Free The Colour by Rose Tremain Page B

the gun barrel began shaking. He tried to turn away from her, but she touched his arm and he moved his head and saw her laughing, her mouth open and wet and her fascinating crooked teeth like a taunt, a provocation . . .
    The blue-duck launched themselves into the bubbling creek and bobbed out of sight. Joseph rubbed his eyes. There was a glare on the water, but beyond the glare, something else, a flicker of colour in the grey mud where the ducks had stood. As his memory of Rebecca began to slide away – back into the darkness where he wanted it to remain – Joseph concentrated on this colour. For a few moments, the sun disappeared behind a cloud and, in the shadow, nothing of it was visible, only the shingly mud and the herringbone imprints of the ducks’ feet. But Joseph knew that he’d seen something. He stood without moving, waiting for the sun to come out again. It returned and sparkled on the water, dazzling him. He had to close his eyes for a second and when he opened them again, he’d forgotten the precise spot where the colour had revealed itself. Then, he saw it once more, a minute patch of shining yellow dust.
    Joseph removed his heavy boots and his woollen socks and began to wade across the icy creek. Almost unbalanced by the current, he stooped and clung to stones, making his way to the mud-bank like a four-legged animal. He felt glad he was alone, felt the excitement, in fact, of being here alone with his discovery. And when he arrived on the further shore, he sank down on to his knees, not caring how his trousers would be soiled. With trembling hands, he scooped into his palms a spoonful of grey mud dusted with gold.
    All day, he worked, combing the earth and stones. He gave no thought to Harriet, away on her journey to the Orchard Run, nor to Lilian, asleep in her room, oblivious to the sun and the blue sky. Once, he returned to the Cob House and found a shallow casserole dish the approximate shape of a gold-pan. Then he went back to the creek, taking this and a tin jug. Scooping mud into the dish, drenching it with creek-water from the jug, swilling it about so that the fine particles of sand and clay were washed away, leaving behind the heavier grains of gold, he was able to believe that nothing escaped his sight. On the dry ground under the scrub, he spread out a handkerchief, and by mid-day a little mound of bright dust, a mound the size of a man’s thumb-nail, lay there. Joseph knelt over it, put a finger into it and saw the tiny particles adhere to his skin. Tenderly, he brought his finger close to his face, caressed the gold with his eyes. He felt a scream rising in his heart.
    His head was full of hectic planning. He knew he was going to keep his discovery secret. Later on, if a great fortune was waiting for him here along the creek bed, then he would talk about it, share it, but not yet. The creek, low down here on the undulating flat, wasn’t visible from the Cob House. So he would come to this place alone and unobserved when Harriet was working her vegetable plot or stirring the washing in her copper and when Lilian was sleeping or mending china. With his rudimentary tools, he would patiently work every inch of mud. Then, towards summer, as the level of the creek fell after the freshes of spring, more and more of the little shoreline would be revealed and he alone would know what he might find there.
    He reasoned also that secrecy was a prudent measure. If he told Harriet that there was gold in her creek, then somehow (because she was a woman and women liked to reveal what was in their hearts) she might let slip this information to the Orchards and from the Orchard Run it would stream outwards – carried far and wide by the shepherds, even whispered by the Maoris in their sing-song tongue – and sooner or later there would be a Rush; the hordes would come, the men who had found gold in Australia in the ‘fifties and then in Otago at the beginning of