Free Sound by Sarah Drummond Page B

his chest until he could feel her heart beating against his. She screamed with pain and started up a whine. He did not know the deep, steady authority in his voice when he said, “No one! No one touches this child.”
    The music stopped. John te Marama, for no other reason than he was Billhook’s countryman, leapt to his feet and glared lizardly around at the group, daring anyone to act. No man spoke. Theywere all too shocked or drunk or both, though Jimmy the Nail and the captain were disturbed enough in their sodden slumber to roll over and snore deep draughts.
    Billhook withdrew from the light with the child still clamped to his chest, as Smidmore struck up a new tune on his fiddle.
    So the ne’er do well,
    The son o’ a swell,
    He’s bin cuckolded
    By a sharpish blackfella.
    Laughter.
    Billhook stood in the dark beyond the bed of skins in the tea-tree forest where two men laboured over Dancer and Sal. He listened to the whalers climax with their odd, boyish whimpers, and watched their shadowy figures shamble away towards the fire still doing up their trousers. He shushed to the whimpering child. Then he gave the women a low whistle. They came out of the forest towards him, both of them limping, stooped and beaten.
    â€œGet your skins,” he whispered in English. The child whined softly. “We’ll go the other side of the island tonight.”

17. D OUBTFUL I SLANDS 1826
    â€œYou pulled out her arm,” Sal said to Billhook.
    Despite the darkness he saw the accusing flash in Sal’s eyes.
    â€œAe?”
    â€œYou pulled out her arm. Now do as I say, Wiremu! Just do as I say and quick!”
    Sal gestured for him to distract the child, anything, anything, away from her port side. While the girl sat on a smooth chunk of basalt weeping with pain and cradling her left arm, Billhook obeyed Sal and took the only prop he had, the orca necklace. He rattled it against his palms, shaking the teeth against each other. The child turned and looked at Billhook, trying to see where the sound came from. He reached the white teeth towards her and as her hand stretched out, Sal, in one quick, brutal movement, grabbed the child’s other arm, twisted it and pushed it back into its socket.
    The child screamed. Then her cries fell away to whimpers of relief.
    Dancer nodded and said something in her language.
    â€œNo one to look after her tonight, Billhook. Dancer, she said that,” said Sal.
    â€œWill she be, will her arm be … where I pulled her …?”
    â€œShe will be sore.” And in the first moment of collusion with Billhook since the day that she greeted him at Kangaroo Island, she grinned and said, “But plenty, plenty sore if you didn’t pull out her arm.”
    They waded through prickly waist-high scrub and fell down muttonbird burrows until they found a place far enough away from the party of men; a reedy hollow where the only sounds that reached them were the wind and the swell against the granite. Even the penguins were quiet. In the morning, before dawn, Billhook left the women, the child and the dog and trekked over the penguin tracks back to the camp.
    The scuffed dirt around the fire was littered with sleeping bodies, their faces cracked and the bush flies beginning to find them. It looked as though they’d been fighting, with blue bruises gathering on reddened brows and chins. Black flies clustered around the tattered remains of the first mate’s ear.
    Bailey was the only man awake, lying on a skin, still drinking from a bottle of rum, so far gone that he had come back again.
    â€œThanks for stealing me the child, Billhook,” he slurred. “She’ll make me some money one day, not this day, but one day. Beautiful girl. She reminds me of Elizabeth.”
    A kennel confession it was, because talking to Billhook did not count for Samuel Bailey. Billhook heard Bailey’s accent change, from rough tar language, to the talk of some