Never having been parted from Grace in all their twenty-two years, Edda had no premonition how much separation from her sister was going to hurt. Leaving their physical similarities out of it, they were not alike temperamentally or spiritually, or indeed in any other way commonly attributed to identical twins. Many and many were the times, Edda reflected now, when she had cursed Grace for tagging along—for not being, it had seemed to a busy, pushy child like Edda, more fun, more joy, a better teammate. No, it was always Edda obliged to lead, Grace compelled to follow. And now that Grace was gone, Edda found herself unreasonably devastated.
“I hope I’ve never thought of Grace as an inoperable and malignant tumor,” she said to Tufts, to whom she related better than to Kitty, “but I can’t deny that in many ways being Grace’s twin felt like hosting a tumor. Now Hymen Goddess of Marriage has separated me from my tumor like the most ruthless surgeon.”
“Well, dear, you’re rudderless,” said Tufts tenderly. “It will take a long time to get used to being without Grace.”
“You don’t understand!” Edda cried. “I always thought I’d be ecstatic at losing Grace.”
“Yes, the way I’m sure I’ll feel when I shed Kitty, except that common sense says I’ll mourn her going dreadfully. Like me, Edda, you have common sense. How could it not be a colossal wrench to lose one’s other half?”
Edda heaved a sigh. “How, indeed?”
“At least Kitty and I understand, remember that.”
Edda tried to, but witnessing their united front every day only served to emphasize her own loss. Not that there weren’t compensations. The most important to Edda was her father’s sudden spurt of independence from Maude, so noticeable that all sorts of people were a little startled. Not that he treated his second wife with less respect, just that the henpecked deference was missing. Too superficial to search her own conduct, Maude blamed the Rector’s new attitude on her fading looks and promptly went to spend three months in a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains, there to diet, exercise, and pour her heart out to people known as “alienists.” She couldn’t have made a worse move, for it took her out of the Rector’s life just at the moment when the first daughter’s marriage reminded him that he too was growing old. Life without Maude, he discovered, was very pleasant: he could have whatever he wanted for breakfast, pick his own hymns for the choir, compose his own sermons, and visit his impoverished and therefore unimportant parishioners as often as he liked. Habits that, when Maude returned from her health treatment, he refused to give up; his ears, it seemed, had grown awfully deaf.
“It serves my stepmother right,” said Edda jubilantly to Jack Thurlow when they met on the bridle path and dismounted to “have a decent yarn,” as Jack put it.
They didn’t meet very often; nursing had cut a huge swath through the old freedoms of leisure, when the four girls had done little for their keep beyond housework for Maude, a flexible business. Nursing meant a physical exhaustion that made going to the pictures or, in Edda’s case, riding, too much an effort.
Amused by the discovery, Edda learned that Jack Thurlow did not appreciate his demotion to, as he put it:
“A convenience you stick in a cupboard and only bring out when the fancy takes you. I don’t know why I oblige you.”
Internal mirth became open laughter; Edda roared with it. “Oh, Jack, grow up! You’re eleven years older than me, but you act like a little boy whose big sister has pinched your favorite toy. I work for a living these days, and work is the significant word. Nothing pleases me more than a ride with you, but I don’t have the time or the energy often—is that clear enough?”
“When you started to nurse you were full of the idea that regular rides would help you cope, but you’ve been nursing now for an eternity and the rides keep dwindling. Your father uses Fatima in a pony cart for Maude, just to give the poor creature exercise.”
Her face fell, but she nodded. “Daddy’s right, but I know you don’t approve of hacks being harnessed, and I’m sorry.” Her face assumed its most seductive look. “The trouble is that I love to ride her when I have the chance, and if she goes back to you, all my chances will vanish. Is it really so damaging for Fatima to tow Maude around in a lightweight cart? I know why you gave me Fatima—she’s a very stupid but simultaneously placid horse. Maude’s even trained her to pull the clippings to the compost heap.”
His grin was reluctant, but gradually broadened. “A pity you’re a woman, Edda. There’s a master politician inside you.”
“Then I’ll marry a master politician,” she said lightly.
“Ride up to the house with me, have a cuppa and a scone,” he wheedled. “More comfortable than the river bank.”
She rose to her feet at once. “And less public,” she said, mounting Fatima, which really was a perfect horse-of-all-trades, yet contrived to master all of them. Stupidity was a help.
“Any news of the Burdum heir?” she asked over buttered cheese scones still hot from the oven—a superb scone baker, Jack!
“The Pommy bloke? Old Tom doesn’t say much, but I don’t think the new heir has any plans to come to Australia any time soon. He has lots of irons in Pommy fires, especially London.”
“Why do we call the English Pommies?”
“I never met anybody who knows,” said Jack, shrugging. “The new heir won’t even know he’s a Pommy until he gets here. Old Tom says he’s a doctor.”
“Maude said that, but I confess we took no notice of her.” Edda pulled a face. “According to her, he’s a tycoon as well.”
“Impossible. They’re opposites—altruistic and exploitative. Like being a saint and a demon rolled in one,” said Jack.
“Oh, I know dozens of people just like that.” Edda smirked. “Look at those with knees shiny from praying—awful villains!”
“That’s why I like you. You see what’s hidden.”
“My profession helps. You can’t learn much about human nature from fat lambs, Jack, but you can from sick people.”
“Maybe that’s why the Burdum heir became a doctor. Money is no teacher of what makes human beings tick either.” Jack took her cup and plate. “Come on, I’ll drive you back to the hospital.”
Heart singing as it had not since the loss of Grace, Edda returned to the hospital in Jack’s battered old utility truck. Why has it come as such a shock to realize that Jack Thurlow is the man for me? I’ve always been drawn to him, and the intimacy of our friendship says what I feel. And yet it was during the two hours of easy talk in his kitchen, drinking tea and eating scones, that it had dawned on me: a part of me loves him! How had that happened? Why had it happened? I don’t want to marry him, and I pray he doesn’t want to marry me, but the bond is there, and it’s strong, very strong.
I want to travel, I want to shake free of Corunda once I’ve completed my nursing, but Jack shows me how lovely it would be to travel in the company of a beloved someone else. There to cover each other’s exposed weaknesses, while there is still enough freedom left to feel at liberty. I have the right amount of love for Jack, but has he the right amount of love for me? And that, I do not know. He hasn’t transmitted the right signals yet. So I keep holding back, and he keeps holding back. Trust? Oh, trust! It doesn’t exist.
Kitty noticed her happiness when she walked in. “You’re getting over Grace at last, Edda.”
“Yes, I am,” said Edda, pulling off boots and jodhpurs. It was on the tip of her tongue to mention Jack, but she didn’t—leave well enough alone. “Did you listen to Maude prattling about the Burdum heir?” she asked instead.
“Only that he’s a doctor. Where does he consult, I wonder?”
“I have no idea,” Edda answered. “Just that he’s a Burdum heir who outranks Jack Thurlow.”
Tufts erupted into the common room. “Edda, the duty roster has been changed. You’re to have your days off, but then you’re going to the operating theatre.” Her pretty face twisted. “Half your luck! I was hoping I’d be the first.”
“Dr. Finucan won’t let you go until you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing for him,” Kitty said unsympathetically. “You can’t have all the treats, Tufts.”
“I know, just as I know that my turn will come.”
But why did I say nothing to them about Jack? Edda asked herself as she headed for the bathroom, there to eliminate the aroma of horse. They are my sisters! But he’s made no overture to me beyond friendship, and what if he should fall in love with Kitty? No, I won’t let that happen! Great though my love for Kitty is, I won’t stand by and let her ruin my life.
A thought that, one day later, Edda found uncanny; by sheer accident she and Jack chanced upon Kitty walking the bridle path. Jack made all the correct responses, so did Kitty, but the horses were in a mood to canter, and Kitty, afoot, disliked being in such close proximity to huge animals.
“Pretty girl,” said Jack after they sat on their log.
“The prettiest in the world,” Edda said sincerely.
Jack grinned. “If you like the type, I daresay. But dumpy azalea bushes don’t thrill me. I like sophisticated poplars.”
Her turn to laugh. “Do you know what sophisticated means?”
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” he said enigmatically.
Corunda Base Hospital’s Casualty department held a small operating theatre adequate for stemming a hemorrhage or immobilizing broken bones until the patient could be transferred for more major procedures to the hospital’s one full-sized and fully equipped theatre, which lay down-ramp from the junction of the Men’s and Women’s wards. Two surgeons attended the hospital, both also having private practices in rooms nearby: Dr. Ian Gordon was the general and abdominal man, Dr. Erich Herzen the orthopedic man, and both were considered good surgeons. The anesthetist was Dr. Tony Watson, skilled in the administration of chloroform, ether, nitrous oxide, and local injections; he also had a good instinct for when it was necessary to give the patient a whiff of oxygen to lighten the gas-induced coma up a little.
When Edda stepped through the double doors she found herself at the start of a series of chambers, only one of which was the operating theatre proper: there was a scrub room, a gassing room, a sterilizing room where all the instruments were stored as well as sterilized, a changing room for the men and another for the women, a room for storing bulky things that might be needed, and six single rooms where the recovering patients were put until the surgeons considered them fit to go back to their wards. Maternity, she had discovered long ago, was pursued elsewhere—unless the expectant mother needed a caesarean section, which was done in this main theatre. The obstetrician, Dr. Ned Mason, was a Corunda institution; anyone under forty born in Corunda had been delivered by Ned Mason, who had no intention of retiring.
Theatre Sister was a martinet named Dorothy Marshall; under her command she had ten nurses and two junior sisters. All the nurses were West Enders permanently seconded to Theatre, but Edda’s arrival heralded the beginning of a change that would steadily grow in size as the years went on. Consequently Theatre Sister was not pleased to see her. However, she understood that her ability to transmit her knowledge to a passing parade of trainee nurses would radically affect her own future welfare. Therefore she was determined to make a good theatre nurse out of Latimer.
Edda would commence, she learned, in Theatre itself, working as the “dirty nurse”—a clean and scrubbed but not sterile servant to those whose sterility had to be maintained. She was there to remove the used instruments, scrub and wash them clear of every particle of tissue and blood, then put them into the sterilizer to boil for twenty minutes before removing them with sterile forceps and laying them out on sterile, cloth-covered trays that went then to a steam autoclave. It was dangerous and uncomfortable work, between the burns, scalds, and heat that dogged every phase of antisepsis. Because of its perils, the job of dirty nurse was a rigidly fixed length of time. Before fatigue set in, a nurse came off dirty nursing and was given sedentary duties for the rest of her shift.
Theatre Sister herself acted as chief surgical assistant and often closed the incision; if the procedure were extremely taxing, another qualified doctor would join the surgeon, who was prone to grumble because Theatre Sister knew more and operated better. She did not, unfortunately, have a medical degree, so the rich, having the knowledge and ability to sue, were actually worse off than the poor, who got Theatre Sister no matter what. Many the chuckles Edda enjoyed as her nursing career went on and she saw for herself that the privileges of rank and wealth did not always guarantee the best medical care. Nor did it pay to be an obnoxious patient; a nurse made to suffer by a patient for no reason beyond malice had all kinds of revenges at her fingertips, from frightful laxatives to itching rashes. Nurses too were human!
Instrument nurse, Edda learned, passed the sterile instruments either to the surgeon or to Theatre Sister, and dropped the used ones in a dish for the dirty nurse to collect and clean. One of the several around the table, usually Swab Sister in Sister Marshall’s establishment, was responsible for counting the number of swabs placed inside an incision. If it were an abdominal operation, swabs might be the size of women’s handkerchiefs, and be stuffed into the cavity by what seemed like the dozen. Yet every swab had to be recovered before a gaping abdominal incision could be closed. Should a swab remain inside, death could ensue.
One nurse hovered by the anesthetist’s shoulder to assist him, and had no other duty than whatever he demanded of her. In fact, each gowned and masked body clustered around the operating table had specific duties and could be pardoned nothing. Theatre Sister, a junior Sister, and five nurses made up the team, with a second team ready to take over the moment Theatre Sister ordered it. That was usually at the end of an operation, but if the procedure were very long and difficult, the team might change in midstream. Not that the second team sat idly by; there were recovering patients to nurse, many things to do.
To her intense gratification, Edda found that watching an operation held neither nausea nor revulsion for her; it was just too interesting. The steady gloved hands sopping up beads of blood, applying a metal tube to suck up a stronger bleed, the deft snapping shut of a pair of artery forceps on a stubborn bleeder, the neat way a whole group of these hemostats, as they were called, was gathered together and confined with a tie to keep them out of the way—fascinating! Admittedly the crunch of cutters through thick bone came as a shock—so much for that romantic twaddle about the delicate hands of a surgeon! Surgeons needed hands like engine mechanics.
Dr. Gordon was glad to have a new audience, it seemed, for he cheerfully talked his way through an appendectomy, just to instruct her and annoy Junior Sister.
“You’ll note, nurse, that we don’t simply dive into the middle of the abdominal contents—too dangerous. But you can see the colon clearly, lying across the thinner entrails, can’t you? Yes? Good! Note that the interior of the abdominal cavity is a vivid pink—first indication of coming sepsis, but we’re here in time, he won’t develop peritonitis. The operation is simple enough because the cecum lies close to the ventral surface, and the vermiform appendix juts off it. Nuisances that are always infecting! Things get stuck inside with nowhere to go, like hard little fecal pellets.”
Was she supposed to ask questions? “Constipation, sir?”
He guffawed. “Wrong end of the colon for that, nurse.”
“Do you open the bowel itself, sir?”
“I wish! No, the bowels contain fecal matter that teems with germs. Open the bowel, let any fecal matter spill into the abdomen, and you’ve caused peritonitis, sepsis, death. You see, we don’t have any medicines that can kill the germs. So if I do a Billroth I or Billroth II to remove part of the stomach or the pylorus for ulcers or cancer, it’s of paramount importance to clamp the ends of the remaining tissue so that no contents can escape before you anastomose them together. You can try the same if removing bowel for cancer with a view to an end-to-end anastomosis, but it’s very risky. Gall bladders are easier,” said Dr. Gordon. “What we have to do is find a way to kill germs by mouth or injection. Come on, nurse, ask questions!”
But the one question Edda burned to ask, she did not dare: why were so many surgeons of Scottish ancestry? If they weren’t surgeons, they seemed to be engineers, and there was a connection.
Dr. Herzen was a German born and bred, and Corunda knew itself extremely lucky to have acquired a bone specialist of his distinction; patients came from Sydney to see him. The most mortifying incident in Dr. Herzen’s history had occurred during the Great War, when, despite Corunda’s screams of outrage, the jingoistic federal government had interned him as an enemy alien and denied him the right to practice. As his medical degree was from Sydney University, it made no more sense than did his two-year detention. His devotion to Corunda was understandable, given the town’s staunch fight to free him, but Corunda had known what it was doing. A natural denizen of Macquarie Street, Sydney, chose to continue practicing in Corunda, which had also obtained him a British passport.
Herzen’s days in Theatre were inevitably busy, whereas Dr. Gordon’s intake varied. Both surgeons saw their share of work in the Casualty department, and they could, if necessary, pinch hit for each other.
Edda’s most extraordinary experience came after she had been promoted to instrument nurse. Theatre Sister had decided to like her, which meant she would receive the full gamut of Theatre’s jobs apart from Sister’s own, and even that would be touched on.
Gordon and Herzen operated together, with Herzen taking the lead, and no anesthetic.
“The patient is comatose and has been fitting,” said Sister Marshall as they scrubbed. “Dr. Herzen is going to try to remove a subdural hematoma—a blood clot that has formed over the outer surface of the brain and is pressing down on it. Such clots keep on absorbing fluids and swelling. Because the cranium is a bony box, swollen contents have no room to expand. So even though the brain itself isn’t injured by the external clot, it becomes injured as a result of being squashed. Unless the pressure is released, the squashing will progress to death. And our surgeons are going to try to stop the squashing by removing the clot.”
“How do you know the patient has a subdural hematoma?” Edda asked. “There’s no test to show it up, is there?”
“The coma, the epileptic seizures on one side of the body only, and one pupil bigger than the other—this last is the classical sign of a subdural hematoma,” said Theatre Sister. “No X-ray shows the clot, but Dr. Herzen is sure he’ll find a huge clot over the left fronto-temporal cortex. The patient had developed a specific speech loss indicating this area, and Dr. Gordon agrees.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have Nurse Trimble on instruments?”
“Frankly, no. Some of the instruments had to be borrowed from Sydney and Trimble wouldn’t know them, whereas you’ve had tutoring on unusual instruments, even if only from books. With any luck, none of them will be needed, but—”
The goddess had spoken. Edda climbed up to stand on her stool just to one side of Theatre Sister, her training vindicated.
Having made a small incision in the scalp and laid bare the bone, Dr. Herzen picked up what looked exactly like an ordinary bit-and-brace. The bit was circular, hollow, and toothed, with a spike in its center; it was about the size of a ha’penny or a quarter. When the surgeon turned the handle on the brace wheel, the bit gouged its way into the bone, with Dr. Gordon carefully scraping up the moist granules of bone dust as the bit bored downward.
“I’ve reached the table—watch out,” Herzen warned. A moment later, and the bit withdrew holding a ha’penny coin of bone. The surgeons huddled to look; Edda couldn’t see.
“It’s black from blood under the dura, Erich—you’re right on the nose!” said Dr. Gordon delightedly.
“Sucker ready?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to snip the dura—Sister, are your nurses set to deal with our patient if he comes to and panics?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dr. Herzen made a minute pair of snips, cross-shaped, with small, curved, pointed scissors; blackish jelly welled into sight immediately, and Dr. Gordon went to work with the sucker tube.
Still comatose, the patient didn’t rouse as the pressure on his brain was relieved, so the two surgeons waited to see whether the bleeding was still going on, or the right kind of clot had formed underneath the malignant one. Finally Dr. Herzen sighed.
“I think we can close up, Ian.”
The disc of bone was gently pushed back into place and the bone shavings patted around it; four scalp sutures, and the craniotomy was over. The patient began to stir.
“Why didn’t you use a trephine, Erich?” Dr. Gordon asked.
“Don’t like ’em,” was the reply. “It’s too easy to go too far once you reach the table. Well and good for the Sydney boys who do this sort of thing all the time, but how often do I ever drill burr holes in a skull? Sure means not sorry. A bit-and-brace I find easier to control.”
“Understood, and filed for future reference.”
When the patient went home a week later none the worse for his head injury, Edda regarded it as a minor miracle; one day, she vowed, she would see the real neurosurgeons operate at Queen’s Square in London. Perhaps by then the ghost of Victor Horsley wouldn’t be pedalling his bicycle around Bloomsbury, but there were others, and that part of London abounded in famous hospitals.
After two years of nursing, the three remaining Latimer sisters were well ensconced in their niche; their faces under the silly winged caps were well known to everyone from Matron Newdigate and Superintendent Campbell through West Ender nurses to wardsmaids and porters, and each had discovered a preference for one kind of nursing above all others, though none liked mental asylum nursing.
For Edda, the Operating Theatre and Casualty nursing reigned supreme. The reasons why were glaringly obvious: the drama and air of urgency and peril that accompanied every patient beyond the walking wounded. Would the procedures go smoothly, or would the patient produce some unexpected, occasionally shocking, factor that turned the surgery into a race for life? Impossible to tell. Since the horrors of the Great War, surgery had gone ahead rapidly, but there were still so many problems it could not, as yet, even begin to tackle. Once her nursing training was over and she was registered, Edda decided that the life of a theatre sister was for her.
Her trim, tall form attracted attention from men that could not be misinterpreted, for she drew men; yet Latimer was not a man-eater, never seemed to notice the glances, passed off the comments with a shrug, and gave a terse refusal to those who had plucked up the courage to ask her out. Except, that is, for Jack Thurlow, with whom she maintained a genuine friendship. For though she loved him, she had no intention of putting his demands on her emotions ahead of her nursing. No, Jack Thurlow would have to wait a little longer before she made any move in his direction. Even then, a part of her was unsure about marriage. A lifetime of Maude had soured her regard for wedlock, she supposed, or perhaps it was more truthful to say that something in her just plain rebelled against taking the subordinate role in life that marriage demanded of a woman.
“It’s logical,” she said to Tufts and Kitty one evening after they had all come off duty, “that women have to be subordinate in a marriage, I suppose. They bear and raise the babies, who do better in the care of their mothers than they do in the care of minders or even nannies. But it doesn’t seem fair all the same.”
“Then don’t marry,” said Tufts, grinning. “I won’t.”
“Oh, poop to the both of you!” Kitty cried. “A career is well and good, but what about love and companionship?”
“What’s love got to do with companionship?” Edda asked.
“Everything! Oh, you’re deliberately baiting me! Surely you can see that love without liking is doomed to failure? Love and liking must both be present.”
“The men who’ve inspired the one in me certainly haven’t inspired the other,” said Edda, eyes gleaming.
“Oh, yes, and of course you’re so experienced! You, Edda Latimer, are a fraud,” Kitty said, disgusted.
It was on the tip of Edda’s tongue to mention Jack Thurlow, but she didn’t. Somehow Jack was her secret, hers and only hers. Especially now they were meeting regularly. Oh, just as friends, good friends in that slightly remote way she had set as their style very early on. For Edda had great pride; she had no intention of showing any man, even Jack Thurlow, her vulnerabilities. He must believe that she cared little for love and less for casual dalliance; that, to her, his male sex was a simple accident of fate, of no importance to their relationship. No come-hither glances or fiery invitations from her eyes!
“You’re determined to travel once you’re registered,” Kitty said to Edda in accusing tones.
“Yes, naturally. Oh, come, Kitty, don’t tell me you’re going to endure three years of this just to get a job in Corunda Base as a junior sister!” said Edda, astonished.
“I love Corunda!” Kitty protested. “Why travel to see yet more human misery than we have here?”
“Don’t talk like that, Kitty,” said Tufts sharply.
“No, no, I don’t mean it in a down-in-the-dumps way, Tufty, honestly! But I do love Corunda, and I want to marry a man I love and like, preferably right here in Corunda.”
“More fool you,” said Edda, pouring tea.
“I understand,” said Tufts more kindly, and smiled at her twin. “However, like Edda I mean to travel, do different sorts of nursing.”
“We’ve never been apart,” said Kitty on a sniffle.
“Nor had Edda and Grace, but growing into legal adults says we’re bound to split up. Edda is a nurse, but Grace prefers being a wife. You and I are exactly the same. I’m the nurse, you’re the wife,” said Tufts.
“Oh, enough!” Edda shouted, thumping the table.
The next time Edda met Jack Thurlow on the bridle path, she did something she never afterward understood, even years later, when time and distance lent her thoughts detachment: she asked him if he would like to meet her twin sister, Grace.
They were sitting companionably on their log and he was rolling a cigarette, his square brown hands entrancing Edda as the bones empowering them moved under the smooth skin; not the hands of a manual laborer, for all that he said he worked on the land. His were the boss’s hands, neither cracked nor crabbed.
The fingers stopped moving; he glanced at her from under his brows in that keen, searching look he sometimes gave her when she surprised him. “Meet your sister Grace?” he repeated.
“Yes, but only if you’d like to,” she said quickly. “I do occasionally realize that I never make any of the expected social overtures to you.” She shrugged offhandedly. “Feel free to say no, Jack, and I do mean that.” She produced a bored expression. “It wouldn’t be very exciting. Grace is expecting a baby in about three months, and rather full—” she chuckled, “good pun!—of her cleverness at doing such a unique, amazing thing.”
His laughter was hearty but ironic. “Poor Edda! You’re asking me because you want company. Your visit must be overdue.”
“How well you know me! Will you come? Say no!”
“I’d like to meet your twin, though the mind boggles at two Eddas. You’re identical?”
“At birth, yes, but living rather lessens the likeness. My twin looks like me, but she’s a far different sort of person, and less overpowering. Not another Edda!”
“That’s a colossal relief.”
“Nonsense! Since when have I overpowered you?”
“Never, I admit it. Sometimes I wish you did.”
“Grace’s house is on Trelawney Way,” Edda said, changing the subject. “Number ten. Shall we meet there—when?”
He lit his cigarette. “When’s your next afternoon off?”
“Tuesday.”
“I’ll pick you up in front of the hospital at three.”
“No, make it the Town Hall for pickup.” And that was that. Instead of accompanying her, Jack remounted, tipped his hat in her direction, and cantered off.
Edda stared after his retreating form in dismay. Fool! To alter anything in a relationship was dangerous, yet she had to go and do it! Why? For the same reason, she thought, riding back to the Rectory stables, that once made me put my chair leg on top of a snake’s head. To see if I could. What is it about me, that I can’t leave well enough alone? Is it alive, or dead? All others will run, but Edda will stay to investigate, experiment.
Jack Thurlow rode away wondering why he had agreed to meet Grace Olsen née Latimer, though in his bones he had an uncomfortable sense that it was because Edda Latimer fascinated him. Did she not, he wouldn’t bother with these fool gallops he didn’t need, in the saddle every day and longing to be out of it. He had a huge physical lust for her, but he was a man who knew how to control his passions, and he had no intention of giving in to Edda. Elegant, sophisticated, aware of sex, she gave off powerful emanations of a carnality his experience told him was rare in one so carefully brought up. A true virgin, but by choice; she hadn’t met anyone good enough yet, the little snob. He realized that she was attracted to him, too, but he had dismissed it as a symptom of her boredom. This was a young woman who hankered for a bigger, wider life than Corunda offered.
For the moment marriage wasn’t on her agenda, and it was never on his; a good reason not to start anything—anythings could wind up in pregnancies. So perhaps, he thought exultantly as he turned off the bridle path in the direction of his home, his acceptance of Edda’s invitation was the best way to reduce the girl to ordinariness: an unimpregnated sister with a pregnant sister, part and parcel of the Corunda he hated most.
When old Tom Burdum had given him Corundoobar for his own, deeded it outright, Jack Thurlow’s world had completed itself, and he was happy. The son of old Tom’s daughter, he had endured a stormy childhood of financial and social ups and downs that still bewildered him, they had been so many and so different. Its chief result, in Jack’s mind anyway, was his ongoing horror of the Evil Twins—Money and Power. A horror that had led him to refuse to be old Tom’s principal heir, and set the old man off in search of a new heir, the Pommy doctor. Well, good luck to old Tom!
At five thousand acres, Corundoobar wasn’t the largest of the Burdum properties; this was rich country, a man didn’t need many thousands of acres to do well as a pastoralist or as a farmer. The soil was deep and nutritious, the rainfall higher and more reliable than in most Australian places, and the district’s plateau elevation gave it a kinder climate, at least during the six months of summer.
Jack had worked Corundoobar since returning from boarding school in Sydney at eighteen; his education had been excellent as far as it went, but he chose not to advertise the fact, preferring the image of inarticulate pastoralist engaged in producing fat lambs and, more recently, the breeding of Arab saddle horses. Arabs were too small for many male riders, but ideal lady’s mounts, and everybody knew women were the horse-mad sex. Old Tom had derided the venture, but had to swallow his scorn when Jack’s Arabs did amazingly well right from the start. Nowadays Jack was entering his Arabs in the big rural shows across the state; his ambition was to exhibit them at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, the biggest and most important venue for livestock in the whole of Australia.
Corundoobar homestead sat athwart a cone-shaped hill, rolling down all its flanks to an enviable three-quarter-circle frontage on the Corunda River where it never dried up into a string of water holes; windpower gave him enough pressure to pump to his paddock troughs, while the home gardens were so enclosed by the stream that watering them was a tank tower and gravity feed. For drinking water, there were underground storage tanks to hold rain runoff from roofs.
The original Burdum house, it was built of limestone blocks on a square pattern with a hip-roof of corrugated iron and a wide verandah all the way around it. The gardens were lush, green, and a mosaic of flowers from September to April; at the present moment, high spring, everything producing bloom was in luxuriant flower. Each time he rounded the hill on the Doobar Road and saw the homestead come into sight Jack felt his breath catch, his heart leap in his chest as it never had for a woman. The loveliest place in the world, and legally, irrevocably his!
Though it lacked a woman’s touch, this bachelor’s house was neat and clean. Like many another man, Jack Thurlow could cook, sew on buttons, take up a hem, darn socks, scrub a floor, and produce whiter-than-white washing; as a child there had often been no one else to do these things, so they had fallen to him and he was proud of his domestic skills. Like the education, they were part of his secret: he was a man to whom duty called more powerfully than any other human condition, for he was a man who had done what he did out of duty, not out of love, and he knew duty for a cruel mistress. To Jack Thurlow, nothing was worse than to be exploited as a duty, and never to see a scrap of love in return. So he hid his secrets, praying he could live like this for the rest of his days, responsible to no one, owing no one a duty of any kind. That was what appealed about Edda Latimer; she would never be his duty, no matter what her life might do to her. Whereas her twin, he shrewdly suspected, was a duty to everybody she knew. He laughed. “Edda’s duty, never mine,” he said.
When Jack pulled up outside the Corunda Town Hall at the wheel of a Daimler, Edda blinked in astonishment.
“Nice,” she said, allowing him to open her door.
“Tom lends it to me when I need it.”
“We could have walked, it’s not far.”
He grimaced. “Ungentlemanly, Edda. Why wouldn’t you let me pick you up outside the hospital?”
“And set all the tongues wagging? No, thank you!”
He was dressed, she noted, in the obligatory three-piece suit, and looked strangely unapproachable. Of course she had been regretting her invitation ever since tendering it; now the sight of him in his suit threw her completely off balance, so she said nothing at all until they turned into Trelawney Way, which ran uphill from George Street in a fairly good part of town. The West End was two miles away.
“That cream and green cottage there,” she said. Silence fell again; she let him extricate her from the car, horribly aware that curtains were furtively being drawn back in every window of every house in the vicinity. Oh, neighbors! Then Jack opened the gate in the picket fence and escorted her up the path to the front door, set in a verandah. Someone, she noticed, had been working in the garden, which wasn’t up to Corunda standards; the roses weren’t blooming as they should, had red spider as well as black spot. But then, Grace had never been a gardener. I am selfish, Edda thought, I should donate an occasional day off to helping her. Bear isn’t a gardener either, even when he’s home. Where are the azaleas and rhododendrons? The pansies and lobelias?
Then Grace was at the open door, ushering them inside, her surprise written clearly on her face. “Edda did explain she was bringing someone, but I confess I never expected you, dear Mr. Thurlow,” Grace gushed in best Maude mode. “Sit down, please.”
Oh, poor young woman! Jack Thurlow was thinking as he sat rather awkwardly in the wrong sort of chair. So like Edda, yet so unlike her! Very attractive, especially with her pregnant bloom suffusing her skin, yet no vitality, no zest for life. “Call me Jack,” he said, smiling at her.
The ice was broken; soon Grace and Jack were laughing, her big grey eyes shining as he put her at her ease, carefully hiding his pity as she, no doubt terribly lonely stuck here all day, expanded under his very ordinary brand of attention.
While the pair talked, Edda was free to assess the house as she never had before, always too immersed in Grace to spare a moment. But the house had changed! How long since her last visit here? A month? No, Edda, it’s at least three months. I always buy her lunch at the Parthenon to free her from her domestic jail, I hate coming to the Trelawneys. Now look at this! Oh, God, why haven’t I kept a more vigilant eye on Grace and her house?
The place was furnished like a rich man’s mansion! That huge Persian rug on the floor in her lounge room. That gorgeous coromandel screen. Genuine tapestry seats on the dining chairs. Grace, Grace, what have you done?
“Jack, content yourself with your own company,” she said as soon as seemed natural, “while Grace and I fetch tea.”
The moment the kitchen door was closed Edda grasped her twin by the shoulder a little cruelly and shook her. “Grace, when did you buy all this furniture?”
Grace glowed. “Isn’t it lovely, Eds? I ran into Maude and Mrs. Enid Treadby about four months ago, and they took me to this wonderful shop way out on the Melbourne road—such stunning bits and pieces! People come from Canberra to shop there.”
The rage died; Edda gazed at her sister in despair. “Oh, Grace, you—you idiot! Well, there’s nothing else for it, you have to return the lot. You can’t live without some money in the bank, and you spent more than your own five hundred pounds, didn’t you? Don’t say Bear let you spend all his money, too!”
“Of course he let me, I’m his wife,” said Grace in wounded tones. “This is real furniture, it appreciates with time!”
“There’s an old proverb, twin, that you have to cut your coat to suit your cloth,” Edda said tiredly. “You’re imitating Mrs. Enid Treadby, who’s rich enough to buy furniture that will appreciate. Oh, you fool! Stepmama led you into this, I know she did, the bitch! It wasn’t Mrs. Treadby, it was Maude.”
By this, Grace was weeping. “I can’t return it, Edda, I bought it!” she wailed. “I love it, and Bear loves it, too. He says I have the best taste in the world.”
“Put the kettle on your fancy new gas stove, Grace, or we’ll look as if we’re neglecting our guest,” Edda said on a sigh. “In future, Grace, you come to me before you spend a single penny on anything that doesn’t belong in a pantry or ice chest, hear me?”
Somehow the visit got itself over and done with; Edda sat in the Daimler’s front passenger seat and said not a word.
“Something’s up,” Jack said.
“Indeed it is.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“I know, but it’s family trouble, Jack. Let’s just say that I forgot how absolutely stupid Grace can be, all right?”
“Ah, poor little Grace! I daresay she is stupid, Edda. It’s her nature, don’t you agree? The trouble with being smart and clever and efficient is that so many people aren’t smart and clever and efficient—or even one of those. But she’s a loving little thing just the same. I bet she gives her husband a lot of headaches, but he probably thinks the love she gives him is worth every pang. That’s the difficulty women like you always have, Edda. For every ounce of cleverness in your brain, you’ve had to give up at least an ounce of love.”
The pain! It lanced through her like a needle of cold fire, but Edda Latimer would have died rather than show this Lord of Creation that his words hurt. “That is utter nonsense,” she said crushingly. “You sound like a women’s magazine.”
“I’d rather call it an exercise in accounting. The debits have to equal the credits, it’s a law of nature. Grace’s credits are measured in love, whereas yours are measured in intellect. Oh, not entirely,” he added, his own eyes twinkling at the anger in hers, “but love would never be enough for you. Its rewards are far too ephemeral, like trying to see water evaporate.”
“And would love be enough for you?” she asked icily.
“No, unfortunately it wouldn’t. However, today has solved one puzzle I’ve always wrestled about twins.”
For a moment Edda contemplated not rising to his bait, then admitted that if she didn’t, he wouldn’t tell her. Ever. “And what puzzle has been so baffling?”
“Why twins at all?” he said. “There’s too much to pack inside one person, but spread over two, the mixture’s thin and lumpy.”
“So a twin is a lesser kind of human being?”
“More different than lesser.”
“You think Grace got all the love and I the brains?”
“Not exactly. Just that she needs some of your good sense and you need some of her compassion.”
“I’m not sorry I got the brain. Grace is going to suffer.”
“Not if she has a good husband.”
Bear’s frost-fair face rose before Edda’s internal gaze; she smiled, squeezed Jack’s hand as it lay on the steering wheel. “Then she’ll be all right. Bear Olsen is a very good man who will always look after her.” Doubt crept into her voice. “If, that is, he can stop her spending money. How odd! I never realized that she’s a spendthrift until now, when I saw all that expensive furniture. She left not a penny in the bank.”
“I don’t suppose she’s ever had the freedom to spend.”
“With our stepmother in control, true words. Yet it was our stepmother encouraged her to buy the furniture.” The Town Hall loomed, the car stopped. “Let me drop you at the hospital,” he pleaded. But Edda was already out of the car, and smiling brilliantly.
“No, thank you. I’ll see you on a ride, no doubt?”
His laughter sounded exciting. “No more rides for a while, Edda. You and I are going to spend our spare time at Grace’s, doing things in the garden. Grace is getting too swollen to tend it, and Bear’s on the road. It’s the least we can do. When are you off duty?”
“Tomorrow,” she said numbly.
“Then I’ll see you here at eleven tomorrow morning. I’d be earlier, except that I have to beg, borrow, or steal cuttings and plants from Hannah, Enid, and whoever else to fill those vacant beds. A house in Corunda without rhododendrons and azaleas? A prunus or two? Daffodils under the grass?”
He was still talking as he drove away, leaving Edda standing to stare after him as at a vanishing genie.
Finally she turned and began to plod toward the hospital side gate, mind whirling. Looking back over the events, she had no idea what she had expected might happen beyond a friendly cup of tea with her twin, about whom Jack had indeed wondered from time to time. If Edda had fretted over an introduction, it was in the belief that Jack might fall for the softer sister. Instead he seemed to pity Grace—why was that more annoying?
Then Edda grasped her unruly emotions firmly, brought them under control, and conjured up an image of Grace as she had been this afternoon. Remarkably pretty, as pregnant women tended to be, showing a seven-months tummy but not yet unwieldy, her big grey eyes filled with love for—oh, everybody! How extraordinary, that a man as unversed as Jack Thurlow had felt it, too, Grace’s voracious appetite for love. She hadn’t tried in the least to captivate him, but he wasn’t proof against Grace’s brand of charm, against her air of helpless incompetence. Owning no incompetence herself, Edda despised it, and had assumed Jack would, too. To find that he didn’t came as an unpleasant shock.
Tufts was sitting in the common room surrounded by books, but of Kitty there was no sign—yes, on duty in Children’s, as per usual. Odd, that. Kitty thirsted for duty on Children’s, and Matron, it seemed, was prepared to indulge her.
“Tufts!” Edda rapped, lighting the gas under the kettle. “Do you ever get tired of being the capable and intelligent twin?”
“A cuppa? Oh, yes, please!” Tufts looked up, her sherry-colored eyes brightening. “The strong twin, I think you really mean,” she said.
“Do I?” Edda stared at her half sister, frowning. Tufts was extremely pretty, too, if one saw her without Kitty there to eclipse her. The same sweet face, straight nose, enormous eyes, domed forehead. Her coloring was more uniform, less striking than Kitty’s, and her dimples rarely showed, but minus Kitty she was a stunning girl. Why does the world never see it?
“Well, you can’t honestly mean Grace and Kitty are stupid or incapable,” Tufts said, puzzled, “because they’re not. They just burn for different things than you and I do.”
“Things like love,” said Edda, giving “love” an unpalatable inflection. “Love! Knuckling under to some man, is what it is.”
“I can understand why you dismiss it as that, Eds, but if nursing has taught you anything, it is surely that women and men are as differently constructed mentally as they are physically. I grow very tired of egalitarian generalizations—all men are not equal, nor are all women. Individualism should be prized.”
“Bravo, Tufts!” Edda cried, laughing. “Getting back to love, I’d sooner die than become a slave to it.”
“Harken back to your experiences nursing, please! Habit is what enslaves, Edda, and that can include love after it becomes a habit.” Tufts poured boiling water into the teapot. “Habits can be almost impossible to break.”
“Oh, Tufts, you’re much wiser than I am! Dr. Finucan talks about hormones. Maybe you and I have a different concentration of them from Grace and Kitty? Or our brains developed in some different way? And what’s a habit, in a brain?”
Edda poured milk, Tufts stirred the teapot to speed up the infusion process. Then, cups brimming with steaming tea, they sat to enjoy this panacea for all woes.
“What brought this on?” Tufts asked, sipping.
“I took Jack Thurlow to see Grace today—what an insane idea! He made his fishing for an introduction sound like sheer curiosity, so I thought once he’d met her, he’d forget her.” Edda gave a wry laugh. “Wrong! Now instead of meeting Jack for a lovely ride on my days off, I’m doomed to go with him to Grace’s house and act as an unpaid gardener and skivvy.”
“That’s not why you’re so angry, Edda.”
“Have you seen Grace’s house?”
“Yes. Very tasteful. It surprised me.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that she must have spent every penny Bear has in the bank as well as her own five hundred? Maude bamboozled her into furnishing her house in a style she plain can’t afford!”
“I never thought . . . My mother is an awful woman,” Tufts said quietly, “we both know that. What was she out to do?”
“Get Grace into trouble with Bear, I imagine. Whenever she splurges on furniture for the Rectory, our gentle father grows less gentle, and makes it impossible for her to keep the item—she’s obliged to return it. She assumed that Bear, a lower class than Father, would make Grace’s life very unhappy if she overspent.” Edda shrugged. “Well, Maude miscalculated. Bear would forgive Grace anything.”
“And thank God for it!” said Tufts roundly. “Her influence on Kitty has waned, of course, so she’s thirsting for revenge as well as other avenues of mischief-making. Grace and Bear is just a practice run, I think. Beware, Edda, you’re Mama’s main target, I’m convinced of it.”
“I’m inclined to agree, sweetheart, except that I’ve thrown off Maude’s authority over my life, such as it was. How can she hurt me, Tufts?”
“Once Grace tells her about Jack Thurlow, through him, is my guess. She’ll try to smear you.”
Edda laughed. “Well, if they start talking about me and Jack, they’ll stop gossiping about you and the doctors.”
Poor Edda! Tufts thought as she made her way down the ramp to Pathology, one of the larger shedlike buildings because it also housed the library and the new X-ray facility, a huge piece of equipment so heavy that it had had to be installed on specially strong foundations. As the more ordinary half of her set of twins, Heather/Tufts had escaped much that Kitty had suffered, and the same could be said for Grace in relation to Edda, who killed snakes with a chair leg and dared anything as well as being both glamorous and alluring. Yet it was Grace had found love, Tufts reflected: genuine love, the kind that lasted, the kind that forgave all sins, contained no condemnation. No matter how many mistakes poor, silly Grace made, Bear would be there to pick up the pieces. Now, it seemed, when Bear wasn’t there to pick up the pieces, other men would volunteer, for the purest of reasons. Hooked on Edda’s line Jack Thurlow might be, but his alacrity in going to Grace’s rescue told Tufts that he wished Edda had need of him, wished Edda were just a little helpless.
Of course Edda didn’t see that; she didn’t want to see it. Edda prized her independence, her ability to take care of herself. Which ought not to make her less deserving of love, yet did. Some women were far more difficult to love. Poor Edda!
Only the night lights were on as Tufts let herself in to walk down the long internal hallway with doors opening off it to the left and right; all the way to the far end, where the hall finished at a red-painted door leading to Dr. Liam Finucan’s lair, his office. It too was dark; the pathologist had gone home for the night, the experiments were all hers. Well, not actually experiments . . . Tissue culture dishes, a lump of mammary tissue embedded in paraffin for sectioning, various histological stains to prepare. The routine stuff like urinalysis had been done by Liam’s one technician; that he managed to exist without a second technician was due to her, Tufts Scobie, who loved the exactitude of this kind of work and did it far better than the young man officially employed for the purpose.
Without turning on the lights she let herself through a side door in the office and emerged into the laboratory, where she threw some switches and blazed the room into glaring yellow relief. They had an automatic microtome blade sharpener, very precious, and the blade on it was ready for use; Tufts went about the task of fixing the chunk of paraffin in place on the microtome base, prepared her stains, and settled to slicing, sliding, and mounting the transparent sections of what had once been a woman’s breast, so absorbed that she neither saw nor heard anything in her vicinity.
“Thanks for that, Heather,” said Dr. Finucan’s voice.
She jumped, then beamed at him. “They’ll be ready on time.”
“I’d be willing to bet it’s a carcinoma,” he said.
“Oh, poor woman! She can’t be much past thirty, her children aren’t at school yet.”
Tufts slid off the tall stool and went back to the office, there to wait until the pathologist locked up the lab.
Like his surgeon confreres, Liam Finucan was a genuine asset to Corunda Base; like them, he could easily have carved a Sydney or Melbourne career with great success. However, his wife was a Corunda girl, and he had loved the place at first sight: its Old Country feel, the green of its grass, its rich European shrubs and flowers. Born and bred in Ulster of Protestant stock, he had taken medical degrees in London sufficiently good to earn him a post as a pathologist anywhere. He had worked with Sir Bernard Spilsbury! For someone who’d grown up in the religious wars of Ulster, Corunda was paradise.
It was probably the only good turn Eris had ever done him, to push Liam Finucan into choosing Corunda, but, he remembered, she’d been young and homesick, poor Eris. A beautiful girl, a beautiful woman, Eris had always been discontented. His area of specialization did not demand long hours away or great inroads on his personal time; in a way, he wished it had, for if it had, he could have remained blind to Eris’s dabblings in men. And the whole of Corunda knew.
Mostly he had coped by ignoring her affairs, only discussing them whenever she decided it was time to ask for a divorce. His refusals were not on account of religion, but grounded in compassion. If such were her nature, let Eris dabble in men, but it was not in her nature to suffer public humiliation, no matter how she begged for divorce. The scandal would wreck her. There was, besides, another aspect to Eris: the man she was wildly in love with this year would be dust and ashes the next. If he, Liam, deserted her, too, she would perish in a world she was not equipped to inhabit. If she had had children, things would have been different, but she was barren; the number of men and her contraceptive ignorance proved it to a pathologist’s mind. Her philandering, thought Liam, was actually a desperate quest in search of a child.
At the moment things were worse than they had ever been. Corunda was not a bottomless pit of men, and Eris had run through those she fancied. A month ago she had secretly packed her bags and gone to Sydney, too rapidly for Liam to follow her. A technical desertion that gave him inarguable grounds for divorce. His private detective located her living with a man who ran a dairy farm at Liverpool, and Liam finally gave up the struggle.
“I saw Don Treadby today,” he said to Tufts.
“Shall I make us a cup of tea?”
“What liquor is to most houses, strong tea is to a house of healing,” he said with one of his rare smiles.
“It’s the caffeine and other whatsits in tea, especially as strong as we drink it. Sit down, close your eyes and count. I’ll be back in one shake of a dead lamb’s tail.”
“An apt metaphor for Corunda,” he called after her.
“Better alive than dead,” floated her voice.
She was back quickly, bearing the tea tray.
“What did Don Treadby have to say?” she asked, pouring.
“That it’s high time I bit the bullet and divorced Eris.”
“Well, unless you do the divorcing, it’s terribly sticky. You’re the injured party. Seems odd to me,” said Tufts, blowing on her tea to cool it, “that either marital partner can’t sue.”
Ordinarily fairly straight, his black brows flew into peaks. “Heather! You’d allow an adulteress to sue for divorce?”
“What a lot of tosh men do talk!” Tufts said crossly. “You say ‘adulteress’ as if adultery were on a par with murder—for a woman! I see it as an indication that the marital partner just turned out to be a terrible disappointment. In my opinion, your wife is sick. And if you were the adulterer, as a man the crime would be minor, have extenuating circumstances.” She leaned into him, eyes gone more golden in the dim light, and gleaming wickedly. “I mean, here you are, well after the dinner hour, closeted alone in your office with a twenty-one-year-old nurse! What do you think the gossip mills of Corunda would make of that?”
He laughed, teeth surprisingly white because his skin was darkish. “Cast not pearls before swine,” he said.
“Shouldn’t they be rubies?”
“And silk purses, not to say sow’s ears?”
They laughed together, minds attuned.
“You think I should divorce Eris, Heather, don’t you?”
“Yes, Liam, I do. You can afford to make her an allowance of some kind—perhaps not as much as she’d like, but under the law you don’t have to give her anything, do you, since she’s the guilty one? It’s still a man’s world.”
“But you are my friend?” he asked, suddenly serious.
“Yes, you fool of a man! It’s why we call each other by our Christian names—frowned on, except between good friends.”
The door opened and Matron strode in; both heads turned to gaze at her in, Matron saw at once, complete innocence.
“Working late, Dr. Finucan?”
“Actually, Matron, no. I did come to do some late work, only to find that Nurse Scobie had already done it.”
“Scobie is an excellent nurse as well as a superb path technician, Dr. Finucan, but she is on duty at six tomorrow morning in Women’s. I suggest you get some sleep, nurse, so I’ll bid you goodnight.”
Tufts rose at once. “Yes, Matron. Goodnight, sir.”
Nothing else was said until after Tufts was gone, then Liam Finucan spoke. “That was unkind, Gertie,” he said.
“Sometimes one has to be cruel to be kind, as well you know, Liam. Don Treadby says you came to see him this morning.”
“Jesus, is nothing sacred?”
“In Corunda? Absolutely nothing.” Matron fished in her immaculately starched pocket and produced cigarettes and lighter, selected a cork-tip and proceeded to kindle it. “Given this new situation, Liam, you can’t afford to entertain trainee nurses in your office at all hours. If Eris’s solicitor got a whiff of it, you’d be in the soup—and so would Nurse Scobie.”
“I never thought,” he said dully.
She eyed him with some sympathy. “Yes, well, men tend not to think in certain circumstances, I find. Certainly I refuse to let your thoughtlessness ruin a wonderful nurse’s chances of a brilliant career. In future, Liam, you are never to be seen alone with Nurse Scobie, or have her do special work for you.”
“I never thought,” he repeated.
“Least said, soonest mended, old friend. Get your divorce from Eris, that’s first and foremost. You ought to have done it years ago, when you were a younger man and might have been an eligible mate for someone like Heather Scobie-Latimer. As it is, you’re forty-three years old and a bit frayed around the edges.” She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. “I may rely on your good sense, Liam?”
“Of course.”
After she had closed the door behind her, an image of Tufts appeared before Liam Finucan’s eyes; he closed them on the first real pain he had felt in many, many years. “God rot you, Gertie Newdigate!” he said aloud. “You’ve ruined something before it occurred to me to dream of it.”
Forty-three and a bit frayed around the edges—not the kind of lover for bewitching little Heather Scobie, so much was definitely sure.