The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “And now you have a tent town of ten thousand.”

  “Absolutely. But I’ve already taken measures to discipline that. It will be many years before Kinross is a beautiful town, but I’ve planned how it will look, subdivided my land with the right amount sequestered for town and state governments—and brought in six good policemen. They’re hand-picked, and know they can’t prey on the Chinese. I’ve also hired a health inspector whose only job for the moment is to make sure that the cesspits are dug where they won’t contaminate the groundwater. I want no typhoid epidemics carrying off Kinross’s residents. There’s a sort of a road to Bathurst—fit to take a Cobb & Co stage, at any rate—and another to Lithgow. Cabbages are selling for a pound each, carrots for a pound a pound, eggs for a shilling each, but that won’t last forever. The good thing is that we’re not in drought, and by the time we are, the dam will be full.”

  The green eyes surveyed him with mingled exasperation and amusement; Ruby guffawed. “Alexander, you’re unique! Any other man would simply rape the place and get out, but not you. The mystery is why you called your town Kinross. Its rightful name is Alexandria.”

  “You’ve been doing some reading.”

  “I am now an expert on Alexander the Great.”

  “Right on the corner of Kinross Street and Auric Street I’ve reserved a particularly enviable piece of land. It has a one-hundred-foot frontage on to both streets, and space behind for stables, sheds, a yard. It’s entered on the town plans as the Kinross Hotel, owner/licensee R. Costevan. I suggest that you build in brick.” His gaze grew stern. “And one other thing—leave your whores behind in Hill End.”

  Her eyes blazed, she opened her mouth to roar, but Alexander got in first. “Shut up! Think, you prickly, pigheaded harridan, think! A woman doesn’t usually personally administer a hotel she owns, but it’s a respectable profession if the hotel is a bona fide business. A profession that won’t handicap Lee when he’s old enough to make his way in the world. What’s the point in pouring so much money into your son’s education if, when he’s trying to establish himself in his chosen field, his mother is the proprietress of a goldfields brothel? Ruby, I’m offering you a new start in a new town, and I want you to be a citizen in good standing there.” Came that wonderful, charming smile. “If you open a brothel in Kinross, one day you’ll be forced to leave. The Bible-bashers will accrue the power to drive shady ladies out, probably tarred and feathered. And I can’t imagine my life without you in it. After all, if I lose you, who will I have to listen to me when I rail against the way the Bible-bashers have appointed themselves the moral police of my town?”

  She laughed, but sobered quickly. “To build the kind of hotel you’re talking about would cost me a third of what you’ve given me. I can’t do that. Here are half Lee’s school fees—and right at the very moment when I was seriously wondering how I would ever scrape the money together. Hawkins Hill production is down, and Hill End is dying along with it. A good many Hill Enders are either already in Kinross, or on their way. So I’ll be frank with you. First of all, thanks to them, my reputation will follow me. Secondly, I’m planning to go to Kinross myself very shortly, but to build in wattle-and-daub and put my girls to work at the only trade they know. I can see the sense in what you say, your majesty, but I can’t follow your orders. Next year you might be able to give me another dividend, but that will be the end of it. The placer will be exhausted.”

  “Let’s go outside and say hello to my dear old mare,” he said, on his feet and holding out his hand.

  HALF AN HOUR later a dazed Ruby went to her room to change into the dress she had hoarded against the day Alexander would return to see her—velvet the color of marmalade, stylish enough to be worn by a cabinet minister’s wife. Perfect for the lady mistress of the Kinross Hotel.

  A reef. He said there was a reef on his land.

  She studied herself in the mirror with complete detachment. No, I don’t look thirty-one. Twenty-five, more like. One of the advantages of an indoor life is a skin unravaged by the sun. Oh, those poor bitches hoeing their vegetable patches while their men are off at the diggings, unable to pay what Hee Poy or Ling Po charge for produce from their market gardens! A couple of toddlers hanging on to their skirts, another bun in the oven. Hands rougher than the hands of their men. I don’t know why any of them put up with it—I bloody wouldn’t. Love, I suppose. If it is love, then I will never love any man that much, from Sung to Alexander. Some of them used to be as lovely as I still am. Used to be.

  Review your thirty-one years, Ruby!

  I’m a shining example of the fact that sin does pay. If I’d let myself go like those women in their vegetable patches, neither of the men who have helped me would ever have noticed me. They say birth is an accident of fate—well, fate puts a hell of a lot more penniless women on the face of the earth than women whose backgrounds let them make comfortable marriages. Alexander says too that some women go to university, but their parents are rich enough to send them. Whereas the only place my mother ever sent me was to the pub for a jug of beer. I never knew my father, a ne’er-do-well named William Henry Morgan. Cattle thief and jailbird, the son of a convict. He already had a wife, so he couldn’t marry my mother, who came out a convict. She died of gangrene after she broke her leg falling-down drunk. My half sisters are drunks and whores, my louts of half brothers are in jail and branded recidivists.

  So why did I survive? Where did I get the strength to get out, better myself?

  My brother Monty raped me when I was eleven—probably a good thing. Once the flower is plucked, the battle is over. No bloodstain on the sheet the morning after the wedding night, so no hope of a respectable husband. Men with marriage on their minds like to be sure they got there first. I’ll bet that’s true of Alexander Kinross!

  What I dreaded was syphilis. All my life it’s been around me, lurking. Monty didn’t have it when he took me, but a year later he was poxed. I didn’t wait. Once my flower was plucked, I ran off to Sydney and found myself a rich old man to keep me in style. He couldn’t get it up unless I sucked it—nothing a female enjoys, but a good way not to have babies. When he died, he left me five thousand pounds—oh, the fuss his family made over that! They’d see me in hell before I got a penny of it. But when I read out his letters to them and said I’d read them out in court, they decided not to contest. Paid up without another murmur. The sucking bit clinched things.

  So I came back to Hill End with the money to set up in the only businesses I know—pubs and prostitution—and fell in love with Sung. A beautiful man. A prince. But as canny as Alexander. Still, he gave me a gift beyond price—Lee. My baby, my hope, my future. And I’ll never tell Lee that on his white side, he’s descended from a lot of no-good convicts. Thanks to Alexander Kinross, Lee will escape the taint.

  Does Alexander know I love him? Maybe, maybe not. Alexander might even love me back. But the good thing about us is that marriage isn’t in the cards. He’d try to own me and I’d refuse to be owned. I pity his wife when he takes one, but I’ll hate her far more for stealing him.

  A reef. He swears it’s there, he swears today’s dividend is just the tip of the golden iceberg floating my way. Do I trust his word? Do I believe in him? Yes, a thousand times yes! So I’ll do as he wants and build the Kinross Hotel in fancy brick, be a leading citizen of Kinross.

  She got up from her dressing table and swirled the massive train of her skirt behind her, then went down to dinner.

  “They’re making excellent bricks in Lithgow,” said Alexander over dinner, “and they can come by bullock dray over the Lithgow track. By the time the Kinross Hotel is finished, there will be a town water supply, gravity fed from the dam site. The sewers may well be finished too. I’ve found an ideal spot for a sewage farm, and God knows there are more than enough Chinese to make the farm produce. Vegetables will be very cheap on the purified—oh yes, the principle of a sewage farm is to treat and purify—human waste. What’s more the site is on the lee si
de of town, so the winds will blow the smell away.”

  He will talk about bloody Kinross from now until the cows come home, thought Ruby. It’s not the gold that drives him, it’s what he can do with the money the gold brings in.

  ALEXANDER FOUND the mother lode in February of 1874. Three months earlier he had begun tunneling into the rock about a mile to the north of the cascades, careful that his adit was on his own land. He worked the slender, man-high tube alone, doing all the blasting, shoring up and digging himself, his only aid besides black powder a set of two-foot rails and a single skip into which he shoveled the fragmented rock and dumped it outside the adit.

  Fifty feet into the base of the mountain he came upon the vein of quartz at the blind end of his tunnel after a small blast that sounded duller, more crumpled. Two feet wide, it ran higher on the left, sloping to lower on the right. Sifting through the detritus by the wan light of a kerosene lantern, he found almost friable lumps of ore intermingled with slate as well as quartz. El Dorado! How did he know where to dig? Working swiftly, he threw the ordinary rock into his skip, piled the ore to one side. Then, holding a piece of the ore in one hand, he walked, a little unsteadily, out into the brilliant light of day and stared at what he held, mesmerized. Jesus! It would assay half gold!

  Then he lifted his gaze to the mountain, smiling, shaking, weak at the knees. It goes upward and downward, and I know it goes a long way farther in. It may be only one of a dozen veins—Mount Kinross is literally a mountain of gold. The bastard child of an unknown father is going to be such a power in this land that he will buy and sell whole governments. The smile faded; he wept.

  And when the tears dried he looked southwest across Kinross town, which wasn’t going to die, oh no. It would be a Gulgong, its roads paved, its buildings imposing. An opera house? Why not? A thing of beauty shaped by a mountain of gold. His sons and his sons’ sons would be proud to bear the name of Kinross.

  THE FOLLOWING Sunday at dawn he brought Sung Chow, Charles Dewy and Ruby Costevan to see his find.

  “Apocalyptic!” Charles cried, grey eyes round with wonder. “This has to be where God has dumped the wherewithal to rebuild the world after He’s destroyed it. Oh, man alive, Alexander! It’s like—like honey crumble! At Trunkey Creek the gold is so finely distributed in the quartz that you can hardly see it, but this looks almost more gold than quartz.”

  “Apocalypse,” said Alexander thoughtfully. “A good name for it and us. The Apocalypse Mine, Apocalypse Enterprises. I thank you, Charles.”

  “Am I in?” Charles asked anxiously.

  “Were you not, I wouldn’t have shown you.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “A capital fund of at least a hundred thousand pounds to begin with, at ten thousand pounds a share. I intend to buy seven shares and retain control of the company, but if any of you wants to buy two shares, that will simply increase our capital. Partnership is limited to the four of us, apportioned by the number of shares each of us holds,” said Alexander.

  “I’d be happy to see you in control even if you weren’t the major shareholder,” said Charles. “I’ll buy two shares.”

  “And I will buy two shares,” said Sung, nostrils flaring.

  “Just one share for me,” said Ruby.

  “No, two shares for you. One you’ll buy, the other is for Lee, to be held in trust by you until he comes of age.”

  “Alexander, no!” Ruby clutched at her chest, for once too shocked to be angry. “You can’t be so generous!”

  “I can be anything I like.” He turned to lead them into the dazzling light, and there turned to face her. “Ruby, I have a feeling in my bones about Lee. That he has a role to play in the Apocalypse—yes, Charles, it’s a brilliant name. This is not a gift, my dear friend. It’s an investment.”

  “Why so much capital?” Charles asked, doing a few mental sums to see how he could come up with twenty thousand pounds.

  “Because the Apocalypse is going to be mined with absolute professionalism from its beginning,” said Alexander, starting to pace. “It will need miners, powder monkeys, carpenters, mill hands, at least a hundred employees on good money. I’ve no wish to be a target for those rabble-rousers who specialize in stirring up discontent among workers. I want a twenty-head series of battery stampers, a dozen crushers, and enough mercury to keep up with the amount of gold. Separation retorts. Steam engines to drive everything, and a mountain of coal. There’s a lot of coal in Lithgow, but the uphill zigzag makes shipment to Sydney so expensive that the place can’t compete with the northern or southern coalfields. We start immediately on the construction of a private standard-gauge railway from Lithgow to Kinross—why? Because we’re going to buy a coal mine near Lithgow, and bring in our own coal. Burning wood is wasteful and unnecessary. We’ll have gaslight for the town, coal for the steam engines, and coke for the separation retorts. We won’t be using black powder much longer—I’m going to bring in the new Swedish wonder, a blasting substance called dynamite.”

  “I am answered,” said Charles wryly. “What happens if the vein peters out before we make a profit?”

  “That will not happen, Charles,” Sung said positively. “I have already consulted my astrologers and the I Ching. They say that this locality will yield huge amounts of gold for a century.”

  THE KINROSS HOTEL was open for business, though Ruby still awaited some furniture and fittings for the lesser accommodation. Alexander had a suite of rooms on the top floor, and today had solved the riddle of whereabouts he had been for such long hours over the past three months. Finding the reef. Secretive bastard!

  “I hope,” she said to him over dinner à deux in the Ruby Room, “that the rest of my stuff comes soon. Once the word leaks out about the Apocalypse, we’ll have the journalists back here in droves. Yet another gold rush.”

  “A few may come, but this is subterranean gold on private property that’s owned by a company. A company that will have the mining rights to the whole of Mount Kinross.” He smiled, lit up a cheroot. “Besides, I have a funny feeling that there’s no gold anywhere off Mount Kinross. No doubt other companies will buy adjoining land and try, but they’ll find nothing.”

  “How much money have you actually got?” she asked curiously.

  “A lot more than the seventy thousand I’ve put into Apocalypse Enterprises. That’s why I’ve hired some of Sung’s surplus men to erect a cable railway to the top of my mountain. I want a mansion built a thousand feet up by next year. Kinross House.” He rolled it off his tongue. “Because of the way this vein travels—there are many others—I intend to put the poppet heads on a limestone shelf about two hundred feet up. The limestone travels west, but I’ll use the shelf as a quarry for blocks to build my mansion, which will enlarge the shelf nicely. The tube you inspected this morning will turn into number one tunnel. Fifty feet below it, on ground level, there will be a big adit with skips towed by cable to where locomotives can pick them up—to the crushers if it’s ore, to the dam if it’s rock. Since we found a tributary that flows directly into the dam valley, we can raise the dam wall. The cable car will haul the miners and their gear up to the shelf and the poppet heads, then go on up to my house site. I have it all worked out,” said Alexander complacently.

  “When don’t you? But why build a mansion? What’s wrong with my hotel here in Kinross? Aren’t you comfortable?”

  “I can’t put my wife in a mining town hotel, Ruby.”

  Her jaw dropped, a numbness crept through her face. “Your wife?” The eyes went the same color as a cat’s, narrow and feral and dangerous. “I see. All picked out, is she?”

  “Picked out for years,” he said, clearly enjoying himself. A puff of smoke gushed ceilingward; a ring followed it.

  “At the moment,” she said calmly, “the Church of England is still abuilding and your town improvements haven’t gone beyond a water supply and sewerage. That you and I are lovers is common knowledge and offends no one. But once you have a wife, that
will change. Jesus, Alexander, what a fucken bastard you are! I let you buy me, I let you put me in a position where I can’t protest! Well,” she said, rearing to her feet so quickly that her chair toppled and every other diner in the Ruby Room was staring, “I suggest you think again, you lump of shit, you—you snake!”

  “Carry on like this,” he said mildly, “and you won’t become a partner in Apocalypse Enterprises.”

  Whack! Her hand struck his face so hard that the pendants on the chandelier tinkled. “That suits me fine! You can shove your fucken gold so far up your arse that you vomit it!”

  She stormed out, the marmalade velvet dress a blur of melted gold air. Alexander regarded the rest of the diners with his brows up, put the cheroot in a crystal ashtray, and followed her out at a leisurely pace.

  He found her on the verandah upstairs, pacing up and down, fists clenched by her sides, her teeth grinding audibly.

  “I think I love you best when you’re spitting mad, darling Ruby,” he said, voice oozing charm.

  “Don’t you cozen me!” she growled.

  “I’m not cozening you, I’m speaking the truth. If you weren’t such a delectable termagant I wouldn’t bother provoking you, but och, Ruby, you’re a nonpariel when you’re in a rage.”

  “Bully for me!”

  “The best thing is that you can’t keep the boiler pressure in the red zone for very long.” He caught her hands and held them easily. “You run out of steam,” he whispered as he kissed her burning cheek.

  Her teeth snapped, missed. “Oh, fuck these ridiculous big skirts!” she cried, fingers curled into claws. “If I could, I’d kick your balls so hard you’d need neither wife nor mistress! Alexander Kinross, I hate you!”