It was as though a curse had accompanied her; all his dealings with the strong-willed, foolish girl had proved disastrous. Coming to the colony at all had been an imposition; even her friendship with Lady Arthur had failed to produce any dividends as far as Barnsley was concerned.
She had turned up her nose at the succession of excellent matches he had tried to arrange for her and had then insisted on marrying a man little better than a brigand who had made off with a fortune. A fortune that by rights and indeed by law belonged to Barnsley himself. Admittedly he had been compensated to some extent by the acquisition of the estate in the midlands that his niece had fancifully called Derwent, but the rank injustice of the loss was a festering wound.
Two hundred thousand pounds when he doubted the estate was worth one fifth of that, to say nothing of the problems and cost of stocking and administering the property… Even with the sheep he was having brought from New South Wales it was obvious that Derwent was a nightmare in waiting. He supposed he might make something out of the forestry, in time, and the trading schooners would be worth something, but the ridiculous half-completed port would never be worth anything, for all the money Emma’s foolish husband had thrown at it.
And now she had foisted on him these two children in return for a story of gold far away that might, or might not, be there. His hands were tied; within days the word would be all around the colony that the two brats had been delivered into his care and, rich and powerful though he was, his reputation would be ruined if he failed to accept them.
Yet only one of them was of his blood. Very well; as far as the world knew he would take them both but in private would treat only the baby William as his nephew and heir. He would pay for Richard’s upbringing because he had no choice but the son of the man who had cheated him would get nothing more, neither affection nor interest nor inheritance. He would arrange for William’s surname to be changed to Tregellas but Richard Dark would have to find his own way.
1913
Conan Hampton had always had a way with horses. He had worked in the stables at Derwent, which itself had been an adventure, with certain things happening that he had not expected and on one occasion something not happening when he had thought it would.
Well, that was life, he thought.
It was years since he’d left Derwent but as the local blacksmith he still dealt with horses on a daily basis. These days they were mostly working animals and not fine-boned thoroughbreds, and he put shoes on them rather than saddles, but they were still horses. He also mended the ironware on carts and made farm implements but some said he’d come down in the world and there were times when he thought the same, pounding the red-hot metal in an explosion of resentful sparks.
The rhythm of his violence echoed the pounding of the cannon at South Africa’s Blyde River crossing on the one occasion in his life he had reached out to touch the heights of heroism, when he had dismounted to rescue Daddo Penrose after the Mauser had blown Daddo out of his saddle.
He had carried him bleeding to safety in defiance of the ambush set by the crack-shot Boers and why they hadn’t dropped him too he never knew. The colonel had congratulated him for his courage and presented him with a cheap watch as a token of regimental approval because Daddo Penrose, heir to the vast Derwent estate, was an important man in the Tasmanian high country.
For an hour or two Conan had been everybody’s friend; there’d even been talk of a medal, but the moment had passed and the clatter of the hammer, the uneasy shifting of the placid animals, echoed the long descent his life had followed since that day when he had dared hope that all things might be possible.
‘Ruined me, that business,’ he told any drinking companion who cared to listen, because drink had become his friend. ‘Never knew I had it in me nor ever did again.’
He had been known to weep in his beer after the memories grew too much.
So he became resentful of the man whose life he had saved and who later had given him back the Derwent job that Bessie Penrose had sworn he would never have. During Daddo’s lifetime he had stuck, just to spite her, but after his death he did a runner to stop her giving him the flick.
Now he had reached the point where he was able to deny there had ever been a moment when he had sensed the might-have-beens that had plagued him ever since.
It was not to be expected that Conan, boozy eyes and bitter heart, would approve of his daughter’s friendship with Jonathan Penrose but when Jonathan turned up unexpectedly he was away from the forge, which was a blessing.
Bec’s heart was pounding but at least she knew how to hide it; Mum, on the other hand, started to run this way and that like a dozen scalded cats, but Mum had always been scared of shadows and what people might say. What in particular Dad might say.
Bec was fond of her mother, as one might be fond of a pet chook, but from the time she had been capable of thinking she had known she was a separate being who would find her own path in life so, when Jonathan asked she said yes, she would be delighted to go for a walk with him.
In the end Dad’s absence made no difference for when he got home and found the strange horse tethered nearby and his daughter missing, the ferocity of the forge fire was at once rekindled in his heart. After questioning his quivering wife and giving her a tap for letting it happen and another to remind her that it was his place to decide these things and not hers, he returned to the forge where he stoked his anger beside the red-hot iron of the horseshoes. From which, after hearing the fading clop of hooves as Jonathan rode away, he later emerged.
His face was red with alcohol and the fire’s heat.
‘What you bin doing, girl?’
She eyed him warily; Bec had always found it easier to relate to her father’s belligerence than the curds and whey with which her mother sought to appease the world but now his ferocity looked as though it might spill over into actual violence.
‘Nothing, Dad.’
‘The way I heard it, you went for a walk with that Jonathan Penrose.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Call that nothing? Where’d you go on this walk?’
‘Through the woods.’
‘You go into the woods with Jonathan Penrose and you call it nothing? People know you done that, what they gunna say, eh?’
‘We didn’t do anything!’
‘Blokes like Jonathan Penrose ain’t for people like us,’ he said.
Suddenly she was willing to challenge him. She was sixteen and willing to challenge him. ‘A walk! That’s all it was! I said we didn’t do anything and we didn’t!’
They stared at each other.
He was big-chested, big-bellied, his temper stoked by flame, but Bec saw domination in a leather apron scarred by fire, in the slant of the man’s unshaven jaw.
And so she flung her resentment at him.
She hadn’t expected it; nor, she saw, had he. But she saw too that she could not back off. Do that and her rebellion would be over.
Perhaps he saw it, too, and believed violence was the only way to restore the authority he would lose if he did nothing. Perhaps he did not know what else to do.
He lifted his hand to her; she stood firm. And he hit her. Not to damage but to spell out his status as her father. It was meant to be only a tap but he hit her higher than he’d intended, across her right eye. It made the eye swell up at once and instead of restoring his authority it marked the end of it.
She did not cry; she did not speak. She stared at him, chin up, then turned and walked away.
The next day, when the blacksmith had gone to Ross, she walked to Waldren’s Corner and spoke to Mrs Painter who, observing Bec’s swollen eye, offered her a bed.
‘Only temporary,’ she told her husband Oswald. ‘She can give me a hand with the baby until things settle down.’
Although when that might be no one knew. Bec went back to the forge and packed.
‘Don’t do it,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t break the family.’
‘He’s already d
one it.’
‘But –’
‘You’ve got to put up with him. I don’t.’
Wearing her straw hat and buttoned boots she turned her back on the past and walked away down the road.
A kookaburra squawked.
‘You tell ’em,’ Bec said.
Mr Painter was uncertain of the wisdom of getting involved, warning there might be difficulties, but since Oswald Painter was the constable Conan Hampton kept away.
‘What was it all about anyway?’ Oswald asked his wife.
‘Something to do with Bec being matey with Jonathan Penrose. Her dad doesn’t like it.’
‘I don’t wonder he doesn’t like it.’ The constable believed in the natural order of things, which was why he was a constable. ‘Not that it will make any odds, in the end.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘You see old Mrs Penrose putting up with it? Bec Hampton and her grandson? She’ll eat young Bec for breakfast, if I’m any judge.’
Although another and far more likely possibility had occurred to them both: that Jonathan Penrose was interested more in getting into Bec than in Bec herself and would drop her like a stone once he’d managed it.
It would have been unseemly to put such thoughts into words, so they didn’t.
Bec knew the risks as well as the Painters. You’d have to be a dummy not to be aware of them but she liked Jonathan, had always liked him, had for years had a crush on him.
That was what they called it, wasn’t it? Having a crush on someone. It meant wanting to be with someone yet being scared of them too. It meant wanting them to admire you while being scared they’d think you a fool.
It meant wanting to show them how clever you were but when you dredged up the courage to say something finding that every word came out like a ball of wool.
Oh yes, she knew all about having a crush on someone. At least on Jonathan Penrose; she’d never felt like that about anyone else.
It was no good, of course. As her dad had said, his sort wasn’t for people like her. She’d hated him for saying it but it was true. Jonathan Penrose and Bec Hampton? It was more than stupid; it was impossible.
She sat on her bed in the Painters’ cottage and thought about it. Since their meeting at the Campbell Town show she had thought of little else.
What of it? she thought. She liked him; it seemed he liked her. That was enough to be going on with.
They’d done nothing – just the one walk – but even that was more than she would have expected. She hadn’t expected to see him at all, except maybe at a distance. When he got married, for instance. Or out riding.
What she would do was take it step by step and see how things played out. She already knew there were things she was prepared to let him do, things she was not.
So far he had not laid a finger on her. She wondered how she’d feel about it if he did. When he did.
So Bec Hampton came to live at the Painters’ place at Waldren’s Corner, the spot where two tracks emerged from the scrubby hills and joined to become the road that climbed the flank of the range and connected with the highway just south of the Derwent boundary, where a sheer cliff called Blackman’s Head dominated the landscape.
Bec gave a hand with the baby, as Mrs Painter had intended, and in time helped in so many other ways that one night three months after her arrival Mrs Painter confided to her husband that she didn’t know how she’d managed in the days before Miss Hampton had come to join them.
The two women had become friendly but first names were out. Status was important, and the social levels that maintained society.
For Oswald Painter this created a problem. He shared his wife’s views about class and the proper order of things and the regular visits of young Master Jonathan to see Miss Hampton challenged those views. He was a nice lad and he had no complaints about Miss Hampton, either, but the relationship between them was a worry.
‘It’s none of our business,’ his wife said.
Oswald Painter wasn’t too sure about that. His wife was starryeyed in the presence of what she had begun to hope might be True Love, so he felt her opinions might be discounted. Also the girl was staying under his roof and responsibility could not be avoided.
‘I wonder if I shouldn’t have a word with Mrs Penrose,’ he said.
It was Mrs Penrose senior he meant – no one in their right mind would ask Mrs Rose Penrose for an opinion about anything more challenging than the weather – but Mrs Bessie Penrose presented a problem too, and a formidable one.
One thing the whole district knew was that Mrs Bessie did not tolerate people poking their noses into Penrose family business, and to speak about her grandson’s regular visits to see Miss Hampton certainly fell into that category.
‘I’d keep well away from it, if I was you,’ said Mrs Painter, who would no more risk crossing Bessie Penrose than jump off Blackman’s Head. ‘You want to say anything, have a word with young Jonathan. If you’re really determined to stick your beak in.’
So her husband, who had no such intention, kept out of the way when Jonathan Penrose came a-calling.
‘We keep seeing each other like this, people will start talking,’ Bec said.
‘Let them talk,’ Jonathan said.
‘All right for you.’
‘You want us to stop seeing each other?’
‘You know I don’t want that.’
‘Then?’
‘Just saying, that’s all. If your grandma finds out –’
‘What do you want me to do about it?’
Bec, whose bones dissolved whenever she saw him, knew exactly what she wanted Jonathan to do but did not see how she could put it into words. ‘Not for me to say.’
They were sitting side by side on a level patch of ground shaded by gum trees. Blackman’s Head rose sheer behind them, its outline dominating the landscape. From there they could see for miles, to a point well beyond Waldren’s Corner where the eucalyptus bush blurred into a continuous blue-grey line.
It was their special place. Times without number Bec had seen Blackman’s Head flush rose-red in the light of a thunderous dawn but never before had she associated it with love.
Now she did. This patch of shaded ground below the Head was the place they visited more regularly than anywhere else. There was nothing up there, not even sheep, so there was no reason for anyone else to visit. They were alone, they were together, and to Bec it was like heaven.
Something else too.
It gave her an extraordinary sense of owning not only herself and the circle of air and stillness that surrounded her but the land she could see stretching away into the distance.
The land called Derwent, to which the man beside her was heir.
Her feelings for Jonathan gave her feelings also for the land that would one day be his, yet that idea was so huge she could not get her head around it.
What was Derwent to her?
She told herself it was nothing yet that was not true. It was a promise, although of what she could not have said. Only that it was there, that she and Jonathan were there, that somehow they were all bound together. They were prisoners of fate.
‘You know we’re related?’ Jonathan said.
‘Ever so long ago though,’ Bec said. ‘Cousins about a million times removed.’
Of course she knew it but the relationship meant nothing. Both sides of the family could trace their origins back to Ephraim Dark but it was the Penrose branch that had the money; the Hamptons had nothing. That was what mattered.
Whenever Bec went to see her Grandma Jane the old lady was always sounding off about it. You couldn’t blame her; why wouldn’t she be narked when she might have inherited a fortune? If things had worked out differently she’d have married some wealthy bloke, had a good life. As it was she’d ended up with her parents’ small farm and Jake Hampton, a decent enough cove in his own way but not one who’d ever make a fortune.
‘I blame William,’ Grandma Jane had said. ‘Any justic
e, he’d have died on the gallows, I reckon.’
As it was he had died in bed, leaving a fortune that his daughter Bessie, Jonathan’s monstrous grandmother, had almost doubled by marrying a sook called Phelan Penrose, whose idea of work was to lie under a shady tree, getting fat and checking out his toenails.
People said it was a wonder Bessie Penrose hadn’t booted him off the property years before he did it for her, trying to roger a parlour maid and going off pop when he was still in his fifties.
‘It’s too long ago to matter, us being related,’ Bec said.
‘I don’t take your meaning,’ he said.
But he did, and she knew he did.
They were friends. At the beginning, in the first weeks after their meeting at the Campbell Town show, she would have been happy to settle for that, already more than she would ever have imagined possible, but now she knew friendship was not enough.
It was a dangerous time. She was pushing against barriers society had rigged to separate people like them. Bec Hampton and Jonathan Penrose might be descended from the same ancestral tree yet it made no odds; the barriers of wealth, custom and education existed. Somehow she must find a way to break them down without frightening him off. She could not bear the thought of losing him yet if they did nothing the relationship would go nowhere, and she couldn’t bear to think of that, either.
She was pretty sure he felt the same.
Do something, she implored him silently. Anything.
She wanted it so much yet was scared too. She sat and waited, hands folded in her lap, her face grave and still. They’d had a dry spell and she could taste the dust that rose from the parched ground.
She could not tell whether his feelings for her were skin deep or came from his heart. She told herself that when the time came she would know.
It seemed the time of miracles had not passed because after sitting silently for a long time he sighed and turned to her and she knew even before he touched her that this was right and all would be well.
He kissed her and she felt him trembling, as she was trembling.
‘Bec,’ he said. ‘Oh Bec.’
Land of Golden Wattle Page 20
