A kookaburra was calling from the trees that lined the dusty road as Bec Hampton walked through the early morning sunshine to the show.
She was dolled up in her smartest clothes: white blouse, the one with the bit of lace at the neck, full-length navy skirt and black boots smeared with dust, broad-brimmed summer hat of yellow straw with the blue ribbon. Bec Hampton, sixteen years old and full of the joys and juices of youth, was heading to the annual Campbell Town show to make the most of whatever excitement she might find when she got there. She would have liked to wear the little jacket she’d had from Mrs Painter of Waldren’s Corner, for whom she’d done some chores, but the summer day was going to be too hot for a jacket.
She regretted that, but only for a moment; Bec Hampton was not given to regretting much in her life. What was the use? Dad and Mum were as they were, which was fair to middling at best and often a lot worse, especially Dad when he’d had a skinful, and there was no one else who mattered in her life. Cyril Stubbs would have taken an interest if she’d given him the wink but she wouldn’t have touched Cyril with a ten-foot pole; his dad might own a small farm but everyone knew Cyril was a brick short of a load.
Bec was not alone; Frances Tickell had agreed to come with her but Frances had no more bounce than a rubber ball with a hole in it so Frances didn’t really count except as a companion to join in whatever fun might be waiting for them.
It was Saturday 15 February and by ten o’clock it was already as hot as fire, as the Tasmanian midlands usually were at that time of year.
‘It’ll be fair sizzling later,’ said Frances. ‘You mark my words.’
‘It’s doing a good job already,’ said Bec, feeling a trickle of sweat worming its way down her front. It tickled but it would be impolite to scratch, especially there, so she let it be.
‘It’s gunna be a hot one,’ Frances said.
Frances was the sort who’d be married long before she’d met her husband. Because she would be married – you knew that as soon as you looked at her – knew too that the identity of the victim wouldn’t matter.
Whereas Bec… Bec was different.
The way things worked out, that was lucky.
Campbell Town’s agricultural show was an annual event, the biggest of its kind in the midlands – some said in the whole of Tasmania – and there were people everywhere. Not only people: there were mobs of sheep and cattle, produce stalls, flags and bunting, sideshows, places to eat, places to drink, a steady surge of farming folk on the hunt for bargains.
Bec and Frances picked their way across the dusty ground past the judging tents where competition was fierce for the best wether in show, the best ram, the best poddy calf, the best colt, the best bull. There was a hurdy-gurdy, steam engine pumping. There was a fat lady stall and a boxing booth. A shearing competition with five quid for the winner drew a crowd, as did the axeman competition, wood chips flying in a frenzy of blows from blokes wider than any barn door.
The dust was awesome as was the noise: the squawk and cackle of poultry almost lost behind the bellowing of livestock, the rhythmic patter of auctioneers from the auction ring.
‘Ten bob I’m bid. Ten bob, eleven, fourteen. And sixpence. Fourteen bob and a tanner I’m bid. Any more? All done?’ A crack, sharp as a gunshot, as the hammer came down. ‘Sold!’
The girls poked their noses into this stall and that; they inspected the homemade cakes, the woolly jumpers for kiddies; the Empire mugs at the china and glass stall. They each wasted a halfpenny at the hoopla, drank a lemonade at the refreshments tent, watched sweaty men arguing prices over sudsy beers. They walked on. Along the edges of the track the grass was already wilting under the hot sun.
‘So many people,’ Frances said.
‘There always are.’
‘Even some from Hobart, I wouldn’t wonder.’
Hobart was another universe to Frances Tickell.
‘There always are.’
Two hours after they arrived the frenzied barking of dogs alerted Bec to trouble. First it was one dog, followed a moment later by a second. Then came a sudden cacophony of barks, a frenzied racket in the sunlight. Frances would have walked on but Bec had an instinct for dogs and cocked an ear. ‘Something’s up.’
‘They’re only dogs,’ said Frances.
‘It’s more than that. Something’s wrong.’
They walked around the corner of a big marquee and there it was.
It was a paddock where the livestock were readied for showing or for the auction ring. In the middle of the paddock was a small boy, maybe five or six years old. He was alone and a few paces from him was a bull that had somehow escaped its handlers and now stood staring at the child, head down, front hooves raking the dusty ground. No sign of the boy’s parents or the bull’s minders; only the dogs performing but not game to get too close.
‘Ohmygod.’
While clouds of dust billowed behind the raking hooves.
Bec looked around but there was no sign of anybody.
‘Maybe we should go for help,’ Frances whispered.
‘By the time anyone comes that bull will have had him,’ Bec said.
‘If we shout at it?’
Frances didn’t know bulls from armchairs.
‘That’ll just annoy it. There’s only one way to deal with this.’
The child was less than twenty feet from the bull, well inside the animal’s comfort zone. If she could get him to back away…
The boy was looking about him, sensing his danger, on the edge of running.
She had to stop him doing that.
Bec walked out slowly into the paddock. The bull’s head was lowered, its shoulders hunched. As she watched it curved its neck towards the boy.
One false move and it would charge. If the boy ran…
The bull would come after him.
The child was thirty yards away now. Bec’s every instinct was to run to him but that would be dangerous. It might even be fatal.
Somehow she had to ignore her screaming nerves. Slow and steady was the only way.
Twenty yards.
Now she could see the child trembling, on the edge of panic. On the edge of flight.
She began to talk to him, speaking in a quiet voice, hoping to calm him. ‘It’ll be all right. Don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t move.’
Ten yards.
The bull’s head was still down, its right front hoof raking the ground.
Bec stopped.
‘Now back towards me. Slowly. You’ll be quite safe. That’s the way. That’s right. That’s lovely.’ She sharpened her voice. ‘Don’t turn round. Keep your eyes on him.’
Bec too was watching the bull. She was conscious that other people had arrived and were now watching from the edge of the paddock. A woman screamed but none of that mattered; for the moment there was nothing anyone else could do. Out there she and the boy were alone. Alone with the bull.
She was calm now, her veins like ice.
‘Come on now,’ she said to the slowly moving boy. ‘That’s right. Everything’s jake. Come on now.’
She had one eye on the boy, the other on the bull. Which still – thank God! – had not moved. She reached out her hands and at last took the boy by his frail-seeming shoulders. This precious child.
How he was trembling!
He wasn’t the only one.
She spoke soothingly. ‘We’re all right now. We’re fine.’
They were edging backwards, moving steadily away from danger. Ten yards from the bull; twenty yards. Now – surely? – they were outside the animal’s comfort zone. Now – surely? – they were safe.
They backed into the waiting crowd. The boy’s mother snatched him up, weeping. Arms held Bec too. She was unsure whether her legs would go on supporting her or whether she was about to collapse in a heap on the dusty ground. The mother, sobbing, was saying something to her but the words did not register. She did not know what to do with her hands, her body. Tears pricked her eyes as she surrendered herself to the arms that held her.
Frances was fussing, her face wet with the tears of remembered terror, but Bec was too weary to pay her any attention now.
In the middle of the paddock the bull was grazing, innocence personified, while those from whom it had escaped approached it cautiously.
That blessed creature might have killed me, Bec thought with mounting outrage. Killed me and the boy. How could they have been so careless? But her weakness was such that she could not sustain even outrage for long.
‘You orright, miss?’
She had no idea who the man was.
‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ she said.
A la-di-da man’s voice said, ‘I’ll look after her now.’
Looking at the newcomer, Bec saw and for a moment was unsure. Then memory brought back the past.
‘Jonathan?’ Her voice sounded as weak as she felt, yet inside her suddenly leaping heart she was not weak at all. Inside she was all smiles. ‘When did you get back?’
Jonathan had missed out on the ram, the final bid far above what the agent had thought the beast was worth. He had considered heading home again but then decided that as he was there he might as well look around the show.
He had been strolling about for ten minutes when he came across the drama of the bull, the child and the brave girl who had brought the little boy to safety. It was only after she was back in the crowd that he realised who the girl was.
Bec Hampton. It was three years since he had seen her. She had grown up a lot in that time; grown up and developed too. She had been an attractive child. Now she was no longer a child, there was no doubt about that. No longer merely attractive, either; now she was beautiful.
Oh God she was beautiful. And brave. He had seen her do something not one person in a thousand could have done. He was not sure he would have had the guts to do it himself.
So many things people did not know. About themselves. About others.
He knew this much. He saw she was trembling. Shock, no doubt, knowing how close to death she had come. How she had faced it down.
Faced it down and won.
Jonathan was trembling too. Trembling at feeling something in him that he had never expected.
This beautiful woman.
It was ridiculous to feel such a thing. She was not for him, not in a thousand years. They lived on different planets, Derwent House and… He didn’t even know where she lived nowadays. He knew only that her father had looked after the Derwent horses before he’d decided to move on.
Grandma Bessie said it proved he could not be relied upon but Jonathan knew he had saved his father’s life in the Boer War. He never knew the details; only knew that much because his father had told him.
He remembered Rebecca’s father was called Conan. Conan Hampton. An Irish name and an Irish temper to go with it, or so Grandma had said.
At his father’s funeral he’d asked Conan about the Boer War business.
‘What business would that be?’
‘Father told me you saved his life.’
‘Did he now? I wouldn’t have put it like that meself but who am I to argue with the likes of your dad?’
‘He said you helped him escape after the Boers shot him.’
‘I’ve only the haziest memory of them days. So I couldn’t say what happened, one way or the other.’
And went off whistling.
Grandma had seen him talking to Conan and ticked him off for it. ‘It doesn’t do to get too familiar with the staff. They only take advantage.’
‘He saved Father’s life.’
‘Is that what he told you? Bragging, no doubt.’
‘It was Father said it, not Conan. He told me nothing.’
Her smile might have been dipped in acid. ‘No doubt because there was nothing to tell.’
‘Why are you so unfair?’
Her laugh brushed his question away. ‘He works for the estate. Provided he does his job I have no feelings about him, one way or the other.’
She was lying; Jonathan sensed it but had only found out the reason years later. Derwent was like a monastery in some ways, a closed community where the inhabitants knew everything about each other’s business but little of what went on in the outside world.
Ethel, one of the housemaids, told him about it.
‘Put Mary Smith in the family way ’e did. Probably the only reason ’e married ’er.’
At that age Jonathan hadn’t been sure exactly what Ethel was talking about, only that she had made it sound somehow shameful and therefore exciting, but it was another reason to think of Bec Hampton as special.
There were other reasons. The six years between them had ruled out playing together but he had seen her about the place all her life. Also Bec had been the only other child on the property, which made them allies even though they didn’t speak much.
‘Don’t let ’er know I told you, mind,’ Ethel said.
The day at the Campbell Town show brought all those thoughts and memories together. He was looking at a woman, no longer a child, whose actions had proved how special she was. The heroine daughter of a hero father.
One more thing. She was a woman who lived in a world as different from his as it was possible to be yet who between one moment and the next had driven a needle into his heart.
She had a friend with her. He remembered nothing about her. She was with them but it was as though she didn’t exist.
They found a café. Jonathan forgot what they ate. Later he found he had forgotten almost everything about that meeting, the first between them as adults, yet one thing he did remember. Sitting at the little table and eating whatever it was they had chosen, it felt not like a first meeting or first anything but a continuation of everything he had ever known, as though the simple fact of their meeting had made her a party to even those episodes about which she could know nothing: his education in England for instance. By being with him now she had become part of everything he had known and done.
How that could be he didn’t know. What it implied for the present he didn’t know either; even less what it might imply for the future.
He had no thoughts at all yet was more aware than he had ever been in his life.
He was; she was. That was all. It was enough.
She told him she lived with her parents at her father’s forge near Waldren’s Corner, where she occasionally helped out Mrs Painter, the constable’s wife. Jonathan asked after her parents; she said they were well. She asked after his mother and grandmother; he said they were well.
He asked if she was married; she laughed and said of course not. She asked him the same; he told her no.
They walked around the show for a while then went their separate ways. He took it for granted they would be seeing each other again, and soon. Anything else was unthinkable.