The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  ‘Yes. They work.’ He looked out at the valley now, not at her. She wondered if he saw the same valley she did. How would it change, in fifty years? ‘I probably could ride, if it comes to that. Have to learn how to balance differently.’

  He turned to her again. ‘I think the real reason is that I couldn’t get on a horse by myself. I’m sick of being handled like a baby. I’ve got some independence at last, in the chair. I’d have to be helped to ride.’

  ‘Is that so very bad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘You’ve made me think, Miss Flinty McAlpine. You know, this is the first time your brother or sister hasn’t called you away.’

  ‘They’re asleep.’

  ‘And you should be too, by the look of you.’

  And I’ve shocked him, she thought. He wanted to think about what she’d said. She hoped she hadn’t hurt him. She hadn’t meant to just as she hadn’t meant to hurt Empress. Maybe she’d charged in here too fast and too hard too.

  ‘You look done in. You go off to bed, Flinty McAlpine. Will you be here tomorrow?’

  He looked so alone suddenly. Who could resist mist and starlight, she thought, and a ghost from the future? One who admired her, whose face lost its grimness when she arrived?

  But Joey and Kirsty would wonder if she walked down to the Rock every day. She’d told them often enough not to go far by themselves. It was one of Dad’s rules: if you go beyond the house paddocks there have to be two of you. That way if one of you were bitten by a snake or had a fall, the other could go for help. The only exception was if you went down the track to the valley, because someone could find you there. And anyway, there was no time for ‘just a walk’ these days, not with the rabbit traps to check, the firewood to gather, the winter cabbages and turnips and swedes to plant…

  But this was Nicholas, who smiled at her. Nicholas, who’d known she’d muster brumbies, but told her there was something else special to come, so special they’d call her ‘the girl from Snowy River’. It was good to feel special to someone again.

  ‘I’ll come tomorrow night,’ she said softly. ‘It’ll be late though, like tonight. Kirsty and Joey don’t go to sleep till it gets dark.’

  He grinned. The lonely look vanished. The man she’d met only nine days earlier wouldn’t have grinned. ‘Another news flash from the future. Eight o’clock isn’t late at night these days. Not when you’ve got electric light.’

  ‘I’ve seen electric light,’ she told him proudly. ‘They have it down at Drinkwater Station. The generator is noisy though.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Electric light is too bright. It fills the whole room too, like it’s trying to take over the world.’

  ‘I suppose it has.’ He sounded amused, enjoying himself again.

  She looked out at the valley. The half-moon had risen, sucking in the light from the nearby stars, leaving a pale grey ghost of itself around it. She glanced at Nicholas, suspecting that he saw the beauty there as well, didn’t just judge country by how many sheep it could run.

  He was hers, just like Snow King. She’d be here the next night and the one after.

  Chapter 16

  23 December 1919

  Dear Diary,

  Nicholas told me about the horse he used to ride: Nightingale, 15.2 hands. He’s agisted on the farm near where his family used to live. I nearly suggested that he bring him here, but I suppose having him close and not being able to ride would be worse than not seeing him. He said he missed his dogs too — a poodle and a Great Dane that Nicholas says is almost the same size as Empress, which I don’t believe. But he can’t have them here in case they chase the sheep, and anyway, they are his parents’ dogs as well as his.

  I told him about old Shep dying, and how we’ll get another dog or even two when Andy gets back, and about, oh, all sorts of things, how Amy used to pinch me to make me give her the answers at school, and Mum growing up in the orphanage till she was sent as a servant out here, and even the box of chocolates that Sandy posted me from Sydney before they sailed. I’ve still got the box, and the wrappers, and even one of the chocolates — I didn’t want to eat every one as they were my last link to Sandy. It’s still in its gold wrapper. Probably bad by now.

  I asked him straight out if he knew why Sandy came back so changed. He thought for a bit, then said, ‘No,’ quite honestly, not like he did know but wouldn’t tell me.

  I’ve met him every night for three weeks now. It’s so good having someone to talk to properly, though Sandy and Johnno have been up, to bring us a forequarter of mutton and take back Joey’s rabbit skins, and to tell us that Mr Mack will bring the cart up to take us down there for the Christmas service and for Christmas dinner.

  The White boys called in too. They left some lamb chops which I know weren’t theirs, because they don’t have any sheep, just the cattle that straggle all over the place. But it was still kind of them. They helped stack up the woodpile as well.

  No letter from Andy, not even a Christmas card, but he probably isn’t anywhere you can post a letter, or even get mail.

  Christmas beetles clattered on the roof. The black cockatoos arrived, as they did every Christmas, screeching and whirling giant wings against the sky. The sun shone straight and clear above Rock Farm, as though to say, ‘Here I am, at the highest point of my year’s journey.’

  It was a good Christmas Day, better than the last: Andy still not home, even though they’d so hoped his ship would be back in time; Dad grieving, the absence of Mum and Jeff so deep that their empty places seemed more vivid than the chairs that were filled, all of them pretending a happiness that wasn’t there.

  Christmas 1917 had been even worse, Dad saying carefully Flinty’s roasted rooster was ‘the best he’d ever eaten’, trying not to so much as mention Mum’s name, all of them worried that another telegram might arrive, this time with Andy’s name, wondering what the valley boys faced in France and Flanders.

  The week before this Christmas Day Joey cut down a small she-oak from the gully for a Christmas tree. They decorated it with the cotton-wool snow and crepe-paper streamers kept in the box at the top of the linen cupboard, and made toffee to take down to the Macks’ for Christmas dinner.

  Mr Mack drove the cart up to fetch the three of them on Christmas morning — Empress wasn’t up to carrying all of them on her back these days, though her leg was very much better.

  The Macks loved their ginger. Mrs Mack exclaimed over the porcelain pot and Sandy said, ‘Ginger. Good.’ Flinty’d had a faint hope that Sandy might give her a present, one of her very own.

  But instead, of course, there was just a present for each of them from all the Macks: a plaited stockwhip for Joey, coloured pencils in a wooden box for Kirsty and a handmade book for Flinty, all Mrs Mack’s knowledge carefully written out in her laborious copperplate, learned long ago at school and rarely used. The lamington squares recipe Mrs Mack had found in a newspaper; instructions for jam drops, and lamb’s fry and onions, and how to get candle-wax stains off a silk dress and make mock chicken from cold mutton.

  It was a gift Mum might have given her, probably would have given her, to go in her glory box along with the embroidered tea towels and tray cloths that every girl slowly made and collected from the time she began to think of a home of her own.

  Flinty hadn’t added to her glory box since Mum’s death. There was too much work keeping one house to think of another. She supposed, in some quiet corner of her mind, that she’d have to marry someone — everyone got married, except for a few maiden aunts, or drunks like Dusty Jim, though even he might have had a wife sometime, somewhere.

  But sixty thousand Australian men had died in the four years of war, and more than twice that number would never quite recover from their wounds. How many young women would never marry now? She didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think about marriage at all.

  The dining-room table was so crowded that Mrs Mack had to put planking over it and cover it with two cloths, to fit them all ar
ound it. Two giant boiled puddings, and custard and brandy sauce, half a dozen cold roast roosters with hot gravy, because there was too much food today to fit in her oven and her daughter-in-law’s; dishes of roast potatoes and pumpkin, parsnips and the last of the spring peas; boiled beetroot in butter and boiled carrots with mint; a massive trifle that had been cooling in the stone dairy since the day before, with sponge cake and bottled peaches from last season, and even more custard; and mince pies and shortbread. Later there was a singsong while Toby played his accordion, especially loud as though to hide the loss of Valma’s voice, of Jeff’s and Rick’s and Andy’s, and Mum’s and Dad’s. Sandy and Kirsty played knucklebones out on the verandah and Kirsty won three times — or Sandy let her.

  Mr Mack drove them back in the cart, so drowsy from three helpings of pudding and the rum he’d been slipping into his teacup all afternoon that old Sally had to find the way up herself, which she did from long practice.

  Joey and Kirsty went straight to bed — they’d been up since before dawn, discovering the oranges and new pencils Santa Claus had left in their stockings.

  Flinty was tired too. Yes, it had been a good Christmas — not a wonderful one, not with Sandy still carefully not looking at her all through dinner — but a taste of happiness, at last, and a promise of more.

  Although there were still things to do, even on Christmas night: checking Snow King and Empress in their paddock, adding wood to the firebox so there’d be coals for the next day’s breakfast, mixing up a batch of bread to rise overnight. She’d told Nicholas she wouldn’t be on the Rock tonight, that she didn’t know what time they’d get back from the Macks’. She’d told him ‘merry Christmas’ the day before, wishing yet again you could give a ghost a present, hoping that his Christmas Day would be good with the people he was staying with (and still wouldn’t name).

  She wished she hadn’t now. Kneading bread dough seemed an anticlimax after the celebration of the day.

  It was dark by the time she’d finished mixing the bread. The moon rose out the window, fat as Mrs Mack’s plum pudding, gold as the Christmas angel on her tree. And suddenly the house, which had seemed so full of Christmas happiness, was empty. The ghosts of those who weren’t there, who would never be there again, seemed once again more real than the brother and sister sleeping in their beds.

  She was tired, that was all, especially after so many late nights the last three weeks. She should go to bed herself. Instead she went out to the verandah and sat down on the big bush settler’s chair Dad had made from snow-gum branches. Maybe if she shut her eyes she could pretend that he sat in the other chair, that Mum was just in the kitchen, that Jeff and Andy were playing knucklebones by the door, each shouting that the other was a dunce.

  Instead she watched the moon float up the sky, its light shining on the mist about the Rock.

  And she knew what you could give a ghost for Christmas.

  ‘I brought you some toffee.’

  He was there, even though she’d said she couldn’t meet him, sitting in his chair in almost the same position as when she’d first seen him. He wheeled around as she approached. She loved the smile that lit his face; loved the fact that she could make him smile. Sandy hadn’t smiled when she’d come into the Macks’ this morning, just said, ‘Merry Christmas.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ she added.

  ‘I’m here most of the time, these days. Got not much else to do. Unless there’s another bushfire, I suppose.’ There was no self-pity in his voice, just a statement of fact.

  She looked at him, suddenly appalled at so empty a life when her month had been so full. ‘Didn’t your parents expect you to go home at Christmas?’

  ‘No.’ The word had walls around it.

  ‘You just sit here? Even on Christmas Day?’

  He smiled at that. ‘It’s not that bad. The people I’m staying with insisted I have Christmas dinner with them.’

  ‘Who are you staying with?’ Surely Dusty Jim’s hut would have fallen down in fifty years — a high wind blew off the sheets of bark that made the roof even now, despite their being weighted down with big stones. ‘It can’t change the future to tell me just that! Do you live in our place — Andy’s place, I mean?’ It hurt a bit to think that sometime in the future she’d have to move from Rock Farm to her own home, leaving it to Andy and his family. But if Nicholas was staying with them it might explain how he knew so much about her.

  He looked at her assessingly. ‘No. Not Andy’s place.’

  ‘In a new house?’

  Nicholas grinned, as though it was a game. ‘Nope. A very old one. But there are more houses in the valley than in your time. I can see their lights from up here sometimes.’

  ‘What do the people you’re staying with think about your coming here so much?’

  ‘They told me about you, remember. About the ghost of young Flinty McAlpine, here on the Rock. I have a good excuse to sit down here too. I’m writing a book and the words come better with all this around me. Mornings are best.’ He grinned again. ‘Even on Christmas Day. I don’t try to write by moonlight, but it’s still good to sit here. Besides, I hoped you might get down here tonight despite being so busy. And you have.’

  ‘You’re really writing a book?’ She’d never met anyone who’d written a book before. Dad had told stories and they had books at the house, of course, two shelves full of books on horses as well as books like Kidnapped and Rob Roy, Jane Eyre and all of Jane Austen’s books, and Rudyard Kipling, who Dad loved and who spoke to him of the Empire he’d been part of once. Even the Macks had the Bible and Shakespeare. People she knew might read books. But they didn’t write them. ‘What’s your book about?’

  ‘A war,’ he said slowly. ‘Not the war I was in. Not your war either,’ he added. ‘It’s an imaginary war, set in the future. Science fiction.’

  ‘So it’s a science book?’

  ‘No. A story. I s’pose it is a true story, in a way. I’d feel like I was dobbing on my mates, if I put about what happened to us back then in a book. But this way, well, maybe some parts of war don’t ever change. Not fifty years ago in your Great War, or maybe a hundred years in the future. Don’t know if it’ll ever get into print,’ he added. ‘I’ve had some stories published, but not a book.’

  She sat on the Rock next to him, her arms around her legs, fascinated. ‘How do you get published?’

  ‘Send it to a publishing company and cross my fingers. Why did you bring toffee?’

  ‘It’s Christmas.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have brought you something too. Except I didn’t know you’d be here tonight. And anyway, I think anything we give each other might vanish when we leave the Rock.’

  ‘You can eat toffee here.’

  ‘Good idea.’ He smiled at her again. It seemed easier for him to smile today. She thought that whatever he’d been doing in the past month had been good for him. She handed him the toffee, watched him bite a bit, then make a face when it stuck his teeth together. He extracted it carefully and stared at it. ‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘Just, er…’

  ‘Sticky.’

  He broke off a smaller bit and began to suck it. ‘So how was your Christmas?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Except for…? There’s an “except” in your voice there, somewhere.’

  ‘Except for Sandy,’ she said slowly. She had told him about Sandy — a bit, at any rate: that she’d loved him, thought he’d loved her, that he’d been changed by the war. She tried to smile. ‘Mrs Mack even had us sitting next to each other, but he changed places with Johnno.’

  ‘Don’t break your heart,’ he said softly. ‘You’re a beautiful girl, Flinty.’ He laughed at the shock on her face. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you that before?’

  She shook her head. ‘Only Mum. Mums don’t count.’

  ‘Well, you are.’

  She felt her face grow hot.

  ‘Surely there must be other young men around here who appreciate a l
ovely young woman?’

  She thought of the White boys, Ron Mullins, even Toby Mack, and laughed. ‘Not that I’d think of marrying.’

  ‘Girls marry young in your time, don’t they?’

  It was a shock to remember how much separated them. ‘Maybe. Mum was seventeen when she married Dad. Is that young in your time?’

  He nodded. ‘Girls are about twenty-one or twenty-two now, before they get engaged. Blokes are a bit older.’

  ‘What about you?’ she ventured. She had wanted to ask him before, but never had the courage. ‘Is there — was there — anyone special for you?’

  ‘Glenys.’ For a moment she thought he was only going to say the name, and then he said, ‘I gave her a friendship ring before I left. We talked about getting engaged when I came back. She decided she wanted a husband with legs intact.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The words seemed so little to offer.

  ‘I’m not. Who wants a wife who doesn’t have the guts to take a man as he is, wheelchair and all?’ She saw his smile in the moonlight. ‘You know, I’ve never realised that before. I tried to make excuses for her. But if it had been her who’d lost her legs, I’d have stuck with her. Still loved her. And you’d do the same, Miss Flinty McAlpine.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because you look a legless man in the face, instead of staring at where his legs used to be.’

  They were both silent, and then he said, ‘Someone will come along for you.’

  She tried to keep her voice light. ‘I know. You told me I’d have children, the day we first met. I’m not the sort to have children without a ring on my finger.’

  ‘Ah, that was a slip. Never mind. You were always bound to get married, a girl like you.’

  She looked at him. Was he implying she wouldn’t marry Sandy? Or just trying to cheer her up on Christmas night?

  ‘Merry Christmas, Flinty McAlpine,’ he said softly. ‘May every Christmas to come be better than the last.’