by Anna Romer
Taking a deep breath, I lifted my sleeve. The Wolf shifted nearer, and let out a soft whistle.
‘What a beauty! How’d you get it?’
‘A dog bit me.’
The Wolf pulled away and looked at my face. ‘Cripes, that must’ve hurt. How old were you?’
‘Six.’
His eyes went wide. ‘I bet you had a gazillion stitches.’
‘Only twenty-five. And surgery. And lots of time in hospital.’
He whistled again. ‘I can’t believe I’ve known you all this time and you’ve never shown me before. Whose dog was it?’
‘My dad’s.’
‘Did it get put down for attacking you?’
‘Well, my dad . . . it was . . . I mean, he—’ I hung my head, suddenly faint. Clawing my fingers into my jeans legs, I tried to breathe away the memory.
‘You okay, Roo?’
I nodded, but I wasn’t okay. Not really.
When I was little, Mum took Jamie and me to see a puppet show in Armidale for the school holidays. There’d been a brightly painted stage with trees and a lake, and wooden puppet-girls wearing swan costumes. The puppets – marionettes, Mum had called them – had danced across the painted lake, faster and faster as the music rose. Then one of the swan-girl puppets got tangled and her strings broke. She fell limp, her wooden body hitting the stage with a clatter.
That’s how I felt now. As if my strings had been snipped.
‘Roo, what’s up? You’ve gone all pale and quiet.’
I gulped a breath and opened my eyes – when had I shut them? The Wolf was staring at me, his eyes a hand span from mine. He collected a strand of my hair and wound it around his finger, gave it a gentle tug and smiled.
‘I thought you went somewhere.’
‘I did . . . kind of. I’m back now.’
He gave a soft growl, then sprang nimbly to his feet. He reached for my hand, and as we stood in the shade of the cypress he began to transform.
‘I didn’t bring the nighty,’ I admitted. ‘Do you think the Beast will mind if I wear jeans?’
The Wolf considered this. His change was almost complete; he was no longer a boy. His eyes blazed and fur was beginning to sprout on his face. His nose was long and sharp and he had whiskers.
Baring his teeth, he snarled. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to escape.’
Without wasting another breath, I turned my back on the terrifying creature and ran for my life.
Pete finished tying off the bandage and stood up, his shadow rippling over me. ‘This time tomorrow, you’ll be right as rain.’
I looked up at him, shading my eyes from the sun.
‘Have you ever been bitten by a snake?’
I don’t know why I said it; the question kind of blurted out of its own accord. Pete must have thought me crazy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the boy emerging from my forgotten past and into the brighter light of these new incoming memories had grown into the man who now stood before me.
Pete’s brow went up, then he grinned. ‘Nah. Their fangs’d snap off in my leathery old hide. Why do you ask?’
‘Never mind.’
He narrowed his eyes, and his lips twitched into a secretive little smile. ‘Although I did,’ he added quietly, ‘get attacked by a crocodile one time.’
‘Nasty.’
As he went back to the barbecue I thought I heard him mutter something about being a champion swimmer.
A flush shot into my cheeks, and I busied myself inspecting the dressing he’d just applied to my foot, picking at the edges of the bandage, loosening a thread and worrying it free.
Of course, I couldn’t just come right out and ask.
What if he said yes? What if he remembered everything that had once happened between us, while I was still mostly in the dark? When I was twelve, life had been precarious. I wasn’t popular like my sister. Rather, I was tubby little Ruby Cardel, always the last one picked for a team, the weird, quiet girl at the back of the class, the one who sat alone at lunchtime.
I glanced at Pete from the corner of my eye.
He was whistling – not a happy tune, but some disjointed rendition of a Nirvana song that made it sound like a dirge – as he scrutinised the sizzling salmon, then reached for more twigs to fuel the barbecue flames.
If my suspicions were right – and Pete was in fact my childhood friend the Wolf – then my stay at Lyrebird Hill had the potential to become tricky.
I drew the loose thread from the bandage weave and rolled it between my fingers. Gradually, my recall was trickling back, but I wasn’t yet ready to play my hand without knowing the full score. Something had definitely happened between us; the only trouble was, I couldn’t remember if it had been good . . . or better off forgotten.
At dusk, we walked down the grassy slope to the river’s edge. Water babbled through the rocks. The tall she-oaks leaning from the banks shed their needles into the current. Pete was quiet, and I guessed he was thinking about Esther.
Picking up a stone, I skimmed it across the water.
There was a splash. Bardo flew past me into the shallows, biting at the ripples where the pebble had vanished. I stiffened and looked at Pete.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, and called the dog to him. But Bardo only grinned at us, clearly ignoring his command. Her tongue lolled in excitement, and her amber eyes darted from me to Pete then back again.
Her expression was so comic that it made me blink, and the muscles in my neck relaxed. Picking up another stone, I sent it further than the first one. Bardo bounded after it, snapping at the ripples again and letting out a joyful yelp.
‘She’s a strange one,’ I observed
‘You’ll never catch her chasing after a ball,’ Pete explained, and there was a waver of caution in his voice. ‘But throw a stone in the river, and she’ll be your friend for life.’
I searched inside myself for the anxiety that this remark should have inspired, but couldn’t find it. In its place, was a faint feeling of completeness, as if a tiny, overlooked puzzle piece had slotted perfectly into the larger picture of who I really was. Breathing deeply, I collected another stone to skim, and was about to hurl it when a whine came from behind. Pete and I looked around.
Old Boy was pawing a large flat rock jutting from the pebbly embankment, as if trying to overturn it.
‘Does he want to play too?’ I asked, my heart bounding only a little.
‘No,’ Pete said thoughtfully. ‘I think he’s found something.’
Wedged almost out of sight beneath the rock was a silver chain. I drew it out. It was attached to an ornate locket, which was embossed with a design of lyrebird tail-feathers.
‘That’s Esther’s,’ Pete said. ‘She must have lost it here.’
I weighed the locket in my palm, suddenly overcome with sorrow. ‘She was wearing it at the gallery.’
‘Poor old girl,’ Pete said softly. ‘She must have dropped it when she slipped that night.’ Taking it from my fingers, he carefully prised it open. ‘Look, there’s a little painting inside, she showed me once.’
It was a woman; she was ghostlike, with colourless eyes and ashen eyebrows, and white-blonde hair piled high on her crown; the only colour was in her cheeks, which bloomed the soft deep pink of summer roses.
‘She’s lovely,’ I observed. ‘Was she Esther’s mother?’
Pete shook his head. ‘Esther found the locket at the farmhouse a few years ago, forgotten behind a bookcase. Apparently she asked your mum about it, but it wasn’t hers, so Esther kept it. Here,’ he said, taking my hand and pressing the locket gently into my palm. ‘Something to remember her by.’
I was about to resist, then hesitated. I turned the locket over in my hands. There was something about it that intrigued me; maybe it was because it had been Esther’s. Then again, maybe it was simply the pretty way its ornate face gleamed softly in the dying sunlight, almost like a silver raindrop.
Almost like a fragment from long ago dream . . .
or memory.
12
Brenna, June 1898
What started as an accidental dalliance quickly became my obsession. Under the pretence of sleeping late, I latched my door and brought out my paints and brushes, balancing my drafting board on my knees at the window.
Some mornings, Lucien appeared in the garden to scythe away the long grass that grew up around the fruit trees, or to deliver barrow loads of manure to the flowerbeds. I hovered unseen in the shadows of my room, my artist’s eye taking note of his copper hair in the sunlight, or the flex of a muscular arm, or the curve of his jawbone beneath the broad brim hat.
Other days he did not appear.
Still, I sensed him out there as he moved through the morning, raking spent straw from the stable, replacing fresh hay in the racks, bruising the oats for the older horses, ensuring they were all watered and fed. If the carriage had recently been in use, he would rise early to wash and dry it and polish its varnished surface with soft leather and sweet oil.
Those days I drew him from memory.
As the murky dawn light shone through my window, and the rest of the house slept, Lucien’s likeness materialised on my pages. My fingers trembled as I worked, and my sides were wet with perspiration. Every creak of the roof or whisper of footfall outside my door made me lurch upright and hold my breath, listening until the imagined threat had passed. But I could not stop. I painted with a fire in my heart, snapping charcoal sticks in my haste, adding a frenzy of ink lines and vibrant colour washes, smearing the paper with fingerprints of alizarin, cardinal blue, sap green and cadmium.
Shame burned within me. It was wrong to feel such intense fascination for a man who was not my husband; but my shame was merely an ember, easy enough to ignore. Because I knew in my heart that if I could not stoke this secret fire each morning, then my spirit would most certainly wither and die.
Carsten arrived unexpectedly, late the following Friday evening.
He came to my bedroom in his travelling clothes, smelling of road dust and port wine and horses. He greeted me warmly, and in the candlelight I noted the flush in his cheeks and the shine of his eyes. He appeared to have forgotten the ill-humour he had suffered the night of his departure, and his soft words lulled me into believing he had forgiven my interest in his silver locket.
But when he undressed and met me under the covers, his violent passion resurfaced. He held me roughly, pressing my face against the mattress, twisting my arms until the joints flamed with pain; soon I was drenched in his sweat and bruised from top to toe, wishing only for our joining to end.
Sliding my hand along the edge of the mattress, I let my fingers curl around the bed frame. Somewhere below me, protected by shadows, was my travelling trunk. Inside, under piles of clothing and several pairs of cloth-wrapped shoes, was the bundle of paper Lucien had gifted me. Each leaf was now buckled by water and pigment, its surface darkened by charcoal lines and ink.
It brought me a strange kind of comfort to think that although Carsten could use my body, my thoughts were free to drift down into the dusty darkness and wander among my private gallery of stolen memories: Lucien watching quizzically while I babbled about wolfsbane that day in the glade; Lucien on the stairwell bathed in morning light as he presented me with a gift of his forbidden esteem; Lucien in the dark garden at midnight, sitting on the bench, his face eerily beautiful in the moonlight.
Lucien. Always Lucien.
I should have destroyed my secret portraits, but it was clear they were among my best work. Besides, they were well hidden; what cause would Carsten ever have to check beneath my bed?
For a long while after Carsten had spent himself and retired to his own room, I lay awake. When the clock chimed midnight and sleep continued to elude me, I made my way to the library.
While the household slept, I stalked the dusty walls of books, hoping that their lofty shelves and muffled quietude would soothe my inner chaos. Instead, the stillness drew my attention to the muffled ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall. Whenever it chimed – the hour, or half-hour – its tones roused my heartbeat with a sort of fearful expectation that I could not name. Earlier, in my bedroom, Carsten had made no mention of his trip, nor whether he had seen my father. I ached for news of home, but more pressingly was the other request I had asked of him.
There was a massacre, a band of Aboriginal people were murdered; someone must know who those men were—
‘Brenna.’
I whipped around. Carsten stood in the doorway. His eyes were dull and his gaze slid past me to the sideboard where he kept his liquor.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I told him, unable to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘I was looking for a book . . .’
Carsten poured himself a sherry and downed it, then retrieved another glass. He topped this to the brim and brought it over to me.
‘It always helps me sleep,’ he said softly. ‘Drink it down and get yourself back to bed.’
The gentleness in his voice roused my courage. I sipped the sherry and swallowed the sickly syrup, then cleared my throat.
‘Your trip went well, I hope?’
He eyed me over his sherry glass. ‘Well enough.’
‘How is my father? Did he send a note?’
‘There was no time for notes. We spoke briefly about business, then I had to board the Newcastle train.’
‘So, you were not long in the New England?’
‘A mere few days.’
‘Did you . . .’ I hesitated, sensing his impatience with my interrogation, but I had waited weeks and the question was eating at me. ‘Did you have an opportunity to enquire after that matter we spoke of – those killings at Lyrebird Hill?’
Carsten looked grim. ‘It was so long ago, no one remembers. Nor do they care to,’ he added gruffly, then his face twisted into a sneer. ‘They’re wild blacks, not worth my energy chasing up their accursed history. Don’t ask me again.’
‘But it’s important to me—’
‘Enough!’ Carsten moved quickly to close the door. When he turned back to me, his face was pale and hard. ‘Those people deserved what they got in seventy-nine. They were stealing cattle, spearing stockmen – they were a danger then, and still are today – the sooner they’re wiped out, the better.’
Wiped out. I staggered back. Dear Jindera and Mee Mee, wiped out? Yungara, my mother; the woman to whom my father had given his heart; the clan whose blood surged through my veins . . .
Wiped out.
A darkness swept through me, rushing up from my depths, bringing with it echoes of my dream – I smelled firesmoke, felt the press and tremble of frightened bodies, heard the anguished screams of my loved ones. I swallowed, trying to seize control of myself, knowing instinctively that my life depended upon my silence. I bit back my words with such force that I tasted blood, but they burst forth anyway.
‘The people steal cattle because they’re hungry,’ I said, clenching my fists at my sides. ‘And because the stock have grazed bare the grasslands where they once hunted kangaroo. And if they spear a stockman, it’s because he has killed their wives and mothers and children for crimes that are not only petty, but the fault of the white settlers to begin with.’
Carsten’s handsome face was ashen with shock. He stood rigid, his sherry glass forgotten in his hand, his eyes glinting darkly.
‘Your words sicken me, Brenna,’ he said, his voice hushed with warning. ‘I’m beginning to think your father’s foolish doctrines have addled your brain. Why should you care what happens to a camp full of blacks? Your interest in them strikes me as an unhealthy obsession. Women should stay out of matters they have no capacity to understand.’
‘You speak of them as if they were no more than animals.’
He dashed his sherry glass to the floor; broken shards and blood-thick sherry sprayed across the boards. ‘They are savages!’ he cried, and staggered towards me. ‘They live like beasts and deserve no better treatment.’
There was little more than
an arm’s length between us; I knew he wanted to see me cringe, to shrink away, but I held my ground and squared myself against him. ‘You’re wrong, Carsten. They live simply, but their inner lives are complex. In many ways, they are superior to those white brutes who—’
Carsten rushed at me and slapped my face. I went to hit back, but he grabbed my arms. His breath reeked of sherry, and his eyes were glassy and bloodshot, dark with anger.
‘Get one thing straight. While under my roof, you’ll keep a civil tongue. You won’t address me again in so loose a manner, or I’ll have you horsewhipped. Do you understand?’
I struggled to free myself, my eyes narrowed on his face. ‘Whip me if you dare, but if you do, I’ll walk out of here and never return.’
He gripped me under the arm and dragged me to the reading table. Sweeping the scattered piles of books onto the floor, he shoved me against the rim and pressed his mouth to my ear. ‘You’ll stay here where you belong,’ he said, digging his fingers into my flesh. ‘At least, until you give me an heir.’
He released me, but when I tried to spring away, he grasped a handful of my hair and forced me face down on the table. With his free hand, he lifted my skirt and insinuated his fingers into the leg of my drawers, dragging them aside.
‘Not here,’ I said harshly. ‘Someone will find us. I’d die of shame.’
‘Shame?’ Carsten hissed, unbuttoning his trousers. ‘Where’s the shame in pleasing your husband in his own house? I want a son, Brenna, and you’re going to give me one.’
He wrenched my arm back behind me, and I had to drag my teeth across my lips not to cry out. Hot tears pricked my eyes, tears of fury and pain that dulled my sense of danger; all I wanted was to lash out, to strike at him, to hurt him – but my only weapon was my words. ‘I’ll give you a son,’ I whispered in a voice I barely recognised. ‘A wild little boy with a savage’s blood in his veins.’
Carsten froze. Hauling me around to face him, he grabbed my arms and shook me until my teeth rattled.
‘What rot is this?’