"Not right away." He placed his hands on her arms, drew her to him and looked deeply into her eyes. "As I was riding back to Melbourne, I was terrified I might lose you. I am going to stay awhile, dearest Hannah. The caves can wait."
As they turned toward the hospital, to go up the steps toward the golden light that streamed from the open doors, Hannah looked at Papunya's staff still standing where the old woman had planted it, the seeds and feathers and teeth gently dancing in the night breeze.
"Neal, do you know where Papunya's people live?"
"Miriam said that their home lies far to the north, many days journey from here. Why?"
"I know there are no tribal Aborigines close to the city, and so I wondered how they knew about the fever before even we knew—before Nellie Turner even came to the hospital. If as you say they would have journeyed for many days."
"I have no idea."
Hannah pondered this for a moment, then she pointed to the mysterious staff rising from the ground. "Do you suppose Papunya was marking her territory?"
Neal looked at Hannah and said with a smile, "Or marking yours."
SIX MONTHS LATER
I
'LL TAKE THAT, MRS. SCOTT," THE HOUSEKEEPER SAID. "YOU shouldn't be lifting heavy things. Not in your condition."
Hannah smiled and let Mrs. Sparrow take the box, which was not at all heavy, up the steps and into the house. I'm not an invalid, Hannah wanted to say, I'm just going to have a baby. But ever since she had announced her condition, everyone treated her as if she were made of glass.
Hannah paused in unloading the wagon, which contained the last of her possessions from her house in town, to look around their new home. It was no longer Brookdale Farm. Hannah and Neal had restored the original native name—Warrajinga—which was Aboriginal for, "The place where rainbows are born."
The May weather had brought cool autumn winds and white puffy clouds to the clover farm that also ran some cattle and sheep. Hannah gazed at the house that shone blinding white in the sunlight, with its fresh paint, new windows and doors, and wind vanes on the gabled roof. At the bottom of a sloping green lawn, a pond had been installed, complete with ducks and black swans. It was a replica of the one at Seven Oaks.
They had eventually found Charlie Swanswick up in the Bendigo gold field eager to sell his property. A Melbourne lawyer drew up the contract and deeds, Neal and Hannah paid the full price, and three days later were married beneath the ghost gums of their new home. Fintan Rorke was best man, and his new bride, Alice, was Hannah's matron of honor. Dr. Iverson and Blanche Sinclair, who were now courting, stood as witnesses, while seventy guests, including Dr. Soames who had miraculously recovered from the childbed fever, had sat on lawn chairs and fanned themselves in the summer heat.
That was three months ago, and now they were finally moving in. When she heard the familiar sound of hammering inside the house, Hannah smiled. Neal, creating cabinets for his new darkroom.
Turning her face into the wind, Hannah recalled how she had once wondered if she and Neal could live together, with their different callings. But now she saw it all: Neal going out periodically to explore and photograph the natural wonders of Australia, always to return to Hannah and Warrajinga. And Hannah, going about the countryside in her buggy with her doctor's bag, with occasional excursions into the city, to visit the hospital and confer with Dr. Iverson, but always to return to Neal and Warrajinga. An unconventional life to be sure, she thought, but a life that was going to be rich, rewarding and no doubt full of surprises.
Although their new home was in the country, they had kept the photography studio in town, and Hannah's office, where she would go periodically to see patients. But the baby would be born at Warrajinga, to start its life on the red soil of this new land. Hannah had turned one of the rooms into a nursery, and the room adjacent to it a writing studio, where she planned to compile her Home Health Manual, which had undergone a change since the childbed fever outbreak, six months ago. Hannah's prior emphasis had been on treatment and nursing care ("In The Event Of Fainting: red face, raise the head; white face, raise the feet."), but now she would stress prevention, with the first chapter covering cleanliness. Perhaps the manual's introduction would include the story of Hygeia, daughter of Aesculapius.
Hannah understood at last what her father had meant with his dying breath. He had not meant that iodine was the key to health—rather, antisepsis was. There was suddenly so much Hannah wanted to explore. Why were Aborigines who lived in the wild so healthy and robust? Why did the natives with whom Neal had lived known little illness? It was no longer enough, Hannah knew, to take care of the sick and prevent disease. She wanted to find sources and cures.
She paused on the verandah to look back at trees that had once been foreign and exotic but which were now familiar, the bushy gray emu trotting by on the road, a flock of white cockatoos, the red earth and blue sky. And as she felt the new life stirring in her womb, she thought of the people who had come before her, criss-crossing this vast continent with their timeless tracks down through the centuries—the ancestors of Papunya, Miriam, Jallara and her people, those of Galagandra, too, fighting to protect their sacred ground. She then thought of those who came later to these shores—the Merriwethers with their good intentions, Mr. Paterson who turned himself orange with carrots, and a lad named Queenie MacPhail, baptized in scotch. New people settling in an ancient land. It reminded Hannah of her father's last words to her: Thee stands at the threshold of a glorious new world. And she wondered: had it been a prophetic vision of his daughter's future? Hannah liked to think so.
She turned at the sound of a horse and saw a wagon coming up the drive. It was the rural mailman bringing the weekly post. "Good day to you, Mrs. Scott!" he called.
Hannah waved and smiled, and when he pulled up, took the bundle of envelopes and newspapers from him.
As she sorted through it all, she saw that Liza Guinness had written a letter of congratulations to Hannah on her marriage. The Gilhooleys, with whom she had stayed in touch, had written as well, and other friends from Adelaide and the Victoria countryside. Hannah had sent them all an open invitation to visit, including Liza, should she and her husband ever return to Australia. One of the property's outbuildings had been converted into a guest house.
Hannah was suddenly arrested by a pale blue envelope with a curious postmark on it, and she realized it was a much-redirected letter from America.
Jamie O'Brien!
"Dear Hannah," he had written in a familiar cramped hand, "I think of you often and pray you are well. I've done a good job here in California, finding gold. I invested in a stage coach line and made some money, and now I'm thinking that the new railway will be a good bet. I love this new land, Hannah, it's fresh and bold and a man can spread his wings. But I'll always love Australia first, and my first real lady-love who I once rescued from a dingo in a rose garden."
A photograph was included in with the letter. Hannah's eyes misted as she gazed at a grinning Jamie O'Brien in front of what looked like the mouth of a cave. A sign at the top read, "The Lucky Hannah Gold Mine."
Pressing the sheet of paper to her breast, where she felt beneath the fabric of her bodice the stone talisman with magic powers, Hannah looked back seven years to that fateful night at Falconbridge Manor. She saw herself boarding the Caprica, bound for an unknown land. Young and naïve, with some laboratory notes and a handful of medical instruments, Hannah had been alone in the world and uncertain of her path. But now she had come into her own. She had shaped her own destiny in this land of fresh starts and new beginnings, and looked forward with great eagerness to the new life that lay ahead—to the songline that she would follow.
Starting here at Warrajinga—Rainbow Dreaming.
FROM
THE DIVINING
A NOVEL BY BARBARA WOOD
NOW AVAILABLE
1
S
HE CAME SEEKING ANSWERS.
Nineteen-year-old Ulrika had awo
ken that morning with the feeling that something was wrong. The feeling had grown while she had bathed and dressed, and her slaves had bound up her hair and tied sandals to her feet, and brought her a breakfast of wheat porridge and goat's milk. When the inexplicable uneasiness did not go away, she decided to visit the Street of Fortune-Tellers, where seers and mystics, astrologers and soothsayers promised solutions to life's mysteries.
Now, as she was carried through the noisy streets of Rome in a curtained chair, she wondered what had caused her uneasiness. Yesterday, everything had been fine. She had visited friends, browsed in bookshops, spent time at her loom—the typical day of a young woman of her class and breeding. But then she had had a strange dream . . .
Just past the midnight hour, Ulrika had dreamed that she gotten out of bed, crossed to her window, climbed out, and landed barefoot in snow. In the dream, tall pines grew all around her, instead of the fruit trees behind her villa, a forest instead of an orchard, and clouds whispered across the face of a winter moon. She saw tracks—big paw prints in the snow, leading into the woods. Ulrika followed them, feeling moonlight brush her bare shoulders. She came upon a large, shaggy wolf with golden eyes. She sat down in the snow and he came to lie beside her, putting his head in her lap. The night was pure, as pure as the wolf's eyes gazing up at her, and she could feel the steady beat of his mighty heart beneath his ribs. The golden eyes blinked and seemed to say: Here is trust, here is love, here is home.
Ulrika had awoken disoriented. And then she had wondered: Why did I dream of a wolf? Wulf was my father's name. He died long ago in faraway Persia.
Is the dream a sign? But a sign of what?
Her slaves brought the chair to a halt, and Ulrika stepped down, a tall girl wearing a long gown of pale pink silk, with a matching stole that draped over her head and shoulders in proper maidenly modesty, hiding tawny hair and a graceful neck. She carried herself with a poise and confidence that concealed a growing anxiety.
The Street of Fortune-Tellers was a narrow alley obscured by the shadow of crowded tenement buildings. The tents and stalls of the psychics, augers, seers, and soothsayers looked promising, painted in bright colors, festooned with glittering objects, each one brighter than the next. Business was booming for purveyors of good-luck charms, magic relics, and amulets.
As Ulrika entered the lane, desperate to know the meaning of the wolf dream, hawkers called to her from tents and booths, claiming to be "genuine Chaldeans," to have direct channels to the future, to possess the Third Eye. She went first to the bird-reader, who kept crates of pigeons whose entrails he read for a few pennies. His hands caked with blood, he assured Ulrika that she would find a husband before the year was out. She went next to the stall of the smoke-reader, who declared that the incense predicted five healthy children for Ulrika.
She continued on until, three quarters along the crowded lane, she came upon a person of humble appearance, sitting only on a frayed mat, with no shade or booth or tent. The seer sat cross-legged in a long white robe that had known better days, long bony hands resting on bony knees. The head was bowed, showing a crown of hair that was blacker than jet, parted in the middle and streaming over the shoulders and back. Ulrika did not know why she would choose so impoverished a soothsayer—perhaps on some level she felt this one might be more interested in truth than in money—but she came to a halt before the curious person, and waited.
After a moment, the fortune-teller lifted her head, and Ulrika was startled by the unusual aspect of the face, which was long and narrow, all bone and yellow skin, framed by the streaming black hair. Mournful black eyes beneath highly arched brows looked up at Ulrika. The woman almost did not look human, and she was ageless. Was she twenty or eighty? A brown and black spotted cat lay curled asleep next to the fortune-teller. Ulrika recognized the breed as an Egyptian Mau, said to be the most ancient of cat breeds, possibly even the progenitor from which all cats had sprung.
Ulrika brought her attention back to the fortune-teller's swimming black eyes filled with sadness and wisdom.
"You have a question," the fortune-teller said in perfect Latin, eyes peering steadily from deep sockets.
The sounds of the alley faded. Ulrika was captured by the black Egyptian eyes, while the brown cat snoozed obliviously.
"You want to ask me about a wolf," the Egyptian said in a voice that sounded older than the Nile.
"It was in a dream, Wise One. Was it a sign?"
"A sign of what? Tell me your question."
"I do not know where I belong, Wise One. My mother is Roman, my father German. I was born in Persia and have spent most of my life roaming with my mother, for she followed a quest. Everywhere we went, I felt like an outsider. I am worried, Wise One, that if I do not know where I belong, I will never know who I am. Was the wolf dream a sign that I belong in the Rhineland with my father's people? Is it time for me to leave Rome?"
"There are signs all about you, daughter. The gods guide us everywhere, every moment."
"You speak in riddles, Wise One. Can you at least tell me my future?"
"There will be a man," the fortune-teller said, "who will offer you a key. Take it."
"A key? To what?"
"You will know when the time comes . . ."
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