The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “SHE REPORTED me to Mr. Kinross,” said Mrs. Summers angrily to her husband, “and he got the pip something horrible with me! So Jade gets to live in the governess’s rooms and the Chinee men get to ride the car! Disgraceful!”

  “Sometimes, Maggie, you’re a stupid woman,” Summers said.

  Mrs. Summers sniffed. “You’re all a pack of unbelievers, and Mr. Kinross is the worst! Consorting with that woman, and marrying a girl young enough to be his daughter!”

  “Shut your mouth, woman!” Summers snapped.

  AT FIRST IT was difficult for Elizabeth to fill in time; in the wake of that exchange with Mrs. Summers, she found herself disliking the woman so much that she avoided her.

  The library, for all its fifteen thousand volumes, was not much of a solace; it was overloaded with texts on subjects that did not interest her, from geology and engineering to gold, silver, iron, steel. There were shelves of various committee reports bound in leather, more shelves of New South Wales laws bound in leather, and yet more shelves filled with something that rejoiced in the title of Halsbury’s Laws of England. No novels of any kind. All the works on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the other famous men he mentioned from time to time were in Greek, Latin, Italian or French—how educated Alexander must be! But she found a simple retelling of some myths, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the complete works of Shakespeare. The myths were a delight, the others hard going.

  Alexander had instructed her not to attend service at St. Andrew’s (the red-brick Church of England with the spire) until she had been in residence some little while, and seemed to think that Kinross town contained no inhabitants with whom she would care to associate. A suspicion began to grow in her that he intended to isolate her from ordinary folk, that she was doomed to dwell on the mountain in solitude. As if she were a secret.

  But as he didn’t forbid her to walk, Elizabeth walked, at first confining herself to the beautiful grounds, then venturing farther afield. She found the snake path and negotiated it down to the shelf where the poppet heads of the mine reared, but could find no vantage point from which she could watch the activity unobserved. After that she began to penetrate the mysteries of the forest, there to find an enchanting world of lacy ferns, mossy dells, huge trees with trunks of vermilion, pink, cream, blue-white, every shade of brown. Exquisite birds flew in flocks, parrots in all the colors of the rainbow, an elusive bird that chimed like fairy bells, other birds that sang more melodically than a nightingale. Breath suspended, she saw little kangaroos leaping from rock to rock—a picture book come to life.

  Finally she went far enough to hear the sound of roaring water, and came upon a clear, strong stream that tumbled in lacy leaps down a monstrous slope, down to the wood and iron jungle of Kinross below. The change was dramatic, horrific; what atop the falls was paradise was transformed at the mountain’s foot into an ugly shambles of slag heaps, detritus, holes, mounds, trenches. And the river down there was filthy.

  “You’ve found the cascades,” said Alexander’s voice.

  She gasped, whirled around. “You startled me!”

  “Not as much as a snake would have. Be careful, Elizabeth. There are snakes everywhere, some capable of killing you.”

  “Yes, I know there are. Jade warned me and showed me how to frighten them away—you stamp very hard on the ground.”

  “Provided you see them in time.” He came to stand beside her. “Down there is the evidence of what men will do to lay their hands on gold,” he said. “Those are the original workings. They haven’t yielded placer in two years. And yes, I’m personally responsible for a great deal of the mess. I was here for six months before the word leaked out that I’d found paydirt on this wee tributary of the Abercrombie River.” He put a hand under her elbow and steered her away. “Come, I want you to meet your teacher of piano. And I’m sorry,” he continued as they retraced their steps, “that I didn’t think to bring in the kind of books I should have known you’d prefer. A mistake I’m busy rectifying.”

  “Must I learn the piano?” she asked.

  “If you wish to please me, yes. Do you wish to please me?”

  Do I? she wondered. I hardly see him except in my bed, he doesn’t even bother to come home for dinner.

  “Of course,” she said.

  MISS THEODORA JENKINS had one thing in common with Jade; they had both followed the gold from place to place in company with their fathers. Tom Jenkins had died of liver failure due to strong drink when he reached Sofala, a gold town on the Turon River, leaving his plain, timid daughter with no roof over her head nor means of support. At first she had taken employment in a boarding house, waiting on tables, washing dishes and making beds; it gave her that roof over her head and her keep, if not more than sixpence a day in wages. As her leanings were religious, church became her great comfort, the more so after the minister discovered how well she could play the organ. After the Sofala gold failed she moved to Bathurst, where Constance Dewy saw her advertisement in the Bathurst Free Press and brought her to Dunleigh, the Dewy homestead, to teach piano to her daughters.

  When the last of the Dewy girls went to boarding school in Sydney, Miss Jenkins returned to the drudgery of teaching piano and taking in mending at Bathurst. Then Alexander Kinross had offered her a little house in Kinross plus a decent salary if she would give his wife daily lessons on the piano. Hugely grateful, Miss Jenkins accepted instantly.

  She was not yet thirty years old, but she looked forty, the more so because her coloring was nondescript and her skin, after constant exposure to the sun, was seamed with a network of fine lines. Her musical gift she owed to her mother, who had taught her to read music and tried to find a piano for Theodora to play on whichever goldfield they happened to be living.

  “Mama died just one day after we arrived in Sofala,” said Miss Jenkins, “and Papa followed a year later.”

  This kind of nomadic existence fascinated Elizabeth, who had never been more than five miles from home until Alexander had sent for her. How hard it was for women! And how pathetically glad Miss Jenkins was for the chance Alexander had offered her!

  That night in bed she turned of her own volition into her husband’s arms and put her head on his shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she said very softly, and pressed a kiss on his neck.

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For being so kind to poor Miss Jenkins. I will learn to play the piano well, I promise. It is the least I can do.”

  “There’s one other thing you can do for me.”

  “What?”

  “Take off your nightgown. Skin should feel skin.”

  Caught, Elizabeth obliged. The Act had grown too familiar to provoke embarrassment or discomfort, but skin on skin didn’t make it more pleasurable for her. For him, however, this night clearly marked a victory.

  OH, BUT LEARNING to play the piano was difficult! Though she wasn’t entirely without aptitude, Elizabeth didn’t come from a musical environment. For her, it meant starting from absolute scratch, even in rudimentary matters like the forms music took, its vocabulary, structure. Days and days of stumbling up and down the scales—would she ever be ready to play a tune?

  “Yes, but first your fingers have to become more nimble and your left hand has to get used to making different movements from your right. Your ears have to distinguish the exact sound of every note,” said Theodora. “Now once again, dear Elizabeth. You are improving, truly.”

  They had passed from formality to calling each other by their first names within a week, and had established a routine that did much to alleviate Elizabeth’s loneliness. Theodora came up on the car at ten o’clock each weekday morning; they did the theory of music until lunch, which they ate in the conservatory, then transferred to the piano for those interminable scales. At three Theodora took the car down to Kinross again. Sometimes they walked in the garden, and once took the snake path until Theodora could point out her little house to Elizabeth; she was entranc
ed with it, so proud of it.

  But she didn’t invite Elizabeth to visit it, and Elizabeth knew better than to ask. Alexander had been firm on that point; his wife was not to visit Kinross for any reason whatsoever.

  WHEN ELIZABETH missed her second lot of courses, she knew that she had conceived. But what she didn’t know was how to tell Alexander. The trouble was that she still didn’t really know him, nor was he the kind of person she thought she might want to know. Rationalize her fears though she did, he still loomed in her mind as a rather remote figure of authority, immensely busy—she didn’t even know what to talk to him about! So how could she give him this news, which filled her with secret joy that had nothing to do with the Act or with Alexander? No matter which way she turned it over in her mind, she couldn’t find the words.

  Two months after she arrived in Kinross House, she played Für Elise for him; for once he had come home to dinner. Her performance delighted him, as she had wisely waited until her fingers could negotiate the keyboard without a mistake.

  “Wonderful!” he cried, plucked her off the stool and sat down in an easy chair with her on his lap. First he chewed his lips, then cleared his throat. “I have a question to ask.”

  “Yes?” she said, expecting a query about the piano lessons.

  “It’s two and a half months since we married, but you’ve had no monthly courses. Are you with child, my dear?”

  Her hands clutched at him, she gasped. “Oh! Oh! Yes, I am with child, Alexander, but I haven’t known how to tell you.”

  He kissed her gently. “Elizabeth, I love you.”

  Had the interlude continued with Elizabeth cuddled on his lap and tenderness flowing in him—had he only confined what he said to the delight of a coming baby and the sweet fact that this girl, still half a child herself, was ripe for closer intimacies—who knows what might have happened to Elizabeth and Alexander?

  But suddenly he jerked her to her feet and stood before her with grim face and angry eyes that she took as evidence that she had in some way displeased him. Elizabeth began to shiver, to shrink away from his hands, which were squeezing hers convulsively.

  “Since you are to bear my child, it’s time that I told you about myself,” he said in a hard voice. “I am not a Drummond—no, be still, be quiet! Let me talk! I am not your first cousin, Elizabeth, just a distant cousin on the Murray side. My mother was a Murray, but I have no idea who my father was. Duncan Drummond knew my mother had been seeing some other man for the simplest of reasons—she had refused to sleep in his bed for over a year, yet grew heavy with a child he knew he hadn’t generated. When he taxed her, she wouldn’t say who the man was—only that she had fallen in love and couldn’t bring herself to be intimate with Duncan, whom she had never loved. She died giving birth to me, and carried her secret to her grave. Duncan was too proud to say that I was not his son.”

  She listened torn between relief that he wasn’t angry at her and horror at the story he told, but most of her was wondering why he had destroyed her lovely moment of feeling enfolded and enfolding. Someone older, more mature, might have asked why this news couldn’t have waited for another day, but all Elizabeth knew was that the devil in him was stronger than the lover. Her baby was less important than his secret illegitimacy.

  But she had to say something. “Oh, Alexander! The poor woman! Where was the man, if he let her die like that?”

  “I don’t know, though I’ve asked that question of myself many times,” he said, voice harder still. “All I can think is that he cared more for his own skin than for my mother or me.”

  “Perhaps he was dead,” she said, trying to help.

  “I don’t think so. Anyway,” he went on, “I spent my childhood suffering at the hands of a man I thought my father, wondering why I could never please him. From somewhere I had a mulish streak that wouldn’t let me cower or beg, no matter how hard or how often Duncan beat me, or what foul thing he put me to do. I simply hated him. Hated him!”

  And that hate still rules you, Alexander Kinross, she thought. “How did you find out?” she asked, feeling her heart slow a little from its frantic tattoo.

  “When Murray arrived to take over the kirk, Duncan found a soul mate. They huddled together from Murray’s first day, and the story of my parentage must have been told almost at once. Well, I was used to half living at the manse, studying with Dr. MacGregor—Duncan wouldn’t go against his minister—and was naïve enough to assume that Murray would continue. But Murray banished me, said he’d make sure I never went up to university. I saw red, and hit him. Broken jaw and all, he managed to spit out that I was a bastard, that my mother was a common whore, and that he would see me in hell for what I and my mother had done to Duncan.”

  “A terrible story,” she said. “So you ran away, I was told.”

  “That very night.”

  “Was your sister kind to you?”

  “Winifred? In her way, but she was five years older than I, and married by the time the truth came out. I doubt she knows to this day.” He released her hands. “But you know, Elizabeth.”

  “Indeed I do,” she said slowly. “Indeed I do. I sensed that there was something wrong from the moment I met you—you didn’t act like any Drummond I knew.” A smile came, dragged up from some reservoir of strength and independence that she hadn’t known she possessed. “In fact, you reminded me of the Devil, with that beard and those eyebrows. I was absolutely terrified of you.”

  That provoked a laugh, a look of astonishment. “Then the beard comes off at once, though there’s not much I can do about the eyebrows. At least there can be no doubt of the identity of this child’s father.”

  “None at all, Alexander. I came to you untouched.”

  For answer he lifted her right hand and kissed it before he turned and left the room. When she went up to bed he wasn’t there, nor did he come that night. Elizabeth lay wide-eyed in the darkness, weeping. The more she found out about her husband, the less she believed she could ever come to love him. His past ruled him, not his future.

  Two

  In the Footsteps

  of Alexander the Great

  WHEN ALEXANDER ran away from home on the night of his fifteenth birthday, he took nothing with him except a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese. The only decent clothes he had were those he wore to the kirk, everything else too torn and ragged to bother packing. Though he wasn’t massively built, the life his father had forced on him had endowed him with more than usual strength, so he ran at a lope all through the dark hours without needing to stop to catch his breath. Other Kinross boys had absconded occasionally, but they were always found a mile or two from home; Alexander fancied that in their hearts they weren’t committed. Whereas he was absolutely committed, and when he paused at dawn to suck water from a brook, he was already seventeen miles from Kinross. What did that place hold for him if he couldn’t leave it to go up to the university in Edinburgh? To spend his life working in the tartan mill was worse than a sentence of death.

  It took him a week to reach the outskirts of Glasgow—he couldn’t bear to head for Edinburgh—where he hoped to find some sort of employment. He’d chopped firewood or hoed gardens for food as he traveled, but these were activities he could perform in his sleep. What Alexander wanted was a chance to work at something he could learn, something that required intelligence as well as brute strength. And he found it as soon as he reached Glasgow, the third-largest metropolis in the British Isles.

  The thing sat inside a yard forcing air into a foundry, its stack smoking, its round girth wreathed in white vapor. A steam engine! There were two steam engines in the Kinross flour mills, but Alexander had never laid eyes on them—nor ever would have, had he stayed in Kinross. Mill territory was divided up among the local families, and Duncan and James Drummond were denizens of the tartan mill, which meant their children were too.

  Whereas I, thought Alexander, am going to follow in the footsteps of my namesake, the Great, by striking into completely unknown
territory.

  EVEN AT FIFTEEN, he had a way with him. Until now it had been directed at no one save the departed Robert MacGregor, but when he sallied into the foundry yard he found a new target—and not the grimy figure shoveling coal into the boiler’s flaming, hideously hot maw. A better dressed man was standing by, a rag in one hand, a spanner in the other, but doing nothing.

  “Excuse me, sir?” asked Alexander, smiling at the idle one.

  “Yes?”

  “What do you make here?”

  Why, thought the man later, did I not just put my boot up his arse and send him flying on to the road? As it was, he lifted his brows and smiled back. “Boilers and steam engines, laddie. There’s no’ enough boilers and steam engines, no’ enough.”

  “Thank you,” said Alexander, slid past him and walked into the cacophony of the foundry.

  In one corner of this inferno was a flight of wooden steps that led upward to a glass-windowed eyrie from which everything going on could easily be seen. The manager’s lair. Alexander leaped up the steps four at a time and banged on the door.

  “What?” asked the middle-aged man who opened it.

  He was clearly the manager, for he wore pressed trousers and a laundered white shirt, its sleeves rolled up, its collar not attached—well, it would wilt in the heat, and who here cared?

  “I want to learn how to make boilers, sir. Then, as soon as I can make boilers, I want to learn how to make a steam engine. I can live in a hole and do without a bath, so I don’t need much of a wage,” said Alexander, producing the smile again.

  “A shilling a day—that’s a penny an hour—and free salt tablets. What’s your name, laddie?”

  “Alexander”—he almost said Drummond, but changed his mind in a split second—“Kinross.”