The Touch (14 page)

Until he went to America, Alexander had never paid much attention to music, simply because he never heard any. But in San Francisco he had gone to a concert of Chopin only because he was passing the hall, and discovered in himself a passion for music. Since then, he went to every concert in every place he could find one—St. Louis, New York, London, Paris, Venice and Milan, Constantinople—even in Cairo, where he heard the first performance of Aida, Verdi’s commemoration of the opening of the Suez Canal. He didn’t care what kind of music it was—opera, symphony, instrumental solo or the songs everybody sang in places like Costevan’s. Music, all music.

And here, in Hill End, was a master pianist playing “Lorena” and singing the same wistful, melancholy verses he had heard sung by all kinds of people during his American odyssey, usually without accompaniment, or to the thin, plaintive strains of a concertina or harmonica.

“We loved each other then, Lorena,

More than we ever dared to tell;

And what we might have been, Lorena,

Had but our loving prosper’d well.

But then, ’tis past—the years are gone,

I’ll not call up their shadowy forms;

I’ll say to them, ‘Lost years, sleep on!

Sleep on! Nor heed life’s pelting storm.’

I’ll say to them, ‘Lost years, sleep on!

Sleep on! Nor heed life’s pelting storm.’ ”

When she finished singing that last verse in her honeyed, strong contralto, the weeping miners applauded hysterically, begged for more, wouldn’t let her go.

I could love her for the music alone, thought Alexander, and beat a cowering retreat to the Blue Room before he said something to her that later he would regret.

Someone had lit a fire; May was cold after dark in Hill End, for it was drawing close to winter. Thank God for that! I don’t have to sleep in my underwear, the room is warm. He stoked the grate with more coal—coal, how interesting! Where did it come from? This wasn’t carboniferous country and there was no railway closer than the siding at Rydal, a terrible drag away.

Perhaps because he had slept during the late afternoon, he wasn’t very tired; he dug in one saddlebag for his Plutarch, adjusted the kerosene lamp so that he could see to read, and climbed, naked, into a bed that had very recently felt the touch of a warming pan.

Only when the door opened did he look up, startled; he had locked it, he knew. But of course the owner of the premises had a key to every room. Ruby came in wearing a lacy, frilly robe that parted as she walked to the bed to reveal a pair of long, shapely legs and feet pushed into feathered, high-heeled mules. Her fabulous mane of hair tumbled about her, almost as long as Lady Godiva’s.

She peered over his shoulder to see what he was reading, and squeaked. “It’s gobbledygook!” she said.

“No, it’s Greek. Plutarch’s life of Pericles.”

She shoved his body aside with her hip and sat on the edge of the bed, undoing the ribbon that held her peignoir together. “You’re an enigma, Alexander Kinross. See? I do know some big words, even if I never got much of an education. But you must be a real swell. Greek, eh? Latin too, I suppose?”

“Yes. And French. And Italian,” he said, unable to keep the pride out of his voice.

“And you’ve been to a lot more places than California, I’ll bet. The minute I set eyes on you, I knew you were a swell.” The ribbons were undone; she slipped the robe from her shoulders to bare her breasts, which were full, high, perfectly shaped. Nor did her waist need much nipping in from that corset; it was small and her belly flat.

“Yes, I’ve been to many places,” he said with more calm than he felt. “Have you come to seduce me, or just to tempt me?”

“You’ve been around the Bible-bashers somewhere, Alexander.”

“I grew up in a nest of them.”

“It shows, though you don’t like being told that. I want you to make love to me—and don’t you dare say a word about the price! When you’re the madam of a brothel, you pay other girls to do the humping, you don’t do it yourself. I’m so fussy that it’s over nine years since I had a bit, so feel honored, sport.”

“Lee’s father, you mean. What do I have in common with him?”

“If you’d sneered when you said that, I’d clout you, but you didn’t. I like the way Chinese look, and some of them are very handsome—tall too. You don’t look Chinese, but you are real dark—a bit like Old Nick.” She chuckled and threw the robe on the floor. “I’ll bet you’ve deliberately cultivated the devilish appearance, Alexander Kinross.” The green eyes glowed. “Well, how about it? In the mood for love?”

Even if his mind wasn’t, his body certainly was, and even an Alexander Kinross couldn’t always rule what the Presbyterian in him called his baser instincts. Though Ruby could have induced a saint to make love to her, and he was no saint. There had, of course, been other women since Honoria Brown: women of diverse nationality, appearance, circumstance. All of them with that special, intangible something that some women possessed, but most did not. And Ruby was irresistible.

She was gorgeous, passionate, sensuous and skilled; either the mysterious Sung Chow was a master of the art, or, despite her long abstinence, Ruby had had plenty of experience. Alexander wallowed in her, his fastidiousness thrust from all conscious thought. And if he knew that he had started something that would be impossible to terminate, he didn’t think of that either.

“Why have you not given yourself since Sung Chow?” he asked, winding her hair around one arm.

“I’ve spent them here in Hill End, and I practice the old saying—never shit in your own nest.”

“Then why me, in Hill End?”

“You won’t stay in Hill End, you’re a rolling stone. A day or two more, and you’ll be gone.”

“So you wouldn’t want to continue this with me?”

“Bloody hell, of course I would!” She sat up indignantly. “But you won’t be here. Just come back to see me sometimes, eh? It has to be you comes to me, because I can’t pick up my traps like a Gypsy and trail along behind you—I have a son to educate. I need my business.”

“How much is this school going to cost?”

“Two thousand pounds a year. He’ll have to stay there in the holidays, you see. Some of the other boys stay as well, so he’ll have company. And Wo Fat.”

“That’s a twenty thousand pound investment in an unknown quantity,” said Alexander’s canny side.

“I am not a stingy Scot like you, Mr. Kinross! If you open your wallet I’ll bet the moths fly out, but I’m not like that. I come from a long line of thieves and spendthrifts. And I’m a woman. What men I give my heart to, I’ll beggar myself to see prosper. You’re a man, one of the lords of Creation. Other men see the iron in you, and surrender to your power. You must know you have it, because you use it. But my only power is in how I look—what other power can a woman have? Yet I’ve got a good business brain, and I’ve used it to exploit my only asset.” Her breath caught on a sigh. “After, that is, I learned how not to be exploited.”

“How old are you, Ruby?”

“Thirty. If I was peddling myself, I’d be looking at five more years of good money, then I’d dwindle to a raddled, clapped-out old tart lucky to get sixpence. Well, I saw that early, and decided to be the one running other girls. There’s no age limit on that, I can only get bigger and better.”

“Until Hill End becomes an upright community of Bible-bashers because the gold is a memory,” he said. “Then you’ll have to move on to some other wide-open mining town.”

“I’ve taken that into account,” said Ruby Costevan. “If you find gold somewhere, how about remembering me?”

“How could I forget you?”

FOR THE NEXT few days Alexander explored the length of the Turon River, amazed at how like the Californian gold country it was. Though this was a much smaller stream flowing from heights that weren’t feet deep in winter snow, or even drenched with a heavy rainfall. New South Wales was a dry place away from the narrow coast, which hampered the mining of gold lodged in gravel. In California they had wasted millions upon millions of gallons of water—more wasted, probably, than had ever existed here. A passing botanist with a thick German accent took a room at Costevan’s, and explained to him that Australian trees and plants in general were designed to survive a semi-waterless environment.

From Ruby, who had been on the goldfields since the alluvial rush of 1851, he learned that all the rivers flowing west from the Great Divide (an imposing title for a comparatively low range of mountains) in this segment of New South Wales had held alluvial gold—the Turon, the Fish, the Abercrombie, the Lachlan, the Bell, the Macquarie. None, when it came to water volume, in the league of the huge deep American rivers. There were times, she said, when drought turned them into a string of waterholes and not a blade of grass was left for a sheep or cow to eat.

But he couldn’t smell a new reef anywhere on the Turon; its wealth had already been plundered.

When he asked Ruby if he might take Lee along on his last day in Hill End, a Saturday, she agreed immediately. He had thought to sit the boy in front of him on his own mare, but Lee turned out to have his own pony and was a good rider.

It proved to be a wonderful day; the more he saw of Lee, the more he liked him. Perhaps loved him. And, stingy Scot though he was, he found himself longing to help ensure that Lee got his precious English education.

The child talked frankly of his coming separation, with a maturity and fatalism that Alexander found sorrowful.

“I’ll write to Mum every week, and she’s given me a diary ten years long—it’s a huge book! Then I’ll always know exactly how long it will be before I see her again.”

“Perhaps she’ll be able to visit you in England.”

The exquisite face darkened. “No, Alexander, she can’t do that. To them, I’ll be a Chinese prince with a Russian mother of high estate. Mum says that if I’m to keep up the fiction, I must live it as if it were absolutely real. Believe in it.”

“She could pretend to be a friend of your parents.”

He actually laughed. “Oh, come, Alexander! Does Mum look as if she’s the friend of princes and princesses?”

“She might, if she tried.”

“No,” said Lee firmly, squaring his slight shoulders. “If I saw her, it would all come apart. The only possible way we can get through this is not to see each other at all. We’ve talked about it over and over.”

“Then the pair of you are best friends with no illusions.”

“Of course,” he said, surprised at Alexander’s denseness.

“I may have to visit England from time to time in years to come. Would you object if I came to see you?—properly dressed like a Scottish gentleman, naturally. The odd thing is that it’s no social impediment in England to have a Scots accent. They regard us as foreigners who’ve shed far too much English blood, which gives us all kinds of advantages in dealing with them.”

Eyes sparkling, Lee smiled joyously. “Oh, Alexander, that would be first-rate! Please!”

SO WHEN Alexander Kinross rode away from Hill End as the church bells were summoning Ruby’s foes to Sunday service, his mind was filled with images of Ruby Costevan and her formidable son. The boy was even more intelligent than his mother believed, though his inclinations lay in engineering, not in the cultural subjects she yearned for. Once he discovered that Alexander knew all about engines, their ride up the Turon became questions and answers. This, he thought as Hill End disappeared, is the kind of son I hope to have when I find me a Drummond wife, as I must.

Back in Bathurst he found Jim Summers immersed in studying bookkeeping; the requirements on his list had been attended to, either sat in the backyard or were on order. The housekeeper was a young widow named Maggie Murphy; her education was sparse, but she cleaned house with energy and skill, and she cooked plain but delicious meals. The way she looked at Summers and the way he looked at her told Alexander which way the wind was blowing, but when Summers didn’t mention his intentions, Alexander didn’t ask. When the time came, he’d be told.

His next expedition was to the Abercrombie River, with a stop on the Fish River en route. There were a very few and very small gold hamlets; otherwise the country, he found out, was extremely wild, virtually unsettled.

The only village was Oberon, atop the Great Divide on the border between the granite intrusions to the west and the dissected sandstone plateau to the east. At one point before reaching Oberon he looked over the most magnificent valley he had ever seen, but its thousand-foot cliffs were Triassic sandstone, and their bases held coal and oil shale, not gold. The residents of Oberon catered to a small number of intrepid tourists who wanted to visit the Fish River caves, something that had to be done on horseback over a rough-hewn bridle path. However, he was assured, the caves were worth the journey, a vast limestone fairyland of stalactites and stalagmites. No cave lover, Alexander rode on.

Realizing that this expedition was going to be a long one, he led a pack horse (mules were impossible to come by) and ate sparingly; of game there was none, since he didn’t fancy dining off the little rock kangaroos which abounded. No deer or rabbits, and no edible plants. The Colt revolver sat on his hip unused. He had a map he had acquired in Bathurst, but it was singularly devoid of names or information. When, many miles to the south of Oberon, he came upon a small but strongly flowing river that headed west, he could find no sign of it on the map. The lofty highlands around it weren’t cleared, nor did he find excremental evidence of sheep or cattle sent up here to graze.

Oh, but his nose was filled with the smell of gold! So he turned and followed the stream westward until he arrived at the top of a cascade. The water didn’t spill over a sheer cliff in a drifting veil of mist, it leaped and frothed from shelf to shelf of a very steep slope for perhaps a thousand feet. Below it was a broad valley; the river gurgled across the flat and meandered off between gentler, more rounded hills strewn with granite outcrops and boulders.

Someone had partially cleared the valley and the gentler hills, but for grazing, Alexander presumed, as there was no sign of gold workings anywhere. A consultation with his map and a sight of the sun through his sextant revealed that, whatever else it was, this whole area was unalienated Crown Land.