Perhaps he was about to kick out at her, kick her like the filthy animal she was, but then he felt himself being pulled away from her. The woman-stink was still there but he realised now that two other women had grabbed his arms, Julietta and the maid. He tried to wrench himself from their grip, but he was outnumbered, he was back to being the plaything of women, their toy, their fool, and all he could do was to keep cursing at the top of his voice.

Resisting all the while, he was dragged outside onto the steps. The steps were slippery in the rain that was now falling. And he knew that, in the next moment, he would fall, too. Julietta and the maid pushed him down the steps and into the street and he lay there, with his left leg twisted under him, staring up at the front door, which was now slammed shut.

In the next moment, a child came skipping by, bowling a wooden hoop. The hoop’s steadiness and momentum was such that when its passage was blocked by the body of Valentine Ross, it lifted itself up and bounced over his anguished face and sped on.

Part Four

A BARGAIN

The Australian miners had tried everything they knew. Most of them were old hands, connoisseurs in the art of gold-seeking and proud of it. They had been told that the Borneo mine was exhausted, but they knew that if anyone could find the ‘tailings’ that remained, it would be them.

Slabs of black beech had been carefully laid in to prevent their diggings from collapse. They had broken their backs carting soil away to the river. They’d manufactured box flumes to bring water to their claims for sifting the dirt through their sluice boxes. When rats started to appear, feasting off decayed food and human excrement, they’d killed as many as they could and roasted them. They referred to them as ‘ground squirrels’ and declared that they remembered the delicate flavour of their flesh from the old Otago days.

They knew enough to dig deeply, to where the ‘blue clay’ lay. Sometimes alluvial gold was to be found at the river’s edge, but these workings were some way from the river, and the true seams lay in depths that were hard to reach. Here, on Borneo, the ‘blue’ was stubborn. It just wouldn’t show itself. Each evening at dusk, as Carrot-beard and his fellow diggers trudged back to where they had placed some of their group to guard their longhouses, they swore at another day lost, at another postponement of the dream which transfixed their minds.

As time passed, they faced a new threat to their hopes. In the largest of the longhouses, Malay women began to arrive, bringing with them sick and dying people and laying them down among the miners’ possessions, leaving the diggers who had made their billet there no choice but to take up their sleeping mats and move.