Read The Road to Gundagai Online
Authors: Jackie French
Sheba lifted her trunk again. Blue began to make her way down to her, careful in her new heeled shoes.
‘Hey, Miss Laurence!’
She turned. It was the aunts’ chauffeur.
‘Wait up,’ he called. ‘Got a message for you.’
‘I don’t want to hear anything my aunts have to say at the moment. I am sure Mrs Mutton can give you a cup of tea.’ She turned away.
‘Ain’t from the old women. It’s from your uncle.’
Uncle Herbert! Blue stopped and waited for the chauffeur to come up to her. His face looked like it had been roughly cut out of a log of wood, the nose sharp, the mouth thin. Poor ineffectual Uncle Herbert. He had failed to protect her, but he hadn’t known what she’d faced either. It wasn’t his fault her aunts had turned out to be poisoners.
I should have sent him a letter, she thought guiltily, reassuring him that I was all right. But why hadn’t Uncle Herbert come here himself? If my niece had been almost poisoned, I’d have gone to her in person.
‘Did Uncle Herbert send you to keep an eye on my aunts?’
‘You got it. I do lots of little jobs for your uncle. Here, this is from him.’ He pulled out a small box of chocolate creams from the pocket of his uniform.
‘Thank you.’ She held the box on top of the tin of squished flies, wishing she had a pocket or handbag to put them in.
‘Ain’t you going to try one?’
She shook her head. She was full of sandwiches and scones. ‘How did my aunts find me here?’
The chauffeur leaned back against the paddock gate. ‘Followed your Mr Cummins in Melbourne, didn’t I? He got a ticket to Gibber’s Creek. Easy enough to find you once we got there. Your aunts just had to ask at the tearoom and they heard all about you.’
Blue took a step back, clutching the squished-fly tin. ‘I don’t understand. You
told
my aunts I was at Gibber’s Creek?’
He looked at her assessingly. ‘You really can’t walk properly, can you? Sure you don’t want one of them nice choccies?’
‘I want you to answer my question.’
She could smell his breath, like a dog kennel. ‘Your uncle told them.’
‘Uncle Herbert!’
‘Then I offered meself cheap as a chauffeur. Your uncle guessed they’d head up here when they found out where you were. Sharp man, your uncle. Been working for him for years. Any tenant what won’t pay up, he gets me to persuade them. Or get them out. He knows he can rely on me.’
She had to get away from here. Even as she realised it, Sheba stamped her feet in the adjoining paddock.
The chauffeur noticed her for the first time. ‘Blimey, what’s that?’
‘An elephant,’ said Blue shortly. What did he think it was? An oversized mouse? ‘Excuse me. I think I’m needed back at the house.’
The chauffeur grinned, showing white teeth all totally even, too obviously false. His nose looked like it had been broken and badly set. He clenched and unclenched his fists. She bet whoever had broken his nose had come off worse. ‘Don’t think your uncle would want you to do that. Not if you ain’t going to eat your nice choccies.’ The man was enjoying this, drawing it out.
She began to brush past him. ‘I’m sorry. I need to go.’
He stayed where he was, against the gate. ‘You don’t need to go nowhere, darlin’. Not ever again.’
She stopped, temporarily frozen. Where could she run? The gate was blocked. The barbed wire would catch her if she tried to get through the fence. The chauffeur grabbed her arm. The squished flies and the chocolates rolled on the ground.
She had to keep him talking. The longer they talked, the more chance that someone would come this way and see them.
‘Uncle Herbert burned our house?’
He laughed. ‘Not him. Left the details to me, he did. Always does. The fire coulda been an accident. Nearly worked too. Then those old biddies spirited you away. But it’s them who’ll get the blame if you drop dead of poison now. But I reckon I know another way too.’ The man looked down at the swollen river, at the logs fighting for position among the froth. ‘I reckon what you need is a dip in the river. Easy enough for two old ladies to push a crippled girl in. Might not even find the body in a river like that. And if they do, well, who’s to say when you fell? An’ your aunts was here all the time.’
She wrenched her arm away from him as he added, ‘All I need to do is … this …’ He grabbed her around both shoulders and lifted her into the air. She tried to scream. His hand shoved a handkerchief expertly into her mouth. She kicked, striking nothing. He began to stride down the paddock towards the river, his arms like sinewy steel around her.
She had to think! And suddenly it was as though Madame spoke to her, telling her exactly what to do now. ‘The man will see what he expects to see.’
He saw a cripple, a fragile Bluebell. Blue let her body sag in what she hoped was a convincingly female-type swoon. She felt the chauffeur’s body relax slightly in response. She let him take three more strides towards the river and then she struck, forcing her arms outwards, using the upper-body strength honed by more than a year of mermaid handstands.
He lost his hold for just a second. Her body hit the ground. She rolled as she hit the earth, a trick she’d learned from the circus people, spreading out the impact to lessen the jolt.
He reached down for her. She struck out with her strong hands again, at his neck, a side chop. The man fell, gasping. For a moment she thought of Ebenezer and Ephraim and their frying pan, Mrs Olsen smashing her tormenter’s hand. She wanted to hurt, kill, destroy, just as Euphrasia and Eulalie had. And then the rage passed and she knew simply that she had to get away.
She rolled, using the momentum of the slope of the paddock, and scrambled to her feet as he raised himself, trying to catch enough breath to come after her.
If she could get to the gate to Sheba’s paddock, she could head up to the men’s quarters from there. She just had to get back up the hill and someone would see her, hear her. He would not dare touch her if anyone could see. Vaguely she was aware that someone was screaming. Was it her? She plucked the handkerchief out of her mouth as she forced her body onwards.
No. It was Sheba, the trumpet cry echoing over the river.
‘Help!’ she yelled. The sound was hidden in the elephant’s roar.
She forced her legs to move. The scar hobbled her. And then she felt it rip.
The universe stopped. In the next instant it began again, but grey with pain. Sweat ran down her face, like the blood warm down her legs. But she couldn’t stop. She dared not stop. For the first time in nearly two years her legs could stretch, could run. She pushed her body, again and again …
The man was gaining on her. His fingers reached out. She flinched away, sidestepping. Her arms, her wonderfully strong arms, struck him again, so he cried out.
The gate was closer. His footsteps thudded behind.
Her shoes sloshed with water. No, not water. Blood. Her blood. Red and dripping into the tussocks.
She shouldn’t have looked. Nausea swept through her. The pain was so great it was no longer pain, just cold, the coldest she had ever known.
‘Help!’ Had she even said the word? There was no air left to speak with and none to cry. The gate to Sheba’s paddock was a mile away, shadowed with pain. She took another step and another, heard his breath behind her, felt the hands grab her arm. Once again she twisted, but the strength was gone now. The blood had swept away her strength.
A noise. Crashing, smashing. Thunder, she thought. A storm. A flood. I must be in the river …
She blinked away the haze of pain and fear.
Not a flood. An elephant, charging through Miss Matilda’s fence as though barbed wire didn’t rip into elephant flesh too, stomping, trampling, leaving the wrecked barrier behind …
The hands wrenched her down, onto the ground. She forced herself up, to look at her attacker. The cold hit her again, the blood-red cold. But a hard wet rage was all over her too, so strong a jet that it forced the man away …
Water. A jet from Sheba’s trunk.
The elephant screamed a challenge. Blue used the last of her strength to roll under Sheba’s legs; she held onto one leg as though it were a safe grey pillar, saw the wrinkled bulk above her, heard the elephant’s bellow, as Sheba kept her friend safe.
And that is what they found, the funeral crowd streaming down towards the river: the blood-stained girl, the elephant, and the bruised man, scrambling away.
The world was pain. The world was blood. The world was her legs, a fire that flamed up when she moved.
The world was darkness, with a small lamp turned right down, and Joseph, sitting by her bed, with Nurse Blamey on the other side.
‘Blue? Blue, can you hear me?’ It was a man’s voice, not the nurse’s.
She nodded, too weak to lift her head. Nurse Blamey lifted it for her, gave her something to sip, so bitter she nearly choked, and then water, sweet and cold. Who would have thought that Nurse Blamey’s hands were so gentle? She shut her eyes for a moment, till the world stopped spinning, then opened them, to see Joseph’s face above her.
‘The man … from Uncle Herbert …’
‘You’re safe,’ he said. ‘He’s in the Gibber’s Creek lock-up. He’s talking like a parrot to save himself. And they have your uncle in charge, down in Melbourne.’
‘My aunts …’ she whispered.
‘It was your uncle and his henchman, not them,’ he told her softly. ‘They wouldn’t inherit anything on your death. The factories were your grandfather’s. They would all have gone to his brother, your great-uncle.’
‘Did the aunts know?’
‘They suspected,’ said Joseph. His eyes were red. He had been crying, thought Blue. Somehow that hurt more than her legs — that he had cried for her. ‘He’d lost a lot in the stock-market crash. Must have seemed a miracle when he had a fortune almost in his lap. Your aunts distrusted him from the start, as soon as the police told them that it looked like the fire at your home had been deliberately lit. That’s why they tried to keep you out of sight, away from him. But they didn’t suspect arsenic till a few weeks before your birthday.’
‘Must have been in the chocolate creams,’ she whispered. ‘Mah ate the hard centres.’
‘I found the ones you’d dropped today. The police have them now. There’s a mark in the base where the poison must have been injected.’
A heavy dose, to kill her fast, she thought. Uncle Herbert wouldn’t risk a slow poisoning again. Why bother, when the aunts were here to blame?
Nurse Blamey held up a warning finger.
‘I’m not supposed to tire you. You just need to know you’re safe now. One of us will be with you. Nothing will ever hurt you again. Nothing.’ It was a vow.
‘My legs?’
Joseph’s gaze met hers. ‘Dr Gregson stitched you up. Surgery would have been easier, darling. But you did a good enough job yourself. No real damage, he says, as long as we can stop them getting infected.’
‘Which we will,’ said Nurse Blamey, as though no germ had ever dared get into any sick room she commanded.
‘Would you mind leaving the room for a moment, nurse?’
‘And why would I do such a thing?’ Nurse Blamey looked at him with a long-perfected gaze designed to take doctors down a peg.
‘Because I want to kiss her,’ said Joseph. And did.
It was morning, even though the sun outside said it was afternoon, because there was breakfast, a boiled egg and toast that she didn’t really want but was eating because Nurse Blamey told her to.
She had been bathed, a long painful business in warm salty water, her dressings changed by those strangely gentle hands, with Mah holding onto her while Blue pressed her lips together and tried not to scream. She wouldn’t let Joseph be there for that. Medical student or not, she didn’t want him to think of blood and pain when he looked at her.
She had slept after that, or perhaps the bitter medicine had made her sleep, just as it eased the pain. Now the world seemed slightly fuzzy and a little bright, which she suspected was a result of the medicine too, but didn’t really care.
‘May I come in now?’ Joseph looked pale, his eyes so shadowed she forced herself to smile at him. In fact the smile was easy; it was stopping it that was hard. Whatever the medicine is, it’s strong, she thought.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He sat and took her hand. Nurse Timmins was on duty now, more biddable than Nurse Blamey. She smiled and left them, even before he asked.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Very odd.’
‘That’s the morphia. They’ll cut back the dose a bit tomorrow.’
She nodded. Her body seemed to be floating somewhere else.
‘Are you up to visitors?’
‘Miss Matilda’s already been in. And Mr Thompson.’ He’d left a bunch of roses in a vase that Nurse Blamey had promptly relegated to outside the door. ‘Who else?’
‘My sister for one. Flinty. She and Sandy came down last night. She says she wants to meet the girl I’m going to marry.’
Blue found the strength to say, ‘But you haven’t asked me.’
He smiled at that. ‘I know. I thought we might wait for a better time. A better place too. There’s a valley I’d like to take you to one day, about twenty minutes’ drive from here. What do you say?’
‘To seeing a valley?’
‘To my asking you to marry me there.’
‘You have my permission to ask me anything you like, Mr McAlpine. And I’ll give you my answer then.’ She could hear a hint of Madame’s tones in her voice. You taught me well, old woman, she thought, and almost heard a chuckle.
‘I think you are going to get well fast,’ said Joseph. He held her hand, a little too hard, then seemed to force himself to relax and even smile. ‘But there are other people who want to see you. Your aunts.’
She had to see them sometime. Now would be best, when nothing was quite real, when her mind and body were floating somewhere else as well as lying here.
‘I’ll be here with you,’ he added.
‘I’m glad.’
They came in quietly, their perfectly polished black shoes soft on the carpet. They always had walked quietly. They sat, gloved hands in their laps, their erect bodies not touching the back of their hardwood chairs, leaving the armchair for those who indulged in such softness.