The Touch (38 page)

“If I have time in Sydney with Lee, yes,” said Ruby.

He kissed her hands, her neck, her lips, her hair. “You can have anything you want as long as we’re out of Kinross and I’m out of Elizabeth’s clutches. Since the girls have grown up, she’s done nothing but nag, nag, nag.”

“I know. She has a bit with me, even,” Ruby agreed. “If she could, I think she’d put Nell and Anna into a convent.” She made a small purr of pleasure. “Oh, she’ll get over being so clucky, it’s just a passing thing, but it might be nice not to be one of her targets.”

WHEN ELIZABETH heard an expurgated version of this from Ruby the following day, she looked aghast.

“Oh, Ruby, surely I’m not that bad!” she protested.

“Very nearly, and it’s not like you,” said Ruby. “Truly, Elizabeth, you have to get over this obsession with protecting the virtue of your girls. The last eighteen months have been a hard time of it. I know it isn’t every mother has two girls turn into young women so quickly, but they’re perfectly safe in this town, I can assure you. If Nell were a flibbertigibbet you might have some cause, but she’s absolutely level-headed and not a scrap in love with love. As for Anna—Anna’s a grown-up child! Your constant carping has driven Alexander away, including from Nell. Who won’t thank you if she finds out why he’s in such a lather to leave.”

“But the Company!” Elizabeth cried.

“The Company will manage,” said Ruby, suddenly reluctant to impart the news that Lee was coming home.

“And you’re really going with Alexander?” Elizabeth asked, sounding wistful.

Ruby gasped. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous!”

“No, no, of course I’m not jealous! I just wondered what it would be like to travel with someone I adored.”

“One day,” said Ruby, kissing Elizabeth on the cheek, “I do so much hope that you find out.”

IT WAS A VERY chastened Elizabeth who farewelled Alexander and Ruby at the train station. She has gone back into her shell, thought Ruby sadly, and isn’t it an indictment of Alexander and me that her only venture into the world of reality has been due to concern over her girls? The worst part is that it’s misplaced—neither of her girls is in need of her concern.

“Did you tell Elizabeth that Lee’s coming home?” Ruby asked Alexander as the train drew out.

“No, I assumed that you had,” he said, surprised.

“I didn’t.”

“Why?”

Ruby shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be one of those newfangled clairvoyants. Besides, what does it matter? Elizabeth takes absolutely no interest in the Company—or in Lee.”

“That upsets you, doesn’t it?”

“Bloody oath it does! How can anyone not like my darling jade kitten?”

“Since I happen to like him very much, I honestly don’t know.”

WITH ALEXANDER gone, Nell immersed herself in her books, determined now to matriculate at the end of next year and go up to university at the very early age of fifteen. An ambition that appalled her mother, who opposed it adamantly. To be told that it was really none of her business.

“If you want someone to pick on,” Nell flared, “then pick on Anna! In case you hadn’t realized it, Anna’s getting very naughty lately—give her half a chance and she’s off.”

As this was a legitimate criticism, Elizabeth bit her tongue and sought Jade to see what could be done to discipline Anna.

“Nothing, Miss Lizzy,” said Jade gloomily. “My baby Anna is not a baby anymore, she doesn’t want to be kept to the house. I try to go with her, but she’s so—so cunning!”

Who ever would have thought it? wondered Elizabeth. Anna had become curiously independent, as if learning to wash and dress had sprung some secret door in her mind that, once opened, told her that she was able to look after herself. Between her courses she was a happy child, and not difficult to amuse; give her a jigsaw puzzle or some building blocks and she would play with them for hours on end. But once she turned twelve, which she did that year Alexander took Ruby away, she began a game of eluding her keepers, scampering off into the garden and hiding. Only her inability to keep her glee to herself—she chuckled very loudly—enabled Jade or Elizabeth to find her.

Elizabeth, however, was smarting from Ruby’s judgment that she was over-protective, compounded when Alexander also gave her a piece of his mind just before he left.

“All she does is go into the garden, Elizabeth, so leave her alone, let up on her a little!”

“Unless she’s curbed, she’ll wander farther afield.”

“When she does is time to act” was Alexander’s verdict.

Now, three weeks after Alexander and Ruby had departed, Anna had been found down at the poppet heads just as the noon shift was changing. Recognizing her because Elizabeth still took her to church on Sundays, the miners kindly yet firmly turned her over to Summers, who brought her up to the house.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with her, Mr. Summers,” Elizabeth said, wondering if a hard slap would do any good. “We try to keep a constant eye on her, but all we have to do is turn our backs for an instant, and she’s off somewhere.”

“I’ll spread the word, Lady Kinross,” Jim Summers said, hiding his exasperation; his time was precious, he had better things to do than police Anna. “If anyone sees her wandering, they’re to bring her to me or to you here at the house. Will that do?”

“Yes, of course. Thank you,” said Elizabeth, relinquishing the slap-for-punishment alternative as worse than useless.

And so it had to be left. With both Alexander and Ruby away, Summers was the man in authority.

BUT NOT FOR long. Elizabeth was marching an unrepentant and giggling Anna back to the house when Lee walked around the hedge from the cable car landing. She stopped in her tracks, staring as if mesmerized. Anna emitted a squeal and slipped from Elizabeth’s slackened grasp.

“Lee! Lee!” the girl called, running to him.

The scene looked a little like a man trying to restrain a gangling hound-sized puppy, thought Elizabeth, gladder to see Lee than she had ever thought possible. She moved across the grass, a smile plastered to her mouth.

“Down, Anna, down!” she said, achieving a laugh.

“It is a bit that way, isn’t it?” Lee asked, laughing too.

Jade appeared to take custody of Anna, who was reluctant to go at first, then submitted to the inevitable in her sunny way.

The youth was definitely a man now—he must have turned twenty-five a month ago. Though he had that smooth Chinese skin that resists ageing, there was a small sharp crease on either side of his fine mouth that hadn’t been there when last she saw him in England, and his eyes seemed wiser, sadder.

“Dr. Costevan, I presume?” she asked, holding out a hand.

“Lady Kinross,” he said, taking it and kissing it.

That she hadn’t expected, didn’t quite know how to react; she removed it from his clasp as casually as she could and began to walk toward the house with him.

“I take it that was Anna?” he asked.

“Yes, that was my problem child.”

“Problem child?”

“She runs away every chance she gets.”

“I see. That must be very worrying for you.”

Someone on her side! Elizabeth stopped to look at him, then wished she hadn’t; she had forgotten what looking directly into those extraordinary eyes was like. Rather winded, she took an audible gulp of air before replying. “Jade and I are beside ourselves,” she said. “It wasn’t too bad when all she did was hide in the garden, but recently she had to be returned from the poppet heads. I suppose next it will be Kinross town.”

“And you can’t have that, I agree. Are you short of Wong sisters, is that it?”

“Jasmine and Peach Blossom have gone with your mother, but I have Jade, Pearl and Silken Flower as well as Butterfly Wing. It sounds a lot, but the trouble is that Anna knows them all so well. What I need is someone she won’t take any notice of. Jade suggested the youngest Wong, Peony, but I can’t ask a twenty-two-year-old to take responsibility for Anna.”

“Leave it to me, then. I’ll ask my father for a woman Anna doesn’t know and who won’t fall for her tricks. Unless Anna has changed since England, once she gets used to having what seems a block of wood in her vicinity, she’ll behave as if she were alone,” said Lee, holding the door open.

“Oh, Lee, I would be so grateful!”

“Think nothing of it,” he said, and turned to go.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Elizabeth asked, dismayed.

“I don’t think so. You have no chaperone.”

“Oh, really!” Elizabeth cried, color flooding into her face. “Considering what my husband and your mother are up to at this moment, that’s ridiculous! Come in, sit down with me and have a cup of tea, for pity’s sake!”

His head went to one side as he regarded her through half-closed eyelids, then Ruby’s dimples popped out in either cheek and he laughed. “Just this once, then.”

So they sat in the conservatory over tea, sandwiches and cakes while Elizabeth plied him with questions. After all that, he had taken a doctorate in mechanical engineering, he told her, though he had also done some geology.

“And I worked for a while in a stockbroking firm in an attempt to understand how the share market functions.”

“Is that useful?” Elizabeth asked.

“Not a scrap,” he said cheerfully. “I discovered that there is only one way to learn business, and that is by doing it. My real education happened at Alexander’s hands, going around with him whenever I had a chance. Now he trusts me to administer the Apocalypse and Apocalypse Enterprises in his absence, though I gather that Sophia Dewy’s husband is also very shrewd in business, and has just been employed by us.”

“More on the accounting side,” said Elizabeth, pleased to be able to contribute something. “He works out of Dunleigh rather than Kinross—poor Constance has never recovered from Charles’s death, and her daughters are very protective of her.”

“He can take the books home, that’s true, but if Sydney’s telephone exchange would only join the march of progress, he could do far more from Dunleigh,” Lee said.

“We do have telephones in Kinross, but with no telephones in Bathurst or Lithgow, it’s purely local.”

“Trust Alexander to be in the forefront of the march!”

When he rose to go Elizabeth looked regretful. “Will you come to dinner?” she asked.

“No.”

“Even if I produce Nell as a chaperone?”

“Even if Nell is there, no, thank you. I also have to keep an eye on my mother’s hotel.”

She watched him walk across the terrace with an ache in her breast, as if some wonderful treat had suddenly been snatched from her without warning. Lee was back, but had made it clear that he didn’t intend to spend any time in her company. Just when she had found sufficient confidence to thaw a little. Just when she felt sure enough of herself to treat him as a friend rather than the dangerously alien creature who had invaded The Pool. Oh, it was too bad!

HE WAS, however, true to his word; he sent her Dragonfly, an elderly Chinese woman as inscrutable as all Orientals are supposed to be. Wherever Anna was, there also was Dragonfly, so unobtrusive that within two days Anna forgot her presence.

“A perfect watchdog,” Elizabeth said to Lee over the telephone, since she saw nothing of him at the house. “I can’t thank you enough, Lee, truly. Dragonfly gives Jade and me a much needed rest, so that when she has her days off, we’re quite capable of taking over. Please come to morning tea sometime.”

“Sometime,” he said, and rang off.

“Sometime, never,” said Elizabeth to herself with a sigh.

AS FAR AS Lee was concerned, “never” was the word that said it all. When he had come around the hedge and seen Elizabeth grimly shepherding a younger edition of herself, Lee’s hopes that he had finally shaken free of Elizabeth vanished as if they had never been. The feelings rolled over him like a wave—love, pity, desire, despair. Not trusting himself, he had refused to drink tea with her, only to come to a sudden understanding of her loneliness that forced him out of common decency to say yes. It was there in her eyes, in the set of her face, in the way she held herself—terrible loneliness! Yet that one pleasant tea with her found him teetering on the brink of a declaration that he knew she would reject with fear and finality. Therefore he couldn’t see her again unless others were present, and such occasions were rare with Alexander away.

He hadn’t wanted to come home, but acknowledged Alexander’s right to command him; after doing all that could be done at a distance, it was high time that he proved himself at the nucleus of the Apocalypse Enterprises network. Alexander was forty-six and clearly seeking a successor who would free him to travel, to perform a less onerous duty for the Company.

When his mother and Alexander had met him in Sydney, he saw their transparent happiness at being together, at the prospect of going far away together, and his heart smote him. By now he knew Alexander’s story—the ostensibly legitimate birth that hid his bastardy, his mother’s unresolved secret, his utter determination to acquire wealth and power, the pleasure he took in that wealth and power. But of his relationship with Elizabeth he said nothing worth hearing; all Lee knew was what his mother had told him, that Elizabeth could not be allowed to have children and thus lived in Alexander’s house as his wife without actually being his wife. But that didn’t answer the mystery; in a town with so many Chinese, Lee knew that either Alexander or Elizabeth could have found a way to enjoy conjugal relations without pregnancy. Though they were famous for multiplying, the Chinese also knew how not to multiply if they so chose. Especially the educated ones. Certainly Hung Chee at the Chinese medicine shop. Nature was rich in abortifacients, if not in things that prevented conception.

His love for Elizabeth had sensitized him to Alexander’s every unspoken expression of face, eyes, body, when he talked of his wife. And those unspoken expressions were of bewilderment, of pain. Not of an all-pervasive love, no—Alexander felt that for Ruby, Lee had no doubt of it. Yet he wasn’t indifferent to Elizabeth. Certainly he didn’t hate her or loathe her. Lee was always left with the impression that Alexander had given up on Elizabeth, which meant that the nature of their relationship must stem from her. No man could be indifferent to her, she was too beautiful for that—inside as well as outside. Beautiful in a way that drew men rather than repelled them; her aura was of unattainability, and that brought out Man the Hunter, Man the Conqueror. But not in Lee, who ached for Elizabeth in a less primitive way. Underneath the aloof composure he had twice glimpsed a panicked creature caught in a trap. What he yearned to do was set her at liberty, even if freedom meant she continued to regard him as the nothing she had once called him.