He shook his head in mock dismay, sharing Saunders’ grin.
‘No, I am but a poor amateur, with far different priorities, although I have every intention before the day’s out of showing you a bit of what fossicking is all about. I think you might enjoy it, provided you don’t start taking it too seriously.’
‘There isn’t much danger of that,’ she replied. ‘But, speaking of the day, are we really going to have time for all this? I mean, it’s well into the afternoon already, and we’re…’
‘Not as far from Launceston as you’d expect,’ he replied casually, not looking at her. ‘We’ve been travelling in a big circle, actually.’
‘Which doesn’t escape the fact that it’s getting a bit late,’ Saunders replied, a tiny, ever-so-faint frisson of something, suspicion, nibbling at her mind, then sliding away before she could truly identify it.
‘You worry too much,’ he replied calmly, but still not looking at her. ‘We’ll make time, if we have to. After all, there’s nobody going to have cat-fits if we’re not home in time for tea. Is there?’
Definitely suspicion, she realised. And made the conscious decision just to accept … for the moment.
They reached the small settlement of Avoca, where Ford turned right and brought his old vehicle up to cruising speed for the brief run to Fingal. Then he turned north again, into a maze of roads that decreased in quality the further they rolled and then lurched along.
As did the conversation. Ford now dominated it, rambling on at length about the mining history of the region in a monologue studded with words Saunders couldn’t understand, but most of which ended it ‘ite’. Apatite, granodiorite, cassiterite, pegmatite … The list went on and on and on.
Saunders hung on for dear life as the ancient vehicle scrambled down a rutted, rock-strewn track, thundered through a tiny dry creek-bed and laboured up the other side to where a steel barrier seemed to preclude further access. Not so. Ford leapt out with a ring of keys in his hand and within moments they were continuing, with the barrier locked again behind them. A second barrier, ten minutes further on, guarded a pass that had obviously been blasted through a solid wall of rock.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said, once that barrier, too, had been locked behind them and he was again in the driver’s seat. ‘But hang on, because from here it gets a bit rough.’
Saunders shuddered to think about that, compared to what they had already negotiated, but did as she was told. The truck bucked and lurched and growled, and spewed stones out behind as it slewed through a series of up-and-down curves, then mercifully came to a halt.
‘Can I look now?’ she asked, and added to herself, Do I want to?
‘No, wait.’
She felt him descend from the vehicle, and a moment later her door opened and he took her arm to guide her down to a footing on solid ground, then walked her a few paces and turned her just so.
‘Now,’ he said, and Saunders was struck by something quite unique in his voice, something she couldn’t recognise exactly. And another sound which was definitely familiar!
She opened her eyes, gasped with disbelief and closed them again immediately. But when she looked again nothing had changed; she was standing on the edge of a small rivulet, facing a miniature waterfall that splashed happily into a miniature pool of crystal water that lapped across gravel of almost rainbow hues.
It was like something from a postcard; squatting beside the pool was a miniature — or so it appeared — cabin, built entirely of stone, with a roof that was covered in … grass?
‘Sod,’ he replied matter-of-factly to her whispered question. ‘A lot of work, but definitely in keeping, I’ve always thought.’
‘It’s beautiful, truly beautiful.’
‘You might change that to “primitive” when you see the inside,’ he replied, taking her by the hand and moving towards the small stone cabin.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she insisted, closing her fingers into his and shoving her earlier suspicions to the back of her mind.
The inside of the cabin was like her first impression of the outside — neat, tidy, almost elfin. And strangely beautiful. There was a stone fireplace which took up all of one wall, a post-and-rail bed that was admittedly crude but somehow also in keeping, a table and some stools, obviously hand-made, and, most amazing of all, a stone sink with water piped from somewhere outside.
‘You did all this, didn’t you?’
She didn’t really need to ask; she knew before the words were uttered. Ford might as well have signed his name to the place, as if it were a rare painting.
‘I certainly wasn’t the first one here,’ he replied, it’s been mined for gold, and tin, and I suspect the Aborigines might have camped here long before that; I’ve found what appear to be artefacts, anyway. Although not many.’
He smiled down at her, obviously pleased by her reaction to the place.
‘Now, what about some coffee? And then I’ll get you started on the fossicking part of this expedition. You go and have a wander around and I’ll fix things up for smoko.’
He waved vaguely off to the left, where a grove of wattles shaded the rear of the cabin. ‘There’s a dunny back there if you need it — or a sort of one, anyway.’
Saunders went off to inspect the waterfall, returned about ten minutes later to his call, and found the coffee made and the small table laden with a variety of foodstuffs. It also appeared that he had unloaded virtually everything else from the vehicle; one corner of the small cabin was heaped with a variety of gear.
‘I had to get at the toolbox,’ he explained, without being asked. ‘The old girl was making some very strange noises just as we arrived, and I thought I’d have a stickybeak while you’re off seeking your fortune.’
He poured the coffee and they sat cornerwise to each other, sipping at it in silence, looking at each other, looking away again.
Saunders fancied she could feel the change in the atmosphere between them, could almost see the question growing into something tangible, alive in the room with them.
‘Will you be able to fix the truck in time?’
There, she thought. It was out now. No longer slinking round the back of her mind, confusing things.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But if it’s what I think it is, yes, and even if I can’t fix it, it won’t stop us from getting out in time to fly home. If that’s what you want.’
He sipped again at his coffee, looking abstractedly into the fireplace at the neat structures of twigs and branches, all laid, just waiting for the match. Then he sighed and turned to face her again.
‘It isn’t just my peculiar version of the old running- out-of-petrol trick, if that’s what you’re thinking, Saunders. I’m a bit old for that one. don’t you reckon?’
He looked away again, but didn’t give her time to answer before he went on.
‘I will admit, for what it’s worth, that I did have visions of maybe persuading you to stay over, to make a weekend of it. But I had no intention of tricking you into it.’
Now Saunders could only stare down into her own coffee-cup. No sense in replying to his earlier question, which wasn’t relevant and never had been. And she wasn’t ready, for reasons she couldn’t even describe to herself, to answer the unspoken question about whether she could be convinced to stay. She wasn’t even that certain it had been a question. ‘I did have visions’, he’d said; had something happened to change his mind?
‘I certainly wasn’t accusing you of anything like that,’ she finally managed to say, but deep in her heart she felt that she’d waited too long to say it. But she hadn’t accused him, hadn’t even thought of such a thing.
Ford didn’t reply. He didn’t look at her either, just sat sipping at his coffee and staring into the fireplace.
The atmosphere, she fancied, was becoming decidedly chilly, and her own mental state was contributing more to that than she wanted to face up to just this minute. Only one thing to do…
‘Well, if time
’s of the essence, we’d best get a move on,’ she said, draining the cup and rising quickly to her feet. ‘Because I am not leaving until I’ve had the chance to try fossicking, as you promised me, and that’s that!’
The look Ford shot her at that defied definition, but a few minutes later she was a hundred metres downstream from the cabin, a shovel in one hand and a gem sieve in the other, her eyes flicking from the old gravel run he’d pointed out to his departing figure.
‘An hour — no more,’ he’d said, after showing her what to do and how to do it. Saunders looked down at her feet, swimming in the gumboots he’d lent her, and wondered how he could have walked away without laughing. Walking in the oversized boots made her as clumsy as a duck, but it wasn’t that which bothered her. Even as she laboriously pushed the shovel into the gravel she was wondering what she’d done to make him change his mind about wanting her to stay.
‘It was part of his plan all along,’ she muttered to herself as she lifted a shovelful of material into the top sieve and knelt to manoeuvre the whole apparatus into the water. ‘Damn the man anyway! All he had to do was ask; now he’s convinced that I’m certain the whole exercise was underhanded or … or something!’
She continued her monologue as she washed the gravel in the top sieve, discarded the remains because nothing looked at all interesting, and began doing the same with what had filtered through to the finer mesh of the bottom sieve.
‘I didn’t accuse him,’ she said to the fistfuls of stones she inspected and discarded. ‘Not of anything.’
More gravel, more sluicing, more careful inspection of the remains. Within minutes she had established a comfortable rhythm, even if the whole process seemed fruitless. In half an hour she found a couple of pieces of what she thought were petrified wood and half a dozen other bits that were interesting enough to set aside for Ford’s expert evaluation.
But she was no clearer in her mind, which she was beginning to think would benefit from a trip through the gem-sieves. Ford had hoped she might prove amenable to being persuaded to stay the weekend, he’d said. No mention of where they might stay, or in what circumstances, although it wasn’t difficult to assume he’d had this place in mind.
‘It isn’t as if there was a written contract saying you absolutely must sleep with him as part of the deal, you know’ she told herself.
Except that she wanted to; that was half — no, almost all — the problem. She did, and Ford Landell knew that she did, and she knew that he knew…
‘And you, you silly goose, knew damned well when you accepted the invitation that it might come to this,’ she continued aloud. ‘You hoped it would, even if you didn’t know then what you’d do about it when the time came. And now the time has come and you still don’t know.’
But she did. She knew that she wanted Ford; she knew that he wanted her. And she knew — no doubt about it — that with this type of man, this man especially, she would always have the choice; Ford Landell would never force himself upon her or any other woman.
Neither was he a trophy-hunter; Simon had said that and she had believed him, had known it herself, instinctively. No, the problem was not, she admitted, Ford Landell at all. The problem was herself.
‘What are you waiting for — a marriage proposal, complete with ring?’
The bitterness in her own voice surprised her, and she looked up, half expecting somehow to find it was someone else who’d spoken, then shook her head in silent mockery of herself.
Then a movement caught her eye, something swimming in the next pool downstream. A fish? As she watched there was a dark shape, that surfaced and then dived again, but it was no shape she could recognize, identify.
Slipping out of the cumbersome boots, she moved up on to the bank and began to stalk her way downstream, carefully taking each step as she picked her way barefoot over the gravel banks. The animal — she was now certain that it was no fish — surfaced again, but still she was too far away to get a proper look.
The left-hand bank, her side, climbed upward, forming the outer curve around the edge of the pool. If she could reach the crest she would be able to look down, have a clear view…
Saunders crept closer, then flopped down on her belly and crawled the last few metres to where she would peer down into the crystal waters of the pool. So clear was the water that she might have been in it; within moments she discerned the flashing movement of two small fish as they slid magically through the water beneath her.
On the other side of the pool a small trout leapt clear of the water, after some insect or another, she supposed, and then, right beneath her, a sleek brown form moved into view, nuzzling into the gravel bottom with its unmistakable, bill-like snout.
Saunders lay there, transfixed. She was a city girl, and although of course, she knew about platypuses, she had never seen one alive — much less in the wild. And, from this vantage-point, every detail of the astonishing animal was as clear as if she’d been swimming beside it: the beaver tail, the bill like a duck, the webbed feet with their enormous claws…
Saunders? Saunders! … where have you got to?’
The voice carried on the breeze, only just loud enough to be a whisper when it reached her, hardly louder than the audible crunch of Ford’s boots on the gravel. She rolled to her knees and saw him approaching, lifted her arm to wave him towards her, lifted her finger to her lips in a silent bid for quiet, then rolled back to peer down again at the rare animal below her.
‘Are you all right?’ Ford asked in a whisper as he loomed up behind her, his eyes intent not on the water, she noticed, but on her, his eyes worried, filled with concern.
‘Of course I am,’ she whispered back. ‘But look … Just look…’
Ford’s smile was warm, gentle, indulgent; this was nothing new for him. this sighting of a platypus. He knelt, then sprawled out beside Saunders and silently joined her vigil.
They lay there, shoulder to shoulder, flank to flank, and she gradually became aware of the heat from his body as they both concentrated on watching the animal. But her awareness of him was only secondary, overshadowed by her fascination with the platypus, until he spoke.
‘We have to get moving soon; the truck’s OK, after all, but we’ve run out of time, I’m afraid.’
Saunders kept her eyes on the furry body of the platypus, but her mind had left it now. Still, she didn’t dare turn to look at Ford, knew that if she did she would never manage to say what she wanted to say. She shifted only enough to be able to point down at the water.
‘Will he be here tomorrow?"
‘I’d expect so; he lives here,’ Ford replied, after what seemed a very long time. And then, after an even longer time, ‘But why?’
He was looking at her now; she could sense it. But Saunders was stricken with an insane shyness, and couldn’t meet his eyes.
‘I’d like to see him again,’ she finally managed to whisper, forcing out the words, knowing she sounded melodramatic, but unable to help that.
This time the silence between them was sheer torture, and her mind raced in a noisy silence of its own. Had she insulted him somehow? Did he really want her to stay, or had she entirely misinterpreted everything?
You ninny, she thought angrily. Why can’t you just out and say that you want to stay? And if that means sleeping with the man, well, damn it — say that too! Because it’s what you want, and he already knows that better than you do.
She could still feel Ford’s eyes on her, and now she could also feel the tension growing between them where their shoulders and hips were linked by tongues of fire. She closed her eyes, opened them, closed them again, but couldn’t quite force herself to glace sideways, much less turn that extra little bit to face him directly.
Say something, damn it, she thought. But when he did, it was in a voice so soft she could barely hear. But it was loud enough to dissolve the tension instantly.
‘Just because he lives here it doesn’t guarantee we’ll see him, Saunders.’
‘Just because there are gemstones here it doesn’t mean I’ll find any,’ she replied. ‘But I still want to try.’
‘You’ll find them,’ he said. ‘Probably easier than I’ll manage to catch us a trout or two for dinner.’ And he rolled away from her and came to his feet in a single, flowing movement.
Then she had to look at him, if only so she could reach up and grasp the hand he extended to her. There he was: Fordon Landell. Same silvery hair, same laughing black eyes, no horns and tail, no sudden transformation to demon or devil. Safe, she thought. But wondered as they walked back to the cabin how long that safeness would last … and how long she really wanted it to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ford had lied about the fishing. Or got lucky. Saunders wasn’t able to determine which; she could only observe how easy he made it look, how smoothly he could deposit a trout-fly in what, to her, seemed to be just the right place at just the right time to have a fish come from nowhere to offer itself as a culinary sacrifice.
He only had to make half a dozen casts near the head of the platypus pool before he caught the first fish, and she was entranced by the performance, by the fish leaping into the air and fighting for its freedom. Not so entranced when Ford dipped his hand into the water, caught up the small trout, laughed at it, said something she didn’t hear, and released it.
‘Too small,’ he mouthed at her. Then, louder, ‘Just a baby; we’ll have a try now and see if his daddy is there.’
Saunders nodded an acceptance, then settled back on her haunches to watch him, marvelling at the rhythm and grace with which he manipulated the fly-rod. Back and forth and back and forth, with all the flair of those girls who did baton work with ribbons, and then, with no specific impetus she could see, he would reach out just that little bit further to deposit the fly, as light as thistledown, then watch as it drifted down through the pool.
Ford moved through the edges of the pool in bare feet, the water lapping sometimes to his knees, sometimes to the edges of his brief shorts. He seemed impervious to the coldness of the water, so totally engrossed was he in the pursuit, in the hunt.
An Irresistible Flirtation Page 14
