Paper Daisies (32 page)

Berylda

M
r Thompson is saying something to me, from where he sits on the ground beside Greta, but I don't hear him. He won't stop looking at me with his cool grey eyes, though, with his overfed conceit, so I ask him: ‘What?'

‘I said would you like a sandwich?' He has unwrapped one and is holding it up to me, the waxed paper beneath it fluttering limply in the breeze.

‘Oh. No. Thank you.' I look at my watch again; the hands swim, as if their gold is melting in the heat of my palm. From my rage. This rage that grows by the minute within me, so that if I slipped my harness now, I might kick out, I might kick the sandwich from his hand, kick my boot into his fat complacent face as the face of Alec Howell's proxy, tear off his too-neat beard, his vanity, as he lounges here by my sister, tear down the tree before them, tear down the hills and the sky.

‘Ryldy suffers such terrible anxiety on my account,' Gret explains to him fondly, lightly, and I walk away to hurry Buckley up again.

My sister appears to have rallied, yes, but the condition persists. What else can it be now but some severe case of morning sickness? A lost line of newsprint returns to me from somewhere, some passing joke:
‘Morning sickness?' I asked the Doc. ‘But I must be having triplets then, for it comes to me morning, noon and night
.
'
And with this severity which Greta is experiencing, logic from somewhere else tells me that the pregnancy might be further advanced than I had presumed.
When did your last menses come?
I asked her on New Year's Eve, when she told me she was only so tender and sore because her whatsits were late.
Oh three weeks, maybe four
… My own ignorance scalds; that I do not know my own body either. Does it come for me next with Ben Wilberry's seed? How stupid have I been? Wilfully stupid.

‘Miss Berylda,' Buckley addresses me as I approach him, standing by the fire with his mug of tea and his cigarette. ‘Don't do this,' he tells me in his low growl, glancing up the little rocky stream towards Ben, who is searching the grass there. I look down at the ground; I cannot let my rage fall upon him. ‘Don't go off on your own this time,' Buckley says. ‘Let me help –'

‘No. You cannot,' I tell the mat of dead grey leaves at my feet, dead grey dust. ‘There is nothing you must help me with.'

‘I can go to the police with what I know,' he says, bending across me to poke the coals with a stick. ‘And I know Miss Greta ain't the only –'

‘Ha!' Contempt snarls through rage and warns him in return: no policeman would believe the word of an old convict labourer against the word of the district surgeon, the treasurer of the Liberal League, a captain in the corps. All that would achieve is our ignominy.

I glance up again, at Ben; he waves as he sees me, stepping down the gentle slope, stepping across the stream. I shrink from his warmth now, from this picture of the future that should be ours, and can't be. What would I say to him if I could? How would I break things off? Tell him that I cannot allow him to be any further corrupted by me, because that is true, and I am devastated, utterly devastated, that I will never know his breath upon my lips again. This pain drives a black rat hole of despair into my chest.

I look back at Buckley and my voice is death as I tell him: ‘It's time to go.'

I return to Gret: ‘Come on, pack up.'

‘Oh, but I just want to fin –'

‘Finish it back at Bellevue – in bed. You are not as well as you think you are.'

Her eyes beg me to calm down; mine beg her to do as I ask. ‘Greta, please don't argue with me.'

‘Oh all right.' She tosses her pencils back into her case, but she snaps the lid shut, exasperated with me. Perhaps I am pulling her too sharply from her denial; perhaps she doesn't want to know what this strange illness is, or perhaps she has guessed; I don't know.

But I must remind her: ‘This morning you were so violently ill, you frightened me into thinking you might not survive this journey back to Bathurst. To lose you would be to lose all meaning to my own life. So you can be as cross with my impatience as you like – all right?'

‘All right,' she sighs heavily but she smiles. ‘I am a bit tired, I'll admit.'

I am. And not least because I need you safely, blamelessly in bed, my sister, while I do all that must be done this afternoon.

Mr Thompson continues to stare at me with his cool complacency, calculating perhaps what gibe he might serve to me next. But whatever it is, he keeps it to himself, which is possibly wise. For I am busily calculating too, beneath all the violence coursing through me, wave upon wave; as Greta stands up, still bent with pencil case and book in hand, I bend with her and whisper: ‘I'll call for Mrs Weston when we get in – have her look at you first, before any doctor. All right? I'll make sure
he
doesn't come near, I promise you.'

Greta nods, clasping her shame to her breast with her pencils. ‘Yes.' And there is something in that look that makes me sure she knows now: she knows something is very wrong inside her, something that grows worse daily. If the shame must be exposed, better that Mrs Weston be the one to discover it. She may be outraged, but that outrage will soon be confused by the sudden demise of Alec Howell. She won't broadcast the transgressions of a dead man around town; she is too decent a woman for that sort of moral gloating; there will be no side to take in grief but ours. And even if she did shun us afterwards, what would it matter then? We will be free of him. We will be free. In a matter of hours.

And I can't wait one second more than I must. The time is now, or this storm in me will pass; I will lose my nerve.

I squeeze Gret's hand with all my addled love and cunning. ‘Don't tell Mrs Weston anything you don't want to, darling. But you must let her examine you, please
–
I need to know you're all right.'

With any luck, Mrs Weston won't find out about any of this at all. She won't ever suspect that Greta's unwellness was anything more than some menstrual anomaly, once I've found and administered the cure myself, and the child is gone from her. But of more pressing concern, I must somehow arrange the timing of things precisely so that Mrs Weston will be with my sister this evening, all evening, should anything happen to me. Should I be –

No, I will not be caught.

I keep my eyes fixed to the road ahead.

Step after step, there is nothing but the road ahead.

Ben

‘
S
uppose that's it then, old matey. I'll walk back to the pub, get the next train out of your life. See you in some other realm sometime,' Cos says to me when we reach the stables.

‘Righteo. Do that then.' I don't care what he does; I don't look away from unsaddling Jack, or bother asking Cos to help with the roan, Rebel. He wouldn't know how, not that I'd want to put the martyr through any further ordeal anyway. I'll do it myself; there's no boy here at Bellevue to do it. No one but Buckley, who's busy with the mare and the vehicle. And Berylda, who's taken Greta directly into the house and is clearly making a point of not speaking to me; couldn't get away fast enough at first sight of the front door. So Cos can go and stuff himself, for all –

‘I reckon it'd be a good idea if yous'd stay with us here for a bit, if you can,' the old man says behind me.

‘Stay? Why?' I ask as I lift the saddle. So that Berylda can demoralise and humiliate me some more? It's not as though I asked her to kiss me, not as though I slipped a note under her door asking for a midnight rendezvous. That's all my doing, is it? Women are evidently not for me, or this one certainly isn't: I should have listened to Cos in the first place, shouldn't I. Oh well, Mama, at least I got a new species to show for the trouble – unless I'm completely wrong about that too, and pink
macranthum
s
are endemic across this whole bloody district and I'm the only one who didn't know about them. Probably. But when I turn to Buckley and see his face, I see a great deal more trouble than that. His eyes nail me with something that looks like dread. I immediately think that Greta is more dangerously ill than she appears. ‘What? You think we should go on to the hospital, after all? Or do you want me to go and get a doctor to come here?'

The man seems torn in his conscience somehow, raising a fist to his head as he wrestles with whatever this is that he does not want to say.

‘What – what is it? Why should we stay?'

‘It's Miss Berylda,' he finally says. ‘She's the one not well, not right in her mind – she intends to …'

‘She intends what?'

‘She intends to harm Mr Howell, her uncle,' he tells me. ‘She got some – she got something from the Chinaman yesterday, something to see him off. You gotta stop her – someone's gotta. Get her off this path. She won't listen to me.'

For a moment I don't understand what he has said.

Cos groans, incredulous. ‘Oh for the love of Delilah, you can't be seri –'

‘You don't say nothing against her.' Buckley cuts him off with a threat as brutal as it is righteous. ‘That bastard Howell deserves it, like no one ever has.'

‘Why? What has he done?' I ask him; I must know. Berylda intends to what? Howell does what?

‘Oh Jesus.' The old man looks up at the rafters, still struggling with this betrayal.

‘You must tell me.'

And now he does: ‘He hurts Miss Greta,' Buckley tells me. ‘He hurts her in a way that's not right, against her will, and she has got the worst for it. You know what I mean.'

Strike me blind, I think I do. And everything makes sense now. Sickening sense.

‘She ain't the only one either,' Buckley says. ‘A while back, maybe six or seven years, some girls went missing over a time – three, maybe four. Then another one, couple of weeks back. Only put it together last night, from something the Chinaman said, and talking to Wheeler and some other fellers at Kitty's about what they'd heard. All of 'em Chinese girls. One from Tambaroora, two around Mudgee way. Maybe one at Gulgong as well. No one ever seen 'em again, except the little one from Tambaroora – they found her just before Christmas, off the Mudgee Road, like she'd been chucked off the back of a cart. Can't prove it, but I reckon Howell had his way and done 'em all in, one way or another.'

That chills: because I have no trouble believing him capable of such things. Greta's haunting pictures, the bruise on Berylda's hand, her sadness, her frown, her charging disquiet: the slug trail that is Alec Howell.

‘What do you want me to do?' Cos says beside me and I almost tell him to go and fill himself a sock full of shit before he ever opens his mouth again, but when I turn to him his face is full of care. He shrugs and says: ‘I was wrong. Mea culpa.
Sue me later. But now, tell me what I can do.'

One day I will no doubt consider this a defining moment in our shared history, but now I can only tell him, ‘I don't know,' as I run past him and up to the house, where I bang on the back door, until the housekeeper's face appears at the kitchen window: ‘Who is it?'

‘Ben Wilberry – I must see Miss Jones – Berylda Jones. Let me in, please.'

The housekeeper looks at me warily, as though I'm mad. ‘Why do you want to come in, sir?'

The staghound, Prince, bounds up to me along the verandah, but he doesn't launch himself at me; he starts barking beside me, his paws planted on the boards facing the housekeeper, as though he is insisting she let me in, too. I tell her: ‘Miss Berylda is expecting me.'

‘I doubt that very much, sir.' The housekeeper is doubtful to the point of being rude; a bit above herself. ‘She's with her sister. Miss Berylda just now came to the kitchen for a plate of my passionfruit custard puffs and then she went back to Miss Greta and she said they were not to be disturbed for any reason.' The housekeeper glares sourly at the dog: ‘Will you be quiet.'

No. Prince continues to bark, and I agree: bugger your passionfruit bloody custard puffs. I ask her: ‘Is Mr Howell at home, then?'

‘No, sir. He is at the hospital, of course. He is a very busy man.'

Good, I suppose. He's not here, at least. I can talk to Berylda freely, plead with her to talk to me, and I plead with the housekeeper now: ‘Please, madam. Please, let me in.'

‘Oh.' She shakes her head, clicks her tongue, nettled but resigned that she will not be getting rid of me. ‘Wait there.'

Like a dog at the back door. I wait with Prince. A small forever. What is taking her so long? I attempt to collect my thoughts as I stand here; assemble and reassemble the elements of all that Buckley has just told me. Berylda intends to poison Alec Howell? Her sister is molested and made pregnant by him? Chinese girls have gone missing from the old goldfields over the years, presumed murdered, and Buckley suspects Howell? The master of this chocolate box dollhouse. Howell. What else has he done is the question that comes next for me, and it is me that wants to kill him. I will kill him with my bare hands. I look at my hands now. These hands. Shaking with fury.

‘Strange.' The housekeeper returns to the window, sour mouth turned further down in wonder. ‘Miss Berylda isn't here. Miss Greta says that she's gone into town to fetch Mrs Weston, but I sent Lucy to do that not ten minutes ago, first thing Miss Berylda asked of me when she got in, though Miss Greta might be mistaken, mind – she's a bit tired, she's not well, you know.'

I don't need to wonder a second longer. I know where Berylda has gone. But how?

‘Horse!' I call up to the stables as I run back, and bless Cos for his uselessness for once as he's not halfway to unfastening the saddle straps on the roan when I get there. In fact, he's now rethreading the strap he just undid and asking me: ‘Do you want me to come with you?'

‘No.' I don't know what I'm going to do but I'll be doing it alone. I take the reins of the roan from him.

And he grabs my wrist as I do. ‘I'll be here,' he tells me, old matey returned at the eleventh. ‘Whatever happens, I'll be waiting for you here. Doesn't matter what you do – do whatever you must. I'll have your back however I can.'

I don't know what he might do for me at my back or otherwise, but I take some heart at the thought as I mount and turn the horse towards the stable doors, to find Buckley searching the landscape for some sign of her.

‘I'd guess she'll have gone as the crow flies,' the old man supposes, ‘up through the scrub, round the back of Glynarthen, the property next door. Two mile that way.' He nods in the direction of the town.

And I look across the bald expanse of this property here with him: nothing but tussocky wire grass and a few wind-beaten wattles all the way to that distant stand of candlebark. She must have flown. And so shall I. I've got to head her off – stop her. She can't go through with this, no matter what Howell might deserve. It can't happen at her hand. I can't let it.