Wimmera Gold Read online

  PART I

  Henry Fanshawe and John Perry

  Wilding, Colony of Victoria, 1872

  1

  Henry Fanshawe had always considered himself a lucky man. After all, at the age of forty-three he leased several thousand acres of good grazing land in the Mount Perfect district, several hundred miles to the north-west of where he had served his apprenticeship as a raiser of sheep. He had a usually amiable wife twelve years his junior, two strong, healthy sons and a pretty daughter. He had left a struggling family farm in Kent twenty years before, in 1852, to join an uncle on a sheep station near Warrnambool in the Western District of the colony of Victoria. After a bad depression in the 1840s wool was a booming commodity again and the Fanshawe uncle and nephew prospered.

  Henry resisted the lure of gold long enough to see the disappointed, distressed men coming back destitute from the diggings. They lived in poverty in the shanty slums of Melbourne and Geelong or in tents and humpies on the outskirts of bush towns. They were prey to disease, drunkenness and despair, living little better than the miserable blacks. The gold fever that had burned briefly in Henry's heart was quickly cooled and he applied himself to sheep farming with energy and ambition. When his uncle sold up after making a fortune to take back to England, he gave Henry a generous portion—enough to enable him to lease his own station, build a house and take a wife.

  Margaret Lockyer was the daughter of a squatter neighbour of Henry's uncle. Although colonial born, she had returned to England for six years of schooling which had polished her taste and manners. She was, however, rather tall and somewhat forthright in her opinions and, although sociable and well-disposed to men, had failed to find a husband during the nine months she had spent in Melbourne after returning from England. With no other option than to live in her father's house, she was relieved to discover Henry Fanshawe close by. She found him appealing, if a little limited in outlook. She was confident she could knock him into shape and married him willingly on the understanding that she would have a proper house to move immediately into—no dirt floors, thatched roof or wattle-and-daub. The sandstone-block house Henry constructed in a sheltered, well-treed section of his leasehold amply met her requirements. She laughed when she saw the board with the word FANLOCK burned on it mounted on the gate to the track that led to the Mount Perfect Road.

  Fanlock grew in size as the district developed. When the nearby town of Wilding was given borough status in 1869, Henry Fanshawe was able to purchase a sizeable part of his run on favourable terms and lease more land. William John (named for the uncle) had been born in 1860; Samuel Charles (for Margaret's father) in 1861 and Elizabeth (for Henry's mother) in 1864. All was well at Fanlock. There were times of anxiety when insufficient rain fell or bushfires raged in the mountains or the sheep developed diseases, but Fanshawe coped, cut his losses, restocked, stayed out of debt. When he stumbled on the huge nugget, while tracking lost sheep in a gully, he was almost unsurprised. More good luck.

  But there was a problem. The gully was not, technically, on his land. The surveying of leaseholds was imprecise, but Fanshawe was aware that he had ridden a considerable distance to the north of his boundary. Moreover, the soil in the gully bore no relation to that in similar creek beds in the northern reaches of Fanlock. The rocks and vegetation were significantly different and Fanshawe could think of no part of his holding which could credibly have yielded up this prize. He had fossicked briefly in streams on his uncle's run and had picked up enough knowledge of the gold-bearing country to know that Fanlock land held no promise. Indeed, it had been ignored by the miners who had rushed to the shallow, quickly exhausted Mount Perfect diggings in the mid-1850s. Gold was still mined in the area, but by machinery in deep shafts.

  An additional complication was that, as well as being unimaginative, Henry Fanshawe was a truthful man. A churchgoer, an occasional Bible reader and a nightly prayer-sayer, the idea of lying about his find troubled his conscience. Against that, he had absolutely no intention of surrendering this tremendous bonanza which, if properly handled, could make him unassailably wealthy. As he reburied the huge nugget on his own property in a spot indelibly stamped in his memory, he reflected on the things he needed to do—investigate the status of the land where he had found the gold, ascertain the law applying to such discoveries and to mineral deposits in general. In short, devise a strategy to legalise his claim to the gleaming lump of metal.

  All this would take time and care. The last thing Henry Fanshawe wanted to do was to create a new Mount Perfect gold rush. His memories of the behaviour of the diggers were strong. When optimistic and energetic they were no respecters of fences, waterholes or livestock. When defeated and drunk they were a menace to respectable people, especially women, and property. Fanshawe confined his reading to the Bible and the newspapers, especially the financial and sporting sections. He knew nothing of geology or fossils and imagined vaguely that the earth had been created by the divine being several thousand years before. Gold, he guessed for no good reason, was made on the first day. Therefore this piece had lain undisturbed for the whole of time and leaving it in the earth a little longer could do no harm.

  He returned to his house, family and servants outwardly calm but experiencing an uncharacteristic inner turmoil and confusion. He slept poorly that first night and thereafter. He was frequently absent in Wilding and watched anxiously for mail. Margaret Fanshawe busied herself with her children and the house and paid him little attention. They had grown apart in recent years, not to a point of friction, but the wife had tired of the husband's stolid predictability. She longed for some change in her life, some excitement. With little prospect of either, she channelled her frustrated energies into her sons. She had tutored them herself but now that they were of an age she wanted them to attend the Geelong Grammar School, in its fifteenth year of operation and apparently running smoothly as a colonial carbon copy of Harrow and Eton.

  The boys, however, were beginning to run wild, spending more time with the horses than their books and showing signs of becoming colonial roughnecks. Henry had argued that the work they did around the station was useful. Margaret maintained that their schooling came first and had insisted that he hire more workers which was partly how the American, Wesley Lincoln, had come to work at Fanlock.

  Fanshawe hired Lincoln some months before he had found the gold and was glad of the extra hand. It gave him time to pursue the plan he had finally arrived at—to lease the 100 acre block to the north of his holding and rediscover the nugget on land to which he held all rights. A difficulty was that the land had been gazetted as an Aboriginal reserve some twenty years before. That no natives remained in the district, the remnant of the tribes having long since been moved to reserves elsewhere in the colony, did not alter the fact. Fanshawe had been advised that it would be possible to get the land regazetted but that the procedure would take time and cost money. He was in touch with a Melbourne lawyer who had contacts in the Legislative Council.

  The more Fanshawe progressed with his plan, the more obsessed he became with shoring up his position. He became aware that many of the tradespeople in Wilding, as well as the newspaper proprietor and those agitating for a railway line, would welcome another gold rush for the business and attention it would bring to the town. Worryingly, he discovered that a Moravian minister in a hamlet to the north-east had living with him a family of half-caste Aborigines who might possibly form an impediment to his land acquisition scheme if anyone alerted the minister to the historical facts. A Melbourne bookseller sent volumes, many of them very expensive, on the law as it related to mineral rights; the Melbourne lawyer wondered at his client's impatience and preoccupation with minutiae.

  While Henry studied and fretted, three members of his family became besotted with Wes Lincoln. The brothers, William and Samuel, were thrilled by the Texan's skills with rope and rein. He taught them riding tricks, lariat-throwing and Indian-wrestling holds.

  'Why d'you wear that glove, Wes?' William ask
ed one day. He had learned to pronounce the name in the American way—'Wess' rather than 'Wez'.

  'Got bit once by a rattlesnake,' Lincoln said. 'Hand's full of poison. Works fine now, but if 'n it ever gets the sunlight on it, why it'd just drop clean off.'

  'Wow,' Samuel said, an expletive he'd picked up from the American. 'So the only time you can take the glove off is at night?'

  Lincoln and the boys were squatting under a gum tree behind the race where the sheep were dipped to combat infestation and disease. Lincoln winked at Samuel and continued whittling at a plug of yellow box, shaping it into a steer with long, curling horns. A slender shadow fell across them and all three males looked up. Margaret Fanshawe stood in the sun with a parasol protecting her fair complexion. She wore a pale blue dress that suited her fine blonde hair and showed that three pregnancies had not appreciably thickened her figure. 'That sounds like a tall story to me, Mr Lincoln.'

  Lincoln uncoiled his long frame and removed his hat with what was almost a flourish. 'That's what we Texians are famous for, Miz Fanshawe. That and a few other things.'

  'And what would they be?'

  'Oh, higher pursuits, dancing for one, singing and such.'

  'Yes, I've heard you sing. You have a fine tenor.'

  'Thank you, Ma'am. Trained in church but I've sung to more cattle than human beings.'

  'C'mon, Wes,' Samuel drawled. 'Git on with whittlin' the bull.'

  Margaret winced at the accent the boy was adopting. Really, she thought. It's time for them to go to Geelong. Her expression became severe. 'I want you boys inside working on your French lessons right now.'

  William, much bigger than his brother and rather slower of wit, chewed on a wood shaving. 'Aw, Mother … '

  'At once!'

  Lincoln set the half-finished carving on a post of the sheep-dip race. 'Do like your Ma says, boys. This'll keep til later. I expect to have some problems with its horns. And French is a useful lingo if you ever get to go down New Awlins way. That's what all the purty gals talk down there.'

  'And do you speak French, Mr Lincoln?'

  'No, ma'am. I speak Spanish pretty good, but not a word of French.'

  Margaret snapped her fingers in a somewhat unladylike way and the boys ran to the house. She was imagining dancing with Lincoln, him holding her tightly and saying things in Spanish into her ear. She felt herself flush.

  'Better get out of the sun, Ma'am. Sure would be a pity to burn that fine skin o' yours.'

  Margaret recognised the import of the words. She had been something of a coquette on the boat coming back from England, and at balls and parties in Melbourne, before returning husbandless to Samuel Lockyer's sheep station. Henry Fanshawe had come to an arrangement with her rather than courted her, and she felt starved for the spice and danger of flirtation. She permitted herself one teasing, knowing look into Wesley Lincoln's cool, grey eyes before twirling her parasol as she turned and walked back to the house.

  A week later, while Henry was away on one of his periodic visits to Wilding and the children were busy with more than normally taxing schoolroom tasks, the American and the squatter's wife met apparently by chance while out riding. The chance was all in Margaret's apprehension; Lincoln had contrived the meeting, and what followed, precisely. His black stallion had caused Margaret's dappled mare to take fright and bolt. Lincoln chased after her and easily caught her. The stallion whinnied and pawed the ground but, discovering that the mare was not receptive, calmed down and was coaxed into a trot alongside the smaller horse. Margaret, riding side-saddle with a long skirt slightly rucked up to show her boots, admired the American's skill in controlling two horses.

  'What are you doing out here, Mr Lincoln?' Margaret asked. 'I've never been exactly sure of your duties.'

  'Why, Ma'am, my main job is to keep them good-for-nothing shepherds and fence-fixers and such at their tasks. Mr Fanshawe's got a few cows as you'd know and I keep track of them, too.'

  'I didn't know. Is that what you're doing now—tracking lost cows?'

  'No, Ma'am, I'm out riding on a fine day with a beautiful lady on a pinto mare.'

  Margaret raised a hand to adjust her wide-brimmed bonnet. She rode well and kept the horse moving smoothly. 'You shouldn't say such things. Pinto, is that one of your Spanish words? What does it mean?'

  'Might be, I never thought about it. Pinto means more than one colour, or hard to say exactly what colour it is. Sort of a mixture of things, like you, Ma'am.'

  'Stop it!' '

  Lincoln moved his horse closer and let his gloved hand rest on Margaret's saddle. 'Stop what?'

  'Stop flirting with me. I'm married.' She looked at the tight black leather glove and felt a tremour run through her. 'And I'm older than you, besides,' she said weakly.

  'I doubt that,' Lincoln said. 'Born in '46 myself. Two years afore they found gold in California.'

  Margaret thrilled. He was five years younger than her and, presumably, ardent as she still was herself, not jaded and mechanical in his lovemaking like Henry. She experienced a looseness in her body, an opening out, a freedom that made her feel like a different person. When they reached the creek bed she let Wesley Lincoln lift her down from the horse and kiss her on the mouth. He tasted young and fresh and his body was lean and hard as he pressed into her. He held both horses' reins in his gloved left hand and let the other hand roam over her body, moulding her buttocks, sliding over her hip bones past her waist to press hard against her breasts. She thrust herself against him and the home and school-instilled lessons of behaviour slid away towards the bubbling creek. She felt him bear her down to the ground; there was a swish of leather and a crash of leaves as he tied up the horses, and then he was back, touching her, probing at her with his hands and his tongue, beautifully, skilfully, so skilfully …

  Nothing in her experience had prepared her for it and she scarcely dared to trust that what she had felt was akin to what she had read about in the novels of Georges Sand. The books circulated in the ladies' academy she had attended and all the accomplished students had acquired sufficient French to read and understand them. Was this the passion that closed the ears, shut the eyes and stilled the breath?

  Wesley Lincoln rolled away and fixed his gaze on the leaves dancing in the jostling water of the creek. He adjusted his trousers and averted his gaze while Margaret Fanshawe restored her skirts to order. He was dying for a smoke, but he took her in his arms and kissed her eyelids. The slight crows' feet, spreading out from her eyes towards the strands of grey in her blonde hair, he ignored. She had done the best she could, and if she was like a cold bowl of oatmeal compared to the whores of Durango, that was nothing to fret over given what was at stake. 'Tell me, Margaret,' he said. 'Why does ol' Henry make all those trips into Wilding? You don't think he's got a woman in there, do you?'

  'Don't be silly. It's business.'

  'Yeah? What kinda business?'

  Margaret kissed Lincoln's still smoothly shaven cheek. A man with a modest moustache and no other facial hair was a rarity in the Mount Perfect district, and in her experience generally. Henry wore full-blown mutton-chop whiskers like her father. The hair was rough and prickly, especially when waxed and seldom washed as was Henry's practice. 'I don't know,' she said. 'To do with the sheep run I imagine.'

  Lincoln nibbled her right ear lobe. 'Sheep don't take much work but your husband's one of the busiest men I've ever seen—forever hopping into the trap and headin' for town. You ain't suspicious?'

  'Of course not.'

  'You're a lady fine, I'll say that. I'm just a cowboy, Miz Fanshawe.'

  Margaret said nothing.

  'Do you want this all to happen again?'

  'Yes. Yes.'

  'Your husband rides out a deal himself, doesn't he?'

  'I think so. Yes.'

  Lincoln's gloved hand closed over Margaret's right breast. 'Where does he go, darlin'? We have to know.'

  2

  'What is the trouble, my dear?' Henry Fanshawe asked his
wife. 'You've been moping about miserably for days now, and the boys are scarcely any better. I've been too busy since that wretched American fellow took off to pay you much attention, but I've put a new man on now. Would you like to go into town, have a meal at the hotel? And the picnic races will be on at Easter. We could make it a family outing and … '

  Margaret Fanshawe struggled to prevent herself from screaming. If only Henry would shut up! Wesley had gone without a word, simply vanished overnight. She had felt like a fresh, new bloom and now she was like something old and withered, fit only to be thrown away and forgotten. She shook her head and said nothing.

  They were in the parlour of the sandstone house. There was a good carpet on the floor, logs burning brightly in the marble-surrounded fireplace and a soft light from the oil lantern. Henry had persuaded his wife to join him in a rare glass of port after dinner. He, who seldom drank alcohol, had had two glasses and the wine was affecting him. Margaret looked slightly gaunt but the weight loss made her more like his memory of her when they had married. With no previous experience of women, he had found the outlines, shapes and texture of her slim body mysterious and exciting. He remembered, almost with shame, how many times he had taken her in those first few nights, after his initial nervousness had been overcome. He felt the return of something like that ardour.

  He got up and poured more wine into his wife's glass although the level had scarcely dropped. He took her hand, small and white, between his work-roughened ones, and stroked it gently. 'Margaret.'

  Her gaze did not lift from the fire. 'Yes, Henry?'

  'Have you heard me? I can't tell you too much now but good things are in store for us, I believe.'

  Inspiration struck him. 'I think I'll be able to see my way clear on the question of the fees at the Grammar School. Perhaps the boys could board and we could take a trip home. My sister would take little Elizabeth for a time …'