The Night They Stormed Eureka Read Online Free PDF

Higgins acknowledged her.
    Suddenly she began to cough, a deep bark that took over her entire body. And now Mr Higgins turned to her, supporting her till the spasm was over. He reached into his pocket and drew out a scrap of cloth, and dabbed the blood from the corner of her mouth, then stood back. She smiled at him, and nodded.
    ‘You right now, Martha?’
    ‘I’ll be fine.’ She laid a hand on his arm. The voice was almost a whisper, but the English clear and educated.
    ‘Ma?’ The boy stood by the paddock railing. His mother tried to smile at him reassuringly. ‘Could you get the Puddlehams their potatoes, George?’ Her words came in strange pants, as though there wasn’t quite enough breath behind them. ‘I’m sure they want potatoes as well as mutton.’
    ‘An’ onions. An’ carrots if you got ‘em, and some of that savoury too. Don’t suppose you got pumpkins left? Or a couple o’ apples?’ Mrs Puddleham spoke to Mr Higgins, not his wife. ‘Be lovely to make Sam some o’ me apple dumplings.’
    ‘No apples left, nor pumpkins. Cherries in a few weeks, if it don’t rain too much,’ said Mr Higgins temptingly. ‘Lovely big ones they’ll be. Maybe a few peaches too, an’ nice new beans.’
    ‘An’ a lovely big price an’ all. Ah well, just give us what you got.’
    ‘I’ll take yer barrow.’ The boy handed his book to his mother. She wiped her hands on her apron before she took it. Her fingers were long and thin.
    ‘Can I help?’
    He looked back at Sam, surprised. ‘If ye like.’ His voice had the same lilt as his father’s.
    For a moment it looked like Mr Puddleham was going to object. But then he nodded.
    Mrs Puddleham beamed, this time at the dark woman too, as though she needed to spread her joy across an audience of more than one. ‘This here’s our son, Sam, what’s up from Melbourne to join us.’
    ‘Aye, and a grand lad he is too,’ said Mr Higgins. He stared at Sam, then at his own son, his expression impossible to read.
    The boy noticed his father’s look. He grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and jerked it towards a shed. It was the flimsiest building Sam had ever seen, just sheets of bark tied to a rough framework with strips of leather.
    The boy glanced round at her resentfully. ‘Didn’t know the Puddlehams had a bleedin’ son.’
    ‘Mmm,’ said Sam. ‘What were you reading?’ she added curiously.
    The boy nudged the wooden door open and pushed the barrow inside. ‘Ye’d not be interested.’
    Sam followed him inside. ‘I might.’
    ‘It’s called
The Great Dialogues of Socrates
.’ The boy pronounced it ‘So-Krates'. ‘Da swapped it for a jar of hooch from this old cove called the Professor,’ he added.
    ‘You mean “Socrates"?’ Sam pronounced it the way Mrs Quant had, back in history class. For a moment the world shivered again, then was still.
    The boy stared at her. The sunlight coming through the shed’s bark walls striped his face black and gold. ‘Ye knows the book?’
    ‘No,’ said Sam honestly. ‘But I know a bit about Socrates. He lived in the world’s first democracy, didn’t he? In ancient Athens.’
    ‘That’s him.’ He looked down at the heap of potatoes, not at her. ‘It’s a funny book. Not like a newspaper, nor the Bible neither. Some of them words is hard to understand.’
    ‘I bet they are,’ said Sam.
    He looked up at her again. Sam could see the relief in his face, as though he’d thought she might laugh at him. ‘There’s this bit in the book,’ his voice was eager now, ‘where they makes this Socrates cove drink a cup o’ poison ‘cause he taught the young people to ask questions, to wonder if what the grown-ups did was right or wrong. Imagine a cove wanting young ‘uns to ask questions! But Socrates said the unexamined life ain’t worth living.’
    The boy bent and threw a half-rotten potato out the shed door with one strong flick of his wrist. ‘Reckon my Da would have handed him the cup. Not one