‘God preserve us,’ Anna Maria muttered. She took a deep breath and, drawing closer to the campsite, smiled at the visitors. ‘Pastor Flügel, we are so pleased to have you come again to minister here. Thank you for your sermon this morning.’ She turned and nodded at Magdalena. ‘Frau Radtke.’
‘What is that in your hand?’ Magdalena looked at the grubs in horror.
‘The women here have shown me how they might be eaten. Would you like one?’ Anna Maria asked.
‘Mama . . .’ Thea dug a finger into her mother’s elbow.
Pastor Flügel stared at the grubs, then sat down on the trunk beside the fire. ‘Frau Eichenwald, Frau Radtke has come to me with a complaint.’ He took a deep breath. ‘She says she has reason to believe you have cursed her vegetable garden.’
Anna Maria laughed out loud. ‘What?’
Magdalena’s chin quivered. ‘Anna Maria, I know we have not always seen eye to eye. It does not give me any joy to cast aspersions. I know that there are many who do the Devil’s labour unknowingly. Ignorance –’
‘The Devil’s labour?’
Magdalena stared at her. ‘Christiana saw it. She saw the book.’
Pastor Flügel steepled the tips of his fingers together. ‘Frau Eichenwald, Frau Radtke says that she has reason to believe her garden has been cursed.’ Anna Maria opened her mouth to protest, but the pastor held up a hand. ‘Let me continue. It is true that something has afflicted the Radtkes’ vegetables. Possibly something supernatural.’
‘They withered overnight.’ Magdalena’s face morphed from anger to pain. ‘Overnight.’
Anna Maria stared at her. Thea, by her side, was pale. ‘Show me,’ the Wend said finally.
The garden was dead. Not a living seedling remained in it. The leaves of the mangel-wurzel were limp and yellow, already turning back to earth, the onion seedlings wisped into nothing.
‘I don’t know what we will do,’ Magdalena said. ‘What we will eat when our stores are gone.’ She was near tears.
Anna Maria turned to her, hand over her mouth. ‘Magdalena, I would never do such a thing.’
The pastor gave her a sharp glance. ‘Do you know how?’
The Wend lifted a hand to her headdress, frowning. ‘No,’ she said gently. ‘No, of course not.’
‘There are false texts that teach a person how to do such a thing. The witches’ bible.’
‘I do not own a witches’ bible.’ Anna Maria turned to Thea, mouth set. ‘Thea, we have more seeds at home?’
Thea swallowed. ‘Yes. Some.’
Anna Maria nodded at Magdalena. ‘They are yours,’ she said. ‘I did not do this. Nor have I any desire to see you or your family starve. Will that satisfy you?’
Magdalena flung a withered mangel-wurzel into the field beyond. ‘For now.’
Pastor Flügel walked Anna Maria and Thea back to their campsite. ‘Frau Eichenwald,’ he began, stopping and facing her as they arrived at the shelter, ‘I feel compelled to invite you once more to tell me if you are in possession of such a text as the one purportedly witnessed by Christiana Radtke.’
‘I possess no book of the occult.’
Thea sat down on the hollow log, fingers splayed against its greyed wood. She stared at the fire, unblinking.
Pastor Flügel sniffed. ‘You are unfamiliar to this congregation.’
‘My family and I have been a part of it since we moved to Kay. We have been familiar these past three years.’
‘You are unfamiliar, then, to me,’ he answered. ‘In cases of church discipline, I accord to the letter of our laws. There are three grades of punishment that may apply to all members of my congregations, without respect of person, rank, age or sex. The first is exclusion from the Lord’s Supper, an opportunity for self-examination and penitence. The second is appearance before the congregation and confrontation with the sin that has been committed. The third is excommunication and committal to Satan, in the case of a sinner who, though fully convicted of her transgression, obstinately denies and impenitently continues her offence.’
I sat next to Thea and placed my head on her shoulder. I could feel her trembling.
Anna Maria smiled at the pastor. ‘I am aware.’
‘Good.’ Flügel nodded. ‘Good. Well, then, I have said what I came to say.’
As spring advanced and the wattles frothed yellow, the watchful silence between the congregation and the first peoples of the country eased into cautious friendliness. Magdalena, Elize, Mama and Amalie, all of whom now received regular laundry work from local English families, found themselves sharing the waterway with the Peramangk women who arrived to catch yabbies crawling from the mud, and they agreed the hot flesh offered to them on the banks of the waterhole was delicious.
Anna Maria continued to follow the same woman who gave her the grubs, and over time she was shown how to find white ant larvae and the better bird eggs to eat. Hans Pasche, who often stopped in at the Eichenwalds’ on his way to and from his father’s allotment, tried everything the Wend placed before him. I watched Thea laugh as he sucked the nectar from stringybark flowers, and while I was glad they were friendly with one another, I found myself dreading the sight of Hans approaching through the allotments.
‘You should come and see something,’ he said to Thea one day, interrupting her as she watered her vegetable garden. ‘Can you come now?’
I followed behind Thea as Hans, grinning, led her to where Matthias stood at the feet of the three red gums in my parents’ allotment, looking upwards, hands over his eyes to shield them from the morning sunlight.
‘What is it?’ asked Thea.
Hans beckoned her closer and pointed into the canopy. As I drew closer I saw that a Peramangk man, with incredible skill and dexterity, was climbing the tallest of the gums. With no low-hanging branches, he’d cut steps for his feet in the bark with a sharp, pointed stick, and was making more as he climbed higher. Finally, reaching a hollow, he deftly pulled out a possum and killed it with a single blow to the head.
I remembered the feeling of furred warmth turning within my hollows and, as I did so, noticed that the smallest of the gums had yellowed and was unflowering. It looked like it was dying.
Matthias and Hans clapped as the man climbed back down, stepping forwards to admire and examine the tool he had used to scale the gargantuan tree. He showed it to them patiently, speaking in both his mother tongue and in English, while Thea, I noticed, fell back, eyes on the possum that hung from his hand.
‘I think he is saying that it can be eaten,’ Hans said, turning to Thea.
‘It isn’t for the fur?’ The possum skin cloaks worn by many of the women were familiar sights by then.
‘No,’ said Hans, glancing back at the man. ‘No, it’s also food.’
The man cut them some meat and that night Hans stayed to eat it beside the Eichenwalds’ fire, nodding enthusiastically as Thea described the scene to her parents. The knowing glance shared between Anna Maria and Friedrich buckled through me like a wave.
‘That Hans Pasche cuts a striking figure,’ Anna Maria said later that night, watching Hans return to his family’s allotment in the twilight. ‘Don’t you think?’