‘No! That’s not right. Ted Strehlow is a good man, a man who means to make a change in Australia.’
‘He be dead long before it made.’ Cat tore off the amber ring and offered it to him. ‘I cannot take this. You have it back, please, Charlie.’ She pressed it into the palm of his hand. He was just about to entreat her to keep it when there was a sudden loud banging on the door. Both of them nearly jumped out of their skins.
‘Is someone in there? Good God, I’m being drowned out here, and so are my roses! Why won’t my key fit into the lock?’
‘Jidu! Hide!’ Charlie hissed to Cat.
Already Cat had stood up and was blowing out candles before removing the blanket from the centre of the floor.
‘Sorry, Mother, it’s me,’ Charlie called cheerily through the door. ‘I heard the storm and I’ve already begun to gather your roses together.’ Making sure Cat was well hidden in the shadows, he turned the key in the door as quietly as he could and threw it into Cat’s hands, as he made a facade of turning the handle numerous times. ‘Good grief, this lock is sticky, we need to have Fred oil it,’ he said loudly.
Turning back to the figure in the shadows, he mouthed, ‘I love you.’ Then, with an exaggerated jerk, he pulled open the door.
‘Mother! You’re positively drenched!’
‘I am indeed, but I shall dry off soon enough.’ Kitty stepped into the shed, dragging a tub of roses in behind her. ‘I’ve never known that door to jam before. One would almost think that you had locked it from the inside.’
‘Why would I do that? Right, I’ll dive out and try and save the rest of the tubs from imminent death,’ Charlie chuckled then stepped out of the shed into the pelting rain.
‘Thank you,’ Kitty said a few minutes later as the last of the roses had been brought in to their safe haven. ‘I pride myself on knowing when a storm is coming, but tonight,’ she sighed, ‘I was so very tired.’
‘Of course, Mother. You work too hard.’
‘And I will indeed be relieved to hand over the burden,’ Kitty replied. ‘By the way, I have invited Elise Forsythe to come to your birthday celebration. She is such a nice young woman. She told me today after you’d left that her grandfather hails from Scotland.’
‘What a coincidence. Now, Mother, shall we go to the house and get ourselves dry?’
‘Yes. Thank you, my darling. I know I can always depend on you.’
‘Always, Mother,’ Charlie said, as he closed the door behind them and Kitty locked it.
Once the footsteps had retreated, a figure emerged from the shadows inside the shed. After tiptoeing to the door and unlocking it with the key Charlie had thrown her, she opened it and made her way out into the night.
The storm had abated, at least for a while. Leaning back against the shed, Cat looked up to the heavens, her hands held protectively around her belly.
‘Hermannsburg,’ she breathed as a tear fell down her cheek. ‘Sanctuary.’
Slipping into bed next to her mother as quietly as the cat she was nicknamed after, Alkina tried to still her breathing.
Helpum me . . . please, Ancestors, help me, she pleaded.
That night, she dreamt that the gumanyba had come down to their cave. She watched them as they went through the forest and the Old Man appeared. They ran off back to their cave, but the youngest was left behind. Suddenly, the Old Man was pursuing her, but when she arrived in the cave, she knew she had to find something that was buried deep down under the red soil. Her sisters were calling to her, telling her to hurry, that the Old Man was almost upon her and would take her for his own. Yet still, even though she could hear his feet thundering across the ground, she kept digging because she could not leave the earth without it . . .
Alkina opened her eyes just as the dream version of herself had clutched at a tin and pulled it out of the ground. A memory came flooding back to her of her mother leading her into the Bush when she was fourteen to initiate her into the ways of their Ancestors. On the way to the corroboree, her mother had said she must stop and check on something. They had arrived at a cave just like the one she’d seen in her dream, and her mother had bent down and begun scrabbling in the earth before drawing out a tin box.
‘Step back,’ she’d told her daughter, as she’d sat cross-legged and opened it. Curious, Alkina had done as she was told, but had watched as her mother had opened the small leather box that lay inside the tin. At that moment, the sun had caught the object inside, which seemed to shimmer with a pink opalescence, the likes of which Alkina had never seen before. It shone like the moon itself, and she had been transfixed by its beauty.
Then the box had been snapped shut, returned to the tin and buried back in the earth. Her mother had stood, mumbling some words under her breath, then had walked back towards her.
‘Bibi, what is that?’ Alkina had asked Camira.
‘You nottum need know. It safe where it is, and so is Missus Kitty. Now, we go on our way.’
As Alkina watched the dawn beginning to break through the wooden shutters of the hut, she knew what she had to do.
25
Charlie, too, had a sleepless night. He tossed and turned, trying to think of what was best to do, and berating himself for having triggered all of this to begin with – after all, it had been he who had given Cat the champagne.
He understood her fear, and there was no doubt it would be hard for them initially. Yet given there were mixed-race unions in the town these days, surely theirs would be accepted too?
There was only one other option, and Charlie had considered it many times in the past year as he’d sweated over his future as a pearling master. No one had ever asked him if it was what he wanted to do. Like the son of a king, it was taken for granted he would don the mantle when the time came – no matter if he was even suited to the task. Charlie had known for a while now that he was not. He’d hated every second of his Economics course at university. Even his professors had said he did not have an aptitude for numbers, but when he had tentatively raised this with his mother, she had brushed away his doubts.
‘My dear Charlie, you are not there to add and subtract, you have plenty of clerks to do that for you. You are there to lead, to inspire and to make decisions on where the businesses should head in the future.’
It was cold comfort, as he was completely uninspired by all facets of the business empire, whether it be pearls, opals or cattle. They all seemed to involve deprivation and sometimes death for those who worked for the companies, while the ‘bossmen’, as Cat called them, became rich on their employees’ toil.
So . . . if Cat refused to marry him in Broome, Charlie was prepared to give up everything and go away with her wherever she wished.
His mother was already at the table when he walked into breakfast, reading her habitual newspaper.
‘Good morning, Charlie. How did you sleep?’
‘Well, thank you, Mother. You?’
‘Far better after I knew my precious roses were safe from the rains. Thank you for being so thoughtful.’