Dorothy Eden (25 page)

A little later the untouched tray brought Mrs Ashburton to her bedside.

‘Now what is it, Eugenia? Are you sulking? I can’t abide sulks.’

‘No, I am not sulking,’ Eugenia said faintly, but indignantly. ‘You don’t need to look at me in that way. I have only an upset stomach, which is hardly romantic.’

‘Ah ha!’

‘Mrs Ashburton, please! You say ah ha mysteriously in a loud voice that makes my head ache. What are you suggesting?’

Mrs Ashburton began to give her hoarse breathless chuckles.

‘Really, my dear, for someone who has been expectant once you are remarkably unobservant. I have been saying to Mrs Jarvis for the last week or more that you would be telling us your news in your own good time. I have lived too long not to have an instinct about these things.’

Eugenia shot up from her pillows.

‘Mrs Ashburton, I will not have my affairs discussed with the servants!’

It was the only thing she could think of to say. What Mrs Ashburton was suggesting was so totally unacceptable. Yet a frantic calculation told her that it could be true. She had been in such a happy dream with Colm that she had overlooked certain signs.

The shrewd eyes regarded her.

‘When is it to be, dearie? How long are you going to keep it a secret? Come, child, why are you looking like that?’

Eugenia pounded the pillow with clenched fists.

‘It’s too soon after Christopher. I don’t want a baby now.’

Mrs Ashburton’s face was compassionate.

‘Are you still remembering that birth? It was a bad one, I admit. I can still hear you saying, brush my hair, make me decent before my husband comes, when you had barely the strength to lift a finger. Now those were the words of a woman in love. And you were quite right, because Gilbert does take a most exorbitant pride in you.’

His baby had been in her womb when she had lain with Colm.

It was the cruellest irony. Their private miracle was ruined. Now she could never go to him. A woman swelling with another man’s child!

‘But it won’t be so bad the second time,’ Mrs Ashburton was saying briskly. ‘Stop looking so peaky, and come downstairs and tell Gilbert. It isn’t fair not to tell him. Besides, he needs cheering up. He was in quite a taking last night when you were late. I believe he almost thought you had run off with that Irishman.’

From sheer defiance against fate, she did as Mrs Ashburton suggested, and went downstairs that evening. But it wasn’t a success.

Conversation seemed impossible, and after several attempts Gilbert wanted to know if she would prefer to return to her room, she still looked poorly.

‘I am not ill,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I have recovered.’

‘Well, your face is the colour of the tablecloth and about as cheerful as a starving cat’s. Are you fretting for your drunken Irishman?’

He could not have said anything more calculated to bring the colour back to her cheeks. She guessed that he had deliberately tried to provoke her.

‘I wish you would not use language like that.’

‘My language is the simple truth.’

‘He was only drunk because you kept filling his glass with your wretched wine. I hate your wine. There, that’s the simple truth, and I have told you at last.’

Gilbert began to laugh. He always looked attractive when he laughed, his face creasing, his eyes very blue.

The days when her blood had stirred at his attractiveness seemed very far off. She could think of nothing but introspective dark eyes, sensitive and perceptive.

‘I like that better,’ Gilbert said. ‘I hardly thought you had lost your spirit. And you’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know. You’ve always disliked the winery and the vineyard, haven’t you? I’m not blaming you for that.’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘I expected it, to tell the truth. Any wife would be jealous of a profession that took so much of her husband’s time.’

Jealousy! So that was his interpretation. She stared at him, astonished.

‘I can understand,’ he went on, ‘that you thought you could provoke me by indulging in a flirtation. I don’t mind telling you you finally succeeded.’

‘And if it was more than a flirtation?’

‘Oh, come, I know you better than that. But I let Mr O’Connor off much more lightly than he deserved.’

He took too much for granted! She had the greatest temptation to enlighten him on that point, but because of the baby she couldn’t do so now. Perhaps she would never be able to do so.

‘You really didn’t have anything to worry about,’ she said tiredly. ‘You had already made sure that I was entirely your possession.’

It seemed that this was no secret to him either.

‘A baby?’ he said, pleased. ‘To tell the truth, I had my suspicions.’

‘Why did everyone know but me?’ Eugenia cried exasperatedly, and Gilbert laughed again.

‘Your moods are fairly readable, my love. That is, to your husband. I don’t suppose an outsider would understand them in the same way. It’s a good thing the Irishman left. I’m sure he wasn’t bargaining for painting a pregnant woman.’

When she didn’t answer, he gave her a long, steady enquiring look.

‘You want this baby, don’t you?’

She bent her head. ‘You know that I always wanted babies.’

‘Then don’t speak in the past tense. You want to have this baby. Isn’t that the way to say it? Looking ahead. I want you to be happy. I built Yarrabee for you.’

‘I know you did.’

‘You can’t make someone happy who won’t be happy,’ he said with such perplexity that her sense of fairness had to prevail.

‘Sometimes I am homesick. I can hardly hold you to blame for that.’

The note of appeal in her voice had her in his arms.

‘Listen, I’ll make you a promise. As soon as I have a good vintage I’ll send you on a voyage home to visit your family. This sister you write all the letters to.’

She looked up with widened eyes. ‘But what about the children?’

‘Children, is it?’ he said elatedly. ‘I’d like a dozen, if I were to tell the truth. Shall we face that problem when the time comes? What I do propose doing at this moment is writing to Phil and Marion Noakes. We’ll get them down for a few days. Phil can take a look at you, and Marion will give you all the gossip from Sydney. That will stop you brooding.’

That night, as was to be expected, she was gathered into his arms. He did nothing but hold her closely, although she could feel the restrained passion in his body. She was thankful for his restraint, although she had a small irresistible treacherous stirring of warmth from the pressure of a male body against her. She thought so vividly of Colm that the tears squeezed beneath her closed eyelids.

‘Look, my lady! That’s an Australian robin. Now what should there be about that innocent wee bird that makes you sad?’

Peabody was not to know that Colm had been the person to make her familiar with the Australian red-capped robin, with its jaunty red crest and bosom, as well as with various gaily-coloured wrens and the charming flirtatious fantail.

Marion Noakes was interested only in the fact that Erasmus had been banished to the back verandah.

‘But he’s getting so amusing, Eugenia. He doesn’t leave you with any secrets, though, does he? I’ve heard him speaking exactly in Gilbert’s tone of voice, and even if I hadn’t seen that lovely portrait Colm O’Connor has done, I would know he had been here. That bird has picked up an Irish accent.’

‘He can cry like a baby, too,’ Eugenia said a little acidly. ‘Mind you, he has plenty of coaching in that part, what with Christopher and Mrs Jarvis’s baby.’

‘Are you complaining?’ Marion asked.

‘No, of course not.’

‘I believe I’d slap your face if you were. You don’t know when you’re lucky.’

‘Sick every morning?’

‘I’d be sick every evening, too, gladly.’

‘Oh, poor Marion. Forgive me.’

‘Forgive you because I could produce only one sickly child who refused to live? What blame is it of yours? But you might give me a thought when you are queasy in the mornings. It’ll probably alleviate your sufferings.’

‘What was Bess Kelly’s new baby?’

‘A boy. Ten pounds. He nearly split poor Bess in half, and she thought the ugly little devil was beautiful. So did I, to tell the truth.’

‘And you pretend not to be sentimental,’ Eugenia said.

The other woman said in a low fierce voice, ‘I can’t cry all the time. Can I?’

But she could spend a great deal of time playing with the two babies. Rose Jarvis was toddling now, but her world rotated round Christopher’s wooden pen. Marion was endlessly amused to see the babies together.

‘What will happen to them when they get bigger?’ she asked. ‘They can’t seem to bear to be parted at this stage.’

‘Gilbert wants to send Christopher to a good boys’ school that has begun in Bathurst,’ Eugenia said. ‘That will be when he is eight or nine. In the meantime, he will have his own brother or sister to occupy him. Rose? I expect she will learn to help in the house.’

‘She’s a bright little thing.’

‘She’s the daughter of convicts.’

Marion gave Eugenia a sharp look.

‘Are you always going to remember that? She is also your son’s foster sister.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sometimes, Eugenia, I declare you not only look but you behave like the lady of the manor. Just as haughty and frosty.’

‘Aren’t I the lady of the manor?’ Eugenia was nettled by Marion’s tone of voice.

Marion gave her short cynical ejaculation of laughter.

‘You’re an Australian the same as the rest of us. You might have found that out by now if that husband of yours had allowed you to. But being what he is, the romantic fool, I doubt if you ever will.’

Eugenia frowned a little. ‘I really don’t know what you are trying to say.’

‘I’m trying to say you can’t transfer one world to another. Or something like that. But perhaps
you
can. I wouldn’t put it beyond your ability. Perhaps we need a few people like you here.’

‘Marion! Don’t you like me?’

‘Bless you, I love you, you adorable fastidious creature. But you belong in a hothouse. Not in the heat and the mess and muck of this beginning of a world.’

‘Isn’t Yarrabee a hothouse?’ Eugenia said, smoothing her immaculate muslin skirt. ‘I’m sure that’s what Gilbert intended it to be.’

Colm’s letter, for which she had waited with deep anxiety for three whole months, arrived at last. It was brought by a young bearded man, riding a tired horse. He told Ellen who answered the door that he had been required to place the epistle in the hands of no one but the lady of the house.

Ellen came running into the sitting-room where Eugenia was busy at her desk.

‘Ma’am, there’s a wild man at the door with a letter for you. You’ll have to come. He won’t give it to no one else.’

‘To anyone else, Ellen,’ Eugenia corrected mechanically.

Her heart was beating fast. She did not need to open the sealed envelope to find out from whom the letter had come. She gave orders that the young man was to be taken to the kitchen and given a meal. She longed to ask him when he had last seen Colm, and how he looked.

Discretion, and her desire to get the letter open, kept her mouth shut.

She took it upstairs to her bedroom, shut the door, and sank down in a chair at the window to read the precious script.

Alannah,

You have asked me to write, and I have done so every evening since I discovered your note in my pocket. But most of my scribbles have to be destroyed for it is one thing to write and another to get a letter dispatched with any certainty that it will reach your hands and no one else’s. Now at last I have that opportunity. The young man who brings you this is on his way to Sydney and has promised to stop at Yarrabee on his way.

I am not going to waste time apologizing for that lamentable last evening. By doing so I only remind you of it, and I do beg you to forget it, for I have not been like that since, and will not be again. I am determined to conquer my weakness, for I feel that only by doing so will I ever see you again.

But I want you to know that you live in my heart forever. I constantly dream of that day beside the lake and I thank you for it again and again. For the more practical side of life I have been working very hard and diligently since I arrived in Bathurst which is the other side of the Blue Mountains. I have been painting the children of some French settlers, a Monsieur Edouard and his wife, nice people, talkative and lively. I am also giving drawing lessons to the elder daughter, Marguerite, and we are good friends. Neither have I neglected my book, and have made sketches of mountain flowers, and become acquainted with several new species of birds. You will see by this that I intend to be famous and make a great deal of money, and then perhaps—dare I mention this wild dream? Of an old grey house, and a green garden, and mossy broken statues, and wild primroses under the trees, and mist with a little bit of sun breaking through, and yourself in that house and that garden.

I beg you to answer this letter, and to address it care of the Edouards. And tell me that you believe in dreams.

Your wandering Irishman,

Colm.

Eugenia read the letter with mingled relief and disappointment.

It seemed that Colm had never intended to do anything so rash as ask her to run off with him until he had something concrete to offer her. So she was not faced with the immediate and painful task of disillusioning him.

This was a relief, and it was illogical to be disappointed that he had not written a wild urgent letter swearing that he would die without her.

He had, after all, survived for three months, and he was practical enough to know that dreams were pretty thin sustenance.

But they were alluring.

The grey house and the green garden, the white doves circling. Eugenia began to smile.

‘I have added doves,’ she would write to him.

Someone knocked at the door.

‘Yes, who is it?’ she called absently.

Ellen put her head in.

‘The master sent me, ma’am. He says are you all right, luncheon is getting cold.’