The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

by Holly Ringland

  ‘Hey, sweetpea, I brought you some hot cocoa.’ Candy appeared in the doorway carrying a steaming mug. ‘Alice? What is it?’ She put the mug down. ‘Let me see.’ Candy prised the book out of Alice’s hands. Alice watched as Candy read the inscription. ‘Oh …’ she trailed off.

  Anger propelled Alice into action. She pushed Candy out of her room, slamming the door after her. Harry ran to Alice’s side, barking. Alice opened the door and shoved him out too.

  She didn’t come down for the rest of the day. Candy brought her roast dinner, which she left untouched. After trying to talk to her through the bedroom door, Twig retreated to the back deck where she sat chain-smoking.

  It was after dusk when the headlights of June’s truck bounced along the driveway. Alice sat on her bed, gripping the book. Downstairs the front door swung open. June’s keys landed in the glass dish on the bureau. Weary footsteps went down the hall into the kitchen. The kitchen tap whooshed on, then off. Bracelets tinkled. The bubbling hum of the kettle on the stove, followed by its whistle and the sigh of steaming water over a teabag. The chime of a teaspoon tapping against the lip of a china cup. A moment’s quiet, before June’s weary footsteps came through the hall to the staircase.

  ‘June.’

  ‘Hang on, Twig.’

  ‘June, I –’

  ‘Hang on, Twig.’

  Her footsteps on the stairs. Up. Up. A knock at Alice’s door.

  ‘Hey, Alice.’ June opened the door. Harry bounded in with her, barking. Alice didn’t look up. She kicked her feet hard against the frame of her bed.

  ‘How was your day?’ June walked around Alice’s room, one hand in a pocket and the other nursing her cup of tea. She stepped over Alice’s homework on the floor and went to the bookshelves. Alice watched June’s boots. When June turned to face Alice she stopped short.

  Alice held the book up with both hands, open to the inscription page, where her mother had written her name, over and over again, making love hearts of every ‘a’.

  Agnes Hart. Mrs A. Hart. Mr and Mrs C & A Hart. Mrs Hart. Mrs Agnes Hart.

  And underneath it, her father’s handwriting.

  Dear Agnes,

  I found this book in town, and thought of you. I know it’s the one thing you came to Thornfield with, and I hope you won’t mind having a second copy, from me.

  Before I bought it for you, I hadn’t read this story. But I have now, and it reminds me of you. How being around you feels like I’m falling, but in the most wonderful way. Like I’m in a maze I never want to find my way out of. You’re the most magical, puzzling thing that’s ever happened to me, Agnes. You’re more beautiful than any of the flowers that grow at Thornfield. I think that’s why Mum loves you so much too. I think you might be the daughter she never had.

  I just wanted to say thanks too for telling me your stories about the sea. I’ve never seen the ocean, but when you look at me I feel like maybe I understand what you’ve described. The wildness and the beauty. Maybe one day we’ll go. Maybe one day we’ll swim in the sea together.

  Love,

  Clem Hart

  June rubbed her forehead roughly. Harry panted hard, his tail flicking back and forth anxiously.

  ‘Alice,’ she started.

  Alice watched as if she was outside of herself, like when she was in hospital and saw the snakes of fire coil around her body, turning her into something she didn’t recognise. She stood from her bed. Swung her arm back. And with all her might, hurled the book at June. It hit her square in the face, and clattered to the floor, its spine cracking as it landed.

  June barely flinched. An angry bruise began to bloom on her cheekbone. Alice glared at her grandmother. Why wasn’t June reacting? Why wasn’t she angry? Why wasn’t she fighting back? Alice’s vision was blurry. She pulled on her own hair, wanting to scream. When was her mother at Thornfield? Why hadn’t anyone told her that her mother was here? Why hadn’t anyone told her that it was where her parents had met? What else didn’t she know? Why would anyone hide this from her? Why did her parents leave? Alice’s head ached.

  June came towards her, but Alice kicked her away. Harry growled, pacing. Alice ignored him. He couldn’t protect her from this.

  ‘Oh, Alice, I’m sorry. I know you’re hurting. I know. I’m sorry.’

  The more June tried to comfort her, the angrier Alice got. She kicked and bit and scratched at June’s hands. She fought hard against June’s strong body, against her life at Thornfield, against being so far away from the ocean. She fought against the bullies at school and how they still picked on her and Oggi. She kicked and screamed against why people had to die. She fought against needing Harry’s help, and against tasting sadness in Candy’s cooking, and hearing tears in Twig’s laughter.

  All Alice wanted was to break free and run down to the river, dive into the water and swim, far, far away, all the way back to the bay. Home to her mother. To Toby’s warm breath on her cheek. To her desk. Where she belonged.

  As she began to tire, Alice started to cry. How she wished she’d never come to Thornfield, where nothing was as it seemed. How she wished she’d never, ever gone into her father’s shed.

  13

  Copper-cups

  Meaning: My surrender

  Pileanthus vernicosus | Western Australia

  Slender woody shrub found in coastal heathlands, sand dunes and plains. Magnificent flowers ranging from red to orange and yellow. Flowering occurs in spring, on twiggy branchlets densely covered in small hardy leaves. Young floral buds bear a glossy oily coating.

  Of all the ways Alice might have learned about her parents’ history at Thornfield, the last June expected was that they would tell her themselves. But there their handwriting was: Agnes practising her future name, Clem writing what would be into being. Before Alice arrived, June thought she’d packed all evidence of both Agnes and Clem into boxes, which she took into town and kept in a rented storage shed. She hadn’t once thought to scour the bookshelves in the bell room.

  After Alice thoroughly exhausted herself, June carried her downstairs to the bathroom, where Twig was waiting with a hot bath. June tried to avoid Twig’s eyes. She would never have said the words, that wasn’t Twig’s style, but June heard them nevertheless. The past has a funny way of growing new shoots.

  June hurried past the kitchen where Candy was at the stove warming milk for Alice, and went wordlessly into her bedroom. She closed her door firmly behind her. The hazelwood box sat on her bed where she’d left it. She eyed it warily.

  The morning Alice had her panic attack and June took off in her truck, it was true, she did go and enrol Alice in school. But she’d spent most of the time in the storage shed, taking comfort from memories and relics of her past. And when she left to head home, she took the hazelwood box with her, telling herself it was because what she needed for Alice’s birthday was inside.

  She sat beside the box and considered its detailed woodwork, imagining the hours Clem must have laboured over it. Second to the desk he carved for Agnes, which was in Alice’s bell room, the hazelwood box was Clem’s proudest work. He was good with seeds and flowers, but he was exceptional at whittling felled trees into dreams. He finished the box just before he turned eighteen, a time when a boy thought he could carve his soul into hazelwood and become a man.

  Around one border of the lid were images of Ruth. One with her hands full of seeds, and flowers growing at her feet. Another, a side view of her swollen belly, and lastly, much older, her back hunched, and a serene look on her lined face as she sat by the river, with flowers in her arms and the faintest shadow of a giant cod in the shallows beside her. Around the other border was Wattle, carrying baby June in her arms, a crown of flowers on her head, the house and a field of flowers sprawled behind them. In the centre of the box, Clem carved himself, with a faceless man standing behind him. To one side of Clem stood June, smiling, in full view. On the other side a girl approached, carrying sprigs of wattle.

  That was how Clem saw h
imself: the centre of Thornfield’s story. Which was why, June reminded herself, he’d done what he’d done: left the farm with Agnes after he’d overheard June telling her she’d decided not to bequeath Thornfield to him. In essence, her own son had heard his mother tell the girl he loved that she deemed him undeserving.

  June reached for her flask and took a long swig. And another. And another. Her head stopped pounding.

  Looking at Agnes’s face carved by her son’s hand, June was loath to admit how much Alice was like her. The same big eyes and bright smile. The same light step. The same big heart. Giving Alice something of her mother was the least June could do. She lifted the brass hook from the latch and opened the lid. Memories flooded her senses before she could stop them. The honeyed scent of winters by the river. The bitterness of secrets.

  June was eighteen years old when she stood beside her mother to scatter her father’s ashes around the wattle tree. Afterwards, when the town gathered in their house to share tales of the babies her father delivered and the lives he saved, June fled to the river. She hadn’t run the chalky path much, not since she was a child when she began to learn stories about the bad fortune doing so brought to the women in her family. June craved an order to things and it frightened her that love could be so wild and unfair; she hated the sight of the gum tree her mother and grandmother had carved their names into, bearing the blessing and curse love had dealt each of them. That day, however, her body parched by grief, June was drawn through the bush by the thought of the water.

  When she reached the river, her face tear-streaked and her black stockings full of holes, she found a young man swimming naked in the tea-green water, staring up at the sky.

  June quickly wiped her cheeks, and drew herself together. This is private property, she announced in her haughtiest tone.

  His calm expression was disarming. As if he was expecting her. He had dark hair and pale eyes. Stubble covered his chin.

  Get in, he said. His eyes rested on her black clothes. Nothing hurts in here.

  She tried to ignore him. But watching him watch her, heat started to rise to her skin; the relief of feeling something other than death and grief was sweeter than the honey from her father’s beehives.

  June started unbuttoning her dress; slowly at first, then in a frenzy until she’d shed her dark mourning clothes and thrown her pale body into the water. She sank to the bottom, blowing the air in her lungs up to the surface. Sand and grit rubbed between her toes. River water filled her ears and nose and eyes.

  He was right. Nothing hurt in there.

  When the pressure in her lungs pinched she sprang to the surface, hungry for breath. He stayed his distance, looking across the green water at her. Before she understood fully what she was doing, June swam straight to him.

  Later that afternoon, with a small fire crackling in a sandy pit on the riverbank, they lay curled into each other. Her body stung from pain and pleasure. She’d fumbled around with boys in the bushes at high school but it was the first time she’d wholly shared herself with a man. She traced her fingertips over a mottled red scar on his chest. There was another at the same point on his back. June kissed each, on either side of his body, tasting the sweet river water on his skin.

  Where do you live? she asked.

  He disentangled himself from her limbs.

  Everywhere, he replied, pulling his boots on. She watched him, realisation sinking through her like a stone. He meant to leave.

  She gathered her clothes to her body. Will I see you again?

  Every winter, he replied. When the wattle blooms.

  June fell into love like it was the river: steady, constant and true. She told herself this was nothing like her grandmother Ruth’s ill-fated love affair with the River King, nor the safety of her mother and father’s union. The way June saw it, she was in control; she would not lose her heart to a man and have to engrave her name in a tree to bear witness to her pain. Her love wouldn’t be an unfinished story. He would be back. When the wattle bloomed. And the wattle always came into bloom.

  The months following her father’s death were slow, dusty, and arduous. Wattle Hart wouldn’t get out of bed. The house smelled of rotting flowers. June turned to the farm, spending long days tending the flower fields and running deliveries to the surrounding towns. At night, after she’d cooked a meal that Wattle barely picked at, June tucked herself into the workshop, where she taught herself to press flowers into jewellers’ resin. She stayed there until her eyes started to blur. Sometimes she slept at her desk, waking with a crick in her neck and flower petals stuck to her cheek. She avoided her mother’s pain wherever and however she could; she couldn’t bear to witness the wreckage love left behind.

  The following May, June kept a close watch; at the first sign of wattle blossom buds in bloom, she ran to the river. She held her breath as she ran. I’ll breathe when I see him. I’ll breathe when I see him.

  She went back day after day. The end of winter drew near. Wattle blossoms began to drop. June’s clothes hung from her hips and collarbone. Purple half-moons appeared under her eyes. While her skin became feverish and her fingers were stained with dirt, the flower fields thrived. One afternoon at the end of August, when she walked through the clearing to the river bank, a small fire was burning, with a billy of tea boiling above it. He looked at her, the gaze of his pale eyes piercing her centre.

  Where have you been? she asked.

  He glanced away. I’m here now, he said. A new scar, blue and jagged, under his right eye.

  June fell to him, gathering his arms around her, feeling his heartbeat through his flannel shirt pressed against her own.

  She didn’t go back to the house for three days.

  They camped by the river, eating tinned pea and ham stew with damper, making love by the fire and daisy chains in the sun. He didn’t tell her where he’d been. She didn’t tell him how much she needed him to stay.

  A few months later, articles about a series of bank robberies far away in the city appeared in the papers. They alleged the thieves were veterans, returned from war. They warned rural towns to be on vigilant watch. These criminals will be armed, dangerous and looking for somewhere to hide.

  Through the spring, summer and autumn, Thornfield yielded a blaze of blooms, the result of June’s relentless work. She was so absorbed, turning her torment into flowers, that she didn’t notice how frail her mother was until Wattle was a mere wisp of the woman she’d once been.

  Pay attention now, Junie, Wattle used her last words to warn her daughter. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.

  While June wasn’t paying any attention, disease had eaten what was left of her mother’s heart. For the funeral, June cut down all the flowering wattle at Thornfield.

  Their third winter together by the river was nearly wordless. He didn’t ask her why she cried. She didn’t ask him where the scars on his knuckles came from. Just like him, she didn’t want to hear the answers.

  By the time spring came, June knew she was pregnant. She gave birth alone on a windblown autumn day and named her son Clematis, a bright and ever-climbing star. When the wattle was next in bloom, June knew before she reached the clearing by the river with the swaddled baby in her arms that he would not be there. Nor would he ever come again.

  On the farm, bereaved, alone and with a new baby, June spent nights crying guilt and terror into her pillow, fearful that her neglect caused her mother to die, fearful that her son would have the same callous nature as his father. Night after night was the same, until the warm day when unexpected friendship walked up her driveway.

  June riffled through the hazelwood box until she found them: a bunch of dried twiggy daisies. She cradled them between her palms, turning them over in her hands.

  It was a clear spring morning when Tamara North arrived at Thornfield with one small bag and a pot of blooming daisies to her name. June answered the knock at the front door, unwashed and stinking of sour milk, with Clem screaming in
her arms and a farm of dying flowers at her back. She offered Tamara a job on the spot. Doing what, she wasn’t sure; farmhand or friend, June needed both. Tamara put her bag and pot plant down and took Clem from June’s arms.

  You put a fussing baby in water, she said. Water calms them.

  Tamara walked confidently to the bathroom, as if she was utterly sure of where she was going and what she was doing. June stayed in the hall, bewildered by the sounds of running bath water, Tamara’s soothing song and Clem’s subsiding wails.

  On Tamara’s first night at Thornfield, after she’d put Clem to bed and settled herself into her new bedroom, June clipped some of the daisies from her pot plant. She hung a small bunch to dry upside down by her window and pressed a few more into the Thornfield Dictionary with a new entry beside them.

  Twiggy Daisy Bush. Your presence softens my pains.

  Tamara had answered to Twig and softened June’s pains ever since. Even when June wouldn’t listen.

  She put the dried flowers back into the box. Ran her fingertips over its whorls. It was the last thing Clem gave her before he found out Thornfield would never be his. Before the temper that simmered just below his skin ever since he was a baby tore through him irrevocably. I wish it was you I never knew and I was raised by my father instead, he screamed at June before he grabbed Agnes and took off in his truck. The hoarseness of his voice and his sickly pallor were still vivid in her memory, as was the emptiness in Agnes’s eyes through the passenger window.

  June’s gut twisted as she wondered if her son chose hazelwood intentionally, though he couldn’t possibly have known how its meaning would haunt her in years to come: reconciliation. Before a sob could escape her, June hurriedly dug through the box until she found what she needed to make Alice’s birthday present.

  She slammed the lid shut and reached a shaky hand for her flask. After a few long glugs, she left her room and went through the house, outside and across to the workshop.