Beautiful Lies (21 page)

“She works hard,” Mei said. “And Emma, too.”

“I'd advise against having them in the house more often than necessary. Mum's not fond of the blacks. She went after one of the stockmen with a knife.”

He looked up at his own words, as if he had just realized how frightening they sounded. “Usually we keep knives away from her, of course, only that time we missed it. She found the knife out in the yards somewhere, I suppose. She takes to prowling at night sometimes. I try to watch out for her, but I have a lot to see to.” He paused. “And she's crafty. She'll pretend to be asleep….”

Mei nodded. “Has she always been like this?”

His face was shadowed. “Always? I don't know.”

She knew better than to ask too many questions, but understanding the Llewellyn family was vital if she was going to steal back the pearl. She decided to invent a story to make her point. “There is a man in Darwin, a Chinese man. Very smart. Everyone goes to see him to get answers to questions. Then one day, his wife steps into the street and, as he watches, she is killed by a team of horses. And after that, he is much like your mother. He talks to her as if she is right there, not a spirit person, but real, like me, like you.”

Bryce seemed fascinated. “Go on….”

“Well, it was seeing something so terrible that did this. Do you understand? I only wondered if perhaps the same was true for your mother.”

He was quiet for a moment, as if he were turning this over in his mind. Finally he said, “She had a different sort of life in Broome.”

“You've been to this place, Broome?”

“No. I don't know any place but this.”

His world had been so narrow. How could he tell her what had turned his mother mad? To whom could he compare Viola? Perhaps he didn't even understand how strangely she behaved.

She began his education. “This life is hard for a woman.”

“Jimiramira? I suppose it is.”

“And what does she have to comfort her?” She hesitated, and when he didn't answer, she went on. “No pretty things here. Maybe she closes her eyes to things she does not want to see?”

“We have drought one year, floods the next. You can't fence land this vast, so duffers and roaming blacks pick off
the cows that roam the boundaries. Malaria's a worry, bar-coo picks off a man now and then.” His lips twisted into a wry grin. “Those are the good times, I reckon. Those
are
the pretty things, but maybe Mum just doesn't see them.”

Mei had to respect his sense of humor. Obviously he had retained it at great cost. She tried once more. “Maybe there is something she loves, something she looks at or hears or smells or tastes, so that she says, ‘This is good. Life is not as bad as I thought'?”

His expression warmed. “It's right good of you to care so much already. Nobody has but me, you know, not in a long, long time.”

She wondered if he realized how much that said about his father. “I must go back and see if she still sleeps.”

“When it's cooler tonight, I'll take you for a stroll and show you all the things around the homestead you haven't seen.”

She wondered about that as the afternoon progressed and she wiped furniture and floor with dampened strips of hessian to remove the layers of dust. She had not gone far beyond the kitchen, just down to the billabong with Emma, who had hung the newly washed bed linen on a line and removed herself once more, this time with a load of Viola's dresses and underthings and Bryce's shirts. Mei wanted to explore every square inch of the homestead proper and some of the land beyond, as well.

She was sweating before she had finished the parlor and dining room, and drenched by the time she started on the bedrooms. Her own room was tiny, airless and off to one side of the house, as if the space had been planned for storage. She ignored it, beginning with the rooms used by the family instead. Since Viola was still sleeping, she opened the door to Bryce's bedroom. Unlike anything else in the
house, it was clean and in perfect order. There was nothing for her to do there, but she paused in this pristine oasis and inhaled. Bryce's smell, a mixture of worn leather, sweat and tobacco, pervaded the room. It was subtly masculine and oddly comforting.

She closed the door behind her and turned to find herself staring into the hard blue eyes of an older man. “I suppose you were the best Stuart Sayers could come up with? The man's a fucking idiot.”

She needed no introduction. For one insane moment she wondered what Bryce's father would say if she told him who she really was. “I am sorry, but I was the only one who would come,” she said evenly. “I will do my best to make you glad he sent me.” She lowered her eyes as if in respect.

“Christ, a Chink. Just what we need. As if the blacks aren't bad enough.”

She kept her eyes downcast and wondered how her father—at least, the saintly man portrayed by her mother—could ever have been friends with Archer Llewellyn.

“May's already worked miracles, Dad.”

Mei looked up to see Bryce coming down the hall. He wasn't smiling, and he walked stiffly, like a man approaching a bucking horse. “She's worked harder in one day than the last couple did in weeks.”

Archer ignored his son and questioned Mei. “What have you done? And I want it all, straight-up!”

She listed the chores she had completed.

“Where's your mother?” Archer snapped without turning his head to look at Bryce.

“Mrs. Llewellyn is sleeping,” Mei answered for him. “I kept watch over her today.”

Archer was silent. Mei felt no fear. Even if he sent her away, it would take time to make the arrangements. Finally
he turned to his son. “You stay clear of this girl, do you understand me? I saw one good man ruined by a girl just like her. I won't tolerate another.” He moved away, boot heels clacking sharply on the ant-bed floor.

Bryce's cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. His eyes sought Mei's forgiveness, but he had the presence of mind not to ask for it and humiliate them both.

She turned away, curiously exultant. She knew exactly who Archer had been talking about. She hadn't expected to remind Archer of her mother. She didn't really resemble Willow, whose beauty had been extraordinary, but Archer had seen Willow in her anyway. He did not suspect Mei's identity, but perhaps he knew, somewhere deep in whatever remained of his conscience, that she had come to Jimiramira to make his life intolerable.

She had done good work today. She had never been more certain that coming to Jimiramira was her destiny.

T
he stroll around the homestead did not materialize that evening, nor for the next week. Bryce was sent to carry mail and supplies to one of the mustering camps, and Archer stayed behind to keep an eye on both Mei and Viola.

Mei hoped this would be an opportunity to observe her father's murderer up close, but she saw little of him, since he seemed to detest his wife. She continued putting the house to rights, supervising Emma and her sister, Millie, who began, under Mei's tutelage, to put some of the out-buildings in order.

Mei and Millie discovered a chicken house with more roosters than hens and stoically wrung the necks of most of them to spare grain for a biddy, who was trying to hatch a much-needed flock. Surprisingly, Henry came up to the house every morning to ask for a list of chores for the day, and, with his help, the smokehouse was scrubbed clean.

Larry—a shortened version of “that old larrikin”—turned out to be an exacting cook and tolerant of Sally's assistance, so the meals improved as the week passed, par
ticularly with the sudden influx of stewing chickens and the supplies that had been brought in from Darwin.

Mei spent much of her time tending Viola. After some difficulty they established a routine that included a bath and fresh clothes each day, and Mei even convinced her that taking a walk in the mornings was good for her health. On the afternoon of the first bone-jarring thunderstorm of the Wet, Viola watched from the veranda, her eyes flashing as the lightning did, as if, finally, something had broken through her imaginary world.

“I hate the Wet most of all.”

Mei, who was startled at the surprising venom in Viola's voice, watched her. “Do the storms frighten you?”

“The thunder is God's voice.”

Mei hadn't suspected God was a part of the Llewellyns' world.

“He's angry, of course,” Viola continued. “As if I haven't paid dearly enough.”

“Why is he angry?”

“I was supposed to marry poor little Freddy Colson. And now he's shouting at me.”

“God is shouting?”

“No, you fool. My father.”

Mei tried to put that together in her mind. The thunder. The deity. The father. “Perhaps the thunder is nothing more than nature, missus, and it has nothing to do with you at all.”

Viola gave her a sharp glance. “Everything has to do with me.”

The rain continued through the night, until Mei worried that Bryce might not return. The billabong, which had been at low ebb, rose quickly. And although the Victoria River was many miles away, Henry told her it was rising, too, overflowing into dry tributaries and isolating cattle that
hadn't been moved to higher ground. The land was too parched to absorb water, so like a thirsty man whose tongue is too swollen to drink, the land rejected the rain, banishing it to basins and hollows, which overflowed in their turn to cut new channels through the land.

Archer found her the next morning before dawn, as she sat in the kitchen with Larry and Sally, having her breakfast. “You. Come out here.” He stepped out to the narrow veranda facing the house.

She obeyed, brushing crumbs from her dark skirt as she joined him. He wore an unfastened oilskin coat over a blue shirt and ragged moleskins. His haggard face wore a frown. Archer's eyes were slits in a leathery face, and his mouth twisted cynically even in repose.

He didn't waste time. “Can you be trusted to look after my wife?”

She didn't point out that she had been doing exactly that since his return. To her knowledge, Archer hadn't even slept in the house, preferring a bed in the men's quarters and meals in their dining room. “I can.”

“She's not right in her head.”

Mei wondered if he thought she was such a galah she hadn't taken note of this.

He didn't wait for an answer. “I'm not crazy about leaving you here, but I don't have any choice. There's too much going on for me to stay home. I'm riding out this morning.”

“I will see to things.”

He narrowed his eyes still further. “That's why you're paid, isn't it?” Satisfied he'd made a point, he went on. “Your English is good. Where did you learn it?”

“I was born in Darwin. I speak English all my life.”

“Are both your parents Chinese?”

She had wondered if Archer would ever look closely at
her and ask this question, and she gave him the explanation she had invented. “Yes, but one of my grandmothers was an English missionary.”

“Well, we won't have anything of that kind here. You want a husband, you can find a Chinese man in Darwin.”

She searched for something good in him, something that would make sense of his friendship with her father. “I know you worry about your missus, and this is why you speak sharply to me.”

He stared at her. “If you want the truth, girl, I'm worried about my missus burning down the house and starting a bushfire. I don't care one bit what happens to her. And I won't be responsible for what happens to
you
if you ever bat those pretty almond eyes at my son or any of my men. Or if you steal anything that belongs to me.”

She did not avert her pretty almond eyes. “Do you have instructions for the days you are gone?”

“I just gave them to you.” He wrapped his oilskin coat tightly around himself, pulled a battered leather hat lower over his forehead and stepped into the rain.

That morning she began her search for the pearl. She had already looked in the most obvious places. The pearl had never been mentioned by anyone, not even Viola, who revealed odd, disjointed bits of information in every conversation. Mei wasn't certain the Pearl of Great Price existed any longer. Even Archer hadn't mentioned it as a reason to keep his wife alive. But he
was
concerned about house fires. She wondered if at least part of his fear had to do with a valuable object secreted somewhere in the shabby rooms.

The search was not as easy as it might have been if the house were sound. As it was, there were a million potential hiding places between boards and ripple iron. There
were cracks in plaster and beams under attack from white ants. She began in Viola's bedroom while Viola ate a solitary meal, painstakingly investigating every crevice, every suspicious projection. Later in the afternoon, she continued as Viola sat on the veranda, watching another storm blow in. She stripped the bed to wash the linen and used the opportunity to thoroughly examine the kapok mattress and the rusting springs that held it in place. None of the tears in the cover yielded a pearl.

By the end of the afternoon, no surface in the room was unexplored. She joined Viola as the storm waned, contemplating ways to hint at the subject of the pearl, but Viola's mind was like a ball of yarn that had slowly unraveled. Perhaps the core was still intact, but tugging at it might only tangle it further.

“It was raining when we first saw this place,” Viola said out of nowhere. Her voice was a monotone, like a school-child doing her first recitation.

“Was it?”

“Torrents. The river had flooded its banks and crept nearly this far. If we had been a week later, we might have drowned. I should have liked that better.”

Mei was afraid to speak, afraid she might disrupt Viola's reminiscences.

Viola went on without coaxing. “There was no house, just a bark hut and a humpy made of tin for supplies. I had understood that things would be primitive at first, but I thought there would be a house, you see. And I hadn't understood about the insects or the blacks or how far we would be from civilization. By then, of course, I couldn't go back.”

“Couldn't you?”

“The land was all I had. I had even sold my jewelry to buy supplies.”

Mei stopped breathing. Viola had sold her jewelry. She had sold the pearl to buy blankets and tinned food and ammunition? She closed her eyes. She had come for nothing.

“Well, I did have something else,” Viola said slyly. “But, of course, I couldn't sell anything so fine.”

Mei didn't move. She waited, but Viola had finished.

Finally Mei took a breath. “Some things are so fine we must keep them close to our hearts.”

“What would you know about that?” Viola tossed her head. “You have
never
owned anything as fine as my pearl.”

Mei didn't show any emotion. “Of course I haven't, missus.”

“And close to my heart?” Viola began to rock back and forth with a terrible cackling laughter. “Now wouldn't that be the first place my husband searched for it?”

Mei was afraid Viola was sinking back into her imaginary world. The older woman's laughter rose in pitch, an eerie descant soaring high above the rain. “No, of course you are more clever than that,” Mei said desperately. “You would have chosen a better place.”

“I…have…chosen…many!” Viola rocked back and forth. “So very, very many!”

“How can you ever remember where you put it last?”

But Viola only rocked, trapped by her own laughter until she was sobbing uncontrollably. Mei, torn between quieting her mistress and shaking the truth out of her, finally took Viola's hands in hers and led her back inside. On the bed that Mei had explored so thoroughly, Viola cried herself to sleep.

 

After two more days of futile searching and no further revelations by Viola, Bryce and Archer rode into the home
stead together, along with a handful of muddy stockmen who looked as if they had camped for weeks in the middle of a stampede. Together, working with half a dozen cattle dogs, they drove their mob into the yard closest to the house, then headed to their quarters to wash and change for tea. Since no one had known to expect them, Mei left a sleeping Viola at the house and went down to the kitchen to lend a hand to Larry and Sally, who were about to reenact the biblical story of the loaves and fishes.

Bryce found her there. She was slicing fresh bread Larry had prepared that morning into wafer-thin slivers as Larry cursed colorfully in the background.

Bryce strolled in, spurs clanking, and removed his hat, a touchingly gentlemanly gesture under the circumstances. “How've you been, May?”

Mei gazed up at him, and her heart expanded in her chest. Bryce's hair was wet, his cheeks shaven and scrubbed clean. The glow of good health and high spirits seemed to light him from the inside. His smile was white and warm, and she found herself smiling back. “I am fine. And you?”

“Nothing to whine over, although if I'd a mind to, I could say a thing or two about the weather.”

She wasn't really listening to his words, she was absorbing everything about him. The rumbling melody of his voice, the way his hair darkened to brown when it was wet, the glisten of water droplets on his eyelashes. He was wearing a clean plaid shirt, threadbare at the cuffs and collar, but stretched across his chest. She liked the way his tattered moleskins clung to his thighs and calves and tapered at his ankles, and the way he rested on the balls of his feet, as if he were set to fling himself at life.

She liked everything about him, this man who was the son of her father's murderer.

Immediately she averted her eyes. “We did not expect you. We have less food than we should.”

“We couldn't spare a man to ride ahead. I'm sorry, May.”

She continued slicing the bread without looking up again, but she knew Bryce remained there watching her.

“How was my mother?”

“We have good walks each morning, and she eats well.” She wished she had more happy news to tell him. Viola was a sad, infuriating creature, but this young man loved her.

“She's still sleeping. I checked on her before I came down here,” he said.

“Emma is ironing, and she promised to tell me if your mother awoke.”

“You shouldn't have been left with the full burden.”

She realized he was criticizing Archer. She wondered what Bryce really thought of his father. “We have rubbed along together, your mother and I, although the rain makes her sadder.”

“You're like a gift that dropped out of the sky, May. I can't remember what we did when you weren't here to manage things.” He turned and left, and she was sorry to see him go, although she wondered what he would think if he knew her real purpose for coming.

She finished helping Larry and Sally put together a meal, then she took a portion back up to the house. Bryce had already awakened his mother, and even Archer, who usually ate with the men, was waiting in the dining room.

She served them all silently, careful not to meet Bryce's eyes in his father's presence, then she took the pots back to the kitchen to be washed. By the time she returned, Viola was on the veranda with her son, and Archer had disappeared.

“I could stay with her,” Mei offered. Viola was staring blankly at clouds forming overhead. The air around them
seethed with the oncoming storm, and Mei could feel sweat beading on her brow and running along her spine.

“We never took that walk together, you and I,” Bryce said.

She was sure Archer had given his son the same speech that he had given her, so there was no sense in reminding Bryce that his father disapproved of them spending time together. “I have seen every bit by now. I hardly need a tour.”

“I bet there are things you haven't seen.”

Viola closed her eyes and began to hum tunelessly.

“Tell me about Darwin,” Bryce said. “Make me see it.”

She heard a hunger for new sights and places in his voice. She wondered if Bryce stayed at Jimiramira because of Viola, or because the place was in his blood. She told him what she remembered, and because she had seen it through the eyes of a stranger, she could easily describe the most colorful sights.

“What about your family, May?”

She gave a carefully rehearsed reply. “My father died in the war, and my mother died when I was young. The old people in my family all went back to China, but I wanted to stay here.”