The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  So, she was thinking, I have found one of the keys to my husband’s mind—and to his spirit, if not to his soul. He is enthralled by mechanical things, by engines and inventions, and no matter how uninformed his audience, he will talk and teach.

  The scenery was spectacularly outlandish. The heights fell away many hundreds of feet in dramatic precipices to mighty valleys stuffed with dense grey-green forests that became blue with distance. Of pine, beech, oak and all the familiar trees of home there were none, but these alien trees had their own beauty. It is grander than home, she thought, if only because it is so limitless. Of habitation she saw no sign apart from a few tiny villages along the train line, usually associated with an inn or a mansion.

  “Only the natives can live down there,” said Alexander when a big clearing gave them a particularly wonderful view of a vast canyon ringed with perpendicular orange cliffs. “Soon we’ll pass a siding called The Crushers—it’s a series of rock quarries—and on the valley floor beyond there is a rich coal seam. They’re talking of mining it, but I think the cost of bringing it a thousand feet straight up will be prohibitive. Though it will be cheaper to ship to Sydney than the Lithgow coal—hauling that up the Clarence zigzag is very difficult.”

  Suddenly his hand swept in a grand gesture, encompassing the world. “Elizabeth, look! What you see is the geology of the earth in all its glory. The cliffs are early Triassic sandstone laid atop Permian coal measures, under which lie the granites, shales and limestones of Devonian and Silurian times. The very tops of some of the mountains to the north are a thin layer of basalt poured out of some massive volcano—the Tertiary icing on the Triassic cake, now all but eroded away. Marvelous!”

  Oh, to be that enthusiastic about anything! How could I lead a life that would enable me to know the tiniest fraction of what he knows? I was born to be an ignoramus, she told herself.

  AT FOUR IN the afternoon the train arrived at Bowenfels; this was as far west as the train went, though the chief town was Bathurst, forty-five miles farther on. After an urgently needed visit to the lavatory on the platform, Elizabeth was bundled into a carriage by an impatient Alexander.

  “I want to be in Bathurst tonight,” he explained.

  At eight they reached the hotel in Bathurst, Elizabeth reeling with fatigue; but at dawn the next morning Alexander was bundling her back into the carriage, insisting that the convoy start moving. Oh, another day of perpetual travel! Her carriage led the way, Alexander rode a mare, and six wagons drawn by draft horses carried her trunks, cargo from the Rydal rail depot, and those precious cases of dynamite. The convoy, said Alexander, was to deter the attentions of bushrangers.

  “Bushrangers?” she had to ask.

  “Highwaymen. There aren’t many left because they’ve been hunted down remorselessly. This used to be Ben Hall country—he was a very famous bushranger. Dead now, like most of them.”

  The cliffs had been replaced by more traditionally shaped mountains not unlike those in Scotland, for many were cleared of trees; here, however, no heather grew to lend the autumn some color, and what grass grew was lank, tufted, brownish-silver. The deeply rutted, potholed track wound aimlessly to avoid big boulders, creek beds, sudden plunges into gullies. Perpetually jerked and tossed, Elizabeth prayed that Kinross, wherever it was, would soon appear.

  But it did not until nearly sundown, when the track emerged from a forest into open space and became a macadamized road lined with shacks and tents. If all that had gone before was utterly strange, it paled compared to Kinross, which her imagination had visualized as Kinross, Scotland. Oh, it was not! The shacks and tents turned into more substantial wooden or wattle-and-daub houses roofed with a rippled iron or sheets of what looked like tree bark strapped and sewn down. Habitation straggled down either side of the street, but a few side lanes revealed wooden towers, struts, sheds, a bizarre landscape whose purpose she could not guess at. It was ugly, ugly, ugly!

  The houses became commercial buildings and shops, all sporting awnings held up by wooden posts; no one awning looked like its neighbors, nor was joined to them, nor had been erected with any attention to symmetry, order or beauty. The signs were roughly hand-painted and announced that here was a laundry, a boarding house, a restaurant, a bar, a tobacconist, cobbler, barber, general store, doctor’s rooms, an ironmongery.

  There were two red-brick buildings, one a church complete to spire, the other a two-storied block with its upper verandah lavishly adorned by the same cast-iron lace Elizabeth had noticed all over Sydney; its awning was of curved rippled iron, had iron posts holding it up, and yet more lavish application of cast-iron lace. An elegantly lettered sign said KINROSS HOTEL.

  Not a single tree stood anywhere, so even the foundering sun beat down like a hammer and turned the hair of a woman standing outside the hotel to pure fire. Her attention riveted by the martial posture, the sturdy air of invincibility the woman exuded, Elizabeth craned her neck to watch her for as long as she could. A striking figure. Like Britannia on the coins or Boadicea in illustrations. She gave what seemed a mocking salute to Alexander, riding beside the carriage, then swung to stare in the opposite direction from the convoy. Only then did Elizabeth notice that she held a cheroot, her nostrils trickling smoke like a dragon’s.

  There were plenty of people around, the men shabbily clad in dungarees and flannel shirts, with soft, wide-brimmed hats on their heads, the women in much laundered cotton dresses thirty years behind the times, shady straw hats on their heads. And many were unmistakably Chinese: long pigtails down their backs, quaint little black-and-white shoes, hats like conical cartwheels, women and men in identical black or dark blue trousers and jackets.

  The convoy passed into a wilderness of machinery, smoking chimneys, corrugated iron sheds and high wooden derricks, then came to a halt at the bottom of a sloping cliff that ascended at least a thousand feet. Here railway tracks actually ran upward until they disappeared from sight among welcome trees.

  “Journey’s end, Elizabeth,” said Alexander, lifting her out of the carriage. “Summers will let the car down in a moment.”

  And down the tracks it steadily came, a wooden conveyance not unlike an open omnibus on train wheels, for it had four rows of plain plank seats-for-six as well as a long, highly fenced tray for freight. But these seats were built at an impossible angle, so that sitting in one tilted the passenger far backward. Having closed the end of their seat with a bar, Alexander slid down beside Elizabeth and put both her hands firmly on a railing.

  “Hang on and don’t be afraid,” he said. “You won’t fall out, I promise.”

  The air resonated with sounds: the chug of engines, a quite maddening constant, thumping roar, metallic screeches, the slap-slap of rotating belts, crunches and grinds and howls. From high above came a separate noise, one lone steam engine. The wooden car began to move over the level ground to where the rails curved up, gave a lurch, and started to ascend the incredibly steep slope. Magically Elizabeth went from almost lying down to sitting upright; her heart in her mouth, she gazed down as the town of Kinross spread before her, widening in scope until the fading light turned its unlovely outskirts to impenetrable shadow.

  “I didn’t want my wife down there,” he said, “which is why I built my house on top of the mountain. Apart from a snake path, this car is the only way up or down. Turn your head and look up—see? It’s being pulled by a heavy wire cable that’s wound or unwound by an engine.”

  “Why,” she managed, “is the car so big?”

  “The miners use it too. Apocalypse’s poppet heads—those derricks holding winches—are on that wide shelf we just passed. Easier for the men than going in through the tunnel at the bottom because of giant ore skips and the close proximity of locomotives outside. Cages let them down into the main gallery and bring them up again at the end of the shift.”

  A coolness descended as they passed into the trees, as much, she divined, from altitude as from the sheltering boughs.

  “Kinros
s House is over three thousand feet above sea level,” he said with that eerie habit he had of reading her mind. “In summer, comfortably cool. In winter, much warmer.”

  THE CAR RAN on to flat ground at last, tilting them, and came to a halt. Elizabeth scrambled out before Alexander could help her, marveling at how quickly night fell in New South Wales. No long Scottish gloaming, no witching hour of soft radiance.

  Hedge screened the car siding; as she came around it she stopped dead. Her husband had built a veritable mansion in this remoteness, of what looked like limestone blocks. Of three full stories, it had big Georgian-paned windows, a pillared porch at the top of a sweeping flight of steps, and an air of having stood there for five hundred years. At the foot of the steps was a lawned terrace; a great effort had been made to create an English garden, from trimmed box hedges to rose beds and even a Grecian temple folly.

  The door was open, light streamed from every window.

  “Welcome home, Elizabeth.” Alexander Kinross took her hand and led her up the steps and inside.

  Everything of the best, brought here at what her Scottish canniness said was astronomical cost. The carpets, furniture, chandeliers, ornaments, paintings, drapes. Everything, including, for all she knew, the house itself. Only the faint reek of kerosene gave the lie to its being situated in a gas-lit city.

  It turned out that the ubiquitous Summers was Alexander’s chief factotum, while his wife was housekeeper; an arrangement that seemed to give Alexander a peculiar pleasure.

  “Begging your pardon, Marm, would you like to refresh yourself after your trip?” asked Mrs. Summers, and led Elizabeth to a properly functioning water closet.

  Never had she been more grateful for anything than for that invitation; like all carefully brought-up women of her era, she sometimes had to go for hours upon hours without any opportunity to empty her bladder, thus dared not drink so much as one sip of water before leaving on an expedition, no matter of what kind. Thirst led to dehydration, concentrated urine to bladder and kidney stones; dropsy was a great killer of women.

  After several cups of tea, some sandwiches and a piece of delicious seed cake, Elizabeth went to bed so tired that she remembered nothing beyond the foot of the staircase.

  “IF YOU DON’T like your quarters, Elizabeth, please tell me what you’d prefer,” said Alexander over breakfast, taken in the loveliest room Elizabeth had ever seen; its walls and roof were of glass panes joined together by a delicate tracery of white-painted iron, and it contained a jungle of palms and ferns.

  “I like them very much, but not as much as this.”

  “This is a conservatory—so named because in cold climates it conserves frost-vulnerable plants from death during winter.”

  He was dressed in his skins, as Elizabeth had privately christened them, his hat dumped on a spare chair.

  “Are you going out?”

  “I’m home, so from now on you’ll not see much of me until the evening. Mrs. Summers will take you over the house, and you must tell me what you don’t like about it. It’s your house far more than it’s mine—you’re the one will do most of the living in it. I don’t suppose you play the piano?”

  “No. We couldn’t afford a piano.”

  “Then I’ll have you taught. Music is one of my passions, so you’ll have to learn to play well. Do you sing?”

  “I can carry a tune.”

  “Well, until I can find you a teacher of piano, you’ll just have to pass your time in reading books and practicing your penmanship.” He leaned to kiss her lightly, clapped his hat on his head and vanished, hollering for his shadow, Summers.

  Mrs. Summers appeared to conduct “Marm” over the house, which held few surprises until they reached the library; every room was sumptuous in the style of the Sydney hotel, even echoing the form of its main staircase, a splendid affair. The large drawing room held a harp as well as a full-sized grand piano.

  “Brought the tuner all the way from Sydney once the piano was put in the right place—a fair nuisance it is too, what with not being allowed to move it a hair to clean under its legs,” said Mrs. Summers, disgruntled.

  The library was definitely Alexander’s lair, for it didn’t have the contrived look the other rooms displayed. Where its vastness wasn’t dark oak bookshelves and dark green leather easy chairs there was Murray tartan—wallpaper, drapes, carpet. But why Murray? Why not his own tartan, Drummond? Drummond was a rich red checkered with multiple green and dark blue lines—a very striking pattern. Whereas Murray had a base of dull green more distantly divided into checks by thin red and dark blue lines. It hadn’t escaped her that her husband’s taste ran to splendor, so why this muted Murray?

  “Fifteen thousand books,” said Mrs. Summers, voice awed. “Mr. Kinross has books on everything.” She sniffed. “Except he ain’t got a Bible. Says it’s rubbish. A godless man—godless! But Mr. Summers has been with him since some ship or other they was both aboard, wouldn’t hear of leaving. And I expect I’ll get used to being a housekeeper. House ain’t been finished more’n two months. Until then I just kept house for Mr. Summers.”

  “Have you and Mr. Summers any children?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No,” said Mrs. Summers shortly. She straightened, smoothed her spotless starched white apron. “I hope, Marm, that youse’ll find me satisfactory.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Elizabeth said warmly, and produced her widest smile. “If you kept house for Mr. Summers, where did Mr. Kinross live before this house was built?”

  Mrs. Summers blinked, looked shifty. “At the Kinross Hotel, Marm. A very comfortable establishment.”

  “Does he own the Kinross Hotel, then?”

  “No” was Mrs. Summers’s answer; no matter how hard Elizabeth probed, she refused to be more forthcoming on the subject.

  The other servants, the mistress of Kinross House discovered as the tour progressed to kitchen, pantry, wine cellar and laundry, were all Chinese men. Who nodded, smiled, bowed as she passed.

  “Men?” she squeaked, horrified. “You mean that men will clean my rooms, wash and iron my clothes? Then I shall deal with my underthings myself, Mrs. Summers.”

  “No need to make mountains out of molehills, Marm,” said Mrs. Summers, unperturbed. “Them heathen Chinee been washing for a living long as I know of. Mr. Kinross says they wash so well on account of they’re used to washing silk. It don’t matter that they’re men—they ain’t white men. Just heathen Chinee.”

  ELIZABETH’S PERSONAL MAID arrived just after lunch, a female heathen Chinee who to Elizabeth’s eyes was ravishingly beautiful. Frail and willowy, a mouth like a folded flower. Though Elizabeth had never seen Chinese before today, something about the girl said that there was European in her ancestry as well as Chinese. Her eyes were almond shaped, but were widely opened and possessed visible lids. She wore black silk trousers and jacket, and did her thick, straight black hair in the traditional pigtail.

  “I am very pleased to be here, Marm. My name is Jade,” she said, standing with her hands clasped together and smiling shyly.

  “You’ve no accent,” said Elizabeth, who in the past months had heard many different accents without realizing that her own Scots accent was so thick that some of her auditors didn’t understand what she said. Jade spoke like a colonial—a trace of East London Cockney intermixed with North of England, Irish, and something more distinctively local than any of those.

  “My father came from China twenty-three years ago and took up with my mother, who was Irish. I was born on the Ballarat goldfields, Marm. We’ve been following the gold ever since, but once Papa fell in with Miss Ruby, our wandering days were over. My mother ran away with a Victorian trooper when Peony was born. Papa says that blood calls to blood. I think she was tired of having girl children. There are seven of us.”

  Elizabeth tried to find something comforting to say. “I won’t be a hard mistress, Jade, I promise.”

  “Oh, be as hard as you like, Miss Lizzy,” said Jade cheerily. “I
was Miss Ruby’s maid, and no one’s as hard as her.”

  So the Ruby person was a hard woman. “Who’s her maid now?”

  “My sister, Pearl. And if Miss Ruby gets fed up with her, there’s Jasmine, Peony, Silken Flower and Peach Blossom.”

  Some enquiries made of Mrs. Summers revealed that Jade was to occupy a shed in the backyard.

  “That isn’t good enough,” said Elizabeth firmly, surprised at her own temerity. “Jade is a beautiful young woman and must be protected. She can move into the governess’s quarters until such time as I need a governess’s services. Do the Chinese men live in sheds in the backyard?”

  “They live in town,” said Mrs. Summers stiffly.

  “Do they ride up from town in the car?”

  “I should think not, Marm! They walk the snake path.”

  “Does Mr. Kinross know how you run things, Mrs. Summers?”

  “It ain’t none of his business—I’m the housekeeper! They are heathen Chinee, they take jobs away from white men!”

  Elizabeth sneered. “I have never known a white man, however poor and indigent he may be, willing to soil his hands on other people’s dirty clothes to earn a living. Your accent is colonial, so I presume you were born and brought up in New South Wales, but I warn you, Mrs. Summers, that I will have no prejudicial treatment of people of other races in this house.”