The Castlemaine Murders Read Online Free PDF

Lin, who was beginning to get the hang of settling a blood feud. It should work out in the end to a nil–nil win.
    ‘As you suggest,’ agreed Mr Hu. ‘Now we come to the goldfields and here I must beg your gracious indulgence. I find this part of the scroll very hard to read.’
    ‘I, also,’ confessed Lin. ‘We have a jumped claim—no, two. And a Lin man informed on by a Hu man for selling alloyed gold to a shopkeeper.’
    ‘What happened to him?’
    ‘Three months jail.’
    ‘Ah. It so happens I have a Hu man who was informed on by a Lin man for abominable practices.’
    ‘And he went to jail for . . .?’ asked Lin.
    ‘Three months.’
    ‘Heaven has designed this meeting to be very neat,’ said Lin Chung.
    ‘And accurate.’ Mr Hu smiled his pleasant double-chinned smile. ‘I count two jumped claims also. And an assault on a Hu woman.’
    ‘What did we do to her?’
    ‘You beat her for refusing to sleep with you. But my notes say that the Lin man was beaten by us, so badly that he was taken to hospital, so we might call that quits as well. Apart from that, we seem to be clean.’ Mr Hu allowed his scroll to roll up. ‘And that concludes our settlement,’ he said. ‘Allow me the honour of inviting you to share my most inadequate noon rice.’
    Lin was surprised.
    ‘No, Mr Hu, wait. There is one more matter. What happened to the Lin couriers, carrying four hundred ounces of gold, who were presumed ambushed and murdered by the Hu family in July 1857 at Golden Point, near Castlemaine?’
    Mr Hu opened the scroll again and scanned it hastily but thoroughly, using a magnifying glass on the faded parts.
    ‘I can find no record of such an event,’ he said at last. ‘Someone may have murdered the Lin couriers, Mr Lin, but it was not the Hu family.’
    The smooth current of the exchange was broken. The scroll curled up from Lin Chung’s weakened hand. He stared at the bland face of his erstwhile enemy. It was unthinkable that he should lie. And he had no reason to lie anyway. This was a règlement des comptes and meant to be a final settlement. Keeping something back would vitiate all agreements and continue the feud.
    ‘Then what can have happened to them?’ asked Lin at last.
    ‘Come and have lunch with me, Mr Lin,’ said Hu, taking Lin’s arm. ‘And this time tomorrow we shall talk to Great Great Grandmother Hu Ta. She was one of the few Chinese women on the goldfields, and like all the Hu women’—here he winced slightly—‘she has a very, very good memory.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Lin Chung. ‘I will be delighted to partake of her wisdom.’
    ‘Enlightened, perhaps,’ said Mr Hu, leading the way into a sumptuous dining room and the scent of Peking duck. ‘But probably not delighted.’

    In the thirteenth year of the reign of the glorious Emperor Lord of the Dragon Throne Kwong Sui of the Ching Dynasty in the season of Autumn, festival of Ancestral Shrines.
    To his younger sister Sung Mai the elder brother Sung Ma sends greetings. The ship is crammed with people. I find that the only place to contemplate the moon is far astern and I come here when I can. The shipmaster does not like coolies on his deck. Fortunately in the first week I cured him of a stubborn case of the itch and his boy of a fever with the bark infusion and now he allows me to walk where I will.
    So I sit on the after deck with the ship’s cat, watching the moon and trying to make up poems. It is very exciting to be going to another world. We have some here who have also been to the First Gold Mountain, California, where they were very badly treated and finally expelled from the city of San Francisco. They tell how some of their number were murdered by the other miners. But there was gold there and if there is gold in this Australia the Lin family mean to have it. You know how we used to joke about the Sze Yup and their coarse speech and their greed? It was all true but they are very determined. If any succeed, it will