The Postmistress
Page 35
Penrose set his glass down. ‘I am beholden to him, Hunt, but this is my life, not his.’
‘Glad to hear it, Penrose. She’s a fine girl.’
‘It’s only a matter of time before another Barnwell crosses her path.’ Penrose screwed up his face. ‘Enough of me, tell me about Melbourne. What did the lawyer say?’
‘The telegram from the solicitor in London confirmed what the letter said but the lawyer in Melbourne has recommended we go to London to put Adelaide and Danny’s affairs in proper order. Not something either of us want to do but if we must, we must. Maybe we’ll do some travelling and see all those places I’ve only read about in books. Paris … Rome …’
‘And Danny?’
‘He’ll come with us but we’ll be back. We’ll lease a house in East Melbourne to use and Adelaide’s enrolled Danny at Melbourne Grammar. He seemed mighty pleased with that decision.’
‘And what do you think you’ll do? Come back to Maiden’s Creek? Open a fancy Collins Street medical practice?’
Caleb fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out a page torn from a newspaper, much crumpled from being folded and refolded. He spread it on the table.
‘I’ve fallen in love with this country, Penrose,’ he said, ‘but I’ve no taste for hard scrabble gold mining or doctoring. These last months have reminded me that I was put on this earth to do some good, but it’s a part of my life I want to put behind me now. I want to go back to the land, back to farming, feel the earth between my fingers. This here’s a property for sale up Mansfield way. Adelaide says she wants to be within sight of the mountains, so we’ll go look at it and if it suits, I’ll put in an offer.’
Penrose turned the paper towards him. The advertisement offered the sale of a cattle property of one thousand acres with grazing rights on Mt Buller and a modest home.
‘A modest home?’ Penrose said. ‘From what you told me, you can afford a damn sight more than a modest home.’
Caleb shrugged. ‘Adelaide and I don’t want a grand mansion with servants and carriages,’ he said. ‘We sail before the end of the month and I don’t expect we’ll be back until the new year but we will be back.’
‘And what about the Shenandoah?’ Penrose asked.
Caleb leaned forward. ‘Adelaide and I, we have a proposition for you.’ He pocketed the advertisement for the cattle station and produced a brown envelope. ‘This here’s the registration for the Shenandoah Mine Limited Liability Company.’
Penrose pulled the sheath of papers from the envelope. He scanned them and looked up. ‘But—’
Caleb scanned his friend’s face. ‘It’s not acceptable?’
‘It’s more than acceptable!’ Penrose sputtered.
‘We’ve got the capital to get the mine going proper but it’s your mine, Penrose. You have to make it work. You will have the total management.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Penrose’s hand shook as he folded the paper that gave him independence from the hold of his uncle and, if he was right about the mine’s prospects, a good future.
‘I know one thing you can say. Go right on over to that girl and ask her to marry you.’
Penrose glanced at Sissy again. This time she caught him looking at her and smiled.
‘I will, but maybe not right now,’ Penrose said. ‘A few things to sort out first.’
In his heart, Caleb wondered if Penrose would ever make good on his promise to marry Sissy. Could a respectable middle-class man, such as his friend, in all honesty hope that the taint of his wife’s unsavoury past could ever be overcome? Probably not.
‘What I will do is write to my sister, Eliza, and tell her to come and join me.’ Penrose smiled. ‘I think she could make a good life for herself here and Adelaide will be a wonderful friend for her.’
‘We’ll look forward to meeting her.’
Caleb fished in the other pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a gold ring. He laid it on the table between them. ‘While I was in Melbourne, I had this made from that nugget you gave me.’
Penrose picked the bright object up and looked at it with awe in his eyes. ‘Our gold, Hunt.’
‘I’ve a favour to ask of you,’ Caleb said. ‘Will you stand beside me at my wedding?’
Penrose grinned as he handed the ring back. ‘My pleasure.’
Caleb lifted his glass. ‘To friendship and new lives, Penrose.’
Penrose echoed the toast and they drained their glasses.
Forty-Four
2 March 1872
‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ Caleb asked his bride as he inserted the key in the lock to the doctor’s cottage.
Down below them, the band in the Mechanics’ Institute still played, light from the open doors and windows spilling into the main street. The bride and groom had, with the connivance of Will Penrose and Netty Redley, slipped out of the back door, unnoticed.
Adelaide still clutched her bouquet of gum leaves and roses from Mrs Russell’s garden, the only vegetation that could be found in Maiden’s Creek in March. She leaned against Caleb’s shoulder drawing in the scent of sandalwood and her man. ‘We’ve had the Menzies and I couldn’t bear the thought of a room at The Empress or the Britannia.’
Caleb flung open the door to the doctor’s cottage. ‘Then welcome to our first marital home, Mrs Hunt.’
Adelaide bit her lip. ‘I think, Dr Hunt, that it is appropriate that you carry me over the threshold.’
Caleb’s mouth curled into the familiar smile, the grey eyes twinkling. ‘After all those sandwiches I saw you eating?’
‘I was hungry,’ Adelaide said, as Caleb swept her up into his arms with an overacted grunt.
‘You women have too many skirts,’ he grumbled.
She locked her arms around his neck. ‘This is nice,’ she said and kissed him on the nose.
He ducked as he entered the little cottage, setting her down on the scrubbed wooden boards. Adelaide cast a critical eye around the living room. Posy, with help from Netty and several of the other women in town, had done an exceptional job. Everything gleamed, from the brass handle of the kettle hanging above the hearth, to the mean little glass windows, now decorated with cheerful gingham curtains. A glass vase stuffed with more gum leaves and roses sat in the centre of a gingham cloth covering the disreputable table.
She set her bouquet on the cloth and unpinned her fashionable straw hat, purchased from an expensive milliner in Collins Street. No bride in white with a long veil, she had chosen a dress of soft apricot silk. The tight-fitting bodice had a flattering shawl neckline and a ruched overskirt looped back into a trailing bustle, revealing a simple underskirt of matching fabric with a tightly pleated frill at the hem. It had been a long, long time since she had worn anything so beautiful, and the woman who had stared back at her from her mirror that morning bore no resemblance to the frightened girl who had fled her father’s house over ten years earlier.
As she had helped her dress that morning, Netty—who in a few short weeks would be wed herself to her beloved Amos—burst into tears.
‘You are beautiful,’ she had told Adelaide.
‘All brides are beautiful,’ Adelaide had replied.
Netty shook her head. ‘No … this is not about how you look. It’s your heart, Adelaide.’
Now Caleb Hunt stood an arm’s length from her, looking at her in a way she had never thought any man would—or should—look at her.
‘What do you see?’ she asked.
‘I see an amazing woman,’ he said. ‘Strong, beautiful and clever. A mother who risked everything for the sake of her child. A woman I am proud to call my wife.’
‘And I see an amazing man,’ she said. ‘A man who has seen more horror in his life than any man should. A man with healing in his hands and his heart. A man I am proud to call my husband.’
‘No. It is you who have healed me, Adelaide. That man arrived in this town a broken being who cared for no one but himself. I had forgotten what it was to love and be
loved.’
She held up her hand and their palms touched.
Adelaide curled her fingers around his. ‘Netty says that before you came to Maiden’s Creek, my heart was dead. It beat enough to keep me alive, but I had shut it away.’ Tears pricked the back of her throat. ‘She said she knew you would be the one to bring me back to life.’
Caleb drew her into his arms and kissed her, not a hurried, snatched kiss but a long, slow exploration.
‘How,’ he whispered into her hair, ‘do I get you out of this infernal dress?’
She leaned her forehead against the snowy white linen of his new shirt and laughed. As she fumbled with the colourful cravat he had tied around his high, stiff collar, the candlelight glinted on the bright gold of the ring on her finger. The ring made from Shenandoah gold that would tie her heart to this man and this land for the rest of her life.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading The Postmistress.
You are probably curious as to whether Maiden’s Creek is a real town or just a figment of an author’s imagination. It is both. I deliberately chose to make it a fictional town because that gave me scope to play with a history, setting and inhabitants in a way unconstrained by using an existing town. However, it is based very heavily on a little gold-mining settlement in the High Country of Victoria that I know very well, called Walhalla. Today Walhalla is a picturesque village of less than twenty inhabitants, buried in a steep-sided valley about fifty miles north of Moe. Aberfeldy and Sale are real towns. Shady Creek existed as a coaching stop on the Melbourne–Sale coach route as described. Buneep (as it was called then) is modern-day Bunyip.
In its heyday, Walhalla was a busy gold-mining town of several thousand people, dominated by pubs, the extensive gold mines and the incessant noise of the gold stampers, recorded by no less a person than the English writer Anthony Trollope. The hillsides for miles around were denuded of vegetation and lovely Stringers Creek was little more than a polluted drain. Hard to imagine today. Sadly, the First World War effectively killed the town, as the young men went off to fight and the gold mines became untenable. Several attempts have been made to revitalise the gold mining but they have come to nothing. It has not stopped my husband and I panning some of the creeks in the area—to no avail.
In my extensive research into the actual history of Walhalla, I did come across several very interesting stories, which I have been delighted to weave into my own narrative. The incident with the smallpox scare (and the method used to deal with it) occurred in Walhalla in 1869 and I was able to draw on detailed contemporary accounts. The quick thinking of the town’s doctors (coincidentally, an alcoholic Irishman and an American) saved the town. I recently came across the lonely grave of the only victim, Sarah Hanks, high above the town.
Sadly, the town’s Irish doctor died on the Melbourne coach in similar, but less sinister, circumstances to those of my Dr. Bowen. His grave can still be found at the Shady Creek cemetery (which, being on private land, is not accessible to the public).
The character of Lil is loosely based on the larger than life Kitty Cane, a former dancer who ran a grog shop on the road to Aberfeldy. When Kitty died she was carried down the hill to the Walhalla Cemetery, but alas, her bulk was such that those carrying her coffin abandoned it in a hastily dug grave at the side of the road where it can still be seen today.
I have taken a liberty with the date of the first Cole’s Funny Picture Book for which I apologise. It was not published until 1879. I always thought it was rather an odd book myself but in its day it was hugely popular and I liked the idea of Danny reading it.
It has been a great pleasure writing a story set in my own backyard, so as to speak, and I am looking forward to sharing the second Maiden’s Creek story with you.
Alison Stuart
Acknowledgements
First and most importantly I have to acknowledge the contribution of my husband, David, without whom this book would never have been imagined, let alone written. His love of the Australian bush and his own deep ties to the land, as well as his insatiable (and misguided) belief that he can find gold in every creek around Walhalla, was the inspiration for this story. He has also been my technical advisor on the intricacies of deep lead gold mining … although there is still no way I am writing ‘extruded swarming dyke’ into the story—even if it is the correct term for a ‘reef’ as we lay people might call it. Secondly I would like to acknowledge the ongoing support of my writers’ group, The Saturday Ladies Bridge Club, who have been there with brainstorming advice, tea (and something stronger) and sympathy. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank my editor Jo Mackay and the team at Harlequin Australia and HarperCollins for their faith in me! This has been such an exciting journey. Finally my thanks go to the residents of Walhalla who keep the town alive for the visitors who make their way through the mountains to this special part of the world. While Maiden’s Creek is NOT Walhalla, it is still my inspiration and the place I escape to on regular occasions. In looking to its history and geography for inspiration, I hope I have done it justice.
ISBN: 9781489256478
TITLE: THE POSTMISTRESS
First Australian Publication 2019
Copyright © 2019 Alison Stuart
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