by JH Fletcher
‘I shall be able to go overseas after all!’ Martin told his mother, scarcely able to believe his good fortune. ‘Of course I’ll make sure half the income comes to you …’
‘There is no need for that,’ Mary told him.
‘But how will you manage?’
‘I’ve never mentioned it to anyone, but I have some capital put aside from an inheritance. Sufficient to buy a house in Adelaide and provide a small income. Enough to maintain your father and me. Only modestly, but sufficient for our needs.’
‘I won’t have you living in penury —’
Mary laughed and placed her hand on her son’s arm. ‘There’s no danger of that. There’s enough for a house in North Terrace and a small staff to run it. We’ll be quite comfortable, I assure you. The Grenville family has maintained me for many years. It’s only fair that I should do my part now.’
And Rufus would be totally dependent on her. Not that she would ever admit to thinking of such a thing, of course.
Martin stared at her admiringly.
‘I’ll be overseas,’ he said. ‘And Eagle on the Hill has been your home for so long. I know how much it’s always meant to you. You’re more than welcome to stay on here —’
‘Strictly between you and me,’ Mary interrupted him, ‘I can’t wait to get away. Can you imagine your father and me, alone here? In the past he’s always been able to keep himself busy. But now? I’d go mad.’ She shook her head, smiling. ‘No, Martin, Adelaide will suit me very well.’
‘How will Father take it?’ Martin asked.
‘With great difficulty, to begin with. But he will come to terms with it. Flexibility is one of his greatest gifts.’
She gave her son a straight look. Neither would ever speak their thoughts, but each understood the other very well.
‘A modest life, a small house in the city … I am sure it will suit us excellently. But there is something I want you to do before you go overseas.’
‘What’s that?’
And she told him.
CHAPTER 96
A week after his conversation with his mother, Martin stood on the terrace of Eagle on the Hill and saw Alex Armstrong entering what was now her mother’s house. Without conscious decision, he walked down the flight of stone steps and between the terraced vines until he came to the border between the two properties.
I have to ask her, he thought. He knew he must, yet was afraid. Everything had come down, finally, to this. He had a life to offer her, which she could accept, or refuse.
He walked towards the little house. He was halfway there when Alex came out and stood on the verandah, watching him as he walked towards her. Only when he was almost at the foot of the steps to the verandah did she speak.
‘You’re trespassing.’
He stopped and looked up at her. ‘I want to speak to you.’
‘And if I don’t want you to?’ Still her expression showed nothing.
‘We need to talk,’ he said. The words sounded hard and arrogant, like a blow. He had not meant them to, but that was how they’d come out, reflecting the urgency and vulnerability of his hopes.
Her face darkened.
Before she could speak, he said: ‘Please …’
Below the house, the water lapped brown and cool against the bank. Somewhere a reed warbler was singing.
He turned and walked away from her towards the water. He had not planned this either, had planned none of it, and did not know whether she would follow him or not. If she did not, that would be all the message he needed. If she came, that too would be a message, not of confirmation but at least of hope.
* * *
Alex thought, Why should I follow him? She felt hurt, and angry, too, that he had spoken in such a way.
So she thought of not following, yet she did — not out of helplessness or longing but because she understood that the outstanding business between them must be resolved.
Her heart was beating like a kettledrum. She sensed what was about to happen. For the second time in her life a man was going to ask her to marry him. She could have been Alex Laird had she wanted, but had said no. Now she thought Martin was about to ask her to become Alex Grenville.
What would she say to that? Would she accept? She loved him, there was no doubt about it, but was love enough? After the way he’d gone off and abandoned her … What kind of man would do that?
Her mother had told her that Martin’s music was his love, his world. That was all very well, but she didn’t want to be second in his life, even to music. And how could she survive in a world of which she was almost completely ignorant?
No, it was not so easy.
They stood and faced each other — so close, but so far apart. The river ran beside them, and the red gums listened.
As though he had heard her thoughts, Martin said: ‘There’s a world of music out there. A beautiful world we can share, if you’re willing.’
‘I don’t understand anything about music,’ she objected.
‘You understand beauty. And music is beauty, like all art.’
‘Beauty is all very well,’ Alex told him, ‘but there’s such a thing as responsibility, too.’
‘Of course. Art is the responsibility of everyone who’s got the talent and the opportunity.’
‘I wasn’t talking about art. I meant responsibility to other people. To me.’
‘Oh, you mean I should have explained things better to you before I went away?’
‘Well, shouldn’t you? I thought … I didn’t know what to think. It looked as though you were only concerned about your music. I know how important it is to you,’ she said hurriedly, ‘but there are other things, surely? If you want life to be truly beautiful?’
He bent his head in humility. ‘It takes such strength …’
But she was not prepared to excuse him so easily. ‘Of course it does. But that’s what I need to know. Whether you are strong enough. I don’t want to take second place, Martin. To music, or … or anything else.’ She took a step forward. She was standing very close to him now, looking deeply into his eyes. ‘Do you, Martin? Do you have that sort of strength?’
He looked at her. ‘Perhaps … if you can help me.’
‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you all the strength you need. But you have to understand. I must come first. With your music, if I have to, but not behind it. You have to decide.’
The river flowed, full of its own beauty, past the spot where they were standing. The breeze sighed in the river gums.
Martin envied the limpid stream, the sturdily rooted trees. He was a man whose soul had been touched by the greatest artists in music, yet he envied the trees their strength, their silence, their close and abiding union with the earth. For a tree was itself and aspired to be nothing else. It was secure in its self-knowledge, whereas he was incomplete. He needed music, the soul’s open window, and this woman, whose being would make him whole.
But what of her wholeness? Rather than ask endlessly what she could do for him, should he not rather be thinking how his love could serve her?
Yes, he thought, yes.
His permanent curse: how to put into words feelings he could not articulate even to himself.
Until at last she said it for him. ‘Do you love me?’
The question, laughable in its simplicity, shone like a lamp upon them both.
‘Yes,’ he said, and felt loneliness and fear lift from him and fly away.
Now courage filled him.
‘Both of us together,’ he said, and stretched out his hand to her. ‘If I promise that …’
‘Yes, Martin? Yes?’
‘Alex … dear Alex … will you marry me?’
And she smiled, her face filled with light.
‘Yes,’ she said, the word so light and simple yet full of majesty, with its promise of sharing, of responsibility and courage and delight. Acceptance placed its warm fingers about her heart. ‘Yes, Martin. Of course I’ll marry you.’
Later he said, ‘Eagle on the Hill. I can’t do anything with it until I’m twenty-five. But do you want to keep it or sell it?’
Alex was caught between laughter, tears and indignation. ‘I read somewhere that Heaven is the place where you keep alive your dreams of childhood. Eagle on the Hill has always been my dream.’
‘And mine,’ he said.
So that, too, was settled.
1902
CHAPTER 97
Alex Grenville comes onto the terrace of the great house. Below her the vines are vivid with new growth. It is Tuesday, 11 November 1902, and the late spring day is dying. Beyond the vines, the setting sun kindles golden fire among the branches of the red gums that line the river’s banks.
In her arms Alex holds Mary, her six-month-old baby, named after Martin’s mother. Mary’s violet eyes look out at the colours and brightness of the world, with its thousand untold adventures, joys and fears. The sunlight plays enticingly, casting a chain of reflections upon the surface of the river, and the baby laughs.
Alex says, ‘Daddy will be home tomorrow.’
Martin is fresh off the boat after his American concert tour, and will be here in the morning. On his previous tour she went with him. She will again. But this time the baby has kept her at home.
Carrying her child, Alex walks down the slope and through a narrow stretch of bush into the adjoining property. These days the ground is not at all as it was when her grandparents lived here. Now it is neatly tilled and there is a scattering of spring flowers about the sturdy little house where Sarah awaits her daily visit.
Below the house runs the river, bringing not water alone but also the past and future, inextricably entwined. For Alex, the dark faces and voices of the past, the thrashing paddles of the steamers, flow into a future that encompasses a world of music and applause, of glory won and glory shared in the music capitals of the earth and in the hearts of men.
She turns and looks at the countryside about her. The bushes are breaking into new leaf. The grass is lush and tall. Here and there, Alex knows, will be the furtive beauty of wild orchids. The breeze blows through the tangled bush and the grass sighs in a shimmer of emerald light.
She holds up Mary, shaking her gently. ‘Look at the flowers! See how beautiful the world is!’
All around them the trees stretch away, holding in their branches memories and hopes, and the eternal present that is life, while behind them, on the stone ridge overlooking the vastness of the land, stands the great house.
Eagle on the Hill.
Alex walks on and climbs the steps to the wooden verandah.
‘Grandma!’ she calls. ‘We’re here!’
2006
EPILOGUE
So my story — the story of my ancestors and the river around which their lives were played out — is almost done.
All that remains is to tell you what happened to them all.
In her old age, Lady Jane Grenville returned to England, to her family name and the manners of her youth, to die in her proper station in the Queen Anne house and five-hundred-acre estate of her ancestors.
As Mary Grenville had anticipated, her husband came to terms with his changed circumstances. She allowed him enough money to keep a-trundling in his motor car, whose fume-stinking engine, with its staccato bangs like a rifle fusillade, continued to frighten Adelaide’s horses until the day, shortly before rifle fire began in earnest in distant Flanders, when Rufus took one swig too many from his brandy flask and trundled gravely, and with a final salute, to his death in the waters of Adelaide’s river.
Luke married a niece of Miss Tossall, fathered eight children and ended up mayor of the town where his father had once been imprisoned on suspicion of horse theft.
Harold and Belinda Keach, pickled as owls, survived on a diet of fish and alcohol for ten years in the windy wilderness of the Mundoo Channel, to die finally in bed within two days of each other while, at the river’s junction with the sea, the distant roar of the surf trampled the air among the wind-whistling reeds.
Petal never remarried. She and Alice stayed friends, built up a prosperous business and in old age retired to a terraced house in Adelaide together.
Over and over again Owen Snibbs, having quarrelled with the chapel elders, threatened to leave his money to a cats’ home, but never got around to changing his will. As mean as Hungry Tyson till the day he died, he wanted a grand funeral, which his daughter provided for him out of the inheritance that he had unintentionally left her.
Davis Laird never married but became one of the legendary skippers of the Murray–Darling river system.
Bethany, the Aboriginal woman who had been Alex’s friend, trusted herself to a bukartilla, or swimming hole, once too often and was drowned by the river. In the second half of the twentieth century, her sister’s grandchild became an outspoken advocate for her people.
Jig Jenkins tried to cheat the wrong bloke at poker and was killed for his pains.
Elsie and her husband raised a brood of children, lived quietly and happily and died without ripples.
Sarah, in her house beside the river, settled into the security that had been her life’s ambition, looking forward to the visits of her daughter and a growing mob of grandchildren, whose laughter and fleeting battles brought Australian life and air to the starch-stiff rooms of Eagle on the Hill — as she had foreseen when she first entered the great house.
Alex and Martin stayed in love always. They had two daughters, one of whom you’ve met very briefly. The younger, born in 1907, became my mother. Alex accompanied Martin as he travelled the world, earning acclaim and fortune in all the world’s great capital cities. They, too, were happy.
And now …
I lay down my pen and lift the strangely shaped stone that Alice Henderson gave my great-grandmother over a century ago. The gargoyle face fashioned upon it by the heat of a long-dead volcano smiles up at me enigmatically. It has become a talisman of my family, representing both past and future.
Beyond the window of my room, the Murray slides silently on.
The river ties all together. Its voices tell a hundred stories of past and future; the stories flow with the stream and become one. Up here on its ridge, the house, resonating with life, dreams.
So that, in the end, there is no end.
About JH Fletcher
JH Fletcher is the author of eight romantic historical novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim. The author's plays for radio and television have been produced by the BBC and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and many of this author's stories have been published in Australia and throughout the world.
JH Fletcher was educated in the UK and travelled and worked in France, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house within sound of the sea in a small town on the South Australian coast.
Also by JH Fletcher
View from the Beach
Keepers of the House
Wings of the Storm
Fire in Summer
Sun in Splendour
The Cloud Forest
Voice of Destiny
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Pty Ltd in 2006
This edition published in 2013 by Momentum
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © JH Fletcher 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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A CIP record for this book is available at the National Library of Australia
Eagle on the Hill
EPUB format: 9781743342541
Mobi format: 97817433425
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