Her Outback Protector

by Margaret Way

  “Give me a break, Bernie,” Sandra said. “I’ve only just arrived.”

  “Wonder of wonders!” He rolled his eyes.

  “You can say that again! Only Daniel’s such a good pilot or I could be dead or in hospital in a coma. As I’ve already said, I had no idea Grandad would make me the major beneficiary in his will. After all, he sent Mum and me packing, remember?”

  “He should never have done that.” Elsa startled them by offering the stern comment.

  “No, he shouldn’t!” Sandra showed her own deeply entrenched resentments.

  “Come off it, Sandra.” Berne’s smile was acid. “Your mother was a real tart! No offence.”

  His father broke in. “This has gone far enough, Bernard. I insist you keep a civil tongue in your head. Apologise to Sandra right now.”

  “Dad, you must be joking!” Berne sat back astounded.

  “Aren’t you the one who called Aunty Pam every dirty name you could think of? So now you’re going to make nice?”

  Colour stained Lloyd Kingston’s strongly defined cheekbones. “That was in the past, Bernard. I was only teasing anyway.”

  “Teasing?” Berne shouted with laughter that held no trace of humour.

  Sandra for her part felt a swift surge of anger. “My mother suffered from your taunts, Uncle Lloyd. So did I. Now, if I am willing to let bygones be bygones I hope you’ll do the same. I didn’t make myself Grandad’s heiress. Grandad did. I have no idea what was going through his mind—”

  “Boy, that’s rich!” Berne lounged back. “I gave you a reason. Every time I came on Grandad and Daniel they were locked into deep conversation. He’d turned his back on Dad and me. We didn’t measure up. He knew Dad would sell Moondai like a shot if he got his hands on it. I would, too.”

  “What about Elsa?” Sandra asked, looking in Elsa’s direction. “Elsa is Grandad’s widow.”

  Berne looked stunned. “Elsa could never take over. She can’t even handle the dinner menu as I’m sure she’ll agree. Meg runs the house.”

  “Why are you speaking like this, Bernie?” Sandra asked. It was so unkind and disrespectful.

  “It doesn’t matter, Alexandra!” Elsa said, waving a thin hand.

  “But Elsa it does matter,” Sandra said. “Anyway Meg is the housekeeper. Before you married my grandfather you were a successful businesswoman. Didn’t you miss it?”

  Elsa seemed to shrink in her carver chair. “That was a lifetime ago, Alexandra.”

  “Does one truly lose one’s skills or the need to use them?”

  “My cleverness has diminished with the years,” Elsa said.

  “I know you mean to be kind, Alexandra, but nothing Bernard says affects me.”

  “Is that so?” Berne intervened with heavy sarcasm. “If the truth were known, Elsa, you lost it the day you married Grandad. Grandad didn’t want a career woman with a mind and a life of her own. He wanted a woman who would know her place, not a business partner. That’s when you set about turning yourself into a piece of furniture.”

  “Really, are you any better?” Elsa asked, piercing him with her colourless eyes. “You strut around doing next to nothing while Daniel runs everything. Gutless young men like you disgust me.”

  Berne’s face was a study. “Well what do you know?” he chortled. “She can talk.”

  “Rudeness is what you employ, Bernard, instead of brains,” Elsa said gravely. “I have never wished to talk to you.”

  “Ditto!” Berne retaliated, dark eyes flashing. “I’m lighting out of here as soon as I’m ready. Who am I anyway? No one!”

  Sandra, amazed by the exchange between Elsa and Berne, felt a sudden rush of empathy for her cousin. “Look, I’m sorry, Bernie,” she said. “I’m sorry Grandad cut you out. I’m sorry he did the same to Uncle Lloyd. He was a very strange man.”

  “He was that!” Elsa pulled more wisps out of her bundle of hair. “He should have been had up for mental cruelty.”

  “Struth!” Berne dug his fork into a piece of chicken like he wanted to spear someone. “Don’t be so ungrateful, Elsa. Grandad’s life may not have centred around you, but he made sure you were kept very comfortable in your quiet corner. He did leave you rich if not merry.”

  “Which was only fitting,” Sandra murmured.

  “If I could I’d send it back to him in hell,” Elsa told them bleakly. “It wasn’t money I wanted from Rigby. It wasn’t money the rest of you wanted from him, either. It was love and attention. There were only two people Rigby loved in this world. Catherine and Trevor. The rest of us amounted to a big fat nothing.”

  “Well thank you for sharing that with us, Elsa,” Lloyd said suavely. “I must say I too have been missing the sound of your voice. Perhaps Sandra’s arrival has brought it back?”

  “Why not?” Elsa nodded her head. “I was fond of her father. He was very different to you, Lloyd.” Her colourless gaze shifted to Sandra. “It’s a great burden you’ve taken on, Alexandra. This place killed your father.”

  “Oh for pity’s sake!” Lloyd Kingston fetched up a great sigh. “Please don’t start on that, Elsa. I won’t have it.”

  “My mother believes to this day my father’s death wasn’t an accident,” Sandra found herself saying although she hadn’t intended to.

  “And what do you believe, Sandra?” her uncle asked while Elsa turned her head away, looking extremely distressed.

  “Can you truly say you weren’t my father’s enemy?” Sandra looked directly into her uncle’s hooded dark eyes.

  Lloyd Kingston’s face flushed a dark red. “I’m going to forgive you for that, Sandra. That’s your mother talking. You were a child. Your mother filled your head with terrible stories. It was a way of getting back at me for the things I’d said about her. A lot of which was true by the way. I loved your father, my brother. I looked up to him. He was everything I wasn’t just as Elsa so kindly said. And he had a heart which Dad never had. I never regarded Trevor as the enemy. That’s blasphemy. I don’t regard anyone as my enemy.”

  “Not me, Uncle Lloyd?” Sandra asked, quietly.

  “Especially not you,” he answered without hesitation.

  “You’re Trevor’s child.”

  “Sure about that, Dad?” Berne asked in a taunting voice.

  “If I were Sandra I’d be worried about what lay behind your sleek mask. No one in this family ever tells the truth.”

  “How very true,” Elsa said in a heartfelt voice, brushing long fingers through her hair. “It is only justice you inherited Moondai, Alexandra. It would have gone to your father.”

  Sandra bit hard on her lip. After a moment, she rose from the table, saying quietly, “Please excuse me. I’d like to look around this afternoon. I’ll take the Jeep out the front if that’s okay?” She pushed in her chair, holding the back of it while she got out what she had to say. “I’ve asked Daniel to move out of the overseer’s bungalow and into the house for a while.”

  As she expected, there was a stunned silence. She might just as well have said the authorities had handed over to her the most dangerous felon in the country to be housed.

  Berne finally broke the silence. “You’ve what?”

  “Sandra, is that wise?” Lloyd asked with less intensity, but he too looked shocked.

  Sandra shrugged. “Elsa has no objection. Daniel can have my old bedroom. It’s only until I bring myself up to scratch on station affairs. He’ll be a big help there as Grandad intended. I’ll move into my parents’ old suite.”

  “I’m quite happy to move out of the master suite,” Lloyd Kingston offered. “You have only to say the word.”

  “Sandra isn’t going to say it, Dad, just as you were counting on. What you weren’t counting on was that Sandra is no fool. She wasn’t easily fooled as a kid, either.”

  Sandra was surprised by his support, if indeed that’s what it was. She decided to hold out an olive branch. “I don’t suppose you’d like to drive around with me, Bernie?”

  For
the first time he looked uncertain of himself. “You can’t want me surely?”

  “What’s the sense in us not being friends? We’re cousins. We can adapt.”

  Berne considered that one, in the end succumbing to his overload of resentments. “Not overnight we can’t!” He shook his head sharply. “Thanks for the offer. It’s beyond me right now to accept.”

  In the kitchen she spoke to Meg about room arrangements asking Meg to make up some sandwiches for Daniel’s lunch. Meg too looked surprised when told Daniel would be staying at the house for a time, but in no way did she appear dismayed. Rather she appeared firmly onside.

  “What is it, love? Are you nervous?” she asked shrewdly, long used to the warring Kingstons.

  Sandra gave a wry laugh. “I have powerfully bad memories of this place, Meg. Daniel is a big dependable guy. I’d like him around. Besides, it’s quite true I’ll be relying heavily on him to teach me what I need to know about the station.”

  “Well he can do that,” Meg said, slicing off some ham.

  “Towards the end he was your grandfather’s right hand man. You could say your grandad treated him as more a grandson than he did Berne.”

  “That must have been awful for Berne?” Despite everything she felt twinges of pity for her cousin.

  “It wasn’t good.” Meg shook her head. “It’s time for Bernie to make a life of his own. He’s got no direction. It’s my belief, excuse me, Sandy for saying this, but inherited wealth is death to ambition. Most times anyway.”

  It was amazing how quickly it was all coming back to her. Sitting tall behind the wheel of the Jeep Sandra drove out of the home compound taking the broad gravelled drive that wound past the neat and comfortable staff bungalows and bunkhouses. Station employees materialized out of nowhere, roughly lining the track. She began to wave. They all waved back. There were mothers with little children, groundsmen, stockmen, what looked like station mechanics going on their oil stained overalls. Finally she stopped the Jeep and climbed out.

  “Hi! Lovely to see you all. I’m Sandra, back home again.”

  Her youth, the diminutive size of her, the smile on her face and the friendliness of her tone instantly broke the ice. People surged at her, delighted and determined to meet the new boss personally. They had all known she was coming. Mr. Kingston’s will—what they knew of it—had been discussed at great length and gasped over. What was going to happen to Moondai, to their jobs? They all knew about the forced landing of the station helicopter in the swamp. Daniel had spoken to his foreman as well as Lloyd Kingston up at the house. The foreman relayed the news to the crew. In a small closely knit settlement like Moondai news travelled faster than an emu at full gallop.

  Rigby Kingston had been one thing. His granddaughter was proving to be very much another. Instead of leaping briskly out of the way or averting their eyes if their former Boss was about in one of his dark moods, his granddaughter was happy being surrounded by smiling faces. Some faces Sandra remembered and greeted by name. Others, the young wives and the small children were newcomers to Moondai. Sandra found herself nursing babies, which she loved, accepting invitations to morning tea and paying a visit to the schoolhouse where all the children on the station under ten were offered an education by a well qualified teacher. With these open-faced smiling people around her Sandra felt safe.

  By the time she drove on she was feeling quite cheerful, not realising friendliness and a genuine interest in the people around them was a side of the Kingston character that had seldom emerged since her father’s day.

  I could almost build a life here, she thought. That was the voice of her heart. But what of her head? These people liked her at any rate. Drat her family.

  One of the station hands had told her Daniel’s location. He was out at the crater, a natural amphitheatre caused by massive earth movements hundred of millions of years before. The family had always used that name for the grassy basin which was almost enclosed—save for a broad canyon—by low lying rugged cliffs of reddish quartzite and sandstone. It was quite possible to climb to the highest point which their Kingston forefather had named Mount Alexandra after his wife. The same Alexandra Sandra had been named for. Of course it wasn’t a mountain at all. More a hill, but it reared out of the vast perfectly flat plains so its height was accentuated. The climb to the summit was a stiff hike too and dangerous with all the falling rubble, but the view from the top Sandra could still remember.

  Her father had used to sing to her that they were sitting on top of the world, his arm around her sheltering her from the strong winds.

  Why did you go and die on me, Dad? Why? Why did you leave me? It was hard. So hard. Do you know the things that have happened to me? How frightened I was without you to protect me? How much I hated Jem?

  She often found herself talking to her father. Not out loud of course, but in her mind. Sometimes she thought he answered. She talked to her little friend, Nikki, too, asking her what it was like in the kingdom of Heaven. Was it all it was cracked up to be? If anyone deserved eternal joy it was Nikki and the children like Nikki who had been so brave and cheerful it had put her own troubles into perspective.

  Her father hadn’t wanted to die, either. She couldn’t forgive her uncle, for all she had said about letting bygones be bygones. Life didn’t work that way. The past could never be buried so deeply it couldn’t resurrect itself at a moment’s notice. All it needed was the requisite trigger.

  The light was dazzling. She pushed her akubra further down over her eyes, congratulating herself she’d had the foresight to buy one from a Western outfitter in Brisbane. It had been hard getting one her size especially when she no longer had her mop of curls to help prop it up. Best quality lens sunglasses sat on her nose, though in the heat they were continually sliding down the bridge. She remembered this extraordinary dazzle of light, blinding in its brilliance, the cloudless skies, the golden spinifex and the blood red sands the wind could sweep into the most beautiful and fascinating delicate whorls and patterns. She remembered the way the desert bloomed in profusion after the rains; the great vistas of the white and yellow paperdaisies she particularly loved; the magnificent sight of the burning sun going down on the Macdonnell Ranges that were always overhung by a hue of grape-blue. These ranges of the Wild Heart were once sand on the beach of the inland sea the early explorers had searched for in vain. She loved the way the wild donkeys came out to graze at sunset and whole colonies of rabbits popped out of their warrens keeping a sharp lookout for any dingoes on the prowl. Around Moondai all the dingoes had been purebred. A wild dingo in prime condition was a splendid sight, but one always had to remember they were killers by nature.

  A big mob of cattle was being walked not far from a water-hole where legions of budgies and perky little zebra finches were having a drink, indifferent to the presence of a falcon that coasted overhead making itself ready for a leisurely swoop. Kill and be killed, she thought. There were always predators, always victims. Her mind returned to the question of what had caused the mechanical components in the tail section of the helicopter to work their way loose. Daniel had explained it but it hadn’t been all that easy for a nonmechanically minded person like herself to take in. Had someone deliberately interfered with the control system, or had it simply been another case of mechanical failure? So many people over the years had been killed in the Outback when helicopters or light aircraft crashed either soon after take-off, or attempting to land. Some plowed into rugged ranges while others took a nosedive to the desert floor. Flying was a risky business especially over the heated unpredictable air of the desert, but given the vast distances flying was no luxury; it was a way of life.

  It was the greatest good fortune that Daniel was such a good helicopter pilot. He had to be equally good with fixed-wing although she understood flying a helicopter was quite different to flying a fixed-wing aircraft. Daniel was licensed to fly both as was Berne. She wasn’t sure if her uncle flew the helicopter, but he had always held a pilot’s lice
nce as had her father and grandfather. It occurred to her it might be a good idea for her to start taking lessons. She had to overcome her fears if she really intended to stay on Moondai. Maybe in the process she would unveil a new aspect of herself?

  The drive through the broad canyon was an experience in itself. The walls presented an extravaganza of brilliant dry ochres, fiery reds, russets, pinks, yellows, stark glaring white with carved shadows of amethyst. High up in every available pocket of earth the hardy spinifex had taken root. Because of the recent rains many clumps were a fresh green, most a dull gold. The sandy floor of the canyon was as red as boiling magma, giving vital clues to the mighty explosion that had formed the crater aeons ago. To either side of the canyon long tranquil chains of waterholes already beginning to dry out sparkled in the sun. In the gums nearby, preening or dozing amid the abundant fresh olive foliage were great numbers of the pink and grey galahs who made sure they were always in the vicinity of water. She had grown up with all this even if she had lost contact over the years. Only love of this ancient land was in her bloodstream hence her deeply felt response. Time and distance had not altered the old magic.

  The crater, secret to all save the aborigines for tens of thousands of years was a miracle of nature. It attracted massive flocks of birds and wildlife. It was wonderful to look out over the giant bowl of the crater with its protected grasslands then up at the rounded curves, peaks and swells of the surrounding rim.

  That afternoon the natural amphitheatre was thickly carpeted in grasses that were liberally strewn with the wildflowers and spider lilies that thrived in the semi-desert environment. Her favourites, the everlastings which didn’t wilt when picked, were by far in the majority. In one area she drove through to get to the holding yards they were pink, then a mile or so on, bright yellow interspersed with long trailing branches of crimson desert peas, native poppies, hibiscus, fire bush, hop bush, salt bush, emu bush. There were so many she couldn’t begin to name them. She had to leave that to Uncle Lloyd who loved every living thing that grew in the earth far more than people. Cataloguing all this floral splendour was his passion. The ranges at their back door harboured a great wealth of wildflowers, making them an exciting hunting ground for a man who was both amateur botanist and excellent photographer. She remembered her father saying with admiration how his brother, Lloyd, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora of the Red Centre and Queensland’s Channel Country where he had spent a lot of time. Did a botanist, passionate about wildflowers, morph into a murderer? It didn’t seem possible.