The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  Elizabeth saw her chance. “Only,” she said with a touch of iron in her voice, “if you tell me all about this Ruby Costevan woman. You can start by explaining why all her employees are Chinese.”

  “Because of Miss Ruby’s ties to Prince Sung.”

  “Prince Sung?”

  “Yes. He’s from Peking, a Mandarin prince. We—all of his people—are Mandarin, not Cantonese.” Jade sighed, fluttered her delicate hands. “So handsome, Miss Lizzy! Didn’t you think so when he came to dinner? A great lord. Two years ago I was hoping that he would choose me as a concubine, but he liked my sister Pink Bird better.”

  “Concubine? It’s a word in the Bible that no one has ever explained to me. What is a concubine?”

  “A woman who is a man’s property but is not well born enough to be one of his wives.”

  “Ohhhh…So what are Miss Ruby’s ties to Prince Sung? Is she one of his concubines?”

  Jade giggled. “Oh, Miss Lizzy! No! Miss Ruby owns the Kinross Hotel now, but she used to own a hotel in Hill End, where Prince Sung used to be too. They have a son. Lee.”

  “So she’s one of Prince Sung’s wives.”

  Jade’s merriment increased. “No, no, Miss Lizzy! Miss Ruby has never been anyone’s wife or concubine. She’s from Sydney, but her family moved to the goldfields when she was a little girl. In Hill End her hotel was a house of ill fame. She isn’t Chinese, but she smokes tiny black cigars and breathes fire like a dragon.”

  The woman outside the Kinross Hotel! That was exactly my own thought—she breathes fire like a dragon. So beautiful, so wild looking, so arrogant. A child by a Chinese prince!

  “Where is this son, Jade? Here in Kinross?”

  “Lee is at a school for swells in England. Miss Ruby reared him British and he goes by her name, Costevan.”

  “How old is Lee?”

  Jade frowned in concentration. “I’m not sure, Miss Lizzy. About eleven, I think.”

  “And is Miss Ruby still tied to Prince Sung?”

  “By friendship only.”

  Down went the embroidery needle; Elizabeth shoved the tambour frame away impatiently—what a bother fancywork was! “Then tell me, Jade, what Miss Ruby is to Mr. Alexander. Are they friends?”

  “Um—I suppose so.”

  “Have they been lovers?”

  “Um—I suppose so.”

  “Are they still lovers?”

  “Oh, please, Miss Lizzy! Miss Ruby said that if I told tales out of school, she’d cut my throat with a razor—she would too!”

  Elizabeth held up her folding embroidery scissors. “If you don’t tell me, Jade, I’ll use these to cut your throat. They’ll hurt a great deal more than a razor, but I will do it!”

  “Your accent, Miss Lizzy! I can’t understand you!”

  “Rubbish! I work on my accent every day, and you’ve had no trouble with it before. Stop beating around the bush, Jade, and tell me the truth. Otherwise you’re dead.”

  “They’ve been lovers ever since Mr. Alexander went to Hill End about three years ago,” Jade babbled. “When he came here, Miss Ruby followed him and built the new hotel. He wouldn’t let her open a house of ill fame, but she doesn’t need to earn money that way anymore—she’s a partner in the Apocalypse Mine.”

  “She’s a harlot. She sells her body,” Elizabeth said in a flat tone. “She’s lower than the things that crawl in slime.”

  “No, Miss Lizzy, she isn’t a harlot!” Jade cried, distressed at such a judgment. “She has never sold her body! She kept a stable of girls and sold their bodies! She’s only ever had two lovers that I know of—Prince Sung and Mr. Alexander. My father, Sam Wong, is her cook.” A look of puzzlement crossed Jade’s face. “Nowadays she calls Papa a chef, whatever that is. He likes it—his pay has doubled.”

  “Then she’s much worse than a mere harlot. She profits from the harlotry of others,” said Elizabeth, stony-faced. “And my husband consorts with her to this day?”

  Jade solved her dilemma by bursting into tears and fleeing.

  Elizabeth kicked the tambour frame so hard that it broke, then got up and walked to the window, staring out at the garden through a red haze.

  So that’s why he doesn’t want me going into Kinross town! she thought. By accident I might encounter his mistress. Or she might accost me—the vile creature can have no pride, no respect for the niceties. And how he would hate the townsfolk to witness our meeting! Many of them are his employees. It’s as I suspected. Alexander is like a rolltop desk—a multitude of compartments inside, each one for a different purpose. His mistress compartment is labeled Ruby Costevan. His wife compartment bears my name. Oh, how much I’ve learned since I left Scotland! But even there, even if one is barely sixteen, one knows that men keep mistresses. The Bible can be quite explicit on the subject—look at David and Bathsheba, and what Bathsheba did to a fine man’s scruples!

  ALEXANDER HAD said that he would be in to dinner early, as he had a gift for her. She donned a new dress from Sydney—burgundy silk shot with purplish black, cut to reveal more of her breasts than she liked. Jade had sent Pearl to help her, do her hair; the minx was taking no chances that Elizabeth might succeed in milking more information out of her. Pearl strung garnets around her neck, pushed pendants through the holes in her earlobes. The diamond in her engagement ring gathered all the light into itself, blazed it back in brilliant rainbow rays. By now Elizabeth knew that garnets were not very valuable, but she had loved them, chosen them herself when her husband had wanted to buy her rubies. Even then, some alarm had gone off, warned her against anything named ruby.

  “My dear, you look magnificent,” said Alexander, his chin and upper lip now the same shade as the rest of his face. She thought he was hand-somer clean-shaven—why do men wear facial hair if they have no flaws to hide? she wondered.

  “A sherry before dinner?” he asked, feeling very urbane.

  “Thank you, I’d enjoy that,” said Elizabeth composedly.

  Suddenly he frowned. “Ought you, in your condition?” It came out sounding as if she were a drunkard.

  “I imagine that a little of anything is all right.”

  “True.” But he poured her only half a glass of amontillado.

  She drained it at a gulp and slapped the glass down on the low table between them. “More, please.”

  “More?”

  “Yes, more! Don’t be a skinflint, Alexander.”

  He studied her as if she had bitten him, then shrugged and refilled her glass to the same level. “That’s all you’re getting, so stretch it out. What’s upsetting you?”

  Elizabeth drew a big breath and looked straight into his eyes. “I’ve discovered exactly who and what Ruby Costevan is. Your mistress and a brothel keeper. You still look like the Devil, Alexander, because you’ve got two faces.”

  “Who’s the little birdie chirped this story?” he asked with suppressed anger.

  “Does it matter? Some little birdie was bound to chirp it sooner or later. What a—an abominable situation! You keep a harlot mistress down in the valley, and a virtuous wife up on the heights, and never the twain shall meet! If she’s Cleopatra, Medusa and I forget who else, what does that make me?”

  “A pain in the arse!” he snapped.

  She began to pleat the folds her skirt made across her lap, head down and concentrating on the task. “For all my ignorance, I begin to see the way your mind works, Alexander. You need heirs from an unimpeachable woman, and Ruby has already been impeached. I am not stupid, just young and inexperienced. Two qualities I am rapidly losing.”

  “I apologize for my language of a moment ago, Elizabeth.”

  “Don’t. It was how you felt, therefore it was truthful. You shouldn’t apologize for speaking the truth, it’s too novel and refreshing,” she said, voice dripping acid that she hadn’t known she contained. “Tell me the truth about you and Miss?—Mrs.?—Costevan.”

  He might have started to win her then if he had thrown himself upon her me
rcy, begged her forgiveness, but he had far too much stubborn Scottish pride. Instead, he went on the attack, determined to put her in her place, which was exactly what he decided her place should be.

  “Very well, if you insist,” he said calmly. “Ruby Costevan is my mistress. But don’t be too quick to judge her, my dear. Consider first what you might have become yourself if your own brother had raped you when you were eleven years old. Consider what you might have become yourself if you were, like Ruby—and like me!—a bastard. Even including Honoria Brown, I admire Ruby Costevan more than any other woman I’ve ever met. Certainly more than I admire you. You’re saturated in the petty bigotries and hypocrisies of a small town dominated by a fanatical minister of religion who instills shame into innocent children. Who would burn Ruby Costevan at the stake if he had the chance.”

  Her color had faded, she looked ill. “I see. I do indeed see. But how are you better than Dr. Murray, Alexander? You bought me for your own purposes, and with no more compunction than you would have bought a side of beef.”

  “Don’t blame me for that. Blame your avaricious father,” he said, deliberately cruel.

  “I do! I do!” Her pupils had dilated, her eyes seemed as black as his. “I wasn’t offered a choice because it’s clear that women don’t have choices. Men make the choices for them. But if I had been given a choice, I wouldn’t have married you.”

  “That speech rings ominous, but there’s truth in it, I admit. You were simply told what your destiny was.” He filled her sherry glass, wanting her head to spin. “What other choice did you have, Elizabeth? Spinsterhood, the fate of a maiden aunt. Would you really choose that over marriage to me, over motherhood?” His voice softened, dropped in tone. “The odd thing is that I love you. You’re so thoroughly nice, despite the prudery.” The smile flashed, disappeared. “I deemed you a mouse, but you’re not, though you have more fortitude than courage. You’re a quiet lion. That appeals to me. It warms my heart. I’m very glad that you’re the mother of my children.”

  “Then why Ruby?” she asked, finishing the sherry.

  Och, patience! He just didn’t have it when it came to women, to women’s troubles. Why was she putting him in the wrong? “You must understand,” he said, the words clipped, uncompromising, “that a man’s physical desires are much as that old horror Murray says. Why shouldn’t I go to Ruby’s bed, when there’s no pleasure to be had in yours? Try though I do to arouse you, to satisfy you, I can’t. You go away somewhere, I make love to a tailor’s dummy. I want physical desire to go both ways, Elizabeth! You tolerate my invasions of your bed because you’ve been taught that a wife does have conjugal duties. But that kind of lovemaking is awful! Your coldness reduces the act to mechanics for generating children! It should be far more—a mutual and passionate pleasure, a joy for both of us! If you offered me that, I’d have no need to seek solace with Ruby.”

  This interpretation of the Act fell upon Elizabeth like a bolt from the blue. What he was saying ran counter to everything she had been taught, and to her own feelings when he made love to her. What he did was endurable only because it was how God had designed the generation of children. But to expect her to grunt and wallow and participate in what he did—! To think that when his fingers plundered the most secret parts of her, he truly believed that she could welcome them? No, no, no! To like the Act for its sensations, its carnal nature? No, no, no!

  She licked her lips, strove to find words he would accept as final. “No matter what you say about choices, Alexander, you were not my choice. You would never have been my choice. Far sooner spinsterhood, the fate of a maiden aunt. I do not love you! Nor do I believe that you love me. If you did, you would not go to Ruby Costevan. And that is all I have to say.”

  He rose to his feet, pulled her up with him. “In which case, my dear, there’s no more to be said, is there? I’m not about to justify myself one millimeter further. What it amounts to is this: you’ve married a man you’re going to have to share with another woman. One for the pleasure of begetting children, one for the pleasure of the flesh. Shall we go into dinner?”

  I lost, she was thinking. I lost—but how can that be? I have been shown that I am wrong, which makes a mockery out of all that I believe in. How did he defeat me? How did he manage to justify his continued connection with a harlot like Ruby Costevan?

  At her place stood a small velvet box. Heart sinking, she opened it to see a ring sporting an inch-long rectangular stone. It was sea-green at one end, and subtly shaded through to a rich pink at the other. Diamonds surrounded it.

  “A watermelon tourmaline I bought from a Brazilian trader,” he said as he went to his place. “A gift for the mother-to-be. Green for the boys you’ll have, pink for the girls.”

  “It’s lovely,” she said automatically, and slid it on to the third finger of her right hand. Her gloves would fit now.

  She sat and ate cold chicken mousse with a caperish sauce, the acidic sorbet her husband was adamant must be served between courses, then unenthusiastically eyed the filet mignon. What she yearned for was a piece of fish, but the river fish were all dead and Sydney too far away to ship fish. One look at the yellow béarnaise sauce and she bolted for her bathroom, there to lose the mousse and the sorbet.

  “Too much sherry or too many home truths?” she panted.

  “Possibly neither,” said Alexander, sponging her face. “It might simply be morning sickness in the evening.” He lifted her hand and lightly kissed it. “Go to bed and sleep. I promise I won’t disturb you.”

  “Yes,” she said, “go down to Kinross and disturb Ruby.”

  I wonder, went her last conscious thought, what Ruby’s son by Prince Sung is like? What an exotic combination. Eleven years old, and in a school for swells in England. I suppose his mother sent him to school so far away in order to conceal his far-from-swell origins. Clever of her.

  But Alexander didn’t go straight down to Kinross to disturb Ruby; first he went out on to the terrace where the light from the house spread golden bars across the lawn.

  Tonight has been a bitter blow, he thought. Elizabeth does not love me. Until tonight I had believed, running my hands gently and lusciously across the body she now bares for me, that my day would come. That she would awake to my touch, arch her back, moan and murmur, use her own hands and lips to explore my body, caress the parts of it that she recoils from if I try to guide her there. But tonight has shown me beyond all shadow of a doubt that my wife will always recoil. What did you do to her, Dr. Unspeakable Murray? You poisoned her for life. She equates sex with corruption, so what sort of fellow would she fall in love with, if she ever did? God help him if he tried to touch her!

  “I TOLD YOU, she’s frozen” was Ruby’s verdict when he ended his tale of the exchange between himself and Elizabeth. “There are some women whom nothing on earth can arouse. She is one. An iceberg. You’re an adept at the art of love—if you can’t provoke her into a response, no one can. Take what you need where you can find it, Alexander.” A throaty laugh erupted. “She’s up there in heaven, I’m down here in hell. I always knew that hell had to be more exciting than heaven—must be, holding such a motley lot. You’re just going to have to make do with two women. Oh, what a terrible prospect!”

  A COOLNESS entered Alexander’s attitude toward Elizabeth from that confrontation on, though if anything he came home for dinner more often, and spent the evenings in her company. Her skill on the piano was increasing as she developed a love for music, but, said Alexander, who had begun to enjoy needling her,

  “You play the same way as you make love. Without passion. Indeed, one might almost say, without expression of any kind. The technique is a credit to Miss Jenkins, who must have to work very hard. It’s a pity you’re not prepared to give a little of your inner self away, but you like to keep your secrets, don’t you?”

  That hurt, but if Alexander had become coolly cruel, Elizabeth had become extremely controlled.

  “Does Ruby play?” she asked
politely.

  “Like a concert pianist, with the whole range of emotions.”

  “How nice for you. Does she sing too?”

  “Like an operatic diva, except that she’s a contralto—not a great many principal parts are written for contraltos.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the word.”

  “Her voice is deep. I haven’t heard you sing yet.”

  “Miss Jenkins doesn’t think I ought to sing.”

  “I’m sure she knows best.”

  Since there was no one to whom she could confide these short exchanges, Elizabeth got into the habit of discussing them with herself—an unproductive business, yes, but at least some kind of relief.

  “It’s better to have Ruby out in the open, don’t you agree?” asked Elizabeth One.

  “She’s certainly something to talk about—nothing ever happens that’s worth talking about,” said Elizabeth Two.

  “I’ve stopped even liking Alexander,” said Elizabeth One.

  “With good reason,” said Elizabeth Two. “He torments.”

  “But I am carrying his child. Does that mean I won’t like his child? Does it?”

  “I don’t think so. After all, look at his contribution—heave, grunt and groan for about a minute, that’s all. The rest is you, and you like yourself, don’t you?” asked Elizabeth Two.

  “No,” said Elizabeth One sadly. “I want a girl to like.”

  “So do I. He doesn’t want a girl,” said Elizabeth Two.

  THE SINGLE track of standard-gauge rail line between Lithgow and Kinross left Lithgow traveling west-west-south for 25 miles before turning south-south-east to run its last 70 miles home. The speed of its construction stood in triumphant contrast to the sluggish progress of the Government railway between Lithgow and Bathurst, its mere 50 miles started in 1868 and still uncompleted.

  At 1 in 100, the average gradient was excellent; Alexander had engineered the line himself, choosing to set it in the flanks of the mountains a hundred feet above the valley floors to keep it as level as possible. The track traversed ten stout, high wooden bridges over flood-prone creeks, and went through two 300-yard tunnels as well as nine cuttings. Because he used Chinese labor, he had no work problems; they were, he thought, consumed with admiration, like engines made of living tissue, just kept on going as if there was no word for exhaustion in Mandarin.