As my strength increased over the following days, Vane’s temper seemed to worsen. I stayed out of his way as far as circumstances allowed, taking short walks around the estate or reading in the shade of the trees at the end of the lawn while he, for his part, made no attempt to bridge the widening gulf between us. It was clear that he would have liked me to maintain a similar distance from his daughter for the remainder of my stay, but that proved impossible. Although I made a point of avoiding the barn, I was unable to prevent Eleanor from seeking out my company elsewhere.
‘You can’t send me away just because he doesn’t like seeing us together,’ she objected one morning, as I tried to reason with her. We were standing on the lawn in full view of the house, and I glanced up anxiously at the veranda as she spoke. ‘He’s not there,’ she said, registering the movement, ‘and even if he were, our friendship’s no concern of his.’
‘You’re his daughter and I’m his guest. We each have certain obligations to him.’
‘I’ve no such obligation.’
‘All daughters have a duty to their fathers.’
‘Only when their fathers have honoured their own obligations. I owe him nothing. And sometimes,’ she added after a thoughtful pause, ‘we have to think of our duty to ourselves.’
I considered the phrase. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘you don’t mean that we should all be allowed to do exactly as we want?’
‘Not quite. I mean that there are times in our lives when what we want is so important that we can’t allow ourselves to be knocked off course by other people’s wishes, especially when those people may not have our best interests at heart.’ And then, turning to look me full in the face: ‘I know what I want, Charles. What do you want?’
The directness of her challenge caught me entirely off guard. What I experienced then was a faint, sweet aftertaste of the exhilaration I had known in the barn as her hand moved smoothly over the swelling contours of her own creation, but I could find no way of translating the sensation into an appropriate answer to her question. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered lamely.
‘Maybe you should find out.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘That’s your homework,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask you again next week.’
‘I may not be here next week, Nell. As soon as I’m strong enough I shall travel to Sydney and book my passage home.’
I saw the smile fade from her face. ‘But you can’t go yet,’ she said. ‘You’ve hardly seen anything of the country.’
I wanted to tell her that I had seen more deeply into the country than I had either expected or wished, but I thought the claim might sound presumptuous. ‘I’ve learned a lot,’ I said simply.
‘There’s always more to learn.’ She turned and looked out across the valley before swing back to face me again. ‘There’s something in particular,’ she said. ‘Something you should see before you go. I’ll take you there this afternoon.’
‘Listen, Nell, your father—’
‘I’ll deal with my father. We’ll leave after lunch.’ She broke away with a little shake of her shoulders and marched up the slope towards the house.
Despite Vane’s absence from the table, or perhaps in part because of it, our conversation over lunch was horribly constrained. Eleanor was visibly unsettled, her features taut and her movements nervy and graceless, though the impression of imbalance was offset by something in her eyes and in the set of her jaw.
‘He’s taking lunch in his study,’ she said tersely, in response to my query. And then, as I debated whether to question her further: ‘John will have the ponies saddled up by the time we’ve finished.’
The remainder of the meal passed in near-silence, but as we rose from the table Eleanor’s spirits seemed to lift, and by the time we had ridden through the gates and out on to the track she appeared to have recovered not only her equilibrium but something of the girlish insouciance that had struck me so forcibly at the beginning of our acquaintance. I remember her urging her pony forward with little whispered endearments, her mouth at the creature’s ear, and then turning to me with a smile of such childlike simplicity and openness that I scarcely knew how to respond.
We had been travelling for perhaps half an hour when the slope above the track abruptly changed character – the trees stark and black, the ground beneath them strewn with charred branches. A faint bitterness rose from the ashy dust stirred by the ponies’ hoofs. I know this landscape, I thought, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my neck. ‘Where are we going, Nell?’
‘We’ve arrived.’ She reined her pony to a halt and slipped nimbly from the saddle. I dismounted more gingerly.
‘You wanted to show me this?’
‘I want you to see how the bush grows back.’ She led me off the track and across the soft scatter of charcoal to a small group of eucalyptus saplings. ‘Look at these.’
What I had registered initially was a scene of devastation, the ravaged landscape of my fevered nightmares. Now, looking more carefully, I saw that the damage was only part of the picture. From the base of each sapling sprouted a ring of fresh shoots, while the blackened trunks had erupted at irregular intervals with similar outgrowths, vigorous tufts of translucent green foliage flushing to red where the leaves were newest.
Eleanor reached out and brushed one of the tufts gently with the palm of her hand. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Hardly more than two months ago, the whole of this hillside was ablaze. From the house you could see the glow of it two nights running, and the sky grey with smoke by day. Now the land’s healing itself. It always does.’
I was struggling to control my emotions, staring at the luminous foliage, half blind with tears. ‘What I’m saying,’ she continued after a tactful pause, ‘is that you’ve done nothing to the land that the land itself can’t mend.’ Her head lifted suddenly and her eyes narrowed. I turned, following her gaze, to see what had distracted her.
Two figures were moving slowly towards us down the track, a man and a woman, both walking with a terrible languor under the weight of the tattered bundles they carried on their backs. Watching their approach, I sensed that the woman was gravely ill: her head hung low and her bare feet dragged in the dust. She was quite young, I realised as she drew close, but her features were stiff and hollow, the bones prominent beneath her dark skin. Her arms swung loosely a little forward from her sides, the wrists as thin as a child’s below the frayed cuffs of her blouse.
Her companion was almost as thin, but evidently not as frail. He held his head as high as his burden allowed, walking with grim concentration, his eyes fixed fiercely on the track ahead of him. As the two of them drew level with us I called out a greeting, but they pressed on without so much as a glance in our direction.
Our actions are not always entirely explicable, even in retrospect, but I can see clearly enough how one unsatisfactory encounter with the indigenous people of the region might have stirred memories of another. I cried out, I remember, then started forward and stumbled after the couple, tugging the bracelet from my breeches pocket as I went. I can’t imagine what they must have thought of me as I fell in alongside them, jabbering excitably, thrusting the thing towards them. Had they seen it before? Did they know the girl it belonged to? Could they get it back to her? Would they take it anyway? As I stopped to draw breath I saw the man shake his head from side to side, slowly but emphatically, his tangled locks sweeping the sides of his gaunt face. He might have been answering any or all of my questions but his eyes steadfastly avoided mine, and I interpreted the gesture more generally as a refusal to have anything at all to do with me. Disconcerted, I stepped back and rejoined Eleanor.
‘I had an idea they might know her,’ I said. ‘The girl who owned the bracelet.’
‘It’s not impossible. But look at them, Charles. They’ve cares enough of their own.’ She stared down the track, following the couple’s painful progress for a moment before turning back to me. ‘Let me see it,’ she said.
I held out the bracelet in the palm of my hand. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured, taking it up between her finger and thumb and examining it closely. ‘So delicately made.’
‘She didn’t want to part with it. We forced her.’
‘You told me. Bullen threatened her. Threatened them all.’
I was watching the movements of a thickset grey lizard as it hunted among the stones at the far side of the track. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but the fault was mine. If I hadn’t wanted it—’
‘You saw the beauty in it.’ She draped the bracelet across the back of her hand so that the spines fanned out as they had against the dark skin of the girl’s wrist. Something in that subtle collocation startled and moved me, bringing the words to my lips before I had time to consider them. ‘Will you have it?’ I asked.
The stillness was so profound that I could hear the tiny snap of the lizard’s jaws as it took its prey. ‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘No, I can’t.’ My expression must have betrayed me for she reached out and touched my forearm like a mother comforting a disappointed child. ‘I mean,’ she said gently, ‘that it doesn’t belong to you, and can’t belong to me.’ She held up the bracelet so that the yellow feathers trembled and glowed in the sunlight. ‘We’ll leave it here.’
‘Do you think she’ll find it?’
She shrugged. ‘What’s important,’ she said, ‘is that we don’t keep it.’ She bent one of the fresh eucalyptus shoots towards her and slipped the bracelet over the tip, easing it down until it hung close against the blackened bark of the trunk. ‘You’ll travel more lightly without it.’
‘I shall be going back almost empty-handed. My uncle’s letter asks how the collection is progressing. I’m steeling myself to report the truth – that the sum of my endeavours is a few dozen insignificant specimens, most of them taken within shouting distance of my host’s front door. I set out with grander designs.’
‘If you stayed on, you could organise another expedition.’
‘I’ve no stomach for it. The fact is, Nell, that I’m coming round to your position on the matter – the grasping, the killing. It seems to me that I’ve done enough damage.’
‘But I don’t want you to leave. Not just yet.’
The ponies were jostling one another, tetchy and restless, eager to be moving. ‘I must,’ I said. ‘I want to get back to England. I have plans for my estate.’
‘Then take me with you,’ she said, the colour rising to her cheeks.
I felt my own face grow hot and my heart quicken. ‘You know I can’t do that, Nell. You must see how such a course of action would compromise us, you as well as me.’
‘Not if we travelled as man and wife.’
Her phrasing was sufficiently ambiguous to leave open in my mind the possibility that she was suggesting some kind of subterfuge. She must have read the uncertainty in my eyes, because she stepped forward and took me by the wrist, looking intently into my face. ‘I mean,’ she said, with careful emphasis, ‘that we might be married.’
I stood speechless, listening to the wind whispering among the black branches overhead. She leaned close, so close that I felt the touch of her breath against my throat as she spoke. ‘Mightn’t we?’
Sheer madness, I thought, beginning to tremble the way I’d trembled out there on the cliff face that evening as I jigged and spun at the rope’s end above unfathomable space; but her gaze was so clear and sane and the pressure of her hand on my wrist so tenderly compelling that it was not, in the end, unduly difficult to give her the answer I hardly dared believe she wanted.