by Peter Watt
For Granville, the purchase of the rundown block of tiny tenements gave him an opportunity to exploit the lucrative vice of prostitution. Where there was poverty, women provided their bodies for the rent money and food for their children.
But it was not the mothers Granville was interested in so much as their prepubescent daughters. The fad for men to obtain their tiny bodies was all the rage in Victorian England and so-called virgins fetched good prices as a supposed cure for syphilis. The tenements promised fertile ground for Granville’s recruiting campaign overseen by underworld thugs recruited from The Rocks. He would provide women for his brothels but it would be the financial return on the prepubescent girls which would swell his personal coffers through a maze of untraceable financial transactions. He had long plotted how certain monies could be skimmed from the Macintosh companies to be used in even more lucrative enterprises and the thought of having personal access to the young girls stirred him. He would remember young Jennifer’s childish body when he went home to service his wife tonight and the exquisite thought caused him to squirm as his dark lust rose.
But first he had business to attend to, and with the discreet handing over of a thick envelope stuffed with paper currency of the colony to Sir George, he had ensured the first step in his depraved desire to sate his lust.
Sir George did not bother to examine the contents of the package. It was not the done thing to question a gentleman’s honesty and he’d slipped the envelope inside his coat pocket without a word.
The transaction at the club had gone smoothly and Sir George had insisted on sealing their bargain with an excellent chilled French champagne, and so it was that Granville arrived in his carriage at his aunt’s splendid residence overlooking the harbour feeling particularly mellow.
As Granville stood at the front door waiting to be invited inside, he had an idle thought that, in time, the magnificent house would most probably be his residence. Not that the house his in-laws had given his wife as a wedding present was not in its own right a magnificent residence. It was just that the Macintosh residence symbolised a certain place in colonial society. Its existence had been a focal point in social functions for the colonial aristocracy over the years.
Betsy opened the door and ushered him inside. She took his top hat and cane as a matter of protocol and escorted him to the drawing room where he gazed around at the paintings on the walls and mused that the European art was already accumulating a good monetary value. Enid had been wise in purchasing them. He was surprised to see an Australian painting by Captain Forrest on the wall among the European landscapes, but he remembered how his aunt had once commented on how much the landscape of a mountain in Hobart reminded her of a European setting.
Enid was not present, as he had known she would not be. She had a habit of making people wait. She liked to remind her visitors that they were in her house, and she responded to her times, not theirs.
Enid entered the room and Granville turned away from his perusal of the artwork to greet her with an icy smile. He was surprised to see how in control of her emotions she was, as he had expected her to be grief-stricken for the terrible loss of her favourite son. But the woman was the woman of old: cool and expressionless. She would have been an excellent gambler, he thought.
‘Aunt Enid,’ he said with just a slight and polite nod of his head. ‘I am here as you requested in your kind invitation.’
She did not reply and for a moment Granville could feel the mellowness of the champagne evaporating, to be replaced by the unpleasant taste one gets after too much cheap port wine.
She sat herself gracefully on an elegant French-designed drawing room chair with ornately carved legs and placed her hands in her lap. Granville felt the power of her silence and retreated to a similar chair in the corner of the room as if to put a distance between himself and the forebidding woman.
‘Are Fiona and my grand-daughters well?’ she asked coldly and Granville immediately knew that their meeting would somehow ruin his day.
‘You should see them more often, Aunt Enid,’ he replied solicitously. ‘They are, after all, your grandchildren.’
Enid’s lips pursed as if she were considering something distasteful in his remark. ‘And they have your blood,’ she replied quietly. ‘Although I suppose I cannot blame them for that.’
Granville blanched at her overt slur on his two daughters. ‘Why did you ask me here?’ he snapped as a way of showing her that he had no time for her insults.
‘I wanted you to come here so that I could personally tell you that I know you were instrumental in David’s death,’ she replied calmly and Granville felt the blood drain from his face as she continued: ‘And that I will not rest until you have paid the full price for his death.’
‘Is that all?’ he responded equally calmly, although he did not feel it. How could she know? he wondered. Mort was not likely to talk and even the police agreed that David was murdered by the savages.
He rose from the chair to indicate that the conversation was at an end. ‘I will see my own way out,’ he added but Enid had not finished with him.
‘You well know I cannot prove your conspiracy in my son’s brutal murder. But that does not matter because I will have my revenge and you will suffer as I have suffered.’
‘Revenge, dear Aunt Enid?’ Granville smiled smugly and challenged, ‘And how will you have your revenge on an innocent man? What can you do to me, the husband of your daughter and the father of your grand-daughters? Would you have your revenge on a grandson when Fiona bears me a son? Oh no, dear Aunt, your obsession with the Macintosh name and its bloodline would never allow you to seek revenge against the father of your grandson. You might consider the idea of revenge while I only have daughters. But not if I am the father of your grandson.’
Enid listened impassively to his carefully delivered rebuke.
‘My grandson will be my strong right arm to smite you down,’ she said in a quiet and controlled voice. ‘Just as the Lord smites the enemies of His people. Oh, and you can believe every word I say, when I tell you that it will be my grandson who will eventually destroy you and all you hold dear, if that is possible for a man as evil as you.’
Granville stood transfixed by the burning green flame of the emerald eyes fixed on him and he had a terrible feeling that he was in the presence of some Old Testament prophet or a medieval witch casting a terrible curse on him. He shuddered and had a great need to be out of her presence.
Without a word he turned and hurried from the room, with her strange words echoing in his head. ‘My grandson will be my strong right arm to smite you down.’ Logic told him that her statement was nothing more than the delusional ramblings of a grief-stricken woman. How could her grandson be used against him when Fiona had not borne him a son as yet?
Duffy!
The name came to him like some terrible ghost rising from the floor in front of him. A ghost of a tall and broad-shouldered young Irishman with thick dark curling hair and steel-grey eyes. And the ghost smiled, mocking his fear. But the bastard son of Fiona and Michael Duffy had been sent to a baby farm. He could not surely be alive. The woman was truly mad. And, as he reassured himself, the smile on the ghost’s face faded to an agonised grimace of despair. Now it was Granville’s turn to smile grimly at his own unfounded fears.
‘Your hat and cane, Mister White?’ Betsy asked with a curious expression on her pretty face. His brief moment of distress had obviously been noted by her when he had stumbled into the hallway to escape the witch in the drawing room.
‘Yes, Betsy, you can fetch them,’ he replied calmly as he regained control of himself. ‘And you can inform my coachman to bring the carriage to the front door. I will wait outside.’
Granville had his coachman take him back to the club, where he drank alone and pondered his meeting with his aunt. No matter how much he attempted to dissuade himself that the irrational fears she had conjured at the meeting had no substance, the drink did not drown them. Enid never made a
threat without carrying it out, as he fully knew from past experience.
The Duffy bastard had to be dead if it was sent to a baby farm, he kept reassuring himself. And if he weren’t, what hope did Enid ever have of finding him anyway? Around 6 p.m. the dinner gong was struck for the residents, reminding Granville that he had an obligation to call on his sister at her house.
He hefted himself unsteadily from the big leather chair and weaved towards the main entrance, where he was met by the doorman who greeted him politely and went to fetch his carriage driver waiting outside.
When the carriage arrived at Penelope’s house, the driver gently prodded his employer awake. Irritably, Granville shook the sleep from his head and staggered to the front entrance. When he glanced at the well-kept hedges, he had a fleeting memory of his old gardener, Harris.
The door was opened by a maid Granville did not know. She was around sixteen years of age and rather pretty in a coarse sort of way. Probably a bit like the girls in his soon-to-be-acquired tenements at Glebe, he thought without a great deal of interest.
‘You mus’ be Mister White,’ the girl said impertinently. ‘Your sister said youse was to go straight up to her bedroom when youse got here.’
‘Did you say her bedroom?’ he mumbled as she held the door open for him to enter.
‘That’s what she said, Mister White,’ she replied with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘You is to go straight to her bedroom where she is expectin’ youse.’
The invitation to his sister’s bedroom was highly unusual, considering the old threat to kill him if he ever dared enter that sacred domain again.
Granville pushed past her and steadied himself as he climbed the stairs. The copious quantity of alcohol he had imbibed at the club had made his legs feel like gelatine, so he squared his shoulders and took a deep breath before preparing to enter the room.
He raised his hand to knock when he heard the sounds. He knew them well. They were the sounds of a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy and he smiled to himself. In his alcohol-befuddled mind, he guessed that his sister had some perverse need for him to witness her in the act of enjoying the carnal embraces of another man and his hopes soared. Was it that she had missed his attentions when they had been young and now wanted him to join in her lust? He did not knock but eased the bedroom door open to step inside.
It took some moments for his eyes to adjust to the flickering light of the many candles placed around the room. Golden soft shadows danced around the two naked bodies writhing on the white silk sheets in an embrace that made them oblivious to everything except their mutual ecstasy.
Granville blinked, adjusting to the candlelight. He gaped at the two sets of well-rounded buttocks and he was confused as he tried to reconcile what he was seeing. He watched as his naked sister pulled herself up to prop herself against the brass bedhead, where she gripped the cornerposts. Her eyes were closed to near slits and the flickering candlelight caught her expression of sensual rapture with a golden glow while her ecstasy flowed like fire through the room to burn an absolute dawning comprehension in Granville’s horror-stricken mind.
His sister’s sexual partner slid down the sheets where her long raven hair flowed over Penelope’s legs spread lasciviously to receive her partner’s attentions.
Slowly Penelope’s eyes opened and turned to stare into his. The normally beautiful blue eyes were black and limpid pools of an evil akin to his own dark soul and were aware of his presence as they taunted him with the reality of the present.
Penelope arched her back and her hands came down to entwine her fingers in the long raven hair between her legs, forcing the head deeper into her as if that part of her body could swallow the beautiful creature giving her so much sensual pleasure. She moaned her pleasure and her legs slowly folded over Fiona to hold her in the embrace as if forever.
Granville felt the nausea rising in his throat and fought the urge to vomit up the afternoon’s alcohol and bitterness. He was barely aware that the name of his wife came to his lips as a strangled hiss as he backed away from the door.
He stumbled from the room and down the stairs to buckle and vomit his despair on the floor of the landing. And as he vomited, he realised that his sister had carefully planned for him to witness her power over him.
She had plotted a revenge so subtle that only a woman could have understood the implications it had to his self-esteem as a man. She had taken her cousin, his wife, from him with the very sexual forces he had so long ago brutally unleashed in his sister.
He now knew why his wife had made excuses to move to another room away from him. She had, in fact, moved to his sister’s bed.
For Granville White, the subtle strength of women would never again be dismissed as something of no consequence. Now the two people who most frightened him were both women: one Lady Enid Macintosh and the other his own sister.
Fiona had not been aware of her husband’s brief presence in the bedroom as her whole existence had narrowed to the erotic pleasure that Penelope’s body, with its soft curves and smooth flesh, provided for her.
So absorbed was she in drinking the sweetness of her cousin’s body that she was unaware of the tension that came as a momentary wave to flow through Penelope’s ecstatic pleasure. All that she was aware of was that that same forbidden pleasure was also her own. And she knew with each time they made love that she would always be a slave to the unimagined joys she had learnt in the arms of her beautiful cousin.
When they were both spent, Penelope held Fiona in her arms and they lay together in a deep and mutual embrace, caressing each other with lingering words of love.
Later in her own bed, Fiona could not be sure whether she had dreamed her cousin’s words, or if they were real. But it did not matter, as they were words she would always treasure when she had heard them drift to her on the golden glow of the flickering candles. ‘Granville will never hurt you again, my love. You and I will always be together, no matter who else is in our lives. I promise you that for always.’
When Fiona returned to her home she was confronted by her uncharacteristically distraught husband.
‘Have you no shame?’ he wailed as his wife stood defiantly in her bedroom. He stared at Fiona’s huge bed. ‘Have you . . .?’ he could not bring himself to ask and she laughed bitterly before replying, ‘That is no longer any business of yours.’ So he knew, she thought. How he knew, she did not care. ‘What is between Penelope and me is very special.’
‘It is unnatural. An abomination in the eyes of God,’ he exploded, gathering the bombastic remnants of his old self, and Fiona’s face flushed with rage.
But when she spoke it was in a clearly controlled voice. ‘Is making a twelve-year-old girl pregnant,’ she said, ‘then discarding her as if she were nothing but rubbish, less an abomination? Is your plan to buy the Glebe tenements from Sir George to be used for prostitution not an abomination?’ Fiona noticed the stricken expression on her husband’s face as she revealed all that Penelope had told her of his activities. ‘You need not ask me how I know all these things, and more, because it is not important. What is important for you to know is that I will live with you in this house. But you and I will never share the same bed again. We will be, as far as everyone is concerned, including my mother, a married couple. Oh, I will be a good wife for you, and a good mother to our daughters, but that is all. From now on, we live separate lives and I don’t have to warn you that any attempt to break those conditions will cause me to inform the relevant people of your secrets. Of how you are embezzling the family business to finance criminal activities. And of your peculiar desire for young girls. And your possible links to an unsavoury character by the name of Jack Horton. Yes, I know how you hired Mister Horton to kill Michael Duffy.’
Granville stared at the beautiful young woman who had once been so compliant to his every whim and desire. His self-esteem had taken a terrible mauling and this confrontation was the death blow to his power over her. He realised for the first time just
how much his wife had inherited of her mother’s characteristics. She was strong like her mother and she had displayed a form of ruthlessness like her mother. It seemed only one person had power over Fiona and that was his hated sister. In the world of the Macintosh and White families, Penelope had emerged as an adversary to be reckoned with.
As he stared at his wife, he felt a surge of desire for her. But it was a desire for something he knew he could never have again and, without comment, he turned on his heel and walked away.
Fiona stood defiantly in the centre of the room watching him leave. When he slammed the door and she could hear his footsteps in the hallway, the uncontrollable trembling came to her. She broke down in tears and cursed herself for her weakness. It was then that she was suddenly aware of how much like her mother she really was. And in recognising how much she resembled her mother, she felt a terrible and despairing loss for the grief that the rift between them had caused.
Of all the people she most wanted to be close to now, it was that stern and ever-present entity in her life. ‘Mother,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘Oh, Mother.’ But her mother had taught her well. And one thing that she had been taught was pride. It was that very characteristic, she knew, that would forever keep them apart as bitter enemies.
FORTY-THREE
The hammering on his hotel room door snapped Luke from his sleep.
He rolled from the bed and was immediately on his feet, blinking away the last shreds of his stupor like a battered fighter in the corner of a boxing ring.
‘Luke, are you in there? It’s Solomon.’
He heard the voice call to him through the door. ‘Wait a moment, Sol,’ he answered groggily as he slipped on his trousers. Downstairs in the hotel, he could hear the rowdy sounds of men in the bar swilling down last drinks before closing time. He crossed the dark and sweltering room, opened the door warily and saw his friend standing in the dimly lit hallway.