The Artist’s Secret

by Sonya Heaney

  Peter became separated from both Farrer and Stanford early on, and found himself plonked beside a woman more than twice his age and around half his height who stood engulfed up to her knees, with her skirts hitched and knotted in a way that displayed more than he’d warrant she’d ever shown the town before.

  A man he didn’t recognise unceremoniously passed Peter a sack of potatoes, struggling under the weight of it, with the clear indication he was to pass it on down the haphazard and growing line of people.

  Despite the circumstances he hesitated before handing it on to the woman. It was heavy, and she was small, and he didn’t want to be responsible for incapacitating one of Barracks Flat’s upstanding elderly citizens. Had she not been one of the ladies fawning all over Robert in the churchyard that afternoon weeks earlier?

  Where Peter hesitated, the woman did not. With a scoff squarely directed his way, she grabbed the thing out of his hands and passed it on.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured, and then passed her the next one without question.

  And so it went on. Anyone who’d had the idea of sheltering themselves from the elements soon gave up. The endless wind gusts came from the side, flipping umbrellas inside-out, rendering them useless. Even those hiding beneath awnings were blasted with unavoidable sheets of water.

  After a solid few minutes of hauling and passing there was a lull as a gap in the chain opened up.

  ‘Hurry up!’ A man yelled as he scurried past.

  Peter hadn’t any idea who the order was directed at. The sense of urgency had infected people to the point they were scurrying around like a group of hyperactive chickens.

  ‘Get a bloody move on!’

  And, he decided as common sense began to fray, if they weren’t careful soon the lot of them would achieve no more than a flock of poultry could manage in the same conditions. It was only then, as people scrambled and swore and the sense of community harmony began to frazzle into disharmony tinged with desperation, that the old woman beside him spoke.

  ‘Have you ever been out to Bungendore?’

  He looked down into her shrewd brown eyes.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She tutted at the rising water and hitched her skirts an inch higher. Peter averted his eyes.

  ‘Bungendore,’ she repeated, saying it more slowly. Peter bent at the waist to listen more closely, straining to make the foreign name sound familiar in his mind. It was no use.

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  She gave him the sort of frank perusal people in cities usually avoided.

  ‘You might want to visit there sometime soon. I’m Miss Hall,’ she continued before he could ask her why in the world he’d want to do that.

  She held out a hand for him and he shook it before he could think to do otherwise. Her grip was firmer than he’d expected, but then he’d not shaken hands with a woman ever before in his life.

  After tutting again, this time at his reticence, she inspected him closely for a second time, grey hair plastered across her forehead and down the sides of her cheeks, and then swatted at the hand of a man of middle years who’d come over, intent on removing her from the chain of workers.

  ‘I’m doing a better job than most of this lot. Leave me be.’

  With the man successfully disposed of she looked back at Peter and beamed. It was mildly disturbing.

  ‘Bungendore,’ she said for a third time. ‘Ask me about it another day, when I’m not up to my knees in this mess.’

  Bungendore. Bungendore. Whatever she was trying to tell him, it was another new name to commit to memory.

  They both turned at the impatient sound of a sturdy-looking woman who’d appeared beside them, a woman who practically threw a bag their way before running off, head shaking at their slow reaction.

  ‘Don’t know what their rush is, honestly. The houses on the other side are already a lost cause, and the Magee mill here’s as good as gone. We could stop and chat much longer and it wouldn’t make much more difference than the praying those ladies are doing up at St John’s right now.’

  To illustrate her point, cries rang out then as part of the river walk dropped into the water. It was a shocking sight.

  ‘I’ve been here since the days of the Clarke brothers and Hall. Villainy everywhere back then. Sometimes it was a bother to share my name with a criminal, but it’s a good name. One I’m proud of. He was a relation of mine, you know.’

  The woman was jumping all over the place. It was hard to decide if she was dotty or earnest, or a combination of both.

  ‘Who was your relation?’

  ‘Ben Hall, I mean. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  She handed him another bag that had appeared from the opposite direction. It was only half-filled, and poorly tied in the hurry, and Peter used too much force to haul it down the line, its lightness taking him by surprise.

  ‘Hm. That’s a pity.’ It was a statement made matter-of-factly, but—as she adjusted her stance, her footing no longer all that steady—it wasn’t possible to ignore the fact she’d started to droop with all the exertion.

  Peter was about to suggest she go and dry herself and try her hand at prayer with the other ladies, and had opened his mouth to say just that, when he saw Elizabeth.

  It couldn’t be. He’d left her installed in a mostly dry homestead. Hadn’t there been a silent understanding that she’d try to keep herself safe and sensible for the remainder of the day? It was the least she could do after that performance with the ladder the night before.

  He squinted. He tried his best to focus on turning the delicate, refined features of the face of the woman halfway up Monaro Street into those of a stranger.

  It didn’t work.

  ‘Damn …’ he breathed. Incredulous, not wanting to believe it, he took a few steps in her direction. The longer he watched her, the more familiar she looked.

  It was Elizabeth Farrer, of that much he was certain, even though her form kept disappearing behind the rising mist. She stumbled along without paying much attention to her surrounds, attention fixed determinedly on the growing barricade behind him. The bag she dragged was surely too heavy for her, but she didn’t once slow her pace.

  ‘Damn,’ he said again, and then he was off jogging, wondering how and when she’d got herself out from the estate.

  For the love of God, could she at least once in her life live up to his expectations of a proper English lady and sit around the house being dainty and appropriate? He reached her at the same time she passed the bag on to the first man in the chain, and then he followed her when she spun around and hurried back up off the street.

  ‘Miss Farrer?’ he called, but she was too focused on her self-imposed task to hear.

  Peter increased his pace and raised his voice.

  ‘Elizabeth! What in God’s name are you doing?’

  ***

  Elizabeth started at the roar of a too-familiar man’s voice behind her.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  She continued onwards, wishing she might have been able to help a little longer before being caught. She’d done nothing wrong, she reminded herself. The town needed as much help as it could get.

  However, when she turned to face the incredulous man bellowing from behind her she found a Peter Rowe unlike she’d ever seen before. Stormy and stern and—for once—not entirely put together. His jacket was long gone and his sleeves were pushed up, the fabric sticking to his skin. The colours of his waistcoat had deepened in the rain.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked in a slightly more reasonable voice, like she’d not heard him the first time, and she struggled to form an appropriate explanation.

  It wasn’t an especially good time for an argument. It took a lot of courage to bend to one of the remaining hessian sacks and begin shovelling again—having a grumbly ogre hovering over her, glowering with disapproval was a bit distracting.

  After arriving in Barracks Flat she’d
almost immediately become separated from Alice, and she hadn’t seen Robert nor John since she arrived. It didn’t matter; speed, not camaraderie, was the only thing they needed right then, because—as Alice had said—the flooding was worse than they’d ever seen before.

  Nearby several men attacked the dirt with shovels, creating a ditch and guaranteeing the street would be rendered useless to traffic once the storm passed. It was a scene that would have caused outrage all around town on any other day, but there were so few hessian bags left, and they were desperate. A road could be fixed faster than a town rebuilt.

  ‘I’m helping,’ she told Peter. ‘Short of watching the buckets fill at Endmoor, there wasn’t anything useful left to do there.’ How could she not help? This was her home as surely as it was anybody else’s.

  ‘You’re helping,’ Peter echoed, but instead of scolding her he bent to take hold of the edges of the bag, holding it open for her to scoop the earth into. There’d been a trowel around somewhere a few minutes ago, but it had disappeared somewhere, and so she continued with her bare hands.

  ‘Here,’ he said, sounding unhappy but resigned. ‘You hold it, and I’ll scoop.’

  ‘No. My hands are filthy already.’ And there really wasn’t time for a debate.

  And so he watched her work, radiating a frustration that was oddly comforting. Elizabeth paused once to give him a companionable nudge with her elbow—it was the cleanest part of her right then.

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Rowe. If it wasn’t raining quite so much I could almost say I was enjoying myself.’

  He grunted. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be amenable to going inside one of the shops and supervising from there?’

  ‘Ask me again in half an hour, when I’m sodden all the way through.’ She suspected her petticoat was still dry enough. ‘For the time being the answer is definitely no.’

  Not much more was said for the long, precious minutes it took to fill first one bag and then another, and then a third. Peter made a few more grumbling sounds about her hands being ruined, but she continued with her work, scooping and packing until there were no more available bags.

  ‘Carry those two down, and I’ll drag the last one.’

  He was gone before she finished fumbling with the string to tie the tops.

  Inspired by his efficiency, and hopelessly optimistic, she took off, realised she hadn’t half his strength, and then instead grabbed her own makeshift sandbag—earthbag, she supposed—by the top and dragged it beside her, only crashing into two people on her way.

  By the time she reached the other end and handed her sack over to a gentleman she knew by sight but not name, she found Peter off to one side of the street, engaged in a debate with a boy of nine or ten years old.

  Chapter 17

  ‘Me dad’s got a bundle of money in there.’

  The boy, with more carrot-coloured hair than any person could surely require in a lifetime, pointed exactly where Peter dreaded he would: to the slowly collapsing gristmill directly ahead.

  There were now two things Peter hadn’t expected to come across in town that day. The first had been Elizabeth. And the second, after he hefted the two bags onto the growing makeshift fortress, was a financial crisis.

  He searched hopelessly for the father in question, and then—resigned—studied the mill. The current was steadily eating away at everything in its path.

  ‘Is there anybody in there?’ Elizabeth asked as she drew up beside them. She released her grasp on the earth-filled sack as a couple of men came to relieve her of it, her eyes fixed on the collapsing building.

  The boy shrugged. ‘Don’t think so. Maybe I oughta climb back in there and see if—’

  ‘No,’ she said at the same time Peter did. He reached out and caught the boy’s arm before he could trot off to do as he’d suggested. The kid twisted, freeing himself.

  ‘Are you absolutely certain about the money?’ It would be just his luck the kid was sending him to a watery end for nothing more than an overactive imagination.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  Peter briefly wished he’d chosen to spend the day watching buckets fill at Endmoor.

  ‘All right. Then wait here. Please.’

  ‘But I could—’

  ‘No,’ Peter said another time, cutting off the boy’s protest, and then closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Stay here, and stay back from the water. Please. You too, Miss Farrer. Please.’

  He started off, but stopped when she called after him.

  ‘Is it safe?’ A ridiculous but understandable question. They both knew it wasn’t.

  He did her the honour of not lying, and instead stepped back close for another moment, eyes focused on hers.

  ‘The structure looks sturdy enough at the moment. I’ll be as speedy as I can.’

  He might have brushed his hand against hers then, or perhaps he only imagined the contact.

  ‘For the love of God, Elizabeth, whatever you do, don’t come climbing in after me.’

  ‘I’ll try my best. Don’t drown.’ It seemed an important caveat, even if it had Peter rolling his eyes.

  ***

  With her boots toeing the edge of the water alongside the boy’s, Elizabeth curled her hands into fists as Peter’s large form disappeared into the mill. Irritable with worry, she noticed not a single other soul offered their assistance.

  The crowd had to keep retreating as the river seeped out in every direction, but Elizabeth held fast as long as she could, until the water bumped against the tips of her boots, and then even after, when her toes were covered by the encroaching sludge. A few people hovered, watching. They’d done about as much as they could—all that was left to do now was hope the sun made an appearance soon.

  The boy fidgeted, and she distractedly recalled he was one of the Magee children. The hair was a giveaway. His father’s business was—quite literally—going under. Elizabeth tried not to imagine what was happening inside that listing structure.

  What was taking so long?

  ‘It’s got worse,’ the child announced, but even when Elizabeth gave in and edged back a few feet she watched the damaged mill the entire time. Was it only her imagination or was it tilting to the left more than it had a minute earlier? She worried over each creak and groan around her, her head filled with visions of the entire building sinking away.

  The boy, still fidgeting, drifted off to share his story with people who’d only then stumbled across the unfolding drama. Elizabeth looked around for Alice but there were too many people about, some still helping, some simply waiting to watch the destruction progress. Her sister-in-law wasn’t always the easiest person to find in a crowd.

  Wrapping her arms around herself, she watched the building Peter had disappeared into. She was almost silly enough to believe something dreadful would happen if she looked away. It was why she nearly jumped up in the air when a voice spoke from somewhere in the vicinity of her shoulder.

  ‘I’d say someone up there in the sky is pretty cranky with us today.’

  ‘Miss Hall.’ She’d not noticed the woman’s approach. Elizabeth tore her attention from the mill just long enough to acknowledge the other woman, and strove for a rational tone. ‘Wouldn’t you be happier out of the rain?’

  ‘’Course I would. But nothing much’ll get done if we’re all cowering in the church like that lot of Auxiliary ladies.’ She nodded at the gristmill. ‘Looks like the Magees are in a spot of trouble there.’

  Elizabeth hugged herself tighter. ‘That’s one way to describe the situation.’

  Something within the building snapped, and her imagination threw up a hundred different possibilities of what was happening inside, each one far worse than the one before.

  She dug her fingers into her arms hard enough to hurt.

  ‘The floods’ve been bad in the past, but at this rate I doubt my family’s graves will survive this time. They were already halfway into the river, and that was when the ground was hard, not mud. I hear it’s even worse
out west than here in town.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ The worry that had niggled at her all day began to blossom into something worse.

  Miss Hall shrugged. ‘People. Glad I was out there to pay respects at Christmas. My Ben and the others buried out there’ll be floating halfway down the Murrumbidgee by the end of the day.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  The older woman gestured at a small horde of people moving in from the opposite end of the settlement.

  ‘If they’re coming in from the south, it means the road up the other way is all but gone.’

  Elizabeth pressed a hand to her stomach. Miss Hall was right. Scanning the swelling crowd, she searched anxious faces, lingering on the children, looking, looking …

  Mrs McCoy was nowhere to be seen. Nor were her children.

  ‘Have you seen Mr McCoy?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Harry McCoy? My brother’s stockman?’

  The woman peered up at Elizabeth through spiky eyelashes. A droplet landed—and stayed—on the tip of her nose.

  ‘Who?’ she asked again.

  Of all the times for the woman to go dotty …

  A shout came from the direction of the collapsing gristmill, and Elizabeth started towards it without thinking. In her distraction she hadn’t noticed the appalling new lean the nearest wall had taken on. Good God, that was the part of the building Peter had to climb back out of.

  Where was he?

  ‘I think I should—’ she took another step, and Miss Hall’s strong fingers grabbed her in a tight grip.

  ‘I’m thinking you really shouldn’t.’

  She would have argued the point, but it was that moment a very irate man began blustering in the direction of anyone who would listen.

  ***

  It was impossible.

  It didn’t take long to ascertain that all the crucial parts of the mill were already inundated, and that the unimportant parts would soon follow. If there had been a small fortune stashed in the building—on that point, Peter was still doubtful—it wasn’t retrievable anymore.