THE CONVICT’S THUMBPRINT
BEVERLEY BOISSERY
_
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Beverley Boissery
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters (with the exception of Mr. White), organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Neither this book nor any part of it may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or means yet to come, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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~ ~ ~
Chapter 1
“Do you think Mum will ever come back, Mr. White?”
Mr. White took his time before answering. He leaned back against the soft leather of his Rolls Royce and closed his eyes. While she waited for his answer, Chloe Murray stared at Wahmurra’s convict-built church with its faded Australian flag fluttering in the breeze.
“Four years is a long time, Chloe.”
Chloe didn’t need Mr. White to tell her that. She knew exactly how long four years was. Four years ago, her mother had disappeared without a single trace. Four years was just not a long time. It was an eternity.
Four years ago, her world had been perfect. Now it seemed like a broken, glued-back-together-badly treasure. But hers wasn’t the only world broken the day that Mum disappeared from Wahmurra, a huge estate in the country north of Sydney. Dad escaped into his movies, spending more time working on them in North America than he did in Sydney, and that meant Chloe went to boarding school and lived with Gran on weekends.
Gran’s world was different as well. It collapsed in a way Chloe didn’t understand. Gran blamed Wahmurra, and Mr. White, its owner/manager. No matter what Chloe said, Gran refused to go there. But now, after four long years, she changed her mind. Chloe was back at Wahmurra, and she vowed to search and search until she found a clue to explain what had happened to Mum.
She leaned forward as the Rolls left the church and, when it stopped, she jumped out and stared around her. The setting sun reflected off yellow sandstone buildings that were almost two centuries old. As always, kangaroos grazed on an expanse of grass the size of a football field. Along the cliff’s edge, several cannon with pyramids of cannonballs beside them still guarded against possible invasion. Sailboats sparkled in the bay. The bougainvillea was in gorgeous purple bloom, and the flame trees were a burst of scarlet.
Chloe was home.
She sighed with relief. “It’s still the same, Mr. White. I was so scared it would be different.”
“But you’re wrong, Chloe. It is different,” Mr. White said, stepping aside to avoid a couple of mountain bikers racing up the driveway. “Time marches on everywhere.” He stopped, and his smile seemed a little secretive when he went on to say, “Though not always at the same speed. There have been some pretty big changes since you were last here.”
He paused and pointed back to one of the buildings called the Barracks. “For one thing, we’ve turned that into a high-priced retreat for executives. We have our own communications tower and a satellite dish. The stables are back to their original glory. Had to do it, of course, for the prices we charge. And, if you look behind the Barracks, you’ll see a lap pool, a spa and a small gym. Everything a modern executive needs is here.”
Chloe was impressed, but she didn’t care about changes to the Barracks. It wasn’t part of her Wahmurra, and Mr. White could do anything he wanted to it. Her Wahmurra was another sandstone building, known as The House.
Long ago, it had been the residence of the original owner, Lord Peter Kendricks. Although she didn’t know why, Chloe always stayed there. Although Gran told her often enough that the Murrays didn’t own Wahmurra, Chloe always thought of it as her home and not the place where she actually lived--Gran’s house in Double Bay.
As she began unpacking in the bedroom she’d slept in ever since she could remember, Mrs. Shaw, the housekeeper, hustled in to help. She chatted about various things as she put Chloe’s dresses into a wardrobe, telling her this and that about Wahmurra before adding, “Mr. White said to tell you it’s an hour before the dinner gong sounds. You’ve enough time to shower and change. He’s taking you across to the new Bistro in the Barracks for dinner. You’d better wear a dress. The blue one, I’d say.”
That was another thing Chloe liked about Wahmurra. Mr. White had old-fashioned manners and rules, and he expected her to keep them. At Gran’s, she would have pulled a face at the thought of dressing for dinner.
But it seemed normal at Wahmurra, and once she’d been seated in the Bistro, it also seemed normal that Mr. White used his own fine china and silverware there. As their server poured of iced water into antique crystal glasses, Chloe realized that she’d been terribly wrong.
One thing was different. Mr. White had aged.
Nobody in Chloe’s family, not even Gran, could remember him being young. Mum used to say he was trying to outlive Methuselah and joked that he had the secret of immortality. She’d also said that Mr. White looked like a desiccated coconut. Chloe looked the word up, and thought Mum meant that Mr. White’s skin looked like all the moisture had been sucked out of it.
Sipping her water, Chloe rocked back in her chair and looked around. They sat in a glassed-off corner called the Kendricks Room, but when she tilted her chair a little she could see that the Bistro was full of happy people in expensive, casual clothes. As usual, Mr. White was making money. Little wonder that people called him “Midas” White.
She reset her chair and turned her attention back to him. “Wahmurra’s really old, isn’t it?”
Mr. White smiled. “Old for Australia. The first buildings went up forty-four years after the First Fleet arrived.”
Chloe did her math. The First Fleet referred to eleven ships that landed at Sydney in 1788 with their cargo of convicted prisoners from England’s jails--the first of Australia’s thousands and thousands of “convicts.” If she added forty-four years to 1788, it meant that Wahmurra dated back to 1832, and that was old in Australia. “Is it old enough for ghosts?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
Surprisingly Mr. White took his time before answering. He sipped some water and cleared his throat before saying, “Not in the traditional sense.”
“What do you mean?”
Mr. White sipped his water again and seemed to choose his words carefully, “Buildings that have been lived in for long periods of time, somehow acquire memories.” He smiled a little when Chloe frowned as she tried to figure out what he meant. “Take your bedroom, for example. We decided to redo it this year. It seemed a good idea, because we had the design people up here for the Barracks. Somehow though, no matter what they suggested, we knew it wouldn’t work. When the decorator told me what they’d finally decided on, I laughed. Your bedroom has almost the same wallpaper pattern and colours as it had in 1832.”
“You mean that the room remembered what it liked and somehow took over?” Chloe couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice. What Mr. White said was just too surreal. But as she wanted to know more, she smiled as she went on, “Tell me more about Wahmurra. Please. About when it started.”
“That’s too much information for one night, Chloe. But, I’ll tell you this. Wahmurra was built in stages. First the House, then the Barracks.”
“Why? Was it hard to get workers?”
Mr. White chuckled. “In a way. Most were convicts.”
Chloe nodded. She paid attention in Socials classes and understood what he meant. The convicts were early Australia’s free workers. Most were thieves and most were males. Some were old, but a few were children. They left families behind they’d never see again. It was a sad beginning in many ways for Australia.
“Are you saying this was really built by convicts?” Chloe asked, looking at the elegance around her.
Mr. White nodded. “We had about three hundred back then, and they did most of the construction. They didn’t have any choice where they worked, poor devils. They went wherever the government sent them--here, Sydney, Timbuktu. In fact, in the very beginning, a lot wished they were in Timbuktu instead of Wahmurra.”
“Why?”
“Because Ol’ Bundy, the overseer, was a real brute. He flogged them for any mistake--his or theirs.”
Chloe looked around her again. It was so hard to connect Wahmurra with slave labour. But she remembered her lessons from school. Most of the important early buildings had been built, like those at Wahmurra, by convicts. You just had to walk along Sydney’s Macquarie Street to see some.
She wondered what it would have been like to have lived in Wahmurra in the 1830s. How did Lord Peter Kendricks and his family cope? She could not imagine living without malls or supermarkets. Or, hospitals. What would they have done in an emergency? And what did they do without Facebook or Twitter? What was it like to be so isolated?
When she asked, Mr. White laughed and refused to answer more questions. “Like I said, Wahmurra was built in stages. Answers come in stages, as well.”
As they walked around the headland on Mr. White’s daily “perambulation,” as he called his walk before going to bed, Chloe thought more about early Wahmurra. “I guess the stone came from around here,” she said eventually. “But how did they get so many bricks?”
“We had our own brickyard in the old days,” Mr. White answered. “If you look carefully enough, you can still see the thumbprint of the convict lad who pulled the bricks from the furnace. If he took them out too early, his thumb made a dent in the wet clay, and he’d be whipped. You wouldn’t believe what Ol’ Bundy did to that boy.”
“What happened?” Chloe asked, surprised by the anger and loathing in Mr. White’s faint, whispery-like voice.
Mr. White looked behind Chloe, and for a moment she thought that he was actually seeing what had happened, because his face looked haunted. He coughed a little, his faint dry cough, and eventually said, “Ol’ Bundy found a yellowish clay and he wanted the men to make a special batch of bricks for his own house. But the bullock teams hauling wood to the furnace went berserk. Just as the bricks were being pulled out.”
“Oh, oh.”
“Indeed. Logs cascaded everywhere. Some bricks fell onto the convict boy’s leg and, in his agony, his thumb made a huge dent in one of them. The batch was ruined and, once Ol’ Bundy found out, he flogged everyone unfortunate enough to be in the brickyard.”
“Even the boy with the smashed leg? Why didn’t anyone stop him?”
They had reached The House and Mr. White held its front door open. “No one could,” he said simply, and Chloe sensed that he was either very tired or that his stories were making him sad. “You have to realise, Chloe, the overseer had total control back then. But after Lord Peter remarried and decided to live here, things changed. Lady Peter, his second wife, couldn’t stand cruelty.”
“Like Mum.”
Mr. White smiled--a weird, secretive smile like the Mona Lisa’s or the Sphinx’s in Egypt. “Exactly.”
~ ~ ~
Chapter 2
When Chloe woke the next morning, she was thirteen and officially a teenager. She lay in bed feeling underwhelmed. Nothing had changed. She’d always believed that something magical would happen on her thirteenth birthday. Magical--like growing super cleavage overnight. She checked, but her chest was as flat as ever. Disappointed, she slumped back against the pillows, only coming to life when Mrs. Shaw knocked on the door.
“You’d better hurry, Chloe. Your dad’s on the phone from Los Angeles. It must be costing him a fortune.”
“Why didn’t he Skype me?”
“Hmmm. Let me see. Maybe he remembered that Mr. White doesn’t allow personal electronics in the House,” Mrs. Shaw answered. “Now, hurry up. Like, I said. It must be costing him a fortune.”
Not a chance, Chloe thought, as she dressed in flowered shorts and a teal tee-shirt. He’d either have some super plan or he’d use the studio’s phone. Nevertheless, it felt good. Dad hadn’t managed the long trip back for her birthday as he’d promised, but at least he’d remembered it.
She even managed to be nice to Mel, Dad’s current “friend.” Mel was a fun person, except for one fatal flaw. She wanted to be Chloe’s stepmother. Worse, Chloe knew Dad was thinking about it. She’d overheard him talking to Gran about the possibility of having Mum declared officially dead so that he’d be free to marry again.
After she said good-bye to Mel, Dad took the phone again, promised to be home for Christmas, and after they said their goodbyes, added a puzzling request, “Be careful with my present, Chloe. Promise?”
“Promise,” she answered, wondering if he was giving her a cut glass figurine or something else that was delicate. “I haven’t opened it yet, so I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I promise anyway. Bye.”
At the breakfast table, there was a mound of presents beside her plate. Mrs. Shaw had given her a body care kit, Gran had sent a couple of hoodies, a pair of jeans, and an oblong package that turned out to be a jeweller’s box with a small string of pearls in it. Chloe’s eyes teared when she read Gran’s card, “These were your mother’s thirteenth birthday present. Grow up to be the kind of woman she was, and I’ll be happy.”
Chloe stared at the beautiful gift. Gran never allowed her to wear jewellery, and if she needed proof that turning thirteen was a big deal after all, this was it. Then Mr. White claimed her attention by holding out a key on a velvet ribbon. “This is your father’s present, Chloe. We had to buy it for him in Newcastle.” Looking at the key, Chloe couldn’t figure out what it would be for.
Mr. White let her puzzle for a few moments before adding, “Dave’s waiting for you in the work yard but, before that, one last present. From me,” he added, smiling as he handed over a faded velvet box.
Chloe looked at the key again. It looked like a car key. And how did Dave factor into things? He ran the work yard. Nevertheless, she put the ribbon around her neck and opened Mr. White’s present. He’d given her an old circular locket on a gold chain. It was beautifully engraved with a complicated set of initials. “It opens,” he told her, inserting his thumb into a ridge and flicking it. “Like this.”
Chloe thought she’d faint when she saw the water colour portrait inside, because her mother’s face stared back at her. “It’s Mum,” she gasped. “Thank you.”
“Look at the clothes, Chloe.”
She looked at the picture again. Her mother wore an old-fashioned dress with a frilly collar. Her front hair was almost frizzy and a high, lacy bonnet covered the rest. Chloe had never seen Mum dressed that way, and suddenly she felt a little disoriented. “It is Mum, isn’t it?”
Mr. White smiled. His Mona Lisa smile, the full of puzzles one. “That, my dear, is a portrait of Lady Peter, the first lady of Wahmurra. She’s the one who changed so much around here.”
With that, Mr. White was done talking. No matter what Chloe said, he simply smiled and tidied wrapping paper away. Then he put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Don’t fret, child. Later, after dinner, I’ll tell you a couple of stories about her. She was a great lady in all senses of the word.” He pulled his old-fashioned watch from his pocket and cluck-clucked. “Now, hurry up. Change into your jeans. No flip-flops either. Wear your boots.”
Chloe pulled a face, “It’s hot, Mr. White. It’s going to be a scorcher.”
“Don’t waste time arguing, Chloe. Just hurry. Dave’s expecting you any moment now. If you stop by the kitchen, Mrs. Shaw has a bag lunch for you.”
She thanked him for her presents and ran to her bedroom. Obediently, she changed into her oldest pair of jeans and one of her new hoodies. Just before leaving the room, she looked at the locket on its antique gold chain. She flicked it open and stared at the woman with her mother’s face. If she ignored the old-fashioned dress and hairdo, she’d swear it was Mum. After fighting the urge to cry, she pulled the chain over her head, collected her lunch from the kitchen and raced for the work yard.
Dad must have organized some kind of treasure hunt, she told herself. The first clue’s probably in one of the cars. That’s why I need the key.
When she saw her dad’s present though, her jaw dropped six feet. “Happy birthday, Chloe,” Dave said, a smile creasing his deeply tanned face. “Isn’t this a beaut?”
Chloe couldn’t think, couldn’t believe her eyes. Dave stood beside a magnificent silver motor scooter with bright yellow trim. “That’s Dad present? For me?”
Dave nodded. “Wish I’d had a dad who could afford that.”
“Well, maybe, your dad doesn’t have a giant-sized guilty conscience for breaking promises about being home for your birthday,” she snapped. But the magnificence of the gift drove all grouchy thoughts away as she walked around the scooter to admire it from all angles. “Is it really mine?” she kept asking. “Am I really allowed to ride it? It’s as big as a motor bike.”
“Hardly,” Dave said, pointing to his beloved Harley a few feet away. “We did think about getting you a bike though. Your dad didn’t tell us what to get exactly. Mr. White wanted something smaller, but I talked him out of it. I wondered about getting you an off-road, but Mr. White told me to get something you could use in Sydney when you’re older.”
He stopped for breath and smiled when Chloe took the handlebars and climbed onto the seat. “This is a real beaut, Chloe. Goes anywhere between eighty and a hundred, flat out. I figure you never know when you need speed to get away from something. Better yet though, it’s also gentle enough for you to ride around here. Not like my Harley. Anyway, Mr. White said you’d be responsible with it, and I’m going to make sure you won’t kill yourself or anyone else. So, listen up. First things first.” He pulled two helmets out of a box. “We didn’t know your head size so we got a small as well as a medium.”
After trying both helmets, Chloe selected the silver, smaller one. “Good,” said Dave, running his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Now, rule number one. That helmet must always be on your head when you’re riding. Always. No exceptions. Your dad said to tell you that if you’re seen without it, the scooter gets deep sixed until you leave school. And the same goes for riding off Wahmurra. It’s not licensed, and won’t till you’re older. Off property? You’re grounded for life. Got it?”
Chloe nodded impatiently. Wahmurra had more than one hundred thousand acres. She had no need to go off property. “I promise, Dave. What’s next?”
What came next was a lesson in how the scooter worked, how to accelerate, and how to brake safely without it bucking and jumping around. Eventually Dave wound down, started up his Harley, and the real lessons began with her following him around the roads. Finally, he stopped. “Your dad said you’d be fine after an hour or so,” he told her approvingly. “I didn’t believe him. Well done you.”
“He takes me off-road biking when I go to L.A.”
Dave laughed. “Well,” he drawled. “If you’re so experienced, want to learn a couple of tricks?”
After Chloe nodded enthusiastically, he taught her how to throw a gravel spray and do mini-wheelies. “Gran would spin if she saw me,” Chloe told him.
Dave laughed again as he led the way back to the work yard. “I’ve time for one last lesson,” he told her. He winced as he got off his Harley and straightened. “Arthritis,” he explained briefly. “Now, Chloe, when you finish for the day, always, without exception, refuel from the yard pump. Make it a habit. That way you’re never out of petrol--or gas, as they say in America. As well, there’s a special garage I’ve made for you in the alcove of the old school. There are glow sticks and a couple of emergency flares in the storage area under the seat. Just in case you have a bad fall and need to signal us. Now watch while I show you how to work them.”
After this long, patient explanation of everything, Dave patted her arm. “That’s it. You’ll do. Just remember to lock up everything up when you’re finished. Right?”
“Right.”
She rode her scooter, which she nicknamed Rex, around for an hour or so, before remembering the lunch Mrs. Shaw had given her. As she ate it on a rock jutting out into Port Adams, she couldn’t stop grinning. Rex was really the best present anyone turning thirteen could get. Her friends would be wild with envy. She wished she had her phone to send pictures, but thanks to Mr. White and his rules, no phones or internet at Wahmurra for her.
After lunch, she rode around following some dirt tracks, riding in long, elongated Ss, finding that the more she rode, the more comfortable she became. Eventually she turned back towards Wahmurra, and, after a while, realised she had reached the old convict church.
She broke out in goose bumps, and her joy vanished as she felt a prickle of fear. On a whim, she parked Rex under a huge Moreton Bay Fig tree and walked across. The church’s front door was closed, but she found the side one open. Gingerly, as if she expected someone to ask what she was doing, she walked in and sat in one of the old pews. She leaned back for a few minutes, savouring the feeling of peace and gradually becoming convinced that she should pray. After all, that’s what people did in churches. She pulled an old kneeler out and dropped to her knees.
It was hard. She had no words. She was prayed out. When Mum had first gone missing, Chloe had prayed day and night that Mum would be found, that she’d come back and everything would go back to normal. After a while, though, she wondered if God took time out from listening to all the prayers that went up every day, or that he was listening to Canadian or American prayers when she prayed and not Australian ones. With no answers, she’d gradually stopped. Prayer was too hard if God that didn’t listen.
Now though, on her thirteenth birthday, she felt the urge to pray again. She was grateful for a lot of things. Life had gone on. There had been happiness, and it wouldn’t hurt to nag God again about her mother. So, alone in the dark, quiet church, Chloe bowed her head. She told God about her confusion, about the horribleness of not knowing where her mum was, about how useless she felt prayer was.
For the first time in years, Chloe felt like she had God’s attention. “So please, God,” she went on, “please help me find something to tell us what happened four years ago. Help me know that Mum is OK. Even if she’s dead, we’ll know she’s at peace. Help Dad and Gran too, because they worry so much. Amen.”
She stayed kneeling for a couple of moments, fighting back tears and loneliness. How she wished Mum would come through the church door. Still kneeling, she studied the floor’s long planks and their square-topped nails. They looked hand made, and she thought that there probably hadn’t been enough money to buy real nails when the church was built.
Over time, a couple of the planks had shrunk, making a crevice between them and the bottom of the pew. Outside a cloud must have shifted letting the sun through, because Chloe suddenly saw something shiny in the crevice. She tried poking at it with her fingers and then a hymn book until realizing that she’d need a coat hanger. Grabbing one from a hook in the cloak room, she straightened it and poked it into the hole.
She dug carefully, muttering to herself when she seemed to push it deeper. But gradually, millimetre by millimetre, she pulled it free. When she looked at what she’d found, she burst into tears. Four years ago she’d saved her pocket money, done all kinds of jobs, to get enough money to buy Mum a special pair of earrings. Dad had helped, of course, but Chloe still remembered how proud she’d felt when Mum had put them on.
And now, here in her hand, was one of those earrings.
She sat in the pew, the earring in her hand, wishing she could phone Dad. He’d know its importance. For the first time in years, they had a new clue. Mum had come to the church before she disappeared. Chloe had no idea why, but she felt focussed.
She’d only been back at Wahmurra for one day, and already she’d found something. She had ten more days before Dad collected her. Ten days, maybe ten more clues. Calling herself “Chloe, Super Sleuth,” she ran out of the church, the earring tucked deep in her jeans pocket. After she started Rex and headed up the hill for the work yard, Chloe thank God and asked him to keep the clues coming. With his help, Chloe Super Sleuth just might find her mum.
Still excited, she refuelled Rex and put him safely away. Dave had tossed the second helmet, a yellow one, on the floor, and Chloe picked it up and hung it on Rex’s handlebars, opposite her own. Obeying Dave’s orders, she pulled the door shut and put the scooter’s key around her neck where it dangled next to the locket.
As she turned towards the House, a yellow brick caught her eye, and she remembered Mr. White’s story about the convict boy. If Super Sleuth had found Mum’s earring, surely she could find the brick with the dent in it. Better yet, she had just enough time before dinner.
But finding the brick proved difficult. She wandered around and, after a while, realised she was looking for the contours and whirls of a fingerprint like she’d seen on CSI shows. Mr. White, though, had described it differently. He’d said the boy had made a dent.
It would be like the hole her finger made in a cake’s icing. She backtracked, looking at every yellow brick she could find until she reached the Barracks. Mr. White had emphasized that the builders had used bricks for its foundations. All she had to do was get underneath to look.
It wasn’t easy. She forced the lattice door open and looked at the space below the stairs to the Barracks in horror. Generations had used it as a dump for unwanted furniture and old junk. Eventually, her eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, and half-crawling, she began working her way to the walls. Then, almost as though there were a neon sign flashing “Look here,” she saw, wedged between two stones, a half brick with a dent in its top corner.
Chloe rocked back on her heels. There it was--living proof of the convicts who had sweated to build Wahmurra. She wondered what it had been like, being sent so far from England, to work from sunrise to sunset six days a week. Some might have been in chains, shackled together, their backs scarred from repeated floggings. How hard it must been to leave England. Had they ever stopped missing their families?
As she crouched in the semi-darkness, she felt pain coming from the bricks. Last night, in the Bistro right above her, Mr. White had said that he thought houses had memories. Maybe, bricks did as well. With a tinge of curiosity, together with an overwhelming need to ease the pain, she slid her own thumb into the indentation. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry that you had to work so hard, sorry about your cruel boss, sorry that I live now and can’t help you. I would--if I knew a way.”
When she tried to pull her thumb out of the brick, it seemed stuck. “Damnation all to blazes,” she said, pulling and pulling until she felt her wrist would break. She could see all kinds of space around her thumb, but the brick somehow wouldn’t let go.
Don’t panic, she told herself. Give it a rest, then try again. Worst comes to worst, Mr. White will send someone to search the grounds. They’ll find me. In frustration, she took a small step backwards and cracked her head on a beam in the ceiling. “Damnation and hell and...”
Her muttered litany of swear words stopped as she felt herself being pulled into two. In one half, things seemed normal. In the other, they went at half speed, and as more and more of her slowed down to match that speed, everything went black.
~ ~ ~
Chapter 3
Slowly, painfully, Chloe opened her eyes.
A kangaroo’s face hovered inches from her face. She blinked; it blinked. She blinked again; it blinked again. She closed her eyes. Never had she felt so frightened. She had no idea if she was in the middle of a nightmare, or if she’d suddenly gone insane. She didn’t know where she was, and her only clue to anything seemed to be a pair of intelligent brown eyes in a furry face that stared back at her every time she opened her eyes. It’s only a kangaroo, they don’t bite, she reassured herself, while wondering if even that was true.
“Go away,” she whispered. “Go eat grass or something.”
The kangaroo only looked back at her and didn’t move. Chloe even thought she saw questions in its eyes. “Go away,” she told it again. “I’m going to hurl at any moment. You won’t want my vomit over you, do you?”
After she raised herself on her elbows and leaned to the side, the kangaroo seemed to understand. It raised a paw to its face in something like a farewell gesture, bounded softly across the small clearing into some scrub and disappeared. After Chloe emptied her stomach and felt well enough, she got into a half crouch and followed its tracks.
Through an opening in the bushes, she saw a glorious bay. Sparkling water reflected a summer’s bright sky. For a few moments, the sounds of waves lapping against the shore soothed her. She drew back a little when a detail of men wearing the military uniform of some long-gone era marched by. Fascinated, she watched as they stopped in front of one of the black cannons in front of her and transferred handfuls of goop from a bucket to its innards. Shocked into disbelieving her own eyes, Chloe noticed a pyramid of black cannonballs beside the gun. It’s only a dream. A nightmare. I must be in some kind of historical theme park, she told herself, shocked into disbelieving her own eyes.
Turning her head the other way she saw a flotilla of tall ships riding at anchor in the bay, their sails gleaming in the sun. Some sailors clambered amongst masts, while others scrubbed decks. A dinghy set off for shore from one ship and, as Chloe watched it, everything turned crazy.
Jutting far into the bay was a massive wooden wharf. One of the ships was tied up to one side and men unloaded crates from its hull. They didn’t use modern cranes, nor did they load the goods into trucks or containers. Instead, they jiggled complicated pulleys and ropes, manipulating the heavy cargo on to horse-drawn carts. To complicate things, instead of the dark shorts and singlets she’d seen workers wear on Sydney’s docks, these wharfies dressed in long baggy trousers and ragged shirts. Some had arrows painted on them. Others wore tattered clothes that were half blue and half yellow. A man carrying a whip watched them carefully.
The men didn’t look like the well-fed actors or even anorexic ones. Chloe shook her head, but that didn’t do anything except make her Mount Everest-sized headache worse. Unable to make sense of anything, she gave up and crawled back into the clearing.
Even then she couldn’t get comfortable. Flies swarmed everywhere, and she hated the feeling of being lost. Trying hard not to panic, she reached under her hoodie for the locket. She flicked it open and stared at the lady’s face, trying to draw comfort from it. “Oh, Mum, wherever you are, help me,” she whispered and then collapsed into the oblivion of unconsciousness.
She half-woke when something poked her in the stomach. She lay still. Then she felt a stick prod her feet, and a child’s shrill voice exclaim in a very British accent, “It’s dead.”
“Has to be. Look. Watch when I poke it again, Billy. Has to be a poor dead boy. I’ll wager no one gives a damn about him.”
“Polly! You’re lucky Nurse isn’t around. She’d box your ears if she heard you swear like that. In any case, you’re wrong. It’s a girl. Look at the hair.”
“A girl?” Polly scoffed. “Then why isn’t he wearing a dress instead of pantaloons. It’s a boy. I know.”
“Not a boy. Boys don’t wear their hair that long,” Billy asserted, as though his male dignity were offended by the thought.
“You’re wrong. I tell you this is a drowned sailor boy who tried to run away. He must have swallowed gallons of salt water and crawled up here to die.”
“He can’t be drowned, Polly. His clothes are dry,” Billy answered scornfully.
Chloe felt another hurtful poke to her stomach, and she willed herself not to react. Whoever Billy and Polly were, she didn’t want to find out. I’m dreaming, she said softly a couple of times while pinching herself in a useless effort to wake up properly. Then she heard the bushes being pulled this way and that as one or both of the children tried to get closer.
“Don’t go in there any further, Polly,” Billy suddenly ordered. “You’ll tear your dress and you know what Nurse said. Next time you come back to the house with it torn, both of us have to fix it. Boys don’t sew, but Nurse said if I couldn’t be a man and control you, she’d make me learn.”
Chloe grinned. Good for you, Nurse Whoever-you-are. It was a brilliant threat, for she heard Billy pull Polly away. After some sort of mini-fight and a lot of name-calling, Polly succumbed ungraciously. “All right. I won’t go in there if you’re so scared of a little sewing lesson. But you’re nothing but a scaredy-cat, Billy Kendricks. A scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat.”
The scuffling noises broke out again, and again Polly gave in. “Pax, Billy. Let’s get Thad. No one worries about his clothes. He can go in and pull the sailor-boy out.”
Within seconds the children scampered off, calling for Thad at the top of their lungs. As their voices faded, Chloe sat up groggily and took another look around her. She did not want to be poked or prodded again. Nor did she want to be pulled out of the bushes for the children’s satisfaction. In fact, she didn’t want to be found, until she had figured out where she was and what was going on. Could she have died? She wasn’t quite sure what heaven was. Surely, though, it didn’t include children poking about with sticks.
Did she have amnesia? She couldn’t feel any suspicious lumps on her head. Her clothes were the same, and she remembered putting on her jeans, school hoodie and boots when she’d gone to ride Rex. What’s more, she had the key to the scooter and the locket still around her neck.
But, what happened next? Who were the children? Who was Thad? At last she faced the fact that she had no idea, and if she didn’t want to be found, she had to find a new hiding place quickly.
Remembering the kangaroo’s route, Chloe followed its path, squirming over roots and debris until she pulled herself free. Then her mouth dropped open. In front of her was an imposing building. Not only did it look huge, it was new. Five stairs led to the main floor. As she looked in disbelief, a red-coated soldier opened one of the doors, and she scuttled back to the safety of the bushes. Peering at the building through them, she felt a rush of adrenalin as she began counting the number of French doors.
Seven. Of course. She’d known there would be seven before she’d started to count. With the unbelievable in mind, she turned to the west.
Sure enough, a sandstone house stood exactly where she thought it would be. It, too, looked both new and large, and from her viewpoint it appeared to be two-storeyed. However, Chloe knew that if she walked to the top of the hill and looked down on it, she would think it had only one level, because the architect had cleverly used the slope of the land to give its residents some privacy. He’d also used the best design features of the Regency period. Several graceful columns supported the roof of the verandah, which ran around three sides of the house. Right now they were a pristine white, but Chloe knew wisteria vines would cover them eventually.
She’d always wondered what a blow to the solar-plexus was. In books, it sounded like being knocked out. Now, she suddenly felt that someone had kicked her already tender stomach hard. The house that she’d always thought was the most beautiful in the world was exactly where it should have been. Its freshly quarried sandstone reflected the pinks and yellows of sunset as they always did. She knew without bothering to check that if she walked to the southern side of the house, she would see four bedroom windows overlooking the bay. Hysterically, she wondered whether the most western one would be decorated in white and various blues, just the way it had been when she’d left it that morning.
She heard the children’s voices, shrill with excitement again, and her new reality intruded. With energy she didn’t think she had, she forced her way from the bushes and ran in the opposite direction, towards the large building and the space she skew she’d find beneath the five stairs. She didn’t expect to find any of the junk she’d clambered over earlier in the day. It would come later. Much later. Many, many years later.
Goose bumps erupted everywhere. Chloe thought her hair must be standing on end because she knew she was running to safety under the Barracks’ stairs in the world of 1833.
~ ~ ~
Chapter 4
After reaching the space beneath the Barracks, she scrambled back as far as she could and lay perfectly still for several moments. Then, crawling forward on her stomach, inch by inch, she looked back at the bushes and the children.
Billy and Polly Kendricks looked to be about five or six. With manic energy they poked long sticks into the undergrowth, howling with disappointment when they couldn’t find their dead sailor boy. “He’s gotta be here,” Billy kept saying every time he jabbed the dirt. “He’s gotta.”
“I know. I saw him first.”
“Did not.” For a moment they forgot everything and argued.
Polly gave up first, dropping to her knees to peer under the bushes. Methodically she worked her way around the area, peering and poking. Finally she came back to Billy. “He’s gone. Maybe Jesus came and resurrected him.”
Chloe knew that everyone went to church in the 1830s, so she wasn’t surprised that Billy understood, though he seemed prepared to argue with everything his sister said.
“You’re silly,” he scoffed. “If Jesus resurrected him, he’d be alive and walking around. Do you see a sailor boy anywhere? Most likely, someone else found him.” He looked back to the track leading up from Oyster Creek. “Hurry up, Thad. Hurry, for goodness sake! Someone’s stolen our dead sailor boy!”
When Thad came into view, Chloe felt her heart stop. She knew him from somewhere. But where? When? And why did she feel such a tremendous sense of happiness? He looked about her own age, maybe a year older. His black curly hair needed to be cut, and he ran slowly, dragging his right leg after him in an ugly-looking movement. On his otherwise good-looking face, pain had carved lines around his mouth and eyes that made Chloe wish for Mum again. Christina Murray was a pediatrician. She’d know how to fix his leg.
Even though Thad might be only thirteen or fourteen he must do a man’s work, because he exuded a man’s authority when he reached the children and told them, “If you lot brought me on some wild goose chase, I’ll tell your papa this time.”
Billy straightened his shoulders as he must have seen officers do, looking like a general staring down a lowly private. “We are not dissembling,” he told Thad, pronouncing the difficult word slowly and in a lofty voice.
And suddenly Chloe not only saw but understood the major difference between the two children and Thad. Billy and Polly, although dirty as chicks learning the beauties of a dirt bath, had something that showed they belonged to a higher social class. Polly’s long dress had a rip in it, her white petticoats were filthy, yet she had a built-in arrogance as she repeated her brother’s words, “Not dissembling at all.”
Thad muttered something in a thick English accent Chloe barely understood. She thought he had to be a servant, although she couldn’t imagine what work he could do with his crippled leg. Equally puzzling was the children’s admiration and trust as they looked at him. She watched as he grabbed one of the sticks and forced his way into the bushes. When he made a soft exclamation, then stooped, she knew he’d found something she’d left behind. Probably vomit, she thought in disgust.
After prodding the dirt for several more minutes, Thad came out and gave his stick to Billy. “Well, young’uns, I owe you an apology. There was someone here all right, but I reckon he’s long gone now. Probably back to his ship. You should run down to the dock and ask if anyone saw him.”
As the children shrieked their way to the wharf, Thad carefully walked around the bushes, then followed some invisible track directly across to the Barracks. As he peered underneath it, Chloe hid her face and tried to become invisible. “It’s all right,” he finally said, pronouncing the word like roight. “I won’t give you away. But you cannot stay in there. It’s dangerous. Your best chance is to go back to your ship and beg your captain for mercy. Say you had sun-stroke or something. If you come now, I’ll go with you and swear it’s true.”
Chloe stayed exactly where she was, not moving by as much as a tenth of an inch, until Thad gave up and limped away. Only after darkness fell, did she feel safe enough to sit up and crouch against the back of the wall. She knew she was in 1830s Wahmurra, but she couldn’t believe it.
She thought time travel was something that only happened in books and movies. Usually, there was some reason. Research, or a need to make something right, or maybe stop a disaster from happening. She, however, was an ordinary person with as much ambition to travel back in time as she had to go to Mars. Zero. None. Nil. Nada. Plus, while she liked history, she didn’t particularly want to live it.
She felt sorry for convicts, but every Australian did. She’d never wanted to see what Wahmurra looked like in 1833, but that was exactly where she was. She knew the year accurately because of Mr. White’s history lesson the night before. He’d said that the House was finished in 1832 and the Barracks in 1833. Construction debris was still scattered around outside. What further proof did she need?
Judging from the sounds above her, the officers were in their mess hall, the room which would become the Bistro, probably having a pre-dinner drink. For Chloe, just the thought of dinner made her stomach rumble in protest.
Thirst, though, was her number one problem. It seemed unfair that while she could tell the date of the buildings, she didn’t have a clue where to find fresh water. The Wahmurra of her time had tap water, of course. She was pretty sure that 1830s Wahmurra would either have to pump its water from a well somewhere or collect rainwater in a cistern. She supposed she could drink water from Oyster Creek, but that was close to a mile away. In any case, Mum always emphasized the dangers of drinking unboiled water. “Chloe,” she used to warn, “no matter how clear it looks, there’s bits of animals’ poo in it. So, always boil creek water, love.”
Chloe thought she could handle bits of animal poo, because her throat felt drier that the Great Sandy Desert. Preparing herself for a mad rush to Oyster Creek, she froze when heard soft scraping sounds and then, “Hello?”
At the sound of Thad’s voice, Chloe instinctively cowered, flinging her arms across her face and shutting her eyes tight. While her brain might have accepted that she was in 1833, the rest of her hadn’t. She still hoped she was dreaming, and that when she woke up, everything would be normal.