Nellie's Quest Read online

  The closer she got, the louder the noise became.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Nellie thought, scratching at her fleabites. It’s bigger than the Killarney fair.

  She walked past long sheds, and stables with horses, and teams of bullocks waiting patiently while drays were loaded. Great heaps of bluish-green copper ore were everywhere. Nellie soon realised that copper wasn’t like gold – there was so much of it that you’d need a bucketful to make sixpence.

  Her headache was growing worse, and she felt by turns freezing cold and burning hot. If only she could find someone who might give her directions! And then, as if in answer to a prayer, she heard a familiar voice.

  ‘If it isn’t Miss Nellie!’

  Nellie turned to find Bob Trelawney, the Cornishman she’d met on the coach, beaming down at her. He was still wearing his miner’s helmet with a candle stub on the brim, set in soft clay.

  ‘I’ve just come off my shift,’ Bob said. ‘’Twas a tough spell this time, with water coming into the mine. The pumps are supposed to clear it, but today we had to paddle a bit.’ He pointed to a tall stone building from which the heavy pounding noise came. ‘The steam engine’s working overtime, but the pumps just can’t pump hard enough. What are you doing here, lassie? This isn’t a place for a young girl.’

  ‘I’m seeking news of my old employers, the Thompsons,’ Nellie said. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. Was she losing her mind, now? ‘A woman in the town said Tom Thompson could have been a pickey boy – do you know where I might find such boys?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Bob said.

  Nellie followed Bob through the noise and confusion of the mine until they reached a big shed. Inside were long benches piled with copper ore, and boys – hundreds of them, it seemed to Nellie. They looked up curiously at the visitors, but their busy hands never stopped sorting through the lumps of ore, keeping some, throwing others aside.

  ‘They separate the ore from the mullock – the rubbish,’ Bob explained. ‘’Tis not a bad job for a young lad, and most of us miners started off that way back in Cornwall. The good stuff is put into barrels and goes off to the smelters. Now, who’s the lad you’re after?’

  Nellie moved behind Bob. If she could stand in the shelter of his broad back, she might not feel so dizzy. It was all she could do not to hold on to him. ‘It’s Tom Thompson, if you please,’ she whispered.

  ‘Listen up, lads!’ bellowed Bob. ‘Is there a Tom Thompson among you?’

  There was some laughter. ‘I’m Tom Thomas!’ came a voice. ‘Me, too!’ came another. ‘I’m Tom Johnson!’ ‘Tom Trembath, me!’ ‘Tom Trethewy!’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a roll call, maties,’ yelled Bob. ‘And we’re not after any old Tom – only Tom Thompson. Is he here, or not?’

  At the sorting table nearest to them, a small boy in a cloth cap stood up. ‘There’s a Tom Thompson who used to work aside of me,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t seen him for a while.’

  ‘Do you know where he might have gone?’ asked Nellie.

  The boy shook his head. ‘He said they’d be going away on account of his father’s accident. He never said where.’

  ‘That’d be my Tom,’ Nellie said to Bob. ‘His father’s an invalid. That’s why they wanted me to work for them again.’

  ‘Seems as if you’ve missed the boat, then, missie,’ Bob said kindly. He raised his voice again. ‘Thanks for your help, lads. Back to work with you then.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Trelawney,’ said Nellie. She swallowed, trying not to notice that her throat hurt.

  ‘It didn’t help much, though, did it?’ Bob said, as they left the shed. He looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right, Nellie? You look quite peaky.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  But she wasn’t. She felt deathly tired. If only she could lie down on the ground, pull her shawl over her head, and sleep for ever! The pounding of the steam engine in the pump house echoed through her head like hammer blows.

  She swayed on her feet. She heard Bob say something, urgently. And then a wave of blackness swept over her and carried her away.

  THE sound of Mrs Thompson’s voice came to her as if from a great distance.

  I should be up and doing out the rooms by now, Nellie thought, with a start. What am I thinking of, lying in bed? I wish I wasn’t so hot. It’s hard to be working in this heat, and maybe I should rest for a while. But of course it’s hot in the laundry, with Li doing the ironing. Such a blaze there is in the furnace, and no wonder my Mary is so pale. I’ll make her a cup of tea – I know Mrs Thompson won’t mind. I don’t expect Tom is back from school yet.

  Then somebody was giving her a cool drink, and Mary had started coughing again, and the coughing hurt so much that Nellie could feel the pain of it like stabbing needles, and it was hard to breathe. Nellie knew she must find help for Mary – Trotty would know where there was a doctor. The last thing Mary needed was a cure from that Lizzie Buckley, with her wicked little black pipe. And the roof was so close to her head, and it looked like the roof of a cave she’d sheltered in with her dada once. In that cave there was green moss on the walls, and it was so soft to touch, like Bertie’s feathers. If only Bertie hadn’t flown away. That was her fault, too, everything was her fault, but it wasn’t her fault that Bessie Rudge had fallen into the chantilly basket – it was the heat, of course. The heat. She was burning …

  And then Mrs Thompson was sponging her face, and it felt so good … Soon she’d get up and dust the upstairs rooms, which must be properly filthy by now … but it was so hard to stay awake … She was so glad she’d found the Thompsons at last. It was like coming home …

  When next she opened her eyes, a stranger’s face was looking down at her. It was a broad, pleasant face, and it was framed by a frilled bonnet.

  ‘You’re awake,’ said Mrs Thompson’s voice.

  Nellie stared. ‘Who are you?’

  The woman laughed. ‘I’m Bob’s missus. You gave us a real fright, you did. Near five days you’ve been raving, and so hot with the fever that we thought you’d never survive it. We were about ready to call a priest. We thought you’d be one of them Catholics, being Irish. You’re a tough little lass, aren’t you?’

  Nellie hardly heard what the woman was saying. All she felt was crushing disappointment. It wasn’t Mrs Thompson looking down at her, but someone different entirely. How could she have been so fooled?

  ‘You’ve been calling out,’ Mrs Trelawney went on. ‘You called for Tom, and for Mary. And for Bertie. Would they be your family?’

  Bertie. Li. Suddenly things started to fall into place for Nellie. She was in the Burra, and she’d been looking for the Thompsons. The last thing she remembered was being at the mine.

  ‘Where –?’

  ‘You’re in our dug-out in the creek bank, my lamb. Bob didn’t know what else he could do with you. It’s the influenza that’s laid you low. Little Martha Evans died of it on Sunday, poor mite. You’ll remember her – Bob said she was on the coach. Her mother is beside herself. It’s the second baby she’s lost.’

  That must be how I caught the sickness, Nellie realised. She remembered holding baby Martha, the feverish heat of her head, and her miserable wailing. Poor little Martha. Poor Mrs Evans.

  ‘We’ve had cholera here in the creek, and typhus,’ Mrs Trelawney went on cheerfully. ‘But at present it’s mostly colds and such. Eat plenty of onions and always wear wool next to the skin, and you’ll be right. Now, my lamb, are you able to eat anything? I’ve some nice nettle broth.’

  Nellie struggled to sit up. ‘We’re in the creek?’

  ‘That’s right. And you are to stay here until you are well. Don’t move, now. I’ll be back.’

  Nellie closed her eyes, and opened them again when Mrs Trelawney loomed over her bed with a mug of steaming greenish liquid.

  ‘Nettle tea – the best thing for you, my lamb. Drink it down.’

  Nellie drank it down.

  Gradually, as she grew str
onger, Nellie was able to take an interest in her surroundings. The Trelawneys’ dug-out home was the strangest place she’d ever been in. It was just like living in a big rabbit burrow, except that rabbits didn’t have mats on the floor, or a window with curtains, or a kitchen with an open fire. Three adjoining rooms had been tunnelled out of the creek bank – a bedroom, a tiny storeroom and the main living room, which was also the kitchen. It was cosy, but very cramped.

  You could change the inside of the dug-out however you wanted. If you needed a pantry, or a bench, or a shelf for a wash basin, you just dug it out of the clay. Even the beds were just broad shelves hollowed out of the dug-out walls. Nellie’s bed in the storeroom was a pile of sacks, and at night she covered herself with a warm quilt made from sugar-bags.

  There were dug-out homes all the way down the creek-bed, like terrace houses lining a street. The creek flowed down the middle, yellow with the muck that was washed from the mine.

  People used the shallow waters of the creek for washing and laundry, trying to find places where the water was fairly clean. The privies were used by everyone, too. Just pit lavatories, they were. They smelled terrible, and Nellie hated them because there was always a long queue of people waiting. But all in all, creek-dwelling was a comfortable way to live.

  Every night, before she went to sleep, Nellie thanked the blessed saints for the kindness of the Trelawneys. The dug-out was her home – for now.

  ‘Oh, drat the boys!’ shouted Mrs Trelawney, coughing and flapping her hands. ‘Go and get them, Nellie!’

  Great curls of smoke were billowing through the dug-out.

  Nellie jumped up from the kitchen table and raced out through the front door. Down the creek-bed she ran, and up a little crooked path to the top of the bank. Sure enough, she saw two boys running away, laughing. They had placed an old sack over the beer-barrel chimney that stuck up out of the bank, and underneath that chimney the Trelawney dugout was filling up with choking smoke.

  ‘Spalpeens!’ yelled Nellie, waving a fist. ‘If I get a hold of you, you won’t be forgetting it soon!’

  She took the sack off the chimney and hurled it after the disappearing boys, and then stood for a while, trying to catch her breath.

  All along the path on the top of the bank were dozens of chimneys from the dug-out homes below. Some were just smoking holes in the ground, others were made of brick, but most were old barrels with the top and bottom knocked out. Nellie had discovered that children enjoyed the practical joke of blocking off the chimneys to smoke out the residents underneath. She had even seen them fishing down a chimney with bits of wire, trying to hook up food from the cooking fire burning down below.

  It made Nellie think of Will Thompson. It was just the kind of thing naughty Will would have done – and little Hetty would have been right there beside him.

  She smiled, remembering.

  NELLIE sat in the stuffy little storeroom, her spelling book open on her lap. ‘His pen has no ink in it,’ she read aloud, slowly. ‘I met a man and a pig. A fox got the old hen.’ She’d been living in the dug-out for nearly two months now, and it was a long time since she’d looked at her book. She had almost given up hope of ever seeing Tom Thompson again, but she was still fiercely determined that one day she would read and write just as well as he did.

  ‘Spring cleaning today, my lamb,’ said Mrs Trelawney, poking her head in. ‘’Tis a fine warm day, and between the two of us we’ll be done and dusted in no time.’

  Nellie put away her book and stood up, eager to help.

  She and Mrs Trelawney moved all the furniture and bedding outside to the creek-bed. They swept all the ledges and the earth floor, and whisked away several spider webs. Nellie flushed out a big cockroach and stamped on it with relish, pretending it was Bessie Rudge. She hadn’t forgotten Bessie’s unkindness, and she never would – the creature! She shook out all the rugs and gave them a good beating with the wire carpet-beater, coughing in the clouds of dust.

  Finally Mrs Trelawney mixed lime, whiting and water in a bucket, and she and Nellie whitewashed the inner walls of the dug-out where the old paint had flaked off, revealing patches of bare clay.

  While they waited for the whitewash to dry, they sat on kitchen chairs out in the sunshine, drinking black tea and eating bread and dripping.

  ‘The heat of the sun sinks right into your bones,’ said Mrs Trelawney with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘I’ll never forget Cornwall, for that’s our home, but the sun here is something I love about Australia.’

  ‘Is it a different sun, so?’ Nellie asked.

  Mrs Trelawney laughed. ‘Bless you, child, ’tis the same sun. There’s just the one of them. And the one moon, looking down on everyone all over the world.’

  Nellie was pleased by the thought that the sun and moon were the same as the ones that shone over Ireland. It was something she’d wondered about. Australia was such a strange place that anything was possible!

  ‘I still can’t get used to the way the year works in this country,’ she said. ‘In January it was so hot the fruit was cooking on the trees. It hardly rains here at all, does it?’

  ‘Well, you’d not expect it to rain much in September,’ said Mrs Trelawney, ‘and in the summertime it’s as dry as a lime-burner’s boot.’

  Nellie looked up from her mug of tea. ‘And is it September now?’ she asked.

  ‘Indeed it is. The second day of September, and the second day of spring.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Nellie, ‘it’s gone past my birthday! I know my birthday is in August, and it’s August that comes before September, isn’t it? And that means it’s almost a year since Mary and I arrived in Adelaide. It was the tenth day of September. I remember that, because it was such an important day.’

  Had she and Mary really been in South Australia for so long? They’d made their plans for the future the night before their ship had docked at Port Adelaide. Nellie remembered how they’d promised each other that in a year’s time they’d see if their wishes had come true. Now the year was almost up. And she was in the Burra, with no job, and Mary … a lump came into her throat.

  Mrs Trelawney’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Well then, my lamb, you have two things to celebrate, don’t you? We must have a party, so you can celebrate in style. We’ll do it on Saturday.’

  It wasn’t really her birthday, of course, but it was the first party Nellie had ever had, and not something she’d ever expected to have, either. Mrs Trelawney paid little Timmy Murphy a penny to go from door to door inviting the neighbours to come around and bring a plate. On Saturday morning she brought out her old cast-iron Dutch oven and spent all day making pasties and gingerbread and a saffron cake. Nellie helped by chopping onions and turnips for the pasties, setting the dough for the saffron cake to rise, and washing bowls and spoons in the creek. It was like working with Bessie Rudge, but it was so much nicer!

  When the food was ready, they set it out on a trestle table in the creek-bed, covering it with a sheet to keep off the dust.

  Nellie changed into her beautiful dress with the pink roses, the one she’d worn when she served dinner to the Governor at the Lefroys’. She’d made a set of new clothes in the same fabric for Vanessa, Mary’s old doll. A pang of sorrow went through her at the thought of Mary and Vanessa in the horrid Infirmary. At least Vanessa would give Mary some comfort.

  Just before nightfall the other creek-dwellers emerged – like rabbits coming out of their burrows at dusk, thought Nellie. Most of them were Cornish miners and their families, but there were also a few Irish, for it was mainly Irishmen who drove the bullock teams. They brought pies and scones and jam tarts, figgyhobbin and home-made ginger beer. A bonfire of dead branches was lit to provide cheerful light.

  When everyone was busy eating, Bob Trelawney stood up and cleared his throat. ‘My friends, you are all welcome,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to ask you now to drink a toast to our newest friend. For a while we thought we’d lost her. But she has just had a birthday,
which we are celebrating tonight, and next week she will have been in this country for a whole year. Ladies and gentlemen – raise your glasses to Miss Nellie O’Neill!’

  Glasses clinked, and there were cries of ‘Speech, Nellie! Speech!’

  Nellie felt her insides curl up. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said to Bob.

  ‘Indeed you can,’ said Bob. He lifted her up and stood her on the trestle table. ‘Just say thank you,’ he whispered.

  Nellie raised her head. ‘It’s a great honour you do me,’ she said, her voice trembling a little. ‘And I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.’

  Everybody cheered and clapped, and Bob swung Nellie back to the ground. ‘On with the party!’ he yelled.

  He brought out his concertina, and its familiar wheezy notes filled the air. The children started dancing first, but the adults soon joined them. Nellie, as the guest of honour, was whisked from one partner to the next, even doing a polka with Mrs Trelawney, who danced as nimbly as a fairy. Soon Nellie took off her boots and danced barefoot, not minding the dust and dirt.

  She ate until she couldn’t eat another mouthful, and danced until she was giddy. Later, when the bonfire had almost died and the moonlight threw strange shadows, she walked down to the creek. What a grand evening it had been! As she paddled her feet in the cold water, she realised that there were two women standing quite close to her in the darkness. One of them was Molly Hagen, the wife of one of the teamsters: Nellie recognised her stout outline. She didn’t know who the other woman was. They were talking in low voices, and they were talking about her.

  ‘The Trelawneys are perfect saints to have taken that little girl in,’ Molly Hagen was saying. ‘Bob’s due for retirement soon, and it’s not as if they can afford another mouth to feed.’