The Road to Gundagai (36 page)

‘You bought Laurence’s shoes,’ said Blue.

‘Of course. They’re the best.’

‘It’s all beautiful,’ said Mah. ‘I … I’ve never owned anything new before.’

‘Not even knickers?’ The words were out before Blue could pull them back. Surely people didn’t wear second-hand knickers?

‘Made them myself out of second-hand petticoats ever since I was six. Third- or fourth-hand maybe. Velvet,’ breathed Mah, stroking a cloche hat.

Blue thought of her wardrobe of new clothes burned in the fire. She was glad Miss Matilda had put Mah in the bedroom next to hers, and not in one of the servants’ rooms, though she suspected that in this house, as at her old home, the servants’ rooms were comfortable too. But which side of the green baize servants’ door you ate and slept on still mattered.

Miss Matilda watched them, a strange expression on her face. ‘I remember when a new dress was the most wonderful thing in the universe. All I had were darned frocks of my mother’s with the hems taken up. Then my great-aunt gave me a new dress — neither of us knew the relationship then; we thought she was simply a friend of another aunt — my mother’s sister, the other side of the family. White and lace that dress was. Every wool cheque after that I bought myself something pretty. My mother loved pretty things too.’

And now you’re enjoying watching us feel the same shock of pleasure, thought Blue.

Miss Matilda ran her finger along a V of lace, the only decoration on a long-waisted pale yellow dress. ‘I still like new clothes. Frivolous, of course, but what is life without a dash of frivolity? Men have cricket. Totally useless, time consuming and they adore it. I’ve never understood why a woman doing a man’s job has to wear old moleskins and a shirt. Pretty things make people happy.’

She grinned again. Suddenly Blue could see her as the girl with her first new dress. ‘Life would be a lot more interesting if men wore lace and velvet, as they did in Queen Elizabeth’s day. But I can’t get Tommy to agree.’

She stood up. ‘And none of this is getting the accounts done. Make free with the house, though you will have to get past Nurse Blamey to visit Madame. We are all bullied a bit by Nurse Blamey,’ she added wryly. ‘But we couldn’t have got through the last five months without her. There’s a good library downstairs — have you read any of Miss Sayers’s work? Or perhaps you shouldn’t,’ as Blue shook her head. ‘Perhaps murder mysteries aren’t quite what you should be reading now. The Jeeves series perhaps … I’ll look it out for you.’ Her look became serious. ‘No one will hurt you here, I promise,’ she said quietly.

‘You can’t be expected to look after us forever,’ said Blue. But she didn’t want to plan a future yet, even one with money. It was hard enough to take in the changes of the last few days.

Miss Matilda seemed to read her thoughts. ‘I think both of you need a holiday,’ she said. ‘Wait till your Mr Cummins arrives and we can talk about things then. Till then …’ She shrugged. ‘Read, go for walks, swim in the river — though ask me about swimming first. The water can come up unexpectedly in weather like this. Do either of you ride?’

Mah shook her head.

‘I used to,’ said Blue. She shrugged. ‘No way I could now.’

Miss Matilda looked at her speculatively. ‘Nice girls used to ride side-saddle when I was a girl. I wasn’t a nice girl, but there’s still a side-saddle in the stable.’ She smiled. ‘You might like to pack a picnic and go out with Joseph next weekend.’

‘Not me,’ said Mah. ‘Horses are too big.’

‘Sheba’s bigger,’ said Blue.

‘Elephants don’t gallop.’

Blue grinned. She wondered what Joseph would say about a picnic on an elephant?

She looked at herself in the mirror. A young woman looked back — a pretty young woman, with fashionably short hair curling in a way that didn’t make the new red growth look so strange. A blue linen dress that left her brown arms bare, matching blue shoes with small rosettes, and her own silver bracelet.

Mah grinned at her in the mirror, a different Mah too, in a deep red dress that looked perfect with her black hair.

‘We look beautiful,’ whispered Mah.

Blue wondered if Joseph would think so too.

Chapter 31

They telephoned the sergeant after breakfast the next morning. Blue felt guilty eating scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes when Ebenezer and Ephraim were in gaol. It was still impossible to think of them by any other names. She picked up the telephone receiver gingerly. She’d never made a phone call before. They’d had a telephone at home, but none of her friends had ever needed to telephone her.

‘Hello?’ she said tentatively to the operator. That was what you were supposed to say, wasn’t it? Not good morning? ‘Could you put me through to the police station please?’

‘Miss Laurence, isn’t it?’ The operator was a woman, sounding middle-aged. ‘I saw you at the circus. Right good acts they were, especially that trapeze. My heart was in my mouth, and no mistake. Putting you through now.’

‘Hello. Gibber’s Creek Police Station. Sergeant Patterson speaking.’

Blue held the receiver out so Mah could hear too. ‘This is Bluebell Laurence speaking.’

‘Ah, Miss Laurence. You’ll be wanting to speak to the sisters. I’m afraid they’re not here.’

‘What?!’ Had they already been taken to prison in Sydney?

‘My wife took them down to the Stores to get some proper clothes.’ She could almost hear his smile. ‘Don’t worry. They’re nice old ducks. Got them staying in our spare bedroom, not in the gaol. Should get a reply today about that husband of theirs.’

Old ducks, thought Blue. Ebenezer the dignified ringmaster and Ephraim with his strength and solidity were now ‘old ducks’. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll let you know as soon as there’s any news. I was going to ring you today anyway. The police in Melbourne have questioned your aunts and their servant.’

Blue felt the memory of nausea grip her stomach. ‘Have they arrested them?’

‘No. They deny having harmed you in any way. The police searched the house, but there was nothing that contained arsenic, not even weed killer. But of course a long time has passed since you were with them. The house where you stayed with them has now been rented by another family. The police searched there too. Nothing.’

‘But Mah heard my aunts talking about how I was going to die of arsenic poisoning!’

‘It’s her word against theirs, Miss Laurence …’

A servant’s word against that of respectable spinsters, thought Blue.

‘Have the police spoken to my Uncle Herbert? Herbert Laurence.’

‘Miss Matilda gave us his name. Yes, the police have spoken to him. He stated that he had grown … concerned … about your health and absence from Melbourne. But that is all he could tell us.’

Poor ineffectual Uncle Herbert, she thought. He probably felt guilty that he hadn’t protected her, that she’d had to escape herself. He would have done his best, perhaps, if Madame hadn’t rescued her first. But she wondered how good his ‘best’ might have been.

‘You didn’t hear your aunts speak about arsenic yourself?’

‘No. But I felt so ill, worse every day. Then I began to get better as soon as I joined the circus. Someone was poisoning me! They were the only people I saw.’

‘You’re forgetting the servants. Miss Ethel Stevens and your friend Miss Malloy.’

‘Ethel’s been with my aunts as long as I can remember. She wouldn’t do anything unless they told her to.’

She heard a quiet cough on the other end of the line. ‘The police in Melbourne are inclined to agree with you. Your aunts, however, state that they suspected that Miss Malloy may have been …’

Mah grabbed the receiver. ‘Now you listen here. If you think I’d ever have hurt Blue, you can think again. I got her out of there as fast as I could.’

‘But you didn’t inform the police.’ Blue could just hear the sergeant’s tinny voice from the receiver.

‘You’re taking their word for it now! You’d have taken their word for it back then!’

‘Miss Malloy, I did not say that either I or the police in Melbourne are taking their word for anything. Did you at any time see your employers or their servant put anything suspicious in Miss Laurence’s food?’

Mah hesitated. ‘No.’

‘And yet you were in and out of the kitchen all the time.’

‘Not always. They knew I’d be out of the kitchen when I was helping Blue wash in the mornings and evenings, and when Ethel made me eat my meals out on the back steps. They had plenty of chances to poison Blue’s food when I wasn’t there.’

‘They say that you too could have added anything to Miss Laurence’s food when you took it up to her.’

‘Could have. Didn’t. You’ve got rocks in your head if you think I did.’ Mah trembled in anger.

‘Did you ever taste anything, leftovers perhaps, that made you ill?’

‘No. Now you go and nick the miserable so-and-sos who really did try to kill her.’

A pause. ‘If you’d just get off your high horse for a minute, you could see we are trying. Could you put me back onto Miss Laurence please?’

Mah handed the receiver back to Blue. She held it so tight her knuckles showed white. ‘Mah saved my life. Twice. Leave her alone.’

‘The questions had to be asked.’

‘Then go back and ask my aunts again! They can’t just go free!’

‘The police are still investigating, Miss Laurence. I’m sorry. It’s all that we can do.’

And suddenly she did see. All she had — all the police had — was a ball of knotted wool, made up of things people said and the one indisputable fact of the arsenic in her hair. ‘I … I see. Thank you. But leave Mah alone.’ Blue put down the receiver. She looked at Mah. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, isn’t your fault. Anyway, I’m used to it.’

‘That makes it worse.’

Mah hugged her, hard. ‘They can’t hurt you here. That’s what really matters. You’re safe here, and you’re going to stay safe.’

‘Yes.’ My brain believes, but my body doesn’t, thought Blue, trying to stop herself shivering. ‘At least Ebenezer and Ephraim are all right. For now.’

Mah nodded. ‘Mrs Mutton asked if I’d like to go into town with her to order the groceries. Mr McAlpine’s driving us. You want to come? Get our minds off it all.’

Blue shook her head. Suddenly she didn’t want to go anywhere, not by car or truck or even elephant.

‘You’re sure you’ll be all right on your own?’

‘Yes.’ Blue managed to make her voice firm.

She went up to Madame’s room once more, peering in and receiving a ‘No change, Miss Laurence’ from Nurse Blamey, then sat quietly in her own room, waiting till she felt calmer, trying not to think of Aunt Lilac and Aunt Daisy, still free to eat scones at the teashop, while they blamed Mah for their crime. At last she walked downstairs, then down the hall towards the library.

It was strange how good it felt to live in a house again, to walk from room to room, with lights that turned on when you clicked a switch, and a bathroom with a big mahogany-faced bath and an indoor toilet on its own mahogany throne. The bathroom she and Mah shared had monkeys on the wallpaper. Blue wondered if it had been added for Miss Matilda’s sons, who were at boarding school.

She wondered again what had happened to her old friends, back in Melbourne. But of course her last year there friendships had been nibbled at by the Depression, her closest friend forced to move to Sydney when her father found a job there; another vanished, her family possibly staying with relatives, unwilling to contact the old friends of their affluent days.

For the first time Blue wondered if the circus had passed near Anne’s new home in Sydney. But Anne’s family would have been horrified to find what looked like a barefoot boy on their doorstep. Nor were they likely to believe in a tale of murdering aunts.

She hadn’t realised how much she had simply immersed herself in her new world of the circus, casting off the old like a skin she’d worn out. Strangely, Drinkwater seemed like the destination she had been heading for the whole time, the circus the necessary vehicle to get her here. Of course she couldn’t abuse the Thompsons’ hospitality for too long. But the idea of a cottage by the river, with Mah and Sheba, seemed more and more attractive.

There was joy in looking out the wide window when she woke up, seeing the same broad sweep of paddocks each morning, the movement of the river, the quartz gleam of the mountains beyond, knowing that those who lived here had a commitment to the place that lasted for generations and not just a night or two.

She had spent her early life perched on the edge of the continent, in a city made up of European houses and gardens. She had travelled across this land, but mostly in darkness, seeing only the circus and small vistas beyond. Now, at last, she was glimpsing the soul of her country. Sitting with Mah as Sheba washed herself in the river was enough to bring about a strange and deep contentment. You didn’t need to travel to see new things — not when you began to look.

The land here changed each day — the grass not just greener, but spreading its fingers more thickly on the newly wet soil. Dozens of small wildflowers had sprung up, with tiny purple orchid-like heads or pink blooms no bigger than a fingernail clipping. Even the river grew each day, from its former silver trail to a powerful but smooth wide brown flow, and now and then a surge and swirl of brown and white.

My country, she thought, as she opened the door to the library. She’d already visited it last night. Most of the library seemed to have been ordered for its matching leather covers, but there were shelves of new books too or, rather, books bought in the past twenty or thirty years:
The Girl’s Own Annual
s,
The Boy’s Own Annual
s, the Dorothy Sayers books Miss Matilda had spoken of and many more besides. She plucked out a random book that looked interesting,
Black Foot’s Last Stand
, and limped over to one of the deep leather armchairs to read it, then stopped when she saw someone was already there.

Mr Thompson stood up shakily as she approached, steadying himself with one hand on his armchair. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Laurence. I didn’t see you come in. I must have dozed off.’