His eyebrows draw down. “No, don’t leave the lighthouse.”
She drops her head. “Yes,” she says, but she means no.
And then there is a knock at the lighthouse door. They both jump. It is not unusual for people to come to the telegraph office, but nonetheless he holds a finger to his lips and indicates she stay here in the bedroom. He quietly closes the bedroom door behind him and goes to the main door.
Isabella puts her ear to the bedroom door. Her heart is thundering so hard she can barely hear. Male voices.
“No, I don’t know who you are talking about.” This is Matthew. Fear rises through her like prickling lights.
More muttered voices. She can’t bear it. She cracks open the bedroom door a little and listens hard.
“Then why would a respectable gentleman tell me I could find her here?”
“I have never heard of Isabella Winterbourne.”
“She also goes by Mary Harrow.”
“I can’t help you.”
It is Percy. The nightmare made flesh. She closes the bedroom door and hides a horrified sob with her hands. Her eyes dart about. The window. She grabs her trunk and hoists it out the window, then pulls up her skirts and climbs out as quickly and quietly as she can. She lands with a thud on the ground and runs for the woods.
Matthew keeps his voice calm and strong, even as Percy Winterbourne—a round-cheeked fellow with a sulky mouth—loses his temper.
“I have already walked up that wretched track in the sun to get here because I have been told that this Mary Harrow, which isn’t even her real name, is contactable via this very telegraph office. You should know where she lives.”
“You have been given incorrect information. I may have dealt with a Mary Harrow, I may have even kept telegrams for her, but I deal with many, many people, sir. I cannot be expected to remember them all and I certainly don’t know where she lives.” His heart tightens under his ribs. He needs to protect Isabella, and this gentleman is violently insistent. Matthew is fairly certain he could best Percy in a tussle if there were one, but he continues to hope that Percy will soon be convinced and go away.
“Why don’t you go to the village and ask around?” Matthew says, trying to buy any time at all to get Isabella out of here. “If she lives at Lighthouse Bay, then someone will surely know her.”
Percy wavers.
“I am terribly busy, sir. I don’t mean to be rude, but I really cannot help you.”
Percy’s eyes narrow, his lips pucker. Finally he says, “I am a rich and powerful man. I hope, for your sake, that you are not lying to me.”
Matthew spreads his hands. “What reason do I have to lie?”
Percy looks him up and down, and gives a resigned, “Harrumph.”
“Good day, sir,” Matthew says, closing the door.
He waits a moment until he hears Percy’s footfalls move away. His thoughts spin. Their plans are in disarray. He heads to the bedroom.
Isabella is gone.
He dares not call out to her. He checks the telegraph office, then clatters up the lighthouse stairs, but his blood grows heavy because he already knows where she is—and Percy has to walk right past the woods to get to the village.
He runs, climbs out the back window so he doesn’t run into Percy on the path, and enters the woods from the northern edge. A flash of her blue dress. She is bent over, her trunk sitting next to her, digging with her hands. He hurries up to her, and picks her up, wriggling and protesting, and clamps a hand over her mouth. “No, Isabella,” he hisses. “There’s no time.”
She claws his hand away and says in a harsh whisper, “We have an hour.”
“You can’t be out here.”
But she is looking at the ground again, at the bird-shaped rock he moved over the burial site so he could come here and remember her when she was gone. He knows every instinct in her body is to bend to the ground and claw her way through to the bracelet.
Footfalls. His head snaps up. She shrinks against him. In the distance, Percy Winterbourne crackles over the undergrowth through the trees.
Matthew’s grip tightens on her, he turns her around and quietly guides her away. But Percy has seen them.
“Isabella, you murdering harlot!” he shrieks, and gives chase.
Matthew grabs Isabella’s small trunk, pushes her ahead of him and runs, tree branches whipping his face. They break free of the woods and round the lighthouse. They must now either make their way over the rocks and down to the beach or head inland into the dense woods. The beach is too open, so he hurries Isabella across the grounds of the light station, into the woods and round to the south. Overnight rain has made the ground muddy, and the mud sucks at his shoes. Isabella stumbles, but he rights her, and they go farther into the trees, with no idea whether Percy is still behind them nor how close. He wishes they could run more quietly. Surely Percy can hear Matthew’s thundering pulse: it is almost deafening, as are the sounds of fallen branches popping and crunching, their ragged breathing and their footfalls. On they go, making a wide semi-circle around the village, then leaving it behind. Isabella gasps with the effort, and he slows his pace a little so she can catch her breath.
“I can’t go on running,” she pants.
Ahead there is a creek, a gully. He grabs her hand and drags her at speed towards it. Down they go. He pulls her to the ground, lies flat on his stomach next to her in the tangled, succulent growth that covers the creek banks. They are hidden from sight. He listens as hard as he can.
A pop in the distance sparks in his heart. He strains to hear. No: no more footfalls. Just the sounds of birds and animals moving about, the sea breeze in the treetops making dry leaves fall and land with a soft scratch on the undergrowth.
The sea.
Her breathing.
“Have we lost him?” she whispers.
“It seems so. For now.”
Percy gives chase for a while, then stumbles over a root and falls with a thud. He puts out his hands to break his fall, and a sharp pain shoots into his wrist. He is angry now. So angry that his stomach seems to boil. These woods are nightmarish, full of strange, prehistoric-looking plants and slithering menace in the undergrowth. He remembers the police constable’s words, back near the site of the shipwreck: snakes, wild dogs, vicious natives; walking into the mouth of a monster.
Percy sits on the rough ground awhile. He is tired from the horrible overnight voyage up from Brisbane in a private coach. He hadn’t wanted to wait two days for the paddle-steamer, but the constant jolting and jiggling, the constant stopping to change horses, had meant a very poor night’s sleep. The coach still waited for him, outside the Exchange Hotel. He had hoped to have Isabella in it by now, to take her to Brisbane, to the police. How he would love to see her locked up in a stinking prison in this vile, humid place so far from home. How he would love those long hours of the coach journey with her all to himself, to satisfy himself with a more direct, more personal revenge.
His throat burns at the thought of not getting that revenge, and he has to spit on the ground.
But he is smarter than a woman and a lighthouse keeper. They have to turn up somewhere. And wherever that is, he will find them.
Percy stands and brushes the dirt off his jacket, pushing down an awkward feeling of embarrassment. Nobody needs to know he had fallen. Head high, he makes his way back to the village. The first place he stops is the general store. The woman behind the counter, a thin-faced redhead, smiles at him warmly.
He does not smile in return. “Tell me what you know about Mary Harrow and Matthew Seaward.”
The woman stutters, intimidated by his bearing. “Mary Harrow? She was the Fullbrights’ nanny for a little while. She’s long gone.”
“Why, I saw her just this morning. Does everyone in this town lie?”
A well-dressed man who stands, smoking, by the postcard rack on the counter speaks up. “I know Mary Harrow,” he says. “She’s not lying. Mary Harrow was working for the Fullbrights, but s
he moved on many months ago. I did, however, see her in the winter.”
“Your name?”
“Abel Barrett.”
Percy sizes him up. He looks like a gentleman, and is clearly itching to tell what he knows of Mary Harrow. “She has duped you all,” Percy says. “Her name is not Mary Harrow, it is Isabella Winterbourne. She is a thief. Possibly a murderer.”
The woman behind the counter pipes up, “She stole from Katherine Fullbright.”
Barrett holds up his hand to hush the woman. “Who are you?”
“I am Percy Winterbourne, of the Winterbourne jeweling family.”
Barrett frowns. “She had jewelry. She sold it in Brisbane.”
Percy flinches, thinking about how much of her own jewelry—paid for by his family—she might have sold. And still she has the mace. Why else would she and the lighthouse keeper run away? “It was all stolen,” Percy declares in an ominous voice. “Stolen from my family. Stolen from my dead brother. Her dead husband.”
The woman gasps. Abel Barrett chews on the end of his cigar thoughtfully, then says, “What has this got to do with Matthew Seaward?”
“They are in league. He’s been harboring her.”
Barrett shakes his head. “No. That can’t be right. Matthew Seaward is as timid as a mouse. Never did a bad thing in his life.”
“My husband runs a carriage hire out the back of the store,” the woman says dramatically. “Seaward has booked a hire overnight. Says he’s going down to Mooloolah Wharf and back. He’s meant to be picking it up at ten, if you want to go and wait.”
Percy freezes. “Mooloolah Wharf?”
“Ships to Sydney leave from there,” she says, clearly enjoying playing her part in the unfolding drama.
And from Sydney . . . anywhere in the world. “Yes, I will wait,” he says. They will be back. They have to get away, and they will be back for their carriage—and he will pounce.
In the gully, Isabella rolls onto her back, letting her head fall and her eyes close. Her face is pale and tired and Matthew feels a pang in his heart. He had forgotten, at least while they were running, that she is carrying a child. His child. All of her limbs seem weighed down. He cannot bear the distance anymore. He doesn’t care how difficult it makes the good-bye: he folds her into his arms and kisses her face, her ears, her hair.
“I love you, I love you. You’re safe,” he says, over and over.
She clings to him, crying.
“Sh, sh,” he says. “It will be all right.”
“How can it be? We can’t go back to the village: he might still be there. We can’t pick up the carriage, and we can’t walk to Mooloolah: it’s forty miles.”
“But we can walk to Tewantin. The Plover leaves tonight for Brisbane. From there you can find another passage to Sydney or Melbourne, and on to New York, where Victoria is waiting for you. I know you are frightened, but once we get you out of Queensland, you will be safe. And one day, not too far in the future, you will be happy. I promise.”
She gazes up at him with huge, unblinking eyes. The instinct to protect her is a hard muscle tightening in his gut.
“Come with me,” she sobs. “You must come with me all the way to New York. We are a family now. Don’t make me do this alone.”
We are a family now. It is like a light has turned on inside him. Why did he not realize this before now? A family. His ears ring faintly as he turns this over in his mind. To allow her and his child to travel across the seas alone would make him a dark man indeed. He must travel too. He must protect them. His responsibilities to the light, to the telegraph, to the government office that has paid his wage these last twenty years, are nothing in comparison to his responsibilities to Isabella and her child. His child. A feeling stirs inside him. It is fear mixed with wonder. It is awe. All his doubts about petty issues of social correctness are washed away in the great river of morality that a man who will be a father feels.
“Yes, my pretty bird,” he says, stroking her hair. “Yes, I will come.”
Thirty
Isabella stumbles through the bush behind Matthew. She is reminded, horribly, of her last great trek through the hostile Australian landscape. Much has changed since then, but she is still fearful. They keep the sea on their left, letting the ocean’s sound lead them south. In a few hours, they will come to the river, and they will follow it inland to the wharf. She is already tired, but she keeps going. Next time they come to a creek, she will insist that they stop and drink. The humidity weighs her down. The screeching racket of the cicadas pounds in her head. Sweat forms on her brow and under her breasts.
“Are you all right?” Matthew calls over his shoulder. He goes on ahead, breaking twigs and moving branches out of the way for her.
“I’m tired.”
“It’s only a few hours more.”
“It’s so hot.”
“Let’s move a little closer to the sea.” He changes direction slightly and she follows him. He still doesn’t break the cover of the bushes, but the sea noise becomes louder and the breeze dries the sweat on her skin.
“There’s a creek just ahead,” he calls back to her. “We’ll stop there to rest.”
Gratefully, she sinks to the ground at the water’s edge and scoops the cool liquid into her mouth. It tastes of dirt and grass, but she drinks anyway.
He sits next to her and drinks his fill. Then he looks at her. “Can you keep going?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll feel safer once we get to Tewantin. The paddle-steamer might already be in dock. We can get on and head straight for the berths to rest and hide.”
“Let me rest, please,” she said. “The baby makes me tired.”
He nods his assent, and she sits among the greenery and takes deep breaths. He paces around her, clearly itching to keep going. She closes her eyes and tries to ignore it.
“Will you miss the sea, Matthew?” she asks him.
He is silent for a few moments, then says, “I suppose I will. I hadn’t thought of it.” She hears that his footsteps have stopped; he is still at last. “I’ve gone to sleep with the sound of it in my ears every night for twenty years. When we stayed in Brisbane, the world seemed strangely muted. I suppose I will have to get used to that.”
She opens her eyes. He stands with the sun behind him, silhouetted. He is turned away from her, looking down the creek towards the ocean.
“I’m sorry that I’m taking you away from here,” she says.
He turns, and smiles at her. “You are taking me somewhere I never dreamed I’d go. Into a life with a loving wife, children. A new city. A new world . . .” He trails off, emotion choking his voice.
She rises and goes to him, sliding her arms around his waist. “See now? You’ve made me keen to keep moving again. Towards that happy new world.”
He picks up the trunk and they pick their way across the creek—their shoes are already sodden, so it matters little if they fill up again—and farther south.
The middle of the day approaches and the sun grows warm. Isabella flinches into shade where she can, but she knows her skin is burning. She has a hat to protect her face, but her sleeves are rolled to collect the breeze and she can see that her hands and forearms are growing pink. Her stomach rumbles, and she collects berries and plants to eat. They pick at food as they walk, a little slower for a while, and she tells him about her journey down the beach from the shipwreck. It seems a lifetime ago: a trauma that happened to somebody else. But it didn’t happen to somebody else, it happened to her. And if she could survive that, then this short journey will be easy. It gives her the strength and confidence to step up her pace. They make good time down towards the Noosa River.
Next time they stop, it is because Matthew needs to rest. A stone has worked its way into his boot. He sits on the ground and pulls both shoes off to give them a good shake, then sits back a minute to catch his breath. She remains standing, fanning herself with the now-useless ticket from Mooloolah Heads to Sydney. They are not f
ar from their destination now. An hour ago they began to follow the river inland, where the vegetation changed: thick and dark green, ferns to trudge over, the sharp-smelling eucalypts. The opposite bank, cleared for farming, bakes in the hot sun. Soon, no doubt, she will see the wharf. She feels light and happy, almost as if she could run the rest of the way.
Matthew stands and stretches, reaches out to pull her into a hug, then jumps, shouting with pain.
“What is it?” she asks, fear hot under her ribs.
He drops to the ground, grabbing his leg. “Snake,” he manages to gasp.
She falls to her knees next to him in time to see a dark shape slither off into the undergrowth. “What do we do? Is it poisonous?”
“I don’t know. I . . .” His face is white with fear.
“Let me see.”
He moves his hands and she can see two distinct puncture marks in his ankle, just above the bone. “Oh God, Matthew. What do we do? What do we do?”
“Find some vines or long lines of grass. We have to tie it off.”
She leaps to her feet and heads down near the riverbank on wobbling knees, yanks down two green vines from a tree and returns. He has fumbled in his pocket for his pen knife, and is scoring two cuts over the bite marks. Blood pours out. At his instruction, she ties one of the vines tightly below his knee, and one above.
“Tighter,” he says through gritted teeth.
She pulls tighter. His knee flushes a deep shade of red.
“Isabella,” he says, his hand gently but firmly on the back of her head, “you have to suction the poison out.”
“Suction the . . . ? How?”
“With your mouth. I can’t get my ankle that close to my own mouth. You have to do it. And quickly.”
Her heart hammers. She is certain she will somehow do it wrong, fail to save him. She crouches next to him and fastens her mouth over the bite. His skin tastes of salt and mud, but the overwhelming taste is metallic blood. She forms a seal with her lips and sucks as hard as she can. Her mouth fills up with his blood; her stomach lurches.
“Spit it out,” he says urgently. “Don’t swallow it.”
Lighthouse Bay Page 34
