by Ann Cliff
FOURTEEN
‘MRS TEESDALE, COULD you leave the class for a while?’ Freda’s careworn face appeared round the door of the little room. Rose drew a deep breath; there must be bad news about Erik. A feeling of panic rose, but she fought it. ‘Of course, the girls can manage on their own quite well.’ The sewing class nodded energetically, gathered round a low table where they were practising cutting out dress patterns from newspaper. Little Ada was sleeping peacefully at the back of the room.
‘Now remember, girls, don’t put pins in your mouth,’ Rose reminded them on her way to the door. It was traditional for dressmakers, but dangerous. Joining Freda, she braced herself to hear the news.
Freda had tears in her eyes. She led the way out of the building into the noonday glare to where two men were sitting with bowed shoulders in the shade of a tree. ‘It’s more private here,’ she said. ‘Please sit down, Rose. I’m afraid the news is bad.’
Rose sat opposite the men. They were covered in dust, unshaven and with red eyes. They stood up as she approached, then sank down again and picked up their glasses of water. Two horses with heads down stood in the shade by the fence, covered in dust and sweat.
With a stab of horror, she realized who the men were: Tom Appleyard, Luke’s employer, and Jim Carlyle. They were bringing bad news to her, not to Freda – unless by chance they knew something about Erik….
A kookaburra laughed harshly once, and was quiet. Bees buzzed in the garden flowers as Tom said gravely, ‘We came as soon as we could. Mrs Teesdale … Rose, I’m afraid your husband has had an accident.’
The world seemed to spin for a while and the garden tilted, then righted itself. Rose found she was breathing fast. ‘How badly is he hurt? Where is he?’ Her mind was working frantically; where was there a hospital? She’d heard that they were going to build one in Warragul, to service the area between Melbourne and Sale, so there was no hospital yet for over 100 miles in either direction. Only Martha and people like her, trying to help the sick and wounded. Oh Luke …
‘He’s dead, lass. We hate to have to tell you this.’ Tom passed his hand over his face wearily and she saw that Jim, haggard, pale and wretched, could not meet her eyes. ‘It was a big tree … it was nearly sawn through, ready to come down, and of course we have to get out of the way.’ He sighed heavily and fumbled for his pipe.
Rose held her breath but she knew what was coming next, could see it in her mind’s eye.
‘The tree fell a bit different to how we thought and Luke … he was running, but he tripped on a root and the tree got him. He died on the spot, he wouldn’t have known anything … no suffering. That’s a small mercy.’ Tom puffed on his pipe desperately.
Luke was dead. That bright, careless laughter she would never hear again. All her plans for a better understanding of each other were gone. She crumbled a leaf in her fingers and the sharp smell of eucalypt surrounded her.
Rose knew she should have thanked them. They had obviously ridden straight here to tell her, but she was numb. No words would come and she felt faint.
Freda took one of Rose’s hands and held it. ‘Rose will need to come to terms with this,’ she said quietly. ‘Can you tell us where is he now? Did you bring him home for burial?’
Jim said with an effort to control his voice, ‘He’s buried at Noojee, in a little cemetery there. It was all they could do, Rose. We thought you’d understand, it was what he would have wanted. They say the name Noojee means the valley of rest.’ He gulped for a moment and then went on, ‘Luke was full of plans for the future. He was going to make life better for you, Rose.’
Tom added, ‘Please accept our sympathy. We know how hard it is for you … not long come out from England and all. And with a little baby.’ He shook his head. ‘It beats me why these things have to happen. We all did our best to be safe …’
She found her voice. ‘Thank you.’ Luke was not coming home. A fierce emotion went through Rose, a mixture of pain and black anger. Fate had let them down. Ada would grow up without knowing her father, Rose would go on being lonely and the farm would never be created. Nothing mattered any more.
They sat for a while in silence, thinking of Luke. Freda moved eventually and said to the men, ‘Please come into my house and have some food. You too, Rose.’ She looked older, more grey since they heard the news.
Rose stood up shakily and remembered her vow to be strong. She was going to need strength as never before. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done,’ she said to Tom and Jim. She had no tears yet. ‘Is there anything that I need to do?’ Jim took two steps towards her as if to comfort her, and stopped. Pulling her shoulders back, Rose went into the house behind the men.
They sat round Freda’s table with cups of tea and the men accepted bread and cheese. Tom handed over a damp envelope. ‘Death certificate,’ he muttered. ‘Doctor on his way through to Sydney. It was lucky he was there.’
After a while Rose went back to her class, but she found it impossible to concentrate. Her pupils looked at her with wide eyes, aware that something had happened. She took Ada into the house and mechanically fed and changed her.
The day wore on slowly; time itself seemed to have slowed to the pace of grief. Gradually, anger was replaced by a devastating sense of loss. Rose knew she would always remember Luke as he stood at the turn of the track, waving goodbye. They had just begun to understand each other a little; there was so much more she might have done to encourage him, so many things they could have done together.
Life was cruel. It hadn’t been easy for either of them in those first months when the pattern of their lives was being set. It wasn’t the lack of money, although more money would have made it easier. But at first, Rose had needed to concentrate on surviving, getting used to the shock of the new environment. Luke had probably been trying to adjust to thinking about a wife and family, instead of looking out for himself. The baby’s crying had been hard for them both to bear. With more time, things could have been different.
For that week and for several more, time passed in a haze; the world felt unreal to Rose, like a bad dream. ‘I’ll take you to see Harriet’s father,’ Freda offered. One day when the school had a half-term holiday, they yoked up Erik’s oldest horse in the four-wheel buggy and trundled down to Moe.
‘I think Erik might marry Miss Sinclair,’ Freda said as they jogged along. They still had no more news of Erik. ‘She’s not used to the bush, but most unmarried women he might meet live in the town and they do seem to adjust to farm life, once they marry. He hasn’t mentioned her to me recently, but …’
‘I hope so,’ Rose replied sadly. Harriet Sinclair would come to a much better farm and environment than the bark hut among the trees that Rose called home. But Erik was still missing.
Rose was not at all interested in legal matters, but Freda was determined to help her to sort out Luke’s affairs. Mr Sinclair was quietly sympathetic. ‘Fortunately, Mr Teesdale’s papers are with me,’ he told Rose. Freda had expected as much as he was the only lawyer in the area that she knew. He scrabbled in a tall mahogany cabinet and brought out a box file.
Rose learned that Luke had taken out a joint title on the block of land in both their names, so the patch of forest and the two huts now belonged to Rose. The bad news was that the government’s conditions of sale included a clause that directed them to ‘improve’ the land and, of course, to clear it. ‘Some of it’s fenced, and there is a house,’ Rose said defensively, not looking at Freda. On her knee, the baby gurgled as though she understood the deception; house was a grand name for their dwelling.
Mr Sinclair pursed his lips. ‘Your best course will be to sell the land, Mrs Teesdale. Let someone else worry about improvements.’
‘It’s too soon to make any changes,’ Rose said quietly over the baby’s head and Freda nodded. Freda had warned her against making decisions while she was still badly shocked. Time would heal the hurt a little, she’d said as one widow to another, and then it would be easier to think clearly.
She had also said, ‘You will feel anger at first.’ It was true.
Luke had signed a will leaving everything to Rose. There were no debts, thank goodness, but no capital either apart from the cattle. All the money they had was in Rose’s tin trunk. A memory stirred, of Luke saying that he’d owed money to Jim and was working for him to pay it off. She must ask whether the whole debt had been paid.
Mr Sinclair was still shuffling papers, peering through rimless spectacles on the end of his nose. He came to the bottom of the box and found a bulky sealed envelope. ‘There’s this, though. It’s for you.’
Luke wrote badly and it was difficult to read the words: In the Event of My Death, Please Give This To My Wife Rose Teesdale.
Rose opened the envelope with trembling hands. There was no letter inside, but a heavy object fell out. It was a gold nugget, gleaming with a dull shine. Luke had left her gold. Ada reached out her baby hands to it.
‘He came in one day, not so long ago,’ the solicitor told them. ‘Said he’d been prospecting and thought he’d better put it away for you as a sort of insurance.’
Tears began to fall as Rose realized that she’d judged the lad too harshly. He and Jim had not spent all their gold on drink, after all. He’d thought about the risks he took and had done this to safeguard her. If only he’d told her what he had done, if only she could thank him! What a strange mixture Luke had been: thoughtful and indifferent by turns.
When she looked up, Mr Sinclair was talking about the gold and offering to get it valued for her. Weighing it in her hand, Rose wondered why Luke had not continued with his search for gold. This success should have made him want to go on. Had he been trying to impress her by working hard to earn money? She would never know. ‘I would like to leave it here with you, for now,’ she told the solicitor.
It was several weeks before Rose had recovered enough to take eggs down to the hotel. Meeting her at the door, Maeve swept her into a huge, perfumed embrace. ‘Rose, mavourneen, we heard about Luke and what a shock it was too. But I know you’re a brave girl, you’ll keep going! You won’t be off to England at all? Not now you’ve had a little time to be thinking. New widows now, they panic, they often scuttle back home on the next boat, God bless ’em, and us needing more females in the country!’ She stood back and looked at Rose with shrewd, kind eyes. ‘You’ve lost weight and no wonder it is.’
‘You talk as though there’s a lot of widows about,’ Rose told her. There was something comforting about Maeve’s soft voice.
Maeve shrugged. ‘Young men get themselves killed, more’s the pity, but so it happens. For the rest, there’s no doctors for miles and miles and never a priest, and so you take your luck as you find it.’
‘It’s all luck,’ Rose agreed. ‘Ada was lucky to be born … the birth could have gone wrong.’
Maeve nodded. ‘Well, now, and folks can die from lack of care, you know that. There’s mud fever sometimes down the river, the men come in here with yellow eyes and very sorry for themselves they are … but I reckon women are tougher than men, when it comes to surviving. If men had the babies there’d be a fine to-do.’
Rose felt her stiff face moving in a smile, the first for many days. ‘There would.’
Maeve led the way into her sitting room. ‘And now, Rose, we will have a cup or two of Boris’s coffee and you can tell me your plans.’ She smiled happily, plumping up cushions in the chairs. ‘I dearly love a plan and it’ll help you to clear your mind. I’m glad you’re back – we’ve been short of eggs for weeks and the boys are getting restless. But they don’t complain, not when Boris is in the kitchen.’
In the face of so much cheerfulness, Rose felt her mood begin to lighten a little. Ada was taken out of the harness and put on the sofa, where she went to sleep. ‘I haven’t really started to plan,’ she admitted. She had got as far as realizing that waiting for an absent husband to come home was far different from sitting alone, knowing that she had only herself to rely on. ‘I’m not sure whether to go home or not,’ she admitted. ‘My father has a nice farm, but I don’t care for my stepmother.’ That was putting it mildly.
Maeve sipped her coffee with eyes narrowed, thinking, while Rose’s mind strayed to Kirkby. Should she go back? There could be more support for them in Yorkshire, but no real place. Luke’s parents would be sad, no doubt she would hear from them when the English mails came. But their loss was cushioned by the fact that they hadn’t expected to see their son again when he went off to the other side of the world. They’d already faced their loss. There were two younger brothers to give them grandchildren eventually. Her father would write too, but he’d never had any real suggestions for her future.
A noise erupted in the bar and Maeve went through to see what was happening. When she came back Rose was half asleep, worn out by the sorrow of the last few weeks. Rousing herself, she said, ‘There are so many things to decide …’ Perhaps Maeve would help her. She was an experienced woman.
‘And of course you are the only one in the world that can decide them,’ Maeve said, waving her hand for emphasis. ‘Nobody can make you a plan, tell you what to do. But I can suggest how you might be working on it, for sure.’
Maeve wasn’t going to tell her what to do. At the back of her mind Rose had expected Maeve to take charge. But she didn’t want that, although part of her longed to be given no options, just a straight course to follow. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘It’s better with pencil and paper, but you can be doing it in your head. Take your time, there’s no hurry, take a week or two.’ Maeve paused, emphasizing she was in no hurry. ‘Make a list of all the good things, the strengths you have, your assets, even friends.’
Rose thought hard, but couldn’t come up with many assets.
Maeve went on quietly, ‘Then a list of the weaknesses. The obvious one is no man in the house and too many trees to chop down, I would reckon. Isn’t that right? The problems, there’s never a lack in this world. But after all that, you can look into the future a little – what chances are there of improving your situation?’
There was too much darkness in the future; Rose felt weary.
After a while Maeve went on, ‘On the other side of the coin, what might threaten you – and for all love don’t say the eucy men! They’ve gone over Port Albert way for a while and good riddance to them.’ Maeve’s black hair shone as she shook it back.
Rose thought about all this. Little Ada was a strength and a weakness, a reason for living but a brake on Rose’s activities. What would be best for her child?
‘I suppose,’ Rose said slowly, ‘I could look at going to England the same way … for and against, whichever adds up the highest, taking feelings out of it and just looking at facts.’
Maeve nodded. ‘You can do that, macushla. But then, whichever way it goes at all, you follow your gut feeling in the end!’ They both laughed.
On the way home Rose looked out hopefully for the dark women, but she met nobody. Perhaps the eucy men had gone away for fear of revenge. Sal had been injured and the men in her group might be after Joe and his horrible friends.
Jim Carlyle called to offer practical sympathy. He was very quiet, grieving for Luke, no doubt, and he said he’d been unwell. She was tempted to let him help. Jim was big and strong, he could do work that she could not, and he had seemed to understand her situation better than Luke at times.
‘There’s nothing I need help with at the moment,’ Rose said. ‘I’m just living from day to day.’
When he had gone she thought about his offer, using Maeve’s system. It would be a great advantage to have someone finish the fencing, maybe even clear the land. She could offer a share in the profits perhaps. But there would be disadvantages: it would put her in his debt, at least for a time. He might be planning to court her, after a decent interval of mourning. Rose was not vain, but Jim had once told her that women were scarce in Haunted Creek and he’d said he envied Luke.
Rose realized that she was certain of one thing: she
was not going to marry Jim or anyone else. Erik’s future was with Miss Sinclair, supposing he came back safely, and she wasn’t going to come between them. It would be too selfish. She knew that she was not the same person, not the woman Erik had known.
The way she felt now, it might be years before she was fit company for a man. Rose was grieving for Luke with an intensity that surprised her, guilty that she hadn’t appreciated his good qualities enough. Given just a little more time, they might have loved each other. She would be faithful to his memory.
Then there was the child: she would rear Ada according to her own ideas and with no interference from anybody else, however well-meaning they were. That was point number two.
There was a third aspect. Rose didn’t want gossip about her to circulate among the settlers. Even in this remote spot, single women couldn’t have visits from men without eyebrows being raised. She would have to be very careful.
‘Right!’ she said to Ada when all this had been thought through. ‘We’ve got some things straight already, my girl.’ She often talked to the baby; how else would Ada learn to talk herself? Already she seemed to be listening and was gurgling replies.
Jim offered to take Rose to visit Luke’s grave, but fortunately Tom Appleyard had offered too and in the end Tom and his wife and Jim all went with her in Tom’s cart to Noojee. Rose was entranced by the stands of tall mountain ash and the brilliant green tree ferns under them, the little bubbling creeks and the undulating country, with small clearings here and there.
Standing at Luke’s grave with its simple wooden cross, Rose made a silent promise. She would bring up Ada to the very best of her ability and would make sure that her father was not forgotten. Jim and Tom took off their hats and Tom read a prayer for the dead. Mrs Appleyard took Rose’s arm in sympathy.