I'm wrist-deep in Strauss, my feet pumping the piano pedals. My mind's eye's riding a bicycle away from this place. I watch the dream-like scenery bounce by: a scattershot of gold-diggers, a thousand black snakes, ten thousand gum trees, each with a wild Myall hiding behind it. And over the lot, the great, dripping damper of the sun.

Dimly, above the music and noise of conversation, I can hear the hollow, knuckle-on-bone thumps of a fist fight out in the street. I don't stop playing. Don't bother turning. It's a nightly occurrence. It could be grog, a woman or a gambling debt that threw the first punch. Cooktown generously encourages all three preoccupations. Twenty hotels with a liquor licence, twenty more sly-grog shops, three opium dens, ten joss houses, countless gee fah and pak-a-pu shanties. And then there's greed, holding both pockets closed while simultaneously trying to pick someone else's. If all else fails: the wet season squatting over the chamber pot of the town is reason enough for a punch-up.

Charley Boule's garlic breath drags me back to the present, plants me firmly on the hard seat in a wide room brittle with the girls' lacquered laughter. He's apparently noticed my spirited playing. 'Pianissimo,' he murmurs in my ear.

As usual, my suave French employer wears his too-tight waistcoat. It's a vanity he won't relinquish despite the sultry weather and the risk of torsion in his vital organs. A swollen swamp of cognac and rich sauces gurgles in the cauldron beneath the material.

'What does it matter if I thump the keys?' I ask. 'No one's listening anyway.'

The blood's sunk from the diggers' eardrums to what's between their legs. And the girls' attention is in the same general area: just a little left of centre, in the pocket where the nuggets are.

Charley clicks his tongue. 'Subtleties of culture, cherie. They escape you entirely.'

'Not entirely.' I look sideways at him. 'Not much escapes me, Charley. What will happen to that prospector? The one your two standover men dragged outside half an hour ago?'

'They are my friends and protectors,' he says mildly, inspecting his fingernails. 'Name-calling is not nice. Did your mother never teach you that?'

He places a damp hand on my arm. I look down to a garish gold ring. Nails clipped on a perfect horizontal; the ugly k.n.o.bs of knuckles half an inchworm's length away. I shake him off.

'So that's why you threw him out, because he was calling you names? Let me see. French sack of bilgewater was one, wasn't it? And what was it he said he would do after he'd run you through with a knife? Feed sc.r.a.ps of your Froggy hide into the stamping machine you sent him out to the goldfields with.'

He sighs. 'Efficient, those little ears of yours. A pity they do not work for me.' He smoothes his moustachio on one side and then the other.

Percy was right. Charley is persistent, and patient. I've been testing a theory over the last few weeks; amplifying my insolence with every night that pa.s.ses. He accepts it all, showing remarkably little irritation. He wants something from me, all right, and he's prepared to wait for it.

'You have my fingers,' I say, a delicate injury in my voice. 'Why would you need my ears?'

He looks down at my big hands. 'Ah, yes, your fingers. Alas, they appear the most useless part of the animal, if your playing is anything to go by. Do not gossip about the prospector, cherie. A slight misunderstanding, that is all. Charley Boule, in his generosity, tries to help those less fortunate. Such charity always backfires on the selfless.'

'Of course.' I nod, as though a curtain has parted. 'It's a translation problem! Now that you've pointed it out, it seems so obvious. You see, what you call charity in France, we call loansharking here in Australia.'

His face goes an unflattering shade of pink, but he doesn't explode. 'I do not understand your ridiculous expression. Stop pounding those keys like a wounded kangaroo. This is a salon, not a dance hall.'

'Yes, Charley.'

I obediently slow the pace, turn my eyes back to the piano, so that he'll walk away. My little experiment in stretching a Frenchman until he snaps has been interrupted by something more important. I've just seen one of Percy's contacts in the periphery of my gaze. A crewman who almost certainly has a note for me.

Charley waddles off. The gaunt-looking sailor approaches the piano. Nothing untoward in that. Many do, requesting a favourite tune. I keep playing as though I haven't noticed him. Wait for his words.

'Do you know the William Tell Overture, Miss Oxnam?'

'Yes, indeed,' I say. 'But my favourite is Life is a Dance.'

'Ah, yes,' he sighs. 'Das Leben ein Tanz oder Der Tanz ein Leben.'

'Indeed. So much better than The Last Waltz, wouldn't you say?'

The preliminaries have been dealt with.

'Do you have something for me?' I relax into the music, turning the page of the score with a snap of paper.

'Yes.' And then louder: 'I've so enjoyed your Strauss, Miss Oxnam. Please accept a tip.'

His right hand reaches across the top of the piano and a few pennies clank into the change dish perched there. He steadies himself with his left hand, which drops a folded paper behind the upraised keyboard cover. He doffs his hat and moves away.

I've finished my shift, having un.o.btrusively collected the note from behind the keyboard cover. Now I'm following the patches of gaslight along Charlotte Street. On my right, a decaying drift of jasmine. On my left, warm exhalations: hops, sweat and damp smoke coughed out through the mouths of open hotel doors. I dodge lewd suggestions, bold hands. Even plain girls are pretty in the drunken dark. Outside the Great Northern, a quick sidestep saves me from yet another fight tumbling into the street, the jerky dance spurred on by a string-pulling crowd in the doorway.

I slip across the road towards the night beyond the town. Charlotte Street is muddy from recent rain. I do my best to avoid the worst of the puddles, holding up my skirt in one hand. A yolk-yellow moon hangs low in the cloud-sling of the sky, and a light breeze brings to my nose a whiff of the lavender oil I've rubbed onto my skin to deter mosquitos. But the Mediterranean can't compete for long with the tropics' sweet rot and cloying jasmine soon muscles in again.

How romantic it sounds: a secret tryst at midnight, on the banks of the Endeavour River. I'm to meet a handsome man, as I do every month on the eighth. Pity it's work and not play. Even so, I smooth back my hair, bite my bottom lip to bring some colour to it, as though he'll be able to see me in the dark.

I scramble down the bank. Debauched sounds of cursing and laughter follow me, faint ghosts of themselves, tearing voice-strips off the edges of the air. In the distance, beyond the river and over the ocean, a purple razor of lightning is sharpening itself, back and forth, on the leathery strop of the horizon. The night turns sickly white for a brief moment, then blackens again. On that edge between cold light and nothingness, between dark trees and the cream between them, I think I see movement to my right. I'm used to Percy's - or are they Samuel Roberts's? - spies. They follow me constantly. My room at the boarding house is searched regularly. The vase I keep on my writing desk to check has been moved minutely when I've been out. At least three times, probably more. But whatever evidence of betrayal they're looking for, they won't find it.

I pa.s.s the ma.s.sive bauhinia tree where I leave the coded notes I'm given at French Charley's. I presume one of Percy's elves descends to spirit the mysterious missives away, decode them, and pa.s.s them on to another elf like myself. The maw in the side of the bole gapes threateningly. I never stick my hand inside without imagining a snake curled up in the dark, ready to strike. And yet the routine has become, if not monotonous, then predictable.

Tonight, I go further. Small twigs and leaves crack under my boots. Fruit bats rustle overhead, squeaking. They make me think of funerals in the rain. Each of them a rat-faced undertaker shielded by a black umbrella of wings. I shiver just a little when I feel a hand on my arm.

'Mary.' A familiar if disembodied voice.

I turn. The bowl of his pipe glows red, a single fevered eye.

'Percy.' I smell his pine cologne, say the first thing that comes to mind. 'Is one of your men following me?'

'Maybe.' He's calm. 'What of it?'

Should I ever need evidence of how small a cog I am in the machine ...

'What do you have for me?' he asks.

We sit together on a log, close to the river. I can hear the slow pant of water on the bank. I keep my ears open for the stealthy plod of crocodiles, feel the bark beneath my thighs dig in.

I tell him what gossip I've heard over the past month. About the captain of Desperance meeting with one of the town's corrupt businessmen down near the docks while his packhorses were loaded. A delivery of hundred-years-old eggs from China to Charley's three weeks ago in the middle of the night. Percy says nothing. He stretches out his long legs and listens, his pipe resting in the corner of his mouth. I mention Charley's lucrative sidelines: his small-time smuggling rackets through the far north reef pa.s.sage; his habit of supplying dest.i.tute diggers with the means to go into the goldfields and work a claim, followed by extortionate demands when they come back into town. Lately, though, they come back with only scratchings. It's getting harder for Charley to extract his pound of flesh.

'Hmm. Keep an eye and ear on Boule's grand plans,' Percy says. 'Roberts particularly wants to know if he's planning another gold-prospecting expedition to New Guinea.'

'Another?'

He shifts a little on the log. As though I'm on the other end of a seesaw, I have to adjust my feet on the ground or else be tipped off.

'He funded an expedition earlier this year. Sent a schooner loaded with experienced prospectors and equipment north to Port Moresby. Apparently some missionary had found alluvial gold about forty miles inland, and Boule thought he would get in on the ground floor. Make a killing.'

It sounds like something Charley would do. I've heard him and his cronies at night in his backroom, speculating about the white colonisation of New Guinea. Nothing on a small scale, of course: Charley wants to revive the lost utopia of Louisiana. Sees himself relaxing on a verandah, sipping sloe gin delivered by a dusky, bare-breasted maiden, while the tamed natives work in his sugar plantations.

'What happened?' I ask. 'Did they hit a lucrative seam?'

'No. Dysentery and malaria put the kibosh on the whole operation. But Boule won't give up so easily.'

Something puzzles me. 'Didn't you say Captain Roberts took medicines up to the new seam in New Guinea? Surely there was quinine available? Why would Charley's prospectors contract malaria?'

'Just because a medicine's available doesn't mean that it's available.'

'So Captain Roberts withheld the medicine from Charley's men?'

'You'd have to ask Roberts about that. I'm not particularly interested in the business in New Guinea. My focus is on something else. But I know enough to say that Roberts wants to keep Boule away from anything north of Cape York.'

No use asking questions about the 'something else' he's interested in. I'll just get the speech about loyalty, repercussions and the dangers of curiosity. Again. So I latch on to another comment that he made.

'You say I'd have to ask Captain Roberts about Charley and New Guinea, but I can't, can I? You've told me not to approach the man.'

'I told you not to go over my head,' he corrects me.

I see it as a minor difference. Not that I've had to restrain myself to any notable degree - I've only seen Captain Roberts twice in the past six months. Once in French Charley's, much to Charley's discomfort. And once down at the ASN Company's wharf as I was pa.s.sing, his huge black head bent forward as he listened with attention to a man I didn't know. I tried to catch his eye as I pa.s.sed, but failed. He was clearly deep in thought about something, lifting the bottom of his long beard up with one hand, then letting it sink again; as though weighing a handful of seaweed.

'I'm not permitted to know about the new venture, of course?'

I don't expect an answer. But fortune favours the brave, and I sense tonight the string has been loosened slightly on Percy's pouch of secrets.

'One thing at a time,' is all he says.

The sky rumbles in the distance, and there's some teeth-edge energy in the heavy air. We'll get a storm before very much longer.

I remember the note then and reach into the pocket of my dress for it. Percy takes it from me. Our fingers connect, briefly. He slips the paper into the top pocket of his shirt.

'You're doing a good job, Mary.' I wonder if I imagine a slight reluctance in his voice. 'Roberts is happy with your performance.'

I flush all the way along my cheekbones. One more try, I tell myself, and then I'll give up - until our next meeting, at least.

'I could be more useful. If only I knew a little more about what to listen for.'

I'm not sure what I expect from him, but it's not what he says next.

'It seems, against my better judgement, that you will. And sooner rather than later.'

My pulse speeds up. I must stay calm. This is my chance at promotion.

'How so?'

He breathes out deeply. Empties the tobacco from his pipe with a few taps on the log.

'I'll be out of town and touch for a while. The man responsible for the decoding of our communications has turned out to be ... unsatisfactory. Roberts says you will take his place. Provisionally, of course. There will be an increase in wages to three pounds a week.'

'Thank you. I mean, that's wonderful.'

My mind gallops. I've had a vague suspicion of who the man might be: the skinny, copper-haired fellow who regularly visits French Charley's with more money in his pockets than seems reasonable for a prospector in these difficult times. He dresses too well, washes too often, and his hands are too smooth. I've caught him staring at me on several occasions.

'What happened to him, your code man? Why isn't he up to scratch?'

Percy ignores both questions. His silence falls into the cracks between storm birds calling, the thunder's tumbler of rocks turning in the distance, and the far-off funfair of the town. The warmth I felt moments ago unravels and I shiver. I recall something I've tried not to think too deeply on: Brisbane, the morning after the poker game; the cheat I'd nicknamed Cobweb on the front page of the Brisbane Courier, found floating face down in the river off Kangaroo Point.

'Did someone kill him? You, or Roberts? Like the cheat in the poker game back in Brisbane?'

It's as if I haven't spoken.

I take a deep breath, turn to him in the half-light of the emerging moon. It throws his features into relief. His face is still handsome and amiable. Even when lightning swathes come and go, wrapping him like a mummy, unwrapping him. He could kill me now. Dump my body in the river, and no one would even come looking until tomorrow night when I didn't turn up for work. By then the crocodiles would have had their fill.

'Do you know what a grille is?' he asks.

'No.'

'It's a piece of metal with boxes cut out of it. When it's held up against a note that has the same dimensions, these boxes correspond to words on the page. Those words are the message.'

He hands me a piece of burlap. I can feel a hard rectangle beneath it.

'You will continue to receive notes. Take them back to your room and decipher them using the grille. Memorise the message, then burn it. Be sure to disperse the ashes. Henceforth, you will come to the wharf at ten o'clock every Sat.u.r.day morning. Inspect the Chinamen's fish baskets. A man will approach you. He wears a dirty white neckerchief. He'll ask you, conversationally, which fish you think you might buy that morning. You will tell him you fancy the flathead. He will suggest the flounder because of the brightness of its eyes. You are then to recite the message verbatim. Do not look him in the face, and he will not look at you. I leave it to you to ensure that bystanders don't overhear you. Repeat the message until he leaves; he won't go until he's memorised it or he feels it is unsafe to continue. If he tells you that none of the fish are any good, you may take it to mean something untoward has happened and you should not speak at all. You will then try again the following Sat.u.r.day. Do you understand?'

'Yes.' But my head is spinning. 'When will I see you again?'

'In about six weeks time.'

He pulls something from his pocket and hands it to me. Pound notes by their feel.

'Do a good job and there'll be more where that came from. Oh, and another thing.' He stands, dusts off his trousers and looks down. 'If you value your life, don't lose the grille.'

'Is that what happened to your other decoder?' Cotton wadding's jamming up my throat. 'Did he lose his grille?'

But I'm talking to myself. His back is to me, walking away into the night.

4.

Story plots are like black pudding,

better thickened with blood than water.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 9TH NOVEMBER 1879.