by Barbara Wood
The male let go of Button and turned on Beth. He lunged at her; but she fell back and his jaws snapped on air. Button went for him, heedless of the other dingo savaging his flank.
Beth dropped the stick and stared as Button, now covered with blood, his flesh torn, his fur matted, fought blindly, unable even to see his attackers.
Clapping her hands over her ears, Beth spun around and ran.
Joanna sat for a long time, staring at the last words her grandfather had written. She was filled with a sense of premonition, a dark and heavy foreboding, as she thought of a young Englishman, cut off from the world and laws he knew, trying to maintain his grip on reality, believing that he was losing his wife to mysteries that were beyond his understanding. Was that what had brought the poison-song upon her family—the breaking of a very sacred taboo, a man spying upon women's ritual? Or was there something more? What had three-year-old Emily witnessed? What terrible maelstrom had swept her up when her father's crime was discovered?
And what, indeed, had the women done inside the mountain?
Joanna looked up. She realized that the woods were suddenly alive with the screeches and cries of birds that were normally silent at night. She heard the frantic faark of crows, and even the high-pitched laugh of a kookaburra. Something was wrong. Something was happening.
And then she thought: Beth!
Beth plunged through the trees, pushing branches and brush out of her way. She flew through the woods, her heart pounding. She realized that the homestead was in the other direction, behind her—but the dingoes were behind her, too. She ran blindly, in mindless terror, into the darkness, tears burning her eyes. She fell, picked herself up and raced deeper into the woods.
Finally she stopped, her chest heaving, and listened. There were no sounds now, just silence. Even the birds had stopped their noise.
And then she heard the soft patter of paws running steadily through the growth.
She felt them drawing closer and began to run again. She heard the snapping of jaws, she collided with a tree, and scrambled up without thinking. Hungry eyes glinted up at her.
Something sharp clamped down on her ankle, and she screamed.
Joanna flew out of the house and down the path toward the woods. She ran into Sarah and Adam, who were in their nightclothes, trying to determine from which direction they had heard the scream.
And then they heard another scream. "That way!" Adam said.
They ran down the path and plunged into the trees.
They came upon something in the grass. It was one of Beth's slippers. Joanna looked around in the darkness. "Beth?" she called. "Where are you?"
She turned in a circle, and then her eyes fell upon something that made her freeze. She ran to it. "My God," she said. It was Button's savaged, bloody body.
"Beth!" Sarah and Adam called.
"Beth!" Joanna cried.
They heard another scream, then another.
Beth, screaming ...
Joanna flew through the trees, knocking branches out of her way, unaware of the stones and twigs that cut her legs and face. "Oh God," she sobbed. "Please. No." Sarah and Adam ran behind Joanna, dashing headlong into the darkness, flailing their arms, their nightclothes snagging on bushes. "Beth!" they called out. "We're coming!"
And then suddenly they heard another sound—a strange whining, a whistle through the air. They heard a sharp thwack and a yelp.
"Over there!" Adam said. "It came from over there!"
In the next instant they saw a dingo flash by, torn and bloody, and immediately behind it ran Ezekiel, his arm lifted, holding a boomerang.
They found Beth halfway up a tree, screaming hysterically, her legs covered in blood, a dead dingo lying at her feet, one of Ezekiel's boomerangs lodged in its neck.
"Mama!" Beth screamed. "Mama, Mama!"
Joanna reached for her daughter and held the desperately crying child in her arms. Joanna turned and ran back through the trees, Sarah and Adam following, with Beth screaming for Button, her legs streaming with blood.
The kitchen door crashed open and Hugh came running in. "Joanna!" he shouted.
He found her in the hallway, just closing the door to Beth's room. "How is she?" he said.
"She'll be all right," Joanna said, wearily pushing a strand of hair away from her face. "She suffered some bad bites, but they'll heal. Thank God her legs weren't broken. But she's had a terrible shock, Hugh. I don't know how she'll get over it."
"Ezekiel came and told me. I got here as quickly as I could. Should I go in and say something to her?"
"I've given her something to make her sleep. Hugh, Ezekiel saved Beth's life. I believe he may have been watching her. That dingo tooth he gave her ... it's as if he knew ..."
Now Beth is marked, too, Joanna thought. The legacy of Naomi Makepeace has been laid upon her. Joanna thought of her mother, dead at forty from an illness that did not really exist. Did such a fate loom over Joanna and Beth, and possibly Beth's daughters? Would it never end?
"We have to find it, Hugh," she said. "Whatever is causing this, we have to find it and stop it. Before it's too late."
PART FOUR
1885-1886
TWENTY-FOUR
I
T WAS NIGHT IN THE OUTBACK, WITH A HINT OF DISTANT ridges behind the silhouettes of the eucalypts; and the stars were in the thousands, scattered across the sky. A fire burned golden in the heart of the darkness—a campfire, around which weary men slouched, their faces fixed patiently upon the steaming billycan. The silence was as vast as the sky and the horizon, which one could not see, but the outback spoke all the same, in the lonesome wail of a dingo, the crackle and hiss of the fire. Suddenly, a voice came through the darkness, strong and loud:
"They were cruel days and trying days,
And hard old days as well,
When we shouldered our swags and set out on the track
That we knew would take us to Hell."
The voice went on to tell of the Great Outback, with its dancing kangaroo and stalking blackfella, of huts built of sapling and bark, and of a girl named Ruth, buried somewhere in the Never Never, "with a babe asleep in her arms." While the voice spoke, the men around the campfire went about their tasks, laying out bedrolls, unsaddling horses, lighting pipes and cigarettes, the silence and the stars hanging over them, "cold and honest and clean." They moved like shadows "enacting a familiar play, tired and stooped, broken and broke, but trusting the night to bring the promise of a better day." At the end of it, the fire went out, and the men settled down, "under blankets that were old friends," and the voice said at last, "But for all our pains, and all our curses, we would have those hard old days again."
The stage went dark and the theater seemed for a moment to hang in time and space. Then the lights came on, and a whole new scene dazzled the eyes. Now it was daytime and there was a hut with smoke spiraling out of its chimney, and fields of golden wheat that seemed to stretch for miles beneath a blue sky. A woman toiled in the yard beside the hut, and the voice said, "How wondrous to think all those rough bush tasks one woman's hands could do ..."
When the ballad of "Hannah's Heart" ended, the homely scene was replaced by a flat red vista out of which the Ayers Rock monolith rose fiery in the sunset, and the unseen narrator recited the famous "The Dreaming: For Joanna."
The scenery continued to change onstage as each poem was read, creating a parade of landscapes and seascapes drawn from the face of Australia. There were few people in the audience who did not see something familiar in at least one of them, for although many who occupied the seats of the Melbourne Music Hall on this night two weeks before Christmas were city dwellers, they were reminded nonetheless of childhoods in the bush, or tales told by their elders. The ballads spoke to their hearts of a way of life that was vanishing, scenes remembered from times long past were being recreated on stage in rich detail, from the twinkling of the desert stars and the laugh of the kookaburra to the crack of the bullocky's whip and the soun
d of the wind blowing through the mulga.
Joanna and Hugh watched the show from box seats. With them were twelve-year-old Beth, wearing a long white lace dress and flowers in her hair, Sarah, in an emerald evening gown, and eighteen-year-old Adam in black tie. Sharing the theater box with them were Frank and Ivy Downs. They had come to Melbourne to attend the opening night performance of Living Tales from the Outback, an imaginative staging of the collection of ballads that had been published three years ago in a book titled Poems by an Outback Son. Hugh had invited Ivy Downs to paint color illustrations to accompany them, depicting the pine trees of the Snowy Mountains, "where the dark green gum trees touch the bright blue bowl of the sky," and the desert so large and clear that "a man can shade his eyes and see into tomorrow." The book had been such a success in the Australian colonies that Hugh's most popular ballad, "The Swagman," had been set to music. It was sung in schoolrooms and pubs, on the track and around campfires. The collection was being widely received all over the British Empire, and people everywhere were reading about the convict whose "sins were written before he was born," and the "shearing tracks that were shortcuts to death."
A barn dance was the next setting, with shearers and sheilas flying around the stage in a lively polka while the audience clapped their hands in time to the music and the narrator could barely be heard reciting "Cut Out Time." And when the stage became the scene of a rodeo, and the audience laughed and howled at the antics of "Lachlan Pete" as he chased after a spirited calf, the noise was so deafening that one could hardly hear the speaker. Frank leaned forward and said to Hugh, "You're giving them a show for their money all right, Hugh. There's nothing ruder and noisier on the face of the earth than a satisfied Australian audience!"
The stage went dark for the last time—on the silhouette of an old drover on his horse—and the voice, fading away, said, "For this is the life, the droving life," and the curtain came down.
Joanna held her breath. The theater was silent. And then the applause began, slowly at first, but rising as the newly installed electric chandeliers came brilliantly to life overhead. A man came out onto the stage, recognized by everyone as Richard Hawthorne, one of Melbourne's best-loved actors. It had been his familiar baritone they had heard reading the ballads. He bowed twice, then held his hand up toward Hugh, and all eyes turned to the theater box. One by one people stood, until the entire audience was on its feet, and their applause filled the music hall.
"They're treating you like some sort of hero, Hugh," Frank Downs said later, as they waited on the sidewalk in front of the theater for their carriage. "By God, but you've shown the world that we're not just a bunch of backwater colonists."
"Give credit to your wife, too, Frank. It was her paintings that inspired the show."
"You both deserve credit," Joanna said. The sidewalk was crowded with ladies in evening gowns and gentlemen in opera capes and top hats. It had been a special night for Melburnians. For once, the entertainment they had come to see was not the work of a Frenchman or an Italian or even an Englishman—a reality that, being such a young race of people, they had become resigned to—but rather it was the product of their own Australian-born Hugh Westbrook. Many came up to him to offer congratulations.
"Stupendous show, Hugh," John Reed said, pumping Hugh's arm. "By heavens but it brought tears to my eyes. I may have been born in England, but at heart I'm Australian."
"Why don't you and Maude join us for dinner, John? We've reserved a private dining room at the hotel."
"Thanks for the invitation, Hugh, but we've made some other arrangements, I'm afraid."
Pauline, who had come to the performance with Judd, held out her hand and said, "It was a beautiful evening, Hugh. You should feel proud."
"Are you coming back to the hotel with us?" he asked. "We're going to open as many bottles of champagne as the King George has to offer."
"I'm a little tired, and I have to catch the early train back to Kilmarnock." She took Joanna's hand and said, "My congratulations to you both."
Ian Hamilton was there as well, and Angus McCloud with young Declan. They praised Hugh for the show and for his ballads, which, Harold Ormsby declared, were certain to be treasured by Australians for decades to come.
Louisa Hamilton and her family came by, and while they congratulated Hugh, Joanna noticed that Athena, Louisa's seventeen-year-old daughter, gave Adam a significant look. "Hello, Adam," she said, smiling at him from beneath sable lashes. Joanna had discovered that, at almost nineteen, Adam seemed to have no end of young ladies hoping to catch his eye. He was a handsome youth, whose scholarly ways and seriousness seemed, for some reason, to awaken passion in young female hearts.
Joanna was proud of her adopted son. Next month, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, Adam was going to start attending classes at the University of Sydney, which had awarded him a scholarship for having graduated from Cameron Town Secondary at the top of his class. The university was a school Adam had been passionately striving to enter, since it possessed, as he put it, "a top-notch science department that's recently added a professor of vertebrate paleontology, a man who's a member of the Royal Society in London, and who actually worked with Charles Darwin!"
It was Adam's dream to follow in Darwin's footsteps, to join the Royal Society and explore the world as a naturalist, discovering new species, unearthing dinosaur bones, contributing to the growing evidence for the case for evolution. Joanna saw in the energetic way he carried himself, the enthusiasm with which he spoke, the eagerness shining in his eyes, that he was going to succeed.
"It was a good show, Joanna," Hugh said, "wasn't it?"
She felt the warmth of his hand through her glove and, looking into his smile, recalled the young man she had met fifteen years ago. Hugh at forty-five was just as handsome tonight, she thought, as he had been then, and the years had etched wisdom into his face, as well as a quiet dignity. "Yes, Hugh," she said. "It was a very good show."
He looked at her for a moment, then he said, "Are you all right, Joanna?"
She was not surprised by his question. Even though she hadn't told him about her recent trouble, and had in fact tried to keep it from him, she knew that Hugh would sense it. "Yes," she said. "I'm all right."
"Are you up to having dinner in the dining room? We could go straight to our room, if you prefer."
"I wouldn't think of it. I'm not going to let one of my ridiculous headaches spoil your special night."
But it was more than just a headache this time, more than just the aftermath of another nightmare—Joanna had been troubled by a strange feeling all day, the kind of premonition one gets before a storm. And today was not the first time she had experienced it; she had been unsettled by a vague but growing sense of dread for weeks now.
"Oh, Father!" Beth said, breaking away from a small knot of friends, "everyone is so impressed! You're positively marvelous!"
As Joanna watched father and daughter embrace, she looked back to the day when the strange feeling of premonition had begun. It had been two months ago, when Beth had begun to menstruate. While Joanna had been explaining to her daughter the changes that were taking place in her body, and what to expect and how to take care of herself, she had experienced the first vague tremors of dread. She had thought: Beth's no longer a little girl; she's growing up.
That same night, troubled by sleeplessness, Joanna had gone through her mother's diary to see if there was anything significant recorded around the time when Joanna herself had begun to menstruate, when she, too, had just turned twelve. But there was nothing—no mention of the event, and no hint that Lady Emily had felt disquieted afterward.
The future frightened Joanna. She knew that her mother's nightmares had started when Joanna was six, just as her own had started when Beth turned six. Was it simply the power of suggestion, she wondered, or was there something more? Joanna had nearly been attacked by a rabid dog when she was seventeen; did such a fate, therefore, await Beth five years from now? Was the attack b
y the two dingoes some kind of foreshadowing?
What should she do; what shouldn't she do? She couldn't keep Beth with her always; she didn't want to be a grasping mother, but she wanted to protect her daughter from whatever forces seemed to be following the descendants of Naomi Makepeace. Joanna knew about Beth's violent fear of dogs. It upset her to look at her lively, happy daughter and think of the hard, dark kernel of fear that lay within her. Joanna knew about it because Lady Emily, too, had carried this same fear; and because Joanna herself carried one. It was almost as if a real disease—something like hemophilia—was being passed from generation to generation, an inescapable curse of heredity that caused each generation to feel sympathy for the next, knowing what lay in store for it.
Joanna had purposely avoided telling Beth the details of her past, and about Lady Emily. She had hoped to end the cycle by simply not allowing Beth's imagination to re-create it, as Joanna was certain her own had. Beth had not read her grandmother's diary, she did not know about Lady Emily's afflictions or her strange, unexplained death. And Beth thought Joanna's search for Karra Karra was simply to locate a plot of land.
And yet Joanna, feeling chilled in the hot December night, knew that, despite her careful precautions, the symptoms were starting to manifest themselves in Beth. And this time she could not so easily lay their cause to imagination.
Joanna would never forget the weeks and months that had followed the night the dingoes had attacked Beth. She had taken her daughter to a seaside resort, where she had fought to restore her child, physically and emotionally, through the curative powers of sunlight, ocean air and love. And Beth had indeed recovered. The wounds had healed; the hysteria and grief had become just a memory. But when they had returned to Merinda, Joanna had seen that the cure was not complete—Beth was terrified of even the friendliest sheepdog.
"Oh Mother," Beth said, as they waited for their carriage in front of the theater, "I should think you would want to faint from the excitement of it all! Everyone just adores Father! He's positively famous!"