Bitterwood, 1931
Winter blew in one breezy afternoon, bringing with it a whirlwind of fallen leaves and an icy chill. Orah rubbed her arms to warm them as she gazed down at the orchard. More than a year had passed since she last saw Warra. Since that day on the track beneath the ironbark tree, when he had closed his eyes for the last time.
He would be bones by now. Ash and bones. She knew it was morbid to think that way, but she couldn’t help it. There were now more people she loved in the land of the dead than there were among the living.
If only Nala would return. Orah had wanted to go to the encampment, but Clarice forbade her. Nala’s grieving for her loss, Orah. Her whole family is. You must be patient. She’ll return when she’s ready.
Orah had drifted half-heartedly through her chores, escaping when she could to her special places. The bench beneath the cherry tree where she’d cut her name with Warra’s penknife; the bushland where she collected wattle seeds with Nala; and, most favourite of all, the grassy bank where Warra had once fashioned her a necklace from wildflowers.
Then a few months ago, Clarice had come to her with news.
‘A miracle,’ she told Orah, her eyes brimming with joyful tears. ‘Edwin and I are having a baby. Just think, Orah. Another little son or daughter. A little brother or sister for you.’
Orah had tried to smile and be happy for Clarice, but a new baby seemed wrong, a betrayal. A year and many months had passed since that day on the track, but Orah had not finished grieving for Warra. She could not forgive that Edwin and Clarice had forgotten him so easily.
A little brother or sister . . .
The words depressed her, made her uneasy. She had settled into life with Edwin and Clarice, had begun to feel part of their family. A special daughter, dearly beloved. Yet if another child came along, a child who shared their blood – would they forget her?
Since Clarice’s announcement, they were being especially kind to her. Edwin brought books from his trips into town or along the coast, despite money being scarce for such luxuries. They fell into the habit of stories before bedtime, Clarice reading on the bed with her, while Edwin listened from the doorway.
Lately, Clarice had begun inventing her own tales. Stories of romance and adventure that bewitched Orah and left her hungry for more. She was almost fifteen, which seemed too old for fairytales. She didn’t care. She looked forward to bedtime. Clarice’s stories cast a spell on her, made her forget the nagging darkness in her heart.
Orah hugged herself as another gust of dry brown leaves stirred in the wind. Shadows crawled along the ground beneath the mulberry trees, and the sight of them made her shiver. Bitterwood had become her home. Edwin and Clarice were now her family. Yet there were times, like now, when not even the promise of a bedtime story could ward away the emptiness that seemed to creep in with the night.
At first, Edwin thought Clarice’s stories charming. Princesses lost in the forest, brave young woodsmen who battled beasts or saved their ladyloves by outwitting the evil old king. When bedtime rolled around, he had loved nothing more than to lean in the doorway and smile in on the enchanting scene.
Orah, beautiful Orah, snuggled next to Clarice on the bed, tucked under her arm like a little bird; her blonde head nestled on Clarice’s shoulder, the lamplight gilding her hair. They might have been mother and daughter, and the rightness of that always filled him with longing.
The scene reminded him of earlier bedtimes, earlier stories – happier times when it had not been Orah under Clarice’s motherly wing, but another girl. The stories Clarice spun now were darker, and in them, Edwin began to glimpse familiar characters and themes. Lost children taken in by a kindly woodsman, or two little girls imprisoned in a deep well. And once, the strange sad tale of a seahorse trapped in a bottle.
Clarice’s imagination both awed Edwin and filled him with a deep disquiet. For the longest time he couldn’t pinpoint the origin of his unease. He had not minded that Clarice wove snippets of their life into her tales; what storyteller didn’t? There was no single story that spelled out their private secrets. Rather, it was an accumulation of tiny threads woven so tightly together that even he could not see exactly where fiction ended and fact began.
Until that night in August, at the tail end of winter in 1931. A cold night, the fire blazed downstairs, filling the house with the scent of wood smoke.
At nine o’clock, they bundled up to Orah’s room at the top of the stairs. Clarice climbed into bed beside the girl, while Edwin took up his usual post at the door. That night, Clarice wove the intricate tale of a queen who lived alone in her castle. Haunted by the loss of her children, she often walked along the beach below her home, despairing. One day, a fisherman found a little girl in a seashell, and gave her to the Queen. The Queen came to love the child dearly. But her love was possessive and smothering, and in time, the child withered and wasted away.
Edwin tried to assure himself it was just a story, that the symbolism of any fairytale was far-reaching. That was its nature; you could pick any tale and find within it echoes of your own life. Yet the tale of the Shell Queen shocked Edwin and filled him with dread.
Clarice looked up from the bed and smiled at him. A devastating smile, she seemed barely more than a girl herself: her face freshly scrubbed and bare of make-up, her hair pulled back, she looked guileless and more breathtakingly beautiful than Edwin had ever seen her. He realised that she had become so caught up in the telling of her story that its resonance with their own lives eluded her.
Orah’s head had grown heavy. She was almost asleep. Clarice rested her lips on the shiny hair, and murmured quietly, almost wistfully, against her scalp.
‘Oh my darling Edith, I’m so happy you’re here with us.’
Orah bent back her head and looked at Clarice. ‘Orah,’ she said sleepily. ‘It’s Orah.’
‘That’s what I said, love.’ Clarice cupped Orah’s cheek and kissed her again, this time on the nose. ‘Sweet Orah, how precious you are.’
A simple mistake, a slip of the tongue, yet Clarice had not appeared to register her blunder.
Edwin did not sleep that night. He lay in the bed next to her, breathing through his teeth. He let his thoughts wander into forbidden territory: little Edith, and the void she had left behind; tiny Joyce and her whisper-short life. Perhaps he and Clarice had tried to fill that void too soon. He pictured the beautiful child who had come to them, even before Edith’s bones had fully crumbled back into the earth. The golden-haired girl who had appeared in their lives as if by magic. She had transformed them, healed them. But was she like the Shell Queen’s child, trapped in the prison of their love, doomed to wither and waste away? Had they, like the Shell Queen in Clarice’s story, chosen badly – would they too pay a price? Yes, Edwin believed they would. And the gnawing in his gut told him it would be a steep one.
Edwin shivered. Rolling on his side, he curled into himself, trying without success to will away the hollowness in his chest. When the dark time before dawn sent its chill into the room, he got up and padded barefoot to his study.
Taking out paper and pen, he drafted a letter. It took several tries, and by the time the first rays of sunlight were peeping through the study window, a scattering of crumpled rejects lay about his feet. Daylight returned his reason. His final draft joined its predecessors on the floor, and Edwin swept them all up and took them downstairs to the fire grate. As he watched the pages burn, the gnawing in his gut subsided, but did not leave him completely. It lingered, barely there, a reminder that in life, just as in stories, no price ever truly went unpaid.
Nala did not return to Bitterwood. Every day Orah went to the gate and watched the road, hoping to see a wisp of dust, wishing hard that Nala’s small figure would appear, striding towards her. She envisioned her friend seeing her there at the gate, lifting her skinny arm in a wave as she ran to greet her.
But Nala never came.
Spring arrived. New green leaves unfurled and mulberry blossoms filled the air with their sweet scent. Seven new lambs had joined the flock, and the mulberry trees were full of nests and fledgling birds.
As Clarice’s time approached, she became more beautiful. If Orah had not seen it with her own eyes, she would have thought such a thing impossible. Edwin had noticed too. Orah watched him sometimes, gazing at his wife as if at some wondrous vision. Clarice seemed to glow with an inner fire. Her lips were always on the brink of a smile, and roses bloomed in her cheeks. She laughed at nothing in particular, and when she caught Orah glaring at her she would sweep the girl into her arms and coddle her like a baby, kissing her hair and trying to tickle her into a better mood.
Orah refused to be drawn into Clarice’s orbit of joy. The happier Clarice became, the more resentful Orah grew.
When the baby comes, you’ll forget me.
By October, the weather grew a little warmer. Although the newspapers reported a worsening economic climate, Bitterwood seemed like another world. Leaves were greening up the bare branches, and jonquils poked their yellow heads from the grass. The house was beginning to wake, a creature stirring after long hibernation. In preparation for the summer guests they hoped would arrive, Orah and Clarice had spent the past few months cleaning the guest bedrooms, airing blankets and sheets, scouring the floors, polishing the windows until they shone. They rarely saw Edwin, who had thrown himself into his usual routine of buying supplies, chopping wood, writing and rewriting inventories and accounts and then transcribing them into his ledgers late into the night. Without Warra and Nala to help with the workload, and now with Clarice needing increasing rest and care, the pace would be hectic.
‘Orah?’ Clarice’s voice drifted from the kitchen.
Orah was in the rearing house. She had been escaping there a lot lately, and had just collected a box of silkworm eggs from the icehouse. She ignored Clarice’s call, concentrating on her task. Picking out a paper sheet of the fine grain-like eggs, she placed it carefully inside the warming boxes and covered it with a soft mantle of new leaves. In twenty days, the eggs would hatch, and feeding would begin.
‘Orah, are you there?’
She still had two boxes of silkworm grain to lay out, and hated to be disturbed. The eggs were fragile. At this crucial stage of their development, they needed steady temperature and quiet.
‘Orah?’
She sighed. Returning to the icehouse, she stowed the boxes, dusted her hands on her apron, and then went towards the house. She could hear Clarice clattering in the kitchen, muttering to herself. Edwin had gone to Apollo Bay and he would not be back until dark. Whenever he left the house, Clarice became more fretful, worrying that the baby might come while he was away.
As Orah stepped into the kitchen, she heard someone knocking at the front door.
‘Would you get that, love?’ Clarice said, as she packed away the box of old preserving jars she’d been sorting. ‘I’m covered in dust.’
Orah frowned. ‘We’re not expecting guests tonight.’
‘Ask them to wait. I’ll be out in five minutes.’
Orah hurried along the hallway to the sitting room and peered through the window. A man stood on the verandah. His back was turned to her, but instantly Orah knew that he had not come for a room. This was no holidaymaker, no solitary soul seeking fresh air and ocean views.
His grubby trousers were shiny with wear and patched around the cuff. The tops of his shoes had separated from the soles, the leather scuffed and broken. He wore an ill-fitting coat, and his dull fair hair curled over his collar, greasy at the roots, in need of a wash.
Most likely he was hoping for a meal, perhaps in exchange for some light labour about the yard. Occasionally men like him turned up at Bitterwood. Half-starved, empty-eyed men desperate for work.
She opened the door. The man turned. When he saw her, his mouth dropped agape. Behind a red-veined nose, his face was chalky-pale, and he was wringing a frayed woollen hat in his hands. He smelled of grog.
‘Can I help you?’ Orah asked.
The man shuffled forwards. He searched Orah’s face, shaking his head, his lips trembling.
‘My name is Hanley Dane,’ he said hoarsely. ‘God forgive me . . . You must be Orah?’