Lessons in Loving

Next morning, before he left Sydney for Kenilworth, Tom visited Morton Ashworth & Associates, Private Investigators. Back in his working days, Tom’s father had often used the firm for business assignments.

‘Excuse me one moment, sir,’ the clerk at the desk offered. ‘I’ll ask whether Mr Ashworth can see you. Your name, please?’

‘Mr Ashworth said if you’re Martin Fortescue’s son, he’d make an exception. He never sees new clients, you know. But he said to tell you he will come down to meet you in a moment.’

Soon a lean, silver-haired man appeared, offered his hand to Tom, and led him to an office with a splendid view of Sydney’s harbour.

‘Take a seat, Mr Fortescue. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Your father and I were the best of friends. Rather a shame he died so young. But how may I help you?’

‘I need help to find a missing person,’ Tom answered. ‘My governess for a while. Name of Kate Courtney. Newly graduated from Avonleigh Teachers College, so I understand.’

‘I hired her to help me polish my English. Save me from being laughed out of court when I paid visits to English society.’

‘Good idea,’ Mr Ashworth murmured. ‘Your interrupted schooling, as I recollect, may have—’

‘Yes. Martin, your father, and I discussed it often. But do go on,’ Mr Ashworth said. ‘It will make the search easier if you give me a little background.’

‘So you took her to help with your courting? To keep an ear open to your English?’

‘Yes. Then one morning, she up and left in a hurry. Said she was heading home to her mother. Said she’d find herself a new position. That her work with me was finished.’

‘But now that has perhaps taken a new direction?’ Mr Ashworth smiled. ‘And, let me guess, you find yourself missing Miss Courtney?’

‘Simply doing my job.’ A satisfied smirk flashed across the man’s face for a second. ‘And what do you think she might be doing now?’ he asked. ‘By way of employment, for instance?’

‘I haven’t the least notion.’ Tom winced as he thought of Kate stepping onto the train at Blackheath a few weeks before. She’d have been tired, confused. Dare he hope she’d missed him a little? Had she perhaps secretly fancied him? There’d been times when she’d glanced at him with a sad look in her eye. And the moments they’d touched, at the ball, or maybe accidentally as they moved about the kitchen, she’d sometimes seemed to melt a little. He remembered her smile at those times. Shy, cautious, as if she might be hiding something. Had those smiles sent him an oblique message? What was it? What had she been trying to tell him?

‘You must give me a few more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle,’ Mr Ashworth said, dragging Tom back to the present.

‘She’d lately graduated from teachers’ college. Never had another position before coming aboard as my governess.’

‘I don’t know. What else might a lady who’s lately graduated from teachers’ college do by way of employment?’

‘So what should I do now?’ Tom had thought the search would be a matter of simple routine for the experienced private investigator.

‘We shall begin work on the case immediately,’ Mr Ashworth said. ‘The clerk will ask you to complete a form, including dates and such. We’ll write to you as soon as we discover some useful information.’

Tom walked downstairs fighting a whirlwind of emotions. What if Mr Ashworth drew a blank? Tom would try another plan, then another. However long it took, he would find Kate.

Back at Kenilworth, Tom struggled to take up his old life—the life he’d lived from childhood until the day he’d met a pretty, petite woman with large schoolma’am glasses and a head of wavy black hair. He remembered that first day, when she’d smiled down at him from the balcony after he’d ridden in from the hills. Was that the moment he’d fallen in love with her? Fallen in love? Wait.

He’d fallen in love with Laetitia, and look where that had ended. What was different about Kate? Well, everything. She was kind, sweet-natured, friendly. Laetitia was a manipulating temptress.

Over the following days, Tom took to sitting on the verandah of the Big House in the evenings with his beer, reliving past times with Kate. It became a bad habit. Perhaps he should sit somewhere else. That verandah came with too many memories.

The Big House was quiet now. Too quiet. On his first day back at Kenilworth, he’d visited the cottage, recalling that it had been Kate’s home. The place was tidy, bare. She’d collected all her belongings, and probably asked Edna to give the cottage a proper going-over. Whenever he sat in the kitchen, Kate’s ghost flitted about, making a pot of tea, or, head in a book, preparing the next day’s lessons for him. Once, despite telling himself that it was a bad idea, he walked through Kate’s cottage again. Perhaps she’d left a scrap of paper bearing her new address. But he already knew the place was as clean as a brand new pin. As he went about his work, his men fed him generous doses of male humour.

‘What is it about you, Tom? You drag all these pretty ladies up to Kenilworth. Then five minutes later, they vanish. You must beef up your game, Tom.’

After a few days, he couldn’t stand the disquiet a moment longer. On the pretext of visiting his Sydney agent, he called on Morton Ashworth & Associates, and met with Mr Ashworth again.

‘I regret to advise you, we’ve drawn a complete blank so far,’ Mr Ashworth said. ‘We’ve visited the New South Wales Education Department, persuaded them to search through their records for teacher positions. And to date, nothing. All we can do is keep searching.’

‘Indeed we have. The government people keep lists of everything from the movements of the stars to the weather in Bullamakanka. But it takes time for the details to percolate into those lists. We’ll write to you the minute we find the least clue.’

The news didn’t lift Tom’s limp mood. Kate might at this very minute be walking out with a new man, with marriage on the horizon. Perhaps he was one of those well-scrubbed gentlemen who wore a suit to his work in a fancy Sydney office. Tom knew Kate liked to be busy. Doubtless she’d seek to be engaged in a demanding job she loved. If she had a husband by now, they’d come home to their little nest each evening, and sit down to a cosy dinner. Probably cooked by the man. Kate had many talents, but cooking wasn’t one of them. Then after dinner … It didn’t bear thinking about.

The days ground by. Every night Tom thought of Kate. Then one afternoon, a letter arrived from Mr Ashworth.

Dear Mr Fortescue,

The steamer Westralia Princess passenger list of August 13th included the name of Kate Courtney. On the form requesting passengers’ destinations in Western Australia, she wrote the words Granite Ridge.

You will appreciate that Granite Ridge is one of several new towns in the region dedicated to goldmining. It is widely known that in order to attract miners, such towns provide amenities such as schools and hospitals.

We have also searched passenger lists of steamers returning from Perth. To date, our searches have not discovered the subject person’s name, suggesting she might have taken up residence in Granite Ridge, perhaps as a teacher.

Tom fought the urge to set out for Granite Ridge next morning. Common sense told him finding a needle in a haystack would be easier than searching an area perhaps as big as one of those petite European countries. A few nights later, after a long, sweaty day riding Kenilworth’s boundary fences, he opened another letter from Morton Ashworth.

Dear Mr Fortescue,

Some time ago we requested Western Australia’s Department of Education’s lists of practising teachers. They record a Miss Kate Courtney as a teacher at Granite Ridge School.

In seconds, Tom decided. It was time to head for Sydney and board the first steamer setting sail for Perth. Next morning he packed his bags and ordered Ah Foo to take him to the railway station.

Three weeks later, after a pleasant cruise to Perth, and a less pleasant train journey to Granite Ridge, Tom stepped down from the Goldfields Express and walked along the dusty station platform. As a cab took him into the little town in the late afternoon, he asked the driver to recommend suitable accommodation. As dusk slid over the town, Tom took a room in the Golden Dawn Hotel. It was too late to ask after Kate’s likely whereabouts.

‘Come to start work in the mines, have we?’ the concierge asked. ‘Perhaps a manager’s position?’ Tom eyed the greying middle-aged man, hoping he’d be friendly, helpful.

‘No,’ Tom said. ‘I was hoping to meet up with an old friend.’ ‘Old friend’ fell a long way short of what he felt for Kate, but he mustn’t give the man gossip fodder.

‘Perhaps if you tell me your friend’s name? I’ve lived here for seven years. Since mining began, you might say. I know near everyone in the town.’

‘Easy. That’s the school.’ He pointed to the skyline. ‘See. Over by the mullock dump.’ Tom looked, saw a gaggle of low buildings perhaps a couple of miles away, huddled beside the grey mountain of overburden excavated to uncover the rich ore buried beneath it.

‘You don’t know where she lives?’ he asked. There was just a chance he wouldn’t have to wait through the long night.

‘Sorry, sir. Best you take a cab over to the school tomorrow and ask. But you’d best not go till the classes are finished for the day. They don’t take kindly to strangers interrupting their classes. I’ve heard Miss Courtney’s rather strict.’

Tom woke early after a night of patchy sleep. How would he manage the meeting with Kate? He’d heard that in these remote mining towns, young single women were more precious than the gold men risked their lives to mine. Unattached women were hunted, tracked down, wooed. The men in these parts were young, strong, ambitious, flush with cash. Many had taken on the tough, spartan life of the miner so that in a few short years they might earn enough to set themselves up for life.

The odds of Kate being unattached were slim. She might well have taken up with a gentleman friend by now. Tom knew well enough that many a well-educated fellow had left the civilised cities such as Sydney and Melbourne to take his chances on the goldfields. He’d heard of young gentlemen working in such places as the Kalgoorlie stock exchange, where a one-pound share bought today might be worth one hundred pounds next morning.

Kate was pretty, friendly, and lovable. He pictured her walking out of her schoolroom at the end of the day. Would her wavy hair now be flowing over her shoulders? Perhaps she’d had it cut short since she arrived in this hot, dusty place. Usually, she made practical choices—the direct opposite of Laetitia.

The thought of Laetitia triggered a cramp of disgust in Tom’s gut. How could he have been so one-eyed? She and her poncy father, with his sugarplum accent, had seen him as an opportunity. Tom had been the big fish that took the bait and swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. He blushed at his blindness. He’d been taken in by a skin-deep layer of beauty that hid a selfish, greedy heart. That, and the trappings—the airs and graces and blue blood—that his homesick mother had told him times without number made a good wife. Then his mother had died.

Years of living a solitary life in remote Kenilworth had set Tom up to fall for the first attractive woman to show a smidgeon of interest in him. Then, at a minute to midnight, he’d discovered the cold truth about Laetitia. Her interest focused on just two things—his money and his naivety.

When did school end for the day? He’d walk by and ask. He returned to the school at half past three, as the woman in the headmaster’s office had suggested. And she had told him that Miss Courtney taught in Room 4.

A few minutes before half past three, Tom headed for Room 4. He’d spent much of the morning bathing, shaving, buying new clothes, and finally, the biggest bunch of roses the remote town’s florist could pull together for the small fortune Tom offered. Now, as he walked the dusty paths round the school buildings, he carried that bouquet. He ordered himself to walk confidently, not like a man heading for the gallows. The bell rang to signal the end of the school day. Pupils flowed from the classrooms, along the paths, down to the school’s front entrance—for the moment, a river in flood. As they hurried by, some pupils fired curious glances at the man carrying the gigantic bunch of flowers.

Tom reached a door bearing the number 4, and locked his eyes onto it. He stood outside and waited. The door didn’t open. After a few minutes, the flood of noisy home-bound pupils ebbed. Kate’s classroom door stayed closed. Had she left early? Was she sick, at home? Had her class been transferred to another room, and the woman at the headmaster’s office not been advised? His eyes stayed glued to the handpainted number. He waited for a few more tortured minutes, pacing, worrying. Then something inside him snapped. He couldn’t abide the tension a moment longer.

Heart thudding, he grabbed the doorknob and turned it quietly. Nerves fizzing like a bundle of fireworks, he pushed the door open. There, beside a table at the front of the room, all schoolma’am glasses and wavy dark hair, staring down at a pile of notes, stood Kate. The pupils focused on their teacher.

‘Tell me, someone,’ she said, eyes still fixed on her notes. ‘What do you think might have been engaging Julius Caesar’s mind when Brutus stabbed him?’

As Tom closed the open door, the latch clicked. Loudly. Every pupil turned at the sound. Every eye locked onto him. Except Kate’s. She was too absorbed in her notes to have heard the click.

The huge bunch of flowers transmitted the obvious message to the pupils. A girl giggled. At last, Kate looked up. He watched as her jaw fell open.

‘Tom.’ The word drifted from her lips like a floating thistledown—a slow, barely audible whisper. She stood statue-still, eyes wide behind her glasses.

Slowly, slowly, Kate’s lips curved into a smile. A gentle, surprised smile. Her mind must be taking in the reality that stood before her. That smile came from her heart.

Tom’s heart jumped. He felt his lips flick into the biggest smile he’d ever made. So she remembered him, liked him. He was too happy to speak. Then he knew he must take charge.

‘Excuse me, everyone,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I came to see Miss Courtney. I waited till the bell rang, but—’

‘Class dismissed.’ Kate’s voice told him she’d transmuted back into her teacherly self. ‘I’m sorry I kept you after the bell rang, class. Please read the rest of Act One for next Tuesday.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be here next Tuesday, Miss Courtney?’ a girl asked, her voice theatrical. Every pupil in the room took in the joke, laughed. The arrival of a stranger carrying a huge bunch of frighteningly expensive roses, shipped all the way from Perth, could mean only one thing to their adorable, smiling teacher. Still giggling, the pupils gathered their books, grinning and staring at Tom as they shuffled through the door. The room was empty but for Tom and Kate. A silence, that could only be described as expectant, descended.