Dorothy Eden (38 page)

‘About separating Kit and Rosie? That’s what it amounts to, you know. It’s probable best at present. They’re pretty young.’

‘And later?’

‘Anyone belonging to you is always welcome at Yarrabee. Does that answer you? Witch woman.’

Molly sighed in his arms.

‘You’re not getting tired of me?’

‘Now what are you wanting? Compliments? I never thought you were vain.’ He kissed her, holding her close.

‘I still love you, Molly. I love two women, in different ways. Does that make me a wicked fellow? Or just unique?’

‘Just lucky, perhaps,’ Molly murmured, with a gurgle of laughter. Then she gave a faint shiver. ‘When I’m with the mistress I feel guilty. I admire her so much. Ever since that first night at that nasty inn when she was so scared.’

‘Scared? Eugenia? Not of me?’

‘Of that escaped convict. Of you, too. She was very young, and a bride. I hope you were kind to her.’ Molly suddenly rolled over, gripping him hard. ‘All the same, I can’t bear to think of it. I shut my thoughts to it. The nights you go to her.’

‘I
am
kind to her,’ Gilbert said, detaching himself from Molly’s grip. ‘Knowing you has made me much more understanding, if that eases your mind. I treat her like porcelain. I should have from the start, I suppose. You’ve taught me that. No two women could be less alike than you and her. But she’s the kind of wife I wanted, Molly. It’s some vanity in me.’

‘You’re a good man!’ Molly said in a stifled voice. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you you’re not.’

Gilbert snatched her to him violently.

‘But what would I have done without you—are you happy? You never ask for anything. You just wait. You’re always here.’

‘And always will be. Don’t you fret, love.’

Of course she waited, of course she was always there. These hours were her heaven. No one could have heaven all the time. No one would be foolish enough to spoil it by making impossible demands. She had suffered too much in her life to risk losing this unexpected beneficence.

But she was human enough to want more for her daughter.

A
S THE LEAVES BEGAN
to fall that autumn, there was nobody to sweep them up. Peabody had died. He was found in his bed in his hut, his face turned up to the ceiling, his wide open eyes lightless. No pain showed on his face. He had gone as easily as a leaf falling off a tree.

No one had ever known much about him. He had romanced about the great gardens he had worked in in England, but that might have been all fantasy. He had never mentioned a family, or even what his first name was.

All that could be put on his tombstone was
Peabody
—
a gardener.

Eugenia thought he would like that as much as Mrs Ashburton would have liked her long panegyric. She missed the old man grievously. His spare crooked figure pottering about was as much a part of the garden as her white roses. The garden was his true memorial. He had lived long enough to see the honeysuckle grow to the tops of the verandah posts, for the rhododendrons to shut out the view of bare dusty paddocks, as they had been meant to do, and for the lilacs and laburnums to flower as prolifically as tropical plants. The herbaceous border was flourishing. Clumps of irises were reflected in the lily pool. Flocks of brilliantly coloured finches frolicked in the bird bath and were Lucy’s especial delight. Frangipani smelled sweetly, flame trees made permanent rags of colour in the background.

But the roses had been Peabody’s pride. He had used to stump up and down beside the trellises declaring that there were none better in the whole of New South Wales.

‘When you catch the scent of them tea roses you’ll remember me, my lady,’ he had been saying lately. That had been his only hint of an awareness of approaching death.

There was no one to take his place. Eugenia tentatively suggested Jem McDougal and was promptly refused.

‘I’ve been training that lad for ten years to be a vigneron. Turn him into a gardener! Nonsense!’

Although he enjoyed the growing fame of Yarrabee’s garden, Gilbert would let nothing interfere with his vineyard.

‘Find a good lad in Parramatta. It shouldn’t be difficult.’

There was really no one to replace Peabody, although Eugenia found a respectable inarticulate young man who had arrived on a recent emigrant ship. His name was Obadiah White, and he hadn’t been at Yarrabee a week before he was making sheeps’ eyes at Emmy. Emmy began to find an astonishing number of errands which took her through the garden. However, that was nothing to worry about. It had been Eugenia’s suggestion that as the convicts departed (and now there were only two long-term men left), their huts should be refurbished and made into decent living quarters for married couples or the single men who wished to stay at Yarrabee permanently, such as Tom Sloan and Jem McDougal.

If Emmy’s blushes meant impending matrimony she could simply move from her room in the servants’ wing to a comfortable hut. Some of the convicts had made small gardens and neat paths round their living quarters. Time had softened everything at Yarrabee. Now the buildings belonged to their background.

And it seemed half a century since that dreadful night when Gilbert had come in with his shirt spotted with human blood.

Kit was in his last year at school. Adelaide, Eugenia regretfully admitted in her letters to Sarah, was a hoyden. Her father spoiled her. He liked her better riding astride her pony than side-saddle in a ladylike way. The next thing, Eugenia said, he would be letting her wear trousers! And he encouraged her to walk up and down the terraces of vines with him, or to join him in the cellar when he was casking or bottling wine. She would come in with her frock stained with red grape juice, her face sunburned and freckled because she would let her hat fall back on her neck as soon as she was out of sight of the house.

Let her be, Gilbert said. She was the new kind of woman that Australia was going to produce. Healthy, outdoor, capable. What nonsense to sit indoors all morning sewing or sketching or struggling with her French grammar when the weather was so good. Besides, one didn’t need to be a man to learn viticulture. Eugenia would be surprised if she saw how skilful Adelaide was at drawing off wine from casks into bottles. She and Jem had bottled the entire season’s sauterne and now it was ready for marketing.

Eugenia was horrified.

‘Whatever do you want? An Amazon for a daughter? I won’t allow it. Adelaide must attend to her studies. Miss Higgins says her French is deplorable, and she has never yet had the patience to read a book from cover to cover. I can endorse that her music leaves a great deal to be desired. She may indeed know a great deal about viticulture, but how is that going to help her in fashionable drawing-rooms?’

Gilbert looked at Eugenia wonderingly.

‘Do you know, sometimes I wonder if you have ever actually left England.’

‘There is no need to criticize me because I mention Adelaide’s shortcomings. She’s my daughter as well as yours, and I insist on her having a decent cultured upbringing. I won’t allow her to be an ignorant hoyden. Anyway, it isn’t right that she should be alone with Jem so much.’

‘Good heavens, she’s only a child.’

‘She’s nearly thirteen years old, and precocious. After the summer holidays I intend making enquiries about placing her at the Misses Chisholms’ College of Arts, and learning to be a young lady. A thing I am afraid she will never become while she stays at Yarrabee.’

‘Very well,’ said Gilbert, after a pause. ‘I have no objection. But after vintage. I’ve promised her she can help this year.’

‘Gilbert! With all those rough people!’

Gilbert became impatient, as he always did nowadays when Eugenia attempted to have a sensible discussion with him.

‘You’re too fastidious! Once it was those terrible convicts. Now it’s that rough riff-raff from Parramatta.’

‘Once you wanted me to be fastidious,’ Eugenia pointed out.

‘Yes, I did. And I still want you to be. It’s right for you.’ It never worried Gilbert that he contradicted himself. ‘But Adelaide’s an Australian. That’s different.’

‘I hope you won’t have these ideas about Lucy, too.’

‘No, no, you have my permission to give Lucy all the ladylike education you want to. But try to make her less scared of things. She won’t even go near that bumbling old pony that wouldn’t hurt a fly. I can’t have a daughter who can’t ride.’

‘Does it matter? She can stay with me in the house. She sketches beautifully, and she has a very pretty singing voice. She already dances very gracefully, and can sew better than I can. Do those things mean that she isn’t suitable for life in this country?’

‘I told you—you can do what you like with Lucy. But leave Adelaide to me.’

Lucy was delighted when Adelaide went to school. Now she had her beloved Mamma all to herself. After the morning lessons with Miss Higgins, she and Mamma could spend the long afternoons together. If it was too hot to go outdoors they sat in the relatively cool drawing-room sewing, or making pictures of dried flowers, and listening to Erasmus screeching on the verandah in reply to the thousand swooping shrieking galahs in the gum trees. When it was cooler they would walk in the garden, Lucy clinging to her mother’s arm so as to share the shade of the parasol. Her skin burned painfully in the sun. She was supremely happy that she had inherited her mother’s delicacy.

Adelaide had departed with her boxes, to join the thirty or so pupils at the Misses Chisholms’ establishment. The brochure said that the Misses Chisholm specialized in singing and music, languages (French, German, Italian and Latin), drawing, enamel or china painting, oil painting in figures, landscapes or flowers, and water-colours on paper, satin, silk or wood, and dancing.

It was to be hoped that Adelaide would now apply herself to her studies and prove that she could become a cultured young lady. This was the end of galloping about the countryside astride Poacher, or mingling among all those noisy rough people at vintage.

Kit wrote,

Dear Addie,

So you are being packed off, too. Sometimes I think Mamma’s ideas for us are too lofty altogether. I had a letter from Rosie. She is now governess to a family at Darling Downs as I expect you know. There are four children. She says she doesn’t mind it and she doesn’t miss old Higgie and the schoolroom, but she always misses Yarrabee. She isn’t coming back for a while because she says she wouldn’t be welcome. I know that Mamma has been a bit hard on her, but I don’t know why she has always thought her own mother doesn’t care about her. She says when she was only four years old she was put to sleep in a room by herself and she knew then that her mother didn’t want her. This is all a bit deep for me. I have always thought Mrs Jarvis was a pretty good sort, but I expect Yarrabee could manage without her even if Mamma and Papa think it couldn’t. Don’t let anyone else see this letter. Mamma would be furious if she knew Rosie wrote to me.

Adelaide was writing her own private letters.

Dear Jem,

I am writing to you because I don’t trust anyone else to look after Poacher. Will you see that he is exercised enough and rubbed down properly? I want your solemn promise to this. And can you keep an absolute secret? The girls here don’t believe I am allowed to drink wine, and have never tasted it themselves. I wonder if you could smuggle me a bottle of sauterne (too sweet, ugh! But these girls are quite ignorant about wine and wouldn’t like a dry to begin with.) If you let me know when you are going to be in Parramatta, and could put a bottle under the bottlebrush just inside the gate, I could get it when we have recreation in the afternoon.
Don’t seal the cork
or I won’t be able to get it out. We will have a midnight party.
Please burn this letter after reading it.

Your friend, Adelaide Massingham.

To Adelaide’s disappointment, however, when the bottle was hidden under the bush at the gates, it contained not wine but a note written in Jem’s large awkward script.

Dear Miss Adelaide,

Not a drop of wine in this bottle, ha ha! Do you want to get expelled and me lose my job? When you are two years older I will oblige. I gave Poacher a good gallop this morning. The vines on the south terrace have got some blight. Your father is worried, but we are cutting them down and burning them to stop it spreading. I miss you about.

Your friend, Jem.

The letter almost made up for the hoax of the empty bottle. Adelaide had been boasting to her two closest friends. She would have to climb down now. She didn’t enjoy that prospect. But—
I miss you about…
Dear silly Jem. And if he thought she was staying in this prim-and-proper school, with the devastatingly tedious drawing and piano lessons, for two years he was mistaken.

It seemed, however, that she might have to, for Eugenia was delighted with the improvement in Adelaide’s deportment and manners. Within three months her hoydenish daughter was showing signs of being a lady. She held herself straighter ‘How can I not, Mamma, when we have to sit for hours with a board tied to our backs?’, spoke more politely, and was beginning to take an interest in clothes. Her best friend, Jane Thompson, had a crinoline and six starched petticoats. Couldn’t Adelaide have one, also? And Jane had been allowed to put her hair up for a party. Adelaide was literally dying of longing for the day when she could stop wearing hair ribbons and those two thick tiresome plaits down her back.

But the lessons were infinitely boring and she had no gift for music or painting or needlework. The Misses Chisholm said they had never seen such clumsy fingers.

‘It’s Lucy who should be at school, not me,’ Adelaide sighed. ‘She would come first in everything.’

‘That’s because she takes pains with her work,’ Eugenia said. ‘But she isn’t strong enough to go to school, I’m afraid.’

‘She’d be teacher’s pet if she did go,’ Adelaide said under her breath, and got a critical look from her mother.

‘Do speak up, Adelaide. No one enjoys muttering. And if you’re going out, pray put on a hat. You’ve only been home for a week and already I can see freckles on your nose. Where are you going, anyway?’