Ghost Gum Valley (81 page)

He took her face between his hands and fervently assured her.

‘I swear by all that is holy, my darling, I will never put you through this hell again. I shall never
ever
lay a hand on you. We will live as brother and sister. I am a swine for making you go through this!'

Isabel caught her breath. ‘Oh shut up, Marmaduke. Spare me the melodrama. This is my big scene – not yours!' Her eyes widened. ‘Oh God, there's another one coming!'

She gave a deep moan and dug her fingernails into his back.

Standing outside the cellar door, Garnet was deathly pale, shaken by the sound of Isabel's cries and forced to remember the terrible images of Miranda's deathbed and the child trapped in her womb. He felt a glimmer of relief when Queenie's head appeared around the door.

‘Whisky, and plenty of it. Pronto!'

Garnet raced for the box of liquor he had brought and delivered it to her.

‘Not for me,' Queenie said tartly, ‘fill those two big bowls, one of cold water, one hot but not boiling. Towels, and set them up on that trestle table over there.'

She was gone. Garnet followed her instructions, hearing Isabel's deep, guttural cries of labour and Marmaduke's reassuring voice. But there was no sound of a baby's cry.

Isabel's moans suddenly ceased – followed by an ominous silence.

Marmaduke came from the cellar ashen-faced, holding a bundle in his arms. He thrust it in Garnet's arms.

‘Queenie says you're to deal with this. It's blue. Never cried. Stillborn.' His voice broke. ‘Not a bloody sound. Here take it away for God's sake. Isabel needs me.'

A moment later Queenie emerged from the cellar and ran to join Garnet at the trestle table. They massaged the mottled blue chest and limbs of the tiny babe, coating its lifeless little body with whisky before plunging it back and forth between the cold and hot water. Garnet blindly followed Queenie's directions.

Time had ceased to exist. Queenie was exhausted but Garnet refused to give up.

‘This is not acceptable to me! I won't allow it.' He yelled at the tiny body. ‘Breathe! You can do it!'

His hands were rough and desperate, his heart crying out to hear the wail that never came.

There was no one else in sight, everyone was in the cellar, focused on Isabel, who was sobbing out in denial.

‘No! no! Why won't you let me see it?'

Suddenly Garnet froze. Queenie touched his arm. They turned and watched in silence as it moved towards them. The thin stream of mist had no form but seemed to have a life-force of its own.

The filmy outline wrapped around the babe. And then Garnet heard the God-given sound – the cry of life. The babe turned pink and took its first breath.

Garnet picked up the bundle and held it over his head, naked, squirming and wailing. The babe's tiny penis sent a gentle shower down into Garnet's face.

Garnet roared with laughter. ‘Angel's piss!'

Queenie sank to her knees, laughing and crying and thanking God, Jesus, the Buddha and all the gods in the Hindu pantheon.

With shaking hands Garnet wrapped the babe in a towel. He raced back to the cellar yelling in triumph and laid his grandson in the arms of his rightful owners.

Marmaduke fingered the miniature gold house on the pendant around Isabel's throat. She lay there exhausted, pale and drenched with sweat. But he had never in his life seen a more beautiful, desirable woman.

‘I reckon Josiah Mendoza was dead right. He said something about a man's true home being his wife.'

Isabel's words were slurred with weariness. ‘Just as well. You keep burning our house down.'

Marmaduke stroked her hair. ‘I know this isn't the perfect time to say this, Isabel. But I need to retract my promise. What I said about never touching you again – to spare you the agony of childbirth. I panicked. The truth is I think I handled the whole performance pretty damned well. I was as cool as a cucumber. So just to put your mind at rest, I'll be more than happy to make a new babe for you – every year.'

When Isabel's mouth hung open in disbelief, he added, ‘How about we start trying for a brother for Rufus later tonight, if you're not doing anything?'

Isabel stared at him. ‘I can't believe you said that, Marmaduke. I only gave birth an hour ago. You're insatiable!'

‘Well, you can't hang a man for his thoughts,' he said with that twist at the corner of his mouth that always gave him away. ‘But I'm happy to take a kiss on account.'

He took her sweaty face between his hands and tenderly kissed the tip of her nose. ‘Who was it said something like, “Was ever woman so wooed, was ever
man
so won?” Oh yeah, I remember. It was Romeo to Juliet.'

‘It was
not
.
You're misquoting again to suit yourself. And it was Richard III.'

‘I'll lay you five guineas it was Romeo.'

‘I haven't
got
five guineas. We're broke, remember? You can't even afford to pay me my contract wages.'

‘That's all right, sweetheart. I'll let you work off the debt – in bed.'

Garnet listened to the sound of their mock fight and gave a weary smile of satisfaction. He looked across at Queenie boiling the billy for tea and they exchanged a nod of mutual respect. The whisky had all been used up in a good cause.

Garnet knew in his heart that Miranda would never again return to him in this lifetime. But to sustain him he had the wonder of that moment when she bent over the stillborn baby and gave it the kiss of life. Then she had turned to Garnet and smiled at him.

Garnet looked through the doorway of the cellar at the makeshift birthing room. On Marmaduke's prompting he had sent Murray Robertson back to the house to bring Rose Alba to see her new baby brother. The little girl now lay asleep, curled up like a kitten in a rug at her mother's feet. Marmaduke lay beside Isabel, loving her passionately with his eyes as she held the babe to her breast.

Garnet said the words in his heart.
This is the happiest day of my entire life, Miranda. What we began – you, me and that damned Klaus – the unholy mess we made of our lives. Well, it's all come right in the end. It took the three of us to create Marmaduke – and my dynasty. Now all I've got to do is build another fortune.

Struck by a thought that came in a sudden shaft of light, Garnet's laughter was wild and long.

Queenie stood over him arms akimbo and demanded, ‘Don't tell me you've chosen
tonight
to throw another one of your crazy turns!'

Garnet tried to quell his mirth. ‘Mother England did me a big favour when she chucked me out. But it just hit me – my sweetest revenge is yet to come! Silas de Rolland has “disappeared” forever. Isabel is now the last of that Plantagenet line to bear the de Rolland name. That means all Godfrey de Rolland's future generations will bear
my
name – thanks to Rufus
Gamble
!'

Isabel lay awake looking around the cellar, the tragic trysting place where Marmaduke's mother and her lover had conceived a babe in one of their last desperate acts of love. Now this room was a place of joy where Marmaduke's son had been born.

Everything close to Isabel's heart lay within reach. Marmaduke was asleep on her shoulder and Rose Alba at her feet. Baby Rufus lay wide-eyed in the crook of her arm, his fuzzy hair shining like a little red halo.

Isabel kissed his hand and whispered, ‘Thank you for coming to us, little one.'

Only one thing remained to be set right.

‘Marmaduke, are you awake?'

‘I am now,' he said, his voice ragged with fatigue.

‘There's something I need to tell you. A sort of confession.'

Marmaduke looked at her warily, suddenly wide awake. ‘Yeah? What is it?'

‘I found out about the loan you needed to rebuild the house and stock Mingaletta.'

‘Don't worry, love, I'll pay it all back in a year or two. Edwin says The Far Horizon Agricultural Company is safe. The new English settler who put up the loan is decent – even if a bit eccentric.' He was suddenly alert. ‘Hang on a minute, what's your confession?'

‘Don't be cross, Marmaduke. That eccentric new English settler and The Far Horizon Agricultural Company – well, that's me.'

‘
You
?! How in Hell could you put up a loan? I haven't paid you in months.'

‘Well,' she said nonchalantly, ‘what do I need with a tiara? I sold it to Uncle Godfrey at a very reasonable price.'

‘Hell! I'd never have allowed you to do that. Your tiara was your inheritance.'

‘No. You and the children are my true inheritance.'

Marmaduke drew her into his arms, searching for words. ‘Isabel, you are one gutsy English Rose...and my Currency Lass.'

Isabel drifted off to sleep smiling in the circle of her lover's arms.

Beyond the ruins of Mingaletta, from the ghostly eucalypts at the heart of Ghost Gum Valley, came the sound of kookaburras' laughter at the break of a brand new day.

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Ghost Gum Valley
is a work of fiction, a marriage between imagination and history. I am indebted to the scores of historians and biographers whose work I read or who I consulted personally. The final choices and interpretations are mine and so of course are any errors of judgement. The opinions expressed by my characters about people and events in their era do not necessarily reflect my own.

All the characters involved in the contrasting worlds of the Gamble and de Rolland families are fictional although I have borrowed some names and reputations (for better and worse) from my own ancestors. Their lives straddle the complex caste system of Penal Colony society of the era, described by Governor Sir Richard Bourke as ‘a most peculiar colony', in which they intercept with historical characters who played public, even notorious, roles in the snakes-and-ladders pattern of colonial life. These include Barnett Levey, Father of Australian Theatre; Alexander Green, ‘The Finisher', hated public hangman; Quaker social reformer James Backhouse; artist Augustus Earle; William Holmes, an early curator of Aboriginal artefacts; Emancipist Freemasons Samuel Terry, Francis Greenway and Dr William Bland.