Wildflower Hill (25 page)

“Was I right about the coffee?” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me the dancing kids were disabled?”

He glanced at me, then back at the road. “You’re angry.”

“I feel like you made a fool out of me.”

“Look, Emma. I know you’re injured. I didn’t want to cause you any pain. I thought if I told you everything about the Hollyhocks, then you might feel pressured to come and see them. It’s a long drive to Hobart, especially for somebody with a sore knee who isn’t used to the distances.” He offered me a smile. “Don’t feel bad that you said no.”

But I did feel bad. I felt like the worst kind of selfish diva. It would cost me only a mildly aching knee to go to Hobart, to meet these kids and talk to them about dancing. “I’ll come,” I said.

He was shaking his head already. “No, absolutely not. You said you couldn’t travel.”

“I’ll be fine if I can take a few rest stops on the way.”

“I won’t hear of it, Emma. I’d feel like I imposed too much
on you. You’re here only a short time, and Monica’s off sick for a few days. You have so much to do.”

“Really, I’ll come. When do they rehearse again?”

He fought with himself silently, then said, “Every Saturday morning from ten until twelve. That’s a flyer for their concert coming up in a couple of months.”

“What time will you pick me up?”

He was reluctant, I could tell, but he also dearly wanted me to come. “If you insist . . .”

“I do insist.”

“Around eight, then. That’ll give us plenty of time for a short rest along the way and to get a coffee when we get to Hobart.”

“Great. Fine.”

He waited a few moments. Then said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said quickly, wondering what I’d gotten myself into. “I’m sure.”

I had no CDs to play, so I relied on the radio. I found a classical music station that played jazz in the evenings, poured myself a glass of wine, and sat down with a box to be sorted. This one was old, the cardboard falling apart ungracefully. Inside were old—very old—ledgers of the business here at Wildflower Hill. Thin exercise books with yellowed pages all covered in neat ink. I carefully tried to follow the transactions but wasn’t at all sure what they meant. I recognized Beattie’s handwriting in the columns, but there was also other
handwriting. Not as measured as Beattie’s. A man’s handwriting, I imagined. But what man?

I shook myself. Imagination getting away with me again. Beattie hadn’t run the whole farm alone; she would have had employees.

I pulled book after book out of the cupboard, thinking about the woman from the historical society. Would she want all these? Perhaps she could make sense of them. It seemed a shame to throw them away. But I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to involve myself with a community organization. I didn’t want visitors.

Then I found a folder held together with red ribbon. In it were dozens of contracts for the buying and selling of items. Furniture. Sheep. Even a contract for a piece of land that Beattie had sold off in 1934. And at the bottom of the pile was the contract for Wildflower Hill itself.

November 1934; the sale to Beatrice Alison Blaxland from Raphael William James Blanchard. For the sum of zero pounds.

I looked at this figure for a long time. Somebody named Raphael William James Blanchard had
given
Grandma Wildflower Hill. Only that couldn’t be right, because Mum had told me differently. Wildflower Hill was a run-down business, losing money badly during the Depression. Beattie had inherited a small sum from an old uncle. The rest of the money she’d borrowed from the bank and had to struggle terribly to pay it off in those first years.

I itched to call Mum. Ask her if she knew who Raphael
Blanchard was. But I thought about the photograph and knew I had to be careful. Mum was drawn to drama like ants are drawn to honey. Besides, there were other ways of finding out who he was.

By the time I’d waited for it to be breakfast time in London and a decent hour to call, I’d convinced myself that the man with my grandmother in the photograph was this Raphael Blanchard, that they had a secret love child, that he’d given Beattie the property to keep her quiet . . . Of course, none of this fit with what I knew about Grandma, but the more wine I drank, the more plausible it became.

I phoned Adelaide. “Did I wake you?” I said.

“No.” She yawned. “Um . . . yes. I don’t have to lie to you anymore if you’re annoying, given that you’re not my boss, right?”

“Sorry,” I replied. “I need help. I’m looking for information about somebody named Raphael Blanchard. I have no Internet connection here. Could you Google him for me?”

“Is he a dancer?” She yawned again.

“No. Why are you so tired?”

“The Flying Fascist had a party last night.”

“And he invited you?”

“I handed out the canapés. Wait a sec, just sitting down at my computer now. What’s the name?”

I spelled it for her. I heard keys tapping.

“All right. Which one?”

“Which one?”

“Raphael Blanchard the first, the second, or the third? Minor nobility.”

Nobility? “In England?”

“Yes.”

“The one who might have been in Australia in the thirties.”

More tapping, more yawning. “That’s the first. He lived in Australia from 1930 to 1934, in Tasmania, apparently. Am I looking up local history for you from London? Can you appreciate the irony?”

“Is there a picture of him?”

“Sure is. It’s small . . . No, wait. Here’s a bigger one.”

I walked to the hall table and picked up the photograph of my grandmother with the strange man. “Describe him. Is he stocky, square-jawed?”

“Not at all. Bit of a pudding with wavy dark hair and girlie eyes.”

I looked at the man in the photograph. There was no way he could be described as a pudding with wavy hair and girlie eyes. Still, I had difficulty letting go of the idea.

“Want me to fax this to you?”

“I don’t have a fax,” I said.

“Mail it, then?”

That would take too long. “I know. Could you look up the local high school’s fax number and send it there? Lewinford High School. Mark it to the attention of Patrick Taylor and say it’s for me.” I heard myself and immediately felt guilty. “Sorry, Adelaide. I know I’m not your boss anymore, but—”

“It’s fine, Em. I’ll send it later today. You should get yourself set up with e-mail, though.”

“I won’t be staying that long,” I said. “I’ll be gone soon.” Boy, was I tired of hearing myself say that.

*  *  *

Monica, recovered from her bug, returned to work on Thursday with the fax from her brother.

“So who is he?” she asked as she handed over the folded picture.

I unfolded it carefully. Disappointment. “Not who I thought it might be,” I said. “Another mystery. This man apparently gave my gran the farm in 1934, but I don’t know why.”

“You should get on to Penelope Sykes.”

“Yes, the florist told me that.” But I was reluctant to go down that path, making new acquaintances, trying myself tighter to the town. Perhaps I’d find everything I needed to know right here in the house.

On Friday morning I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating toast and drinking coffee, when there was a knock at the door. Monica had her own key, so I knew it wasn’t her. I rose reluctantly—I liked neither being interrupted while eating nor unexpected guests—and went to answer it. A small woman with tightly curled black hair stood there. She might have been in her fifties, but any gray was assiduously dyed out.

“Can I help you?” I asked, thinking of my coffee cooling on the table.

She held out a forthright hand to greet me. “I’m Penelope Sykes. I hear you’ve been asking about me.”

“That’s not strictly true; people have been telling me about you,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I was on my way past. I’m driving up to my sister’s in Launceston for the weekend. Is now a good time to chat?”

“Come in,” I said reluctantly. “I’m just having breakfast.”

Penelope studied each detail of the house avidly as we walked through to the kitchen.

“Have you never been to Wildflower Hill before?” I asked, wondering if it would be rude to drink my coffee without offering her one, knowing it would be.

“No, it’s been locked up for decades. A lot of history in here.”

“Coffee?”

She shook her head, and I warmed to her. I sat and resumed my breakfast. “There is a lot of history here. I have some books you can take, old records for the farm.”

Her eyes widened. “I’d love that.”

I shrugged. “They were going to the dump otherwise.”

“Don’t throw away anything like that. I’ll take it. One day I’m going to write a book about Tasmania during the Depression.” She sat opposite me. “My mother knew your gran.”

“She did?”

“Not well. But she used to come and play up at Wildflower Hill some days in the school holidays. They lived on the neighboring farm for two years. Mum used to tell me there was a little girl who came every school holiday, and they used to play together all day. I can’t remember her name, though.”

“Would your mother remember?”

“She died four years ago.”

“I’m sorry. Do you know anything else about the little girl?
You see, I’ve stirred up a bit of a mystery.” I told her about the photograph, and she asked me to fetch it, which I did.

“This was taken in about 1929 or 1930,” she said. “I can tell from the clothes but also the street scene. It’s Hobart. There were street photographers who would take photos of passersby, then sell them at the end of the week very cheaply. But this shop here . . .” She jabbed her finger at a shop sign I hadn’t even noticed. “MacWilliam farming supplies. They collapsed in 1931, during the Depression.”

“So this child . . . ?”

“She’s about a year old here, which would make her the same age as my mother. I wonder if it’s the same girl she played with. She had red hair. They’d run about like savages, Mum said, completely unsupervised.”

“Do you think she was Beattie’s daughter?”

Penelope shook her head. “No. Mum said a black car would arrive at the end of the holidays and come for her. A man and a woman. Mum always assumed they were her parents.”

I felt let down, though I wasn’t sure why. “Oh. I see.”

“I guess that Beattie was an auntie of some sort.”

“Beattie didn’t have any siblings.”

“Then they must have been close family friends . . . Have you finished your breakfast? I’d love to see those books.”

I drained the last of my coffee, and took her to the sitting room, and gratefully off-loaded onto her the books that were piled up on the piano. She gazed longingly at some of the letters, but they were too private and too much part of our
family to give away. She promised to go through some of her materials at home and see if Beattie was mentioned anywhere else. She left just as Monica was arriving.

I put the photograph back on the hall table, feeling oddly disappointed.

S
aturday morning was overcast, threatening to rain, and I woke up with a scratchy throat and a headache. I thought about canceling my trip to Hobart with Patrick; I thought about staying in bed all day. But I would have felt too guilty. A hot shower cleared my head a little, and rather than my usual jeans, I put on the only dress I had packed. I brushed my hair out loose and hoped I looked nice but wasn’t quite sure why I hoped it. I’d thought at the start that Patrick was attracted to me, but I hadn’t really any evidence for it now. He was unlike most of the men I’d met. He wasn’t polished and confident like Josh, nor was he rough and blokey like my dad. He was quiet but not shy. Gentle but not weak. Not that I was falling for him; I was still in love with Josh. I was just intrigued by him. He was different.

Patrick was dead on time, didn’t say anything about my dress or my hair, and we drove away from Wildflower Hill just as the rain started. He seemed happy not to talk, so I watched the landscape speed by outside my window while the
windshield wipers beat a rhythm. Sheep stood still and miserable in the downpour under dead crooked trees.

“Rotten weather,” he said at last.

“I quite like the rain.”

“No good for driving, though.” Then he was quiet again.

I shifted in my seat so I could steal a glance at him. He had such a serious face, courtesy of severe eyebrows and a straight-edged nose. Then I turned my eyes to the windshield. The rain sheeted down, and Patrick slowed.

“I’m sorry, I’d planned to stop at a little town not far up the road for coffee. But it might take a little longer to get there in this weather.”

I realized at that instant that he was being quiet because he was nervous. He was holding the steering wheel tightly, and his whole body was drawn up tautly.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “Wet-weather driving not your thing?” I tried to sound light, friendly.

He didn’t smile. “Ah, you could say that.” Then a pause. “Our parents . . . There was an accident . . . Monica was seven, I was seventeen. We were in the car. Dad lost control in the wet. He and Mum both died.”

I was speechless with embarrassment for a moment, then my imagination conjured what Patrick must have experienced in those moments, and I was speechless with pity. “I’m so sorry,” I managed. “I didn’t know about your parents.” Though, on reflection, I had wondered why Monica never mentioned her mother or father. “Take your time. My knee is fine at the moment.” Then curiosity caught me. “So what happened afterward? Who looked after you and Monica?”

“We did,” he said. “Or rather, I did. It was right at the end of my final year of high school, and there was talk of sending Monica off to our uncle’s place in Melbourne, but we really wanted to stay together. We inherited the family home so we had somewhere to live. I got a part-time job, and we just managed. It was really tough. I worked whenever I could, I relied on the neighbors to pick her up from school when I was down at the university. I always felt guilty that she was growing up in such a strange way, but then she’d lost her parents, so I suppose it doesn’t get worse than that. Not my fault.”