The Artist’s Secret

by Sonya Heaney

  ‘We are. Off to deliver some things to the McCoys over to the west, and then to town.’

  ‘Ah, well. It’s a fine day for it. Not too hot compared to yesterday.’

  Why, he truly wished to know, did uncomfortable people always start nattering on about the weather? He strove to do better, and shoved a second comment about the heat back where it had risen from before it could be voiced.

  ‘I was about to read a paper.’ Oh yes, that was a vast improvement.

  ‘You were?’ Her polite disinterest was expected, but he just kept on speaking.

  ‘Yes. About botrytis cinerea. Grey mould, some people call it. Noble rot.’

  He couldn’t blame her for not swooning.

  ‘Grey mould?’ She smiled then. ‘How lovely.’

  It had been a few years since Peter had had his manners drilled into him, but a fellow didn’t have to be a genius to know he shouldn’t discuss fungus with a lady first thing on a Thursday morning.

  ‘Yes, I’m told that if an infestation is introduced at the right time, it works for the production of botrytised wines, and—’

  And that’s where the conversation ended, because Stanford was back, his infernal Aurelian hair shiny in the sunlight, and Elizabeth was looking at the man with blatant relief. Peter knew with absolute certainty that the other man had not once, not ever felt the need to say a word like infestation to a beautiful woman.

  ‘Well, enjoy your day,’ he finished pathetically, and she had the decency to look at him one more time—with sympathy, he was sure—before taking Stanford’s proffered arm and moving away towards the carriage.

  Sense had him thinking of that letter to Moss Vale that needed composing, but pride won over, and he’d called Elizabeth’s name before he could stop himself.

  She came back to him, which meant she’d finally stopped clinging to her brother’s business partner, but he’d not thought beyond regaining her attention and struggled again, thinking it would have been better to have stayed in the house.

  The house. Aha.

  ‘You’ve created a picture I’ve an interest in. The smaller one I saw two days ago, the one of the homestead. I was wondering if it was one you were willing to sell. To me, I mean, if you’ve not got a buyer already.’

  ‘You want to buy my painting? Why?’

  Because I made a fool of myself a moment ago and am trying to recover.

  ‘I thought I might send it to Sydney. People there would be interested to see it. Also, it’s a very good piece.’

  He probably should have begun the conversation with the compliment.

  ‘If you’re serious about purchasing it, then—’

  ‘I am.’ Now that the idea had come to him he realised it was the truth. Daisy could find a home for it in amongst all of those manly horses.

  ‘Then …’ She thought briefly and then named a price that left Peter incredulous.

  ‘Miss Farrer, that’s little more than the cost of a loaf of bread!’

  She named a higher price.

  ‘And for that I could just about afford some jam to go with it.’

  The Farrers’ horses stamped, impatient now.

  Peter leaned closer. ‘Think of a price that’s at least halfway reasonable, and we’ll negotiate this evening.’

  There were worse ways to end a morning than with a smile from Elizabeth Farrer and a new piece of art.

  ***

  It was later that day, on his third journey out along the Yealambidgie trail, that Peter finally found the ramshackle cottage from the old painting in his father’s house.

  After taking a look at a few reports, and then discussing those reports with Endmoor’s owner, and then rereading that infernal piece about mouldy infestations, Peter took himself off across the land, moving fast in an attempt to outrun his own discomfiture. It hardly worked, but as the bush enveloped him he allowed his mind to drift beyond the estate and the people living on it.

  The day was ideal for investigating the land. Clouds had managed, for once, to blow across the valley and provide the hapless residents within it some shade, and the cooler air was a blessed relief. He’d never realised a man could become sick of the sun.

  It would have been much easier to find the collapsing hut had the landscape not changed so drastically in the years since his parents left it behind. Search after search was wasted taking a wrong turn at the same clearing; time after time he veered back towards Endmoor by accident.

  So many frustrating days of searching, and of thinking he’d finally taken himself off northwest, only for the homestead’s straight, neat chimney stacks and pristine corrugated iron roof to reappear in his view, taunting him as they emerged on the horizon … The land was constantly tricking him.

  The whole search had been an exercise in frustration from the outset. While settlers slowly carved away at the bush everywhere else, the trail was one place they’d left for nature to reclaim. And it had done just that, in all its messy, scrubby, infuriating glory.

  Yealambidgie … it was a word that odd, aloof Vernon Towner had given him that day they’d first met, one Peter had repeated the whole way back to Endmoor, worried he’d forget it. In his experience luck always came in bursts, and it turned out it was both a name Robert Farrer recognised and a place he could direct him to.

  ‘It’s been unused for years, so I’d tread carefully. You’ll find it a little wild,’ he’d cautioned.

  As understatements went, Farrer’s had been enormous.

  Just as he had the first two visits, Peter took pity on the horse and left him tethered in the shade a way back. It was only when he was stomping his way in, imagining killer snakes ready to pounce at every turn, that it occurred to him that not once had Farrer questioned why he needed to find the trail. The discretion was pretty nice.

  Pausing once, and then again, he consulted his memory of that painting back on the wall in the Glenmore Road terrace, and could not match it to what he saw around him. There were too many changes to find his bearings.

  Moving through the bush, and selecting a direction at random, he walked a good half-hour through trees and clearings so monotonous they could send a man out of his mind before he stumbled upon something interesting.

  And when he did, it was very interesting.

  Peter stopped suddenly, sending something scurrying away in the undergrowth.

  Up ahead was a rundown hut emerging bit by bit from the trees and the weeds with each step he took. The rusting iron rooftop shone dully in the daylight, and off to one side was what might once have been a little vegetable patch.

  He was almost within reach of the place when he caught sight of the oversized chimney, hanging a little sideways as though it had been built by a drunkard.

  Aha.

  ‘Found you,’ he said, and walked towards the door.

  ***

  ‘He cannot be serious.’

  Elizabeth was going to faint. Right there, in the middle of the post office, on a busy day in a place that was filled with familiar faces, she was going to collapse in a heap there on the floorboards.

  Hands shaking, head swirling and her vision dotted with a kaleidoscope of colours, she tried very hard to focus on maintaining her balance rather than on all the activity around her.

  Once she’d regained a few of her senses, she dared to have a second look at the telegram in her hands. Mr Evanson’s words had not changed, and nor had she misread the sum he’d offered for a commission. It was three times the price anybody had offered for her work in the past.

  It was enough to make her dizzy yet again.

  Stepping forwards, she gripped the bench firmly with her free hand and tried to force her way through the muddle in her mind to form a coherent thought.

  ‘Miss Farrer?’ the man behind the counter asked, a thousand questions rolled into two words.

  She found a bland smile somewhere, and offered it to the fellow as she clasped the message tightly and looked over her shoulder. Several other people waited to be
served; Barracks Flat was uncharacteristically busy at the exact moment she could have done with privacy.

  ‘I’ll need a few minutes. Perhaps you could help someone else first?’

  Stepping aside, she drifted over to the building’s large widows and gazed out at the street, searching for Alice who’d gone visiting Mrs Hobson at her shop.

  Who knew buyers could make her offers so high? Somehow her name was becoming known, which meant Mr Evanson was working magic greater than she had ever expected.

  What of England? What of London?

  Her sister-in-law emerged on the opposite side of Monaro Street then, purchases stacked in her arms, marching across the road too fast for anybody who’d noticed to catch up and offer assistance.

  Elizabeth tucked her message away and left the building, rushing across to relieve Alice of the top package so that she might actually see where she was going.

  ‘I thought you were merely visiting.’

  The smaller woman darted to the side before she could be divested of any more of her burden.

  ‘Imagine how much I would’ve come out with if I’d gone in there to shop. Are you ready to head home? Duncan’ll be wakin’ up and makin’ a fuss for Bessie, if he isn’t already. She’s got patience, that one, but I think I shouldn’t test it too often.’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Elizabeth tucked the package under her arm and reached out to grab at Alice’s skirts with the other, using them like reins to guide the woman to the carriage, tugging her to the side before she managed to turn an ankle in a ditch.

  ‘It’s nice that you worry, but we must look like a pair of loonies,’ Alice shot over her shoulder.

  ‘Probably,’ Elizabeth agreed, but she didn’t let go.

  A reply to the telegram would have to wait for another day, because right then she had no idea what that response might be.

  ***

  Nobody came rushing to stop Peter from entering the house.

  He’d felt a right idiot standing there knocking on a door in the middle of nowhere, especially as he’d had to wade his way through enough weeds—the gardeners in town would faint clean away—to reach the thing.

  The door didn’t creak so much as swing wildly on rotting, rusting hinges, and once it had slammed back against the wall with enough force to make him wince, Peter had all the proof he needed he had the place to himself.

  He nudged aside a small collection of discarded shoes, some with holes and some clearly mended a time or two, and stepped inside, smelling the age and neglect seeping through every wall, and even up through the floor.

  It hadn’t always been that way, though. The disintegrating hearth was stacked with what he supposed was once intended as kindling, and spread across the little table was a cloth he was fairly sure—underneath several generations of dust—bore a floral pattern. A little wooden chest had been shoved to the back of the table, and dozens of spiders had spun their webs around it.

  That, Peter thought, was a better form of security than any lock or key.

  An assortment of old books and horrendously yellowed newspapers stood near the door. As far as hoarding went, it wasn’t precisely what he expected of a rundown hut in the middle of a scrubby bit of nowhere.

  He moved in further and made a thorough inspection of the ceiling. It wasn’t new, but he didn’t think it’d cave in on him. At least not that day.

  Unlike his much larger and more comfortable cottage on Endmoor grounds, this one was devoid of any real decoration, except for …

  He crossed the floor, attention captured by the framed sampler hanging crookedly on the wall and also yellowing with age. Peter touched it gingerly, moving it more or less into alignment. There was a name stitched in the bottom corner, finished a bit crookedly, like its creator had lost interest before she was done. He tried to imagine Daisy’s meticulous governess excusing such careless work.

  Shaking his head, he was about to move on to examine the rest of the tiny place when he froze. The initials in the stitching …

  C.T.

  It could mean nothing. It could mean a lot more than that. There were Catherines and Claras aplenty in the colonies, but the missionaries had named his mother Charity. And her maiden name had been Towner.

  Releasing a breath, he removed his hand. His fingers came away covered in an impressive coat of cobweb and dust as the sampler immediately returned to its odd angle. The nail it hung on was as crooked as everything else surrounding him.

  He took himself on a turn around the four walls, which was a task that lasted all of four or five seconds, and then dug a discarded knife out of a particularly thick patch of dust and used the thing to hack away at the worst of the spiders’ webs surrounding the chest. He wasn’t in the right mood to risk death by arachnid attack.

  Task accomplished, he eased the latch open, not expecting treasure, and found only a single item inside it.

  There wasn’t much point being disappointed. Finding the hut was more than he’d expected out of his day. It suggested his father might just have sent him off into the right unobtrusive spot in a massive colony. Not that his evidence was infallible yet.

  He repeated little appeasements in his mind while reaching into the chest to lift out a small case. Kept safe from the elements for an age, it was the best-preserved item in the whole place. He inspected the simple design stamped into the metal before opening the clasp with his thumb and forefinger.

  It took several seconds to comprehend what he found inside.

  ‘My God.’ Apparently he’d found treasure after all.

  Peter cupped the frame in his hand and took it over to the door to get a better look at the image within it by the sunlight. Encased in the metal was a miniature daguerreotype, an old sort of photograph favoured in his parents’ generation, an image created on silver-plated copper. He’d not before seen one so small, but once his eyes focused it was more than enough.

  It showed a small family lined up in front of an unfamiliar building, which itself stood in front of an unfamiliar landscape. And in the centre, dressed in the fashion of her girlhood—dressed as a white woman and with her hair harshly parted and looped around her ears—was his mother.

  Hardly daring to touch it, worried that it was as fragile as everything else around him, he traced the line of her face, fingertip hovering just above the picture.

  Charity Rowe had died when he was still emerging from boyhood, and before he’d developed the courage to ask who he was and where they’d come from. Her portrait sat in his father’s office, there for Peter to study whenever he wished, but in the picture in his hands as he stood in a tiny house in the middle of the country, she seemed different to him. Alive, even.

  The sketch in his pocket crinkled as he moved and he pulled the thing out.

  Even though the light was dim, seemingly made worse by the ancient, earthy smell of the small space, he removed the disastrous map and placed it on the table. He doubted it could be any more help than it had been so far.

  Feeling like a thief, which is what he supposed he was, he tucked the case away in his pocket, not trusting the ramshackle building with it a moment longer. He closed the chest and placed the knife back where he’d found it, and then again started for the door.

  He paused on the threshold and turned back one more time. Nobody might live here anymore, but the well-trained, ordered accountant in him desperately needed to straighten the pile of old books and papers someone had left by the door, and the only decent—and matching—pair of shoes in the place begged to be set side by side at the entrance.

  He’d be back another day. For now there was a woman two-hundred miles away who deserved to know his news.

  Chapter 12

  Once he’d successfully negotiated a rational price with Elizabeth, Peter sent his new painting off home, mildly confident that, thanks to its small size, it would arrive at the other end unscathed. He noted that the stares he’d garnered in town in the past had gradually transformed into an occasional nod
and, once or twice, a brief conversation. Progress, he supposed. It was probably too exhausting for everyone involved to continue with suspicion.

  The visit to the bank that followed took longer, thanks to a gentleman with a wealth of carrot-coloured hair who lingered at the counter.

  ‘What in the blazes is taking so long?’ the fellow asked several times while Peter shifted his weight from one foot to the other and stifled a yawn. Forbearance was an attribute he’d cultivated over the years, but when his toes numbed and the debate moved to interest rates—which neither of the men seemed to actually understand—he shifted forwards.

  ‘I might be able to—’ he began, only to have the man whip around and give him an impressive glare, dissolving any desire Peter might have had to help resolve the situation. Some days were better ruined by sore feet than rude strangers.

  Business in town eventually concluded, and with reluctance to return to the estate coursing through him, Peter found himself wandering along the river walk.

  He reached the bridge where Monaro Street crossed the Murrumbidgee, and then wandered onto it. It was the furthest south he’d been ever in his life, which was a startling thing to comprehend. It looked like Barracks Flat had begun its sprawl across the water some time ago, but now the sprawl had become a wave of development. The entire area rang with the sounds of hammering and sawing.

  Advancement people called it. Peter didn’t know if he’d describe it quite like that.

  He watched a pair of black swans emerge from directly beneath him, gliding downstream with a pair of half-grown cygnets in tow. Raising his gaze to the riverbank beyond he took in the sea of European weeping willows that ran the length of the water, their branches sagging into the stream.

  A few stone cottages formed a row on the river’s southern side, their tin roofs glinting blindingly in the sun. Another, newer inn sat below the level of the bridge on the other side, and on the street leading uphill beyond it, he made out what might have been a small convent, the silver spire of a chapel nearby the structure pointing high into the sky.