Read The Secret Fate of Mary Watson for Free Online Page B

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 passage; his habit of supplying destitute 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 thewhite 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 Robertstwice 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 passing, 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 passed, 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