Wildflower Hill (30 page)

“Oh, here he is,” Tilly said with a laugh in her voice. “Frank, this is Beattie.”

He nodded once, with a tight smile. Beattie noticed Tilly had grown anxious. The idea that she bossed her husband around was patently ludicrous: the jealous rumblings of elderly women with too little to occupy themselves.

“It’s a pleasure,” Beattie said, picking up her parcels. “I must be on my way.”

She pushed open the door. As she did, she nearly ran into Margaret Day coming the other way. She hadn’t seen Margaret since the older woman had asked her to leave many months ago.

“Hello, Margaret,” Beattie said, buoyed by her successful exchange with Tilly.

Margaret gave her a cold stare, brushed past her. The shop
door swung closed, and Beattie stood outside, her feeling of goodwill draining away. She dared to look over her shoulder, through the shopwindow, and saw Margaret leaning over the counter talking to Tilly. Tilly looked up, saw Beattie through the window, and looked away. No smiles this time.

Beattie wanted to run back inside and shout, “Don’t listen to her! She’s a pious fool!” But she didn’t. She set her chin and started the walk home. She didn’t need allies; she could manage on her own.

The long weeks when Lucy was away only pained her at nighttime, when she lay in her bed alone and had many dark hours to contemplate how she’d mismanaged her life. The days were busy and full, left her tired and yet satisfied. Only with the evening came the regrets.

In March it was crutching season. Charlie taught Mikhail how to use a pair of shears, and he chipped in, too. It was an intense time: up early, the predawn sky bruised with rain clouds, the black crags of dead trees standing still in the mist. Then endless days of mustering stock and wrangling them in and out of the sheds. Beattie fell into bed every night exhausted. But it was all worth it when they sold the crutching to a Launceston wool trader for much more than Beattie had hoped. A little extra money. She walked into town and bought a few feet of heavy pink cotton from Tilly Harrow’s store. Tilly had hardened toward Beattie but, like everyone else in town, was still happy to take her money.

With the cotton, Beattie hand-sewed a dress for Lucy.
She’d forgotten how much she loved fabrics and sewing, seeing the neat lines of seams and pleats appear under her needle, and wondered what happened to the wool that she sold. If she could get a little of it back, made into cloth, she could wear her own farm on her back. The thought gave her a feeling of intense pleasure, of being independent, strong. That night, for the first time in many, many months, she pulled out a piece of paper and sketched a design for a jacket that would be perfect made of wool. In the magazines for sale in the Lewinford general store, she had seen the long lines and wide bindings of the latest fashions. She lost herself in it for hours.

Easter finally came, but Henry refused to bring Lucy until after the Easter Sunday service. Beattie never made it to church; there was too much else to do, and anyway, Wildflower Hill with its unbroken silence and earthy smells felt much closer to God than the damp little church hall in town. Sometimes when she walked out at dusk—the distant mountains had shaded to blue, the dam was a silver mirror, the cool shadows spread from hollows to cover the grass and trees—she couldn’t believe she had ever lived in damp, crowded cities and been happy.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, her little girl came back.

Charlie was wrestling with some fencing wire beside the driveway—they hadn’t money for new fencing, and he’d become an expert at patching it with old cutoffs—when Henry’s car rounded the bend and came into view.

Beattie’s heart soared. The long months of waiting were over. For two weeks now, she would have Lucy’s little body
snuggled against hers in bed at night, would fall asleep with the warm smell of the girl’s hair in her nostrils.

The car beeped—surely not Henry acting unprompted; she could imagine Lucy and Molly urging him to—and then pulled to a stop at the top of the driveway.

The door opened and Lucy climbed out. This time Beattie didn’t wait for her. She folded Lucy into a tight embrace. When she stood back to look at her, Lucy’s face was awash with tears. “I missed you, Mummy,” she said.

“I missed you, too. More than you could know.”

Molly and Henry were climbing out of the car now. Molly, beautifully dressed as always with her hat and gloves, froze when she saw Charlie.

Henry approached Beattie and handed her two books. “Make her keep up with her reading,” he said gruffly. “She’s not doing well at school.”

Lucy blushed.

“Yes, Lucy, you must read better so that your mother can write you letters while you’re apart,” Molly said gently, her eyes darting back to Charlie nervously.

Beattie tucked Lucy under her arm. “Molly, have you met Charlie? He’s my farm manager.”

“Charlie!” Lucy exclaimed, spotting him for the first time and racing over.

Charlie, who sensed the situation, pulled up so Lucy couldn’t hug him, holding out the wire and a set of pliers in warning. “Hang on there, little red-haired girl, I’ve got sharp things here.”

“
That’s
Charlie?” Molly said under her voice. “I’ve heard Lucy talk of him endlessly. I’d no idea he was black.”

“He’s barely black,” Henry said with a shrug, not bothering to adjust his volume. “And what does it matter, anyway?”

Beattie was torn between embarrassment that Charlie could hear them talking about him so openly, and amusement that Henry was so unmoved by Molly’s discomfort.

Lucy remained with Charlie, talking animatedly about horses and school and Easter eggs. Henry put Molly back in the car, and they drove off. Beattie was surprised: it seemed Molly’s good and gentle heart didn’t have a place in it for anyone who wasn’t white. Selective kindness rather than the genuine variety. It wasn’t often that Beattie had opportunity to feel morally superior to Molly, so she enjoyed the feeling while it lasted.

“Come on, darling,” Beattie called to Lucy, “I’ve got a little present for you.”

Lucy dashed toward her, wrapping her arms around Beattie’s middle. “What is it, what is it?”

“I made you a dress. Pink. Your favorite color. Come inside.”

Beattie led Lucy upstairs to the bedroom. The little pink dress was lying on the bed. Lucy immediately stripped out of her skirt and blouse. She had lost much of her baby fat—in fact, she had started to look quite different, taller, managing her own buttons. A child rather than a big baby. As Lucy stepped into the dress, Beattie realized that it wouldn’t fit her.

“Oh,” Lucy said.

“Lucy, you must have grown two inches!”

Lucy grinned proudly. “Mama always says I eat like a horse.”

Mama.
All at once, Beattie felt a sense of having lost something precious. Her daughter was growing up somewhere else. With someone else as her mother. She had changed so much in the months since Beattie had last seen her and held her. She would continue to change, no doubt, constantly and constantly, like the face of the sea. Then one day, perhaps, she would change so much that Beattie wouldn’t know her. Not in the intimate way a mother should know her child.

“Mummy? Are you sad that the dress doesn’t fit?”

Beattie took her hands. “No. I can make the dress bigger. I’m sad that you are growing up without me.”

Lucy blinked back at her.

“Are you happy with Daddy and Molly?”

“Yes. But I liked it better when I saw you more.”

“I liked it better, too.”

“I don’t like school.”

“But Molly’s right. Once you can read and write, we can write letters to each other and not feel so far apart.”

“All right. I’ll try a little harder.”

“That’s my girl.”

The bank manager increased the interest on Beattie’s loan just as the first cold finger of winter traced itself across the fields. Much of Beattie’s life in the last few years had been consumed with worrying about running out of money, but she had never been so responsible for finding it. She spent long hours over the bookwork, making budgets, going back through old records for past wool clips, and estimating this year’s clip, which
was now only four months away. The cold season was not a time to be eking out pennies, and she felt particularly sorry for Mikhail and Charlie, who were men and needed much more food than she did. She knew, herself, from the long days spent mustering and treating sheep for foot rot, that a hard day’s work could make her ravenous. To serve them thin vegetable soup and bread and dripping on such evenings seemed almost cruel.

But they never complained. And so the three of them became like family, bonded through hardship, sacrifice, and a common sense that they were achieving something together. Beattie knew she occupied a privileged position: she would reap most of the benefits of their hard work. So she vowed to herself that she would repay them, would never take so much for herself that a gap would open up between them and break their bond. After Lucy, they were the people she cared most for in the world.

Beattie decided it was time to open up the sitting room, even though there were no chairs to sit on. The big fireplace was in there, so she had sewn cushions out of scraps for the floor and bought a secondhand rug from town. While Beattie went over her books for the day, sitting in the windowsill, trying to catch the sun’s warmth through the cool glass, Mikhail cleaned out the fireplace. Beside it was a neat pile of wood that he’d chopped earlier that day. Beattie was very much looking forward to firelight and warmth that afternoon and hoped that Charlie would join them. She couldn’t understand why he refused to spend more time in the house. She had lived in the shearers’ cottage; she knew that it was cold and
rough. He worked so hard, and she wished for him just a little comfort.

She wished, also, to spend a little more time with him.

That feeling had crept up on her. When they were out working together, there wasn’t time for conversation. They were often working opposite ends of a paddock, calling to each other over barking dogs or bleating sheep or across the muddy ditches. But she drew such comfort from his presence. The more familiar they became, the more she longed for a deep familiarity: to know him better, know about the mind and the heart at work in that lean, graceful body; to draw him closer to her somehow. He was patient and kind, hardworking, strong . . . He was many admirable things. Perhaps she had come to admire him a little too much.

“There. I am all done,” Mikhail said, scooping up his bucket and his brush. His face and hands were sprinkled with soot.

“We can light a fire tonight?”

He shrugged. “I hope so. If room fills with smoke, we will know I need to try again.”

Beattie laughed. “You go and clean yourself up. Thank you for that.”

He tilted his head to the side, wincing. “I have very stiff neck. Too old for these jobs now,” he joked. He left the room limping, as he had done since he’d speared his foot on a piece of old fencing wire the week before.

Beattie eyed the fireplace. It was only afternoon; not cold enough for a fire yet. Though she would have to test the chimney . . . Smiling to herself, she stacked the wood in the
fireplace, carefully arranged some kindling, and lit it. For the next quarter of an hour, she tended to the fire, poking it and making sure it wasn’t going to smoke the house out. Then she pulled up a cushion on the floor and sat on it, gazing at the flames.

Her heart relaxed a little. Yes, money would be tight over the winter, but then the shearing season would come, and she had budgeted so beautifully that when the money came in, they would be fine. She could pay Mikhail and Charlie, she could meet her interest payments, she could even buy some furniture. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what this room would look like this time next year. A sofa, a side table, a lamp . . . Yes, she could reconnect the phone and electricity: Raphael had spent so much money having the lines run out here, and now they were idle. Upstairs, there would be a room for Lucy. Beattie would miss the girl in her bed, but she was getting far too big to share. Beattie still wasn’t in any hurry to open up the other rooms in the house. She’d rather have the ones she used looking nice. Winter would give her time to sew, here by the fireplace. Ah, yes, when the money came, she could buy an electric sewing machine.

She warmed herself on her fantasies while the afternoon deepened. Outside, she could hear Charlie coming back to the stables, calling to his dogs, and she thought about making dinner. She went up the hall and knocked gently on Mikhail’s door.

“Come in,” he called.

She opened the door. He lay on his bed, on top of the covers, looking stiff and in pain.

“I’m about to start dinner,” she said.

“Not for me tonight,” he said. “I am not well.”

She was concerned. “What kind of not well? Just stiff from cleaning the fireplace?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I think I have fever.”

She advanced toward him and put a hand on his forehead. It was warm but not alarmingly so. “Just get some rest, then,” she said. “Charlie and I will eat on our own.”

But Charlie said it wasn’t worth making a proper dinner if Mikhail wasn’t there, so he ate some bread and honey and went back to the shearers’ cottage. Beattie returned to the fire and used the light to work on some cross-stitch. She stayed up for hours, her hands aching and her eyes straining in the firelight, enjoying the fire as the wind rattled outside.

At last she couldn’t stay awake any longer and put aside her sewing. She lit a candle to show her the way and left the fire to die. When her foot struck the first stair, she realized she hadn’t checked in on Mikhail again. He was probably asleep. She rounded the bottom of the staircase and listened outside his door.

There was a groan. Had he heard her footsteps? She leaned close to the door to listen. His breathing was labored. She paused, not wanting to go in uninvited, but worried that he was sick.

“Mikhail?”

The groan again; he was trying to call to her. Her pulse quickened, and she opened the door.

By the flickering candlelight, a grim scene confronted her. Mikhail was where she had left him, on top of the covers, but
his body had arched into a rictus. His fists were curled tight at his sides, his back bent like a violin bow. He looked at her with pleading eyes, his jaw clamped tight and his lungs struggling for breath.