Curses and Confetti

by Jenny Schwartz

  Suffragette though she was, her future would mean following Jed—and he wouldn’t be staying in the Swan River Colony. She’d have to adjust to life in America, away from her family and friends. Before she went, there were so many things she had to do—quite apart from the wedding—projects she’d committed to accomplishing. Establishing the Institute for Modern Women loomed large.

  “Too many toffee apples?” Jed queried her pensive mood.

  She bumped shoulders with him. “I only had one. It was a lovely afternoon. Thank you.”

  “I enjoyed it, too. What could be nicer than taking my best girl to the fair?”

  “Courting on the porch swing?” she said mischievously. The porch swing was an American idea Jed had introduced her to. He’d arranged for a local carpenter to build it, gotten her father’s permission to install it on their front veranda and filled it with a jumble of colored cushions. Then in the late evening shadows he’d introduced Esme to the delights of stolen kisses and cuddles while the town lit up before them and the ships at anchor in the harbor showed their lights.

  “Chance would be a fine thing. Last evening Aaron had me studying the plans for his automated confetti-showerer. The sideways shaking arm looked like nothing so much as a spindly spider’s leg. I like your father, but…”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve put Father off the confetti-showerer for the moment. I told him first he needed to design a machine to make sufficient, multi-colored confetti for the showerer to scatter. He was drafting the plans this afternoon. We’re to be festooned in clouds of paper rainbows.”

  Jed groaned.

  She laughed and squeezed his arm. An architect by training, her father had been bitten by the gold bug years ago. Even after his awesomely lucky strike, he still enjoyed prospecting. In the long, dull hours of work, his clever brain occupied itself dreaming up unlikely gadgets. She’d grown up with the quirkiness of an inventor’s unique take on life and she was glad that Jed—another inventor—could appreciate her father’s enthusiasm.

  Her own enthusiasm re-surfaced. Jed’s ingenuity would make their life together an adventure. She would support his work, just as he’d support her political ideals of universal suffrage, education and welfare. It didn’t matter that home would be America, not Australia. She would make new friends, become part of his family. It would all work out.

  They reached the side gate to her father’s house and he stretched an arm over it to unlatch it.

  Kelly, her dog raced forward to meet them. Medium sized and dusty brown, he was a sharp, intelligent kelpie, a sheep herder. Her father’s two kangaroo dogs, akin to lurchers, ambled up more slowly, tails wagging politely.

  She stepped through the gate and patted the dogs. “Come early to dinner,” she invited Jed. “And maybe we’ll be able to steal some time on the porch swing.”

  “Temptress.” He kissed her cheek.

  She flushed, unable to keep from glancing around. No one was watching and the high limestone wall hid them from the street. She put a hand on his shoulder, stood on tiptoe and returned his kiss.

  “Sweetheart.” His eyes darkened with emotion, with desire.

  A secret shiver slid along her spine.

  He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Maybe your father has the right idea, after all.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I think, tonight, I can’t be trusted with you on the porch swing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh.” He smiled ruefully. “Who was the idiot who agreed to a New Year’s Day wedding?”

  “That would be the man who thought it would help him remember our anniversary.”

  “Not one of my better ideas.” He tipped his hat. “Ah well. See you soon.”

  “Bye, Jed.” She latched the gate behind him and leaned against it a moment, watching him walk away, so tall, lean and handsome. So beloved.

  “We should have eloped.” Her whisper was low enough that only the dogs heard. She sighed. Eloping would have hurt her father—bad enough that Jed’s family, constrained by his father’s political responsibilities wouldn’t be at the wedding. Although they had sent warmly welcoming telegrams and letters, and apparently a wedding gift was in the mail. On New Year’s Day, she’d become the daughter-in-law of a powerful US senator.

  She straightened and walked towards the house, her home.

  Two stories high and built of the local cream-colored limestone with red brick corners and green guttering, it was framed by shady verandas and occupied the top of a ridge, commanding a magnificent view of the port town and the Swan River.

  Tonight, she’d wear her new blue gown with its scooped neckline and gauzy sleeves. She’d had Jane sew it especially to complement Jed’s sapphire engagement ring. It seemed she’d finally found a reason to care about her clothes—the expression of pride and desire in his eyes when he looked at her.

  “Love,” she told the dogs. “Changes people.”

  “I should have built a ballroom in the house,” Aaron Smith said, impatient self-chastisement in his voice.

  “Why?” Esme asked. Her mother had often said he had two left feet and dancing remained a despised activity in her father’s mind.

  “For your wedding reception.”

  She put down her spoon, no longer hungry for the delicious spiced crab soup just served. “I thought we’d agreed to hold a luncheon?”

  Across the table, Jed kept his cowardly gaze focused on the soup.

  Not that I blame him. Her father’s increasingly elaborate preparations for their wedding tested even her patience.

  “A luncheon isn’t much,” Aaron said, spooning up soup. “A dinner dance is the thing. It’s a shame we don’t have a ballroom, but it can’t be helped. I’ve hired the town hall for the evening.”

  “A sensible solution,” Jed said.

  Esme frowned at him.

  He shrugged infinitesimally.

  “Now, flower girls.” Aaron pushed aside his empty soup bowl. “I’m designing clockwork posies for them. The gemstones will move slowly into new arrangements, like a kaleidoscope. I’ll need to make seven. I’m wondering whether to simply give the design to Shoehorn, the jeweler, and have him make them up. There’s so much to do.”

  “Seven?” Esme queried. “Do you need a couple spare in case they break?”

  Aaron waved aside the suggestion of failure. “I told Orwell his twin daughters could be your flower girls, as well. They’re practicing their curtseys.”

  Seven flower girls. Esme closed her eyes. She wouldn’t be getting married. She’d be leading a parade.

  Her father leaned back to allow Francis to remove his bowl and added, a tad defensively. “Well, you said you didn’t want Amberley’s automated flower girls.”

  “I don’t.”

  “However, I told him he could make an automated pageboy to carry the rings. Esme, he’s known you forever. He wanted to contribute something.”

  “And I’m grateful, for everything. Thank you,” she added as Francis removed her soup bowl and put a plate of chicken and spring vegetables in front of her. Determinedly she took the opportunity to change the subject. “Uncle Henry is due back, tomorrow.”

  Henry Fellowes captained his own skimmer-boat. Usually he travelled between Australia and Europe, but this time his journey was shorter, heading east to Sydney and returning. Even with the speed of the elegantly efficient skimmer design, an international journey would have taken too long and left him out of the wedding preparation hoopla. Lucky man.

  She sighed when neither her father nor Jed followed her change of conversational topic.

  In fact, Jed looked at her father and thanked him for the over the top wedding activity. “I know how important you and Esme are to one another and I appreciate everything you’re doing to make her wedding a happy one. Her happiness is all that’s important to me, too.”

  The men exchanged a long look.

  “If I didn’t think that,” Aaron said. “If I didn’t know you were an honorable man, you w
ouldn’t be marrying her.”

  Chapter Three

  Eating breakfast alone had one advantage, no one complained if you made notes.

  Her father was out on his early morning walk with the dogs and Esme had the dining room to herself.

  Toast in one hand, pencil in the other, she planned her day. First up, she had an appointment with Mr. Loonar. Another appointment. Honestly, as the town planner, he was being as difficult as he knew how about granting permission to repurpose the old Port View newspaper building as a school for training women as telegraph operators, stenographers and in using the revolutionary new office machine, the typewriter. She would get permission in the end. It was only—only!—a matter of holding onto her temper, emphasizing her respectability and that of all the teachers, and complying with all his fiddling building code requirements. Ha. None of the pubs that littered the town had to have four fire exits for the same size building.

  A grin sneaked past her annoyance. Just wait till these recalcitrant men discovered the extent of the Board of the Institute for Modern Women’s plans. Suffragettes like herself, the Board intended to expand the institute from training women in the use of modern communication and office technology to repairing and even designing it. That was why they’d purchased the old newspaper office. Its printing room would make a perfect workshop.

  She tapped her pencil on the open notebook, marshaling her arguments for the town planning appointment. She was the guiding light, the financial backer and the public face of the Institute, which meant it had to be up and running by the time of her New Year’s Day wedding and departure to America. The clock was ticking.

  Time to bring in the big guns. Her father bankrolled a lot of the port town’s recreational activities. She would remind Mr. Loonar that such generosity could be disrupted by his balky behavior. She hated to do it—and neither her father nor her would ever withdraw money for libraries, sporting activities and the new art gallery—but Mr. Loonar needed a reminder that women weren’t without power.

  Unpleasant decision made, Esme closed the notebook and reached for the newspaper.

  Fatal Accident at the Fair.

  “Oblivious fairgoers reveled in the light-hearted atmosphere of the newly opened funfair, while unbeknownst to them, in the shadows of the canvas stalls, a man lay dead, his tragic demise a somber warning. Alfred Brixton, 42, newly arrived from England, died from a fall while under the influence of the demon drink.”

  The moralizing tone was typical of the paper, but the facts were reassuring.

  Esme winced, feeling guilty for her sense of relief, but when she’d read the headline about an accident at the fair, she’d feared an over-excited child had done something dangerous and died from their folly. An adult and a stranger was more distant. Nonetheless, she murmured a quick prayer, “May he rest in peace” as her mother had always done on hearing such news, before continuing the article. She paused, her attention arrested by the description of the deceased.

  “Mr. Brixton was a large man and memorable for the green and yellow checked jacket he wore. Witnesses report he spent the evening at a licensed stall, drinking beer. This paper has railed before about the evils of irresponsible…”

  There could only have been one large man in a green and yellow checked jacket at the fair, yesterday. The same man who’d heckled the gypsy fortuneteller.

  Esme folded the paper thoughtfully and returned it to beside her father’s plate. Then she ventured out to the kitchen.

  The staff were eating their breakfasts, but greeted her easily. Some, like Maud, their housekeeper, and Francis, their general factotum, were old friends. The others had adopted their respectful but relaxed attitude. Around the table, faces turned in friendly greeting. Chairs scraped, but she put out a hand indicating they should stay seated.

  “Good morning. Francis, do you have today’s copy of The Gossip?” He handed it across to her. “Thank you.”

  She scanned the disreputable newssheet. As she’d suspected, it had gone to town on the story. The editor couldn’t contain his glee at such a melodramatic story. “Gypsy’s Curse,” the headline screamed. The vulture mark and fortune were described in loving detail before the editor ended on a note of ghoulish glee. “Who’ll be next?”

  “Poor man,” Maud said with easy sympathy. “Did you and Mr. Reeve see him at the fair?”

  “Actually, we did.”

  “Ooh.” A stir of interest went around the table. Even Mr. McGregor, the head gardener who took his porridge very seriously, looked up.

  “Not to speak ill of the dead, but he didn’t seem a nice man,” Esme said with understatement.

  “Aye weel, little loss then.” Mr. McGregor finished his porridge and held out his mug for more tea.

  Esme handed the paper back to Francis and left them to their meal.

  Poor woman, she thought as she returned to her own breakfast. She hadn’t appreciated the gypsy’s attitude to Jed, but the drunken bully’s unfortunate demise could ruin her. At best, no one would be willing to risk her “Gypsy’s Oracle”. At worst…Esme’s mouth tightened. If enough fools believed in the curse, a mob could turn nasty.

  She finished her breakfast in a pensive mood. Her father entered as she poured herself a second cup of tea.

  “The harbor master’s boy caught me walking home,” he said, helping himself to bacon keeping warm on a chafing dish. “They’ve sighted the Athena.”

  “Wonderful.” She relaxed into a smile. “Trust Uncle Henry to be on time.”

  She could also trust Uncle Henry to redirect some of her father’s enthusiastic assistance with her wedding preparations. Maybe, she thought with rising hope, he’d even convince her father to visit friends upcountry for a week? A week without wedding preparations might enable her to shake off a strange mood of tension. “I think I’ll walk down and meet him off the boat. My appointment with Mr. Loonar isn’t till eleven o’clock.”

  “I’ll join you when I’ve breakfasted.”

  The jacket of her sage green walking costume was sufficient protection against the freshness of the spring air. Esme simply added the matching hat, securing it with the sharp hairpin that doubled as a mechanical pencil—truly ingenious—pulled on her gloves and set out. She elected to walk into town and her path took her past Mrs. Hall’s boarding house, where Jed resided. Approaching it, she glimpsed the charred timbers of the shed an Indian anarchist had blown up a month ago. The muscles of her stomach tightened. At the time, she’d believed Jed had been in the shed—his workshop—when it exploded. That was when she’d realized how much she loved him.

  Life without Jed was too awful to contemplate.

  Fortunately, he hadn’t been in his workshop and after they’d dealt with the anarchist, Jed had compensated Mrs. Hall for the destruction of her shed and rented a new workshop, the former Suds Soap works factory around the corner. The brick building was larger, stronger and more secure, even if it did smell of lye and tallow.

  Esme paused at Mrs. Hall’s front gate. Even as an engaged person, it would be impossibly rude to interrupt the household at breakfast.

  However, the solution was at hand. Young George and Trevor, the terrible Holden twins, were dawdling their way to school where they’d make their teacher’s life interesting. Esme called them over to her as she rummaged in her purse for a penny each to knock at Mrs. Hall’s kitchen door and pass a message to Jed. “Just tell him Captain Fellowes’s Athena has been sighted and that I’m on my way to the harbor.”

  “Can’t, miss.” Their little hands closed tight around their pennies. “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” She blinked. “To his workshop?”

  “No, miss. The gypsy lady took him.”

  Across the road, Esme saw the Widow Hanson’s lace curtain twitch. “Never mind,” she said hurriedly to the boys. “You run along to school. Yes, yes, keep the pennies.” She set a good example to them by walking away fast. Mrs. Hanson was a terrible gossip; perhaps from loneliness, perhaps from natural incl
ination. The important point was not to be caught and dragged into her parlor where one was fed stale fruit buns and weak tea while being interrogated.

  The gypsy lady took him. Esme puzzled over the boys’ news. She’d thought the woman might have trouble after Alfred Brixton’s death, but why call on Jed? And what could she possibly have said to have drawn him out before his landlady’s customary breakfast hour?

  “Good morning, Miss Esme.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Curtis.” She smiled at the local bookseller, then nodded to Miss Rose who was opening her millinery shop. She put the puzzle of the gypsy woman and Jed to one side for the moment. There were a lot of greetings to be exchanged as she reached the center of town and the streets grew busier.

  After all, Fremantle was home. She’d watch it explode like a fire cracker after her father’s discovery of gold inland. Previously small and remote, now the port town fizzed with activity and color. All sorts of businesses had sprung up to serve the miners and mining industry and the general prosperity had imbued the colony with confidence.

  Maybe too much confidence.

  She winced as she saw the cobbler, Mr. Braun’s, latest addition to his roofline. Few shopkeepers had a wind vane on their roof. Mr. Braun had twelve. Hopefully he’d settle for a happy dozen because the latest addition—a cow jumping over the moon, black and white spotted nose pointing into the wind—was beyond fanciful and all the way into ridiculous.

  Although not as ridiculous as the clockwork monkey that climbed the circuit of the tailor’s shop window next door. It was the apprentice’s task to wind it up every hour on the hour. Mr. Gibbons, the tailor, thought the pun on his name the last word in humor.

  She smiled, remembering the lady visitor to the colony who had mistaken the clockwork monkey for a black spider. She’d fainted to the footpath, only waking to scream “tarantula” before fainting again.