by Anna Romer
Inside, the cottage was just as I remembered. A short hallway bypassed three compact bedrooms, and led through the lounge room to a light-filled dining room and kitchen. I hesitated here, flashing back to the last time I had seen my mum. She’d been standing on this same spot in the doorway, her clothes soaked by rain, covered in mud and grazes, her face ashen. Where’s your father? she had asked. A shiver ran along my arms. Shaking off the memory, I breathed away my guilt and followed Len towards the back of the house. The timber floor gleamed, and Indigenous artworks adorned the walls. Len ushered me in to the lounge room, and offered me a seat.
Between sips of scalding milky Darjeeling and bites of shortbread, I explained to Len that I was keen to talk to her mother about her time at Bitterwood as a child.
Len nodded. ‘Mum’ll love that. She often talks about you, you know.’
I had a flash of a tiny, birdlike woman bustling along Bitterwood’s hallways, carrying bundles of folded sheets or breakfast trays for the guest rooms. I had followed her around like a pale little ghost, her constant happy chatter filling the hollows in my heart created by my mother’s sudden absence.
‘She was always kind to me,’ I remembered. ‘She took me under her wing.’
‘That’s Mum for you.’
‘When are you expecting her back?’
‘She’s visiting my brother Warren in Daylesford. I was expecting her home by now, but she called last night to tell me she’s decided to stay longer.’ Len rolled her eyes and smiled. ‘Which, knowing Mum, could mean a few hours or a few days. She doesn’t own a watch, never has. She tells the time by looking at the sun or stars. Reading between the shadows, she calls it. She grew up in the bush with her mother and aunties, in a little community north-west of here. She started working at Bitterwood when she was twelve, which sounds terribly young, doesn’t it? But that’s what it was like, back in the 1920s. She wore hand-me-down clothes and spent most of the time barefoot – but she gets a glow about her when she talks about those days, you know? She says they were the happiest of her life.’
‘Makes me kind of envious.’
‘Me too. My brother and I grew up in Stern Bay, but things had changed by then. Back in Mum’s day, there was tension between the black community and the whites. Mum doesn’t like to talk about it, but we’d occasionally hear whispers in town. Of course, by the time Warren and I came along, all that business had settled down.’
‘Business?’
Len drained the last of her tea and got to her feet. ‘I’ll let Mum explain, it’s her story. She tells it better than I could. Besides,’ she added, grabbing her keys off the coffee table, ‘I’m going to have to be terribly rude, my dear Lucy, but I must dash off. I’ve so enjoyed our talk. We must do it again sometime.’
‘I’d like that, Len.’
As we went back along the hall, light spilled from an open doorway, a bedroom, my old bedroom. I couldn’t help looking in. A pretty chenille bedspread brightened the narrow iron bed, and a floral rug warmed the polished floorboards. I was about to continue past, when I spied a large framed photograph on the wall near the door. It was a creased and spotty old print of three kids: two girls in their early teens had crowded into a wheelbarrow, while an older boy pushed them along. All three were smiling broadly, their faces blurred a little by the motion. Two of the children were dark-skinned, but one of the girls was fair.
A thrill of recognition went through me. It was the girl from the church fete photograph.
Len joined me. ‘Gorgeous photo, isn’t it? We keep it in here so we can shut the door if need be. Some of our relatives are sensitive about old pictures, it can upset them to see images of those who’ve left us.’
‘Beautiful kids. They seem so happy,’ I said, looking closer, rubbing the sudden goose bumps on my arms.
‘Yes, old photos are usually so formal and stiff. Your grandfather took this one in 1930. He had a knack for photography. The boy is my Uncle Warra, Mum’s brother. Sadly, he died the year this was taken. That’s Mum in the middle, and the fair-haired girl was her best friend.’
My yearning to identify her, my hunch that she was the key to Clarice’s story made me want to rush ahead, ask the questions. Who is she? How do I get in touch with her? But as my gaze travelled over the old photo with its cracks and age spots, its sepia haze, I realised that much time had passed and the girl may have moved on, or no longer be alive.
I took a breath. ‘The fair girl, do you know who she is?’
‘I should.’ Len smiled. ‘I’m named after her. My full name is Lenorah.’ She looked back at the photo, and her expression turned wistful. ‘Her name was Orah, and Mum never forgot her.’
‘Was?’ My hopes plunged. ‘Then she’s gone.’
Len searched my face. ‘Mum never knew what became of her. Orah may well be alive, but she left Bitterwood while Mum was away and never returned.’
27
Bitterwood, 1931
Winter blew in one breezy afternoon, bringing with it a whirlwind of fallen leaves and an icy chill. Orah rubbed her arms to warm them as she gazed down at the orchard. More than a year had passed since she last saw Warra. Since that day on the track beneath the ironbark tree, when he had closed his eyes for the last time.
He would be bones by now. Ash and bones. She knew it was morbid to think that way, but she couldn’t help it. There were now more people she loved in the land of the dead than there were among the living.
If only Nala would return. Orah had wanted to go to the encampment, but Clarice forbade her. Nala’s grieving for her loss, Orah. Her whole family is. You must be patient. She’ll return when she’s ready.
Orah had drifted half-heartedly through her chores, escaping when she could to her special places. The bench beneath the cherry tree where she’d cut her name with Warra’s penknife; the bushland where she collected wattle seeds with Nala; and, most favourite of all, the grassy bank where Warra had once fashioned her a necklace from wildflowers.
Then a few months ago, Clarice had come to her with news.
‘A miracle,’ she told Orah, her eyes brimming with joyful tears. ‘Edwin and I are having a baby. Just think, Orah. Another little son or daughter. A little brother or sister for you.’
Orah had tried to smile and be happy for Clarice, but a new baby seemed wrong, a betrayal. A year and many months had passed since that day on the track, but Orah had not finished grieving for Warra. She could not forgive that Edwin and Clarice had forgotten him so easily.
A little brother or sister . . .
The words depressed her, made her uneasy. She had settled into life with Edwin and Clarice, had begun to feel part of their family. A special daughter, dearly beloved. Yet if another child came along, a child who shared their blood – would they forget her?
Since Clarice’s announcement, they were being especially kind to her. Edwin brought books from his trips into town or along the coast, despite money being scarce for such luxuries. They fell into the habit of stories before bedtime, Clarice reading on the bed with her, while Edwin listened from the doorway.
Lately, Clarice had begun inventing her own tales. Stories of romance and adventure that bewitched Orah and left her hungry for more. She was almost fifteen, which seemed too old for fairytales. She didn’t care. She looked forward to bedtime. Clarice’s stories cast a spell on her, made her forget the nagging darkness in her heart.
Orah hugged herself as another gust of dry brown leaves stirred in the wind. Shadows crawled along the ground beneath the mulberry trees, and the sight of them made her shiver. Bitterwood had become her home. Edwin and Clarice were now her family. Yet there were times, like now, when not even the promise of a bedtime story could ward away the emptiness that seemed to creep in with the night.
At first, Edwin thought Clarice’s stories charming. Princesses lost in the forest, brave young woodsmen who battled beasts or saved their ladyloves by outwitting the evil old king. When bedtime rolled around, he had loved nothing more tha
n to lean in the doorway and smile in on the enchanting scene.
Orah, beautiful Orah, snuggled next to Clarice on the bed, tucked under her arm like a little bird; her blonde head nestled on Clarice’s shoulder, the lamplight gilding her hair. They might have been mother and daughter, and the rightness of that always filled him with longing.
The scene reminded him of earlier bedtimes, earlier stories – happier times when it had not been Orah under Clarice’s motherly wing, but another girl. The stories Clarice spun now were darker, and in them, Edwin began to glimpse familiar characters and themes. Lost children taken in by a kindly woodsman, or two little girls imprisoned in a deep well. And once, the strange sad tale of a seahorse trapped in a bottle.
Clarice’s imagination both awed Edwin and filled him with a deep disquiet. For the longest time he couldn’t pinpoint the origin of his unease. He had not minded that Clarice wove snippets of their life into her tales; what storyteller didn’t? There was no single story that spelled out their private secrets. Rather, it was an accumulation of tiny threads woven so tightly together that even he could not see exactly where fiction ended and fact began.
Until that night in August, at the tail end of winter in 1931. A cold night, the fire blazed downstairs, filling the house with the scent of wood smoke.
At nine o’clock, they bundled up to Orah’s room at the top of the stairs. Clarice climbed into bed beside the girl, while Edwin took up his usual post at the door. That night, Clarice wove the intricate tale of a queen who lived alone in her castle. Haunted by the loss of her children, she often walked along the beach below her home, despairing. One day, a fisherman found a little girl in a seashell, and gave her to the Queen. The Queen came to love the child dearly. But her love was possessive and smothering, and in time, the child withered and wasted away.
Edwin tried to assure himself it was just a story, that the symbolism of any fairytale was far-reaching. That was its nature; you could pick any tale and find within it echoes of your own life. Yet the tale of the Shell Queen shocked Edwin and filled him with dread.
Clarice looked up from the bed and smiled at him. A devastating smile, she seemed barely more than a girl herself: her face freshly scrubbed and bare of make-up, her hair pulled back, she looked guileless and more breathtakingly beautiful than Edwin had ever seen her. He realised that she had become so caught up in the telling of her story that its resonance with their own lives eluded her.
Orah’s head had grown heavy. She was almost asleep. Clarice rested her lips on the shiny hair, and murmured quietly, almost wistfully, against her scalp.
‘Oh my darling Edith, I’m so happy you’re here with us.’
Orah bent back her head and looked at Clarice. ‘Orah,’ she said sleepily. ‘It’s Orah.’
‘That’s what I said, love.’ Clarice cupped Orah’s cheek and kissed her again, this time on the nose. ‘Sweet Orah, how precious you are.’
A simple mistake, a slip of the tongue, yet Clarice had not appeared to register her blunder.
Edwin did not sleep that night. He lay in the bed next to her, breathing through his teeth. He let his thoughts wander into forbidden territory: little Edith, and the void she had left behind; tiny Joyce and her whisper-short life. Perhaps he and Clarice had tried to fill that void too soon. He pictured the beautiful child who had come to them, even before Edith’s bones had fully crumbled back into the earth. The golden-haired girl who had appeared in their lives as if by magic. She had transformed them, healed them. But was she like the Shell Queen’s child, trapped in the prison of their love, doomed to wither and waste away? Had they, like the Shell Queen in Clarice’s story, chosen badly – would they too pay a price? Yes, Edwin believed they would. And the gnawing in his gut told him it would be a steep one.
Edwin shivered. Rolling on his side, he curled into himself, trying without success to will away the hollowness in his chest. When the dark time before dawn sent its chill into the room, he got up and padded barefoot to his study.
Taking out paper and pen, he drafted a letter. It took several tries, and by the time the first rays of sunlight were peeping through the study window, a scattering of crumpled rejects lay about his feet. Daylight returned his reason. His final draft joined its predecessors on the floor, and Edwin swept them all up and took them downstairs to the fire grate. As he watched the pages burn, the gnawing in his gut subsided, but did not leave him completely. It lingered, barely there, a reminder that in life, just as in stories, no price ever truly went unpaid.
Nala did not return to Bitterwood. Every day Orah went to the gate and watched the road, hoping to see a wisp of dust, wishing hard that Nala’s small figure would appear, striding towards her. She envisioned her friend seeing her there at the gate, lifting her skinny arm in a wave as she ran to greet her.
But Nala never came.
Spring arrived. New green leaves unfurled and mulberry blossoms filled the air with their sweet scent. Seven new lambs had joined the flock, and the mulberry trees were full of nests and fledgling birds.
As Clarice’s time approached, she became more beautiful. If Orah had not seen it with her own eyes, she would have thought such a thing impossible. Edwin had noticed too. Orah watched him sometimes, gazing at his wife as if at some wondrous vision. Clarice seemed to glow with an inner fire. Her lips were always on the brink of a smile, and roses bloomed in her cheeks. She laughed at nothing in particular, and when she caught Orah glaring at her she would sweep the girl into her arms and coddle her like a baby, kissing her hair and trying to tickle her into a better mood.
Orah refused to be drawn into Clarice’s orbit of joy. The happier Clarice became, the more resentful Orah grew.
When the baby comes, you’ll forget me.
By October, the weather grew a little warmer. Although the newspapers reported a worsening economic climate, Bitterwood seemed like another world. Leaves were greening up the bare branches, and jonquils poked their yellow heads from the grass. The house was beginning to wake, a creature stirring after long hibernation. In preparation for the summer guests they hoped would arrive, Orah and Clarice had spent the past few months cleaning the guest bedrooms, airing blankets and sheets, scouring the floors, polishing the windows until they shone. They rarely saw Edwin, who had thrown himself into his usual routine of buying supplies, chopping wood, writing and rewriting inventories and accounts and then transcribing them into his ledgers late into the night. Without Warra and Nala to help with the workload, and now with Clarice needing increasing rest and care, the pace would be hectic.
‘Orah?’ Clarice’s voice drifted from the kitchen.
Orah was in the rearing house. She had been escaping there a lot lately, and had just collected a box of silkworm eggs from the icehouse. She ignored Clarice’s call, concentrating on her task. Picking out a paper sheet of the fine grain-like eggs, she placed it carefully inside the warming boxes and covered it with a soft mantle of new leaves. In twenty days, the eggs would hatch, and feeding would begin.
‘Orah, are you there?’
She still had two boxes of silkworm grain to lay out, and hated to be disturbed. The eggs were fragile. At this crucial stage of their development, they needed steady temperature and quiet.
‘Orah?’
She sighed. Returning to the icehouse, she stowed the boxes, dusted her hands on her apron, and then went towards the house. She could hear Clarice clattering in the kitchen, muttering to herself. Edwin had gone to Apollo Bay and he would not be back until dark. Whenever he left the house, Clarice became more fretful, worrying that the baby might come while he was away.
As Orah stepped into the kitchen, she heard someone knocking at the front door.
‘Would you get that, love?’ Clarice said, as she packed away the box of old preserving jars she’d been sorting. ‘I’m covered in dust.’
Orah frowned. ‘We’re not expecting guests tonight.’
‘Ask them to wait. I’ll be out in five minutes.’
Orah h
urried along the hallway to the sitting room and peered through the window. A man stood on the verandah. His back was turned to her, but instantly Orah knew that he had not come for a room. This was no holidaymaker, no solitary soul seeking fresh air and ocean views.
His grubby trousers were shiny with wear and patched around the cuff. The tops of his shoes had separated from the soles, the leather scuffed and broken. He wore an ill-fitting coat, and his dull fair hair curled over his collar, greasy at the roots, in need of a wash.
Most likely he was hoping for a meal, perhaps in exchange for some light labour about the yard. Occasionally men like him turned up at Bitterwood. Half-starved, empty-eyed men desperate for work.
She opened the door. The man turned. When he saw her, his mouth dropped agape. Behind a red-veined nose, his face was chalky-pale, and he was wringing a frayed woollen hat in his hands. He smelled of grog.
‘Can I help you?’ Orah asked.
The man shuffled forwards. He searched Orah’s face, shaking his head, his lips trembling.
‘My name is Hanley Dane,’ he said hoarsely. ‘God forgive me . . . You must be Orah?’
28
Ballarat, 1930
On the edge of the goldfields, a shantytown of sorts had sprung up. Edwin stood at a narrow crossroads, scratching his head, trying to make sense of the directions Mrs Mallard, the barmaid, had given him. The maze of tents and shanties and dirt lanes between them seemed too chaotic to navigate.
Edwin gave the Scotsman’s description to a toothless old gent, who pointed to a little dwelling on the far side of the camp. Edwin approached.
There was no door to knock on, just a heavy burlap curtain fixed to the lintel with a row of rusty nails. Edwin stood in the doorway, despairing. The man was alive after all. He had not expected the disappointment to be so raw. He almost walked away right then, but only his promise to Orah stalled his retreat.