Thornwood House (11 page)

‘Aylish, my butterfly . . . I thought you’d never get here.’

He’d been born across the sea in Ireland and arrived here as a boy, too late to lose the burr that sweetened the shape of his words. My name on his lips always sounded like ‘eyelash’.

I took a hesitant step. ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’

He frowned. ‘Have you? I mean . . . it’s all right if you have, we don’t have to – ’

‘Of course not.’

Neither of us moved.

Samuel cleared his throat. ‘What about Jacob, is he – ?’

‘Poppa’s gone to Ipswich with Klaus Jarman to collect a box of donated Bibles. He won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon.’

‘I’ll be gone by then.’

‘Yes. Although . . .’

Samuel tilted his head, eyeing me intently.

‘Although,’ I continued, feeling braver yet unable to keep the tremor out of my voice, ‘at least you’ll be leaving with a sweet memory.’

Samuel’s expression melted. The crease between his brows smoothed, his eyes shut briefly . . . then he moved so fast my head whirled. He grabbed my hand and drew me to him, then somehow I was sitting on his lap on the edge of the bed, enveloped by his warmth, overcome by this new – and intimate – proximity.

‘Aylish,’ he whispered into my hair, ‘don’t you know that
all
my memories of you are sweet? And one day soon, when the
blasted war is over, we’ll have no need for memories. We’ll be married, and I’ll never leave your side again.’

‘You won’t forget me while you’re away?’

‘Forget you?’ He snorted, then gathered me closer against him, kissing my temple. ‘There’s a war going on, my butterfly, but do you think a man can turn his mind to it? Oh, love . . . how could I ever forget you? My fool head can think of nothing but a certain smile, a laugh that turns my blood to water, a set of legs that render me deaf, dumb and blind to anything of greater import . . .’

I harrumphed. ‘What could possibly be of greater import than my legs?’

‘That’s the problem, my own. To me there is nothing greater than your legs. Nothing more significant than your fingers, your pretty arms, your succulent mouth. The smallest hair on your head holds more meaning to me than anything in this world or the next. There is nothing in existence that means more than the wonderful, thrilling, intoxicating entirety of you.’

My blood raced at his bold words. His breath was warm on my cheek, I could feel the heat radiating from his skin. I tilted my face, giddy with longing; if I moved just a fraction nearer, our lips would touch –

I pulled back. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

He sighed. ‘No . . . at least, not for myself. But sweetheart, don’t trouble yourself – I’ll be back for you, that’s my solemn promise. And then we’ll be married and embark on our wonderful life together.’

His words were meant to comfort me, but I felt my old darkness bubble up. A clammy sweat broke across my shoulders. My ears began to buzz as though a swarm of bees had risen from some vile hive deep inside to suck dry my heart.

Samuel continued to whisper his reassurances into my hair, but my mind strayed. He was nearing the end of his sixth
year of Medicine at Sydney University. He’d spent the last ten months studying in the morning and training in the wards every afternoon at St Vincent’s Public Hospital. He came home to Magpie Creek on the train each holiday for a few weeks, assisting at his father’s busy surgery, and spending all his free time with me.

Our plans for a future together had been going along swimmingly . . . then, when war was declared two years ago, he and several others in his year had requested that their courses be condensed, enabling them to sit their exams earlier. The very minute Samuel graduated, he’d rushed off and enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force. I’d hoped the war would end before his training was complete – we had set our wedding date for December, just six weeks from today – but yesterday he’d received notice that his battalion was deploying immediately.

Samuel must have sensed my wretchedness, because he pulled me near and buried his face against my neck. Whispering, whispering. I couldn’t make out the words, but after a moment, his whispering began to tickle. I tried to wriggle away but he held me fast. Soon, on account of all my squirming, he began to laugh, a warm, languid, gravelly sound that raced a shiver of glorious tingles across my skin. Soon I was giggling too. The music of our shared nervousness loosened the tension. I forgot my fears. There was just Samuel – my dear, sweet Samuel – and the delicious private moment we now inhabited.

Winding myself around him like an eager vine, I clung tightly, and tighter still as he tumbled us both onto the bed, crushing me under his weight. My skirt found its way to my waist, then left me altogether. Somehow my blouse joined it on the floor, and then my undergarments along with Samuel’s trousers and shirt. His skin was velvety smooth, the muscle beneath like iron.

‘What if I’m dreaming?’ I murmured. ‘What if I wake and find you’ve already gone?’

Samuel stroked his thumbs against my cheeks and kissed the corners of my mouth. The bed creaked as he shifted his weight and rested himself along my length.

‘Is this real enough?’ he breathed, sliding his hand to my shoulder, then down over my breast. ‘Is this proof that I’m no dream?’

‘Oh, you’re a dream, all right,’ I countered, smiling as I slid my arms about his neck and lifted my hips to meet him. ‘A beautiful dream I never want to wake up from.’

‘We won’t wake, then,’ he promised. ‘We’ll stay here forever, just you and me, as we are now, always together.’

I liked the sound of that, and wanted to bask longer in the glow it gave me . . . but then Samuel’s mouth met mine with such hunger that I forgot the things he’d said, forgot his vows, forgot the sweet promise of our future together. For the longest time I was aware only of the sunlight fading from the window, the slow-moving shadows as day became night, the gentle squeak of the cot’s rusty springs – and Samuel, my dear Samuel, possessing me in a dream that I wished would never end . . .

Later – much later, it seemed – I lay awake while Samuel slept. Somewhere in the heat of our joining I had felt the old Aylish crumble and fall away, like a snakeskin abandoned in the grass. I’d always been an outsider, trapped midway between my father’s world of books, Bible study, and prayer – and the simple mission existence of my mother’s people. I was neither light nor dark, but a shadow-girl wedged between the two. Now, though, I belonged to Samuel, and he to me. I smiled to myself, feeling full in my spirit. We would, as he had so often told me in the past, create our own world where a person’s differences were cherished, and their skills and talents and heart placed far above such trifles as the colour of their skin –

A flinch at the window.

An owl or nightjar, I thought. Flapping past, disturbing the fragile moonbeams that shone into our haven. I wanted to
ignore the disturbance, and for a while I did . . . but then my skin began to prickle as though I’d taken too much sun, and I had the oddest sense that we were no longer alone.

My gaze went across the moonlit jumble of garments strewn on the floor, past the oblong shadow of the door to the tallboy and its vase of rosehips. It slid along the rough-hewn wall until at last it alighted on the pale glow of the window.

A face was peering through the glassless opening. A child’s face, hovering with no body, a restless spirit drifting out of the night. It was plump and gleamed white as alabaster, floating like a ghost, peering into the room with large curious eyes. For the briefest instant I met its gaze and terror struck my heart. I was looking into the face of death. My death . . . or maybe Samuel’s. I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth, but couldn’t cry out. That face had captured my voice, drowned it in a well of silence and turned me mute.

But only for a moment.

At last I gulped air and screamed.

Samuel lurched upright and found me in the half-light, held me until I calmed. When my wits returned enough to babble, ‘There, at the window, a face, it was horrible, Samuel, a horrible ghostly face,’ he sprang from the bed and dragged on his trousers. Grabbing a cloth bundle from under the bed, he unrolled a black object and rushed out the door. I heard his footsteps pound down the stairs then around the side of the hut, crunching through the bracken as he moved away. A moment later he returned, thudding back up the steps and across the verandah, bursting through the door with a muttered curse.

‘Who was it?’ he demanded.

‘Don’t know.’

He replaced the black object on the floor under the bed and gathered me into his arms.

‘Whoever it was, they’ve gone. I tell you, Aylish,’ he said, stroking my hair and pressing his lips along my brow, ‘if I get
my hands on the mongrel . . .’ He pulled back and examined my tear-stained face. ‘Did someone follow you here? Are you sure you didn’t recognise them?’

‘It wasn’t a person, Samuel. I’ve already told you. It was a ghost.’

He sighed and threw a thoughtful look across the room. ‘Ghosts don’t spy on people through windows, Aylish.’

‘This one did.’

Samuel’s eyes were full of shadows then, and he pulled me close. Retreating into the bed, we lay without speaking. The disturbance had stolen something; we were no longer alone in the universe, no longer cocooned in our dream. The outside world had crept through our barricade of love and polluted it with uncertainty and doubt. The night drifted by, and we must have dozed because, too soon, the piccaninny light began to blush along the eastern horizon, then dawn stained the hem of the sky first with pale green, then pink, then gold.

I shivered. I’d seen death. Death had seen me. Fear sprouted in my heart like a dark mushroom, pushing and straining until it broke through the surface of my resolve.

‘I don’t want you to go. I’m afraid you might die over there.’

Samuel folded me closer against him and kissed the top of my head. ‘No one’s going to die. I’ll be back before you know it – we’ll be married and never spend another moment apart for the rest of our lives. We’ll survive the war and be together again, Aylish, have no fear.’

‘Oh, Samuel.’ I wanted to snuggle like a kitten and take refuge in his arms, but then he was sitting up, drawing away and reaching for his shirt. With one final firm kiss to the corner of my eye, he clambered out of bed and retrieved his object from the floor.

‘Which means that while I’m gone, I want you to be safe. And the only way you’ll be safe is if you know how to defend yourself.’

Crossing the room, he paused by the doorway to look back. The light had strengthened, the edges of the sky were tinted
deepest blue, the colour of wild violets. Samuel drank in a breath of the moist air and shut his eyes, as though capturing the moment – the sight of me dishevelled and naked on the bed, the yearning that surely radiated from my eyes; the vase of rosehips, our scattered clothes, the scent of bush jasmine; and the dark tree-shadowed hole of the window.

‘Samuel – ?’

He blinked, then with a smile that seemed more sad than happy, he beckoned me to follow.

I dressed quickly but then lingered on the verandah. Samuel stood ten paces from the hut, fiddling with the object he’d retrieved from under the bed. There came a click as the weapon broke across the middle, and Samuel loaded six brass cartridges. He motioned me to join him.

‘No, Samuel.’

‘Come on, Aylish. It won’t take long.’

‘I can’t . . . you know Poppa opposes firearms. The mere idea of me handling a revolver would stop his dear old heart . . . But learning to use one? God help him, Samuel, he’d perish – ’

Samuel cocked a brow. ‘All the more reason to arm yourself. If Jacob won’t defend you, then you must learn how to defend yourself. Besides,’ he added with a devilish wink, ‘what the old man doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’

I didn’t want this to be my last memory of Samuel. I wanted to cling to those moments of passion we’d shared in the rose-scented darkness . . . but the ghostly face had stolen those memories, somehow claimed them as its own. At that moment, I felt bereft, shaken. Poppa’s gentle world of prayer and quiet devotion seemed very distant to me; meanwhile, the world of war and of young men leaving to take up guns and kill each other, and of newspapers full of maps and lists of the dead and missing – that world was suddenly very near.

I joined Samuel in the clearing. Tall ironbarks cast shadows on the grass, their leaves shivering in the morning air, while the
birds – whip-birds, whistlers, kookaburras, lorikeets – sang up the sun. I breathed the peppery scent of yellow-buttons, the tangy-green sharpness of eucalyptus, and the sweet full-bodied perfume of roses . . . and decided that Samuel was right.

He placed the revolver in my hand, taking care to point it toward the edge of the clearing. ‘Rest your forefinger along the top of the trigger guard, and hold the grip firm. Brace it with your other hand like this, and keep your arms straight.’

The weapon was large and weighty, too cumbersome to hold as he’d shown me. A powdery metallic aroma lifted off it, tinged with cloves and sweat, ugly and out of place in the gentle flower-scented morning. I tried to thrust it back into Samuel’s hands, but he shook his head.

‘No, no . . . keep it pointed outwards. You see that tree over there?’

‘I can’t, Samuel.’

‘Here – ’ He moved behind me and enclosed me in his arms, sliding his fingers over mine. ‘You’re holding it like a dead rat . . . You need to grip it with confidence, claim it as part of your body. An extension of your arm.’

I shuddered. ‘It’s too heavy. I can’t point it properly.’

Samuel adjusted his position. His body was warm against my back, his chest solid, his arms strong and reassuring.

‘Hold it tight with both hands, then pull back the hammer with your thumb . . . here, like so, until it clicks into place.’

The lesson was a waste of time. I knew I’d never point a weapon at another living soul, let alone fire off a deadly shot, not even to save my own life. My father might be elderly and set in his ways, but he was also – apart from Samuel – the wisest man I knew. ‘Liebling,’ he so often said, ‘each time we kill even the smallest of God’s creatures, we fray away our own connection to the divine.’