Wife to Order: An Australian Outback Romance

by Lucy Walker

  Uncle Tam, she said under her breath, you’re a wicked old man, and you’re up to something. But you should have told me.

  ‘You got some decent shoes?’ Tony asked, looking down at Carey’s delicate blue tapered shoes with the high slim heel. ‘I can show you where the foals run in the paddock behind the stable. They’re due to be broke from the mares nowabouts.’

  Carey looked dazedly at her shoes.

  ‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘I haven’t anything. I mean anything except what I’ve got on.’

  She fingered the fine silk of her dress. She glanced at the fashionable little white hat lying on the chair.

  ‘Hannah will lend you something,’ Tony said. ‘Hey, Hannah! You got something to lend Carey to wear. She’s staying.’

  The maid came into the room from the adjoining kitchen.

  ‘She’s what?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m staying,’ said Carey. ‘And I haven’t anything to sleep in.’

  ‘My, oh my!’ said Hannah. ‘Wait till Miss Reddin hears of these goings on. What’s come over Mr. Oliver? Your uncle staying too, miss?’

  Carey shook her head.

  ‘Who is Miss Reddin?’ she asked.

  ‘Mr. Oliver’s sister,’ said Hannah. ‘She won’t want any pretty young lady staying at Two Creeks just now.’ She shook her head from side to side, then began gathering up the tea things. ‘I’ll see Mr. Oliver about what you’re to wear to-night,’ she said.

  Tony nudged Carey.

  ‘Miss Millicent, that’s Mr. Oliver’s sister, is going to marry her girl friend to Mr. Oliver. She brings her out here a lot. That’s what Hannah means. But you’re nice. I shouldn’t mind if I were you.’

  ‘Why should I mind?’ said Carey, looking down at Tony. ‘I don’t even like Mr. Oliver. And I’m not going to stay here any longer than I have to. You might like it, Tony. I don’t.’

  Tony slid off his chair.

  ‘Wait till you see the foals,’ he said. ‘Come on. Oh … I forgot. Those shoes.’

  ‘I can take them off,’ said Carey. ‘Back at home I often went across the paddock barefooted.’

  Oliver Reddin, standing at his study window, looked in amazement at the pair crossing the gravel track and ducking under the rails of the home paddock. Tony looked as he always did, but the girl running beside him, with her hair, full of red lights, flying behind her, wore a blue French silk dress … and had bare feet.

  The anger and astonishment passed from his eyes and in their place was a look of sardonic amusement.

  ‘It will be interesting to hear what Millicent has to say to that,’ he said to himself.

  He walked to his desk, sat down, and drew towards him the bank statement of Carey’s affairs. He lit a cigarette and settled down to the business.

  A little later he rang for Hannah.

  ‘Bring me my dinner on a tray, will you, Hannah?’ he asked when she appeared at the door. ‘I’ve got an all night job here. I don’t want to be disturbed.’

  Chapter Two

  For the next two days Carey, except when with Tony, had been very silent and what Uncle Tam had called ‘docile’. Underneath she wasn’t docile at all. She didn’t understand Oliver Reddin or the way his big luxurious homestead was run. She was amidst alien corn and was still trying to understand what had happened to her. Uncle Tam loved her, she knew. But why had he gone off without a word of farewell? The bad old man was up to something reprehensible again. The thing that worried Carey most was that she wasn’t there to get him out of trouble.

  She had worn her one beautiful silk dress all day yesterday with one of Hannah’s cardigans. At night she had slept in one of Hannah’s long-sleeved nightgowns. Carey hadn’t known there were nightgowns like that outside of books.

  She had heard about shining pink porcelain bowls in one’s own bedroom, with hot and cold taps serving it, and matching pink flannel and face towel and bath towel. And a bathroom next door in the same colour scheme. She’d seen them in magazines. She had never dreamed she would see and use them this side of heaven.

  It would all have been a wonderful adventure if it hadn’t been for Oliver Reddin’s cold and distant presence in the house; and if she had known how long it would last and just how soon Uncle Tam would either come to his senses or have them brought back to him by someone else.

  After the stark brownness and harsh winds of the outback, the station was like a slice of heaven to her astonished eyes. Green grass everywhere! Though Tony did tell her that when summer came the grass would all burn up except where they had the grazing paddocks irrigated, and down by the creeks.

  There were two creeks, too. One was three miles over the hills and one was at the bottom of the home paddock. They had willows growing along them and the leaves on the trees were shooting a pale ethereal green such as Carey had not even dreamed of before. Carey at Wybong had seen three or five wire fences but here the fences were of white painted timber. Confined beyond them were beautiful sleek proud horses, totally different from the wild-looking rough-riding mountain ponies from the outback.

  Inside the homestead, instead of old linoleum-covered floors there was carpeting everywhere. Huge porcelain jars stood in corners and on small tables, loaded with flowers and foliage. In the drawing-room were brass and silver ornaments, plates hanging from the walls like pictures; and china on the mantelshelf and a piano that was as old as it was beautiful and well kept.

  The drawing-room with its low button-padded chairs, its wall mirrors, its tables of bric-a-brac was so beautiful and precious that Carey found herself holding her breath and closing the door gently after her in case a whisper of wind would do some damage there.

  When her trunk arrived Oliver Reddin, face still remote and cold, stalked into her room … something that would never have been permitted outback … and told her to sit down ‘over there’ while Hannah unpacked it. He stood, hands in his pockets, and watched Hannah bring out Carey’s dresses one by one.

  There was the brown cotton one she had made herself; brown so as not to show the dust when the willi-willies blew. There was a grey woollen one she had made three years ago, and which did not quite fit her now, but it had been very comfortable on the frosty nights of mid-winter, sitting before the fire in Uncle Tam’s house. There were her heavy low-heeled shoes, rather worn in the sole. There were her underclothes, carefully and neatly mended, which were very plain and with which she had found nothing wrong until Uncle Tam had told the woman in Myers’s to buy ‘those pinky, lacy frothy things’.

  Carey quietly told herself she would never forgive Oliver Reddin for having seen her humble wardrobe.

  When the last garment was out … a nightgown that had been made from a pair of blue rayon curtains given her by Mrs. Wilson, the storekeeper’s wife … Oliver Reddin looked down at Carey.

  There was nothing any girl could say to a man who had just witnessed the unveiling of her total possessions. Her eyes met his for a minute and then dropped down again to her hands in her lap.

  ‘That will do, Hannah,’ Oliver Reddin said. ‘You may go now.’

  Carey was an outback country girl but she was not so remote from civilisation that she didn’t know that Oliver had done the cruellest thing that any man could do. He had exposed the poverty of her possessions.

  At the moment when the last garment, the nightgown made of curtains, came out and was folded and put on the bed, Carey Fraser grew up ten years.

  Though she looked down at her hands in her lap, her back was straight and her head was high. Only her eyelids dropped to cover her eyes.

  While Hannah went out of the room, and closed the door behind her, Oliver stood in silence, looking at the girl.

  ‘Carey,’ he said at length, very quietly. ‘Whose idea was this? Yours, or Tam Fraser’s?’

  Carey had to protect Uncle Tam, of course. He was such a silly old man, but such a darling. Very exasperating in the fanciful ideas he sometimes got. Heavens only knew how she, Carey, would get him out of this one.


  ‘Mine,’ she said, looking up. ‘I wanted to come to Melbourne. And I wanted a good dress and ‒ and all the other things that go with it.’ She was quite used to telling white lies to save her Uncle Tam from disgrace. She looked at Oliver Reddin steadily out of her clear eyes.

  Oliver moved over to the mantelshelf on the opposite side of the room from Carey. He leaned back against it, his hands still in his pockets.

  ‘When did you know your father had left me executor of your estate?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, a long time ago.’

  Quite clearly she saw now what Uncle Tam had done. Oliver’s questions helped to throw a light. By coming under Oliver Reddin’s roof and patronage she was taking a big step up in the world … so Uncle Tam had thought. She would be a rich man’s protégée.

  Of course he had done it for her! He hadn’t known, poor darling, that all the riches she wished for in the world had been the pleasant friendly smiles in the sun-browned faces of the people outback: the only home she needed, the wood and iron homestead on a ramshackle acreage on the outskirts of Wybong: the only animals the two goats in their own back yard, the two brumbies, caught and broken by herself, and a lame but faithful kelpie dog.

  Now, to save Uncle Tam’s skin again, she had to pretend it had all been her own idea.

  The sooner Mr. Oliver Reddin understood this the better, because the sooner would he send her packing.

  ‘How long ago?’ came the cold, finger-pointing voice. ‘How long ago did you know your father appointed me executor?’

  ‘Well … it was a long time ago …’

  ‘Two years? Five years? Ten years?’

  How long had it been since her father had been well enough to worry about his affairs? If she said ‘Five years’ she ought to be safe. She was sure her father hadn’t bothered about any business affairs for quite as long as that. She would have been thirteen at the time. Old enough to understand.

  ‘Five years,’ she said. ‘Five years, I think.’

  She looked away from his steady interrogating gaze towards the bed on which was spread her slender wardrobe. She winced, then looked quickly back to her hands in her lap.

  She missed the glimmer of a sardonic smile that altered, momentarily, the expression on Oliver Reddin’s face. He knew what Carey evidently did not know, that Reg Fraser, her father, had made his will only eighteen months before his death. There had been a former will that made old Tam Fraser executor. The girl could not have known five years ago that Oliver Reddin, wealthy grazier of Two Creeks, was to be her trustee.

  ‘Where did you say you got those clothes you are wearing?’ he asked. ‘Myers’s, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carey said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Do you remember the name of the saleswoman who helped you?’

  ‘It was ‒ it was a Mrs. Wellman.’

  Oliver crossed over to the bed and sat on it while he lifted the telephone from its receiver on the bedside table and dialled a number. He sat with his back to Carey but she could see his reflection in the wall mirror on the other side of the room. He had crossed his knees and was looking down at the toe of his shoes. He didn’t look so cold or angry with his eyes covered by his lids like that. He looked like a very handsome man, except for his mouth which was too straight and his brow which was too stern.

  Oliver Reddin spoke to two people before he got on to someone called Browning.

  ‘Oliver Reddin of Two Creeks,’ he said. ‘You are carrying my account there. Right? I want you to get hold of a Mrs. Wellman … you know who I mean? … Good. I want a complete skeleton wardrobe for Miss Carey Fraser. Mr. Tam Fraser of Wybong opened an account for her several days ago. I want the usual sets of clothes that are sent out to stations and farms by mail order. Two or three of everything, including a pair of low-heeled shoes that aren’t too plain. Mrs. Wellman will have the measurements and will remember the young lady … Good … At once. Treat the order as urgent, will you? … Yes, send them to Two Creeks and the account to me … Thank you.’

  He put the receiver down with a small bang. Carey stood up.

  ‘Mr. Reddin …’ she began. She made a small gesture of protest.

  He stood up and turned to look at her.

  ‘You’re in my hands now, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’ll do as you’re told.’

  He walked to the door and opened it. He turned.

  ‘By the way, my mother and sister will be here late this afternoon. You’d better keep up that quiet innocent approach of yours. It is as successful as it is effective.’

  He went through the door, and closed it behind him.

  Carey looked lovingly at her old working shoes. To-morrow, she would do what Tony had done … walk across the paddocks until she had walked home. Home was seven hundred miles away but she would find work as she went. It might take her weeks to get there, but get there she would. Until her shoes had come she had been imprisoned by her pretty blue spiky-heeled shoes, for she had not even one penny in her purse.

  What she would say to Uncle Tam when she did get home would take all those weeks of walking to compose!

  Carey did not hear Mrs. Reddin arrive because she was so busy hearing Miss Reddin.

  First there was the autocratic compelling voice in the hall below.

  ‘Hannah! Have the cases taken in, will you? Tell William he may drive the car round to the garage. See that my mother is taken to her room at once, will you? Where is my brother? We’ll take tea in the drawing-room as soon as we have taken some of the travel stains off. Don’t bother to come up with me. I presume my room is in order.’

  Poor Hannah! Carey thought. All those things to do at once. She had an urge to go and help Hannah and another to peep over the banisters to see this grand lady who was issuing orders in a highly cultivated voice that was just a little too loud and a little too authoritative.

  Carey did not go into the big dining-room for dinner that night, not because her nerve had deserted her but because Tony had invited her to dinner with Mrs. Wackett, the wife of the head stableman at Two Creeks. Carey told Hannah but did not tell Oliver Reddin. After to-morrow morning she would never see him again so she did not mind how angry he would be. After all he had made her angry, too. Only she hadn’t been able to show it because she was in his house accepting, unwillingly, the hospitality which he too was giving unwillingly.

  Down at Mrs. Wackett’s little house she had cottage-pie for dinner and pineapple crush as a dessert.

  Mrs. Wackett and Tim Wackett, the stableman, had wanted to know all about Wybong and Carey had told them everything … even about the horses which were no more than brumbies caught when young, broken in and trained by anyone who wanted another mount.

  ‘Cripes,’ Tim Wackett had said. ‘What a country! Can get a horse for nothing. Anyone comes here to buy one of Mr. Reddin’s foals better have the best of five hundred pounds in his pocket.’

  ‘Five hundred pounds?’ echoed Carey.

  ‘Sure. We’ve sold ’em upwards of a thousand. Stud stock we got here. Say, Miss Fraser, your dad used to run good horses over there at Wintall. That fellow who was runnin’ it for him sure took him down a heap. Pity your dad was a sick man.’

  ‘Do you mean that over on my farm we could have good grazing like Mr. Reddin’s got here? Green grass? And we could irrigate the creek?’

  ‘Sure. Oliver Reddin’s always clapping his eyes on that place and wishing it was his. I’ve heard him say many a time he wished he could open up our racing paddock and carry it out over the long paddock at Wintall. But it ’ud cost a fortune right now. There’s bracken all across it. An’ plenty of blackberry, too.’

  ‘But if it was Mr. Reddin’s it would pay him to have it cleared, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Too right. First-class investment. You thinking of selling it to him, miss?’

  Carey did not answer for she was really thinking not of ‘selling’ it to him but of ‘giving’ it to him. That would pay him for that hotel bill and the Myers’s ac
count, not forgetting her own board and lodging for three days.

  Tony had yet another idea.

  ‘Me and you could farm that place, Carey,’ he said. ‘You could bring some of those brumby foals down from Wybong and I could break ’em. Like my dad …’

  Even Carey laughed for she too knew that stud stock meant generations of breeding, and brumby stock had no breeding at all. But the idea brought a light to Tony’s eyes.

  ‘Which would you like most, Tony? To be my horse-breaker, or my manager?’

  ‘Both,’ Tony said promptly.

  ‘All right. You get some schooling so you can keep the account books as well as the stud books … and I’ll make you my manager.’

  ‘Yes …’ said Tony dolefully and kicking the table leg with his boot. ‘That means going away again. I’m not ever going away from home again. Not ever …’

  He looked balefully round at the three pairs of eyes watching him.

  ‘Two Creeks is his home,’ Mrs. Wackett said sadly. ‘It would break his heart to go away.’

  ‘Mr. Reddin would let you come home for holidays, wouldn’t he, Tony?’ Carey asked.

  ‘How would you like to be away from your home?’ Tony asked stonily. Something squeezed at Carey’s heart. Wasn’t she going to run away home herself to-morrow? Tony would have her feelings, only more so because he was younger. When he kept coming back to Two Creeks he was only doing what she would do in the morning. Coming … or in her case, going … home.

  ‘Yes, Tony,’ she said sadly. ‘I think home is best after all.’

  How could she preach to him to-night, and to-morrow know that he would throw her advice to the winds when he found out that she too was quite a hand at running away.

  Up at the homestead, dinner over, Millicent Reddin was sitting in one of the button-backed chairs pouring the coffee for her mother and her brother. She was tall, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty years old. Her yellow hair was dressed high on her head in what she called a ‘Paris roll’ and at the back it showed the nape of a long haughty neck and in front a clear square brow, not unlike her brother Oliver’s brow except that she was as fair as he was dark. She was too proud looking to be good-looking and her impressive appearance was spoilt by her emphatic manner and slightly edgy voice.