by Barbara Wood
Joanna was anxious to hear from the authorities in South Australia. She was hoping they could tell her something that would shed some light on what had wounded him, for then she might know how to heal him. She thought again of her mother, and wondered if Lady Emily might still be alive today had someone long ago been able to help her face what it was that had damaged her, and coax the pain out of her.
Joanna was looking for other letters in the mail as well.
On the morning after her arrival at Merinda, she had written to the governments of the six colonies into which Australia was divided, requesting information on missionaries named John and Naomi Makepeace; she had also asked that maps of the colonies be sent to her. She had taken the deed to Hugh Westbrook's lawyer in Cameron Town, but all he had been able to tell her was that, until they knew in which colony the land was located, there was no way of finding out where the land was, or if the deed was even legal.
She was also watching for an envelope bearing the postmark of Cambridge, England.
One of the entries in Lady Emily's diary had been written eight years ago, when Joanna had accompanied her mother on a visit to England. Lady Emily had written: "Although Aunt Millicent refuses to speak of my parents, so deep is her grief over losing her sister, I have nonetheless learned a few things from her neighbor across the green, Mrs. Dobson, who knew Millicent and my mother when they were girls.
She mentioned a name—Patrick Lathrop—and she seemed to recall that he had been a good friend of Father's from school. Perhaps if I can locate Mr. Lathrop, I might be able to find out where exactly in Australia I was born, and what my father was doing there."
As far as Joanna knew, her mother had never followed up on Lathrop, but Joanna had thought it a piece of information worth pursuing. Knowing that her grandfather had attended Christ's College, Cambridge, from 1826 to 1829, she had written to the university two months before she left India, giving as her return address General Delivery, Melbourne. And the Melbourne postmaster knew that she was now residing at Merinda.
She was puzzling over the cockatoo feathers she had found, when she saw a sudden movement in the shadow of the shearing shed across the yard.
She realized that it was Sarah, the young Aboriginal girl who worked at the homestead. She was standing very still, staring at Joanna the same way Ezekiel had stared at her by the river two weeks ago. The fourteen-year-old watched her now in the same unsettling way the old man had. Joanna did not think the girl was simply curious, as Hugh had suggested; she had the impression that Sarah was wary of her, was assessing her.
She had caught Sarah spying on her before, at unexpected moments. Joanna would feel that she was being watched, and she would look up to see the girl there. Joanna had tried to talk to her, tried to make friends, but Sarah always turned away. "She speaks English," Hugh had told Joanna when she had asked him about the girl. "Not very good English, but enough to make herself understood. I imagine she's mystified about you. I don't think she's had much contact with white women outside of the Aboriginal Mission, where she grew up."
Joanna thought Sarah pretty, with high cheekbones and large, almond-shaped eyes. She wore her hair long and straight; it was a shiny mahogany brown, as dark as her skin, and she wore ordinary dresses, but no shoes. Why did she seem to be spying? Joanna wondered. Why was there an attitude about Sarah of watching and waiting? Was she responsible for the strange objects Joanna had found on the veranda?
Bill Lovell, the station manager, suddenly appeared across the yard at that moment, with something in his arms. "Hello," he called. "I've brought something for the boy."
Joanna had seen little of Bill in the two weeks since her arrival, but when she did encounter him, he was always friendly. He had the white hair and weathered skin of a man who had spent all his life in the sun; his blue eyes were bleached, as if from having continually squinted over great distances.
When he stepped into the shade of the veranda, he unfolded the burlap sack he was carrying and Joanna saw a pair of tiny brown eyes blinking up at her. They were set in a soft, furry face that had an impossibly big nose, a white fuzzy chin and outlandish ears. She was spellbound; she had never been this close to a koala before.
"I found it upriver, lying on the ground," Bill said. "I'd say it's about eight months old, not quite mature yet. There was a dead female nearby, I assume it was its mother. She had been shot, probably by a hunter using koala bears for target practice. I thought the boy might like him for a pet."
"Adam," Joanna called. "Come and see what Mr. Lovell has brought you." She looked over at the shearing shed and saw that Sarah had gone.
"They're a nuisance, really," Bill said. "As I'm sure you've heard."
"Yes, Mr. Lovell, I have heard!" Everyone's sleep was being disturbed these days by the koalas. It was the mating season, and all through the night the bellowing of the males and the wailing call of the females kept everyone awake. Hunters were encouraged to kill them. "But still," the station manager said, "I couldn't just leave him there for the dingoes."
"Here you go, Adam," Joanna said, as she placed the animal in the boy's arms. "Be very gentle with him, he's only a baby."
"Ko-la!" Adam said with glee.
"No, Adam," Joanna said. "It's ko-ah-la. Can you say koala?"
Adam's eyebrows drew together and the furrow between them deepened. "Koah-la," he said.
"The word koala is Aborigine for 'doesn't drink,'" said Bill. They're not really bears, you know. They're silly creatures, too. All they do is hang in the trees all day, getting drunk on eucalyptus juice. And they were made wrong. Their pouches don't open at the top like a kangaroo's, but at the bottom."
Joanna laughed. "I should think that would be most inefficient for a tree dweller! We'll build a pen for him," she said. "I'll give him water and"—she looked at Bill—"what do koalas eat?"
"Well, they don't drink water. And they only eat the leaves of certain gum trees. But we can manage something."
"Oh, you've hurt your hand."
"A sheep tried to bite me," he said. "It's nothing."
"Let me take care of it for you. Adam, would you please go into the house and fetch my healing kit? And can you bring me a basin of water as well?"
"Please don't trouble yourself, miss," Lovell said, as Joanna peeled away the handkerchief that was tied around his hand. "It'll be all right. Stumpy Larson poured kerosene on it."
Joanna laughed. On her first day at Merinda, she had found a bottle of kerosene in the cabin with a label on it that said, "Just whack it on everything."
"This needs something more, Mr. Lovell," she said.
"Please call me Bill."
"All right, Bill. You must be one of the few men around here who doesn't have a nickname!"
"Australians are fond of nicknames. It's the rare man who doesn't have one."
Adam came back carrying a basin of water and the healing kit. As Joanna washed Lovell's hand with soap and water, and then applied a salve to the bite, the boy stood beside her, taking things out of the box and handing them to her.
Bill watched Joanna wrap the bandage, and then he looked at her bowed head and the glossy brown hair that threw back auburn glints in the sunlight. He reckoned it had been a while since he had given much thought to a woman—not since Mildred died. But he found himself curious about this young girl Hugh had brought home. And he wasn't the only one who was curious about her. Bill would swear he had never seen so many combed heads and freshly shaven faces come out of one sheep station bunkhouse in the morning. And there was that young doctor, David Ramsey, who had come by a few times. He was always on his way somewhere else, and had just dropped by "to see if everything was all right." Bill wondered what the young man's intentions were toward Miss Drury, and was surprised to find himself feeling jealous. What, after all, could the young lady possibly see in an old brumby like himself?
"You certainly have a nice touch, Miss Drury," he said as he flexed his bandaged hand.
"I just wish the ot
her men would let me take care of them. I've tried to help with some of the injuries around here but they run away!"
"The men don't like to show weakness in front of a woman."
"Well, it's silly to risk bleeding to death until Doc Fuller or Dr. Ramsey can be summoned! Please keep the wound clean, Mr. Lovell. Animal bites can be tricky." She handed the leftover gauze to Adam and showed him how to roll it up and put it away. "How is the wool clip, Bill?" she said. "I haven't seen Mr. Westbrook to ask."
"I'm afraid it isn't good. Lice is bad for the sheep, makes the wool break apart easily. Hugh's down at the washing right now, and he doesn't look too happy."
Joanna looked toward the trees clustered at the river's edge, and a poem came to her mind:
Amid life's hurley, hubble-bubble, Two things stand alone:
Compassion in another's trouble, Courage in your own.
Joanna had found it written in an awkward hand on the inside cover of a book she had come across in the cabin. The author's signature was beneath it: "Hugh Westbrook, aged seventeen."
She had discovered Hugh's books on her first morning at Merinda. They stood in a small collection on a wooden shelf—old, well-thumbed volumes of poetry, history, farming and fiction. There were works by Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, and even the Brontes. Every one of them appeared to have been read many times; some had underlinings and pencil notes in the margins. In the book titled Sheep Farming and Wool Growing, Joanna had found a collection of old and yellowed newspaper and magazine clippings, articles with such headings as "The Breeding of Subterranean Clover," and "The Application of Scientific Principles in Wool Production." The dictionary was very worn, as were the world atlas and a history of the Australian colonies.
As she had gone through them, Joanna had come to learn something more about the man who owned Merinda.
"I never went to school," Hugh had told her when they had spent the night at Emu Creek. "We never stayed in one place long enough. My father and I had to keep on the go if we were going to find work. It was an old hermit woodsman, up near Toowoomba, who taught me my first letters."
Hugh's modest collection of books had told Joanna the history of that boy's road toward self-education. In Jane Eyre, for example, nearly every page had words underlined, clearly to be looked up in the dictionary. Two dates were written inside the cover—July 10, 1856, and June 30, 1857—which Joanna had assumed indicated the dates on which he started and ended this book. Hugh had been fifteen years old and it had taken him nearly a year. But A Christmas Carol had taken him only from August 1860 to October of the same year; he had been nineteen then, and only a few words were underlined—clear evidence of his progress. And while the notes written in the margins of the history book, first opened in 1858, were full of misspelled words, the notes written in the sheep-management handbook were nearly perfect, with better penmanship. The date in that book was September 1867—four years ago.
As Joanna had handled the books, she had a strong sense of seeing Hugh Westbrook's life unfold before her. She saw the illiterate boy struggling to print letters facing the right way—many a "b" had an erasure and the ghost of a backward "b" underneath it; then the teenager, hungry for knowledge, his head bent as he pored over the world atlas—a town on the map of Queensland had been circled and a star drawn next to it; Joanna wondered what had happened there that made it special to him. And finally she had seen the man, confident and sure of himself, assimilating the knowledge of "scientific" farmers in far away England, printed in the humble pages of outback newspapers.
And then there were the poems written on scraps of paper, some in pencil, some in ink, some with words scratched out, a few whole and flawless as if the entire piece had flowed in perfection. Hugh had written ballads about Australia's outlaws, known as bushrangers: "'I'll fight, but not surrender,' said the wild colonial boy." And poems about shearers: "They work hard and they drink hard, and they go to Hell at last ..." And about the outback, where "Rugged old she-oaks sigh in the bend/O'er the lily-strewn pools,/Where the green ridges end." And there was the ballad of "The Shearer's Widow" which Joanna had discovered was not about a woman whose husband had died, but whose husband had "hit the wallaby track" in search of shearing jobs—gone for half the year, returning home penniless.
"I'm sorry Mr. Westbrook is having problems," Joanna said now.
"In all the years I've known Hugh—and that's a fair number—I've never seen him look so discouraged."
After Bill left, Joanna showed Adam how to clean the instruments in the healing kit, and put them away. "You must be sure to put everything back where it was," she said, "and that way it will be there when you need it."
They both looked up when they heard a voice call from the yard. "Finish putting the things away," Joanna said to Adam, and she walked out of the veranda into the sunlight.
"Hello," she called when she saw Constable Johnson come riding up. This was his fourth visit in the past two weeks, and when he said, "I knew I would be passing by Merinda, Miss Drury, so I thought I would bring your mail for you," she was not surprised, because he had said the same thing the previous times.
"Thank you, Mr. Johnson," she said. "That's very kind of you." Joanna noticed that he was wearing his uniform for the first time, and she wondered if he was going somewhere on an official errand, as he was rarely seen in the stiff black tunic with shiny brass buttons. When he swung down from his horse, she noticed that his boots were highly polished, and the badge of office on the brim of his hat flashed back the sunlight. She also detected the fragrances of cologne and hair oil.
"It's a lovely spring day, isn't it, Miss Drury," the young policeman said as he handed her the mail.
"Indeed it is, Mr. Johnson," she said, and she quickly looked through the envelopes. Her attention was caught by two return addresses: one was from South Australia, the other from Cambridge University in England.
Adam came out at that point; Constable Johnson turned and said, "Hello, son," and the boy started to scream.
Joanna tried not to drive too quickly; she didn't want to alarm Adam. After she had calmed him down a bit, holding him and keeping him from hurting himself, she had suggested they go for a ride in the wagon. She had realized she needed to get him away from the yard, and from Constable Johnson.
Now they were riding through beautiful countryside, following a small, noisy flock of ewes and lambs. Joanna looked at the boy. His eyes were still swollen from crying, but his attention was caught up with the business of nature all around him. When she had asked him what had frightened him, he had closed up like a flower.
Finally they came to a bend in the river where they were met by an extraordinary sight.
A monstrous machine resembling a locomotive engine stood on the bank, belching black smoke and churning great wheels, which in turn were connected by leather belts to smaller wheels attached to what looked like a large, square water tank. Steam spewed from the top of the tank, while boiling water poured from conduits at its base. As Joanna brought the wagon to a halt, she stared in amazement at the bleating sheep being pushed into the river and goaded toward the water tank by men with sticks. The animals were then plunged into a steaming pool, where men standing inside tarred barrels vigorously scrubbed them; and when the sheep came out on the other side, they were soaking wet but beautifully white and clean.
She saw Hugh standing at the river's edge, his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face.
"Hello!" she called.
He turned, and a vision flashed in his mind of how she had looked on that first night, when she had run out of the cabin after Sarah had startled her, and he had caught her briefly in his arms. Despite his efforts to forget it, the memory stayed vividly in his mind: the nightgown, the shiny hair flowing over her shoulders and breasts. How soft she had felt, how warm in his arms.
And suddenly he was remembering something Bill Lovell had once said years ago, when Bill had had too much to drink. "Now take the woman I used to be married to. She never di
d like me to touch her. Was always grateful when I did it fast and got it over with. Women are like that. They're not like men. It repulses them. Can't imagine why God made the two sexes so different. How does He expect the human race to keep going?"
And then another voice, that of Phoebe Ferguson, who ran the establishment down in St. Kilda, whispered in his mind, "Most of my customers, if you can believe it, Mr. Westbrook, are married men. I don't get many single gents like yourself. Husbands come here to get what their wives won't give them. High-class ladies, in particular, don't enjoy the bedroom."
Hugh thought of Pauline, and the way she had responded to his kiss two weeks ago. He knew there would be no reluctance with her. And then he found himself wondering about Joanna.
"Miss Drury," he said. "What a pleasant surprise." He held out his hand and helped her down from the wagon. And then he saw that, although she was smiling, there was worry in her eyes. "Is everything all right?" he said.
"Adam had a terrible fright a short while ago."
"Oh?" Hugh looked at Adam, who was staring at the chaotic scene in the river. "What happened?"
She described the sudden hysterical fit. "It was worse than the one he had on the pier. And I think it was caused by the sight of Constable Johnson."
"How can that be? Adam has seen Johnson before."
"Yes, but not in his uniform. And this came today," she reached into the pocket of her skirt and drew out the letter from the South Australia authorities who had taken charge of Adam. She had managed to read it while driving out to the river; the rest of her mail she had left at the cabin. "They say that a gold digger found Adam. He told the authorities that he had gone to the farmhouse hoping for a handout, and had heard a child screaming. He saw the child there with a dead woman, and so he went into the nearby town and got a policeman to help. When they went into the farmhouse, they found Adam alone with his mother. Apparently she had been dead for quite a while."