'Who?!'

But he doesn't say. Just tips his face forward so it's totally eclipsed by the brim of the hat. For a moment I think he intends to kiss me, or perhaps bite me. Then he jerks back.

'Let me go!' I tell him.

The handcuff-grip unlocks, and a flood of pins and needles rushes in. I rub the skin. Breathe out. Look up, but he's gone. Dissolved back into the alley as if he's never been.

The thunder moves north, shaking the last coins in its collection box.

Three nights later Bob says: 'I'm no good with the airs and graces of courting.'

He kissed me just seconds ago, on the cool sand near the tied-up boats in the harbour. Under a moon like a huge blister pearl with black fingers trawling over it. I'd closed my eyes. Tasted pipe tobacco. The vague seaweed undertow of the ocean. Pretended it was Percy.

'I like the common touch,' I tell him, my lips still smarting from his bristles. 'When I think of your skin fitting, it's not here in Cooktown. But in a more primitive place. Your island, maybe. Or the middle of the ocean.'

I hold up the toy monkey he bought me, lolling on its stick, to the moon's light. Its smile seems leerish, surrounded by apricot cheeks, red jacket and black bow tie. The outfit of some voodoo doll.

We've spent the evening strolling through Chinatown, by the water. Wandering the narrow, covered alleys flaring with lanterns and banners. He led me, two fingers in the small of my back. Past the pyramids of oranges and apples. The counter with its enormous gla.s.s jars of fish-shaped sweets.

'I've tried them,' I admitted when he offered me some. 'They taste like sweetened beeswax seals on the backs of important letters.'

Bob asked how long I'd been nibbling on bits of Her Majesty's post.

I said it wasn't much different to licking stamps.

He chuckled, steering me casually away from the opening in the opium tent, where the toothless man with small knives in his eyes handed out pieces of dripping sugarcane.

He bought the toy from the very last stall.

Now, his medicinal b.a.l.l.s chatter amongst themselves, considering my comment.

'Aye,' he says. 'The cloth of my skin don't fit right in Cooktown.'

The ocean in the distance keeps opening the same bottle of fizzy water. Pouring out a gla.s.s, then putting the stopper back in.

Bob sniffs the air. 'A good fisherman can scent a patch of slugs twenty miles away.'

'What do they smell like?'

He smiles crookedly. 'I never said I was a good fisherman.' He sniffs, and his nostrils flare. 'It's not the slugs themselves, but the fast-running tide that goes with them.'

'I know the ocean smells stronger when there's an onsh.o.r.e breeze, but that's not the same thing, is it?'

'No.' Suddenly earnest, he takes my hands in his. The monkey dangles between us. 'Ye're like a breath of fresh air, Mary. Ye smell like flowers. Not hothouse blooms, but those tough, no-nonsense ones that grow by the roadside, drinking up the sun.'

'Must be my new perfume, Caprice,' I say. I test the aroma of the air myself and decide it's ripe for revelation. 'Have there been other women in your life, Bob?'

He stares out to sea. The edges of the stars are softer than usual. And brighter. Pasted onto the sky with watery cornflour glue. I can almost hear the mainsail in his head creak as it stretches back into the distant past.

'The fairer s.e.x have always wanted something from me,' he says. 'I've been played a fool many times. I've always had a soft spot for a bonny face.'

'I see,' I say, and inwardly yawn. Clearly I haven't been specific enough.

He guides me gently around so that I'm bathed in moonlight. Follows the wings of my eyebrows, then the rest of my features. I endure the scrutiny, teeth clenched.

'Do ye mind me saying? It would soften yer looks no end if ye didn't pull yer hair quite so tight away from yer face.'

'Do you think so?'

'I do find ye bonny, it's just ...' Instead of only his foot, this time he shoves his leg into his mouth, all the way up to the kneecap. 'Anyway, look at the Germans. They don't value beauty in their wives. It's strength, thrift, good nature and obedience that count.'

'You forgot youth.' If my voice were any drier he could strike a match on it.

'I know it's too early to ask. But do ye think we might ... That is, I know full well ye're half my age. But ye seem so different to other girls.'

I hear the strange, excited chatter of Chinamen plying their wares in the distance. The exotic wafts of cooking: onions, shrimp paste. A repeated chipping-metal sound: some bird in an invisible tree. Light and shadow play across Bob's damaged face.

'I've heard some talk, Bob. About a woman you knew on the goldfields. She disappeared a year ago.'

Seconds play out. Water slaps its washing against wharf pylons. The bruised ma.s.s of the sky moves its grudge closer.

'That nonsense again. Who says so?'

The wind's winding up. I raise my voice just a little to compensate. 'It doesn't matter who. But why is it nonsense?'

'A case of mistaken ident.i.ty.' His medicinal b.a.l.l.s make an abandoned sound, like the sign outside a deserted inn clanking in the breeze. 'A slug fisherman from Barrow Point had a sable belle for years. She ran away from him. Ended up on the goldfields, then was never seen again. Ye know how stories go. I was on the goldfields for a time. Now I'm a slug fisherman. Seeing most lips that pa.s.s loose talk are numb from drink, it's not really surprising they'd think it me.'

The delivery is smooth. Only a trained ear could hear the small squeak of a tight new shoe.

'Why would a native woman who runs away from a white man be noteworthy?' I ask. 'If it were the other way around ...'

I'm thinking of the naked, white Normandy woman, the one whom diggers on the goldfields have seen on and off for years. No one's found out how she came to live among the natives. Or why.

'There was some trouble from her tribe. Threats to kill the fellow. I really can't say.'

It could be river water kicked up by the wind that's peppering my arms. Or the dirt flung off Bob's spade as he digs himself a deeper hole.

'Ye must believe me, Mary. I'd never stoop so low.'

He's pensive on the brisk walk back. His medicinal b.a.l.l.s have fallen silent. But he does lift a damp frond out of my way and warns me to watch my step as we clamber up the gravelly slope to Charlotte Street. We step onto the nearest verandah just as tumult descends. The nails-on-tin above our heads means we now have to shout.

'I have to go.' Bob pulls his coat up over his head. 'I have to speak with Will Hartley. He's the merchant who handles my slugs. Do ye want to climb Gra.s.sy Hill the day after tomorrow?' There's a gleam in his good eye. A definite challenge. 'If ye're up to it.'

'Oh, I'm up to it. You'll find I'm up to almost anything.' Amazing how confident I sound, even to my own ears.

With a last crooked smile and a flick of his forked tongue, he pulls his coat down tighter on his head, leaps off the verandah and runs headlong into the rain.

11.

It's not only the fairer s.e.x

that is hard to fathom.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 11TH DECEMBER 1879.

It's not Heccy Landers who stops me on my way home tonight, but another man, lurking behind a tree on the other side of Charlotte Street. He calls my name. I turn. He slips his long body into the nearest shadow. I look behind me to make sure no one is watching, then half-walk, half-skate across the muddy road. The smell is like a handkerchief that's washed a hundred dirty feet being held over my nose.

I follow Percy down a slight slope, through the trees and into a secluded clearing. The moon shimmers in the humid air with the consistency of half-cooked eggwhite. Just enough light through the branches to see that he's distracted. Twitchy. Something joyous in my chest jumps up to meet him.

'I didn't expect you back in town,' I say. 'I thought you would be gone longer.'

'I'm off to the Lizard tomorrow. I'll be grounded there for a while. I've pushed my luck about as far as it will go with Watson.'

His body is tense. He doesn't seem at all happy to see me. A waft of something decaying rises from the river. When he turns, his green eyes are blazing. 'What do you think you're playing at with him?'

'With Bob?' I take a step back and almost fall over the root of a tree. Even in the half-light, I can see a vein prominent on Percy's forehead. That laconic mouth is taut. 'Haven't you talked to Roberts?' I rub my hands up and down my arms, though I'm not cold.

'I've spoken to no one. I've been chasing up the Chinaman, remember?'

'Did you find him?'

I wonder if I imagine something furtive scuttling across his face.

'No. And you're avoiding my question. What are you doing playing up to Watson?'

'Dirty White Neckerchief - I mean, Collins - didn't turn up to receive my message on the dock. He'd had an accident. Roberts himself came into Charley's. I gave him the message that the Chinaman was still nowhere to be found.'

'What's that got to do with Watson?'

'I'm getting to that. It was Charley who introduced me to Bob, with some vain hope that I'd marry him, go to Lizard Island, and then help Charley with his smuggling operations.'

'Did he now?'

Wires under the surface of his face tighten skin over bones. He seems far more concerned with Charley's underhand tactics than me talking to Roberts. But why?

'I told Captain Roberts all of the above,' I go on, 'and then it occurred to me that I could marry Bob and be your signaller on the Lizard. You can't object, surely? Someone has to do it.'

'd.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l! Why can't you stop meddling in things that don't concern you?'

He rakes big fingers through his hair and glares at me. The moonlight has a curious effect on his eyes, emptying them of colour. He hardly looks human any more. I almost reach out, try to break whatever mad spell he's under, but I'm afraid of what he'll do if my fingers come in contact with that coiled-up bundle of nerves.

'I don't understand why you're so angry. You haven't got the Chinaman. You need someone on the Lizard.'

He must realise he's not being rational, because he takes a couple of deep breaths.

'It's dangerous and stupid. And you'll have to bed him. Did you think of that, Mary Oxnam? You with your clever little plans. Your eagerness to make money. You know Watson went around with a black woman? They say he killed her out on the goldfields.'

'He says it was someone else. Not him.'

I shouldn't be upholding Bob's story. I didn't believe it when he told me, and I don't believe it now. But this isn't about Bob's peccadillos. It's about Percy's regard for me.

'Don't tell me you've fallen in love with the old Scottish git!'

'Of course not!'

He rubs a hand roughly over his mouth. Even the familiar woodsy cologne he uses smells perturbed, as though some big animal's giving the trunk of the pine tree a shake.

He pulls his pipe from his pocket. His next words are low and measured. 'It's perilous. And no job for a woman. You'd have to climb that hill to signal at night, and you may have the dubious company of cranky blackfellows from the mainland.' He tamps the bowl and goes to light it. The match flares. His face flashes huge in front of me. He shakes the match out. 'The truth is, I feel ... some degree of responsibility. For your welfare. I'm the one who employed you, after all. You don't know what Watson's like. I do. I don't want him getting his dirty hands on you. You are still a vulnerable young girl, despite your bravado.'

The spontaneous joy comes back for an instant. He doesn't want Bob to have me. He wants me for himself! But as quickly as the heady feeling swirls me around, a killjoy hand falls on the whirligig, stopping it dead. The killjoy makes me repeat his words, his tone, in my head. Over and over until I hear the discrepancy. His voice was halting, but not because of some underlying affection. He was making the speech up as he went. Having failed to catch the insect with vinegar, he'd thought, reasonably enough, to try honey. And something else - that unfamiliar accent had crept back into his voice. For some reason, all of a sudden I want to get away from him.

'We'll talk about it again when you've settled down,' I say. 'I must get home now. It's not safe in the dark.' I don't wait around to hear his response.

12.

Nothing increases a girl's attractiveness

so well as the possibility of a rival.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 12TH DECEMBER 1879.