The Best of Sisters

by Dilly Court

  In spite of everything, Eliza found herself chuckling. Happiness was welling up inside her. Freddie had come home. He was here beside her and she wanted to dance up and down and shout for joy. All the suppressed emotion, the longing and the uncertainty as to whether her feelings for him had simply been puppy love had vanished in that first moment of recognition. She buried her face in the soft silk of his handkerchief, and inhaled the scent of him that was so heartrendingly familiar.

  ‘Let me have a proper look at you.’ Taking her by the shoulders, Freddie held her until she lowered the handkerchief and looked him in the face. As he wiped away the last of her tears with the tips of his fingers, a tender smile played on Freddie’s lips. ‘You’ve grown into a beautiful young lady, Liza. You were little more than a child when I was sent off to the penal colony, and now just look at you.’

  There was no mistaking the admiration in his eyes, and Eliza’s heightened senses detected something more. She had seen that flicker of appreciation before; a certain look that men gave her, confirming that she was no longer a child. She lifted her face, longing for him to kiss her on the lips in the way that Brandon had kissed her, but as she glanced up at him beneath her lashes, her heart went cold.

  Freddie dropped his hands to his sides with a shadow clouding his eyes, and the moment was lost. Perhaps it had never happened. Eliza searched his face for the answer, but his expression was controlled and unreadable.

  ‘Well now, my dear Eliza. We’ve six years to catch up on.’ Freddie jerked his head in the direction of the chandlery. ‘I can see that a lot has happened while I’ve been away.’

  A cold east wind blew down the street, hurling bits of straw and sawdust into the air. Eliza shivered; the sun was still shining from a translucent blue sky with tiny puffballs of clouds tossed around like playful lambs, but she felt chilled to the bone. He took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. ‘You’re shivering, Liza. Let’s find somewhere nice and warm where we can talk.’

  Seated by Freddie’s side in a chophouse near Execution Dock, Eliza toyed with a large helping of steak pudding, which normally would have been a real treat, but now her appetite seemed to have deserted her. Freddie, however, ate his with relish and he encouraged her to talk, listening sympathetically while she related the events of the past years, ending with Aaron’s offer to rebuild the chandlery and his startling revelations concerning her mother.

  ‘My poor Eliza,’ Freddie said, wiping his mouth on a table napkin. ‘You’ve been through so much and I wasn’t there to help you.’

  She forced her lips into a smile. ‘It weren’t your fault. You didn’t choose to go off to Australia.’

  ‘That is true. But in a way it’s been the making of me, Eliza.’

  ‘It certainly looks that way. I thought you was transported for seven years, and here you are large as life and dressed like a toff. Did you escape from the penal colony?’

  Freddie leaned back in his chair and a lazy smile lit his face. ‘I’m a free man, Liza. It’s a long story, but in the end I earned an absolute pardon.’

  She rested her elbows on the table, cupping her chin in her hands. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘You really wouldn’t want to know all the sordid details, but suffice it to say that my limited medical skills came in very useful, especially when I first arrived in the colony. I tended the sick to the best of my ability and, having successfully treated the governor of Swan River colony for extremely painful boils, I was granted a ticket of leave. Eventually I found myself in the Northern Territories and I headed for the goldfields, where I set myself up as a doctor, treating the miners for everything from the pox to typhoid, bites from venomous snakes and spiders to broken bones. I can’t say I struck gold myself, but they paid me handsomely in gold dust and even small nuggets. One of the unfortunates that I couldn’t save had struck it rich and, with no one in the world to mourn him, he left his hoard to me. When I got my pardon, I made my way to Sydney and booked passage on a ship heading for New Zealand. I stayed there for a while, and then I took another vessel bound for London.’

  ‘Well, I never did.’ Eliza could hardly bear to take her eyes off Freddie’s animated countenance. He had made his story sound like a great adventure, although she knew he wasn’t telling her the worst of his experiences. She longed to reach out and touch the laughter lines that radiated from the corners of his eyes, and to smooth the twin furrows between his eyebrows caused by harsh sunlight in the outback. But she did none of these things and she sat back in her chair, clasping her hands on the table in front of her. ‘There must be so much more you haven’t told me, Freddie.’

  ‘All in good time, my love.’

  ‘But you won’t go away again, will you?’

  ‘I’m here to stay, Liza. And I wasn’t wasting my time entirely in the penal colony. I had access to the governor’s library and I spent my evenings studying medical books.’

  ‘So you’re a proper doctor now?’

  ‘Not exactly, but I know a lot more than I did when I was peddling my elixirs door to door.’

  ‘Will you do that again?’

  Freddie shook his head. ‘No, I’ve bought a property and I intend to set up a clinic in the East End. Pay my debt to society by treating the poor and sick.’

  ‘Oh, Freddie, that’s so wonderful.’

  ‘Hold on, Liza, you’ll have me thinking I’m a saint in a minute and I promise you I’m far from that. I’ll treat a few City bankers and merchants on the side.’ Freddie tapped the side of his nose and winked. ‘For a huge fee, of course.’

  A bubble of laughter rose in Eliza’s throat and she found herself laughing, really laughing for the first time since he had gone away.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, with a nod of approval. ‘This is the Liza I remember most, not the sad-faced, serious young woman I met on the corner of Old Gravel Lane a couple of hours ago.’ Reaching across the table, he took Eliza’s hand in his and held it, looking deeply into her eyes. ‘I know you’ve had a hard time, my love, but Freddie’s here now. Here to stay, and I have a surprise for you.’

  ‘You have?’ Eliza wondered how many shocks one person could take in a day. ‘What sort of surprise?’

  Freddie leapt to his feet. ‘Come with me. This news is too good to deliver in a chophouse.’ He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to her feet.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Eliza demanded, as he led her through the closely packed tables towards the street door. ‘Why can’t you tell me here?’

  ‘It’s not too far to walk,’ Freddie said, plucking his top hat from the stand and opening the door. ‘A stroll will bring the colour back to your cheeks. Just wait until you see what I’ve brought back from the Antipodes. You’ll get the surprise of your young life.’

  Young life, thought Eliza, struggling to keep up with him. He still talks as though he’s my father. There might be nine or ten years between us, but if it makes no difference to me, why should he care? Just a short while ago she thought Freddie had seen her as a grown woman, but now he was talking to her as if she were still a child.

  ‘Keep up, Eliza,’ Freddie said, striding along and towing her behind him like a wayward toddler. ‘Chop-chop.’

  She was out of breath and gasping for air by the time Freddie stopped outside a house overlooking the river at the end of Dark House Street. Squashed tightly between a tea warehouse and a tavern, the five-storey, double-fronted edifice, with a crumbling Georgian portico and grimy stucco, looked oddly out of place and sadly neglected, like an ageing courtesan propped in the corner of a bar and about to tumble off her stool.

  A painful stitch made Eliza clutch her side. ‘Who lives here?’

  ‘I do,’ Freddie said proudly, taking a large iron mortice key from his coat pocket and unlocking the front door. Sweeping off his hat, he stood aside to usher Eliza into the entrance hall. ‘Welcome to my home. This crumbling pile of bricks and mortar will eventually be Dr Freddie Prince’s clinic for the poor and needy.
’

  Eliza stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the pervading smell of damp rot and mildew. Spiders’ webs hung in festoons from the cornices and the floorboards were so caked with dried mud and dirt that it could have passed for a stable. A staircase rose from the centre of the square hall, dividing on a mezzanine lit by an arched window and winging elegantly up in two curves to a galleried landing. ‘You own this house?’

  ‘Every last cracked brick and worm-eaten timber, my dear. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a mess.’

  ‘But it has potential, Eliza.’ Freddie surveyed his property with a blissful expression on his face. ‘A bit of a clean and a lick of paint and it will be a palace fit for a queen.’

  Eliza opened her mouth to say that it was probably only the dirt that was holding the whole thing together, when a woman appeared through a doorway at the back of the hall. For a moment, Eliza thought she must be a servant or someone hired to do the cleaning, but the woman came towards them, smiling and holding her arms out to Freddie. As she drew closer, Eliza could see that she was quite young, and pretty in a blowsy sort of way. She was dressed in a yellow watered-silk gown trimmed with black braid and cut daringly low to reveal a generous bosom, rather too much of it in Eliza’s opinion, and her waist was impossibly small. Her corsets must have been killing her!

  ‘So you found her then, Freddie, my love.’ She wrapped her arms around Freddie’s neck and kissed him on the lips.

  ‘I found her, Daisy. Although she’s grown into such a fine young lady that it took me a few moments to realise that it was indeed my little Eliza.’

  Daisy released him, turning to Eliza with a smile fixed on her face and eyes narrowed like a duellist looking down the barrel of a pistol. ‘She’s not the child you described.’

  Freddie chuckled and slipped his arm around Eliza’s shoulders, giving her a hug. ‘Not too grown up, I hope.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us, Freddie?’ Eliza met Daisy’s hostile stare with what she hoped was a cool look and a sinking heart.

  ‘My dear girl, of course. But there is someone else I want you to meet as well. Go and fetch him, Daisy. Let’s do this properly.’

  ‘Anything you say, Freddie darling.’ With a coquettish smile, Daisy sashayed off with her silver-blonde ringlets bobbing and her hooped skirts swaying. ‘Tommy,’ she called. ‘Tommy, where are you?’ She opened a door across the hall and disappeared inside.

  Eliza shot a puzzled glance at Freddie, but he just smiled and nodded. Suddenly she wanted to slap him. Was this awful woman his wife or his mistress? If so, why hadn’t he thought to warn her? Her instinct was to slam out of the house never to return, but she forced herself to stand still and, hopefully, to appear calm.

  From inside the room she could hear Daisy’s voice. ‘There you are, Tommy. Oh, you bad boy! I told you not to play with them cockroaches, nasty dirty things.’

  ‘She’s a fine woman really,’ Freddie whispered in Eliza’s ear. ‘You’ll like her when you get to know her.’

  Eliza bit back the sharp retort that she already hated the common, brassy trollop. She recognised the type as soon as she had set eyes on Daisy, dyed blonde hair, breasts like pillows and ready to oblige any man with a few bob in his pocket; it was Beattie Larkin all over again.

  Daisy reappeared dragging a small boy by the hand. Judging by the tears welling up in his large brown eyes and the red weals on the side of his face, Daisy had fetched him a clout for playing with bugs. As they stopped in front of Eliza, the boy plugged his thumb in his mouth, staring up at her.

  There was something disturbingly familiar in those large, pansy-brown eyes, something about the mutinous lift of that small chin – a look – an instinctive feeling. Eliza had to stop herself from scooping Tommy up in her arms and cuddling him.

  ‘Liza, I want you to meet Daisy Bragg, Bart’s widow, and this fine young fellow is Tommy, your brother’s son.’

  For a moment Eliza thought she was going to faint. The ceiling and the floor seemed to be spinning in a vortex around her, and if Freddie had not supported her, she might have fallen. She could hear his voice but the words made no sense at all. It was Daisy’s shrill tones that penetrated her consciousness.

  ‘Poor thing, she’s gone quite pale, Freddie. Go and fetch some sal volatile or something from your medicine bag.’

  ‘Of course, you’re right, Daisy. You always were a practical woman.’ Freddie helped Eliza to the staircase and sat her down on the bottom step. ‘Sit down for a while, Liza. Daisy will look after you.’

  The thought of being looked after by Daisy acted quicker than a burning feather wafted under her nose. Eliza lifted her head. ‘I’m all right. It was a shock and I’ve had plenty of those today.’

  ‘Course she has, you great booby,’ Daisy said, slapping Freddie on the arm. ‘I dunno, men! Why don’t you make yourself useful, Freddie? Go and tell that stupid girl, Sukey, to make us a nice cup of tea. I’m sure that would do Eliza more good than a sniff of smelling salts.’

  Freddie’s face crumpled with consternation as he bent over Eliza. ‘I’m a clumsy dolt, Liza. I should have broken the news more gently.’

  ‘It’s all right, Freddie. Really it is. I’m fine now.’

  ‘Best give it a minute or two or we’ll have you swooning all over the place,’ Daisy said, preventing Eliza from rising with a firm pressure on her shoulders. ‘Freddie, tea!’

  ‘Yes, general!’ Winking at Eliza, Freddie gave Daisy a mock salute and strolled off into the dim recesses of the house.

  ‘Now then, dearie,’ Daisy said, her smile fading. ‘I can see you don’t approve of me, but that’s your problem, not mine. Me and Freddie are very close and I won’t let no one come between us. Do you get my meaning?’

  ‘Mama.’ Tommy tugged at Daisy’s hand.

  She looked down at him with an impatient tut-tutting sound. ‘Hush, Tommy. Mama’s talking to your Aunt Eliza.’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Tommy said, glaring at Eliza.

  Daisy patted him on the head. ‘Of course you don’t, love. But you will get to know your auntie very well, and when you’re a big boy she’ll show you how to run the shop that by rights belongs to you.’ Daisy kept her gaze fixed on Eliza’s face. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Eliza? If my Bart had lived then he would have inherited the business, so when Enoch dies it should go to Bart’s son.’

  ‘Enoch died several years ago. The shop belongs to me now, but I’ll see that Tommy gets his fair share.’ Wrapping her arms around his small body, Eliza gave him a hug. ‘I’m your auntie and I hope we’ll be very good friends, Tommy.’

  ‘You talk funny,’ he said, eyeing her warily. ‘Everybody here talks funny. I want to go back home.’

  ‘This is home now,’ Daisy said, prising him from Eliza’s arms. ‘Go and play with your bricks while I have a little chat with your auntie.’

  Tommy’s bottom lip stuck out and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Don’t want to play with bricks. I’m hungry.’

  ‘Then go and ask Sukey to make you some bread and milk. Freddie’s in the kitchen, you can tell him to hurry up with the tea. Off you go, there’s a good boy.’ Clapping her hands together, Daisy shooed him off in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘He’s a fine boy,’ Eliza said, watching him trot off on sturdy little legs, with a lump in her throat and a surge of love threatening to overwhelm her. ‘Bart would have been so proud of him.’

  ‘And Bart would want Tommy to inherit the business.’

  ‘Is that the only reason you brought the boy all the way to England?’ Eliza demanded, rising to her feet. ‘You told me in your one and only letter that Bart had found gold. Surely you don’t need money?’

  Daisy shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s all gone. I bought a hotel in Arrowtown but it weren’t easy running it with a child to raise, so I sold up and went to live in Wellington where I bought a pub. I got in with a gambling man who robbed me blind, drank all me profits and then bugg
ered off, leaving me with a pile of debts. I was desperate, and then one day Freddie come into the bar and we got talking, as you do. He’d seen me name above the pub door and he says, I knew a family called Bragg back in Wapping. Wapping, says I, why that’s where me dear departed hubby come from. That’s how it come about, and when Freddie says he’s booked a passage to England, then I think, why not? Uncle Enoch can’t be as black-hearted as Bart said, and even if he was, then I can get round most men if I put me mind to it.’

  ‘Then it’s a pity you won’t have a chance to find out, isn’t it?’

  Daisy pushed her face close to Eliza’s. ‘Look, dearie, don’t get clever with me. I’ve had to fight for survival ever since I was ten. You cross swords with me and you’ll come off the worse.’

  ‘I’m not scared of you and you ain’t the only one what’s had to struggle.’

  Daisy drew back a little way, her voluptuous breasts flushed pink and threatening to burst from her bodice as she drew a deep breath. ‘Get on the wrong side of me and you’ll be sorry. You may be my sister-in-law, but get in my way and I’ll make mincemeat out of you, girl.’

  Eliza glared at her, wondering how Bart had managed to fall in love with such a scheming slut. But just thinking of Bart was enough to make her bite back a bitter retort; whatever Daisy’s faults, he had loved this woman and she was the mother of his child. Eliza held up her hands. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Daisy.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Daisy said, tossing her head so that her ringlets bobbed up and down and her gold earrings jiggled. ‘You’d be the loser, I can tell you.’

  ‘Answer me one question, honestly.’

  Daisy’s lip curled. ‘Honestly? That’s asking a bit much.’

  ‘Tell me what Freddie is to you. Are you just using him because he’s got a bit of money or do you love him?’

  ‘I love him, of course. At least that’s what he believes and I intend to keep it that way.’

  ‘That’s so cruel and unfair. He’s a good, kind man and I won’t let you use him this way.’