I never knew anyone else to mention Clark, but of Figge there were occasional whispers. He’d been murdered in the bush, or had found his way back to India, or even England. He was in China, he’d been hanged or impaled on a Gweagal spear or burnt alive. It was his skeleton that swung from the gibbet on Pinchgut, or turned up softened by the acids of a lime burner’s barrel. He was a necromancer, a preacher, an alchemist. He was immortal, already reincarnated. He was a lightning rod for florid talk. When I listened to my father, I thought of Figge as some manifestation in the weather, a cataclysm that smote the men and violated the women and was gone.

The lascar boy, the Bengali, in my father’s story had no name and Father spoke little of him. He was Clark’s manservant, that was all. It was he who had provided the account of the long trek north from the Sydney Cove wreck that cast so much suspicion on his two fellow survivors. And I knew, too, that it was my mother who had drawn the story forth from the silent, terrified boy, which perhaps accounted for some of my father’s anguish around it. At any rate, the story was full of contradictions, made worse by my father’s frequently addled state in the telling. It confused him, even years later. And it certainly confused me. It formed some part of his wider grief: that much I knew.

~

As I walked up the hill, the provisions slung over the mare and the iron returned to the pannier, I waited for the Bengali to talk. It was extraordinary. This man, sunk deep in his middle age, was the legendary boy of those childhood tales. And yet I was no less disconcerted by his staring, by the smouldering intensity of his presence. Was he in his right mind? I felt sure he was quite profoundly disturbed.

Then he did begin to talk, prompted by some small invitation from me to do so, and it was as though a torrent had been released. The words rushed out of him, even while he stared.

‘I suppose you may know, Miss Grayling, that I lost my father in the forest. I went back to the coast to find him.’ This was the first thing he said, and it seemed stranded. As though it fell outside the order of the story he wanted to tell, such was his urgency in saying it.

I did know that the lascar boy’s father was one of the survivors of the Sydney Cove. Now I learned that Srinivas had gone back south, when Sydney was done with him and he with them.