The Artist’s Secret

by Sonya Heaney

  Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.

  Elizabeth buried her face in her hands. ‘Argh.’

  She stayed until the peace of the hour settled her, fixing her mind on her plans for the following day, and was about to return to her room when movement across the garden caught her eye.

  Gasping, her instinct to flee hit her before common sense took over.

  Ghosts were nonsense. Intruders, however …

  Bushrangers were long gone from the tablelands, and there was more than one burly man on Endmoor grounds who’d willingly deal with an intruder. All she had to do was call for help—but she stopped herself before any words formed on her lips. Surely she was being overly dramatic.

  Elizabeth hugged her knees as everything calmed again, and she was about to convince herself she’d imagined it but then the shadows shifted again.

  ‘Bollocks.’ The word formed on her lips, but no sound emerged. Her heart pounded so loudly she could hardly hear over it.

  Rising slowly, she edged to the window, clasping at the gathered curtains and straining to see. If she could just convince herself it was a tree out there and not a man, or perhaps that it was an overly large possum, everything would be fine.

  The clouds had come over since the sun set and now they moved on with the breeze. As the moon emerged, casting light across the estate, Elizabeth got her third glimpse of what had frightened her.

  She saw him better this time, as growing confidence had him strolling right past the homestead and out of her view.

  She rushed to the next room to keep sight of him: a tall figure whose striking features were almost entirely disguised in the night. Uncertainty had her clutching tightly at her shawl and walking on the tips of her toes.

  From the dining room she spotted Mr Rowe again as he rounded the side of the cottage and continued on in the direction of the grapevines and the paddocks beyond.

  Another instinct, one she didn’t understand, told her to not announce herself, and she followed it as she followed him, creeping on bare feet out the kitchen door and making her way across the cool path that wound around the garden. Small pebbles and stray twigs pressed into her feet, and she cursed them silently but continued, her shawl pulled as tightly around herself as she could manage in an attempt to mask the white of her nightgown.

  She stopped when the path ended, biting her lip and staring after him as he strode off into the darkness. The night swallowed him up almost entirely, but he didn’t slow, even as the clouds came back across, masking her vision once more.

  Frustrated, she shivered in the cool breeze. What did they really know about him, after all? Over the course of the evening meal they’d learnt that his education was impressive, that he’d never been to the area before, and that he had a deceased mother, a living father, and one sister named Edith. It wasn’t exactly much to go by.

  In that moment the town, along with its reassuringly large police barracks and magistrate’s quarters, felt a thousand miles away.

  Behind Elizabeth the house had fallen silent once more, but she took some comfort in the fact her brother kept a cricket bat in his office. What she lacked in size to the mysterious man out there stalking the countryside, she could certainly make up for with a lump of willow wood and a decent swing.

  Chapter 3

  It was madness to go wandering the property so late. Peter was well aware of it. He’d heard the country brought with it all kinds of dangers, and some of them had far better vision at night than he did. Thank goodness for the near-full moon, but it wouldn’t do to succumb to a snakebite—or a hidden ditch—before he’d even taken his first look at Robert Farrer’s ledgers.

  And yet there he was sneaking about like a dashed criminal for no better reason than his infernal impatience. For a generally even-tempered man, it was a shocking thing to discover about himself.

  He’d avoided a collision with Albert, the young butler, who’d come bustling along the path at an odd hour, smelling mildly like hops and mumbling something about a lost door key. Peter was fairly certain he’d come out the winner if the two of them got into a tussle, but he tended to avoid fisticuffs during the first week in a new position, and so stuck to the shadows until he had the night to himself again.

  He wouldn’t go far tonight. However, he felt the need to be out there, on the land, searching for … well. It’d help a great deal if he knew precisely what he was up to.

  Self-preservation had him startling like a jumpy kitten at the sight of movement up ahead, and then laughing quietly to himself at the sight of Mrs Farrer’s enormous tabby ambling around the corner. He garnered one slow, bored perusal, the cat’s eyes gleaming at him freakishly, and then she continued on her way at the same disinterested pace.

  Dismissed, he walked on, attention fixed on the shadowy foothills. Dead leaves crunched under his feet the moment he left the path and he slowed his pace, half expecting to take a tumble down a wombat hole at any moment.

  Wouldn’t that be an interesting story to explain when he was found by an unsuspecting stockman at dawn?

  He almost missed the movement off to the side of his vision. Had a bat not flown over at that exact moment, its eerie shriek coming from his right, he wouldn’t have turned enough to see the woman.

  Lit only by a dim light from one of the homestead’s rooms, she was too slender to be the housekeeper, and it wasn’t Mrs Farrer; Robert’s fair-haired wife was so diminutive not even the force of her personality could disguise that fact.

  Elizabeth Farrer, then. Peter froze.

  ‘Damn,’ he breathed.

  ***

  ‘It’s too big,’ Daisy had no choice to concede two days earlier. She stood with Peter in the terrace on Glenmore Road, the light coming and going around them as the sea breeze blew the end of rain shower away west across Sydney’s growing sprawl.

  Brother and sister stood in silence for a little while, side by side as they gave the painting on the parlour wall a frank assessment. Peter really hadn’t needed to pay a visit to the house to study the thing one last time before he left; he was fairly sure he could describe it in his sleep. He knew each rock and tree and shadow depicted in the valley, just as he knew each rise and fall of the mountains beyond it. A single building stood off to the left of the picture, a crooked and poorly formed blight on the wild landscape.

  ‘It’s far too big,’ he agreed readily. ‘And that’s why I can’t take it with me.’

  In a house that had been furnished with all things masculine—the walls, it seemed, could always do with another image of a man on a horse—the sprawling depiction of a countryside so alien to Peter stood out each and every time. Long after his father’s more obvious decorating choices had become stale and forgettable, his attention never failed to be captured by this one.

  It was an unsophisticated work. In what Peter guessed had been a rare moment of sentimentality, his father had purchased the painting as he’d passed across the countryside back in the early 1850s, travelling the long, slow way from his own parents’ modest home in Albury to begin his new life in the city.

  ‘I don’t miss the bush’ Maurice Rowe had been known to say firmly—and often.

  The man had arrived in the city with not only a somewhat battered painting but also a wife plucked from a small settlement in the middle of nowhere, a woman as eager to be gone from her own rural backwater as Maurice had been himself.

  Daisy stepped closer, using the edge of her shawl to wipe at the dust on the brass plaque at the bottom. Peter watched her trace the title etched into the metal.

  Namadgi Sunrise

  Soon, so soon, Peter would see this view with his own eyes.

  His mother’s family had been there long before the bullock trains had arrived in the valley, and well before the bush had been tamed and the thick forest transformed into a maze of fields and roads. He knew it in a vague, distant way, but he could not yet feel it.

  Another burst of spring rain misted the window, and a seagull sailed by, down the slop
e to the bay. It would be strange to leave the coast. His whole life had been spent within a few miles of the Pacific.

  Rowe and Son was thriving, and even though the Farrer property was likely to do well in the future, neither Peter nor his father needed to take on the management of a brand-new vineyard in the middle of the country. The coincidence that the senior Rowe had somehow heard about Endmoor, of all the properties in New South Wales, wasn’t just suspicious, it was telling.

  Not for the first time since being asked—ordered—to pack his things and make a railway journey south, Peter found himself wondering …

  ‘Do you think it’s really like that there?’ Daisy’s focus was on the crooked little hut to one side of the picture. ‘I can’t even imagine … The valley is so large you’d need some sort of map to navigate it.’

  ‘I’ve made a sketch of the painting to take with me.’ He hadn’t intended to tell her; the words just came out. ‘It’ll have to do.’

  She whipped around to face him. Her dark eyes danced. ‘Am I allowed to see it?’

  ‘No!’

  She gasped with laughter at the power of his response. ‘It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘Believe me, Daisy, it is.’

  His sister had hugged him then. Tightly. ‘What will I do without you here?’

  ‘I doubt you’ll even notice I’m gone,’ he’d said, and received a little pinch on the arm and a kiss on the cheek for it.

  ***

  Had Miss Farrer seen him? For long moments Peter stayed as he was, hoping that from so far away he looked like nothing more than a trick of the shadows or perhaps a small tree.

  He watched until her attention moved elsewhere, and then carefully crept on, past his cottage, to where he couldn’t easily be seen.

  Imaginary tentacles stretched out in every direction, searching, seeking. Out in the paddock the merinos were a sea of hazy white figures dotting the plain, and beyond that rose the Brindabella Range. A painting could capture many things, but it also gave a man a chance to imagine the rest; the sounds and the scents of the country were opposite in every way to the bustle of a city and the breeze of the coast. The vastness was easy to picture, and yet it was different when it was actually felt.

  Shaking his head at his own idiocy, Peter had to wonder what he’d expected to find at night that he’d not been able to see during day.

  He took another step and grunted as something skittled under his foot, turning his ankle.

  Crouching, he scooped his hand in the dirt and closed his fist around something small and hard. He ran a thumb over it.

  A gumnut.

  He tucked it into his pocket, and had just decided to return to the house when his head snapped up, all his senses alert. There’d been something out there a moment ago …

  It was then he saw the bob of light some hundred yards away, maybe more.

  Stilling, he strained to see, tracking the person’s progress, occasionally losing sight of them as someone—he, he supposed—picked his way across the valley, the light disappearing here and there as the trees blocked the view, and then re-emerging further away. The light became less distinct as its owner carried it off to the west, and then faded away to nothing more than a whisper of a glow. It was as though a ghost had passed by.

  Once he lost sight of it completely, Peter watched for another few minutes just in case, and then turned back.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he murmured, his voice sounding too loud in the emptiness.

  When he retraced his steps and rounded the corner the house was dark and Miss Farrer was gone.

  ***

  ‘Are you finished with that?’ Elizabeth asked Alice several days later as the other woman closed the cover of her novel with a satisfied sigh and set it aside, picking up her mending in its place.

  Her sister-in-law focused on threading a needle, but the corners of her mouth still curved up as she nodded. ‘Yes, I’m finished. Now, on to the next one.’

  ‘There’s another one?’

  ‘There will be, just as soon as I can convince Robert to order it.’

  That drew Elizabeth up short. ‘What’s so terrible that he wouldn’t order it?’

  Alice pressed her lips together, eyes laughing. ‘I reckon I ought not to ruin your respectability by tellin’ you.’

  Elizabeth spluttered long enough for Alice to execute a couple of stitches. ‘What on earth …? Are you trying to preserve my modesty? What about yours?’

  ‘I never had much of it to being with. And I’m a married lady now, so I can read whatever I want. I bet Robert wouldn’t want your young mind corrupted.’

  ‘Alice, I’m five years older than you!’

  The younger woman grinned. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’

  Elizabeth groaned. It was a little funny, how marriage changed things so much.

  ‘You’re impossible.’

  The days were becoming noticeably longer, and even though they were now close to the evening meal, the drawing room was still bright. Elizabeth set the letter she had been reading aside—the art buyer in Goulburn wanted to discuss the pricing of her work—and eyed the book surreptitiously.

  ‘I promise, one day I’ll be so corrupted you’ll all be astonished.’

  Alice looked up and then looked appalled. ‘If you do that nobody will come callin’ on us.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like callers.’

  ‘Not most of ’em, but we’ve gotta give Mrs Adamson someone to impress.’

  Sighing and admitting defeat for the time being—the housekeeper did deserve a guest or two now and then—Elizabeth returned to her letter.

  It had been a complete accident that she had sold any of her work to Evanson and Associates to begin with. A delayed coach on a trip to Sydney at the beginning of the year, on a day everyone was so out of sorts thanks to the heat and the wait that they turned to the nearest person to moan about it, and the next thing she knew she was showing her work to a man she’d never seen before in her life.

  Mr Montague Evanson, a married, ruddy-faced fellow somewhere in his forties, had been remarkably enthusiastic about the whole thing, and had waxed poetic about city buyers’ enthusiasm for the romance of the bush.

  In truth, at first she’d been sceptical. His offer had sounded too good to be true, and before their conversation had even ended she’d been sure it was an elaborate scam. It was only weeks later, with some investigative help from Robert and John Stanford, that they’d learnt the offer was genuine.

  Soon after that she’d made her first sale, and then her second and her third.

  ‘If you like,’ Alice began generously once Elizabeth folded and set the letter aside, ‘I’ll lend the book to you. But maybe don’t tell Robert, and don’t mention it to me when he’s around, because that’s not a conversation any of us want to have.’

  Elizabeth rewarded her with a happy sigh. ‘I knew you’d come around.’

  They shared a private, secret smile.

  Alice added a few more stitches while Elizabeth rose from the chair, and then a couple more as she crossed the room and picked the book up, turning it over and examining the seemingly innocent maroon and black cover.

  ‘Is it really such a scandalous story?’

  ‘Uh huh, I reckon it is. Even by me own standards.’

  Alice had grown up in different circumstances to her. It was something that made them seem closer in age than they were—at least Elizabeth thought so. And, as Alice had jokingly pointed out only moments earlier, she was also a married woman. A mother, too.

  Some days recently Elizabeth had begun to feel like she was another child in the house.

  ‘Speakin’ of books, weren’t you goin’ to take some over for that Mr Rowe?’

  ‘I was.’

  It had been her plan back when she’d thought him less nefarious than he’d shown himself to be. She’d still not said anything to anyone about that night he’d gone wandering. When it came down to it, there wasn’t anything illegal about taking a midnight stro
ll, and it wouldn’t do to go about accusing innocent men of odd things.

  ‘Last I heard, he’s not there right now. Rode out with Robert somewhere or other. Probably lookin’ at those fences to the east, though I don’t know what a businessman like him wants with them. Maybe you want to wait a bit? Go over when he gets back?’

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure she trusted that look in the other woman’s eyes. It was a look that said she’d noticed too much—far too much.

  This wasn’t good.

  ‘No, I think I’ll take them over now.’ And maybe snoop a bit.

  Chapter 4

  Elizabeth felt incredibly guilty as she made her way down the path, past Alice’s rose garden, and across the gravel to the cottage. The sun seemed angled to blind her. Cicadas sounded from every direction.

  It was extremely hard to hurry with a stack of books in her arms and Hutton, her brother’s dog, darting past, providing her with an excellent opportunity to take a tumble.

  ‘Why aren’t you off with Robert?’ she asked the heeler after coming within an inch of stepping on a paw, and received a happy yip but no intelligible response.

  Bessie the maid walked by, offering Elizabeth a smile, and a stockman stood on the drive, talking to Mr Adamson about something or other over the top of a wagon.

  Elizabeth ducked around the dog, who’d become suddenly fascinated with the bottom of a wattle bush, and continued on her way. The books in her arms were rather heavy. With each step she imagined the men’s eyes boring into the back of her, though the conversation that drifted across implied they’d not even noticed she was there.

  Everything about what she was doing felt suspicious—probably because it was.

  She sighed in frustration when she reached the door and realised she couldn’t set the books down to knock, and then glanced in either direction before bracing for balance and giving the door a couple of decent whacks with her shoe.

  How very, very ladylike.

  The door opened of its own accord on the second kick; it struck her as naïvely trusting on the accountant’s part.