The Thorn Birds (25 page)

Thirteen million pounds. The chance to get out of Gillanbone and perpetual obscurity, the chance to take his place within the hierarchy of Church administration, the assured goodwill of his peers and superiors. And all while he was still young enough to make up the ground he had lost. Mary Carson had made Gillanbone the epicenter of the Archbishop Papal Legate’s map with a vengeance; the tremors would reach as far as the Vatican. Rich though the Church was, thirteen million pounds was thirteen million pounds. Not to be sneezed at, even by the Church. And his was the sole hand which brought it into the fold, his hand acknowledged in blue ink in Mary Carson’s own writing. He knew Paddy would never contest the will; so had Mary Carson, God rot her. Oh, certainly Paddy would be furious, would never want to see him again or speak to him again, but his chagrin wouldn’t extend to litigation.

Was there a decision? Didn’t he already know, hadn’t he known the moment he read her will what he was going to do? The tears had dried. With his usual grace Father Ralph got to his feet, made sure his shirt was tucked in all the way round, and went to the door. He must get to Gilly, pick up a soutane and vestments. But first he wanted to see Mary Carson again.

In spite of the open windows the stench had become a reeking fug; no hint of a breeze stirred the limp curtains. With steady tread he crossed to the bed and stood looking down. The fly eggs were beginning to hatch maggots in all the wet parts of her face, ballooning gases puffed up her fat arms and hands to greenish blobs, her skin was breaking down. Oh, God. You disgusting old spider. You’ve won, but what a victory. The triumph of one disintegrating caricature of humanity over another. You can’t defeat my Meggie, nor can you take from her what was never yours. I might burn in Hell alongside you, but I know the Hell they’ve got planned for you: to see my indifference to you persist as we rot away together through all eternity….

Paddy was waiting for him in the hall downstairs, looking sick and bewildered.

“Oh, Father!” he said, coming forward. “Isn’t this awful? What a shock! I never expected her to go out like this; she was so well last night! Dear God, what am I going to do?”

“Have you seen her?”

“Heaven help me, yes!”

“Then you know what has to be done. I’ve never seen a corpse decompose so fast. If you don’t get her decently into some sort of container within the next few hours you’ll have to pour her into a petrol drum. She’ll have to be buried first thing in the morning. Don’t waste time beautifying her coffin; cover it with roses from the garden or something. But get a move on, man! I’m going into Gilly for vestments.”

“Get back as soon as you can, Father!” Paddy pleaded.

But Father Ralph was rather longer than a simple visit to the presbytery demanded. Before he turned his car in that direction he drove down one of Gillanbone’s more prosperous side streets, to a fairly pretentious dwelling surrounded by a well-laid-out garden.

Harry Gough was just sitting down to his dinner, but came into the parlor when the maid told him who had called.

“Father, will you eat with us? Corned beef and cabbage with boiled potatoes and parsley sauce, and for once the beef’s not too salty.”

“No, Harry, I can’t stay. I just came to tell you Mary Carson died this morning.”

“Holy Jesus! I was there last night! She seemed so well, Father!”

“I know. She was perfectly well when I took her up the stairs about three, but she must have died almost the moment she retired. Mrs. Smith found her at six this evening. By then she’d been dead so long she was hideous; the room was shut up like an incubator all through the heat of the day. Dear Lord, I pray to forget the sight of her! Unspeakable, Harry, awful.”

“She’ll be buried tomorrow?”

“She’ll have to be.”

“What time is it? Ten? We must eat dinner as late as the Spaniards in this heat, but no need to worry, it’s too late to start phoning people. Would you like me to do that for you, Father?”

“Thank you, it would be a great kindness. I only came into Gilly for vestments. I never expected to be saying a Requiem when I started out. I must get back to Drogheda as quickly as I can; they need me. The Mass will be at nine in the morning.”

“Tell Paddy I’ll bring her will with me, so I can deal with it straight after the funeral. You’re a beneficiary, too, Father, so I’d appreciate your staying for the reading.”

“I’m afraid we have a slight problem, Harry. Mary made another will, you see. Last night after she left the party she gave me a sealed envelope, and made me promise I’d open it the moment I saw her dead body for myself. When I did so I found it contained a fresh will.”

“Mary made a new will? Without
me
?”

“It would appear so. I think it was something she had been mulling for a long time, but as to why she chose to be so secretive about it, I don’t know.”

“Do you have it with you now, Father?”

“Yes.” The priest reached inside his shirt and handed over the sheets of paper, folded small.

The lawyer had no compunction about reading them on the spot. When he finished he looked up, and there was a great deal in his eyes Father Ralph would rather not have seen. Admiration, anger, a certain contempt.

“Well, Father, congratulations! You got the lot after all.” He could say it, not being a Catholic.

“Believe me, Harry, it came as a bigger surprise to me than it does to you.”

“This is the only copy?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“And she gave it to you as late as last night?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you destroy it, make sure poor old Paddy got what’s rightfully his? The Church has no right to Mary Carson’s possessions at all.”

The priest’s fine eyes were bland. “Ah, but that wouldn’t have been fitting, Harry, would it now? It was Mary’s property, to dispose of in any manner she wished.”

“I shall advise Paddy to contest.”

“I think you should.”

And on that note they parted. By the time everyone arrived in the morning to see Mary Carson buried, the whole of Gillanbone and all points of the compass around it would know where the money was going. The die was cast, there could be no turning back.

It was four in the morning when Father Ralph got through the last gate and into the Home Paddock, for he hadn’t hurried on the return drive. All through it he had willed his mind to blankness; he wouldn’t let himself think. Not of Paddy or of Fee, or Meggie or that stinking gross thing they had (he devoutly hoped) poured into her coffin. Instead he opened his eyes and his mind to the night, to the ghostly silver of dead trees standing lonely in the gleaming grass, to the heart-of-darkness shadows cast by stands of timber, to the full moon riding the heavens like an airy bubble. Once he stopped the car and got out, walked to a wire fence and leaned on its tautness while he breathed in the gums and the bewitching aroma of wildflowers. The land was so beautiful, so pure, so indifferent to the fates of the creatures who presumed to rule it. They might put their hands to it, but in the long run it ruled them. Until they could direct the weather and summon up the rain, it had the upper hand.

He parked his car some distance behind the house and walked slowly toward it. Every window was full of light; faintly from the housekeeper’s quarters he could hear the sound of Mrs. Smith leading the two Irish maids in a rosary. A shadow moved under the blackness of the wistaria vine; he stopped short, his hackles rising. She had got to him in more ways than one, the old spider. But it was only Meggie, patiently waiting for him to come back. She was in jodhpurs and boots, very much alive.

“You gave me a fright,” he said abruptly.

“I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to. But I didn’t want to be inside there with Daddy and the boys, and Mum is still down at our house with the babies. I suppose I ought to be praying with Mrs. Smith and Minnie and Cat, but I don’t feel like praying for her. That’s a sin, isn’t it?”

He was in no mood to pander to the memory of Mary Carson. “I don’t think it’s a sin, Meggie, whereas hypocrisy is. I don’t feel like praying for her, either. She wasn’t…a very good person.” His smile flashed. “So if you’ve sinned in saying it, so have I, and more seriously at that. I’m supposed to love everyone, a burden which isn’t laid upon you.”

“Are you all right, Father?”

“Yes, I’m all right.” He looked up at the house, and sighed. “I don’t want to be in there, that’s all. I don’t want to be where she is until it’s light and the demons of the darkness are driven away. If I saddle the horses, will you ride with me until dawn?”

Her hand touched his black sleeve, fell. “I don’t want to go inside, either.”

“Wait a minute while I put my soutane in the car.”

“I’ll go on to the stables.”

For the first time she was trying to meet him on his ground, adult ground; he could sense the difference in her as surely as he could smell the roses in Mary Carson’s beautiful gardens. Roses. Ashes of roses. Roses, roses, everywhere. Petals in the grass. Roses of summer, red and white and yellow. Perfume of roses, heavy and sweet in the night. Pink roses, bleached by the moon to ashes. Ashes of roses, ashes of roses. My Meggie, I have forsaken you. But can’t you see, you’ve become a threat? Therefore have I crushed you beneath the heel of my ambition; you have no more substance to me than a bruised rose in the grass. The smell of roses. The smell of Mary Carson. Roses and ashes, ashes of roses.

“Ashes of roses,” he said, mounting. “Let’s get as far from the smell of roses as the moon. Tomorrow the house will be full of them.”

He kicked the chestnut mare and cantered ahead of Meggie down the track to the creek, longing to weep; for until he smelled the future adornments of Mary Carson’s coffin it had not actually impinged on his thinking brain as an imminent fact. He would be going away very soon. Too many thoughts, too many emotions, all of them ungovernable. They wouldn’t leave him in Gilly a day after learning the terms of that incredible will; they would recall him to Sydney immediately.
Immediately
! He fled from his pain, never having known such pain, but it kept pace with him effortlessly. It wasn’t something in a vague sometime; it was going to happen immediately. And he could almost see Paddy’s face, the revulsion, the turning away. After this he wouldn’t be welcome on Drogheda, and he would never see Meggie again.

The disciplining began then, hammered by hoofs and in a sensation of flying. It was better so, better so, better so. Galloping on and on. Yes, it would surely hurt less then, tucked safely in some cell in a bishop’s palace, hurt less and less, until finally even the ache faded from consciousness. It had to be better so. Better than staying in Gilly to watch her change into a creature he didn’t want, then have to marry her one day to some unknown man. Out of sight, out of mind.

Then what was he doing with her now, riding through the stand of box and coolibah on the far side of the creek? He couldn’t seem to think why, he only felt the pain. Not the pain of betrayal; there wasn’t room for that. Only for the pain of leaving her.

“Father, Father! I can’t keep up with you! Slow down, Father, please!”

It was the call to duty, and reality. Like a man in slow motion he wrenched the mare around, sat it until it had danced out its excitement. And waited for Meggie to catch him up. That was the trouble. Meggie was catching him up.

Close by them was the roar of the borehead, a great steaming pool smelling of sulphur, with a pipe like a ship’s ventilator jetting boiling water into its depths. All around the perimeter of the little elevated lake like spokes from a wheel’s hub, the bore drains dribbled off across the plain whiskered in incongruously emerald grass. The banks of the pool were slimy grey mud, and the freshwater crayfish called yabbies lived in the mud.

Father Ralph started to laugh. “It smells like Hell, Meggie, doesn’t it? Sulphur and brimstone, right here on her own property, in her own backyard. She ought to recognize the smell when she gets there decked in roses, oughtn’t she? Oh, Meggie…”

The horses were trained to stand on a dangling rein; there were no fences nearby, and no trees closer than half a mile away. But there was a log on the side of the pool farthest from the borehead itself, where the water was cooler. It was the seat provided for winter bathers as they dried their feet and legs.

Father Ralph sat down and Meggie sat some way from him, turned side on to watch him.

“What’s the matter, Father?”

It sounded peculiar, his oft-asked question from her lips, to him. He smiled. “I’ve sold you, my Meggie, sold you for thirteen million pieces of silver.”

“
Sold
me?”

“A figure of speech. It doesn’t matter. Come, sit closer to me. There may not be the chance for us to talk together again.”

“While we’re in mourning for Auntie, you mean?” She wriggled up the log and sat next to him. “What difference will being in mourning make?”

“I don’t mean that, Meggie.”

“You mean because I’m growing up, and people might gossip about us?”

“Not exactly. I mean I’m going away.”

There it was: the meeting of trouble head on, the acceptance of another load. No outcry, no weeping, no storm of protest. Just a tiny shrinking, as if the burden sat askew, would not distribute itself so she could bear it properly. And a caught breath, not quite like a sigh.

“When?”

“A matter of days.”

“Oh, Father! It will be harder than Frank.”

“And for me harder than anything in my life. I have no consolation. You at least have your family.”

“You have your God.”

“Well said, Meggie! You
are
growing up!”

But, tenacious female, her mind had returned to the question she had ridden three miles without a chance to ask. He was leaving, it would be so hard to do without him, but the question had its own importance.

“Father, in the stables you said ‘ashes of roses.’ Did you mean the color of my dress?”

“In a way, perhaps. But I think really I meant something else.”

“What?”

“Nothing you’d understand, my Meggie. The dying of an idea which had no right to be born, let alone nurtured.”