Whispers Through the Pines

by Lynne Wilding

  Jessica forced herself to stop thinking about Damian. Today she didn’t want to give in to the melancholy, despite the almost overwhelming need to do so. Instead she walked out to the verandah, looked at her easel, picked up a brush and began to mix colours, even though, being dusk, the light was too poor to accurately catch the textures and the colours. Within minutes and uncaring of the dollops of paint that fell onto her linen frock, she became absorbed in her task.

  Later she would realise that painting could help lock the memories behind an invisible door, deep in her subconscious. And that she was the only one who had the mental key to the door and, therefore, the control of opening or closing it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Marcus Hunter wound the motorbike’s throttle back as the cottage the Pearce’s rented came into view. Known as Cassell’s Cottage because Victor Cassell’s family had owned it and lived there until the last member of the family moved off the island about five years ago, it perched high on a hill above the rise of the area known as Kingston. An uncompromising lonely location, Marcus had always thought it, though he well imagined the view down to the sea would be magnificent.

  Marcus parked the bike, an ancient post-World War Two Harley Davidson that he continually had to tinker with, and scrounge spare parts for, to keep running. He did so because it was ideal for motoring around the island and exploring tracks too narrow for a car to handle. He stood for a moment looking at the cottage. A grin softened his features as he acknowledged with a glance the work Jessica had done on the overgrown front garden. Only a small section remained unweeded.

  He opened the gate and strode towards the front door, mentally disgusted with himself because of the way his body was reacting to the anticipation of seeing her again. Yesterday, at home he’d had the opportunity to observe her in a family situation, and he liked what he’d seen. She was natural, unaffected, but she was also married to a man that, so far, he liked and respected. And just as obvious as the once-broken nose on his face was the fact that Jessica Pearce loved her husband. End of story, end of any other possibilities as far as he was concerned. Yeah, sure! A small voice in the back of his mind jeered at him.

  He knocked on the door and waited.

  Blue-coated paint brush in one hand, a rag in the other, Jessica peered through the half translucent glass door, recognised the caller and opened the door wide.

  ‘Good morning, Marcus. I thought you’d be at home recovering, taking it easy after yesterday’s celebrations.’

  ‘Hi, Jessica.’ His mouth twisted in a wry grin. ‘With four children under five, there won’t be much rest for anyone at Hunter’s Glen. It’s usually a quiet day around the tourist spots, so I thought I’d pop down to the cemetery to do some work.’ He held out a plastic bag. ‘You left your cardigan. If there’s a cold snap, Nan thought you might need it before you come back to the studio. She said you’re going to spend a day with her once the family members go home.’

  Jessica took the parcel. She had forgotten about the cardigan. ‘Thanks.’ And then to his other question: ‘Yes. I’m interested in the process, and Nan’s been kind enough to offer to let me sit in on one of her working days.’

  ‘Kind!’ Marcus chuckled deep in his throat. ‘Yes, my sister’s kind all right, but she also doesn’t object to a helping hand. You won’t be a passive observer, believe me. You’ll be working. Just wear old clothes, right.’

  Jessica looked at the shirt she had thrown on over a patterned skirt. Both items of apparel were spotted with paint. She smiled at him. ‘Something like this?’

  His grin widened as he looked her up and down, an exercise guaranteed to elevate his blood pressure a couple of degrees. ‘Perfect.’

  Jessica remembered Nan talking over yesterday’s lunch about Marcus’ passion for recording the history of the island. Nan reckoned it was going to be his life’s work. She refrained from making the comment that it seemed an odd occupation, to spend so much of his holiday time with the dead. Instead, she offered, ‘Perhaps you’d like a coffee before you head down to Kingston?’

  ‘I would,’ he agreed. They gravitated into the kitchen, and after he’d watched Jessica make the coffee, they moved to the glassed-in verandah.

  ‘I thought the view from here would be wonderful,’ Marcus commented as he stood by the window looking down the broad meadow to the Pacific Ocean.

  ‘Do you mind me continuing on?’ She waved the paint brush at him as she stood in front of the easel. ‘The light’s just right at the moment and those,’ she pointed to a bank of white cumulus clouds coming in over the water, ‘will be here within the hour.’

  ‘No, go ahead. May I take a peek?’ he asked, curiosity getting the better of him.

  ‘It’s a bit rough yet,’ she defended, ‘but no, I don’t mind. I’ve really got the bug again. All I want to do is paint. After so many years of not picking up a paint brush, it’s amazing.’

  He stood diagonally behind her, watching her stroke a pastel blue sky background onto the paper. He saw her features tighten as she worked, and her concentration gave him the opportunity to watch her without making her feel overly self-conscious.

  ‘I like it.’ He said finally, after studying the scene and checking it through the window. She had captured the abandonment of the vine slowly engulfing the metal arch, and through it was woven some kind of climbing rose that bloomed sporadically and gave bursts of colour to the greenery.

  ‘Tell me about the work you’re doing at the cemetery.’

  As Marcus took a sip of his coffee, he wondered how long he could decently make the cup last. ‘It’s time-consuming, but worth the effort. Many books have been written about Norfolk; for the size of the island and its short human historical time frame, it’s probably better documented than most Pacific islands. I’m focusing on what hasn’t been covered. The cemetery’s only the beginning. I plan to do historical work-ups of all the major properties on the island and the people who own them.’

  ‘Rather like a history for and about the people of Norfolk, rather than concentrating on the convict settlement and such?’

  He nodded, impressed by her ability to grasp his intention in a few words. ‘That’s a good description. At present I’m doing rubbings of the headstones. First I take a photo, then do tissue rubbings of the headstones and the inscriptions on them. After that’s documented, I’ll go into the person’s history, do biographies on everyone who’s been buried there.’

  ‘It sounds…’ she paused to make a final brushstroke near the edge of the paper, ‘like a lot of work.’ She was going to prefix the word work with gloomy but decided not to. If Marcus wanted to work around cemeteries in his spare time, instead of having a relaxing holiday, that was his business.

  ‘It is. Like painting. How many hours does it take to complete a painting such as the one you’re doing?’ His question made her laugh, a throaty amused sound that sent his pulse up a notch or two.

  ‘Longer than I always anticipate. I think it’ll be done in no time at all, but making it come to life takes attention to detail. Something you’d be familiar with, I’m sure.’ She stepped back to get a better perspective on the composition, looking first at the painting and then the sky outside. Satisfied, she turned sideways towards him and caught him staring at her.

  Caught out, Marcus drained his cup and put it on a side table. ‘Watching you work has made me feel guilty because I’m not doing any. I’d best be on my way.’ He looked straight into her eyes, noticing gold flecks in the blue for the first time. ‘Any time you want to come to Kingston and play tourist, I’ll be there most mornings. I’ll give you a personalised Cook’s tour of the place.’

  Jessica liked Nan and Marcus, but thought he was just being polite. She agreed with a smile as she saw him to the front door. Cemeteries weren’t high on her priority list of things to do, and she knew Simon and Alison wouldn’t think it a good idea to prowl around such a place. Keeping a balance, not allowing the melancholy to control her was important to her, and pa
inting was helping to keep the depression away.

  She saw him kick-start his motorbike and take off in the direction of Kingston, which was where the first convict colony had begun. Her head tilting to one side thoughtfully, she continued to watch until he disappeared from view.

  Jessica completed two paintings within a week, which delighted her and Simon.

  Running out of subjects to paint from her verandah ‘studio’, she began to explore the island, seeking other subjects to immortalise. She took her camera and when she came upon a likely subject, if the light was right, she would take photos from several angles and then have the film developed and the shots enlarged. After she tacked the photos to a large piece of cardboard, that subject would become the basis for her current painting, which in this case was a scene of Anson Bay.

  Tuesday dawned with storm clouds rolling in from the sea. Soon rain lashed the cottage, beating a staccato rhythm on the windows of the verandah and on the corrugated iron roof. The downpour lasted for hours.

  Jessica prowled about the small cottage with uncharacteristic restlessness. Impatient to work, she yearned to get on with painting her latest subject, but even when she switched all the verandah lights on, there wasn’t sufficient light. To try to paint, improvising for the lack of light, might ruin the work. She’d done that a couple of times years ago and had learned from the mistake.

  Instead, she sat on the lounge and, using the coffee table as a make-do desk, answered all outstanding correspondence, including a letter from Max and David at the practice. The newsy letter advised her of office gossip. Mandy, the receptionist, had left, and Faith Wollenski, who’d been with the firm for fifteen years, was getting married and, of equal importance, came information on the list of current briefs and how the barrister who had replaced her was performing. Frowning as she tried to decipher Max’s scrawl, she acknowledged that she didn’t miss the offices of Greiner, Lowe and Pearce, the litigation work or the court confrontations in the least.

  Who would have thought it? Her gaze lifted from the letter as she pondered this new revelation. Once she had lived for her job, for the cut, thrust and parry of taking on a case with the object of winning it for her client and the firm. Family law was a demanding field, and depressing. So many injustices and often no clear-cut winner, or absolute sense of rightness to the judgements made.

  Maybe her lack of interest in the business was the result of what she’d been through since Damian’s death. God knew she’d had little interest in anything since that time. But, she sucked at her bottom lip in contemplation, she was improving. Her life was getting back to having a certain evenness to it.

  She walked onto the verandah and saw that the rain had eased to a drizzle, but the light remained too poor to paint. It had become a soft, misty rain, almost undetectable to the eye, and seeing it took her back many years, to memories of London, and how she and Simon would enjoy getting rugged up to walk in the rain. The locals had thought them mad, but coming from Western Australia where it sometimes didn’t rain for months, being young and deeply in love, they had revelled in the activity. Suddenly she made a decision: that’s what she’d do, walk. Had she packed any wet weather gear? She couldn’t remember.

  Ransacking the wardrobe, she found a nylon jacket with a hood, which belonged to Simon. She changed into her oldest jeans and a pair of time-worn Doc Martens, grabbed an umbrella and got into the compact car Simon had leased for her. As she drove towards the ocean, she remembered Marcus’ offer of a Hunter’s tour. No, she wouldn’t impose. She’d just meander around by herself…

  For several hours Jessica wandered along Quality Row, in and out of buildings which had mostly been built during the Second Settlement of Norfolk Island, absorbing the history and reading the plaques and brochures provided for tourists. Imagining the misery of the convicts sent there and that of their overseers, who must also have been victims of deprivation, wasn’t difficult. Kingston, as the settlement was named now, looked peaceful and scenically attractive, but its history told another story. The mother colony of Sydney Town, as it had once been known, had sent the worst of its convicts here: those who had reoffended since transportation; many of the commandants sent to oversee their sentences, would, by today’s standards, be regarded as monsters far worse than the convicts had been.

  A little over two hundred years ago, the establishment of the colony at Kingston had created the first recorded human settlement on the island, though Jessica also learned of evidence of earlier occupations by Polynesians, who had planted a grove of banana trees. The initial influx of convicts and soldiers were sent there to farm the island with its lava-enriched soil. Another task for the settlement’s inhabitants was to cut the island’s trees for ships’ masts, to harvest the abundant flax and grow vegetables to supplement the stores at Sydney Town, which had been settled on sandy, infertile soil.

  Whether by conscious or unconscious intent, Jessica found herself walking away from Quality Row up the rise towards the picket fence of the island’s cemetery. Something—instinct or perhaps nothing more than curiosity—compelled her to walk past the rows of marble headstones and more recently interred Norfolkers to uneven rows of aged sandstone headstones which were weather-pitted and situated closer to the shore line, all facing towards the east. Many headstones leant at precarious angles, due to erosion and the effects of the elements on them.

  As the midday sun began to push its way through the heavy clouds, Jessica wandered between the rows of headstones, occasionally stopping to reflect on an inscription, and to shake her head at the sadness of reading, ‘Here reposes Dora, the beloved daughter of John and jane Quintal who died from accidental burns, August 7th, 1866. Aged 2 years and 6 months. Farewell darling.’

  That many had died so young and sometimes tragically was a fact borne out by the inscriptions, the only testament that such a person had once existed. A shaft of sunlight streaked across a lichen-encrusted headstone, allowing her to read what was intended to last for all eternity, but the message had become almost illegible because too many letters had disappeared in just over a century and a half. And, had Jessica come to think of it, she would have found it curious that being immersed in learning the history of the settlement, she had made no comparison with her own recent loss.

  ‘Jessica.’

  The soft calling of her name in a lilting whisper made Jessica turn around. No one was there. No one was even close by. She looked back up the slope and saw that the only people in the cemetery were a family hovering around a recent interment.

  Puzzled, she moved on, thinking she must be hearing things, and silently chuckled at the nonsense of it. She had no intention of being spooked by old headstones and a certain melancholy wrought by the history of the place. Walking around cemeteries had never bothered her in the past—she’d done so in Greece and in England—so why should she be rattled now?

  ‘Jessica.’

  Again. More insistent.

  Jessica stood still, held her breath, listened. Only the sound of distant surf and the faint whisper of a breeze rustling through the majestic pines came to her. Those kids again?

  She whirled around as fast as she could, expecting to see a head bob down behind a headstone. Again, nothing. Her heartbeat began to race, her lips thinned with annoyance…and something else. She was not amused. Was it the same person or persons who’d been in the cottage, who’d stared at her in the garden from the anonymity of the bush across the road? Why were they—she assumed it was a they rather than a he or a she—doing this to her, trying to unnerve her? Was it a game they played on unsuspecting visitors they knew weren’t permanent residents?

  She stood her ground, unprepared to give whoever it was what they wanted to see, her scurrying out of the cemetery like a frightened rabbit, and she rammed her hands into the jacket’s pockets, pretending to be unfazed.

  Until…a clamminess and then a rush of unseasonal coldness enveloped her. The chill began in her feet, seeping through the thick soles of her shoes. It tr
avelled up her legs into her torso, down her arms and along her spine, to her neck and finally her head. Her teeth began to chatter, her body temperature having dropped several degrees in less than twenty seconds to cause the shivering that now convulsed her body.

  Her gaze darted back to the people at the top of the cemetery. One man wore shorts, the woman a sunfrock, and sunshine now lay over every headstone, every mound of grass. Obviously it wasn’t cold, but she was shaking with cold, from her head to her feet.

  And there was something else. So faint she almost missed it. Perfume of some sort. She tried to get a handle on what it reminded her of, but the aroma was too elusive. None of it, the cold or the perfume, made sense. Her body stiffened in an attempt to halt the chilling invasion. Then she remembered, this cold was something she’d felt before…

  Once, she’d been skiing at Mt Hotham and had become lost and disorientated on the slopes. Commonsense and casual conversations overheard between other skiers in the ski hut told her to keep moving downhill. But as the chill and a numbing exhaustion had begun to have an effect, the desire to stop, to sink into the soft whiteness and rest for a few minutes, became an overwhelming need.

  Every muscle in her body had ached from propelling the skis and the stocks forward, as did her eyeballs peering through the light curtain of snow. To stop, to rest, to catch her breath from ever decreasing lungfuls of air, everything screamed for her body to give in, to let nature take its course.

  She had been on the brink of hypothermia, of giving up, when a party of skiers had found her…

  The lesson had been a salutary one for Jessica, and though the passage of time, almost fifteen years, had dulled the terror of the experience, she hadn’t forgotten it. Perhaps, had she the concentration to dwell upon it, it may even have helped her when she’d needed the strength of being able to endure the worst experience of her life, Damian’s death.