The Secret Fate of Mary Watson Read online

  ‘Of course not. And even if he were, I’m of age. I don’t need your permission.’

  Under a worn housedress, her shoulderblades shuffle from side to side as she shifts the meat. She’s looking old, I think. Developing a permanent slump. The hair over her ears has turned decidedly grey. And the curves of her body have melted into a single pile of flesh at her middle.

  She turns around abruptly, wooden spoon in hand. ‘Will you take Carrie with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just for a little while. It’s Papa, he’s been … unwell. I’m worried …’ Her voice trails off. She can’t, or won’t, meet my eye.

  ‘You weren’t worried when I was at home.’ The rasp in my voice surprises, embarrasses, me.

  ‘I did fret about you. I still do.’

  ‘You’ve no need to, now I’m away from Papa.’

  ‘He’s not well,’ she repeats, as though it’s some magical chant that excuses everything.

  ‘Why don’t you and Carrie just pack up and leave?’

  I stare out the window at the buddleia bush. The sun has broken through the clouds, highlighting its lavender torches pricked with small flowers.

  ‘Where would we go? To one of those homes for abandoned wives? They make you eat mouldy bread. You sleep with no blankets in winter. We’d be worse off than the blacks. And, anyway, he’d come looking for us.’ Her mouth works as though to say more, but no words emerge. Eventually, she sits, carefully placing the spoon on the table. ‘I’ve tried my best.’ She puts floury hands to her head, then rubs her temples. White dust runs across her face. ‘I’m getting one of my headaches.’

  I look at the candlesticks on the hearth that need silvering: remnants salvaged from the jaws of the bailiffs. The milk jug next to them with its tracery of hairline cracks. Next to that, the brown salt pig with its corner broken off. The dilapidated sadnesses of her life laid out in a neat line of self-pity.

  I take the carrots over to the pan. Red pinpricks of rabbit blood dot the dimpled skin. I tip the vegetables in and put the lid on. ‘Does this need water?’

  ‘A few splashes,’ she whispers.

  From now on, she’ll play some fragile saint, every angry word a nail driven into her wrists. I lift the lid again and add water from the kettle on the stove.

  ‘I’m having a cup of tea. Would you like one?’ My voice is deliberately robust.

  ‘All right.’ Wanly. ‘But I doubt I’ll be able to drink it.’

  I bring the teapot over and turn it around three times. That’s the way it’s done. Not twice or four times. I’ve never thought to question why three is the critical number.

  She puts her hand over mine. ‘I just want you to be settled. But you’ve always been so restless. Full of secrets. You’re more like Papa than you think. A sparrow flew into the house the other day. You know what that means?’

  ‘You left the door open?’

  ‘Bad luck of the worst kind is coming.’

  ‘You don’t need a bird to predict that. Just look into the face of your husband for once instead of staring at the floor. And by the way, I’m nothing like Papa. If I thought I were, I’d have slit my wrists long ago.’

  She puts a shocked hand to her mouth. ‘You mustn’t say such wicked things!’

  I pour a liverish river of tea into her cup. The leaves are coarse. And rabbit is the cheapest meat at the butcher’s. I wonder if Papa intends to ask for a loan before I leave. A few brown logs float to the surface of my cup. I retrieve them with a finger.

  ‘This Lizard Island. What will you do there?’

  ‘Help Bob with his business, I suppose.’

  She gives me a queer look through the steam of her tea. ‘You know I can’t come to the wedding. Papa won’t allow it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Please, Mary. Take her with you? Just for a while, until I secure a place for her at a school in Brisbane. I’ve been slipping some coins out of the till in the pub when Papa’s not looking. In a few months I’ll have enough.’

  I think of my own slippery fingers in Charley’s drawer.

  ‘Lizard Island is no place for a twelve-year-old girl. Particularly a dressed-up doll like Carrie. She’d be bored witless. And you can’t make her go, even if you could convince me to take her.’

  And I have plans, Mama. I can’t imagine Carrie in any of them. Not without disaster following her every prancing-pony step.

  ‘She’ll do what I say. And if Lizard Island is no place for her, then it’s surely no place for you either.’

  I stare down at the cleaver on the table with its glittering metal, its no-nonsense handle. How easy life would be if the pieces that didn’t fit could be neatly severed from the whole.

  Mama sips her tea with convalescent’s hands, lifts her headache bravely over the rim of the cup. ‘You’re a good girl at heart, Mary. I know you’ll do this.’

  When I open my mouth to say no again, she throws the bait in. And, like all the best snares, the mechanism comes down before I have time to jump backwards.

  ‘You’ll never forgive yourself if you leave her here and something bad happens.’

  Lizard Island

  Winter, 1880

  23

  When all at sea, there’s nothing to do

  but keep an eye firmly on the horizon.

  From the secret diary of Mary Watson

  3RD JUNE 1880

  Logic has deserted me. My body won’t be talked out of seasickness. Isabella shuffles under my feet. The burned sun sheds orange flakes on the surface of the water. The ocean’s a rocking sheet of oriental silk pulled tight beneath the hull — until a fish jumps, pushing like a needle through the surface.

  Carrie’s screech pecks a hole in the precarious equilibrium of my inner ear. ‘I can smell manure!’

  Unfortunately, her voice is not carried away by the breeze. She’s at the bow, her pretty tip-tilted nose turned up under her tip-tilted hat. ‘Why did you have to bring this … this …’

  ‘Menagerie?’ I offer. ‘It is a big word, isn’t it?’

  My eyes take sickly inventory. Isabella’s laden with supplies for the island: food, seeds, Carrie, Bob and me. Twenty hens, a dozen ducks, two pigs. And, because I couldn’t resist, one of Virgin Mary’s puppies.

  ‘I know what it means!’ Carrie whines. ‘You think I’m dumb. Well, I’d rather be dumb than homely.’

  With perfect timing, the pig in the pen nearest her grunts, then squirts out a large green bowel motion.

  ‘Ooo. How perfectly revolting.’

  She holds a handkerchief over her nose and drapes herself decorously over the rail to find a pocket of fresh air. One quick hoist of those shapely calves and she’d be overboard, I think. I wonder if Bob, being Scottish, has some experience of caber-tossing.

  I catch his eye as he sits at the stern, relaxed, his hand resting lightly on the tiller. His good mood is apparently Carrie-proof. What’s left of his hair licks the edges of his battered face. His scar in the saffron light of afternoon is a smile turned sideways. He gives me a newly married wink. The soreness between my legs flares.

  I can’t say I’ve been overwhelmed with the joys of intimacy. I’ve had more stimulating rides in a horse and buggy. But I smile back, the dutiful wife, giving hearty thanks for the industrial quantity of French contraceptive sponges in the bottom of my bag, purchased from the catalogue of Mrs B Smyth.

  Whatever Bob’s reason for sending me away to Rockhampton, he was clearly happy to see me when I returned. And delighted with my acceptance of his marriage proposal. Even the thought of accommodating Carrie on the Lizard brought nothing more than a minute’s rueful grimace and a shrug. With so many other things to think about, I’ve decided to let the sleeping dog of his then-puzzling behaviour, lie.

  ‘How’s the slops bucket in yer belly, Mrs Noah?’ Bob asks. ‘Yer wee sister doesn’t seem to be suffering.’ He glances at Carrie, who smirks with malicious pleasure.

  ‘Neither am I,’ I say briskly. My vo
ice clearly doesn’t match my face.

  ‘Look to the horizon.’ He eases the rudder slightly to port. ‘Just till ye find yer sea legs.’

  The mainsail whipcracks, gathering an extra handful of breeze. I do as I’m told and lift my gaze. To the east, the ocean turns over under its pale blue blanket. To the west, the craggy edges of Cape Bedford. It does help, a little.

  When we left Cooktown this morning, I looked back only once. We glided past the steamer wharf, the shopfronts and their verandahs receding to a row of teeth along dusty Charlotte Street. The final image struck me with its aptness: one stray dog humping another on the sand near the pier.

  I look down to the woven gold ring on my finger. Bob had it made specially by an artisan in Chinatown. Already there’s an irritation beneath it to match the rash on my palms. So this is marriage? Yet another reason, should I need one, to be forward thinking. To keep my eyes firmly locked on the horizon.

  Coming on dark, the sun’s a wheel of red-vein cheese slipping off the edge of a breadboard. The sea turns leaden, smoothes the shore of the horseshoe-shaped beach ahead. We approach the Lizard on its western side. My first impression is of a reclining, muscular back bedded down; the rest of the body turned away in rejection. Encroaching shadows. Hills of grey granite, stinting shrubs. A burned red smell washes up my nose.

  ‘Something on fire, Bob?’

  He steers Isabella closer to shore. Wavelets lick the hull. He points to a small hut, perhaps fifty yards inland and barely visible, from which smoke twists upwards like rope.

  ‘Mangrove wood burning in the smokehouse.’

  ‘For the slugs?’ Something in the begrudging air makes me want conversation.

  ‘Aye. We boil them in the tank for a wee while. Twenty minutes give or take. Then we gut them, leave them to dry in the sun. Next, they smoke for a day till they shrivel, ready for packing. Come keep the tiller steady, while I pull down the mains’l.’

  I move aft. The tiller feels warm from his palm. It tugs to port. I pull slightly to starboard to correct it.

  Bob goes to the boom, unwinds the lanyard from the cleat. With a series of shrieking arm-over-arm pulls, the canvas descends in a grey puddle. He drops anchor over port side. The water is shallow.

  The ocean elbows the hull a few more times. Carrie sits next to me and rubs her arms, then suddenly slaps a spot on the back of her hand. ‘There’s mosquitos, Mary.’ Her voice is thinner than it was in daylight.

  ‘Where’s the tank you boil the slugs in, Bob?’ she asks.

  Bob points to an even dimmer shape on our left, about halfway to the smoking hut, thirty yards up from the shoreline: a ship’s water tank, cut in half. It sits on iron bars over a cold firepit, well above the high-tide mark.

  ‘It looks like one of those pots for boiling missionaries. In the newspaper cartoons.’ Carrie shivers a little, pulls her shawl tighter.

  ‘I was thinking of “The Owl and the Pussycat”,’ I say.

  She cocks her head. ‘They went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat, didn’t they?’

  Bob laughs. ‘Well, the tank’s not lovely, nor green.’

  Carrie puts an arm around my waist, her earlier posturing swallowed up by the darkness. ‘I don’t like it here, Mary,’ she whispers.

  I squeeze her shoulder absently. Even the animals are quiet. ‘Things will be different tomorrow.’

  There’s a hill in the far distance, behind the shape of what must be the house. From somewhere near the base of its swelling, I think I discern a thinner twirl of grey smoke in the darkness. A blacks’ fire?

  I don’t draw Carrie’s attention to it.

  The boat drifts, with a small jolt, onto a cushion of treacly sand. Bob rolls up his trousers, then lights the kerosene lamp. I hear the rusty swing of its handle as he jumps overboard into a soft, wet explosion. Night noises drift from further inland. A bird’s call I’ve never heard before. A series of squeaks, as though someone’s scraping chips off a shiny surface. The small amount of water under the hull has gravel in its throat. It’s as if the island is trying to push us away with little shoves, send us back to sea where we came from.

  ‘Ye both wait here.’

  I follow Bob’s dipping light as it moves towards shore. Several moths the size of saucers circle around it. The air has a chill that cuts through the material of my dress.

  Carrie slaps a few more times at her arms and neck. ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘What of, silly girl?’ But I already know.

  She moves closer. I feel her thigh against my own. ‘I get feelings sometimes. In my stomach …’ Her voice trails away.

  ‘Biliousness?’ Even in the dark I can feel her scorn. ‘Well, then, perhaps you’re touched, Carrie, like every inbred Cornish woman.’

  But she doesn’t rise to the bait. ‘I’m not inbred, and you aren’t either. You must feel it too.’ She taps her finger in the middle of her forehead. ‘What’s the word? Something like haunted … but not quite. I just know we shouldn’t be here.’ She puts her arm on the railing, turns her head away. ‘I wish I knew more words. What is it?’

  Possessed is what she’s looking for. As in: belonging to someone else. Already occupied. Full up. No vacancy. Trespassers will be dealt with in a timely fashion. Yes, Carrie, I feel it.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,’ I say.

  ‘You pretend you don’t. I haven’t forgotten that time back in Truro. The morning you woke up, looked at the snow falling outside, and told me that Grandfather was dead.’

  ‘He was, dear.’

  ‘I know that. But Mama hadn’t been into his room to call him down for breakfast. He hadn’t yet been found dead when you said it.’

  ‘You misremember. Mama had already been in to tell me.’

  ‘I recall it perfectly. I was six. Six year olds remember things.’

  I bite my tongue. Six year olds also forget things when they’re sharing a room with an elder sister. When those things are to do with your father.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘You’re just tired. And it’s dark.’

  Bob is back and planting three tall stools in two feet of water. He stands next to the lugger, one arm outstretched, the other holding the lamp that flares and flattens under its glass, in danger of going out in the breeze. His face is lit from beneath, a battered skull, both ancient and wise.

  ‘A man’s pride tells him to carry ye both to shore. His bad back tells him to mind his own business.’

  ‘I think your plan is very chivalrous, Bob. Come on, Carrie, you first.’

  ‘But I can’t swim!’

  ‘You don’t need to.’ I give her a gentle push. ‘Bob’s made a bridge in the water.’

  He coaxes her over the side, taking her weight under one arm. I hear her yelp of surprise, then a groan as her shoes take on water. A short time later, Bob’s back and enticing me over.

  ‘I won’t drop my new bride.’

  I wonder if I imagine the hint of play in his voice.

  ‘Come on, Mary.’ I can hear the anxiety in Carrie’s. She doesn’t want to be left on the beach alone.

  Bob lifts me over the side. ‘Oops.’ He pretends he’s losing his grip on me and I slip towards the water.

  ‘Bob!’

  He gathers me up tighter and I punch him on the back with my free hand.

  He’s still chuckling when I feel the cold, clammy water in my hose. Then my shoes fill up. My foot finds the stool. Bob guides me by my elbow.

  I have to trust the steps are as long as he says they are, that something solid will be where he says he has put it. A few long, dark steps of faith to the shore.

  There’s no turning back now. Not even from a place that clearly doesn’t want us there.

  24

  A house can seem more a strategic outpost

  than a home.

  From the secret diary of Mary Watson

  The first thing I hear are the three tethered dogs barking somewhere to our right in the darkness. Bob
’s already told me they are here to warn the homestead if any blacks approach. After the sand, there is coarse gravel underfoot. Then the house, sixty yards up from the beach on a grassy knoll. Squat, no-nonsense. Made of limestone blocks, like a neat little cell. Bob opens the heavy door, lights a match. The scar on his face strikes out like a shiny copper blade. Rough benches loaded with old newspapers. Fish traps. Packets of hooks. There’s moonlight coming through the far wall. Sharp leaves of light pierce cracks in the mortar, like the ivy-patterned, pressed-metal ceiling back in Cornwall. A slop of playing cards spilled over the surface of a trunk. A tobacco tin’s upturned lid, filled with coins. Last year’s flyspotted calendar discarded on the floor. A ball of twine with a large needle sticking out of it sits atop the collapsed lung of a sail in the corner. The house reeks of locked-up earth and shellfish. It wouldn’t have hurt him to clean up a bit.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘It’s a mess, all right.’ Bob rubs his mouth.

  Carrie’s voice comes out of the shadows. ‘But it’s so small. And where will we sleep?’

  ‘There’s a wash bucket behind ye.’ Bob’s turning to leave. ‘I’ll unload the beasts. The rest can wait till daylight.’ And then he’s gone.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Shh, Carrie. What’s that noise?’

  ‘It’s the ocean sloshing in my boots.’ She looks at me flatly. The lamplight catches her cheekbones, hollowing the flesh beneath.

  ‘No, something else. Like singing.’

  The sounds of the dark outside are mostly muted. There’s the fizz and swell of sea in the background. The breeze, lisping to the closed window shutters. Something with ‘S’ in it. Solitude? Isolation? I hear one of the pigs give a clotted snort in the distance. Virgin Mary’s pup howls for its mother. The dogs onshore respond with barking.

  ‘Smelly old island,’ Carrie says. ‘What about our valises? They’re still on the boat.’

  I shake my head to clear it, ignoring her melodramatic shivers.