The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  ‘And yours too,’ she said.

  Chapter 17

  January 1920

  Dear Sis,

  It is grand about the money and the horse. Well done, you. I’m glad the brats can go to school again. That colt will keep you out of mischief, eh?

  I’m writing this from Brisbane. It’s a funny place, hot enough to fry an egg on every roof and steamy as a shearing shed. The mosquitoes are the size of cricket balls, no joking. Anyhow, this is just to tell you that I met a good bloke who’s looking for help to take some cattle out past the Darling Downs. They say it’s grand country there, a stick will grow as soon as you put it in the ground. I’d like to see that. After that I might head up north a way too. It’d be a pity not to see more when I’ve come all this way, and now I know you and the brats are all right without me. I’ll still wire half my wages back as soon as I’m cashed up and near a post office. Post offices might be a bit thin on the ground again for a while, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a month or two.

  Well done again on the brumby running. I’d have liked to have seen it.

  Your loving brother,

  Andy

  She sat with the letter in her hand. Outside Joey and Kirsty dug potatoes, having a competition to see who could dig up the biggest. They both insisted on bare feet, so they didn’t spoil their new boots before school started. Flinty hoped they didn’t put the potato fork into their toes…

  She looked at the letter again. She wanted to feel angry. She’d waited for Andy to come home for nearly three months after Dad had died and within a month he’d been off again, leaving it all to her once more. This was his home! He owned it. The farm was his responsibility — and his brother and sisters were too.

  But all she felt was — empty. She understood now that she never would understand. Nicholas had shown her that war was too big to understand unless you’d been there. War had sent Andy off with cattle now as surely as it had sent him to the trenches.

  And, once again, all she could do was wait.

  She wanted to cry too. But if she cried Joey and Kirsty would worry, think she couldn’t cope. It was important for them to feel she could manage, that no matter what she’d always look after them.

  But she could cry with the ghost, tonight.

  She told Joey and Kirsty to put themselves into bed. She was going to sit on the Rock to watch the sunset, just like Dad and Mum had done sometimes, dangling their legs over the edge as the sky turned the sifting mist red then pink then grey. ‘Up here I own the sunset,’ Dad used to say. ‘Just me and your mum and no one else to share it.’

  She had the letter in the pocket of Dad’s cut-down trousers. She almost ran down the track, into the mist, then stopped.

  He wasn’t there.

  Had something happened to him? She suddenly realised that if Nicholas ever stopped coming to the Rock she might never know why, or at least not for fifty years. Nicholas could find out what she had done, back in the past, but she could never know about the future, except by living it.

  But she was panicking for nothing. He was expecting her later, when it was getting dark. Even if he sat here most of the day writing, he must go back for his tea, at least.

  She sat on the Rock, her legs dangling from its bulk. The sun was behind the ridge now, the full glory of the sky above it seeming so close she could almost touch it. There was yellow too — was there yellow in every sunset, or had she just seen it now? The red faded to orange before it became pink, and there was a moment, almost too fast to see, when the cliffs turned red too, even the tree leaves flashed scarlet. Then, all at once, the sky had faded, like an old dress in the wash, and you wondered if it ever had been as bright, as wonderful…

  ‘I never get tired of it,’ he said.

  She turned as he rolled up out of the mist, his hands expert on the chair’s wheels. ‘Of the sunset?’

  Nicholas nodded. He manoeuvred his chair closer. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She handed him the letter. He read it, then looked down at her.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you asking if he’s a selfish so-and-so who leaves his sister in the lurch, or a man who’s driven by his ghosts? Not ghosts like me,’ he added. ‘The ones in his memory. The ones you think you can leave behind if you run far enough.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes. Being somewhere new you have to make new memories instead of always living with the old ones — it helps.’

  ‘You didn’t leave anyone did you, to come up here?’

  ‘My parents. I ring them every Sunday night. I’ve hurt them, staying here.’ He spoke as if he had just realised that fact.

  ‘But they don’t need you.’

  ‘You’re coping,’ he said gently. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I…I suppose so.’

  ‘You’re more than coping. Andy’s right. Your brother and sister are happy and well cared for. You’ve got money in the bank and a grand colt in the paddock. So he thinks he can take another few months for himself, after what? Four years of war. Is it so very bad?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted.

  ‘Responsibility,’ he said. ‘That’s what he’s landed you with. That’s what you’ve been stuck with the last two and a half years. But you have managed, Flinty. Managed brilliantly. And if you really needed him, he’d be back again. That’s what he’s saying in this letter too.’

  She was silent. She’d wanted him to be angry for her, be indignant that a brother could just ride off like that, even maybe to give her a story of something horrible that happened in war, like the newspaper stories of the Huns bayoneting babies, to show that Andy was wounded in his mind just as badly as Nicholas was wounded in his legs, except with Andy it didn’t show.

  Instead he’d told her that she’d read the letter wrongly. Andy was praising her, not abandoning them. And Nicholas was right. It did sort of say that if they’d needed him he’d have come back.

  ‘I thought he’d want to train Snow King,’ she whispered.

  ‘Did you say so?’

  ‘No. Just that he’s here.’

  ‘Then that’s a compliment too,’ he said gently. ‘Snow King is your horse. Your brother thinks that you can break him in. Can you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I’ve helped break in horses before. But none of them had Snow King’s promise.’

  ‘Anyone you can ask for advice?’

  ‘Of course. Mr Mack, any of the Colours, though none of them are horsemen like Dad. I could probably write to Mr Clancy. They’d send the letter on from Drinkwater.’

  ‘Clancy of The Overflow?’ He gave another grin she didn’t quite understand. ‘Who better? There you are then.’

  She put the letter back in her pocket. She’d thought she wanted to cry with him. Instead she felt touched by the sunset’s gold. Sort of glowing. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Chapter 18

  2 February 1920

  Dear Diary,

  Nicholas brought me chocolate today! Real chocolate! Mum used to make chocolate fudge with cocoa, but it isn’t the same.

  It wasn’t a box of chocolates, but a big fat block. I wondered if I could share it with Joey and Kirsty. Nicholas said, ‘Try.’

  I stepped off the Rock and out of the mist with the chocolate in my hand and suddenly it wasn’t there. I think it felt stranger than even the first time I met Nicholas — the second time, I mean, when he said he was from 1969.

  I also felt really stupid, because I’d lost a whole block of chocolate. I stepped back into the mist and there it was, just lying on the Rock.

  ‘It dropped out of your hand,’ said Nicholas. He looked shocked too.

  I picked it up again, and we shared it. I felt guilty that the others couldn’t have some, but even if I had been able to take it away I’d have had to explain to Kirsty and Joey how a block of chocolate suddenly appeared. I suppose I could’ve said I’d hidden it on top of the linen cupboard. That’s where Mum used to
hide our presents — where I hide them still. We all know we’re not supposed to look closely at anything up there.

  The chocolate was delicious, with dried fruit and nuts in it. I don’t think you can buy blocks like that these days, but I’ve never been in a sweet shop so I don’t know.

  I felt disloyal to Sandy, somehow, accepting chocolate from another man. But he doesn’t want to eat chocolate with me, and anyway, it wasn’t a romantic box of chocolates, it was just a gift for a friend.

  Nicholas told me that in his time women wear trousers even to church! But they are pretty trousers, in bright colours, like the shirts he wears. It’s so funny to see a man in bright colours. Sandy wouldn’t be seen dead in one of those psychedelic shirts. Nicholas is growing a beard too. I told him he looked like a swaggie, but he just laughed.

  Ten eggs today. Fixed the netting so the goanna can’t steal any more. The Bath apples are ripe. They’re not good keepers, so I gave Joey a bag to drop in to the Macks on the way to school. He says Sandy is back from the sheep sales. I thought maybe he might look at farms to buy too, but Joey says Sandy didn’t say anything about that. He asked Mrs Mack if they had any new stamps, because he’s started collecting them again so that he can sell his collection one day, and she said they hadn’t, so that means that Sandy isn’t getting letters from anyone. So if he did meet someone they still aren’t writing to each other.

  ‘Good boy, King. That’s a fine boy. Good boy now.’ The colt looked at her assessingly, as though he knew exactly what she was trying to do, leading him round and round the paddock, the saddle on his back.

  Dad would have ridden him by now, in the round horse yard, where Snow King would only have been able to circle endlessly and, if he was so inclined, to buck. But if a horse wanted to buck you off then you hadn’t made friends with him, Dad had said. It was your own fault if you had a tumble.

  Better to go slowly. There was no hurry. Snow King couldn’t be hard trained for racing until he was a two-year-old. She reckoned he was only a year and a half. Nor did she have any idea how to enter a horse in a race, much less ride one to win. Only boys and men could be jockeys, though some races had special events for women — but not ‘real’ races, and not on potential champions like Snow King.

  Flinty knew enough to realise it was going to be difficult even to register Snow King in the Stud Book. She’d have to hope that Miss Matilda would state that Repentance was his sire, and old Regret his great-grandmother, for him to have a chance to be considered. He’d have to show his form in picnic races too, before any racing trainer might take him on.

  Horses that weren’t Stud Book horses might win races, sometimes big races, but not often. Even if Snow King raced as brilliantly as she hoped, the stud fee would be low unless she could show he came from a line of champions and wasn’t just one amazing horse.

  She hoped Andy would be back before it was time to try to convince a trainer to give Snow King a chance, to give the young horse the best possible start in racing and a proper track to train on. It would be hard enough to get a trainer to take on an ex-brumby. It would probably be impossible to find one who’d take a girl seriously.

  Meanwhile the school term had begun. Her days had another pattern now: waking before rooster crow to dress a sleepy Kirsty and a reluctant Joey, saddling Empress for their journey down the mountain to the Macks’ so that Mr Mack could take them and the oldest two Mack grandchildren the next five miles down the valley to the one-room school.

  These days she did the chores herself, with just the kookaburras for company, collecting the eggs and feeding the hens, weeding the vegetables, putting a stew on for dinner and, if she was lucky, a few hours like this with Snow King, before Empress ambled up, slightly faster than she’d gone down, eager for her hay and oats. Joey and Kirsty would be starving, sliding off Empress’s back to run through the kitchen like a plague of grasshoppers, as Mum used to say, eating everything in their path.

  She’d make scones today, she decided, two tins of them so Joey and Kirsty wouldn’t eat the table legs. Or maybe pikelets. Mrs Mack had sent up a crock of butter two days earlier. She remembered Sandy saying how he’d thought of Mrs Mack’s pikelets in France. Well, she could make good pikelets too, and there was the raspberry jam she’d made to go with them, the fruit from the thicket beyond the potato patch. She could just about murder a plate of pikelets herself now. Somehow she’d forgotten to have lunch.

  ‘Come on, boy. Training’s over.’ She led Snow King into the pen at the end of the stables. The colt whinnied, lifting his head and rearing a little. Just to show me he’s still King, she thought, doing what I want but only because he agrees to do it. She unbuckled the girth, pulled off the blanket and saddle, then opened the yard into the next paddock. The young horse made no move to go into it. Instead he stared at her, and pawed the ground.

  She laughed. ‘No, I didn’t forget.’ She bent and took the apple from the rock where she’d left it. The Bath apples were crisp when you first harvested them, but soft as snow after two days, not like the hard-fleshed apples of autumn. She held the fruit out on the palm of her hand, felt his warm breath as he took it, the whisper of his lips. He crunched it, grinning at its sweetness, then turned abruptly, swung his head down and cantered out into the paddock, out across the hill as though happy to pit his muscles against its steepness.

  Oh yes, thought Flinty. You’ll be a racer.

  She glanced up towards the sun. Dad had shown her the old soldier’s trick of telling the time, holding up her fist outstretched; if the sun had moved two fists, three hours had passed. Another hour perhaps till Empress plodded back up the hill.

  Which meant she had time to meet Nicholas at the Rock and still make the pikelets. He was still there every day, writing in a spiral-bound notebook. Most weekdays she managed to get down to see him, during daylight now, guilty at the time ‘wasted’ away from chores, guiltier still when Mrs Mack patted her sympathetically and said how lonely it must be for her, all alone up there every day.

  But she wasn’t alone. She had her horse, and she had her ghost.

  She ran inside to check her hair was neat and that there were no smudges on her face. Somehow, lately, it had become important to look nice for Nicholas. She could even put on a dress…

  She bit her lip, still watching her face in the mirror. Dresses were for going to church on Sundays or dances.

  She looked out the window. Down past the mountains there were women who wore dresses every day of their lives, not men’s trousers cut down to size and boots. They wore silk and lace, in the colours Kirsty loved, bright pinks and pastel blues, frills and lace and kid slippers.

  Flinty wasn’t sure what a kid slipper was, but she’d read about girls wearing them to balls. Kirsty probably knew already, even though she was only eight years old. Kirsty dreamed of going to a ball, of petticoats that rustled as you swept across the polished floor.

  Flinty suspected that when Kirsty grew up she’d marry a man who’d take her away from the mountains, to a house with a skivvy to scrub the floor and sweep the stairs and fold the washing, where you didn’t step out into slush up to your ankles every time the snow melted. Someone like Walter Green, who’d come back from the war and taken up an apprenticeship at the dockyards in Sydney.

  But not her. She loved the mountains like Dad had loved them at first sight. He’d been going to buy a farm down on the flats and had just come up here because the doctor said it would be good for his health, after the fever in India.

  Before the war it had never occurred to her that someone might know the mountains but choose to live somewhere else.

  Mum’s clock chimed two in the parlour. She gave her hair a final pat and ran out the door.

  Nicholas was there, as he always was, sitting in his chair, his notebook in his lap. This time, though, something else lay next to the notebook. Roses.

  She caught her breath at the sight of them. ‘Hello.’

  He smiled. ‘Hello yourself.’ He held the bu
nch of roses out to her. They were pink, with long straight stems that looked like they’d learned to stand to attention, not the white floppy roses or the little red ramblers that sprawled over the front fences in the valley, cuttings passed from woman to woman. She noticed a fragrance wafting up, put her nose down and sniffed.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. It was the first time anyone had ever given her flowers.

  It was hard to interpret his look. ‘I know they’ll vanish when you leave the Rock. But I thought you might like them now.’

  She lifted her head from the flowers. ‘I’ve read about rose perfume in books. I thought maybe it was just made to smell like roses looked. I didn’t realise that roses themselves could have a scent.’

  ‘A lot of them do, I think. Not that I know much about roses. Picked them this morning,’ he said. ‘There’s a bush by the front door. The old lady where I’m staying said you’d like them.’

  ‘I love them.’ She sniffed again, felt the softness of the petals on her cheeks. Heroines in books had lips like roses. She’d thought that meant red or white, but maybe it meant pink like these.

  ‘Flinty…’

  Something in his voice made her look up at him. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I have to go away for a while.’

  ‘What! Why?’

  ‘I’m going to be fitted for new legs.’

  ‘Wooden legs?’ Peg legs, they were called in books. Sailors had peg legs, or an arm that ended in a hook where they’d lost a hand. She remembered he’d told her that false legs were different now.

  ‘Not wooden ones these days. They’ll be metal. They’ll even bend at the ankle.’

  ‘But that won’t take long, will it?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Just a few days?’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as that. The legs have to be fitted specially. Then I have to learn to walk on them. It’ll take many months, Flinty.’

  Months! Empty months, scrubbing the kitchen floor, kneading bread, checking fences, Joey and Kirsty too tired to talk much when they got home from school, and anyway, they weren’t like Nicholas. No one was like Nicholas. No one else understood.