The Thorn Birds (39 page)

“Yes, it is. You look so pretty tonight, Meghann.”

What was it about the color of her eyes? Grey wasn’t normally a color he cared for, too anemic, but looking at her grey eyes he could have sworn they held every color in the blue end of the spectrum, violet and indigo and the sky on a rich clear day, deep mossy green, a hint of tawny yellow. And they glowed like soft, half-opaque jewels, framed by those long curling lashes which glittered as if they had been dipped in gold. He reached out and delicately brushed his finger along the lashes of one eye, then solemnly looked down at its tip.

“Why, Luke! What’s the matter?”

“I couldn’t resist seeing for myself that you don’t have a pot of gold powder on your dressing table. Do you know you’re the only girl I’ve ever met with real gold on her eyelashes?”

“Oh!” She touched them herself, looked at her finger, laughed. “So I have! It doesn’t come off at all.” The champagne was tickling her nose and fizzing in her stomach; she felt wonderful.

“And real gold eyebrows that have the same shape as a church roof, and the most beautiful real gold hair… I always expect it to be hard like metal, yet it’s soft and fine like a baby’s…. And skin you must use gold powder on, it shines so…And the most beautiful mouth, just made for kissing…”.

She sat staring at him with that tender pink mouth slightly open, the way it had been on their first meeting; he reached out and took the empty cup from her.

“I think you need a little more champagne,” he said, filling it.

“I must admit this is nice, to stop and give ourselves a little break from the track. And thank you for thinking of asking Mr. MacQueen for the sandwiches and wine.”

The big Rolls engine ticked gently in the silence, warm air pouring almost soundlessly through the vents; two separate kinds of lulling noise. Luke unknotted his tie and pulled it off, opened his shirt collar. Their jackets were on the back seat, too warm for the car.

“Oh, that feels good! I don’t know who invented ties and then insisted a man was only properly dressed when he wore one, but if ever I meet him, I’ll strangle him with his own invention.”

He turned abruptly, lowered his face to hers, and seemed to catch the rounded curve of her lips exactly into his, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; though he didn’t hold her or touch her elsewhere she felt locked to him and let her head follow as he leaned back, drawing her forward onto his chest. His hands came up to clasp her head, the better to work at that dizzying, amazingly responsive mouth, drain it. Sighing, he abandoned himself to feeling nothing else, at home at last with those silky baby’s lips finally fitting his own. Her arm slid around his neck, quivering fingers sank into his hair, the palm of her other hand coming to rest on the smooth brown skin at the base of his throat. This time he didn’t hurry, though he had risen and hardened before giving her the second cup of champagne, just from looking at her. Not releasing her head, he kissed her cheeks, her closed eyes, the curving bones of the orbits beneath her brows, came back to her cheeks because they were so satiny, came back to her mouth because its infantile shape drove him mad, had driven him mad since the day he first saw her.

And there was her throat, the little hollow at its base, the skin of her shoulder so delicate and cool and dry…. Powerless to call a halt, almost beside himself with fear lest she should call a halt, he removed one hand from her head and plucked at the long row of buttons down the back of her dress, slid it off her obedient arms, then the straps of her loose satin slip. Face buried between her neck and shoulder, he passed the tips of his fingers down her bare back, feeling her startled little shivers, the sudden hard points to her breasts. He pushed his face lower in a blind, compulsive touch-search of one cold, cushioned surface, lips parted, pressing down, until they closed over taut ruched flesh. His tongue lingered for a dazed minute, then his hands clutched in agonized pleasure on her back and he sucked, nipped, kissed, sucked…. The old eternal impulse, his particular preference, and it never failed. It was so good, good, good,
goooooood
! He did not cry out, only shuddered for a wrenching, drenching moment, and swallowed in the depths of his throat.

Like a satiated nursling, he let the nipple pop out of his mouth, formed a kiss of boundless love and gratitude against the side of her breast, and lay utterly still except for the heaves of his breathing. He could feel her mouth in his hair, her hand down inside his shirt, and suddenly he seemed to recollect himself, opened his eyes. Briskly he sat up, pulled her slip straps up her arms, then her dress, and fastened all the buttons deftly.

“You’d better marry me, Meghann,” he said, eyes soft and laughing. “I don’t think your brothers would approve one little bit of what we just did.”

“Yes, I think I’d better too,” she agreed, lids lowered, a delicate flush in her cheeks.

“Let’s tell them tomorrow morning.”

“Why not? The sooner the better.”

“Next Saturday I’ll drive you into Gilly. We’ll see Father Thomas—I suppose you’d like a church wedding—arrange for the banns, and buy an engagement ring.”

“Thank you, Luke.”

Well, that was that. She had committed herself, there could be no turning back. In a few weeks or however long it took to call banns, she would marry Luke O’Neill. She would be…. Mrs. Luke O’Neill! How strange! Why did she say yes? Because
he
told me I must,
he
said I was to do it. But why? To remove
him
from danger? To protect himself, or me? Ralph de Bricassart, sometimes I think I hate you….

The incident in the car had been startling and disturbing. Not a bit like that first time. So many beautiful, terrifying sensations. Oh, the touch of his hands! That electrifying tugging at her breast sending vast widening rings clear through her! And he did it right at the moment her conscience had reared its head, told the mindless thing she seemed to have become that he was taking off her clothes, that she must scream, slap him, run away. No longer lulled and half senseless from champagne, from warmth, from the discovery that it was delicious to be kissed when it was done right, his first great gulping taking-in of her breast had transfixed her, stilled common sense, conscience and all thought of flight. Her shoulders came up off his chest, her hips seemed to subside against him, her thighs and that unnamed region at their top rammed by his squeezing hands against a ridge of his body hard as a rock, and she had just wanted to stay like that for the rest of her days, shaken to her soul and yawning empty, wanting…. Wanting what? She didn’t know. In the moment at which he had put her away from him she hadn’t wanted to go, could even have flown at him like a savage. But it had set the seal on her hardening resolve to marry Luke O’Neill. Not to mention that she was convinced he had done to her the thing which made babies start.

No one was very surprised at the news, and no one dreamed of objecting. The only thing which did startle them was Meggie’s adamant refusal to write and tell Bishop Ralph, her almost hysterical rejection of Bob’s idea that they invite Bishop Ralph to Drogheda and have a big house wedding. No, no, no! She had screamed it at them; Meggie who never raised her voice. Apparently she was miffed that he had never come back to see them, maintaining that her marriage was her own business, that if he didn’t have the common decency to come to Drogheda for no reason, she was not going to furnish him with an obligation he could not refuse.

So Fee promised not to say a word in her letters; she seemed not to care one way or the other, nor did she seem interested in Meggie’s choice of a husband. Keeping the books of a station as large as Drogheda was a full-time job. Fee’s records would have served a historian with a perfect description of life on a sheep station, for they didn’t simply consist of figures and ledgers. Every movement of every mob of sheep was rigidly described, the changes of the seasons, the weather each day, even what Mrs. Smith served for dinner. The entry in the log book for Sunday, July 22, 1934, said:
Sky clear, no cloud, temperature at dawn 34 degrees. No Mass today. Bob in, Jack out at Murrimbah with 2 stockmen, Hughie out at West Dam with 1 stockman, Beerbarrel droving 3-year wethers from Budgin to Winnemurra. Temperature high at 3 o’clock, 85 degrees. Barometer steady, 30.6 inches. Wind due west. Dinner menu corned beef, boiled potatoes, carrots and cabbage, then plum duff. Meghann Cleary is to marry Mr. Luke O’Neill, stockman, on Saturday August 25 at the Holy Cross Church, Gillanbone. Entered 9 o’clock evening, temperature 45 degrees, moon last quarter
.

Luke bought Meggie a diamond engagement ring, modest but quite pretty, its twin quarter-carat stones set in a pair of platinum hearts. The banns were called for noon on Saturday, August 25th, in the Holy Cross Church. This would be followed by a family dinner at the Hotel Imperial, to which Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat were naturally invited, though Jims and Patsy had been left in Sydney after Meggie said firmly that she couldn’t see the point in bringing them six hundred miles to witness a ceremony they didn’t really understand. She had received their letters of congratulations; Jims’s long, rambling and childlike, Patsy’s consisting of three words, “Lots of luck.” They knew Luke, of course, having ridden the Drogheda paddocks with him during their vacations.

Mrs. Smith was grieved at Meggie’s insistence on as small an affair as possible; she had hoped to see the only girl married on Drogheda with flags flying and cymbals clashing, days of celebration. But Meggie was so against a fuss she even refused to wear bridal regalia; she would be married in a day dress and an ordinary hat, which could double afterwards as her traveling outfit.

“Darling, I’ve decided where to take you for our honeymoon,” Luke said, slipping into a chair opposite hers the Sunday after they had made their wedding plans.

“Where?”

“North Queensland. While you were at the dressmaker I got talking to some chaps in the Imperial bar, and they were telling me there’s money to be made up in cane country, if a man’s strong and not afraid of hard work.”

“But Luke, you already have a good job here!”

“A man doesn’t feel right, battening on his in-laws. I want to get us the money to buy a place out in Western Queensland, and I want it before I’m too old to work it. A man with no education finds it hard to get high-paying work in this Depression, but there’s a shortage of men in North Queensland, and the money’s at least ten times what I earn as a stockman on Drogheda.”

“Doing what?”

“Cutting sugar cane.”

“Cutting sugar cane? That’s coolie labor”

“No, you’re wrong. Coolies aren’t big enough to do it as well as the white cutters, and besides, you know as well as I do that Australian law forbids the importation of black or yellow men to do slave labor or work for wages lower than a white man’s, take the bread out of a white Australian’s mouth. There’s, a shortage of cutters and the money’s terrific. Not too many blokes are big enough or strong enough to cut cane. But
I
am. It won’t beat me!”

“Does this mean you’re thinking of making our home in North Queensland, Luke?”

“Yes.”

She stared past his shoulder through the great bank of windows at Drogheda: the ghost gums, the Home Paddock, the stretch of trees beyond. Not to live on Drogheda! To be somewhere Bishop Ralph could never find her, to live without ever seeing him again, to cleave to this stranger sitting facing her so irrevocably there could be no going back…. The grey eyes rested on Luke’s vivid, impatient face and grew more beautiful, but unmistakably sadder. He sensed it only; she had no tears there, her lids didn’t droop, or the corners of her mouth. But he wasn’t concerned with whatever sorrows Meggie owned, for he had no intention of letting her become so important to him she caused him worry on her behalf. Admittedly she was something of a bonus to a man who had tried to marry Dot MacPherson of Bingelly, but her physical desirability and tractable nature only increased Luke’s guard over his own heart. No woman, even one as sweet and beautiful as Meggie Cleary, was ever going to gain sufficient power over him to tell him what to do.

So, remaining true to himself, he plunged straight into the main thing on his mind. There were times when guile was necessary, but in this matter it wouldn’t serve him as well as bluntness.

“Meghann, I’m an old-fashioned man,” he said.

She stared at him, puzzled. “Are you?” she asked, her tone implying: Does it matter?

“Yes,” he said. “I believe that when a man and woman marry, all the woman’s property should become the man’s. The way a dowry did in the old days. I know you’ve got a bit of money, and I’m telling you now that when we marry you’re to sign it over to me. It’s only fair you know what’s in my mind while you’re still single, and able to decide whether you want to do it.”

It had never occurred to Meggie that she would retain her money; she had simply assumed when she married it would become Luke’s, not hers. All save the most educated and sophisticated Australian women were reared to think themselves more or less the chattels of their men, and this was especially true of Meggie. Daddy had always ruled Fee and his children, and since his death Fee had deferred to Bob as his successor. The man owned the money, the house, his wife and his children. Meggie had never questioned his right to do so.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know signing anything was necessary, Luke. I thought that what was mine automatically became yours when we married.”

“It used to be like that, but those stupid drongos in Canberra stopped it when they gave women the vote. I want everything to be fair and square between us, Meghann, so I’m telling you now how things are going to be.”

She laughed, “It’s all right, Luke, I don’t mind.”

She took it like a good old-fashioned wife; Dot wouldn’t have given in so readily. “How much have you got?” he asked.

“At the moment, fourteen thousand pounds. Every year I get two thousand more.”

He whistled. “Fourteen thousand pounds! Phew! That’s a lot of money, Meghann. Better to have me look after it for you. We can see the bank manager next week, and remind me to make sure everything coming in in the future gets put in my name, too. I’m not going to touch a penny of it, you know that. It’s to buy our station later on. For the next few years we’re both going to work hard, and save every penny we earn. All right?”