Taste of Victory

by Sandra Dengler

  He was smaller than she had guessed, hardly taller than her own five feet five inches. What a wonderful, thick, healthy looking head of hair he had, all black ringlets! His olive skin suggested that his accent was probably Italian or Greek, neither of which Linnet would recognize. He looked…well, he looked classic, a minor Greek god in a strange and rather threadbare velvet jacket. He couldn’t be any older than her sister Meg—twenty-five perhaps. And yet he left no doubt that he could rule the world, given the opportunity. Imperious. That was the adjective. Imperious.

  “Your name, miss?”

  “Linnet Connolly, sir.”

  “Irish.”

  “Emigrated a year and ten months ago with me two sisters. Me papers be in order, sir.”

  “I’m sure. Your purpose?”

  “Twofold, sir. I’m seeking employment, and I hope to enroll in the University of Adelaide here.”

  “Which curriculum?”

  “Meself has always loved music, sir.”

  “Prior training?”

  “Nae training, sir. Me parents could ill afford lessons beyond those I learned in school. I learned some music in school.”

  “With no education and no training, you purpose to enter the university. You are very bold, young lady, or very naive.” He studied her a moment. “Or you are a very fine musician. Sing for me.”

  “Sir?”

  “Sing for me!”

  A small voice at the back of her mind warned her that this young man had no right or cause to make such a demand, but she stilled the voice. Flustered, she could think of no song except “Brennan on the Moor,” and that was hardly appropriate to the situation. Better that than no song at all. “’Tis of a brave young highwayman / this story I will tell…”

  Why wasn’t he stopping her? She continued with the next line. “His name was Willie Brennan / and in Ireland he did dwell.” In fact, the actual Willie Brennan, dead by hanging some hundred years ago, plied his trade and forged his legend in the hills right behind her native Cork.

  The dark young gentleman stood there, his head cocked slightly aside, his arms folded. He gave no direction yea or nae, so she continued.

  “It was on the Kilwood mountain / he commenced his wild career, and many a wealthy nobleman / before him shook with fear.” She completed the chorus and the three verses she knew. At last she ran out of song, and still he did not speak.

  Suddenly he lurched into motion. “Come with me, please, Miss Connolly.”

  She followed him to a grand piano in the far corner. A magnificent instrument it was, gleaming black. Carelessly he shoved the lid open and propped it up, then bared the keyboard in the same manner. “Play.”

  This was getting to be a bit much. She took a deep breath. “Meself lately informed ye, sir, that I cannae play. Sister Bertrand taught me some etudes and such, but I cannae remember them.”

  Eyelashes. He had the most wonderful long black eyelashes. “I want to hear ‘Brennan on the Moor’ rendered on the piano.” The dark, dark eyes behind those lashes softened. “As best you can. Please. Perhaps the key of one flat?”

  Why was she doing this? Why was she making an utter fool of herself at his behest? Obediently she sat down on the slick, stiff stool. One flat. F. She struck the F chord, hummed the first line to herself and picked it out. She hummed the second.

  “Very good. In the key of E, please.”

  This time she had to really think; four sharps were involved. She got as far as the wealthy nobleman when he laid his warm hand on hers. The silence rang.

  He smiled, and in smiling glowed. “You have a wonderful ear! And a splendid voice. Untrained, but beautiful.” He dropped the lid unceremoniously, as if this lovely piano were nothing more than a glove box.

  From the doorway came a girl’s voice. “Chris! Is that you?”

  “At the piano,” he called.

  That was silly; surely she could see them here. No, she could not. As she approached, tapping with a white cane, Linnet saw the unfocused, sightless eyes, and understood. Linnet stood up as Chris introduced them.

  “Elizabeth, this is Linnet Connolly, a girl of perhaps eighteen—” He turned to Linnet. “Eighteen? Yes. And seeking to enter the music program. She is perhaps five feet five, weighs I’d say ten stone, gray-green eyes and lovely auburn hair. Light auburn, on the red side. Fair complexioned. Linnet, Elizabeth Mapes here is a third-year music student majoring in violin.”

  “How do you do.” Elizabeth smiled and extended her hand before her.

  Linnet curtsied, realized in a flash of embarrassment that the gesture had gone unseen, and took the proffered hand briefly. “How do ye do.”

  “You two just met?” With her flat brown hair and rather coarse, plump frame, Elizabeth appeared, frankly, quite plain. But when she smiled so warmly like this, the plainness disappeared.

  “Yes. She just wandered in.” Chris’s eyes twinkled.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Then, Miss Connolly, I’ll bet he didn’t introduce himself. He never does. This is Esmond Christenikos Yorke, a fourth-year piano and organ student. Did he mention that his father is a diplomat?”

  “No. Uh, he didn’t. That’s, uh, very nice.” Linnet smiled because it seemed the right thing to do. What was the relationship between these two? Cozy, it would seem. And what was their role in the University of Adelaide? She felt dreadfully confused and out of place. This notion of coming to a university, of all places, was so absurd! Whatever made her think a simple servant girl and clerk had any business at all here?

  “Now, I like that!” Yorke beamed. “You don’t seem the least bit impressed with my father’s trade. There’s hope for you, Miss Connolly. Come, we’ll introduce you to the registrar and see what we can do for you. The term has started, but that shouldn’t bar your entry.”

  Elizabeth turned and Chris Yorke took her arm, ushering her toward the door. Linnet fell in beside them, the fifth wheel on a buggy. Elizabeth tucked her cane under her arm. “So you think the girl shows promise?”

  “Wait until you hear her sing!”

  Linnet followed them from the dark and sonorous cave of Elder Hall into the blinding light of day. A brilliant little red and blue parrot sort of bird lifted off the green lawn before them, flew a few yards, and settled again into the grass. Poor Elizabeth! She missed so much beauty!

  Yorke glanced at Linnet. “Since you’re a special case, we’ll take you directly to the vice chancellor, Dr. Barlow. You’ll sing for him—an audition, as it were—and probably you’ll sing for Guli Hack, too. Women’s vocal instructor. So you might fetch up in your mind something besides ‘Brennan on the Moor,’ right?”

  Two days later, Linnet gradually began to realize just how special a case she was. As if she were a horse tendered for sale at a great academic horse auction, professors poked and prodded at her, intellectually. They quizzed her and drilled her. Parse this sentence. Do that long division problem without use of paper and pencil. What poetry can you recite from memory? What is the story behind Handel’s Water Music? Name the capital of Canada. They frowned at her a lot. They muttered and rumbled among themselves and entered her into the university music program with a big red conditional stamped across her papers.

  But that was the least of it. This university regimen could hardly be termed “school,” as Linnet knew school. She had grown up under the tutelage of nuns in a parochial girls’ school in Cork. Some of the awesomeness of God sort of rubbed off on nuns and invested them with authority. Linnet would never in a million years dream of talking back to a nun. But these professors—and that included Miss Hack, the vocal instructor—basked mysteriously in the power of their own authority, answering neither to God nor man. Linnet would never in a million years dream of talking to one of these professors at all.

  And the classes! Somehow it just wasn’t school without a uniform. Men and women attended together. Unnatural! Students wandered from building to building as their schedule dictated, unprotected by either walls or the watchful ey
e of the Mother Superior.

  And Papa was not paying for it. How would Linnet ever meet the tuition costs and bills? She was assessed fourteen pounds three. Chris insisted she apply for an indigent’s scholarship, and the bill dropped to nine pounds twelve. She had not two pounds to her name. She wrote urgent letters to her sisters, Margaret and Samantha. Meg was probably doomed to penury as a pastor’s wife, but possibly Sam had found work by now. Maybe Sam could help.

  Through a counselor, who apparently did nothing all day but sort out problems such as hers, Linnet obtained a position as part-time maid in the home of an assistant professor. She performed her household duties morning and evening, and attended class between times. In a stroke of munificence, her employer, Onslow Warner, gave her half days off on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, without loss of pay. Yet he paid her not much more than her former employer Cole Sloan had under terms of indenture. It would take her forever to accumulate nine pounds twelve. She needed it now.

  Saturday noon she cleaned up the luncheon remains and left the house. Until tomorrow noon she was free. By Monday she would owe more than she could pay. With a heavy heart she strolled through the summer heat, headed for the practice rooms. She might as well soak up just as much music as she could until they kicked her out.

  “Ahoy, the fair Irish lass!” Chris Yorke’s lilting voice instantly lifted away all the weight of the world that had been plaguing her. She turned and watched him come bounding across the broad, stately lawn between the conservatorium and North Terrace. He wore a startling blue silk shirt. She’d never seen anything quite like it. Come to think of it, neither had she seen anything like the flowered silk ascot he wore last week. Or any of the other details of outrageous costume he obviously loved.

  With a broad, happy grin he dropped to a walk beside her. “My piano student extraordinaire! You’re on your way to the practice rooms, right? Good girl! I’ll come along. So, now that you’ve tasted academic life, what do you think?”

  “It’s lovely…different…”

  He stopped so suddenly she ran into him. Those anthracite eyes bored into her. “What’s wrong? Warner is behaving himself, isn’t he?”

  “Behav—You mean…yes! No problem.”

  “You are frightened of something. Fearful.”

  “Chris, I cannae afford this. I’ve nae money at all. And they want so much.”

  “What else?”

  “What else? What more need there be?”

  “Just money? Why, Linnet, there’s always a quid or two lying about waiting to be found. We’ll go practice, but first join me for a pause and conversation at the Goat’s Beard. It’s too fine an afternoon to waste with mundane scales and etudes.”

  She froze in place. “Oh no. Thank ye. Uh…. no. I, uh, thank ye, but I never frequent pubs.”

  “Then you’ll never eat in Adelaide, for the best places are all fully licensed. You may have tea if you wish, and if you further wish, I shall have tea also.”

  “Well, uh—”

  “There’s a clever girl.” He swiftly headed out across the lawn, almost dragging her along. She nearly had to trot to keep up. “For a talented young woman like you, Linnet, money will never be a problem.”

  “Easy enough for y’rself to say, with y’r own dear father sending ye funds. Me papa has me mum and grandmum and brother Ellis, and nae income save his own. He cannae help; I wouldnae ask him.”

  “Then we’ll ask Brennan.”

  “Brennan who?”

  “Why, the only Brennan you know, ‘Brennan on the Moor.’”

  Linnet had no idea what he might be thinking, but it didn’t sound good.

  She had seen the Goat’s Beard in passing, but never had she gone inside this pub or any other. Nice girls didn’t do that sort of thing. Papa would have a first-rate conniption, and rightly so, were he ever to learn what she was doing just now. And think what Meg and Sam would say!

  They stepped from daybright into hot, stuffy gloom. Chris waited in the doorway a moment; no doubt his eyes took as long to adjust as did hers. A bar, armpit high, made a varnished mahogany U in the middle of the room. Matching booths studded the walls. At the back, where the U connected to the far wall, a wonderful variety of goat figurines marched along a shelf above a huge mirror. Cabinets on both sides of the mirror held bottles of every imaginable sort, in clear, green, brown and blue. Stem glasses of all sizes hung head down from racks above the barman. Except for one woman with her hair piled high on her head, every soul here was male. And they were every one of them looking at Linnet.

  Chris dragged her forward. “Anybody here Irish? Hurlihy, I know you are. Hurlihy, my brawny lad, I’m about to bring a tear to your eye. Jemmy, let me borrow your guitar.”

  And Linnet realized with a shocking jolt like lightning what Chris had in store. She shook her head, her mind full of protests, but no words came out of her dry mouth. He couldn’t be serious about this! He had duped her. Tea? Conversation? Ha! He intended all along to put her on display like the two-headed calf at the fair. She had been betrayed by one of the few people in Australia she felt like trusting.

  Chris rotated slowly, addressing the room in general. “This young woman has never been in a pub before. She’s quite shy, and as you can see, that adds immensely to her stupendous charm. But her voice, gentlemen. Wait until you hear her voice!”

  Chris pulled her closer to him. “I present with enthusiasm Miss Linnet Connolly, a music student of very limited means, performing one of the great ballads from the Auld Sod. Miss Connolly?” He propped his foot up on a chair rung to support the guitar and strummed several chords.

  What could she do? It was no longer a matter of avoiding shame. Her goal now was to minimize it. Should she run out the door and leave Chris there strumming, as he so richly deserved? What if she met one or more of these persons in the days to come? She wouldn’t know them, but they would surely know her. And they would laugh. Almost querulously, she began to sing.

  The chorus came easier. Her throat loosened up enough that she could make it through the next verse without choking. Not only was Chris an excellent pianist, he was an accomplished guitarist as well. Was he one of those persons, like her sister Sam, who could do anything at all and do it well?

  The song ended. Linnet glanced at the burly man identified as Hurlihy. Just as Chris had promised, his eyes were glistening! “Speak something, lass,” he murmured.

  She licked her lips. “Uh, sure ’n I’m glad ye liked me song, sir.”

  “Real!” he purred in a heavy Galway burr. “Y’re realer than real!” He dug into his pocket. With one smooth stroke he transferred something from his pocket to her hand. He clasped both his huge hands over hers. “God bless ye, lass! And God bless the fine folks what raised ye free of pubs and shame!”

  “Thank ye. God bless y’rself, Mr. Hurlihy.”

  Chris grabbed her elbow and guided her toward a booth. There was an other-worldly feel to this whole unimaginable escapade. It made her almost numb. Too many weird things were happening too quickly. And it was so hot in here. Three others on the way pressed coins into her hand. She sat down because Chris sat her down. He muttered, “Count it later,” and flung himself carelessly into the seat across.

  She whispered hoarsely, “Had I known y’r intent, Mr. Yorke, I’d not have come here. Ye know that.”

  “I know that. Do you want to learn music?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you have the resources?”

  “No.” A thousand lessons and homilies from her past flooded in. The end does not justify the means. Walk uprightly. Avoid temptation. God judges. Sin not. And flooding in from the other side came Where do you plan to get money, Linnet? How will you support yourself and pay tuition? Is this so terribly bad? See, the tea has arrived, and scones. You’re not drinking alcohol. Yes, but…No buts. Yes, but…

  The heat, plus the clamor of conflicting thoughts, wilted her resolve to do either good or bad. She sat like a lump and sipped at he
r tea. “Chris, I don’t know—”

  “Life isn’t perfect black and white, Linnet. And what you just did is a very light shade of gray, if it’s gray at all. You’re not accustomed to this, I understand. But you have a lovely gift—a voice like an angel’s—and you might as well use it to further your education.”

  “But ye dinnae understand.”

  “And frankly, neither do you. Had I proposed this while we were walking out on the lawn, you would have refused flat out, not because it’s wrong but because it’s unknown. Now it’s known, if only slightly. Think about it.” With that irresistible grin he raised his teacup. “To the long and successful career of one of the world’s great sopranos.”

  She giggled suddenly. “Here now, ye scoundrel. And what great soprano would fain sing ‘Brennan on the Moor’?”

  Chapter Four

  Trouble

  Sloan enjoyed most this aspect of Sydney’s racing season: behind the scenes. With Hilary on his arm as decoration, he strolled among the long white barns behind the racetrack. Here and there horses sneezed or whinnied. Iron-shod hoofs raised a gentle haze of dust. Diminutive jockeys, burly trainers, quiet grooms all wore bright colors and laughed a lot.

  Sloan loved the smells—yes, all of them. He particularly liked the clean, honest smell of horse sweat. He liked the odor of freshly saddle-soaped leather. Foremost, the sweet aroma of hay jogged memories of his boyhood, when he dallied around these very barns and stables. Long ago he dreamed of owning the world’s finest racehorse, and of riding it to victory. Now he smiled to himself at the idea of a six-foot-plus jockey.

  And the horses…Nothing—absolutely nothing—can match a fine horse well groomed. Sloan paused to admire a glistening bay stallion being led out to the track. The long neck arched gracefully as the impatient steed sidled and pranced, anxious to be moving faster than his groom was walking. His jockey, in vivid yellow and blue silks, couldn’t be more than sixteen. Did the lad appreciate the glamor of his calling?