The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “You don’t,” he said, laughing. “Come, let’s kiss and make up. Whether you like it or not, you’re committed to Apocalypse Enterprises, and you’ll just have to get used to the idea of my wife. We can be friends, if not lovers.”

  She stared at him scornfully. “I’d sooner be friends with a Bible-basher!”

  “To repeat my eternal refrain, Ruby, think! I can’t marry you, that’s manifest. As husband and wife we’d murder each other. But I’ve just found what I think will be the biggest gold mine in the world, and to whom am I going to leave my interest in it? I need a wife to sire sons. You have an heir. Sung has plenty of heirs. Whereas I have no heirs whatsoever. Be fair, dear one.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” she said, beginning to tremble as she came down from the peaks of her rage. “Are you hinting that it’s me you love, not her?”

  “How can I possibly love a girl I’ve never seen?”

  “Never seen?”

  “I’m sending to Scotland for a bride. A cousin. Someone who knows nothing about New South Wales—or Australia, if you prefer that name—and nothing about me. I hope she’ll be a nice little thing, but she’s a pig in a poke. Certainly she’s bound to be virtuous.” He pulled a face. “And certainly she’ll be soaked in Presbyterianism, but I can break her of that. As she will be the mother of my children, I hope to learn to love her. I hope she’ll be a dutiful wife. That’s highly likely—the women of my clan are brought up dutiful. Which is more than I can say for you, Ruby. Your virtue is nonexistent, and the duties of a wife would bore you to perpetual rebellion.”

  She fumbled in the pocket of her skirt and stamped a foot. “Oh, bugger, I’ve lost my cheroots! Give me one, Alexander.”

  He struck a match, held it while she puffed. “Down out of your high flies, Ruby?”

  “With a wallop.” Up and down the verandah she went, cheroot to and from her mouth. Then, some distance from him, she halted and turned to face him. “Alexander, this is madness. A pig in a poke? What a way to describe a wife! Marriages of convenience abound, but usually the parties to one know each other a little. Why don’t you go to Sydney and find a suitable wife there? Charles and Constance have two or three girls who are ‘out,’ I think they phrase it. Sophia would be good for you, you’d learn to love her.”

  His face went flinty. “No, Ruby. My wife is not a subject I care to discuss with you any further. I’ve told you what I intend, and why I intend it.”

  “And are relegating me to the role of friend.”

  “I know that lot in Scotland,” he said, plucking the burned-out stump from her fingers, “and whoever my cousinly bride will be, she’ll never hold a candle to you. Besides, I’m not married yet, so friendship is for the future.”

  Her arms stole around him, her eyes went from cat to kitten. “You can’t be sure she’ll be charmless, Alexander. What if she turns out to be Delilah?”

  The wall was near; he pushed her against it and wrenched the top of her dress down to bare her breasts. “There is only one Delilah, Ruby, and she’s you.”

  THE LETTER that Alexander Kinross sent to James Drummond, the one that Elizabeth yearned in vain to see, went as follows:

  My dear James,

  I write requesting one of your daughters as my wife. Jean will do nicely if she is not yet married, otherwise another will suit me equally well.

  Last time we met you said you’d sooner see a child of yours married to an Anabaptist, and I promised you that one day you would change your mind. This is that day.

  The boilermaker’s apprentice has done extremely well for himself, James. Not only did he find gold in California—a fact you wouldn’t let me tell you—but he has found a whole gold mine in New South Wales. Alexander Kinross is a hugely wealthy man.

  Kinross? I hear you say. What is this Kinross? Well, the Drummonds according to you have disowned me, so I chose a new name for myself. Your daughter will live the life of a great lady. New South Wales, from whence I write, has no suitable wives to offer—its women are whores, convicts or English snobs.

  I am enclosing the sum of one thousand pounds to cover the cost of sending my bride out first-class, and accompanied by a trained abigail, as these females are also scarce here.

  Write to me at once to tell me which of your girls I am to meet when she arrives in Sydney. You may expect five thousand pounds in the future if she pleases me.

  He signed his name with immense satisfaction and sat back to reread it with a smile. So much for you, money-grubbing old sod that you are, James Drummond! And so much for you, John Murray!

  Summers took the letter into Bowenfels to post, though there was a Royal Mail concession on the Cobb & Co coach to Bathurst. Its passage to Scottish Kinross was painfully slow; mailed in March, it reached James Drummond in September. James’s answer informing Alexander that he was sending his sixteen-year-old youngest, Elizabeth, traveled much faster. It arrived in New South Wales a week before Aurora was due to sail from Tilbury.

  KINROSS HOUSE stood atop Mount Kinross, finished in a frenzy. How Maggie Summers had wailed at the prospect of becoming its housekeeper! Not that her carryings-on had gotten her anywhere. Jim Summers said she was to do as she was told, and that was that. Poor woman, she seemed doomed to be barren; no children by her first husband, and none by Summers.

  He had left it until late to tell Charles and Constance Dewy about his impending marriage, uncomfortably aware that it would sound most peculiar. Constance had tried her best to interest him in her eldest, Sophia, who she privately considered was an ideal match for Alexander—fetchingly pretty, clever, educated, a grand sense of humor and a nice touch of worldliness. But, though Sophia had yearned for Alexander, he did what Constance feared—looked through the poor girl as if she wasn’t there.

  Ruby Costevan was a social difficulty that the Dewys had gotten around the way a cat gets around a puddle: by wary side-stepping that pretends to be the route chosen ten thousand years before the puddle ever existed. Charles met her whenever the Apocalypse board met at the Kinross Hotel, Constance only when the Apocalypse board threw a reception at the Kinross Hotel. What they, all of Hill End and all of Kinross town knew was that Ruby Costevan belonged to Alexander body and (if she had one) soul. What they couldn’t even guess at was how Alexander was going to treat Ruby after he married, as marry he must.

  When Alexander told the Dewys of Elizabeth’s imminent arrival in Sydney, they were flabbergasted.

  “Good lord, man, you’re closemouthed,” Constance said as she plied her fan vigorously. “A bride from Scotland.”

  “Yes, a cousin. Elizabeth Drummond.”

  “She must be lovely to catch you.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Alexander imperturbably. “I knew her eldest sister, Jean—a beautiful, sprightly girl. But this one wasn’t far out of the nursery when I was last in Scotland.”

  “Uh—really? How—how old is she now?” Constance faltered.

  “Sixteen.”

  Charles choked on his whisky, which permitted a little time to elapse before a reply had to be made.

  “Nearly half your age,” said Constance, and beamed her widest smile. “That’s delightful, Alexander! A very young girl will suit you. Charles, don’t guzzle! It’s whisky, not water.”

  AN ODD CHANCE, that his dynamite should be on the same ship; he had his bill of lading for it in the same postal delivery that brought James Drummond’s letter. News that she was booked on the Aurora didn’t please Alexander; Aurora took only a dozen passengers, which meant second-class accommodation, facilities and food. Plus a two-and-a-half-month voyage around the Cape of Good Hope instead of a brisk passage through the Suez Canal.

  Once he had cast the die and couldn’t retreat he had grown nervous, anxious, snapped at everyone including Summers. Was his pricked pride leading him into something he would bitterly regret? Why hadn’t he realized how young she was bound to be? Why hadn’t he counted up the years? The only young girls he knew were the Dewy daughters, and th
at was a matter of saying hello, then quite forgetting they existed. Every time he saw Ruby she was in a new mood: Cleopatra out to sexually please a jaded Caesar, Aspasia wanting a debate about politics, Josephine sure that he would abandon her, Catherine di Medici contemplating the contents of her poison ring, Medusa with a stare that reduced a man to stone. And Delilah, out to betray.

  So he set out for Sydney halfway through March to find the coastal plain a swimming sea of humidity, and Sydney’s sewerage problems still on everybody’s lips. However, he did what he could to cushion Elizabeth’s shocks, for he knew how James would have brought her up. Well, wasn’t that why he was marrying her? Virginal and virtuous, unschooled, untried, a wee country lassie who got jam on the supper table on Sundays only and a roast dinner when the family celebrated some unusual event. A world he knew all too well, and had hated. What he hoped was that Elizabeth hated it too, had jumped at the chance to get out, start afresh.

  When he saw her sitting primly on her trunk with her hands folded over her purse, clad in that unbearably hot, heavyweight Drummond tartan from head to foot, he knew that these hopes were unfounded. Her whole pose was that of an orphan cast adrift in a world she didn’t know and didn’t want. A mouse. Spirit broken by her father and—no doubt whatsoever—by her minister of religion. That knowledge prompted him to be businesslike and brisk toward her, while his heart squeezed up in dismay. Och, this wasn’t going to work!

  There was no wise and experienced older woman to tell him that he was going about it all the wrong way, so he had no idea that he was going about it all the wrong way. He proceeded according to plan: meet her and marry her as soon as possible.

  The literal day that he spent with her before he married her he found encouraging in some ways, discouraging in others. Though her clothes were awful and her coloring too like his own to have instinctive appeal, a good look at her told him that she had the potential to be a very beautiful woman. And he liked her eyes, wide apart and big, their irises a genuine navy-blue. Once she was fashionably dressed and dowered with striking jewels, he’d have no cause to be ashamed of her appearance. The shyness and quietness, he told himself, would vanish in time, and her unintelligible Scottish accent would lessen. Her reception of the diamond ring was exasperating, but in the two weeks that followed their wedding she didn’t object to being made over.

  He had approached bedding her with the confidence of a man skilled in making love, whose experiences were wide enough to encompass womankind. But he failed to take into account the fact that all of his conquests were of women who had invited him into their beds—that is, women who desired him. And he had pleased every one of them, had them begging for more. Of course he knew that Elizabeth was too young and too ignorant to be in a receptive state of mind before the bedding took place, but he had no doubt that within a couple of minutes she would be aroused and ready for him. When that didn’t happen, he was left without resources: no Don Juan, Alexander Kinross. Just a brilliant engineer with a powerful sexual drive so far channeled into mutual pleasure. But the silly girl wouldn’t even let him remove her nightgown! Nothing he could do aroused her! At sixteen women were supposed to be absolutely at their ripest, but Elizabeth was a sour, very green cherry. She endured his attentions politely, in that she didn’t reject him outright; clearly she was prepared to do her matrimonial duty, duty plain and simple though it was. So, after three assaults on the citadel of his new wife, Alexander left her bed a bitterly disappointed man. But more than that: he left her bed wondering if he had been mistaken all these years—was it possible that the women who had seemed to be aroused by his lovemaking were counterfeiting pleasure?

  Reflection in his own sleepless bed reassured him on this last point. A man who knew gold from fool’s gold wouldn’t be so easily hoodwinked, and memories of Ruby in his bed laid those particular doubts to rest. No fake climaxes there, she was too juicy, too downright greedy. Och, but it was humiliating to realize that he wasn’t such a great lover after all! Why couldn’t he rouse Elizabeth? I’m not a vain man, he said to himself, having no idea that some would call his buckskins evidence of vanity, I’m not a vain man, but I have a good body and a fairly reasonable sort of face. I’m rich, successful, well liked. So why am I failing with my wife?

  A question he couldn’t answer.

  Nor was it answered by the time that they left Sydney, though he had made love to her dozens of times, always without response. She just lay there and suffered it.

  Had Elizabeth only realized it, she couldn’t have found a better way to intrigue her husband than to be what she was: a woman he couldn’t wrap around his finger, charm with that irresistible smile, drive into a fury that led to passion and wild pleasure. To him, it was a little like being married to an icicle that wasn’t ice all the way to its core; if he could only find the key to what would melt her, he would be king of the world. He fell in love with her because he couldn’t move her, he couldn’t make her eyes light up when he entered the room, he couldn’t elicit any response save uncomplaining duty.

  On the night she turned to him and kissed him as thanks for his kindness to Theodora Jenkins, he had made a terrible mistake by calling in the debt at once.

  “Take off your nightgown. Skin should feel skin.”

  Thinking that skin on skin was bound to light a spark in her, because it always did in him. But it hadn’t. The stoical duty was still a duty. Elizabeth, he knew by now, not only didn’t love him; she would probably never love him. He was her burden.

  So he hadn’t broken off his liaison with Ruby after all, and that in turn led to the complication of making sure that Ruby remained his secret. If he permitted Elizabeth to go about the town without him beside her, some vindictive old tabby would stick her claws in; it was even possible that Ruby would introduce herself. For of course Ruby had winkled the true situation out of him the moment he returned to Kinross and her, the woman he couldn’t live without.

  “You’ve fallen out of love with me and into love with your frozen wife,” she said maliciously.

  “It’s worse than that,” he said gloomily. “I’m in love with two women at once, for different reasons and with different objectives. Well,” he asked, propping himself up on an elbow, “isn’t that natural? You’re about as different from each other as women can get.”

  “How would I know?” she asked, sounding absolutely bored. “I’ve never met Mrs. Kinross.”

  “And you never will!” he snapped.

  “Sometimes, Alexander, you ooze shit.”

  HOWEVER, NONE of it mattered when he realized that Elizabeth was pregnant. She’d fallen at once, which boded well for a large family of boys and girls. One every twenty months or so. That would give her sufficient rest between their births. She may not be interested in the act of love, but she will make a wonderful mother, and she’ll be queen in this house, he said to himself. His delight at the news of her pregnancy had driven him to tell her right then and there how far he had come, from what ignominious origins he had sprung. It had burned to be said as if a part of the sacrament of conception, which was logical to a man like Alexander, whose own conception was shrouded in mystery, whose mother had kept the identity of her lover a secret so close that not even Pinkerton’s, when he put them on to it, had been able to break the silence of that little Scottish community. What he didn’t know was that his confession destroyed the moment for Elizabeth, drove her even further away from him. He had intended to bridge the gap with it, not widen it.

  Yes, he repeated to himself, Elizabeth will make a wonderful mother, and she’ll be queen in this house. It took courage to put Maggie Summers in her place over Jade and the manservants. The hide of that woman to do such things behind my back! Why do women as common as Maggie Summers look down on the Chinese as their inferiors?

  And my wife thinks that I look like the devil. If only I’d known! If only I’d known!

  The beard and mustache came off on his next visit to Joe Skoggs the barber.

  Elizab
eth actually smiled when she saw his face, dark bronze and sickly white.

  “Like a piebald pony,” she said. “Thank you, Alexander.”

  Four

  Home Truths and

  an Unexpected Alliance

  THANKS TO Miss Theodora Jenkins and Jade, Elizabeth’s life in Kinross House was not quite as lonely as it had been when she first arrived, but time still hung heavily on her hands, so used to being busy. Apart from a visit by the Dewys, during which Alexander gave a dinner party, she continued to see no outsiders. Sung Chow, who came to the dinner party, fascinated her, but his conversation was so erudite and his English so scrupulously correct that after the Dewys departed Elizabeth spent all her spare time reading, trying to improve her vocabulary and the way she expressed her thoughts—and in mitigating her accent. When she demonstrated no talent for watercolor painting or drawing, Alexander suggested that she take up embroidery.

  “You’re going to get heavier and more uncomfortable as the months go on, my dear, so some fancywork might vary your days,” he said, striving to be kind and sympathetic, but very aware that he wasn’t building his own life around his pregnant little wife.

  It was from Jade that Elizabeth finally found out all about Ruby Costevan. The formal nature of their relationship was hard to break down due to Jade’s terror of overstepping the familiarity mark, but finding Elizabeth in tears after a particularly trying attempt to do padded satin stitch on an embroidered butterfly’s body, formality flew out the window in a trice. Jade mopped up the tears and spoke her mind, which dwelled on the coming baby.

  “Oh, Miss Lizzy, I’ve always wanted to be a nurserymaid! Please may I look after your baby? Please? Pearl can come and maid you, she’s been dying to ever since I told her how nice you are,” Jade pleaded with fervor.