Bec was sitting in her favourite spot: the chair on the deck of Derwent House, protected by a collapsible awning from the worst of the fierce summer sun yet with views over the vastness of the land lying to the north.
After so many years it still seemed miraculous that for all her adult life she, the blacksmith’s daughter, had been a member of the family that owned the fifty thousand acres that made Derwent the largest property in Tasmania’s high country: twenty thousand from the original grant, ten thousand more from Barnsley and finally twenty thousand acres of what had once been Penrose land.
Bec had read an article in a farming magazine that had held up the Derwent operation as a shining example of an iconic property that unlike many, and thanks of course to Tamara, had not been afraid to embrace new techniques.
And now there was the obvious danger that, despite her marriage, Tamara’s rightful place might still be usurped by an outsider.
In the noonday shadows she saw them: Emma and Bessie who had made Derwent what it was, Grandma Jane who more than any other being had united her with what had proved to be her destiny. They were the forerunners and she was determined she would be worthy of them and of Tamara, who was the future.
I hold past and future in my hands, Bec thought, and I will not fail.
It was easy to say but not so easily done because Raine Armitage had a tight grip on Giles’s affections and it would need clear and incontrovertible evidence to dislodge her. Evidence that for the moment was lacking.
Mr Gardiner of Elphinstone and Partners had been back to her the day before and given her the little information he had been able to obtain from his firm’s Zurich correspondents. It wasn’t much: certainly not what Bec had been hoping.
Basically the Lardner family and its legal advisers had refused to give any information at all about what they called their private affairs.
In their place Bec would have done the same yet she remained convinced that it was in Raine Armitage’s past that the solution to the problem would be found. She was determined on one thing: in no circumstances would she tolerate the prospect of Raine’s son Jaeger getting his hands on Derwent.
For the first time she understood how Bessie Penrose must have felt sixty-nine years before when the blacksmith’s daughter had appeared on the horizon of her life.
‘I am planning something radical,’ she had told Tamara after Mr Gardiner had left. ‘I am going to Zurich.’
Tamara had looked at her.
‘I know what you’re thinking. You think it’s madness at my age and so it is but I see no alternative. This is something I have to do.’
Now the arrangements had been made, the tickets and hotel booked, her passport updated. At six o’clock the next morning she would be aboard the early flight from Launceston to Melbourne where she would connect with the Swissair flight to Zurich.
What happened after that would be in the lap of the gods. All she knew was that if determination was the criterion she would win.
Bessie must have felt as I do, she thought. Certainly she did everything she could to stop me.
What a battle that had been.