The Thorn Birds

3

The road to Drogheda brought back no memories of his youth, thought Father Ralph de Bricassart, eyes half shut against the glare as his new Daimler bounced along in the rutted wheel tracks that marched through the long silver grass. No lovely misty green Ireland, this. And Drogheda? No battlefield, no high seat of power. Or was that strictly true? Better disciplined these days but acute as ever, his sense of humor conjured in his mind an image of a Cromwellian Mary Carson dealing out her particular brand of imperial malevolence. Not such a highflown comparison, either; the lady surely wielded as much power and controlled as many individuals as any puissant war lord of elder days.

The last gate loomed up through a stand of box and stringybark; the car came to a throbbing halt. Clapping a disreputable grey broad-brimmed hat on his head to ward off the sun, Father Ralph got out, plodded to the steel bolt on the wooden strut, pulled it back and flung the gate open with weary impatience. There were twenty-seven gates between the presbytery in Gillanbone and Drogheda homestead, each one meaning he had to stop, get out of the car, open the gate, get into the car and drive it through, stop, get out, go back to close the gate, then get in the car again and proceed to the next one. Many and many a time he longed to dispense with at least half the ritual, scoot on down the track leaving the gates open like a series of astonished mouths behind him; but even the awesome aura of his calling would not prevent the owners of the gates from tarring and feathering him for it. He wished horses were as fast and efficient as cars, because one could open and close gates from the back of a horse without dismounting.

“Nothing is given without a disadvantage in it,” he said, patting the dashboard of the new Daimler and starting off down the last mile of the grassy, treeless Home Paddock, the gate firmly bolted behind him.

Even to an Irishman used to castles and mansions, this Australian homestead was imposing. Drogheda was the oldest and the biggest property in the district, and had been endowed by its late doting owner with a fitting residence. Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story. Gracing the sides of every window were black wooden shutters, not merely ornamental but useful; in the heat of summer they were pulled closed to keep the interior cool.

Though it was autumn now and the spindling vine was green, in spring the wistaria which had been planted the day the house was finished fifty years before was a solid mass of lilac plumes, rioting all over the outer walls and the veranda roof. Several acres of meticulously scythed lawn surrounded the house, strewn with formal gardens even now full of color from roses, wallflowers, dahlias and marigolds. A stand of magnificent ghost gums with pallid white trunks and drifting thin leaves hanging seventy feet above the ground shaded the house from the pitiless sun, their branches wreathed in brilliant magenta where bougainvillaea vines grew intertwined with them. Even those indispensable Outback monstrosities the water tanks were thickly clothed in hardy native vines, roses and wistaria, and thus managed to look more decorative than functional. Thanks to the late Michael Carson’s passion for Drogheda homestead, he had been lavish in the matter of water tanks; rumor had it Drogheda could afford to keep its lawns green and its flower beds blooming though no rain fell in ten years.

As one approached down the Home Paddock the house and its ghost gums took the eye first, but then one was aware of many other yellow sandstone houses of one story behind it and to each side, interlocking with the main structure by means of roofed ramps smothered in creepers. A wide gravel driveway succeeded the wheel ruts of the track, curving to a circular parking area at one side of the big house, but also continuing beyond it and out of sight down to where the real business of Drogheda lay: the stockyards, the shearing shed, the barns. Privately Father Ralph preferred the giant pepper trees which shaded all these outbuildings and their attendant activities to the ghost gums of the main house. Pepper trees were dense with pale-green fronds and alive with the sound of bees, just the right lazy sort of foliage for an Outback station.

As Father Ralph parked his car and walked across the lawn, the maid waited on the front veranda, her freckled face wreathed in smiles.

“Good morning, Minnie,” he said.

“Oh, Father, happy it is to see you this fine dear mornin’,” she said in her strong brogue, one hand holding the door wide and the other outstretched to receive his battered, unclerical hat.

Inside the dim hall, with its marble tiles and great brass-railed staircase, he paused until Minnie gave him a nod before entering the drawing room.

Mary Carson was sitting in her wing chair by an open window which extended fifteen feet from floor to ceiling, apparently indifferent to the cold air flooding in. Her shock of red hair was almost as bright as it had been in her youth; though the coarse freckled skin had picked up additional splotches from age, for a woman of sixty-five she had few wrinkles, rather a fine network of tiny diamond-shaped cushions like a quilted bed-spread. The only clues to her intractable nature lay in the two deep fissures which ran one on either side of her Roman nose, to end pulling down the corners of her mouth, and in the stony look of the pale-blue eyes.

Father Ralph crossed the Aubusson carpet silently and kissed her hands; the gesture sat well on a man as tall and graceful as he was, especially since he wore a plain black soutane which gave him something of a courtly air. Her expressionless eyes suddenly coy and sparkling, Mary Carson almost simpered.

“Will you have tea, Father?” she asked.

“It depends on whether you wish to hear Mass,” he said, sitting down in the chair facing hers and crossing his legs, the soutane riding up sufficiently to show that under it he wore breeches and knee-high boots, a concession to the locale of his parish. “I’ve brought you Communion, but if you’d like to hear Mass I can be ready to say it in a very few minutes. I don’t mind continuing my fast a little longer.”

“You’re too good to me, Father,” she said smugly, knowing perfectly well that he, along with everybody else, did homage not to her but to her money. “Please have tea,” she went on. “I’m quite happy with Communion.”

He kept his resentment from showing in his face; this parish had been excellent for his self-control. If once he was offered the chance to rise out of the obscurity his temper had landed him in, he would not again make the same mistake. And if he played his cards well, this old woman might be the answer to his prayers.

“I must confess, Father, that this past year has been very pleasant,” she said. “You’re a far more satisfactory shepherd than old Father Kelly was, God rot his soul.” Her voice on the last phrase was suddenly harsh, vindictive.

His eyes lifted to her face, twinkling. “My dear Mrs. Carson! That’s not a very Catholic sentiment.”

“But the truth. He was a drunken old sot, and I’m quite sure God will rot his soul as much as the drink rotted his body.” She leaned forward. “I know you fairly well by this time; I think I’m entitled to ask you a few questions, don’t you? After all, you feel free to use Drogheda as your private playground—off learning how to be a stockman, polishing your riding, escaping from the vicissitudes of life in Gilly. All at my invitation, of course, but I do think I’m entitled to some answers, don’t you?”

He didn’t like to be reminded that he ought to feel grateful, but he had been waiting for the day when she would think she owned him enough to begin demanding things of him. “Indeed you are, Mrs. Carson. I can’t thank you enough for permitting me the run of Drogheda, and for all your gifts—my horses, my car.”

“How old are you?” she asked without further preamble.

“Twenty-eight,” he replied.

“Younger than I thought. Even so, they don’t send priests like you to places like Gilly. What did you do, to make them send someone like you out here into the back of beyond?”

“I insulted the bishop,” he said calmly, smiling.

“You must have! But I can’t think a priest of your peculiar talents can be happy in a place like Gillanbone.”

“It is God’s will.”

“Stuff and nonsense! You’re here because of human failings—your own and the bishop’s. Only the Pope is infallible. You’re utterly out of your natural element in Gilly, we all know that, not that we’re not grateful to have someone like you for a change, instead of the ordained remittance men they send us usually. But your natural element lies in some corridor of ecclesiastical power, not here among horses and sheep. You’d look magnificent in cardinal’s red.”

“No chance of that, I’m afraid. I fancy Gillanbone is not exactly the epicenter of the Archbishop Papal Legate’s map. And it could be worse. I have you, and I have Drogheda.”

She accepted the deliberately blatant flattery in the spirit in which it was intended, enjoying his beauty, his attentiveness, his barbed and subtle mind; truly he would make a magnificent cardinal. In all her life she could not remember seeing a better-looking man, nor one who used his beauty in quite the same way. He had to be aware of how he looked: the height and the perfect proportions of his body, the fine aristocratic features, the way every physical element had been put together with a degree of care about the appearance of the finished product God lavished on few of His creations. From the loose black curls of his head and the startling blue of his eyes to the small, slender hands and feet, he was perfect. Yes, he had to be conscious of what he was. And yet there was an aloofness about him, a way he had of making her feel he had never been enslaved by his beauty, nor ever would be. He would use it to get what he wanted without compunction if it would help, but not as though he was enamored of it; rather as if he deemed people beneath contempt for being influenced by it. And she would have given much to know what in his past life had made him so.

Curious, how many priests were handsome as Adonis, had the sexual magnetism of Don Juan. Did they espouse celibacy as a refuge from the consequences?

“Why do you put up with Gillanbone?” she asked. “Why not leave the priesthood rather than put up with it? You could be rich and powerful in any one of a number of fields with your talents, and you can’t tell me the thought of power at least doesn’t appeal to you.”

His left eyebrow flew up. “My dear Mrs. Carson, you’re a Catholic. You know my vows are sacred. Until my death I remain a priest. I cannot deny it.”

She snorted with laughter. “Oh, come now! Do you really believe that if you renounced your vows they’d come after you with everything from bolts of lightning to bloodhounds and shotguns?”

“Of course not. Nor do I believe you’re stupid enough to think fear of retribution is what keeps me within the priestly fold.”

“Oho! Waspish, Father de Bricassart! Then what does keep you tied? What compels you to suffer the dust, the heat and the Gilly flies? For all you know, it might be a life sentence.”

A shadow momentarily dimmed the blue eyes, but he smiled, pitying her. “You’re a great comfort, aren’t you?” His lips parted, he looked toward the ceiling and sighed. “I was brought up from my cradle to be a priest, but it’s far more than that. How can I explain it to a woman? I am a vessel, Mrs. Carson, and at times I’m filled with God. If I were a better priest, there would be no periods of emptiness at all. And that filling, that oneness with God, isn’t a function of place. Whether I’m in Gillanbone or a bishop’s palace, it occurs. But to define it is difficult, because even to priests it’s a great mystery. A divine possession, which other men can never know. That’s it, perhaps. Abandon it? I couldn’t.”

“So it’s a power, is it? Why should it be given to priests, then? What makes you think the mere smearing of chrism during an exhaustingly long ceremony is able to endow any man with it?”

He shook his head. “Look, it’s years of life, even before getting to the point of ordination. The careful development of a state of mind which opens the vessel to God. It’s earned!Every day it’s earned. Which is the purpose of the vows, don’t you see? That no earthly things come between the priest and his state of mind—not love of a woman, nor love of money, nor unwillingness to obey the dictates of other men. Poverty is nothing new to me; I don’t come from a rich family. Chastity I accept without finding it difficult to maintain. And obedience? For me, it’s the hardest of the three. But I obey, because if I hold myself more important than my function as a receptacle for God, I’m lost. I obey. And if necessary, I’m willing to endure Gillanbone as a life sentence.”

“Then you’re a fool,” she said. “I, too, think that there are more important things than lovers, but being a receptacle for God isn’t one of them. Odd. I never realized you believed in God so ardently. I thought you were perhaps a man who doubted.”

“I do doubt. What thinking man doesn’t? That’s why at times I’m empty.” He looked beyond her, at something she couldn’t see. “Do you know, I think I’d give up every ambition, every desire in me, for the chance to be a perfect priest?”

“Perfection in anything,” she said, “is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.”

He laughed, looking at her in admiration tinged with envy. She was a remarkable woman.

Her widowhood was thirty-three years old and her only child, a son, had died in infancy. Because of her peculiar status in the Gillanbone community she had not availed herself of any of the overtures made to her by the more ambitious males of her acquaintance; as Michael Carson’s widow she was indisputably a queen, but as someone’s wife she passed control of all she had to that someone. Not Mary Carson’s idea of living, to play second fiddle. So she had abjured the flesh, preferring to wield power; it was inconceivable that she should take a lover, for when it came to gossip Gillanbone was as receptive as a wire to an electrical current. To prove herself human and weak was not a part of her obsession.

But now she was old enough to be officially beyond the drives of the body. If the new young priest was assiduous in his duties to her and she rewarded him with little gifts like a car, it was not at all incongruous. A staunch pillar of the Church all her life, she had supported her parish and its spiritual leader in fitting fashion even when Father Kelly had hiccuped his way through the Mass. She was not alone in feeling charitably inclined toward Father Kelly’s successor; Father Ralph de Bricassart was deservedly popular with every member of his flock, rich or poor. If his more remote parishioners could not get into Gilly to see him, he went to them, and until Mary Carson had given him his car he had gone on horseback. His patience and kindness had brought him liking from all and sincere love from some; Martin King of Bugela had expensively refurnished the presbytery, Dominic O’Rourke of Dibban-Dibban paid the salary of a good housekeeper.

So from the pedestal of her age and her position Mary Carson felt quite safe in enjoying Father Ralph; she liked matching her wits against a brain as intelligent as her own, she liked outguessing him because she was never sure she actually did outguess him.

“Getting back to what you were saying about Gilly not being the epicenter of the Archbishop Papal Legate’s map,” she said, settling deeply into her chair, “what do you think would shake the reverend gentleman sufficiently to make Gilly the pivot of his world?”

The priest smiled ruefully. “Impossible to say. A coup of some sort? The sudden saving of a thousand souls, a sudden capacity to heal the lame and the blind… But the age of miracles is past.”

“Oh, come now, I doubt that! It’s just that He’s altered His technique. These days He uses money.”

“What a cynic you are! Maybe that’s why I like you so much, Mrs. Carson.”

“My name is Mary. Please call me Mary.”

Minnie came in wheeling the tea trolley as Father de Bricassart said, “Thank you, Mary.”

Over fresh bannocks and anchovies on toast, Mary Carson sighed. “Dear Father, I want you to pray especially hard for me this morning.”

“Call me Ralph,” he said, then went on mischievously, “I doubt it’s possible for me to pray any harder for you than I normally do, but I’ll try.”

“Oh, you’re a charmer! Or was that remark innuendo? I don’t usually care for obviousness, but with you I’m never sure if the obviousness isn’t actually a cloak for something deeper. Like a carrot before a donkey. Just what do you really think of me, Father de Bricassart? I’ll never know, because you’ll never be tactless enough to tell me, will you? Fascinating, fascinating… But you must pray for me. I’m old, and I’ve sinned much.”

“Age creeps on us all, and I, too, have sinned.”

A dry chuckle escaped her. “I’d give a lot to know how you’ve sinned! Indeed, indeed I would.” She was silent for a moment, then changed the subject. “At this minute I’m minus a head stockman.”

“Again?”

“Five in the past year. It’s getting hard to find a decent man.”

“Well, rumor hath it you’re not exactly a generous or a considerate employer.”

“Oh, impudent!” she gasped, laughing. “Who bought you a brand-new Daimler so you wouldn’t have to ride?”

“Ah, but look how hard I pray for you!”

“If Michael had only had half your wit and character, I might have loved him,” she said abruptly. Her face changed, became spiteful. “Do you think I’m without a relative in the world and must leave my money and my land to Mother Church, is that it?”

“I have no idea,” he said tranquilly, pouring himself more tea.

“As a matter of fact, I have a brother with a large and thriving family of sons.”

“How nice for you,” he said demurely.

“When I married I was quite without worldly goods. I knew I’d never marry well in Ireland, where a woman has to have breeding and background to catch a rich husband. So I worked my fingers to the bone to save my passage money to a land where the rich men aren’t so fussy. All I had when I got here were a face and a figure and a better brain than women are supposed to have, and they were adequate to catch Michael Carson, who was a rich fool. He doted on me until the day he died.”

“And your brother?” he prompted, thinking she was going off at a tangent.

“My brother is eleven years younger than I am, which would make him fifty-four now. We’re the only two still alive. I hardly know him; he was a small child when I left Galway. At present he lives in New Zealand, though if he emigrated to make his fortune he hasn’t succeeded.

“But last night when the station hand brought me the news that Arthur Teviot had packed his traps and gone, I suddenly thought of Padraic. Here I am, not getting any younger, with no family around me. And it occurred to me that Paddy is an experienced man of the land, without the means to own land. Why not, I thought, write to him and ask him to bring himself and his sons here? When I die he’ll inherit Drogheda and Michar Limited, as he’s my only living relative closer than some unknown cousins back in Ireland.”

She smiled. “It seems silly to wait, doesn’t it? He might as well come now as later, get used to running sheep on the black soil plains, which I’m sure is quite different from sheep in New Zealand. Then when I’m gone he can step into my shoes without feeling the pinch.” Head lowered, she watched Father Ralph closely.

“I wonder you didn’t think of it earlier,” he said.

“Oh, I did. But until recently I thought the last thing I wanted was a lot of vultures waiting anxiously for me to breathe my last. Only lately the day of my demise seems a lot closer than is used to, and I feel… oh, I don’t know. As if it might be nice to be surrounded by people of my own flesh and blood.”

“What’s the matter, do you think you’re ill?” he asked quickly, a real concern in his eyes.

She shrugged. “I’m perfectly all right. Yet there’s something ominous about turning sixty-five. Suddenly old age is not a phenomenon which will occur; it has occurred.”

“I see what you mean, and you’re right. It will be very pleasant for you, hearing young voices in the house.”

“Oh, they won’t live here,” she said. “They can live in the head stockman’s house down by the creek, well away from me. I’m not fond of children or their voices.”

“Isn’t that a rather shabby way to treat your only brother, Mary? Even if your ages are so disparate?”

“He’ll inherit—let him earn it,” she said crudely.

Fiona Cleary was delivered of another boy six days before Meggie’s ninth birthday, counting herself lucky nothing but a couple of miscarriages had happened in the interim. At nine Meggie was old enough to be a real help. Fee herself was forty years old, too old to bear children without a great deal of strength-sapping pain. The child, named Harold, was a delicate baby; for the first time anyone could ever remember, the doctor came regularly to the house.

And as troubles do, the Cleary troubles multiplied. The aftermath of the war was not a boom, but a rural depression. Work became increasingly harder to get.

Old Angus MacWhirter delivered a telegram to the house one day just as they were finishing tea, and Paddy tore it open with trembling hands; telegrams never held good news. The boys gathered round, all save Frank, who took his cup of tea and left the table. Fee’s eyes followed him, then turned back as Paddy groaned.

“What is it?” she asked.

Paddy was staring at the piece of paper as if it held news of a death. “Archibald doesn’t want us.”

Bob pounded his fist on the table savagely; he had been so looking forward to going with his father as an apprentice shearer, and Archibald’s was to have been his first pen. “Why should he do a dirty thing like this to us, Daddy? We were due to start there tomorrow.”

“He doesn’t say why, Bob. I suppose some scab contractor undercut me.”

“Oh, Paddy!” Fee sighed.

Baby Hal began to cry from the big bassinet by the stove, but before Fee could move Meggie was up; Frank had come back inside the door and was standing, tea in hand, watching his father narrowly.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to go and see Archibald,” Paddy said at last. “It’s too late now to look for another shed to replace his, but I do think he owes me a better explanation than this. We’ll just have to hope we can find work milking until Willoughby’s shed starts in July.”

Meggie pulled a square of white towel from the huge pile sitting by the stove warming and spread it carefully on the work table, then lifted the crying child out of the wicker crib. The Cleary hair glittered sparsely on his little skull as Meggie changed his diaper swiftly, and as efficiently as her mother could have done.

“Little Mother Meggie,” Frank said, to tease her.

“I’m not!” she answered indignantly. “I’m just helping Mum.”

“I know,” he said gently. “You’re a good girl, wee Meggie.” He tugged at the white taffeta bow on the back of her head until it hung lopsided.

Up came the big grey eyes to his face adoringly; over the nodding head of the baby she might have been his own age, or older. There was a pain in his chest, that this should have fallen upon her at an age when the only baby she ought to be caring for was Agnes, now relegated forgotten to the bedroom. If it wasn’t for her and their mother, he would have been gone long since. He looked at his father sourly, the cause of the new life creating such chaos in the house. Served him right, getting done out of his shed.

Somehow the other boys and even Meggie had never intruded on his thoughts the way Hal did; but when Fee’s waistline began to swell this time, he was old enough himself to be married and a father. Everyone except little Meggie had been uncomfortable about it, his mother especially. The furtive glances of the boys made her shrink like a rabbit; she could not meet Frank’s eyes or quench the shame in her own. Nor should any woman go through that, Frank said to himself for the thousandth time, remembering the horrifying moans and cries which had come from her bedroom the night Hal was born; of age now, he hadn’t been packed off elsewhere like the others. Served Daddy right, losing his shed. A decent man would have left her alone.

His mother’s head in the new electric light was spun gold, the pure profile as she looked down the long table at Paddy unspeakably beautiful. How had someone as lovely and refined as she married an itinerant shearer from the bogs of Galway? Wasting herself and her Spode china, her damask table napery and her Persian rugs in the parlor that no one ever saw, because she didn’t fit in with the wives of Paddy’s peers. She made them too conscious of their vulgar loud voices, their bewilderment when faced with more than one fork.

Sometimes on a Sunday she would go into the lonely parlor, sit down at the spinet under the window and play, though her touch had long gone from want of time to practice and she could no longer manage any but the simplest pieces. He would sit beneath the window among the lilacs and the lilies, and close his eyes to listen. There was a sort of vision he had then, of his mother clad in a long bustled gown of palest pink shadow lace sitting at the spinet in a huge ivory room, great branches of candles all around her. It would make him long to weep, but he never wept anymore; not since that night in the barn after the police had brought him home.

Meggie had put Hal back in the bassinet, and gone to stand beside her mother. There was another one wasted. The same proud, sensitive profile; something of Fiona about her hands, her child’s body. She would be very like her mother when she, too, was a woman. And who would marry her? Another oafish Irish shearer, or a clodhopping yokel from some Wahine dairy farm? She was worth more, but she was not born to more. There was no way out, that was what everyone said, and every year longer that he lived seemed to bear it out.

Suddenly conscious of his fixed regard, Fee and Meggie turned together, smiling at him with the peculiar tenderness women save for the most beloved men in their lives. Frank put his cup on the table and went out to feed the dogs, wishing he could weep, or commit murder. Anything which might banish the pain.

Three days after Paddy lost the Archibald shed, Mary Carson’s letter came. He had opened it in the Wahine post office the moment he collected his mail, and came back to the house skipping like a child.

“We’re going to Australia!” he yelled, waving the expensive vellum pages under his family’s stunned noses.

There was silence, all eyes riveted on him. Fee’s were shocked, so were Meggie’s, but every male pair had lit with joy. Frank’s blazed.

“But, Paddy, why should she think of you so suddenly after all these years?” Fee asked after she had read the letter. “Her money’s not new to her, nor is her isolation. I never remember her offering to help us before.”

“It seems she’s frightened of dying alone,” he said, as much to reassure himself as Fee. “You saw what she wrote: ‘I am not young, and you and your boys are my heirs. I think we ought to see each other before I die, and it’s time you learned how to run your inheritance. I have the intention of making you my head stockman—it will be excellent training, and those of your boys who are old enough to work may have employment as stockmen also. Drogheda will become a family concern, run by the family without help from outsiders.’”

“Does she say anything about sending us the money to get to Australia?” Fee asked.

Paddy’s back stiffened. “I wouldn’t dream of dunning her for that!” he snapped. “We can get to Australia without begging from her; I have enough put by.”

“I think she ought to pay our way,” Fee maintained stubbornly, and to everyone’s shocked surprise; she did not often voice an opinion. “Why should you give up your life here and go off to work for her on the strength of a promise given in a letter? She’s never lifted a finger to help us before, and I don’t trust her. All I ever remember your saying about her was that she had the tightest clutch on a pound you’d ever seen. After all, Paddy, it’s not as if you know her so very well; there was such a big gap between you in age, and she went to Australia before you were old enough to start school.”

“I don’t see how that alters things now, and if she is tight-fisted, all the more for us to inherit. No, Fee, we’re going to Australia, and we’ll pay our own way there.”

Fee said no more. It was impossible to tell from her face whether she resented being so summarily dismissed.

“Hooray, we’re going to Australia!” Bob shouted, grabbing at his father’s shoulder. Jack, Hughie and Stu jigged up and down, and Frank was smiling, his eyes seeing nothing in the room but something far beyond it. Only Fee and Meggie wondered and feared, hoping painfully it would all come to nothing, for their lives could be no easier in Australia, just the same things under strange conditions.

“Where’s Gillanbone?” Stuart asked.

Out came the old atlas; poor though the Clearys were, there were several shelves of books behind the kitchen dining table. The boys pored over yellowing pages until they found New South Wales. Used to small New Zealand distances, it didn’t occur to them to consult the scale of miles in the bottom left-hand corner. They just naturally assumed New South Wales was the same size as the North Island of New Zealand. And there was Gillanbone, up toward the top left-hand corner; about the same distance from Sydney as Wanganui was from Auckland, it seemed, though the dots indicating towns were far fewer than on the North Island map.

“It’s a very old atlas,” Paddy said. “Australia is like America, growing in leaps and bounds. I’m sure there are a lot more towns these days.”

They would have to go steerage on the ship, but it was only three days after all, not too bad. Not like the weeks and weeks between England and the Antipodes. All they could afford to take with them were clothes, china, cutlery, household linens, cooking utensils and those shelves of precious books; the furniture would have to be sold to cover the cost of shipping Fee’s few bits and pieces in the parlor, her spinet and rugs and chairs.

“I won’t hear of your leaving them behind,” Paddy told Fee firmly.

“Are you sure we can afford it?”

“Positive. As to the other furniture, Mary says she’s readying the head stockman’s house and that it’s got everything we’re likely to be needing. I’m glad we don’t have to live in the same house as Mary.”

“So am I,” said Fee.

Paddy went into Wanganui to book them an eight-berth steerage cabin on the Wahine; strange that the ship and their nearest town should have the same name. They were due to sail at the end of August, so by the beginning of that month everyone started realizing the big adventure was actually going to happen. The dogs had to be given away, the horses and the buggy sold, the furniture loaded onto old Angus MacWhirter’s dray and taken into Wanganui for auction, Fee’s few pieces crated along with the china and linen and books and kitchen goods.

Frank found his mother standing by the beautiful old spinet, stroking its faintly pink, streaky paneling and looking vaguely at the powdering of gold dust on her fingertips.

“Did you always have it, Mum?” he asked.

“Yes. What was actually mine they couldn’t take from me when I married. The spinet, the Persian carpets, the Louis Quinze sofa and chairs, the Regency escritoire. Not much, but they were rightfully mine.” The grey, wistful eyes stared past his shoulder at the oil painting on the wall behind him, dimmed with age a little, but still showing clearly the golden-haired woman in her pale-pink lace gown, crinolined with a hundred and seven flounces.

“Who was she?” he asked curiously, turning his head. “I’ve always wanted to know.”

“A great lady.”

“Well, she’s got to be related to you; she looks like you a bit.”

“Her? A relation of mine?” The eyes left their contemplation of the picture and rested on her son’s face ironically. “Now, do I look as if I could ever have had a relative like her?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve cobwebs in your brain; brush them out.”

“I wish you’d tell me, Mum.”

She sighed and shut the spinet, dusting the gold off her fingers. “There’s nothing to tell, nothing at all. Come on, help me move these things into the middle of the room, so Daddy can pack them.”

The voyage was a nightmare. Before the Wahine was out of Wellington harbor they were all seasick, and they continued to be seasick all the way across twelve hundred miles of gale-stirred, wintry seas. Paddy took the boys up on deck and kept them there in spite of the bitter wind and constant spray, only going below to see his women and baby when some kind soul volunteered to keep an eye on his four miserable, retching boys. Much though he yearned for fresh air, Frank had elected to remain below to guard the women. The cabin was tiny, stifling and reeked of oil, for it was below the water line and toward the bow, where the ship’s motion was most violent.

Some hours out of Wellington Frank and Meggie became convinced their mother was going to die; the doctor, summoned from first class by a very worried steward, shook his head over her pessimistically.

“Just as well it’s only a short voyage,” he said, instructing his nurse to find milk for the baby.

Between bouts of retching Frank and Meggie managed to bottle-feed Hal, who didn’t take to it kindly. Fee had stopped trying to vomit and had sunk into a kind of coma, from which they could not rouse her. The steward helped Frank put her in the top bunk, where the air was a little less stale, and holding a towel to his mouth to stem the watery bile he still brought up, Frank perched himself on the edge beside her, stroking the matted yellow hair back from her brow. Hour after hour he stuck to his post in spite of his own sickness; every time Paddy came in he was with his mother, stroking her hair, while Meggie huddled on a lower berth with Hal, a towel to her mouth.

Three hours out of Sydney the seas dropped to a glassy calm and fog stole in furtively from the far Antarctic, wrapping itself about the old ship. Meggie, reviving a little, imagined it bellowed regularly in pain now the terrible buffeting was over. They inched through the gluey greyness as stealthily as a hunted thing until that deep, monotonous bawl sounded again from somewhere on the superstructure, a lost and lonely, indescribably sad noise. Then all around them the air was filled with mournful bellows as they slipped through ghostly smoking water into the harbor. Meggie never forgot the sound of foghorns, her first introduction to Australia.

Paddy carried Fee off the Wahine in his arms, Frank following with the baby, Meggie with a case, each of the boys stumbling wearily under some kind of burden. They had come into Pyrmont, a meaningless name, on a foggy winter morning at the end of August, 1921. An enormous line of taxis waited outside the iron shed on the wharf; Meggie gaped round-eyed, for she had never seen so many cars in one place at one time. Somehow Paddy packed them all into a single cab, its driver volunteering to take them to the People’s Palace.

“That’s the place for youse, mate,” he told Paddy. “It’s a hotel for the workingman run by the Sallies.”

The streets were thronged with cars seeming to rush in all directions; there were very few horses. They stared raptly out of the taxi windows at the tall brick buildings, the narrow winding streets, the rapidity with which crowds of people seemed to merge and dissolve in some strange urban ritual. Wellington had awed them, but Sydney made Wellington look like a small country town.

While Fee rested in one of the myriad rooms of the warren the Salvation Army fondly called the People’s Palace, Paddy went off to Central Railway Station to see when they could get a train for Gillanbone. Quite recovered, the boys clamored to go with him, for they had been told it was not very far, and that the way was all shops, including one which sold squill candy. Envying their youth, Paddy yielded, for he wasn’t sure how strong his own legs were after three days of seasickness. Frank and Meggie stayed with Fee and the baby, longing to go, too, but more concerned that their mother be better. Indeed, she seemed to gain strength rapidly once off the ship, and had drunk a bowl of soup and nibbled a slice of toast brought to her by one of the workingman’s bonneted angels.

“If we don’t go tonight, Fee, it’s a week until the next through train,” Paddy said when he returned. “Do you think you could manage the journey tonight?”

Fee sat up, shivering. “I can manage.”

“I think we ought to wait,” Frank said hardily. “I don’t think Mum’s well enough to travel.”

“What you don’t seem to understand, Frank, is that if we miss tonight’s train we have to wait a whole week, and I just don’t have the price of a week’s stay in Sydney in my pocket. This is a big country, and where we’re going isn’t served by a daily train. We could get as far as Dubbo on any one of three trains tomorrow, but then we’d have to wait for a local connection, and they told me we’d suffer a lot more traveling that way than if we make the effort to catch tonight’s express.”

“I’ll manage, Paddy,” Fee repeated. “I’ve got Frank and Meggie; I’ll be all right.” Her eyes were on Frank, pleading for his silence.

“Then I’ll send Mary a telegram now, telling her to expect us tomorrow night.”

Central Station was bigger than any building the Clearys had ever been inside, a vast glass cylinder which seemed simultaneously to echo and absorb the din of thousands of people waiting beside battered, strapped suitcases and fixedly watching a giant indicator board which men with long poles altered by hand. In the gathering evening darkness they found themselves a part of the throng, their eyes on the steel concertina gates of platform five; though shut, they bore a large hand-painted sign saying GILLANBONE MAIL. On platform one and platform two a terrific activity heralded the imminent departure of the Brisbane and Melbourne night expresses, passengers crowding through the barriers. Soon it was their turn, as the gates of platform five squashed themselves open and the people began eagerly to move.

Paddy found them an empty second-class compartment, put the older boys by the windows and Fee, Meggie and the baby by the sliding doors which led into the long corridor connecting compartments. Faces would peer in hopefully in sight of a spare seat, to vanish horrified at the sight of so many young children. Sometimes being a large family was an advantage.

The night was cold enough to warrant unstrapping of the big tartan traveling rugs all the suitcases bore on their outsides; though the carriage was not heated, steel boxes full of hot ashes lay along the floor radiating warmth, and no one had expected heating anyway because nothing in Australia or New Zealand was ever heated.

“How far is it, Daddy?” Meggie asked as the train drew out, clanking and rocking gently across an eternity of points.

“A long way further than it looked on our atlas, Meggie. Six hundred and ten miles. We’ll be there late tomorrow afternoon.”

The boys gasped, but forgot it at the blossoming of a fairyland of lights outside; everyone clustered at the windows and watched while the first miles flew by and still the houses did not diminish. The speed increased, the lights grew scattered and finally went out, replaced by a constant flurry of sparks streaming past in a howling wind. When Paddy took the boys outside so Fee could feed Hal, Meggie gazed after them longingly. These days it seemed she was not to be included as one of the boys, not since the baby had disrupted her life and chained her to the house as firmly as her mother was. Not that she really minded, she told herself loyally. He was such a dear little fellow, the chief delight of her life, and it was nice to have Mum treat her as another grown-up lady. What caused Mum to grow babies she had no idea, but the result was lovely. She gave Hal to Fee; the train stopped not long after, creaking and squealing, and seemed to stand hours panting for breath. She was dying to open the window and look out, but the compartment was growing very cold in spite of the hot ashes on the floor.

Paddy came in from the corridor with a steaming cup of tea for Fee, who put Hal back on the seat, glutted and sleepy.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A place called Valley Heights. We take on another engine here for the climb to Lithgow, the girl in the refreshment room said.”

“How long have I got to drink this?”

“Fifteen minutes. Frank’s getting you some sandwiches and I’ll see the boys are fed. Our next refreshment stop is a placed called Blayney, much later in the night.”

Meggie shared her mother’s cup of hot, sugary tea, suddenly unbearably excited, and gobbled her sandwich when Frank brought it. He settled her on the long seat below baby Hal, tucked a rug firmly around her, and then did the same for Fee, stretched out full length on the seat opposite. Stuart and Hughie were bedded down on the floor between the seats, but Paddy told Fee that he was taking Bob, Frank and Jack several compartments down to talk to some shearers, and would spend the night there. It was much nicer than the ship, clicking along to the rhythmic huff-a-huff of the two engines, listening to the wind in the telegraph wires, the occasional flurry of furious huffs as steel wheels slipped on sloping steel rails, frantically sought traction; Meggie went to sleep.

In the morning they stared, awed and dismayed, at a landscape so alien they had not dreamed anything like it existed on the same planet as New Zealand. The rolling hills were there certainly, but absolutely nothing else reminiscent of home. It was all brown and grey, even the trees! The winter wheat was already turned a fawnish silver by the glaring sun, miles upon miles of it rippling and bending in the wind, broken only by stands of thin, spinding, blue-leafed trees and dusty clumps of tired grey bushes. Fee’s stoical eyes surveyed the scene without changing expression, but poor Meggie’s were full of tears. It was horrible, fenceless and vast, without a trace of green.

From freezing night it turned to scorching day as the sun climbed toward its zenith and the train racketed on and on and on, stopping occasionally in some tiny town full of bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles; cars were scarce out here, it seemed. Paddy opened both the windows all the way in spite of the soot which swirled in and settled on everything; it was so hot they were gasping, their heavy New Zealand winter clothing sticking and itching. It did not seem possible that anywhere outside of hell could be so hot in winter.

Gillanbone came with the dying sun, a strange small collection of ramshackle wooden and corrugated iron buildings along either side of one dusty wide street, treeless and tired. The melting sun had licked a golden paste over everything, and gave the town a transient gilded dignity which faded even as they stood on the platform watching. It became once more a typical settlement on the very edge of the Back of Beyond, a last outpost in a steadily diminishing rainfall belt; not far away westward began two thousand miles of the Never-Never, the desert lands where it could not rain.

A resplendent black car was standing in the station yard, and striding unconcernedly toward them through the inches-deep dust came a priest. His long soutane made him seem a figure out of the past, as if he did not move on feet like ordinary men, but drifted dreamlike; the dust rose and billowed around him, red in the last of the sunset.

“Hello, I’m Father de Bricassart,” he said, holding out his hand to Paddy. “You have to be Mary’s brother; you’re the living image of her.” He turned to Fee and lifted her limp hand to his lips, smiling in genuine astonishment; no one could spot a gentlewoman quicker than Father Ralph. “Why, you’re beautiful!” he said, as if it were the most natural remark in the world for a priest to make, and then his eyes went onward to the boys, standing together in a huddle. They rested for a moment with puzzled bewilderment on Frank, who had charge of the baby, and ticked off each boy as they got smaller and smaller. Behind them, all by herself, Meggie stood gaping up at him with her mouth open, as if she were looking at God. Without seeming to notice how his fine serge robe wallowed in the dust, he stepped past the boys and squatted down to hold Meggie between his hands, and they were firm, gentle, kind. “Well! And who are you?” he asked her, smiling.

“Meggie,” she said.

“Her name’s Meghann.” Frank scowled, hating this beautiful man, his stunning height.

“My favorite name, Meghann.” He straightened, but held Meggie’s hand in his. “It will be better for you to stay at the presbytery tonight,” he said, leading Meggie toward the car. “I’ll drive you out to Drogheda in the morning; it’s too far after the train ride from Sydney.”

Aside from the Hotel Imperial, the Catholic church, school, convent and presbytery were the only brick edifices in Gillanbone, even the big public school having to content itself with timber frame. Now that darkness had fallen, the air had grown incredibly chill; but in the presbytery lounge a huge log fire was blazing, and the smell of food came tantalizingly from somewhere beyond. The housekeeper, a wizened old Scotswoman with amazing energy, bustled about showing them their rooms, chattering all the while in a broad western Highlands accent.

Used to the touch-me-not reserve of the Wahine priests, the Clearys found it hard to cope with Father Ralph’s easy, cheerful bonhomie. Only Paddy thawed, for he could remember the friendliness of the priests in his native Galway, their closeness to lesser beings. The rest ate their supper in careful silence and escaped upstairs as soon as they could, Paddy reluctantly following. To him, his religion was a warmth and a consolation; but to the rest of his family it was something rooted in fear, a do-it-or-thou-shalt-be-damned compulsion.

When they had gone, Father Ralph stretched out in his favorite chair, staring at the fire, smoking a cigarette and smiling. In his mind’s eye he was passing the Clearys in review, as he had first seen them from the station yard. The man so like Mary, but bowed with hard work and very obviously not of her malicious disposition; his weary, beautiful wife, who looked as if she ought to have descended from a landaulet drawn by matched white horses; dark and surly Frank, with black eyes, black eyes; the sons, most of them like their father, but the youngest one, Stuart, very like his mother, he’d be a handsome man when he grew up; impossible to tell what the baby would become; and Meggie. The sweetest, the most adorable little girl he had ever seen; hair of a color which defied description, not red and not gold, a perfect fusion of both. And looking up at him with silver-grey eyes of such a lambent purity, like melted jewels. Shrugging, he threw the cigarette stub into the fire and got to his feet. He was getting fanciful in his old age; melted jewels, indeed! More likely his own eyes were coming down with the sandy blight.

In the morning he drove his overnight guests to Drogheda, so inured by now to the landscape that he derived great amusement from their comments. The last hill lay two hundred miles to the east; this was the land of the black soil plains, he explained. Just sweeping, lightly timbered grasslands as flat as a board. The day was as hot as the previous one, but the Daimler was a great deal more comfortable to travel in than the train had been. And they had started out early, fasting, Father Ralph’s vestments and the Blessed Sacrament packed carefully in a black case.

“The sheep are dirty!” said Meggie dolefully, gazing at the many hundreds of rusty-red bundles with their questing noses down into the grass.

“Ah, I can see I ought to have chosen New Zealand,” the priest said. “It must be like Ireland, then, and have nice cream sheep.”

“Yes, it is like Ireland in many ways; it has the same beautiful green grass. But it’s wilder, a lot less tamed,” Paddy answered. He liked Father Ralph very much.

Just then a group of emus lurched to their feet and commenced to run, fleet as the wind, their ungainly legs a blur, their long necks stretched out. The children gasped and burst out laughing, enchanted at seeing giant birds which ran instead of flying.

“What a pleasure it is not to have to get out and open these wretched gates,” Father Ralph said as the last one was shut behind them and Bob, who had done gate duty for him, scrambled back into the car.

After the shocks Australia had administered to them in bewildering rapidity, Drogheda homestead seemed like a touch of home, with its gracious Georgian façade and its budding wistaria vines, its thousands of rose-bushes.

“Are we going to live here?” Meggie squeaked.

“Not exactly,” the priest said quickly. “The house you’re going to live in is about a mile further on, down by the creek.”

Mary Carson was waiting to receive them in the vast drawing room and did not rise to greet her brother, but forced him to come to her as she sat in her wing chair.

“Well, Paddy,” she said pleasantly enough, looking past him fixedly to where Father Ralph stood with Meggie in his arms, and her little arms locked tightly about his neck. Mary Carson got up ponderously, without greeting Fee or the children.

“Let us hear Mass immediately,” she said. “I‘m sure Father de Bricassart is anxious to be on his way.”

“Not at all, my dear Mary.” He laughed, blue eyes gleaming. “I shall say Mass, we’ll all have a good hot breakfast at your table, and then I’ve promised Meggie I’ll show her where she’s going to live.”

“Meggie,” said Mary Carson.

“Yes, this is Meggie. Which rather begins the introductions at the tail, doesn’t it? Let me begin at the head, Mary, please. This is Fiona.”

Mary Carson nodded curtly, and paid scant attention as Father Ralph ran through the boys; she was too busy watching the priest and Meggie.

4

The head stockman’s house stood on piles some thirty feet above a narrow gulch fringed with tall, straggling gum trees and many weeping willows. After the splendor of Drogheda homestead it was rather bare and utilitarian, but in its appurtenances it was not unlike the house they had left behind in New Zealand. Solid Victorian furniture filled the rooms to overflowing, smothered in fine red dust.

“You’re lucky here, you have a bathroom,” Father Ralph said as he brought them up the plank steps to the front veranda; it was quite a climb, for the piles upon which the house was poised were fifteen feet high. “In case the creek runs a banker,” Father Ralph explained. “You’re right on it here and I’ve heard it can rise sixty feet in a night.”

They did indeed have a bathroom; an old tin bath and a chipped water heater stood in a walled-off alcove at the end of the back veranda. But, as the women found to their disgust, the lavatory was nothing more than a hole in the ground some two hundred yards away from the house, and it stank. After New Zealand, primitive.

“Whoever lived here wasn’t very clean,” Fee said as she ran her finger through the dust on the sideboard.

Father Ralph laughed. “You’ll fight a losing battle trying to get rid of that,” he said. “This is the Outback, and there are three things you’ll never defeat—the heat, the dust and the flies. No matter what you do, they’ll aways be with you.”

Fee looked at the priest. “You’re very good to us, Father.”

“And why not? You’re the only relatives of my very good friend, Mary Carson.”

She shrugged, unimpressed. “I’m not used to being on friendly terms with a priest. In New Zealand they kept themselves very much to themselves.”

“You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

“No, Paddy’s the Catholic. Naturally the children have been reared as Catholics, every last one of them, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“It never occurred to me. Do you resent it?”

“I really don’t care one way or the other.”

“You didn’t convert?”

“I’m not a hypocrite, Father de Bricassart. I had lost faith in my own church, and I had no wish to espouse a different, equally meaningless creed.”

“I see.” He watched Meggie as she stood on the front veranda, peering up the track toward Drogheda big house. “She’s so pretty, your daughter. I have a fondness for titian hair, you know. Hers would have sent the artist running for his brushes. I’ve never seen exactly that color before. Is she your only daughter?”

“Yes. Boys run in both Paddy’s family and my own; girls are unusual.”

“Poor little thing,” he said obscurely.

After the crates arrived from Sydney and the house took on a more familiar look with its books, china, ornaments and the parlor filled with Fee’s furniture, things began to settle down. Paddy and the boys older than Stu were away most of the time with the two station hands Mary Carson had retained to teach them the many differences between sheep in northwest New South Wales and sheep in New Zealand. Fee, Meggie and Stu discovered the differences between running a house in New Zealand and living in the head stockman’s residence on Drogheda; there was a tacit understanding they would never disturb Mary Carson herself, but her housekeeper and her maids were just as eager to help the women as her station hands were to help the men.

Drogheda was, everyone learned, a world in itself, so cut off from civilization that after a while even Gillanbone became no more than a name with remote memories. Within the bounds of the great Home Paddock lay stables, a smithy, garages, innumerable sheds storing everything from feed to machinery, dog kennels and runs, a labyrinthine maze of stockyards, a mammoth shearing shed with the staggering number of twenty-six stands in it, and yet another jigsaw puzzle of yards behind it. There were fowl runs, pigpens, cow bails and a dairy, quarters for the twenty-six shearers, small shacks for the rouseabouts, two other, smaller, houses like their own for stockmen, a jackaroos’ barracks, a slaughter yard, and woodheaps.

All this sat in just about the middle of a treeless circle whose diameter measured three miles: the Home Paddock. Only at the point where the head stockman’s house lay did the conglomeration of buildings almost touch the forests beyond. However, there were many trees around the sheds, yards and animal runs, to provide welcome and necessary shade; mostly pepper trees, huge, hardy, dense and sleepily lovely. Beyond in the long grass of the Home Paddock, horses and milch cows grazed drowsily.

The deep gully beside the head stockman’s house had a shallow, sluggish stream of muddy water at its bottom. No one credited Father Ralph’s tale of its rising sixty feet overnight; it didn’t seem possible. Water from this creek was pumped up by hand to service the bathroom and kitchen, and it took the women a long time to get used to washing themselves, the dishes and the clothes in greenish-brown water. Six massive corrugated-iron tanks perched on wooden derricklike towers caught rain from the roof and provided them with drinking water, but they learned they must use it very sparingly, that it was never to be used for washing. For there was no guarantee as to when the next rains might come to fill the tanks up.

The sheep and cattle drank artesian water, not tapped from an easily accessible water table, but true artesian water brought from over three thousand feet below the surface. It gushed at boiling point from a pipe at what was called the borehead, and ran through tiny channels fringed with poisonously green grass to every paddock on the property. These channels were the bore drains, and the heavily sulphurated, mineral-laden water they contained was not fit for human consumption.

At first the distances staggered them; Drogheda had two hundred and fifty thousand acres. Its longest boundary stretched for eighty miles. The homestead was forty miles and twenty-seven gates away from Gillanbone, the only settlement of any kind closer than a hundred and six miles. The narrow eastern boundary was formed by the Barwon River, which was what the locals called this northern course of the Darling River, a great muddy thousand-mile stream that finally joined the Murray River and surged out into the southern ocean fifteen hundred miles away in South Australia. Gillan Creek, which ran in the gully beside the head stockman’s house, merged into the Barwon two miles beyond the Home Paddock.

Paddy and the boys loved it. Sometimes they spent days on end in the saddle, miles away from the homestead; camping at night under a sky so vast and filled with stars it seemed they were a part of God.

The grey-brown land swarmed with life. Kangaroos in flocks of thousands streamed leaping through the trees, taking fences in their stride, utterly lovely in their grace and freedom and numbers; emus built their nests in the middle of the grassy plain and stalked like giants about their territorial boundaries, taking fright at anything strange and running fleeter than horses away from their dark-green, football-sized eggs; termites built rusty towers like miniature skyscrapers; huge ants with a savage bite poured in rivers down mounded holes in the ground.

The bird life was so rich and varied there seemed no end to new kinds, and they lived not in ones and twos but in thousands upon thousands: tiny green-and-yellow parakeets Fee used to call love-birds, but which the locals called budgerigars; scarlet-and-blue smallish parrots called rosellas; big pale-grey parrots with brilliant purplish-pink breasts, underwings and heads, called galahs; and the great pure white birds with cheeky yellow combs called sulphur-crested cockatoos. Exquisite tiny finches whirred and wheeled, so did sparrows and starlings, and the strong brown kingfishers called kookaburras laughed and chuckled gleefully or dived for snakes, their favorite food. They were well-nigh human, all these birds, and completely without fear, sitting in hundreds in the trees peering about with bright intelligent eyes, screaming, talking, laughing, imitating anything that produced a sound.

Fearsome lizards five or six feet long pounded over the ground and leaped lithely for high tree branches, as at home off the earth as on it; they were goannas. And there were many other lizards, smaller but some no less frightening, adorned with horny triceratopean ruffs about their necks, or with swollen, bright-blue tongues. Of snakes the variety was almost endless, and the Clearys learned that the biggest and most dangerous-looking were often the most benign, while a stumpy little creature a foot long might be a death adder; carpet snakes, copper snakes, tree snakes, red-bellied black snakes, brown snakes, lethal tiger snakes.

And insects! Grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, bees, flies of all sizes and sorts, cicadas, gnats, dragonflies, giant moths and so many butterflies! The spiders were dreadful, huge hairy things with a leg span of inches, or deceptively small and deadly black things lurking in the lavatory; some lived in vast wheeling webs slung between trees, some rocked inside dense gossamer cradles hooked among grass blades, others dived into little holes in the ground complete with lids which shut after them.

Predators were there, too: wild pigs frightened of nothing, savage and flesh-eating, black hairy things the size of fully grown cows; dingoes, the wild native dogs which slunk close to the ground and blended into the grass; crows in hundreds carking desolately from the blasted white skeletons of dead trees; hawks and eagles, hovering motionless on the air currents.

From some of these the sheep and cattle had to be protected, especially when they dropped their young. The kangaroos and rabbits ate the precious grass; the pigs and dingoes ate lambs, calves and sick animals; the crows pecked out eyes. The Clearys had to learn to shoot, then carried rifles as they rode, sometimes to put a suffering beast out of its misery, sometimes to fell a boar or a dingo.

This, thought the boys exultantly, was life. Not one of them yearned for New Zealand; when the flies clustered like syrup in the corners of their eyes, up their noses, in their mouths and ears, they learned the Australian trick and hung corks bobbing from the ends of strings all around the brims of their hats. To prevent crawlies from getting up inside the legs of their baggy trousers they tied strips of kangaroo hide called bowyangs below their knees, giggling at the silly-sounding name, but awed by the necessity. New Zealand was tame compared to this; this was life.

Tied to the house and its immediate environs, the women found life much less to their liking, for they had not the leisure or the excuse to ride, nor did they have the stimulation of varying activities. It was just harder to do what women always did: cook, clean, wash, iron, care for babies. They battled the heat, the dust, the flies, the many steps, the muddy water, the nearly perennial absence of men to carry and chop wood, pump water, kill fowls. The heat especially was hard to bear, and it was as yet only early spring; even so, the thermometer out on the shady veranda reached a hundred degrees every day. Inside the kitchen with the range going, it was a hundred and twenty degrees.

Their many layers of clothing were close-fitting and designed for New Zealand, where inside the house it was almost always cool. Mary Carson, exercising gently by walking down to see her sister-in-law, looked at Fee’s high-necked, floor-length calico gown superciliously. She herself was clad in the new fashion, a cream silk dress coming only halfway down her calves, with loose elbow sleeves, no waist and a low décolletage.

“Really, Fiona, you’re hopelessly old-fashioned,” she said, glancing round the parlor with its fresh coat of cream paint, the Persian carpets and the spindly priceless furniture.

“I have no time to be anything else,” Fee said, curtly for her when acting as hostess.

“You’ll have more time now, with the men away so much and fewer meals to get. Raise your hems and stop wearing petticoats and stays, or you’ll die when summer comes. It can get fifteen to twenty degrees hotter than this, you know.” Her eyes dwelled on the portrait of the beautiful blond woman in her Empress Eugénie crinoline. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing.

“My grandmother.”

“Oh, really? And the furniture, the carpets?”

“Mine, from my grandmother.”

“Oh, really? My dear Fiona, you’ve come down in the world, haven’t you?”

Fee never lost her temper, so she didn’t now, but her thin lips got thinner. “I don’t think so, Mary. I have a good man; you ought to know that.”

“But penniless. What was your maiden name?”

“Armstrong.”

“Oh, really? Not the Roderick Armstrong Armstrongs?”

“He’s my oldest brother. His namesake was my great-grandfather.”

Mary Carson rose, flapping her picture hat at the flies, which were not respecters of person. “Well, you’re better born than the Clearys are, even if I do say so myself. Did you love Paddy enough to give all that up?”

“My reasons for what I do,” said Fee levelly, “are my business, Mary, not yours. I do not discuss my husband, even with his sister.”

The lines on either side of Mary Carson’s nose got deeper, her eyes bulged slightly. “Hoity-toity!”

She did not come again, but Mrs. Smith, her housekeeper, came often, and repeated Mary Carson’s advice about their clothes.

“Look,” she said, “there’s a sewing machine in my quarters which I never use. I’ll have a couple of the rouseabouts carry it down. If I do need to use it, I’ll come down here.” Her eyes strayed to baby Hal, rolling on the floor gleefully. “I like to hear the sound of children, Mrs. Cleary.”

Once every six weeks the mail came by horse-drawn dray from Gillanbone; this was the only contact with the outside world. Drogheda possessed a Ford truck, another specially constructed Ford truck with a water tank on its tray, a model-T Ford car and a Rolls-Royce limousine, but no one ever seemed to use them to go into Gilly save Mary Carson infrequently. Forty miles was as far as the moon.

Bluey Williams had the mail contract for the district and took six weeks to cover his territory. His flat-topped dray with its ten-foot wheels was drawn by a magnificent team of twelve draft horses, and was loaded with all the things the outlying stations ordered. As well as the Royal Mail, he carried groceries, gasoline in forty-four-gallon drums, kerosene in square five-gallon cans, hay, bags of corn, calico bags of sugar and flour, wooden chests of tea, bags of potatoes, farm machinery, mail-order toys and clothes from Anthony Hordern’s in Sydney, plus anything else that had to be brought in from Gilly or Outside. Moving at the clipping rate of twenty miles a day, he was welcomed wherever he stopped, plied for news and weather far away, handed the scribbled scraps of paper carefully wrapped around money for goods he would purchase in Gilly, handed the laboriously written letters which went into the canvas sack marked “Royal GVR Mail.”

West of Gilly there were only two stations on the route, Drogheda closer in, Bugela farther out; beyond Bugela lay the territory that got mail only once every six months. Bluey’s dray swung in a great zigzagging are through all the stations southwest, west and northwest, then returned to Gilly before setting out eastward, a smaller journey because Booroo town took over sixty miles east. Sometimes he brought people sitting beside him on his unsheltered leather seat, visitors or hopefuls looking for work; sometimes he took people away, visitors or discontented stockmen or maids or rouseabouts, very occasionally a governess. The squatters owned cars to transport themselves, but those who worked for the squatters depended upon Bluey for transport as well as goods and letters.

After the bolts of cloth Fee had ordered came on the mail, she sat down at the donated sewing machine and began to make loose dresses in light cotton for herself and Meggie, light trousers and overalls for the men, smocks for Hal, curtains for the windows. There was no doubt it was cooler minus layers of underwear and tightly fitting outerwear.

Life was lonely for Meggie, only Stuart at the house among the boys. Jack and Hughie were off with their father learning to be stockmen—jackaroos, the young apprentices were called. Stuart wasn’t company the way Jack and Hughie used to be. He lived in a world all his own, a quiet little boy who preferred to sit for hours watching the behavior of a throng of ants than climb trees, whereas Meggie adored to climb trees and thought Australian gums were marvelous, of infinite variety and difficulty. Not that there was much time for tree-climbing, or antwatching for that matter. Meggie and Stuart worked hard. They chopped and carried the wood, dug holes for refuse, tended the vegetable garden and looked after the fowls and pigs. They also learned how to kill snakes and spiders, though they never ceased to fear them.

The rainfall had been mediocrely good for several years; the creek was low but the tanks were about half full. The grass was still fairly good, but apparently nothing to its lush times.

“It will probably get worse,” said Mary Carson grimly.

But they were to know flood before they encountered a full-fledged drought. Halfway through January the country caught the southern edge of the northwest monsoons. Captious in the extreme, the great winds blew to suit themselves. Sometimes only the far northern tips of the continent felt their drenching summer rains, sometimes they traveled far down the Outback and gave the unhappy urbanites of Sydney a wet summer. That January the clouds stormed dark across the sky; torn into sodden shreds by the wind, and it began to rain; not a gentle downpour but a steady, roaring deluge which went on and on.

They had been warned; Bluey Williams had turned up with his dray loaded high and twelve spare horses behind him, for he was moving fast to get through his rounds before the rains made further provisioning of the stations impossible.

“Monsoons are comin’,” he said, rolling a cigarette and indicating piles of extra groceries with his whip. “The Cooper an’ the Barcoo an’ the Diamantina are runnin’ real bankers an’ the Overflow is overflowin’. The whole Queenslan’ Outback’s two foot under water an’ them poor buggers is tryin’ to find a rise in the groun’ to put the sheep on.”

Suddenly there was a controlled panic; Paddy and the boys worked like madmen, moving the sheep out of the low-lying paddocks and as far away from the creek and the Barwon as they could. Father Ralph turned up, saddled his horse and set off with Frank and the best team of dogs for two uncleared paddocks alongside the Barwon, while Paddy and the two stockmen each took a boy in other directions.

Father Ralph was an excellent stockman himself. He rode a thoroughbred chestnut mare Mary Carson had given him, clad in faultlessly tailored buff jodhpurs, shiny tan knee boots, and a spotless white shirt with its sleeves rolled up his sinewy arms and its neck open to show his smooth brown chest. In baggy old grey twill trousers tied with bowyangs and a grey flannel undershirt, Frank felt like a poor relation. Which was what he was, he thought wryly, following the straight figure on the dainty mare through a stand of box and pine beyond the creek. He himself rode a hard-mouthed piebald stock horse, a mean-tempered beast with a will of its own and a ferocious hatred of other horses. The dogs were yelping and cavorting in excitement, fighting and snarling among themselves until parted with a flick from Father Ralph’s viciously wielded stock whip. It seemed there was nothing the man couldn’t do; he was familiar with the coded whistles setting the dogs to work, and plied his whip much better than Frank, still learning this exotic Australian art.

The big Queensland blue brute that led the dog pack took a slavish fancy to the priest and followed him without question, meaning Frank was very definitely the second-string man. Half of Frank didn’t mind; he alone among Paddy’s sons had not taken to life on Drogheda. He had wanted nothing more than to quit New Zealand, but not to come to this. He hated the ceaseless patrolling of the paddocks, the hard ground to sleep on most nights, the savage dogs which could not be treated as pets and were shot if they failed to do their work.

But the ride into the gathering clouds had an element of adventure to it; even the bending, cracking trees seemed to dance with an outlandish joy. Father Ralph worked like a man in the grip of some obsession, sooling the dogs after unsuspecting bands of sheep, sending the silly woolly things leaping and bleating in fright until the low shapes streaking through the grass got them packed tight and running. Only having the dogs enabled a small handful of men to operate a property the size of Drogheda; bred to work sheep or cattle, they were amazingly intelligent and needed very little direction.

By nightfall Father Ralph and the dogs, with Frank trying to do his inadequate best behind them, had cleared all the sheep out of one paddock, normally several days’ work. He unsaddled his mare near a clump of trees by the gate to the second paddock, talking optimistically of being able to get the stock out of it also before the rain started. The dogs were sprawled flat out in the grass, tongues lolling, the big Queensland blue fawning and cringing at Father Ralph’s feet. Frank dug a repulsive collection of kangaroo meat out of his saddlebag and flung it to the dogs, which fell on it snapping and biting at each other jealously.

“Bloody awful brutes,” he said. “They don’t behave like dogs; they’re just jackals.”

“I think these are probably a lot closer to what God intended dogs should be,” said Father Ralph mildly. “Alert, intelligent, aggressive and almost untamed. For myself, I prefer them to the housepet species.” He smiled. “The cats, too. Haven’t you noticed them around the sheds? As wild and vicious as panthers; won’t let a human being near them. But they hunt magnificently, and call no man master or provider.”

He unearthed a cold piece of mutton and a packet of bread and butter from his saddlebag, carved a hunk from the mutton and handed the rest to Frank. Putting the bread and butter on a log between them, he sank his white teeth into the meat with evident enjoyment. Thirst was slaked from a canvas water bag, then cigarettes rolled.

A lone wilga tree stood nearby; Father Ralph indicated it with his cigarette.

“That’s the spot to sleep,” he said, unstrapping his blanket and picking up his saddle.

Frank followed him to the tree, commonly held the most beautiful in this part of Australia. Its leaves were dense and a pale lime green, its shape almost perfectly rounded. The foliage grew so close to the ground that sheep could reach it easily, the result being that every wilga bottom was mown as straight as a topiary hedge. If the rain began they would have more shelter under it than any other tree, for Australian trees were generally thinner of foliage than the trees of wetter lands.

“You’re not happy, Frank, are you?” Father Ralph asked, lying down with a sigh and rolling another smoke.

From his position a couple of feet away Frank turned to look at him suspiciously. “What’s happy?”

“At the moment, your father and brothers. But not you, not your mother, and not your sister. Don’t you like Australia?”

“Not this bit of it. I want to go to Sydney. I might have a chance there to make something of myself.”

“Sydney, eh? It’s a den of iniquity.” Father Ralph was smiling.

“I don’t care! Out here I’m stuck the same way I was in New Zealand; I can’t get away from him.”

“Him?”

But Frank had not meant to say it, and would say no more. He lay looking up at the leaves.

“How old are you, Frank?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Oh, yes! Have you ever been away from your people?”

“No.”

“Have you even been to a dance, had a girlfriend?”

“No.” Frank refused to give him his title.

“Then he’ll not hold you much longer.”

“He’ll hold me until I die.”

Father Ralph yawned, and composed himself for sleep. “Good night,” he said.

In the morning the clouds were lower, but the rain held off all day and they got the second paddock cleared. A slight ridge ran clear across Drogheda from northeast to southwest; it was in these paddocks the stock were concentrated, where they had higher ground to seek if the water rose above the escarpments of the creek and the Barwon.

The rain began almost on nightfall, as Frank and the priest hurried at a fast trot toward the creek ford below the head stockman’s house.

“No use worrying about blowing them now!” Father Ralph shouted. “Dig your heels in, lad, or you’ll drown in the mud!”

They were soaked within seconds, and so was the hard-baked ground. The fine, nonporous soil became a sea of mud, miring the horses to their hocks and setting them floundering. While the grass persisted they managed to press on, but near the creek where the earth had been trodden to bareness they had to dismount. Once relieved of their burdens, the horses had no trouble, but Frank found it impossible to keep his balance. It was worse than a skating rink. On hands and knees they crawled to the top of the creek bank, and slid down it like projectiles. The stone roadway, which was normally covered by a foot of lazy water, was under four feet of racing foam; Frank heard the priest laugh. Urged on by shouts and slaps from sodden hats, the horses managed to scramble up the far bank without mishap, but Frank and Father Ralph could not. Every time they tried, they slid back again. The priest had just suggested they climb a willow when Paddy, alerted by the appearance of riderless horses, came with a rope and hauled them out.

Smiling and shaking his head, Father Ralph refused Paddy’s offer of hospitality.

“I’m expected at the big house,” he said.

Mary Carson heard him calling before any of her staff did, for he had chosen to walk around to the front of the house, thinking it would be easier to reach his room.

“You’re not coming inside like that,” she said, standing on the veranda.

“Then be a dear, get me several towels and my case.”

Unembarrassed, she watched him peel off his shirt, boots and breeches, leaning against the half-open window into her drawing room as he toweled the worst of the mud off.

“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, Ralph de Bricassart,” she said. “Why is it so many priests are beautiful? The Irishness? They’re rather a handsome people, the Irish. Or is it that beautiful men find the priesthood a refuge from the consequences of their looks? I’ll bet the girls in Gilly just eat their hearts out over you.”

“I learned long ago not to take any notice of love-sick girls.” He laughed. “Any priest under fifty is a target for some of them, and a priest under thirty-five is usually a target for all of them. But it’s only the Protestant girls who openly try to seduce me.”

“You never answer my questions outright, do you?” Straightening, she laid her palm on his chest and held it there. “You’re a sybarite, Ralph, you lie in the sun. Are you as brown all over?”

Smiling, he leaned his head forward, then laughed into her hair, his hands unbuttoning the cotton drawers; as they fell to the ground he kicked them away, standing like a Praxiteles statue while she toured all the way around him, taking her time and looking.

The last two days had exhilarated him, so did the sudden awareness that she was perhaps more vulnerable than he had imagined; but he knew her, and he felt quite safe in asking, “Do you want me to make love to you, Mary?”

She eyed his flaccid penis, snorting with laughter. “I wouldn’t dream of putting you to so much trouble! Do you need women, Ralph?”

His head reared back scornfully. “No!”

“Men?”

“They’re worse than women. No, I don’t need them.”

“How about yourself?”

“Least of all.”

“Interesting.” Pushing the window all the way up, she stepped through into the drawing room. “Ralph, Cardinal de Bricassart!” she mocked. But away from those discerning eyes of his she sagged back into her wing chair and clenched her fists, the gesture which rails against the inconsistencies of fate.

Naked, Father Ralph stepped off the veranda to stand on the barbered lawn with his arms raised above his head, eyes closed; he let the rain pour over him in warm, probing, spearing runnels, an exquisite sensation on bare skin. It was very dark. But he was still flaccid.

The creek broke its banks and the water crept higher up the piles of Paddy’s house, farther out across the Home Paddock toward the homestead itself.

“It will go down tomorrow,” said Mary Carson when Paddy went to report, worried.

As usual, she was right; over the next week the water ebbed and finally returned to its normal channels. The sun came out, the temperature zoomed to a hundred and fifteen in the shade, and the grass seemed to take wing for the sky, thigh-high and clean, bleached brilliant as gilt, hurting the eyes. Washed and dusted, the trees glittered, and the hordes of parrots came back from wherever they had gone while the rain fell to flash their rainbow bodies amid the timber, more loquacious than ever.

Father Ralph had returned to succor his neglected parishioners, serene in the knowledge his knuckles would not be rapped; under the pristine white shirt next to his heart resided a check for one thousand pounds. The bishop would be ecstatic.

The sheep were moved back to their normal pasture and the Clearys were forced to learn the Outback habit of siesta. They rose at five, got everything done before midday, then collapsed in twitching, sweating heaps until five in the afternoon. This applied both to the women at the house and the men in the paddocks. Chores which could not be done early were done after five, and the evening meal eaten after the sun had gone down at a table outside on the veranda. All the beds had been moved outside as well for the heat persisted through the night. It seemed as if the mercury had not gone below a century in weeks, day or night. Beef was a forgotten memory, only a sheep small enough to last without tainting until it was all eaten. Their palates longed for a change from the eternal round of baked mutton chops, mutton stew, shepherd’s pie made of minced mutton, curried mutton, roast leg of mutton, boiled pickled mutton, mutton casserole.

But at the beginning of February life changed abruptly for Meggie and Stuart. They were sent to the convent in Gillanbone to board, for there was no school closer. Hal, said Paddy, could learn by correspondence from Blackfriars School in Sydney when he was old enough, but in the meantime, since Meggie and Stuart were used to teachers, Mary Carson had generously offered to pay for their board and tuition at the Holy Cross convent. Besides, Fee was too busy with Hal to supervise correspondence lessons as well. It had been tacitly understood from the beginning that Jack and Hughie would go no further with their educations; Drogheda needed them on the land, and the land was what they wanted.

Meggie and Stuart found it a strange, peaceful existence at Holy Cross after their life on Drogheda, but especially after the Sacred Heart in Wahine. Father Ralph had subtly indicated to the nuns that this pair of children were his protégés, their aunt the richest woman in New South Wales. So Meggie’s shyness was transformed from a vice into a virtue, and Stuart’s odd isolation, his habit of staring for hours into illimitable distances, earned him the epithet “saintly.”

It was very peaceful indeed, for there were very few boarders; people of the district wealthy enough to send their offspring to boarding school invariably preferred Sydney. The convent smelled of polish and flowers, its dark high corridors awash with quietness and a tangible holiness. Voices were muted, life went on behind a black thin veil. No one caned them, no one shouted at them, and there was always Father Ralph.

He came to see them often, and had them to stay at the presbytery so regularly he decided to paint the bedroom Meggie used a delicate apple green, buy new curtains for the windows and a new quilt for the bed. Stuart continued to sleep in a room which had been cream and brown through two redecorations; it simply never occurred to Father Ralph to wonder if Stuart was happy. He was the afterthought who to avoid offense must also be invited.

Just why he was so fond of Meggie Father Ralph didn’t know, nor for that matter did he spend much time wondering about it. It had begun with pity that day in the dusty station yard when he had noticed her lagging behind; set apart from the rest of her family by virtue of her sex, he had shrewdly guessed. As to why Frank also moved on an outer perimeter, this did not intrigue him at all, nor did he feel moved to pity Frank. There was something in Frank which killed tender emotions: a dark heart, a spirit lacking inner light. But Meggie? She had moved him unbearably, and he didn’t really know why. There was the color of her hair, which pleased him; the color and form of her eyes, like her mother’s and therefore beautiful, but so much sweeter, more expressive; and her character, which he saw as the perfect female character, passive yet enormously strong. No rebel, Meggie; on the contrary. All her life she would obey, move within the boundaries of her female fate.

Yet none of it added up to the full total. Perhaps, had he looked more deeply into himself, he might have seen that what he felt for her was the curious result of time, and place, and person. No one thought of her as important, which meant there was a space in her life into which he could fit himself and be sure of her love; she was a child, and therefore no danger to his way of life or his priestly reputation; she was beautiful, and he enjoyed beauty; and, least acknowledged of all, she filled an empty space in his life which his God could not, for she had warmth and a human solidity. Because he could not embarrass her family by giving her gifts, he gave her as much of his company as he could, and spent time and thought on redecorating her room at the presbytery; not so much to see her pleasure as to create a fitting setting for his jewel. No pinchbeck for Meggie.

At the beginning of May the shearers arrived on Drogheda. Mary Carson was extraordinarily aware of how everything on Drogheda was done, from deploying the sheep to cracking a stock whip; she summoned Paddy to the big house some days before the shearers came, and without moving from her wing chair she told him precisely what to do down to the last little detail. Used to New Zealand shearing, Paddy had been staggered by the size of the shed, its twenty-six stands; now, after the interview with his sister, facts and figures warred inside his head. Not only would Drogheda sheep be shorn on Drogheda, but Bugela and Dibban-Dibban and Beel-Beel sheep as well. It meant a grueling amount of work for every soul on the place, male and female. Communal shearing was the custom and the stations sharing Drogheda’s shearing facilities would naturally pitch in to help, but the brunt of the incidental work inevitably fell on the shoulders of those on Drogheda.

The shearers would bring their own cook with them and buy their food from the station store, but those vast amounts of food had to be found; the ramshackle barracks with kitchen and primitive bathroom attached had to be scoured, cleaned and equipped with mattresses and blankets. Not all stations were as generous as Drogheda was to its shearers, but Drogheda prided itself on its hospitality, and its reputation as a “bloody good shed.” For this was the one activity in which Mary Carson participated, so she didn’t stint her purse. Not only was it one of the biggest sheds in New South Wales, but it required the very best men to be had, men of the Jackie Howe caliber; over three hundred thousand sheep would be shorn there before the shearers loaded their swags into the contractor’s old Ford truck and disappeared down the track to their next shed.

Frank had not been home for two weeks. With old Beerbarrel Pete the stockman, a team of dogs, two stock horses and a light sulky attached to an unwilling nag to hold their modest needs, they had set out for the far western paddocks to bring the sheep in, working them closer and closer, culling and sorting. It was slow, tedious work, not to be compared with that wild muster before the floods. Each paddock had its own stock-yards, in which some of the grading and marking would be done and the mobs held until it was their turn to come in. The shearing shed yards accommodated only ten thousand sheep at a time, so life wouldn’t be easy while the shearers were there; it would be a constant flurry of exchanging mobs, unshorn for shorn.

When Frank stepped into his mother’s kitchen she was standing beside the sink at a never-ending job, peeling potatoes.

“Mum, I’m home!” he said, joy in his voice.

As she swung around her belly showed, and his two weeks away lent his eyes added perception.

“Oh, God!” he said.

Her eyes lost their pleasure in seeing him, her face flooded with scarlet shame; she spread her hands over her ballooning apron as if they could hide what her clothes could not.

Frank was shaking. “The dirty old goat!”

“Frank, I can’t let you say things like that. You’re a man now, you ought to understand. This is no different from the way you came into the world yourself, and it deserves the same respect. It isn’t dirty. When you insult Daddy, you insult me.”

“He had no right! He should have left you alone!” Frank hissed, wiping a fleck of foam from the corner of his trembling mouth.

“It isn’t dirty,” she repeated wearily, and looked at him from her clear tired eyes as if she had suddenly decided to put shame behind her forever. “It’s not dirty, Frank, and nor is the act which created it.”

This time his face reddened. He could not continue to meet her gaze, so he turned and went through into the room he shard with Bob, Jack and Hughie. Its bare walls and little single beds mocked him, mocked him, the sterile and featureless look to it, the lack of a presence to warm it, a purpose to hallow it. And her face, her beautiful tired face with its prim halo of golden hair, all alight because of what she and that hairy old goat had done in the terrible heat of summer.

He could not get away from it, he could not get away from her, from the thoughs at the back of his mind, from the hungers natural to his age and manhood. Mostly he managed to push it all below consciousness, but when she flaunted tangible evidence of her lust before his eyes, threw her mysterious activity with that lecherous old beast in his very teeth… How could he think of it, how could he consent to it, how could he bear it? He wanted to be able to think of her as totally holy, pure and untainted as the Blessed Mother, a being who was above such things though all her sisters throughout the world be guilty of it. To see her proving his concept of her wrong was the road to madness. It had become necessary to his sanity to imagine that she lay with that ugly old man in perfect chastity, to have a place to sleep, but that in the night they never turned toward each other, or touched. Oh, God!

A scraping clang made him look down, to find he had twisted the brass rail of the bed’s foot into an S.

“Why aren’t you Daddy?” he asked it.

“Frank,” said his mother from the doorway.

He looked up, black eyes glittering and wet like rained-upon coal. “I’ll end up killing him,” he said.

“If you do that, you’ll kill me,” said Fee, coming to sit upon the bed.

“No, I’d free you!” he countered wildly, hopefully.

“Frank, I can never be free, and I don’t want to be free. I wish I knew where your blindness comes from, but I don’t. It isn’t mine, nor is it your father’s. I know you’re not happy, but must you take it out on me, and on Daddy? Why do you insist upon making everything so hard? Why?” She looked down at her hands, looked up at him. “I don’t want to say this, but I think I have to. It’s time you found yourself a girl, Frank, got married and had a family of your own. There’s room on Drogheda. I’ve never been worried about the other boys in that respect; they don’t seem to have your nature at all. But you need a wife, Frank. If you had one, you wouldn’t have time to think about me.”

He had turned his back upon her, and wouldn’t turn around. For perhaps five minutes she sat on the bed hoping he would say something, then she sighed, got up and left.

5

After the shearers had gone and the district had settled into the semi-inertia of winter came the annual Gillanbone Show and Picnic Races. It was the most important event in the social calendar, and went on for two days. Fee didn’t feel well enough to go, so Paddy drove Mary Carson into town in her Rolls-Royce without his wife to support him or keep Mary’s tongue in its silent position. He had noticed that for some mysterious reason Fee’s very presence quelled his sister, put her at a disadvantage.

Everyone else was going. Under threat of death to behave themselves, the boys rode in with Beerbarrel Pete, Jim, Tom, Mrs. Smith and the maids in the truck, but Frank left early on his own in the model-T Ford. The adults of the party were all staying over for the second day’s race meeting; for reasons known best to herself, Mary Carson declined Father Ralph’s offer of accommodation at the presbytery, but urged Paddy to accept it for himself and Frank. Where the two stockmen and Tom, the garden rouseabout, stayed no one knew, but Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat had friends in Gilly who put them up.

It was ten in the morning when Paddy deposited his sister in the best room the Hotel Imperial had to offer; he made his way down to the bar and found Frank standing at it, a schooner of beer in his hand.

“Let me buy the next one, old man,” Paddy said genially to his son. “I’ve got to take Auntie Mary to the Picnic Races luncheon, and I need moral sustenance if I’m going to get through the ordeal without Mum.”

Habit and awe are harder to overcome than people realize until they actually try to circumvent the conduct of years; Frank found he could not do what he longed to do, he could not throw the contents of his glass in his father’s face, not in front of a bar crowd. So he downed what was left of his beer at a gulp, smiled a little sickly and said, “Sorry, Daddy, I’ve promised to meet some blokes down at the showground.”

“Well, off you go, then. But here, take this and spend it on yourself. Have a good time, and if you get drunk don’t let your mother find out.”

Frank stared at the crisp blue five-pound note in his hand, longing to tear it into shreds and fling them in Paddy’s face, but custom won again; he folded it, put it in his fob pocket and thanked his father. He couldn’t get out of the bar quickly enough.

In his best blue suit, waistcoat buttoned, gold watch secured by a gold chain and a weight made from a nugget off the Lawrence goldfields, Paddy tugged at his celluloid collar and looked down the bar for a face he might recognize. He had not been into Gilly very often during the nine months since he arrived on Drogheda, but his position as Mary Carson’s brother and heir apparent meant that he had been treated very hospitably whenever he had been in town, and that his face was well remembered. Several men beamed at him, voices offered to shout him a beer, and he was soon in the middle of a comfortable little crowd; Frank was forgotten.

Meggie’s hair was braided these days, no nun being willing (in spite of Mary Carson’s money) to attend to its curling, and it lay in two thick cables over her shoulders, tied with navy-blue ribbons. Clad in the sober navy-blue uniform of a Holy Cross student, she was escorted across the lawn from the convent to the presbytery by a nun and handed over to Father Ralph’s housekeeper, who adored her.

“Och, it’s the wee bairn’s bonnie Hielan’ hair,” she explained to the priest once when he questioned her, amused; Annie wasn’t given to liking little girls, and had deplored the presbytery’s proximity to the school.

“Come now, Annie! Hair’s inanimate; you can’t like someone just because of the color of her hair,” he said, to tease her.

“Ah, weel, she’s a puir wee lassie—skeggy, ye ken.”

He didn’t ken at all, but he didn’t ask her what “skeggy” meant, either, or pass any remarks about the fact that it rhymed with Meggie. Sometimes it was better not to know what Annie meant, or encourage her by paying much attention to what she said; she was, in her own parlance, fey, and if she pitied the child he didn’t want to be told it was because of her future rather than her past.

Frank arrived, still trembling from his encounter with his father in the bar, and at a loose end.

“Come on, Meggie, I’ll take you to the fair,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Why don’t I take you both?” Father Ralph asked, holding out his.

Sandwiched between the two men she worshipped, and hanging on to their hands for dear life, Meggie was in seventh heaven.

The Gillanbone showground lay on the banks of the Barwon River, next door to the racecourse. Though the floods were six months gone, the mud had not completely dried, and the eager feet of early comers had already pulped it to a mire. Beyond the stalls of sheep and cattle, pigs and goats, the prime and perfect livestock competing for prizes, lay tents full of handicrafts and cooking. They gazed at stock, cakes, crocheted shawls, knitted baby clothes, embroidered tablecloths, cats and dogs and canaries.

On the far side of all this was the riding ring, where young equestrians and equestriennes cantered their bob-tailed hacks before judges who looked, it seemed to a giggling Meggie, rather like horses themselves. Lady riders in magnificent serge habits perched sidesaddle on tall horses, their top hats swathed with tantalizing wisps of veiling. How anyone so precariously mounted and hatted could stay unruffled upon a horse at anything faster than an amble was beyond Meggie’s imagination, until she saw one splendid creature take her prancing animal over a series of difficult jumps and finish as impeccable as before she started. Then the lady pricked her mount with an impatient spur and cantered across the soggy ground, reining to a halt in front of Meggie, Frank and Father Ralph to bar their progress. The leg in its polished black boot hooked round the saddle was unhooked, and the lady sat truly on the side of her saddle, her gloved hands extended imperiously.

“Father! Be so kind as to help me dismount!”

He reached up to put his hands around her waist, her hands on his shoulders, and swung her lightly down; the moment her heels touched the ground he released her, took her mount’s reins in his hand and walked on, the lady beside him, matching his stride effortlessly.

“Will you win the Hunting, Miss Carmichael?” he asked in tones of utter indifference.

She pouted; she was young and very beautiful, and that curious impersonal quality of his piqued her. “I hope to win, but I can’t be sure. Miss Hopeton and Mrs. Anthony King both compete. However, I shall win the Dressage, so if I don’t win the Hunting I shan’t repine.”

She spoke with beautifully rounded vowels, and with the oddly stilted phraseology of a young lady so carefully reared and educated there was not a trace of warmth or idiom left to color her voice. As he spoke to her Father Ralph’s own speech became more pear-shaped, and quite lost its beguiling hint of Irishness; as if she brought back to him a time when he, too, had been like this. Meggie frowned, puzzled and affected by their light but guarded words, not knowing what the change in Father Ralph was, only knowing there was a change, and not one to her liking. She let go Frank’s hand, and indeed it had become difficult for them to continue walking abreast.

By the time they came to a wide puddle Frank had fallen behind them. Father Ralph’s eyes danced as he surveyed the water, almost a shallow pond; he turned to the child whose hand he had kept in his firmly, and bent down to her with a special tenderness the lady could not mistake, for it had been entirely lacking in his civil exchanges with her.

“I wear no cloak, darling Meggie, so I can’t be your Sir Walter Raleigh. I’m sure you’ll excuse me, my dear Miss Carmichael”—the reins were passed to the lady—“but I can’t permit my favorite girl to muddy her shoes, now can I?”

He picked Meggie up and tucked her easily against his hip, leaving Miss Carmichael to collect her heavy trailing skirts in one hand, the reins in her other, and splash her way across unaided. The sound of Frank’s hoot of laugher just behind them didn’t improve her temper; on the far side of the puddle she left them abruptly.

“I do believe she’d kill you if she could,” Frank said as Father Ralph put Meggie down. He was fascinated by this encounter and by Father Ralph’s deliberate cruelty. She had seemed to Frank so beautiful and so haughty that no man could gainsay her, even a priest, yet Father Ralph had wantonly set out to shatter her faith in herself, in that heady femininity she wielded like a weapon. As if the priest hated her and what she stood for, Frank thought, the world of women, an exquisite mystery he had never had the opportunity to plumb. Smarting from his mother’s words, he had wanted Miss Carmichael to notice him, the oldest son of Mary Carson’s heir, but she had not so much as deigned to admit he existed. All her attention had been focused on the priest, a being sexless and emasculated. Even if he was tall, dark and handsome.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be back for more of the same,” said Father Ralph cynically. “She’s rich, so next Sunday she’ll very ostentatiously put a ten-pound note in the plate.” He laughed at Frank’s expression. “I’m not so much older than you, my son, but in spite of my calling I’m a very worldly fellow. Don’t hold it against me; just put it down to experience.”

They had left the riding ring behind and entered the amusement part of the grounds. To Meggie and Frank alike it was enchantment. Father Ralph had given Meggie five whole shillings, and Frank had his five pounds; to own the price of admission to all those enticing booths was wonderful. Crowds thronged the area, children running everywhere, gazing wide-eyed at the luridly and somewhat inexpertly painted legends fronting tattered tents: The Fattest Lady in the World; Princess Houri the Snake Dancer (See Her Fan the Flames of a Cobra’s Rage!); The India Rubber Man; Goliath the World’s Strongest Man; Thetis the Mermaid. At each they paid their pennies and watched raptly, not noticing Thetis’s sadly tarnished scales or the toothless smile on the cobra.

At the far end, so big it required a whole side for itself, was a giant marquee with a high boardwalk along its front, a curtainlike frieze of painted figures stretching behind the entire length of the board bridge, menacing the crowd. A man with a megaphone in his hand was shouting to the gathering people.

“Here it is, gents, Jimmy Sharman’s famous boxing troupe! Eight of the world’s greatest prize fighters, and a purse to be won by any chap game to have a go!”

Women and girls were trickling out of the audience as fast as men and boys came from every direction to swell it, clustering thickly beneath the boardwalk. As solemnly as gladiators parading at the Circus Maximus, eight men filed onto the bridge and stood, bandaged hands on hips, legs apart, swaggering at the admiring oohs of the crowd. Meggie thought they were wearing underclothes, for they were clad in long black tights and vests with closely fitting grey trunks from waists to midthighs. On their chests, big white Roman capitals said JIMMY SHARMAN’S TROUPE. No two were the same size, some big, some small, some in between, but they were all of particularly fine physique. Chatting and laughing to each other in an offhand manner that suggested this was an everyday occurrence, they flexed their muscles and tried to pretend they weren’t enjoying strutting.

“Come on, chaps, who’ll take a glove?” the spruiker was braying. “Who wants to have a go? Take a glove, win a fiver!” he kept yelling between the booms of a bass drum.

“I will!” Frank shouted. “I will, I will!”

He shook off Father Ralph’s restraining hand as those around them in the throng who could see Frank’s diminutive size began to laugh and good-naturedly push him to the front.

But the spruiker was very serious as one of the troupe extended a friendly hand and pulled Frank up the ladder to stand at one side of the eight already on the bridge. “Don’t laugh, gents. He’s not very big but he is the first to volunteer! It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, you know, it’s the size of the fight in the dog! Come on now, here’s this little bloke game to try—what about some of you big blokes, eh? Put on a glove and win a fiver, go the distance with one of Jimmy Sharman’s troupe!”

Gradually the ranks of the volunteers increased, the young men self-consciously clutching their hats and eyeing the professionals who stood, a band of elite beings, alongside them. Dying to stay and see what happened, Father Ralph reluctantly decided it was more than time he removed Meggie from the vicinity, so he picked her up and turned on his heel to leave. Meggie began to scream, and the farther away he got, the louder she screamed; people were beginning to look at them, and he was so well known it was very embarrassing, not to mention undignified.

“Now look, Meggie, I can’t take you in there! Your father would flay me alive, and rightly!”

“I want to stay with Frank, I want to stay with Frank!” she howled at the top of her voice, kicking and trying to bite.

“Oh, shit!” said Father Ralph.

Yielding to the inevitable, he dug into his pocket for the required coins and approached the open flap of the marquee, one eye cocked for any of the Cleary boys; but they were nowhere to be seen, so he presumed they were safely trying their luck with the horseshoes or gorging themselves on meat pies and ice cream.

“You can’t take her in there, Father!” the foreman said, shocked.

Father Ralph lifted his eyes heavenward. “If you’ll only tell me how we can get her away from here without the entire Gilly police force arresting us for molesting a child, I’ll gladly go! But her brother volunteered and she’s not about to leave her brother without a fight that will make your chaps look like amateurs!”

The foreman shrugged. “Well, Father, I can’t argue with you, can I? In you go, but keep her out of the way, for—ah—pity’s sake. No, no, Father, put your money back in your pocket; Jimmy wouldn’t like it.”

The tent seemed full of men and boys, milling around a central ring; Father Ralph found a place at the back of the crowd against the canvas wall, hanging on to Meggie for dear life. The air was foggy from tobacco smoke and redolent with sawdust they had thrown down to absorb the mud. Frank, gloves already on his hands, was the first challenger of the day.

Though it was unusual, it was not unknown for a man out of the crowd to last the distance against one of the professional boxers. Admittedly they weren’t the best in the world, but they did include some of the best in Australia. Put up against a flyweight because of his size, Frank knocked him out with the third punch he threw, and offered to fight someone else. By the time he was on his third professional the word had got around, and the tent was so jammed they could not fit another eager spectator inside.

He had hardly been touched by a glove, the few blows he had taken only provoking his ever-smoldering rage. He was wild-eyed, almost spitting in passion, each of his opponents wearing Paddy’s face, the yells and cheers of the crowd throbbing in his head like a vast single voice chanting Go! Go! Go! Oh, how he had ached for the chance to fight, denied him since coming to Drogheda! For to fight was the only way he knew of ridding himself of anger and pain, and as he landed the felling punch he thought the great dull voice in his ears changed its song, to Kill! Kill! Kill!

Then they put him with one of the real champions, a lightweight under orders to keep Frank at a distance and find out if he could box as well as he could punch. Jimmy Sharman’s eyes were shining. He was always on the lookout for champions, and these little country shows had yielded several. The lightweight did as he was told, hard-pressed in spite of his superior reach, while Frank, so possessed by his hunger to kill that dancing, elusive figure he saw nothing else, went after him. He learned with every clinch and flurry of blows, one of those strange people who even in the midst of titanic rage still can think. And he lasted the distance, in spite of the punishment those expert fists had meted out; his eye was swelling, his brow and lip cut. But he had won twenty pounds, and the respect of every man present.

Meggie wriggled from Father Ralph’s slackened clasp and bolted from the tent before he could catch hold of her. When he found her outside she had been sick, and was trying to clean her splattered shoes with a tiny handkerchief. Silently he gave her his own, stroking her bright, sobbing head. The atmosphere inside had not agreed with his gorge either, and he wished the dignity of his calling permitted him the relief of releasing it in public.

“Do you want to wait for Frank, or would you rather we went now?”

“I’ll wait for Frank,” she whispered, leaning against his side, so grateful for his calmness and sympathy.

“I wonder why you tug so at my nonexistent heart?” he mused, deeming her too sick and miserable to listen but needing to voice his thoughts aloud, as do so many people who lead a solitary life. “You don’t remind me of my mother and I never had a sister, and I wish I knew what it was about you and your wretched family… Have you had a hard life, my little Meggie?”

Frank came out of the tent, a piece of sticking plaster over his eye, dabbing at his torn lip. For the first time since Father Ralph had met him, he looked happy; the way most men did after what one knew was a good night in bed with a woman, thought the priest.

“What’s Meggie doing here?” he snarled, not quite down from the exaltation of the ring.

“Short of binding her hand and foot, not to mention gagging her, there was no way I could keep her out,” said Father Ralph tartly, not pleased at having to justify himself, but not sure Frank wouldn’t have a go at him, too. He wasn’t in the least afraid of Frank, but he was afraid of creating a scene in public. “She was frightened for you, Frank; she wanted to be near enough to you to see for herself that you were all right. Don’t be angry with her; she’s upset enough already.”

“Don’t you dare let Daddy know you were within a mile of this place,” Frank said to Meggie.

“Do you mind if we cut the rest of our tour short?” the priest asked. “I think we could all do with a rest and a cup of tea at the presbytery.” He pinched the tip of Meggie’s nose. “And you, young lady, could do with a good wash.”

Paddy had had a tormenting day with his sister, at her beck and call in a way Fee never demanded, helping her pick her fastidious, cross-patch way through the Gilly mud in imported guipure lace shoes, smiling and chatting with the people she greeted royally, standing by her side as she presented the emerald bracelet to the winner of the principal race, the Gillanbone Trophy. Why they had to spend all the prize money on a woman’s trinket instead of handing over a gold-plated cup and a nice bundle of cash was beyond him, for he did not understand the keenly amateur nature of the race meeting, the inference that the people who entered horses didn’t need vulgar money, instead could carelessly toss the winnings to the little woman. Horry Hopeton, whose bay gelding King Edward had won the emerald bracelet, already possessed a ruby, a diamond and a sapphire bracelet from other years; he had a wife and five daughters and said he couldn’t stop until he had won six bracelets.

Paddy’s starched shirt and celluloid collar chafed, the blue suit was too hot, and the exotic Sydney sea-food they had served with champagne at luncheon had not agreed with his mutton-inured digestion. And he had felt a fool, thought he looked a fool. Best though it was, his suit smacked of cheap tailoring and bucolic unfashionableness. They were not his kind of people, the bluff tweedy graziers, the lofty matrons, the toothy, horsy young women, the cream of what the Bulletin called “the squattocracy.” For they were doing their best to forget the days in the last century when they had squatted on the land and taken vast tracts of it for their own, had it tacitly acknowledged as their own with federation and the arrival of home rule. They had become the most envied group of people on the continent, ran their own political part, sent their children to exclusive Sydney schools, hobnobbed with the visiting Prince of Wales. He, plain Paddy Cleary, was a workingman. He had absolutely nothing in common with these colonial aristocrats, who reminded him of his wife’s family too much for comfort.

So when he came into the presbytery lounge to find Frank, Meggie and Father Ralph relaxed around the fire and looking as if they had spent a wonderful, carefree day, it irritated him. He had missed Fee’s genteel support unbearably and he still disliked his sister as much as he had back in his early childhood in Ireland. Then he noticed the sticking plaster over Frank’s eye, the swollen face; it was a heaven-sent excuse.

“And how do you think you’re going to face your mother looking like that?” he yelled. “Not a day out of my sight and you’re back at it again, picking fights with anyone who looks at you sideways!” Startled, Father Ralph jumped to his feet with a soothing noise half-uttered; but Frank was quicker.

“I earned myself money with this!” he said very softly, pointing to the plaster. “Twenty pounds for a few minutes’ work, better wages than Auntie Mary pays you and me combined in a month! I knocked out three good boxers and lasted the distance with a lightweight champion in Jimmy Sharman’s tent this afternoon. And I earned myself twenty pounds. It may not fit in with your ideas of what I ought to do, but this afternoon I earned the respect of every man present!”

“A few tired, punch-drunk old has-beens at a country show, and you’re full of it? Grow up, Frank! I know you can’t grow any more in body, but you might make an effort for your mother’s sake to grow in mind!”

The whiteness of Frank’s face! Like bleached bones. It was the most terrible insult a man could offer him, and this was his father; he couldn’t strike back. His breathing started coming from the bottom of his chest with the effort of keeping his hands by his sides. “No has-beens, Daddy. You know who Jimmy Sharman is as well as I do. And Jimmy Sharman himself said I had a terrific future as a boxer; he wants to take me into his troupe and train me. And he wants to pay me! I may not grow any bigger, but I’m big enough to lick any man ever born—and that goes for you, too, you stinking old he-goat!”

The inference behind the epithet was not lost on Paddy; he went as white as his son. “Don’t you dare call me that!”

“What else are you? You’re disgusting, you’re worse than a ram in rut! Couldn’t you leave her alone, couldn’t you keep your hands off her?”

“No, no, no!” Meggie screamed. Father Ralph’s hands bit into her shoulders like claws and held her painfully against him. The tears poured down her face, she twisted to free herself frantically and vainly. “No, Daddy, no! Oh, Frank, please! Please, please!” she shrilled.

But the only one who heard her was Father Ralph. Frank and Paddy faced each other, the dislike and the fear, each for the other, admitted at last. The dam of mutual love for Fee was breached and the bitter rivalry for Fee acknowledged.

“I am her husband. It is by God’s grace we are blessed with our children,” said Paddy more calmly, fighting for control.

“You’re no better than a shitty old dog after any bitch you can stick your thing into!”

“And you’re no better than the shitty old dog who fathered you, whoever he was! Thank God I never had a hand in it!” shouted Paddy, and stopped. “Oh, dear Jesus!” His rage quit him like a howling wind, he sagged and shriveled and his hands plucked at his mouth as if to tear out the tongue which had uttered the unutterable. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!”

The moment the words were out Father Ralph let go of Meggie and grabbed Frank. He had Frank’s right arm twisted behind him, his own left arm around Frank’s neck, throttling him. And he was strong, the grip paralyzing; Frank fought to be free of him, then suddenly his resistance flagged and he shook his head in submission. Meggie had fallen to the floor and knelt there, weeping, her eyes going from her brother to her father in helpless, beseeching agony. She didn’t understand what had happened, but she knew it meant she couldn’t keep them both.

“You meant it,” Frank croaked. “I must always have known it! I must always have known it.” He tried to turn his head to Father Ralph. “Let me go, Father. I won’t touch him, so help me God I won’t.”

“So help you God? God rot your souls, both of you! If you’ve ruined the child I’ll kill you!” the priest roared, the only one angry now. “Do you realize I had to keep her here to listen to this, for fear if I took her away you’d kill each other while I was gone? I ought to have let you do it, you miserable, self-centered cretins!”

“It’s all right, I’m going,” Frank said in a strange, empty voice. “I’m going to join Jimmy Sharman’s troupe, and I won’t be back.”

“You’ve got to come back!” Paddy whispered. “What can I tell your mother? You mean more to her than the rest of us put together. She’ll never forgive me!”

“Tell her I went to join Jimmy Sharman because I want to be someone. It’s the truth.”

“What I said—it wasn’t true, Frank.”

Frank’s alien black eyes flashed scornfully, the eyes the priest had wondered at the first time he saw them; what were grey-eyed Fee and blue-eyed Paddy doing with a black-eyed son? Father Ralph knew his Mendelian laws, and didn’t think even Fee’s greyness made it possible.

Frank picked up his hat and coat. “Oh, it was true! I must always have known it. The memories of Mum playing her spinet in a room you could never have owned! The feeling you hadn’t always been there, that you came after me. That she was mine first.” He laughed soundlessly. “And to think all these years I’ve blamed you for dragging her down, when it was me. It was me!”

“It was no one, Frank, no one!” the priest cried, trying to pull him back. “It’s a part of God’s great unfathomable plan; think of it like that!”

Frank shook off the detaining hand and walked to the door with his light, deadly, tiptoed gait. He was born to be a boxer, thought Father Ralph in some detached corner of his brain, that cardinal’s brain.

“God’s great unfathomable plan!” mocked the young man’s voice from the door. “You’re no better than a parrot when you act the priest, Father de Bricassart! I say God help you, because you’re the only one of us here who has no idea what he really is!”

Paddy was sitting in a chair, ashen, his shocked eyes on Meggie as she huddled on her knees by the fire, weeping and rocking herself back and forth. He got up to go to her, but Father Ralph pushed him roughly away.

“Leave her alone. You’ve done enough! There’s whiskey in the sideboard; take some. I’m going to put the child to bed, but I’ll be back to talk to you, so don’t go. Do you hear me, man?”

“I’ll be here, Father. Put her to bed.”

Upstairs in the charming apple-green bedroom the priest unbuttoned the little girl’s dress and chemise, made her sit on the edge of the bed so he could pull off her shoes and stockings. Her nightdress lay on the pillow where Annie had left it; he tugged it over her head and decently down before he removed her drawers. And all the while he talked to her about nothing, silly stories of buttons refusing to come undone, and shoes stubbornly staying tied, and ribbons that would not come off. It was impossible to tell if she heard him; with their unspoken tales of infant tragedies, of troubles and pains beyond her years, the eyes stared drearily past his shoulder.

“Now lie down, my darling girl, and try to go to sleep. I’ll be back in a little while to see you, so don’t worry, do you hear? We’ll talk about it then.”

“Is she all right?” asked Paddy as he came back into the lounge.

Father Ralph reached for the whiskey bottle standing on the sideboard, and poured a tumbler half full.

“I don’t honestly know. God in heaven, Paddy, I wish I knew which is an Irishman’s greater curse, the drink or the temper. What possessed you to say that? No, don’t even bother answering! The temper. It’s true, of course. I knew he wasn’t yours the moment I first saw him.”

“There’s not much misses you, is there?”

“I suppose not. However, it doesn’t take much more than very ordinary powers of observation to see when the various members of my parish are troubled, or in pain. And having seen, it is my duty to do what I can to help.”

“You’re very well liked in Gilly, Father.”

“For which no doubt I may thank my face and my figure,” said the priest bitterly, unable to make it sound as light as he had intended.

“Is that what you think? I can’t agree, Father. We like you because you’re a good pastor.”

“Well, I seem to be thoroughly embroiled in your troubles, at any rate,” said Father Ralph uncomfortably. “You’d best get it off your chest, man.”

Paddy stared into the fire, which he had built up to the proportions of a furnace while the priest was putting Meggie to bed, in an excess of remorse and frantic to be doing something. The empty glass in his hand shook in a series of rapid jerks; Father Ralph got up for the whiskey bottle and replenished it. After a long draft Paddy sighed, wiping the forgotten tears from his face.

“I don’t know who Frank’s father is. It happened before I met Fee. Her people are practically New Zealand’s first family socially, and her father had a big wheat-and-sheep property outside Ashburton in the South Island. Money was no object, and Fee was his only daughter. As I understand it, he’d planned her life for her—a trip to the old country, a debut at court, the right husband. She had never lifted a hand in the house, of course. They had maids and butlers and horses and big carriages; they lived like lords.

“I was the dairy hand, and sometimes I used to see Fee in the distance, walking with a little boy about eighteen months old. The next thing, old James Armstrong came to see me. His daughter, he said, had disgraced the family; she wasn’t married and she had a child. It had been hushed up, of course, but when they tried to get her away her grandmother made such a fuss they had no choice but to keep her on the place, in spite of the awkwardness. Now the grandmother was dying, there was nothing to stop them getting rid of Fee and her child. I was a single man, James said; if I’d marry her and guarantee to take her out of the South Island, they’d pay our traveling expenses and an additional five hundred pounds.

“Well, Father, it was a fortune to me, and I was tired of the single life. But I was always so shy I was never any good with the girls. It seemed like a good idea to me, and I honestly didn’t mind the child. The grandmother got wind of it and sent for me, even though she was very ill. She was a tartar in her day, I’ll bet, but a real lady. She told me a bit about Fee, but she didn’t say who the father was, and I didn’t like to ask. Anyway, she made me promise to be good to Fee —she knew they’d have Fee off the place the minute she was dead, so she had suggested to James that they find Fee a husband. I felt sorry for the poor old thing; she was terribly fond of Fee.

“Would you believe, Father, that the first time I was ever close enough to Fee to say hello to her was the day I married her?”

“Oh, I’d believe it,” the priest said under his breath. He looked at the liquid in his glass, then drained it and reached for the bottle, filling both glasses. “So you married a lady far above you, Paddy.”

“Yes. I was frightened to death of her at first. She was so beautiful in those days, Father, and so… out of it, if you know what I mean. As if she wasn’t even there, as if it was all happening to someone else.”

“She’s still beautiful, Paddy,” said Father Ralph gently. “I can see in Meggie what she must have been like before she began to age.”

“It hasn’t been an easy life for her, Father, but I don’t know what else I could have done. At least with me she was safe, and not abused. It took me two years to get up the courage to be—well, a real husband to her. I had to teach her to cook, to sweep a floor, wash and iron clothes. She didn’t know how.

“And never once in all the years we’ve been married, Father, has she ever complained, or laughed, or cried. It’s only in the most private part of our life together that she ever displays any feeling, and even then she never speaks. I hope she will, yet I don’t want her to, because I always have the idea if she did, it would be his name she’d say. Oh, I don’t mean she doesn’t like me, or our children. But I love her so much, and it just seems to me she hasn’t got that sort of feeling left in her. Except for Frank. I’ve always known she loved Frank more than the rest of us put together. She must have loved his father. But I don’t know a thing about the man, who he was, why she couldn’t marry him.”

Father Ralph looked down at his hands, blinking. “Oh, Paddy, what hell it is to be alive! Thank God I haven’t the courage to try more than the fringe of it.”

Paddy got up, rather unsteadily. “Well, I’ve done it now, Father, haven’t I? I’ve sent Frank away, and Fee will never forgive me.”

“You can’t tell her, Paddy. No, you mustn’t tell her, ever. Just tell her Frank ran away with the boxers and leave it at that. She knows how restless Frank’s been; she’ll believe you.”

“I couldn’t do that, Father!” Paddy was aghast.

“You’ve got to, Paddy. Hasn’t she known enough pain and misery? Don’t heap more on her head.” And to himself he thought: Who knows? Maybe she’ll learn to give the love she has for Frank to you at last, to you and the little thing upstairs.

“You really think that, Father?”

“I do. What happened tonight must go no further.”

“But what about Meggie? She heard it all.”

“Don’t worry about Meggie, I’ll take care of her. I don’t think she understood more of what went on than that you and Frank quarreled. I’ll make her see that with Frank gone, to tell her mother of the quarrel would only be an additional grief. Besides, I have a feeling Meggie doesn’t tell her mother much to begin with.” He got up. “Go to bed, Paddy. You’ve got to seem normal and dance attendance on Mary tomorrow, remember?”

Meggie was not asleep; she was lying with eyes wide in the dim light of the little lamp beside her bed. The priest sat down beside her and noticed her hair still in its braids. Carefully he untied the navy ribbons and pulled gently until the hair lay in a rippling, molten sheet across the pillow.

“Frank has gone away, Meggie,” he said.

“I know, Father.”

“Do you know why, darling?”

“He had a fight with Daddy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go with Frank. He needs me.”

“You can’t, my Meggie.”

“Yes, I can. I was going to find him tonight, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up, and I don’t like the dark. But in the morning I’ll look for him.”

“No, Meggie, you mustn’t. You see, Frank’s got his own life to lead, and it’s time he went away. I know you don’t want him to go away, but he’s been wanting to go for a long time. You mustn’t be selfish; you’ve got to let him live his own life.” The monotony of repetition, he thought, keep on drumming it in. “When we grow up it’s natural and right for us to want a life away from the home we grew up in, and Frank is a grown man. He ought to have his own home now, his own wife and family. Do you see that, Meggie? The fight between your daddy and Frank was only a sign of Frank’s wanting to go. It didn’t happen because they don’t like each other. It happened because that’s the way a lot of young men leave home, it’s a sort of excuse. The fight was just an excuse for Frank to do what he’s been wanting to do for a long time, an excuse for Frank to leave. Do you understand that, my Meggie?”

Her eyes shifted to his face and rested there. They were so exhausted, so full of pain, so old. “I know,” she said. “I know. Frank wanted to go away when I was a little girl, and he didn’t go. Daddy brought him back and made him stay with us.”

“But this time Daddy isn’t going to bring him back, because Daddy can’t make him stay now. Frank has gone for good, Meggie. He isn’t coming back.”

“Won’t I ever see him again?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I’d like to say of course you will, but no one can predict the future, Meggie, even priests.” He drew a breath. “You mustn’t tell Mum there was a fight, Meggie, do you hear me? It would upset her very much, and she isn’t well.”

“Because there’s going to be another baby?”

“What do you know about that?”

“Mum likes growing babies; she’s done it a lot. And she grows such nice babies, Father, even when she isn’t well. I’m going to grow one like Hal myself, then I won’t miss Frank so much, will I?”

“Parthenogenesis,” he said. “Good luck, Meggie. Only what if you don’t manage to grow one?”

“I’ve still got Hal,” she said sleepily, nestling down. Then she said, “Father, will you go away, too? Will you?”

“One day, Meggie. But not soon, I think, so don’t worry. I have a feeling I’m going to be stuck in Gilly for a long, long time,” answered the priest, his eyes bitter.

6

There was no help for it, Meggie had to come home. Fee could not manage without her, and the moment he was left alone at the convent in Gilly, Stuart went on a hunger strike, so he too came back to Drogheda.

It was August, and bitterly cold. Just a year since they had arrived in Australia; but this was a colder winter than last. The rain was absent and the air was so crisp it hurt the lungs. Up on the tops of the Great Divide three hundred miles to the east, snow lay thicker than in many years, but no rain had fallen west of Burren Junction since the monsoonal drenching of the previous summer. People in Gilly were speaking of another drought: it was overdue, it must come, perhaps this would be it.

When Meggie saw her mother, she felt as if an awful weight settled upon her being; maybe a leaving-behind of childhood, a presentiment of what it was to be a woman. Outwardly there was no change, aside from the big belly; but inwardly Fee had slowed down like a tired old clock, running time down and down until it was forever stilled. The briskness Meggie had never known absent from her mother had gone. She picked her feet up and put them down again as if she was no longer sure of the right way to do it, a sort of spiritual fumbling got into her gait; and there was no joy in her for the coming baby, not even the rigidly controlled content she had shown over Hal.

That little red-haired fellow was toddling all over the house, constantly into everything, but Fee made no attempt to discipline him, or even supervise his activities. She plodded in her self-perpetuating circle of stove, worktable and sink as if nothing else existed. So Meggie had no choice; she simply filled the vacuum in the child’s life and became his mother. It wasn’t any sacrifice, for she loved him dearly and found him a helpless, willing target for all the love she was beginning to want to lavish on some human creature. He cried for her, he spoke her name before all others, he lifted his arms to her to be picked up; it was so satisfying it filled her with joy. In spite of the drudgery, the knitting and mending and sewing, the washing, the ironing, the hens, all the other jobs she had to do, Meggie found her life very pleasant.

No one ever mentioned Frank, but every six weeks Fee would lift her head when she heard the mail call, and for a while be animated. Then Mrs. Smith would bring in their share of whatever had come, and when it contained no letter from Frank the small burst of painful interest would die.

There were two new lives in the house. Fee was delivered of twins, two more tiny red-haired Cleary boys, christened James and Patrick. The dearest little fellows, with their father’s sunny disposition and his sweetness of nature, they became common property immediately they were born, for beyond giving them milk Fee took no interest in them. Soon their names were shortened to Jims and Patsy; they were prime favorites with the women up at the big house, the two spinster maids and the widowed childless housekeeper, who were starved for the deliciousness of babies. It was made magically easy for Fee to forget them—they had three very eager mothers—and as time went on it became the accepted thing that they should spend most of their waking hours up at the big house. Meggie just didn’t have time to take them under her wing as well as managing Hal, who was extremely possessive. Not for him the awkward, unpracticed blandishments of Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat. Meggie was the loving nucleus of Hal’s world; he wanted no one but Meggie, he would have no one but Meggie.

Bluey Williams traded in his lovely draft horses and his massive dray for a truck and the mail came every four weeks instead of every six, but there was never a word from Frank. And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget. To Meggie, an aching fading of the way Frank had looked, a blurring of the beloved lineaments to some fuzzy, saintlike image no more related to the real Frank than a holy-picture Christ to what must have been the Man. And to Fee, from out of those silent depths in which she had stilled the evolution of her soul, a substitution.

It came about so unobtrusively that no one noticed. For Fee kept herself folded up with quietness, and a total undemonstrativeness; the substitution was an inner thing no one had time to see, except the new object of her love, who made no outward sign. It was a hidden, unspoken thing between them, something to buffer their loneliness.

Perhaps it was inevitable, for of all her children Stuart was the only one like her. At fourteen he was as big a mystery to his father and brothers as Frank had been, but unlike Frank he engendered no hostility, no irritation. He did as he was told without complaint, worked as hard as anyone and created absolutely no ripples in the pool of Cleary life. Though his hair was red he was the darkest of all the boys, more mahogany and his eyes were as clear as pale water in the shade, as if they reached all the way back in time to the very beginning, and saw everything as it really was. He was also the only one of Paddy’s sons who promised adult handsomeness, though privately Meggie thought her Hal would outshine him when it came his turn to grow up. No one ever knew what Stuart was thinking; like Fee, he spoke little and never aired an opinion. And he had a curious knack of being utterly still, as still within himself as he was in body, and to Meggie, closest to him in age, it seemed he could go somewhere no one else could ever follow. Father Ralph expressed it another way.

“That lad isn’t human!” he had exclaimed the day he dumped a hunger-striking Stuart back at Drogheda after he was left at the convent minus Meggie. “Did he say he wanted to go home? Did he say he missed Meggie? No! He just stopped eating and patiently waited for the reason why to sink into our thick skulls. Not once did he open his mouth to complain, and when I marched up to him and yelled did he want to go home, he simply smiled at me and nodded!”

But as time went on it was tacitly assumed that Stuart would not go out into the paddocks to work with Paddy and the other boys, even though in age he might have. Stu would remain on guard at the house, chop the wood, take care of the vegetable garden, do the milking—the huge number of duties the women had no time for with three babies in the house. It was prudent to have a man about the place, albeit a half-grown one; it gave proof of other men close by. For there were visitors—the clump of strange boots up the plank steps to the back veranda, a strange voice saying:

“Hullo, Missus, got a bit of tucker for a man?”

The Outback had swarms of them, swagmen humping their blueys from station to station, down from Queensland and up from Victoria, men who had lost their luck or were chary of holding a regular job, preferring to tramp on foot thousands of miles in search of only they knew what. Mostly they were decent fellows, who appeared, ate a huge meal, packed a bit of donated tea and sugar and flour in the folds of their blueys, then disappeared down the track headed for Barcoola or Narrengang, battered old billycans bouncing, skinny dogs belly down behind them. Australian itinerants rarely rode; they walked.

Occasionally a bad man would come, on the lookout for women whose men were away; with a view to robbery, not rape. Thus Fee kept a shotgun standing loaded in a corner of the kitchen where the babies couldn’t get to it, and made sure she was closer to it than her visitor until her expert eye assessed his character. After Stuart was officially allotted the house as his domain, Fee passed the shotgun to him gladly.

Not all the visitors were swaggies, though they were in the majority; there was the Watkins man in his old model-T, for instance. He carried everything from horse liniment to fragrant soap unlike the rock-hard stuff Fee made in the laundry copper from fat and caustic; he had lavender water and eau de cologne, powders and creams for sun-dried faces. There were certain things one never dreamed of buying from anyone but the Watkins man; like his ointment, better by far than any drugstore or prescription salve, capable of healing anything from a rent in the side of a work dog to an ulcer on a human shin. The women would crowd around in every kitchen he visited, waiting eagerly for him to pop open his big suitcase of wares.

And there were other salesmen, less regular patrollers of the backblocks than the Watkins man but equally welcome, hawking everything from tailor-made cigarettes and fancy pipes to whole bolts of material, sometimes even luridly seductive underwear and lavishly beribboned stays. They were so starved, these women of the Outback, limited to maybe one or two trips a year into the nearest town, far from the brilliant shops of Sydney, far from fashions and feminine furbelows.

Life seemed mostly flies and dust. There had not been any rain in a long time, even a sprinkle to settle the dust and drown the flies; for the less rain, the more flies, the more dust.

Every ceiling was festooned with long, lazily spinning helixes of sticky flypaper, black with bodies within a day of being tacked up. Nothing could be left uncovered for a moment without becoming either an orgy or a graveyard for the flies, and tiny speckles of fly dirt dewed the furniture, the walls, the Gillanbone General Store calendar.

And oh, the dust! There was no getting away from it, that fine-grained brown powder which seeped into even tightly lidded containers, dulled freshly washed hair, made the skin gritty, lay in the folds of clothes and curtains, smeared a film across polished tables which resettled the moment it was whisked away. The floors were thick with it, from carelessly wiped boots and the hot dry wind drifting it through the open doors and windows; Fee was forced to roll up her Persian carpets in the parlor and have Stuart nail down linoleum she bought sight unseen from the store in Gilly.

The kitchen, which took most of the traffic from outside, was floored in teak planks bleached to the color of old bones by endless scrubbing with a wire brush and lye soap. Fee and Meggie would strew it with sawdust Stuart carefully collected from the woodheap, sprinkle the sawdust with precious particles of water and sweep the damp, pungent-fragrant mess away out of doors, down off the veranda onto the vegetable garden, there to decompose itself to humus.

But nothing kept the dust at bay for long, and after a while the creek dried up to a string of waterholes, so that there was no water to be pumped up from it to kitchen or bathroom. Stuart took the tank truck out to the borehead and brought it back full, emptied it into one of the spare rain tanks, and the women had to get used to a different kind of horrible water on dishes and clothes and bodies, worse than muddy creek water. The rank, sulphur-smelling minerally stuff had to be wiped off dishes scrupulously, and made the hair dull and coarse, like straw. What little rain water they had was used strictly for drinking and cooking.

Father Ralph watched Meggie tenderly. She was brushing Patsy’s curly red head, Jims standing obediently but a little rockily waiting for his turn, both pairs of bright blue eyes turned up to her adoringly. Just like a tiny mother, she was. It had to be a thing born in them, he mused, that peculiar obsession women had for infants, else at her age she would have regarded it as a duty rather than pure pleasure, and been off to do something more alluring as fast as she could. Instead she was deliberately prolonging the process, crimping Patsy’s hair between her fingers to shape waves out of its unruliness. For a while the priest was charmed with her activity, then he whacked the side of his dusty boot with his crop and stared moodily off the veranda toward the big house, hidden by its ghost gums and vines, the profusion of station buildings and pepper trees which lay between its isolation and this hub of station life, the head stockman’s residence. What plot was she weaving, that old spider up there at the center of her vast web?

“Father, you’re not watching!” Meggie accused him.

“I’m sorry, Meggie. I was thinking.” He turned back to her as she finished with Jims; the three of them stood watching him expectantly until he bent and scooped the twins up, one on either hip. “Let’s go and see your Auntie Mary, shall we?”

Meggie followed him up the track carrying his crop and leading the chestnut mare; he toted the infants with easy familiarity and seemed not to mind, though it was almost a mile from the creek to the big house. At the cookhouse he relinquished the twins to an ecstatic Mrs. Smith and passed on up the walkway to the main house with Meggie by his side.

Mary Carson was sitting in her wing chair. She hardly ever moved from it these days; there was not the necessity any more with Paddy so capable of overseeing things. As Father Ralph came in holding Meggie’s hand, her malevolent gaze beat the child’s down; Father Ralph felt the increase in Meggie’s pulse rate and squeezed her wrist sympathetically. The little girl dropped her aunt a clumsy curtsy, murmuring an inaudible greeting.

“Go to the kitchen, girl, have your tea with Mrs. Smith,” said Mary Carson curtly.

“Why don’t you like her?” Father Ralph asked as he sank into the chair he had come to think of as his own.

“Because you do,” she answered.

“Oh, come now!” For once she made him feel at a loss. “She’s just a waif, Mary.”

“That’s not what you see in her, and you know it.”

The fine blue eyes rested on her sardonically; he was more at ease. “Do you think I tamper with children? I am, after all, a priest!”

“You’re a man first, Ralph de Bricassart! Being a priest makes you feel safe, that’s all.”

Startled, he laughed. Somehow he couldn’t fence with her today; it was as if she had found the chink in his armor, crept inside with her spider’s poison. And he was changing, growing older perhaps, becoming reconciled to obscurity in Gillanbone. The fires were dying; or was it that he burned now for other things?

“I am not a man,” he said. “I am a priest… It’s the heat, maybe, the dust and the flies… But I am not a man, Mary. I’m a priest.”

“Oh, Ralph, how you’ve changed!” she mocked. “Can this be Cardinal de Bricassart I hear?”

“It isn’t possible,” he said, a passing unhappiness in his eyes. “I don’t think I want it anymore.”

She began to laugh, rocking back and forth in her chair, watching him. “Don’t you, Ralph? Don’t you? Well, I’ll let you stew a little while longer, but your day of reckoning is coming, never doubt it. Not yet, not for two or three years, perhaps, but it will come. I’ll be like the Devil, and offer you—Enough said! But never doubt I’ll make you writhe. You’re the most fascinating man I’ve ever met. You throw your beauty in our teeth, contemptuous of our foolishness. But I’ll pin you to the wall on your own weakness, I’ll make you sell yourself like any painted whore. Do you doubt it?”

He leaned back, smiling. “I don’t doubt you’ll try. But I don’t think you know me as well as you think you do.”

“Do I not? Time will tell, Ralph, and only time. I’m old; I have nothing but time left to me.”

“And what do you think I have?” he asked. “Time, Mary, nothing but time. Time, and dust, and flies.”

The clouds heaped themselves in the sky, and Paddy began to hope for rain.

“Dry storms,” said Mary Carson. “We won’t get rain out of this. We won’t get any rain for a long time.”

If the Clearys thought they had seen the worst that Australia could offer in the way of climatic harshness, it was because they hadn’t yet experienced the dry storms of drought-dogged plains. Bereft of soothing dampness, the dryness of the earth and the air rubbed each other raw and crackling, an irritating friction which built up and up and up until it could end only in a gargantuan dissipation of accumulated energy. The sky dropped and darkened so much Fee had to light the lamps indoors; out in the stockyards the horses shivered and jumped at the slightest noise; the hens sought their perches and sank their heads into apprehensive breasts; the dogs fought and snarled; the tame pigs which rooted among the rubbish of the station dump burrowed their snouts into the dust and peered out of it with bright, skittish eyes. Brooding forces pent in the heavens struck fear into the bones of all living things, as the vast deep clouds swallowed the sun whole and prepared to spew solar fire over the earth.

Thunder came marching from far away with increasing tread, tiny flickers on the horizon cast soaring billows into sharp relief, crests of startling whiteness foamed and curled over midnight-blue depths. Then, with a roaring wind that sucked up the dust and flung it stinging in eyes and ears and mouths, came the cataclysm. No longer did they try to imagine the biblical wrath of God; they lived through it. No man could have kept himself from jumping when the thunder cracked—it exploded with the noise and fury of a disintegrating world—but after a while the assembled household grew so inured to it they crept out onto the veranda and stared across the creek at the far paddocks. Great forks of lightning stood ribbed in veins of fire all around the sky, dozens of bolts each and every moment; naphtha flashes in chains streaked across the clouds, in and out the billows in a fantastic hide-and-seek. Blasted trees alone in the grass reeked and smoked, and they understood at last why these lonely paddock sentinels were dead.

An eerie, unearthly glow seeped into the air, air which was no longer invisible but on fire from within, fluorescing pink and lilac and sulphur yellow, and smelling of some hauntingly sweet, elusive perfume quite beyond recognition. The trees shimmered, the red Cleary hair was haloed in tongues of fire, the hairs of their arms stood out stiffly. And all afternoon it went on, only slowly fading into the east to release them from its awesome spell at sunset, and they were excited, on edge, unappeased. Not a drop of rain had fallen. But it was like dying and coming back to life again, to have survived the atmospheric tantrum unscathed; it was all they could talk about for a week.

“We’ll get a lot more,” said Mary Carson, bored.

They did get a lot more. The second dry winter came in colder than they had thought it could get without snow; frost settled inches thick on the ground at night, and the dogs huddled shivering in their kennels, keeping warm by gorging on kangaroo meat and mounds of fat from the homestead’s slaughtered cattle. At least the weather meant beef and pork to eat instead of the eternal mutton. In the house they built great roaring fires, and the men were forced to come home when they could, for at night in the paddocks they froze. But the shearers when they arrived were in a mood for rejoicing; they could get through faster and sweat less. At each man’s stand in the great shed was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching sweat into the wood of the board.

There was still grass from the flood long ago, but it was thinning ominously. Day after day the skies were overcast and the light dull, but it never rained. The wind howled sadly across the paddocks, spinning drifting brown sheets of dust before it like rain, tormenting the mind with images of water. So much like rain it looked, that raggedly blowing dust.

The children developed chilblains on their fingers, tried not to smile with cracked lips, had to peel their socks away from bleeding heels and shins. It was quite impossible to keep warm in the face of that bitter high wind, especially when the houses had been designed to catch every stray puff of air, not keep it out. Going to bed in icy bedrooms, getting up in icy bedrooms, waiting patiently for Mum to spare a little hot water from the great kettle on the hob so that washing was not a teeth-chattering, painful ordeal.

One day small Hal started to cough and wheeze, and rapidly grew worse. Fee mixed up a gluey hot poultice of charcoal and spread it on his laboring little chest, but it seemed to give him no relief. At first she was not unduly worried, but as the day drew on he began to deteriorate so quickly she no longer had any idea what to do, and Meggie sat by his side wringing her hands, praying a wordless stream of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. When Paddy came in at six the child’s breathing was audible from the veranda, and his lips were blue.

Paddy set off at once for the big house and the telephone, but the doctor was forty miles away and out on another case. They ignited a pan of sulphur and held him over it in an attempt to make him cough up the membrane in his throat slowly choking him, but he could not manage to contract his rib cage enough to dislodge it. His color was growing a deeper blue, his respiration was convulsive. Meggie sat holding him and praying, her heart squeezed to a wedge of pain because the poor little fellow fought so for every breath. Of all the children, Hal was the dearest to her; she was his mother. Never before had she wished so desperately to be a grown-up mother, thinking that were she a woman like Fee, she would somehow have the power to heal him. Fee couldn’t heal him because Fee wasn’t his mother. Confused and terrified, she held the heaving little body close, trying to help Hal breathe.

It never occurred to her that he might die, even when Fee and Paddy sank to their knees by the bed and prayed, not knowing what else to do. At midnight Paddy pried Meggie’s arms from around the still child, and laid him down tenderly against the stack of pillows.

Meggie’s eyes flew open; she had half fallen to sleep, lulled because Hal had stopped struggling. “Oh, Daddy, he’s better!” she said.

Paddy shook his head; he seemed shriveled and old, the lamp picking up frosty bits in his hair, frosty bits in his week-long beard. “No, Meggie, Hal’s not better in the way you mean, but he’s at peace. He’s gone to God, he’s out of his pain.”

“Daddy means he’s dead,” said Fee tonelessly.

“Oh, Daddy, no! He can’t be dead!”

But the small creature in the pillowed nest was dead. Meggie knew it the moment she looked, though she had never seen death before. He looked like a doll, not a child. She got up and went out to the boys, sitting hunched in an uneasy vigil around the kitchen fire, with Mrs. Smith on a hard chair nearby keeping an eye on the tiny twins, whose cot had been moved into the kitchen for warmth.

“Hal just died,” said Meggie.

Stuart looked up from a distant reverie. “It’s better so,” he said. “Think of the peace.” He got to his feet as Fee came out of the hallway, and went to her without touching her. “Mum, you must be tired. Come and lie down; I’ll light a fire for you in your room. Come on now, lie down.”

Fee turned and followed him without a word. Bob got up and went out onto the veranda. The rest of the boys sat shuffling for a while and then joined him. Paddy hadn’t appeared at all. Without a word Mrs. Smith took the perambulator from its corner of the veranda and carefully put the sleeping Jims and Patsy into it. She looked across at Meggie, tears running down her face.

“Meggie, I’m going back to the big house, and I’m taking Jims and Patsy with me. I’ll be back in the morning, but it’s best if the babies stay with Minnie and Cat and me for a while. Tell your mother.”

Meggie sat down on a vacant chair and folded her hands in her lap. Oh, he was hers and he was dead! Little Hal, whom she had cared for and loved and mothered. The space in her mind he had occupied was not yet empty; she could still feel the warm weight of him against her chest. It was terrible to know the weight would never rest there again, where she had felt it for four long years. No, not a thing to cry over; tears were for Agnes, for wounds in the fragile sheath of self-esteem, and the childhood she had left behind forever. This was a burden she would have to carry until the end of her days, and continue in spite of it. The will to survive is very strong in some, not so strong in others. In Meggie it was as refined and tensile as a steel hawser.

Just so did Father Ralph find her when he came in with the doctor. She pointed silently to the hallway but made no effort to follow them. And it was a long time before the priest could finally do what he had wanted to do since Mary Carson phoned the presbytery; go to Meggie, be with her, give the poor little female outsider something from himself for her very own. He doubted that anyone else fully appreciated what Hal meant to her.

But it was a long time. There were the last rites to be administered, in case the soul had not yet left the body; and Fee to see, Paddy to see, practical advice to give. The doctor had gone, dejected but long used to the tragedies his far-flung practice made inevitable. From what they said, little he could have done anyway, so far from his hospital and his trained nursing staff. These people took their chances, they faced their demons and hung on. His death certificate would say “Croup.” It was a handy malady.

Eventually there was nothing left for Father Ralph to see to. Paddy had gone to Fee, Bob and the boys to the carpentry shed to make the little coffin. Stuart was on the floor in Fee’s bedroom, his pure profile so like her own silhouetted against the night sky outside the window; from where she lay on her pillow with Paddy’s hand in hers, Fee never left her contemplation of the dark shape huddled on the cold floor. It was five o’clock in the morning and the roosters were stirring drowsily, but it would be dark for a long time yet.

Purple stole around his neck because he had forgotten he was wearing it, Father Ralph bent to the kitchen fire and built it up from embers into a blaze, turned down the lamp on the table behind, and sat on a wooden bench opposite Meggie to watch her. She had grown, put on seven-league boots which threatened to leave him behind, outstripped; he felt his inadequacy then more keenly, watching her, than ever he had in a life filled with a gnawing, obsessive doubt of his courage. Only what was he afraid of? What did he think he couldn’t face if it came? He could be strong for other people, he didn’t fear other people; but within himself, expecting that nameless something to come sliding into consciousness when he least expected it, he knew fear. While Meggie, born eighteen years after him, was growing beyond him.

Not that she was a saint, or indeed anything more than most. Only that she never complained, that she had the gift—or was it the curse?—of acceptance. No matter what had gone or what might come, she confronted it and accepted it, stored it away to fuel the furnace of her being. What had taught her that? Could it be taught? Or was his idea of her a figment of his own fantasies? Did it really matter? Which was more important: what she truly was, or what he thought she was?

“Oh, Meggie,” he said helplessly.

She turned her gaze to him and out of her pain gave him a smile of absolute, overflowing love, nothing in it held back, the taboos and inhibitions of womanhood not yet a part of her world. To be so loved shook him, consumed him, made him wish to the God Whose existence he sometimes doubted that he was anyone in the universe but Ralph de Bricassart. Was this it, the unknown thing? Oh, God, why did he love her so? But as usual no one answered him; and Meggie sat still smiling at him.

At dawn Fee got up to make breakfast, Stuart helping her, then Mrs. Smith came back with Minnie and Cat, and the four women stood together by the stove talking in hushed monotones, bound in some league of grief neither Meggie nor the priest understood. After the meal Meggie went to line the little wooden box the boys had made, planed smooth and varnished. Silently Fee had given her a white satin evening gown long since gone to the hue of ivory with age, and she fitted strips of it to the hard contours of the box interior. While Father Ralph put a toweling padding in it she ran the pieces of satin into shape on the sewing machine, then together they fixed the lining in place with thumbtacks. And after that Fee dressed her baby in his best velvet suit, combed his hair and laid him in the soft nest which smelled of her, but not of Meggie, who had been his mother. Paddy closed down the lid, weeping; this was the first child he had lost.

For years the reception room at Drogheda had been in use as a chapel; an altar had been built at one end, and was draped in golden raiment Mary Carson had paid the nuns of St. Mary d’Urso a thousand pounds to embroider. Mrs. Smith had decked the room and the altar with winter flowers from Drogheda’s gardens, wallflowers and early stocks and late roses, masses of them like pink and rusty paintings magically finding the dimension of scent. In a laceless white alb and a black chasuble free of any ornamentation, Father Ralph said the Requiem Mass.

As with most of the great Outback stations, Drogheda buried its dead on its own land. The cemetery lay beyond the gardens by the willow-littered banks of the creek, bounded by a white-painted wrought-iron railing and green even in this dry time, for it was watered from the homestead tanks. Michael Carson and his baby son were entombed there in an imposing marble vault, a life-size angel on top of its pediment with sword drawn to guard their rest. But perhaps a dozen less pretentious plots ringed the mausoleum, marked only by plain white wooden crosses and white croquet hoops to define their neat boundaries, some of them bare even of a name: a shearer with no known relatives who had died in a barracks brawl; two or three swaggies whose last earthly calling place had been Drogheda; some sexless and totally anonymous bones found in one of the paddocks; Michael Carson’s Chinese cook, over whose remains stood a quaint scarlet umbrella, whose sad small bells seemed perpetually to chime out the name Hee Sing, Hee Sing, Hee Sing; a drover whose cross said only TANKSTAND CHARLIE HE WAS A GOOD BLOKE; and more besides, some of them women. But such simplicity was not for Hal, the owner’s nephew; they stowed his homemade box on a shelf inside the vault and closed elaborate bronze doors upon it.

After a while everyone ceased to speak of Hal except in passing. Meggie’s sorrow she kept exclusively to herself; her pain had the unreasoning desolation peculiar to children, magnified and mysterious, yet her very youth buried it beneath everyday events, and diminished its importance. The boys were little affected save Bob, who had been old enough to be fond of his tiny brother. Paddy grieved deeply, but no one knew whether Fee grieved. It seemed she grew further and further away from husband and children, from all feeling. Because of this, Paddy was so grateful to Stu for the way he minded his mother, the grave tenderness with which he treated her. Only Paddy knew how Fee had looked the day he came back from Gilly without Frank. There had not been a flicker of emotion in those soft grey eyes, not hardening nor accusation, hate or sorrow. As if she had simply been waiting for the blow to fall like a condemned dog for the killing bullet, knowing her fate and powerless to avoid it.

“I knew he wouldn’t come back,” she said.

“Maybe he will, Fee, if you write to him quickly,” Paddy said.

She shook her head, but being Fee went into no explanations. Better that Frank made a new life for himself far from Drogheda and her. She knew her son well enough to be convinced that one word from her would bring him back, so she must not utter that word, ever. If the days were long and bitter with a sense of failure, she must bear it in silence. Paddy hadn’t been the man of her choice, but a better man than Paddy never lived. She was one of those people whose feelings are so intense they become unbearable, unlivable, and her lesson had been a harsh one. For almost twenty-five years she had been crushing emotion out of existence, and she was convinced that in the end persistence would succeed.

Life went on in the rhythmic, endless cycle of the land; the following summer the rains came, not monsoonal but a by-product of them, filling the creek and the tanks, succoring the thirsting grass roots, sponging away the stealthy dust. Almost weeping in joy, the men went about the business of the patterned seasons, secure in the knowledge they would not have to hand-feed the sheep. The grass had lasted just long enough, eked out by scrub-cutting from the more juicy trees; but it was not so on all the Gilly stations. How many stock a station carried depended entirely on the grazier running it. For its great size Drogheda was under-stocked, which meant the grass lasted just that much longer.

Lambing and the hectic weeks that followed it were busiest of all in the sheep calendar. Every lamb born had to be caught; its tail was ringed, its ear marked, and if it was a male not required for breeding it was also castrated. Filthy, abominable work which soaked them to the skin with blood, for there was only one way to wade through thousands upon thousands of male lambs in the short time available. The testicles were popped out between the fingers and bitten off, spat on the ground. Circled by tin bands incapable of expanding, the tails of male and female lambs alike gradually lost their vital bloody supply, swelled, withered and dropped off.

These were the finest wool sheep in the world, raised on a scale unheard of in any other country, and with a paucity of manpower. Everything was geared to the perfect production of perfect wool. There was crutching; around the sheep’s rear end the wool grew foul with excrement, fly-blown, black and lumped together in what were called dags. This area had to be kept shaven close, or crutched. It was a minor shearing job but one far less pleasing, stinking and fly-ridden, and it paid better rates. Then there was dipping: thousands upon thousands of bleating, leaping creatures were hounded and yanked through a maze of runs, in and out of the phenyl dips which rid them of ticks, pests and vermin. And drenching: the administration of medicine through huge syringes rammed down the throat, to rid the sheep of intestinal parasites.

For work with the sheep never, never ended; as one job finished it became time for another. They were mustered and graded, moved from one paddock to another, bred and unbred, shorn and crutched, dipped and drenched, slaughtered and shipped off to be sold. Drogheda carried about a thousand head of prime beef cattle as well as its sheep, but sheep were far more profitable, so in good times Drogheda carried about one sheep for every two acres of its land, or about 125,000 altogether. Being merinos, they were never sold for meat; at the end of a merino’s wool-producing years it was shipped off to become skins, lanolin, tallow and glue, useful only to the tanneries and the knackeries.

Thus it was that gradually the classics of Bush literature took on meaning. Reading had become more important than ever to the Clearys, isolated from the world on Drogheda; their only contact with it was through the magic written word. But there was no lending library close, as there had been in Wahine, no weekly trip into town for mail and newspapers and a fresh stack of library books, as there had been in Wahine. Father Ralph filled the breach by plundering the Gillanbone library, his own and the convent’s shelves, and found to his astonishment that before he was done he had organized a whole Bush circulating library via Bluey Williams and the mail truck. It was perpetually loaded with books—worn, thumbed volumes which traveled down the tracks between Drogheda and Bugela, Dibban-Dibban and Braich y Pwll, Cunnamutta and Each-Uisge, seized upon gratefully by minds starved for sustenance and escape. Treasured stories were always returned with great reluctance, but Father Ralph and the nuns kept a careful record of what books stayed longest where, then Father Ralph would order copies through the Gilly news agency and blandly charge them to Mary Carson as donations to the Holy Cross Bush Bibliophilic Society.

Those were the days when a book was lucky to contain a chaste kiss, when the senses were never titillated by erotic passages, so that the demarcation line between books meant for adults and those meant for older children was less strictly drawn, and there was no disgrace for a man of Paddy’s age to love best the books his children also adored: Dot and the Kangaroo, the Billabong series about Jim and Norah and Wally, Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s immortal We of the Never-Never. In the kitchen at night they would take turns to read the poems of Banjo Paterson and C. J. Dennis out loud, thrilling to the ride of “The Man from Snowy River,” or laughing with “The Sentimental Bloke” and his Doreen, or wiping away surreptitious tears shed for John O’Hara’s “Laughing Mary.”

“Clancy of the Overflow” was everyone’s favorite, “the Banjo” their favorite poet. Hoppity-go-kick doggerel, perhaps, but the poems had never been intended for the eyes of sophisticated savants; they were for the people, of the people, and more Australians of that day could recite them off by heart than knew the standard schoolroom pieces by Tennyson and Wordsworth, for their brand of hoppity-go-kick doggerel was written with England as inspiration. Crowds of daffodils and fields of asphodel meant nothing to the Clearys, living in a climate where neither could exist.

The Clearys understood the bush poets better than most, for the Overflow was their backyard, the traveling sheep a reality on the TSRs. There was an official Traveling Stock Route or TSR winding its way near the Barwon River, free crown land for the transference of living merchandise from one end of the eastern half of the continent to the other. In the old days drovers and their hungry, grass-ruining mobs of stock had not been welcome, and the bullockies a hated breed as they inched their mammoth teams of from twenty to eighty oxen through the middle of the squatters’ best grazing. Now, with official stock routes for the drovers and the bullockies vanished into legend, things were more amicable between vagabonds and stay-puts.

The occasional drovers were welcomed as they rode in for a beer and a talk, a home-cooked meal. Sometimes they brought women with them, driving battered old sulkies with galled ex-stock horses between the shafts, pots and billies and bottles banging and clanking in a fringe all around. These were the most cheerful or the most morose women in the Outback, drifting from Kynuna to the Paroo, from Goondiwindi to Gundagai, from the Katherine to the Curry. Strange women; they never knew a roof over their heads or the feel of a kapok mattress beneath their iron-hard spines. No man had bested them; they were as tough and enduring as the country which flowed under their restless feet. Wild as the birds in the sun-drenched trees, their children skulked shyly behind the sulky wheels or scuttled for the protection of the woodheap while their parents yarned over cups of tea, swapped tall stories and books, promised to pass on vague messages to Hoopiron Collins or Brumby Waters, and told the fantastic tale of the Pommy jackaroo on Gnarlunga. And somehow you could be sure these rootless wanderers had dug a grave, buried a child or a wife, a husband or a mate, under some never-to-be-forgotten coolibah on a stretch of the TSR which only looked the same to those who didn’t know how hearts could mark out as singular and special one tree in a wilderness of trees.

Meggie was ignorant even of the meaning of a phrase as hackneyed as “the facts of life,” for circumstances had conspired to block every avenue whereby she might have learned. Her father drew a rigid line between the males of the family and the females; subjects like breeding or mating were never discussed in front of the women, nor did the men ever appear in front of the women unless fully clothed. The kind of books that might have given her a clue never appeared on Drogheda, and she had no friends of her own age to contribute to her education. Her life was absolutely harnessed to the needs of the house, and around the house there were no sexual activities at all. The Home Paddock creatures were almost literally sterile. Mary Carson didn’t breed horses, she bought them from Martin King of Bugela, who did; unless one bred horses stallions were a nuisance, so Drogheda didn’t have any stallions. It did have a bull, a wild and savage beast whose pen was strictly out of bounds, and Meggie was so frightened of it she never went anywhere near it. The dogs were kept kenneled and chained, their mating a scientific, supervised exercise conducted under Paddy’s or Bob’s eagle eye, therefore also out of bounds. Nor was there time to watch the pigs, which Meggie hated and resented having to feed. In truth, there wasn’t time for Meggie to watch anyone beyond her two tiny brothers. And ignorance breeds ignorance; an unawakened body and mind sleep through events which awareness catalogues automatically.

Just before Meggie’s fifteenth birthday, as the summer heat was building up toward its stupefying peak, she noticed brown, streaky stains on her drawers. After a day or two they went away, but six weeks later they came back, and her shame turned to terror. The first time she had thought them signs of a dirty bottom, thus her mortification, but in their second appearance they became unmistakably blood. She had no idea where the blood was coming from, but assumed it was her bottom. The slow hemorrhage was gone three days later, and did not recur for over two months; her furtive washing of the drawers had gone unnoticed, for she did most of the laundry anyway. The next attack brought pain, the first non-bilious rigors of her life. And the bleeding was worse, far worse. She stole some of the twins’ discarded diapers and tried to bind herself under her drawers, terrified the blood would come through.

Death taking Hal had been like a tempestuous visit from something ghostly; but this strung-out cessation of her own being was terrifying. How could she possibly go to Fee or Paddy to break the news that she was dying from some disreputable, forbidden disease of the bottom? Only to Frank might she have poured out her torment, but Frank was so far away she didn’t know where to find him. She had listened to the women talk over their cups of tea of tumors and cancers, gruesome lingering deaths their friends or mothers or sisters had endured, and it seemed to Meggie sure to be some kind of growth eating her insides away, chewing silently up toward her frightened heart. Oh, she didn’t want to die!

Her ideas about the condition of death were vague; she wasn’t even clear on what her status would be in that incomprehensible other world. Religion to Meggie was a set of laws rather than a spiritual experience, it couldn’t help her at all. Words and phrases jostled piecemeal in her panicked consciousness, uttered by her parents, their friends, the nuns, priests in sermons, bad men in books threatening vengeance. There was no way she could come to terms with death; she lay night after night in a confused terror, trying to imagine if death was perpetual night, or an abyss of flames she had to jump over to reach the golden fields on the far side, or a sphere like the inside of a gigantic balloon full of soaring choirs and light attenuated through limitless stained-glass windows.

She grew very quiet, but in a manner quite different from Stuart’s peaceful, dreamy isolation; hers was the petrified freezing of an animal caught in the serpent’s basilisk stare. If she was spoken to suddenly she jumped, if the little ones cried for her she fussed over them in an agony of expiation for her neglect. And whenever she had a rare moment to herself she ran away, down to the cemetery and Hal, who was the only dead person she knew.

Everyone noticed the change in her, but accepted it as Meggie growing up without once asking themselves what growing up for Meggie entailed; she hid her distress too well. The old lessons had been well learned; her self-control was phenomenal and her pride formidable. No one must ever know what went on inside her, the façade must continue flawless to the end; from Fee to Frank to Stuart the examples were there, and she was of the same blood, it was a part of her nature and her heritage.

But as Father Ralph paid his frequent visits to Drogheda and the change in Meggie deepened from a pretty feminine metamorphosis to a quenching of all her vitality, his concern for her mushroomed into worry, and then into fear. A physical and spiritual wasting away was taking place beneath his very eyes; she was slipping away from them, and he couldn’t bear to see her become another Fee. The small pointed face was all eyes staring at some dreadful prospect, the milky opaque skin which never tanned or freckled was growing more translucent. If the process went on, he thought, she would one day disappear into her own eyes like a snake swallowing its tail, until she drifted through the universe as an almost invisible shaft of glassy grey light, seen only from the corner of the vision where shadows lurk and black things crawl down a white wall.

Well, he would find out if he had to wring it from her forcibly. Mary Carson was at her most demanding these days, jealous of every moment he spent down at the head stockman’s house; only the infinite patience of a subtle, devious man kept his rebellion against her possessiveness hidden from her. Even his alien pre-occupation with Meggie couldn’t always overcome his politic wisdom, the purring content he derived from watching his charm work on such a cantankerous, refractory subject as Mary Carson. While that long-dormant care for the welfare of a single other person champed and stamped up and down his mind, he acknowledged the existence of another entity dwelling side by side with it: the cat-cold cruelty of getting the better of, making a fool of a conceited, masterful woman. Oh, he’d always liked to do that! The old spider would never get the better of him.

Eventually he managed to shake free of Mary Carson and run Meggie to earth in the little graveyard under the shadow of the pallid, unwarlike avenging angel. She was staring up into its mawkishly placid face with shrinking fear written on her own, an exquisite contrast between the feeling and the unfeeling, he thought. But what was he doing here, chasing after her like a clucky old hen when it was really none of his business, when it ought to be her mother or her father to find out what was the matter? Only that they hadn’t seen anything wrong, that she didn’t matter to them the way she mattered to him. And that he was a priest, he must give comfort to the lonely or the despairing in spirit. He couldn’t bear to see her unhappy, yet he shrank from the way he was tying himself to her by an accumulation of events. He was making a whole arsenal of happenings and memories out of her, and he was afraid. His love for her and his priestly instinct to offer himself in any required spiritual capacity warred with an obsessive horror of becoming utterly necessary to someone human, and of having someone human become utterly necessary to himself.

As she heard him walk across the grass she turned to confront him, folding her hands in her lap and looking down at her feet. He sat near her, arms locked around his knees, the soutane in folds no more graceful than the easy length of the body inhabiting it. No sense beating around the bush, he decided; if she could, she would evade him.

“What’s the matter, Meggie?”

“Nothing, Father.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Please, Father, please! I can’t tell you!”

“Oh, Meggie! Ye of little faith! You can tell me anything, anything under the sun. That’s what I’m here for, that’s why I’m a priest. I am Our Lord’s chosen representative here on earth, I listen on His behalf, I even forgive on His behalf. And, wee Meggie, there is nothing in God’s universe He and I cannot find it in our hearts to forgive. You must tell me what the matter is, my love, because if anyone can help you, I can. As long as I live I’ll try to help you, watch over you. If you like, a sort of guardian angel, better by far than that chunk of marble above your head.” He took a breath and leaned forward. “Meggie, if you love me, tell me!”

Her hands gripped one another. “Father, I’m dying! I’ve got cancer!”

First came a wild desire to laugh, a great surge of uproarious anticlimax; then he looked at the thin blue skin, the wasting of her little arms, and there came an awful longing to weep and cry, scream of its unfairness to the roof of heaven. No, Meggie wouldn’t imagine this out of nothing; there had to be a valid reason.

“How do you know, dear heart?”

It took her a long time to say it, and when she did he had to bend his head right down to her lips in an unconscious parody of the confessional pose, hand shielding his face from her eyes, finely modeled ear presented for the sullying.

“It’s six months, Father, since it started. I get the most awful pains in my tummy, but not like a bilious attack, and—oh, Father!—a lot of blood runs out of my bottom!”

His head reared back, something which had never happened inside the confessional; he stared down at her shamed bent head with so many emotions assaulting him that he could not marshal his wits. An absurd, delicious relief; an anger at Fee so great he wanted to kill her; awed admiration for such a little thing as her, to bear so much so well; and a ghastly, all-pervasive embarrassment.

He was as much a prisoner of the times as she was. The cheap girls in every town he had known from Dublin to Gillanbone would deliberately come into the confessional to whisper their fantasies to him as actual happenings, concerned with the only facet of him which interested them, his manhood, and not willing to admit it lay beyond their power to arouse it. They muttered of men violating every orifice, of illicit games with other girls, of lust and adultery, one or two of superior imagination even going so far as to detail sexual relations with a priest. And he would listen totally unmoved save for a sick contempt, for he had been through the rigors of the seminary and that particular lesson was an easy one for a man of his type. But the girls, never, never mentioned that secret activity which set them apart, demeaned them.

Try as he would, he could not prevent the scorching tide from diffusing up under his skin; Father Ralph de Bricassart sat with his face turned away behind his hand and writhed through the humiliation of his first blush.

But this wasn’t helping his Meggie. When he was sure the color had subsided he got to his feet, picked her up and sat her on a flat-topped marble pedestal, where her face and his were level.

“Meggie, look at me. No, look at me!”

She raised hunted eyes and saw that he was smiling; an immeasurable contentment filled her soul at once. He would not smile so if she were dying; she knew very well how much she meant to him, for he had never concealed it.

“Meggie, you’re not dying and you haven’t got cancer. It isn’t my place to tell you what’s the matter, but I think I had better. Your mother should have told you years ago, prepared you, and why she didn’t is beyond me.”

He looked up at the inscrutable marble angel above him and gave a peculiar, half-strangled laugh. “Dear Jesus! The things Thou givest me to do!” Then, to the waiting Meggie: “In years to come, as you grow older and learn more about the ways of the world, you might be tempted to remember today with embarrassment, even shame. But don’t remember today like that, Meggie. There’s absolutely nothing shameful or embarrassing about it. In this, as in everything I do, I am simply the instrument of Our Lord. It is my only function on this earth; I must admit no other. You were very frightened, you needed help, and Our Lord has sent you that help in my person. Remember that alone, Meggie. I am Our Lord’s priest, and I speak in His Name.

“You’re only doing what all women do, Meggie. Once a month for several days you’ll pass blood. It starts usually around twelve or thirteen years of age—how old are you, as much as that?”

“I’m fifteen, Father.”

“Fifteen? You?” He shook his head, only half believing her. “Well, if you say you are, I’ll have to take your word for it. In which case you’re later than most girls. But it continues every month until you’re about fifty, and in some women it’s as regular as the phases of the moon, in others it’s not so predictable. Some women have no pain with it, others suffer a lot of pain. No one knows why it’s so different from one woman to another. But to pass blood every month is a sign that you’re mature. Do you know what ‘mature’ means?”

“Of course, Father! I read! It means grown up.”

“All right, that will do. While ever the bleeding persists, you’re capable of having children. The bleeding is a part of the cycle of procreation. In the days before the Fall, it is said Eve didn’t menstruate. The proper name for it is menstruation, to menstruate. But when Adam and Eve fell, God punished the woman more than He did the man, because it was really her fault they fell. She tempted the man. Do you remember the words in your Bible history? ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ What God meant was that for a woman everything having to do with children involves pain. Great joy, but also great pain. It is your lot, Meggie, and you must accept it.”

She didn’t know it, but just so would he have offered comfort and help to any of his parishioners, if with a less intense personal involvement; so very kindly, but never identifying himself with the trouble. And, perhaps not so oddly, thereby the comfort and help he offered was all the greater. As if he had gone beyond such small things, so they were bound to pass. It was not a conscious thing in him, either; no one who came to him for succor ever felt that he looked down on them, or blamed them for their weaknesses. Many priests left their people feeling guilty, worthless or bestial, but he never did. For he made them think that he, too, had his sorrows and his struggles; alien sorrows and incomprehensible struggles, perhaps, yet no less real. He neither knew nor could have been brought to understand that the larger part of his appeal and attraction lay not in his person, but in this aloof, almost godlike, very human something from his soul.

As far as Meggie was concerned, he talked to her the way Frank had talked to her: as if she were his equal. But he was older, wiser and far better educated than Frank, a more satisfactory confidant. And how beautiful his voice was, with its faint Irishness and pear-shaped Britishness. It took all the fear and anguish away. Yet she was young, full of curiosity, eager now to know all there was to know, and not troubled by the perplexing philosophies of those who constantly question not the who of themselves but the why. He was her friend, the cherished idol of her heart, the new sun in her firmament.

“Why shouldn’t you tell me, Father? Why did you say it ought to be Mum?”

“It’s a subject women keep very much to themselves. To mention menstruation or one’s period in front of men or boys just isn’t done, Meggie. It’s something strictly between women.”

“Why?”

He shook his head, and laughed. “To be honest, I really don’t know why. I even wish it weren’t so. But you must take my word for it that it is so. Never mention it to a soul except your mother, and don’t tell her you discussed it with me.”

“All right, Father, I won’t.”

It was damnably difficult, this being a mother; so many practical considerations to remember! “Meggie, you must go home and tell your mother you’ve been passing blood, and ask her to show you how to fix yourself up.”

“Mum does it, too?”

“All healthy women do. But when they’re expecting a baby they stop until after the baby is born. That’s how women tell they’re expecting babies.”

“Why do they stop when they’re expecting babies?”

“I don’t know, I really don’t. Sorry, Meggie.”

“Why does the blood come out of my bottom, Father?”

He glared up at the angel, which looked back at him serenely, not troubled by women’s troubles. Things were getting too sticky for Father Ralph. Amazing that she persisted when she was usually so reticent! Yet realizing he had become the source of her knowledge about everything she couldn’t find in books, he knew her too well to give her any hint of his embarrassment or discomfort. She would withdraw into herself and never ask him anything again.

So he answered patiently, “It doesn’t come out of your bottom, Meggie. There is a hidden passageway in front of your bottom, which has to do with children.”

“Oh! Where they get out, you mean,” she said. “I always wondered how they got out.”

He grinned, and lifted her down from her pedestal. “Now you know. Do you know what makes babies, Meggie?”

“Oh, yes,” she said importantly, glad she knew at least something. “You grow them, Father.”

“What causes them to start growing?”

“You wish them.”

“Who told you that?”

“No one. I worked it out for myself,” she said.

Father Ralph closed his eyes and told himself that he couldn’t possibly be called a coward for leaving matters where they stood. He could pity her, but he couldn’t help her any further. Enough was enough.

7

Mary Carson was going to be seventy-two years old, and she was planning the biggest party to be held on Drogheda in fifty years. Her birthday fell at the start of November, when it was hot but till bearable—at least for Gilly natives.

“Mark that, Mrs. Smith!” Minnie whispered. “Do ye mark that! November the t’urrd herself was born!”

“What are you on about now, Min?” the housekeeper asked. Minnie’s Celtic mysteriousness got on her own good steady English nerves.

“Why, and to be sure it means herself is a Scorpio woman, does it not? A Scorpio woman, now!”

“I haven’t got the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Min!”

“The wurrst sign a woman can find herself born into, Mrs. Smith darlin’. Och, they’re children of the Devil, so they are!” said Cat, round-eyed, blessing herself.

“Honestly, Minnie, you and Cat are the dizzy limit,” said Mrs. Smith, not a whit impressed.

But excitement was running high, and would run higher. The old spider in her wing chair at the exact center of her web issued a never-ending stream of orders; this was to be done, that was to be done, such and such was to be taken out of storage, or put into storage. The two Irish maids ran polishing silver and washing the best Haviland china, turning the chapel back into a reception room and readying its adjacent dining rooms.

Hindered rather than helped by the little Cleary boys, Stuart and a team of rouseabouts mowed and scythed the lawn, weeded the flower beds, sprinkled damp sawdust on the verandas to clear dust from between the Spanish tiles, and dry chalk on the reception room floor to make it fit for dancing. Clarence O’Toole’s band was coming all the way from Sydney, along with oysters and prawns, crabs and lobsters; several women from Gilly were being hired as temporary helpers. The whole district from Rudna Hunish to Inishmurray to Bugela to Narrengang was in a ferment.

As the marble hallways echoed to unaccustomed sounds of objects being moved and people shouting, Mary Carson shifted herself from her wing chair to her desk, drew a sheet of parchment forward, dipped her pen in the standish, and began to write. There was no hesitation, not so much as a pause to consider the positioning of a comma. For the last five years she had worked out every intricate phrase in her mind, until it was absolutely word perfect. It did not take her long to finish; there were two sheets of paper, the second one with a good quarter of it blank. But for a moment, the last sentence complete, she sat on in her chair. The roll-top desk stood alongside one of the big windows, so that by simply turning her head she could look out across the lawns. A laugh from outside made her do so, idly at first, then in stiffening rage. God damn him and his obsession!

Father Ralph had taught Meggie to ride; daughter of a country family, she had never sat astride a horse until the priest remedied the deficiency. For oddly enough, the daughters of poor country families did not often ride. Riding was a pastime for the rich young women of country and city alike. Oh, girls of Meggie’s background could drive buggies and teams of heavy horses, even tractors and sometimes cars, but rarely did they ride. It cost too much to mount a daughter.

Father Ralph had brought elastic-sided ankle boots and twill jodhpurs from Gilly and plumped them down on the Cleary kitchen table noisily. Paddy had looked up from his after-dinner book, mildly surprised.

“Well, what have you got there, Father?” he asked.

“Riding clothes for Meggie.”

“What?” bellowed Paddy’s voice.

“What?” squeaked Meggie’s.

“Riding clothes for Meggie. Honestly, Paddy, you’re a first-class idiot! Heir to the biggest, richest station in New South Wales, and you’ve never let your only daughter sit a horse! How do you think she’s going to take her place alongside Miss Carmichael, Miss Hopeton and Mrs. Anthony King, equestriennes all? Meggie’s got to learn to ride, sidesaddle as well as astride, do you hear? I realize you’re busy, so I’m going to teach Meggie myself, and you can like it or lump it. If it happens to interfere with her duties in the house, too bad. For a few hours each week Fee is just going to have to manage minus Meggie, and that’s that.”

One thing Paddy couldn’t do was argue with a priest; Meggie learned to ride forthwith. For years she had longed for the chance, had once timidly ventured to ask her father might she, but he had forgotten the next moment and she never asked again, thinking that was Daddy’s way of saying no. To learn under the aegis of Father Ralph cast her into a joy which she didn’t show, for by this time her adoration of Father Ralph had turned into an ardent, very girlish crush. Knowing it was quite impossible, she permitted herself the luxury of dreaming about him, of wondering what it would be like to be held in his arms, receive his kiss. Further than that her dreams couldn’t go, as she had no idea what came next, or even that anything came next. And if she knew it was wrong to dream so of a priest, there didn’t seem to be any way she could discipline herself into not doing it. The best she could manage was to make absolutely sure he had no idea of the unruly turn her thoughts had taken.

As Mary Carson watched through the drawing room window, Father Ralph and Meggie walked down from the stables, which were on the far side of the big house from the head stockman’s residence. The station men rode rawboned stock horses which had never seen the inside of a stable in all their lives, just shuffled around the yards when penned for duty, or frisked through the grass of the Home Paddock when being spelled. But there were stables on Drogheda, though only Father Ralph used them now. Mary Carson kept two thoroughbred hacks there for Father Ralph’s exclusive use; no rawboned stock horses for him. When he had asked her if Meggie might use his mounts also, she could not very well object. The girl was her niece, and he was right. She ought to be able to ride decently.

With every bitter bone in her swollen old body Mary Carson had wished she had been able to refuse, or else ride with them. But she could neither refuse nor hoist herself on a horse anymore. And it galled her to see them now, strolling across the lawn together, the man in his breeches and knee boots and white shirt as graceful as a dancer, the girl in her jodhpurs slim and boyishly beautiful. They radiated an easy friendship; for the millionth time Mary Carson wondered why no one save she deplored their close, almost intimate relationship. Paddy thought it wonderful, Fee—log that she was!—said nothing, as usual, while the boys treated them as brother and sister. Was it because she loved Ralph de Bricassart herself that she saw what no one else saw? Or did she imagine it, was there really nothing save the friendship of a man in his middle thirties for a girl not yet all the way into womanhood? Piffle! No man in his middle thirties, even Ralph de Bricassart, could fail to see the unfolding rose. Even Ralph de Bricassart? Hah! Especially Ralph de Bricassart! Nothing ever missed that man.

Her hands were trembling; the pen sprinkled dark-blue drops across the bottom of the paper. The gnarled finger plucked another sheet from a pigeonhole, dipped the pen in the standish again, and rewrote the words as surely as the first time. Then she heaved herself to her feet and moved her bulk to the door.

“Minnie! Minnie!” she called.

“Lord help us, it’s herself!” the maid said clearly from the reception room opposite. Her ageless freckled face came round the door. “And what might I be gettin’ for ye, Mrs. Carson darlin’?” she asked, wondering why the old woman had not rung the bell for Mrs. Smith, as was her wont.

“Go and find the fencer and Tom. Send them here to me at once.”

“Ought I not be reportin’ to Mrs. Smith furrst?”

“No! Just do as you’re told, girl!”

Tom, the garden rouseabout, was an old, wizened fellow who had been on the track with his bluey and his billy, and taken work for a while seventeen years ago; he had fallen in love with the Drogheda gardens and couldn’t bear to leave them. The fencer, a drifter like all his breed, had been pulled from the endless task of stringing taut wire between posts in the paddocks to repair the homestead’s white pickets for the party. Awed at the summons, they came within a few minutes and stood in work trousers, braces and flannel undershirts, hats screwed nervously in their hands.

“Can both of you write?” asked Mrs. Carson.

They nodded, swallowed.

“Good. I want you to watch me sign this piece of paper, then fix your own names and addresses just below my signature. Do you understand?”

They nodded.

“Make sure you sign the way you always do, and print your permanent addresses clearly. I don’t care if it’s a post office general delivery or what, so long as you can be reached through it.”

The two men watched her inscribe her name; it was the only time her writing was not compressed. Tom came forward, sputtered the pen across the paper painfully, then the fencer wrote “Chas. Hawkins” in large round letters, and a Sydney address. Mary Carson watched them closely; when they were done she gave each of them a dull red ten-pound note, and dismissed them with a harsh injunction to keep their mouths shut.

Meggie and the priest had long since disappeared. Mary Carson sat down at her desk heavily, drew another sheet of paper toward her, and began once more to write. This communication was not achieved with the ease and fluency of the last. Time and time again she stopped to think, then with lips drawn back in a humorless grin, she would continue. It seemed she had a lot to say, for her words were cramped, her lines very close together, and still she required a second sheet. At the end she read what she had put down, placed all the sheets together, folded them and slid them into an envelope, the back of which she sealed with red wax.

Only Paddy, Fee, Bob, Jack and Meggie were going to the party; Hughie and Stuart were deputed to mind the little ones, much to their secret relief. For once in her life Mary Carson had opened her wallet wide enough for the moths to fly out, for everyone had new clothes, the best Gilly could provide.

Paddy, Bob and Jack were immobilized behind starched shirt fronts, high collars and white bow ties, black tails, black trousers, white waistcoats. It was going to be a very formal affair, white tie and tails for the men, sweeping gowns for the women.

Fee’s dress was of crepe in a peculiarly rich shade of blue-grey, and suited her, falling to the floor in soft folds, low of neckline but tightly sleeved to the wrists, lavishly beaded, much in the style of Queen Mary. Like that imperious lady, she had her hair done high in back-sweeping puffs, and the Gilly store had produced an imitation pearl choker and earrings which would fool all but a close inspection. A magnificent ostrich-feather fan dyed the same color as her gown completed the ensemble, not so ostentatious as it appeared at first glance; the weather was unusually hot, and at seven in the evening it was still well over a hundred degrees.

When Fee and Paddy emerged from their room; the boys gaped. In all their lives they had never seen their parents so regally handsome, so foreign. Paddy looked his sixty-one years, but in such a distinguished way he might have been a statesman; whereas Fee seemed suddenly ten years younger than her forty-eight, beautiful, vital, magically smiling. Jims and Patsy burst into shrieking tears, refusing to look at Mum and Daddy until they reverted to normal, and in the flurry of consternation dignity was forgotten; Mum and Daddy behaved as they always did, and soon the twins were beaming in admiration.

But it was at Meggie everyone stared the longest. Perhaps remembering her own girlhood, and angered that all the other young ladies invited had ordered their gowns from Sydney, the Gilly dressmaker had put her heart into Meggie’s dress. It was sleeveless and had a low, draped neckline; Fee had been dubious, but Meggie had implored and the dressmaker assured her all the girls would be wearing the same sort of thing—did she want her daughter laughed at for being countrified and dowdy? So Fee had given in gracefully. Of crepe georgette, a heavy chiffon, the dress was only slightly fitted at the waist, but sashed around the hips with the same material. It was a dusky, pale pinkish grey, the color that in those days was called ashes of roses; between them the dressmaker and Meggie had embroidered the entire gown in tiny pink rosebuds. And Meggie had cut her hair in the closest way she could to the shingle creeping even through the ranks of Gilly girls. It curled far too much for fashion, of course, but it suited her better short than long.

Paddy opened his mouth to roar because she was not his little girl Meggie, but shut it again with the words unuttered; he had learned from that scene in the presbytery with Frank long ago. No, he couldn’t keep her a little girl forever; she was a young woman and shy of the amazing transformation her mirror had shown her. Why make it harder for the poor little beggar?

He extended his hand to her, smiling tenderly. “Oh, Meggie, you’re so lovely! Come on, I’m going to escort you myself, and Bob and Jack shall take your mother.”

She was just a month short of seventeen, and for the first time in his life Paddy felt really old. But she was the treasure of his heart; nothing should spoil her first grown-up party.

They walked to the homestead slowly, far too early for the first guests; they were to dine with Mary Carson and be on hand to receive with her. No one wanted dirty shoes, but a mile through Drogheda dust meant a pause in the cookhouse to polish shoes, brush dust from trouser bottoms and trailing hems.

Father Ralph was in his soutane as usual; no male evening fashion could have suited him half so well as that severely cut robe with its slightly flaring lines, the innumerable little black cloth buttons up its front from hem to collar, the purple-edged monsignor’s sash.

Mary Carson has chosen to wear white satin, white lace and white ostrich feathers. Fee stared at her stupidly, shocked out of her habitual indifference. It was so incongruously bridal, so grossly unsuitable—why on earth had she tricked herself out like a raddled old spinster playacting at being married? She had got very fat of late, which didn’t improve matters.

But Paddy seemed to see nothing amiss; he strode forward to take his sister’s hands, beaming. What a dear fellow he was, thought Father Ralph as he watched the little scene, half amused, half detached.

“Well, Mary! How fine you look! Like a young girl!”

In truth she looked almost exactly like that famous photograph of Queen Victoria taken not long before she died. The two heavy lines were there on either side of the masterful nose, the mulish mouth was set indomitably, the slightly protruding and glacial eyes fixed without blinking on Meggie. Father Ralph’s own beautiful eyes passed from niece to aunt, and back to niece again.

Mary Carson smiled at Paddy, and put her hand on his arm. “You may take me in to dinner, Padraic. Father de Bricassart will escort Fiona, and the boys must make do with Meghann between them.” Over her shoulder she looked back at Meggie. “Do you dance tonight, Meghann?”

“She’s too young, Mary, she’s not yet seventeen,” said Paddy quickly, remembering another parental shortcoming; none of his children had been taught to dance.

“What a pity,” said Mary Carson.

It was a splendid, sumptuous, brilliant, glorious party; at least, they were the adjectives most bandied about. Royal O’Mara was there from Inishmurray, two hundred miles away; he came the farthest with his wife, sons and lone daughter, though not by much. Gilly people thought little of traveling two hundred miles to a cricket match, let alone a party. Duncan Gordon, from Each-Uisge; no one had ever persuaded him to explain why he had called his station so far from the ocean the Scots Gaelic for a sea horse. Martin King, his wife, his son Anthony and Mrs. Anthony; he was Gilly’s senior squatter, since Mary Carson could not be so called, being a woman. Evan Pugh, from Braich y Pwll, which the district pronounced Brakeypull. Dominic O’Rourke from Dibban-Dibban, Horry Hopeton from Beel-Beel; and dozens more.

They were almost to the last family present Catholic, and few sported Anglo-Saxon names; there was about an equal distribution of Irish, Scottish and Welsh. No, they could not hope for home rule in the old country, nor, if Catholic in Scotland or Wales, for much sympathy from the Protestant indigenes. But here in the thousands of square miles around Gillanbone they were lords to thumb their noses at British lords, masters of all they surveyed; Drogheda, the biggest property, was greater in area than several European principalities. Monegasque princelings, Liechtensteinian dukes, beware! Mary Carson was greater. So they whirled in waltzes to the sleek Sydney band and stood back indulgently to watch their children dance the Charleston, ate the lobster patties and the chilled raw oysters, drank the fifteen-year-old French champagne and the twelve-year-old single-malt Scotch. If the truth were known, they would rather have eaten roast leg of lamb or corned beef, and much preferred to drink cheap, very potent Bundaberg rum or Grafton bitter from the barrel. But it was nice to know the better things of life were theirs for the asking.

Yes, there were lean years, many of them. The wool checks were carefully hoarded in the good years to guard against the depredations of the bad, for no one could predict the rain. But it was a good period, had been for some time, and there was little to spend the money on in Gilly. Oh, once born to the black soil plains of the Great Northwest there was no place on earth like it. They made no nostalgic pilgrimages back to the old country; it had done nothing for them save discriminate against them for their religious convictions, where Australia was too Catholic a country to discriminate. And the Great Northwest was home.

Besides, Mary Carson was footing the bill tonight. She could well afford it. Rumor said she was able to buy and sell the King of England. She had money in steel, money in silver-lead-zinc, money in copper and gold, money in a hundred different things, mostly the sort of things that literally and metaphorically made money. Drogheda had long since ceased to be the main source of her income; it was no more than a profitable hobby.

Father Ralph didn’t speak directly to Meggie during dinner, nor did he afterward; throughout the evening he studiously ignored her. Hurt, her eyes sought him wherever he was in the reception room. Aware of it, he ached to stop by her chair and explain to her that it would not do her reputation (or his) any good if he paid her more attention than he did, say, Miss Carmichael, Miss Gordon or Miss O’Mara. Like Meggie he didn’t dance, and like Meggie there were many eyes on him; they were easily the two most beautiful people in the room.

Half of him hated her appearance tonight, the short hair, the lovely dress, the dainty ashes-of-roses silk slippers with their two-inch heels; she was growing taller, developing a very feminine figure. And half of him was busy being terrifically proud of the fact that she shone all the other young ladies down. Miss Carmichael had the patrician features, but lacked the special glory of that red-gold hair; Miss King had exquisite blond tresses, but lacked the lissome body; Miss Mackail was stunning of body, but in the face very like a horse eating an apple through a wire-netting fence. Yet his overall reaction was one of disappointment, and an anguished wish to turn back the calendar. He didn’t want Meggie to grow up, he wanted the little girl he could treat as his treasured babe. On Paddy’s face he glimpsed an expression which mirrored his own thoughts, and smiled faintly. What bliss it would be if just once in his life he could show his feelings! But habit, training and discretion were too ingrained.

As the evening wore on the dancing grew more and more uninhibited, the liquor changed from champagne and whiskey to rum and beer, and proceedings settled down to something more like a woolshed ball. By two in the morning only a total absence of station hands and working girls could distinguish it from the usual entertainments of the Gilly district, which were strictly democratic.

Paddy and Fee were still in attendance, but promptly at midnight Bob and Jack left with Meggie. Neither Fee nor Paddy noticed; they were enjoying themselves. If their children couldn’t dance, they could, and did; with each other mostly, seeming to the watching Father Ralph suddenly much more attuned to each other, perhaps because the times they had an opportunity to relax and enjoy each other were rare. He never remembered seeing them without at least one child somewhere around, and thought it must be hard on the parents of large families, never able to snatch moments alone save in the bedroom, where they might excusably have other things than conversation on their minds. Paddy was always cheerful and jolly, but Fee tonight almost literally shone, and when Paddy went to beg a duty dance of some squatter’s wife, she didn’t lack eager partners; there were many much younger women wilting on chairs around the room who were not so sought after.

However, Father Ralph’s moments to observe the Cleary parents were limited. Feeling ten years younger once he saw Meggie leave the room, he became a great deal more animated and flabbergasted the Misses Hopeton, Mackail, Gordon and O’Mara by dancing—and extremely well—the Black Bottom with Miss Carmichael. But after that he gave every unattached girl in the room her turn, even poor homely Miss Pugh, and since by this time everyone was thoroughly relaxed and oozing goodwill, no one condemned the priest one bit. In fact, his zeal and kindness were much admired and commented upon. No one could say their daughter had not had an opportunity to dance with Father de Bricassart. Of course, had it not been a private party he could not have made a move toward the dance floor, but it was so nice to see such a fine man really enjoy himself for once.

At three o’clock Mary Carson rose to her feet and yawned. “No, don’t stop the festivities! If I’m tired—which I am—I can go to bed, which is what I’m going to do. But there’s plenty of food and drink, the band has been engaged to play as long as someone wants to dance, and a little noise will only speed me into my dreams. Father, would you help me up the stairs, please?”

Once outside the reception room she did not turn to the majestic staircase, but guided the priest to her drawing room, leaning heavily on his arm. Its door had been locked; she waited while he used the key she handed him, then preceded him inside.

“It was a good party, Mary,” he said.

“My last.”

“Don’t say that, my dear.”

“Why not? I’m tired of living, Ralph, and I’m going to stop.” Her hard eyes mocked. “Do you doubt me? For over seventy years I’ve done precisely what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, so if Death thinks he’s the one to choose the time of my going, he’s very much mistaken. I’ll die when I choose the time, and no suicide, either. It’s our will to live keeps us kicking, Ralph; it isn’t hard to stop if we really want to. I’m tired, and I want to stop. Very simple.”

He was tired, too; not of living, exactly, but of the endless façade, the climate, the lack of friends with common interests, himself. The room was only faintly lit by a tall kerosene lamp of priceless ruby glass, and it cast transparent crimson shadows on Mary Carson’s face, conjuring out of her intractable bones something more diabolical. His feet and back ached; it was a long time since he had danced so much, though he prided himself on keeping up with whatever was the latest fad. Thirty-five years of age, a country monsignor, and as a power in the Church? Finished before he had begun. Oh, the dreams of youth! And the carelessness of youth’s tongue, the hotness of youth’s temper. He had not been strong enough to meet the test. But he would never make that mistake again. Never, never…

He moved restlessly, sighed; what was the use? The chance would not come again. Time he faced that fact squarely, time he stopped hoping and dreaming.

“Do you remember my saying, Ralph, that I’d beat you, that I’d hoist you with your own petard?”

The dry old voice snapped him out of the reverie his weariness had induced. He looked across at Mary Carson and smiled.

“Dear Mary, I never forget anything you say. What I would have done without you these past seven years I don’t know. Your wit, your malice, your perception…”

“If I’d been younger I’d have got you in a different way, Ralph. You’ll never know how I’ve longed to throw thirty years of my life out the window. If the Devil had come to me and offered to buy my soul for the chance to be young again, I’d have sold it in a second, and not stupidly regretted the bargain like that old idiot Faust. But no Devil. I really can’t bring myself to believe in God or the Devil, you know. I’ve never seen a scrap of evidence to the effect they exist. Have you?”

“No. But belief doesn’t rest on proof of existence, Mary. It rests on faith, and faith is the touchstone of the Church. Without faith, there is nothing.”

“A very ephemeral tenet.”

“Perhaps. Faith’s born in a man or a woman, I think. For me it’s a constant struggle, I admit that, but I’ll never give up.”

“I would like to destroy you.”

His blue eyes laughed, greyed in the light. “Oh, my dear Mary! I know that.”

“But do you know why?”

A terrifying tenderness crept against him, almost inside him, except that he fought it fiercely. “I know why, Mary, and believe me, I’m sorry.”

“Besides your mother, how many women have loved you?”

“Did my mother love me, I wonder? She ended in hating me, anyway. Most women do. My name ought to have been Hippolytos.”

“Oh! That tells me a lot!”

“As to other women, I think only Meggie… But she’s a little girl. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say hundreds of women have wanted me, but loved me? I doubt it very much.”

“I have loved you,” she said pathetically.

“No, you haven’t. I’m the goad of your old age, that’s all. When you look at me I remind you of what you cannot do, because of age.”

“You’re wrong. I have loved you. God, how much! Do you think my years automatically preclude it? Well, Father de Bricassart, let me tell you something. Inside this stupid body I’m still young—I still feel, I still want, I still dream, I still kick up my heels and chafe at restrictions like my body. Old age is the bitterest vengeance our vengeful God inflicts upon us. Why doesn’t He age our minds as well?” She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, her teeth showing sourly. “I shall go to Hell, of course. But before I do, I hope I get the chance to tell God what a mean, spiteful, pitiful apology of a God He is!”

“You were a widow too long. God gave you freedom of choice, Mary. You could have remarried. If you chose not to remarry and in consequence you’ve been intolerably lonely, it’s your own doing, not God’s.”

For a moment she said nothing, her hands gripping the chair arms hard; then she began to relax, and opened her eyes. They glittered in the lamplight redly, but not with tears; with something harder, more brilliant. He caught his breath, felt fear. She looked like a spider.

“Ralph, on my desk is an envelope. Would you bring it to me, please?”

Aching and afraid, he got up and went to her desk, lifted the letter, eyed it curiously. The face of it was blank, but the back had been properly sealed with red wax and her ram’s head seal with the big D. He brought it to her and held it out, but she waved him to his seat without taking it.

“It’s yours,” she said, and giggled. “The instrument of your fate, Ralph, that’s what it is. My last and most telling thrust in our long battle. What a pity I won’t be here to see what happens. But I know what will happen, because I know you, I know you much better than you think I do. Insufferable conceit! Inside that envelope lies the fate of your life and your soul. I must lose you to Meggie, but I’ve made sure she doesn’t get you, either.”

“Why do you hate Meggie so?”

“I told you once before. Because you love her.”

“Not in that way! She’s the child I can never have, the rose of my life. Meggie is an idea, Mary, an idea!”

But the old woman sneered. “I don’t want to talk about your precious Meggie! I shall never see you again, so I don’t want to waste my time with you talking about her. The letter. I want you to swear on your vows as a priest that you don’t open it until you’ve seen my dead body for yourself, but then that you open it immediately, before you bury me. Swear!”

“There’s no need to swear, Mary. I’ll do as you ask.”

“Swear to me or I’ll take it back!”

He shrugged. “All right, then. On my vows as a priest I swear it. Not to open the letter until I’ve seen you dead, and then to open it before you’re buried.”

“Good, good!”

“Mary, please don’t worry. This is a fancy of yours, no more. In the morning you’ll laugh at it.”

“I won’t see the morning. I’m going to die tonight; I’m not weak enough to wait on the pleasure of seeing you again. What an anticlimax! I’m going to bed now. Will you take me to the top of the stairs?”

He didn’t believe her, but he could see it served no purpose to argue, and she was not in the mood to be jollied out of it. Only God decided when one would die, unless, of the free will He had given, one took one’s own life. And she had said she wouldn’t do that. So he helped her pant up the stairs and at the top took her hands in his, bent to kiss them.

She pulled them away. “No, not tonight. On my mouth, Ralph! Kiss my mouth as if we were lovers!”

By the brilliant light of the chandelier, lit for the party with four hundred wax candles, she saw the disgust in his face, the instinctive recoil; she wanted to die then, wanted to die so badly she could not wait.

“Mary, I’m a priest! I can’t!”

She laughed shrilly, eerily. “Oh, Ralph, what a sham you are! Sham man, sham priest! And to think once you actually had the temerity to offer to make love to me! Were you so positive I’d refuse? How I wish I hadn’t! I’d give my soul to see you wriggle out of it if we could have that night back again! Sham, sham, sham! That’s all you are, Ralph! An impotent, useless sham! Impotent man and impotent priest! I don’t think you could get it up and keep it up for the Blessed Virgin herself! Have you ever managed to get it up, Father de Bricassart? Sham!”

Outside it was not yet dawn, or the lightening before it. Darkness lay soft, thick and very hot over Drogheda. The revels were becoming extremely noisy; if the homestead had possessed next-door neighbors the police would have been called long since. Someone was vomiting copiously and revoltingly on the veranda, and under a wispy bottle brush two indistinct forms were locked together. Father Ralph avoided the vomiter and the lovers, treading silently across the springy new-mown lawn with such torment in his mind he did not know or care where he was going. Only that he wanted to be away from her, the awful old spider who was convinced she was spinning her death cocoon on this exquisite night. At such an early hour the heat was not exhausting; there was a faint, heavy stirring in the air, and a stealing of languorous perfumes from boronia and roses, the heavenly stillness only tropical and subtropical latitudes can ever know. Oh, God, to be alive, to be really alive! To embrace the night, and living, and be free!

He stopped on the far side of the lawn and stood looking up at the sky, an instinctive aerial searching for God. Yes, up there somewhere, between the winking points of light so pure and unearthly; what was it about the night sky? That the blue lid of day was lifted, a man permitted glimpses of eternity? Nothing save witnessing the strewn vista of the stars could convince a man that timelessness and God existed.

She’s right, of course. A sham, a total sham. No priest, no man.

Only someone who wishes he knew how to be either. No! Not either! Priest and man cannot coexist—to be a man is to be no priest. Why did I ever tangle my feet in her web? Her poison is strong, perhaps stronger than I guess. What’s in the letter? How like Mary to bait me! How much does she know, how much does she simply guess? What is there to know, or guess? Only futility, and loneliness. Doubt, pain. Always pain. Yet you’re wrong, Mary. I can get it up. It’s just that I don’t choose to, that I’ve spent years proving to myself it can be controlled, dominated, subjugated. For getting it up is the activity of a man, and I am a priest.

Someone was weeping in the cemetery. Meggie, of course. No one else would think of it. He picked up the skirts of his soutane and stepped over the wrought-iron railing, feeling it was inevitable that he had not yet done with Meggie on this night. If he confronted one of the women in his life, he must also deal with the other. His amused detachment was coming back; she could not disperse that for long, the old spider. The wicked old spider. God rot her, God rot her!

“Darling Meggie, don’t cry,” he said, sitting on the dew-wet grass beside her. “Here, I’ll bet you don’t have a decent handkerchief. Women never do. Take mine and dry your eyes like a good girl.”

She took it and did as she was told.

“You haven’t even changed out of your finery. Have you been sitting here since midnight?”

“Yes.”

“Do Bob and Jack know where you are?”

“I told them I was going to bed.”

“What’s the matter, Meggie?”

“You didn’t speak to me tonight!”

“Ah! I thought that might be it. Come, Meggie, look at me!”

Away in the east was a pearly luster, a fleeing of total darkness, and the Drogheda roosters were shrieking an early welcome to the dawn. So he could see that not even protracted tears could dim the loveliness of her eyes.

“Meggie, you were by far the prettiest girl at the party, and it’s well known that I come to Drogheda more often than I need. I am a priest and therefore I ought to be above suspicion—a bit like Caesar’s wife—but I’m afraid people don’t think so purely. As priests go I’m young, and not bad-looking.” He paused to think how Mary Carson would have greeted that bit of understatement, and laughed soundlessly. “If I had paid you a skerrick of attention it would have been all over Gilly in record time. Every party line in the district would have been buzzing with it. Do you know what I mean?”

She shook her head; the cropped curls were growing brighter in the advancing light.

“Well, you’re young to come to knowledge of the ways of the world, but you’ve got to learn, and it always seems to be my province to teach you, doesn’t it? I mean people would be saying I was interested in you as a man, not as a priest.”

“Father!”

“Dreadful, isn’t it?” He smiled. “But that’s what people would say, I assure you. You see, Meggie, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re a young lady. But you haven’t learned yet to hide your affection for me, so had I stopped to speak to you with all those people looking on, you’d have stared at me in a way which might have been misconstrued.”

She was looking at him oddly, a sudden inscrutability shuttering her gaze, then abruptly she turned her head and presented him with her profile. “Yes, I see. I was silly not to have seen it.”

“Now don’t you think it’s time you went home? No doubt everyone will sleep in, but if someone’s awake at the usual time you’ll be in the soup. And you can’t say you’ve been with me, Meggie, even to your own family.”

She got up and stood staring down at him. “I’m going, Father. But I wish they knew you better, then they’d never think such things of you. It isn’t in you, is it?”

For some reason that hurt, hurt right down to his soul as Mary Carson’s cruel taunts had not. “No, Meggie, you’re right. It isn’t in me.” He sprang up, smiling wryly. “Would you think it strange if I said I wished it was?” He put a hand to his head. “No, I don’t wish it was at all! Go home, Meggie, go home!”

Her face was sad. “Good night, Father.”

He took her hands in his, bent and kissed them. “Good night, dearest Meggie.”

He watched her walk across the graves, step over the railing; in the rosebud dress her retreating form was graceful, womanly and a little unreal. Ashes of roses. “How appropriate,” he said to the angel.

Cars were roaring away from Droghedas as he strolled back across the lawn; the party was finally over. Inside, the band was packing away its instruments, reeling with rum and exhaustion, and the tired maids and temporary helpers were trying to clear up. Father Ralph shook his head at Mrs. Smith.

“Send everyone to bed, my dear. It’s a lot easier to deal with this sort of thing when you’re fresh. I’ll make sure Mrs. Carson isn’t angry.”

“Would you like something to eat, Father?”

“Good Lord, no! I’m going to bed.”

In the late afternoon a hand touched his shoulder. He reached for it blindly without the energy to open his eyes, and tried to hold it against his cheek.

“Meggie,” he mumbled.

“Father, Father! Oh, please will you wake up?”

At the tone of Mrs. Smith’s voice his eyes came suddenly very awake. “What is it, Mrs. Smith?”

“It’s Mrs. Carson, Father. She’s dead.”

His watch told him it was after six in the evening; dazed and reeling from the heavy torpor the day’s terrible heat had induced in him, he struggled out of his pajamas and into his priest’s clothes, threw a narrow purple stole around his neck and took the oil of extreme unction, the holy water, his big silver cross, his ebony rosary beads. It never occurred to him for a moment to wonder if Mrs. Smith was right; he knew the spider was dead. Had she taken something after all? Pray God if she had, it was neither obviously present in the room nor obvious to a doctor. What possible use it was to administer extreme unction he didn’t know. But it had to be done. Let him refuse and there would be post-mortems, all sorts of complications. Yet it had nothing to do with his sudden suspicion of suicide; simply that to him laying sacred things on Mary Carson’s body was obscene.

She was very dead, must have died within minutes of retiring, a good fifteen hours earlier. The windows were closed fast, and the room humid from the great flat pans of water she insisted be put in every inconspicuous corner to keep her skin youthful. There was a peculiar noise in the air; after a stupid moment of wondering he realized what he heard were flies, hordes of flies buzzing, insanely clamoring as they feasted on her, mated on her, laid their eggs on her.

“For God’s sake, Mrs. Smith, open the windows!” he gasped, moving to the bedside, face pallid.

She had passed out of rigor mortis and was again limp, disgustingly so. The staring eyes were mottling, her thin lips black; and everywhere on her were the flies. He had to have Mrs. Smith keep shooing them away as he worked over her, muttering the ancient Latin exhortations. What a farce, and she accursed. The smell of her! Oh, God! Worse than any dead horse in the freshness of a paddock. He shrank from touching her in death as he had in life, especially those flyblown lips. She would be a mass of maggots within hours.

At last it was done. He straightened. “Go to Mr. Cleary at once, Mrs. Smith, and for God’s sake tell him to get the boys working on a coffin right away. No time to have one sent out from Gilly; she’s rotting away before our very eyes. Dear lord! I feel sick. I’m going to have a bath and I’ll leave my clothes outside my door. Burn them. I’ll never get the smell of her out of them.”

Back in his room in riding breeches and shirt—for he had not packed two soutanes—he remembered the letter, and his promise. Seven o’clock had struck; he could hear a restrained chaos as maids and temporary helpers flew to clear the party mess away, transform the reception room back into a chapel, ready the house for tomorrow’s funeral. No help for it, he would have to go into Gilly tonight to pick up another soutane and vestments for the Requiem Mass. Certain things he was never without when he left the presbytery for an outlying station, carefully strapped in compartments in the little black case, his sacraments for birth, death, benediction, worship, and the vestments suitable for Mass at whatever time of the year it was. But he was an Irishman, and to carry the black mourning accouterments of a Requiem was to tempt fate. Paddy’s voice echoed in the distance, but he could not face Paddy at the moment; he knew Mrs. Smith would do what had to be done.

Sitting at his window looking out over the vista of Drogheda in the dying sun, the ghost gums golden, the mass of red and pink and white roses in the garden all empurpled, he took Mary Carson’s letter from his case and held it between his hands. But she had insisted he read it before he buried her, and somewhere in his mind a little voice was whispering that he must read it now, not later tonight after he had seen Paddy and Meggie, but now before he had seen anyone save Mary Carson.

It contained four sheets of paper; he riffled them apart and saw immediately that the lower two were her will. The top two were addressed to him, in the form of a letter.

It was not signed or initialed. He felt the sweat on his forehead, felt it running down the back of his neck from his hair. And he wanted to get up that very moment to burn both documents, never read what the second one contained. But she had gauged her quarry well, the gross old spider. Of course he would read on; he was too curious to resist. God! What had he ever done, to make her want to do this to him? Why did women make him suffer so? Why couldn’t he have been born small, twisted, ugly? If he were so, he might have been happy.

The last two sheets were covered by the same precise, almost minute writing. As mean and grudging as her soul.

It was duly signed, dated and witnessed.

His room looked west. The sun was setting. The pall of dust which came with every summer filled the silent air, and the sun thrust its fingers through the fine-strung particles so that it seemed the whole world had turned to gold and purple. Streaky clouds rimmed in brilliant fire poked silver streamers across the great bloody ball which hung just above the trees of the far paddocks.

“Bravo!” he said. “I admit, Mary, you’ve beaten me. A master stroke. I was the fool, not you.”

He could not see the pages in his hand through the tears, and moved them before they could be blotched. Thirteen million pounds. Thirteen million pounds! It was indeed what he had been angling for in the days before Meggie. And with her coming he had abandoned it, because he couldn’t carry on such a campaign in cold blood to cheat her of her inheritance. But what if he had known how much the old spider was worth? What then? He had no idea it was a tenth so much. Thirteen million pounds!

For seven years Paddy and his family had lived in the head stockman’s house and worked themselves ragged for Mary Carson. For what? The niggardly wages she paid? Never to Father Ralph’s knowledge had Paddy complained of being shabbily treated, thinking no doubt that when his sister died he would be amply repaid for managing the property on ordinary stockman’s pay, while his sons did stockman’s work for rouseabout’s wages. He had made do, and grown to Jove Drogheda as if it were his own, rightly assuming it would be.

“Bravo, Mary!” said Father Ralph again, these first tears since his boyhood dropping from his face onto the backs of his hands, but not onto the paper.

Thirteen million pounds, and the chance to be Cardinal de Bricassart yet. Against Paddy Cleary, his wife, his sons—and Meggie. How diabolically well she had read him! Had she stripped Paddy of everything, his way would have been clear: he could have taken the will down to the kitchen stove and thrust it inside the firebox without a qualm. But she had made sure Paddy wouldn’t want, that after her death he would be more comfortable on Drogheda than during her life, and that Drogheda could not quite be taken from him. Its profits and title, yes, but not the land itself. No, he wouldn’t be the owner of that fabulous thirteen million pounds, but he would be well respected, comfortably provided for. Meggie wouldn’t go hungry, or be thrown shoeless upon the world. Nor would she be Miss Cleary, either, able to stand on an equal footing with Miss Carmichael and that ilk. Quite respectable, socially admissible, but not top drawer. Never top drawer.

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.”

“There is nothing which has no right to be born, even an idea.”

He turned his head to watch her. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“I think so.”

“Not everything born is good, Meggie.”

“No. But if it was born at all, it was meant to be.”

“You argue like a Jesuit. How old are you?”

“I’ll be seventeen in a month, Father.”

“And you’ve toiled all seventeen years of it. Well, hard work ages us ahead of our years. What do you think about, Meggie, when you’ve the time to think?”

“Oh, about Jims and Patsy and the rest of the boys, about Daddy and Mum, about Hal and Auntie Mary. Sometimes about growing babies. I’d like that very much. And riding, the sheep. All the things the men talk about. The weather, the rain, the vegetable garden, the hens, what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

“Do you dream of having a husband?”

“No, except I suppose I’ll have to have one if I want to grow babies. It isn’t nice for a baby to have no father.”

In spite of his pain he smiled; she was such a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. Then he swung sideways, took her chin in his hand and stared down at her. How to do it, what had to be done?

“Meggie, I realized something not long ago which I ought to have seen sooner. You weren’t being quite truthful when you told me what you thought about, were you?”

“I…”, she said, and fell silent.

“You didn’t say you thought about me, did you? If there was no guilt in it, you would have mentioned my name alongside your father’s. I think perhaps it’s a good thing I’m going away, don’t you? You’re a little old to be having schoolgirl crushes, but you’re not a very old almost-seventeen, are you? I like your lack of worldly wisdom, but I know how painful schoolgirl crushes can be; I’ve suffered enough of them.”

She seemed about to speak, but in the end her lids fell over tear-bright eyes, she shook her head free.

“Look, Meggie, it’s simply a phase, a marker on the road to being a woman. When you’ve become that woman, you’ll meet the man destined to be your husband and you’ll be far too busy getting on with your life to think of me, except as an old friend who helped you through some of the terrible spasms of growing up. What you mustn’t do is get into the habit of dreaming about me in any sort of romantic fashion. I can never regard you the way a husband will. I don’t think of you in that light at all, Meggie, do you understand me? When I say I love you, I don’t mean I love you as a man. I am a priest, not a man. So don’t fill your head with dreams of me. I’m going away, and I doubt very much that I’ll have time to come back, even on a visit.”

Her shoulders were bent as if the load was very heavy, but she lifted her head to look directly into his face.

“I won’t fill my head with dreams of you, don’t worry. I know you’re a priest.”

“I’m not convinced I chose my vocation wrongly. It fills a need in me no human being ever could, even you.”

“I know. I can see it when you say Mass. You have a power. I suppose you must feel like Our Lord.”

“I can feel every suspended breath in the church, Meggie! As each day goes on I die, and in each morning saying Mass I am reborn. But is it because I’m God’s chosen priest, or because I hear those awed breaths, know the power I have over every soul present?”

“Does it matter? It just is.”

“It would probably never matter to you, but it does to me. I doubt, I doubt.”

She switched the subject to what mattered to her. “I don’t know how I shall get on without you, Father. First Frank, now you. Somehow with Hal it’s different; I know he’s dead and can never come back. But you and Frank are alive! I’ll aways be wondering how you are, what you’re doing, if you’re all right, if there’s anything I could do to help you. I’ll even have to wonder if you’re still alive, won’t I?”

“I’ll be feeling the same, Meggie, and I’m sure that Frank does, too.”

“No. Frank’s forgotten us… You will, too.”

“I could never forget you, Meggie, not as long as I live. And for my punishment I’m going to live a long, long time.” He got up and pulled her to her feet, put his arms about her loosely and affectionately. “I think this is goodbye, Meggie. We can’t be alone again.”

“If you hadn’t been a priest, Father, would you have married me?”

The title jarred. “Don’t call me that all the time! My name is Ralph.” Which didn’t answer her question.

Though he held her, he did not have any intention of kissing her. The face raised to his was nearly invisible, for the moon had set and it was very dark. He could feel her small, pointed breasts low down on his chest; a curious sensation, disturbing. Even more so was the fact that as naturally as if she came into a man’s arms every day of her life, her arms had gone up around his neck, and linked tightly.

He had never kissed anyone as a lover, did not want to now; nor, he thought, did Meggie. A warm salute on the cheek, a quick hug, as she would demand of her father were he to go away. She was sensitive and proud; he must have hurt her deeply when he held up her precious dreams to dispassionate inspection. Undoubtedly she was as eager to be done with the farewell as he was. Would it comfort her to know his pain was far worse than hers? As he bent his head to come at her cheek she raised herself on tiptoe, and more by luck than good management touched his lips with her own. He jerked back as if he tasted the spider’s poison, then he tipped his head forward before he could lose her, tried to say something against the sweet shut mouth, and in trying to answer she parted it. Her body seemed to lose all its bones, become fluid, a warm melting darkness; one of his arms was clamped round her waist, the other across her back with its hand on her skull, in her hair, holding her face up to his as if frightened she would go from him in that very moment, before he could grasp and catalogue this unbelievable presence who was Meggie. Meggie, and not Meggie, too alien to be familiar, for his Meggie wasn’t a woman, didn’t feel like a woman, could never be a woman to him. Just as he couldn’t be a man to her.

The thought overcame his drowning senses; he wrenched her arms from about his neck, thrust her away and tried to see her face in the darkness. But her head was down, she wouldn’t look at him.

“It’s time we were going, Meggie,” he said.

Without a word she turned to her horse, mounted and waited for him; usually it was he who waited for her.

Father Ralph had been right. At this time of year Drogheda was awash with roses, so the house was smothered in them. By eight that morning hardly one bloom was left in the garden. The first of the mourners began to arrive not long after the final rose was plundered from its bush; a light breakfast of coffee and freshly baked, buttered rolls was laid out in the small dining room. After Mary Carson was deposited in the vault a more substantial repast would be served in the big dining room, to fortify the departing mourners on their long ways home. The word had got around; no need to doubt the efficiency of the Gilly grapevine, which was the party line. While lips shaped conventional phrases, eyes and the minds behind them speculated, deduced, smiled slyly.

“I hear we’re going to lose you, Father,” said Miss Carmichael nastily.

He had never looked so remote, so devoid of human feeling as he did that morning in his laceless alb and dull black chasuble with silver cross. It was as if he attended only in body, while his spirit moved far away. But he looked down at Miss Carmichael absently, seemed to recollect himself, and smiled with genuine mirth.

“God moves in strange ways, Miss Carmichael,” he said, and went to speak to someone else.

What was on his mind no one could have guessed; it was the coming confrontation with Paddy over the will, and his dread of seeing Paddy’s rage, his need of Paddy’s rage and contempt.

Before he began the Requiem Mass he turned to face his congregation; the room was jammed, and reeked so of roses that open windows could not dissipate their heavy perfume.

“I do not intend to make a long eulogy,” he said in his clear, almost Oxford diction with its faint Irish underlay. “Mary Carson was known to you all. A pillar of the community, a pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being.”

At that point there were those who swore his eyes mocked, but others who maintained just as stoutly that they were dulled with a real and abiding grief.

“A pillar of the Church she loved more than any living being,” he repeated more clearly still; he was not one to turn away, either. “In her last hour she was alone, yet she was not alone. For in the hour of our death Our Lord Jesus Christ is with us, within us, bearing the burden of our agony. Not the greatest nor the humblest living being dies alone, and death is sweet. We are gathered here to pray for her immortal soul, that she whom we loved in life shall enjoy her just and eternal reward. Let us pray.”

The makeshift coffin was so covered in roses it could not be seen, and it rested upon a small wheeled cart the boys had cannibalized from various pieces of farm equipment. Even so, with the windows gaping open and the overpowering scent of roses, they could smell her. The doctor had been talking, too.

“When I reached Drogheda she was so rotten that I just couldn’t hold my stomach,” he said on the party line to Martin King. “I’ve never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life as I did then for Paddy Cleary, not only because he’s been done out of Drogheda but because he had to shove that awful seething heap in a coffin.”

“Then I’m not volunteering for the office of pallbearer,” Martin said, so faintly because of all the receivers down that the doctor had to make him repeat the statement three times before he understood it.

Hence the cart; no one was willing to shoulder the remains of Mary Carson across the lawn to the vault. And no one was sorry when the vault doors were closed on her and breathing could become normal at last.

While the mourners clustered in the big dining room eating, or trying to look as if they were eating, Harry Gough conducted Paddy, his family, Father Ralph, Mrs. Smith and the two maids to the drawing room. None of the mourners had any intention of going home yet, hence the pretense at eating; they wanted to be on hand to see what Paddy looked like when he came out after the reading of the will. To do him and his family justice, they hadn’t comported themselves during the funeral as if conscious of their elevated status. As good-hearted as ever, Paddy had wept for his sister, and Fee looked exactly as she always did, as if she didn’t care what happened to her.

“Paddy, I want you to contest,” Harry Gough said after he had read the amazing document through in a hard, indignant voice.

“The wicked old bitch!” said Mrs. Smith; though she liked the priest, she was fonder by far of the Clearys. They had brought babies and children into her life.

But Paddy shook his head. “No, Harry! I couldn’t do that. The property was hers, wasn’t it? She was quite entitled to do what she liked with it. If she wanted the Church to have it, she wanted the Church to have it. I don’t deny it’s a bit of a disappointment, but I’m just an ordinary sort of chap, so perhaps it’s for the best. I don’t think I’d like the responsibility of owning a property the size of Drogheda.”

“You don’t understand, Paddy!” the lawyer said in a slow, distinct voice, as if he were explaining to a child. “It isn’t just Drogheda I’m talking about. Drogheda was the least part of what your sister had to leave, believe me. She’s a major shareholder in a hundred gilt-edged companies, she owns steel factories and gold mines, she’s Michar Limited, with a ten-story office building all to herself in Sydney. She was worth more than anyone in the whole of Australia! Funny, she made me contact the Sydney directors of Michar Limited not four weeks ago, to find out the exact extent of her assets. When she died she was worth something over thirteen million pounds.”

“Thirteen million pounds!” Paddy said it as one says the distance from the earth to the sun, something totally incomprehensible. “That settles it, Harry. I don’t want the responsibility of that kind of money.”

“It’s no responsibility, Paddy! Don’t you understand yet? Money like that looks after itself! You’d have nothing to do with cultivating or harvesting it; there are hundreds of people employed simply to take care of it for you. Contest the will, Paddy, please! I’ll get you the best KCs in the country and I’ll fight it for you all the way to the Privy Council if necessary.”

Suddenly realizing that his family were as concerned as himself, Paddy turned to Bob and Jack, sitting together bewildered on a Florentine marble bench. “Boys, what do you say? Do you want to go after Auntie Mary’s thirteen million quid? If you do I’ll contest, not otherwise.”

“But we can live on Drogheda anyway, isn’t that what the will says?” Bob asked.

Harry answered. “No one can turn you off Drogheda so long as even one of your father’s grandchildren lives.”

“We’re going to live here in the big house, have Mrs. Smith and the girls to look after us, and earn a decent wage,” said Paddy as if he could hardly believe his good fortune rather than his bad.

“Then what more do we want, Jack?” Bob asked his brother. “Don’t you agree?”

“It suits me,” said Jack.

Father Ralph moved restlessly. He had not stopped to shed his Requiem vestments, nor had he taken a chair; like a dark and beautiful sorcerer he stood half in the shadows at the back of the room, isolated, his hands hidden beneath the black chasuble, his face still, and at the back of the distant blue eyes a horrified, stunned resentment. There was not even going to be the longed-for chastisement of rage or contempt; Paddy was going to hand it all to him on a golden plate of goodwill, and thank him for relieving the Clearys of a burden.

“What about Fee and Meggie?” the priest asked Paddy harshly. “Do you not think enough of your women to consult them, too?”

“Fee?” asked Paddy anxiously.

“Whatever you decide, Paddy. I don’t care.”

“Meggie?”

“I don’t want her thirteen million pieces of silver,” Meggie said, her eyes fixed on Father Ralph.

Paddy turned to the lawyer. “Then that’s it, Harry. We don’t want to contest the will. Let the Church have Mary’s money, and welcome.”

Harry struck his hands together. “God damn it, I hate to see you cheated!”

“I thank my stars for Mary,” said Paddy gently. “If it wasn’t for her I’d still be trying to scrape a living in New Zealand.”

As they came out of the drawing room Paddy stopped Father Ralph and held out his hand, in full view of the fascinated mourners clustering in the dining room doorway.

“Father, please don’t think there are any hard feelings on our side. Mary was never swayed by another human being in all her life, priest or brother or husband. You take it from me, she did what she wanted to do. You were mighty good to her, and you’ve been mighty good to us. We’ll never forget it.”

The guilt. The burden. Almost Father Ralph did not move to take that gnarled stained hand, but the cardinal’s brain won; he gripped it feverishly and smiled, agonized.

“Thank you, Paddy. You may rest assured I’ll see you never want for a thing.”

Within the week he was gone, not having appeared on Drogheda again. He spent the few days packing his scant belongings, and touring every station in the district where there were Catholic families; save Drogheda.

Father Watkin Thomas, late of Wales, arrived to assume the duties of parish priest to the Gillanbone district, while Father Ralph de Bricassart became private secretary to Archbishop Cluny Dark. But his work load was light; he had two undersecretaries. For the most part he was occupied in discovering just what and how much Mary Carson had owned, and in gathering the reins of government together on behalf of the Church.