is about to begin. Half the local population will no doubt be heading for the courthouse along with his wife. ‘How can it be good for you to hear the details of this crime?’ ‘If it becomes too distressing, I promise I’ll leave.’ Gotardo remains silent. He could not impose his will upon her even if he wanted to. Since the child was conceived they cannot seem to agree about anything. For all his misgivings about the church, he still wants the child brought up in the 128


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faith. Jemma knows what it means to him, that everyone in their community will expect to be at the baptism and that it is unthinkable for it not to happen. But at present, she refuses to consent. She says she has not made up her mind. It is not in his nature to argue but she seems to want to fight, as if she is angry with him. As if she resents her confinement and blames him for it. Which baffles him, because she never resisted his touch. In fact, she had welcomed it with an eagerness that stirred them both. They would read a tale from Ovid each evening, having discovered that there was no better prelude to bed. Gotardo tells himself that she can’t help acting this way, that being expectant brings on peculiar appetites and moods. Perhaps she has spent too much time in the cellar and just needs to get out. She will see reason when the child comes. ‘Go if you must,’ he says. Jemma finishes tying the ribbons of her bonnet in a bow under her chin and lets her hands rest on her swollen belly. She looks at Gotardo’s downcast face. It is no wonder he is bewildered. She doesn’t want to upset him. She knows she is being difficult, even perverse. And yet she can’t make him understand why she needs to go because she hardly understands it herself. It is not simply what happened in the cellar, her identification with the woman in question. She can only call it a compulsion, something to do with the realisation that there is little to separate the bloody theatre of birth from that of death. * 129


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As she enters the bluestone courthouse, she is conscious of a sudden hush. She finds a place in the back row of the visitors’ gallery next to Mrs Bruhn from the Coffee Palace, who nods in greeting as her eyes drop to Jemma’s expanded girth. Just before the court rises, Jemma sees the geologist, Mr Byrne, slip in the door and look around for a seat. He gestures inquiringly towards the empty space at her side. She pulls the loose folds of her skirt close to her body as she makes room for him, detecting a hint of alarm in his eyes as he notes her size. Through a side door, two policemen enter, one of whom is Marcus O’Brien. Jemma is thankful she is out of his sight, that even if he were to turn in her direction and crane his neck, he still would not be able to see her. She knew it was risky coming here but she is not going to live her life in fear of Marcus O’Brien or anyone else. From the front of the court, the coroner begins his address on the fate of the eighteen-year-old redhead, Mrs Lillian McQueen, who was found by her husband Geo McQueen, upon his return from the Excelsior Co. mine, lying in their cellar with five deep stab wounds to her throat. After outlining the events of that night, he turns to the public gallery and solemnly announces that he must ask some probing and indelicate questions of the two doctors, Fullerton and Trembath, who attended the scene. He will also present to the court photographs taken by Thomas Feehan of the Wombat Hill Portrait Gallery, who was called in by police to help record the details of the crime. ‘The evidence about to be tendered is grisly in the extreme,’ he intones. ‘It is my firm opinion that any woman 130


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who has any regard for her character should promptly leave the court.’ There are audible sighs of disappointment and many pursed lips. A loud harrumph issues from the stout frame of Mrs Prohaskey, the barmaid at the Athens. But given her line of work, she, more than most, is sensitive to public opprobrium and does not protest. The men rise to their feet as the women reluctantly leave their seats. It takes some time before the rustling of crinoline ceases. The courtroom door closes behind the departing women and Coroner Drummond is ready to begin when he glances towards the gallery. Jemma can feel his eyes fi xed on her as he peers over the rim of his spectacles. She stares straight ahead, the baby unleashing a flurry of kicks. Around her, men are fidgeting with their pocket watches and clearing their throats. She has witnessed many grisly sights out on the goldfields and does not see why she, or any other woman, should be excluded from hearing facts that have already been much discussed in the papers. It is absurd, she thinks hotly, that women endure the violence and pain of childbirth with all its attendant dangers and horrors and yet they must pretend for the sake of their reputations that they are likely to faint at the mention or sight of blood. Seeing that she will not be moved and reluctant to make a fuss, the coroner mutters something into his cravat and proceeds to call the doctors to the stand. For all her determination to remain in the court, Jemma hardly hears their testimony, her thoughts now mired, like the wheels of a cart in a boggy track, on the subject of the approaching birth. She thinks of her mother, the stranger in the portrait that once 131


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hung over the mantelpiece in the lounge room of the house she grew up in and now hangs in her bedroom, reminding her that she is not motherless after all. She shares with this woman the same retroussé nose and half-moon eyes, the same asymmetrical smile. The thought of her has always inspired an abstract affection, more for the saintly object of her father’s adoration than for the woman herself. By regarding her in this way, Jemma did not have to think of her mother as a flesh-andblood woman, did not have to think of how she suffered and died. But now these thoughts press upon her and cannot be denied. What was it like to go through the agonies of birth, to hold your child in your arms, knowing, as the blood seeped from your body, that you would never see the child grow up? Jemma closes her eyes to hide the tears. How strange, she thinks, to discover feelings you did not know you had. To ache for the mother you never knew and the motherless child that is yourself; the child who had always accepted her mother’s absence as a simple fact of life and did not pine because she did not know what she lacked. In a distant, passionless voice Doctor Trembath is speaking of the volume of blood lost, the signs of molestation, the hour of death. The sudden thump of the coroner’s gavel jolts her back to the courtroom as the clerk announces the end of the morning session. Jemma is slowly making her way to the door, too absorbed by her thoughts to be bothered by the disapproving glances, when she becomes aware that someone is smiling at her. She looks up. It is the geologist Mr Byrne. He is extending his hand and apologising for not recognising her earlier. 132


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She feels the child quicken. He leans closer and lowers his voice. ‘Bravo, madam. Bravo.’ Jemma shakes her head. If she was defiant, it was only because she had no choice.

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18 Two months before the child is due, Gotardo finally receives a letter from his parents. They hope that he is happy with his new wife. They are deeply sorry to inform him that Felice is dead. Although her condition deteriorated not long after he left the valley, she clung to life for almost two years. The last winter in the valley was a mild one and there was less hunger than before. They are grateful for the money he sent them and they live for the day when they will see him again. His parents do not mention, in their letter penned by the village mayor, whether Felice died before or after his letter arrived announcing his marriage. But the mention of how long she lingered suggests to him that she was holding out for news from him and that it was his news that killed her. He had secretly dreamed of her death and his wish had come true. The walk from the post office up the hill to the bluestone church where Gotardo worships each Sunday has never felt so 134


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steep. It is his intention to go to the confessional but at the last moment he cannot bring himself to speak to the priest who is from his valley and knew Felice as a child. Father Rossetti does not approve of his marriage to Jemma, a judgement reinforced by the fact that she is never at Sunday mass. Head resting on the pew in front, Gotardo kneels at the back of the church and prays for forgiveness. Even if God forgives him, though, he does not know if he can forgive himself. He is a coward. He ought to have told Felice the truth before he left: that he could not marry her because he had no intention of ever coming back. Instead he kept her waiting and hoping and then snatched away her hope with the cruellest of blows. His knees hurt on the hard wooden floor but he does not get up. The pain is all he deserves. On his return home, Gotardo is unlatching the gate when a hawker draws up in his wagon and stretches out a meaty hand, launching into his usual patter while making rapid-fire inquiries after the lady of the house. Gotardo is in no mood for talk and barely grunts in reply but does not have sufficient wits about him to fob the man off. Reluctantly, he calls out to Jemma who is pruning the roses in the front garden. When Jemma reaches the gate, the man sweeps his cabbage-tree hat from his head. ‘My best wishes, Mrs Voletta, on the impending momentous event,’ he says, passing a critical eye over her mud-streaked dress. ‘You will no doubt have heard of me, although it has not been our good fortune to meet until now. You will also have noticed that in this fine town, the standards of fashion are high, which is why my stock is in great demand.’ With a flourish, he throws back the canvas covering his wagon 135


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to reveal tiered shelves overflowing with brilliant silks and velvets and taffeta, gold braiding and Spanish lace. Dutifully, Gotardo urges her to buy a new shawl or a bonnet or a hat with large bows but Jemma is not in the mood for finery. ‘It’s calico I want,’ she says. ‘For a smock. And canvas, I don’t suppose you sell bleached canvas?’ ‘That’s not my line, madam. Try the Empire Emporium. But you won’t find stock of this quality in any of the stores in town.’ ‘You have nothing for infants?’ Gotardo asks. ‘I am afraid not, sir. Haute couture is what I am known for. Only the finest fabrics and styles, silk stockings and bonnets à la mode. It is my experience that, after their confinement, ladies of distinction desire a new outfit in which to re-enter society.’ Gotardo looks doubtfully at Jemma, who is staring dreamily across at the cone of Mount Franklin. Seeing that he has lost her interest, the hawker hurriedly tries a new tack. Only last year, he confides, he was held up by the infamously suave Johnny Gilbert dressed in buckskin trousers, polished boots and leggings, a neat cravat and a serge vest studded with jewels. The bushranger’s only request was a pair of kid gloves and a silk top hat. Having inspected the hawker’s wares, he declared them of superior quality to those found in Melbourne’s pre-eminent fashion house of Buckley and Nunn. Faintly amused, Jemma smiles. ‘What are the chances, do you think, of meeting such a rogue?’ ‘The man is dead, madam. But he was, I thought, quite a gentleman—of a kind. Unfortunately, most of them are mere bandits. They have no scruples and no taste.’ He tells her 136


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of a recent attack on a woman with a young girl travelling in their buggy between Fryerstown and Castlemaine. When their driver was knocked from his seat, the woman seized the reins and tried to keep the attackers at bay with the whip. For all her efforts, the whip only deterred the fiends for so long and they soon got the upper hand. Jemma stiffens as she remembers the fate of Mrs McQueen. ‘What happened?’ The hawker plucks at his mutton-chop whiskers and demurs. ‘I don’t think madam would like to know.’ With practised ease, he reaches into the wagon and brings out a flat cedar box and fl ips back the lid. ‘Now, if the lady had one of these, it might have been a different story.’ Nestled inside the baize-lined case is a small pistol with a pearl inlay handle. Surrounding it, a tin of percussion caps, a gunpowder flask, an oil bottle, six lead balls and a barrel key. ‘Most compact, don’t you think? The .45 calibre singleshot is a ladies’ special. German design. I have a holster for it that can fit under your jacket without the slightest bulge.’ Gotardo curses the hawker’s scaremongering under his breath and is about to send the man on his way when Jemma, who has never seen a gun before, reaches out to touch the delicate pattern of the pearl inlay. ‘The workmanship is very fine,’ she says appreciatively, wrapping her slender fingers around the handle. ‘I had not expected a deadly weapon to be so elegant. Nor to feel so smooth.’ No gun can eliminate the spectre that haunts her and yet it would give her comfort just to possess it. She casts a glance at her husband and it is immediately clear to Gotardo that she is intent on buying the pistol. If 137


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he tries to advise her against it, he knows it will only make her more determined. One corner of the folded letter in his pocket is pressing into his thigh like a thorn. The very thought of it makes him ill and he knows he cannot vouch for his behaviour much longer. ‘You must have it then,’ he says as calmly as he is able, not daring to consider why his wife should want a gun. And so the purchase is made. In later years, he will remember how she weighed the gun in her palm and the feverish look in her eyes.

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19 Jemma is lying on her side staring at the wallpaper, her eyes open yet unseeing. At decreasing intervals her back arches like that of a cornered animal, her whole frame trembling with the strain before she slumps back onto the mattress, gasping with disbelief. The midwife presses a glass of tonic to her lips while Celestina squeezes her hand and urges her on. As the invisible pestle begins once again to grind at her lower back, Jemma tries to speak but cannot utter more than the lowest, most strangled of moans. Monstrous, she thinks. It is monstrous. Why had no one warned her? She fl ings her head into the pillow and momentarily locks eyes with the friend who is kneeling beside her, before the pain drives them shut. The midwife is telling her to push and she is pushing but something’s not right; she is sure the child is stuck. It is going to be as she feared: not birth but death. She has seen it happen out in the fields—things go wrong. She remembers the head of a calf jutting out of its mother’s rear, the cow 139


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bellowing in pain and Gotardo throwing a noose around the calf ’s head. Out in the hallway Gotardo is cursing the absent doctors in furious bursts of dialect and railing at God. His helplessness appals him. He has delivered more calves than he can possibly remember but he can do nothing for his wife. The door to Jemma’s bed chamber flies open and the cherry-faced midwife pokes out her head. Without mincing her words she tells him to restrain himself if he doesn’t want to distress his wife. Unable to bear the waiting, Gotardo sets off to town to find the doctor, declaring that he will drag him back by the hair, if he must. Jemma is thrashing in a delirium, beyond caring what happens to her or the child, when Dr Trembath finally arrives with the chloroform and forceps. Inhaling deeply, she slips hungrily into oblivion. An hour later, she is wrenched awake by the sound of her squalling infant lying swaddled in its crib. The torn cry tugs at her guts as if the cord had not been cut. Jemma turns her head to look at its blotched face, its gulping mouth and thatch of dark hair, and cannot believe that they both have survived. She is too relieved to give much thought to the pain now shooting up from her groin. Celestina, who has been by her bedside for the whole duration, helps her sit up against the pillows then takes the child from the crib and hands it to her. ‘A girl,’ she says. Jemma examines the child’s waving hands. Once, in a dream, she discovered she had six toes on one foot, confirming what the gossips claimed, that there was something unnatural about her. But by some miracle, her child is perfect; she bears no sign of her mother’s faults. Tiny fingers wrap themselves 140


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around her finger in a fierce grip until, somewhere in the house, a door slams and the child’s arms fly into the shocking vacancy around her. Jemma lifts her daughter to her swollen white breast. To her amazement, the baby seems to know what to do and clamps itself to her nipple as if she has been waiting all her short life for this moment. Jemma slips in and out of sleep as the child suckles. When she wakes, Celestina is gone. Jemma studies the child’s face— the pursed lips, the flared nostrils, the slight slant of the closed eyes. Who needs God, she thinks, when man can do this? She gazes for what might be hours or only minutes, until her eyelids start to droop. She is about to return the child to her crib, when her stomach clenches violently, sending streams of warm blood coursing down her legs. Remembering her mother, she hugs the infant to her breast as the room begins to swim. Hearing her feeble cry, the midwife rushes into the room, fl ings back the sheet and surveys the bloody discharge. Without warning, she brings her fist down hard on Jemma’s still-swollen belly. There is a pop, and out shoots the remains of the afterbirth. The midwife whips the liverish mass away, returns the child to the crib and props Jemma’s feet up on a mound of books plucked from a nearby shelf. ‘I will not die?’ Jemma whispers. The midwife pats her hand, telling her it is time to rest; her work is done. That night, Jemma is woken by the grunts and snorts of a wild creature she has never heard before. Still half asleep and menaced by unnameable fears, she sits bolt upright in bed and seizes her husband’s shoulder. ‘Gotardo, there’s an animal in the room!’ 141


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* Two weeks after the birth of Lucia Rose, the Volettas make their first outing as a family. As they walk up the main street of Wombat Hill with the perambulator thrust proudly before them, townsfolk Jemma has never before spoken to, and some who have previously shunned her, emerge from shop doorways and hurry across the street to peer under the wicker hood and coo over the sleeping child. The day after the birth, Gotardo’s people had converged upon their house with gifts and food and so much goodwill that Jemma spent the day fighting back tears. Like connoisseurs of infant flesh, they hovered around the child debating the provenance of every feature and fl ickering expression. Jemma looked on from the bed, pale and exhausted. For all her love of art, she had never been particularly moved by the works of the great masters depicting the Madonna and Child, which too often seemed sentimental or simply unreal. And perhaps they would still strike her that way. But one thing she can now understand is the urge to worship the everyday miracle of a human child. As for her own feelings, they are too overwhelming to be displayed. During the night, she wakes every hour and strains to hear her daughter’s breath while holding her own. Like the pain of childbirth, she finds that she cannot speak of this love. It is too large, too fierce, too full of hope and fear to be reduced to words. The truth of it is stark. Within a matter of weeks she has become a willing captive to a love from which there is no escaping. A love that has transported her heart for the term of her natural life. 142


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Jemma’s old self asserts itself quickly, however, when wellwishers ask about brothers and sisters for the child. ‘I am not,’ she is tempted to reply, ‘a breeding machine.’ She braces herself when she sees Mrs Henning bustling up the street with her entourage. After chucking the child under the chin, she turns to Jemma and observes with satisfaction, ‘Humbling, isn’t it, Mrs Voletta? I suggest you’ll see things differently from now on.’ ‘Humbling it is. Good day, Mrs Henning.’ Jemma continues pushing the perambulator along the footpath, knowing that if she pauses for even a moment, she will be subjected to further platitudes which may provoke her to say something she will later regret. Their destination is the photographic studio of Thomas Feehan. Gotardo is eager for them to pose for photographs en famille so that he will have a card to send to his parents by the next mail. Although Jemma likes the idea of having photographs of Lucy, Mr Feehan’s forensic work is still too fresh in her mind for her to share her husband’s enthusiasm. Mr Feehan shows them a range of backdrops and they agree on scenery of ancient ruins overgrown with flowering vines. ‘We have costumes, too, in keeping with the Roman mood,’ Mr Feehan says. Gotardo is almost tempted until he sees Jemma roll her eyes. ‘Another time, perhaps.’ For his parents they will remain dressed as they are. Mr Feehan explains that the backdrop they have chosen demands an informal yet classical positioning. He directs Jemma to stand against a stone pillar and hold the child out 143


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to Gotardo’s welcoming arms, and then advises on a series of further arrangements. When the session is almost over, Gotardo makes a special request. He wants a portrait of himself and his wife. From his pocket he takes a small box and hands it to Jemma. ‘Will you put this at your throat, my darling?’ It is an oval locket of pink gold into which a small photograph can be placed: a gift to mark their daughter’s birth. As Gotardo had hoped, their girl has put their small disputes and disagreements into perspective. In Lucy, they have found a perfect marriage of their better selves. Mr Feehan proposes that they stand side by side but Gotardo has something else in mind. He points to the love chair upholstered in tapestry of green and gold in which they can sit on opposite sides and yet remain face to face. Mr Feehan disappears beneath the black cloth, there is a crackle of light and they are caught forever, gazing into each other’s eyes. It is a photograph which Gotardo will keep with him always, a sepia-tinted reminder of this season of their content. By the time they have finished at the photographic studio and visited Celestina, it is evening. On the outskirts of the town, the darkness is almost complete, except for the cold marcasite glitter of the Milky Way, the yellow pool of their lantern guiding their steps along the dirt track through the bush and the occasional line of fl ickering candles weaving in and out of the eucalypts as the miners on night shift make their way to Brandy Hot. In the future, when he looks at the photographs taken this day, Gotardo will think of this homeward journey accompanied by the screech of fruit bats and the feral sounds of their daughter 144


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in her pram. He will remember how the horizon took on an unearthly glow as they approached the abandoned shafts of the Grand Mystery Co. mine where the mullock heaps rich in fossil matter and lignitic clay from a prehistoric swamp had caught alight, and how it went on to burn for twenty-three months. He will remember how they stopped on a ridge to watch the low blue fire that danced on one spot like a spirit released from the earth, and how it reminded him of going to midnight mass as a child, and how perfect the moment seemed and how he would have been happy to stand there all night inhaling the smoke-scented air. Each night the child dreams of the warm gush of milk, the soft curve of flesh pressed to her cheek and the diorama of sky, leaves, branches and faces that wheel above her pram. She teaches herself to rock the cradle, to roll over and then to crawl, and soon she is hoisting herself up on the furniture and tottering about on her own and saying words such as ‘Mama!’ and ‘Papa!’ and ‘No!’ Gotardo’s ‘Swiss Gold’ matures to perfection and is ready to be brought up from the cellar. On the proceeds from his animal husbandry, he has been able to employ a young farmhand to relieve Jemma of her chores. To crown their good fortune, Lucy loves her sleep, sparing them the sleepless nights they had been warned of, and allowing Jemma long periods during the day to spend at her easel. Whenever Gotardo is passing the studio, he will pause by the window to snatch glimpses of Lucy in her brightly painted crib, once an alluvial cradle that separated gold from gravel. He also loves to watch Jemma at work: the silent intensity with which she 145


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stands before the canvas, the sudden movements of her brush, the way she will stare at the sleeping child before turning back to her canvas where a landscape is slowly appearing as if through melting snow. Just occasionally when he passes, she will be feeding Lucy at her breast and singing. It is the only time he has ever heard her sing. She has a deep, breathy voice, not particularly melodious but it resonates pleasantly enough in the lofty room. Although her songs bear little resemblance to the lullabies he remembers from childhood, one song in particular has lodged in his head. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.

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20 When Nathaniel Byrne was seven years old he found a graptolite—a branched, fossilised organism that once drifted in the ocean—in the flaky layers of black slate on the banks of the Loddon River. As he examined the primitive creature with his magnifying glass, moving the fish-eye back and forth so that the fossil swelled and shrank and almost swam before his eyes, a legend came alive. He could almost feel the ancient waves lapping at his feet. After that, his nostrils would quiver whenever a northerly gusted from deep inland, seasoned with red dust like cayenne pepper and the faint but unmistakable tang of the sea. As he grew older, the great ocean at the heart of the interior retreated like an outgoing tide as explorers made bolder and bolder forays into the unmapped hinterland, dragging boats overland for hundreds of miles without so much as a whiff of water. Even when Charles Sturt tracked the River Murray to a salt lagoon and dispelled the vision of a river system 147


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flowing inward from the Great Divide, young Nathaniel refused to give up hope. He knew in his bones, as if they were divining rods, that the remnants of the body of water that once covered much of the country were still to be found. Rather than being discouraged by Sturt’s failure to find the inland sea, Byrne took heart from the explorer’s observation that, throughout his journey, he was haunted by faint echoes of a submarine world. In the Simpson Desert, the explorer was met with shimmering dunes that undulated all the way to the horizon like interminable ocean waves. There were, Nathaniel liked to remind those who mocked him, vast tracts of the country still untraversed. Like shifting sandhills, this uncharted territory encroached on his dreams. As yet, Nathaniel Byrne has made no move to mount an expedition, although he has found it useful to raise the subject when any of the young ladies to whom he has been paying mild attention start to get the wrong idea. He cannot offer them a future, he tells them. It would not be fair to deceive them, to raise their hopes. Apart from anything else, he would make a poor husband as he has neither the financial security nor the intention of remaining settled in one place. Extracting himself in this manner is always a delicate operation and there have been occasions when he has left his retreat dangerously late, earning himself a reputation as a cad. He now finds it safer to fl irt with married women and, when the need arises, to call upon the highly skilled ladies of the Red Lion. Betsy used to be his favourite there but he avoids her now, ever since she asked him what he was so afraid of. She had always been the one who seemed to understand him 148


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and why he chose to live as he did. The others were always asking when he was going to get married, but never Betsy. He suspects now that she might have fallen in love with him. He remembers her big dark eyes watching him as he got dressed, the last time he was with her. ‘You think it can’t happen to you, don’t you?’ she said. ‘But one day, you’ll find out. You’ll fall like everyone else. And when you do, Nat, you won’t know what’s hit you.’ One of Nathaniel’s preferred forms of leisure on a hot day is to sit on the wide front veranda of the Mountain Hotel, one mile out of town, with a tall, beading glass of ale. When there is no wind, he can hear the trickle of mineral springs as they bubble out of the earth and form sparkling rivulets through the undergrowth before joining the creek in the gully below. The countryside around here is like a colander, porous with springs. The water bubbles up from aquifers, underground reservoirs held in folded and hardened sediments of sandstone and shale which lie buried beneath the basalt. He is conscious, as always, of the never-ending activity beneath the ground, the restlessness of the earth and the pressures within it. The carbon dioxide in deep-seated igneous magma which gives the mineral water its effervescence and forces it up to the surface. There are some who claim that an ancient river runs far beneath the town, replenishing the springs. He loves to contemplate these subterranean caverns and the possibilities they raise. The continent could well be awash with underground rivers and seas, even when the surface looks like the moon. With eyes closed and feet propped up on the wrought-iron lacework of the balcony, Nathaniel is contemplating the 149


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movement of water underground when he feels the shudder of footfalls on the wooden boards. A quick glance reveals the gangly, stork-like presence of Sergeant O’Brien settling into a wicker chair nearby. The two men nod curtly to each other and slip back into their own thoughts. Nathaniel observes that O’Brien seems to have lost the self-satisfied spring in his step that distinguished his bearing in the months after the robbery at the First Colonial Bank when he was the talk of the town. He seems sullen and withdrawn, as if fame did not deliver what it had promised. Nathaniel tells himself that he is not interested in fame. He only wants to know the truth about the inland sea, scientific knowledge being its own reward. He has to admit, though, that fame brings some benefits, such as the attentions of women—which is why he can’t understand O’Brien’s sullen mood. But then, he smiles to himself, one doesn’t need to be written up in the papers to charm a woman into bed. Marcus O’Brien nurses his whisky as he looks darkly across the surrounding countryside. He cannot understand why people rave about this view. He doesn’t like the bush; there is no comfort in its drab colours and scraggly plants, not to mention the venomous creatures that hide like outlaws within its crevices. He would rather be sitting inside, taking in the much more appealing view of the many coloured bottles with their liquid magic lined up behind the bar, but the stuffy heat has driven him out in the hope of a breeze. A figure is approaching on the road below, a woman pushing a perambulator up the hill on which the hotel sits. The road is little more than a track and the terrain inhospitably steep, 150


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hardly a route one would expect to see a mother and child take for an afternoon’s walk. Even from this distance, Marcus O’Brien can pick her. He has watched her often enough to recognise the shape she makes in her plain brown skirt, white cotton chemise and unadorned straw hat; a shape unlike that of most women in the town, who favour hoops or crinoline or, more recently, that absurd-looking bustle. He is also familiar with the way she moves, the brisk pace she sets. As she passes the hotel, she tilts her face to the sky as if studying the position of the sun. He knows where she is going because he has followed her there before and he would follow her again today if he didn’t have to get back to the station. At least he knows what she is up to, or thinks he does until he notices that Nathaniel Byrne has left his seat on the veranda and is heading up the road in Jemma’s wake. An hour’s walk from the town towards Breakneck Gully lies a clearing in the bush where a homestead once stood. All that remains of the building are three red-brick chimneys with hearths facing invisible rooms. Jemma discovered the abandoned site before Lucy was born and began some preliminary sketches in preparation for a painting. It is the kind of place she is naturally drawn to, a place with a melancholy atmosphere and lingering presences hovering just out of sight. From the abundant regrowth on the trees at the edges of the clearing, and the grass now carpeting the interior of the house, it would appear to be at least two years since the bushfire swept through. A mass of purple wildflowers tumble from an iron skillet. An overturned camp oven has become a 151


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nest for a family of small marsupials. In what would have been the parlour, a blackened china teacup still sits on the charcoal remains of a wooden table. Behind the house is a creek that branches into pools of still, dark water that would be almost invisible if not for the reflected underbellies of passing clouds. Gnats hover over the surface, appearing and disappearing as they move through fi ltered columns of light. Jemma finds a shady spot to park the perambulator and covers it with netting to protect the child from fl ies, then settles near the creek with the stretched canvas on her lap. She lets her eyes slip out of focus so that the colours and outlines dissolve into a shifting palette of shapes and light. She finds herself thinking about the child’s vision, how fragmented and phantasmagoric the world must appear as it wheels above the pram. When Lucy was younger she would explode into cries of delight as they passed under a canopy of trees or giant ferns and the chiaroscuro dappled her face, her puggy hands reaching out to grasp the shadows swimming by. From a few yards back, the image on the canvas is quite distinct. Standing at the edge of the clearing, Nathaniel Byrne can make out the quicksilver shimmer of the creek, the surrounding trees and their reflection in the pools, and in the foreground, the towering red chimneys of the burntout homestead. How is it, he wonders, that he is a regular at the Mountain Hotel on the nearby road to Breakneck Gully, and yet he has never stumbled across these ruins? He watches her paint and is reminded of the fractured, light-fi lled patterns one sees through a child’s kaleidoscope. Without thinking, he moves in closer to find that something 152


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strange happens to the painting as he does. Like an optical illusion, the picture blurs, the trees, the creek and the oncesolid chimneys dissolve into a swarm of colour. He almost expects Mrs Voletta herself to disappear before his eyes like a trick of light. Jemma swings around, brush in hand. ‘Do you always sneak up on women like this?’ Byrne steps back involuntarily. ‘My apologies, madam. I saw you climbing that great hill with the perambulator and your canvas. I must admit I was intrigued.’ At a loss to further explain his motives, he pauses, annoyed at himself for being caught out. ‘I hear you are going to be exhibited at Bendigo next month. Your paintings, that is, not yourself. Although no doubt there are many who would be happy to gaze upon—’ ‘Don’t tie yourself in a knot, Mr Byrne. I’ve always thought charm another word for deception. It surprises me that you bother. You don’t strike me as the type.’ Jemma doesn’t know why she is being so prickly. Something about him puts her on her guard; on guard against herself as much as him. She doesn’t like the feeling, that she isn’t quite in control of herself. ‘I seem to have acquired an unfounded reputation,’ he says. ‘I don’t care about reputations,’ Jemma says more defiantly than she feels. Wherever she goes she is conscious of the talk that trails her, the eyes silently passing judgement. Even Gotardo finds it hard to understand why she is always dragging the perambulator down rough bush tracks in search of places to sketch; why she doesn’t spend more time making clothes for the baby and running the house. 153


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‘I admired your boldness at the McQueen inquest. As I hope I made clear to you afterwards.’ ‘You did, and I was grateful. Unfortunately you are in a minority of one, Mr Byrne,’ Jemma says. ‘Tell me, how did you know about the exhibition?’ ‘The curator, Mr Kidd, is an old friend. He told me he had viewed your work and was most impressed.’ Jemma had hoped Mr Kidd would select her triptych of the windswept picnic and the young girl’s miraculous escape but, while full of praise for the work, he felt it might cause offence and he did not feel he could take the risk. He said he couldn’t help wondering why she had called it Déjeuner sur L’herbe when there was no grass in the paintings at all, the ground being the colour of tanned hide. Jemma had blushed and decided against mentioning the French painters. What had seemed like a good way of placing her work within a new tradition suddenly felt hopelessly affected. A delusion. Just thinking about it now makes her face hot. Byrne notes her colour and is encouraged to think he has stirred her. But the conversation seems to have run aground. He is conscious of the steaminess of the bush after the morning’s rain, which has left a clear varnish on leaves untouched by the midday sun. Inhaling deeply, he says, ‘There’s nothing like it, don’t you think, Mrs Voletta? The smell of the bush after the rain. If only you could bottle it. Call it eau de something and all the society ladies would love it.’ Jemma smiles, then says, ‘Forêt.’ ‘Of course. Eau de forêt.’ He puts on such a silky, exaggerated accent Jemma can’t help laughing. The air does seem to tingle. The tang of 154


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eucalypt, the pepper of wattle, the muskiness of damp earth. She is about to say how fecund it smells, but stops. There is something about the word ‘fecund’ that feels too forward. Too much. She turns to her canvas again to hide her confusion. Nathaniel watches her with amusement. He is not going to let her off that easily. ‘You were about to say something, Mrs Voletta?’ They were making progress and he is damned if he will let it pass. Jemma cannot look at him. He is making her feel coy now and she doesn’t like feeling coy. Coyness is false and girlish. She turns to him boldly. ‘This aroma. I was about to say how fecund it smells.’ ‘Fecund.’ His expression does not change, except for a brief flare in his tropical eyes. ‘A fine and most appropriate word.’ It is a moment of perfect understanding. But what, Nathaniel wonders, to do with it? He is used to playful banter with women but not this kind of intensity. It unnerves yet excites him, makes him want more. Suddenly, there is a crackle of twigs nearby. They turn to see a police uniform disappearing into the scrub. ‘O’Brien!’ says Nathaniel. ‘Again.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘He watches me.’ Jemma tells him briefly how they know one another. ‘I can only hope he will grow weary of it. But let’s not talk of it any longer.’ There is awkward silence. ‘I should leave you to your painting,’ Nathaniel says. But still he lingers. He peers at the canvas intently. ‘At a distance 155


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I could see the creek and the chimney and the trees. But now I can see nothing but daubs of paint.’ ‘It’s a new technique I’m experimenting with. I don’t expect you to understand or even admire it. I hardly understand it myself.’ ‘Understanding is not always important. Even in geology you must sometimes trust your intuitions.’ He flashes a restrained smile and takes a small nugget from his pocket. If he were to cut the nugget in half, he tells her, it would look like an onion, layer upon layer. In solution, a small nodule grows into something larger by attracting more gold. He fi xes her with his startling eyes. ‘Like minerals attract like. Even substances which are not magnetic can be drawn to each other. We don’t know why.’ There is a ragged cry from the perambulator. Byrne replaces his hat. ‘Until next time, Mrs Voletta.’ He pauses, then can’t resist. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be here tomorrow?’ Jemma stares long and hard at the canvas. It would be wrong to encourage him. And yet she had planned to return. What harm is there in telling the truth? ‘It will take some days to finish.’ ‘Well then,’ Byrne says, suddenly decisive. He nods goodbye. She watches him stride down the narrow bush path towards the Mountain Hotel. She can still feel the cool directness of his gaze. She places the child at her breast. The milk begins to flow, flooding her body with warmth. Like attracts like.

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21 The next day, Jemma arrives at the burnt-out house earlier than usual. The morning chorus of birds, the low angle of the sunlight through the eucalpyts and the bright green regrowth bursting from every crevice has banished its former mood of abandonment. The air hums with expectation. As the day warms up and the air thickens and the birds fall silent, however, she finds it increasingly hard to concentrate on her painting. The fl ies seem worse than yesterday and more persistent as they buzz around her eyes and lips. The sun feels hotter as its rays pierce the canopy above her. Putting her canvas aside, she dips her face in the creek then takes off her boots and, lifting her skirt, wades through the clear, running water up to mid-calf. She wishes it were deeper so that she could swim. Her feet still bare, she wanders around the burnt-out house, bending occasionally to inspect broken pieces of crockery, a tarnished copper candlestick, a ceramic butter cooler—all half-buried under leaves and dirt. Her ears 157


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strain for the sound of footsteps. There are moments when she is sure she has heard him, the crunch of twigs and bark. But when she looks up no one is there. She could have stayed in her studio and finished the painting in cool comfort and, by midday, she is wishing she had done just that. A commanding voice rings out. Jemma turns to see Lucy, woken from her nap, sitting up in her pram, grinning broadly as she shakes the sides. ‘Mama!’ Having won her mother’s attention, she lets out a squeal of delight. Jemma opens her arms wide in reply. ‘Lucia mia!’ she laughs and whisks the child out of her pram. For a while, she walks about the clearing with Lucy in her arms, pointing to things and giving them names—chimney, tree, table, bird—and singing snatches of song. She marvels at the way everything becomes new again when you have a child. The world of scurrying ants and crawling creatures that live under rocks. The sight of water bulging over pebbles in a stream. A tiny shoot pushing through a blackened tree trunk. When Lucy starts to wriggle, Jemma puts her down on a grassy patch to let her totter around. Even before Lucy could walk, she would hoist herself up to the wooden trolley Gotardo had made her and race with it as fast as she could, up and down the hallway. Jemma smiles as she thinks of what she will tell Lucy when she is older: how she ran before she could walk. Jemma returns to her canvas, stares at it for a while but is too distracted. She begins to pack away the paints. She will not come back here again. What rash impulse allowed her to even entertain the thought of another meeting? 158


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She has put everything away on the tray beneath the pram and is searching for her boots, when there is a flash of movement and colour in the bush and out steps Nathaniel Byrne. He sweeps off his hat. Tiny beads of sweat glimmer on the bridge of his nose. ‘I meant to come by earlier, Mrs Voletta, but work kept me away. Must you go immediately?’ Holding up a brown paper bag, he tells her that he has come from Bonetti’s Bakery where he bought some jam tarts and cinnamon buns which he had hoped they might share. Jemma’s first impulse is to say she hasn’t the time. Lucy will be getting tired and grumpy and there are a million things she should be doing at home. She is also cross that he kept her waiting so long. Yet it would be churlish to refuse him, and Lucy would love a jam tart. With sudden embarrassment, she remembers that her feet are bare. Nathaniel Byrne follows her downward gaze. He stares at her naked feet spattered with mud, the transparency of her skin, the intricate xylophone of her bones. They look at each other and laugh. ‘As you can see, Mr Byrne, I am not going anywhere just yet.’ He watches her lips as they move, hardly hearing what she says. He wonders if any man has ever told her how beautiful her mouth is, how full and alive. No matter how much she tries to hold herself back, everything bursts forth when she smiles. He looks around the clearing, his eyes coming to rest on the blackened table with the china teacup sitting on it. 159


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The wood has been pitted by rain and wind but is still solid enough to take the weight of a small picnic. He brings out a flask of tea and two tin cups and they take their afternoon tea standing up. Jemma touches the charred surface of the table. ‘The bushfire that came through here. It must have been years ago now.’ ‘Not a bushfire. A house fire. See how only the immediate surrounds were burned? Probably a spark from one of these fireplaces that caught alight.’ She can feel Mr Byrne’s gaze but doesn’t dare meet his eye. She thinks about such a moment. A spark flying onto a mat and soon a whole house in flames. How quickly it could happen. How quickly life can change. She calls Lucy over and offers her a small piece of jam tart. As the child slathers the jam across her face, her sticky fingers waving like tentacles, Jemma makes a note to wipe away all signs of it before they arrive back home. She watches as Lucy wanders off to play with a pile of small stones that she has found near one of the hearths. ‘What brings you to places like this, Mrs Voletta?’ Nathaniel asks. ‘You have a lovely garden at home which you could paint. Or the forest nearby. Why go to all this trouble?’ ‘That’s what my husband asks me.’ Nathaniel would like to tell her that he asks this for a different reason. He understands that she is the kind of woman who cannot stay confined to her home; that she is a restless spirit, like himself. ‘I can see the appeal of these ruins,’ he says. ‘They tell a story—a tragic one, perhaps.’ 160


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Jemma smiles evasively. ‘The mood is definitely important. More important to me, though, is quality of light. But I don’t like to analyse these things too closely. The magic might disappear.’ ‘Better to act on impulse?’ Jemma is contemplating how she can parry him when she hears Lucy’s shriek. In a split second, she has taken it all in. Lucy is pointing to a small brown snake that is trapped, only two feet away, between her and the large chimney behind it. The snake would no doubt have made its escape if it could have but now that it is cornered, it is poised to strike. With a strength and speed she did not know she possessed, Jemma seizes one of her boots from the ground and hurls it through the air so that it lands just in front of the snake. There is a heavy thud, a puff of dust and the poised snake swings sharply to avoid the blow, twists over in the dirt and slips away into the bush. Nathaniel scoops up the wailing child and hands her to Jemma. A cicada begins its piercing, metallic thrum. Jemma pulls Lucy to her and rocks her from side to side, needing to calm herself as much as the child. She rocks and murmurs words of comfort until Lucy falls sleep. Watching them from the margins of their closed circle, Nathaniel has the disconcerting feeling that he no longer exists. It is not a feeling he is used to in the company of women. His head tells him he should give up on this woman and disappear as he is so deft at doing, but his body refuses to move. Only when Jemma has settled Lucy into the pram does she acknowledge his presence again. ‘It was wrong of me to bring 161


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her out here. Everyone told me so, but I wouldn’t listen. I am too impulsive, Mr Byrne, I always have been.’ She looks at him meaningfully. ‘But I have learned my lesson.’ ‘There are snakes everywhere, Mrs Voletta. The risk is probably as great in your garden as out here.’

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22 The Bendigo Mechanics’ Institute is not an art gallery but it will serve the purpose well enough. The interior is well lit by a series of skylights and has been painted an unobtrusive offwhite. Jemma and the curator Mr Kidd have been hanging the works all morning and now that Mr Kidd has gone to fetch some lunch, Jemma takes the opportunity to stand back and absorb the full impact of their work. It is a strange business, finding oneself on the brink of an event that one has looked forward to for so long. Strange and terrifying. Soon, there will be people walking through these rooms, studying her paintings, moving on from one to the next, assessing and possibly dismissing years of work in a glance. And because the work is in a style that is unorthodox and new, and may not meet people’s expectations about what a painting should be, there is every chance that the public won’t like them. And there will be nothing Jemma can do. ‘Mrs Voletta.’ 163


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The voice comes from the doorway behind her. Jemma turns, startled. He has taken her by surprise again. Conscious of the rapid rise and fall of her chest, she says, ‘You are making a habit of this, Mr Byrne.’ ‘I waited for you at Breakneck Gully. But you didn’t go back.’ Nathaniel had gone that way numerous times over the past month in the hope of seeing her. It alarms him deeply that he has been able to think about little else. ‘Your friend, Mr Kidd, has just stepped out for lunch,’ Jemma says, determined to ignore any advance. ‘I will tell him that you dropped by.’ ‘No matter, Mrs Voletta. I am more than happy to see you.’ He glances around the walls. ‘And your work.’ ‘You will have to excuse me if I turn my back on you. There are more works to be hung.’ Jemma adjusts a crooked painting, relieved to have something to do with her hands. She desperately wishes he had not come. She had thought often about going back to Breakneck, had lain in bed at night next to Gotardo, wondering what to do, and wondering if she were betraying him with such thoughts. But the painting could be finished in the studio, without exposing Lucy to unnecessary risk. She made sure she kept herself busy with works for the exhibition so that there wasn’t time to daydream or dwell. She told herself that, regardless of the feelings Nathaniel Byrne stirred in her, Breakneck Gully would be the beginning and end of it all. But now that he is here, with his hat hanging from one hand and his chiselled body sharp against the white walls, Jemma knows this is not true. 164


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She asks him what brings him to Bendigo. ‘I teach some classes at the Bendigo School of Mines.’ He is standing in front of the work she was doing at Breckneck Gully and studying it intently. The sky above the bush clearing is much bluer now. A blue that shimmers hypnotically, as do the white-gold patches of dried grass lit up by the sun. He can feel the heat of that day rising out of the canvas, can hear the cicadas chanting in the heavy air. He tells her that something about it reminds him of a painting by a Frenchman that he saw in the Great Exhibition of Modern Works in Melbourne some years ago. The way both paintings seemed to assemble themselves before one’s eyes. ‘I think I am beginning to understand what you are doing. It is the way of the future, Mrs Voletta. I am sure of it.’ Jemma puts down the cloth with which she has been dusting a frame. Since the exhibition, she has carried that French painting inside her like a secret that can’t be shared. And here he is, effortlessly sharing her secret, as if he knows her innermost thoughts. Gotardo and Celestina have tried to be encouraging, to say the right things, but it is clear they are baffled, that they wish she would return to the more conventional style of Paddock With Buttercups. Even Mr Kidd prefers her earlier work. He seems to be anxious that her later paintings will be attacked as the Frenchman’s have been. Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Mr Kidd has not yet returned, Jemma raises her concerns. ‘I suspect all the fuss in the papers about Mr Monet has put him on edge,’ Nathaniel replies. ‘Mr Kidd has a rather nervous disposition.’ 165


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They talk for a while about the savaging the Frenchman’s paintings received from the public and from the press, and the likely antagonism towards any local paintings perceived to be influenced by this ‘new French fad’. Nathaniel mentions his own brief experience of being the subject of the papers’ ire after he defended the Chinaman, Ah Sen, on the charge of making spurious gold. The attention, while it lasted, he tells her, almost cost him his job. He glances down at the pages of the Advocate, which Jemma had used to wrap her paintings, scattered across the floor. ‘The newspapers claim they are delivering up the moment as it happens. But there is more truth in your paintings, Mrs Voletta, than there is in a whole edition of the Advocate’. He grins. ‘They give real mud and dirt a bad name, the way they fl ing about words.’ Despite the levity, he is serious, too. Real mud preserved the past. It had no bias, no assumptions about right and wrong or the way the world should be. ‘Spoken like a true geologist,’ Jemma laughs. ‘I am grateful to you, Mr Byrne, more than I can possibly say. But now that the exhibition is about to open, I keep wondering why on earth I wanted it. When I look at my paintings hanging here on the walls, I feel—’ she pauses and takes a deep breath, ‘painfully exposed. To criticism, ridicule, disdain.’ Nathaniel Byrne says softly, ‘Not from everyone.’ His voice reverberates deep in her flesh. She bends to pick up the painting she was about to hang. When they talk, the real conversation is not in their words. It is in the vibrations that move between them like a telegraph message passing down a wire. 166


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She raises the painting to the wall but struggles to place it on the hook. Framed, it is heavier than she realised. Her arms start to shake and suddenly he is right behind her, reaching over her shoulders to grip the wooden frame. She can feel his hot breath on her neck. ‘Please, Mr Byrne, I can manage,’ she says, even as every atom in her body strains towards him. When the painting is on the hook, Nathaniel lets go of it and steps back. He has desired many women before but never like this; it shocks him how different this is. He remembers what Betsy told him. That one day it would happen, that he too would fall, and fall hard. And how right she was. The one woman he longs for is beyond his reach. This is his punishment: to feel his heart thud like a fist on a closed door. As he stands, uncertain what to do next, his eyes fl icker across the painting of the burnt-out homestead and he is jolted by something he had not noticed before: a figure in the landscape, the little girl, Lucy Voletta, playing in the shadows. You had to be at the right distance and angle to see her but once you did, the whole painting reconfi gured around her and was animated by this little sprite who moved so lightly she hardly seemed to touch the ground. He is about to comment on it when Jemma says quietly, ‘I think you had better go, Mr Byrne.’ They look at one another, but do not trust themselves to speak. Afraid she will relent, Jemma turns away from him and waits for his footsteps to fade. * 167


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Now what to do with herself? The space around her, the whole building, aches with the lack of him. She sits down on a chair, throws back her head and stares at the ceiling. She thinks of his hands as they gripped the frame and craves his touch. How could she have let this happen? And yet nothing has really happened. Nothing and everything. Jemma puts a hand over her mouth, stifl ing an urge to cry out. She will have to live with it now, this urgent awareness of the other life she might have lived, the other person she might have been. Something has awoken in her that will not be put back to sleep. Something that thrives in the darkness, like those mythical creatures living deep under the sea or in the bowels of the earth. She had read enough Ovid and had lived long enough to believe that she understood the unruliness of human desire. But until now, she knew nothing at all.

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23 Since the arrival of Laddie—a rusty-faced mongrel with a white penny patch over one eye—Gotardo no longer uses his horn to call the cows in for milking. Eager to win the approval of his new master, Laddie quickly learned to sort the milkers from the dry cows and to fetch any of the herd that Gotardo might name. The horn has been retired, the brass polished so that it gleams like gold, and it now hangs by its crimson cord above the fireplace, where it is much admired by visitors. It will not stay there long, however, as the time is approaching when Gotardo will not be able to stand the sight of it, when it will be too painful a reminder of all that has been lost. He will store it away in a tea chest where it will tarnish unseen in the darkness. The last few days Gotardo has observed a certain listlessness in the herd. They do not come trotting eagerly towards him when he calls, but drag their hooves like sulky children. The recent heatwave, he assumes, must have knocked them 169


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flat; Gotardo feels rather listless himself. He does not worry unduly. The lung plague, which killed so many cows in the district the past winter, disappeared with the spring and its departure has been largely credited to him. He always insisted that there was nothing special about his treatment for the plague—the standard mix of powdered sulphate of iron, Glauber’s salts, nitre, chlorate of potash, tartar emetic and camphor grains. But the farmers whose herds he has tended are full of praise for his ‘soothing touch’. Everyone knows that the Swiss have been treating the sickness for centuries, that they have a way with suffering beasts. For all his protestations, Gotardo is proud of his reputation and the regard in which he is held. After the success of his winter ministrations, he has no reason to doubt his powers. He cannot understand it the morning Laddie returns from the dawn round-up with only a quarter of the herd. He calls the dog to his side and they make their way across the paddocks through the grey wash of pre-dawn. From a distance, his cows lying in the grass look like large, smooth rocks carefully arranged by some prehistoric tribe to mark the winter solstice. Then he hears the hacking, the ominous sound of coughing, and Gotardo begins to run. He goes from cow to cow, calling them by name, examining their tongues and eyes, urging them to their feet, as Laddie runs in circles yapping madly. It soon becomes clear that most of the cows are unable to rise. They show no interest in the hay Gotardo offers them and when he applies the compound that had so miraculously revived the other farmers’ herds, it makes no difference. In the days that follow, Jemma starts to wonder if Gotardo has caught the fever himself. He sleeps with the cows in 170


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the barn, presses soaked hessian to their lolling tongues and sings them mountain choruses until he has no voice. Out of desperation, he takes up the horn from the wall and as the air resounds with notes that conjure up rocky mountain slopes and pastures by a lake, a few of the ailing beasts open their eyes and struggle to raise their wobbly forelegs before collapsing in a palpitating heap. He thinks of Lucy’s efforts to crawl, the way she used to lie on her belly and lift her head like a curious turtle, her arms and legs swimming through air before her forehead crashed to the floor. For all her frustration, it was a comic sight. But there is nothing comic about this—his beloved beasts so weakened they are more helpless than a newborn calf. One evening Gotardo appears at the kitchen door, his eyes puffy and cheeks dark with stubble. Jemma has hardly seen him all week and is shocked by how haggard he looks. ‘It is over,’ he announces. ‘All of them. Gone.’ Jemma holds his shuddering body in her arms, the first time she has seen him weep. It is impossible to comprehend how all those solid, stubborn beasts with their grassy breath and milk-rich udders could give up the ghost so quickly. Those solid beasts she had often cursed and wished out of her life— although she had never wished for this. Two weeks ago they had a herd of fifty and now they have none. She and Gotardo might have lost their livelihood, but they still have each other and their Lucy. Gotardo will need her more than ever. She had hoped to make some money from the exhibition but has only sold two early works. The few short notices in the papers were as she expected. Muted praise for the early paintings but dismay over the later works. One 171


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critic was provoked to remark that these later works gave the impression of ‘decomposition’. Jemma might have taken the remark to heart had she not just witnessed the devastation of Gotardo’s herd and the true meaning of decomposition. At least she is clear now about what really matters and what must be done. Above all, there must be no more ‘chance’ meetings with Mr Byrne. Gotardo limply returns her embrace, too crushed to speak. The trench is as deep as Gotardo is tall; if anyone were to pass, he would be invisible to them. Moist clods fly up out of the earth and land like cowpats on the grass. He bends and digs and occasionally wipes the back of his hand across the stubble on his chin, the shadow of a beard he is growing to hide his sorrow and shame. He could have thrown their carcasses down the abandoned shaft in the northern corner of the property and then covered it with lime and clay, but Gotardo is determined to make a proper burial ground for his beasts. They are the stock of his great-great-grandfather’s herd, just as he is the progeny of generations of dairy farmers who survived centuries of invasion and famine to raise their families in the isolated valley of his birth. And now, he supposes, he will have to follow his dead herd into the bowels of the earth, will have to get used to the underground life of blind tunnelling, for what else can he do? It is clear that God demands penance of him for his overweening pride, for his betrayal of Felice. He has brought disaster upon himself and his family and it seems only fitting that, after a lifetime breathing mountain air, he should be condemned to spend his days in the fetid, damp burrows of a deep lead mine. 172


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His brothers have offered him a share in their venture and, as uneasy as he is about a partnership with them, he cannot afford to reject the offer. Gotardo stabs at the clay with the blade of the shovel, estimating the dimensions required to take the carcasses of fifty cows. His ears still taunt him with the soft jingle of cow bells. But it is not only his cattle he has lost. His past, his childhood, the man he used to be have died with them, leaving him as empty as his paddocks. His shoulder jars as the shovel hits rock. He strikes again and again but makes no impression. Remembering an English phrase, Gotardo lets out a mirthless laugh. Rock bottom. He has hit rock bottom. There is a dizzy relief in the realisation. He can go no deeper. Water sloshes at his feet and seeps through the toes of his boots where the stitching has come away from the sole. He is inspecting the boots, thinking that he must repair them before they fall apart, when a notion enters his head like a divine visitation. A solution. He need not go down the mines or become entangled in his brothers’ dubious business dealings. He straightens up, still staring at his boots. There is a way of salvaging what remains of his animals and what remains of his pride. It will take him years to re-establish himself but he will work like a mule and one day he will buy a new herd. This, he knows with blinding certainty, is what is meant by the grace of God. Jemma can only assume that the shock and grief is making him behave so oddly. Suddenly secretive, he has requested that she not venture into the paddocks or the barn. She has seen him from a distance with Pliny Serafini, lugging the carcasses into 173


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the barn and later piling them into the cart to take them to the mass grave that Gotardo has dug in the far corner of the property. She has also seen them disappear into the nearby bush and emerge with great swathes of wattle bark under their arms. Perhaps, she thinks, they are engaged in some ancient SwissItalian ritual, some superstitious rite which Gotardo cannot bring himself to disclose. There seem to be plenty of them. The men often head out to the forest to cut timber after nightfall on a waning moon because the wood is thought to be stronger and less likely to crack when the sap is down. It was widely rumoured that Bonetti the baker was guilty of the McQueen murder because he was said to have an evil eye. Jemma has no doubt that certain of Gotardo’s older compatriots will blame her for the death of the herd, for having brought on God’s wrath because she does not attend mass. Even after half an hour spent scrubbing himself with soap and pumice in the wash-house before he comes in for dinner, Gotardo cannot erase all traces of the blood and other strange fluids that have spattered his body and clothes. Unable to tolerate the mystery or Gotardo’s evasions any longer, Jemma slips out of bed one night when her husband is asleep, pulls a shawl around her shoulders and takes a lantern to guide her steps across the damp paddocks. The large wooden door of the barn swings open and at first she can make no sense of the shapes that hover in the air before her. She sweeps the lantern from side to side until her brain slowly registers a forest of cow hides strung like giant fruit bats from the rafters. She walks through the corridors of tanned hides, touching the softer, smaller skins and remembering the poddy-calves which she handfed with a child’s bottle. At the far end of the barn sits 174


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a large wooden tub and a giant copper full of tea-coloured liquid that smells of wattle. There are footsteps behind her and Gotardo appears in the doorway with a candle in hand. Dark shadows under his eyes. ‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he says forlornly. He didn’t want her to know about the flaying. It was a bloody and miserable business. He wanted to have the hides prepared to show her that all was not lost. He tells her about his Uncle Clemente, a shoemaker back in his village. As a boy Gotardo would spend hours in the workshop watching his uncle cutting leather and stitching it together over the wooden shoes. It is not what he would have chosen for himself but God has chosen for him. There are, after all, many shoes to be made from the hides of fifty beasts. For a time he will become a shoemaker. He need only buy the tools. Jemma is relieved to see a fl icker of the old Gotardo. A shoemaker. So be it. At least they will have something to live on. Yet she knows that in his eyes, his fate has diminished him; that in losing his herd he has lost a part of himself. He carries himself stiffly, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of another blow. ‘It will be difficult for a time,’ he is saying. ‘But there is no need to worry. The Volettas are not afraid of hard work and we are lucky to have good friends.’ He forces a smile and holds the candlestick up to his wife’s face. ‘You are not ashamed of me?’ he whispers. Jemma blinks away tears. It is she who ought to be ashamed. ‘Never, ever think that.’

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24 As Jemma and the child pass the racecourse and the bocce grounds near the lake, Lucy tugs at her mother’s hand. She has spied Uncle Battista and Uncle Aquilino among the men cheering the progress of a shiny gum root bowl rolling towards a small white ball. Hearing the cries of their little niece, the uncles throw out their hands, blowing extravagant kisses. To Jemma they merely nod. She returns the curt greeting, picks up her protesting daughter and continues on to the main street, where Gotardo has hung up his shingle two doors down from Celestina’s tearoom. Jemma has begun to dread running into Gotardo’s people. As kind and welcoming as the Serafinis have been, she knows that she is an enigma to them, that she will never really belong. Sometimes she catches them looking at her as if she were one of Mr Darwin’s strange new species that had wandered into their midst. Only with Celestina does she feel accepted for who she is. She is tired of questions about the deferral 176


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of the child’s baptism and solicitous inquiries after Gotardo’s business, which has been dispiritingly slow. Jemma leaves Lucy sitting at Celestina’s counter drinking lime cordial through a wax-paper straw. After two hours in her studio, she returns to Celestina’s and they all go to the post office on their way to Gotardo’s workshop. When Jemma enters, Gotardo barely looks up from the bench where he is repairing the heel of a woman’s boot. ‘Mending,’ he says with disgust. ‘It’s all I seem to do.’ Jemma knows what he is saying. They cannot live on the odd shillings he makes from repairs. All but one round of the Swiss Gold has been sold and a quarter of the hides. ‘Where is the little one?’ ‘With Celestina. They’re coming now. I’ve been finishing a painting. It’s impossible to do anything with her dashing about.’ Lucy now refuses to stay in the studio when Jemma is working and bangs furiously on the door until she is released. ‘And so the painting must come first?’ Jemma fl inches. It is not like Gotardo to confront her in this way, especially on this subject. He must be more dejected than she realised. ‘I have a commission for a portrait,’ she says quietly. ‘It will bring in twenty pounds.’ The bell over the door rings as Lucy bursts in, followed by a beaming Celestina. ‘Have you heard the news?’ Celestina cries. ‘But I thought you did not do portraits!’ Gotardo says to Jemma. ‘You don’t think your wife is so blind to your situation that she would turn such an offer down?’ Celestina demands. ‘She would be a fool to refuse.’ 177


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Gotardo raises his eyebrows. ‘Twenty pounds, eh? Perhaps I should take up painting. More money in it than making shoes. Who will you paint?’ Jemma hopes that the room is dark enough to disguise her hot cheeks. ‘The geologist from the government survey, Mr Byrne. I ran into him just now at the post office. His mother wants his portrait painted for her sixtieth birthday and he wondered if I would oblige.’ Jemma had not seen Nathaniel Byrne since the death of Gotardo’s herd, and if Celestina had not been with her at the post office, she would have politely refused him and gone on her way. But Celestina was so thrilled for her, knowing how much the money was needed, it had been impossible for Jemma to say no. Gotardo walks her to the door, still frowning. ‘Are you sure you are happy to do this? You always said portraits were flattery dressed up as art.’ Jemma wishes Celestina wasn’t there. Gotardo is giving her a way out of the agreement and she would happily seize it. Simply standing next to Mr Byrne in the post office had reminded her how dangerous such an encounter could be. ‘Do you really think she would flatter anyone?’ Celestina laughs, before Jemma can open her mouth. ‘Not if she had the choice. But she is fortunate with Mr Byrne,’ Gotardo admits. ‘His features are pleasant enough. The truth should not offend him.’ Nathaniel Byrne runs his hand through a quiff of tawny hair as he stands at his office window waiting for Mrs Voletta. The arrangement is far from perfect but at least he will have 178


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her company for as long as the portrait takes, and without raising suspicions. The Volettas are in need of the money, so everyone has something to gain. When he sees her approaching the front entrance of the council offices, he goes to meet her in the foyer. ‘The buggy is waiting, Mrs Voletta.’ ‘We are going somewhere? Can’t the drawings be done here, Mr Byrne?’ ‘You mentioned the importance of the setting. As it happens, I’ve done much of my field work at Mount Franklin. Of course, if you are not comfortable with the proposal . . . But I thought you preferred to work outdoors.’ He helps her into the buggy where they sit side by side. ‘You’re not angry with me, are you, Mrs Voletta?’ Nathaniel flashes a nervous smile. ‘I had hoped the arrangement would put you at ease.’ Jemma had been angry but she is finding it hard to sustain. At least she need not feel guilty about the time she spends in his company. It is purely a commercial transaction. She will be firm and professional with him. Once the painting is done they will not continue to meet. As they head for the extinct volcano, Nathaniel Byrne talks of the mountain’s prehistory and the myths that overlay it like layers of fine sediment, his eyes caressing the countryside as he speaks about what lies beneath. Mount Franklin, he says, is a mere babe when compared with the other volcanoes in the district. Only two hundred thousand years old. Its eruption is even recorded in the oral legends of the local natives. Jemma surveys the surrounding grazing land as the buggy judders across the hard, ungiving earth. She knows that 179


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stories hover around Mount Franklin like low-lying cloud. For all the lush grass that grows in the crater, no farmer in the district will graze his cattle there. Miners who once sank a shaft in the crater floor quickly abandoned the site when the ground began to ring hollow. They imagined that at any moment they might break through the earth’s crust and find themselves plummeting to the fiery core. She asks him about the miners’ fear. ‘Could it happen?’ Then immediately regrets the question. ‘A foolish notion, no doubt.’ Nathaniel laughs. ‘The idea has a certain potency.’ After all, he adds, the rock on the floor of the crater is very light. Frothed lava. It would sound hollow. But below that, the volcanic plug has cooled to form solid black rock. There was never any danger of them free-falling to the centre of the earth. It was understandable, though, that they should look for gold there. Like a genie guarding his treasure, Mount Franklin sat above a series of promising but unreachable deep leads. He tells her of the geological ages that have formed the surrounding countryside, of crustal thickening and buried rivers, of uplifting and faulting and anticlinal folds, of the land puffing like a giant blister as magma pushes up from below. Jemma had never given much thought to the earth’s formation or to the restless activity deep within it until she began reading Mr Ruskin. For Ruskin, stones, minerals and rock were the basic matter of great art. Although she had thought it beneath her, her apprenticeship with him began with an exercise in which one was required to draw a stone. If one could rightly capture the roundness of a stone, he 180


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claimed, everything was within one’s reach. Slowly, she had begun to see the importance of these simple lessons and her admiration for him grew. She tells Mr Byrne that she is still battling her way through the many chapters in Mr Ruskin’s Modern Painters concerning the complexities of mountain formation. ‘If you have any questions,’ he says, ‘you know who to ask.’ While Nathaniel Byrne’s eyes are fi xed on the road ahead, Jemma steals quick glances at his profi le. It is so good to be out of her normal routine, thinking new thoughts. She had not realised how low her spirits had sunk, how inward and fretful her thoughts had become. She is glad to leave the town behind, to move through the open countryside under a sapphire sky and forget about domestic chores. To be carefree again. An expansive mood overtakes her. There is real grandeur in the geological opera of which Mr Byrne speaks—the white-hot rock searching for fissures, the mountain ranges erupting through desert plains, the globe cracking open like a giant egg, the oceans appearing and disappearing as the earth consumes and remakes itself. ‘Mr Ruskin says an artist must also be a geologist, if she is to do justice to the landscape she paints.’ Nathaniel laughs. ‘What do you think?’ ‘That I haven’t time to be studying rocks.’ ‘Perfectly understandable. But in combination, what a great artist we would make!’ Without warning, the rutted road throws them together in a violent collision. For all her efforts to remain upright, Jemma is forced to seize his shoulder to steady herself. 181


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Nathaniel swings with the buggy, lingering momentarily against her before settling back in his seat, his lips quivering with the faintest of smiles. Jemma wonders if he can hear her thudding heart. The wind drops away as they descend into the crater, yet there is little sign that they have entered a volcano’s mouth. They might just be following a gentle slope down to a creek. Only when they stop, and Jemma has a chance to look around, does she register the encircling rim. It is the first time she has been here. She steps out, half expecting the earth to be pliable beneath her feet. When he has secured the buggy, Nathaniel stretches out his arms. ‘I am at your disposal. Where do you want me?’ They wander around looking for a suitable spot. Every so often, Mr Byrne kneels and plucks something from the crater floor—volcanic ‘bombs’ from millions of years ago, shards of obsidian, a granite axe-head used by the natives who once inhabited the area. He tells her of the graptolites he found in the Loddon as a boy and of his plans to mount an expedition in search of the inland sea. ‘Laugh, if you wish, Mrs Voletta. I am used to it.’ He was often met by smirks or outright guffaws of derision when he spoke of his lifelong obsession. Since Sturt’s failure to fi nd this interior ocean, it had become a byword for self-delusion. As vain a hope as finding the inland sea. It was now his belief that the sea could be seasonal, that it might flourish in time of great rains and retreat underground when the rivers ran dry. ‘Too elusive a theory for most people’s liking. In the mind of your armchair traveller, of which there are far too many, there is either a sea or there is not.’ 182


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‘You are quite a dreamer, Mr Byrne.’ ‘I prefer to think of it as a scientific hunch.’ Jemma chooses a spot where there are few trees and the earth is almost bare except for a large boulder of granite on which she asks him to sit. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Don’t try to look relaxed; it never works. The best thing you can do is talk. Tell me more about your expedition or whatever comes into your mind.’ Nathaniel flashes her a lazy smile. ‘Whatever comes into my mind, Mrs Voletta? I’m not sure I should tell you that.’ Jemma takes up her charcoal and sketches the outline of the rock. ‘What is it about the sea that so intrigues you? If you had come here in a ship, you might have a different view.’ Nathaniel disagrees. ‘If those who came out here to find gold knew what I knew, they would not be rushing inland in droves, like the lemmings that they are.’ He sees her raised eyebrows. ‘You think I am being too harsh? I have witnessed more folly and heartbreak on these goldfields than I had imagined possible.’ Jemma waits for him to go on. It is the first time she has seen him impassioned and she wants to capture it. But to paint him she must lower her guard, become porous, drink him in through her skin. Must let the tension between them animate her brush. She focuses on his muscular brown arms against the granite, the sharp lines of his jaw, while carefully avoiding the tropical glare of his eyes. There is more gold in the sea, he begins to tell her, than you could ever dig out of the earth. Alluvial gold disturbed by slowmelting glaciers and flushed from ancient rivers; auriferous 183


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sands from coastal cliffs liberated by ocean waves. More gold than a thousand shipwrecked galleons bearing caskets of coin and candelabra and other plundered treasures. He has often wondered what might have happened if someone had told all those men and women sailing across the world in search of their fortune that the stuff of their dreams was suspended in the waves washing over the deck. That if they strained their eyes towards the coast of Africa they might see dark figures crouched on its shores sifting sand through their calabash, a day’s work yielding placers worth half a guinea or maybe nothing at all. That as they sailed across the Indian Ocean, a great desert lay to their north, a home—it was said—to giant ants which heaped up tiny hills of sand in which gold dust could be found. In ancient times, the Indians would ride in on their camels and raid the golden hills while the ants were sheltering underground during the heat of the day. If the Indians were too slow fi lling their sacks, the ants would set upon them and devour them all. ‘You have a gift for storytelling, Mr Byrne. But do you think such stories would have made them pause?’ ‘Probably not. The power that gold has over men’s minds is not something I can fathom. I have many weaknesses but gold is not one of them.’ Jemma does not doubt it. He is too coolly self-sufficient to rely on chance or good fortune. And too contrary to follow the mob. It does not surprise her that he would rather pursue water in the desert than mine the gold beneath his feet. ‘I used to think I was immune to the fever,’ Jemma confesses. But with the loss of Gotardo’s herd, she is once again reminded that no matter how secure life seems, 184


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nothing is certain. She learned the hard way when her father died how quickly everything one took for granted could be snatched away. Now she understood why people dreamed of striking it rich. Dreams were free and anyone could have them. It didn’t matter who you were. The more she worried about money, the more she fantasised about sudden good fortune. Even as she weeded the rose garden she found herself turning over pieces of rock to rub off the dirt, or imagining flecks of gold amongst the carrots and potatoes in the vegetable patch. Nathaniel leaves his position by the rock and approaches her. ‘We do not know ourselves as well as we think.’ Jemma looks up from her canvas and their eyes collide. ‘I have a confession to make, Mrs Voletta. My mother didn’t ask for my portrait. I thought it a clever way to contrive your company but I have been caught out by my own cleverness. My feelings are more powerful than I understood.’ She inhales sharply. He has ambushed her. She wasn’t prepared for this. In a brittle voice Jemma hardly recognises, she says, ‘One of your weaknesses, Mr Byrne?’ ‘It’s true I thought myself invulnerable to this kind of emotion. An arrogant assumption. I was wrong. Very wrong.’ He had thought he could manage their encounters. That he could enjoy the pleasure of her company while maintaining the necessary distance. But he can’t. And it has made him reckless. He is in the grip of something over which he has no control. Nathaniel takes the charcoal from her fingers. ‘We are not bound by ordinary laws, Jemma. We both know it. This is something we cannot ignore.’ 185


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It is the first time he has dared address her so intimately. Jemma does not trust herself to look at him or call him by name. She can feel herself beginning to shake, whether with anger or desire she can hardly tell. ‘I should not have come here with you. This is madness. You know I care nothing for what the gossips might say, but I do care for my husband and child. My feelings cannot be indulged.’ ‘At least tell me you feel as I do.’ ‘It would only torment us both.’ ‘What am I supposed to make of that? That you have toyed with me and feel nothing at all?’ Jemma clings to her anger. It is her only defence against the flood of feelings he has unleashed. If she has to be harsh, so be it. ‘We have toyed with each other, Mr Byrne, and now we are paying the price. Let us go back and not speak of it.’ ‘You will finish the portrait?’ ‘Another sitting is not necessary. If the agreement still stands, I will deliver it to you next week. After that, we must not see each other again.’

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25 Gotardo closes his workshop early and ambles up the street to the tearoom. Lucy spies him coming through the door and rushes to greet him, crying ‘PapaPapaPapa!’ with such fierce joy that he forgets about the lack of customers and the indignity of mending old boots, and wraps his arms about her, pressing his nose into her soft, sweet-smelling curls. No one in the world greets him with such rapture, no one adores him as she does. He is still amazed when he looks at her, that he could have shared in her creation: this glorious, rosycheeked child with the future swimming in her large brown eyes. Lucy puts her plump little hand in his large calloused one and leads him back to the door, chanting ‘Home, Papa, home’ while waving blithely to Celestina. With the inducement of a lollipop, she is persuaded to climb into the perambulator and they trundle slowly back to the empty farm. The late-afternoon shadows fall across their path and as Gotardo studies his daughter he finds 187


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himself contemplating the business of portrait painting, of sitting and absorbing another person for hours on end. The brazen intimacy of it. ‘Out, out!’ Lucy cries at the sight of the house. Gotardo builds a fire in the corner of the living room that he calls the library (even though there are only two shelves containing books) and sprawls on the floor with Lucy. They play with a small wooden frog on wheels attached to a string which he made for her first Christmas. He is conscious of a nagging thought left dangling in the back of his mind that he had meant to pursue, something he had been pondering on the way home. But he is too distracted by his daughter to retrace his thoughts. Her attention has wandered to a volume on the bottom shelf and Gotardo must act quickly to save it from her eager hands. He and Jemma have lost the habit of reading to each other in the evenings. Even before Lucy was born, their evening performances had become less and less frequent. He cannot say why this happened, whether it was the demands of work or that their enthusiasm dwindled as the ritual lost its charm. Jemma is spending more time in her studio in the evenings once Lucy is settled for the night, and when his wife comes to bed she is so tired she is only interested in sleep. Before his cows died, he, too, was often exhausted—a good kind of exhaustion—after a long day’s work milking and tending to the animals and making butter and cheese. But he does not sleep well now, does not feel he has earned it. When he cannot sleep, he wraps himself in a blanket and reads Plato’s Death of Socrates in this corner. It has inspired him to ponder what it means to live with dignity, not to be afraid to speak 188


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the truth. Jemma, who is more inclined to be outspoken, thinks he is too accommodating, too reluctant to make a fuss and stand up for himself. ‘Too accommodating?’ he rehearses in his defence. ‘I would have thought you are lucky I am!’ He is gazing into the flames when he realises what Lucy is up to. He had thought she was tearing up the newspaper left over from making the fire. All around her, like feathers freshly plucked from a goose, are the pages of Plato. Lucy laughs at her father’s sudden exclamation, thinking it is all a game. Seeing him dive for the pages, she fl ings her arms through them, sending them exploding into the air and then rolls amongst them. Normally, her giggles evaporate his anger, but in a flash of inexplicable fury, he yanks her onto his knee. Lucy’s squeals turn to howls of dismay as he slaps the tender backs of her thighs. Her screwed-up face turns to accuse him. Gotardo tells himself she must learn her lesson but he lacks the necessary conviction. What, after all, does the book really matter? It is not a sacred, irreplaceable object. He can always buy or borrow another. He tries to soothe her but she won’t be consoled and runs sobbing to her mother as soon as Jemma, who has been working in the studio, sets foot in the house. Jemma bends to hug her sobbing daughter who is clutching at her knees. She is standing in the kitchen but part of her is still at Mount Franklin. She and Nathaniel did not speak for the whole trip back. She watched the volcanic hills go by and sat with her back erect, making sure their bodies did not touch. When they reached the town, he took her hand to help her down from the buggy. 189


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‘This is torture, Jemma,’ he whispered. She pretended not to hear. She needed all her strength to remain composed. She had to face her family. She could not allow herself to think about anything else. Now, as she presses Lucy’s little body to her, smells the sweetness of her skin, she says to herself, ‘This is what matters. This little creature.’ She looks across at Gotardo’s sad face. ‘And this man.’ ‘I lost my temper,’ Gotardo sighs. He holds up the remains of Plato. Jemma can imagine how it happened, how he could have been distracted. He has had so much to bear of late, and although she has tried to help him, she cannot deny that her mind has been elsewhere. ‘Oh, Lucy! Poor Papa’s book!’ The girl’s face crumples, she begins howling again. Jemma picks her daughter up and motions to Gotardo to join them. ‘A big hug will make it all better.’ It’s their ritual, the big hug that soothes all tears. Gotardo closes his arms around them both and they stand like that, quietly shushing, until Lucy’s crying subsides. Jemma smiles at Gotardo then has to look away, afraid he will read her eyes. But it is good to have his arms around her and to know that her tenderness for him endures. Such is his strength and solidity that perhaps he might even be able to protect her from herself. For the next week, Jemma spends every spare moment in the studio working on the portrait, painting by the light of the Rochester lamp late into the evening. She finishes the 190


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portrait but cannot bring herself to deliver it. The painting is the only part of him that she has any claim to and she wants to hold on to it for as long as she can. Whenever Gotardo asks about it, she tells him it is not yet ready for viewing. She is afraid of what he will see in it. Afraid that everything she has tried to deny will burst out of the canvas and announce itself to the world. Jemma studies the painting on the easel. She can barely remember applying the paint. Only tingling moments here and there when she could feel his skin beneath her fingers as her brush stroked his body into being. And yet there he is, lounging against the granite rock, his head thrown slightly back as if beckoning her to him, a smile playing about his lips. The sharp line of his bold sideburns encroaching on his polished cheeks, as if he had materialised of his own accord. She knows what he will think when he sees the portrait, no matter what she tells him. He will demand that she confess to what her brush has disclosed.

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26 Gotardo is down in the cellar when he hears the knock at the door. He ought to be at the shop but has been slow to get moving this morning. Now it looks as though he is going to be further delayed. He climbs up the ladder until his head rises above the floor line from where, in the sudden brightness, he makes out a figure in a policeman’s uniform standing in the kitchen doorway. Although he has seen Marcus O’Brien around the town they have never spoken. He closes the trapdoor behind him, sucking his breath hard between his teeth. As he straightens up a slight twinge in his back makes him wince. ‘My wife is not here, Sergeant. And if she were, she would not want to see you.’ ‘Actually,’ O’Brien drawls, ‘I haven’t come to see your wife, Mr Voletta. May I come in?’ Gotardo would like to forbid him from stepping across the threshold, would like to slam the door in his face. But much 192


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as he fears what Sergeant O’Brien might be up to he is also curious. He bows his head and gestures reluctantly for O’Brien to enter the kitchen, pulling out one of the hardwood kitchen chairs. He is damned if he is going to invite the man into his living room. He only hopes that Jemma doesn’t decide to leave her studio in search of something to drink or eat. They sit down opposite one another, their hands resting on the kitchen table. ‘I trust your wife is not here,’ O’Brien begins. Gotardo’s eyes narrow. He takes in O’Brien’s long face and closely cropped red hair. Regardless of what Jemma has told him, Gotardo has observed enough of the man in public to dislike him. Men who swagger are not to be trusted. With studied gravity, O’Brien says, ‘If I may ask, do you know where she is?’ ‘I do not see how it is any of your business.’ O’Brien leans forward on his elbows, staring hard at Gotardo. ‘There are times when a policeman must ask difficult questions.’ Gotardo looks away and says nothing. It is all he can do not to pick the man up by the collar and throw him out the door. Except that he knows that O’Brien is quick with his fists and would probably knock him flat. The silence is heavy between them. Laddie has started barking at something, charging up and down the fence line as he used to do in anticipation of bringing in the herd. Gotardo imagines he can hear the cows’ bells softly chiming as they wander the top paddock. As if he can no longer hold back, O’Brien bursts out, ‘Do you realise that she spends her time with another man? That 193


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they have assignations out in the bush?’ O’Brien is quivering with rage. He wipes his mouth with his handkerchief and sits back in the chair, waiting for Gotardo’s response. Gotardo can’t help smiling. ‘Of course I know. She is painting Mr Byrne’s portrait. It’s a commission. I’m looking forward to seeing it. You know, Sergeant O’Brien, she doesn’t like being watched when she works.’ Gotardo is almost enjoying himself now. Jemma had told him she suspected that O’Brien was following her, and that once when she was out painting she caught sight of him galloping off through the bush. Gotardo had never been easy about her wandering the bush alone and was relieved that she would have Mr Byrne’s company while the portrait was being done. There has been talk of it being improper but he suspects there will always be talk of one kind or another about Jemma: the way she dresses, the way she used to drag the perambulator around with her while on excursions to find places to paint, the way she refuses to accompany him to mass. No matter what Jemma does, people talk. He knew from the beginning that he would have to accept her peculiarities. As difficult as things have been for them lately, he does not doubt he can trust her, even if he doesn’t understand what is going on in her mind. He thinks of yesterday evening, as he approached the front gate after work, the fire blazing inside, the living room dancing with light. In the armchair by the hearth, a picture of maternal devotion, the very image before which he has crossed himself since his earliest days, was Jemma with Lucy: Madonna and Child. Deeply moved, he had paused on the veranda by the window and studied the flushed cheeks of his 194


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wife. She was smiling to herself, entranced by the fire, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking. Then, when he pushed open the door, her mood seemed to change. She greeted him with an air of distraction and busied herself with making the meal. Marcus O’Brien scowls and stands up. This fool, he thinks, has no idea; seems to think his wife is an angel. He always knew this peasant-turned-cobbler wasn’t a threat; that it wouldn’t last. But Nathaniel Byrne is another matter. He was right, too, about Jemma, about her loose ways. He had only spoken the truth when he told her so. He knew her better than anyone else and in time she would recognise this. One way or another, the truth would come out, he would make sure of that. Gotardo is accompanying Sergeant O’Brien down the gravel path to the front gate, relieved to be seeing him off, when—with exquisitely bad timing—Jemma emerges from the studio. She spies Gotardo across the garden and calls out that she has something to show him. The portrait is finished. She has decided that if she tries to keep it from him, she will only arouse his suspicions. The painting is good and nothing to be ashamed of. She tells herself her fears are baseless. It is a picture of a man sitting on a large rock. How could it possibly reveal her feelings? Jemma glides across the lawn, realising too late that Gotardo is not alone, that Marcus O’Brien is with him. They exchange tight smiles and greetings as Jemma’s eyes dart between her husband and O’Brien, trying to gauge what O’Brien has told him. ‘Sergeant O’Brien is just leaving,’ Gotardo explains. 195


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‘Your husband didn’t tell me you were here, Mrs Voletta. Very remiss of him, don’t you think? Nothing would give me more pleasure than to see what you’re working on.’ Jemma and Gotardo stare at one another helplessly. Such is the authority O’Brien wields, they feel they have no choice. Jemma turns back towards her studio and the two men follow her into the high-ceilinged room, its exposed rafters stacked with canvases. On a long bench are tubes and pots of paint, jars with many different-sized brushes, and large sheets of paper covered in sketches. O’Brien looks around with interest. Momentarily he drops his taunting tone, becomes his old boyish self as he remarks that the room is much larger than her studio in East Melbourne. As if disarmed by the smell of linseed oil and the sights that take him back to those days of hope, his eyes follow Jemma with naked longing as she walks across to the easel in the far corner and turns it around to face them. The two men stare at the painting in silence. It is so quiet Jemma can hear them breathing. She is most conscious of O’Brien’s nasally inhalations, which sped up as soon as he laid eyes on the painting. His eyes rake the canvas, taking in every nuance, every tender brushstroke, his mouth pressed down in a bitter smirk. Gotardo’s response is one of unease, as if he is trying to convince himself that there is nothing to be troubled by. He looks at the portrait then glances away, searching distractedly for something in his trouser pockets, then looks again. Jemma cannot bear watching either of them, or the painting. She has never felt so exposed and only has herself to blame. She cannot believe she has allowed this to happen. She 196


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ought to have known that one cannot paint a portrait without betraying oneself in one way or another. Either betraying oneself by pandering to the sitter’s vanity, or betraying one’s feelings for the sitter—whether they be positive or not. This was why she had always sworn to herself that she would not paint portraits. They were inherently unsatisfying—and sometimes downright dangerous—for all involved. She didn’t mind figures in a landscape. They were different, were all about mood, and the relationship between man and nature. But try fi xing a man to a canvas, try pinning him down like an insect, and you were asking for trouble. Eventually, Gotardo clears his throat and dutifully declares it an excellent likeness. ‘So it is,’ O’Brien says abruptly, turning his back on the painting. He glances at Gotardo—‘If you needed any more proof ...’—and shrugs. Without taking his leave, he strides out the door.

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27 The day begins windless and dreamy, no hint of what is to come. Near the boundary of Rosemount Station, five miles from the town, they find a shady gully known for its wild mushrooms. Although it is early autumn, the ground is still parched after a long, dry summer, the creek barely a trickle, and there are no mushrooms to be found. Undeterred, Lucy fossicks among the leaves, bark and debris, occasionally seizing upon a rock or small plant with the glee of a miner who has struck it rich. She places the various objects on the corner of the rug on which her parents are lying and immediately races off in search of more. Jemma watches the busy figure of her daughter, longing to close her eyes and enjoy the warmth of the fi ltered sunlight. But she must be ready at any moment to leap up to stop the child from straying or doing herself harm. Under her breath, Lucy is singing a song to herself that seems to be comprised of only one word. Mama, mama, mama, mama. Mama, mama, mama, ma. 198


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Jemma smiles, bathing in the sound. Lying next to her, Gotardo is so still she assumes he must be sleeping until he reaches across the rug and takes her hand. He has said nothing about the portrait since he viewed it with Marcus O’Brien a week ago. That afternoon, Jemma had wrapped it up and taken it to the offices of the Geological Survey, where she had presented it to Nathaniel Byrne, telling him not to open it until she was gone. If he was not pleased with it, she told him, she would return his twenty pounds. They were in a public place, so no intimate conversation was possible—which was as Jemma had wanted it. He had assured her, though, that he would respond. As yet she has heard nothing from him. She tells herself that it is for the best but his silence hurts. Twice a day she checks for the mail, so consumed by thoughts of him that she is beginning to understand what drives O’Brien in his pursuit of her. Gotardo gives her hand another squeeze and Jemma dutifully returns the pressure of his grip. Encouraged, Gotardo props himself on one elbow and leans across to kiss her. Jemma smiles but gently pushes him back. ‘Wait till Lucy is asleep.’ Lucy has become her refuge and her escape from marital demands. No matter how hard she tries to curb them, her thoughts stray wildly even as she lies holding her husband’s hand. Lost in their own worlds, the two adults pay no attention to the dry crackling of the undergrowth beneath Lucy’s feet. ‘I want you to tell me something,’ Gotardo says, staring up at the sky where a curiously large number of birds are wheeling. Jemma tenses and waits. She has been anticipating this moment all week. He is going to ask about Nathaniel Byrne. 199


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‘Why is it that you no longer smile at me?’ The question surprises her. ‘Don’t I?’ She looks at him and makes herself smile, then grows serious again. ‘Is that all I get?’ he cries with mock indignation. ‘Your husband? I remember when I would raise an eyebrow and my beautiful wife would laugh out loud. Am I so hard to be happy with?’ Jemma can feel her heart sitting like a lump of iron in her chest. She wishes she were free to weep. Instead, she keeps her eyes fi xed on the sky. She has done nothing to betray him and yet feels as if she has committed a host of crimes. Her crime being that she cannot love him enough—not in the way that will transform her into the wife he deserves. Her crime being her passion for another man. Her crime being that as an artist she lacks the devotion required of a wife. It frightens her that she might never be able to right these wrongs, that she will have to live with this guilt and regret for the rest of her life. ‘Oh Gotardo. It’s not you.’ Afraid he might pursue this point, she quickly adds, ‘Let’s have something to eat.’ Jemma sits up and begins taking the food from the picnic basket and spreading it out on the rug, remembering the picnic that she sketched over three years ago; the paintings of which—the best work she has ever done—are now gathering dust in her studio. ‘Come on, my darling,’ she calls to Lucy. ‘It’s time for lunch.’ After the meal they are even more drowsy than before. Neither Jemma nor Gotardo have been sleeping well lately. Jemma settles Lucy on a pillow but has no intention of dozing 200


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off. She lies with her daughter’s arm flung across her chest, telling herself she will just close her eyes to give them a rest but, before she knows it, they are all asleep on the rug. Something wakes her. A gust of wind sways the treetops and the whole world seems to tilt on its axis, the sky reeling above them now sepia-tinged. The light gone strange. She sniffs the air and sits up, alarmed. ‘Can you smell it?’ Gotardo scrambles to the top of the hill and cannot believe what he sees. About two miles off, a wall of livid orange flame fringed with great puffs of grey is racing down the hillsides and the wind, from which they have been sheltered in the gully, is driving the blaze towards them. He follows the line of the fire only to see another front sweeping around their backs. Their horse, tethered to a tree at the top of the gully near the cart, has started to whinny and tug at the rope, trying to break free. The wind is so gusty and changeable that Gotardo cannot tell in which direction they should go, the tantalising sound of water rippling through the leaves above their heads. Gotardo hurtles back down the slope to tell Jemma. They decide to head across the paddocks to Jack Maddick’s homestead, hoping that the partially cleared land will act as a break to slow the fire down. Jemma presses Lucy to her chest to shield her from the acrid air. Gotardo hardly notices the wire tearing at his skin as he struggles to unknot it from the post and make an opening in Jack Maddick’s new fence. He leads the horse and cart through. With each smoke-fi lled gust, the mare grows more agitated, her flanks moist with sweat. It takes all Gotardo’s 201


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skill to keep her under control. When Lucy begins to gag on the smoke, to whimper and cough, Jemma is seized with panic. How could she have allowed this to happen, to have put their girl in such danger? Not far behind them the fire roars and whooshes and sets off sudden explosions in the eucalypts that spew fireworks into the sky. Burning strips of candle bark and stringy-bark fizz through the air like comets as the scalding heat presses in. Unable to get their bearings, Gotardo and Jemma begin to argue, to scream at one another about which way they should go. The land should be opening up but instead the undergrowth is thickening and the bush grows more dense. The mare rears up on her hind legs as though the ground were too hot to bear. A woman has appeared on the path in front of them and is almost under her hooves. With words they can’t understand, she calms the terrified horse. She is a native dressed in the garb of a maid, her dark curly hair now escaping from beneath her cap, which is speckled with ash from the sky. They learn that she works at the homestead and was returning from an errand to their elderly neighbour when she found her path blocked by the flames. She tells them they are heading in the wrong direction, that if they continue this way they are sure to be overwhelmed by the smoke, even before the fire finishes them off. She tells them they will have to leave the cart and the horse and directs them towards another gully. There is a waterfall, behind which they can hide. They scramble, slide and cling to small shrubs as they descend, drawn by the sweet sound of falling water, the air growing fresher, offering respite from the suffocating smoke and heat. At the bottom, the woman urges them to abandon 202


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their heavy outer garments and enter the pool, pointing to a cave that can be glimpsed behind the liquid veil that almost seems to hang like a foamy length of tulle from the ledge twenty foot above. It is lucky, she tells them, there is not the torrent there would have been in winter. They will have to wade right through it to reach the cave. Without a word, she unfastens the hooks at the back of her skirt and gestures to Jemma to pass her the child. Making a tent over their heads with her skirt, she moves swiftly through the wall of water and disappears, as if into another world. Jemma and Gotardo quickly plunge after her and find themselves at the mouth of a cool, shallow cave where there is an unexpected air of stillness. Bemused by their dripping hair, Lucy looks from face to face with a gleeful grin, as if it were all a wonderful game. Although they are partly protected by the falling water, there is still the danger of smoke. From behind their liquid curtain they can see the hellish, pulsing haze of the fire approaching the gully, refracted by the falling water. The bulk of the cave is relatively shallow but the woman, whom they have discovered is called Harriet Farmer, knows of a small tunnel that runs deep into the hillside. On their hands and knees they crawl into this crevice, breathing the dank subterranean air as the fire eats up the oxygen outside and blackens the earth. The roar of it passing over them is like that of some ravenous mythical beast. Huddled together, they lie on the mossy rocks and wait. When the sound dies away and it seems safe to emerge, they creep out into the open to find the landscape utterly changed.

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28 Gotardo will later come to think of it as the last supper. There are Celestina and Carlo and their two children, Guilia and Cesare; there are Marina and Pliny and their four children, Maurizio, Anna, Giacomo and Rosa; there are Gotardo’s brothers, Battista and Aquilino. Dour big-whiskered beards next to generous mouths and tight chignons next to softcheeked cherubs with curls and long wavy locks next to Roman noses and trimmed moustaches. Dark-haired, strongboned, olive-skinned. Gotardo’s own features reflected back at him in multiple forms. And even Jemma looking happy and more at ease than she has been for months. He will remember them at this moment, all of them sitting around the table in the lamplight, making horrified exclamations; their expressions magnified by the shadows as he and Jemma tell and retell their story so vividly that everyone’s eyes sting with the smoke. Pliny raises his glass. ‘To life!’ 204


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To life! everyone cheers. When the Volettas first arrived that evening and Lucy saw the fire in the hearth, she screamed until Marina put the screen in front of the flames. Apart from this understandable alarm at the sight of a fire and a slight throat irritation from the smoke, she appears unscathed. In fact, after the pool and the waterfall, she has decided she likes being bathed, whereas once it was an ordeal. Before leaving for the Serafinis, Jemma and Gotardo performed the ritual together as they have done almost every day since her birth. As if in prayer, the two parents knelt either side of the tub and lowered the naked child into the water, watching the pantomime of her face as the water and suds dripped from her skin. They sang the songs they had made up for her, nonsense rhymes set to old tunes and songs dredged up from their childhoods, each of them vying for Lucy’s attention. Although it is two days since the fire, they still found black smudges of ash inside the shell of her ear and bits of moss under her nails. Jemma took a flannel and raised it above Lucy’s head, squeezing drops of water onto her hair. This daily baptism meant more to her than anything that could happen in a church. But after the scare of the fire, Jemma has given in to Gotardo’s pleas. Lucy Rose Voletta will be baptised the coming Sunday. Before darkness falls, the children play ‘bushrangers and bobbies’ outside in the garden. Occasionally they flash by one of the windows, Lucy trailing behind, crying, ‘Stop, thief!’ As the night wears on, the children fall asleep in front of the fire. Jemma watches the yellow light glancing across their bodies, the unthreatening warmth of the domesticated flames as different from a bushfire as a lizard might be from a dragon. 205


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The adults raise a glass to Harriet Farmer and rowdily debate how best to reward the native woman who saved the Volettas from certain death. It strikes Jemma that she has not, since the fi re two days ago, given a thought to Nathaniel Byrne. There seems no room in her mind for him now—it is as if all her pent-up desire has been evaporated by the fire’s great heat. They have brushed with death and come through, and everything is different from before. This trial by fire has changed her. She thinks she is beginning to understand what contentment might mean: simply being satisfied with what one has. She looks around the table and even feels warmly towards Battista and Aquilino who, this evening—for the first time since she has known them—seem genuinely pleased to see her. And she is truly happy to be one of them. She finishes her glass of wine and holds it out to Pliny for another, floating pleasantly amid the talk, happy in her skin and finally at home. At midnight, they make their way back to the house down the muddy track that links the two properties, Jemma carrying Lucy wrapped up in a blanket, her curly head resting on her mother’s shoulder, her rosebud lips occasionally pursing as she snuffles in her sleep. Gotardo leads the way with a lantern. On the branch of a eucalypt, a pair of round, golden eyes watches their passage. An owl hoots and swoops off into the darkness. Gotardo stops, stares out over the paddocks, and Jemma knows what he is thinking. How empty they look. She comes up behind him, breathing white vapour into his ear. The cows will come home, she smiles. It is a little joke of theirs, a phrase to keep his spirits up when he despairs that he will be a bootmaker for the rest of his life. 206


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‘Look!’ Gotardo suddenly cries, pointing down towards the Stony Creek basin where the fire at the Grand Mystery Co. is still burning. It surprises him that he should warm to the sight of it fl ickering out there in darkness after what they have been through. But there is a mystery in fire that goes beyond fear, especially a fire such as this. He stands with his hands in his pockets, marvelling at the sight of it until Jemma hurries him along. She does not want Lucy to catch a chill. Once inside, she takes the sleeping child upstairs to her cot at the foot of their bed. Jemma tucks her in, pulls another blanket up to her chin, kisses her daughter’s warm skin and whispers goodnight. Husband and wife sleep soundly and, if they dream, their dreams will be buried too deeply by the rubble of their former lives ever to be excavated. Jemma is woken by the silence of the room. Although it is after dawn, Lucy has not stirred as she usually does. Jemma lies listening for her daughter’s breath beneath the morning warble of magpies and chatter of other birds. She throws back the covers and hurries to the cot. She leans over the railing, then stops. Wills herself back into sleep, back into whatever dreams she was dreaming while Lucy still breathed, and even further back to when Lucy lay curled safe in her belly, back into a time that is gone. Lucy’s lips are blue. As Jemma lifts her from the cot she knows. Instead of the familiar soft, snuggling body of her daughter, she holds in her arms the rigid form of a porcelain doll.

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29 Even before the coroner’s report raises questions about the cause of death, the rumours have spread like wildfire. The fuel was laid down long ago and catches so readily that soon a conflagration is raging and nothing can stop it. Since Gotardo burst into her shop with his unbearable news, Celestina has been the guard at the door. She has done her best to look after and shield them—has cooked their meals, fended off unwanted visitors, dealt with the undertakers. But when Sergeant O’Brien arrives, she knows she cannot turn him away. He tells her he has already spoken to Pliny and Marina, and to Battista and Aquilino, about the night before the death. He asks Celestina for her version of events and then says he must speak to Jemma and Gotardo. Celestina protests, demands to know why an investigation is needed when the child clearly died from natural causes, no doubt from some complication brought on by the fire. It is tragedy enough without searching for someone to blame. 208


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Sergeant O’Brien stands in the kitchen, his arms folded across his chest. Fate moves in mysterious ways, he is thinking, and it has finally delivered him the upper hand. Distasteful as the coming events will be, they are a necessary cleansing. Not so much a restoring of order as an ushering in of a new one. He informs her that the autopsy showed no reason for sudden death. The lungs and heart were in good condition; there was no sign of illness or irritation from the smoke. For reasons unknown, the child stopped breathing. It is his responsibility to decide what evidence there is of human agency in her death. ‘Human agency! What kind of language is this?’ Why couldn’t he just say what he meant? That either Gotardo or Jemma or both of them murdered their own child. ‘Asphyxiation looks the most likely cause,’ O’Brien says. ‘I would like to speak to Mr Voletta fi rst, and then his wife.’ Celestina does not move from the kitchen. She knows about O’Brien’s feelings for Jemma and she is afraid. ‘They have suffered enough, Sergeant O’Brien. They have lost their daughter. Their adored little girl.’ A spasm in her throat chokes off the words. ‘Please, leave them be.’ ‘I am running out of patience, Mrs Manotti. Infanticide is more common than you might think. It is my unpleasant duty to investigate such matters. Do not obstruct me or there will be consequences.’ Infanticide. Celestina goes cold. There was a sensational case recently in all the papers. O’Brien knows he only has to mention the word ‘infanticide’ and this incident will spring to everyone’s minds. A woman who killed her two children because her lover was jealous and wanted them out of the way. 209


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The more common cases were those of young, unmarried women who hid their pregnancies and slipped away to give birth alone, and then, for want of support and fear of censure, did away with the child. Celestina has no doubt that the policeman is enjoying his power—and that he has made up his mind what to do with it. What appals her most is that she can do nothing to stop him. She goes to fetch Gotardo. A few moments later, he appears in the kitchen doorway like a ghost, his face ragged with stubble. He sits down and stares blankly at Sergeant O’Brien while Celestina hovers in the background. The interview is brief, almost perfunctory. Then Gotardo is free to return to his weeping relatives in the living room. Celestina would dearly love to go and weep with them, but for Jemma’s sake she cannot. The mourners cannot understand why Jemma refuses to join them, why she doesn’t want to share her sorrow. Why she remains dry-eyed. Why she doesn’t wear black. Even Pliny and Marina, who know and love her, can’t help wondering about her. They think that there is something wrong with a mother who does not cry for her child. And Celestina herself must fight the demons of doubt, the memories of Jemma’s reluctance when she learned she was pregnant, the hints that she would put an end to it if she could. Celestina picks up a saucepan and crashes it down on the kitchen table like a magistrate’s gavel, as if to call order in her mind. How can she entertain such thoughts when she knows how much Jemma loved that child? What hope is there, Celestina wonders, when Jemma’s family think and talk this way? She knows what other people 210


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in the town are saying. Word has gone around that Jemma was having an affair with Nathaniel Byrne. Celestina had heard that one before. Now the story has become more elaborate, more absurd. They are saying that she took her husband and child into the bush on the day of the fire with the intention of killing them both and hiding them there, but that the bushfire and Harriet Farmer foiled her plans. And they haven’t forgotten how she sketched that child who nearly fell down a mine shaft. A woman callous enough to do that could surely kill her own child. This is what people are saying. It shocks her what people will believe. What depths of malice and mean-mindedness tragedy draws out of them. How eager they are to imagine the worst. And yet, like anyone, she knows the impulse too well. Celestina tells O’Brien that Jemma refuses to leave the studio where she has been since Lucy’s body was taken away. O’Brien shrugs. ‘That is easily solved.’ Even though he says he knows the way, Celestina insists on leading him to the studio. She lingers as long as she can until O’Brien indicates that she must go. As she is walking back to the house she hears him knock at the door and say, almost tenderly, ‘It is me, Jemma. Can I come in?’ Jemma cannot sleep, her thoughts burn like hot coals. There have been moments during the night when she has been dreaming with her eyes open; hallucinating a small, burnt form in foetal position lying cupped in her palms. It looked vaguely human but also like a monstrous black broad bean. The thought came to her that, if she planted it, it might shoot 211


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and begin to stretch skyward like Jack’s beanstalk—as in the tale she had been reading to Lucy just the other day—and that she could climb the beanstalk and find Lucy in some fairytale kingdom in the clouds. Perhaps she really is asleep. If only she were. If only she could wake up. She gets up off the hard, flagstone floor of the studio where she has been lying and goes to the windows overlooking Wombat Hill forest, her mind now painfully sharp. It is early morning, the stars are still out. She stands in her white nightgown as the day slowly dawns like a photograph in solution, developing in front of her eyes. Out of a dark mass, the individual trunks of trees; from dense clumps, the sickleshaped leaves. On the dew-carpeted ground, each blade of grass. She stands there so long she begins to sway and has to find a chair before she falls down. She had expected it to stay night forever, for how could the world go on as before? And yet another day has begun, the sun rising into the sky, the birds singing, people stirring. How can she possibly endure each new morning when her little girl did not wake? The door opens and a man calls out her name. She leaps up, angry and startled, expecting O’Brien again. Nathaniel Byrne was not prepared for this. Jemma in her nightgown, eyes sunken and hair hanging loose. He approaches her and takes her hands. Hardly dares speak. ‘Jemma,’ he whispers. She stares at him. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Forgive me. But do you know what O’Brien is up to?’ Nathaniel tells her what he has learned. The sergeant is planning to arrest her for the murder of her child. Jemma thinks of the offer O’Brien made her yesterday. He 212


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would not pursue charges against her if she agreed to leave her husband, after a decent interval, and marry him. The pure, utter madness of it. He had spoken quietly and firmly, as if he were simply doing his duty. As if he were being perfectly rational. As if it were an option that she would seriously consider. And she remembered, once again, how he swore to her that he would never give up. She had thought of going to his senior officer at the station, who seemed an honest man. But what chance was there that he would believe her? O’Brien would deny it, would accuse her of being deranged, of trying to deflect the blame from herself. ‘I know, Nathaniel.’ Without thinking, he reaches his arms out to her. It is the first time she has ever called him Nathaniel, although she does not even seem aware of it. He longs to hold and comfort her, to erase her pain. ‘I can take you somewhere safe, Jemma. Somewhere O’Brien won’t find you.’ Jemma looks at him through fallen strands of hair. ‘And have everyone believe that I killed my child?’ ‘If he can’t have you, he will see you swing!’ Jemma does not believe O’Brien wants her dead. He wants her to be his. If she were in prison, she would be in his power; he would still have hope. She is not afraid of O’Brien. When Lucy was born, Jemma discovered the real meaning of fear; the fear of losing that which is more precious than your own life. No, she is not afraid of O’Brien. The fear that overwhelms her is of a different order. It concerns the events of the following afternoon. The little coffin, the freshly dug grave. 213


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Nathaniel waits for her to reply. ‘Jemma?’ She shakes her head. ‘Think about it, please. I will come back tomorrow,’ he says. ‘There isn’t much time.’

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30 The rain begins the following night and continues into the morning. Woken by the sound of it pelting the iron roof, Jemma throws open the studio door and walks out into the downpour. She follows the gravel path that loops around the garden, past the vegetable patch and the grapevines, past the milking shed and the pergola. The rain soaks through her blouse and skirt and flows down her back and fi lls her shoes. She walks past the orchard and then she sees it before she has time to retreat—the little pit of heaped sand buttressed on all sides by thick planks of red gum. Inside the sandpit is a tiny tin bucket and spade. The bucket is bubbling and overflowing with water as if it were cooking on a stove. Jemma stares at it. How alive the water looks, raindrops bouncing off the pocked surface like balls of mercury set free. How does one live with this heedless life all around one, and with the absence of the one life that is dearest of all? And yet people do, all the time. If she were to stay, there 215


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would be no escaping it. The house, the garden. The bucket. The spade. The constant reminders everywhere she looked. And everywhere, the smell of rich, damp loam. With rain blurring her vision, she stumbles back to the studio. Once inside, she sinks to her haunches and puts her head in her hands. It cannot be borne. Today, her little girl will be laid in that wet, cold earth. She knows then that she cannot do it; cannot stand by and watch it happen. Gotardo will be better off without her, without all the suffering she will cause him. She would rather be thought guilty of murder than wake each morning to the silence of their bedroom, their empty house, and see her grief mirrored in her husband’s face. Without their Lucy, they will surely tear each other apart. Even if O’Brien cannot send her to jail, she will still be imprisoned in this house with its memories. She will still have to live with the accusations and with O’Brien dogging her steps. Nathaniel said he would return later that morning and she does not doubt that he will. She must get ready. She is relieved to have something to occupy her mind. She will have to wash, dress and pack a small bag. She will write Gotardo a note but she will not try to explain why she is going. What is the point? Either he will understand or he won’t. It is not a matter of choosing between him and Nathaniel. If she is not to go mad, she must go away. An hour later, Nathaniel taps the front window three times as he had promised. He has a horse saddled and waiting. Without speaking, he takes her bag. She raises her boot to the stirrup and swings herself onto the horse. The rain 216


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has eased to a drizzle but it is still sufficient to muddy their trail. They take the path that leads away from the town and into the forest.

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Part Three 31 On a paddle-steamer churning its way across Port Phillip Bay from Melbourne to the holiday resort of Settlers Cove, two newlyweds lean into each other as they clutch at their hats to stop them being swept away by the wind. It is a fine early autumn day, only a few high plumes of cirrus stretched across an infinite sky. Lounging against the rails of the upper deck smoking a cigar, a middle-aged man in a turquoise waistcoat lets his gaze fall on the honeymooning couple, watches the husband put his arm around his wife and draw her to him; sees her look up at him, her eyes wet with tears of what can only be joy. They are modestly dressed, nothing about them to attract undue attention. The man chastely kisses his wife’s forehead, the woman dries her eyes with a handkerchief and they continue their promenade around the deck with the many daytrippers flocking to the coast for the dying days of the season. Almost immediately, the man smoking the cigar has forgotten the newlyweds, his gaze now distracted by a much 219


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more fashionable quartet of two women with waists laced so tightly they can hardly bend, and two well-dressed men in silk cravats playing deck quoits. If the cigar-smoking man were to read in the paper of a woman suspected of killing her child and fleeing with her lover from the scene of the crime, he would have no reason to give a moment’s thought to the newlyweds he has briefly noted on the deck of the Hygeia this autumn morning. They are now in the centre of the bay, a watery plain so vast it saturates the view in every direction. Jemma goes to the railing and looks down at the foaming water, staring so long and hard that Nathaniel draws her away, fearful of what might be going through her mind. They sit on a wooden bench, sheltered from the spray, and watch land slowly appear on the horizon, solidifying out of distant cloud into ochre cliffs and limestone mansions with two-tiered balconies of wrought-iron lacework that seem to float above the tea-tree scrub. When they dock at the pier at Settlers Cove, porters in smart uniforms from the big hotels overlooking the bay offer to ferry them up the hill in cabs and wagonettes. Preferring the anonymity of the horse-drawn tram, they join the general crush and alight at the Royal Hotel, where they sign the register as Mr and Mrs Jonathan Wright. Once in their room on the second floor, the door closed behind them, Nathaniel throws himself on the bed, but Jemma cannot keep still. She wanders around the room, her hands limply dragging across whatever she passes—the brass bedhead, the patchwork quilt, the rosewood dresser, the Rochester lamp. Soft afternoon light streams in through the 220


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lace curtains, casting fi ligreed shadows on the walls. As she nears the wardrobe, she catches sight of herself in the large oval mirror: a stranger with haunted eyes. Can it be only a week ago that she was walking back from the Serafi nis’ with Lucy wrapped in her arms? She sits down on the edge of the bed. Being on the move had made it all bearable. She was Mrs Elizabeth Wright, newly married to Mr Jonathan Wright of Melbourne, and they were on their way to Settlers Cove where they planned to live and work. This was the story they told whenever it was required. But now they are alone and no performance is necessary and Jemma is afraid of her thoughts. Nathaniel pulls out his watch. They must keep busy, this much he knows. If they are to buy what they need, he says, they will have to hurry as the shops soon close for the day. He has enough of his savings with him to last them for some months and is confident that they will soon find work. At the Ozone Emporium, Nathaniel insists on buying Jemma a bathing costume and then suggests that they walk down to the ocean beach amphitheatre where they can sit in the Coffee Palace and observe the giant waves of Bass Strait that come crashing over the rocks. By the time they return to the hotel it is dark. Over their meal in the hotel dining room, Nathaniel talks of his holidays here as a boy, when it was little more than a settlement of limeburners and fishermen who lived in small stone cottages on the beach. He describes how a lookout would be stationed at the top of the cliffs to ring a bell when a large shoal was sighted, and how he would rush to the beach when the fishermen’s boats came in so that he could help haul in the 221


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nets. It saddens him to see how much the place has changed. The fishermen’s huts are gone from the beach, demolished to make way for swimming baths, bandstands, bathing pavilions and all the other facilities deemed necessary for a fashionable seaside resort and playground of the gentry. The rough magic of the village he once knew has been all but polished out of existence by the demands of gentility and progress. He talks to fi ll the silence and wonders if Jemma is even listening. She has not touched her meal and has spent most of the night staring out the dining room window at the silvery gloom of the bay. Every now and then, her eyes dart around the room at the other guests. The turmoil in her is palpable. He doesn’t dare ask what she is thinking. Jemma picks up the butter knife and examines the dull, flat blade before turning her attention to the lace cloth with coloured beads that covers the sugar bowl. All these curious little objects that one normally took for granted, that seemed so necessary to a civilised life. Amid all these welldressed, well-fed people, she is beginning to understand what it might mean to see humans from another perspective, to appear like everyone else and yet to have joined the walking dead. She remembers a cartoon she saw in the Argus inspired by the controversy over Mr Darwin’s theories, of apes dressed in bonnets and crinolines and waistcoats and top hats. She can’t remember the caption, only the image of chattering apes. The intention was to ridicule evolution. Yet, in spite of himself, the cartoonist had done the opposite. He had created a portrait of civilised men and women in the grip of primordial forces which they could neither fathom nor control. 222


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She glances around the room again, clenching her balledup gloves. Her eyes blaze as she looks at them, these cultured apes who dare not face the truth. Everyone absorbed in their own little worlds, talking and laughing and calmly getting on with their lives as if suffering and death did not exist or were merely a nightmare from which one could awake. Jemma turns to Nathaniel and says with quiet vehemence, ‘I hate everyone I lay eyes on.’ Tentatively, he places his hand over her fist. ‘Everyone?’ he smiles. Her anger fi lls him with a strange excitement. For the first time in his life he is with a woman whom he does not want to keep at bay; a woman whom he longs to make happy, above anything else. They must get away to the countryside, away from people and society and prying eyes. He has told the hotel manager they are in search of employment, ideally on a large property. The manager, Nathaniel tells her, seems to have taken a shine to them and is going to make some inquiries. Jemma gives an empty laugh. ‘If only he knew what the papers are saying. But who would believe us if we told the truth? If we are not guilty, then why are we running?’ ‘In time, the world will learn the truth.’ His voice rings with conviction. He must believe it, that he has saved her from O’Brien’s clutches. Because otherwise, all he has done is drag her away from her home and her husband and everything she knows and loves, for no good reason except that he wanted her for himself. He had dreamed of it, of them running away together, and now it has happened. But in his dreams there was no grief and no guilt. * 223


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That night, Jemma dreams she is on the steamer gazing down at the water when she spies something on the sandy bottom. A silent cry escapes her lips. An infant’s dark eyes stare up at her, waiting. Quick as a girl, she straddles the railing and dives down through the liquid blue until she is close enough to grab hold of its tiny body. Clutching the child to her chest, she has only one hand with which to claw herself upward against the drag of her dress and the congealing water. The sun on the surface has created a halo of light, like the end of a tunnel, and she is almost there. But just as she is about to break through, she wakes to the dark hotel room, her empty arms clutched to her chest. Nathaniel draws her to him. ‘You’ve been sobbing.’ Jemma cannot speak. She pushes her face to the soft whorls of his chest, then desperately seeks his mouth. She sobs again, grabs his hair by the handful and sinks her teeth into his lips. Nathaniel gasps as her teeth draw blood. Until now, they have been almost chaste. The occasional kiss on the forehead is all he has allowed himself. There has not been a moment when it felt right to do more and he has feared imposing himself upon her. Much as she might want to be comforted, he did not believe she would want anything else. He was prepared to wait until she was ready. He had waited this long, he could wait some more. And now without warning, without even a word, she turns to him and suddenly ignites. As soon as he touches her, she is molten, imploring him to go on. There are no rules for this kind of lovemaking; they must make them up as they go. He has the sensation of them falling into darkness, into a vast 224


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space without gravity. Like meteors aglow with heat. Jemma tears at his shoulders with her fingernails, fighting him off and drawing him close, wrestling to fi ll the emptiness that can’t be fi lled. She claws and bites him, as if inciting him to return the pain. It is clear to him what she is seeking. Annihilation. For nothing else to exist. To be consumed by the fire of their bodies. It would not surprise him if, in the morning, there is nothing left of them but a small pile of ashes and bones. A willing slave to her wishes, he buries his face in her groin. At the touch of his burning lips, she shudders and arches, lets out a long, guttural howl and collapses back onto the bed. He wipes the tears from her face, then gently moves into her, making her cry out once again. And so they toil through the night until Jemma finds the oblivion she seeks. Nathaniel lies on his side, cradling her from behind. Even though she is sleeping peacefully, he has no desire to move. This was their marriage ceremony, the welding of their bodies together so that no man may prise them apart. In the past, he would have been out of the bed and dressing as soon as the act was over. He had not known then what was possible, this other kind of lying together; this laying bare of the self; this deep arousal of both flesh and heart. Weary though he is, if she were to wake and reach out to him, his gratitude would flow all over again. As dawn breaks, he goes to sit by a window overlooking the town. The main street is mercifully empty of the expensive coaches and showily dressed holiday-makers that throng the town during the day. If he strains his ears he can hear the 225


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faint bass whoosh of the surf carried by the southerly wind. Nothing is lost on him. Not the passage of a cat across the rooftops or the splash of a fisherman’s oars. In the east, he can see the crest of a lava-red sun rising out of the bay. He thinks of the inland sea and of his dream to go in search of it. For years he has prepared and planned, but something has always held him back. Now, in the strangest of circumstances, his journey has finally begun and it could not have happened without Jemma. He has always believed that his life’s purpose was to find that mysterious body of water. And if by some chance he doesn’t, he is sure history will prove him to be right. But what matters most at this moment, as dawn breaks over the bay, is not history or glory but the wellbeing of this sleeping woman. The expedition can wait. He looks across at her lying on the bed, her hair fanning over the pillow, her face pale and serene. He wishes he could keep her this way, could stop the pain that widens her eyes the moment they open. Perhaps his purpose is not what he had always thought. Perhaps it is somehow greater. What he longs for, more than anything else, is to make her smile a real smile, the kind of smile he remembers from Breakneck Gully that holds nothing back. And when she has become accustomed to smiling, he will coax her gently until that smile widens and quivers and explodes into a laugh from her belly; a true laugh of unbridled delight. However long it takes, he will be patient. His purpose, his mission, will be to make her as glad to be alive as she has made him.

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32 Sergeant Marcus O’Brien sits on his grey stallion, staring at the horizon. With small movements of his heels and hands, he turns the horse in a slow circle, registering every possible direction in which they could have fled. The landscape is vast, the possibilities endless. On a nearby telegraph pole, a crow exhales raggedly with a bronchial sigh. From further away, another crow seems to reply. O’Brien looks up at the crow and scowls. He hates crows more than any other creature. More than spiders and snakes. It isn’t their blackness or the stink of death or even that he once caught one hungrily eyeing his female canary when her cage was out on the porch. It is the look in their eyes that he hates. Their knowingness, and the way they communicate in barbaric caws, incapable of song. They are sly; he hates that too. He has seen the way they operate in gangs in broad daylight, ambushing their high-flying enemies by camouflaging themselves in the shade of trees. 227


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They remind him of bushrangers, too damn clever for their own good. The crow on the pole caws once again and just as it is lifting its wings to fly off, O’Brien raises his American Colt and takes aim. He knows, even before he squeezes the trigger, that he’s too slow off the mark. The bullet grazes the bird’s wing as it flaps heavily away, cawing as it goes. A few bits of black feather float down through the air. Next time he won’t miss. The bird is soon a full-stop in the distance. With the advantage of a crow’s-eye view, O’Brien reflects, he would have found her by now. His black-eyed Jemma Musk. He is sure those black-eyed crows know of her movements. Another reason for hating them. How can it be that no one in the town or surrounding district has seen them since they fled? Not even the trace of a trail. He is convinced that certain people are not telling him all that they know. Although it is the age of the steam engine, it has not yet occurred to Marcus O’Brien that, having fled the scene on horseback, Jemma Musk and Nathaniel Byrne might continue their fl ight by other means. He knows that Jemma is a good horsewoman. And such is Byrne’s knowledge of the surrounding countryside, it seems fair to assume that they will hide out in a cave or abandoned mine shaft that O’Brien has no hope of uncovering. Unless, of course, he can persuade the Police Commissioner to give him more men and a black tracker. But as yet, a woman suspected of infanticide and her lover (and possible co-conspirator) are not the kind of felons that warrant such largesse, especially when the local police force is already stretched for men. 228


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There is no one at the cemetery when he arrives. Although he doubts that Jemma will make an appearance at the funeral, it would not surprise him if she were to find a vantage point from which to watch the ceremony. He has stationed a constable in the lookout tower in the Botanic Gardens and now, having dismounted at the cemetery gates, he wanders the dusty paths between the graves, his eyes roving the surrounding hills. Near the Chinese graves with their bowls of fresh rice, he passes a large old lemon-scented gum. The bark is as smooth and aromatic as perfumed paper, and on impulse he takes out his pocket-knife. For a moment, he is tempted to do it, to scratch Jemma’s initials in the bark. In memory of how he had loved her, the intensity of which remains and always will, even if it is no longer love. But instead of initials, he lightly etches her face in the bark, then gouges the image deeper, exaggerating certain features, giving her full, lascivious lips. Finally, he cuts a frame around it and at the bottom carves the word WANTED. He stands back and smiles. What good is love? Love left him feeling helpless and scorned, but hatred gives him strength and power. It clarifies the mind. When she fled with Byrne, he couldn’t kid himself anymore. She had never loved him. She had tolerated him for her father’s sake and, later, to keep the peace. And in his lovesick delusion, he had believed that she cared for him, and had forgiven her all. But there was only so much a man could forgive. She might refuse to recognise his claim on her, but she could not deny the rule of law, and by putting herself outside it, she had granted him full licence to hunt her down and punish her as the law saw fit. * 229


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From a distance, it looks like a giant black serpent slowly inching its way down the road towards him, accompanied by an unearthly wail. As it approaches, O’Brien can see the priest, Father Rossetti, in his long, dark cassock, a bulky silver cross at his neck, leading the procession. Behind him is a haggard-looking Gotardo Voletta and his cousin Pliny Serafi ni, shouldering a tiny pine coffi n. Behind them are huddles of weeping Swiss peasants in black. Pitiful as the little coffi n might be, Marcus is repelled by their wails and tears. Funerals are something to be got over and done with. He remembers his father laid out in the coffi n in their parlour for an endless day before the funeral, his rigid face as angry in death as it had been in life. After taking one last look, the only emotions Marcus had felt were scorn and impatience. He couldn’t wait to see the old man put underground. Gotardo does not acknowledge Sergeant O’Brien as they pass. It pains him to think that he promised Jemma she had nothing to fear from him. Gotardo had thought he had the man’s measure. If he had stopped O’Brien from hounding her, if he had stood up to him, she would not have needed to flee. It was his own weakness that drove her away. Easier to blame himself than to believe that she had chosen to be with Nathaniel Byrne. Byrne, who knew nothing of their girl. Who was not there each night when Lucy woke for her milk, sucking at her mother’s breast. Who was not there when Lucy caught a fever and screamed for a day and a night until the danger passed. Who was not there to see Lucy’s first smile or first step. Who was not there in the mornings 230


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when she wandered into the dairy to pat the new calves, and laugh at the cows’ fat udders and swishing tails. Only Gotardo’s fury makes it possible to bear these thoughts. He looks straight ahead and sees nothing, his knuckles white from gripping at the rails of the coffin. His knees as loose as hinges ready to fold. They pass grey stone angels, towering plinths, plain tablet-shaped headstones, mounds of dirt with wooden crosses and graves fenced with rusting wrought iron that make him think of a child’s cot. Only the rise and fall of Father Rossetti’s chanting stops Gotardo from letting forth a howl as he lays eyes on the freshly dug hole where the coffi n will go. Night has begun to fall. Gotardo stares across the open paddocks in the direction of the Stony Creek basin, vaguely aware that something is missing from the view. He should not be surprised, he says to himself, that everything appears changed. Then it dawns on him. The fire at the Grand Mystery Co. For the past year, whenever he looked southward in the evening, he saw those blue flames licking at the combustible, fossilised ground, lighting up the horizon as if it were a star that had fallen to earth. The fire must have burned itself out. Now the light is gone. After inspecting each veiled woman to make sure that Jemma is not among the mourners, O’Brien gallops back into town. He has discounted his original theory that she might still be in the vicinity. Even now, though, he feels that she is still toying with him, deliberately inviting him to believe one thing while doing another. She and Byrne would want to put as much distance between themselves and the town as 231


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possible. He had been foolish to have thought otherwise. But in what direction had they gone? The time he is losing is making him angry. Once again he will have to bide his time. By the end of the week, ‘Wanted’ posters bearing their likenesses will be plastered on telegraph poles and post offices from here to Melbourne. If he is patient, intelligence will find its way back to him. They cannot, after all, disappear into thin air. The next day, a farmer appears at the police station to report the theft of two horses earlier that morning. He explains that he saw the culprits galloping off with the horses—what looked like a woman in man’s clothing and a man with flame-coloured hair. It is the farmer’s belief the thieves were ‘that woman who killed her baby and that cove she ran away with’. Later that day, O’Brien comes across a hawker on the road who admits to having sold Jemma a lady’s revolver and ammunition, a few years back. When journalists from the local papers come seeking details, O’Brien seizes his opportunity. Whether Jemma and Byrne were behind the robbery or not, he can use it to his advantage. He tells the journalists to warn the public that they should not approach the couple if sighted as they are known to be armed. In the weeks that follow, O’Brien will quietly feed speculation that Musk and Byrne are behind local incidents of cattle duffing or theft or even shootings where the identity of the felons is unknown. The papers will eagerly take up the story, embroidering on details and sightings of the lady outlaw and her lover. As the story gathers momentum, Marcus O’Brien will petition the Police Commissioner for extra men to pursue 232


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the outlaws and encourage journalists to take up the cause. Within a few months, editorials in the Age and the Argus will be advocating the need for a special force like that which captured Ben Hall, to hunt down ‘this pair whose threat to public morality is almost as grave as their crimes’.

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33 When Jemma wakes, there is blood under her fingernails. She looks across at Nathaniel, who is still asleep, and sees his shoulders scored with red lines. She scrubs her hands at the washstand and dresses quietly before slipping down the stairs to the empty foyer and out into the morning light. There is no one about. Jemma’s are the first footprints in the tide-smoothed sand. At the far end of the shore there is a small headland and beyond it, the arc of the bay. After checking that no one is watching, she unties her boots and removes her stockings and leaves them at the base of the grassy hillock. Lifting her skirt, she runs over the cool, damp sand. She keeps on running until her legs are weak and her chest is on fire and she can run no more. For a time, she sits in a trance, registering nothing but weary relief. Her eyes follow the horizon and the play of light on the water. She would like to throw off her dress and plunge straight in but there are other people around now: some fishermen on the jetty and 234


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in the boats just off shore, and morning walkers approaching along the sand. She will have to go back to the hotel and fetch her costume and wait for ladies’ swimming hours at the sea baths near the pier. It is mid-morning by the time she is able to enter the water. Most of the other women slowly inch their way in, squealing like schoolgirls, then bob up and down on the spot. For a while Jemma bobs with the rest of them, but when no one seems to be looking, she dives under the water and, for a brief moment, is back in her dream. Each time she goes under she slips into that other dimension where her Lucy lives and lies waiting. Forgetting herself, Jemma begins to swim overarm from fence to fence, eyes open and scouring the bottom, unaware that she is creating a stir. Only when she stops does she notice all the heads turned in her direction. Most haven’t gone under the water, their hair still perfectly dry beneath their frilly caps. Jemma looks at the staring faces. She has done what she meant to avoid: made a spectacle of herself. Tears burn her eyes. Taking the quickest means of escape, she dives under the water again and surfaces close to the shore. She is halfway across the foyer when she feels eyes upon her again. Behind his desk, the hotel manager is sitting with a pen poised over the register, observing her entry. She nods and moves quickly towards the staircase, remembering a cow she once saw which, instead of bearing a mark on its rump, had been brutally branded on the side of its nose, just below the eye. Jemma’s hand goes to her cheek, thinking of the scar it had left. She might well be branded herself, such is the way people stare. 235


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The hotel manager raises his hand. ‘Mrs Wright, your husband tells me you are looking for employment.’ Eager to impart his news, he does not wait for her reply. ‘I think you might be in luck, Mrs Wright. One of our most distinguished guests is the Melbourne surgeon Dr Theodore Leask. He tells me he is in urgent need of a governess for his son and an overseer for his property on Westernport Bay.’ Within minutes it is arranged. She and Nathaniel will meet Dr Leask early that afternoon, before Leask and his wife take the steamer for Melbourne. When Nathaniel and Jemma enter the hotel lounge, a large man in a turquoise waistcoat lowers the paper he is reading, spears his cigar into the fi replace and rises from his chair to greet them. Jemma’s eyes fall to the Argus which he has just discarded. She had fl icked through it earlier this morning over breakfast and thrown it down in disbelief at the claims being made about them. She stiffens as she wonders what Dr Leask has read. Theodore Leask is about to speak when something makes him stop and stare. Recognition flashes in his eyes. Jemma braces herself. They ought to have known running was futile. ‘Of course!’ he says, beaming at the both of them. ‘The newlyweds on the steamer yesterday. I saw you up on the deck.’ Jemma manages a faint smile and they all sit down. With the clipped, no-nonsense manner of the army man he once was, Dr Leask thanks them for making themselves available at such short notice. ‘Been rather left in the lurch, I’m afraid.’ 236


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A week ago, he explains, his son’s governess and the overseer of his property at Red Ridge had eloped and taken off to the goldfields. He is due back at the Royal Melbourne Hospital by evening and must settle this business as quickly as possible. The hotel manager, Mr Lucas, tells him they are a respectable, newlywed couple and has recommended them. As Mr Lucas is a man of good judgement, he is confident they won’t disappoint him. Jemma and Nathaniel exchange glances. Jemma wonders if she can keep up the pretence. ‘You are very trusting, Dr Leask.’ Dr Leask peers over his glasses. Nathaniel smiles back reassuringly, quietly furious at Jemma for raising doubts. For a moment Dr Leask looks perplexed, unable to pick the tone of the comment. Then his uncertainty evaporates with a gruff laugh and a wave of his hand, as if they have just passed a test he had set for them. ‘Trust is only part of it, Mrs Wright. I am a man of science. I make deductions. The mere fact of your observation tells me that you are worthy of trust.’ Glancing at his pocket watch, he hurries on, asking them perfunctory questions about their previous employment. Jemma mentions her years spent teaching at Mrs Sands’ Ladies’ College; Nathaniel refers to his time working on several properties in the Mount Alexander district. Anxiously, they wait for him to ask about testimonials. In the only criminal act that either of them has committed so far, they have spent the morning composing forged references from previous employers. A ship’s horn sounds the arrival of the steamer down at the pier, Dr Leask looks at his watch again and the subject of references never arises. 237


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‘Everything seems to be in order,’ he says, rising from his seat. ‘The positions are yours if you want them. Mr Wright will be in charge of the outdoor staff; Mrs Wright will be responsible solely for the instruction of my son, Henry. The housekeeper, Mrs Croad, looks after all domestic matters. Any problems or questions, Mrs Croad is the one to ask. I have only one request, Mrs Wright—that you do not push my son too hard at his lessons. He is a bright boy and hungry for knowledge but inclined to nervous reactions if overstimulated.’ Dr Leask tells them that he and his wife, Amelia, expect to return to Red Ridge within the month. He pauses in the doorway, and takes a final look at them. ‘I feel very fortunate that you have come my way, Mr and Mrs Wright. If you could be ready first thing in the morning, I will have my coachman pick you up.’ Too stunned to speak, Nathaniel and Jemma watch him as he strides through the foyer and out into the street. Jemma supposes she should be glad that they have won the positions, but beyond relief to be moving away from the town, she feels nothing. Nothing but the slightest puzzlement over the way the whole interview unfolded, the speed of it, the curious fact of Dr Leask leaving his son in the care of domestic staff and a pair of strangers he has only just met. It should not be this easy to become someone else, she thinks. To cast off half a lifetime like a change of clothes. She feels she has entered upon an unspoken pact, as if she has traded her daughter’s existence for her lover and a new identity, and must spend the rest of her life paying the price. Through the hotel window she can see a fisherman rowing 238


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slowly towards the horizon, gulls circling above his head. As she and Nathaniel climb the stairs to their room, words from a child’s song float into her head, the once jaunty rhyme transformed into a melancholy taunt. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.

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34 No one is watching them now as they disappear into the landscape. No eyes of curious bathers, hotel manager or prospective employer on the deck of a steamer, no police officer at the top of a lookout tower. Once they leave the township behind, most signs of settlement quickly evaporate. For a time, the tea-tree bush swallows them up and they lose all sight of the sea. Jemma has never seen such tortured-looking trees, their trunks like human sinews twisted and bent by the wind. Only the occasional flowering gum with its fiery little cups of orange and crimson adds specks of colour to the view. Gradually, the land starts opening out in hummocky, dune-like formations that suggest vast tracts of sand covered in a thin layer of grass. Then the hills settle into green, undulating plains of pasture dotted with cattle and sheep. As dusk approaches, a herd of kangaroos bound across the road ahead of them and two laughing jackasses begin a duet, their cackles rising to syncopated hiccups of manic glee. 240


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Jemma stares out the window of the coach and can feel the darkness coming on. The road begins to wind as they descend into a gully, rain falling in violent waves. It is happening as she knew it eventually must, the sensation of going under, of sinking from all human reach. Even as she sits holding Nathaniel’s hand with the rain drumming the roof, she knows there is nothing he can do for her. When she tries to think of the past or Wombat Hill, the only image that comes to mind is of the ruined, burnt-out house she once painted in the bush. Nothing but a brick chimney and a few charred remains of another life. Her hand goes to the locket at her neck, her fist clenched so tightly the gold seems to soften in her palm. When they finally glimpse the sea again, it is a different bay to the one they had crossed from Melbourne. They are now at the back of the peninsula, facing east, and have not seen another traveller since they left the outskirts of Settlers Cove. The sun is low in the sky as they arrive at the bottom of a long driveway where a regiment of pencil pines stands to attention. The horses trot wearily up the hill. Rising above the treetops, Jemma and Nathaniel can see a red-brick turret and soon a large homestead surrounded by a wide veranda with climbing roses and ornamental vines. As they step from the coach, they are greeted by a young man with pale blond hair and a loping stride, his hand outstretched, eager yet hesitant. His cheeks a feverish pink. At his heels a beagle hound grins up at them like a barrel on legs. They stand with the sea breeze whipping at their hair while thirteen-year-old Henry Leask dutifully performs his role as man of the house and introduces them to the four 241


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other staff: Mrs Croad, the housekeeper; Lizzy, the cook and maid; Jaspers, the gardener; and Dyson, the coachman and groom, whom they have already met. If they want, they can live in the cottage—he points to a pretty limestone and red-brick building in the far corner of the garden—or they can choose one of the large bedrooms upstairs in the house. Henry directs Dyson to fetch the Wrights’ two small trunks from the coach. At a loss as to what to do next, he bends to rub the dog’s head. ‘How could I forget?’ he laughs. ‘And this is Astor!’ He is just a boy, Jemma thinks. She would like to stroke his cloud-coloured hair, as he is doing to the dog. Instead, she crouches down at Astor’s side and fondles his silky ears. ‘I bet he’s a good friend.’ Henry explains that his father bought him as a roo-hunting dog, but every time Dr Leask took him out on a hunt, the dog deserted the party and headed for home. His father would arrive back hours later to find Astor curled up at Henry’s feet by the fire, pretending to be asleep. Henry ushers them inside. As they cross the threshold, Jemma notices the painted glass around the doorway and pauses to study the sketches of local scenes—a lighthouse, a fishing boat, long-legged birds picking over mudflats. The touch is light and execution impressive. She asks him who was the artist. ‘My mother,’ he says quietly. ‘She died of consumption last year.’ ‘But your father said he and his wife would—’ ‘That’s my stepmother. She doesn’t come here often.’ He leads them up the hallway to the drawing room where 242


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two large bay windows overlook a lawn which ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff. A few last rays of sun rake through the clouds, turning the bay silvery gold. They can see the dark shape of an island a few miles offshore, a rim of foam at its base. Henry stands by the window and contemplates the view. ‘The best thing about Red Ridge is that you can forget the rest of the world exists.’ Such is the tone of his voice that for a split-second Jemma can’t help wondering if he has recognised them. Then he turns, almost pleading. ‘You do like it here, don’t you? You are going to stay?’

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35 For a time it seems that Henry might be right. That it might be possible to forget about the rest of the world. When Jemma opens the curtains in their bedroom the next morning, a veil has come down between the house and the world. She cannot see the island, the bay or the garden. There is nothing but a haze of ghostly white. The heavy fog lasts until early afternoon but doesn’t clear to a radiant sky as fogs normally do. Instead, it retreats, leaving a low roof of solid cloud hanging just above their heads. She can see the stark white disc of the sun behind it and finds herself wanting to stare, to drink in this forbidden sight. The house has fi xed routines governed by Mrs Croad, who has been housekeeper at Red Ridge since it was built twenty years ago. Breakfast at eight o’clock, luncheon at midday, afternoon tea at four and supper at seven. As long as they observe these times and stay out of the kitchen, Mrs Croad does not bother herself with them. Not even 244


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Dr Leask, when he makes his occasional visit, dares interfere with Mrs Croad’s routines. Jemma is careful to keep her days structured and busy. Henry’s lessons occupy her mornings and, having discovered a shared passion for natural history, the two of them spend the afternoons on field trips in search of plants and animals to examine, classify and sketch. Some days are so still and clear they can see the sealers’ boats moored on the island at the mouth of the bay as they roam the surrounding hills. Other days are so foggy they dare not venture beyond the front lawn in case they step off the edge of the cliff. Every morning before breakfast, if there is no fog, Jemma makes her way down to the beach. No matter how cold it is, if she is to get through the day, she must go for her swim. It is her addiction, her morphia. Since the episode at the Settlers Cove sea baths, she is careful to swim only when the beach is deserted, which is not a difficult task as so few people live nearby or visit this remote coast. When it works its magic, swimming puts her in a suspended state; a weary numbness that keeps the pain at bay. On a good day she will be joined by a seal or two who, completely unafraid, will swim right up to her then quickly swerve away, looking back playfully with their doggy eyes before returning again. She has seen them dance underwater, spiral around each other and then dart into the body of a wave, gracefully swooping down its flank before making a last-minute exit as the wave crashes onto the shore. If they don’t appear for days at a time, she begins to worry that she has frightened them off and that they will never return. Sometimes, she will have the sensation that she is being watched and will look over her shoulder to see a whiskery 245


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nose and those doggy eyes poking up out of the water. But other times, the sea and the sand will be empty and she will still feel eyes upon her. She will remember swimming in the Serafinis’ waterhole the first time she met Gotardo and how he had watched her with a kind of wonder as she glided her way upstream. She will find herself thinking about him, and wishing she could write and make him understand why she had to leave. And in this lapse of vigilance, her mind will leap to the look on his face when he realised that Lucy was dead, and how he had reached out to her in his grief, and how she had turned away. Then she will make herself swim again to the headland in the hope of washing all thought away. Every morning Henry watches from his bedroom window as Mrs Wright follows the path that wends its way down through the eucalypts and she-oaks to emerge at Honeysuckle Beach, where a creek runs into the sand. At first he thought she was taking a morning walk, but then he noticed that when she returned, her hair was damp and she carried something wrapped in a towel. One morning he followed her, keeping a good distance so that she wouldn’t hear him. By the time he reached the beach, she was already in the water, swimming through the gentle swell, her arms describing pale arcs against the stark blue sky. When she had swum out to the headland, she swam parallel to the beach, then turned again and returned to the shore. Sometimes when she emerges from the water there are small leaves of weed in her hair. He knows that he should not be watching but cannot help himself. Since she and Mr Wright arrived he has been so excited he can hardly sleep. 246


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What he fears most is that his cough will give him away or that they will notice the blue tinge of his lips. Each time his father comes to visit Henry, he conducts an examination of his chest, tapping with his fingers and telling him to take deep breaths. Henry watches his father’s face. If there is a crumpling sound when he inhales, his father will frown and listen again. Whenever Henry asks him what he thinks is wrong, he slips into his doctor’s voice and tells him it is nothing to worry about, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘Look at me!’ Henry wants to shout. ‘Look at my face, the hairs on my chest. I’m a young man, not a boy.’ The most important thing, his father says, oblivious to his son’s frustration, is that he take daily exercise and not overtax his mind. How long will his father go on pretending like this; refusing to acknowledge what they both know?

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36 Once a week Nathaniel rides into Flinders, five miles away, to collect the mail, but apart from the occasional visit from a neighbour, they see no one else except the other staff. So far Nathaniel has managed to get away with ‘forgetting’ to buy the papers, even though this is supposed to be one of his duties. Mrs Croad, however, has started to complain about missing the news and he knows he cannot avoid it much longer. He and Jemma will have to put up with the possibility that the latest rumours about Musk and Byrne may find their way into talk over dinner or casual conversation, and that there is nothing they can do to escape it. All the papers are hot with the story, with new sightings and speculation being reported weekly, along with their accumulating number of ‘crimes’. The first time Nathaniel went to the Flinders post office cum general store, the proprietor, Mr Coombs, kept him there for almost an hour chatting, wanting to know who he was and where he was from. While Nathaniel recognises it 248


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was hunger for company that drove the man’s interrogation, he can’t help dreading their weekly encounters. No one in the area has any reason to suspect them, especially as most of the reported sightings happen in the north, and yet it would be all too easy to slip up in an unguarded moment, and for word to get out. It wouldn’t surprise him if someone as obsessed and half-mad as Marcus O’Brien had spies in every town in the state. When not running errands in Flinders, Nathaniel spends his mornings riding the property, checking on the fences and the cattle and the calves. Once any small maintenance problems at the homestead are ironed out, the rest of the day is his to do with what he will. Dyson looks after the stables and the garden and is diligent enough not to need prodding or direction. When the mood takes him, Nathaniel will explore the cliffs for caves and collect rock samples. It is his conjecture that they are sitting on a fracture in the earth’s crust that may still be active and give off the occasional shudder, although there is every chance that Jemma is right when she says that it is they who are jumpy, not the earth. He is reminded of this observation one day when, during a visit to Flinders, Mr Coombs asks him if he would like to try out a velocipede which he is hoping to sell. An overambitious gentleman rode the vehicle from Settlers Cove and then decided he couldn’t face riding it back. Nathaniel has occasionally seen fashionable types riding two-wheeled dandyhorses in Melbourne but has never come across one of these latest inventions with pedals and rotary cranks that allow the rider to propel the machine without one’s feet ever touching the ground. 249


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‘They’re all the craze at Home, and on the Continent too,’ Mr Coombs tells him as he holds the bicycle steady for Nathaniel to mount. Nathaniel has no need of such a vehicle and has heard that people call them ‘boneshakers’, but he can’t resist trying it out. Cautiously, he straddles the machine, lowers himself onto the seat and settles his feet on the pedals. He is a confident horseman but this narrow vehicle has none of the sturdiness of a four-footed creature. ‘I’ll push when you’re ready,’ says Mr Coombs. ‘You’ll need a bit of motion to stop you from falling to one side or the other.’ Nathaniel gives the word and Mr Coombs launches him down the empty main street. For the first few seconds, it seems like it might be easier than he imagined. All is going quite smoothly until he hits a small bump in the road and the front wheel starts to wobble. Despite his rigid grip on the handlebars, the machine takes over and sends him lurching into the embankment. As he pushes the bike off himself and struggles to get up, he is conscious of the feeling one gets when stepping off a boat, of the earth tilting beneath one’s feet. ‘I ought to have mentioned,’ Mr Coombs says as he hurries over to help brush him down, ‘that it takes a few turns to get the hang of it.’ Half an hour later, Nathaniel is whizzing down the road that leads to Red Ridge, his face washed by the wind. He has probably gone as fast on a horse and yet the sensation is markedly different. There is an intoxicating sense of freedom, of swooping and gliding like a bird, of hurtling into the future with such streamlined, arrow-like certainty that he 250


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can imagine a time when man will invent a machine that can fly. The grassy hills and cattle flash by in a blur. An enormous grin consumes his face. He can’t remember when he last had such fun. He imagines Jemma in his place, hurtling down the road towards him, her eyes wide with terror and delight, the terror fading as her confidence grew. He imagines her abandoning herself to the sensation of fl ight, and then, when it is over, falling into his arms, giddy and laughing like a girl.

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37 They find it in the tea-coloured creek that flows into the sea at Honeysuckle Beach. A small, fl ightless bird with fl ippers instead of wings, deep slate-blue feathers on its back, its belly a glossy white. There is no sign of a wound, everything about it perfect; untouched. It looks to Jemma like a soft toy, the kind a child might clutch in bed. She waits for Henry, who is still approaching across the sand. ‘Do you know what this is?’ He kneels at her side to inspect it and gently touches the bird’s head. ‘A fairy penguin from the island.’ As they are on one of their natural history expeditions, he adds dutifully, ‘Eudyptula minor. I’ve looked it up.’ Henry knows about the little penguins because of the sealers who sometimes come across from the island for supplies. He knows that they spend the day diving for food and then return to the beach to nest in the sand dunes. The sealers have told him that they see the penguins floating by 252


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on the water, looking as if they are dead while really just taking a nap. And that it is the funniest sight, seeing hundreds of these little birds waddling out of the water at sunset and up the beach, making the most incredible racket. But Henry has never seen one alive, only those that have been washed up. ‘Papa’s promised to take me there for my fourteenth birthday.’ It has been a month since Dr Leask’s last visit. Jemma hopes that Leask will honour his promise, but knows that Henry has been let down before. Leask has visited Red Ridge only twice in the past three months, and each time has stayed only one night. His wife, Amelia, has only come once. Henry says she doesn’t like the seaside. As for Dr Leask, there always seem to be urgent matters at the hospital in Melbourne that make it impossible for him to remain longer. Jemma has no doubt that the surgeon is in great demand. And she has observed enough of his relations with his son to believe that Leask genuinely loves the boy. But something about Henry causes him deep agitation and he is always visibly relieved to be on his way. The aim of the afternoon’s field work is to find a small creature, a lizard, perhaps, or marine animal that they can take back to the house to dissect. Jemma wants Henry to classify it—vertebrate or invertebrate, cold or warm-blooded, and to name its genus and species. They will sketch the creature whole as they found it and also after dissection, identifying the important organs. When Jemma proposed the day’s project, Henry had been thrilled. The only natural history he had done with his last governess had been sketching insects, 253


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seaweed and flowers. All the wondrous flora of the natural world reduced to a catalogue of cotyledons, plumules and radicles by the dead hand of M.A. Liversidge’s Elementary Botany. And they never cut anything up. But now, as Jemma suggests that they draw the fairy penguin, Henry can’t stop his face from falling. ‘Don’t worry, we won’t be dissecting it,’ she reassures him. ‘Not a beautiful creature like this.’ They find a dry spot on the sand close to the creek and bring out their sketchbooks. For a time they sit in silence, their grey leads skating across the paper, their eyes moving back and forth between the dead bird and the page. Behind them, small waves suck at the sand. Such is the stillness that the occasional note from a bellbird ripples through the air like a stone dropped into a pond. Henry feels as if he has grown antennae. Everything seems to be humming with its own special life. Now and then, he glances at Mrs Wright then looks quickly back at his page in case she catches him staring. He can’t remember when he last felt so content. He wants to tell Mrs Wright, but that would mean explaining how lonely he has been and how desperately he misses his mother, and he doesn’t think he can do that without ending up in tears. Henry has drawn the bird and is concentrating on the surrounds. He is thinking how hard it is to capture the sheen of the oily feathers and the transparency of the creek water when he catches sight of Mrs Wright’s sketch as she shifts position. In spite of being upside down and at an odd angle, the drawing is immediately arresting. ‘Can I see?’ He reaches out his hand. 254


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Jemma hesitates, then relents. It is very rough, she says. Certainly not as precise and detailed as his very fi ne work. Henry has never received any formal training in art, although his mother had encouraged and guided him. He taught himself by copying and was proud of his ability to correctly capture the dimensions and proportions of whatever object was at hand. He suspects that his mother was quite gifted, but as she was often sick, she was unable to complete anything more than the occasional watercolour or piece of glass work. As he studies Mrs Wright’s drawing, Henry sees that she has done much more than copy the bird for scientific purposes. She has not drawn the penguin so much as shaded it into existence with the unmistakable flair of a real artist, not just someone who can copy. She even knows how to make the bird’s feathers gleam and the water shimmer, how to give it depths and shadows the like of which Henry could not possibly render. Beyond all this expertise, though, is the remarkable mood of the drawing, the sadness it exudes, although Henry has no idea how. ‘This is wonderful!’ he sighs. In a feverish burst, he asks if she has studied art and whether she paints, and if she doesn’t, why not? He asks her which artists she loves and promises to show her some more of his mother’s work. Jemma doesn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm but nor does she want to talk about painting. That is something she used to do; something Jemma Musk once did. Not Mrs Wright. For Mrs Wright, sketching is a technical skill, a useful means of recording natural phenomena. She knows that once, art was everything to her, that it gave her life meaning, that it 255


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made her feel connected with something much larger than herself. But she can no longer fathom why it had mattered so much. The connection has been broken and she does not know if it will ever be restored. She knows that Jemma Musk once believed there was no higher calling and that she had never doubted she’d been called. But it makes no sense to her now. She cannot see the point or purpose in thinking about herself this way. If she is honest, she cannot see the point to anything much at all. She closes the sketchbook and begins to pack up. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says quietly. She did the sketch as if she were doodling, her mind elsewhere. She is as surprised as Henry at the result. Henry loiters by the creek, not wanting to leave the penguin exposed to the crows and the gulls and any other creatures that would be sure to peck out its eyes and mangle its plump little body. Why don’t they bury it, he suggests, and make a small wooden cross to mark the spot? Soon they are standing at the tiny graveside not far from the creek and Henry is reciting lines from Ecclesiastes. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it . . . Jemma’s eyes fall to the grave. She should not have let this happen. She feels her blood surge like the sea, and remembers two hearts racing inside her when she was trapped in the cellar, and how she lay down in the darkness as if lying down in her grave. And once again she is trapped; ambushed on this faraway beach by thoughts of that other burial and the grave she has never seen. 256


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‘That will do!’ The boy stops mid-sentence and stifles a cough. Without speaking, they turn away from the mound in the sand and climb back up the hill to the house.

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38 All over Wombat Hill, letterboxes are appearing on gate posts and brass-framed slots in front doors. Gotardo has heard the excited talk of the postal delivery but cannot share it. If anything, all the chatter is a painful reminder that the letter he most longs to receive will never reach him. Each day when Gotardo Voletta collects his mail from the post office, the postmaster, Mr Hazzard, refuses to meet his eye, knowing as he does what happens to Mr Voletta’s mail before it reaches his hands. Mr Hazzard would rather not be party to such interference but he has no choice. Senior Sergeant O’Brien has warned him that if he hears of a single letter slipping through to Mr Voletta without his approval, the consequences will be grave. And the senior sergeant is not a man one would want to cross. While Mr Hazzard does not approve of this overzealous surveillance of Mr Voletta, one has to be careful in whom one confides, such is O’Brien’s hold on the town. Mr Hazzard has heard it said 258


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that the senior sergeant has private reasons for wanting to see Mrs Voletta brought in, reasons that have nothing to do with the death of her child. For Gotardo, the feeling of violation never goes away. Each time he turns over a letter to open the envelope, the telltale signs are there. The puckered paper, the occasional grubby fingerprint, the roughly folded sheets inside. Even the letters from Ticino are opened. It would not surprise him if O’Brien is paying someone to translate them, just in case. The only benefit Gotardo can see in having the mail delivered will be that he won’t have to endure Mr Hazzard’s awkward avoidance of his gaze. What worries him more, though, than this intrusion on his privacy is Celestina’s bloody-minded determination to take O’Brien on. Not long after Jemma’s departure, she approached the police sergeant in the street and told him she knew that he had threatened Jemma, and that she would make sure he was exposed. O’Brien had coldly replied that she would be wise to hold her tongue. With a twitch of his drooping moustache, he added that if she failed to heed his advice, her business would suffer and so might she. Since this confrontation and veiled threat, rocks have twice been thrown through the plate-glass window of the tearoom during the night. Such is the hostility towards Musk and Byrne whipped up by O’Brien, the gossips and the papers, it is impossible to really know who was responsible. Battista and Aquilino have taken it upon themselves to watch the tearoom at night. As furious as they are with Jemma for abandoning Gotardo, their hatred for O’Brien is much greater. * 259


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The vines are bare now. It seems to Gotardo that they crouch on the side of the hill like rows of gnarled old men. In the weeks following Lucy’s death and Jemma’s disappearance, when the grapes were ripe and ready to pluck, he decided to let them rot on the vine. He didn’t have the energy or spirit to do what had to be done. Then, one morning at dawn, he looked out the kitchen window to see dark figures moving purposefully up and down the rows with wicker baskets slung around their necks. It was Pliny and his brothers, Battista and Aquilino. After harvesting the grapes, they trampled and pressed them and now the must is fermenting in vats in the cellar. Gotardo is convinced the wine will be sour. How could it be otherwise after such a year? Even if the wine is good, he cannot imagine it giving him pleasure. The only thing he looks forward to is visiting Lucy’s grave, which he does every evening at dusk. Her plot lies on the northern edge of the cemetery, not far from a row of poplars whose golden leaves rained down on it throughout the autumn. Every day he cleared the leaves away, remembering the delight on her face when she saw a pile of them, and how she loved to run straight through them, sweeping them up with her arms so that they fell like confetti on her hair. The headstone is white marble with grey veins, her name and date of birth and death in gilded roman capitals. He agonised over her epitaph, hating the stock, sentimental phrases commonly found on children’s graves. In the dark hours, he shouted and wept and cursed Jemma for not being there to help him fi nd the right words. He had almost given up when he found a collection of Wordsworth’s poems on the bookshelf. The book fell open where Jemma had left some 260


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wattle pressed between its pages, like a letter she might have sent him, were it not for O’Brien. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. He doesn’t know how long he wept for, but he felt much better afterwards. The next morning he went to the stonemason and told him what he wanted. He knew his people would be shocked—no references to God or heaven or angels or consolation of any kind—but he didn’t care. When he showed Celestina the lines, she went pale. ‘But she is with God!’ He had only chosen the poem, she said accusingly, because he thought Jemma would approve. ‘She’s gone and she won’t come back, you poor, foolish man!’ Gotardo let her words wash over him. It was true that it mattered to him what Jemma would think of the epitaph and he didn’t see what was wrong with that. He didn’t really know why the poem felt right. Somehow, it told the awful truth, and yet kept Lucy alive. She was out there in the rocks and the trees. All that mattered to him now was keeping faith with those he loved. Every evening when he takes a fresh bunch of flowers to lay on the grave, he whispers to his girl as he used to when putting her to bed, telling her tales his mother once told him, before pressing his face to the grassy mound and saying goodnight. He cannot help hoping that one day when he is approaching the cemetery, he will see the familiar figure 261


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of his wife bent over the grave. And that after saying goodnight to their girl, they will walk home together through the falling night. He knows it is a fantasy—just as he knows that the letter he longs for will never arrive—and that if this fantasy came true, it would only lead to more pain. For it is not only Gotardo’s mail that is violated daily. Even at the graveyard Gotardo is rarely alone. The hovering presences of the senior sergeant or one of his men are never far away, watching and waiting for Jemma Musk to return.

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39 The last heat of autumn flares in the golden haystacks that dot the fields like ramshackle shanties all the way between Flinders and Red Ridge. Nathaniel is still smiling when he climbs off the velocipede at the foot of the driveway, his cotton shirt clinging to his body, his legs sore, his buttocks numb. Boneshaker is the right word for it, he thinks, but it is a good kind of shaking up. He hides the bicycle in a bush by the front gate and walks the final hundred yards to the house. He finds her alone in the drawing room. ‘Jemma!’ he whispers, ‘I want to show you something.’ Jemma fl inches at the use of her name, even though it is whispered and no one else is around. She shoots him a look of warning which Nathaniel greets with a defiant grin. ‘No questions.’ At the bottom of the driveway he tells her to close her eyes. ‘Keep them closed until I say!’ Retrieving the bicycle, he wheels it further up the road. At the top of the hill he 263


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climbs on and as he begins his descent, he shouts out that she can open her eyes. Jemma blinks, open-mouthed at the sight of him speeding down the hill on this two-wheeled contraption and miraculously remaining upright. He waves at her as he fl ies by, his feet pumping hard as he begins the climb up the next hill. His waistcoast has come undone and is flapping as he goes, his shirt sleeves ballooning with the in-rushing air. Just as he crests the hill, he traces a wobbly turn and, after a moment’s pause, lets the machine swoop back down again. With his arms raised to the sky, he whoops like a boy before coming to a shaky halt in front of her. Jemma waits for him to catch his breath. ‘It’s for you,’ he grins. She stares at him and then at the bicycle. She had been sure he would fall off it and probably kill himself—especially when he took his hands from the handlebars—and she is still in shock. This quickly passes as something else begins to stir, a part of herself she hardly knows anymore. A small smile tugs at her lips. ‘You are madder than I thought, Nat.’ ‘Much madder. You have no idea.’ They hold each other’s gaze in a way they have not done since Wombat Hill, when to look at one another so brazenly was the most intimate thing they could do. ‘Well then?’ Nathaniel says. ‘Mr Coombs says it’s all the craze in France.’ ‘Alors,’ Jemma says with mock-seriousness, trying to hide her nerves. The machine seems to defy gravity. She can’t imagine how it will possibly stay up. But Nathaniel has gone 264


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to such trouble, and it does look tempting and possibly even fun, albeit of a risky kind. But, then, who is she to care about risk? They live in a constant state of it. The most pressing question is what to do with her skirt. She looks up and down the road to make sure no one is approaching, before tucking it into her bloomers. ‘I warn you, Nat, don’t laugh!’ Nathaniel offers a few words of advice and when she is ready, he launches her down a gentle decline, running at her side with one hand on the handlebar. His aim is to stop her from falling but it soon becomes clear he is making it impossible for her to gather the speed she needs. He warns her that he is about to let go. She nods and keeps pedalling confidently along a straight stretch but when the road starts to climb she loses speed. The bicycle begins to waver and with mesmerising slowness falls to one side. She lands heavily on the red dirt road. Jemma is more annoyed than hurt. She can feel a slight graze down her left leg but cannot inspect it because of her stockings and the bloomers. At least the bulk of her skirt broke her fall and there is no sign of blood. She brushes the red dust off her clothes and looks ruefully at Nathaniel. ‘You might have warned me how hard the ground is!’ He is relieved that she can joke about it, and that she seems undeterred. He has an idea. There is a smooth, worn-down walking track through a nearby field that is used by locals to access the beach. If she has any further tumbles, the grass will break her fall. The fields trace a gradual slope, with an occasional plateau, down to the cliff edge and the beach at its foot. Beyond lies 265


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the teal glimmer of the sea. As Jemma gazes over the cut grass and the golden haystacks, a strange expression comes over her face. Nathaniel would like to ask what she’s thinking but senses that this is not the time. He watches her climb onto the bicycle and wobble her way along the path, soon pedalling harder and leaning into the wind as she picks up speed. Her hair has come loose from its clips and is flying out behind her, her eyes glittering and wild. He has seen this transformation at night in their bedroom, this fierce indifference, as if she has given up caring what happens. If only, Nathaniel thinks, she would allow herself to relax, to be fi lled with the lightness of being that is the gift of this precarious machine. Then suddenly she is veering off the walking track and with a small cry of defiance, heading straight for one of the haystacks. Hay and chaff explode into the air as Jemma and the bicycle plough into the stack. In a great puff of golden smoke, the loose structure slowly dissolves. When Nathaniel reaches her side, a crumpled Jemma is leaning against what remains of the haystack, holding her stomach. ‘Jemma!’ he cries in alarm. But when she looks at him she is laughing. She is holding her stomach because she is laughing so hard. She laughs until she is crying, until her jaw muscles ache. She cannot remember when she last laughed like this. Perhaps not since she was a girl. Nathaniel begins to laugh too. He has made her laugh, he has done it! Tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks. What a glorious sight! To see her undone by joy, her hair and clothes covered with hay. 266


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She collapses onto the grass and when the laughing fit subsides, she sighs with deep satisfaction and wipes her eyes. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted to do something like that?’ Nathaniel plucks a blade of dried grass from her hair, bends to kiss her and murmurs, ‘Oh yes.’ They make love behind one of the haystacks—gentle and playful, a love that bears no relation to the anguished passion of their nights—and the afternoon passes in a dream from which neither of them wishes to wake. When they finally stir themselves from the grass, they take it in turns on the bicycle until Jemma proposes that they ride together, just one last time before they go back to their duties as Mr and Mrs Jonathan Wright. Against the purple haze of late afternoon, great flocks of white cockatoos with sulphur crests descend on the fields to pick at the grass seeds. While Nathaniel straddles the velocipede, Jemma eases herself onto the handlebars. Tentatively, he pushes off with his foot. Their combined weight slows them at first and they move at a stately pace down the gentle slope. Nathaniel guides the vehicle across the path in lazy arabesques. They should, he cries, join a circus and perform death-defying acts! They are laughing so hard that Jemma isn’t aware when it starts happening, but at some point they find they have left the track and are careening across the field, having suddenly picked up speed. They come over a rise and out of nowhere, a great blue gum looms up in their path, a few hundred yards down the hill. Nathaniel’s vision is mostly obscured by Jemma and she must be his eyes. By the time she cries out in warning their 267


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momentum is such that there is little hope of avoiding a collision. All they can do is bail out. Jemma dives to her left and hits the ground with a yelp, Nathaniel tumbling straight after her. Two seconds later, they watch as the velocipede hits the massive trunk of the blue gum and fl ies up into the branches, its wheels spinning wildly before it comes crashing down and its iron frame snaps in two. Jemma is lucky that her fall was cushioned by small, scattered mounds of hay. She sits up and calls out to Nathaniel who is lying on the ground, not moving. As she registers his prone shape and the velocipede in the background, one wheel still aimlessly spinning, she has a vision of a painting that she will one day make. A painting of a man with a broken bicycle and she will ache for him as she paints it just as she ached for him the first time she brushed his body into being. ‘Nat! Are you all right?’ Nathaniel groans and lifts himself onto one elbow. Dark shapes swarm at the corner of his vision and he wonders if he is about to black out. He closes his eyes and opens them again. The swarming shapes slowly disappear, but his head continues to thump. ‘Nothing seems to be broken.’ ‘And you?’ ‘Just sore,’ she says, rubbing her thigh. ‘What were we thinking of?’ he smiles wearily. ‘We might have killed ourselves.’ He drags himself across the ground towards her and lays his head in her lap. They remain like this, in silence, listening to their ragged breath. The white cockatoos, momentarily startled by the crash, return to picking at the grass. Low clouds in the sky turn pink. 268


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‘We’re going to be black and blue for a month,’ Nathaniel says. It comforts him to nominate a time limit, even though he has no idea how long the healing might take. Or whether healing, of a deeper kind, will ever be possible. Whether their love will always be one part ecstacy, two parts pain. One wheel of the bicycle lies bent on the grass, the other is slumped against the tree like a drunk. Half of the frame dangles from a low branch, twisted back on itself. Jemma sighs. ‘I’m sorry, Nat.’ Nathaniel rolls off her lap and onto the grass. ‘Sorry about what? We did what we wanted to do, Jem. It made us laugh, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t you do it all again?’ ‘Do it all again?’ She knows he is not just asking about the events of the afternoon. He wants her reassurance that their time together has been worth it. She looks at him sprawled out on the grass; his shirt is torn at one elbow and he has a nasty red graze on his forehead, yet she has never seen him looking more handsome. If only it were possible to block out everything else, to live just for each other. But from the beginning, they have been hostage to events beyond their control. She stares out over the bay. ‘We never really had a chance.’ Nathaniel is about to speak when Jemma spies Henry emerging from the house. ‘Look!’ she says, glad of a distraction. They both watch as the boy starts running across the fields towards them, Astor bounding at his side.

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40 Not since she was last pregnant has Celestina slept so lightly. Since the rock-throwing incidents, she finds that the slightest noises wake her—possums on the roof, the low murmur of the miners’ voices as they troop home from the midnight shift, the sound of footsteps passing on the street. Sometimes she thinks she hears the urgent drumming of a woman’s fingers on the tearoom door. Even though the sound vanishes as soon as she wakes, she cannot help getting out of bed—as she is doing now—and quietly hurrying down the stairs to the shop, just in case. She cannot bear to think of Jemma waiting out in the darkness, that she might miss her call. A gas lamp across the road casts a faint glow through the tearoom. Celestina can see Battista sitting at one of the tables, his head slumped on his arms, snoring like a train. She has told him and Aquilino there is no need for them to keep watch, but they are staunch when they make up their minds and will not be deterred. 270


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Of course there is no one at the door, the dark street is empty and silent. But there is no peace in this silence. The voices have started up in her head again, too many voices telling her what she should do. They have been at her for months now, niggling, admonishing, cajoling, threatening. Most of them are at her about Jemma’s painting, demanding to know how she can leave ‘that picture’ hanging on a public wall after all that has happened. Telling her she ought to be ashamed. Every time Celestina enters the tearoom her eye goes straight to it, lingers there, and she finds herself thinking and remembering and, before she knows it, she is angry and hurt. Before the child died and Jemma left, the painting was rarely remarked on. Occasionally a customer who knew something about art might praise the execution or use of colour or technique. But on the whole, it seemed that the work was too moody and devoid of anecdote to stir feelings other than bafflement. How sad, Celestina thinks, that it took a tragedy and a scandal to provoke a response. Now reactions to it are violent. They no longer see the painting but the woman. And if the woman can’t be punished, then at least the painting can. Celestina lifts the candle up to the painting. It would be easy enough to have an accident, to hold the flame too close and for the canvas to catch. An accident that would absolve her of all responsibility to make a decision either way. She has enough to worry about without the painting attracting attention and causing a fuss. As she looks at it now, moving the candle back and forth in front of the canvas, she remembers the day she went to Jemma’s studio and the thrill 271


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of discovery, which was inseparable from the certainty that this was a friendship that would see them through to the end of their lives. She remembers hanging the painting on this wall and dreaming of the gallery she would one day open and how she would boast to the world that she was the first to recognise the talent of Jemma Musk. It is not until Celestina backs away from the canvas that she notices. All the times she has gazed upon Paddock with Buttercups and still not seen it. She had, of course, registered the way some of the buttercups were flattened. But not the shape that they made—accentuated by the nighttime shadows of the tearoom—as if they were recording the impression of a body that had just been removed. The realisation comes like a slap, a reproof. A reminder that there will always be crucial details that one will miss. She had known the story of Erasmus Musk’s death, but not seen that it was unfolding there before her eyes. And now the painting speaks to her of two absences. The absent father and the absent friend, both still communicating with her, still leaving their mark. It sometimes seems to Celestina that her life is shaping itself around Jemma’s absence, that everything she does is driven by it. Sometimes, when she is feeling tired and low, she resents this, and finds herself thinking if only Jemma had trusted her friends and family. She ought to have known that they would stick by her. She ought to have known she owed Gotardo, owed all of them, that much. But then the mood passes and she reminds herself that grief makes people do unaccountable things and that O’Brien gave Jemma no choice. And she knows what she has to do. It is a matter of honour as well as loyalty. 272


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At first she doubted it could be done. O’Brien’s authority and his hold over the public seemed unassailable. But there are, she has discovered, others in the town who are concerned about the way O’Brien has conducted himself, and she has found a particularly useful ally in the journalist from the Advocate, who once interviewed Gotardo. The young man has been making investigations based on information she has given him and she is confident that he will soon have enough material to publish an article pointing to irregularities in police conduct in the pursuit of Musk and Byrne. She does not know whether it will have any impact but it will be a start, a small voice of dissent, a reminder that all is not as it seems. Only when O’Brien is finally exposed will Celestina get a good night’s sleep.

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41 From his position by the piano, Henry is watching Mrs Wright as she looks out the drawing room window. He clears his throat, waiting for her to give the word. It is not the fi rst time he has seen her like this, a blank-eyed statue. Lapsed into a sort of trance. Kind as she has been to him, part of her has always been absent, as if she were living another life in her head. When he saw her and Mr Wright on that velocipede heading straight for the old blue gum, it was as if a door flew open and he glimpsed this other life. Then the door slammed shut and he was in the dark again. Henry doesn’t want to disturb her but he can’t stand there all afternoon. ‘Mrs Wright?’ Jemma looks up with a jolt. ‘Henry! I’m sorry.’ She is so pale he is afraid she will faint. ‘Is anything wrong?’ he asks. 274


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‘Not at all. Begin, please.’ As Henry launches into the poem, Jemma shakes herself. She wonders how long the boy had been watching her. She had completely forgotten where she was. She had drifted back to that sunny afternoon a week ago, swooping downhill on the bicycle with Nathaniel cheering her on. She was remembering the sweet taste of hope it gave her, hope that she and Nathaniel might have a future beyond the daily charade. Hope that happiness might still be possible, in spite of all that has happened. But to imagine such happiness is to fool herself that she deserves it, or that the past can be left behind. And neither are true. To let go of the pain would mean letting go of Lucy and she knows she can never do that. Her pain is all she has left. She fi xes her eyes on Henry, as if to a lifebuoy in the middle of the ocean. He is tall for a thirteen-year-old and so sweet-faced it makes her sad to think that he must grow into a man with whiskers and an enormous girth like his father. Occasionally, his voice strains and breaks, and blood blooms from his collar. The blush fades as he finds his rhythm and forgets himself, becoming Tennyson’s ageing Ulysses as he thirsts for one last voyage. Beneath Henry’s words Jemma can hear the faint crackle of his lungs. She has noticed that he tires more easily than a young man of his age ought to, and that he is often breathless after climbing a hill or taking the stairs. Whenever she asks him what is wrong, he waves his hand—as she remembers his father doing at their first interview—as if to brush the problem away. He is prone to colds, he says. Nothing serious that he won’t grow out of. 275


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Hardly a satisfactory explanation and yet it seems to Jemma that Dr Leask is complicit in playing down whatever ails the boy. She will never fathom why a man of his intelligence and standing is prepared to let his only son rattle around this large, empty house. Anyone can see that the boy is unwell. When she asked Mrs Croad about Henry’s health, the housekeeper clammed up. She said she had no idea but was sure that Dr Leask knew what was best. Sometimes, when Henry has enough breath and energy, Jemma hears him singing sad folk songs about lost love. He only sings when he is alone, usually when he is walking along the beach with that way he has of hunching his shoulders, his hands pressed deep in the pockets of his tweed jacket, his eyes fi xed on the ground when he is not staring out to sea. When Henry finishes his recital, Jemma talks to him about iambic pentameter and enjambment, the influence of Shakespearean soliloquy and the passage from Dante which inspired Tennyson’s poem. Henry tells her that he, too, writes poems, but that it isn’t enough to write poems about great adventures; he longs for his own adventures. During his daily walk he sees ships on their way to the open ocean and sees himself on deck, heading for untravelled worlds. Jemma remembers something she read in The Times about the Poet Laureate. When a good friend of Tennyson’s was leaving England to come to the colonies, Tennyson remarked that were it not for his wife, he would happily go with him. Jemma says she can’t help wondering whether that frustrated longing to travel might have inspired him to write ‘Ulysses’; that if he had actually made such a journey he would not have needed to write the poem. 276


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‘I’d rather live!’ Henry bursts out, with the force of someone beyond his years. Then he’s fighting back tears. He blinks them away and starts talking about his hero, Lord Byron, and how nothing ever stopped him from writing great poems and having adventures. And what adventures! Jemma smiles at him sadly. The grandfather clock in the hallway begins to chime, its deep, trembling notes signalling the end of Henry’s lessons for the day. She would like to tell him that adventures are not always what they seem. Each time she opens the Argus or the Port Phillip Herald—Mrs Croad insists that Nathaniel buy both— she steels herself for the latest word on doings of the notorious Musk and Byrne. There is, she has to admit, a dark kind of amusement in reading about yourself in this way. At first, she and Nathaniel had thought it to their advantage, that it would keep O’Brien off their trail. (So poor were the woodblock likenesses of them in the Police Gazette and on the ‘Wanted’ posters that there was little chance of them being identified.) But more recently there has been talk in the papers of a special police force formed to hunt them down. The absurdity of it. She had thought the stories would fizzle out when they were found to have no substance. But something about her has inflamed the public mind. When she reads the letters people have written to the papers, she can’t understand why they would bother. Don’t they have their own lives to get on with? No one doubts that she is guilty. Her actions speak for themselves. What kind of woman deserts her grieving husband and runs off with her lover before her dead child is even laid in the earth? She is wanton, dangerous and at large. 277


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There are times when Jemma thinks she should have been arrested and tried and imprisoned, that she is somehow responsible for the death of her child. Or that she deserves to be punished for falling in love with another man and abandoning Gotardo. The rubbish she reads in the papers could be borne were it not for the knowledge that Gotardo’s people doubt her—and even Celestina. Only Gotardo knows the truth. Marcus O’Brien is often quoted in these articles, fuelling speculation wherever he can. The more Jemma reads, the more certain she becomes that he will never give up.

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42 They lie awake in the chiffon moonlight waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Nathaniel can feel Jemma’s arm against his, the fine hairs touching his own. He sees them both from above: a knight and his lady on a medieval tomb. If he could be sure they would end their days in this way, he could endure almost anything. But nothing is certain in this fragile marriage of theirs; this marriage which they consummate when they fall at each other in the darkness, ripping away the masks they must wear as Mr and Mrs Jonathan Wright. Nathaniel feels it building through the day, the tension of constant watchfulness, of scrutinising every word before it is spoken, of never giving too much away. His and Jemma’s every communication in the house and around the property conducted as if on a stage. The struggle to make looks and gestures say more than their words. He once would have regarded it as the perfect aphrodisiac—lovers posing as man and wife—were it not for the effort of the pretence, and 279


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the sorrow and the guilt, and the anxiety of being found out. As in a tableau, only moments remain. Jemma’s contorted face in the moonlight more like that of a woman being flayed than one making love. Her eyes rolling back in her head, her teeth bared like a wolf. A deep, elemental gurgle rising up from her throat like a poison her body must expel. Nathaniel, with curled lip and hungry glint, feasting on that anguished cry and answering it with his own. The blue flame of his eyes imploding; his flexed body like a hammer driven to strike and strike. Images of body parts dismembered by the shadows. Images their age cannot own. Images that even they recoil from once the night is over. Afterwards, in the silence, they look at one another and wonder what possessed them. When Jemma rolls onto her side, Nathaniel imagines that she is shrinking from him, this man who is not her husband, this man whom she hardly knows. He imagines her longing for Gotardo in his empty bed. And so he lies there, staring at the ceiling as he tries to comprehend the unaccountable turn of events that brought them here, side by side and yet alone. Before he can stop her, Jemma is out of bed and splashing her face at the washstand. Nathaniel watches her from beneath the quilt—the curve of her breasts, her long, loose hair swinging as she moves—and wishes he could entice her back. At least when they are in bed together, there is still hope for them. With her body for comfort, he can almost believe that their love is not as doomed as it feels. But once she is out of bed, she is gone from him. She is someone he does not know. Someone grave and aloof, as if their nights had never happened. As if the day with the velocipede was indeed just a dream. 280


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He thinks of something she said to him recently. How she often found herself wondering why he had done it. Why he had given up everything and made himself a wanted man. He could not believe she needed an answer. ‘You know why I did it.’ ‘But surely you must regret it.’ ‘How can I make you see, Jemma? I have everything that I want!’ ‘But have you?’ She had looked at him despairingly. ‘Is this really what you want? A woman like me? A wretched coward who abandoned her husband and left him to bury their child?’ Nathaniel saw then what he was up against. What hope could there be for them if she could never forgive herself—or him—for what they had done? Jemma finishes dressing by moonlight, then lights the lamp and takes it with her into the kitchen. She stuffs balls of old newspaper into the fireplace where some embers still glow and soon has enough of a fire to boil the water for tea and make some pancakes for breakfast. She calls to Nathaniel to get up. They will run out of time if he doesn’t. They have to be off early if they are to get to the Cape and back before nightfall. The day before, a letter and parcel had arrived for Henry from Dr Leask. Urgent business prevented him from coming to Red Ridge for Henry’s birthday. Along with his apologies, he sent a full edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and promised that next time he visited they would go to the island to see the penguins as planned. In the meantime, 281


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Mrs Croad would bake a cake for the young master and make sure that a fitting supper was prepared. Although Henry said nothing to Jemma about the change in plans, his disappointment was plain. All day, she could hardly get two words from him. Only when she proposed another expedition, to somewhere she and Nathaniel could take him, did he brighten. He had never been to Cape Schanck, he said. He had heard many stories about the Cape, about smugglers at Bushrangers Bay and escaped convicts who had put ashore there, about ships that had been wrecked on its rocks. But, even though it was less than ten miles away, he had not seen it for himself. As they set out, the air is sharp against their skin but at least there is no mist. The ride to Flinders is easy enough as the slopes are never steep and the road is well worn. They ride through forests of eucalypt and she-oak and across the rolling pastures with occasional sleepy clusters of cattle and sheep, the sun on their left, rising over Westernport Bay. Sometimes they ride three abreast, sometimes Nathaniel impatiently surges ahead, leaving Jemma and Henry to canter side by side, exchanging the odd remark. Henry would like to tell her that he has seen her down at Honeysuckle Beach, and that he has never seen anyone, woman or man, swim like she does. He would like to know how she learned to swim and draw so well. There are many things he would like to know but whenever he asks her about herself she offers him the same information, the bare bones of a story that doesn’t feel quite real. By late morning their pace has slowed. There are a series 282


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of steep gullies that they have to wind their way down into, their path constantly doubling back on itself in compressed figures of eight. Recent rain has made the rough track slippery and they must dismount to lead the horses across a swollen black creek. At one point they are even held up by a family of echidnas which emerge out of the bracken and slowly amble across their path. The journey back out of the gully is slow but once they reach the top of the hill and emerge from the scrub, they finally see it in all its wind-beaten glory—the Cape, with the lighthouse overlooking its tip. Henry whistles with delight. He had not expected the Cape would look so strangely alive, like a dinosaur with its neck and head slumped in the sea. Nathaniel, too, is impressed, although for different reasons. He cannot help pointing out the layers of black basalt and red clay and explaining, with the confidence of someone who has been trained in the discipline, how successive flows of lava have built up the distinctive stacked sandwich effect. Jemma notices Henry looking at him quizzically, as if wondering how he could know such things. She loudly suggests that they should leave the horses and descend on foot, and casually takes an opportunity to whisper in Nathaniel’s ear. Nothing, however, is lost on Henry. Over the past months, he has become attuned to a certain secretiveness in their communication. Their code of looks and gestures. Sometimes, what remains unspoken hovers around them, charging the atmosphere, like the tension one feels in the air before a storm. ‘You sound like a geologist, Mr Wright,’ Henry remarks with an ingenuous smile. 283


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Ahead of them, the path descends into a dense patch of scrub before opening out onto the exposed grassy neck of the Cape. Nathaniel disappears into a thicket of tea-tree and banksias. He is sick of all the deception, especially with the boy. It is easier to pretend he hasn’t heard. He moves quickly through the tunnel of scrub, keen to get out into the open again. Diverted by their field work habits, Henry and Jemma’s progress is slower. Jemma stops to inspect the gaping little mouths on a banksia seed pod and calls Henry over. Further on, she spies some stalks of native orchid, which she adds to the bunch of kangaroo paw she has already collected with a mind to pressing it between the pages of a book. They do not realise how far they have fallen behind until they hear a shout from Nathaniel which seems to come from some distance ahead. They quicken their pace until they reach a fork in the path where they hesitate, taking the one that seems to lead in the right direction, only to fi nd it petering out into impenetrable scrub. As they double back, they hear Nathaniel cry out again. This time it is not just a shocked ejaculation caused by a sudden mishap but a pained plea for help. At first Jemma doesn’t register it—until Henry, who is leading the way, glances back over his shoulder with that quizzical look again. Nathaniel is calling her by name. Her real name. Peering over the edge of the dinosaur’s neck, they spot Nathaniel halfway down the side of the crumbling cliff. At the bottom is a platform of rock where waves surge and collide, sending up great spouts of spray. He yells that he has 284


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twisted or broken his ankle when he slipped on loose rock. Now he can’t move without help, can’t put any pressure on his right foot. There is no real path to speak of down the cliff face and Henry must move crabwise down the crumbly slope. When he reaches him, Nathaniel drapes his right arm around the boy’s shoulder and leans into him as they begin the slow ascent. Tentatively, they hobble their way back up the cliff, zigzagging across its face in search of a flat surface and vegetation to grip on to. Once they are at the top, Nathaniel insists that Jemma and Henry go and explore the headland to take in the full view. If he had not been so stupid and impatient to get to the bottom, he says, they could have found a safe path down to the beach. Jemma and Henry wander around the base of the lighthouse from where they can see out across the blue expanse of Bass Strait. Just below the lighthouse is a rocky formation that looks like a castle jutting precariously up out of the cliff. They scramble across the neck and onto the head of the Cape, setting off tiny avalanches of rock that tumble down into the sea. The wind is much stronger here. Stretching out his arms like a scarecrow, Henry lets himself be buffeted by the southerly gusts that snap at his clothes. He looks down at the white water surging around the furthest outcrop, known as the Pulpit, at the waves driving themselves onto rocks. He wonders what it might be like to do such a thing, to throw oneself from this cliff, to abandon oneself to the elements and die amid this wild splendour rather than the slow, agonising death he watched his mother endure. ‘We ought to be going, Henry.’ 285


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Henry smiles at the way Mrs Wright has read his thoughts. Jemma, he says to himself. Jemma. As blasted as he is by the wind, he feels strangely warm and secure. He wonders if this is what it means to be in love. ‘Why did Mr Wright call you Jemma?’ Jemma has been waiting for this question. ‘People have special names for each other.’ She glances at him sidelong to gauge his response but he has reverted to his usual position of hands in pockets and eyes raking the ground. It takes them a good hour to reach the horses, supporting Nathaniel between them. Jemma tears her petticoat into strips and binds it around his ankle before they help him mount. It is well after nightfall by the time they reach Flinders. Even when the moon appears from behind a cloud and lights their path, they cannot gallop or even canter because the motion causes Nathaniel too much pain, his foot so swollen he has had to remove his boot. Too large for the stirrup, it bounces uselessly against the horse’s belly and sometimes makes him cry out. For most of the return journey they have ridden single fi le but as they approach the homestead, Henry falls in beside Jemma. She doesn’t look at him but is conscious of his breathing and his mind ticking over, drawing conclusions from the evidence of the day. They ride side by side for some time until Jemma cannot stand the silence. ‘You wanted an adventure!’ Henry grins. ‘I’m glad to have had it.’ He pauses. ‘But there are things, Mrs Wright, that puzzle me.’ ‘What things, Henry?’ 286


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He doesn’t know how to say it, how to broach the mystery that seems to surround them, his sense that there is something they don’t want to reveal. They have both been so good to him it makes him sad that they do not trust him, that they shut him out. ‘Why don’t you trust me?’ Jemma sighs. She, too, is weary of dissembling. ‘We don’t trust anyone, Henry. We don’t even trust ourselves.’

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43 Nathaniel is sitting on the lawn in front of their cottage, his right foot propped up on a boulder, staring across to the island. At his side lies a pair of rough crutches he has fashioned from eucalypt branches to help him get around until the swelling subsides. At least the ankle wasn’t broken, only badly sprained. On still, clear afternoons like this, the island seems to edge in closer, the sun blazing on the windowpanes of the few houses on the opposite coast, as if someone were sending them signals. In the paddocks above the distant cliffs, the grazing cattle look like toys carved from wood. Only last week it would have been too cool to sit here on the lawn. But they are experiencing an Indian summer and even the air smells different. One could almost believe that spring had begun. Nathaniel has seen iridescent dragonfl ies hovering over the sluggish creek that runs out at Honeysuckle Beach, and cabbage butterfl ies in the garden. 288


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He adjusts himself so that he is leaning on his side. He plucks a long blade of grass and runs it along Jemma’s exposed wrist. She keeps her eyes fi xed on the distance. ‘If we had a boat we could row there.’ ‘Why are you always wanting to go somewhere else? You could swim there, if you really wanted to.’ ‘I have thought about it.’ Nathaniel laughs. ‘It doesn’t surprise me.’ A figure appears on the headland below them, stops to inspect a rock pool and then moves on, eyes on the basalt platform. They wait for Henry to look up so that they can wave at him but he is too preoccupied with the world at his feet. Following on behind him, as always, is Astor, his nose pressed to a pile of dried kelp. ‘I told you there was nothing to worry about,’ Nathaniel says. Jemma stares thoughtfully at Henry. He hasn’t said anything to confirm he has suspicions. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t harbour them. She finds him poring over the Argus more than he used to, and twice he has left it open at pages with letters or articles speculating about the doings of Musk and Byrne. Jemma has just picked up her book, when his fi ne, piping tenor voice floats up on the wind. It is a song that Jemma has heard him sing before about a young woman called Molly Malone who sells cockles and mussels from her cart in the streets of Dublin. When he reaches the part where Molly dies of a fever, his voice drops and becomes almost inaudible. Then, in a surge of defiance, it swells with the chorus until he is almost shouting the words. 289


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Alive, alive-o Alive, alive-o, Crying, ‘Cockles and mussels, Alive, alive-o!’ No sooner has he released the final note, than he breaks into a violent fit of coughing, so harsh and protracted that Jemma turns to Nathaniel in alarm. She is about to get up when the coughing subsides into ragged barks. It is then that Henry looks up at them, as if he knew they were there all the time. He waves and continues across the rocks before disappearing into the foreshore trees. Nathaniel pretends not to notice Jemma’s agitation. If he remarks on it, he knows it will only cause trouble between them. He is convinced that Dr Leask and his wife are afraid of contagion and that this is why they stay away. In effect, they have abandoned Henry, even though they would never see it that way. It angers him that he and Jemma have been made responsible for the boy’s health when his father ought to take charge. Jemma already has more than enough on her mind. With every day that passes, the silence between them grows. They never speak about what happens during the night. To acknowledge it would be too hazardous, it would raise too many disturbing questions about what they want from each other and why. Nathaniel has come to think of her as a nocturnal animal which only comes out under the cover of darkness. An animal whose needs are fierce and increasingly dark. Now, when she lashes out at him, it is not just provocation. She is not only inciting him to hurt her, to 290


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give her pain. She wants to make him suffer too. When she bears down on him, gripping his shoulder with her nails and tearing at his mouth with her own, the anger in her is all too real. He is afraid that one day he will lose control of himself and do her damage because he can no longer distinguish between her cries of pleasure and her cries of pain. Once, the violence sharpened the tenderness. But the tenderness has almost gone. The more she withdraws from him and withholds her affections, the more he finds himself wanting her, craving not her body but her love. When Henry has gone to bed in the evenings and Jemma is sitting with him by the fire in their cottage, reading or darning or gazing out the window at the stars, he will reach out and take hold of her hand. It ought to be a companionable feeling, sitting silently without needing to speak. But if he squeezes her hand or in any way seeks her attention, she closes her eyes or tosses him a distant smile, like a mother with a pestering child. He tried to cheer himself up the other day by getting out his maps of the centre, of Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens and the Simpson Desert. To remind himself that he once had great plans. But he can’t seem to concentrate on them or to rouse much enthusiasm for the expedition anymore. While the will to mount the expedition remains, he can feel his desire for it draining away like a river into the desert. Other desires are now paramount. He finds it hard to understand how he could once have believed that nothing was as important as finding answers to riddles that most people believe have already been solved. He is still convinced that the inland ocean could exist underground or as a capricious seasonal phenomenon. But he 291


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no longer feels it to be his special destiny to test if the thesis is true. Let someone else do it. What will it matter in the end? There was a time when he could not stand it when a woman cried and clung. Now he now longs for her to weep and grieve openly so that he might be able to comfort her and know that her need for him is as deep as his for her. When he urged her to flee Wombat Hill, he did not imagine that he would find himself her captive, a spectator to her grief. Or that a day would come when she would do her best to push him away. ‘Why are you never here with me, Jemma?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘You spend all your time with Henry.’ She is silent. ‘He is dying, Nathaniel.’ Nathaniel knows he will curse himself for going on, but he doesn’t care anymore. In this fugitive life they are living, they only have each other. And if they don’t have each other, they have nothing. ‘Not everyone dies of consumption.’ Jemma throws down the book she has been holding and shoots him a look of contempt. She hates herself for hurting him, but it is the only way to make him see that he doesn’t need her, that he is better off without her. Better off alone. That Henry needs her more. Nathaniel picks up a copy of the Port Phillip Herald lying nearby and begins scanning the columns. There is no point him telling her how much he loves her. He knows she won’t return the declaration, she won’t say she loves him too, even though he is sure she still does. Nothing makes sense anymore. He has long since stopped believing that these smudgy columns of newsprint will reflect 292


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the world as he knows it, has long since stopped believing in the idea of ‘news’. It might be novel but that is a far cry from fact or the real complexities of people’s lives. For months now, he and Jemma have watched with disbelief as the myth of Musk and Byrne has gathered momentum, each new report adding to the already feverish speculation about their whereabouts and their supposed misdeeds. Nathaniel has come to realise that evidence and truth are irrelevant when everything hinges on what people wish to believe. The stories take hold like Chinese whispers until even the most unlikely incident emerges as shining proof. Only a week ago, he and Jemma were alleged to have conducted a robbery at a general store at nearby Merricks. Woken in the middle of the night by what the owners first thought were possums which had come down the chimney and started knocking things off the shelves, they discovered, instead, a man and what looked by candlelight to be a boy ransacking the shelves. When challenged, the pair charged out the door, each with a sack full of goods. The man flung himself onto his horse but the boy couldn’t mount with his sack. ‘Jem, leave it!’ the man was heard to cry. Immediately, the boy dropped his sack and they both galloped off into the night. The magic word ‘Jem’ was enough. The boy was a woman. It was the owners’ conviction that the robbery was the work of Musk and Byrne. Since then, everyone in the district has been talking about it, bringing the whole farce uncomfortably close. It occurs to Nathaniel, as he reads the letters published in the paper, that this hysteria is not fuelled by fear or disapproval but by something murkier and deeper, something 293


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no one will readily admit to: an infatuation, a warped kind of love. Ordinary citizens, frustrated by the police force’s lack of success, are mounting their own search parties, disappearing into the bush on some false trail or other, only to return days or weeks later clutching a piece of charcoal supposedly from their campfire, or a fragment of lace said to be from Jemma Musk’s petticoat, or some other dubious token that allows them to claim a piece of her. Nathaniel lets out a bitter laugh. At least he is in company! He is not the only one eluded by Jemma Musk.

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44 As they make their way down the rocky path to the beach, Henry often stops for breath, pretending to take in the view over the water or to pat Astor at his side. There is a peculiar lustre to his eyes that makes him seem preternaturally alive, even though he is often tired, especially in the late afternoon. Jemma knows why he no longer sits with them in the evenings, much as he enjoys their company. Because the room would be full of his breathing. It is two months since Dr Leask was last at Red Ridge. As before, he stayed for one night and spent much of his time inspecting the property and pacing about the house. When he asked Jemma and Nathaniel about his son, he paid little attention to their expressions of concern. Henry, he told them, was prone to asthma, which was why Dr Leask insisted that he stay by the sea where the air was fresh and invigorating. The boy had the necessary inhalants and powders which he had mixed for him, and Henry knew what to do when 295


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an attack came on. Jemma can only presume that Dr Leask keeps up this charade because of the distress his wife’s death caused him, and his distress at his own inability to help his son. She knows the impulse too well, this perpetual motion to stave off thought; this refusal to let the mind settle on the source of pain. Or is it more simple than this, as Nathaniel alleges—that he is afraid of his sickly son? The tide is low. Henry is turning over rocks, picking up the occasional one and, after inspecting it, sending it skimming across the water. Astor watches him eagerly, waiting for a stick. ‘Haven’t you ever wished you could fi nd a fossil?’ he asks. ‘From a dinosaur or a giant wombat?’ He flashes a weary grin. ‘Can you imagine it?’ He doesn’t wait for her reply. ‘And what about these theories of Mr Darwin? Do you believe them?’ Henry is in one of those moods when he can’t stop asking questions. There are so many things he wants to know, so few people to tell him anything and so little time to find out. ‘Papa says it’s the hottest topic at the club.’ Jemma chooses her words carefully. She does not think it is a matter of belief. Either the theories about the origins of man are true or they are false. The closer she looks at nature, the more inclined she is to suspect that Darwin was right. Think, for instance, about that fairy penguin they found. Like other birds, it would once have had wings. But the wings had become fl ippers. Or perhaps it was the other way around. That other birds had developed wings from fl ippers while the little penguin had not. How did that happen and why? Darwin’s theories offered answers that the Bible could 296


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not. She tells Henry she will order copies of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Then they can read them together and thrash out the matter for themselves. Henry looks at her sadly. ‘It will take too long.’ Jemma pretends not to understand. Seeing a small brown frog that must have been washed down the creek, she picks it up and presents it to him. ‘The class?’ Henry cradles it in his palm. ‘Amphibia.’ He looks pleased with himself. ‘It means double life, doesn’t it? Half in the water, half on land.’ He almost tells her this is how he thinks of her when he sees her out in the water or emerging from the surf. Almost tells her that he knows about her double life. But he is too afraid of what will happen if he confronts her. He could not bear it if she went away. There is something about the way he is looking at her that makes Jemma uneasy. She hears herself telling him in her teacher’s voice not to mistake naming for knowledge. ‘Knowing what something is called in Greek or Latin is not knowledge. Real knowledge is understanding how and why things work. How a tree sucks energy from the sun. How the planets stay in their orbits. Why some creatures become extinct and others endure.’ Why a child dies in her sleep. ‘Dear God!’ Jemma looks down at her sodden hem as if to explain the outburst. Her hand goes automatically to the locket around her neck. She doesn’t know why she says it. Anything to change the subject. ‘You must miss your father, Henry.’ Henry finds another rock and turns it over. His father, he says, is a busy man. And when he isn’t at the hospital or seeing 297


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patients, he is out at some ball or other with Amelia. If Henry were up in the city, he probably wouldn’t see much more of him than he does now. He glances shyly at her and adds that he has been a lot less lonely since she and Mr Wright came to stay. At first they do not notice the sea mist drifting in. Crouched on the sand with their backs to the water, they inspect another fairy penguin that has been washed across from the island. Henry strokes the small creature’s glossy black head and then turns away, convulsed by a coughing fit. When he takes his handkerchief from his mouth, he quickly stuffs it into his pocket but not quickly enough to hide the flecks of blood. ‘Look!’ Henry says, pointing out to where the sea should be. The horizon is gone, as is the headland and the view up the coast: all consumed by the vaporous air. Jemma has seen these sea mists roll in before but only from a distance, has never been in the thick of the cloud. When she and Nathaniel first arrived here, she welcomed the obliterating whiteness of the mist, the sense of being made invisible to the outside world. But this is a different sensation. Here, there is nowhere to go, no windows and walls to keep the invading blankness at bay. All they can see of the water are the small grey waves lapping at their feet. The birds have all gone silent, as if they are listening and waiting for something to happen. Then, further up the beach, a dog starts to bark. ‘Astor!’ There are a sharp series of yelps in reply and a scampering sound. A small, low form materialises out of the mist. Henry kneels and pulls the dog’s face to his chest. ‘You silly, silly dog,’ 298


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he says, fondling its ears. ‘You didn’t think I’d leave you here?’ It is the kind of thing a mother says to a child who has momentarily thought himself lost. There have been a number of occasions like this, when Jemma has heard in Henry the echo of lost last words. His mother’s voice. An instinctive way of summoning her up, of keeping her at his side as she no doubt promised she would always be. Jemma remembers making such promises. Promises whispered into Lucy’s ear. The promise that she would never leave her, no matter what. She reaches for the gold locket again. Her fingers flutter over her chest and then up to her chin, blindly feeling under the collar of her blouse. Unable to locate the chain, she undoes the top buttons and presses her hands to her throat, finding nothing but her leaping pulse. The skin is bare. Horribly bare. The locket was there earlier but somewhere between the creek and this spot where she now stands, it has slipped from its clasp. The dense mist has swallowed up most of the beach. Jemma looks down at the sand. She cannot see beyond a few feet. She drops to her knees, trying not to panic. Since leaving Wombat Hill, not a day has passed when she has not longed to open the locket and look upon Lucy’s face. But she has not let herself, not even once. She has forced herself to be content with having the locket close to her skin, the thought and the feel of it. She knows that it makes no sense and yet the resolution has brought her great comfort. For as long as she does not open the locket, the possibility remains that Lucy still lives. Jemma can hear herself whimpering but is helpless to stop. Everything she has desperately tried not to feel is threatening to unleash itself on this cloud-wrapped beach. 299


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Henry joins her on his knees, wondering what could be so valuable that the loss of it has reduced his governess, who is always so poised, to such a wretched state. They scramble around in the sand, brushing it this way and that, lifting matted chunks of seaweed and driftwood, but Jemma is sure it is hopeless. She ought to get Henry back to the house. He ought not to be out in such weather. But she cannot leave until the locket is found; she cannot abandon Lucy again. Seeing Astor sniffing at the dead fairy penguin gives Henry an idea. The dog might never have been much of a bloodhound but he still has a nose for a scent. Henry asks Jemma for her handkerchief and gives it to the dog to smell. At Henry’s command, Astor is off and sniffing his way across the sand. Jemma stands with her hands limp at her side, watching, mesmerised, as Astor moves in and out of the mist. The slow dissolution of colour and form and its reversal as the dog reappears. It seems so futile and yet she has no choice but to trust that the slightest trace of her body lies somewhere here in the sand. They have been waiting for what seems like ages when they hear the short sharp yips. They rush over to the source of the sound, where Astor is standing with his tail madly wagging. Beneath his nose they can see a glimmer. Henry picks up the locket and, as he brushes the sand away, it comes open. Inside is a tiny photograph of a very young child with curly blonde hair and Mrs Wright’s half-moon eyes. He passes it back to Jemma, who glances down at the photograph and snaps the locket shut. He looks at her steadily. ‘Is she your daughter?’ 300


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Jemma knows she cannot avoid it. She must tell him. And it suddenly surprises her to find that she wants to, wants to tell the world that Lucy once lived. For six months Jemma has not spoken of her, not uttered her name out loud. Her throat is so tight she can barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Lucy,’ she whispers. ‘That was her name.’ She has said it now. She has used the past tense. Lucy is gone and Jemma can’t pretend anymore. She remembers the first time she said ‘my daughter’ and how impossibly large the word felt in her mouth; how she almost had to gulp as she said it. The enormity of the occasion, even though it must have seemed so ordinary to everyone else. Henry looks at his feet. He is familiar enough with grief to know there is nothing worthwhile he can say. He had sensed a sadness in her, had felt they had something in common, and now he understands why. It’s time they were going, she says, straining to see the path through the trees. She has no idea how they will find their way back. Seeing her bewilderment, Henry reaches out to take her hand. His face is lit up by an unearthly glow. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Wright. The thing to remember about a mist is that it’s not like a wall. With every step you can see a bit further. You have to keep pushing on.’ Jemma closes her hand around his, shocked at how burning hot it is even though he is starting to shiver. She is beginning to realise it is possible to do this, to keep pushing on. She squeezes his hand in gratitude as they follow Astor into the mist.

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45 That night when Jemma closes her eyes she sees a figure emerging out of a mist. Or is it disappearing? She opens her eyes and takes in the darkness, then closes them again. The image remains, so shadowy and vaporous, it is hard to know if it is truly a figure or an object or a dark patch of cloud. Jemma waits for the mist to clear, for the figure to declare itself. But even as the air shimmers with movement, with tiny oscillating particles of light, the figure stays indistinct. The longer she holds the image in her mind, the more she realises that this impression of dissolution, of cloudiness and atomised light, is not a temporary state. The figure is inseparable from the landscape, forever on the verge of becoming something else. Jemma lies listening to the soft rain on the roof. It surprises her that she isn’t disappointed. The tantalising figure promised so much and yet she will never know who or what it might have been. Instead come stirrings of old feelings she thought she had buried with her child. Feelings about the smell of 302


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paint and the urge to put marks on a page. If she thinks of the image as a painting, what matters is not the figure alone but the whole; the luminosity of the veiled landscape; the effervescence of the light; the sense of infinite depth even though the distance is obscured by the mist. She thinks of her dear Ruskin, her beloved old master’s dictum that there are no outlines in nature, only shades of dark and light. One might think of the image as a work in progress, palpitating and raw, but this instability is the truth of it: that life is as fugitive as light. The next morning, after her swim, Jemma goes to the large sideboard in the hallway where, some weeks before, she discovered the paints that once belonged to Henry’s mother. When she asks Henry if she might use them, he goes upstairs to the attic and comes down, panting heavily, with two blank canvases that his mother had intended to fi ll. Jemma is pleased to have the canvases but fears that anything she paints will only disappoint him. He will expect her to paint like his mother, or at least to paint local scenes as his mother always did. Sometimes she catches him gazing at her with a kind of wonder, and when she asks him what he is thinking, he says that she reminds him of her. ‘You don’t mind my saying that?’ he asks and she reassures him that she doesn’t. But it is a heavy burden to bear. He wants and needs more of her than she will ever be able to give him. She is haunted by the possibility that she and Nathaniel may have to suddenly pick up and leave, and that he will rightly feel he has been abandoned all over again. As always he is full of questions. Does she do portraits or landscapes? Perhaps she would like to paint the view from the 303


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cliff outside the house or go down to the beach and paint the sea from there. Would she mind if he watched her at work? Jemma tells him it isn’t possible. She can’t work if she is being watched. At least during the early stages, she needs to be alone. She sets up her easel in a small room on the second storey at the far end of the house where no one goes. Here, the windows face north and the light is good for most of the day. Once the paints are mixed and everything is ready, she stands looking at the canvas, remembering the figure in the mist. She tells herself not to think, just to follow the original impulse and the impression it made. Not that painting doesn’t require hard thinking; it is never purely a matter of inspiration. But she knows from experience that as she begins to paint, as certain doors are unlocked, the hard and painful part will begin. And by that time, she will be so possessed by what she is doing that she will have no option but to push on. She does not want to paint the vistas she sees around her at Red Ridge, as striking as they are. What she wants to paint is inside her head, not particular images so much as a palette of feelings and memories and impressions for which she has to find a form. At the same time, she knows that the form itself is inscribed in the image, the image of the figure in the mist; the ghostly absence that remains with her and always will. In the past, when she was about to start a painting, she would relish the sense of setting out on a journey of discovery, of venturing into the unknown. But the feeling is different this time. She’s had enough of journeys and the precariousness of life on the run. This time, when she steps into the mist with her brush, she knows she will be going home. 304


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Over the next few days, the painting emerges as she had sensed it would, the brushstrokes rough and unfused, half out of impatience to get them down, half out of a desire to capture the ephemeral energy of the moment, the images dissolving and re-forming before the eye. Much of it painted through tears. She will be lightly stroking the canvas when she finds herself remembering how she would stroke Lucy’s face. And more and more, she thinks of Gotardo, wanting to ask if he too remembers this or that. Sometimes it feels as if her mouth is fi lling up with words that can’t be uttered because the memories can’t be shared. Nathaniel would listen if she tried to tell him, but this is not what she wants or needs She cannot say to him, ‘Remember the time Lucy went missing and we found her out in the paddock staring into the eyes of a calf?’ or ‘Remember how she ran before she could walk?’ or ‘Remember how she used to laugh in her sleep!’ Jemma longs for the shorthand of shared knowledge, of things understood without being spelled out, of knowing that Lucy remains alive in the world they once shared. As she has always done after an intense bout of painting, Jemma feels the urge to wander. Walking around the garden and listening to the cry of the gulls, she wonders about Henry. She can see him now, making his way up the cliff path with the help of a stick. He stops often to catch his breath, his pale hair falling over his face as a coughing fit takes hold, his clothes hanging off him as if they were two sizes too big. She is reminded of him standing like a scarecrow on the cliff top at Cape Schanck and how much thinner he has grown. Jemma retreats from the window. She cannot bear to watch 305


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any longer. She is determined to confront him about it, to stop this pitiful pretence that nothing is seriously wrong. She is also determined to telegraph Dr Leask and insist that he come and take charge of his son. To Jemma’s amazement, Dr Leask arrives at Red Ridge the day after she sends the telegram. He dines alone with his son, then requests that Mrs Wright join him in the drawing room. When she is seated, he closes the door. He does not take a seat himself, but stands in front of the fire. Jemma notices that he is not his usual blustering self. He is subdued and thinner in the face, as if he has been fretting, and his eyes are puffy. ‘I have to confess to you, Mrs Wright, that I am deeply ashamed to have left my son in your hands without telling you the truth of his illness. I have known for some time that he has consumption but I have not wanted to admit it, even to myself. The pain of watching Henry’s mother die is still too raw. And, yes, I was afraid you would not take up the position if you knew. You were right to confront me about it. I had buried myself in my work so that I wouldn’t have time to reflect on what the future might hold.’ Jemma waits as he pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket and turns away to blow his nose. It had been a risk contacting Dr Leask, drawing attention to herself, given the amount of speculation surrounding Musk and Byrne. Leask had done them a favour by leaving them alone. But she couldn’t watch Henry grow weaker and do nothing. ‘If I may speak frankly, Dr Leask,’ she begins, ‘I think that the boy is pining for love. I know little of medical matters but 306


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I know what a child needs. Children are resilient creatures— at least, most—’ Her voice catches in her throat. ‘What I am trying to say is that he lacks a reason to live. And only you have the power to give it to him.’ For all his contrition, Dr Leask is affronted by this woman’s audacity. ‘He is hardly a child, Mrs Wright. A young man must learn self-reliance, how to stand on his own two feet. Perhaps when you have children of your own—’ Jemma cannot help herself. She no longer cares about the danger of saying too much. ‘I had a child, Dr Leask. She died earlier this year. Let me tell you, there is nothing more terrible, no matter what the child’s age. I am making this plea for Henry. He is my primary concern. But I would not wish what I have been through on any parent.’ Dr Leask stares at the carpet. His mouth is partly open but he seems too overwhelmed to speak. He looks suddenly old and helpless. Jemma is reminded of the night before her father’s death when she found him wandering in his nightshirt, his hand clutched to his chest. ‘I am sorry about your child. It was presumptuous of me,’ Leask says eventually. ‘But do you know what it is like, Mrs Wright, to watch patient after patient die of consumption, and then to watch your own dear wife fade away, and be utterly helpless?’ ‘But there is something you can do.’ ‘I loved my wife but it did her no good!’ Jemma says nothing. There is no point. She can see he is paralysed by fear, and by dismay at his own powerlessness. But she hopes that when he has had time to think about what she has said, he will send for Henry to come home. 307


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46 Nathaniel knows that something is wrong when he sees Jemma waiting for him at the gate. It is dusk, and the sky is incandescent behind the obelisks of the pines. For a brief moment, he can’t help hoping she is simply there out of eagerness to see him. But as he draws closer, her expression tells him that the news is grave. She begins talking even before he is off the horse, the bulging mail bags still hanging from the saddle. ‘He knows, Nathaniel.’ Before Nathaniel left for Flinders, they had been in the room Jemma was using as a studio, discussing the article in the Argus that claimed the police had fresh intelligence about the whereabouts of Musk and Byrne. Word was that they were about to close in. There was also another small article, reprinted from the Wombat Hill Advocate, which raised concerns about police handling of the case and particularly about the conduct of Senior Sergeant Marcus O’Brien. It was 308


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the first glimmer of hope that their version of events might be believed. They had not realised that Henry was out in the garden, reading beneath the open window. Henry had confronted Jemma as soon as Nathaniel had gone. ‘You’ll leave now, won’t you?’ he said. It wasn’t an accusation so much as a melancholy statement, a recognition of the inevitable, as if this were his fate—to be left. They would leave him as his mother and his father had done. He told her that Lizzie, who was at the washing line nearby, might have also overheard the conversation. When Henry glanced across at her, she had stopped pegging and was standing perfectly still, as if straining to hear. Then she got on with hanging out the clothes and Henry couldn’t be sure what she knew. His cheeks were so gaunt Jemma had a sudden vision of the skull beneath. She pulled him to her in a fierce hug. Henry did not respond straight away, as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening. How long was it since he had been held? Then, tentatively, he raised his arms to her waist and pushed his face into her hair. She felt his ribs and shoulders heave and his tears on her neck. Nathaniel leads the horse and Jemma walks at his side towards the stables. They must leave immediately, he is saying, as soon as everyone has gone to bed. They will have to ride through the night to Settlers Cove to get the morning steamer to Melbourne. The big city is their best disguise. Anywhere else, they will stand out and people will talk. She must persuade Henry to hold his tongue for as long as he can. Does she think the boy will talk? There’s 309


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nothing they can do about Lizzie. They will have to hope she didn’t hear. At first Nathaniel doesn’t register what Jemma is telling him. She can’t leave Henry, she says. She can’t and she won’t. Jemma looks around the property, at the house with its peculiar turret and the line of pine trees that always make her think of a graveyard, to the silent sea beyond, and then back at Nathaniel. She is not going to run anymore, she says, if it means leaving behind those who need her. She would rather run the risk of being found out. They are approaching the stables when they hear sounds coming from within. Nathaniel pushes open the wooden door and leads his horse to its stall. Dyson looks up from brushing one of the other horses and nods hello. Jemma notices how the horse’s flanks gleam in the dim light of the stable and how firmly Dyson drives the brush, a steadiness and certainty in his movements that seems to throw everything else into doubt. He knows what he is doing and why he is there. Jemma wishes she felt the same. Nothing in her world is certain. Not who she is or what she is doing or where she is going. When the stables are a good distance behind them, they begin speaking again. It is almost dark now. Nathaniel tells her she is being pig-headed and foolish, that there is nothing she can do for the boy. They are not responsible for him. Even if Henry promises not to tell anyone, in time he will betray them, whether he means to or not. ‘He wants to come with us, Nathaniel.’ ‘What did you tell him?’ 310


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‘I said I would talk to you.’ Nathaniel can see she will not be shifted. They either take the boy with them or Jemma stays. He has no say in the matter. Wearily he asks, ‘In his condition?’ Jemma agrees that Henry should not be travelling. But it will only be as far as Melbourne. Since she last spoke to Dr Leask, he had sent a letter promising that he would soon come to fetch his son. They will simply be taking him home to where he belongs. ‘If I can make Henry see that he will jeopardise our safety by remaining with us, I know he will do as we ask. He has every right to be angry with us, Nathaniel. But he’s not. We owe him our gratitude for that.’ They wait until midnight to be sure all the staff are asleep then, as quietly as possible, make their way to the stables. They are fortunate that the sky is clear and that they have the waxing moon to light their way. Somehow, Henry manages not to cough until they are clear of the property and out on the road to Settlers Cove. As he rides between Nathaniel in front and Jemma at the rear, Henry has the sensation that he is floating through the air. Occasionally, when they pick up speed, he might even be flying, such is the rush of wind around his ears. The horse seems to know its way and Henry is happy to let himself be carried through the silvery night. He does not know if he is awake or asleep when he sees the smooth, still glitter of Port Phillip Bay opening out before him. Just before they reach a jetty that leads to a distant horizon, they stop on the grassy foreshore and let the horses go. All he 311


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remembers is sinking onto the grass where a blanket has been thrown down, and the silhouettes of Nathaniel Byrne and Jemma Musk standing by like bewildered parents watching over him as he sleeps.

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47 They are stepping off the steamer at Railway Pier, gulls screeching and wheeling about their heads, when they hear—above the racket of the birds and the cries of porters— a paperboy announcing the latest on Musk and Byrne in the early edition of the afternoon paper. Jemma had known that time was short but she had banked on at least a day’s grace before the word got out. Now, as she reads the headline under ‘telegraph dispatch from Flinders’, she can almost feel the telegraph wire closing in on them as it forms a noose for their necks. SURGEON’S SON ABDUCTED BY MUSK AND BYRNE. It is lucky they are standing next to a bench. Jemma sinks onto it and hands the paper to Henry while Nathaniel paces nearby, muttering. He knew it would come to this. Henry looks up from the paper, utterly crushed. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ 313


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‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Jemma says flatly. ‘The world’s gone mad.’ She is thinking that no matter what they had done they would have been condemned for it. If they had left Henry behind at Red Ridge the headline would probably have read MUSK AND BYRNE ABANDON DYING BOY. Henry suddenly realizes there is something he can do to make things right. For once, it is in his power to take matters into his own hands. He will go to his father’s rooms in Collins Street and insist on speaking to the police himself. He will tell them how it was he who insisted that they take him with them. He will tell them how good Jemma Musk and Nathaniel Byrne have been to him and how he will always be grateful. He will make sure the police understand that they have got things all wrong. Nathaniel ushers them onto a waiting omnibus that will take them to the centre of town. Jemma wishes she had a veil on her hat and notices that Nathaniel has pulled the rim of his low over his face. Both of them stare blankly out the window. Only Henry cannot help gazing eagerly around him, entranced by the grand new buildings and the jostling life of the place after the near-solitude at Red Ridge. As they had made their way down the gangplank from the steamer, there had been a surge of people pushing to disembark and Henry had felt bodies pressing in from all sides, had felt himself—for the fi rst time in years—caught up in the flow of humanity, the general rush of life. He feels it now in the omnibus, the sense of being part of a larger whole. He looks with wonder at the hansom cabs lined up at their ranks, the elegant gas lamps and multi-tiered telegraph wires slung from pole to pole down the streets, the 314


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smartly dressed people striding off to work. His heart races as he contemplates what must be done. It seems that he has spent his whole life waiting in the wings for this moment when he will step out onto the stage. He might only be a minor character and yet the whole drama hinges on what he does next. He notices that Jemma Musk is transfi xed by something out the window. He follows her gaze to find it resting on a mother and her toddler with tawny curls waiting on a corner. The mother is standing holding her daughter’s plump little hand. The girl looks up and speaks. The woman smiles, the girl laughs, and Jemma’s face contracts. Jemma watches them as they move down the street, weaving their way through the crowds. The sight of them so exquisitely painful she can’t stop drinking them in. Wherever she looks now there are children. In the omnibus and out in the street. She had forgotten what it was like to lay eyes on their otherworldly faces and unguarded eyes. Children in their prams or in their mothers’ arms or skipping ahead. The way they skip for the sheer joy of it, the joy of propelling their bodies through space. When they arrive at the top of Collins Street, Henry shakes Nathaniel’s hand but cannot look at Jemma. He is afraid she will see that he is trembling. It is all he can do to contain the sobs that sit like explosives in his chest. He longs for her to hold him but knows that if she does, he will collapse or fly apart. He does not think his heart could stand it. Still avoiding her eye, Henry seizes her hand and kisses it, then runs up the steps to his father’s rooms. * 315


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On a secluded bench overlooking a pond in the nearby Fitzroy Gardens they sit in silence, both afraid to speak. Both knowing what must be said. ‘We cannot stay together,’ Jemma says finally. Nathaniel knows she means that they are too obvious as a couple, that they will always be looking over their shoulders. Always be haunted by the myth of Musk and Byrne. This is what she wants him to understand by the statement. At the same time he knows—has known for some time—that she wants to be free of him. He does not doubt that she still loves him. But she must live with herself and there is nothing he can do to help her. He cannot wipe away her guilt or regret. He cannot share her grief. He had even begun to hope, early on, that they would one day have a child together. ‘I was about to say as much,’ Nathaniel says, turning his hat in his hands. ‘Throw them off our scent.’ They grin at each other like comrades in arms. Jemma is deeply grateful to him for playing along. It is better this way. Better to pretend that they are following a strategy rather than parting for good. Her eyes follow a duck gliding across the pond with a gaggle of ducklings in its wake. Nathaniel tells her that he will go to Portland on the evening steamer. He has a friend who has long been eager to join him on an expedition in search of the inland sea. He estimates that within a week they should be ready to set out. This friend knows some blacks from that part of the country who are prepared to guide them; they will travel light and find their food as the black men do. He talks as if their fl ight from Red Ridge was part of a larger plan to mount the expedition, that he 316


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has simply been waiting for the moment to arrive. He talks as if they will be reunited once he returns and that their life together will go on. As he talks she can hear him convincing himself that it was meant to be this way, that they have been moving inexorably towards this point. He has been talking to the vacancy in front of him, not meeting her eye, but now the tone of his voice changes. He is no longer making an announcement but speaking across the gulf of their separate bodies, reaching out to her with his voice. There is one more thing he must do before he leaves, he says quietly. He must go straight to the papers, and tell them the truth about Marcus O’Brien, about his obsession with Jemma, his offer of marriage and his threats after the child died; how it was O’Brien who fuelled the myth of Musk and Byrne, and how he has stalked her since. The article they read the other day from the Advocate showed that the time was ripe, that it would be possible to expose O’Brien for what he was, and be believed. Once O’Brien has been shown as corrupt, the whole absurd story will come apart at the seams. Only then will they be free to get on with their lives. ‘But look at how the papers have hounded us,’ Jemma says. ‘What makes you think they’ll change?’ Nathaniel puts his hat back on. He reaches for her hand and helps her rise. ‘Because, my beautiful outlaw, it is a damn good story. And even better, it’s true. The papers know there is no love lost between the public and the police. And if the troopers want to persist, let them chase me inland, if they dare!’ Holding her waist, he fi xes her with those tropical eyes. ‘Expect a postcard from somewhere north of Lake Eyre.’ 317


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Jemma absorbs his features as she did when painting his portrait and remembers the lustful tenderness with which she had brushed him into being. Tenderness. A word that Ruskin uses over and over. If one could not paint tenderly one should not paint at all. Now, with tender detachment, she studies the shape of his face and distinctive line of his body, searching for what Ruskin called the ‘awful lines’—the lines in a form which determined its past and will determine its future—which the artist must seize in order to capture the constant change at the heart of a subject, whether it is an animal in motion or a tree growing or a mountain slowly wearing away. They say their farewells as lightly as possible. She can’t let herself think about what might have been. Watching him stride across the gardens towards the city, Jemma knows that she will never love him as well as she does now that he is walking away.

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48 With the newspapers full of the story of Musk and Byrne’s abduction of the surgeon’s son, Marcus O’Brien can smell victory in the wind. Musk and Byrne have blown their cover and are skulking somewhere in Melbourne. It is now simply a matter of flushing them out. For months O’Brien has bided his time and in doing so has discovered a kind of power he had not known existed, the power of spinning stories and nurturing myths. A power much greater, in the end, than any posse of well-armed men. Now, he will get all the men he needs and the chase will be over in a matter of days. But the next morning he wakes to find that the wind has changed, and that the story in the papers is no longer following his script. That he, in fact, has become the story and that his days of storytelling are over. He is sitting at his kitchen table trying to digest this rude turn of events, when there is a sharp series of raps at the door. The sudden noise provokes a flurry of wings and nervous twitterings from the startled canaries in 319


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their cages on the back porch. When O’Brien opens the door, he is met by the bulldog face of the Police Commissioner who has made a special trip up from Melbourne on the morning train. Behind the Commissioner, who is flanked by constables, is a gaggle of men with notebooks in their hands, a number of whom O’Brien recognises. The Police Commissioner refuses to enter the house. Standing on the doormat, he orders O’Brien to hand over his pistol, his badge and his uniform. Any resistance, he warns, and O’Brien will promptly find himself an inmate of his old jailhouse. ‘I suggest that you make yourself scarce,’ the Police Commissioner adds, before taking his leave. ‘While you have the chance.’ Once the Police Commissioner has gone, the journalists from the various papers clamour with questions. For a moment, Marcus O’Brien, who has until now played most of them to his advantage, is tempted to try it again. Perhaps he can still turn the whole thing around, perhaps it is not too late. But the look in their eyes tells him that they are like dogs on a scent; they will rip him apart if they get half a chance. He slams the door and draws all the curtains, ignoring their shouts and their taunts. He sits in the gloom of his kitchen, pouring himself a tumbler of rum, his poached eggs and bacon untouched. A glass of grog with his breakfast has become such a habit that he finds it hard to remember a time before. He often wakes in the middle of the night in a sweat, and has to reach for the flask by his bed. But he isn’t a drunk like his father was. He knows that much. He doesn’t stagger 320


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and slur his words, he doesn’t spray his abuse on anyone. He keeps his hatred honed, and his target clear in his mind. After a while, he vaguely registers that the banging on the door and windows has stopped. The only question that matters is what to do with his birds. If he leaves them as they are, they will be at the mercy of his landlord, who had never liked him keeping canaries and would be sure to kill them or let them starve. If he lets the birds go, they will be prey for hawks and crows, or might simply die of fright from being out in the wild. There is one other possibility. He has a small supply of chloroform and could easily put them gently to sleep, a sleep from which they will never awake. He pours himself another glass of rum and mulls over what to do. Outside, the sun breaks through the dark cloud cover that had threatened rain and, as if woken from a daze, some of the canaries begin to sing. Marcus lets their fluting music fi ll his head, music that has given him more pleasure than anything else in his life, and knows he cannot kill them or risk leaving them in their cages. Much as it pains him, he would rather set them free and let them take their chances in the big wide world. There is a flutter of excitement and scattering of grit as he fi lls up their bowls with water and seed. He lets them eat and drink and then, when they are done, Marcus opens the door of a cage, the first of ten. He stretches out his index finger and waits. As soon as the bird has hopped onto it, he brings his hand out into the open and begins to whistle a tune. The bird cocks its head and listens, and when Marcus stops, it repeats back the melody to him note for note. Then Marcus raises his hand and gently shakes it. At first the bird clings to 321


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his finger, but after some whispered encouragement, it rises tentatively into the air. O’Brien repeats this routine seven times until each male bird has sung a few bars from ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. The female birds he simply lets perch on his finger and very lightly strokes the top of their heads before sending them on their way. None of the birds go very far. He can see some of them sitting in trees in his garden. As he watches, a crow comes swooping past, squawking so loudly that one of the canaries drops from a branch. The crow follows the plummeting bird and, as soon as it hits the grass, seizes the tiny yellow body in his talons and begins to tear it apart with its beak. The closest thing Marcus can lay his hands on is a book he had been reading. The book lands wide of the mark but still near enough to send the crow flapping away. O’Brien knows it will come back and that it is pointless to stand vigil. He cannot stay to look out for them. Unsuited as they are to the wild, his birds will have to look after themselves. Marcus goes inside, slumps in an armchair and finishes the bottle of rum. Between mouthfuls he sings to himself. My Bonnie lies over the ocean My Bonnie lies over the sea My Bonnie lies over the ocean Oh bring back my Bonnie to me. As he slips into a drunken stupor, his fevered mind spins on taking its own revenge. Jemma Musk is still on the run, but he is closing in on her. A party of his troopers has her surrounded at Breakneck Gully. In a sensational shoot-out that leaves two 322


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policemen wounded and everyone baffled, she melts away into the bush. Her escape wins her such a following that it sparks a mass exodus from towns and cities on a scale not seen since the early days of the gold rush as devotees, admirers and the curious go in pursuit of her, as helpless to resist her lure as Marcus himself. The papers compare it to the outbreak of a contagious disease and demand that the government take action. Knowing that she will always elude them, Marcus O’Brien conceives a brilliant idea. No price will be put on her head, no rewards will be offered. No more ‘Wanted’ posters bearing her likeness will be plastered on post office walls or telegraph poles. They would only inflame the passions she has already ignited, would only add to the humiliation of the men whose job it was to bring her in. Under O’Brien’s guidance, a novel strategy is devised. If they cannot trap her by conventional means, they will bury her in silence, banish her to the netherworld of non-existence until her besotted public grows tired of waiting for news. Any reports of her activities will be dismissed or attributed to some passing bandit or local scoundrel until, one way or another, she will be made to disappear. And so it happens. The tales of her exploits and the sightings grow rarer and rarer until she vanishes like the woman in a magician’s act. When she ceases to oblige the people with felonious deeds, the mood begins to turn against her and fresh rumours take hold; stories to fi ll the void she had left. It is said she had hoodwinked them all with her devious charms, that she claimed responsibility for crimes not her own, that she is no more than a brazen shyster, a petty criminal who 323


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fancies herself as another Black Mary or Calamity Jane. Like betrayed lovers, her champions scorn her as an infatuation, an illicit affair they would rather forget. Even those who have been her victims now deny that she ever crossed their path. In the penny dreadfuls she becomes a fallen woman, a ginsoaked, pox-ridden strumpet who, it is said, finally met her end in a madhouse and was buried in an unmarked grave.

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49 It is thirty-five degrees and dropping. Gotardo crouches by a thermometer attached to a stake on the border of the newly planted crop of vines. A lantern dangles in one hand as he peers at the mercury glimmering in its glass sheath. They are in the grip of a cold snap. In another few hours, some time after midnight, the temperature will drop below freezing. If he is to save the cuttings which have been in the ground barely a month and have just started to bud, he must be vigilant and prepared, for his enemy comes under the cover of darkness, withering the tenderest with its icy breath. Since July he has lovingly prepared the earth, digging the trenches, row after row on the lower slopes where his cattle once grazed. Almost all the old paddocks are now ridged and turned with a mulch of vegetable mould and ashes, and staked in readiness for the fresh young shoots to be trained and tied. It has been good to bend his mind to these matters. He could not have kept mending shoes. Until his cows died, 325


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he had always worked outdoors, played his part in nature’s cycle, watching with wonder as the grass mysteriously sucked the blue of the sky and the yellow of the sun to make the most vivid of greens. Marvelled as this grassy green was transformed by the belly of a cow into the silky white of its milk. Gotardo checks the small heaps of straw mingled with loose earth that he has placed at intervals of six or eight yards before heading back indoors. He will be ready when his enemy calls. With a glass of grappa at his elbow, he settles into his favourite chair and takes up his reading. He does not read poetry anymore. In recent times, he has devoted all his energies to learning about the cultivation of the grape and the winemaking process. It has its own poetry. After the harvest of that first crop, Gotardo had been too deep in grief to care what happened to the grapes, leaving Pliny, Aquilino and Battista to take care of making the wine. The vines had been planted by Pliny before Gotardo arrived in the colony and, apart from housing some of Pliny’s casks in his cellar, Gotardo had given little thought to what was taking place as the grapes swelled in the sunshine, or to the chemical equations unfolding beneath his feet. A few days after the must had been put into the vats and the fermentation was underway, Gotardo had gone down to the cellar to collect a leg of cured meat. What struck him first was the noise coming from the vats, as if they were on the boil. He could not understand why the flame kept snuffing out every time he put the candle down on one of the casks. Not realising the depths of his friend’s ignorance on 326


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the subject, Pliny had failed to warn Gotardo of the carbonic gas produced during the initial tumult of fermentation. If it had been a perceptible cloud, Gotardo would have seen the heavy gas swirling about his body up to his chest. He was lucky the cellar was large and that the gas had not yet reached a height where it had extinguished all breathable air. When he told Pliny of the incident, his friend let out a shriek. He had known a man, he said, who once went down to his cellar to fetch a bottle of wine and never returned. Gotardo is gazing into space, thinking about this story of the man who went down to his cellar never to return, when he hears a knock at the kitchen door. He is used to people dropping by, but not at this late hour. He is glad, though, for the interruption. It is time he checked the thermometer again and made himself a pot of tea to keep him alert for the long night ahead. Even as he reaches for the door handle, his mind is elsewhere, anticipating the rush of the tea as it warms his blood. He almost drops the lamp when the door swings open to reveal the black figure on the threshold. When she lifts the veil from her face, he is met by those unmistakable eyes. They sit in their old chairs by the fire—his with the armrests, hers without. They have hardly spoken, hardly said a word. Gotardo would like to offer her a cup of tea and something to eat but he doesn’t want to leave the room, afraid she might disappear. She looks much the same, although a little thinner and her hair is drawn back more severely than in the past. The past! It is only six months since she left but it might be years. Or centuries. How time dragged, especially the nights. Sleep refusing to come. Sometimes he couldn’t stand it and 327


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would end up punching the rough stone walls until his fists were a bloodied pulp. Gotardo massages his knuckles, wondering if she will notice the scars. When he looks at her again, she reaches out to his face and runs her fingers lightly down one side of his beard. He had forgotten about the beard. Six months’ worth of growth. He has not shaved since the morning they found Lucy dead. Riddled with grey and untrimmed, it must make him look old and half wild. There are fresh creases in the corners of his eyes. ‘Oh, Gotardo,’ Jemma breathes, her hands flat on her lap. She presses down on her thighs to steady herself. He can see that she has something to ask him. ‘Have you kept it—the cot? And her toys?’ Gotardo nods, his eyes wet. He gets up and leads her to their bedroom. The cot is still there, at the foot of the bed, just as it was. The blankets are on it. The soft lamb Marina made for Lucy sits on the pillow. And the piece of cloth she couldn’t sleep without is tucked under the lamb. Jemma gives a small moan and holds the rails of the cot. She stands in silence, then steps back to look at Gotardo. All this time he has slept here with her empty cot. She can’t understand how he did it. How terrible the silence must have been. How he must have strained to hear Lucy’s breath, those snuffl ing animal sounds that had fi lled the room when she slept. How did he sleep with that void at his feet? She looks at him in dismay. ‘Why?’ ‘Why did I leave it there?’ His eyes blaze. ‘Better an empty cot than nothing at all.’ It was enough to find himself alone, 328


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without banishing all trace of the life the room had contained. A whole world gone overnight. Not long after Jemma had left, Gotardo lowered the side of the cot and squeezed himself into it, his feet tucked up to his chin, his nose buried in her pillow so that he might breathe the last remnants of Lucy’s scent. He does not tell Jemma this, or how he had clutched Lucy’s comforter, that tattered piece of brushed cotton, and wept until it was soaked. Jemma stares at the bed she and Gotardo used to share. She sinks down onto the patchwork quilt that her mother-in-law made for them. Her hand slips under the pillow on her side of the bed. It is as she thought. Her nightgown, neatly folded for her return. She looks up at him. ‘Why don’t you hate me?’ ‘You felt you had no choice.’ This is too much, too charitable. She has hurt him intolerably and yet she can’t stop herself. ‘I had a choice, Gotardo.’ Her voice trembles with guilt and an unfathomable need to shove the truth in his face. ‘And I chose to go.’ Gotardo fl inches. ‘Don’t do it, Jemma. I’m not pretending to be a saint.’ There were times, many times, when he did hate her, when the hate was so strong it might have consumed the love. But then he would see O’Brien swaggering around the town with his embittered face and he knew that if he let his anger get the better of him, he would become like O’Brien. Bitter to the core. There is silence, then he sighs deeply. ‘I wasn’t going to let that happen. It wasn’t for you that I gave up hating. It was for myself.’ ‘You have forgiven me?’ 329


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‘What there was to forgive. How could I stand in judgement when I, too, wanted to run away?’ ‘But you stayed.’ ‘And you have come back.’ The clock on the mantelpiece gives a slow, mechanical heave and sounds a single chime. Gotardo’s head jerks to the window that faces the vineyard. ‘Will you come outside with me?’ He takes one of his thick sheepskin jackets from the wardrobe and holds it out to her. Jemma follows him out the back door, lost in the thick folds of his coat. She can see from the light of the moon and the lantern that things have changed. Rows of vines have replaced the open pasture, all the way down to the forest. Gotardo goes across to the vines and kneels by a mound of straw and dirt. He lights it, gets it smouldering, then moves on to a pile a few yards further up and lights that one too. Soon a cloud of smoke is hanging, like a great genie, across the whole vineyard. He tells her he must stay out until sunrise, to keep the frost from killing the shoots. She ought to go in and get some sleep. But Jemma has no desire to sleep. She watches him go from pile to pile, prodding them when the embers fade or lighting a fresh pile when one burns itself out. She can tell that he is relieved to have something to do with his hands. When she arrived here, she had not known what she wanted to do. All she had known was that she needed to see Gotardo, to talk with him about Lucy and to see Lucy’s grave. She had not thought about the future, had neither dared assume he would have her back nor even known if she wanted to stay. 330


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He is walking towards her between rows of vines, his heavy leather coat squaring out his stocky frame, his long beard and calm dark eyes. He goes to the woodshed and returns with an armful of wood and kindling for a fire to warm themselves by. Once the flames are leaping, Gotardo stops busying himself for a while. He looks at her across the fire and begins to talk of his plans for the vineyard and the wines he hopes to produce once the new vines begin to fruit. He talks of pinot gris and syras and grizzly Frontignac and a new colonial variety called Australian white cluster developed from seedlings raised by the sons of John Macarthur. It will take a number of years before he has much to sell but, in the meantime, he will work for Pliny and make ends meet that way. Making milk had been like making bread; he had known he was producing something that people would want every day of their lives. Making wine was different. It was not essential. One could do without it. And yet, what could be more important than making people happy? Man could not live, after all, on milk and bread alone. His wine will bring people joy, make them smile and forget their cares for a while. It seems a small miracle to him that he can do such a thing when he wakes each day with such a weight in his heart. Jemma has never heard Gotardo talk like this before. He talks like a man who has been silent for too long and is now drunk on the relief of being able to unburden himself. There is pride in his voice, as when he used to speak to her of his herd. She is struck by his quiet air of self-sufficiency and hardwon wisdom. He has dragged himself out of despair and now knows what he is capable of. 331


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He tells her that for the first few months after Lucy’s death he completely gave up, let everything on the farm run down, and that he has Pliny to thank for planting the idea of winemaking in his mind. He tells her how he had fully expected the wine from the grapes Pliny and his brothers collected and pressed to be sour. Tells her how he had tended to the must blindly, with little idea of what should be done. But how, as his reading gave him confidence, he began to experiment, blending different varieties, and that the result has surprised them all. He takes a bottle which has been chilling on the window sill and pours each of them a glass of the clear white wine. They raise their glasses in silence, the flames dancing in the liquid, and hold each other’s gaze before tasting the wine. They drink solemnly, as if performing an important ritual, a sacrament of thanksgiving. Jemma lets the fruity liquid fi ll her whole mouth before swallowing it down. An owl hoots in the forest. She shivers and smiles. The wine is young but very good. This newly found passion for the vine has been Gotardo’s salvation and she is glad for him. He says it could not have happened without Pliny and Marina and Celestina. He does not know what would have come of him had it not been for them. ‘They will be happy to see you, Jemma.’ ‘I find that hard to believe.’ ‘They will see how happy I am.’ He stops, suddenly appalled. He has assumed that she has come back for good. A dangerous assumption. She may have simply come to make peace with him, to see Lucy’s grave. What does he know of 332


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her life now? He knows from the papers that O’Brien has been thrown out of the police force and that he won’t show his face in the town. He knows that Nathaniel Byrne has disappeared into the interior with Marcus O’Brien on his trail. But what of her feelings for Byrne? Perhaps she still loves him and awaits his return. Jemma sees his face drop and guesses. She knows it won’t be easy. They cannot pick up their old lives. And she doesn’t believe Gotardo would want that. They cannot go back to the past, cannot pretend that nothing has changed. At the same time, she has begun to understand that being an artist doesn’t have to mean living at odds with the world. She had pitted herself against a society she felt didn’t understand her; had needed to be misunderstood. And yet strangely enough, she had cared what people thought of her but had convinced herself that she didn’t. She has let go of it now, that special identity she clung to so hard. It is as insubstantial, as meaningless to her, as the myth of Musk and Byrne. It has left her much lighter and she hopes that, in spite of the sorrow, she will live more lightly. The town gossips will find other gossip, the talk will pass. And what can be said of her worse than what has already been said? ‘Perhaps I am making assumptions that should not be made,’ Gotardo begins. ‘If you are worried about Mr Byrne, there is no need,’ Jemma says. ‘That is finished.’ ‘And what of us?’ Jemma cradles the glass in her palms. ‘I can’t say what might happen.’ What she does know is that they are joined now, as they never were in marriage, by a shared pain that 333


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has forged a new kind of love. A love that has been tested to its limits and been reborn as a bond that transcends ordinary ties. A love that will endure for the rest of their lives, whether they stay together or not. Just after dawn they find themselves walking along the back road to the Wombat Hill cemetery, a woman dressed in black and a man in a battered leather coat. Tears of frozen water hang from the fence wires, a layer of white frost covers the grass. The sky is rosy and clear. It is going to be a day without cloud or wind. Gotardo is thinking about the epitaph, whether he should warn her. He decides to hold his tongue. She will see it soon enough. From the tall eucalypts either side of the road come the songs of bellbirds and magpies and parakeets in a random choir. The sounds of waking and stirring and rising. At the northern edge of the cemetery, Gotardo holds back. He is about to let Jemma go ahead on her own when he suddenly reaches out for her arm. ‘They all hate it. The words on the headstone. Everyone. They thought I’d gone mad.’ Jemma nods and steps forward. She stares at the small, smooth mound. So small. A pregnant swelling in the grassy ground. She raises her eyes to the sky, makes herself swallow the cry that is pushing up from her chest. She kneels at the foot of the mound and reads the epitaph. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. 334


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Gotardo is now standing at her side. He cannot read her face. ‘Did I do right?’ ‘Right?’ Jemma almost laughs. The verse is like a blast of wind from the southern pole. The kind of icy blast that lets you know you’re alive. And like such a wind, it offers no solace. Just the simple truth that their girl has become one with the earth. ‘It is the truest and saddest thing I have ever read.’

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Epilogue For the next three decades, Jemma quietly got on with her life. She lived for part of the week in Melbourne, and the other part in Wombat Hill, helping Gotardo in the winery when she could, and teaching art to pay for her small studio in Bourke Street where she painted late into the night. Henry slowly recovered his health, and the bond between him and Jemma grew such that she came to think of him as her adopted son. Gotardo had accepted that there would be no more children and that if Jemma was to stay his wife, he must allow her to live as she chose. Jemma and Celestina rekindled their friendship, and although Celestina struggled to accept the way Jemma had chosen to live, she continued to collect her works and hang them in the tearoom. Jemma’s unconventional marriage and her comings and goings from Wombat Hill generated sufficient suspicion to keep the stories about her bubbling along—as did Nathaniel Byrne’s mysterious disappearance somewhere north of Lake 336


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Eyre, along with that of Marcus O’Brien, who had continued to pursue him. And so the legend of Musk and Byrne lived on—at least for a while. The story simply grew larger, with multiple strands to accommodate the truth of Lucy Voletta’s death and Marcus O’Brien’s obsession and the general public’s bewitchment, even while incorporating the wild rumours and myths. In the manner of fairytales, these fabricated strands were prefaced by ‘It was said that ...’ and ‘the police believed ...’, thus maintaining the narrative tension and enough uncertainty to allow room for doubt. The legend may well have become one of the nation’s foundational myths had it not been eclipsed by overheated stories of the latest sensation, a colonial Robin Hood in the guise of a flash Irishman called Ned Kelly who seized a small town and, from that moment, held the whole country captive to his tale. In one sense, O’Brien’s dream came true. In the thrall of the Kelly gang, people soon forgot about Musk and Byrne, who had not been real outlaws at all. Two years after Jemma’s death at the turn of the century, a keen young art historian unearthed her triptych of the picnic in the Hepburn forest and other later paintings such as Burnt-out House, Breakneck and Man with Broken Bicycle and proclaimed, in an influential monograph, that she had discovered Australia’s first Impressionist, a woman working alone, fifteen years before the painters of the Heidelberg school made their names. In passing, the art historian remarked upon a ‘dark year in the painter’s life when she was accused of killing her child’ and thus consigned the whole myth to a footnote. 337


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Jemma’s will bequeathed her possessions to Gotardo, but he quickly followed her to the grave. All they possessed was divided up between Celestina and the Serafinis and passed on to their children and their children’s children. Even after most of the paintings had found their way into public galleries, Burnt-out House, Breakneck remained in the Serafinis’ hands. Which was why, one hundred years later in a Melbourne suburban lounge room, the descendants of Pliny and Marina Serafini still found themselves pausing in front of that painting and contemplating the shadowy little girl in the pale pink frock playing amid the ruins of a homestead. It was their understanding that she was the daughter of the artist, who was their ancestor, Jemma Voletta. And that the girl died ten months after the painting was finished. Yet all these years later, long after those who knew her were gone, the little girl still lived among them, staring boldly out from the canvas as if beckoning them to come and play.

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Acknowledgements The idea for this novel began with the story of my greatgreat-grandfather Gotardo Foletta, who came to Australia from Ticino in Switzerland to join a community of ItalianSwiss living in Daylesford, Victoria. Family myth has it that he arrived with his herd of dairy cattle, although shipping records and rate books from the Hepburn Shire show no evidence of this. While I began this novel with Gotardo, his story was soon overtaken by the entirely fictional story of Jemma Musk. For the kernel of the incident in the first chapter, I am indebted to Judith Wright’s poem ‘Request to a Year’. The sentiment of this poem has informed the whole novel. For the details of the pig slaughter and sausage-making in Chapter 3, I am grateful to Wilma Tobacco, who has witnessed such rituals. Carol White from Lavandula, a historic Italian-Swiss farm in Shepherd’s Flat, was very helpful with historical information and anecdotal material.


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I want to thank my sister Debra Capp and her husband Ian Stewart, who live in the region in which the book is set, and who gave me accommodation, support and help when I was doing my research. Much research was done in the State Library of Victoria and I am grateful to the library for giving me a Fellowship in 2006. Thanks also to Clare Wright for pointing out some useful publications and for her warm response to the opening chapter which was published in Overland magazine in 2007. I am grateful to the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a grant in 1999, which was of great help in the early days of my research. For geological information about the Daylesford region, I want to acknowledge the expertise of Dr Julian Hollis who was generous with his time and his knowledge. Although Monet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe did not come to Australia as a part of an international exhibition in the late 1860s, as is described in the novel, I trust that historians will forgive this poetic licence. Drafts of the novel were read by Anna Murdoch and Colleen Keane and I thank them for their honesty, advice and encouragement. Many other friends, my sisters and brothers, and my parents have been supportive during the ten-year period it took for this novel to see the light of day and I have appreciated being able to talk to them about the book at various stages of its development. My publisher at Allen & Unwin, Annette Barlow, has been simply extraordinary in terms of the amount of time, thought and wonderfully constructive advice she has dedicated to the manuscript. The novel has benefited greatly from her contribution. I am also very grateful to Ali Lavau for her fine 340


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editing, and to Siobhán Cantrill for her work as production editor. Thanks also to publishing assistant Catherine Milne. It has been a great pleasure to be represented by Jacinta di Mase, whose encouragement and professional support came at just the right time. Finally, to my own Butch Cassidy and my Sundance Kid. This book was begun before the birth of my son, Leo, and has grown with him. I could not have written the novel without the transformation that he worked on my life. Steven Carroll has read various drafts more times than either of us can remember. His advice and support kept me going. I can’t thank him enough.

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