The Postmistress

by Alison Stuart

  Caleb’s fingers curled around the nugget and he stowed it in his waistcoat pocket. ‘You’ve heard?’

  ‘There are no secrets in this town. You should know that.’

  ‘Hunt?’ The few patrons of the Britannia scattered as the tall police sergeant entered.

  Caleb stood up. ‘Is there a problem, Maidment?’

  ‘Beer, please, Oldroyd.’ Unbidden, Maidment sat down at their table and removed his helmet. ‘Hope you don’t mind if I join you?’ The sergeant looked from one to the other as Yorkie Oldroyd set a glass down in front of him. He downed it without drawing breath and wiped his hand across his mouth. ‘It’s been a hell of a few days,’ he said. ‘In the middle of everything I forgot to tell you some news I picked up in Melbourne, Hunt.’

  ‘To do with Bowen?’

  ‘No, that other matter. That mad Irishman, Hannigan.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about him,’ Caleb said. His business with Hannigan now belonged to another time, another world.

  ‘Well, he’s dead. Found at the bottom of a mine shaft near the Creswick diggings with a broken neck. Local constables reckoned he was drunk and fell in.’

  Caleb raised his eyebrows at the unspoke “but”.

  Maidment shrugged. ‘Seems like the O’Riley brothers had got into a fight with him a few nights earlier. They’ve vanished off the goldfield. Word is they’ve gone north to Queensland. Either way, you’re out of luck in getting your equipment back.’

  Caleb shrugged. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’ Maidment stood up and clapped his helmet on his head. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you, gentlemen. Just thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘Before you go, Maidment,’ Penrose said, ‘do they know who the poor soul on the track might have been?’

  ‘There’s nothing to identify him. We think it was a prospector who was working the gullies beyond Blue Sailor, called himself Ivan the Russian.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s the nature of the goldfields.’

  Caleb and Penrose waited until the policeman left the now nearly empty bar.

  ‘So, what do you intend to do about the mine now, Hunt?’ Penrose asked.

  Caleb touched his waistcoat pocket where the little nugget weighed heavily. ‘I guess I need to put some capital together and get this mine going. What’s your advice, Penrose?’

  ‘The good news is you can go down from the top and follow the reef without the need to construct an adit—at least not for a while.’ Penrose paused. ‘I have some money saved. I would like to put it into the mine … if you’ll have me as a partner.’

  Caleb looked at his friend. ‘Penrose, you need every penny.’

  ‘But I have faith in the Shenandoah. Sometimes you have to take a risk, Hunt, and I am prepared to take a risk on this.’

  Caleb nodded. ‘I can’t think of anyone better qualified to bring into this enterprise. Adelaide and I are going down to Melbourne on tomorrow’s coach. We’ve some legal matters to sort out. Let’s talk when I get back.’

  The two men clasped hands and Caleb retired to his surgery.

  Caleb stood at the surgery window, watching as Penrose crossed the road, returning to his uncle’s mine. He pulled out the little nugget of gold and turned it over in his fingers.

  Enough for a ring, Penrose had said.

  Forty-Two

  Melbourne

  23 February 1872

  Caleb tugged at his best, but decidedly shabby, scarlet and gold waistcoat and Adelaide tightened her grip on his arm. She had reverted to her best black dress trimmed with jet beads but it was sadly outmoded and frayed around the hem. Adelaide had insisted they stay at the Menzies Hotel over Caleb’s protestations about the expense and now he wondered if she regretted that decision. They did not suit the rarefied atmosphere of Melbourne’s best hotel with its pristine white linen, gold-trimmed plasterwork and waiters with silver platters moving on silent feet.

  The maître d’ of the Menzies’ dining room looked the hotel’s two guests up and down, his waxed moustache twitching with disapproval as he led them to a table in a dark corner near the kitchen. As they passed, the other diners, mostly dressed in evening dress or something very close, hid smiles behind hands or turned their attention to their soup bowls.

  ‘I feel like a country hick come to town,’ Caleb muttered after the waiter had swept the large linen napkins from the table and placed them across their knees.

  Adelaide smiled, reaching across the table for his hand. ‘You are,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we will visit the lawyer and I will see to cashing the banker’s draft. Then we’ll go shopping. We both need new clothes and there is an excellent gentleman’s outfitters in Collins Street.’

  They gave their orders to the waiter and as the man glided away, Caleb took a breath and coughed. On the long uncomfortable coach ride from Shady Creek he had been brooding on this strange new situation he found himself in and he had concluded that if they were to be wed, he believed they needed to be honest from the start.

  ‘Adelaide, a man has his pride and just because it is my extraordinary good fortune that you have consented to be my wife, I need to make one thing plain between us. I don’t want to be a kept man. I’ve always made my own way in this world without being beholden to anyone.’

  Adelaide’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, Caleb, I hadn’t thought you would see it like that.’

  ‘To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it before, but my pa believed husband and wife were equal partners in a marriage.’

  The waiter approached and set down the soup plates with a gesture of disdain that caused the consommé in Caleb’s dish to slop. He bit his tongue to stop the rebuke that rose in his chest. He didn’t need to lash out at the waiter when his own demons were to blame for his annoyance.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Adelaide said as she picked up her soup spoon. ‘I thought it would be wonderful to have you to myself in a lovely hotel, away from Maiden’s Creek, and to have the money to buy new clothes.’ She laughed but with a tinge of sadness. ‘I had a fanciful notion of strolling the block with you beside me.’

  ‘And I’m spoiling it?’ Caleb said. He caught her hand. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m real uncomfortable with this new role I find myself in. If what that lawyer said in his letter is right, it’s your money, your inheritance, but I’m to be the one to control it? I truly hate that, Adelaide. I don’t want to be your trustee. I want to be your equal partner.’

  ‘Unfortunately, despite what he might have said, my father is dictating from the grave how things will be, Caleb, but even if you are the one with the ultimate decision-making power, maybe we can make the decisions together. For example, I’ve been thinking about the Shenandoah,’ Adelaide said. ‘You do realise we now have the capital to invest in it?’

  Caleb stared at her. The thought hadn’t occurred to him. ‘Penrose says it’s got good prospects,’ he said slowly, ‘but high returns means high risk, Adelaide.’

  ‘But if Penrose is willing to invest in it, he must have faith that it will do well. How much do you need to raise to get it going?’

  ‘Penrose says we’ll need three thousand pounds.’

  Adelaide gasped. ‘That’s a large amount.’

  ‘It’s an expensive proposition. We are proposing we float a company with sixty shares at fifty pounds each.’

  Adelaide hesitated, fiddling with one of the spoons. ‘Assuming we can release that money from father’s estate—and we won’t know that until the lawyers in London have finalised everything—would it work if I were to put up the initial capital? I would give you fifty-one per cent of the shareholding.’ When Caleb opened his mouth to protest, she added, ‘Consider it my wedding gift to you.’

  He nodded. ‘What about the other forty-nine per cent?’

  ‘I will retain that, subject to whatever Penrose can contribute and if he agrees to manage the mine, part-payment could be by way of shares.’

  Caleb studied the woman across the table from him, dressed in her austere and outm
oded black dress. Her eyes shone in the gaslights and he had never loved her so much.

  ‘Partners?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘Partners,’ he agreed. ‘Enough talk of business matters. Nothing we can’t discuss with the lawyer tomorrow. We are here, by ourselves, and just this once, I am prepared to swallow my pride and allow you the pleasure of entertaining me. Let’s get ourselves some fancy clothes, stroll the block, whatever that is, go to the theatre, go dancing. Whatever you like—a kind of honeymoon before the wedding.’

  Colour rose in Adelaide’s cheeks and she dropped the spoon she had been fiddling with on the floor.

  27 February 1872

  Adelaide stood in front of the long mirror in her hotel room and fingered the soft ivory silk organza of the elegant peignoir that had been delivered to the hotel. The other purchases, ordered from the finest shops in Melbourne—bonnets and stockings, petticoats and ribbons, and presents for Netty and Danny—were thrown higgledy-piggledy on a bed she had no intention of sleeping in that night.

  She turned to view her reflection from a different angle, shaking the lacy ruffles at her wrists to hide her work-worn hands. She had never owned anything so beautiful, or so risqué. The matching silk nightdress, visible beneath the sheer material, shimmered in the light. She shook out her hair, letting the long, dark tresses fall down her back. Audacity? Recklessness? Wantoness? All these words bounced through her mind.

  ‘Once a fallen woman, always a fallen woman,’ she mused aloud and, with a soft whisper of silk ruffles, turned for the door.

  Her heart beat a tattoo as she crossed the carpeted corridor to the room opposite hers. As she stopped before the solid, unyielding polished cedar door of Room 12, the butterflies in her stomach rose in a rabble. She took a shuddering breath and rapped lightly on the door. When Caleb didn’t respond, she knocked again, louder.

  This time she heard the floorboards creak as he crossed the room. The key turned in the lock and Caleb stood in the doorway, his shirt undone and a towel around his shoulders, his hair, properly barbered on their first morning in Melbourne, sticking up damply as if he had been rubbing it dry when he had been disturbed.

  He looked her up and down, swallowed and stepped to one side to allow her to enter. ‘Is there a problem, Adelaide?’

  ‘No,’ she said, surprised by the huskiness in her voice. ‘No. May I come in?’

  He stood aside, then closed the door behind her. He whipped the towel from around his shoulders, tossing it in the general vicinity of the washstand and stood facing her, running his fingers through his damp hair, which only had the effect of making it stick up more. Even in the thoroughly respectable newly purchased shirt and trousers, Caleb still seemed a wild thing and she wanted him. How she wanted him … She stood in the centre of his spacious room, the peignoir falling in graceful folds around her body, revelling as his gaze travelled from her head to the bare toes that peeped from beneath the silk flounces.

  ‘Adelaide … I don’t recognise you,’ he said at last.

  A qualm caught at Adelaide’s confidence. When she had rehearsed this scene in her mind, it had not begun like this.

  ‘On the first night we were here, Caleb, you said this was our “honeymoon before the wedding”. Unless you have changed your mind about wedding me on our return to Maiden’s Creek …’

  He smiled. ‘No. This is perfect. I can’t imagine a wedding night spent in the best bedroom in The Empress can match this.’ His eyes searched her face. ‘Are you sure this is what you want, Adelaide?’

  ‘More than anything.’ She swallowed. ‘I—I—that one time with Richard. I had no idea what—’

  He laid a finger on her lips. He may as well have touched them with a brand.

  ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘That is forgotten. You are here and I am here. No ghosts, no memories. Let it just be about the two of us tonight.’

  She shivered as his thumbs caressed the skin of her arm through the thin material. Every nerve in her body jangled and it felt to Adelaide that if he didn’t kiss her she would simply melt into the carpet.

  But he didn’t kiss her.

  With deliberate slowness, he undid the ribbons and pushed the peignoir away from her shoulders, revealing the scanty silk nightdress. He smiled as his hands skimmed her form beneath the thin material, shoulders, waist and hips, every nerve tingling at his touch.

  She shivered as he reversed the process. This time his hands skimmed her breasts. She let out a sigh as the hands came to rest on her shoulders and he drew her into him, applying his mouth to the sweet spot at the base of her neck, peppering her throat with soft butterfly kisses. One hand pressed into the base of her spine and she melted against him, her back arching as he slid the nightdress away from her shoulders. It dropped with a sigh at her feet and she stepped out of it, completely naked in the arms of the man she loved.

  Caleb slid his braces away from his shoulders, managing to divest himself of his clothes without relinquishing his hold on her as his lips ran down her body. Adelaide closed her eyes and surrendered herself to the moment as skin touched skin. Then, and only then, did she dare to raise her own hands, running her fingers lightly across the hard planes of his back, the soft hair of his chest and lower …

  He gave a groan as her fingers brushed against him and buried his face in her hair, sighing her name, before scooping her up and carrying her across to the large cedar bed furnished with pristine white linen.

  I was lost, she thought as they entwined, one body, one being. He has found me …

  The clock on the General Post Office further down Bourke Street tolled one in the morning and the flickering of the streetlights cast shadows into the corners of the room. A soft breeze through the open window stirred the lace curtains.

  Caleb stared at the elegant cornices of the room as he stroked her head, her hair fanning across his chest. She seemed to be asleep, her breathing deep and even, but Caleb thought he would never sleep again. Every nerve in his body was awake, sensitive to the slightest movement, the slightest nuance.

  It had been less than five months since he had landed in this town, tired, angry and jaded with life, looking for the next opportunity for a quick dollar, caring for no one, not even himself. He didn’t recognise that man any more. Adelaide had given him back his life and his self-respect. She had brought purpose and meaning to a life seemingly scarred forever by war and imprisonment.

  He curled a tress of her hair around his finger, a silken bond binding them. Tonight was just the start of something different and exciting. With this woman by his side, they could make something of this new country. He drew a shuddering breath and closed his eyes, summoning his fading memory of his father, the good and Godly man who had railed against slavery, railed against a war that should never have been allowed to occur and railed against a son who had taken up a cause that his father did not believe in. There had been nothing but sadness and disappointment in his father’s tired, grey face when he had come to Elmira. Perhaps his father would have cause to be proud of the man his son had become.

  Oh Shenandoah,

  I love your daughter,

  Away, you rolling river.

  For her I’d cross

  Your roaming waters,

  Away, I’m bound away

  ’Cross the wide Missouri.

  Adelaide stirred in his arms. ‘Are you singing?’

  Caleb gave an awkward chuckle. ‘I wasn’t aware I was singing aloud,’ he said.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Adelaide said. ‘What is the song?’

  ‘“Oh, Shenandoah”,’ he said. ‘It’s an old riverman’s song. It reminds me of—’ He had been going to say home, but the Shenandoah Valley belonged to another life. ‘Another time,’ he said. ‘It’s best sung after a few whiskeys.’

  Adelaide laughed. Her fingers were tracing whorls in the hair on his chest, sending shafts of fire through his body. He groaned and rolled her over, his mouth seeking hers as she arched beneath his touch.

  Forty-Thr
ee

  Maiden’s Creek

  1 March 1872

  ‘How was Melbourne?’ Penrose set his hat down on the table, pulled up a stool and sat down with a grunt. He pushed back his hair and signalled for Lil.

  Caleb cocked his head, listening to the ceaseless pounding of the stampers, and said, ‘Quiet and expensive. I swear Adelaide spent her entire inheritance on the dressmaker.’

  Penrose laughed. ‘Looks like she spent a few pennies on you too. Quite the swell in your fancy new clothes. Does it bother you that it is Adelaide’s money?’

  Caleb looked down at the new, bright, jacquard waistcoat. ‘Penrose, you know the state of my wardrobe. A man would have to be a knuckle-headed idiot not to accept a kind offer like that but Adelaide and I, we’ve come to an understanding about how things’ll be between us.’

  Lil set two glasses down in front of them. Caleb reached for his purse and she knocked his hand away.

  ‘On the ’ouse, love,’ she said. ‘Just as long as me and my girls get an invite to the wedding.’

  ‘That will put the wind up the Mesdames Russell and Jervis,’ Penrose said.

  Caleb ignored his friend. ‘Wouldn’t dream of not inviting you, ladies,’ he said. ‘In fact, if we could not invite Mrs Russell and Mrs Jervis that would make me quite happy. They’ve already taken Adelaide on as their new project. They are insisting on a full wedding breakfast in the Mechanics’ Institute, I believe. So much for a quiet bourbon in the back room of the Britannia.’

  Lil punched Penrose on the shoulder. ‘And what about my girl, Sissy?’ she said. ‘Time’s running out. I can’t ’ave you ’anging around ’er with your puppy dog eyes. You’re bad for business. I’m warning you, Penrose, make an ’onest woman of ’er or she’s going back to Melbourne.’

  The good humour drained from Penrose’s face as Lil flounced off to resume her position behind the bar. He glanced across the room to where Sissy leaned across a table, talking to a miner.

  ‘Lil’s right. It’s time,’ he said.

  ‘And what about your uncle?’