by Anna Romer
Orah followed him in. ‘Why is it called the rearing house?’
‘It’s where we rear our little workers.’
She stared at him, mystified.
Mr Briar seemed pleased. He beckoned her over to the nearest table. Orah saw that she’d been right: the trays were full of leaves. Mr Briar brushed a handful of leaves aside, and gestured her nearer. Bending closer she saw thousands of tiny wriggling white bodies clinging to the underside of the leaves.
‘What are they?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Maggots?’
Mr Briar had a soft laugh, a throaty chuckle that made her think of sun-warmed honey. ‘Silkworms. My mother started farming them just after the war. Her brother brought back a bag of silkworms from the Orient, along with instructions on how to care for them. The rest she learned herself through many years of trial and error.
Orah pointed to the far wall. ‘What are those shelves?’
‘Nesting frames. When the worms are big enough, we transfer them there. They attach themselves to the sticks while they spin their silk cocoons, and when they’re done with that, they turn into moths.’
Orah remembered Clarice’s story about the Chinese princess. ‘You make silk?’
‘Silk thread. Clarice spins it from the short fibres leftover when the moths emerge. She hasn’t the heart to boil them.’
‘Do you make a living from it?’ Orah wanted to know.
Mr Briar laughed gently. ‘It’s more of a hobby, really. Clarice loves to sew, but there’s no fine fabric around these days. And no money to spend on luxuries. There’s a mill in Geelong where they weave our thread into cloth and dye it. They keep a bolt of fabric for their troubles, and give us what’s left. Usually enough for Clarice to make a dress or two.’
Orah smiled at this. She remembered long cosy days in Glasgow with her mother, twirling her spindle, watching it bulge with newly spun yarn. Silk, she marvelled. How much finer it would be than the coarse fluffy fibres of wool.
‘Our main living,’ Mr Briar went on, ‘comes from the guesthouse. Although lately, things have slowed right down. No one has the money for holidays. We only had a handful of people last year, and this season we’ve had just one couple.’ He drew a breath and rubbed his hands together. ‘But the slump won’t last forever. The new ocean road is already attracting people to the area. In the meantime, we get a modest income from produce. Fruit and preserves, eggs and meat. Speaking of which, have you sampled Nala’s pancakes and homemade jam?’
Orah nodded, and to her horror, her stomach grumbled.
Mr Briar laughed again in that soft liquid-honey way he had. ‘Hmm, I’m quite sure I can smell the sizzle of something marvellous on the hob. Would you do me the honour?’
He smiled at Orah and offered his arm, as though she were a lady and he a fine gentleman – rather than a girl with bare feet, and a string bean in a worn-out suit.
Orah felt like giggling. Wildly, nervously. Instead, she adopted a haughty look and took his arm, which made him smile widely, his eyes gleaming with pleasure, and perhaps a little surprise.
Orah was surprised too.
Her ordeal on the ocean had crippled her, stolen the joy from her life, stolen her mam. It had abandoned her on the shores of a strange country, bereft and alone and filled to the brim with sorrow. She had believed, with a strength of conviction that ached deep inside her, that she would never laugh or smile again.
Yet here she was, barely more than a week later, giggling like a five-year-old in the company of a man she had only just met. A man who, in some unidentifiable way, made her remember another man, a flushed-faced bear of a man who had romped and skylarked and play-acted with her, all the way back in those dreamlike childhood days in Glasgow.
12
Bitterwood, May 1993
He hadn’t meant to startle her that day, but she’d been so absorbed in her thoughts, standing in the early morning light, her face pressed to the rearing house window, a glorious child. Freckles sprinkling her nose, a high forehead framed by golden locks, skin the colour of clotted cream, eyes the deep velvet blue of spring violets.
Later they laughed about it, made a joke of how he’d shaved a few years off her young life. Even Clarice had chimed in, teasing that the girl might soon discover a few grey hairs among the gold.
Yet even as they laughed and bantered, Edwin kept seeing another little fair-haired girl, and the likeness between the two made his heart ache.
He shook his head, banishing them all to the shadows. Unlocking the rearing house, he went in, bypassing the tables to stand at the back of the room where the light barely reached. He had built the nesting shelves soon after the first war. The dark time, he called his post-war days. While his mother grieved for her favourite son, Edwin had almost worked himself into an early grave, planting new trees and pruning the old, applying himself to maintenance around the guesthouse until there was not a window that creaked, not a door that jammed in its frame, not a pane of glass besmeared by grime. Madness, his mother had called it. In Edwin’s mind, it was penance.
In those days, it had been just him and his mother, following her dream to help pioneer the silk boom she predicted would soon sweep Australia.
‘Silk is the warmest fibre on earth,’ she used to say. ‘You don’t need acres of land, just a grove of mulberry trees and a sheltered place for the worms to spin in peace. Once you get the knack of caring for the worms, production is cheap and easy. A child could do it.’
Edwin smiled.
She had been short and stout, with the rosy-cheeked face of a cherub. Even when she was in her eighties, there was something of the delighted child about her. It may have been her enthusiasm, her impish smile, or the waxy skin that never seemed to age. Edwin pictured her striding between the trees in her coveralls and gumboots, sawing leaves from the trees with the long-handled blade she had made especially for the job.
She had warned him about Clarice. Warned him that he would never make her happy, that her heart would always belong to Ronald. Gently, in her kind way, she had explained that a quiet, bookish man like Edwin was out of his depth with a passionate girl like Clarice. ‘You’re too different,’ she had warned. ‘Give her up, Edwin. Find yourself a plainer girl, someone who can be content with your ways. Who will,’ she’d added softly, ‘take care of you when I’m gone.’
Edwin sighed. As always, his mother was right. He had known he was rushing headlong into dark waters. In the beginning, he had considered himself a good enough swimmer. From the moment he’d first seen Clarice, he had wanted her. Even when she’d belonged to Ronald, he had wanted her with a passion he hadn’t known possible. What red-blooded man wouldn’t? She was beautiful, like a Hollywood star with her cherry-red lips and high heels and sleek satiny dresses that whispered around the curves of her body when she walked. Edwin lost his head. Seeing her with Ronald had been torture. The thought of possessing her – having what other men desired, proving wrong the people who looked down on him – was too great a temptation. He used to daydream about strolling through town with Clarice on his arm, her beauty inspiring envious glances from all who saw them.
Shaking free of the spell Clarice always cast on him, he shuffled over to one of the large feeding tables that dominated the rearing house. The silkworms were gone. Nothing remained but empty trays and leaf dross. Outside, a breeze lifted the branches of the lemon tree, scratching them against the window, casting ghostly shadows on the walls.
If he had listened to his mother, his life would have taken a different path. He often conjured the woman his mother had described to him, the strong, reliable girl who knew her way around the kitchen, who, in another version of his life, would have taken care of him. Dulcie had fitted that bill, but he had found her too late. By the time Dulcie had come along, Edwin was tainted. His blood still burned for Clarice, his heart and soul bore her imprint so indelibly that he could barely see another woman, let alone love her.
If only they had never met. If only Ronald had not br
ought Clarice home that long-ago Sunday. If only she’d been plainer, less dazzling, perhaps then Edwin would have stood a chance. Perhaps tonight, instead of loitering in the abandoned rearing house conversing with ghosts, he’d be sitting around a bustling dinner table amid the happy babble of voices. The voices of his children, his grandchildren and of his goodhearted wife. And he’d be raising his glass, giving thanks for the full life he had led.
A chill ran over his skin.
It was a heartless fantasy. So real in his mind, yet so removed from reality.
He sighed. No amount of bitterness or regret had ever managed to rewrite history. His crime would eventually surface. One day, the truth would come out. He only hoped that by the time it did, he would be gone.
His brain dislodged an image. A golden-haired girl rushing ahead of him through the avenue of trees, her basket piled with mulberry leaves that jostled free as she ran, swirling behind her in the luminous afternoon . . .
He hung his head. Perhaps if the children had chosen a different day to return. Perhaps if they’d lingered with their family at the camp or decided to take the long way back to Bitterwood. Perhaps if Edwin had not been so quick to offer their young companion a place in his home. Perhaps then, their lives would have taken a different turn.
He still blamed Clarice. From the moment she had first seen the pretty violet-eyed child and learned that she was alone in the world – motherless, her father’s whereabouts uncertain – she had begun to scheme. Like Edwin, she had yearned too strongly for something more, something to fill the aching, terrible void.
Edwin could have told her early on that nothing good ever came from a lie. But he’d always lacked the power to make her listen.
Fumbling for the keys, he went to the rearing house door. Locked it behind him and shuffled along the path towards the house. The only power he’d ever had was the power of forgetting. And there were times, like tonight, when even that eluded him.
13
Bitterwood, June 1993
A gust of wind shook the old Volkswagen. I drew back the curtain. It wasn’t yet dawn. Watery moonlight silvered the upper branches of the mulberry trees in the orchard, but beneath them lurked dark shadow. Thunder rumbled overhead, and the first spots of rain began to patter the van roof.
I returned to my little table, where I’d been drinking tea and doodling some illustration ideas for Dad’s manuscript, pondering his story. The chapter I’d read last night before bed had not yielded anything concrete to bolster my theory that Dad’s characters were based on real people. The old King clearly resembled my grandfather, and the castle reeked of Bitterwood, but I was still attempting to puzzle out how Fineflower and the other wives factored into our family tree – if at all. Before me on the table, arranged like evidence, were my grandfather’s letter, the little gold heart, and the glass negative of the two soldiers I’d retrieved from the attic. My attempts to link them had failed, but I couldn’t get Edwin’s words out of my mind.
I have something for you. It will explain everything.
Explain . . . explain what, exactly?
I sketched a woman’s face. Square-jawed, with full lips, and wide cheekbones dotted with freckles, framed by waves of shoulder-length blonde hair. My mother’s face. She was part of the puzzle, but when I placed my drawing on the table beside my collection of objects, she only seemed to add to the confusion—
A deafening crash overhead sent me flying to my feet.
Sliding open the side hatch, I stepped out. A branch had fallen on the van roof. I dragged it off and hurled it into the trees, then checked the roof for damage, relieved to find none. Heavy clouds were now smothering any moon or starlight. The house loomed like a dark fortress against the mottled dawn sky. Further down the slope, blacker shadows gathered beneath the bare twiggy limbs of the mulberry trees.
A spear of lightning ignited the horizon, followed by a thunderclap. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a pale shape dart from the van and streak away into the night.
‘Basil!’
I saw him at the edge of the orchard, just before he vanished. The rain fell harder; droplets dampened my hair and shoulders, sending a cool chill along my scalp. Grabbing my torch from the van, I ran down the slope towards the trees. I looked around, calling his name, but the cat had gone.
I stood in the darkness, listening. The garden seemed full of stealthy creaks and rustlings, joined now by the increasingly loud patter of raindrops.
I shivered, suddenly aware that I was miles from town, barefoot in pyjama bottoms and T-shirt on a winter night in the rain. I weighed up running back to the van for jeans and a cardigan, shoes. But by then Basil might be long gone.
The rain began to fall more heavily. I was soon soaked to the skin. Raindrops danced in the torch-beam, and all around me the garden teemed with wet shadows.
‘Basil?’
I continued down the slope, shining my light into the tree trunks, calling. When I reached the bottom of the garden, another flash of lightning illuminated the old dead oak tree. Its contorted branches raked the sky, its trunk rising from the steep mound that sheltered my grandfather’s icehouse.
I hadn’t meant to venture so close. The shock of seeing it jogged a memory. I was ten years old, creeping through the orchard on another night exactly like this one. Moonless, rainy and wild. I had taken my grandfather’s keys from the pantry lintel and unlocked the icehouse door, stepped inside and ventured along the passageway into the dark. I never really knew what drew me there that night. Curiosity. The thrill of the forbidden. The excitement of the unknown. Then a gust of wind had grabbed the door and slammed it behind me, the force so great the broken handle shot off and bounced away into the shadows. For the longest time I stood staring into the gloom, my knuckles pressed to my mouth, my breath ringing in my ears. Then, a familiar voice called softly through the blackness—
‘Lucy?’
I jerked around as memory and reality collided. I began to run. Up the hill, through the maze of fruit trees with their wet shadows and mouldering leaves, back towards the safe haven of my van—
Straight into the arms of a large rain-soaked man.
My scream could have shattered glass. The man flinched away, but then he gripped my shoulders.
‘Lucy, it’s me.’
Warm hands, I registered. Strong fingers. He knew my name.
‘Morgan?’ I squinted at him in the half-light, going limp with relief. He was large and solid, reassuringly familiar after my sprint through the rainy trees. But as my shock ebbed away, I felt the first stirrings of annoyance. What part of I’d rather do it alone hadn’t he understood?
He drew me under a tree where the dense canopy formed a natural shelter. ‘You okay?’
I was shaky, my limbs suddenly flushed with heat. I stepped away from him.
‘I was, until you gave me a heart attack. Why are you here?’
‘Ron got worried. He saw a storm warning on the weather report, asked me to pop down and check on you.’
‘Pop down? It’s a two-hour drive.’
Morgan shrugged. ‘All in a day’s work.’
‘So, now you’ve checked you’ll be heading straight back will you?’
‘I might stick around a day or two, help with any heavy lifting.’
‘Don’t you have classes?’
‘They owe me leave.’
His hair was wet, raked back from his face. Raindrops gleamed on his skin. The sky behind him lit up suddenly. In the brightness that followed, his image burned itself into my eyes. His face shadowed, his hair glittering with raindrops, his shoulders hunched slightly against the downpour.
I stepped away. Instinct told me to get rid of him as quickly as possible, send him back to Melbourne, keeping my promise to avoid him. But another part of me, the naive girl who had once kissed him under the party lights in her father’s garden and had her heart broken, was secretly glad. Perhaps spending time with him would break the spell of the kiss, get us back on even foot
ing. Set me free.
‘It’s early,’ I pointed out. ‘You must have left in the middle of the night.’
He shrugged. ‘I wanted to avoid the downpour. That road is deadly in a storm, especially on a bike. Anyway, Ron didn’t want you being alone.’
I hugged my arms around myself, and frowned down the hill.
‘Basil’s out there somewhere. The thunder scared him, I forgot to shut the van door and he ran off.’
‘Basil. The cat?’
I nodded. ‘You think he’ll be okay?’
‘He’s probably nice and dry in a hollow log. He’ll be back in time for breakfast, you’ll see. Cats generally don’t wander far.’
I looked at him. ‘Sage advice from the cat whisperer?’
He smiled. ‘Something like that.’
‘Great. I’ll mention it to Basil, if he ever returns.’
‘We need to get out of this rain.’
I ran over to the van. In my rush to chase the cat, I’d left the sliding door open. Even in the gloom, I could see puddles gleaming inside on the floor.
‘Damn,’ I muttered. Slamming shut the hatch I whirled to face Morgan. ‘I don’t suppose the cat whisperer has any quick fixes for a saturated campervan.’
He laughed quietly. ‘As a matter of fact, he does.’ He led me towards the house. ‘Tea and toast. A blazing fire. Some dry clothes. And maybe, if you’re very good, a long hot shower.’
The cat whisperer kept all but one of his promises. As I stood shivering in my grandfather’s dark kitchen, Morgan located a teapot and caddy of tea leaves, then set a kettle of water on the gas stove to boil.
I retrieved dry clothes from the van, and stood about sipping tea, waiting for Morgan to get the fire blazing. Beside the old combustion heater, he found a wooden box full of newspapers and kindling, matches. Then he crouched in front of the firebox and opened the door. ‘What’s this?’
At first glance, it appeared to be a book. All that remained was the spine and partial, scorched pages. As I kneeled beside him for a closer look, my heart sank.