This Golden Land (19 page)

     "I understand," Hannah said.

     "But Alice doesn't have to leave," Mrs. Throckmorton said. "I've told her she can stay, and when she's all better, I'll give her a job and a room."

     But Alice went to stand at Hannah's side. "I'm going with Miss Conroy," she said, trying to look as dignified as she could with her poor black eye and bandaged head. She turned to Hannah. "It's my fault, miss. I was the one who took you to Lulu's. And then you rescued me. I will make it up to you, I promise. I shall work two jobs and pay you back."

     Hannah turned to the landlady. "Mrs. Throckmorton, may I have a look at the letter?"

     Hannah perused the page, reading the inflammatory words, threats, ending with the signature,
A Concerned Citizen.
But this time she saw something she had not noticed in Dr. Davenport's office. The handwriting was unmistakably Lulu's.

     "Yes, you can come with me, Alice," Hannah said as she lifted one end of her trunk and Alice picked up the other. "We'll be all right, you'll see."

     They managed to get to the street corner, where carriage and wagon traffic made it impossible to cross, when two men on horseback shouted, "Hoy there, ladies!" To Hannah's surprise, they jumped down—men in dusty work trousers and shirts, with bush hats and sunburned skin—and each took an end of Hannah's trunk. They gave Alice an odd look, but grinned and touched their hat brims at Hannah and said, "Where to, miss?"

     She and Alice followed the helpful strangers for several blocks until they came to a modest hotel with a sign in the window that said, "Lady Guests Must Be Accompanied."

     Hannah tried to pay the two men, but they only winked and said it was their pleasure, and as they made their way back down the busy street to where they had tethered their horses, Hannah saw a boy in ragged clothes and bare feet sloppily pasting posters to the brick wall of the hotel.

     They were all the same: the latest front page of the
Adelaide Clarion.

     And the headline story was about troubling news from Western Australia, something about an Aboriginal uprising near Perth, colonists slaughtered, missionaries massacred.

     And a government coastal survey party, their vessel docked in a deserted cove, had been attacked—with loss of life.

A
LICE DREAMED OF THE FIRE AGAIN LAST NIGHT.

     It was the fourth time since leaving Lulu's. Before that, Alice had not dreamed even once of the fire that had claimed the lives of her parents and her siblings, sparing only herself. Why? she wondered as she finished her morning tea and decided to go for a walk, today being Sunday. Why had she not dreamed, or even really thought about the fire, for the past eight years, only to have it haunt her now in such detail that she woke up soaked in perspiration?

     "I'm sorry, miss, but I won't wear cosmetics," she said quietly but firmly, responding to a suggestion Hannah had made for concealing her disfigurement. "Lulu paints her face. She forces her girls to paint their faces. I won't be like them."

     Hannah gave Alice, who might otherwise have been very pretty, a thoughtful look. It was a cool autumn morning in May, and they were finishing their breakfast in the room they shared at the Torrens Hotel on King William Street. Hannah had asked Alice to call her by her first name, but
Alice was too unused to such familiarity with anyone to stop addressing Hannah as "miss." Besides, in order to secure a room at the hotel, the two had to pass themselves off as a lady traveling with her maid, as hotel policy did not allow unaccompanied women to register.

     A week had passed since their eviction from Mrs. Throckmorton's. Alice's injuries were fading, and now she was anxious to search for employment. But Hannah suspected that Alice was going to run into the same problems she had before she went to work for Lulu: no one wanted a disfigured servant. Hannah had an idea of how Alice could solve the problem with cosmetics, but Alice would have none of it.

     "You're really quite pretty," Hannah said. "With your lovely blond hair and its natural curls, your blue eyes. From the right side, you have a perfect profile and flawless skin. Now if we could just cover . . ." When she saw the closed look on Alice's face, Hannah said, "Let me show you something."

     She was determined to help somehow. Alice's disfigurement was crippling. Strangers, when they saw her face, could be insensitive and even cruel. Everywhere Alice went, she met looks of curiosity, pity, and revulsion. It resulted in her developing a defensive gesture: she would bring her hand up to the scarred side of her face and let her fingers flutter at the edge of her maid's cap, as if she were trying to hide behind her hand. The unfortunate result was that she just brought all the more attention to the disfigurement.

     "My mother was a Shakespearean actress," Hannah said as she opened her blue carpetbag and brought out her mother's book of poetry. Folded inside was a playbill that Hannah had kept as a memento. Unfolding it now, she held it up for Alice to read.

A W
INTER'S
T
ALE
BY
W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
O
N WHICH OCCASION,
M
ISS
L
OUISA
R
EED
W
ILL PERFORM

B
EING
T
HE
L
AST
N
IGHT OF
T
HEIR
P
ERFORMANCE
T
HIS
S
EASON
T
HEATRE
R
OYAL
, S
HAKESPEARE
S
QUARE
, E
DINBURGH
29 J
ULY
1824

     "This was my mother's last performance," Hannah said. "She had met my father months prior, during a tour of southern England. She had twisted her ankle and he had treated it. They had fallen in love. After this performance, my mother returned to Bayfield and to John Conroy, giving up the stage forever."

     As Hannah spoke, a memory from her childhood returned in vivid detail. She was no more than six or seven at the time, and her mother was showing her a most remarkable bag. She called it her "kit" and it was full of boxes and bottles and little cases. Stage makeup from her days as an actress. Hannah was dazzled by the sticks of greasepaint, the gums and pencils and powders designed to give the actor a different face than his own. "With these I can be a Chinese Princess," Louisa had said merrily. "Or an African Negress or a maiden aunt in Lincolnshire. I can make myself ugly or beautiful, young or old. Anything I wish to be!"

     Recalling that distant afternoon, Hannah thought: Stage cosmetics can create artificial flaws.

     Or cover them up.

     "You see? My mother wore cosmetics, and she was very respectable. Alice, have ever seen a stage play? Then I shall take you to one as soon as we can afford it."

     "Thank you, miss," Alice said, thinking: When we can afford it. They were already in arrears with the hotel rent, and soon they would have no money for food. The problem was, how were they to earn an income? So far, no one would hire Alice, and Hannah had gone through the employment adverts in the newspapers, only to decide in the end against applying for positions. She had not explained why to Alice, but Alice knew the reason: that Hannah might put a future employer in the same jeopardy as she had Dr. Davenport. Both Alice and Hannah knew that whoever she worked for would be a likely target of Lulu Forchette's poisonous pen. Unfortunately, leaving Adelaide, and thereby Lulu's reach, was not an option. Alice knew that here was where Hannah was to meet the American, Neal Scott, in October—or so she prayed.

     After reading a frightening newspaper account of Aboriginal uprisings in Western Australia, Hannah had written letters to authorities in Perth,
asking after the welfare of a ship called the HMS
Borealis.
She had also written to an Aboriginal mission, inquiring about a missionary couple she had met on the voyage from England.

     Alice had heard all about the miraculous journey of the
Caprica.
And she had seen Neal Scott's photograph. He was a very good looking man, and from the way Hannah had talked about him, he was smart and educated, adventurous and courageous, and quite the gentleman. Alice was envious, as she herself could never hope for such romance in her life. Long ago, before fire had robbed her of family and home, Alice had dreamed of being a wife and mother. But that dream had died.

     After removing the maid's apron that she insisted upon always wearing, Alice straightened the cuffs and buttons of her maroon dress that was slightly out of date in that the sleeves were tight and there was no crinoline under the petticoats. She then affixed her simple straw bonnet to her hair and took a long look at her face in the mirror—one side supposedly pretty, the other side puckered with scars. She looked at Hannah in the reflection, seated at a desk, her head bent over quill and stationery. Through the open window came the melodic peeling of bells from Adelaide's numerous steeples. "How come you don't go to church, miss?"

     Hannah looked up. "I beg your pardon?"

     "You said your father was a Quaker. Don't they go to church?"

     Hannah studied Alice's eyes that were a remarkable shade of blue, and she saw only innocent curiosity there. "When my father married a stage actress he was banned from the fellowship of Friends. But he kept the Sabbath in his own way."

     Alice paused, then said, "Do you pray, miss?"

     Hannah thought about this. She did not mind the question, but did not know how to respond. Prayer was something that had never come easy to Hannah. She thought of how her father would stand in the parlor of their small cottage, beginning his day in silence, his Irish Quaker feet planted firmly on the braided rug as he gathered his soul and his thoughts together before the first pink of the morning sun—before he knew what surprises or disappointments the day was going to hold. Hannah had always sensed about him, in that silence, as he stood tall and thoughtful, a brink of excitement,
as though he were living in just that moment, as if no other moment was ever going to exist. Was that when he prayed? Was that when he walked in the Light? He never talked about it. The sun would crest through the trees, yellow rays would sneak into the parlor, and John Conroy would shake himself loose from the invisible hold of the Supernatural and begin his day.

     Hannah had tried to emulate him. But all she could do, she had found, was just stand and be silent. It never went farther or higher or deeper than that. As always, standing in her bedroom before the bed was even made, still in her nightdress with her bare feet on the cold floor, she would try to travel where her father had traveled, send her eyes and ears on a spiritual journey as he did, but her thoughts inevitably would tug her in the direction of the kitchen and flood her mind with prosaic details: a curtain that needed mending, a lamp that needed a new glass chimney, a bill to be paid to the butcher, and would a letter arrive at last from the Lying-In Hospital?

     "I do my best," Hannah said with a smile. "But I think God listens to us no matter how we phrase our words."

     "I remember, before our farm burned down, on Sundays my father would open our big Bible to any page and read from it." Alice looked inward for a moment, then said, "I don't remember the voyage over. I was four when we left England. My parents had such high hopes here." Her voice caught.

     "Alice," Hannah said gently. "Would you like to go to church?"

     She shook her head. "I will just go for a walk."

     "Why not go to the horse races at Chester Downs? I understand that city omnibuses will be departing hourly from Victoria Square."

     "Perhaps," Alice said, and she left.

     But horse races were not on her mind as she followed one of the main thoroughfares out of the city, joining many pedestrians who were out for a stroll, and open carriages going up and down the streets for the Sunday outings the citizens of Adelaide so loved.

     Alice had a long walk ahead of her, but her injuries from Lulu's beating were nearly cleared up now, the pain was but a memory, and she felt strong as she followed the country lane past houses and gardens and sheep paddocks until the city was far behind and farms became so vast that houses
were miles apart. Passing through dappled sunlight, waving to the occasional passersby in carriage or on horseback, Alice fought down her fears. When doubt crept in and she wondered if she were making a mistake, wondered if Lulu would trap her and keep her prisoner once again, Alice reminded herself of newly learned words: fairness, equality, justice. And they kept her resolve strong.

     These were concepts Alice had never really known. Memories of her early life on the farm were vague. She had lost much of her recollection after the fire that left her family dead and herself disfigured. It was probably an ordinary life, possibly even a happy one. After that, all she had known were impatient Juvenile Care authorities who tried to place her in homes only to have her returned, followed by snappish employers who could not understand her fear of fire, and then finally the harsh streets where she slept in alleys and doorways and stayed alive by begging at back doors. After that, it was Lulu's house.