The Curse of the Rainbow Serpent

By Anna Lord

Book 14 in a series of chronological stand-alone plots.
Australia, October 1900
Amongst the mysterious Min Min lights and songlines harkening back to the Dreamtime…
For five years the Countess has harboured the notion that the death of her step-aunt at the monolith known as Hanging Rock may not have been an accident.
Now, a French school mistress has fallen to her death during a picnic at the same place. Will investigating one death help to solve the other?
Ghost gold, legendary bushrangers, missing schoolgirls, secret aboriginal rites, strange rumblings, black vanishings – what dark truths is the sinister monolith hiding?
Can geography have memory? Does a place possess it's own supernatural spirit? Can a rock exert evil?
And who will be its next victim?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Lord
• Release date: Sep 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370822010

Anna Lord

Anna Lord has long been fascinated by myth and metaphor, and the way they inform human thought. With an English and Philosophy degree focused on metaphysical poets and logical thinking there was only one creative avenue for her to follow: two rational detectives battling to make sense of a superstitious gas-lit world. Anna's Ukrainian background, coupled with a love for whodunnits, Victorian settings, and Gothic characters, inspires her literary world and makes the books a joy to write. The result is her new series: Watson and the Countess. www.twitter.com/CountessVarvara

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The Curse

of the

Rainbow Serpent

ANNA LORD

Book Fourteen

Watson & The Countess Series

Copyright © 2020 by Anna Lord

Melbourne, Australia

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Table of Contents

1 Picnic at Hanging Rock

2 Boobook

3 Bunyip Aristocrats

4 Squattocracy

5 Blackfella

6 Pre-inquest Hearing

7 Ghost Gold

8 Sister Sleuths

9 Pioneer Graveyard

10 Midnight Ride

11 Confession

12 Revelation

13 The Rock

14 Mateship

15 Bunyip Hunt

16 Billabong

17 Goorialla

1

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Above all, it was a Dreaming place… Terra Nullius, no man’s land, a place between here and there, like the space between words, the blink of an eye, a blip of chorological time on a causal loop shifting between multiple pasts where every ending was a new beginning.

Since the start, it had disturbed the flat gentle plain that surrounded it. That was before whitefella came along, and even before the Wurundjeri deemed it a forbidden sacred site. It was during that timeless time when Goorialla emerged from the embryonic earth to create valleys and mountains, gullies and rivers, and the geography of memory.

Vertiginous and dangerous. It was a brutal phenomenon born out of boiling magma spewing from an existential furnace to form anatomical pinnacles known collectively as a mamelon: a cosmic handful of grotesque nipples on a gargantuan breast.

Every violent hiss, every groan, every rupture, of this Rock of Ages was defined by deep crevices and deconstructed cleavings, cleft for me, cleft for thee, when magma met air – hot and cold and loveless – shivered, shuddered, splintered, split, forever separating the seismic thrustings from each other, some with fissures just wide enough for little crawly things, others wide enough for something sinfully reptilian, and others impossible to breach.

It had other names – Anneyelong, Mount Diogenes, and Dryden’s Rock – but everyone now called it Hanging Rock because of the whacking-great boulder suspended horizontally atop two vertical fragments like a stone lintel framing a doorway.

Nature’s joke, a teasing jest, a caprice of sculptural rock art imbued with a malevolent craquelure, the improbable configuration marked a Dreamtime portal where the climb to the top of the totem started if you dared…

On the first day of October in the year 1900 a small gathering of respectable young ladies, aged between seventeen and eighteen, who would soon comprise the five senior girls at Campaspe College, prepared to convene at the summit of the Rock with their prospective drawing mistress, Mademoiselle Fleurot, for the purpose of artistic inspiration and friendship bonding. Acting as chaperone was Madame Arlovsky, ably assisted by Reverend Byng. Three servants and one aboriginal hand employed at a homestead in nearby Mount Macedon had been roped-in to help out with transportation and refreshments.

Everyone attending the horse race at the base of the Rock watched the drawing party set off and thought what a fine spring day it was for a picnic.

I might go join ’em, joked Barton Bailey, admiring the way wispy white muslin hugging soft round curves juxtaposed itself against the rigid hardness of the Rock.

It won’t improve your artistic skills none, sneered the tall angular man with the sun-burnished face overshadowed by a dusty Akubra. I’ve witnessed your handiwork with a paintbrush.

It’s not my artistic skills I’m hoping to improve, returned the other with a cocky wink.

Shut up, you fool! Alistair Sunderland wasn’t in the mood for louche humour. Let’s get this show on the road. There’s a lot riding on today and everyone’s waiting.

Bailey and Sunderland were best mates and fierce rivals. Both were hardy-handsome and well-respected despite being a bit rough around the edges, or perhaps because of it, and both owned large pastoral properties that produced some of the finest merino wool in Victoria.

Today was a day that had been in the planning for months, ever since they both claimed to own the fastest stockhorse in the district. The boast demanded to be put to the test. Plenty of money had been wagered among the locals and the odds were even. Both men had stumped up substantial personal savings to stage the event and turn it into a proper racing carnival with five minor races ahead of the big one. The crowd had swelled to more than one hundred.

It wasn’t just pride and money at stake. The winner won the right to invite Mrs Katerina Katzenberg to the shearer’s ball in November.

The day ran like clockwork and by a quarter after three it was time for the much-anticipated last race. Bailey and Sunderland saddled up and were proceeding to the starting line when someone noticed Min Min lights hanging over Bolobek Swamp.

One hundred pairs of eyes watched the golden-winged murmuration trace songlines in the sky until, gradually, the luminous cloud began drifting in a north-westerly direction as if drawn to the messianic monument forged from fire and fury like a halo in search of a god.

That’s how one hundred people witnessed something plummet from the top of the Rock.

Shock sobered the tipsy race-goers and galvanised the two riders already mounted. Spurring their stockhorses, they thundered toward the monolith. Mobs of kangaroos scattered as the ground trembled and shook. A joey was dropped into the underbrush. Lizards darted for cover. Sulphur-crested cockatoos and black galahs streaked the heavens in raucous panic, shrilling a warning.

Familiar with the lay of the land and the native scrub, the two horsemen had little trouble locating the lifeless thing lying broken in the shadow of the Rock.

2

Boobook

Halcyon days! Dr Watson surveyed the gold-tinted landscape from under the wide shady eaves of the Boobook homestead that gave onto the tops of some giant tree ferns dotting the hillside tumbling down to the Willimigongon Creek. This is the life! Those wealthy colonial chaps who decided to build their summer villas in the leafy Macedon Ranges understood a thing or two about gracious living.

A cooling breeze wafted up the steep slope, riffling the speckled leaves on the snow gums that danced in the sunlight and cast playful patterns on the wraparound verandah.

Sighing, he settled wearily into a basket chair that had sat empty for five long years, the tightly-woven wicker creaking to accommodate the spread as he stretched his legs, crossed his feet at the ankles, and pondered this latest journey from the Occident to the Antipodes.

I say, he continued in reflective mode, how the deuce did your step-aunt fail to spot a snake in a picnic hamper? A serpent coiled around the sandwiches, stilton and strawberries is not something one could easily overlook.

Countess V finished pouring barley water from a lustre jug garnished with sprigs of mint before handing him a frosty glass dripping with condensation. Throats were parched and dry. It was a mild spring day for the month of October but they had travelled forty dusty miles from Melbourne to Gisborne, first by steam train belching soot and then by coach and four hired from Mr Hurley’s livery stables.

When I say ‘picnic hamper’ I refer to something the size of a child’s coffin. As well as roast beef sandwiches, a wheel of stilton and a punnet of strawberries it housed a large tin of stilton biscuits and a Spode dinner service. There were three cane hampers altogether. Each one necessitated four strong men to carry it from bullock dray to picnic ground at the foot of Hanging Rock. The second hamper held crystal stemware, a full tea service, and a basket of warm scones. The third was zinc-lined. It contained milk, cream, lemonade, champagne, wine and beer.

That’s not a picnic, he gibed, that’s Belgravia on a rug! A refreshing gulp of barley water hardly touched the sides as it went down, but no sooner had he drained the glass than he realised he might be making light of death and changed his tune. What sort of snake was it?

After pouring a glass for herself, the Countess folded her lithe frame into an adjacent wicker chair angled for a westerly view, and waited for her memory to wander back five years…

Saint Valentine’s Day – the most romantic day of the year and a perfect day for a picnic. That was the summer of 1895 when the countryside was under siege and grassfires were a common sight, flaring up from lightning strikes whenever storm clouds blew in promising rain then blew out again without delivering a single drop. Spot fires jumped from farm to farm, devouring stubble in drought-stricken paddocks, robbing scrawny sheep of food and farmers of their precious livestock. Desperate families abandoned their worthless farms in droves and moved to Castlemaine, Kyneton or Maldon, hoping to scratch a living as best they could, but jobs were scarce and many decided to try their luck in prosperous Gold Rush towns like Bendigo or Ballarat. Dreams of finding that elusive gold nugget kept hope alive.

Despite the sweltering heat, the fourteenth day of February started happily enough amid a romantic flurry of cards and flowers then ended badly with the death of Countess Zoya Volodymyrovna. Everyone was shocked but no one was really surprised. That summer they had already killed a tiger snake near the chook shed and a copperhead basking in the dry creek bed.

I was just thinking the same thing. I never really found out. It was a blistering hot day, typical for February when one is apt to feel dozy, and it didn’t help that I’d been sipping champagne since breakfast. Saint Valentine rather went to my head along with all those French bubbles – not to mention all the flattering attention from a string of male callers: Captain Sunderland from Min Min Homestead, Dr Hargreaves from Lavender Cottage on Devonshire Lane, and Mr Bailey from Woiwurri Farm down Romsey way.

He wasn’t interested in her former beaux. Your step-aunt died on the spot?

Yes. The short sharp syllable attested to dismay, as though she still couldn’t believe it, even after five years, though being a product of Holmes-Adler there was no dramatic display of maudlin emotion or self-pity. The cool and analytical exterior hid a cool and analytical brain that would have frightened the pants off most men. After thirteen months of travelling together, he was still amazed that such an unlikely union should work out – a foreign heiress and a humble doctor! What was the likelihood? And yet…

And yet, were they so different? A daughter of intellect and a man of experience – why shouldn’t they have the same values? Between intelligence and experience there existed a congruence of intuitive aims, a shared seriousness, the same sense of right and wrong in the face of injustice. She was courageous too. Here she was, back in the place where one of the most tragic moments of her life had played out, where she had lost the one person who meant the most to her… Another thing they had in common.

My step-aunt simply plunged her hand into the hamper for a jar of quince paste, gasped, jerked back, and collapsed. I thought she was having a seizure. Everyone sort of froze for an instant and then panic set in. Something slithered off into the surrounding scrub. Someone screamed. I think it was Cicely Sloane. I think I was already in a state of mild shock. Someone referred to the snake as a Rainbow Serpent. I can’t recall who said it, but now that I think on it, that can’t be right. There’s no such thing. Snakes in Victoria are not brightly coloured, not like tropical snakes. Most are camouflaged to blend in with the mottled foliage and stringy bark littering the ground. A tiger snake has ragged yellow-black stripes all down its body but I wouldn’t call them bright. You could be right on top of it without noticing. Even a red-bellied black snake is more of a dirty dusty black than red. When I realised my step-aunt was dead I fainted. I can’t remember anything after that. The days that followed were a blur.

A cry of stuttering joy from a kookaburra sitting in the lower branches of an alpine ash interrupted the colloquy.

I should warn you now, she digressed, that the best time to tread on a snake is at dawn or dusk. That’s when they’re on the move. Although it’s not yet the season for snakes, so you should be safe. Next month when it starts to heat up you will need to take care where you plant your feet. Avoid long grass unless you’re wearing boots and thick socks. Australian snakes have short fangs and a defensive nip probably won’t even break skin.

Right-ho, he said with a shudder before returning to topic. Who was at the picnic that day, apart from your three gentlemen callers?

"There was Major Vernon Sloane and his daughter, Cicely. They live permanently at Bunyip Lodge in Upper Macedon. She was twelve years of age and used the word spiffing ad nauseam. Every time I hear that word I recall that awful day. There was also Sir Tarquin Emden and his unmarried sister, Miss Emmeline Emden. Knighthood rather than baronetcy; services to Queen and country and all that. They were house-guests at Government Cottage."

Nine picnickers? he clarified, holding out his glass for a refill.

Ten, she corrected, obligingly refreshing his drink. I forgot Jack. He didn’t call at the homestead that morning to deliver Valentine favours. He met us at the picnic ground.

Jack – the man she would marry less than twelve months later. It struck Dr Watson as wrong, yes, wrong, for a young widow to utter the name of her late husband with such indifference. He could hardly breathe Mary’s name without his throat thickening-up, and there was always a tremolando attached to the utterance. He liked to think that Mary would have betrayed similar emotion had the situation been reversed.

Whose idea was it to have a picnic in the first place?

Major Sloane organised a picnic at Hanging Rock every year on Saint Valentine’s Day in remembrance of his late wife – it was the date of their wedding. He kept it simple and low key, but Aunt Zoya decided to turn it into a proper party. She never did things by halves. She invited the three gentlemen callers to join us. The Emdens were invited by the Major.

What about Jack? Who invited him?

He invited himself. He was staying at The Swagman’s Arms in Woodend. He arrived late with a box of candied jellies and a bottle of warm champagne.

Was he a suitor for your hand at the time?

There was no romantic declaration, if that’s what you mean. He was a frequent visitor to Boobook that summer but he paid just as much attention to my step-aunt as me.

You married him before the year was out?

Yes, I felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under me. He took me in hand and gave my life direction. He helped me deal with the aftermath – the inquest, the will, even the funeral arrangements.

Your step-aunt is buried in the cemetery in Upper Macedon?

She gave a mechanical nod. I plan to pay a visit to the grave while we’re here. We might go tomorrow after church. Mrs Smeaton told me the early service has been cancelled, but there’s a second one at eleven o’clock.

Church? Since when did you start going to church? Thy name is hypocrite!

I concede I have never harboured any aspiration to join that exalted club but find me a person who goes to church who isn’t a hypocrite and I’ll eat my Sunday hat. Besides, it’s the simplest way to announce our arrival. We don’t want to give the impression we are hermits.

Amused at the prospect of watching her munch on her latest expensive chapeau, he nevertheless agreed with her logic. Invitations to bush picnics and barn dances were sure to follow once the local gentry heard she had returned to Boobook. Go back a bit, he prompted, you were telling me about Jack.

Dear old Jack, she sighed without a hint of throat-thickening. He advised me as to my responsibilities regarding all the business interests I’d suddenly inherited, not just in Australia but all over the world. I had telegrams and lawyers coming at me from all sides. I was still bereft and could barely get my head around half of it. He stopped everyone badgering me. They had to go through him to speak to me. He whisked me off to Melbourne and introduced me to his solicitors and a whirl of social engagements. The change of scene stopped me slipping into insanity. You have to remember I had no family to turn to at that stage. Apart from my two servants - Fedir and Xenia - everyone else was a stranger, and an unmarried foreign heiress in mourning is a magnet for every unscrupulous fortune hunter on the make. I was twenty; Jack was twenty years older and more like a father figure. He was wealthy in his own right, strong enough to deal with gold-diggers, and bloody-minded when it came to getting his own way. By the time he got down on bended knee, it seemed natural to accept. He’d done so much for me. I couldn’t imagine life without him.

Neither said anything further. The blood-orange sun was sinking behind the snow gums. They made a move to go inside to dress for dinner. Someone was playing a zither. The haunting sound floated through the garden like a ghost in search of a grave.

Dr Watson paused a moment. What tune is that?

Waltzing Matilda.

Hmm, he murmured pensively, I thought for a moment I recognised it.

It’s said to be based on a Scottish folk tune: Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea.

Ah! That explains it. Do you know the words?

Yes, I have a piece of sheet music too. I can play it on the piano for you after dinner.

Later that evening, when they returned to the verandah, he to light his pipe, she to enjoy a Turkish cigarette, the constellation of the Southern Cross clearly visible in the cloudless vault of stars that seemed strange and shifted, he thought about the plaintive lyrics to the folk tune that immortalised a rural tramp who drowned himself in a billabong…

Did you ever entertain the notion your step-aunt may have been murdered?

A plume of white smoke floated on a cross-current of air before vanishing into the darkness like the ghostly swagman from the old bush ballad. Yes.

When…when did you suspect?

I’m not sure when it dawned on me. The idea just popped into my head one day. I was walking in the garden at Ripponley, our house in Melbourne, and the thought appeared out of the blue. I don’t know what prompted it. Something must have, I guess.

Did you follow the thought to see where it led?

Not really. What I mean is – I didn’t get very far. Jack had kept all the newspapers from me for months after the tragedy to spare me re-living the horror. I decided to get hold of some back copies. There were various outrageous theories that made my blood boil.

Such as?

"Suicide à la Cleopatra and the asp – the suggestion that my step-aunt was bankrupt, insane, and jealous of Jack’s attention directed my way."

Was there any truth in the theories?

Of course not! My step-aunt was far from bankrupt and left me a fortune; totally outrageous but never insane! And she’d had so many fantastic and brilliant lovers during her lifetime it was laughable to suggest someone as rough-necked as Jack would have induced her to take her own life. Besides, as I said earlier, Jack wasn’t paying any more attention to me than her.

Still, she was getting on – past sixty years, wasn’t she? - and a lady of senior years can start to see things differently, even imagine things that might...

Nonsense! Indignant, she cut him off without apology. My step-aunt was already seventy and the sort of woman who would have killed Jack - not herself - if she thought he was playing her for a fool. I know for a fact she killed three men. There may have been more. She wasn’t the type to be messed with.

He decided to ignore the moral implications in that confession. Do you think she could have been having a love affair with Jack?

It’s possible – she was a remarkable lady. Age did not weary her. There was a rumour after we wed that he had bedded my step-aunt first. I paid it no heed. There were lots of rumours about Jack – none of them good. He kept a mistress throughout our marriage. At first, it rankled, but then I managed to rationalise it.

What! One cannot possibly rationalise something like that!

Oh, yes they can. The tone was curt.

He decided not to argue; once again there were too many moral pitfalls. Do you think she would have approved your marriage to Jack?

Probably not, she admitted. She didn’t exactly warn me off, but I recall her saying he was good for a short time not for a long time. She called him Lightning Jack and she always laughed when she said it; he didn’t find it amusing. She usually ended by slapping him on the back and telling him not to take life so seriously.

Lightning Jack?

There were a lot of lightning strikes that summer setting off grassfires, short-lived but destructive. The forests covering Mount Macedon were thankfully spared any rogue sparks but people lived in constant fear of a bushfire that would have obliterated everything you see around you. I think she may have been mocking Jack’s prowess too, which now that I think of it, would confirm she conducted a brief love affair with him. But it could also have been a reference to a bushranger. She actually referred to him as The Bushranger once.

Bushranger – I thought they died out after the Gold Rush ended?

Most of them did, but some persisted, living rough in the high country, emerging every now and again to rob banks and mail coaches. There are still a few die-hards in Western Australia and Queensland. They all had colourful nicknames: Captain Thunderbolt, Mad Dog Morgan, Captain Moonlite…

Could Jack have been a bushranger back in the bad old days?

I wouldn’t put anything past Jack. He led a wild life. But he never tried to hide his past. He started off as a grave-digger and found a gold nugget the size of a leg of mutton that weighed more than two bricks. It set him up for life. He bought a hotel in Bendigo and never looked back. By the time I met him he owned a string of hotels, dozens of boarding houses, a pastoral property in the Yarra Valley and a mansion in Melbourne built for The Right Honourable Cedric Rippon. He was already moving up in the world.

Marriage to you must have propelled his rise. He tried not to sound too cynical and felt relieved when she agreed.

Having a wife with a respectable fortune and a noble title is an undeniable asset in a colonial town trying to shake off its provincial mantle. It shot Jack to the top of the social tree. Doors opened up. He was even considering going into politics. There was no stopping him after that.

"So, it did profit him that your step-aunt died?"

"Certainly, but he came late to the picnic. The snake was already in the hamper. It must have crawled into the cane basket back