She knew what she had done. It was what she always did. She made plans that sounded plausible, she sucked people in, then she lost interest in them just as everyone else prepared to act on them. She picked up her pen to finish the interrupted letter. ‘… nearly as clear as I might have hoped. Discretion and long hours at work are large stumbling blocks, so even if I wanted to, I could take no drastic action and certainly wouldn’t without warning you in advance so you could alert the Light Horse. I’m sure, with nothing better to do, they will gallop to my rescue with all speed. Please give Beattie a hug from me and tell her to keep her chin up. Doctor Spencer’s advice makes me even more resolved to do what I came here to do. I am in no danger and don’t intend to become so. The weather here is much colder than I expected but the town is pretty, and walks by the river are lovely. We are also very lucky in our access to an extraordinary choice of provisions from Nightingales. I can’t imagine how such an elegant store in such a small town did so well during the war and the quarantine.
The more she wrote about trivialities, the more normal her descriptions of the life she was leading sounded, the saner her thoughts became. They informed her that life with the Nightingales was far from normal. Theirs was a household at war with itself, consisting of an exhausted woman with no experience of, or stomach for, fighting battles on her own behalf and a man so exhausted by bloody battles that the only fight left in him was the one he waged with his wife.
It was hardly the safe haven she’d thought it might be when she’d accepted Adelaide’s offer. The choice, Pearl decided as she tucked her letter to Annie into an envelope, to leave or to stay, might not be hers alone. Adelaide might order her to leave, which would settle the matter. If it were up to her, then the argument for staying was only that she was already here. The arguments for leaving were she’d be no less unprotected and un-provided for than she currently was, she’d no longer be at the mercy of an employer whose whims would almost certainly clash with her own, and she would no longer have to answer for the implications of a problem she should never have mentioned. Leaving won hands down. She would hand in her notice in the morning, advertise for a man to help her and begin her search in earnest.
Adelaide, curled up in the large lonely bed from which her husband had fled the minute she’d announced she was pregnant with Freddie, tried not to think of the morning. She blocked her ears with her fists, desperate for sleep. She could hear the baby grizzling in the next room, and she thought she could hear her demented husband prowling about the office. Worse, she couldn’t hear a thing from Miss McCleary’s room and Miss McCleary, the rock on whom she’d been depending for clarity and order, had turned out to be made of clay and gone to bed without bolting the doors.
How could she sleep when in the morning she might be without help again and still no closer to sacking Archie Stokes? Unless … unless … his petty theft could be endured for the sake of respectability. Unless she could simply put it aside and allow life to go on. No more fights; no more dread of the shop. It was the only pleasant thought she’d had in days. But in the nursery, Freddie’s grizzling found some momentum. ‘Mwaaa,’ he bawled. ‘Mwaa, mwaa, mwaa!’ Louder and louder. She would let him cry. He would cry himself to sleep. She would go to sleep. ‘Mwaa, mwaa!’ Fury swelled in the baby’s lungs as he strove for greater volume. On the other hand, it had been three pounds last week, five the week before. The shop couldn’t afford it. That’s why he had to go. All those horses! All those bushrangers! Those criminal boys not a hundred yards away threatening to burn the whole town down. Who would save her?
Pearl knocked at Adelaide’s door. ‘Would you like me to soothe him?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Adelaide. And within minutes Pearl had.
Chapter Twelve
Louisa, sitting on her verandah with a gun on her lap, stared at the house opposite, willing Pearl to emerge and say she’d help one way or another. Through the window above the sturdy front door she could see lights being carried from room to room. Then, unexpectedly, the door did open and she saw not Pearl but Marcus, wearing only a pair of trousers and carrying a bottle, walk unsteadily down the path. His gaze, she thought, was fixed on her and, sure enough, he crossed the road. But though he stared at her house, he appeared not to see her. She thought that if she stayed very still, he wouldn’t notice her. She held her breath. She cursed the breeze that lifted her skirt.
‘Hello, Louisa,’ he said. ‘May I come in?’
It was late, she was in her nightclothes, she was carrying a gun. He was scarcely dressed, he was carrying a bottle, he sounded sad and lonely and drunk. She felt sad and lonely. ‘Of course,’ she said.
She stood. She squared her shoulders. She adjusted her neckline. A tiny hope, not even articulated by any voice her brain heard, was that if she allowed Adelaide Nightingale’s very dull and steady, though less steady than he had been, husband into her empty house in the dead of night, he would fall in love with her, leave his family for her and she would have no need of a part-time husband. As he tottered unsteadily up her path, the hope found voice and from it a gigantic future leapt. Were she in Adelaide’s shoes, she’d soon sort out Archie Stokes. She’d soon restore happiness and order to the Captain’s life. Louisa hadn’t eaten in days. She’d polished off the gin and another note had arrived. Fifty more coming your way, you slut, it had said. And ‘slut’ had cut her to the quick. Now she said to herself, I’ll give them slut!
She looked quickly up and down the street, then admitted Marcus into the house. She led him into her drawing room, where a single lamp flickered and the gin bottle stood empty on the sideboard. She found two unused glasses, took the bottle from her guest, who seemed to be shivering, and poured two generous whiskies. ‘This will warm you up,’ she said. ‘I’d say sit by the fire but as you see, there is no fire.’ She took a blanket from the sofa and threw it to him. He made a broad sweep with his arm to catch it but missed it by miles so he left it where it fell at his feet. He dropped into one of the matching armchairs, which had once held promise of a marriage for life. Louisa arranged herself on the sofa, where the flickering light from the lamp on the corner table flattered her lovely, sad face.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Marcus said. He stared at her with eyes so moist and red and confused that Louisa wondered what was up with him. She wished it was nothing. She wanted him to be steadfast and powerful and rich and hers. And he seemed to know it because he said, ‘You really are a very attractive woman, Louisa. You always have been. So small, so dainty … I don’t imagine you’ll stay a widow for long.’ The words were indistinct but his intention was clear. ‘Poor Jimmy.’
Louisa wiped her eyes, not crying but with an instinct for the right gesture. Marcus rose unsteadily and, tripping over the blanket, lurched towards her. She stood as well, alert to the danger of imminent injury if he fell on her, but he didn’t fall. He put his arms around her, he rested his head against hers and suddenly, he sobbed. He sobbed because his heart was broken, crushed by the awful loss of some mind he couldn’t locate no matter how long he slept or how much he drank.
Louisa held him and patted him but she hated the noise, she hated the sorrow, she hated the weakness. Her husband had gone to war and died. Marcus was alive and drunk. ‘You’d better go home,’ she said. ‘Take this.’ She handed him the blanket then she took his hand because he seemed to be lost, and led him back down the very dark corridor. She closed the front door behind him and heard him stumbling down the path. When a terrible shriek shattered the night air, she thought that surely it couldn’t have come from him. It must be a horse, and she froze. Then she heard footsteps running and she heard Adelaide say, ‘Maggie, for goodness sake,’ followed by, ‘Marcus, go inside. You’ve frightened her.’ When she opened the door a fraction she saw Maggie wearing what appeared to be a ball gown, holding hard to her fence gasping, ‘I thought he was a bushranger.’
Adelaide laughed more from anxiety than amusement. ‘It’s just silly Captain Nightingale, bolti
ng the door and enjoying the night air.’
‘What on earth are you doing out this time of night and wearing so little?’ Pearl asked, emerging briskly from the shadows to assume control in case her loss of it had been the cause of the shock.
‘I was sewing and I suddenly remembered I had no job.’ Maggie was trembling so violently that words tumbled from her mouth incomprehensibly. Pearl wrapped her own shawl about the girl’s slender bare shoulders. ‘I found a key to my mother’s trunk with her beautiful clothes in it …’
‘But dear, it’s so late,’ said Pearl, tightening the shawl and rubbing Maggie’s freezing hands between her own. ‘Where were you going?’
‘To Mrs Mayberry. To give her a letter. I need her to forgive me.’ Poor Maggie clung to Pearl as she had clung to no other in years. ‘I’m sorry I called out. I didn’t recognise him.’ To which both Adelaide and Louisa might have added, Me neither.
Louisa quietly closed her front door and disappeared back into her cold, friendless house. Adelaide attempted to take her husband’s arm as he headed towards theirs but he shook her off. They entered their house in silence and disappeared into their separate rooms, each swamped by their own misery, ever the natural outcome of unnatural silence.
Pearl, gripping Maggie’s arm, walked with her along the boundary of Louisa’s paddocks before they crossed the road and hurried past the grand entrance to Somerset Station, without so much as glancing at it. An icy wind ripped down Hope Street from the mountains. ‘I need a job,’ Maggie was babbling. ‘I don’t think anyone understands how much I need a job. If I don’t work, we don’t eat. And I’ve ruined this dress by cutting it too short. Do you know how to sew?’
‘Let’s talk about it in the morning,’ Pearl said. ‘No one’s going to let you starve.’
‘I need a husband, that’s what I need,’ Maggie said. ‘A man who’ll get me back my land. Please, Miss McCleary. We all need a husband.’ How sad she sounded. How sad is hope when it’s been doused in cold water and drowned.
Chapter Thirteen
Next morning, comfortless Maggie woke fraught and anxious, but pluck had arrived in the nick of time to help her. Pluck and defiance. She ordered her two grumpy brothers from their beds, gave them porridge, packed lunch for them and took each firmly by an arm as she marched them to school. ‘I don’t care,’ she said when they complained that she would make them a laughing stock. ‘From now on you’re doing what I tell you, because if you don’t I’ll lock you in the woodshed and you’ll die there.’ Al and Ed scoured her face for a joke but it was no joke.
From the school, Maggie headed to the Mayberrys’. In the pocket of the very big coat was the letter she had penned. Dear Mrs Mayberry, it read. I know you think I am wicked for having taken the pie but Mrs Nightingale understands why I did it and she has forgiven me. I hope you will forgive me too. I am very grateful to you for the work you give me and I will try even harder to do a good job if you will give me another chance. Yours respectfully, Maggie O’Connell (Miss). She had copied the letter three times, checking and re-checking the spelling and the punctuation.
The morning was grey and dreary but less cold than the one before. The Mayberry house, built three years previously in deep purple brick, sat square and gloomy in a garden the Mayor’s wife liked to call ‘pure Surrey’. Or pure ‘Thurry’, if she remembered. She meant it had roses in it, and magnolias, camellias and rhododendron. She had planted it with a view to the kind of grandeur that befitted a mayor and his wife. She imagined garden parties where she would move among the townspeople nodding and smiling, possibly waving.
Maggie knocked on the door, intent on delivering the letter in person. A living soul, she had persuaded herself, clearly in need of a job, had to be harder to resist than a letter whose handwriting might be illegible. She waited. Surely it wasn’t too early. School was in. Surely someone was up. How long should she stand on the Mayberrys’ doorstep looking suspicious and feeling this anxious? She was halfway to the gate when the Mayor himself opened the door.
‘Yes?’ he said to her back.
‘I was hoping to find Mrs Mayberry at home.’ Maggie returned to the door. The Mayor’s face, she noted, was blotchy.
‘Why?’ asked the Mayor.
‘Because I wanted to give her a letter.’
‘Give me the letter.’
‘And I’d hoped to speak to her.’
‘What about?’
‘About my job.’
‘What about your job?’
What could Maggie do, short of run? ‘I would like to keep it.’
‘The letter?’
‘The job.’
‘And why wouldn’t you keep it?’
‘Because yesterday Mrs Mayberry sacked me for taking a pie she believed I had stolen from Nightingales, but Mrs Nightingale was giving it to me. She told Mr Stokes she was giving it to me but I’m not sure Mrs Mayberry knows.’
The explanation was truthful as far as it went, if you were prepared to ignore the crime’s mens rea and see only the actus reus, but neither seemed to concern the Mayor even though he had a sprinkling of law in his repertoire. He had no idea that Maggie’s sacking was reckoned by the entire town, on whose good opinion he was relying, to be the Right Thing. Not a single part of his understanding acknowledged that his wife’s popularity was, as of last week, considerably greater than his own. What he saw before him, tiny and anxious and quite pretty now he looked at her, was an opportunity to remind his wife who was boss. So he smiled and said, ‘Well, I think Mrs Mayberry might have been a bit hasty. I’ll speak to her and you can consider your job restored.’
‘Thank you, thank you very much, Mr Mayor,’ Maggie said, flashing him a smile that was, he thought, really very lovely. He told her to run along and not give it another thought, then he went in to a hearty breakfast, prepared by Mrs O’Reilly, the mother of Mrs Quirk from The Irish Rover, while his wife still slept, and he felt very pleased with himself.
The further she hurried from the Mayberry house, the less elated Maggie felt. It was all very well for the Mayor to give her back her job. She had still to confront his wife. She wished she’d insisted. She wished she’d left the letter. By the time she reached the bridge, she wished she’d spoken to Miss McCleary first. She would speak to her now. Which was odd because precisely the same thought was occurring to Adelaide and Louisa.
Louisa had woken knowing she would beg if she had to. Miss McCleary was her only hope. She would talk to her as soon as she had the strength to dress and comb her hair. Adelaide had woken knowing that, however un-Christian Pearl McCleary might be, she couldn’t do without her. She was the only person who could relieve her of the baby, the only person who could keep the house orderly and clean, the only person she could ever imagine so unfazed by her husband naked and drunk she didn’t even mention it. She’d speak to her the minute breakfast was over. She’d suggest a stroll in the garden where Marcus wouldn’t hear the baby screaming, so they could reach an agreement of the new conditions of her employment.
But Pearl got in first. As Louisa was sticking pins in her hair and Maggie was trotting through the Arch, she said to Adelaide, ‘I wonder if I could speak frankly.’ And before Adelaide could take steps to avoid ‘frankly’, Pearl added, ‘I’d like to hand in my notice to be effective immediately.’
‘No,’ Adelaide said. ‘Please no,’ and she’d certainly have said more but Maggie banged very loudly on the door. Knowing that any minute the head of the household might appear in any stage of undress or anger, Pearl flew to let her in and guided the girl into the kitchen where Adelaide was hovering by the sink in no mood for visitors.
‘I have my job back,’ Maggie reported breathlessly, regardless of any conversation she might have been interrupting. ‘But I don’t feel right about it.’
‘Why ever not?’ snapped Adelaide. ‘How astonishing of Mrs Mayberry to see reason.’
‘She didn’t,’ Maggie said. ‘The Mayor did. And she won’t be pleased. I know she wo
n’t be pleased. She won’t be pleased because he seemed to be so pleased.’
Amazing insight though this was for such a young girl, it meant very little to Adelaide and Pearl, and there was no chance for her to explain further because Louisa strolled into the kitchen, remarking casually, ‘The front door was open. How is Captain Nightingale this morning?’
‘I wish people would close the door when they enter my house,’ said Adelaide but no one cared.
‘He was out so late and wearing so little,’ Louisa said, then realising her mistake added quickly, ‘I saw through the window.’
‘I didn’t see you,’ said Adelaide.
‘He gave me such a fright,’ said Maggie. ‘I thought he was a bushranger. But guess what? I have my job back.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Louisa, then immediately turned her back on the wonder. ‘What I’ve come to say is this. I think Miss McCleary should come and live with me.’ If it sounded blunt, it was only because the point needed to be reached quickly.
‘I thought she could come and live with me,’ said Maggie.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, she works for me,’ said Adelaide. ‘She’s staying where she is.’
Pearl looked from one to the other in astonishment. ‘Thank you for the offers,’ she said, ‘but I’m planning to move on. I need to do what I came here to do and I now see that involving anyone else is irresponsible. We each have our own way of seeing things.’
Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband Page 8