by Amanda Doyle
They stood up as Clancy approached with her tray, which Jed took from her and set on the green wicker table.
Clancy poured tea, added a thin sliver of lemon to each cup, and passed a plate of newly made pikelets.
Dr. Wishaw looked along the veranda.
“Tamara not around today?” he queried.
“Oh, she’s down at the creek with the children. They’re trying to hollow out a bark canoe, but I doubt if they’ll find a pool deep enough to float it at this time, of the year. Tammy says they have plans to dam one up if the worst comes to the worst.” Clancy laughed indulgently.
Bill smiled too.
“Well, it’s nice to hear kids are still getting up to those capers. It’s a long time since my brothers and I did things like that, but it seems the world of children doesn’t alter basically with the passage of time. Looking back now, those were the days all right—no worries, no cares, although I dare say we added a few grey hairs to our parents’ heads with some of our escapades. I never dreamed, then, that I’d one day turn into a crabby old doctor with a pair of silver wings, eh, Clancy?”
“You’re not old, and you’re not crabby, and we’re always pleased to see you, so do stop being so hard on yourself. In fact, you must be the most welcome visitor we Outback people ever have, and you know it!” Clancy sighed. “It must be wonderful to feel so needed by people, to know you’re able to do so much to help people,” she added, a little wistfully.
The doctor gave her a thoughtful look, and remarked matter-of-factly,
“I’m not the only one going round helping people, you know, Clancy. Jed, here, does much the same thing—in a different way, from a different angle. So make the most of his assistance while he’s here, won’t you? We were just talking about that while you were off getting tea, as a matter of fact. Jed’s been asking what I know about your chap-Raustmann. Beyond the fact that he came here from Kimberley, I couldn’t tell him much. Can you add to that at all?”
“I? No, of course not. Why ask me?”
Clancy’s strangled voice caused both men to sit upright in alarm. She was no longer the calm, confident young hostess she had been a moment ago. Her face felt pale, and her slim brown fingers trembled as she endeavoured to place her clattering cup safely on the table.
That accomplished, she rose hastily.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ve—something to watch in the oven.”
“Hey, Clancy—wait.”
Jed’s voice intervened.
“Take it easy, Bill. Let her go,” he commanded curtly.
Clancy knew without looking at him that he was both angry and disapproving. She wished she’d been able to control herself more becomingly. It was just that she hadn’t had any warning, hadn’t reckoned, somehow, that Jed would go to the length of checking up on Johnny with other individuals. Johnny didn’t like being questioned himself, and he always discouraged questions and answers even in his more amiable moments. He had lived here on Bunda all these years, but none of them had ever had the temerity to be openly curious about his life before he came to them. He’d be simply furious if Jed ever asked him. She hoped Jed wouldn’t. She hoped, from now on, that he’d stop asking anybody at all. Johnny in a temper could be very awkward, and Clancy wished that particular sleeping dog could remain safely undisturbed.
Jed was looking at her. His eyes were slits of blue ice.
Tactfully, Dr. Wishaw rose to go, and Clancy was thankful for his somewhat prosaic conversation as she accompanied him to the veranda steps.
When she returned, Jed was stacking up the tray.
“I’ll bring these, Clancy,” he informed her coolly. “You’d better go ahead and watch that something-in-the-oven, hadn’t you?”
Colour stained Clancy’s cheeks. He’d made it more than clear that he was well aware of her prevarication, and she was humiliated at the thought.
She gazed into the vacant depths of the kitchen range, and wished miserably that Jed Seaforth would leave things alone. She wanted badly, terribly badly, for things to remain as they’d been. What did they call it? Preserving the status quo? Well, that’s what she wished, that Jed would peaceably preserve the status quo at Bunda Downs, instead of stirring up feelings that had been dormant before he came. Tamara’s feelings of irritating hero-worship. Johnny’s feelings of insecurity and hatred. Clancy’s feelings—her own newly awakened, unfamiliar, undeclarable feelings of painful need and longing, which even the inexperienced Clancy had been able to identify as the first fruitless flutterings of an adult love.
“Is it burnt?”
The swing-door closed behind Jed, and he placed the tray on the sink.
“What? Oh—er—no, it’s fine.”
“That’s good. What is it, by the way?”
“What is what?” asked Clancy suspiciously.
“The something you’ve got in the oven,” supplied Jed patiently.
There was a glint in his eye that Clancy decided she didn’t like at all.
“Well, it’s a—a cake, actually,” she improvised hurriedly.
“A cake, is it? Are you sure, Clancy?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she snapped.
Jed gave her a tolerantly amused shake of his head, strolled past her, and placed his hand on the knob of the oven door.
“Don’t open it,” she shrieked urgently. The urgency was genuine enough. “It’ll go flat if you open the door, Jed.”
Jed’s good humour seemed to have returned. He smiled as his lean brown fingers turned the knob, and flung wide the door.
He indicated the empty void inside with the air of a conjuror who has reduced a white rabbit to complete nothingness. He eyed his discomfited audience with one questioning brow comically raised.
“See, Clancy,” he told her. “Nothing! No cake. Nothing.”
He straightened up, and looked down on her reprovingly, but there was a hint of laughter in that look as well, she could swear.
“Now, Clancy, this can mean only one thing,” he said, and this time his voice sounded rather like a college professor lecturing a kindergarten pupil on an extremely important discovery. “You thought there was a cake, but there wasn’t. No cake. Therefore that cake may safely be described as a figment of your imagination. Isn’t that so? Now, imaginations can be dangerous things, Clancy. They can blind us with prejudice, and generally cloud the picture, so that we don’t know which way to go, or what path to take. Myself, I much prefer to deal in facts, and their inseparable partners, truths. I think you may find it profitable to dwell on this aspect more often, Clancy, and attempt to follow my unasked advice in this one thing at least.”
With a courteous nod of departure, Jed strode out of the kitchen, leaving Clancy feeling rather like the white rabbit that the conjuror forgot to bring back to reality.
The next day, Rex arrived with Jed’s horses. There was great excitement down at the huts. The fat-tummied piccaninnies ran to and fro, peering out at the small group gathered there to admire the beautiful animals. The station-hands and “boys” alike knew good horse-flesh when they saw it, and walked round and round the restive pair in silent admiration. There was also Rex’s own gelding, two drooping pack-horses, and a beautiful, delicate chestnut pony with a handsome white blaze.
Tamara couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“What’s his name, Rex?” she asked Jed’s stockman, a hardy old man with a filthy pipe, greying stubble that showed silver against his black skin, and sagging trousers held up by a pair of tired maroon braces.
“Boss bin call ‘im Flashpoint. Him plurry good-fella colt, missie.”
“He’s beautiful, Rex—just beautiful,” Tamara breathed, entranced. She put up a hand, but the colt tossed his head nervously and shied away. Spirit, too, she approved silently. Quite a challenge, this one, just what Tamara loved.
Jed had come up softly behind her. He greeted Rex casually, as if he had seen him last at breakfast-time that morning, and not twelve days ago, some hundreds of miles away.
Then he turned and looked down at the little girl, her thin face alight with admiration.
“He’s for you, Tamara,” Jed informed her.
“For me?” squeaked Tamara. “Oh, Jed, no— really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But—you mean you had him brought all this way for me? Oh, Jed, you darling!”
She threw her arms about his waist and hugged him hard, her face pressed against his torso.
“Jed, how did you know I was here—before you came, I mean?”
Jed grinned.
“I just did, that’s all. I knew there was a little girl named Tamara who didn’t like lessons but did like horses—wild ones,” he emphasised mischievously, as Flashpoint rolled his eye wickedly, and sidled back and forth on his rein, Tammy’s eyes were shining.
“I’m going to tell Clancy—right now,” she announced, and raced towards the house, plaits flying out behind her, leaving Jed and Rex looking after her in indulgent amusement.
At lunch-time, Clancy thanked Jed for his kindness to Tamara. When it had nothing to do with herself, she found she could talk to him quite unselfconsciously, and her brown eyes were soft and warm with appreciation as she told him how grateful she was, and what joy he had brought to her small sister’s heart.
Jed looked down at her earnest, face.
For just a second, he put his strong brown hand over one of hers.
It was the old, kind Jed speaking now, his voice deep, even a little tender.
“I’d do the same for you, too, you know, Clancy—if I knew what to give you, what you want from life?” His expression was gravely questioning, his blue eyes penetrating, as his words hung between them. Clancy’s eyes went blank. She wriggled her hand free, gathered up plates in flurried haste, and left the room.
CHAPTER 9
JED was patient and gentle with Clancy in the next few days—as patient and gentle as he was with Tamara’s chestnut colt, Flashpoint, which he was breaking in to the saddle down at the yards. From the house, Clancy would see them, the big, impervious man, and the nervous, high-spirited colt, going round and round in their own cloud of dust. Flashpoint rode at the end of a lunging rope which Jed paid out slowly until the small hoops the horse made trotting round him gradually widened out into huge circles. From that distance, he controlled his pupil by pressure on the rope, skilled flicks of his long stock-whip which never actually touched the pony’s rump, and an endless patter of slow-spoken conversation. It was soothing kind of talk. Clancy, who had walked as near as she dared to watch the proceedings without disturbing man or animal, decided that it must be quite nice to be that colt. It seemed to her that every frightened movement was quietened, every nervous quiver subdued, every sudden spirited revolt forgiven, with the same unruffled, gentle, patient kindness that this domineering master employed with everyone—his human subjects as well! Clancy found herself thinking of him as a complete contradiction in terms. She couldn’t yet reconcile that rocklike insistence on domination with the understanding and insight which were peculiarly Jed’s. It seemed that Flashpoint was learning his lesson more readily than Clancy. Already he was giving up the struggle. He had realised that, no matter how he rebelled, it made no-appreciable difference to the unswerving determination of this persistent, soft-spoken man
Now he was beginning to obligingly change his pace as the whip cracked. No longer did he pull on the rope distractedly or rear unavailingly, rolling a wicked, pink-rimmed eye. Jed persevered a while longer, then hitched the rope around the rail and pushed his hat back from his sweating brow. Without turning from making his knot secure, he called to Clancy.
“Hullo. I’m glad you came out of the house for a spell. Come over and see what you think of this fellow.”
Clancy hadn’t realised he had seen her—though she should know by now that those keen eyes missed nothing! Obediently, a little shyly, she advanced. She had watched a good deal of horse-breaking in her time—in fact, she loved to see the gradual affinity building up, the developing trust between animal and human—but she had never seen a more effortless display than Jed’s. He looked up now, to smile at her as she approached.
“He’s a nice young thing, eh? See that beautiful cheek, and the way he picks up his feet? He’s learning fast, too. I don’t say he’ll have the stamina of the usual run of station horses, but Tammy will have fun with him soon, and it’s nice for her to know what a highly bred bit of horse-flesh looks like compared with a mob of half-broken brumbies.”
“She’s absolutely enchanted with him, Jed, and that’s the truth. When can she begin to ride him herself, do you think? At the moment, it’s her last question to me at night, and her first in the morning!”
Jed came over to stand beside her where she leaned on the gate looking into the yard.
“It won’t be long now—he was leading well by the time he came here, Clancy. I know how keen Tamara is to make friends with him—she’s been sticking to me like a piece of chewing-gum to a leather boot ever since he came.” He grinned. “It’s a bit distracting, so I sent her back to the creek to finish her boat while I got on here. I even promised the youngsters I’d help them build a dam there if they all cleared out in the meantime! Rash of me, I guess, but the peace can be heaven, as you no doubt know!” Clancy smiled. When she did that, the sun glinted on her small, even teeth, white against the honey-tan of her smooth skin, and her eyes captured golden flecks in their brown depths, and lost a little of the haunted weariness that lurked there.
“I’ve a feeling you may be sorry,” she said, amused. “Peace at any price doesn’t strike me as being part of your make-up.”
Jed was interested.
“Oh? And what do you think is the probably correct substitute—in my make-up?”
Clancy wrinkled her nose, and pulled her linen hat down further as she squinted into the sun thoughtfully. For the moment she almost seemed to have forgotten that Jed himself was there.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she murmured contemplatively. “Peace, I suppose, but at your price, would be more in character, wouldn’t it? Peace the way you want it, the way you ordain it to be. You—you have a habit of getting your own way, haven’t you, Jed? Do you always persevere until you do get it, I wonder? And how can you be so sure it’s right?”
Jed’s eyes met hers, kindly, but with a hint of steel somewhere in the blue.
“Yes, Clancy,” he replied firmly, “I do always persevere, but I usually like to make sure I’m on the right track before I dig my toes in.”
Clancy ran a finger along that rung of the gate which was nearest to her nose. Her eyes were on the dusty path it made as she framed her next, seemingly pointless, question.
“I wonder what happens, then, when you come up against someone with the same philosophy—someone who thinks quite differently from you, but has an equal unshakable conviction that he’s right? What happens then?”
There was a definite glint in Jed’s eye now.
“Anyone particular in mind, Clancy?”
Clancy blushed to the roots of her wheat-blonde hair. She had, of course, been thinking of Johnny Raustmann, but she was sure she had concealed the motive behind her query admirably. Apparently she hadn’t though—she knew that by Jed’s sarcastic approach, and his perception sent her floundering. In the end, she made a bad recovery.
“Of—of course I’ve no one in mind. It—it’s a purely hypothetical question. Just interest, that’s all. I’ve—I’ve always wondered what happens when two strong-minded people with forcefully opposing views clash.”
Jed’s face was deceptively mild, his tone sardonic.
“I see. Well, Clancy, what happens is this. There’s usually a bit of a fight if the two opposing parties are equally tough. It’s always a moral fight, and occasionally a physical one as well. In the end, somebody wins—he has to, you understand?” Jed regarded her a moment, before adding, with a somewhat breathtaking lack of humility, “If I’m one of the parties involved, the winner’s usually me.”
&
nbsp; Clancy was speechless, and Jed, reading her expression with his customary unerring accuracy, laughed outright.
“Watch this colt, now, Clancy. I’m going to saddle him presently. He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to win—you wait and see. At this moment, he’s against the idea, but he’ll come round, in time. Horses—and people—usually do.”
With this oblique remark, Jed pulled his hat down again and walked over to the chestnut. The young animal shivered and rolled its eyes as he approached. Jed took his time, talking and soothing, as he tied a bundle of folded bags on to the horse’s back.
“As you know, it never does to use the saddle at this stage. They can throw themselves, roll, and ruin it,” he reminded Clancy, without altering the pitch of his voice.
Next, he untied the rope from the railing and paid out a little of the halter, leading Flashpoint towards the centre of the yard once more. Suddenly the horse seemed to go mad. In a frenzy of rage and indignation at the unfamiliar burden on its back, it plunged and kicked, bucked and reared, snorting, while Jed braced himself with the rope looped round his waist. For perhaps half an hour, the struggle went on, until the spells of futile protest became less and less frequent, and the intervals of quiet acceptance more so. All the time, Jed kept up an even, relentless pressure on the rope, never tugging or pulling, but resisting with firm gentleness, until the final irrevocable moment when the colt suddenly drooped in exhausted surrender, lathered flanks heaving. Jed was breathing hard, too. Having made certain that all resistance had gone out of his stubborn young trainee, he undid the leather strap securing the bags, and removed them gently. Then he went to fondle the horse, patting the wet neck, smoothing the trembling velvet of its nose. After a while, he reached for the saddle that hung on the fence. Cautiously, stealthily, with hands working gradually along Flashpoint’s quivering back, he finally lowered the saddle softly in its place. This time, there was no frenzied protest, no torment of bucking and rooting.
