Ghost Gum Valley (58 page)

‘Now I know the truth. Paradise is a secret place right here in his nursery,' she whispered under her breath, startled to find Marmaduke had been awake all the time.

‘There are many roads to Paradise. Give me time and I'll take you along all of them.'

‘Tonight?' she asked hopefully.

Marmaduke buried his mouth in her hair to smother his laughter. ‘How wonderful. My bride is cut from the same cloth as I am. We're insatiable.' He tenderly nuzzled her throat. ‘But this time will be different. Forgive me. You'll understand why when it happens.'

Isabel felt her whole body tense.
This time? What does he mean? He promised he would never hurt me, never do anything I did not want. Oh God, what's going to happen?

Isabel soon realised that this time was indeed different. His kisses and caresses were even more urgent, demanding. Marmaduke did not pause to allow her to rest. He observed her, waiting for something. She began to fight him. Not from fear, but frustration. Enraged, she became the aggressor, digging her fingernails into his back, wrapping her limbs around him, demanding that he stop then instantly forbidding him to stop. Wild anger consumed her because despite her fatigue she never wanted to let him go.

Finally she cried out, ‘You bastard. You
know
I want you. Why are you doing this?'

He pinned her down, his kisses teasing yet urgent. ‘Yes! You can do it, my darling.'

Isabel gave a cry of rage. Then a cry that had no name. It came from her throat, a primordial sound like some trapped animal that had broken free from its prison. She felt her heart break inside her and the pain gushed out in wordless agony.

She was shocked by the power of it. Her face was wet with tears and she was sobbing violently, her body soaked with a flood of tears that washed over his chest and hair.

Marmaduke rocked her in his arms. ‘At last. Thank God,' he said softly.

She gave in to the grief that poured out of her body. She felt as if a secret dam inside her had shattered the walls that had confined it. All the pain and rejection of her childhood, the night terrors, the fear of darkness, the whirlpool of her feelings for Silas, love, fear, hatred. Everything evil was being washed away forever – powerless to hurt her again.

Isabel felt a sudden surge of energy that reminded her of the rare moments in her childhood of shared laughter, a clear memory of running in the sunlight of a beautiful garden with a woman's voice behind her, laughing as she chased her.

My mother! I can't see her face but I know she was there. I can remember her voice!

She wriggled around within the safe circle of Marmaduke's arms and looked down into the face of a friend. He was tired and his chin was covered with dark stubble but he was smiling like a cat satiated by a bowl of stolen cream.

‘I hope you're satisfied now?' Isabel asked after a final sniff. ‘I need a handkerchief.'

He stretched out a weary arm to take a crumpled ball of linen from the bedside table. ‘Use mine. You might as well. You steal everything, even my soap. Here, blow.'

Isabel obeyed. As embarrassed as a small child she tried to regain her dignity. ‘Do you make all your mistresses cry like that?'

Marmaduke raised an eyebrow. ‘No. I've never seen anything quite like your performance, soldier.'

‘But you did it deliberately. You wanted to make me cry.'

Marmaduke rolled her over and ran his finger gently along the curve of her nose.

‘To prove you can trust me. And to prove to you that your cousin Silas was a lying bastard. Witches
never cry
!'

Isabel gasped at the truth that had escaped her. She snuggled down into Marmaduke's arms and kissed his neck.

‘Now that my tears have proved I'm not a witch, you're in no danger I'll destroy you.'

‘That's a relief,' he said lazily.

‘So now it's my turn to teach
you
something you won't find in the
Kama Sutra
.' She knelt beside him and gently drew her leg across his thighs as if carefully testing the waters before diving into a creek.

‘Close your eyes. Lie back. And learn what it means to be made love to by a lover who
wants
you more than any woman you have ever known.'

Marmaduke closed his eyes and smiled. ‘I'm game if you are, sweetheart.'

Chapter 40

The early dawn light was wan and watery, coating the walls of Bloodwood Hall's farm buildings like a weak solution of whitewash. Garnet strode in the direction of the stables, glad to be free of the household tension. Fear was running rampant throughout the whole Colony since the news of the murder of Rupert Grantham.

Four weeks after their killing spree the three faceless bolters who had cut him down when he was alone and unarmed continued to be hunted by a small army of mounted police.

Garnet was furious that despite his orders for calm the tension at Bloodwood Hall was at fever pitch. No one was immune.

Elise reached for her smelling salts at every sound of horses' hooves on the gravelled carriageway and even refused to walk in the garden unattended. The servants were quick to escalate petty quarrels into warring factions. Even Bridget's usual cocksure manner was replaced by wariness. The three Marys, Red, Black and Spotty, genuflected at the drop of a hat. The young manservant had become increasingly sloppy in his livery and Garnet suspected the lad rubbed his teeth with cinnamon in a vain attempt to disguise the moonshine whisky on his breath. Their anxiety was palpable.

Garnet considered the tide of fear was nothing short of cowardice.

Rhys Powell was preoccupied with a bout of unspoken depression that Garnet recognised as the national trait known as ‘the Welsh hour'. Queenie's mind was, as always, locked into avenging the wrongs of the past rather than concern about today's villains and bolters.

Not all at Bloodwood Hall had lost their heads. Garnet was satisfied that at least two others under his roof had kept their heads – only to lose their hearts.

Marmaduke and Isabel walked together in the garden as if they had been joined at the hip. It was clear to Garnet the nights were never long enough for them.

As he threw open the stable doors he gave a wry smile.

What a fool Marmaduke was to think he could hoodwink me. Does he think I'm so old I can't remember what it is to be in love? God willing that girl will soon translate my son's lust into an heir while I'm still spry enough to teach the little chap how to ride a horse and be a man. To grow up to be Wine Son from Vinegar, as old Mendoza used to say.

Garnet yelled out to the ostler sleeping in the hayloft above the stables. Davey wore his slop clothing day and night. He peered over the edge of the loft, his tousled head threaded with hay then stumbled down the ladder begging Garnet's pardon.

‘I'd have been having your horse saddled and waiting for ye, sir, if I'd known ye had a mind to be riding out early this morning.'

Feverishly saddling Garnet's choice of stallion, Davey asked, ‘Is it wise to be riding out alone, sir? To be sure it's dangerous times we live in, what with the villains who murdered that fine Mr Grantham still being at large in the bush.'

Garnet was not sure if the lad's expression was sly, disrespectful or genuinely concerned. How many of his assigned labourers would consider the murderers to be heroes and turn feral themselves?

‘No need to feel concern on my behalf, lad. I'm always armed to the hilt,' Garnet said, patting his hip to underline his reference to firearms.

He rode the stallion at walking pace past the aviary; the large domed bird house was covered with fine wire netting to contain the swirling kaleidoscopic patterns of brilliantly coloured budgerigars, the tiny descendants of those long ago captured in the bush for Miranda's pleasure.

He pictured Miranda in his mind, seated at the heart of the aviary on a wrought-iron garden bench, dressed in a filmy white Empire gown, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, her outstretched arms holding lines of the tiny creatures that she had tamed to come to her in the way she attracted everyone to her. The bird she loved most, an emerald green and turquoise one more adventurous than his companions, attached its tiny claws to the crown of her head, gently rubbing his minute beak in her hair and repeatedly chirping the words she had patiently taught him when she had separated him from his brothers.

‘Love me, love me not,' Garnet echoed softly, reminded of the
ironic contrast between a romantic female like Miranda who was enchanted by these clever birds and the practical attitude of Aborigines who lived off the land. He remembered how Miranda had taken a tribal elder to admire her aviary and to her horror the old man had cheerfully confided, ‘Budgerigar plenty good tucker, missus.'

Now as these tiny caged beauties played and flirted together inside the aviary, flying from miniature swings to the branches of potted shrubs, they were a living reminder of the first year of his marriage when Miranda was radiant, blossoming with child. The whole Colony had then seemed to him like a trunk full of freshly minted golden sovereigns.

Everything seemed possible. Now I'm growing older and my time is running out.

The screeching laughter of kookaburras high in the treetops heralded daybreak as Garnet rode unhurriedly along a bush track, screened from sight of the estate's farm buildings and the fading voices of the Government men Fordham was assigning to their labour.

Riding past the graveyard Garnet averted his eyes from the corner where a slab of stone pinned down the last remains of Klaus von Starbold. He knew the inscription by heart as he had ordered the stonemason to write it for two reasons. To give the whole locality the illusion that the lavish public funeral paid full tribute to his son's tutor, who was well liked in the village. Secondly, he chose the words written in stone specifically to conceal from posterity the fact the scoundrel met a violent death at Marmaduke's hands. The words were weathered but the memory was as sharp as hell.

 

K
LAUS VON
S
TARBOLD
. B
ORN
H
ESSE
–
DARMSTADT
.
1788 – 1825
R
EMEMBERED WITH RESPECT BY
G
ARNET
G
AMBLE AND FAMILY
.
A
WELCOME STRANGER FAR FROM HIS NATIVE LAND.

 

A welcome stranger
. Garnet remembered how that phrase had nearly choked him and caused young Marmaduke to charge through the house in uncontrollable rage. It had taken all Miranda's powers of persuasion to calm her son and convince him this lie was necessary to shield her reputation, part of her desperate attempt to prevent Marmaduke being convicted on the grounds of ‘wilful murder' in the guise of a duel.

The fact that Garnet had been forced to bury von Starbold's body in the Gamble family cemetery was the reason Garnet had insisted that Miranda be buried on her own land.

No way on earth I'd let her lie in the same graveyard as that Hessian scoundrel.

Now overlooking the mouth of the Ghost Gum Valley beyond Mingaletta, Garnet paused to take stock of the land that he had been loath to visit for years.

Through the dense frieze of eucalypts of many species, tall thin stragglers soared to the sky between the trunks of giants that had taken scores of years to expand their girth. At their feet, a thick undergrowth of ferns and shrubs had sprung up, freed from the controlled fire-farming methods he knew had been practised by tribal blacks who had hunted here for untold centuries, before the British came and claimed the whole country as a gaol.

For criminals like me.
Now I'm buying it back from the Crown block by block. But the time has come to let go of Mingaletta – Marmaduke's rightful inheritance.

Garnet heard their voices before he saw them. The quicksilver ripples of Isabel's laughter sounded in response to the dark, rich voice of his son.

He wanted to join them, to be accepted on the fringe of that warm circle that surrounded all young lovers in a private cocoon of their own making. But even more Garnet wanted the truth. Knowledge was power. What exactly were these two hiding from him?

Looping his horse's reins to the limb of a gum tree, he took care to remain out of sight as he manoeuvred himself closer to hear their conversation.

Isabel and Marmaduke stood with their backs to him, their heads bent over the blueprint of the house that covered the circular stump of a tree, serving as a drawing board. Before them lay a cleared section marked out with pegs to define the dimensions of future rooms.

Marmaduke's voice was confident. The sun was shining on the coil of hair that cascaded down his back. His sleeves were rolled up, the arms tanned and muscular. His head was close to Isabel's honey-brown hair as he pointed out details in the plans.

‘It isn't grand, I admit. But it's as close as I could get to the
drawing of the Indian Colonial bungalow that the Colonel built here for Mother. The verandahs are covered except for this central section. It's larger than the original homestead. See? Here's the plan for the additional rooms.'

Like a boy he sprang inside the pegged spaces to demonstrate the layout and beckoned her to join him.

‘Here's the library to hold all our books. Here's the music room and this is your own little sitting room to do your sewing.' He pointed to the open area beyond the house. ‘That's where I'll build the stables and a cabin for however many assigned men the authorities allow me. Only a few to begin with and I'll be working like a dog myself. But I'll build a successful life for us – just you watch me, soldier.'

Garnet felt moved by the natural way Isabel slid her arm around her husband's waist in a gesture of possession. The sweet expression on her face, the soft, rounded lines of her body belonged to a girl who had begun to blossom in the hands of her lover.