Lyrebird Hill (13 page)

‘What did she think of my father?’

Aunt gave a soft sigh. ‘Yungara’s dark eyes never left Michael’s face. Not even for a moment. Besotted, they were, the two of them. I knew then that there would be trouble.’

‘Trouble?’

My aunt blinked suddenly. Tears gleamed in her eyes. ‘Yungara,’ she said softly. ‘It feels good to speak her name again at last.’

I too wanted to say the name. It sat on my tongue like honey with the promise of sweetness that would fill me if I said it aloud; but I hesitated. Who had she been, this woman whose name had the power to quicken my blood, whose memory caused my aunt’s tears to flow so freely? This woman who had once captured my father’s heart.

My mouth was suddenly dry. Reaching for the lemon water, I drained the glass, and placed it back on the nightstand. Then I waited for my aunt to resume her story.

And waited.

Silence breathed around us.

I touched a pale hand. ‘Aunt, are you awake?’

Waxy eyelids fluttered. My aunt’s eyes opened. She had drifted somewhere. Not sleep . . . memory, perhaps. When she finally registered that I’d spoken, she blinked back at me, confused.

‘Florence?’

I knew I should let her sleep. Her face was grey, her breathing shallow. But the name of Jindera’s sister had entered my bloodstream, beating through my veins like a moth.

‘You were saying there was trouble. Between my father and . . .’
Yungara
.

Aunt Ida nodded, and closed her eyes.

Her hand lay on the coverlet, and I took her fingers in mine. They were deathly pale against the soft tan of my own hand, and I found myself wondering about her story.

Aunt Ida often said that after my mother died, Fa Fa had suffered greatly. Mama had left us a week before her fortieth birthday; her fair hair showed no signs of grey, and her pale skin was as smooth and clear as a girl’s. She had been frail for years, but her death was a horrible shock, and it had broken my father’s heart.

It seemed impossible that he had once loved anyone else.

I stood up, intending to go downstairs and fetch Millie. Instead, I found myself standing by the window in the dying light. A whirlpool of unfamiliar feelings churned in me. I felt cold, but my skin was hot. Time seemed to unravel around me. The fabric of my life began to fray, develop holes. Through those holes I caught glimpses of a past I had not, until now, considered.

‘Aunt?’

The corner of her eye twitched, but she was beyond hearing. Kissing her damp brow, I stole across the room and went out, closing the door gently behind me. Tomorrow, when she woke, I would ask her to continue her story. Now, it was time for her to sleep.

Aunt Ida did not wake again.

We buried her a few days later at the Presbyterian cemetery in Armidale. My father stood by the grave while the minister read from the Psalms. Black half-moons darkened Fa Fa’s eyes and his flesh looked sunken, the bones retreating beneath.

Afterwards, he withdrew from us, locking himself in his study, only taking meals when Millie hammered on his door and insisted he eat. As far as I knew, he didn’t sleep. I grew fearful that he would quickly sicken and die, just as Aunt Ida had. I began tiptoeing past his study at intervals during the night, listening at his door. I heard the shuffle of paper, the clink of glass, the gurgle of brandy being poured. Countless times a night I lifted my knuckles to rap on the door and go in, to ask him the questions that were burning a hole in my heart.

Who was this woman you loved? Who was she to me?

But the nights passed, and my courage failed; my questions went unanswered. My wedding day sped nearer, but still my father did not emerge from his study. Finally, on the eve of our departure for Armidale, I decided to confront him.

It was nearing midnight. Silence had settled over the house. I knocked softly on the door of my father’s study. When there came no call to enter, I turned the knob and looked inside.

Fa Fa was slumped at his desk, in dim lamplight, his head in his hands. A brandy bottle sat before him, and an empty glass.

He looked so crushed beneath the weight of sorrow that my courage left me. I was about to quietly slip away, when he looked up and saw me, beckoned me in.

‘How are you faring?’ he asked.

My eyes were red and sore, and my lips bitten; I knew the question was his way of acknowledging my grief, so I simply said, ‘I miss her.’

Retrieving a second glass from the sideboard, Fa Fa dashed in a measure of brandy and pushed it across the desk. I had never shared a drink with him, and I wondered if he had guessed the nature of my visit. Fa Fa swallowed his drink in a gulp, while I sipped mine. It burned my gullet, and the smell made my eyes water, but its invigorating effect was immediate. I took a breath.

‘Aunt Ida told me something before she died. She said you once knew Jindera’s sister . . . She said . . .’ I hesitated, expecting Fa Fa to startle at my words, to jump to his feet and splutter a string of denials. So, when he simply nodded in a resigned way, my courage grew. ‘She said you loved her.’

My father smiled sadly. ‘Poor Ida. Years ago I made her promise to keep my secret close to her heart. I had hoped the passage of years would provide me the pluck to tell you myself, but of course time only buried the truth deeper.’

The gravity of his words added weight to my suspicion. ‘My skin is darker than yours, Fa Fa. And Mama was fair. I have brown eyes, while yours are blue, as were Mama’s. You used to say that I resembled your Spanish grandmother, but I can’t help wondering why Aunt Ida would insist I hear your story . . . unless it had direct relevance to me.’

Fa Fa’s mouth moved as if chewing over his thoughts. ‘Ida was right, my sparrow. I once loved a young Aboriginal woman.’ He circled his fingers around his brandy glass, but did not pick it up. ‘You are very like her, you know.’

I sat immobile, listening to the clock mark out its minutes. Each tick was a shard of my old life, the life I had taken for granted, falling away, casting me adrift in a present that was no longer mine. After a while, I looked at my father; even he seemed a stranger to me in that moment, a stranger with a familiar face
but whose heart and mind were suddenly mysterious. I gripped my elbows and bent forward over my lap.

‘There are things I need to know,’ I whispered.

My father’s brow tightened, but he nodded for me to continue.

I dragged the air into my throat, and in a strained voice said, ‘My mother was Yungara.’

‘Yes.’

‘Jindera is my aunt. And Mee Mee is . . .’ My words stuck fast in my throat as I remembered her brown eyes wet with tears, and the searching way she had looked at me, as if
willing
me to know her, willing me to understand.

‘She is your grandmother,’ Fa Fa said.

My fingers trembled. I knotted them in my lap, forcing myself to calm. ‘All these years I’ve been going to see Jindera, feeling drawn to the camp and never knowing why. And now, when I’m on the brink of leaving, I learn they are my kinfolk. I would . . .’ My throat was suddenly tight and I couldn’t finish. I sipped the brandy until my glass was empty, and said hastily, ‘I would have liked to speak of it to Jindera.’

‘And you will, my Brenna. When next you return to us for a visit.’

I tensed. Rather than reassure me, his sentiment was like an ill-played note, all wrong to my ears. As Whitby’s wife, I might not return to Lyrebird Hill for a year or more; it seemed an eternity.

I went to the window and stared into the darkness.

The encampment was an hour’s walk, up hills and over rocky outcrops, along the narrow river trail. Treacherous enough in daylight, but deadly in the dark. And yet I wanted to run through the night and find my aunt and grandmother, to embrace them with the open-heartedness of a family member, rather than with the shy awkwardness of a friend. Why hadn’t I guessed before now? Why hadn’t anyone told me?

I heard my father pour more brandy. The clink of glass on glass, the gurgle of liquid; the dry click of his throat as he
swallowed. And in that moment, a chasm opened between us; it was only the merest breach, a fracture in the foundation of our bond, a hairline crack that might have gone unnoticed – but it was done now, that whisper of damage, and I did not know how it might ever be repaired.

I went back to my chair and sat stiffly. ‘What was my real mother like?’

My father picked up his pipe and prodded the contents of the bowl, then abandoned it. He scratched the stubble on his jaw, clearly uncomfortable. Finally he sighed.

‘Yungara . . .’ A pause. ‘Yungara was a proud girl with the courage of a warrior. And yet she could be tender and shy. She was strikingly beautiful, too – the first time I saw her, I was spellbound. But as I came to know her, I saw her gentleness with the elders, and the soft way she teased her sister, and her games with the little girls as she taught them which berries to gather, or how to weave fish traps, or cut fine lengths of hide to make twine. Her kind, clever spirit touched my soul. I wanted to marry her. I begged her to come away with me, to a place far from the judgemental eyes of the world, where we could live peacefully.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘She wouldn’t leave her clan. She insisted that her people and her land protected her. If we went to another place, she believed she would sicken and die.’

I recalled Jindera’s plea that I stay where I belonged, and not go across the water to another land.
Danger there
, she had said.
Bad spirits
.

‘But she died anyway.’

Fa Fa’s lips tightened over his teeth. ‘Eighteen years have passed since I lost her. In all that time, not a day goes by – not an hour, not even a minute – that I don’t think of her. She haunts me. Every night I carry her memory into sleep. And every day I feel her presence beside me. But it brings no
comfort. What use is a ghost, when I yearn to hold a woman of flesh and blood?’

The longing in his words touched me, and I ached for him; yet his admittance seemed somehow cruel, selfish. ‘But Yungara was still alive when you married Mama?’

For a long time my father sat silently. I feared I’d lost him, that he would withdraw again and refuse to say more. When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet and pink. ‘I told Florence everything before we were married. About Yungara, and about you. I gave her the choice to back out of the marriage. You see, she was in love with someone else, too. I never found out who he was, just that Florence had cared deeply for him. But her father had disliked the young man’s family, and so influenced Florence to marry me instead.’

He slumped and rubbed his eyes. ‘Florence and I were friends above all else, and we found sanctuary in our friendship. I suppose we thought we could make our marriage work. I vowed to be a good husband and avoid the encampment, to spare her feelings. We were wed, and took our honeymoon in London.’

Fa Fa paused, and stared across the room to the window. It was a black rectangle, and I wondered what he saw there. Mama’s soft kind face, or Yungara’s proud striking beauty; or perhaps he saw me in the darkness of his mind’s eye – me as a baby, wriggling and laughing in my mother’s tawny arms.

I pinched my lips to stop them trembling. ‘But you never forgot—’
Yungara
, I’d meant to say, but her name caught in my throat. ‘You never forgot my natural mother.’

‘No.’

Clenching my hands in my lap, I breathed away my apprehension and asked, ‘How did she die?’

‘Men came one night,’ he said quietly, choosing his words with care. ‘They rode along the riverbank, armed with swords and hatchets and rifles. They rounded up the clan and herded
them into a gully. Some boys escaped into the water, concealing themselves against the banks. Others fled into the trees. Millie was among them, a frightened ten-year-old who only survived because her elderly aunt drew the killers away from her, sacrificing herself to protect Millie’s hiding place. The rest of the clan, nearly fifty in all, were cut down in cold blood.’

I sat very still. A vacuum had opened around me and for a few beats of my heart I could not breathe. Aunt Ida had told me that Yungara died – but now, to learn that she had been violently murdered, plunged me into a shadowland of fear and despair.

‘How did Jindera get away?’

‘Jindera and her mother, Yargul—’ Fa Fa gestured at me. ‘The woman you know as Mee Mee, your grandmother – well, they took you and crawled into a small cave, barely more than a fissure beneath an overhanging boulder. That cavity saved your lives, but at a high price.

‘From their vantage point, they heard everything. The screams and pleas of their families, the dreadful noises of slaughter. Yargul and Jindera clung together, pressing you between their bodies to keep you from crying. Finally, came the silence.’

My father hung his head. For a long time he did not speak. His shoulders began to shake, and when he finally looked back at me, his eyes were dull and wet.

‘When dawn climbed the treetops and fell into the valley, Jindera and Yargul smelled smoke. Later, after the men had gone, they emerged to find that the killers had built a pyre and thrown the bodies of their victims on it to burn.’