The lights pleased Fred. He pointed his knife at near and distant flames.

“Pretty,” he said to Kirstie, who was gathering up the dirty plates and cutlery.

“What is?” she asked him when he handed her his cup and plate.

“The lights.” He struggled a minute, attempting to find words to express his pleasure. “They’re beautiful.” He smiled at her so winningly that despite herself, she smiled back at him. She wondered what he would look like if his long hair and straggly beard were trimmed. He was certainly a fine figure of a man.

“That’s better,” he said encouragingly.

“What’s better?”

“You. When you smile you look pretty. Do it more often—for me.”

An Innocent Masquerade
Paula Marshall

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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PAULA MARSHALL,

married with three children, has had a varied life. She began her career in a large library and ended it as a senior academic in charge of history in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely, has been a swimming coach and has appeared on University Challenge and Mastermind. She has always wanted to write, and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor. She derives great pleasure from writing historical romances, where she can use her wide historical knowledge.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Prologue

Villa Dilhorne, Sydney, 1851

Thomas Dilhorne, that proud and serious man once known as Young Tom, but now, by his own wish, always referred to as Thomas, walked into the nursery at Villa Dilhorne, his parents’ home. Thomas’s mother, Hester, had just finished feeding his infant son, Lachlan. When he sat by her, she handed the empty dish to the boy’s nurse and the little boy to his father.

Thomas sat the lively child awkwardly on his knee, fearful that his careful and elegant clothing might be stained. Hester watched him, pain in her eyes, as Thomas carefully lifted Lachlan to his shoulder, kissing him gently on the way, his cold face never relaxing.

Hester loved her eldest son, but sometimes his sobriety, his almost total lack of humour compared with his father and his younger twin, Alan, troubled her. He had always been a serious, earnest child who rarely showed open affection, and as a man he was the same. In intellect very like his father, in appearance and temperament he bore him no resemblance.

The only person who had ever shattered Thomas’s calm severity a little had been his wife, Bethia. Hester sighed again when the coldly handsome face opposite relaxed into the faintest of smiles while the little boy stroked his father’s cheek—and then lost it when Thomas saw his mother watching him.

He stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said, handing the child back to Hester. ‘I have a busy day ahead of me. Master Lachlan will have to wait until the evening for further play.’

His mother smiled at him—a trifle ruefully this time—saying, ‘Don’t forget that we have a dinner party tonight’, but she thought with dismay, Play, he calls that play! Two minutes and then he hands his son back to me like a parcel.

Thomas turned briefly at the door, to see Lachlan crawling towards him. His smile half-appeared, but was soon lost. He turned again and walked, straight-backed, through the door and into the world of work: the only world he now cared to inhabit.

Eleven years ago Thomas had married his childhood sweetheart, Bethia Kerr. Her father had been his father’s best friend and the marriage had been a happy one. Bethia was a loving and gentle girl for whom Thomas was the centre of the universe. She had a gift for home-making and their beautiful villa in the newest part of Sydney was full of love, friends and happiness. The only thing it was not full of was children.

At first this had not mattered but, as time went by, Thomas and Bethia became increasingly disappointed that their happiness was not crowned with a family. At length they became reconciled to their lack, although every time that they heard of an addition to Alan’s a small shadow crossed Bethia’s face.

Suddenly, after years of marriage, the miracle happened. Seated at dinner one evening she told Thomas that their dreams had come true: she was increasing. For once Thomas’s iron control broke and they had wept in one another’s arms. Bethia’s pregnancy was an easy one; even the birth had not been difficult, and she was able to hand Thomas their long-awaited son herself.

Alas, within twenty-four hours she was showing signs of fever; two days later she was dead. Hester sometimes thought that her son had died with his wife. Always reserved, he became impenetrable. Any affection which he had felt for anyone had descended into the grave with Bethia. He had never wept for her, and on the day of her funeral he had stood, cold and rigid, among the crying mourners. He was the only person present to show no emotion, to shed no tear.

Both his parents thought that only the fact that Lachlan was his last link with Bethia was why he tolerated him at all. Passing time appeared to make little difference to him—other than to drive him further into himself. He closed his own home and moved into Villa Dilhorne for Lachlan’s sake, but he might as well have been a stranger or a lodger for all the emotion he showed, or the family life he shared.

‘I’m afraid for him,’ Hester said to Tom later that afternoon.

‘I know,’ said Tom sorrowfully, ‘but there’s little we can do but hope. I’ve tried to interest him in other than work, but…’ and he shrugged his shoulders regretfully.

‘He doesn’t really love Lachlan either,’ said Hester. ‘He’s just… Indifferent is the only word which fits him.’

‘Yes, indifferent describes him well. I know it was a terrible blow for him to lose Bethia, who really brought him out of his shell—but now he’s back in it with a vengeance! I’ve tried to encourage him to be easier with himself, but when I do he looks at me as though I were a stranger.’

They were silent for a little until Tom said, hope in his voice, ‘Everything here reminds him of the past, so perhaps a change of scene might help. He sees Bethia around every corner. I could send him to Melbourne. Since the gold rush, it has turned into a major centre. He can look into our interests there, invest in the new railway and find out where else we can expand. We don’t want Dilhorne’s to be left behind. He’s still a superb businessman; it’s all he seems to care for—which isn’t enough.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Hester, her face sad. She had already lost one son to distant England and did not like to see the other disappear, even if only inside Australia, but Thomas’s needs came first. Hard though it was, it was time that he broke with the past. Bethia was gone, and grieving would not bring her back.

Thomas was seated alone at table the next morning when his father came in. Tom sat down in front of the giant Japanese screen which ran the entire length of the room. A rampaging tiger charged across it in full view of Thomas.

Tom poured himself tea. ‘I’m getting old,’ he said abruptly.

‘Never,’ said his son, affection for once in his voice.

‘I’m in my early seventies, I reckon,’ continued Tom, who was not sure of his exact age. ‘I don’t want to gallivant about these days. With this gold strike in Victoria and the new railway being projected, as well increased trade in shipping, one of us should go to Melbourne and, with Jack away in Macao, I think it ought to be you.’

‘No,’ said Thomas firmly. ‘I don’t want to leave Sydney.’

‘A proper old woman you’re becoming,’ said his father. ‘Set in your ways. Do you good to go to Melbourne.’

‘I don’t need to be done good to,’ returned Thomas coldly. ‘I’m sick of you and Mother nannying me about. I’m a grown man. Leave me to my own ways or I’ll go back to my old home with Lachlan.’

‘Nannying, is it?’ said his father in his irritatingly equable manner. ‘Seems to me that a grown man who doesn’t want to adventure out a bit needs nannying.’

Thomas looked at his father with acute distaste, inwardly defying him. Why can’t he leave me alone? This is the second time that he has suggested sending me away. Can’t he understand that I shall lose Bethia all over again if I lose the places where we were happy together…places where I can remember her beautiful bluey-green eyes? He remained mute with something that was almost like rage.

‘I’ve never given you an order,’ said Tom, ‘not since you were a lad. But I’m giving you one now. You need a holiday or a change of air. Go to Melbourne. Look things over for the firm. Take it easy, enjoy yourself, have some fun. See life a bit—why not, you’ve never really spread your wings? Let yourself go.’

‘Drink, gamble, brawl and find a woman or two while I’m at it. Is that what you’re suggesting, Father?’

Thomas’s voice was as offensive as he could make it, and his expression was an angry glare. ‘Roister about, like you and Alan did? Horseplay and similar folly. It’s not how I wish to live, and you should know that by now. Or would you prefer me to go the way my grandfather Fred Waring went? A fine example he was before drink, whores and play did for him…’

His father said, a trifle wearily, ‘Oh, yes, I know you, and what I know doesn’t make me happy.’

His son interrupted him. ‘I’m not interested in your happiness, Father. Have you told Mother that you think that I should go off and live the life of a debauchee? A fine piece of advice for an old man to give his grown-up son!’

Tom leaned back in his chair, the running tiger’s head visible behind him. They both shared the same expression of intense irony and predatory determination.

‘You’re a self-righteous sanctimonious prig such as I never thought to have for a son, aren’t you? A damned arrogant swine who thinks only of himself, never of those about him who love and care for him.

‘Poor Lachlan might as well not have a father for all the notice you take of him. It’s in your mind, not mine, that pleasure is associated with debauchery. You must have a fine old sewer swilling about inside you to make you come out with that.’

There was no way that you could put down or annoy his father. He should have known that. He could insult his son with such calmness that the red rage inside Thomas, the rage which he had never known he possessed until Bethia had died, almost burst its bounds.

His usually calm face was twisted and purple. He rose, flinging his napkin down.

‘So, that’s what you think of me. I might have known. It’s not enough for me to live a decent life but you have to twit me with it. Yes, I’ll go to Melbourne, do my duty, and work for the firm just to get away from you. I shan’t tell Mother of your preposterous suggestions and I’m not about to see life as you so charmingly put it. I’ve seen it all in Sydney and it doesn’t attract. I’d as lief crawl around in the gutter.’

He stalked to the door, where he turned to confront his father again. Tom had not moved. His expression was as pleasant and cool as though they had been exchanging polite words over afternoon tea.

‘Your duty? Oh, yes, your duty. By all means,’ said his father drily, his expression still unchanged. ‘I can see that that is what everything has shrunk down to. Yes, I’ll be in the counting house later and talk to you then.’

‘Of business—and nothing else,’ Thomas flung at him. The heavy door shut behind him with a tremendous crash.

Temper, temper, thought Tom mildly. Not really perfect, are we, for all our protestations.

All that day, while preparations were being made for his journey to Melbourne, Thomas was glacially correct to his father, to such a degree that even the clerks commented on it.

His manner remained the same that evening. Before he retired to bed his mother, who had been told of his coming departure, kissed him, saying, ‘You will be careful, Thomas. I understand that Melbourne is a dangerous place these days.’

‘You may depend upon it, Mother. Your advice is always sound, unlike Father’s, which I shall not be taking,’ and he flung out of the room, banging the door behind him for the second time that day.

‘Now what was all that about?’ asked Hester after he had gone.

‘I merely suggested to him this morning that he enjoy himself a little in Melbourne while he is there and he behaved as though I had told him to go straight to the devil.’

‘Oh, dear! That was bad of him—but you know what he’s like these days.’

‘Yes, I do know what Thomas is like,’ said her husband grimly. ‘He’s a man of strong passions who is not aware of it. One of these days he is going to find out. He can’t sit on himself for ever. What will happen then, God knows. I sometimes fear for him. The trouble is, he’s the image of your father—as he was before drink destroyed him. He may be fearful of behaving like him if he’s not careful, consequently he’s denying all human appetites. He eats his food as though he resents it, and a friendly word from anyone in the counting house earns a severe put-down—if he deigns to notice it, that is.

‘At the moment he hates everybody, particularly me because I’m trying to help him, and he resents that most of all. If Bethia hadn’t died, things might have been different…as it is…’ He shrugged his shoulders sadly.

Hester gave a little moan of despair and, to comfort her, Tom said, ‘Try not to worry. He might even enjoy visiting Melbourne. Away from his memories things might yet go well.’

But he did not believe what he was saying, and knew that Hester did not believe him either.

Chapter One

‘It’s big, Pa,’ said Kirstie Moore faintly, shaking her ash-blonde head. ‘Melbourne is even bigger than I thought that it would be. Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’

‘Ballarat’ll be smaller when we get there, my love,’ said Sam Moore robustly, ‘and you know that we couldn’t stay at the farm. I explained all that before we set out.’

Kirstie nodded an unhappy agreement. She considered saying something along the lines of ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,’ but refrained. Once Pa got an idea into his head it tended to stay there.

She remembered the morning, nearly a month ago, when their neighbour, Bart Jackson, had come visiting and her father had told him that he could see a way out of the cripplingly narrow and poverty-stricken life which was all that living on their barren farms was giving to them. They and their children deserved better than existing on the edge of starvation in a place where young Kirstie would never find a suitable husband.

‘We can sell our land, go to the gold field and make our fortunes,’ he said vigorously. ‘Jarvis, the banker from Melbourne, is only too willing to buy us out and sell them to some Melbourne bigwig with more money than sense. We can use the proceeds to outfit ourselves for the diggings. Come on, Bart, there’s nothing left for us here. What’s to lose?’

Bart, who had always followed Sam’s lead, thought that this was splendid advice, and they shook hands on it. After he had gone Sam walked into the kitchen to tell his eldest daughter this exciting news. ‘What do you think of going to the gold fields, eh, Big Sister? Ballarat, perhaps? They says there’s riches there for the taking.’

Kirstie, who had been known to her family and friends as Big Sister ever since her mother’s death in giving birth to little Rod, believed at first that her father must be joking.

‘I thought you was off to milk the cows, Pa, not daydreaming.’

‘No, Big Sister,’ he told her. ‘No more milking cows for me, I hope. I’m tired of working like an ox for nothing. We’ll sell up, and be off to the diggings as soon as possible.’

‘The diggings, Pa?’ Kirstie nearly dropped Rod, whom she had been spoon-feeding, in her excitement and horror at hearing this unlikely news. ‘What shall we live on there?’

‘This,’ he said, waving a hand at the few poor sticks of furniture in the room. ‘Together with the money for the farm it’ll give us enough for a stake, as well as for a couple of drays, digging equipment and a little something for food until we strike lucky. There’ll be young men there, perhaps a husband for you, as well—there’ll never be one here. Besides, others have made their fortune at the diggings—why shouldn’t we?’

Kirstie’s blue-green eyes flashed at him. ‘And others have lost everything—and I don’t want a husband, I’ve the family to look after and that’s enough for me.’

‘But it won’t always be, Big Sister.’

‘And we shall be leaving Mother’s grave behind us.’

‘Kirsteen,’ he said, using her real name for once. ‘She left us nigh on two years ago and staying here won’t bring her back. She had a hard life, daughter. I’d like a better one for you. You’ll live like a princess if we strike it rich.’

‘If…if…if…’ she said fiercely. Big Sister was always fierce and kind and hardworking. ‘It’ll be hard for the little ones in the diggings.’

‘You’re wrong there. The little ones will like it most of all. They’ll be free to run around, you see.’

Kirstie wailed in exasperation. She knew that it was no use trying to talk to him, he had already made his mind up before he had so much as said a word to her.

‘Don’t take on so, Big Sister,’ Sam said humbly. ‘I know it’s hard. Harder to stay, perhaps. The kids are wild to go.’

‘The kids don’t know any better. You do.’

Sam Moore gave a heavy sigh and sat his big body down on a battered chair.

‘Oh, Big Sister, can’t you see? It’s my last chance to have any sort of life. The farm killed your mother and it will kill you. You’re already getting her worn look and you’re still so young. Please say that you understand and will make the best of it. You’ve never failed me yet, however hard the road.’

This humble appeal moved her as his enthusiasm had not.

‘Dear Pa, if that’s how you feel, I’ll try to do my duty by you—but I wish that you’d spoken to me first.’

‘And now you know why I didn’t. Oh, Kirstie, I want to hear you laugh again—there’s not been much that’s jolly here lately, has there—?’

She was about to answer him when the door opened and Patrick ran in.

‘Oh, Pa, is it true what Davie Jackson is saying? That we’re all going to the diggings to get rich? Oh, huzzah, I say.’

After that she could offer no more opposition, however desperate she thought Pa’s plan was. The notion that simply going to the diggings would secure her a husband was laughable, but she could not tell him so. Why should a suitor there be any better than poor oafish Ralph Branson whose offer of marriage she had recently turned down? It just showed how desperate Pa was that he could offer her such a prospect.

Besides, she didn’t want to become a wife, since being a wife meant that you were simply a man’s drudge both in and out of bed. No, she would prefer to stay Big Sister and, later on, perhaps, the kind unmarried aunt who had no responsibilities to any man.

In the meantime, she would cease to criticise Pa and offer him all her loving support in this unlikely venture.

So here they were, Pa, Kirstie, Aileen, twelve, Pat, ten, Herbie, four, and Rod, two, bang in the middle of Melbourne with all their possessions loaded on to two drays, drawn by bullocks. Pa was driving one dray and Kirstie the other, with the Jacksons’ dray drawn up behind them.

Oddly enough, when they had started out it had been Pat who had burst out crying at the prospect of losing the only home he had ever known. In his young mind you could go to the diggings and still stay at home. To quieten him, and the little ones who had begun to roar with him, Kirstie gave Pat their scarlet and gold parrot to look after. When that wasn’t enough she sang them songs from back home in England, songs which Ma had used to sing.

‘That’s my good girl,’ Pa had told her quietly. ‘I knew that you’d not let me down.’

When they had reached Melbourne they had found it full of people like themselves, all making for the diggings. There was nowhere to stay or to sleep except in and around the drays whilst they bought further provisions, tents and equipment. The little ones ran wild, dodging in and out among the many tramps who were lying in the street, dead drunk and clutching empty bottles: ruined before they had even reached the diggings.

Two of them were lying where the Moore party was parked in front of The Criterion, Melbourne’s most expensive hotel. One was large with thick dark hair and a long beard and the other was red-headed and small. Both were ragged and smelled evil.

Kirstie sniffed her disgust at the sight of them, while Pa and Bart talked busily with those who seemed to know what ought to be done at the diggings if a fortune were to be made.

‘Just the two of you won’t get anywhere,’ said one burly digger. They were all burly, rough and good-natured, as well as free with their violent language, blinding and bloodying in front of Kirstie as though she were not there. ‘You need to form a small syndicate. A big chap would be best.’

The trouble with taking on a big chap, Sam thought, was that he might see the Moore family, tenderfeet all, as a suitable party for pillaging. Someone less powerful might be safer.

On the morning that they were ready to leave they had still not discovered any extra mates.

‘We’ll try to find someone when we get there,’ said Pa hopefully—he was always full of hope.

They were just hoisting their last load of provisions into Kirstie’s dray when a middle-sized Englishman, looking vaguely ill, came up to them. He was respectably dressed in clerk’s clothing and said diffidently, in a low cultured voice, ‘They told me at the store that you’re off to Ballarat and needed a chum to make up your team. My name is Farquhar, George Farquhar. They call me Geordie here.’

Sam looked sharply at him. He scarcely seemed the sort of chum they needed, but then the stranger said, ‘I can not only drive the dray, I’m good with horses as well. I don’t drink or gamble and I’m stronger than I look. I also have a little spare cash to put in the pot if you’d care to take me on.’

That did it. Bart asked shrewdly, ‘How much spare cash?’

The man said, ‘Enough. I’ll not show you here, too public. If you want a reference, I’ve been working at an apothecary’s for the last three months. I’m steady,’ he added, ‘and they told me that you were steady, too.’

Sam looked him bluntly up and down, and, as usual, made a sudden decision on the spur of the moment.

‘Well, Geordie Farquhar,’ he said, ‘I like the look of you and I’m inclined to take a chance with you. Money in the pot—and join us in the hard work. Just do what you can. Let’s shake on it,’ and he put out his work-calloused hand. Bart followed suit, and the three of them solemnly sealed their bargain.

Geordie proved helpful almost immediately. He persuaded them to stay an extra day and sell one of the drays and buy a horse and wagon—‘It will be more useful than a bullock when we get to the diggings,’ he told them.

‘Except that we can’t eat it,’ Pa said practically.

‘Oh, horse isn’t bad,’ Geordie told them. ‘I’ve eaten horse rather than starve.’

The next morning, when an adventurous young Davie fell out of a tree on one of their earliest stops and broke his arm, Geordie set it for him carefully and patiently.

‘I used to be a doctor,’ he said brusquely when Bart thanked him. ‘It might be helpful in the diggings.’

Back at the farm neither Kirstie nor Sam had thought that when they finally left Melbourne for Ballarat they would be part of a vast exodus of folk walking and riding to the gold fields. With two bullock-drawn drays and the horse and wagon they were among the more affluent of the travellers—although, as Kirstie commented, that wasn’t saying much. They were mostly big, heavily whiskered men, many with pistols thrust into their belts. Some were already drunk, early in the morning though it was.

Pat, indeed, always lively and curious, gave a loud squeal when they passed a scarecrow of a man driving a rackety cart pulled by a spavined horse.

‘Look, Big Sister, look, it’s the two tramps from outside The Criterion. Fancy seeing them here!’

So they were. The little red-headed one was sitting up and looking around him while the big, dark one was lying on his back, eyes closed, a bottle in his hand, dead to the world already.

Kirstie sniffed her disgust at them. ‘Hush, Pat. They might hear you.’

‘Oh, Corny and The Wreck won’t mind. They’re used to people noticing them. Corny says they get more money that way. He’s the little one.’

‘There’ll be more money for them in the diggings, perhaps,’ commented Pa. ‘And you’re not to talk to them, Pat.’

‘Oh, I don’t talk to them. Besides, only Corny talks. The Wreck never says anything. Just looks.’

‘And smells!’ sniffed Kirstie.

‘One thing, though,’ said Geordie later, ‘at least they weren’t trying to cadge a free ride.’

He, Bart and Pa had been compelled to beat off with their whips great hairy ruffians trying to climb in beside them. One bold fellow, stinking of grog, jumped up and thrust his whiskered face at Pa, demanding that he sell him a ride. Pa threw him off, and left him behind in the dirt, hurling curses after them.

Some people were pushing wheelbarrows, full of their possessions, and their little children, some not as old as Herbie, even, were walking behind them. Public houses, inns and sly grog shops, so called because they were not legally licensed, lined the road. One lean-to shed had a sign, ‘Last sly grog shop before the diggings,’ which was a lie since a few miles further along was another with an even bigger sign saying, ‘This really is the last sly grog shop before the diggings.’

Geordie, who had a dry wit which kept them entertained, suggested that ten miles after the last one they came to they ought to set up their own grog shop and make a fortune—except that someone else would be sure to build another a few hundred yards further on! He didn’t drink, though, refusing a swig from the rotgut passed round after they had eaten their grub, and he never asked to stop at a grog shop.

He soon grasped that Sam Moore and Big Sister were the driving forces of the expedition. Sam was quiet and determined and made the decisions. Big Sister did all the donkey work. She rounded up the children, kept watch over them. scolded them, and bandaged their cut knees, in between doing the many chores which came her way. It was Big Sister who washed the clothes, lit the fire, cooked the food, banged a spoon on a tin plate and shouted ‘Grub’s up’, a sound which began on the journey and which was to echo round the diggings in the months to come.

And on the road she entertained them by singing, in her small true voice, the songs which Ma had taught her to sing—their last link with long-gone England.

Kirstie knew that the diggings were going to be a man’s heaven and a woman’s hell as soon as they reached the ruined landscape which was Ballarat. The diggings were called the diggings because that was exactly what they were. There were hundreds of great deep holes, many filled with water, with soil flung up around them, and left there in heaps. Besides that, there were more people than they had ever seen before, even in Melbourne, crammed though it had been. They swarmed round the muddy holes and the canvas buildings like wasps around a honey pot.

Whatever there had once been of rural beauty before the gold rush began had long since disappeared. The settlement pullulated with life and noise, particularly noise, something which none of the party had expected, and to which none of them was accustomed—but which, like everyone else, they came to accept and ignore.

Symbolically, perhaps, the first people Kirstie saw as soon as they arrived were The Wreck and Corny lying in the muddy road where their driver had turned them out when he had found that they had little to pay him with. Somehow they had managed to beg enough to share a bottle and a pie between them, and were busy sleeping their impromptu banquet off.

Worst of all, Kirstie could plainly see that living in the diggings was going to be one long, improvised and dreadful picnic. Any hope that she might resume the orderly life she had been used to on the farm disappeared in the face of the cheerfully impromptu nature of gold-field society.

The men would love it, she thought bitterly, trust them. No need to be good-mannered, to sit down decently to eat. Male entertainment of every kind was laid on in abundance, for there was no getting away from the alleys where the grog shops, brothels, gaming halls, and bars flaunted their wares to the world.

There were even boxing booths, she discovered, and shortly after they arrived a small improvised theatre called The Palace started up—as though any palace could be constructed out of tent poles and canvas! There were few women in the diggings and Kirstie soon discovered that little was provided for them in this masculine paradise.

But exploring Ballarat was for the future. For the present it was time to settle in, to discover how to make one’s claim and work it, and how to sell the gold—if they ever found any, that was.

Unkempt men, quite unlike the husband whom Pa had promised her, their soil-encrusted clothes reeking of sweat, came over to speak to the new chums, to advise them where the stores were, who was honest and who wasn’t. They stared jealously at the drays and bullocks, at Geordie’s horse and wagon, and the equipment which the men began to unload while Geordie helped Kirstie to light a fire outside, and set up a tripod and cooking pot over it. Meals would have to be eaten in the open.

‘Really need all this, do you?’ asked one ginger-haired digger. He was pointing at the trunks and blankets Sam was lifting out. ‘Give you good money for this,’ he offered, putting a hand on a storm lamp.

Sam pushed the eager hand away. ‘Nothing to sell, mate. We need all we’ve brought for ourselves.’

‘Seems a lot to me,’ said Ginger, whose real name was George Tate. ‘If you’ve ever a mind to sell anything, I’m in the market for what you don’t want.’

The firing of a gun in the middle of removing Ginger’s sticky fingers from Kirstie’s cooking pots surprised them all. Kirstie dropped the frying pan she was holding and the younger children began to cry. Emmie Jackson, already depressed by their primitive living conditions, howled with them.

‘That’s nowt,’ said Ginger phlegmatically. ‘All digging has to stop when the gun goes off. It’s time to light the fire, eat your grub, and…’ he paused a minute to wink at the men ‘…that’s when the evening’s fun really begins.’

‘For the men, I suppose,’ returned Kirstie smartly, for only men, she thought, would want to live in this dreadful way—and enjoy it, too. No woman of sense would ever want to settle down in such dirt, confusion and mess, even to find gold.

Just to show that she meant business, she struck Ginger’s hand smartly with her iron ladle when it strayed again among the pots lying on the ground. ‘Give you good money for it, gal,’ he said cheerfully—it seemed to be his favourite phrase.

‘Don’t want money for it, good or bad,’ she snapped back. ‘We shall need all we’ve got in this Godforsaken hole.’

Grinning at her, he wandered off—only to be succeeded by another set of diggers who, like squirrels, Geordie said, descended to try to wrench their stores from them. He made it his business to protect Kirstie so that she could prepare their supper. The children had long since run off to begin a disorganised game of tag in and out of the filthy maze of holes and the alleys which stood in for streets. It didn’t improve her temper to see The Wreck shamble by, still clutching his bottle, Corny trotting along behind him.

Somehow Pa managed to round everyone up at last, after Big Sister had shouted, ‘Grub’s up,’ and they ate their meal with all the relish of the genuinely hungry.

‘Work tomorrow,’ he said, after he had finished eating. ‘Fancy a stroll, eh, Bart, Geordie?’ Kirstie, gathering up dirty pots, an apathetic Emmie Jackson helping her, watched them go.

Pitched among the tents and the huts of the diggers were all the masculine delights which Kirstie had disapprovingly noted, and the three men found themselves part of the seething life which roared and reeled around them. They stopped at a sly grog shop, drank and moved on. The lure of a dance-hall was rejected. Fat Lil’s Place, with Fat Lil outside in satin and feathers—the girls were all inside—was reserved for another night. Money best spent elsewhere at the minute, thought Sam regretfully, but Hyde’s Place, as the Golden Ace gambling den was known, beckoned them in, not to play, but to watch.

Further down the alley was a music hall where the trio enjoyed themselves after moving on from Hyde’s. After that they reeled home singing, waking up Big Sister when they stumbled around before falling into their improvised bedding.

Sam and Bart had already agreed that life was never like this on the farm!

The diggers in Melbourne who had told them that two of them were not enough to make a successful syndicate had not been deceiving them. Even adding Geordie was not enough, so the Moore party, as Geordie had nicknamed them, decided after a couple of weeks’ fruitless work that they really needed a new chum—preferably one big and strong. Sam suggested that they try to hire someone—safer than trying to find a partner since they could control him.

‘Well, now,’ Bart said, ‘that’s a good idea, but who is going to hire themselves out when they can stake their own claim, eh?’

‘You can’t mean a layabout, Pa,’ said Kirstie disapprovingly. ‘He wouldn’t work, not after the first pay day.’

‘Never know ’til you try,’ said Sam mildly. But even he quailed at the sight of some of the rogues and ruffians who worked until they earned a little money for drink and then lay about the alleys. Kirstie was probably right.

‘What about The Wreck?’ asked Geordie, while drinking tea one breakfast. ‘God knows he’s big enough.’

‘The Wreck?’ said Sam dubiously. ‘You can’t seriously mean The Wreck, Geordie.’

‘Yes, I mean the big fellow Corny Van Damm brought here. Corny was the brains of the pair of them. I’ve been watching him. Ever since the police frightened Corny away he’s been a lost soul. In and out of the nick, every penny thrown to him going on drink. But…’

Geordie stopped. How could he tell them that something about The Wreck roused his pity and his interest? The occasional worried and questioning look in his eye, perhaps. Whatever it was, Geordie had an impulse to save him.

‘The Wreck!’ exclaimed Bart derisively. ‘What use would he be? He’s big enough, I grant you. But…’

‘I know a few tricks to control drinking,’ said Geordie. ‘I could try them on The Wreck. Nothing would be lost if I failed. We could throw him out again.’ He shrugged. It would be interesting to test whether he’d lost his touch.

‘Geordie’s right,’ said Sam. ‘We could take him in. Sober him up. Pay him by the week. Get rid of him if he won’t give up the drink.’

Bart rose. ‘Last time I saw him he was lying outside Hyde’s Place. Yesterday afternoon, that was. There’s a patch of shade there he seems to like.’

‘He was in a bad way,’ said Sam. ‘Likely the police have picked him up. I’ll go over to the nick. They’d be glad to get rid of him to us.’

Kirstie put her oar in. ‘I think you’re all mad,’ she said tartly. ‘Talking about taking on The Wreck. Only fit to trip over, is The Wreck.’

‘Now, Big Sister don’t be hard,’ said Geordie gently. ‘A bit of pity wouldn’t come amiss.’

‘Bit of pity!’ scoffed Kirstie. ‘I know who’ll end up looking after him, cooking for him, and washing his clothes for him—and it won’t be you lot.’

‘Don’t think The Wreck’s much bothered about having his clothes washed, Big Sister,’ was Bart’s response to this.

‘Ugh,’ she snorted, ‘and I object to that, too.’ But nothing she said would move them, as she well knew. They were entranced by the prospect of a new, large and strong chum, even if he were at the moment a dead-drunk liability. They all trusted to Geordie’s magic powers to restore him to rude health and strength.

That afternoon Sam harnessed the one remaining dray—they had sold the other to raise money for more equipment—and took Kirstie shopping. While they were out they would look for The Wreck.

‘Taken off to the nick, half an hour ago,’ they were told by one of Hyde’s strong-arm men, so once shopping was over they set off for it.

In the compound at the front of the nick an officer was glumly watching The Wreck, who was reclining happily against its front wall: he was too disgustingly filthy to be put inside, the officer told them.

Sam knew the officer. He made a point, unlike some, of always being well in with the law.

‘In trouble again, is he, Mac?’

Mac scratched his head. ‘God knows what we are going to do with him, Sam,’ he said. ‘Locking him up is no answer. He just goes straight out and…’ He shook his head despairingly.

‘What if I took him off your hands, Mac? Geordie reckons he can dry him out, and then set him to work.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ said Mac drily. ‘Miracle worker is he, Geordie?’

‘Bit of,’ said Sam. ‘Done some good things for us, has Geordie.’

The officer looked at The Wreck, who smiled happily at them all.

‘Can’t lose,’ he said, much as Geordie had done earlier. ‘You’ll be doing us a favour, Sam, by taking him off our hands for a little, even if you don’t cure him. I doubt very much whether you’ll be able to sober him up.’

‘Depends on whether he’s a hardened drunk,’ said Sam, inspecting the sodden figure who now gave him the smile previously offered to Mac.

The Wreck said with great dignity, opening one red eye, ‘I can’t be drunk, because I never drink.’ He closed the eye again and began to snore. The officer groaned and helped Sam to haul him to his feet. Kirstie, sitting in the dray, was stiff with disapproval.

‘You can’t want him, Pa,’ she called to her father. ‘What use will he be?’

‘He’s a big fellow,’ said her father. ‘We’ll dry him out and put him to work. We need him, girl.’

‘I know that we need someone—but him? Can’t you find anyone more suitable?’

‘No one wants to work for anyone else now, girl. We’re lucky to get him.’

So saying, Sam helped Mac to walk The Wreck to the dray, his feet dragging behind him. Between them they managed to hoist him into it. He was so dirty that Kirstie drew her skirts away from him, making disgusted noises which seemed to wake him up a little.

He opened his bloodshot eyes and stared at her.

‘Where am I?’ he asked.

‘Where I don’t want you to be,’ she flung at him. When he tried to sit up she pushed him down again. ‘Lie still. I don’t want you near me. He’s disgusting, Pa. I think that this is a big mistake.’

‘Think what you want, my girl,’ said her father equably. ‘He’s coming with us, and if he proves useless we’ll throw him out.’

‘I’m not disgusting,’ said The Wreck reproachfully. ‘Fred’s tired, that’s all. Fred needs to sleep.’

‘Then sleep,’ she threw at him. ‘Your breath is as nasty as your person, and that’s a feat in itself.’

‘Unkind,’ moaned The Wreck. ‘Women should be gentle.’

‘Gentle!’ Kirstie’s voice would have cut steel. ‘And men should be decent. When you’re decent I’ll be gentle, not before.’

He ignored this and, rolling over, said placidly, ‘I’ll sleep now,’ and immediately began to snore.

‘Fred?’ said Sam to Mac, now that their passenger was settled. ‘Is that all the name he has?’

‘Waring,’ said Mac, glad to see the back of Fred—for the time being at least. ‘Fred Waring, at least that’s who he says he is. Not too sure about that sometimes. Doesn’t even know where he is or what he’s doing. Except drink.’

Kirstie drew her skirts still further away from Fred and looked to the front, offering Mac her opinion of the police for letting him go so easily.

Sam picked up the reins and began the journey back to their claim.

Geordie Farquhar was up to his waist in the hole he had started to dig the previous evening, just before the gun went. He was using his pickaxe, not with the same strength and vigour as Bart and Sam—Bart cleared nearly twice as much mud as Geordie in any one session—but there was no doubting his determination.

He was already far more muscular than the soft man he had been before arriving at the diggings. When Sam returned with the dray he put down the pick and hauled himself out of the hole, wincing at his blistered hands. Even Sam and Bart had trouble with their hands and they were far more used to manual labour than he was. Geordie had been proud of his beautiful hands once—but once was long gone.

He walked over to the dray. Big Sister jumped out, stiff with distaste. She said scornfully to him in passing, ‘A fine creature we’ve brought you, Geordie Farquhar, lying there in his muck. The dray will need fumigating.’

‘Give over, do, Big Sister,’ said Sam in his mild way. ‘Come and help me with the new chum, Geordie.’

Bart put his head out of his hole. ‘Got him, did you, Sam?’

‘Aye, and blimey, he’s a big ’un. He’ll do when we’ve sobered him off.’

The three men looked at Fred lying in the bottom of the dray. He was now fully conscious and smiled up at them sweetly—but showed no signs of wanting to get up.

‘Big Sister was right,’ said Geordie. ‘We’re dirty. He’s disgusting.’

‘Get him down to the creek,’ said Bart practically. ‘Clean him up there. Sober him up a bit.’

‘Right,’ said Sam, ‘but he’ll need clean clothes. His are too dirty even for the diggings. He’ll need boots, too. His are useless, but where shall we find clothes or boots for him? We’re all too small for us to give him any of ours.’

‘Andy Watt,’ offered Geordie briskly.

‘That’s right,’ said Sam.

Andy Watt had been a big digger and a neighbour on their last claim. When the rains set in Andy had got drunk, fallen into one of the flooded holes, and drowned. Geordie had thoughtfully ‘saved’ Andy’s clothes and possessions and stored them away in his wagon.

‘Might come in useful some day,’ he had said. Geordie was a proper squirrel, they all agreed.

Geordie went to his wagon to collect the clothes, boots, soap and a towel. Sam and Bart hauled a protesting Fred out of the dray and walked him on his jelly legs down to the creek. Big Sister, still stiff with disapproval, watched them go.

Fred had a happy look on his face. He had no idea what his new friends were going to do to him when they reached the creek. If he had, he would not have looked so contented.

Geordie Farquhar, loaded with his possessions, gave Big Sister a wink when he passed her.

‘What use do you think he’ll be?’ she shouted at him.

‘Never know, Big Sister, until we try, do we?’

Bart and Sam had now thrust the protesting Fred into the creek. You could scarcely call it cleaning him. The water was milky, if not to say murky, from the many washings in it of the muck and quartz in which the gold was embedded. But it performed the dual purpose of cleaning the encrusted Fred of much of his grime and half-sobering him into the bargain. Every time he tried to climb out, Sam and Bart shoved him back in again.

The noise and the excitement not only brought all the children down to see the fun, but attracted a small crowd of men and women as well. Finally Sam and Bart let him climb on to the bank—and then threw him back in again for one last soak. The watching crowd cheered lustily when, shouting and spluttering, he hit the water, which rose in a vast fountain drenching the spectators!

This time when he surfaced Sam and Bart dragged him out and began stripping him of his sodden clothing now that it was fit to touch. The women in the crowd screeched and covered their eyes when they pulled his trousers from a loudly protesting Fred. Geordie threw him the scrubby towel not only for very decency but so that he might dry himself.

Fred was now shivering so violently from reaction that Geordie had to help him to dress. Fortunately Andy Watt’s clothing fitted him well enough. Even the boots seemed to be the right size. Once he was fully dressed and standing more or less erect, all three were agreed that he was indeed a right big ’un, and if he could work at all would be a useful mate.

Fun over, the crowd dispersed and Sam’s party returned to base where Big Sister’s withering stare seared them all.

‘A right picnic you made of that. You should have charged for watching. We could have made enough to pay for next week’s grub.’

She had to allow, though, that The Wreck was much improved after the trio’s ministrations. His long hair was beginning to dry in rioting waves and curls. His beard needed a trim as well. Fred blinked at Big Sister when he saw her watching him and gave her a slow smile, revealing excellent white teeth. The smile was the first—but not the last—he was to favour her with.

‘I’m Fred,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Who are you?’

‘That’s Big Sister,’ shrilled Pat, who had watched the forced bath with great appreciation. It was better than a play, being real life not pretence.

Fred smiled again. Something about the young woman who was so cross with him appealed to his fuddled brain. Perhaps it was her bluey-green eyes which reminded him of someone, but exactly who, he couldn’t remember. He wanted her to talk to him so he said eagerly, ‘Hello, Big Sister. Say hello to Fred.’

He was so impossibly childlike that rather than attack him Kirstie swung on Pa, Bart and Geordie, who were all enjoying Fred’s innocent unawareness of Big Sister’s anger with him.

‘Think it funny, do you?’ she raged at them. ‘Am I expected to cook and wash for him as well?’

‘So long as he’s part of the gang,’ Sam told her.

‘And how long will that be, Sam Moore?’ That showed him how cross she was. She only called her father by his full name when she had been tried beyond endurance. The Wreck, Fred, whatever his name was, stood for everything which Kirstie disliked so about her new life. How could they arrive with such a useless creature and expect her to be enthusiastic about him? So far as she was concerned, he was more extra work for her while they would get little back in the way of work from him.

And all her father could say was, ‘We’ll see, girl, we’ll see.’

‘You mean, I’ll see!’

‘I’m hungry,’ announced Fred, blithely unaware of what a bone of contention he had become. ‘Fred hasn’t had anything to eat today.’

He had sat down on the ground at the beginning of the argument between Kirstie and Sam and it was now passing back and forth over his head.

‘Yes, he ought to be fed,’ said Sam. ‘Do him good. Set him up for work tomorrow.’

Big Sister whirled on them all, shaking a rebuking finger, either at Fred or the other men, it didn’t matter which. They were all as bad as one another.

‘You see! You see!’ she exclaimed. ‘The first thing he wants is food—and I’m to cook it for him, I suppose.’

‘You will?’ said Fred hopefully. ‘That’s kind of you, Big Sister.’

The three men collapsed into laughter, whether at Fred’s sublime innocence or Kirstie’s anger they could not have said.

She shot into the hut and shot out again carrying two cold lamb chops and a damper—the diggings’ primitive version of bread—on a tin plate.

‘Will that do?’ she demanded, thrusting it at him.

‘Nice,’ said Fred, beginning to demolish the food where he sat.

Kirstie stared down at him, watching him cheerfully chewing his way through the grub. For the first time her face softened a little.

‘Are you sure that he’s not simple?’ she demanded of Geordie, who had been watching Fred with a trained eye ever since he had helped to haul him out of the dray. ‘He seems simple.’

‘No, Big Sister,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t think that he’s simple. He may have been injured recently, though.’

He squatted down by the sitting Fred.

‘Had a knock on the head lately, old fellow?’

Fred looked up. ‘Think so. Not sure. Fred’s had lots of knocks lately.’ He was impatient to finish his chop.

‘Mind if I take a look at your head? I promise not to hurt you.’

‘Don’t mind,’ said Fred, still chewing busily. He smiled at Big Sister again. ‘Nice, I like this.’

Geordie’s long and skilful fingers explored Fred’s skull gently. He soon found a tender spot. Fred winced and pulled away.

‘You said that you wouldn’t hurt Fred,’ he mumbled reproachfully through his last mouthful of chop.

Geordie looked thoughtfully at him before breaking one of the diggings’ major rules. ‘Do you remember your home, Fred—where you come from? Did you live in Melbourne, or did you go there because of the gold rush?’

Fred pushed his empty plate away and hung his head, muttering, ‘My head hurts when you ask me that, Geordie.’

His distress was so plain that even Kirstie began to feel sorry for him.

‘Do you remember anything at all, Fred?’

‘Yes.’ Fred’s voice was so low that they had to strain to hear him. ‘But not much. It hurts when I try to remember.’ He looked around him agitatedly. ‘Where’s my bottle? Who took my bottle away?’

Geordie stood up, shaking his head. ‘It’s all right, Fred, don’t worry. You can tell me another time, perhaps.’

Fred shook his head agitatedly. ‘No, no, nasty—Fred doesn’t want to remember. No one was kind to him. They didn’t give him chops—not like Big Sister.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’ asked Sam. ‘Is he ill? Or what?’

‘Not exactly ill, no, but he needs looking after. He’s lost his memory, you see. He might get over it, and then again he might not. It depends on whether he wants to.’

He looked sadly at Fred, who had cringed into himself, his head on his chest and his knees drawn up to his chin. ‘He’s had a blow on his head, a severe one, and I think that that was what caused him to lose his memory. He’s obviously forgotten who he is—or rather was.’

Big Sister was suddenly sorry for the unkind way in which she had spoken to Fred ever since they had freed him from the nick.

‘He’s not really ill, then, Geordie?’

‘No, Big Sister,’ said Geordie gently. ‘He’s not really ill, but he does need looking after.’

He looked sharply at her. ‘I think that what he might need most of all is kindness.’

‘Will he get his memory back?’ asked Sam.

Geordie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows? He might, and he might not. Only time will tell.’

The gun went off when he finished speaking, so they couldn’t put Fred to work that day, even if they had wanted to, or thought that he was fit to begin digging. When Fred uncoiled himself Bart took him on one side and explained to him that they had freed him from the nick, washed, clothed and fed him, and in return they expected him to work for their syndicate.

‘We’ll pay you a weekly wage, of course,’ Sam added. ‘We’ll see you right.’

Fred nodded agreeably.

‘I’ll try to be good,’ he said.

Geordie had hurt him a little, but these days his head had begun to pain him less and less. The vague feeling of unexplained misery, which had plagued him during his memory of his recent past and which had led to his drinking to forget it, was also beginning to disappear. Besides that, since the Moore party had washed him he had become aware of Ballarat for the first time, rather than seeing it as a blur of unmeaning noise and colour.

Kirstie watched him demolish another large plateful of stodge with every appearance of pleasure, and his reputation as a man who loved his grub was already on the make. He looked happily around while he ate and listened carefully to Bart, Sam, and Geordie when they told him what they expected of him. None of them, even Geordie, had any notion of how much of their instructions he understood.

In all directions lights had come on. There were small fires everywhere. People sat in the open, eating, laughing and talking. Music drifted from a big canvas tent nearby. Ginger Tate, who worked the claim next to theirs, was playing a banjo; the hard drinking and high living which followed the day’s work had already begun.

The lights pleased Fred. He stopped listening to the talk around the fire and pointed his knife at near and distant flames.

‘Pretty,’ he said to Big Sister who was gathering up the dirty plates and cutlery.

‘What is?’ she asked him when he obediently handed her his plate and tin cup.

‘The lights.’ He struggled a minute, attempting to find words to express his pleasure. ‘They’re beautiful.’ He smiled at her so winningly that this time, despite herself, she smiled back at him. She wondered what he would look like if his long black hair and his straggling beard were trimmed. He was certainly a fine figure of a man, justifying Sam’s belief that he would be an asset to the syndicate if he were able to work properly.

‘That’s better,’ he said encouragingly.

‘What’s better?’

‘You. When you smile you look pretty. Do it more often—for Fred.’ His artlessness robbed the words of any ulterior meaning.

‘I need something to smile at, Fred Waring,’ she snapped back at him, but it was only a little snap, nothing like those with which she had treated him when they had fetched him from the nick, before Sam and the others had cleaned him up and had discovered that he had lost his memory.

Allie helped her to collect the pots and carry them into the kitchen of the rude hut which the men had built for her. A large hand appeared in front of her when she bent over the washbowl. It was Fred’s.

‘Help?’ he queried. ‘You need help, Big Sister?’

Kirstie stared at him. Whatever their other virtues, the men took it for granted that all the chores around the camp—except for the digging—were done by her. None of them had ever offered a hand to help her during the long day which began at dawn and only ended when she was the last to retire, for now that Emmie’s baby had been born, everything fell to Kirstie.

Here was Fred, though, saying uncertainly and looking anxious, ‘Big Sister does a lot of work. Fred help?’

Sam appeared in the doorway, having followed Fred into the hut. ‘Anything wrong, Fred?’

It was Kirstie who answered for him. ‘No, nothing wrong, Pa. Fred came to help me.’

Sam began to laugh. He went outside to share the joke with the others, leaving Kirstie annoyed and Fred puzzled.

‘Big Sister’s got a kitchenmaid.’ Sam smiled. ‘Don’t wear him out for tomorrow, mind.’

Kirstie bounced to the hut door. ‘He’s got more consideration for me than some I know, Sam Moore!’ she shouted, bringing on another burst of laughter. Even Geordie Farquhar was looking amused.

She let Fred dry the pots, remembering what Geordie had said about kindness. When they had finished washing up Fred went back to the fire where Bart and Sam were passing a bottle back and forth. Geordie was repairing some tack.

‘I need a drink,’ Fred announced, and put out his hand for the bottle.

Geordie spoke before Sam or Bart could answer. ‘No, Fred, you’re not to drink.’

Fred’s eyes filled with tears. So far Geordie had been kind to him: it was the other two who had been rough and thrown him into the water.

‘Oh, I do so want a drink, Geordie. Please.’

Geordie walked over to sit by Fred. He took him by the right wrist, and looked hard at him, almost like the mesmerist in the little fair at the other end of the diggings.

‘No, Fred. Drink isn’t for you. You’re poorly, Fred. Drink will make you worse, not better.’

‘I feel better when I drink, Geordie,’ said Fred, pleading with him.

‘I know you do. But it’s wrong, the wrong sort of better, Fred. Do you understand me?’ He tightened his grip on Fred’s wrist and looked even harder into his eyes.

‘Bart and Sam are drinking,’ said Fred in a sullen voice.

‘It’s not wrong for them. It’s wrong for you. Look at me, Fred. Look into my eyes. Don’t turn your head away.’

Geordie’s stare grew even more piercing. Fred turned his head away to try to avoid it, but something drew him back again and, this time, when he looked into Geordie’s eyes, he was lost. Kirstie, watching them, thought that the usually self-effacing Geordie had suddenly become hard and dominant: a man of authority. Sam and Bart were silent and fascinated spectators of his attempts to control Fred.

Fred dropped his head to break the spell which Geordie was beginning to weave around him. Geordie put a hand under his chin and raised it.

‘Look at me, Fred, and repeat what I say. Geordie says that it’s wrong for you to drink.’

Fred obediently began to do as he was bid—and then faltered. ‘Geordie says it’s wrong, but…’

‘No buts, Fred. You understand me.’ His grip on Fred’s wrist tightened, Geordie could feel Fred’s hammering pulse. ‘No buts, Fred, and no drinking.’

Fred looked sorrowful. ‘No buts, Geordie, and no drinking.’

‘Promise me, Fred.’

‘I promise, Geordie. No buts and no drinking.’

They sat there for some moments, quite still, Fred drowning in Geordie’s eyes until Geordie took his hand from Fred’s wrist. He said, his voice low but firm, ‘That’s it, Fred. No more drinking for you in the future. You understand me? Say “Yes, Geordie”.’

‘Yes, Geordie,’ Fred said, and then fell silent, inspecting his hands as though he were seeing them for the first time.

There was a moment of silence. Then Big Sister moved away and Bart and Sam started talking again, and although Fred watched the bottle sadly, he made no attempt to take it, or ask for it with Geordie glaring at him from across the fire.

Chapter Two

Whether it was the session with Geordie which disturbed Fred, or simply the consequence of his exciting day, he was too dazed to know. Only when he went to bed that night, lying wrapped in a blanket under the stars, he found himself trying to remember and recall who and what Fred Waring was, for all his memories were of the recent past. He was not even sure that Fred Waring was his name.

Geordie’s voice echoed in his ears. Did you live in Melbourne, or did you go there because of the gold rush?

How to say that he had no notion of who he was or where he had come from when he found it difficult to say anything at all? What were his first memories? Try as he might he could remember nothing before…and he was back there again, where his memory began, standing in the dock of a courtroom in a place which he now realised must have been Melbourne.

He was feeling dreadfully ill, and was hardly able to stand upright. There was a horrible smell of drink. It took him some time to grasp that it was he who was the cause of the smell. His wrists and ankles hurt, too, which wasn’t surprising since he was in chains.

Someone was asking him his name.

‘My name?’ he said. His voice sounded odd, and his mouth hurt. His lips and nose were so swollen that he could not breathe properly.

Someone said, ‘He’s been on a bender for four days. Constable Brown said that he came crawling out of an alley a week ago, too drunk and dazed to speak. He’s been lying round the town ever since, begging. There’s always some fool to throw him money. He promptly spends it all on drink.’

‘He must know his name. Ask him again.’

Someone took him by the hair and thrust a grinning face into his, shouting, ‘What’s your name, cully?’

‘My name?’ He dredged a name from some pit whose bottom he had not yet reached. ‘Fred!’ That’s it, he told himself. Fred.

‘Louder, man,’ said another voice.

‘Fred, it’s Fred.’

He looked around and the room came briefly into focus. A well-dressed man was sitting on a kind of dais: other men, some in uniform, were standing about. Where could he be? A courtroom? Yes, it was a courtroom. What was he doing in a courtroom?

‘Fred what? You must have another name, man.’

‘Not Fred what. Fred…Fred…Fred…Waring.’

He was not sure that was his name, but it was a name, someone’s name, and since he remembered it, it might be his. It seemed to satisfy them, even if he didn’t feel too happy with it himself.

If only his head didn’t hurt so much he might be able to understand what was happening to him. The man on the dais began to drone at him. Then he stopped. The man on the right, who had seized him by the hair, now took him by the shoulders and began to push him out of the room.

‘Where am I going?’ he asked.

‘You ’eard, chum. On the road.’

‘On the road? What for?’

His articulation was so poor that, what with his head and his hangover, his guard could barely understand him.

‘Don’t worry. You’ll find out soon enough.’

He was in a fog again. To some extent he began to grasp that something was very wrong. Trying to understand what the wrongness was, was beyond him.

‘I need a drink,’ he said pitifully.

Someone cuffed him. ‘No, you don’t. That’s why you’re here. You’re a drunk.’

Yes, there was something wrong about everything because some remnant of his old self had him saying with great dignity, ‘I don’t drink.’

For some reason, when he came out with this the whole courtroom broke into laughter, and even the stern-faced man on the bench gave a great smirk. He began to protest—against what, he wasn’t sure—and it took two men to haul the inebriated ruin he had become through the doorway and out of the courtroom.

He was suddenly in a yard in the open with no memory of how he had got there. He was chained to other men and standing in the cruel mid-day sun. It was so strong that it hurt him to endure it.

He started to fall but was hauled upright by an ungentle hand. He could hear people laughing. Even the other chained men were laughing at him. Out of some dim recess of himself that knew what was really wrong with him, he dredged up a coherent sentence that told the truth.

‘I need a doctor,’ he said, and then everything disappeared around him again.

His next memory was of being in a cart with other men. His neighbour kept complaining bitterly and tried to push him away when he fell, lax, against him, bawling, ‘Sit up, can’t you, mate. You weigh a ton.’

‘Can’t,’ he said, and lost everything once more.

Then he heard someone calling out names. He was standing in a compound, surrounded by huts. He was still chained to other men. Guards stood about—somehow he knew that they were guards, though how he knew, he could not say. They were carrying muskets, old ones. How strange that he knew that they were old, since he knew so little of anything else!

Someone shouted ‘Waring!’

The man next to him prodded him roughly and said, ‘That’s you, ain’t it? For God’s sake, answer him so that we can get this over.’

He said ‘Yes?’ but it was really a question, not an affirmation, and before he could register anything more the world went dark again, a nasty habit it had which frightened him.

He awoke to find that he was lying in the shade and someone was holding a tin cup of water to his lips. He drank it greedily. A voice said, ‘This man’s not fit for work today. He appears to be in a drunken coma.’

‘No,’ he said. It seemed important to say it again. ‘I don’t drink.’ This time he was not greeted with laughter. Instead a hard face swam into view. ‘You’ve drunk enough to kill a horse, man. You’re sodden with liquor. Leave him to dry out. He should be fit tomorrow.’

After that he slept, or rather was unconscious, he was not sure which. Only that, in the morning when he awoke, for the first time since memory had begun in the courtroom he saw his surroundings quite plainly with an almost hurtful clarity, so that he wished that he were drunk again. Now this was an odd thought to have, and it disturbed him greatly, since he knew—how did he know?—that being drunk was something foreign to him.

The thought disappeared when the stomach cramps took him. After he had recovered and eaten a little, he was told to strip. He was given clean clothes—a coarse canvas shirt and trousers—and he put them on, shivering as he did so. He asked for shoes or boots—his had been removed, and the guards laughed at him.

‘No need, chum, you’re making roads, not walking on them.’

From some corner of his mind Fred grasped—if dimly—that he was part of a chain-gang building one of the new roads which was connecting Melbourne to the north. Not that he knew that he had been living in Melbourne when he had been sentenced to hard labour—he only found that out later.

He was clumsy and bewildered at first, because the whole world was strange, but one of his fellow prisoners was kind and helped him when they were fed at mid-day.

‘Keep your head down, mate, and always eat your grub up. You’ll not be able to work if you don’t, and then they’ll thrash you for being idle.’

His shrewd eyes saw more than the court officials or the chain-gang’s guards and overseers. ‘Ill, aren’t you? It’s not just the drink, is it?’

The man’s voice was coarse but kind. Fred’s short memory had no kindness in it, only curses, blows and kicks.

That night, for the first time, he dreamed of a tiger. It ran through his dreams, frightening him, while he looked for something which he had lost—and knew that he would never find again. This thought filled him with such desolation that it was almost worse than his fear of the tiger which nearly cornered him once.

In the morning the memory of the dreams stayed with him, and trying to remember what they reminded him of made his head hurt again—and the desire to drink almost destroyed him.

At this point in his effort to make sense of his brief past Fred opened his eyes and looked at the stars, bright above him in the clear night. He had seen them when he had been a prisoner in the chain-gang and in an odd way they comforted him. It puzzled him that he suddenly remembered some of their names quite clearly when he was not entirely sure of his own.

He had pointed the Southern Cross out to the man who had helped him, and who, when their time on the road gang was over, stayed with him when they were driven back to Melbourne and set free again. They were given a little money in return for their work, and Fred and Corny Van Damm, his new friend, turned into the first saloon they could find and within a few hours were lying dead drunk in the street again.

Corny looked after Fred, found him places to sleep where they wouldn’t be disturbed and protected him from the roughs who tried to steal his pitiful store of money from him. It was Corny who arranged transport for them to Ballarat where he told Fred that there would be easier pickings than in Melbourne. Corny also comforted Fred when he became distressed, usually something which occurred whenever Fred seemed to be on the verge of remembering his lost past.

The trouble was that every time that this began to happen it was not only Fred’s head which hurt him, but something else which seemed to be associated with his heart. This new pain was so strong that Fred found that the only way to overcome it was to drink himself into a stupor—whereupon it disappeared.

Corny also taught him to steal, beginning with fruit off stalls and barrows, but Fred wasn’t as clever at this as Corny. He was clumsy and got caught and kicked for his pains, but Corny looked after him as much as he could. One day a very bad thing happened. Corny was helping a stupefied Fred to find a nice corner to lie down in, out of the sun, when a pair of policemen stopped them.

The bigger one took a good hard look at them. His eyes widened when he saw Corny. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re Corny Van Damm. You went bushranging with Ryan’s lot.’

Corny let out a shrill cry, dropped poor Fred and bolted. One policeman ran after him, and the other bent over Fred and hauled him to the nick. Neither Fred nor the police ever saw Corny again—self-preservation being the name of his game. Without Corny Fred was lost. People tripped over him, and he was dragged in and out of the nick until Sam and Kirstie had arrived to free him, feed him, and promise him something of a future.

Remembering all this not only made Fred’s head hurt again, but disturbed him so much that when he finally slept not only did the tiger run through his dreams, trying to eat him, but somewhere in the background there was an old man who disapproved of him and frightened Fred even more than the tiger.

He shouted his distress and one of his new friends came to comfort him.

The odd thing was that when Fred woke up he remembered the tiger, but not the old man…

Sam decided that the new chum was to be put to work at once, and Fred, who had heard him tell Big Sister to feed him, was anxious to oblige him, never mind that Sam and Bart had thrown him into the water.

Fred had suffered from cramps in the night, and had begun to shout wildly in his sleep. Geordie, who shared a tent with Sam and Bart—Emmie and Kirstie slept in the hut for safety—heard him, and went outside to look after him.

He was thrashing blindly about. Geordie put a gentle hand on his shoulder and asked, ‘What is it, Fred?’

Fred opened his eyes, clutched at Geordie’s wrist and gasped, ‘It’s the tiger, Geordie! The tiger’s after Fred. Don’t let it catch him.’

‘Don’t worry, Fred. Sam, Bart and I will keep the tiger away. I’ll fetch you a drink of water and then you must try to sleep.’

‘Thank you, Geordie. Don’t let it catch you.’

‘It won’t, Fred.’

Fred drank the water down obediently and went back to sleep. The tiger was to run through his dreams for months but he never woke up shouting about it again, as though Geordie’s reassurance had made it toothless.

He enjoyed his breakfast. His head had cleared even more, and while he sat eating and drinking he really saw them all for the first time.

Sam was fair, well built and powerful, both in mind and body, the true leader of the party. Bart was dark and ox-like. He depended on Sam and Geordie for leadership and advice, but he was a tireless worker—and reliable. He always did what he said he would. All three of them were dressed in guernseys and moleskins, and Sam and Bart were heavily whiskered.

Geordie was small and sallow and, Fred came to understand later, somewhat sardonic. He was one of the few men in the diggings who was clean-shaven. His eyes were watchful, occasionally moving over Fred, assessing him slightly. Fred didn’t mind this. Geordie was his friend. He hadn’t thrown Fred about as the other two had. Geordie had given him these nice warm clothes, and had been kind: the tiger had been chasing Fred in the night but Geordie had made it go away.

The diggings were alive with noise and movement while Big Sister and Emmie Jackson handed round the grub. Big Sister, Fred thought, was a puzzle. She was nasty-nice. True, she gave Fred his grub, but she wasn’t pleased with him, Fred knew.

On the other hand, Fred could see how well she looked after everybody, even though she snapped at them, and cuffed large Pat and small Herbie when they were naughty. She had nice, fair hair even if it was screwed up. Her eyes were nice, too, bluey-green. They reminded Fred of someone, but every time he tried to remember who that someone was, he felt so sad and ill that he gave up trying to remember. He thought that he didn’t really want to know if knowing made his head hurt.

Big Sister looked after baby Rod, giving him his food, tying him up to the kitchen-table leg with his reins so that he couldn’t stray and get lost or hurt. In his new awareness he also saw that she looked after Emmie Jackson and her baby as well. It was a pity that Big Sister was so cross at times, particularly with Fred.

Still and all Fred helped her to clear away again, and would have done more except that Sam said, ‘No, Fred. Leave that to Big Sister. It’s time you started work. Pay for all the good grub you’ve eaten, eh?’

Geordie examined Fred’s hands carefully before shrugging resignedly. It was apparent to him that, although Fred’s nails were broken and his hands bore recent scars on the backs, palms and wrists, he had done very little manual work. His palms were soft and the calluses on them were new. His hands were beautiful and shapely, and Geordie thought that they had been cared for until not too long ago. All the marks of neglect on him were recent.

His body had been cared for, as well, and he had done very little physical labour. He was not unfit, but his muscles were not those of a man given to using them. For all his size—and his potential for strength—digging would, at first, be a hard task for him.

This soon proved to be true. Fred began enthusiastically enough in order to show his thanks to them, but he soon grew weary. His hands blistered and bled and he used his spade and swung his pick ever more slowly. He looked dismally at Sam, but Sam said, not unkindly, ‘You’ve got to persevere, chum. We all went through this at the start, didn’t we, Geordie?’

Geordie agreed, but he kept watch over Fred without saying anything or showing his concern overmuch. It was obvious that Fred was strong-willed behind all his artless charm—charm which even Big Sister grudgingly conceded he possessed. Once he grasped that they wanted him to go on, he bent to his task again, whispering to himself, ‘This hurts,’ but he still continued to dig, if slowly.

He had dug quite a hole when they stopped for a rest, a drink and more grub. Sam had hit a small pocket of gold-bearing quartz and Big Sister, Pat and Allie went down to the creek to wash it out. It wasn’t a big strike, but with what they had already found between them it would make a fair profit on the week and would enable them to keep and pay Fred, and feed well themselves.

It was surprising how deft the women and children were at washing out and sorting the grains of gold. Sam showed it to Fred and told him that that was what they were looking for, and how he would know it when he struck it.

Geordie dressed Fred’s hands and they started work again. The piles of muck around Fred’s diggings grew, but he slowed down more and more when his aching shoulders and back began to add to the pain of his hands.

By the time the gun went off to signal the end of the day’s work, Fred was so exhausted that he had to be lifted out of his hole by Sam and Bart. They laid him down on the ground and he only recovered a little when Big Sister brought him tea and grub, and said approvingly, ‘Well done, Fred.’

Her voice was so kind that it nearly brought tears to poor Fred’s eyes. So few people had been kind to him lately.

Sam agreed. ‘Kept at it, Fred, didn’t you? Many wouldn’t.’

It was nice to hear them say it, but it didn’t ease his bleeding and swollen hands much, nor his aching back and shoulders. Geordie dressed his hands again, and he too said, ‘Well done, Fred,’ and then, ‘Are you all right, mate? Your head’s not hurting you too much?’

‘No,’ said Fred. ‘It’s not my head today. It’s my hands and my back,’ and he made an almost comic face when he said it.

‘You’ll get used to it in time, and so will your hands.’

Fred was more than ready for his grub that evening and Big Sister was kind to him because he had worked so hard. Before supper Geordie treated his hands with spirits, which hurt, but Geordie said it would harden them sooner. He still wouldn’t let Fred drink, which saddened Fred, but he tried not to mind too much.

Funnily enough, although Fred was so sad, he didn’t feel able to disobey Geordie. Geordie told him that the more he worked the more he would be able to work, and the sooner his body would become work-hardened.

‘Drinking won’t help that,’ Geordie told him. ‘Quite the contrary.’

Although talk of the past was taboo round the diggings it was inevitable that a certain amount of harmless enquiry went on.

Bart said idly, ‘How’d you get to Ballarat, Fred?’

Fred looked up from the damper he was eating with great enthusiasm. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Corny brought me.’

‘Clerk, were you?’ asked Sam, who, like Geordie, had noticed that Fred’s hands were not those of a labourer.

Fred looked puzzled. ‘Can’t remember,’ he said, after a minute’s thought. ‘Don’t know.’

It became increasingly plain that Fred had, or claimed to have, little memory of a life before he had arrived in Ballarat. He had apparently worked on a road gang. He disliked the few police he saw, and was inclined to hide from them, crouching in his hole if they appeared when he was working.

Mac came along to watch him throwing muck about, and said, ‘Congratulations, Geordie, think it’ll last?’

Geordie shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Time will tell.’

Fred didn’t object to Mac. He couldn’t remember him as unkind, but the hard-faced man caused him obvious distress when he appeared one day.

Fred told Geordie that he thought that the police had been very unkind to him before he came to Ballarat, but careful and quiet questioning of him when the others were not about, continued to show that Fred’s memories were all very recent.

Big Sister bawled at him once when he annoyed her by refusing to hand over a particularly dirty shirt to be washed. ‘Brought up in a pigsty, were you?’

Great hilarity greeted his solemn answer, ‘Don’t know, Big Sister. Perhaps?’

‘Can it be true?’ Kirstie said to Geordie later, ‘Can he really not remember anything? Or is it that, like some, he’s quiet about the past because he’s got a dreadful secret in it which he doesn’t want to reveal to us?’

Like me, thought Geordie, but said aloud, ‘I don’t know why, Kirsteen. I thought that it was because he’d had a head injury that he couldn’t remember anything, but I’m not sure that the injury was bad enough for that. I think that perhaps he doesn’t want to remember. Don’t question him. It makes him unhappy. Perhaps, one day…’ and he shrugged. ‘I think that he’s already beginning to change a little, which is a good sign.’

Kirstie thought it all very odd. She continued to be kind to Fred that evening which made Fred very happy. Indeed, what surprised Kirstie the most was how contented Fred usually was—unless he was questioned about his past.

She remarked to Geordie that perhaps it was because Fred could remember so little that he was happy—which was not the first time that she surprised Geordie by her perception. She had already grasped that it was her memories which made her miserable, whether they were of the loss of her mother, or her dead older sister, Kathleen, or the farm, or her brother Jem, who had deserted them after his marriage to a wealthy farmer’s daughter.

In the noisy press of their active life she and the others gradually forgot Fred’s strange loss of his past, particularly since living with their little group began to educate him, to make him more responsible and a little less artless. It was not only Geordie who noticed that, when Fred stopped referring to himself as ‘Fred’ so often and began to use ‘I’ instead, much of his oddity disappeared.

He helped Kirstie in many little ways from that very first evening onwards. He also liked to tease her, as though she were his little sister, but he would always give over if he thought that it made her unhappy. As for his drinking, that had stopped altogether, and even though Geordie had hoped that his attempt to cure Fred might work, he was a little puzzled by how effective it had been. He had never seen a case like this since the days when…well, those days, anyway—he tried not to remember them.

What Fred did not tell Geordie, or anyone else, for they might think him mad, was that when he thought of having a drink a cold, hard voice in his head told him he was to do no such thing. ‘You’ve had quite enough of that, Fred Waring,’ it said. ‘You don’t need any more.’

Fred wondered who the voice belonged to. It wasn’t Geordie’s, that was for sure. Geordie’s voice to Fred was always kind. This was a nasty voice. It belonged to a right nasty and arrogant bastard, the sort of person Fred disliked most. It reminded him of the magistrate in Melbourne, or the Commissioner and the police who rode about the diggings being unpleasant to people.

It was so harsh that Fred was frightened into obeying it. Who knew what might happen if he didn’t do as he was told? Perhaps it was a pity that he didn’t tell Geordie about the voice, for it would have confirmed Geordie’s growing belief about what was really wrong with Fred.

Fred puzzled for a long time about who the voice might belong to, and then gave up the struggle. Life was too interesting, and there was so much fun to be had, that it would be a pity to waste it worrying about voices. After a time this one began to fade, but Fred was still careful never to take a drink—he didn’t want it back again.

Fred discovered fun with women quite early on, and like everything to do with Fred, it came about in the oddest manner. Geordie Farquhar was one of the few clean-shaven men in the diggings; most could not be troubled to take the time, or make the effort, to shave off their beards and moustaches once they had reached Ballarat. Thus Big Sister’s dismissal of men as large hairy monsters seemed particularly apt.

Geordie, however, always kept himself trim—he tried not to become too dirt-encrusted, even if, like everyone else, he fought a losing battle with mud and/or dust.

Fred, however, once he emerged from his liquor-induced semi-coma began to see the world—and himself—quite clearly. Consequently he started to chafe at his enforced dirtiness and to grieve over his damaged hands, but he had to accept that there was nothing he could do about them, committed to digging as he was. He also disliked intensely his unkempt and unruly black hair and beard. He was vaguely sure that there had been a time when he hadn’t possessed them.

One day, watching Geordie shave, he came to the conclusion that he, too, would like to rid himself of his beard and shorten his long hair.

‘Could you show me how to do that?’ he asked Geordie plaintively.

‘Surely,’ said Geordie. ‘Let me do it for you first, Fred, and then you’ll know how to keep in trim yourself.’

It was a lengthy and painful business, Fred discovered, losing his whiskers, but Geordie’s handiwork transformed him completely. Kirstie was not the only person to stare at the new handsome Fred it revealed to the world. That his teeth were good had always been plain, but that the rest of him was so personable was a surprise.

Beards could be grown to hide weak, lumpy, and ugly faces, and Big Sister often thought that some men were happy to grow them in order to disguise their facial shortcomings. Trimmed, Fred’s hair fell into loose black curls, which added to the attractiveness of a strong and handsome face.

‘Looks a different man, doesn’t he?’ said Sam to Bart. Both of them had ‘run wild’ as Kirstie disparagingly put it, and had luxuriant hairy growths.

‘You could say so,’ agreed Bart sadly.

It had been easy to patronise Fred when he was so vague and looked so wild, but the new man who had emerged from Geordie’s ministrations—like a handsome butterfly breaking out of a cocoon—was not someone you could easily look down on.

Women turned to stare at Fred when he walked through the diggings, and Kirstie thought that this was what started Fred on his road to ruin with them. Not that Fred was vain. He seemed in some mysterious way innocent of most of the minor sins, vanity included. Perhaps what principally distinguished him was his happiness—it was difficult to upset him other than by being naughty with his food which Kirstie sometimes was in order to punish him for anything she thought was a misdemeanour. Kirstie considered all those in her care, from Sam, Bart and Geordie downwards, to be little more than her children to be kept in order for their own good.

Fred liked to eat and, whilst not over-fastidious, he always looked glum if he was given the least attractive portions or didn’t get what he considered to be enough. He was big, worked hard and loved his grub. He was always ready for it, and was always the first to hold out his plate for seconds.

‘You’re greedy, Fred Waring,’ Kirstie snapped at him once.

‘Now, now, Big Sister,’ said Sam mildly. ‘Fred’s a big fellow. He needs his grub and he works hard. Don’t grudge it to him, girl.’

She half-flung more damper at Fred which he took thankfully. Damper wasn’t exciting, but it was better than nothing. He decided that Big Sister for all her grudging manner deserved a smile, so he gave her one. The effect was dazzling, but didn’t mollify her.

‘You needn’t grin at me, Fred Waring! You’ll get your share, no more.’

‘I don’t want any more,’ said Fred, who was feeling restless. He didn’t know why, but somehow it was connected with the sheep’s eyes which several women had made at him that day. He rose, and instead of helping Big Sister he decided to take a stroll around the diggings and see life. He might be able to walk the strange feeling off.

Geordie watched him go, and then joined Sam and Bart in a card game around the fire. Big Sister finished the washing up, put the children to bed and began to mend shirts. Emmie Jackson, more lethargic than ever, sat beside her, making no effort to help.

Fred looked around him on his walk until he reached the section where Hyde’s saloon and gaming den was flanked by Fat Lil’s Place. He had never visited either of them, although he had heard Sam and Bart chatting about them.

He stopped there—and caught the eye of Fat Lil herself.

It was the Yankees at the diggings who had christened the Madam at The Golden Horseshoe Fat Lil, and had changed its name to Fat Lil’s Place. Not that Lil was really fat, just big all over. Junoesque, as Geordie had once described her to Bart.

‘You know who?’ Bart had said, puzzled. ‘She’s Fat Lil, isn’t she?’

Fat Lil was very much the Madam. She kept the girls in order, and the place respectable, if a whorehouse could ever be called respectable. She often stood, or sat, outside, gathering custom, magnificent in her satins, with feathers in her hair, her face as highly painted as an Old Master, Geordie said, confusing Bart all over again.

Although Lil had once been on the game herself she rarely practised it now. Occasionally, if someone took her fancy when she sat outside, she invited him into her bed. ‘Lucky for some,’ laughed the diggers, since she never asked for payment—but this happened rarely.

Fred’s restless mood had grown with every step he had taken. Lately he had found that looking at women, other than Big Sister, that was, made him feel—well—strange. He had a dim memory that doing something with women was very nice, but like many other aspects of Fred’s life, his memory of exactly what that something was, was rather patchy.

Fat Lil watched him approaching. Everything about his handsome face and his beautiful body attracted her. When he drew level she returned his innocent stare with her knowing one.

‘Hello! New chum, aren’t you?’ Then she realised that he was The Wreck, sobered off, and without all the hair. A proper Apollo, as someone had once called a handsome man she had known, long ago when she had been Thinner Lil.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not all that new now, though.’

‘No,’ said Fat Lil, running her eyes up and down him. ‘Like a bit of fun, would you? Free, too.’

Fred was immediately attracted by the prospect of a bit of fun.

‘Yes,’ he said, adding, ‘my name’s Fred.’ He gave her his swooning smile, even more attractive now that he had lost his beard. ‘A bit of fun sounds nice.’

‘Right, then,’ she said, taking him by the hand, for he seemed a little unsure of what to do next. She led him to her own quarters which were unexpectedly comfortable and pleasant, in contrast to the stark appointments of the girls’ rooms.

Fred thoroughly enjoyed having fun with Fat Lil. Once in her bed he found, much to his surprise, that he knew exactly what to do, and that he was rather skilful at it, judging by Fat Lil’s pleased reactions.

Fat Lil was surprised as well as pleased. She thought that although it was some time since Fred had enjoyed a bit of fun—and she was right about that—he was still very considerate of his partner, both before and after the fun. She thought this was a little surprising, too. Great hulking diggers were not usually so thoughtful in her experience.

‘Nice, wasn’t it?’ said Fred dreamily, afterwards, thinking that he had been missing a lot in life by not remembering what fun was before. He sometimes wondered why he had such difficulty in recalling things. Whenever Geordie asked him questions about the past to test whether his memory was returning, his usual reply was, ‘I can’t remember, Geordie.’

Geordie, indeed, was curious to know why it was that Fred had lost some things completely, and yet remembered others quite well. It had been obvious to him for some time that sex had flown out of Fred’s universe, and he had sometimes wondered what would happen when—and if—it flew back, and why it had disappeared at all.

That first night Fat Lil was so pleased with Fred that she allowed him, nay, encouraged him, to pleasure her for longer than usual, so it was quite late when he finally trotted off to the only home he could remember. Not that Fred had much idea of time and its importance—that was something else which he had mislaid.

Big Sister was still up when Fred rolled home, a look of stunned happiness on his face. Sam and Bart had abandoned the card game and had gone to Hyde’s for a quick drink—which always seemed to turn into a slow one, Kirstie noticed sardonically.

Geordie was teaching her to play chess. He had tried to interest Fred, but Fred had said distressfully, ‘It makes my head hurt,’ when Geordie had begun to explain some of its basics to him. The chessboard lay on a mat between them, and Fred’s arrival came at a crucial point in the game.

‘Remembered you had a home to come back to, did you, Fred?’ Kirstie said sharply to him. The sharpness was partly because Geordie had her Queen pinned down again.

Her sarcasm flew over Fred’s head. He was still in such a state of delight that nothing could disturb him.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t forget that.’

‘As a matter of interest,’ Kirstie asked, more to delay the fatal moment when her next move—whatever it was—would result in her losing the game than real curiosity about Fred’s doings, ‘where have you been and what have you been doing?’

Fred, who had sat down in front of the chessboard, opened his mouth to tell her about his adventure with Fat Lil—and then closed it again. He was not so far gone that he did not remember that fun with women like Fat Lil was not something which you talked about to a pure and innocent young girl like Big Sister.

Not that she didn’t know about them—you couldn’t live in the diggings and be unaware of their presence, but there was a pretence that somehow young virgins never saw them and knew nothing about them and their activities.

He desperately tried to invent some explanation of where he had spent the last three hours, and began to sweat with worry that he might come out with something wrong.

‘I…’ he began, and then, water running down his face, he pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and tried to mop it up. He looked at the chessboard as though it might give him inspiration. Not that it did, but what it did do was drag a memory from the distant recesses of his mind.

‘If you’re playing with white, Big Sister,’ he said judiciously, ‘you could mate Geordie instead of him mating you, if you let him have your Queen, and then you moved your rook to the square opposite his King—seeing that his taking your Queen leaves your Bishop covering his King as well, and so his King has nowhere to go and you’ve won the game.’

There was an intense and stunned silence. Both players stared at the board. Geordie, an old chess hand who was certain that he had won the game, saw immediately that Fred had spotted a major weakness in his attack—probably because he had not been concentrating very hard against a novice.

He looked across at Fred. ‘Now, how the devil did you know that, Fred?’

Fred had spoken without thinking. He looked at the board and tried to think but nothing happened. The game of chess was once more as mysterious to him as it had been when Geordie had tried to teach him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, mopping his sweating forehead with his handkerchief again. ‘Why did I say that, Geordie? Does it mean anything?’

‘Yes,’ said Geordie, ‘It means that you were once a better player than I am, and I’m a good one. Are you sure that you can’t remember anything more?”

Kirstie, who had been watching Fred and his handkerchief closely, gave a short scornful laugh. ‘I think that Fred has remembered another game,’ she said. ‘Lend me your handkerchief, Fred, I’m hot, too.’

Fred obediently handed it over to Big Sister. He invariably tried to oblige her. Too late, he remembered that Fat Lil had given it to him as a memento of their highly successful encounter, and that Lil was embroidered in one corner. It reeked of powerful perfume, too.

Kirstie saw the name and smelled the perfume.

‘Well, well, Fred Waring,’ she said softly. ‘So you ended up at Fat Lil’s Place, did you? Were you there all the time you were gone?’

Fred sighed and said stiffly, ‘A gentleman never talks of such things, Big Sister. Particularly to a good woman.’

I wonder where he dredged that piece of etiquette from, thought Geordie who was watching Big Sister’s stricken face.

‘If it is Fat Lil’s I certainly don’t want it, Fred Waring, and you can have it back,’ and she tossed it into his lap.

Fred said anxiously, ‘If you want a nice clean one which isn’t Fat Lil’s, Big Sister, I have one in my other pocket.’

Geordie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at this artless answer. Big Sister’s response was to snap, ‘No, thank you, Fred. I’ll take your advice about the chess game, and then leave you to talk to Geordie about those things which a gentleman never talks about to good women but can, apparently, discuss with good men.’

She rose agilely to her feet and stalked to the door of her hut where she turned to bid them both a haughty goodnight.

Fred said anxiously to Geordie, ‘Why is Big Sister so cross with me? I tried not to tell her about Fat Lil, but she insisted.’

Geordie hesitated a moment before saying, ‘I can’t explain to you now why she’s so cross with you, Fred. I don’t think that you would understand. But I’m sure that one day, perhaps soon, you might be able to work it out for yourself.’

Fred nodded. He wasn’t sure that he understood what Geordie was telling him, but said in an earnest voice, ‘I do try to be good, you know, Geordie.’

‘Yes, I do know, Fred. Don’t worry about it. Go to bed yourself. Tomorrow is another day.’

Fred nodded his head and did as he was bid, leaving Geordie to wonder what the future held for Fred and the Moore party now that Fred had remembered one of the reasons why women had been put on earth.

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