Broken Threads
Page 36
Jenny turned to grasp Ronald’s arm. He was out of reach for the moment, waving and calling farewells for one last time.
‘Ronald!’ called Jenny.
‘Just a moment, my love.’ He moved farther off, to lean over the rail at the point still nearest the land. ‘Keep after that joiner making the woolpress for Giddiring!’
On the pier Chalmers held up palms helplessly, signifying he couldn’t understand.
‘Giddiring! Woolpress!’
Chalmers pantomimed non-comprehension. Ronald went as far aft as he could, cupped his mouth, and shouted his last instructions. It was useless to try for his attention elsewhere.
Perhaps that was as well. Perhaps it was better that he shouldn’t know.
Dinah had not wanted him to know. She had made that clear by disappearing from the Fowlers’ sheep station.
Jenny understood her feelings. What good would it do? To reproach him, berate him, demand something from him ‒ and what? What could he give?
He certainly couldn’t give his name to the coming child. He could have offered money, of course, but Jenny knew in her heart that Dinah would have thrown it back in his face. She herself, in making her arrangement with Chalmers, had tried to do it so that if it was needed the money could be made to seem impersonal, brought from a bank, from some businesslike fund.
She stood holding her cloak about her, racked by indecision. Should she fetch Ronald, point the girl out to him, tell him what she had seen?
Heather ran up from the far side of the ship. ‘I nearly didn’t see us leave!’ she panted. ‘I was talking to the sheep.’
She was hatless, her bonnet having fallen off while she leaned over the sheep pen. Her honey-coloured hair was beginning to be darkened by the rain but even so, it suddenly occurred to Jenny, she must be clearly recognisable to the girl on the jetty. Recognisable as Ronald’s daughter.
Jenny looked towards her. She was just in time to see her staring at mother and daughter before she turned away in angry despair.
‘Mama, they’ve got some lovely little rabbits in hutches. Mr Gatton says I can take them out and hold them sometimes.’
‘That’s wonderful, Heather.’ She put a fold of her cloak round the child to keep the rain off. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s all fading out of sight in the cloud and rain. Say goodbye to Sydney, dear.’
Obediently the little girl waved her hand in the direction of the harbour. But already her mind was losing the picture of Goodie and the rides on the Fowlers’ station, the travels on the strange little train to Parramatta, the room at the hotel she had shared with Baird. She was thinking of the voyage, the livestock who would become her new friends, walks on shore in strange ports where there were strange animals such as camels and elephants, lessons in the saloon with other young travellers, perhaps a party soon for her birthday.
The jetty dwindled and was lost in the rainstorm. Sydney was gone, blotted out by the downpour. On either side the shores were only intermittently visible as the wind drove the squall.
The ship sounded its siren in farewell.
Goodbye to this strange wild country, to all that had happened here. It was behind them now, Jenny told herself. Even this great secret which she had been allowed to learn by chance ‒ it was behind them.
She would say nothing to Ronald. What good could it do to tell him? Yet more guilt to bear as a burden … And he had enough already, for she knew he would never forgive himself for the affair with Dinah. If he had loved her deeply ‒ if it had been born of something more than proximity and restlessness ‒ that would have been different. But she recalled his embarrassment when he tried to describe how he felt about Dinah.
And it might come between them in their new life. She had tried by every means to show him she forgave him his unfaithfulness, understood how and why it had happened. If she were to say to him now, ‘Dinah is having your baby,’ she might find it hard to add, ‘and I forgive you that too.’
Worse, it would shatter him. To fall momentarily in love with a beautiful farm girl who soon proved boring was one thing. To leave her with a baby coming was quite another. He would see himself as a scoundrel. Which would be unfair, because once Jenny came on the scene Dinah with her strong religious principles had felt so much in the wrong that she herself gave him up.
It would harm their day-to-day relationship as husband and wife if she had to tell him what she had learned. Especially here in the crowded confines of a ship. No, no! If she were ever to tell him Dinah’s secret it would be once they were home, safe in the workaday wonders of making fine cloth, busy and confident in their natural surroundings.
But it would be better to say nothing, ever. It was not her secret to tell, it was Dinah’s. Perhaps she would write when the baby was born. Perhaps she would preserve her silence. Whichever she chose, Jenny vowed to herself, I will abide by that decision.
She sighed. She had looked forward so much to this home-going. For weeks in her mind’s eye she had had the picture of the hills around her home-town ‒ the rich green of pasture, the coming purple of the heather, the cool pale blue of the sky, the sparkling brown of the water in the hillside burns. But now it was all blotted out by her memory of that lonely figure on the wool stacks.
Ahead lay the ocean, the long voyage round the world to the life where she and Ronald belonged. On that journey she must come to terms with what she now knew, make it part of the fabric of the past. It was an unhappiness, but unhappiness and joy go together through human existence, she had learned ‒ twining and interweaving, first one taking priority and then the other.
She must pick up the threads of their life again, mend those that had been broken, strengthen and protect those that carried joy. They were the threads that led into the future.
***
The Corvill Family Saga concludes in the third book of the trilogy, The Final Pattern, available as an ebook from Amazon.
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