‘You should come and see something,’ he said to Thea one day, interrupting her as she watered her vegetable garden. ‘Can you come now?’
I followed behind Thea as Hans, grinning, led her to where Matthias stood at the feet of the three red gums in my parents’ allotment, looking upwards, hands over his eyes to shield them from the morning sunlight.
‘What is it?’ asked Thea.
Hans beckoned her closer and pointed into the canopy. As I drew closer I saw that a Peramangk man, with incredible skill and dexterity, was climbing the tallest of the gums. With no low-hanging branches, he’d cut steps for his feet in the bark with a sharp, pointed stick, and was making more as he climbed higher. Finally, reaching a hollow, he deftly pulled out a possum and killed it with a single blow to the head.
I remembered the feeling of furred warmth turning within my hollows and, as I did so, noticed that the smallest of the gums had yellowed and was unflowering. It looked like it was dying.
Matthias and Hans clapped as the man climbed back down, stepping forwards to admire and examine the tool he had used to scale the gargantuan tree. He showed it to them patiently, speaking in both his mother tongue and in English, while Thea, I noticed, fell back, eyes on the possum that hung from his hand.
‘I think he is saying that it can be eaten,’ Hans said, turning to Thea.
‘It isn’t for the fur?’ The possum skin cloaks worn by many of the women were familiar sights by then.
‘No,’ said Hans, glancing back at the man. ‘No, it’s also food.’
The man cut them some meat and that night Hans stayed to eat it beside the Eichenwalds’ fire, nodding enthusiastically as Thea described the scene to her parents. The knowing glance shared between Anna Maria and Friedrich buckled through me like a wave.
‘That Hans Pasche cuts a striking figure,’ Anna Maria said later that night, watching Hans return to his family’s allotment in the twilight. ‘Don’t you think?’
Thea glanced up from her whitework and followed her mother’s gaze into the soft light. She shrugged.
Anna Maria patted her daughter’s knee. ‘He visits us quite a lot now. Do you ever wonder why?’
‘Probably to escape his father,’ Thea said, snapping thread between her teeth. ‘He works him and his brothers like dogs.’
‘Still,’ Anna Maria said quietly.
‘He likes your cooking. He likes those yams you get from the women.’
‘Honestly, Thea.’ Anna Maria looked steadily at her daughter, and when Thea did not meet her eyes placed a hand over her sewing.
Thea looked up, exasperated. ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘He’s fond of you.’
I was sitting at Thea’s feet, looking up at her, my head resting on her knee, but at these words I stared at the fire like I might throw myself onto the embers. I did not want to see Thea’s face. An ache gathered in my gut.
‘I . . .’ Thea hesitated. I felt tension wire through her body. She pulled her knees together.
‘I know it embarrasses you.’
Thea said nothing. Sap ran sticky down the length of a burning branch, hissed into steam.
‘You may want to consider your future,’ Anna Maria said softly, ‘in case his thoughts turn to marriage.’
Thea laughed and then fell abruptly silent. Water issued through my hair. Liquid gathered at the ends of my fingers.
‘I don’t understand why he would be thinking of such a thing.’ Thea’s voice was quiet. Strangely empty.
‘Well . . .’ Anna Maria sighed. ‘He is his father’s eldest son. He has two brothers. Four men there, on that allotment. In time he’ll need to find his own home, his own land.’ She hesitated. ‘Like you say, Christian works him like a dog.’
I was drowning, next to the campfire. My heart was caught in salted current.
‘I don’t understand why he visits me . . . for that.’
I heard Anna Maria shuffle closer and turned to see her place an arm around Thea. Maternal love wrapping around a doubting daughter.
‘He would be lucky to have you. He knows it too.’
‘Why not one of the other girls? Christiana is desperate to be married.’
‘You’ll have to ask Hans.’
The light around us swam. I lifted my eyes and saw sharks circling in the darkening sky.
There is little doubt in my mind that, had the Peramangk not shown the congregation how to find food, many would have died. That first spring the piglets were growing but not ready for slaughter and the chickens provided by MacFarlane were too young to lay. The wheat was growing on the cleared slopes – my father had been right about the fertility of the soil – but it was still green and not ready for harvest. Much of the ship’s biscuit bloomed with the same mould scrubbed from it on the Kristi, and bread baked from rice and wheaten flour had become a Sunday treat rather than a staple.