When an unexpected opportunity to meet Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. presented itself, Charles leaped at it. For a mere forty-year-old, Schiller had gone very far very fast, including earning himself a knighthood at the amazingly early age of thirty-seven after a series of stunning legal victories in the High Court of Australia and the British Privy Council in the service of commerce and finance. He was possessed of life’s advantages—birth, wealth, education, an impressive colonial family history; on his father’s side he was Prussian junker, on his mother’s side English gentleman; the “von” had been dropped long since as inappropriate in a society like Australia, where the family owned a lot of Queensland, the Northern Territory, and the north of Western Australia. As pasture much of it was so poor it grazed only one steer per hundred acres, but some was extremely arable or pastoral, and the mineral wealth was, in places, incredible, including places that only the Schillers yet knew about. No rattle of a convict’s leg-iron had ever marred the Schiller or the Rawson families: free settler all the way.

Sir Rawson lived and worked in Melbourne, where the Schiller moneys were concentrated; little surprise, then, that his charitable activities were usually confined to Melbourne, including a Lord Mayor’s dinner at £50 per plate to benefit spastic children. The moment he heard, Charles bought two plates at the Speaker’s Table (they cost £100 each), for Sir Rawson was the guest speaker and star attraction of the evening, which also boasted a famous dance band for those with the stamina to stay up until dawn.

It was to be a glittering affair: white-tie-and-tails for the men, ball gowns for the women, and since Kitty loathed Melbourne, Charles took Edda in her place. By chance Edda had been attending a theatre nursing seminar in Melbourne that week, so when Charles offered her a hotel room-and-bath for her entire visit if she would accompany him to the dinner, Edda leaped to say yes. Her cup overflowed as he gave her a hundred pounds to spend on a ball dress for the Lord Mayor’s charity dinner. Because she made all her own clothes, Edda was able to use the money to buy eleven lengths of different fabrics to make eleven different outfits. Not even the fashion journalists who prowled the periphery of these functions suspected that her deceptively simple robe of black-shot burgundy silk was homemade; they were too busy gushing over its obviously Parisian origins. Her only touch of ostentation was a pair of diamond earrings Kitty had lent her.

She went with Charles in a hired Rolls, as always consumed by admiration for his nonchalance—how, for instance, he passed off their disparity in height as if it were the natural order of things. The blue flare of exploding flash bulbs on press cameras he tolerated well; Edda’s acute hearing noted that his male press secretary was calling her “Sister Edda Latimer” whenever he gave her name. I like it! thought Edda, inwardly gratified, outwardly indifferent. Charlie is telling the world that I am a professional woman, not a gilded society lily or an upper-class trollop, and I thank him for his consideration. Oh, if only my title were “Doctor!” But, for all his liberality, Charlie would never put me through medicine, for the same reason Daddy didn’t years ago—it isn’t a suitable career for a woman. How I long to be a doctor!

“It should be Kitty here tonight,” Charles said as they trod up the staircase. “It’s damned awkward having to explain that you’re my sister-in-law, not my wife.”

So that’s why he’s in a bad mood! Nothing but complaints and surly looks since we set out. Oh, Kitty! It wouldn’t have killed you to make this little sacrifice for your husband—why wouldn’t you? All your dreams and energies have turned in one direction, and one direction only—a house full of children. In which case, you have the wrong life’s partner. Charlie doesn’t mind children, but he’ll never live for them. He lives for public activities.

By some quirk of fate, neither Charles nor Edda saw the guest speaker during the forty minutes they spent beforehand sipping sherry and mingling in anterooms; by another quirk of fate they were among the first through the doors into the ballroom where the banquet was to take place. Edda’s memory was of walking through a vast room of big round tables toward the focal one on the fringe of a large dance floor and beneath the speaker’s podium. The area was deserted save for a man standing behind his chair at the table.

“Stop grizzling, Charlie!” she growled sotto voce, her gaze on—Sir Rawson Schiller King’s Counsel?

Yes, this had to be Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. Unforgettable. A Charlie over six feet tall? No, that was to compare a diamond with an emerald or a da Vinci with a Velázquez. There was no sort of comparison possible. Not that Edda fell in love: she didn’t. It was more that she seemed to recognize the one person who had always been missing from her life, and for the fleeting second during which his eyes met hers, she had a conviction that he was thinking the same thought. Then he looked elsewhere, and the moment and the conviction were both over.

A slim and whippy man, two inches over six feet, narrow-framed, but with a huge, bulbous head whose cranium housed a lot of brain. Striking yet not handsome: iron-grey hair in thick waves brushed straight back from his massive forehead, high cheekbones, a fine mouth, black brows and lashes, but vividly blue eyes. His nose was large and beaked, his lower jaw and chin big, too.

She and Charles were halfway around the table from him, and no handshakes were exchanged; just smiles and nods. Only a team of wild horses could have dragged Charlie close enough to have to look so far upward, Edda knew as she sat down and assessed the table’s population, eleven in number: Sir Rawson had come without a companion.

“But he always does,” said her nearest feminine neighbor in a long-suffering voice.

“Why?” Edda asked.

“He’s working tonight, pet.”

Never having been called a pet before, Edda lapsed into silence. Oh, she thought, exasperated, why will important Australian men insist upon marrying undereducated, domestically inclined women? At this table, the men did all the talking, the women confining their chat among themselves. And Charlie was growing more discontented by the minute, probably because he knew no one and the gargoyle had obliterated the film star out of existence. No one was usually more charming, but when the gargoyle ruled alone, he was horrible. The effect of Sir Rawson Schiller, of course. For once in his career, Charlie felt utterly eclipsed.

A mood Sir Rawson’s hour-long speech only served to enhance. His subject—could it be anything else?—was the Depression, and it took Edda’s breath away many times, for Sir Rawson had that incomparable gift of an eloquence so perfectly honed from voice to phraseology that one moment tears poured down every face, and the next, every face was crumpled in laughter. Privately Edda thought a large number of people who heard him would always remember what he said and how he said it.

It came after a generous portion of first course; after the main course the speaker answered questions from the podium for half an hour. A hard evening’s work; he threw everything he had into making his audience feel that £50 was a bargain.

One member of the audience at least felt that he hadn’t got his money’s worth: Charles Burdum. Who, with a muttered something in Edda’s ear, left his chair as the dessert came in. Everybody at the table assumed he had gone to relieve himself, but Edda knew he wouldn’t be back, and began explaining to her companions that urgent business had called him away.

More than two-thirds of his fellow diners were dancing when Sir Rawson got up and usurped Charlie’s chair, turning it toward Edda.

“And you are?” he asked, smiling.

“Sister Edda Latimer. I came with Charles Burdum.”

“Sister Latimer, but no nun.”

“By profession I’m an operating theatre nurse.”

“Could they spare you, Edda? May I call you that?”

“Of course, Sir Rawson.”

“Tit for tat. Call me Rawson. Can they spare you?”

“Easily. In fact, I’m so surplus to requirements that I’m toying with the idea of finding a job in Melbourne. I’m extremely well trained and experienced, so even in the Depression I should be able to find work. I’ve made some contacts here at a seminar.”

“I’d hoped to converse with Charles Burdum. Has he gone?”

“Called away by something that wouldn’t wait.”

“Leaving you to fend for yourself?”

“Oh, he’s family, married to my sister. He didn’t think.” The sunken, hooded eyes gleamed. “Are you married?” she asked.

The baldness of the question startled him into answering.

“Seventeen years ago, a youthful business. We divorced.”

“Were you white as snow, or the culpable party?”

“You ask naked personal questions as if you were an American. I was as unsullied as the driven snow.”

“The perfect color for a politician.”

“The only color,” he said meaningfully.

“A pity, that. You don’t feel it asks too much of a man?”

“Politicians, would-be or otherwise, should never deal in feelings. Only in realities. And realities can be bleak.”

“You’re Nationalist Party—a Tory?”

“A die-hard Tory, though how much longer there will be a Nationalist Party is on the lap of the gods. Labour is inclining more and more to the right, but not as far right as I.”

“When are you planning to enter—federal?—parliament?”

“Definitely federal. The party has a blue-ribbon seat picked out for me in Melbourne that means I don’t have to change my place of abode.” He grimaced. “Awful business, relocating.”

“Especially for something as ephemeral as votes,” she said.

Interest piqued, he leaned forward. “You’re an unusual woman, Sister Latimer. Well read and well educated, I suspect. You may juggle sharpened steel in a chamber of anesthetized torment, but that is not what you wanted to do, nor did your life start there. In fact, you think it has ended there.”

“I am everything an ultra-conservative man deplores in a woman, Counsellor,” she said levelly, eyes glowing at his uncanny insight. “I hold myself the equal of any man—I should have been allowed to do medicine and choose to specialize in whatever I wanted—and I will never marry. To marry is to subordinate myself at law to my husband as my superior.”

“Oh, bravo!” he exclaimed, smiling and leaning back. “I knew I liked you enormously! So you wanted to be a doctor.”

Suddenly Edda’s own problems vanished; all kinds of ideas were chasing through her brain—a muddle of mobile brows, facial expressions, something lurking just beyond vision, delicate and supple fingers, a certain wry crease to the fine mouth. Tangled visions that slid and slipped into place to form a certain male entity . . . She caught his blue gaze and held it sternly, pinning him as only her strange eyes could. And he, discomfited, oddly afraid, waited.

“You’re homosexual,” Edda said softly.

“That’s a baseless nonsense could see you in court,” he said, managing to control every part of himself save his breathing.

“I have no intention of disseminating the fact. Why on earth should I? So my brother-in-law could crow? He has enough to crow about already.”

“Who told you? Who knows?” he asked, quite calmly.

“No one told me. In fact, you hide your secret extremely well. But when I first saw you, you stunned me—it was a little like—oh, coming home. And I was endowed with special perceptions about you. It must be that way,” she said, smiling at him tenderly.

Capacity for denial gone, he stared at her like an exhausted boxer told he must fight on just one more round, with no idea in him as to how he could. “How much do you want?” he asked tiredly.

“Blackmail?” Edda laughed. “No, there is no possibility of blackmail, ever. I can only imagine what you must have gone through over the years—it’s a terrible secret, the worst secret a man with public ambitions can have. I want to be your friend, is all. When our eyes met, that was what I knew—that I was, and am, your best friend ever.” She swallowed. “I don’t expect you to understand, though I had rather hoped you would, because I thought the feeling was reciprocated.”

The dance band was blaring, its brass drowning out the sweeter sounds of strings and woodwinds, and this table was taking the full brunt of the noise as determined couples capered only feet away.

A saxophone wowed and wailed; he winced. “Would you come home with me for a quiet drink and a talk?” he asked.

She rose at once. “The sooner, the better.”

“Burdum?”

“He deserted me first.”

Home for Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. was the entire top floor of one of Melbourne’s tallest buildings at fifteen stories, and came with a spacious roof garden shielded from traffic noise and voyeurs by a tall, dense hedge. The interior of twelve rooms, all generous in size, had been furnished and decorated by a prominent design firm, and no doubt reflected the owner’s tastes: conservative, comfortable, richly autumnal in coloring, understated.

“What would you care to drink?” Rawson asked, seating her in his library, obviously the room he inhabited the most.

“Since I notice the unobtrusive presence of servants, a cup of really good coffee would please me best, but, failing that, a cup of what Charles Burdum calls coal-tar tea will do nicely,” she said, settling into a chair upholstered in amber crushed velvet. “I’m glad you didn’t choose leather. Sweaty for bare skin.”

“Leather can be a sweaty horror for a man, too, when it’s in his own home,” he said. “Coffee it shall be.”

His eyes took her in, a leisurely pleasure. Such an elegant, sophisticated creature! Pure bones, flawless skin, lovely features, and hands to die for, graceful and speaking despite their short-cut nails. Only her eyes told of a brilliant mind handicapped by her sex, a thirst for interest, a hunger for bigger things to do that was always denied. And such eyes! A white wolf, offputting and eerie, framed by long, thick lashes.

They made casual conversation until the coffee was removed.

“That was the best coffee I’ve ever had,” she said then.

“Not exactly a tall order to fill,” said he, smiling. “I happen to like good coffee.”

A silence fell then, so comfortable and familiar that Edda ended in thinking she had known him for all eternity; why that was, she hadn’t the remotest idea. Every scrap of her understood why Charlie had escaped this man’s company the minute that manners said he could leave; to Charlie, this relatively young knight was a bigot with no time for the working man. Edda translated this as envy for Sir Rawson’s height and properly Australian-type aristocracy. Archconservatism did suggest a bigot, but Edda was not convinced Rawson was one. Simple answers couldn’t solve the riddle of such a complex man, of that she was sure.

The silence was succeeded by talk about many things, none of them political, some of them pertaining to philosophies, some to sex. Certainly he was starved for a candid friendship with a woman he could trust implicitly, and clearly until now that had been denied him. In her, Edda, he was beginning to feel a little of that implicit trust; she resolved always to say what she felt.

“What prompted you to marry?” she asked.

“Panic, combined with family expectations,” he said, and for a moment panic flared in his eyes. His mouth closed, stoppered.

“No, tell me,” she said strongly.

An apologetic smile, and he resumed. “I was psychically at my most confused, and I’d known Anne since early childhood—we were neighbors. Whatever I did, wherever I went, Anne was somewhere fairly close. Our schools were partnered in all social events, and we went up to university together. I did Law, she did Arts, then a secretarial course. We went to the same law firm, I as a junior at the bar, she as private secretary to one of the senior partners. Then she proposed marriage to me, I think because she was tired of waiting for me to do it. Our families were delighted. In fact, I was the only fly in the ointment! Also, I realized that if I wanted to keep my secret, I would have to marry. So we married. We were both twenty-three.”

“And of course it was a disaster,” Edda said.

“Frightful! I couldn’t manage to make love to her, and the only logical reason I could find was to keep insisting I felt too much her brother to be a husband. It dragged on for two years. Then she met someone else, and I gave her an uncontested divorce.”

“I am so sorry!”

“Don’t be. I kept my secret, even from Anne.”

“Have you a lover?”

This time his smile was rueful. “I dare not, Edda.”

“I refuse to believe you avail yourself of rent boys.”

“The rent boy. Why not be done with it and call him a prostitute? Have you ever looked into a rent boy’s eyes? Dead—so dead! One plumbs a pit, and wonders how he ever got started. No, not for me. I go abroad for a month, usually winter and summer.”

“I wish you had room in your life for a best friend,” she said.

The intensely blue eyes grew brilliant. “Would you work here in Melbourne to be my best friend?”

“In an instant, though I know nothing about the law, which I suppose means I can’t be a satisfactory best friend.”

That made him laugh. “My dear, the last thing one wants in a best friend is a mind tunnelled by the law.” He reached out to take her hands in his, holding her gaze with what she fancied was a kind of love. “For thirty years I’ve led a very lonely life, Sister Edda Latimer, but now I think I’ve finally found a friend with whom I can share all my secrets. A natural streak of paranoia has protected me from close friendships, but now—how odd! I don’t feel it.”

“I’ll start making enquiries at the bigger hospitals tomorrow,” Edda said, wanting to weep, knowing she didn’t dare.

“No, not yet!” he said sharply. “Do you believe that I have the influence to postpone the awarding of any hospital job for—say, another two or three weeks?”

Bewildered, she frowned. “Yes, it’s Melbourne. You have the influence,” she said.

“Then grant me two weeks of your time, starting early on Monday morning. Grant it to me not knowing what I want you for, just believe that at the end of it, the hospital job will be waiting for you,” Rawson said.

“You may have your time,” Edda said gravely.

He gasped, thumped his fists on his beautifully tailored knees, and squeezed her hands before releasing them. “Oh, well done! The mystery must remain, but I’ll explain enough for you to make plans. One floor down I own a guest flat. It’s much smaller than this one, but quite spacious for someone not making a home there. You will move into it tomorrow afternoon, and on Monday you will commence two weeks of living in it doing exactly as I bid you. Your sentence will be up on Sunday evening two weeks from tomorrow.”

“Well, stone the crows!” she said, feeling some sort of exclamation was called for. “Two weeks of mystery labor for Sir Rawson Schiller coming up. I wonder what it can be?”

“Time will tell,” he said, quietly chuckling. “I will only say that I have been visited by an inspiration. We have talked of shoes, ships, sealing wax, medicine, hospitals, courts, music, books, and God knows what tonight, and out of the jumble has come a wonderful, beautiful idea. I do not believe that all men were created equal, otherwise why are there so many idiots around? But I do firmly believe that the world contains as many intelligent women as it does intelligent men.”

“What do I say to Charles Burdum?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Anything you like that sits well with you. I presume he knows you’re applying for a position in Melbourne?”

“As a matter of fact, he doesn’t. I’ve been here attending a seminar, and listening to the chatter over teacups inspired me with the Melbourne idea. I’ll tell him something to make him hope.”

“Hope? Hope what?”

“That his most disliked, uncomfortable sister-in-law will decide to live four hundred miles away in Melbourne. That would mean he stands a better chance of discouraging his wife from seeking the company of her sisters,” she said with a snap.

“Oh, I see. A possessive husband.”

“Very much so. And I’m the one who stirs the pot.”

“Sometimes it can be more effective to stir the pot from a long distance,” he said slyly.

She laughed. “Occasionally I see a glimmer as to why you’ve won so many court cases. Tell me why you need me for two weeks!”

“No, and picking away at me won’t work, either.” He changed the subject. “Interesting, that Burdum and I so detested each other. Like pouring water on phosphorus. However, our feelings won’t prevent our collaborating in the federal parliament. He’s bound to be a Nationalist Party man.”

Edda’s brows rose. “Charlie, a Tory? Not in a fit! I don’t say he’ll join the Labour Party, but he’ll side with them on lots of issues. To a socialist he may be on the right, but to a conservative he’s definitely on the left.”

Schiller looked astonished, then huffed in exasperation. “My instincts were correct, then. He’s one of those wretched fellows who thirst to tamper with the status quo. He probably thinks Jack Lang’s fiscal policy is the answer.”

“Lots of people from all walks admire Jack Lang,” she said.

“Then more fool they! When one borrows money, one is honor-bound to repay the loan at whatever interest rate was agreed upon.”

“I don’t know enough to quarrel with you, Rawson,” she said, “so let’s agree to differ. Despite my complaints about Charlie, I owe him loyalty and support for reasons that have nothing to do with you, or Melbourne, or politics. It’s all to do with the love sisters have for each other—do you have sisters?”

“No. I have an older and a younger brother.”

She had to suppress a yawn. “Oh, I’m sleepy! May I go back to my hotel now, please?”

“If you tell me what you like about Charles Burdum.”

“That’s easy! His passion for people as thinking human beings rather than as mere ciphers on pieces of paper,” she said instantly. “He turned our district hospital from pathetic to the best in the state, not by massive retrenchment and huge upheavals, but by putting round pegs in round holes and square pegs in square holes. Discrimination on racial or sexual or religious or gender grounds is anathema to him, so Chinese and Catholics and women and homosexuals can find employment as equals with him. He’s arrogant and autocratic, yet his blindnesses are confined to the personal, as with his wife, of whom he’s overly possessive. He has a curious intellectual dichotomy—the mind of a stockbroker and a healer.”

“You’d make a good advocate.”

“Why, thank you, but hospitals are where my heart is.” She got up and began to prowl about the room taking in the titles of his books, while Schiller watched her. Her figure was magnificent—nothing to excess, everything fused together by a grace of movement that contained nothing artificial. That was the nurse training, of course. And where had she bought her dress? No couturier would have cut that rich shot silk in such a way, but it was extremely clever and flattering.

“Your library is heavily weighted in favor of the law,” she said, picking up her wrap and holding it out to him, “and you have no novels. That’s a shame. Almost all the great books of the world are novels, from Crime and Punishment to Vanity Fair. Surely you’re reading some of the new writers like William Faulkner and the not-so-new like Henry James?”

“Legal minds are narrow, I freely admit it,” he said, taking the wrap and examining it. “Has no man given you a fur?”

“I don’t take gifts from men.”

“Your stole is beautifully made. By whom?”

“By me. I’m too poor to buy the kind of clothes I like, so I make them.” She allowed herself to be wrapped up.

“And you wouldn’t let me buy them for you?”

“No, though I thank you if that was an offer. I dislike the idea of being kept by a man, including within marriage.”

He sighed. “Then I’ll escort you home, Sister Latimer.”

When Edda moved into Sir Rawson Schiller’s guest flat she found out her fate, far from anything she had imagined. Among the possibilities that had flitted through her mind were various kinds of work to do with health, hospitals, nursing, medical lawsuits; it occurred to her that perhaps he was on some charity board committed to a new approach to surgery, and wanted a theatre sister’s viewpoint; courses and curricula sprang to her mind, pet projects he might be helping with: round and round went her mind, to no avail.

On Sunday evening she moved in and ate dinner upstairs with him; at the end of the meal he enlightened her.

“I won’t see you at all until you’re done,” he said by way of introducing the subject, “because from tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you’re going to be head down, tail up, studying flat out for two weeks.”

“Studying?”

“Studying. Specifically, studying human anatomy, physiology, and the new science of organic chemistry cum biochemistry. Those three subjects, nothing else. Your doorbell will ring at nine and you will admit your tutor in all three disciplines, a chap you’ll call John Smith. It’s not his real name, but that doesn’t matter. He’s the best teacher in the business, I am assured. Today, Sunday, two weeks hence, you will sit an examination in each discipline. After which, we shall see,” said her tormentor, leaning back with his cognac balloon and smiling.

“I would never have guessed,” she said slowly. “You thought of this last night, is that so?”

“Yes.”

“And in the space of less than twenty-four hours you’ve set all this up, including John Smith the tutor?”

“Yes.”

“I quite see why they knighted you. Anything to get you off their backs! The knighthood makes you so expensive they’ve kicked you upstairs to a career in parliament, complete with blue-ribbon seat and the front bench.” Edda put her glass down, laughing hard.

“And you, madam, are extremely clever,” he said. “Oh, I do hope you pass those examinations and Plan Schiller can proceed!”

“I am Plan Schiller?”

“Yes.”

A purring sound erupted from her throat. “Fancy having a plan named in your honor! I’m also looking forward to the study.”

Which was just as well; the amount of knowledge Edda was required to absorb was huge, but she was astonished to find how much of it she already knew from her nursing studies and her own driving curiosity to know more than was actually needed. John Smith was the epitome of his name, anonymous and undemanding of personal attention; provided she worked at what he gave her, he asked for nothing. He arrived at nine and went home at five, though she never found out where or to whom he went home. Edda’s meals were sent down from Schiller’s apartment, including lunch for John Smith.

Every book and chart she needed had been supplied, blackboards and lecterns, models of molecules, brains, hearts, a skeleton. And Edda loved every moment of this strange, apparently purposeless two weeks, especially the last few days, when she felt able to pit her knowledge against John Smith’s.

On the two-week Sunday she did three written examinations. The morning was given to biochemistry, the afternoon to physiology, and the evening to anatomy. Some of the questions were difficult, but when she finished anatomy at eight that evening, she felt she had done well at the same kind of examination a second-year medical student would have taken.

A card arrived with her late supper.

“I will leave you in peace until tomorrow evening, Monday, when I would be delighted to see you at my dinner table. R.S.”

It took Edda all the intervening hours to come down from the heights to which such a frenzied and passionate fortnight of study had lifted her, though why she decided to wear pillar-box red to dinner escaped her. It was such a triumphant color, perhaps, and she felt as if she had survived some kind of test above and beyond mere examinations.

“Pillar-box red,” said Rawson, taking her purse and gloves.

“After post boxes and telephone booths, I imagine,” she said composedly, accepting a glass of sherry and sinking into a chair.

“It suits you, but you already know that. You probably have too much red in your wardrobe, but that’s a symptom of not having enough money to indulge in things you won’t wear as often because they’re not your favorite color.” He sat down where he could look at her directly. “I’d like to see you in electric blue, jade or emerald green, amber, purple, and a few interesting prints.”

“When I’m a deputy matron and can afford to splurge.”

“Affording to splurge might be arranged,” he murmured, “but I think I’ll save what I have to say until after dinner. That way, if you walk out on me, at least your tummy will be full.”

“It’s a bargain. What are we eating?”

“Crayfish and crabmeat in an oriental sauce to start, then roast baby chicken.”

A menu to which Edda did full justice, consumed with curiosity though she was. Afterward, settled in the library, he produced a sheaf of papers and waved them at her. “Congratulations, my dear,” Rawson Schiller said. “You passed all three subjects with high distinction.”

Stupefied, all she could find to say was “What?”

“I had those papers set and then had them marked by the chaps who set and mark the Medicine II papers at Melbourne University,” he said, sounding pleased with himself.

“Medicine II?”

“Yes. I saw no point in going ahead with my idea until I had discovered exactly what standard of knowledge you already possessed from your nursing career, so I entered into a conspiracy of sorts with some friends of mine up at the university in the Faculty of Medicine. Melbourne has an admirable record when it comes to admitting women students into medicine, whereas Sydney, strangled by a Scottish faculty, has always been disgracefully opposed to women. Fascinating to think that senseless national bigotries belonging to the other end of the world should have so marred a whole university faculty as important as medicine, yet that has happened, to Sydney’s lasting shame. But I digress.”

Edda seemed to have gone beyond listening properly, her eyes fixed on Rawson’s face with a look in them he had never seen: of an unbearable pain unexpectedly resurrected, a pain against which she had no defenses.

So he hurried on, anxious to destroy the root cause of that pain, knowing he could—if she consented. “In February of next year, Edda, when university goes up, you have a place as a student in Medicine III allocated to you on the basis of these examinations. Here, in Melbourne. Commencing as a third-year student, you would have only four years of Medicine to graduate, which you would in November of 1935. After a year of internship, you would be given your license to practice at the end of 1936. Think of it! That would make you a qualified doctor at the age of thirty-one, with years and years of fruitful work ahead of you.”

Her body twisted convulsively, she began to get up, face a mask of terrified panic.

“No, don’t!” he cried. “Hear me out, Edda, please!”

“I can’t take charity, especially from a dear friend.”

“This is not charity. It comes at a considerable price.”

That stilled her, smoothed away the lines of anguish. “It comes at a considerable price? What price?”

“I need a wife,” he said flatly. “That’s my price. Marry me and you can do medicine, buy an electric blue or a jade green dress, wear furs—there’s no limit, I’m a very rich man. But I need a wife. Did I have a wife, I’d already be in parliament. Men my age who are bachelors are suspect, even if their reputations are unsullied. But I couldn’t find her, Edda, I just couldn’t. Until I met you. Sophisticated, intelligent, educated, understanding—even humane! For what it’s worth, you’d be Lady Schiller. Most women would kill for it, but it doesn’t impress you, does it?”

Little trills of laughter began, a stream of small bubbles gathering speed and volume until finally Edda howled—or did she cry? Even she wasn’t sure.

“It struck me, too,” Rawson went on, determined to give voice to all his ideas while he had the courage, “that I find you very alluring. Perhaps at some time in the future, we might try for a child. I don’t know whether I could manage, but later on, when we are at peace with each other—and always provided that you were willing, too—I would like to try. Nannies and nursery help would make it easier—” He thumped his brow with his fist. “I’m getting ahead of myself, these are things for the future, not now! Edda, marry me, please!”

What was there to think about, up to and including that child? “Yes, Rawson, I’ll marry you,” she said huskily.

He came to lift her hand, kiss it reverently.

“A marriage of convenience,” she said, clasping his fingers and smiling up at him. “I can’t deny, Rawson, that I’m accepting your proposal for one reason only—it gives me the desire of my heart, a degree in medicine.”

“I am quite aware of that; but you wouldn’t accept were I the sort of man who repels you. Our blossoming friendship counts for much, don’t try to deny it,” he said, stiffly stilted.

“How strange! We’ve gone all uncomfortable,” Edda said.

“Well, it’s not exactly a traditional proposal of marriage. Very bleak and bare!”

“Then let’s talk logistics,” she said, “and do sit down again. Do we have a grand wedding, or a quiet wedding, or a secret one?”

“I incline to secrecy, for a few reasons.” He finally sat. “Would you like to hear them?”

“Please.”

“Really, because I doubt a quiet wedding is possible. I have living parents, two brothers, two sisters-in-law, three nieces and three nephews, plus the usual plethora of aunts, uncles and cousins. They would have to come to a quiet wedding.”

“I’m nearly as bad—three sisters, one brother-in-law, one sane parent, and a parent with presenile dementia, two men who aren’t brothers-in-law but would have to be invited, and at least a dozen women who couldn’t possibly be ignored. That, for me, would be quiet, compounded by the fact that my father would insist on marrying us in person in his church,” she wailed.

Two pairs of startled eyes locked on each other. “Dearest Edda, this is awful! Your father is a minister of religion?”

“Church of England, an important New South Wales rural parish of huge area, and until the Depression came along, very rich in C of E terms.” She giggled. “Archbishops? Bishops? I know them by the score, and they may truthfully be said to have dandled an infant me on their purple-clad knees.”

“My God, Edda, I knew you were eligible, but not this eligible!”

“The only thing about me that your family will be able to object to, Rawson, is my lack of money. My antecedents and my background are all that they should be.” She looked uncomfortable. “As for a grand wedding, dear Rawson, my father cannot afford it.”

“A grand wedding is not, nor ever would be, a consideration,” Rawson said, sweeping grand weddings under the tattiest old carpet his imagination could conjure up. “No, my dearest Edda, given our mature ages, I think we choose a secret wedding. Our families may feel rebuffed, but the scalpel cuts as keenly to either side of the central aisle. Let all the introductions and opinions and spats take place after our wedding, which I suggest occurs in one month’s time at a registry office here in Melbourne.”

“Mordialloc?” she asked.

He looked blank. “Mordialloc? Why there?”

“I like the name.”

“You are allowed to respond to as many names as charm your ear, my quirky friend, but we’ll still marry in an obscure office right here in the heart of Melbourne city,” Rawson said firmly. “Then we’ll take a small ocean liner from Sydney to California, in which legendary place we’ll honeymoon until the New Year of 1932. While we’re away, let the storm break—private as well as public. Blood relatives, friends, colleagues, and enemies will all hear on the same day. Shock, horror, and consternation will reign. But will we care, cosseted by the same hands as pamper film stars? No! Reality will be postponed until our return.” Suddenly he looked naughtily boyish. “Then, it’s face the music time! Only our work will sustain us—you at university, I in politics.”

“How much you pack into that one word, politics! I hope I’m a satisfactory wife,” she said, assailed by qualms.

“Darling Edda, in you, I intend to show this country what the wife of a politician should be, and isn’t. You’re not shy, you have a mine of conversation, your appearance is stunning, and when it’s discovered that you have your own professional career, it will frighten the daylights out of my colleagues. When a journalist asks you for an opinion, he’ll get it—and be impressed.” He drew a breath. “Both my brothers married well in terms of the right background and adequate wifely fortunes, but said wives are dreary, uneducated, and, depending upon the enterprise, sometimes a real handicap to their husbands. You will never be that! Even on its periphery, you’ll relish the cut-and-thrust of political life. I won’t hamper your medical career, but I will ask you for help.”

“And I’ll give it gladly,” she said warmly, smiling. “Oh, to think that in five years I’ll be registered to practice medicine! But under my own name. I pity the poor patient whose appointment is to see Lady Schiller! That, I’ll keep for your world.” A look up. “How long does it take to arrange a secret marriage?”

“A month. You’ll continue to stay downstairs until my ring is on your finger—a ruby for your engagement ring?”

“Do you know, I think I’d prefer an emerald? Anyone from Corunda thinks rubies are old hat.”

“An emerald it shall be. Tomorrow morning I’ll introduce you to George Winyates and Karl Einmann, my secretaries, upon whose discretion you can utterly rely. They’ll know our plans, but no one else. They’ll arrange accounts for you at all the places you might shop regularly, including bookshops. The accounts will be temporarily in your own name, but after the knot is tied, they’ll be for Lady Schiller.”

“Lady Edda,” she said dreamily, and laughed. “It sounds—oh, I don’t know, unreal.”

“It is. You’re not Lady Edda, you’re Lady Schiller. Women who tack their Christian name onto the ‘Lady’ are the daughters of dukes or marquesses. The wives of knights don’t have that privilege.”

“How extraordinary! I’m learning already.”

“You must have fox furs and sables, but never mink,” he said, pulling a face. “Mink is coarse to the touch and too Hollywood.”

“Medicine!” she exclaimed, telling him where her heart was, and how little she would value furs alongside her profession. “Rawson, I can’t thank you enough for this chance, and I say that from the very core of my soul. I’ll go for surgery, abdominal and general. I’d like neurosurgery, but I’m a little too old, and it’s too demanding a field,” A different thought entered her mind. “Will we live in this flat?”

“Have you any objection?”

“Not at all. I’d just like to know.”

“There is a suite of four rooms beyond my own bedroom suite, and I thought of turning it over to you.” The big nose and chin that saved him for handsomeness endeavored to meet across his mouth; he pursed his lips, then smiled. “I snore notoriously, so I won’t ask you to share my bed. You would have a bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and sitting room, and I would ask you to speak with the interior decorators who do my work, tell them what you want. They will obey your every request. I thought you might like to use the guest flat downstairs as your medical refuge, thus keeping your studies separate from our life together.”

“Wouldn’t the other tenants object?”

“They’d better not,” he said crisply. “I own the building.”

Her head was whirling, a combination of tiredness—she had spent a large part of today walking—and shock.

“Downstairs to bed,” he instructed, pulling her out of her chair. “Come up for breakfast at eight, then we’ll get down to the real business. And, Edda?”

“Yes?” she asked, smiling up at him muzzily.

“I adore you. Perhaps not in the way a man adores his wife of choice, but it’s sincere and ardent. I do adore you.”

And if only, thought Edda, climbing into bed, he loved me the way a man does love a wife! Well, that cannot be. But so many compensations! A degree in medicine, and Lady Schiller the political hostess. How very strange and wonderful!

It sounded like a fairy tale, and so everybody would regard it, from her family clear through to his, and the whole world in between. Like Kitty, another fairy-tale romance ending in marriage to a rich, handsome, busy, and successful man. And look at her, with a huge empty house and two miscarriages to show for nearly two years of wedded bliss. Oh, Kitty!

What will my marriage bring? Edda asked herself, certain that its pains would outweigh its pleasures. Except for medicine. That was worth any price the gods might ask her to pay. At least she knew Rawson’s secret, she had some bargaining power; Kitty had somehow wound up owning no power whatsoever, and Edda was too modern in her thinking to deem that a good thing, even if it was tradition. There was no question of her, Edda, ever using Rawson’s secret against him to achieve some desire of her own. He wouldn’t renege on his offer to put her through medicine, the only factor that might have tempted her.

Busy-brained Edda, she couldn’t leave it alone; her mind alighted on Rawson’s expressed wish to produce a child—now when would it be easiest for her to go through a pregnancy? Never, she concluded, sighing—which also meant, any time at all. If he did quicken her, she would carry the child, go right on with her work until her water broke, then be back at work a few days later. Why not? Women used to be expected to do that—what had changed except social attitudes? Yes, thought Edda, I will cross that bridge when I come to it, and take it in my stride. I have to! I am a twentieth-century woman, I have the chances my ancestors only dreamed of. And I will do it comfortably, because I will be married to a wonderful man who carries a terrible burden.

How lovely it would be to tell her sisters! Or, if but one were possible, to tell Grace. How odd! Grace, existing in straitened circumstances, beset by all the worries of a widow from fatherless children to lack of income, yet it was this selfsame Grace she yearned to tell? The full sister, yes, but also the twin. Kitty would oppose the marriage, knowing the pain it was bound to bring; Tufts would consent but never condone it, seeing the element of sale in it; and Grace would deplore it from jealousy and narrowness of mind. Yet she, Edda, hungered to confront them with it before it happened. Somehow to hit them in the face with it afterward felt like treachery.

Even taking their reactions into account, Edda wanted Grace and Kitty and Tufts to be there at her wedding. That it could not be, she understood. Grace would blab far and wide, Kitty would tell Charlie, who would blab far and wide, and Tufts—well, Tufts was Tufts, a hard act to follow.

Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. chose to issue an elegant press release on the subject of his marriage timed to reach its recipients while their ship was on the high seas bound for California, and leaving some hundreds of staggered people with no one to talk to. The release included a black-and-white photograph of bride and groom, their first sight of Sister Edda Latimer for the majority. Intriguing, to say the least. The couple stood close together, he in a three-piece suit, she in afternoon clothes, looking not at each other, but directly into the camera. The best photograph colorist in Melbourne had hand-tinted matte sepia versions as per instructions, revealing that the bride had chosen to wear a dark red ensemble of incomparable smartness. Chic, right down to her dark red seven-button kid gloves. A severe beauty, slightly haughty, was the consensus of opinion; Lady Schiller looked to members of the Nationalist Party as if she would be an excellent consort for the man expected to be their future leader.

There was already a Lady Schiller, of course. Rawson’s father was a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George thanks to his business and pastoral career. Sir Martin and his Lady Schiller stared at their copy of the press release, softened by the inclusion of a personal letter from their middle son.

“She’s not socially brilliant, but she’s acceptable,” Lady Schiller said. “An exquisite outfit, though the color is perhaps a little adventurous for a bridal gown. Twenty-six years old—she’s not an eighteen-year-old bottle-blonde, at any rate, for which we must be thankful. Father a Church of England Rector . . . Mother was an Adelaide Faulding—good family, too, if it’s the one I’m taking it for. I doubt Rawson would marry beneath him.”

“She has lovely eyes,” said Sir Martin. “Very unusual.”

“According to Rawson’s letter, she’s a medical student—I don’t care for that,” said Rawson’s mother.

“Then she’s brainy,” said Rawson’s father, whose wife wasn’t.

“Brains should not be what a man looks for in a wife. Medicine is inappropriate, all that vulgar nudity and exposure to disease.”

Martin Junior, an amiable and obedient oldest son who had been designated to take over the Schiller business enterprises, declared himself delighted. “Time Rawson put Anne behind him,” he said. “Face it, Mother, he’s the Schiller who will shine the brightest, and his wife looks an ideal mate. Brains and brains.”

“I agree,” said Rolf, the youngest son, designated to manage the family’s pastoral empire. “Too unusual to be a raving beauty, but she rather frightens me.”

“She’s a designing harpy!” Gillian snapped. Martin Junior’s wife, she had turned forty, and knew she hadn’t done so gracefully. Four children and an extremely sweet tooth had ruined her figure, and Martin Junior had ruined her disposition.

“I’m with Gilly,” said Constance, who was Rolf’s wife. “She laid a trap for poor, silly Rawson, I know she did.”

The three men guffawed. Lady Schiller Senior smiled. The lines were drawn about where she had imagined they would be. Neither Gilly nor Connie had a particle of dress sense, and dark red would make them look as if they had a terminal illness. Just as Rawson, the middle child of whom nothing much had been expected, had utterly eclipsed his brothers, the new and youthful second Lady Schiller was definitely going to cast her two sisters-in-law permanently into the shade. As for the first Lady Schiller, time would provide the right answer.

In Corunda, where the press release was softened by four letters from Edda to her father and her three sisters, the news caused a sensation. But to no one quite as profoundly as it did to Charles Burdum. When Kitty, waving her letter and the press release, told him on his return to Burdum House that fateful evening in early December of 1931, Charles looked as if he were going to faint. Reeling to a chair, he sank into it awkwardly and held out a hand for the press release, pushing Edda’s letter away.

“Edda? Edda has married Rawson Schiller?”

Eyes round, Kitty took in his shock and poured him a drink. “Charlie, you look as if it were a disaster! Why, for heaven’s sake? It’s wonderful news! Look at her letter, do, please! In February she starts Medicine III in Melbourne—her greatest dream, the desire of her heart, and now she has it.”

“At what price?” he asked bitterly, angrily.

“That’s her affair, Charlie, not yours. How can either of us ever know? Except that Edda isn’t to be bought, and I take strong exception to your implication that she can.”

“If I’d known she hankered after a medical degree that much, I would have paid to put her through!” he snapped.

“Bullshit!” Kitty exploded, losing patience and tolerance. “You’ve always known, and Lord knows you have the money, but Edda isn’t one of your favorite people, I am aware of that. She tells you what she thinks, from petty things like my not having a mode of transport from the top of this hill, all the way to how you’re building the hospital. You’ve enjoyed knowing Edda can’t have what she wants, and don’t bother trying to deny it. With you, Charlie, it all goes on underneath consciousness so that you can tell yourself what a super chappie you are! Charles Burdum, the rock upon which Corunda stands. Feeding Edda scraps like the promise of her own operating theatre when you know perfectly well one is enough, and it belongs to Dot Marshall. Well, she was applying to some hospital in Melbourne to run an operating theatre there, she says, when she met Rawson Schiller.”

The alcohol was having an effect; Charles sat up straighter. “Oh, yes! She met Rawson Schiller through my agency, no one else’s! Since you, madam, won’t come to Melbourne, I took your sister to the Lord Mayor’s charity dinner. It cost me a hundred pounds to buy her a plate at that dinner, and this is the thanks I get—she up and marries an ultraconservative bigot who’d see working men on subsistence wages, the Chinese deported, Melanesians back in the sugar fields, and women barred from all employment. If your precious sister has married a man like Rawson Schiller, then she is no better than a common harlot!”

Whack! Whack! Kitty’s blows, one to either side of his face, happened faster than lightning. At one moment she was sitting in her chair arguing with him—oh, fiercely, maybe, but in a civilized manner—and the next his ears were ringing, his head hammered. Eyes blazing magenta fire, she stood over him and kept on whacking his ears, eyes, cheekbones, jaw.

“Don’t you dare call my sister a harlot, you puffed-up, piggy, pompous, pox-doctor’s clerk! You’re a gutless, nutless eunuch!”

Fending her off, he managed to wriggle out of the chair and move to the door. “Harlot! Whore! Strumpet! And you, madam, go wash out your mouth with lye soap! Such disgusting vulgarity!”

“Go to hell!” she shrieked. “You don’t care about working men, all you really care about is yourself. It was you deserted Edda at that dinner, left her alone at a table full of strangers—she told me! Rawson Schiller rescued her. And guess what? He’s tall! No one can ever call him a Napoleon, eh, Boney?”

Then she pushed past him, ran to the back door, and out. Came the sound of a flivver starting up: afterward, silence.

Charles went first to the sideboard, then returned to his chair, where he sat and shook so badly that it was five minutes before he could lift the glass to his mouth without spilling the drink. It had been so sudden, so convulsive, so spontaneous. No time to think and no time to draw back from voicing aloud what he should have kept to himself. Edda was a harlot, but no sister could stomach such a candid insult. The rage still possessed him, fuelled now by the additional uncaged beast of anger at his wife, whose love for him was always marred and diminished by what she felt for those wretched sisters of hers. Kitty was his wife—legally, emotionally, totally his! Yet she always held some part of her back to lavish on her sisters. It wasn’t right!

Edda was a harlot—an easy, loose woman who gave her sexual favors to men outside of marriage, men like Jack Thurlow. And Kitty knew! How could she possibly condone it without admitting Edda was a harlot? Did it mean Kitty was only a virgin by accident when she married? Was she practiced in all sex short of the ultimate act?

Twenty minutes later the Rector rang: Kitty was with him and would be home later, no need to worry.

“I won’t go back!” she cried to her father. “Daddy, he called Edda a harlot for marrying Rawson Schiller! As if she’d concocted a plot!”

“Yes, yes, my dear, and quite unfounded, I know. But from what Charlie said when he came back from Melbourne, I gathered that on meeting Schiller he behaved like a small and aggressive dog setting eyes on a large and particularly complacent cat. Think about it, Kitty dear. Under the skin they’re so alike, despite the political differences—and those can be assumed or discarded in a trice. We see examples every day. Politics has to be played like a game, and those who throw themselves into it wholeheartedly are bound to be cruelly disillusioned. For it isn’t a fair or a clean game. It’s a tissue of lies—deceptions—personal ambitions—false hopes. It’s devoid of ethics or morality and designed to give victory to the unprincipled. A man with true aspirations to serve mankind will be in social work or medicine or something with visible positive gains.” He gulped and looked confused. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I’m supposed to be pointing out their likenesses, aren’t I? Take it from an old man, they are veritable brothers poles apart.”

An astonished Kitty stared at her father. “Daddy, you’re a cynic! I had no idea.”

The Rector bridled. “I am not a cynic, I’m a realist!”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“Kitty, our brain is the most remarkable instrument God ever gifted on living creatures. It flowers to greatest glory in human beings, and we are supposed to use it, not suffocate it in frivolities and rubbish. So think! Charlie and my new son-in-law have few real differences compared to what they have in common. My instincts say that Charlie isn’t as left as Rawson believes, and Rawson isn’t as right as Charlie believes. But there is one difference.”

“And I have another, more important difference,” said Kitty, calming down. “Rawson is nearly a foot taller than Charlie.” She sighed. “His inferiority over his height will ruin Charlie.”

“Get him into parliament. It’s an ideal career for short men.”

“Nothing can excuse his attitude to Edda,” Kitty muttered.

“Oh, Kitty, it was said to hurt you, not Edda! He doesn’t think her a trollop, even when he spoke his feelings aloud.” Thomas Latimer put the kettle on for a pot of tea. “Have a cuppa.”

She stifled a giggle. “I fear I’ve blackened both his eyes.”

“My goodness! Someone was annoyed! I’m very happy that my girls have so much love and loyalty for each other, but you must remember that your first love and loyalty is to your husband.”

The back screen door banged, and Grace erupted into the old kitchen, clutching her letter and press release.

“Oh, Kitty, you beat me here!” The Queen of the Trelawneys sat down. “A cuppa would be lovely, Daddy. What a shock, eh? My twin sister is now Lady Schiller.”

“Miffed, Grace?” Kitty asked, lips twitching.

“Miffed? Why ever would I be miffed?” Grace asked, astonished. “I can quite see why they did it secretly, though—imagine trying to plan a wedding that size! Half of upper-crust Melbourne would have to be invited, and Daddy could never afford the expense. It’s such poor form if the groom has to pay, I always think. Lady Schiller! Good for Edda! And she’s going to do medicine at last!”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Kitty said warmly. “I’m very happy.”

“I bet Charlie isn’t,” Grace said shrewdly. “Cast in the shade.”

“If you can’t say something pleasant, Grace, kindly do not say anything at all,” the Rector said sternly.

“Oh, pooh, Daddy! He is miffed, Kits, isn’t he?”

“Not exactly miffed, Grace, just a little sad that Edda will be moving out of Corunda’s ken.” The two faces looking at Kitty fell.

“Oh, I hadn’t stopped to realize that,” said Grace.

“Nor I,” said the Rector.

But Tufts had, as she confided to Liam Finucan over morning tea in her office the next day.

“One can’t replace Edda, that’s the saddest part. So steady and logical, so—oh, I don’t know, straight. I understand why she’s married him, it means a medical degree, and she must like him a great deal as well.”

“You imply that love isn’t in the equation?” Liam asked.

“Oh, yes. I don’t think Edda can love. At least not in the way Kitty and Grace do. She’s a scientist, not a romantic.”

“That’s pretty sweeping. What about him, Heather?”

She frowned. “Good question, you old wet blanket. I daresay he must love her tremendously, to marry her. After all, he’s a man of forty, far wealthier than Charlie, significantly taller than Edda, and famous within the British Empire. Oh, how much I hope it works out! I pray it does! Because she didn’t marry him to be Lady Schiller or a social butterfly. Edda is Edda, a law unto herself. I must meet him, Liam! I’ll not rest until I do.”

The Rector’s feelings were akin to Tufts’s, though they did not discuss the matter between themselves. All through Kitty’s stormy childhood it had been Edda who spotted the warning signs, Edda who rescued the hapless girl from her mother’s idiocies, Edda who provided the strength; and all that said Edda was extremely perceptive, sensitive, loving, and protective. But how would she cope with a Rawson Schiller? Why had she tied herself to his star in such an irrevocable way? Naturally Mr. Latimer knew about Jack Thurlow; he wasn’t blind, and he certainly wasn’t deaf to gossip. Contrary to God’s precepts it might be, but to Mr. Latimer the relationship was far preferable to an unhappy marriage, not to be broken asunder. Now here she was, a ladyship, and one day to be a doctor. And try though he did, he couldn’t smother his misgivings.

For Maude Latimer the news came too late. Three times she had boiled the kettle dry and set the Rectory kitchen on fire, the last time badly. After a bitter struggle with himself, the Rector had been forced to put her in the old people’s hospice, a place she bumbled around, apparently happy, regaling everyone about her gloriously beautiful baby daughter, Kitty. Told of Edda’s marriage, it failed utterly to impinge. It was Kitty who would grow up to make a brilliant marriage. Edda? A nobody-nothing.

It appeared that Charles Burdum was never going to climb down from his high horse. True to his word, the Rector sent Kitty home two hours after she had left, but her nose was in the air and she wasn’t sure she could forgive him, though for her father’s sake she was prepared to try. But she discovered an icy husband who declined dinner, then slept in his dressing room, where he instructed Coates to set up a bed. Face impassive, the man did as he was told, but Kitty knew the tale would be all over Corunda tomorrow—Charlie’s valet was superb at his job and a born gossip. The pubs might be shut and most people asleep, but Coates would find a way. There had been times when Kitty had slept alone for “health reasons,” but it had always been she who moved out of the master’s bed. This was very different—the master had done the moving. Sensational news!

Kitty interpreted it as evidence that harlotry was contagious and she had caught it from Edda. In the air as well as in the blood. No doubt, thought the fulminating Kitty, Tufts and Grace also wore scarlet As on their foreheads. How dared Charlie carry on like a bourgeois evangelist! On which thought she fell fast asleep.

In the morning she woke to find she’d had the most peaceful sleep in many moons, and leaped out of bed vibrating with energy. She hurried to breakfast. To find no Charlie. He was already at the hospital, said her trusty domestic help, Mrs. Simmons.

“Splendid!” said Kitty cheerfully. “He and I have had the most ding-dong row, Mrs. Simmons, and I’m moving out of our bedroom. I’d appreciate it if you and Beatrix—oh, and Coates!—would put my stuff in the lilac suite. Charlie hates the lilac suite!”

Mrs. Simmons ostentatiously closed her mouth by putting her hand on her sagging lower jaw and shoving it upward. “Jeez, Kitty, that’s a bit drastic, ain’t it?” she asked, with a typical Corundite’s attitude toward her boss—no “ma’am”s for Mrs. Simmons!

Accepting Mrs. Simmons’s reaction as the norm, Kitty was unfazed. “Yes, it is drastic, but at least it isn’t boring,” she said. “Do you know what the little twerp did? Called my sister Edda a harlot for marrying a rich man with a knighthood!”

“Stiffen the snakes and use ’em as broom handles! The mauve rooms you mean, Kitty?”

“Yes, the mauve rooms.”

Leaving her removal in the capable hands of Mrs. Simmons, Kitty went to the orphanage and volunteered for nursing work there.

“Kitty, you’re manna from heaven,” said Matron Ida Dervish, the head of an institution that had mushroomed in just two years. “A trained children’s nurse! My dear, we can work you nigh to death, but can you spare the time? Dr. Burdum must keep you busy.”

“Time,” said Kitty, “is something I have acres and acres of, and no wretched government will allow me to utilize my training by giving me a job because I’m married. Well, the latter is debatable. I have had a right royal bust-up with Dr. Charles Burdum, who finds me surplus to his requirements. One glance around as I came in here, Ida, said that here at least I’m really needed. Charlie can rot!”

“Kitty!” Matron Dervish exclaimed. “Say things like that, and it will be all over town in a second.”

“It already is. Coates, Ida, don’t forget Coates,” said the indignant wife with a grin. “Oh, he’s hurt me, and I’ll have his guts for garters!”

“Who, Coates?”

“No, idiot! Charlie. Have you anything I can wear until I can have some plain uniforms sent down from Sydney? A pity our local shops have closed their doors in such numbers.” She sighed, sobering, her mood beginning to slide. “At heart I’m very hurt, but I’d sooner die than let Charlie see that. Calling Edda, of all people, a harlot!”

“Is that what he did?”

“Yes.”

“The man’s touched in the head. Not to mention jealous.”

A judgment many Corundites made as the news flew around, but not a universal one by any means. Charles Burdum had devoted and faithful followers in all walks, and they had no trouble in seeing the justice behind Charles’s comment about Edda Latimer, who might be a stuck-up bitch, but was definitely very shady when it came to morals. Though the cause of the Burdum quarrel was irrelevant; its piquancy lay in its participants, until now considered bound as closely as—well, twins.

For a week Charles ignored Kitty, the public nature of his dilemma, and the fact that his wife was now inhabiting an ugly suite of rooms at the far end of his house. The gauntlet he had thrown down so thoughtlessly she had picked up with indecent eagerness, and was busy whacking his face with it. Not helped by the fact that he was sporting two black eyes no one would believe were the result of walking into a door.

At the end of a week he was prepared to climb down a little, and seized his opportunity when he heard the front door shut at six in the evening: his wife had returned from her ridiculous job at the orphanage.

“May I have a word, Kitty?” he asked courteously, appearing in the doorway of the small sitting room adjacent to his study.

By rights she should be looking tired, for her work was no sinecure—hard, heavy, remorseless. His spy network had informed him that she was going through every head of hair for lice and nits, scrubbing every orifice mercilessly, all the jobs the understaffed and overcrowded orphanage staff hadn’t had time to do properly.

Yet she was blooming, more beautiful than she had been in many months; the lilac-blue eyes blazed with life, the exquisite mouth was set contentedly, and her skin absolutely glowed with good health. This woman, bear stillborn babies? Never!

“Certainly,” she said.

“A drink?”

“Cold beer would be lovely, thank you.”

Having served her and watched her settle in a chair, he sat. “This has got to stop,” he said.

“What’s got to stop?” she asked, sipping luxuriously.

“The shenanigans. Proclaiming that you and I have been rowing, that you’re bored, that you dislike my attitude to your family.”

“My goodness, what a litany of peccadilloes!” she said.

“They have to stop.”

“On your say-so, by your order?”

“Yes, of course. I’m your husband.”

“And what if I refuse to stop my shenanigans?”

“Then I should be compelled to take steps.”

“Steps . . . Do explain, please.”

“I can cut off your allowance, decline to honor your debts, use my influence to make it impossible for you to do any kind of unpaid work. You are my wife, Kitty,” Charles said, strongly and with unflinching authority.

If he had hoped to see her lose her temper, he was disappointed. Kitty stared at him as if he were a new, rather repulsive kind of insect. Then her upper lip curled. “Oh, Charlie, really!” she cried, exasperated but not angered. “Don’t be a bigger fool than God made you! Corunda is my hometown, not yours. Try to beggar me in Corunda, and you’ll reap a whirlwind. I can ruin you in next to no time. Kitty Latimer, sister of that harlot Edda, both much beloved of the locals? It can’t happen. What’s more, you know it can’t happen. This is all a bluff, your last-ditch stand to acquire an obedient and subordinate wife. Well, eat shit!”

“You have a harlot’s vocabulary,” he said, needing to say something yet having no comeback anywhere in the recesses of his mind. How much he loved her! Why were things going so wrong for him? Those wretched sisters of hers, always her sisters . . . It came hard to admit his jealousy, his possessiveness, for he had never experienced their like before Kitty entered his world, and now he realized that, loving her, he would never be free of the Latimer sisters.

“Yes, I was always the salty-tongued twin,” she said with a smile, liking the idea. “When one grows up from infancy being hailed as the most beautiful child in creation, it becomes very necessary to develop a quality that can shock, disillusion people. I make no apologies for it, and I have no intention of apologizing to you, Charlie, for having to suffer an insufferable insult. My sister Edda is a woman of total integrity and strong character, always intelligent, always unswerving in her loyalties. You dislike her because you sense a quality in her that declines to be owned. It’s a quality I don’t have, unfortunately for me. But this much I do know: that Edda would never sell herself, even for the chance to be a doctor. Which means Rawson Schiller must have wanted something from Edda that cancelled out any element of a sale. It’s a union of equals, Charlie, whereas our poor effort gives me nothing.”

For a long while he made no answer, just sat and stared at his wife, whom he loved but couldn’t plumb. Finally he sighed. “Will you come back to my bed?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

A huge and empty pit engulfed his belly. “It’s over?”

“I didn’t exactly say that. Like the Tsarina Alexandra, I love my mauve boudoir. To have my own little realm within your palace is greatly to my liking, I’ve discovered. I’m happy to admit you to my bed for sex, Charlie, if you ask and you’ll come to me, but I won’t sleep with you. Nor do I want your touch on my realm. It’s mine. I’m twenty-four years old, and it’s high time I had some genuine privacy. I yearn to have children. But I insist on a life of my own, and that means—for the present, at any rate—that I continue at the orphanage.”

“You’re hard, very hard,” he muttered.

“All women are, when it comes down to it,” said Kitty, her composure undented. “Men force us to be. Do we have a pact?”

Not knowing whether he loved her more than he hated her, he nodded. “When I want sexual congress with you, I ask, but that does not include sleeping together. How much of living together does it permit?”

“As much or as little as you want. I will run your house, act as your hostess, eat meals with you, sit and talk with you of the day’s events or family doings, be a good mother to your children when God pleases to let them live. Have I missed anything, Charlie? If I have, do tell me,” said this new Kitty.

“Is there a chance that the magic can come back?”

Kitty laughed, a sound as brittle and sharp-edged as crystal. “For me, Charlie, I don’t think it was ever there. But you wanted it—or me—and you pushed until I crumbled. As for throwing my cap over the windmill—no! A harlot I was not.” A gleeful look entered her face; she grinned. “You’d better hope, husband dear, that I continue not to be a harlot. According to you, it may well run in the family.”

And so much for indiscreet remarks, thought Charles Burdum, retiring to his solitary bed. Until he had married into Clan Latimer, he had never experienced the emotions of siblings, for he had none. How could an only child have known the strength and depth of the ties between sisters, especially twins?

And she had implied that he pushed her too hard—what had she said, that she crumbled? Ground down, eaten away, undermined. But that was ridiculous! To think like that was to demean herself, to have a low opinion of herself. Then, out of nowhere, memories of his talk with Edda when he had first arrived in Corunda came back to him. She had said Kitty had a poor opinion of herself, that the mother had all but ruined her. Why did confidences like that seem to have so little significance at the time of telling? He hadn’t taken it in as he ought—overwhelmed, probably, by the wealth of information Edda fed to him in one sitting.

No, be fair, Charles, he told himself now; you genuinely heard only what was grist to your mill, and that mill was intent upon winning Kitty. Nothing else. Kitty the perfect partner, whom Edda was trying to make you see—correctly—as imperfect. No one is perfect! Least of all you, Charles Henry Burdum. Now you’ve stuffed it up a treat. Your wife is damaged through no fault of her own, and you’re not the right person to cure her. In effect, she has closed the door on her marriage without shirking its duties, but duties are all they can ever be to her. Is that why she miscarries?

It fell to Tufts and Liam Finucan to be the first Corundites who met Sir Rawson and Lady Schiller, docking in Sydney after sailing from San Francisco at the beginning of 1932. Liam had a conference to attend in Sydney and Tufts took leave to go with him; they had adjoining rooms at the Hotel Metropole not far from Circular Quay, spent their days apart, their evenings together, and their nights chastely separated by a hotel wall. Which suited them very well. Then on their very last day, Tufts received a telephone call from Edda.

“Rawson and I are at the Hotel Australia,” she said, “and we would dearly like you and Liam to have dinner with us tonight.”

“Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away!”

Since Liam’s unkempt days were in the past, he was clad in a good suit with a Guy’s Hospital tie, and tiny Tufts was beautiful in a dinner dress of amber chiffon. The couple waiting for them in the lounge, however, took all eyes; Tufts and Liam forgot their manners and stared. The man was impressive, if on the ugly side, but Edda was magnificent in emerald green silk the exact color of the ring on the third finger of her left hand, a big square emerald surrounded by small diamonds. Around her neck she wore a simple diamond choker, and in each earlobe a large first-water diamond.

“Starve the lizards!” said Tufts, on tiptoe to kiss Edda’s cheek. “You look like a million dollars.”

“I nearly cost it,” said Edda, laughing.

Then Tufts met her new brother-in-law’s blue eyes and liked him, which was such a relief she almost buckled at the knees.

One wouldn’t think, Edda mused, listening to Rawson and Liam talk, that a lawyer and a pathologist would have much in common, and perhaps they didn’t, but they weren’t lost for words, which flowed back and forth in an easy comradeship that told Edda this folded-up, precise Irishman approved of her husband.

“You’re happy, Edda,” Tufts said in the ladies’ room.

“I am, very, except for the gifts.” Edda grimaced. “The engagement ring I couldn’t avoid, but I fought the diamonds tooth and nail. I may as well have saved my breath.”

“They’re beautiful, Eds, and in perfect taste. Simple.”

“Yes, thank God I don’t have to worry about Rawson’s taste. We mesh together amazingly well.”

“And you start Medicine III in February?”

“Yes, yes, yes! The jewelry goes to the bank for storage then, I refuse to keep it at home.” She stopped, smiled. “Home! The whole top floor of a tall building in the City of Melbourne, isn’t that odd? I have a whole flat one floor down for studying.”

“Lord! It must be like a dream.”

“Yes, it is, and I’m terrified I’ll wake up.”

“The man loves you.”

“Do you think so?”

The amber eyes blinked. “It’s written all over him.”

“He’s moved mountains for me.”

“I suspect,” said Tufts, tucking her arm through her sister’s, “that he’s a man accustomed to moving mountains.” Yet, walking back to the Metropole with Liam at midnight, she voiced some misgivings. “Oh, Liam, pray for her!” she cried.

“Does she need your prayers, Heather?” he asked, surprised.

“I suspect she does. Rawson Schiller is highly likeable, and I like him . . . But there are many sides to him, and I’m not sure how much Edda knows about all of them.”

“Well, they’ll be on the day train with us tomorrow, so keep your eyes open and your ears tuned. I share your opinion of him.”

“At least he’s not stingy. Such jewels!”

He snorted a laugh. “You don’t fool me, madam! Jewels are not high on your personal list of priorities.”

“Nor on Edda’s, alas. Therein lies the rub.”

“Only if he thinks she values them. I have a feeling he does not think she values them. On the other hand, as his wife she must wear them when the occasion calls for it.”

Grace decided that her own position as Queen of the Trelawneys saw her rank equally with a knight of the realm, and was gracious when they met; this occurred in her own cream-and-green house on Trelawney Way for morning tea, a repast that a widow with little children found easier to furnish than anything from luncheon onward.

It being the height of summer, the boys were shirtless and barefoot, clad in cotton shorts.

“Brian goes to school next year at the East Corunda Public, and John will go the year after that—they were born quite close together,” she said to her visitors, apparently unimpressed by Edda’s clothes or emerald ring.

“It must be very hard, Grace,” Rawson said warmly, “but it isn’t difficult to see that you’re a splendid housekeeper.”

“I manage. No point in whinging or moaning, is there? One must take the bad with the good, I always say.”

“Would you prefer to see your sons privately schooled?”

On the surface nothing rattled Grace, and the shock of Edda’s union was by now old enough to have been incorporated into her scheme of things, considered as a possibility, but then discarded—unless, later, things changed, of course.

“Brian and John know only one world, the Trelawneys,” said Grace to Rawson, charm and nobility showing. “I am assured East Corunda Public can provide satisfactory matriculation standards. I want my boys to matriculate with high distinctions.”

“What great things do you hope for them?” Rawson labored.

“As a victim of the Great Depression, Rawson, my main hope is that whatever they do, their field of work is more secure than that of selling. Their father was a brilliant salesman, but the moment the Depression crunched down, people just stopped buying. They can’t go on the land because we don’t own any land, but schoolteaching or a career as an army or navy officer would be safe,” said Grace sternly.

Rawson eyed her helplessly, knowing himself totally confounded. This was Edda’s full twin? Extremely alike to look at, but they had nothing in common mentally or spiritually—absolutely nothing!

“If I can ever help, Grace, promise me you’ll come to me,” he said strongly. “I won’t insult you by pressing the matter, but remember what I’ve said.”

“I understand, but we’re all right,” Grace said. “Perhaps life’s greatest lesson is to aim low. Then you’re not disappointed.”

“Rubbish!” Edda snapped, finding her tongue. “Aim low, and you stay low! You have two splendid boys, and I hope you intend to make sure they gain university degrees, not merely matriculate.”

Grace turned to Rawson with a tolerant smile. “Darling Edda!” she cried. “A typical Edda reaction, you know. But how could you know? I’m her twin, I know the lot. Ambitious! Oh, lord, she has enough ambition for some sort of world contest. Though I’m really pleased she’s finally doing medicine. Not that it will bring her any joy. Women doctors have a very hard time of it.”

“Edda will succeed,” he said mildly.

“Do have another finger of toast, Rawson. The apple jelly on it is homemade from my own Granny Smith tree. So much better for you than that bought stuff. Those of us on a Depression budget may eat more monotonously, but we also eat more healthily. Homemade!”

“The apple jelly is delicious,” he said, meaning it.

“And,” said Edda through her teeth as they drove off in the Rector’s car, “Grace is absolutely insufferable! I thought no one could be worse than the old complaining Grace, but all-conquering Grace, Queen of the Trelawneys, is beyond imagination. Insufferable!”

“But you love her to death,” he said, smiling.

She emitted a sound, half a sob, half a laugh. “Yes, I do.”

“Water finds its own level, Edda, and Grace is the pool at the bottom of the cascades. Not shallow—hidden depths. Whereas you are the falls, always in motion, full of energy, glorious to watch.”

She flushed, loving the unexpected compliment. “Kitty is the cascades—sparkling, dancing, a symphony of sound and rainbows.”

“What about Tufts?”

“The Pacific Ocean, nothing less.”

“She and Kitty have preserved a strong physical likeness, too, yet all of you seem far more different than you are alike,” he said.

“I know what you mean. Each of us has been altered by life.” She sighed. “I was wrong to encourage Kitty to marry Charlie—but she dithered so, Rawson! Tufts and I became convinced that the only thing that held her back was the stigma of being judged a gold digger. And I genuinely believed she needed a man who idolized her. Charlie did. She struck him like a high voltage wire, he went a little off his head with love for her. What we couldn’t know turned out to be their ruination—Charlie’s jealousy and possessiveness.”

“Yes, he’s the sort who’d like to lock his women up.”

Edda ran the gauntlet of Rawson’s family the night following their arrival back in Melbourne. The only one who had an enjoyable evening was Rawson himself, at liberty to sit back and watch his new wife’s effect on a typical three-generations-of-wealth colonial family. The Schillers, he thought, have forgotten everything except how to maintain their social standing and keep increasing their money. My brothers married out of the stud book, women who labor to write a note; my mother is a snob with her own impeccable family tree; my father is a hard, narrow man who’d keep women in the home. There is only one Schiller with a university degree, me—my three nieces will be allowed to leave school before they matriculate, and my three nephews will matriculate, then not go up to university as a matter of course. But the Schillers are important people.

And here, like a shaft of red lightning, I have thrown down the bolt of my wife to shatter their complacence, split their ignorance asunder. Look at her! Sophisticated is the word I always think of first, because her beauty is suffused with all the qualities experience allied to intelligence can give; pain has expanded her sense of being, an innate need to assume full responsibility has endowed her with strength, and a passion to know will forever drive her beyond home, kitchen, and nursery. She has such style! That’s a gift, it cannot be acquired.

Poor, silly Constance, to try to humiliate her by commenting on her unmanicured nails, unworthy of my emerald ring. How charmingly Edda explains that the rubber gloves of a theatre sister wouldn’t tolerate long nails, nor the understatement of a hospital condone red polish on them. And Constance, Gillian, maybe even my mother, sit remembering those awesome women smoothly bullying them into using a bedpan or showing them how to cope with the indignities of that drastic leveller, pain.

My father is baffled, he flounders in a mire of conversational inadequacy because he’s clever enough to understand that my wife outstrips him, could probably outstrip him at making money if such was her desire. Thank God it isn’t! Baby brother Rolf comes closest to liking her—he’s the countryman, nearer the earth and more in tune with the great cycles of Nature. For Edda, he senses, is the Great Goddess who had the power before men wrested it from her.

“How did it go for the fly on the wall?” she asked him after they returned to their own apartment.

“The fly saw you terrified them,” he said, smiling.

“Then if the fly doesn’t mind, I’ll keep it that way.”

“Mind? The fly loves it!”

To inhabit the whole top floor of an office building, even including a roof garden, meant that Sir Rawson Schiller had literal rooms to spare. Nor did losing his erstwhile guest flat to Edda inconvenience him, as the top three floors were subdivided into apartments he kept for family guests and staff on schedules or duties that made living at a distance from him difficult.

A married couple in their late forties, Ivan and Sonia Petrov, had looked after Sir Rawson for twelve years; together with a cook, Daphne, a cook’s offsider, Betty, and a scrubwoman known as Wanda, they comprised his domestic staff. The Petrovs and Daphne lived in the building, whereas Betty and Wanda travelled by tram from some other part of Melbourne. Working hours, especially for the Petrovs, seemed to be flexible, but Edda suspected Rawson wasn’t the kind of employer who pinched pennies on matters like wages and perquisites; his staff clearly loved him too much, including his male secretaries, each of whom lived in. It’s like a tiny colony up here, she thought, amused and touched. As for his secret—none of them knew it.

Daphne ruled the kitchen, the Petrovs all else. Privy to Kitty’s struggles with Charlie over a chef, Edda saw the difference in attitude immediately. Charlie saw only a Cordon Bleu man; Rawson took a woman with no formal training and had by far the better, more versatile cook.

Ivan and Sonia had fled the Red Revolution in Russia, but not because they were wealthy aristocrats; they hated Lenin and all he stood for, their reasons too Russian for Edda to comprehend. What she did gather was that Sir Rawson gave them their idea of a worker’s paradise. A week after Edda moved in as Rawson’s wife, Nina appeared to function as her maid. She was the Petrovs’ nineteen-year-old daughter, who lived with them, and had been properly trained as a lady’s maid, at which she had worked since fifteen.

“Maiding you is ideal!” said Nina in a broad Melbourne accent.

“Isn’t it an outmoded sort of career, Nina?” Edda asked. “You could be a teacher, or a nurse, or a secretary—this is servile.”

“Yeah, but,” said Nina, top lip curling. “Proper maids earn terrific wages. Mum trained me. I left Lady Maskell-Turvey to maid you, and she would have doubled my wages to keep me. But maiding you is beaut, even if you’d rather I called you Edda.”

Remembering the pittance a trainee nurse was paid, Edda shut up. If this bright, fair-haired, and blue-eyed child of refugees didn’t mind washing underwear and ironing dresses for an apparently enormous wage, why should she, Edda, complain?

Though it was a tremendous relief to discover that all Rawson’s staff seemed genuinely to like her. Very glad to see him married at last to Lady Right, for so they regarded her, that was plain to see.

Edda’s own suite of rooms was at the far end of the apartment, and was ideal. But somehow she never managed to make full use of them apart from sleeping, bathing, and dressing. Her leisure soon saw her downstairs in the medical flat, readying it for her study, including keeping the bed made up and towels in the bathroom. No doubt the staff gossiped, but half of it at least did so in rapid Russian. Not much danger there; the Petrovs knew which side their bread was buttered on.

Books, books, and more books filled the wall shelving, always being added to; Edda bought a microscope, a stethoscope, glass slides and cover slips, test tubes, basic surgical instruments in Swedish stainless steel, piles of simple cotton dresses that could be laundered and ironed with a minimum of trouble, short white coats, and sturdy nurses’ shoes. When Medicine III began, she wanted to have every eventuality catered for so that she did not need to waste time rushing off to acquire things she’d forgotten. The precise, managing mind was in full control.

She also enjoyed the time she spent with Rawson, who was true to his word and utilized her social services. It sounded impressive, but the truth was that he loved to listen to her as she enthused about her “medical flat,” as she called it, and felt refreshed at the end of an evening in her company. Her youth, beauty, and power fascinated him, and he found room to regret that his own sexual inclinations would forever set her on an outer orbit of his life. For wife in the full sense she was not, and he felt no stirrings to make her so; perhaps what he felt for her was more by nature fatherly?

His colleagues in law and politics, skeptical about his sudden union, gradually succumbed to Edda’s spell, though their wives held out far longer, and some wives never did come around at all. The senior Lady Schiller was well known to detest her, it seemed chiefly because she had no money of her own, and was good at spending Rawson’s. That he could afford an expensive wife everybody understood; what nobody understood was that the gowns, the jewels, the furs, and the increasing cost of his lifestyle emanated from his, not her, impulses and wishes. It had to be left to time to teach Sir Rawson Schiller’s world that his wife was actually content with very little beyond a medical degree.

As far as Rawson himself was concerned, marriage to Edda got him all the things so long withheld due to his being a bachelor. In every way he had married the right woman, in that no one ever questioned why such a long-settled bachelor had fallen for this woman and no other. She was incredibly stylish as well as beautiful, obviously well-bred, had a fund of conversation of all kinds, was able to flatter those Rawson needed to flatter, could snub someone with wit and aplomb yet remain a lady—yes, Edda was ideal, and no one blamed him for marrying a fascinating and unusual woman. A medical student, for heaven’s sake!

But she made no friends among the women of his sphere, for no other reason than that her studies didn’t give her the time. On occasion she would meet someone to whom she was strongly drawn, but how could she spare two hours for morning coffee or three hours for lunch? Impossible. The books called like a siren song, and she was enchanted.