They crossed slowly. She urged Bolinda Vale on with her heels. Halfway across, the filly baulked and she had to dismount. “I can’t use a switch on you, but please come on.” She tugged at the reins while the animal snorted in disapproval.
The water continued to rise as Laurie hesitated. It almost reached her knees now. Maybe they should turn back. Her hesitation proved disastrous. A wall of water descended upon them and swept away the bridge, carrying them with it. The reins jerked out of her hand as Laurie stumbled and fell into the swirling water. Frantically she tried to grab Bolinda Vale’s tail, but the terrified horse instinctively started swimming to shore.
She was going to drown. A weak swimmer at the best of times, she grabbed desperately at an overhanging branch as the torrent swept her downstream. Useless trying to drag herself out of the water as the banks were too steep. All she could do was hang onto the branch in the hope someone might come to her rescue.
Water roared in her ears as she felt the undertow dragging her under. Her aching arms felt like they were being twisted out of their sockets. Her only solace was that as she got swept away she glimpsed Bolinda Vale struggling out of the water.
It was freezing. The wetness seeped right through to her bones and she felt as if she wore lead shoes.
“God save me, please.” Would he answer? How many others had cried out the same words on the blood-soaked beaches of Gallipoli or in the trenches of France? Eighteen was too young to die, yet Danny had been almost the same age, and God hadn’t spared him.
“Help! Somebody help me,” she screamed over and over. Exhaustion started to set in, and a swirling black mist appeared before her eyes. Why bother fighting, anyway? If she drowned, the shame and disgrace of having Blair’s baby out of wedlock would remain hidden.
From a distance a voice called her back from the brink of death. “Hang on, Laurie.” Her eyes opened and she spotted Dick.
Her numbed hands started slipping from the branch, and it took her last reserve of strength to grit her teeth and hang on. A branch struck Dick in the face, flinging him into the water. Horrified, she watched his horse swimming away.
“Dick,” she screamed. His arms came up and he started swimming. Her hands felt as though they were being ripped to the bone, yet somehow she managed to hang on until he came up level with her. He grabbed the branch and stood up, with the water swirling level with his chest. As she started slipping into the creek, he supported her with an arm about her waist.
“Come on, we have to get out while I can still stand up. There’s no way we can climb out here. Some of the levee banks upstream have broken. We’ll have to go with the current until we find a spot where it isn’t so steep.”
“Leave me, Dick. Save yourself.”
“Hang on, Laurie.” He braced himself as a huge wave broke over them, almost lifting him off his feet. “We have to get out of here.”
Dear God, the water was over her head. Without Dick’s support, she would surely drown. For one so finely built, he had exceptional strength. Maybe desperation gave it to him.
They eventually made it to the centre of the creek and swam with the current to where the banks were much lower. By the time they had battled their way to a point at which she could stand up in the eddying water, Laurie trembled with cold and exhaustion.
“Come on, not much farther,” he urged. With a reserve of strength dredged from somewhere deep within, she struggled on, with Dick’s arm clamped around her.
“Made it.” He pulled her clear of the creek and flopped down on the grass. She was shivering, her teeth chattering like castanets, but they rested for a moment before Dick stood up.
“Come on, I’ll help you. If we stay here much longer, we’re both dead. If you had to nearly drown, you couldn’t have picked a better place.” He gave a cracked laugh. “There’s an outrider’s hut close by. It’s on Guy Webster’s place, but he won’t mind if we use it.”
With Dick half-carrying, half-dragging her, they managed to struggle to an old split-log hut. He stood her up while he fumbled with the wooden door latch. Inside, it was dry, if musty smelling, and from the elements outside it was a haven.
“These places are always kept stocked up with emergency rations. We’ll have a fire going in a little while,” he reassured, as he fumbled around in the semi-darkness. Within a few minutes a fire blazed in the little stone hearth.
She shivered uncontrollably now. Staggering over to the fire, she held her trembling hands towards the flames, trying to infuse some warmth into her frozen limbs.
“Right. We’ll have to dry our clothes. Take this blanket.” He thrust it into her hand. “It smells a bit musty but at least it’s dry.”
As she stood staring at him, embarrassed heat surged into her cheeks.
He gave a strained grin. “I’ll collect some more firewood, in case it starts raining again. You change while I’m out. Wrap yourself in the blanket, and then we can try to dry your clothes out.”
She waited until he had sloshed out the door before stripping off her sodden skirt. There were only two choices, keep her underclothes on and risk pneumonia, or take them off to be dried out. She stripped everything off and wrapped herself in the brown blanket. Its rough texture grazed her bare skin. Shivering, she drew it more tightly around her body.
A sharp rap on the door broke the silence. “Is it all right for me to come in?”
“Yes.” The door swung open, letting in a blast of icy air.
“It’s bloody freezing outside.” Dick kicked the door shut with one foot and dropped some logs on the hearth. “This should keep us warm tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. We’ll have to stay here until morning. It would be madness trying to walk back to Coolibah, or even my place. There should be some flour and salt here, so we won’t starve.”
He peeled off his clothes, until he was stripped to his pants. How slim and feminine he looked. He removed his leggings, followed by his boots and socks. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep my pants on for a while.” He gave a rueful laugh. Draping his shirt near the fire, he then reached for her clothes, hanging them on a piece of rope stretched across the fireplace.
Gazing at their steaming clothes, Dick joked, “Looks like a Chinese laundry.”
Laurie hugged the blanket close to her body, feeling physically much warmer. It was only her heart that remained frozen. Dick’s face took on a pinched whiteness. As he lifted the billycan for their tea, his hands trembled.
They drank the scalding liquid black, without sugar, from tin mugs, while waiting for their damper to cook.
The rain pelted down again. Thank goodness they were inside, safe from the elements. She shuddered on thinking about the swollen creek and how close to death she had come. The hut was only small, unlined and with a dirt floor, but with the fire crackling merrily, it softened the austerity of their surroundings.
There were two chairs, and a rough wooden cupboard from which Dick had taken the food. In one corner lay a pile of bags most likely used for bedding. Otherwise the place seemed empty.
“Things are a bit primitive, but I’d hate to be outside now. What were you trying to do, Laurie? Lucky I saw you go into the water.”
“I wanted to bring Bolinda Vale over to your place so you could have her back.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m leaving Coolibah. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Go home to Dad, I suppose. I can’t stay there any longer because Blair and Helen are getting married. Pity the river didn’t take me.”
“Laurie.” His blue eyes stood out, a vivid splash of color, against his blanched skin. “Th… th… that’s terrible.” His stutter became so bad the words were barely audible. When he came to stand beside her, he was shaking.
“I wish I were dead, Dick.” She started crying and couldn’t stop. He hesitated then put his arm around her in a brotherly gesture, and her tears trickled down the smooth skin of his bare chest.
He pushed her away after a time. Whe
n he spoke, his voice sounded gruff. “I have to take my pants off, my legs are freezing.”
She shut her eyes, which helped stem the flow of tears. When he tapped her arm, she glanced up to find him with a blanket wrapped sarong-wise around his waist. His damp hair had turned deep blond and stuck out every which way, making him seem younger than ever.
She said nothing, and he lapsed into his own silent little world as they huddled in their blankets. The only sounds were those of the screaming wind, the pounding rain outside, and the fire crackling in the hearth before them.
Eventually he stirred himself. Moving over to the fire, still without speaking, he raked away the ash and laid the damper on a tin plate.
“We’ll have half now and the rest in the morning.”
“All right. Thanks, Dick.”
He devoured his, while she nibbled at hers. “I’m going to be sick.” She rushed to the doorway and, even though it was freezing cold, stood there vomiting her heart out.
“You’ll feel better now.” Which one of them did he want to convince? “You must have swallowed gallons of creek water.”
“I don’t think it was that.” She lifted one hand to wipe her mouth, and the blanket shifted, exposing her bare shoulders.
“Help me, Dick, I think I’m going to faint.”
When she woke to full consciousness, Laurie found herself lying on a pile of bags with Dick’s pale face hovering anxiously over hers.
“Are you better now?”
Weakly, she nodded.
“I’ll get you some more tea.” When he returned, he helped her sit up. “I’ve been thinking.” The stutter had disappeared, although he rubbed vigorously at one cheek. “I might have to marry you, I mean…” He gave a cracked laugh. “I’ve compromised you, and if we spend the night here together…” He wasn’t joking. In fact his face was set into somber lines.
“You wouldn’t want to marry me. No man would, now.”
He picked up the bitterness straight away. “Any man would be proud to have you for a wife, Laurie. You’re so beautiful.”
“I’m having a baby.”
Every vestige of color drained from his face. “You shouldn’t joke about things like that, it isn’t decent.”
“It’s true.”
In a flat, toneless voice that seemed to belong to a stranger, she told him the whole sordid little tale. His face registered shock at first, but he did not interrupt. In fact, so still did he become that, when she’d finished, he looked like a statue carved from white marble.
“Why don’t you tell Blair? He’d marry you. It’s the only decent thing for a man to do.”
“He and Helen are making wedding plans now. Anyway, he thinks I purposely went to his bed to trap him into marriage because I knew Helen was coming.”
“Oh, God, Laurie.” He looked white as a ghost, yet his eyes burned fever bright. “You, you could marry me.”
“What!”
He took her hand. “Marry me. I can support a wife. I have an army pension, as well as what I earn from helping father.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I’m carrying another man’s child.”
His fingers closed around hers so tightly they hurt. “I wouldn’t mind,” he whispered tremulously. “If I tell you something, something terrible about me, will you swear never to tell a soul?”
“I promise, but what terrible things could you have done?”
“I, I, I’m not like other men.”
“What are you talking about?”
Perspiration beaded his upper lip, his hand, clutching hers, felt clammy. “When I was in Egypt, there was this officer quite a lot older than the rest of us. He got me drunk one night on some foreign grog. Anyway, when I woke up we were in bed together. He forced me, Laurie, I swear it. He threatened to tell everyone, threatened to say I instigated it. He made me do things I didn’t want to do.”
As the story poured out, he started crying, and feeling sick with revulsion, she tried to pull away.
“No, please, I’m not one of those people, I swear.” He clutched both her hands in his. “No one knows, but I’m scared they might find out. It would kill my parents. I might even go to prison.”
“But if you found a nice girl…”
“You still don’t understand. Ever since then, I can’t do anything—certainly not with a man.” He shuddered. “But even a pretty girl doesn’t make me want to do anything. I mean, I want to, but I’m just not able to. If we got married, I wouldn’t ask anything of you. We could pretend the baby is mine. I’ve worked it all out. Remember the day we went to the waterfall? We could say it happened then, and both our secrets would be safe. No one would ever doubt either of us.”
His confession was revolting, his suggestion terribly wrong, yet she felt desperate enough to consider it. What a dilemma. Marrying someone as young and troubled as Dick, or facing disgrace and subsequent castigation from everyone once her condition became obvious? She had no choice, unless she wanted Blair’s child to be born a bastard.
“All right,” she agreed huskily.
“I like you a lot, Laurie, and I promise to look after you. It can work for us. I know it can.”
It was dark now. A freezing draught blew in under the door. Intermittently Dick stoked the fire up, but they did not speak further. She huddled in one chair, he in the other. The firelight cast eerie shadows around them, and suddenly she started shaking and shivering with cold and fear.
“We better turn in. We’ll need all our strength for the morning; we’ll have to walk home.”
She stood up, wearily making her way to the pile of bags in the corner.
“Do you want to go outside or anything?” he asked.
“No.”
“I don’t, either.” He followed close behind her. “We’ll have to sleep together for warmth, otherwise we’ll freeze.”
“It’s not right, Dick.”
“Why not? We’re going to get married soon, and who’s going to know?”
“What if someone comes searching for us?”
“No one will.”
“What about your parents?”
“I often go off on my own so they’re used to it. The folk at Coolibah will think you stayed over at our place.”
He was right, no one would come, and they had to keep warm. Already her legs ached from the cold. They each kept one blanket wrapped around themselves. When they lay down, Dick covered them with the third one before piling some of the bags on top for added warmth.
Laurie lay on her side, Dick on his back. As she lay there her thoughts turned to Blair, whose baby grew inside her even now. If Helen could make him happy, it would be some solace, yet how could such a selfish person bring happiness to anyone? What would Danny have thought of her behavior? He would want to punch Blair in the mouth. This wouldn’t have happened, Danny, not if you hadn’t gone away. It might have been your baby, yours and mine. Hot tears scalded her cheeks, and she tried to sniff them back.
“Are you crying again? Please stop.” Dick wrapped his arms around her and she clung to him.
“I’ll try to be a good wife.”
“Things will work out for us, you’ll see. You’ve got pretty hair. It’s such a vibrant color.”
He ran his fingers through the tousled curls, and then his forefinger traced the outline of her face. She closed her eyes tight, willing herself not to flinch away if he tried to kiss her. He made no such move, seeming quite content to hold her close. His breath blew warmly against her throat, and his arms felt comforting as he kept their bodies close together.
Chapter Eleven
Laurie would never know whether the sudden light from the lantern or Blair’s savage oath wakened them.
“You dirty little whore,” he snarled. “Helen was right about you.” His look of hatred and sheer loathing made her cringe behind Dick.
“Now look here, Blair. You’ve got no right abusing Laurie.”
“So, this is where you’ve been meeting. Living under my roof and co
ming here to fornicate like some alley cat.”
“Please, it’s not what you think.”
Blair was white with rage, and a pulse convulsed in his throat.
“Laurie and I are getting married.”
“Well, you’re welcome to her, Dick. I’ll make arrangement for her things and Bolinda Vale to be sent over to your place. She’s no longer welcome under my roof. Laurie,” he gritted. “I hope I never set eyes on you again.”
He swung away. Dick, who had gained his feet, followed him to the door, where a hurried conversation took place. What was said she neither knew nor cared. For Blair to look at her with such loathing and speak to her in such a shocking manner was one of the hardest things she had ever endured. Her only grain of comfort was that Bolinda Vale had made it home safely.
“They’ve gone now. They left my horse, so as soon as it gets light we can go. Our clothes are dry,” Dick said when he returned.
He started pulling on his pants. “While I’m outside, you get dressed.” He peered into her face. “Don’t take it so bad.”
When he’d finished dressing he strode outside, banging the door behind him.
Laurie dressed in quick, jerky movements. Her clothes had dried rock hard, with water stains she knew would never come out. She couldn’t do anything about her hair, except try to sort it out with her fingers. Blair hated her; nothing else registered. The cold fury in his voice when he accused her of being a harlot. The sheer loathing in his eyes. She would never forget it.
She didn’t want to marry Dick, yet her condition would bring not only disgrace to herself but also her father, and the child would be ostracized. She couldn’t do that to them. The torture of living near Blair and Helen would nearly kill her, but there was no other choice.
When Dick returned, she went outside. By the time she got back inside, he had the fire raked up and the billycan on. “I could have done that,” she offered listlessly.
“It’s all right. We’ll have our tea and eat up the rest of the damper before we leave. Are you far gone?”
“What?”
Lauren's Dilemma Page 15