Sunset Ridge (21 page)

‘Evans,' Madeleine repeated. ‘You don't think old Ross Evans is related to that boy, do you, George?'

‘At this point, anything is possible,' George declared.

‘Here we go. Julie Jackson started employment here in the last quarter of 1918.' Madeleine squirreled her eyebrows together. ‘Look at this − it's another entry. Isn't two thousand pounds a lot of money, George?'

‘It was back then,' he agreed.

‘Well, either someone was owed a lot of money or it was a big purchase, not that we'll ever know. The amount is categorised as an incidental expense. And here's another one for five hundred pounds.'

Removing his glasses George sat them on the table. ‘Considering all the other entries are so carefully itemised − food, clothing, saddlery items, et cetera − it does make you wonder what these payments were for.'

 

Later, as she lay on the bed in her grandfather's room and stared at the ceiling, Madeleine thought more about the ledger entries, which they had spent a number of hours going through. The two thousand pounds appeared to be a one-off payment, but each cash-flow book from 1918 up to 1925 showed a withdrawal of five hundred pounds at the same time every year during that period. Madeleine, George and Rachael agreed that these were substantial amounts to be paying out after the war, especially when the world was heading into a depression. George matched stock numbers from paddock books with livestock sale records from the same period and concluded that the property's financial situation began to decline in the late 1930s, and within a decade Sunset Ridge was in serious trouble. He recalled a comment that Jude had overheard her parents make about their great-grandmother Lily Harrow – of her having worn the pants in the family. If that were the case, George suggested, it was possible that as Lily's age increased and her health declined, her role in running Sunset Ridge might have lessened and her son simply may not have been capable of managing the property. Either that or as David Harrow aged he grew less inclined to be a farmer and became more interested in his painting.

There was a substantial gap between the unknown commissions from 1918 and when David Harrow began painting his first landscape, titled
Deliverance
, in 1935, although it was possible that other works could come to light from this lost period in his life, it was equally plausible that David Harrow had simply ceased painting for nearly seventeen years. Why? Was it a combination of things? Had the war affected him so much, did marriage and the business of running the property truly take up all his time? It was possible.

‘Your great-grandparents hated your grandfather painting.'

Ross Evans's words came to her unbidden. Sitting up, she dangled her legs over the side of the bed. His statement didn't help Madeleine with the post-war gap in her grandfather's life, but what if Ross Evans was correct and G.W. and Lily Harrow didn't approve of his talents from an early age? Madeleine knew that David Harrow had begun drawing before the war – the river sketches hanging in Jude's apartment were evidence of this – but what if he had hidden his creative side from his parents in the early days? He was a bush boy raised to work the land; maybe his interest in art was considered a little too feminine, and not for public display.

‘It couldn't be that easy, could it?' she asked herself. Within seconds she was on her knees tapping the bottom of the desk, removing drawers and checking for false panels. Nothing. Sitting on the floor, Madeleine glanced at the tongue-and-groove walls and then very slowly she looked up to the manhole in the corner of the ceiling. Her mouth filled with saliva as she dragged the stacked storage boxes and shoe-filled milk crate out of the way and positioned the desk chair beneath the manhole. She grabbed an old hockey stick and clambered up.

‘Here goes nothing.' She jabbed at the wood panel, loosening it, and then jabbed again. The board flipped sideways, dislodging dirt and leaves, mouse-droppings and paper. Madeleine dropped the hockey stick, rubbed dust from her eyes and looked at the floor. She couldn't believe it. Climbing down from the chair, she quickly unfolded the two pieces of paper. They were a little mouse-eaten and stained but the charcoal drawings were complete. One sketch was of a woman, all angular shapes and distorted lines; the other was of a chair that appeared to have been pulled apart and then reassembled. They displayed all the hallmarks of Cubism and were both initialled with the letters D.H. and dated 1916.

Madeleine let out a scream of excitement that brought George and Rachael running.

 

Madeleine had always found the village of Banyan an uninspiring destination. Comprised of four short streets, not much had changed in the past hundred years; the original three churches, hotel and post office had been classed as historical buildings.

The heat from the bitumen rose up in a wave as Madeleine left the car and walked across the deserted street. She was still reeling with excitement from having found the two sketches yesterday and she had left George and Rachael checking every crevice, bit of old furniture and manhole in the homestead in the hope of discovering more. The two sketches were wonderful early works, but Madeleine had no way of knowing if her grandfather had had access to art magazines from the period and she could therefore not be sure how much of his skill was raw talent or emulation. If they were drawn without outside influences, then these two early attempts at Cubism would have matched the innovative talents of the greats such as Picasso – an incredible achievement for a young isolated bush boy.

Now here she was, flush with excitement and hoping that a trip to Banyan might dislodge further snippets of information about the Harrow family, specifically her grandfather. A worn plaque noted the destruction of the Banyan newspaper offices from a fire in the 1960s, an event that also destroyed the local court documents from the 1880s that were housed there. It seemed she would have to be satisfied with Sonia's newspaper clippings, which included an opinion piece from 1916 commenting on all three Harrow boys being punished for Luther's crime. She was beginning to form a clear impression of her tyrannical great-grandfather.

Turning left, Madeleine walked down the street to the original post office, which was now a museum. Australia Post had shut up shop some years earlier, citing cost constraints, and the old building was now decked out in a creamy yellow with a brown trim, its signage noting that it was once a changing post for the Cobb & Co. line. Inside, the original mail counter was covered with souvenir teaspoons, tea towels and enlarged laminated photographs of the Banyan River, which in a good season was still a popular spot for fishing enthusiasts. Any spare wall space was taken up with old black-and-white pictures of the village: the time-stained photographs showed a busy place, with varied shopfronts and streets teeming with people and horse-drawn carts.

At the rear of the former post office the building had been extended, and Madeleine was intrigued to find a not-to-scale model of a Cobb & Co. coach laden with mailbags and luggage, with a dressmaker's dummy inside decked out in period costume. Various paraphernalia associated with the turn of the nineteenth century lined the walls, including pictures of a steam engine that had once milled timber in the local lumber yard; and lanterns and ladders and countless other items of hardware were grouped under a sign that said Lawrence Ironmongers.

‘What do you think of our museum, then?' The woman was short and had a weather-beaten look. Madeleine guessed she was anywhere between forty and fifty. She held a clear plastic container, the label on which stated that a gold-coin donation would be appreciated. She curled red-and-black-streaked hair around a nail-bitten finger, nodding when Madeleine dropped some coins into the jar.

‘Love it,' Madeleine replied. ‘I'm wondering, do you have any information on the old families of the district?'

‘Sure thing.' They walked to the front counter, where the woman handed Madeleine an A4 photocopied screed. ‘Mostly that's on the big families − you know, them with money. The squatters, well, they came first. They're all in there, like the Cummins family. They're the best known in these parts, after the Wangallon Gordons, of course. At one stage the Cumminses gave Waverly Station a run for their money. You know, them that bred the ram that was on the shilling coin for nearly thirty years?'

‘Of course.' Madeleine had no idea what the woman was talking about.

‘Anyway, the Cumminses are still here. They bought up a fair bit of land early in the piece and they've managed to hold onto it.'

‘Anything else you can tell me? Are there any interesting stories about any of the properties, or townspeople – you know, stories from the past?'

‘Well,' she said as she lit a cigarette and leaned confidentially across the counter, ‘there's a place here called Sunset Ridge.' She blew a puff of smoke over her shoulder. ‘People around here reckon the property is bad luck. One of the old people out there lost some of the land in a bet years ago. He was a cranky old bastard, which is probably why his three sons were always getting into scrapes with the townies. Eventually one of them nearly went to gaol, so the old man locked them all up, and then they ran away to the war.'

‘Was there a woman involved?' Madeleine tried to sound gossipy.

‘Isn't there always? And she was a real looker in her day, Corally was. People around here thought a fair bit of her. She came from nothing – lived near the cemetery in a hut with a dirt floor – and she tried to make something of herself. Every boy for miles about was in love with her.'

Madeleine nodded, thinking how different a picture this was to that painted by Sonia.

The woman took another good drag of the cigarette and dropped the butt in an empty beer bottle. ‘Anyway, the story doesn't end there. There was a
murder
out there too, later on, so they say. Then the male line eventually dried up and a daughter married a bloke by the name of Boyne. Ashley Boyne.' Madeleine tried to remain calm, but her stomach began to churn as the woman leaned further across the desk and continued. ‘He wasn't from around here – he'd met the daughter at uni, I think, and he came out with her when she inherited the place. He was a drunk, apparently, and there he was out on this big spread. The place was handed to him on a platter, but they say he couldn't take to it, couldn't handle it. Eventually he killed himself. What a loser.'

Madeleine nodded numbly, wondering how much truth was contained in the comment about her father's drinking. Was alcohol the cause of his mood swings, or did he drink to self-medicate? Either way, Madeleine had never realised that he had drunk; maybe it was just gossip.

‘After that the place was locked up and leased for ages. There's a son there now, married to a hoity-toity wife. Personally I don't know how anyone can live out there with a history like that.'

Madeleine digested all this information like she was eating a raw egg, feeling an anger welling inside her at the woman's proprietorial attitude towards the Harrow family history. She forced herself to remain calm as she asked: ‘And the artist? Didn't David Harrow live there?'

The woman waved away a sticky black fly. ‘Yeah, he painted, it's true, although me ma tells me no one liked him much 'cause he was friendly with Germans. Anyway, he couldn't have been very important.' The woman flicked a strand of red hair from her brow. ‘So, are you a visitor, then?'

Madeleine straightened her shoulders and stated: ‘I'm Mad­eleine Harrow-Boyne.' She didn't wait for the woman's stuttered apology; instead she left the museum and crossed the street, making for the shady Box tree, where she concentrated on calming her roaring heart. Diagonally opposite was the courthouse, to her right a peeling signpost that directed visitors to the site of the old blacksmith's forge and the path to the Banyan River. Madeleine's brain hurt as the information percolated through her skull, raising questions and shattering long-formed ideas. Was her father an alcoholic? And what was this about murder? She needed to speak with George, immediately.