The Girl From Eureka Page 6

  A month or so after the funeral, the same woman had been found in the river having drowned. Grieving his loss, her husband said they had just found out she was pregnant again. The devout Catholics did not speak of the fact that when the woman had been lifted from the river, her coat pockets were filled with heavy stones. But when Indy heard that little bit of gossip at the Criterion store on Main Street, she knew the woman had taken her own life.

  Indy had never really been interested in becoming a wife. She much preferred to control her own destiny. But if she had had any designs on becoming a mother, this one woman’s tale had scared the idea right out of her. She never wanted to feel that kind of loss. That’s not to say she hadn’t had her fair share of proposals of marriage. But she had declined them all. It wasn’t as though the men hadn’t been good solid citizens who weren’t half bad to look at. She just didn’t think she needed to have a man to take care of her. Soon enough, the men stopped asking. She didn’t care that the gossips thought her a spinster, or that she preferred the company of women instead of men. She had her mother and her friends. They were her family. She was in charge of her own life, and that was exactly how she liked it.

  Of course, she wasn’t silly enough to believe that marriage caused pregnancy. There were plenty of unmarried women who had found themselves with child. The girls who chose to keep their babies, born out of wedlock, were shunned by much of society. Others gave their children away, or worse, left them on the church steps in Melbourne. Hopefully to be found and cared for by someone before they died of exposure.

  Reaching the top of the rise, Indy inhaled deeply the fresh air that drifted over from the dense scrub. The plains behind her had been laid to waste years before, at the beginning of the gold rush. So many trees had been felled to make timber posts to shore up mines or be used as firewood. And now the tree fellers were going further afield to collect timber to construct the shops and hotels in the main street. The post office and the auction houses had sprung up overnight. No one was leaving Ballarat or the goldfields any time soon.

  She frowned at the remaining bushland laid out before her. There’d be nothing left but barren landscape if they continued to go on this way. And that would be a tragedy. The wildflowers were blooming in some patches that caught the early sunlight as she headed for the natural spring. Water bubbled from between the rocks, cool and clear, into the river upstream from where the soldiers were garrisoned at the government camp. Setting down the canvas bags she stretched her back before scooping a hand into the cold spring and taking a mouthful of the fresh-tasting water.

  Above her head, a reflection darkened the water and she spun around so quickly she nearly fell in. With a giant sigh of relief, she laid a hand over her heart to calm its suddenly rapid beat.

  ‘Why do you always have to sneak up on a girl like that, Whitey?’

  He didn’t speak, just moved to kneel beside her and drank as she had from the spring. She smiled as he sat upright again and grinned broadly at her, the whites of his teeth glowing against the black of his skin.

  ‘I saw my mother last week,’ Indy told him. ‘She said to tell you to come by and try her kangaroo stew again. She says it’s getting better, but I don’t think it is.’

  Indy had been living with Annie and Sean for six months before she’d finally saved enough money to bring her mother out from the city. The hut in the bush had seemed like a good base to build on, but her mother’s appalled expression as they’d stood in front of the ramshackle wooden building had concerned her. Having seen it only once herself, she admitted she must have imagined it in better repair than it actually was.

  ‘It’s so run down, Indy,’ Mary had said.

  She wondered if she’d made a mistake bringing her mother out so soon from her comfortable bedsit in Melbourne. The violent storm that blew in that evening confirmed it.

  They spent the night inside the little hut, huddled together, trying to stay dry as the torrential rain leaked through every gaping crack in the wooden structure of what was really nothing more than a broken down shepherd’s shelter.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ Indy said, lifting the blanket further over their heads as the rain pelted the tin roof and the wind howled around them, rattling loose timber. ‘I should have fixed it up a little before I brought you here.’

  By morning, Indy had made the decision to send her mother back to the city until she could ensure the house’s structure was sound. But as they had stepped out of the hut just after sunrise, they’d been shocked to see a native man, with the whitest of white hair, standing not a hundred yards away.

  Terrified at first, Indy’s mother had tried to pull Indy back into the house. But the man had lifted the dead kangaroo he held in his hand as though he were offering it to them.

  Indy walked cautiously towards the native man.

  ‘Indy, don’t!’ her mother cried in a panic. ‘He’s a native. A heathen.’

  Ignoring her mother’s pleas, she moved closer to him and reached out, prepared to take the kangaroo. ‘Thank you.’

  He spoke in his native tongue but did not hand over the animal. Instead, he walked up to the fire Indy had set, carefully removed the billy of tea she’d had boiling, and lay the full kangaroo carcass on the flames. Mary retched but Indy was fascinated. She stood by and watched as the carcass cooked, and when it swelled, the man pulled the kangaroo from the fire. Setting it down on the ground, he sat beside it.

  Mary gasped when he pulled out a knife. ‘Indy, come away.’

  But Indy had just watched as he meticulously gutted the animal. Enthralled by his skill, she asked what seemed like a hundred questions over the next hour. He spoke no English but they used hand gestures to make themselves understood. Once the kangaroo was cleared of all its entrails, he scraped the remaining fur from the body and placed the kangaroo over the coals of the now waning fire. That day they had shared rare cooked kangaroo meat with the native man they called Whitey.

  After they had eaten, Whitey had taken a quick look at the little hut and, without a word, had set about replacing the rotten wood. By nightfall, the holes in the roof had been patched and when another shower of rain came through they were thrilled to see it was waterproof. Mary made soda bread with the supplies they had brought up from Melbourne and they offered for Whitey to dine with them again. Afterwards, he disappeared and they didn’t see him for a few weeks as Mary and Indy set about doing their best to create a proper home. But Whitey came back every so often with meat or more materials to shore up the hut. Mary quickly lost her fear of him and over the next months she began to teach him English words. In turn, Indy learned some of his native language, which entertained them all as she struggled with the difficult phonetics. Over the months, Whitey became a good and trusted friend.

  Indy bent down to the spring to fill her canvas water bags.

  ‘I think the winter is finally over,’ she chatted away to him. Whitey was never much of a conversationalist, so she just rabbited on about the weather and other menial goings-on. ‘More soldiers arrived yesterday too. Did you see them?’

  ‘Mm hm,’ he murmured his agreement. ‘White feller dead in Ballarat.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Indy asked, unsurprised. Death was hardly news. It was more a daily occurrence.

  ‘Man they call Scobie.’

  She didn’t know James Scobie personally but she sure knew him by reputation. He was a Scotsman with a love of drink and a greater love of causing trouble.

  ‘What happened?’

  Whitey ran his thumb across his throat as a sign that someone had killed the man.

  ‘Murdered? James Scobie was murdered?’ The shock of it had her fumbling and she nearly dropped her water bag in the river. Righting herself, she turned to look back towards the campsite in the distance. ‘Murdered how? By whom?’

  He shrugged.

  Knowing she wasn’t going to get much more information out of Whitey, she said goodbye to her friend and rushed as quickly as she could carry her heavy wate
r bags back to camp.

  News had obviously spread through the camp like an outbreak of the measles, because people were standing in groups talking about the alleged murder of James Scobie.

  ‘It were Bentley and his cronies. I know it were,’ she overheard one man say as she made her way back to Annie and Sean. Why would a well-reputed businessman like James Bentley have cause to murder a man like Scobie? she wondered.

  ‘Oh, Indy, I was worried when you weren’t here when I woke,’ Annie said, catching sight of her.

  ‘I went to get the water,’ she said, dumping the heavy canvas bags at her feet.

  ‘Have you heard?’

  She wiped the sweat from her forehead and sat down, trying to catch her breath.

  ‘About Scobie? Yes. Whitey told me up at the spring. Was it really Bentley?’

  ‘No one knows.’ Annie shook her head.

  ‘Well, it’s not the first time someone’s gotten themselves killed here,’ Indy said with a shrug. ‘Probably won’t be the last.’

  ‘How can you be so calm?’ Annie asked, clasping and unclasping her hands.

  Indy placed her own hand over her friend’s to stop the fretting. ‘Just wait until we hear the whole story. No doubt Scobie was drunk and it was an accident. Or he got into a brawl and lost.’

  ***

  The next day, rumours circulated that James Bentley and his mates were about to be arrested for the murder of James Scobie. It was the talk of the goldfields. Everywhere Indy went, people gossiped about how Bentley and several of his friends had chased Scobie down and knocked him over the head with a shovel from outside someone’s tent. There was apparently a witness. A young boy had evidently seen everything. But each time Indy heard a version of the story it became more fantastic.

  In front of the Criterion store, she heard Mrs Tavistock tell Wilhelmena Krick that Scobie had sexually assaulted Mrs Bentley. At the California Tent Maker, while she was purchasing a new windsail for the mine, she listened to the Italian Raffaello Carboni, a friend of Scobie’s, saying Bentley had all but beheaded Scobie with the shovel.

  By the time she and Sean were sitting down to dinner with Annie that night, gossip had Scobie painted as a saint and Bentley headed for the gallows for certain.

  ‘He broke a window at the Eureka Hotel,’ Sean said through a mouthful of food as he read from the newspaper.

  ‘Who did?’ Indy asked.

  ‘Scobie.’ Sean flipped the page of the paper and read on. ‘They say he was drunk, broke a window trying to get into the pub after midnight, and then he called Mrs Bentley a whore.’

  ‘Sean!’ Annie reprimanded. ‘You will not use that foul word in my presence, do you understand?’

  Indy smiled at Sean. ‘He called her a “lady-who-rubs-her-naughty-bits-up-against-men’s-naughty-bits-for-money”?’

  Sean chuckled.

  ‘Not any better, Indy,’ Annie warned.

  ‘Sticks and stones, for goodness sake.’ Indy rolled her eyes and broke off a hunk of soda bread to dip into her gravy. ‘You don’t kill a man over a bad-mouthing. If that is indeed why he was killed.’

  ‘You do here,’ Sean murmured putting the paper down to concentrate on the roasted meat before him.

  The mutton joint Indy had bought that day from the store was surprisingly cheap, but the butter had cost her four shillings, the sugar a hefty nine shillings. Food was becoming more expensive as the coach companies and transport lines cashed in on the import trade to the goldfields.

  After dinner, Indy left Annie and Sean to clear up while she prepared for her latest group of students. Johannes Gregorius, Father Smythe’s young Armenian servant boy was the first to arrive. He was shortly followed by Joaquim the Spaniard and Jonte the German. All three men had English as a second language, but she also had a few students who spoke English well enough, but were simply illiterate. That evening there were five students in all, once Brie Flanagan and Teria O’Hara joined them. Indy was proud of the progress the two married women were making. She knew they intended to teach their own little ones to read when they were old enough. She habitually borrowed books from the lending library for her classes. Children’s books mostly, which had some of the men grumbling at reading stories meant for the kiddies. But Indy insisted it was the best way for them to learn the language.

  ‘We didn’t learn to walk by running marathons,’ she told them when they’d complained.

  Some of her more experienced students had worked up to reading the local newspaper. Of course, with all the recent excitement over Scobie’s death, reading from the paper started more discussions and arguments between the miners in her class than Indy could bear to listen to. But she didn’t want to discourage their excitement at finally being able to understand the print on the pages.

  Only half listening to Jonte’s strong German accent as he took his turn with a paragraph from the paper, Indy slapped at the mosquito that bit her arm. Once the summer came, the horrible little biters would swarm in and help spread the diseases around camp once more.

  She said goodnight to her students and watched them walk away, back to their own camps. The moon hung high in the dark sky above her and instead of going straight to bed she sat by the waning fire and listened to the night sounds of Ballarat.

  Dogs barked ferociously, defending their master’s mine from a claim jumper or simply at the night animals that scurried around after dark picking up scraps. In a tent nearby, a man snored loudly and somewhere in the distance a fiddle played a slow, wistful tune, its strings wafting on the light breeze. Indy sighed with rare melancholy.

  Three years. Three years she’d lived in this commune of contradictions. So much wealth and so much poverty existing side by side. It had been an adventure for sure. But, like any adventure, it had provided its fair share of challenges too. And, despite so many people living so close together, it could be a lonely place. The thought made her uncomfortable. She wasn’t exactly lonely. She had Annie and Sean. Although, she did miss her mother terribly, and worried about her being out there in the bush by herself. Trusted friends looked in on her from time to time but Indy promised herself, once again, that she’d go to her mother soon.

  Glancing across at the Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, thriving with late night business, she thought of James Scobie. Did he have a family back in Scotland who would miss him?

  Rumour was rife about who had killed him. There had been murders on the diggings before. It was hardly a new phenomenon. Miners had shot other miners for their claim or their gold. Drunken men had been stabbed in brawls and the perpetrators arrested and tried. Some were even now languishing in Her Majesty’s prison in Melbourne. Others had been acquitted due to lack of evidence and shoddy work by a corrupt and often inebriated police force.

  But Bentley’s supposed involvement meant this particular murder was different. A wealthy English businessman being accused of the murder of a troublemaking Scottish miner was a different kettle of trouble altogether. Ballarat was already a place struggling with an imbalance of justice.

  As she finally slipped into her tent to find her bed, Indy had a terrible feeling the real trouble was only just beginning.

  Chapter 6

  ‘Joe! Joe!’

  The panicked shouts rang out across the goldfields. Men scattered. Running, hiding, trying to escape the troops as they descended on horseback from all directions. Those who were licensed got out of the way and held up their hard-earned parchments for the police to see.

  Indy stood by, fuming as men were hit with batons and dragged away, tied behind horses. She wished she could do something, but risking a split skull was hardly going to help anyone.

  ‘Indy!’

  She turned to see Annie running towards her. ‘Annie? What is it?’

  Annie panted, puffed and collapsed against her weeping. ‘They’ve got Sean! They’ve taken my boy.’

  ‘But he’s licensed.’ Indy searched the mayhem of clashing police and miners, until she spotted Sean across the creek. He�
�d gone to fetch more wood to shore up their mineshaft that had begun to come loose with the last rains and was now arguing with the policeman trying to tie him to the horse.

  Together, Indy and Annie ran across the shallow waters of the creek towards Sean.

  ‘I left my licence in the tent!’ Sean was yelling, the wood he’d collected now in a pile at his feet.

  ‘Then you’ve no right to collect wood, nor to dig today,’ the trooper told him and landed a baton to Sean’s legs.

  ‘Stop!’ Indy shouted. ‘Annie, go back to the tent and get his licence. Run!’

  Annie turned and ran back towards the Eureka camp.

  Reaching the group of diggers and the trooper who was hitting them, Indy threw herself at the policeman, grabbing the baton from his hand before he could land another blow on any of them.

  ‘Wretched wench!’ the trooper yelled. ‘Give that back.’

  ‘You bet I’ll give it back!’ With all her might she landed the baton against the trooper’s arm. He screamed in pain. ‘Not so fun when you’re on the receiving end, is it?’

  As she swung again, the policeman grabbed the baton in one hand and Indy in the other.

  ‘No!’ Sean demanded. ‘Let her go!’

  Despite his tied hands, Sean threw his weight into the trooper and they all tumbled to the ground. The sound of horses’ hooves echoed around them.

  ‘What’s happening here, Constable Stone?’

  Indy’s fury doubled as she tried to get up off the ground and out of the trooper’s grip. She knew that voice.

  The trooper stood and dragged Indy up with one arm and Sean with the other.

  Turning slowly, Indy faced the man she hated with every inch of her being. Sergeant Warren Donnelly.

  He glared down at her from his horse, an equal amount of hate emanating from him as he recognised her too. His dark hair showed some grey around the ears, his nose was broad across his face and his skin was pink and blotchy. Premature ageing, Indy thought. Or too much alcohol. He was slim of stature, but had the beginnings of a pot belly beneath his dark blue police uniform.