Daughter of the Regiment Read Online Free

take Mum over to it, and she’d see it for herself. But something stopped him.
    Maybe it was the laughter. It had been such private laughter, the girl and her parents believing they were alone. He’d eavesdropped and he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone else to eavesdrop as well. Besides, it was his world, that funny world inside the light.
    And suddenly he realised he didn’t want anyone else to share it. Not even Mum and Dad.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘You were right, Mum. It was just a trick of the light. There’s this little hole on the wall and the light shines right through it.’
    ‘I told you it’d be something like that,’ said Mum sympathetically. ‘Come on. It’s hot enough to melt a mountain out here. You’ll be getting heatstroke, just like Uncle Ron did that time down at the coast when we were kids … did I ever tell you about that? Come and have some afternoon tea.’

chapter four
Trying to Make Sense of It
    He dreamed of the girl that night. Cissie, that was her name. Cissie.
    In his dream she was laughing, among the rocks, the creek muttering beyond her, the ripples wrinkling the red gum shadows on the water. Then suddenly the laughter stopped. There was silence, the sort that seemed to echo even though there was no noise, and then the sound of sobbing, sobbing, sobbing …
    Harry woke up shivering. His Doona had slipped sideways in the night. He was cold, that was all. He’d had a nightmare because he was cold.
    Harry pulled the doona up over his shoulders again and twitched the curtain aside. The sky was grey, not black. A cuckoo trilled down the scale like it was practising for an eisteddfod. Arnold Shwarzenfeather would be crowing soon, and then the kookaburras would be gurgling, and the shrike thrush singing and then every other bird around would yell up at the sky.
    There was no way he could get back to sleep. The dream was still too strong.
    That small girl by the creek, crying, crying, crying, all alone.
    But that was silly. Silly. She’d been laughing. Her parents had been with her. She’d been having fun, not unhappy at all. They’d all been picnicking by the creek which was so like his creek …
    Harry sat up, the Doona slipping from his shoulders. Of course!
    It WAS his creek! Cissie’s creek was his creek like it must have been last century perhaps, before the gold miners dredged it and sieved it searching for their gold … the gold miners came in 1852 so it had to be before that. Maybe twenty years before or even more.
    Mrs Easton at school said there’d been waterlilies all along the creek in those days, and giant red gums along the banks, instead of just a few skinny ones on the creek flats. The miners had cut down the red gums to fuel their dredges and the casuarinas had taken their place.
    Hadn’t Mrs Easton said there’d been a garrison here in the early days, even before the farmers came? The soldiers had been stationed down by the river in case the French invaded, in case they sailed up from the sea with their cannons and their flag to claim the land, just as the English had claimed it a few years before … but no French ship ever came.
    Cissie’s father must have been one of the soldiers at the garrison, and her mother and Cissie lived there as well. And that Captain Piper they spoke about, and Sergeant Wilkes … and there would have been more soldiers stationed at the garrison if they were there to keep out the French.
    It would have been a lonely outpost in those days. It took weeks of trekking on horseback from Sydney to get there in the days before roads and cars and planes, unless you had a boat, and how many boats were there back then?
    So, thought Harry, that’s what he was seeing through the hole. This place more than a hundred and fifty years ago. What was the hole then? A hole in time? Could Cissie see him … was there a hole at her end as well? There had to be … but she hadn’t seemed to see it. Maybe she was too upset to see the hole.
    Or