‘Ralph!’ she said thankfully. ‘Oh, I am so pleased to see you! I don’t know what is to be done for this poor woman. Her son is dead and she will not be pacified.’
He took her by the arm and they entered the room together. A woman was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, rocking to and fro
and making a high-pitched wailing sound. On the floor by her side sat the girl, Moira, and standing over near the broken window was a young boy.
‘It’s a keening for the dead,’ Ralph whispered. ‘I’ve heard it before with the Irish in Sydney. Only usually they do it over the body.’
Amelia looked up at him. ‘She had word only this morning that her youngest son has just died in the workhouse infirmary,’ she whispered back. ‘Moira says she’s crying because she can’t go to see him. She can’t walk far, she is very lame.’
Ralph glanced towards the woman and saw a stout stick lying beneath her chair. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked. ‘Can we take her to him?’
Amelia beckoned to Moira to ask her. ‘He’s still at the workhouse, miss,’ she answered. ‘Then they’ll take him to the paupers’ graveyard. That’s bothering Mammy too, she wants him to have a proper burial with a priest there.’
‘All right.’ Ralph made up his mind. ‘Tell your mother we’ll hire a cab to take you all to see your brother. Then we’ll see what is to be done about the burial.’ He turned towards the door. ‘I won’t be long.’
He came back within ten minutes to say a hackney cab and driver was waiting out in the street and, in the meantime, Amelia had persuaded Mrs Mahoney to cease her crying. Moira then wiped her mother’s face with a damp cloth and plaited her long sandy-coloured hair.
‘Thank you, miss,’ Mrs Mahoney whispered. ‘Moira has always said how good you were to her and Kieran. Ah! And to Eamon too, God bless him.’ She seemed more composed now that she was actually going to see her boy for the last time.
The workhouse was a new building far out of town on the road to Anlaby, and Amelia and Ralph followed in a separate hansom cab behind the one holding the Mahoneys. ‘Thank you so much, Ralph,’ Amelia said gratefully. ‘I was beginning to despair of what to do. She wouldn’t be comforted and I didn’t like to leave them without doing anything.’
‘It is only when you see things at first hand like this, that you realize what miserable lives some people have.’ He sat silently for a moment, then said, ‘I keep thinking of Ma. I always knew that she had had a hard life before she was transported, but I had no idea just how bad it must have been. She must have lived much as these people are living.’
Without thinking, Amelia placed her hand on his. ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘But how strange that the worst thing to have happened to her, transportation, should be the way to her change in fortune.’
He nodded and closed his other hand over hers. ‘Yes, meeting your mother and Da – well, fate must have taken a hand.’
She wanted to say she was sorry. Sorry for being so awkward on so many occasions and to
thank him for coming, yet she couldn’t bring herself to utter the words.
They followed the Mahoney family into the workhouse and Ralph made the necessary arrangements for the funeral service, paying the matron for the expenses and arranging for a priest to say a mass.
‘We are finished here, Amelia,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more that we can do.’
‘But should we not wait and escort them back?’ she asked, ‘and I should talk about Moira’s future. That is why I came.’
‘No.’ He bowed to the matron, who bent her knee respectfully, and escorted Amelia out of the door. ‘The cabby will wait to take them back. Now they must be allowed to grieve. They’ll not wish to think of anything more at the moment. We’ll go home, your mother is anxious about you.’
There! Amelia deliberated. He is always right! That is what is so annoying about him!
JACK HAD HAD
dreams again during his fevered sleep. He had tossed, hot and sweaty beneath his bedclothes, and only gained ease when he dived into the cool deep freshwater lake. Down into the depths were large fish which swam past him, undisturbed by his presence. He tumbled and rolled beneath their glistening bodies, then in a swift spiralling surge he swept to the surface, breaking the water’s sun-cloaked mantle like a waterspout.
High beyond the lake edge were long white hills fringed by brown plains, whilst in the sheltered sand dunes, camps had been set up for the summer; fires were burning along the eastern edge and the women, his own amongst them, were preparing and cooking the golden perch or cod which they had caught in the lake. He could see them constructing the ovens in the sand, digging out shallow holes and lining them with stones, heating them with their fire-sticks ready to place the fish in them and then
covering with grass and hot stones, to cook.
He stood up on the water’s edge, avoiding the nets which were laid to dry, and raised his hand to his woman. She stood up in acknowledgement of him and he smiled at her. She was small and gracile, a different race from his own whose bodies were robust and sturdy. She sat down again by the fire amidst a heap of mussels which she had collected and would bury in the sand for consuming on another day. She is a good woman, he thought, as he strode towards the hills, a skilled gatherer of food, a wise teacher to our children.
He looked down from his vantage point on the escarpment. The lake was drying. Soon there would be no more fish or shellfish. Soon they would have to escape to the far hills to hunt kangaroo and wombat. His woman would crush and grind grass seed for bread. A great wind was blowing, dispersing the sand from shore and filling the lake, making it into desert and dune. He clasped the firestick which was now in his hand and felt its heat. It was time once again to move on.
‘I’ll help out with haymaking before I go back to York,’ Ralph said to Jack, ‘and by then you should be feeling better.’
‘I feel better already,’ Jack insisted, though as he put his feet to the floor there was a distinct rocking movement which hadn’t been there before.
‘You were delirious when I looked in last time,’ Ralph said. ‘Mumbling on about fire and ice.’
Strange images swam into Jack’s mind. ‘It was the fever I expect,’ he said huskily ‘and I was thirsty, I’d knocked my water over. But I’ll be ready to get up tomorrow.’
‘Good.’ Ralph rose from where he had been sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘All the ladies will be glad to see you downstairs again.’
‘Will they?’
‘Every one of them. Mrs Boyle, Phoebe, Amelia, even young May. They’ve all been asking about you.’
Jack gave a weak grin. ‘It’s my charm, I expect.’
‘I expect it is,’ Ralph agreed. ‘Regrettably I don’t have it as you do. I don’t notice what the ladies are wearing or if they have a new hair fashion. And Amelia is set against me for something or other. I don’t think she was too pleased about me following her into Hull.’ He shrugged. ‘My intentions were good. I knew her mother was worried, but it seems I can’t do right for doing wrong.’
The whole family turned out for haymaking, though Ralph’s main reason for being there was to put off the time when he should go back to York and confront Scott. Amelia, her mother and Ginny packed hampers of food from the kitchen – meat pies, baked potatoes, apple pie and numerous jugs of ale and lemonade – and
drove down to the fields in the traps to feed the hungry workers.
‘I’ve never done this before.’ Phoebe, on top of a haywain, wearing an old cotton dress of Amelia’s and an even older sunbonnet, looked down at her blistered hands as she wielded a hay rake. ‘Such fun!’
Roger rode across on his bay mare and heard her comment. ‘Such fun!’ he said. ‘It is, Miss Boyle, when you can stop if you’re tired. But come ten o’clock tonight when the men are still working and they know they have to be up at five to start again, then it isn’t fun, just hard work.’
Amelia looked around. She loved this time of year: the rich smell of new-mown hay, the swish of the scythes, the darting of goldfinches, the rabbits scurrying for cover and the children romping and calling to each other as they tumbled in the newly cut hay. She saw Ralph with his trousers turned up and his shirtsleeves rolled back and a battered felt hat on the back of his head, his face turning brown with the sun and heat, and she smiled. He looked right in that setting, she thought. He looks a true countryman, whereas he is usually so dapper in his fashionable clothes.
He came across to her and she poured him a tankard of ale. He mopped his brow and took a deep quenching drink. His forehead was red where the sun had caught it. ‘It’s a pity Jack isn’t here,’ he said, ‘he would enjoy this.’
‘He’ll come tomorrow. We decided that the
dust would go on his chest and start him wheezing again,’ said Amelia. ‘He wanted to come.’
‘Jack’s coming!’ Phoebe called from her vantage point on the cart. ‘He’s riding up now.’
They turned and saw Jack sitting easily on a mount and riding towards them. ‘I didn’t want to miss seeing Miss Boyle pretending to be a country girl,’ he joked. ‘What would your friends say if they heard, Miss Boyle?’
She looked down at him. ‘They would be astounded, Mr Mungo,’ she said. ‘But I would enjoy giving them something to gossip about.’
Amelia, glancing across at them both, caught a look of understanding between them and she looked again more pertinently. Has he, I wonder, been charming Phoebe in the way he charmed me? Has he stolen a kiss from her? And did she object if he has? A pang ran through her, not exactly of jealousy, but of pique, that she wasn’t the only woman who had been admired by him.
‘Oh, Mr Mungo, I’m so pleased that you are well again.’ May ran across the field to greet him.
He bowed his head in greeting. ‘I have missed your company, Miss May,’ he said gallantly. ‘My days have been dull without it.’
May blushed prettily and sighed and Amelia laughed. What a philanderer he was, yet she was sure there was no harm intended. She glanced at Phoebe again and she had a wry amused look upon her face.
‘Don’t listen to him, Cousin May,’ Ralph called across to her. ‘He’ll break your heart into little pieces and then leave you.’
May blushed even deeper and hung her head and Jack dismounted. ‘I will not break your heart, Miss May,’ he murmured to her. ‘I am merely making it tender, ready for some young gentleman to desire.’
Amelia, catching his whispered words, felt a sudden understanding and a warm indulgence towards him.
Jack rode back to the house and Phoebe, tired now with the heat and her blistered hands sore, drove back with Mrs Linton and Ginny, and Amelia moved from group to group of workers with a basket over her arm offering food and refreshment. Her uncle Sam, and Roger had both discarded their cotton shirts and were scything at the bottom of the meadow. She walked down to them and after offering them drinks, she turned back and saw that Ralph too was pulling his wet shirt over his head. He was broader-chested than she would have imagined and his skin was brown in spite of him being so fair-haired.
‘It’s very hot, isn’t it?’ she said, avoiding looking at him directly. ‘Although perhaps you don’t find it so?’
‘This is nothing compared with the heat at home. There I couldn’t take off my shirt until the evening or I would scorch, and then Jack and I would swim in the creek.’
‘It will be warmer still at harvest time,’ she said. ‘Will you still be here?’
He looked frankly and intently at her. ‘Would you like me to be?’
The question caught her off guard and she was momentarily confused. ‘I – I only meant, that is, I’m sure that Uncle Sam and Roger would be pleased if you were. They are always glad of extra help,’ she added lamely.
‘That isn’t what I asked.’ He continued to gaze at her. ‘I said, would you like me to be?’
She felt a prickle of vexation. Why was he always so direct? But she bowed her head pleasantly enough and said yes of course, they would all, including herself, be glad if he would stay.
Jack was over his cold in just a few days and Ralph decided to go back to York. ‘I want to come face to face with Edward Scott,’ Ralph explained to Amelia and her parents, ‘and ask him point-blank if he was my mother’s husband and is he indeed my father.’ He wanted to add, and to ask him, or was I the bastard child of another man? for that thought had crossed his mind. But he didn’t want to upset the sensibilities of his aunt or Amelia by uttering such a statement, and he pondered whether that could have been the reason why Scott wouldn’t speak for his wife at the trial.
‘Perhaps if you have the time, you would call on the Misses Fielding and give them our regards?’ Amelia asked, ‘and do say that we trust that they are both in good health.’
What
she
didn’t say was that she had written to Elizabeth Fielding and told her of the plight of the Mahoney family and of the death of the boy Eamon, and put forward her suggestion that Moira should go to stay with her.
Ralph and Jack booked in at an inn in York and Ralph hired a horse for the next day. ‘I’ll go alone to meet Scott,’ he said, ‘and give you the news on my return in the evening.’
Jack nodded. ‘And I will acquaint myself with the antiquities of this city and learn of your ancestry, though the period is short compared with mine, a mere two thousand or so years.’
Ralph gave him a friendly shove on the shoulder. He knew that Jack was humouring him, trying to put him in a lighter frame of mind before he faced the ultimate change in his life.
He rode once more up the short drive of Scott’s house, tied up the reins again and rang the bell on the front door. The maid, a different one from before, bade him wait whilst she asked if Mr Scott was at home. ‘Tell him – advise Mr Scott I have something important to discuss with him,’ he murmured. ‘Most important.’
She came back to say that Mr Scott would see him if he would kindly come through. Scott was sitting at his desk as he had been the last time and he raised his head as Ralph entered, although he didn’t get up from his chair.
‘So, Hawkins, you return. Have you thought more on the confectionery business?’
‘No. Not a great deal,’ Ralph answered firmly. ‘But I have other business to discuss with you if you will permit me. Business which concerns us both.’