The Tartan Touch

by Isobel Chace

  “I wish I could believe you!” she sighed.

  I waved them goodbye, standing, lonely, on the front porch. Someone had had to stay behind to see to the men’s lunch and it was natural that that someone should have been me, but I would have loved to have had a glimpse of the nearest town to Mirrabooka, now that Big Bell lay abandoned and empty, the great gold mine closed for ever.

  The foreman was calling ‘Smoke-o’ as I went past the sheds. It meant that it was time for a break and time for me to provide them with the gallons of tea that they poured down their throats, parched from the greasy stench of sheep and wool and the breathless heat outside.

  “Reckon you’ll miss us next week, Miss Kirsty?” one of the men asked me. I recognised him as the man who had sent me for Andrew to break up the fight earlier in the week.

  “Whisht!” I bade him with a frown. “Will I miss all the work you make?”

  “Well, will you, Kirsty darling?” another asked, bolder than the rest.

  I sighed. “Ay, I’ll miss you,” I admitted.

  “Good on you, Mrs. Fraser!” the foreman smiled at me. “We’ll all be back next year to sample some more of your Scotch cooking. You’ve fed us like fighting cocks!”

  I sucked in my cheeks and looked at him. “And fighting cocks you’re like to remain!” I observed demurely.

  They shouted with laughter. “You speak to your Andrew,” they advised me. “It takes a man to put him down on the floor. My word, but he knows how to handle himself in a barney!”

  “I doubt but he’s had some practice!” I retorted.

  “It’s always the same when money changes hands over a silly sheep,” the foreman agreed, with the hint of a smile.

  “Betting!” I exclaimed. I might have known that that was at the bottom of it. “It’s sinful wickedness to have nothing better to do with your wages!”

  “But it’s so easy, Kirsty,” one of the roustabouts cajoled me. “It’s mathematical too!” He took two silver pieces out of his pocket and showed them to me. “Now what are the odds of them both falling face down if I were to throw them up in the air?” he asked me.

  I frowned at the coins, not having the slightest idea. “I wouldn’t want to say!” I objected.

  “Have a guess,” he prompted me.

  “Three to one,” I hazarded.

  He looked at me with warm approval. A whole ring of men had gathered around us, their faces eager. “Come in, spinner!” one of them called out, and laughed. The two coins rose high in the sky, sparkling as the rays of the sun caught them. They fell heavily on to the ground and there was a mad rush forward to see whether they were heads or tails, and if both of them were the same.

  “You see how it is,” the roustabout said with a grin. “If you’d bet on them, you could have done yourself a good turn!”

  “Don’t listen to him!” the foreman told me. “The game’s illegal. One day the police will catch him and they’ll make him turn out his pockets!”

  “Never!” the boy boasted, “I’d like to see the police in the Murchison even try!”

  “They broke up a game once,” the foreman reminisced. He broke off, embarrassed. “Ladies present,” he said regretfully. “Tell you some other time.” He glanced down at his watch. “Back to work, boys.” He gathered up the tin mugs and threw them into the cauldron that a few minutes before had been full of tea. “Thanks a lot, ma’am,” he said cheerfully. “See yer!”

  I nodded gravely, warmed by their friendliness. I was singing when I went back into the kitchen and started the inevitable and never-ending washing-up.

  Lunch was put back so as to give Margaret Fraser time to put her things in her room before coming to the table. She had stepped out of the front of Andrew’s old ute as though it had been a Rolls-Royce. I envied her her cool, soft dress and immaculate pink enamel on her nails.

  “Hullo, my dear,” she said mildly when she saw me.

  “Mrs. Fraser,” I answered. “You’re very welcome at Mirrabooka.”

  “Is that so?” she drawled.

  I kept my temper firmly under control. “We’ve been looking forward to your coming,” I said, daring her, or anyone else, to doubt my word.

  “How sweet!” she murmured.

  Mary threw me a helpless look and followed her mother into the house. I followed more slowly, carrying one of Margaret’s suitcases, for she had brought enough luggage to have brought every garment she possessed.

  “The men have eaten,” I told Andrew, hoping I looked less harassed than I felt.

  “I’ll go out to the shed and have a word with the foreman,” he said. “I want to be sure that they finish tonight. Will you be all right?” he added, his grey eyes dwelling on my face.

  I nodded. “But haste you back!” I pleaded.

  He smiled, “Right you are, mate!”

  The memory of that meal will live with me until I die. Mrs. Fraser swept into the dining room with Mary a pace or so behind her.

  “Do I sit in my usual place?” she asked of nobody in particular.

  “I’ve put you on Andrew’s right,” I said dourly.

  “It’s where I usually sit,” Mary added.

  Margaret smiled casually in my direction. “You seem to take your duties very seriously,” she congratulated me. “You’ve quite settled in, haven’t you?”

  I felt thoroughly unsettled. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve been so busy with the shearers coming.”

  She laughed with a brittle air of gaiety. “You sound quite the little grazier’s wife!” she assured me. “But I suppose you know that?”

  “Me? I scarcely know one end of a sheep from the other,” I protested. “Isn’t that so, Mary?”

  Mary tossed her flaming red hair. “I’m trying to teach her,” she said to her mother. “It’s important for her to know the difference between Andy’s sheep and the Australian merino you see mostly in Western Australia. I was telling her the story of John Macarthur—”

  “Must you, dear?” Margaret put in with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “I think it’s very interesting!” Mary replied.

  “And I think a young girl like you ought to have other interests besides sheep,” Margaret sighed. “When are you coming to Perth again? You need some new clothes, and it wouldn’t do you any harm to get to know some civilised people!”

  “Meaning what?” Mary asked indignantly.

  “Whatever you like,” Margaret said smoothly. “My own beginnings were very poor, as we all know, but your father was a Fraser and I think you have some duty to his memory.”

  Mary looked downright sulky. “Father was a grazier just as much as Andy is!”

  “Hardly,” her mother contradicted her. “Donald lived most of the time in Perth, if you remember.”

  “Because you wanted to!” Mary accused her. I wished that Andrew would come back from the sheds. “Tell me about John Macarthur,” I said to Mary, not knowing what else to say.

  Her face lit up, “He was an officer in the New South Wales Corps,” she began. “He started to breed sheep in 1794. He crossed some English rams with some Bengal rams which he had imported. Then he mated the offspring with a few Merino sheep he imported from Spain. The results were the first Australian merinos. Nowadays they produce half the world’s merino clip.”

  She looked suddenly shy. “Frank Connor runs them on his station.”

  Margaret’s face looked suddenly pinched. “I don’t want to hear any more about Frank Connor!” she snapped.

  I took a deep breath. “But I think I know him!” I exclaimed with real pleasure. “He came to see us at the hotel in London!”

  “You never told me!” Mary shot at me.

  “I’d forgotten,” I admitted. “There were so many of them there and I hardly knew the names of any of them!”

  Mary leaned back in her chair, grinning to herself. “But Frank stood out, didn’t he?”

  I remembered the way he had kissed me and nodded. “I suppose he did,” I acknowledge
d.

  To my great relief, Andrew came into the dining room and took his place at the head of the table. “What are you all talking about?” he asked, pleasantly enough.

  “Mary’s unsuitable friends,” Margaret said dryly. “Frank Connor.”

  Andrew cast Mary a brief smile. “He isn’t around at the moment,” he commented “I saw him briefly in London.”

  “His presence here or not is hardly the point,” Margaret put in. “The point is that Mary has such a limited circle in the Murchison. It’s time she came to Perth and had a bit of social life.”

  Andrew looked stubborn. “Mary is a Fraser,” he said. “She has a substantial interest in Mirrabooka—”

  “There’s no need for her to know personally every sheep on the station!” Margaret said angrily. “Besides when she marries, her husband can look after her interests. Isn’t that what you have in mind?”

  “Maybe,” Andrew said briefly.

  How suitable it all was, I thought. Fraser would marry Fraser and Andrew would control their joint fortune with even less interference than he had now. And I? I should be gone, with my part in the proceedings played out, having provided the necessary female presence to enable Andrew to keep Mary on Mirrabooka until she came of age and could make her own decisions, without recourse to the Court to whose care her father had left her.

  “Well, it’s that I should like to prevent,” Margaret drawled, “I don’t see why she shouldn’t enjoy her own money.”

  “Or why you shouldn’t enjoy it for her?” Andrew added lazily.

  “Right,” Margaret acknowledged. “Donald had a certain duty towards me, don’t you think?”

  Andrew’s grey eyes hardened. “I think you overplayed that particular hand when you denied that he had ever married you,” he said sternly.

  “But, darling, what was I to do? Apparently he thought I was such a bad mother that I couldn’t be left in charge of my own child! It was the only way out of that particular legal entanglement. If I were an unmarried mother, she’d be all mine!”

  “Not quite,” Andrew snapped back.

  “Anyway, darling, you effectively put an end to that little plan, and now here we all are, dancing to any tune you care to play. You ought to be pleased!”

  How much hate can you put into the word darling? I longed to creep away, out of the dining room, and leave them to it, but there was Mary to consider. Mary, whose beauty caught at my heartstrings, and who writhed with embarrassment every time her mother opened her mouth.

  “Mother!” she protested now.

  “How like Donald you are,” her mother smiled at her. “You wouldn’t care a rap if I starved to death, would you?”

  “You know I would,” Mary answered. “But it isn’t very likely, is it?”

  “Isn’t it?” Margaret snapped. “How could you possibly know, cocooned in comfort as you are here?” One look at Mary’s face told me that this, somehow, had to be stopped. I took a deep breath and forced a smile to my face.

  “Are you clever at mathematics?” I asked of no one in particular. “The men were asking me what the odds were against two pennies both landing the same way up.

  There was a frozen silence.

  “I thought you never gambled,” Mary said in a suffocated voice.

  “But this isn’t gambling,” I explained eagerly, having very nearly convinced myself. “It is more—more a mathematical problem.”

  “And how much money did you lose?” Andrew asked, his voice as steely as his eyes.

  “I d-didn’t,” I stammered.

  “Perhaps he should have asked how much you won?” Margaret said with a light laugh.

  “It was a discussion,” I said with dignity. “Besides,” I added, “I couldn’t have wagered any money because I haven’t got any!”

  “Wow!” said Margaret. “That hurt!”

  “But of course you have money, mo ghaoil,” Andrew said very gently.

  I gave him a stricken look. I had not known! I had been so stupid! I stared at him, tongue-tied and devastatingly aware that I would go penniless all my life to hear him call me ‘my dear” in Gaelic every now and then.

  “Of course you have!” Mary chimed in. “No grazier’s wife is exactly poor these days!”

  “Then where is it?” I asked, reasonably enough in my own opinion.

  Andrew scraped back his chair. “We’ll talk about it in the office,” he said quietly.

  “Just now?” I said.

  “Why not? I can’t have my wife without a bawbee in her pocket, now can I?”

  I blushed, as I always did when he looked at me in quite that way. He made me feel very small and inexperienced, and more than a little stupid.

  “You’d better look out, Andy,” Margaret called out, “She’ll bleed you dry, if you don’t watch her!”

  How could she? I wondered bleakly. Couldn’t she tell that I wouldn’t touch a single piece of Andrew’s money if I didn’t have to?

  “Shut up, Mother!” Mary rasped, angrier than I had ever heard her. “Kirsty isn’t like that!”

  “No?” Margaret said lightly. “But then you don’t know the little daughter of the manse as well as I do, do you?”

  There was a long silence in the office. I was seated on a polished chair, opposite Andrew, with the desk, as big as a football field, between us.

  “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Andrew,” I said uneasily.

  “Why didn’t you ask for some money?” he asked me, I twisted my fingers together. “It didn’t occur to me,” I muttered. “What would I spend it on here?”

  He looked at me in silence. I gulped, wishing that I knew what he was thinking.

  "Besides,” I went on, for anything was better than that awful silence, “it’s Fraser money and I’m—I’m a MacTaggart!”

  “On temporary loan to the Frasers,” Andrew reminded me.

  “Ay,” I admitted, “but there was nothing in the bargain about money!”

  “Don’t be silly, Kirsty.”

  I relapsed into silence. Perhaps I was being silly, but if he thought that I’d willingly accept money from his hands, except for my immediate needs, he had another thought coming.

  “I should have explained it to you,” he went on quietly. “I opened an account for you at the bank in Cue by letter on the day we got married. There’s a hundred dollars to your credit there now, and a further hundred dollars will be paid in cm the first of every month—”

  “Oh no!” I said, aghast.

  “It’s usual for a man to make his wife an allowance,” he reminded me with a hint of a smiles

  “Your wife, yes,” I said.

  “Well then?”

  I eyed him steadily. “I am not your wife,” I told him. “As I said before, it takes more than some words from a minister to make a woman a wife. And so I’ll earn any money I have, like any other person who’s working for you.”

  He was very angry then.

  “But you are my wife!” he stormed at me. “And while you’re my wife, you’ll behave as I expect my wife to behave. Is that understood?”

  I quailed in the face of his wrath. “I won’t take your money!”

  There was another lengthy silence. I bit my lip, sure that in a moment I was going to cry.

  “I reckon that one of us is going to have to give in,” he said at last. “How do you think you’re going to manage without any money?”

  I didn’t know. My father had left me nothing, that I knew, but my needs were few and I couldn’t imagine having to spend out more than a few dollars a month. But nearly fifty pounds! What did he imagine I would do with such wealth.

  The silence stretched endlessly on. “What arrangement did your father have with you?” he asked finally.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He gave me what he could every week,” I whispered. “I managed with that.”

  “Nothing for yourself?”

  I shook my head. The tears were a knot in my throat that I could no longer swallow. “He had little e
nough,” I said,

  Andrew’s face tightened. If he was going to be angry again, I thought, I couldn’t bear it!

  “A hundred dollars isn’t a very big sum,” he said slowly. “I suppose it amounts to rather less than fifty-four pounds—”

  “Fifty-four pounds!” I exclaimed. My eyes flashed. “You can keep your fancy sums! It wouldn’t be honest to take a sum like that—”

  His face relaxed into a broad smile. “Don’t you know that Mary has twice that amount?”

  The tears I had been so valiantly keeping back burst the barricades and cascaded down my face. I wiped them away angrily with the back of my hand.

  “But she’s a Fraser,” I objected, my voice muffled by my efforts to stop my greeting. “She has an interest in the property.”

  “While my wife has none?”

  It scarcely seemed the moment to remind him, yet again, that I was not his wife, except in a legal, and strictly temporary, sense. He made a sound of complete exasperation and stood up.

  “What will you accept?” he asked me.

  I sniffed dismally. “I don’t know!” I wailed.

  “Oh, Kirsty, Kirsty, what am I to do with you?”

  “You could pay me wages for my cooking,” I said. “Not all the time, of course,” I added hastily, not wanting to seem greedy. “But while the shearers have been here, you would have had to hire a cook, wouldn’t you?”

  He laughed. “Too right I would!” He sat down at the desk again and scribbled a few figures on a piece of paper. “I reckon I owe you about ninety dollars on the two weeks,” he said, his voice warm with triumph.

  “What?”

  “Forty-five dollars a week,” he said. “Cheap at the price!”

  I thought he was teasing me. It would be like him, I thought, to take his revenge for my independence by turning my own words against me.

  “How—how much would you pay a cook?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Forty-five a week at the very least!” He looked amused. “It’s nothing to what a fully-fledged shearer can earn.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “How much would he be earning?”

  “Maybe a couple of hundred a week.”