The Touch (7 page)

“I like them very much, but not as much as this.”

“This is a conservatory—so named because in cold climates it conserves frost-vulnerable plants from death during winter.”

He was dressed in his skins, as Elizabeth had privately christened them, his hat dumped on a spare chair.

“Are you going out?”

“I’m home, so from now on you’ll not see much of me until the evening. Mrs. Summers will take you over the house, and you must tell me what you don’t like about it. It’s your house far more than it’s mine—you’re the one will do most of the living in it. I don’t suppose you play the piano?”

“No. We couldn’t afford a piano.”

“Then I’ll have you taught. Music is one of my passions, so you’ll have to learn to play well. Do you sing?”

“I can carry a tune.”

“Well, until I can find you a teacher of piano, you’ll just have to pass your time in reading books and practicing your penmanship.” He leaned to kiss her lightly, clapped his hat on his head and vanished, hollering for his shadow, Summers.

Mrs. Summers appeared to conduct “Marm” over the house, which held few surprises until they reached the library; every room was sumptuous in the style of the Sydney hotel, even echoing the form of its main staircase, a splendid affair. The large drawing room held a harp as well as a full-sized grand piano.

“Brought the tuner all the way from Sydney once the piano was put in the right place—a fair nuisance it is too, what with not being allowed to move it a hair to clean under its legs,” said Mrs. Summers, disgruntled.

The library was definitely Alexander’s lair, for it didn’t have the contrived look the other rooms displayed. Where its vastness wasn’t dark oak bookshelves and dark green leather easy chairs there was Murray tartan—wallpaper, drapes, carpet. But why Murray? Why not his own tartan, Drummond? Drummond was a rich red checkered with multiple green and dark blue lines—a very striking pattern. Whereas Murray had a base of dull green more distantly divided into checks by thin red and dark blue lines. It hadn’t escaped her that her husband’s taste ran to splendor, so why this muted Murray?

“Fifteen thousand books,” said Mrs. Summers, voice awed. “Mr. Kinross has books on everything.” She sniffed. “Except he ain’t got a Bible. Says it’s rubbish. A godless man—godless! But Mr. Summers has been with him since some ship or other they was both aboard, wouldn’t hear of leaving. And I expect I’ll get used to being a housekeeper. House ain’t been finished more’n two months. Until then I just kept house for Mr. Summers.”

“Have you and Mr. Summers any children?” Elizabeth asked.

“No,” said Mrs. Summers shortly. She straightened, smoothed her spotless starched white apron. “I hope, Marm, that youse’ll find me satisfactory.”

“I’m sure I will,” Elizabeth said warmly, and produced her widest smile. “If you kept house for Mr. Summers, where did Mr. Kinross live before this house was built?”

Mrs. Summers blinked, looked shifty. “At the Kinross Hotel, Marm. A very comfortable establishment.”

“Does he own the Kinross Hotel, then?”

“No” was Mrs. Summers’s answer; no matter how hard Elizabeth probed, she refused to be more forthcoming on the subject.

The other servants, the mistress of Kinross House discovered as the tour progressed to kitchen, pantry, wine cellar and laundry, were all Chinese men. Who nodded, smiled, bowed as she passed.

“Men?” she squeaked, horrified. “You mean that men will clean my rooms, wash and iron my clothes? Then I shall deal with my underthings myself, Mrs. Summers.”

“No need to make mountains out of molehills, Marm,” said Mrs. Summers, unperturbed. “Them heathen Chinee been washing for a living long as I know of. Mr. Kinross says they wash so well on account of they’re used to washing silk. It don’t matter that they’re men—they ain’t white men. Just heathen Chinee.”

ELIZABETH’S PERSONAL MAID arrived just after lunch, a female heathen Chinee who to Elizabeth’s eyes was ravishingly beautiful. Frail and willowy, a mouth like a folded flower. Though Elizabeth had never seen Chinese before today, something about the girl said that there was European in her ancestry as well as Chinese. Her eyes were almond shaped, but were widely opened and possessed visible lids. She wore black silk trousers and jacket, and did her thick, straight black hair in the traditional pigtail.

“I am very pleased to be here, Marm. My name is Jade,” she said, standing with her hands clasped together and smiling shyly.

“You’ve no accent,” said Elizabeth, who in the past months had heard many different accents without realizing that her own Scots accent was so thick that some of her auditors didn’t understand what she said. Jade spoke like a colonial—a trace of East London Cockney intermixed with North of England, Irish, and something more distinctively local than any of those.

“My father came from China twenty-three years ago and took up with my mother, who was Irish. I was born on the Ballarat goldfields, Marm. We’ve been following the gold ever since, but once Papa fell in with Miss Ruby, our wandering days were over. My mother ran away with a Victorian trooper when Peony was born. Papa says that blood calls to blood. I think she was tired of having girl children. There are seven of us.”

Elizabeth tried to find something comforting to say. “I won’t be a hard mistress, Jade, I promise.”

“Oh, be as hard as you like, Miss Lizzy,” said Jade cheerily. “I was Miss Ruby’s maid, and no one’s as hard as her.”

So the Ruby person was a hard woman. “Who’s her maid now?”

“My sister, Pearl. And if Miss Ruby gets fed up with her, there’s Jasmine, Peony, Silken Flower and Peach Blossom.”

Some enquiries made of Mrs. Summers revealed that Jade was to occupy a shed in the backyard.

“That isn’t good enough,” said Elizabeth firmly, surprised at her own temerity. “Jade is a beautiful young woman and must be protected. She can move into the governess’s quarters until such time as I need a governess’s services. Do the Chinese men live in sheds in the backyard?”

“They live in town,” said Mrs. Summers stiffly.

“Do they ride up from town in the car?”

“I should think not, Marm! They walk the snake path.”

“Does Mr. Kinross know how you run things, Mrs. Summers?”

“It ain’t none of his business—I’m the housekeeper! They are heathen Chinee, they take jobs away from white men!”

Elizabeth sneered. “I have never known a white man, however poor and indigent he may be, willing to soil his hands on other people’s dirty clothes to earn a living. Your accent is colonial, so I presume you were born and brought up in New South Wales, but I warn you, Mrs. Summers, that I will have no prejudicial treatment of people of other races in this house.”

“SHE REPORTED me to Mr. Kinross,” said Mrs. Summers angrily to her husband, “and he got the pip something horrible with me! So Jade gets to live in the governess’s rooms and the Chinee men get to ride the car! Disgraceful!”

“Sometimes, Maggie, you’re a stupid woman,” Summers said.

Mrs. Summers sniffed. “You’re all a pack of unbelievers, and Mr. Kinross is the worst! Consorting with that woman, and marrying a girl young enough to be his daughter!”

“Shut your mouth, woman!” Summers snapped.

AT FIRST IT was difficult for Elizabeth to fill in time; in the wake of that exchange with Mrs. Summers, she found herself disliking the woman so much that she avoided her.

The library, for all its fifteen thousand volumes, was not much of a solace; it was overloaded with texts on subjects that did not interest her, from geology and engineering to gold, silver, iron, steel. There were shelves of various committee reports bound in leather, more shelves of New South Wales laws bound in leather, and yet more shelves filled with something that rejoiced in the title of Halsbury’s Laws of England. No novels of any kind. All the works on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the other famous men he mentioned from time to time were in Greek, Latin, Italian or French—how educated Alexander must be! But she found a simple retelling of some myths, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the complete works of Shakespeare. The myths were a delight, the others hard going.

Alexander had instructed her not to attend service at St. Andrew’s (the red-brick Church of England with the spire) until she had been in residence some little while, and seemed to think that Kinross town contained no inhabitants with whom she would care to associate. A suspicion began to grow in her that he intended to isolate her from ordinary folk, that she was doomed to dwell on the mountain in solitude. As if she were a secret.

But as he didn’t forbid her to walk, Elizabeth walked, at first confining herself to the beautiful grounds, then venturing farther afield. She found the snake path and negotiated it down to the shelf where the poppet heads of the mine reared, but could find no vantage point from which she could watch the activity unobserved. After that she began to penetrate the mysteries of the forest, there to find an enchanting world of lacy ferns, mossy dells, huge trees with trunks of vermilion, pink, cream, blue-white, every shade of brown. Exquisite birds flew in flocks, parrots in all the colors of the rainbow, an elusive bird that chimed like fairy bells, other birds that sang more melodically than a nightingale. Breath suspended, she saw little kangaroos leaping from rock to rock—a picture book come to life.

Finally she went far enough to hear the sound of roaring water, and came upon a clear, strong stream that tumbled in lacy leaps down a monstrous slope, down to the wood and iron jungle of Kinross below. The change was dramatic, horrific; what atop the falls was paradise was transformed at the mountain’s foot into an ugly shambles of slag heaps, detritus, holes, mounds, trenches. And the river down there was filthy.

“You’ve found the cascades,” said Alexander’s voice.

She gasped, whirled around. “You startled me!”

“Not as much as a snake would have. Be careful, Elizabeth. There are snakes everywhere, some capable of killing you.”

“Yes, I know there are. Jade warned me and showed me how to frighten them away—you stamp very hard on the ground.”

“Provided you see them in time.” He came to stand beside her. “Down there is the evidence of what men will do to lay their hands on gold,” he said. “Those are the original workings. They haven’t yielded placer in two years. And yes, I’m personally responsible for a great deal of the mess. I was here for six months before the word leaked out that I’d found paydirt on this wee tributary of the Abercrombie River.” He put a hand under her elbow and steered her away. “Come, I want you to meet your teacher of piano. And I’m sorry,” he continued as they retraced their steps, “that I didn’t think to bring in the kind of books I should have known you’d prefer. A mistake I’m busy rectifying.”

“Must I learn the piano?” she asked.

“If you wish to please me, yes. Do you wish to please me?”

Do I? she wondered. I hardly see him except in my bed, he doesn’t even bother to come home for dinner.

“Of course,” she said.

MISS THEODORA JENKINS had one thing in common with Jade; they had both followed the gold from place to place in company with their fathers. Tom Jenkins had died of liver failure due to strong drink when he reached Sofala, a gold town on the Turon River, leaving his plain, timid daughter with no roof over her head nor means of support. At first she had taken employment in a boarding house, waiting on tables, washing dishes and making beds; it gave her that roof over her head and her keep, if not more than sixpence a day in wages. As her leanings were religious, church became her great comfort, the more so after the minister discovered how well she could play the organ. After the Sofala gold failed she moved to Bathurst, where Constance Dewy saw her advertisement in the Bathurst Free Press and brought her to Dunleigh, the Dewy homestead, to teach piano to her daughters.

When the last of the Dewy girls went to boarding school in Sydney, Miss Jenkins returned to the drudgery of teaching piano and taking in mending at Bathurst. Then Alexander Kinross had offered her a little house in Kinross plus a decent salary if she would give his wife daily lessons on the piano. Hugely grateful, Miss Jenkins accepted instantly.

She was not yet thirty years old, but she looked forty, the more so because her coloring was nondescript and her skin, after constant exposure to the sun, was seamed with a network of fine lines. Her musical gift she owed to her mother, who had taught her to read music and tried to find a piano for Theodora to play on whichever goldfield they happened to be living.

“Mama died just one day after we arrived in Sofala,” said Miss Jenkins, “and Papa followed a year later.”

This kind of nomadic existence fascinated Elizabeth, who had never been more than five miles from home until Alexander had sent for her. How hard it was for women! And how pathetically glad Miss Jenkins was for the chance Alexander had offered her!

That night in bed she turned of her own volition into her husband’s arms and put her head on his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said very softly, and pressed a kiss on his neck.

“For what?” he asked.

“For being so kind to poor Miss Jenkins. I will learn to play the piano well, I promise. It is the least I can do.”

“There’s one other thing you can do for me.”

“What?”

“Take off your nightgown. Skin should feel skin.”

Caught, Elizabeth obliged. The Act had grown too familiar to provoke embarrassment or discomfort, but skin on skin didn’t make it more pleasurable for her. For him, however, this night clearly marked a victory.

OH, BUT LEARNING to play the piano was difficult! Though she wasn’t entirely without aptitude, Elizabeth didn’t come from a musical environment. For her, it meant starting from absolute scratch, even in rudimentary matters like the forms music took, its vocabulary, structure. Days and days of stumbling up and down the scales—would she ever be ready to play a tune?

“Yes, but first your fingers have to become more nimble and your left hand has to get used to making different movements from your right. Your ears have to distinguish the exact sound of every note,” said Theodora. “Now once again, dear Elizabeth. You are improving, truly.”