White Feathers (39 page)

‘Are you all right, about the baby?’ she asked the following day. ‘I was a little worried that the news might upset you.’

Keely, who was stretched out on a chaise on the terrace making the most of the spring sunshine, smiled. ‘I’m absolutely thrilled, for both of you.’ She opened one eye and squinted at Erin. ‘Of course, this means you won’t be able to go back to nursing now.’

Erin nodded regretfully. ‘I know, but perhaps later on.’

Keely laughed and sat up. ‘You really are disappointed, aren’t you? You can’t have everything you want in life, you know!’

‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ Erin replied. ‘But, really, you’re not upset about it?’

‘No, not at all. In fact I’m delighted, because it means the two of them will be able to grow up together, like you and I did.’

Erin frowned. ‘What do you mean, the two of them?’

‘Well, there will be. Two, I mean.’

‘But I’m not having twins.’ Erin’s hand crept to the barely noticeable swell of her stomach. ‘At least, I don’t think I am.’

Keely took a deep breath, let it out and said evenly, ‘No, you’re having one baby and
I’m
having one baby. And that makes two.’

Erin stared at her, unable to believe her ears. ‘Are you saying you’re
pregnant
!?’

Keely nodded, quite cheerfully Erin thought, given the circumstances.

‘But, you … I mean, you can’t be! Who …’

‘The ever-popular and thoroughly decent Owen Morgan.’

Erin’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my God! But, when?’

‘The night of your wedding. We got caught in the hay barn when the storm came, remember?’

‘And you …’

‘Yes. We were both drunk. Just think, all those times with Ross and nothing happened, and now, after just the once with Owen and I’ve fallen.’ She said this with a mildly puzzled note in her voice.

‘Oh Keely. Are you sure?’

‘I’m as sure as you are.’

Then Keely started to cry, great, silent sobs that were wrenched out of her. Her hands slid over the back of her head and she hunched over until she had curled almost into a ball.

Erin moved closer and placed her hand on Keely’s back, patting and smoothing gently but firmly. She began to make the small, reassuring noises she had used to soothe the terribly broken young men in the hospitals over seas.

She let Keely weep for almost ten minutes, until her slowly subsiding sobs indicated she had done enough crying, for now anyway.

‘Have you told him?’

A negative shake of the auburn head.

‘Have you told Aunty Tam?’

Another short, sharp shake.

Erin said, ‘Keely, listen to me.’

She gently pulled Keely’s hands away from her face and lifted her head. Her cousin’s eyes were red, her lips were swollen and dry and there was a long, thin thread of snot on her cheek. Erin used the hem of her dress to wipe Keely’s face, and carefully pushed the damp hair back from her temples.

‘Keely, listen,’ she said again. ‘You have to tell your mother.’

‘She’ll kill me.’

‘No, she won’t. She loves you. And, with all due respect, it’s not as if this sort of thing is completely foreign to her, is it? She knows these things happen.’

‘Well, then, Da will kill me.’

Erin nodded — there was no denying this. ‘Yes, he probably
will, so you have to tell Aunty Tam first. And then Owen.’

Keely’s head jerked up in alarm. ‘
No
! Not him. Why? He’s barely even spoken to me since the night of the wedding!’

Erin realised that relations between the pair of them had in fact deteriorated even further over the last few months. ‘Well, have
you
talked to
him
since then?’

‘No. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. I got drunk and I let him make love to me. In fact, I
encouraged
it. It was my fault. And I just assumed he wouldn’t have much to say to me after that.’

‘Would it have hurt you to at least
try
talking to him?’

Keely’s eyes filled again as she confessed, ‘Yes, Erin, it might have hurt me very much.’

And it suddenly occurred to Erin that Keely was right — she had had enough disappointment in her life already, and it was understandable that she should try to protect herself from even more.

She took Keely’s hands in her own. ‘Do you want me to come with you when you tell your mother? You have to, you know. You won’t be able to hide it soon.’

‘Yes, I know that.’ Keely looked back at her cousin. ‘Thanks, but I’ll tell her. You’re right, she does love me. I know that too.’

Andrew and Tamar sat in the parlour in brittle silence. They had barely spoken since Keely had broken the news to her mother that morning and she, in turn, had reluctantly informed Andrew. Keely herself was hunched in the corner of the couch opposite, her arms folded over her stomach and her face set in an unreadable expression.

They were waiting for Owen. Outside in the still garden the sun was warm and the hum of bees flitting busily from one flower to the next drifted in through the open doors. Joseph, who had been
sent to fetch Owen and was looking as mystified as he no doubt felt, said from the doorway, ‘He’s just taking his boots off. Er, is there anything I can help with?’

Tamar waved her hand. ‘No, thanks, darling. It’s just something we need to talk about, the four of us.’

Joseph looked at her carefully for a moment, then said, ‘Oh, right,’ and disappeared as quickly as he could.

Owen appeared then, in his socks and shirtsleeves, arms and face tanned already. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’ he asked cheerfully.

Andrew said tersely. ‘Yes, we do, Owen. Sit down.’

Owen perched on the opposite end of the couch to Keely, his hands on his knees, and waited expectantly.

There was an increasingly uncomfortable pause, then Andrew said without preamble, ‘Keely has informed us that she is expecting a baby. And that you’re the father.’

Tamar had heard the expression ‘his face drained of blood’, but had never actually witnessed it — until now. Owen had gone a deathly shade of white, and she wondered if he might be about to faint. He sat for a moment in stricken silence, then whipped around to face Keely.

‘My God, why didn’t you tell me!?’ he blurted.

Tamar closed her eyes in relief. At least he wasn’t going to try and deny it.

‘So it’s true?’ Andrew demanded.

Without taking his eyes off Keely, Owen replied, ‘If Keely says so, it must be.’

‘Don’t speak to me like that, young man,’ Andrew snapped, his own face white now, but with anger, not shock. ‘We invited you to stay at Kenmore out of the kindness of our hearts. We wanted to do something for you because of the support you gave Ian in France. How
dare
you repay us like this!?’

Keely spoke at last, but her voice was dull and without emotion.
‘It was me, Da. You can’t blame him.’

‘What?’

‘I said it was me. I pushed him into it.’

Owen opened his mouth to say something but Andrew got in first, appalled and profoundly embarrassed by this shameless admission from his daughter.

‘I don’t care
whose
fault it was, Keely, it’s a bloody
shambles
!’ he barked, his voice rising several notches in angry frustration. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing, the pair of you, eh? What the
hell
did you think you were doing?’

Sick with worry, and at the end of her own tether from listening to Andrew rant and rave in the privacy of their bedroom for the last two hours, Tamar snapped, ‘Oh Andrew, what do you
think
they thought they were doing?’

She despaired; what on earth was wrong with her children? First James, then Ian, and now Keely! And because Keely was a woman, her indiscretion would be considered much more shameful than those committed by her brothers: people expected young men to venture far and wide and with occasional careless abandon. Only Joseph had managed to father his and Erin’s child within the boundaries of wedlock. And that, Tamar strongly suspected, was only because they had been on opposite sides of the world for the duration of much of their relationship. She wondered briefly, but guiltily, whether it was her fault, whether somehow such irresponsible behaviour could be passed on through the blood, then dismissed the thought as absurd.

And perhaps, after years and years of being pushed away, repressed and ignored, a similar idea reared up in Andrew’s mind, because, for the first time in the whole of their married life together, he turned on his beloved wife.

‘Shut up, Tamar, for God’s sake! You might think this is normal behaviour, but it bloody well isn’t!’

Tamar recoiled as if he had slapped her across the face.

Andrew slumped, horrified at the cruelty of his own words and regretting them instantly. ‘Oh God, Tamar, I am
so
sorry. Please, I don’t know what I’m saying.’

He was distraught. Since being informed of Keely’s condition earlier that morning, he had been relentlessly assailed by ghastly visions of his precious only daughter living the rest of her life a lonely, unwed mother, spurned by any men who once might even remotely have been considered suitors, all because of one stupid, thoughtless mistake.

He reached blindly for Tamar’s hand. ‘Please forgive me, my darling, I’m so sorry.’

And Tamar did understand his pain and his need to lash out, because she felt it too, possibly even more, although she had learnt years ago that the pain of one individual was not something that could be measured and compared with that of another. She felt for Keely and, as she took Andrew’s cold hand in her own, she felt for her dear husband, sitting beside her with his grey-streaked head bowed, crumpled and defeated.

In the intimate tableau they presented, Owen saw something that touched him deeply, and it helped him to come to a decision. He stood up, uncomfortably aware of his rough, hand-knitted socks and informally bare forearms, and cleared his throat nervously.

‘With your permission, Mr and Mrs Murdoch, I would like to ask Keely to become my wife.’

Andrew’s head came up then, and Owen averted his gaze to avoid seeing what he suspected might be sudden tears of relief in the old man’s eyes. He looked instead at Tamar, who was smiling at him gently. When she raised her eyebrows a fraction in Keely’s direction, Owen took his cue and turned.

‘Keely, I would be honoured if you would consent to marry me, as soon as possible, providing of course that your mother and
father give their blessing. I won’t allow a child of mine to grow up without a father.’

No one said anything for several moments, although all eyes were on Keely.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘Yes, I’ll marry you, Owen.’ Then, as an afterthought, she added, ‘Thank you.’

So the Reverend McKenzie journeyed out to Kenmore once again, although this latest wedding was a very quiet affair with only the most immediate family present. He had been briefed by Tamar regarding the circumstances, although quite rightly not in any great detail, and couldn’t help feeling empathy for both the daughter and her parents, after everything else the family had been through. Naturally he didn’t at all approve of intimate physical activity outside the bonds of marriage, but God knew people did it all the time these days, especially since the war, and who was he to judge? Unlike the clergymen of some faiths he could mention, he had never considered unsolicited criticism of his parishioners to be part of his vocation.

And this union seemed to be a sensible one, if nothing else. The groom was a personable young man, a war veteran whom McKenzie had met at the wedding last July and had rather warmed to. By all accounts a man of maturity and responsibility (apart from the presumably single rash act that had prompted this wedding, of course), he seemed a good catch for a girl who had allowed herself to fall so irreversibly from grace. And Keely Murdoch was a very attractive young woman, and quite bright, too, although he gathered she had been rather a trial to her parents since returning from over seas. Oh, well, perhaps motherhood and a husband would settle her down.

Tamar and Andrew fervently hoped so. They had both been
somewhat surprised, not to mention extremely relieved, when Keely had agreed so calmly to Owen’s proposal. The fact that he had made it without any prompting had gone a long way towards restoring Andrew’s opinion of him, although Tamar had never wavered from her belief that he was an honourable man. She hoped, however, that he hadn’t offered purely out of a sense of obligation. This possibility had preyed on her mind to the extent that two days after the confrontation in the parlour, and a week and a half before the wedding, she set out on horseback late one morning to talk to him about it.

She found him in one of the lower paddocks, using a pair of pliers to mend a fence through which a number of enterprising sheep had recently escaped. There were no fences up in the hill pastures, except for those defining Kenmore’s boundaries, but down here on the flat the land was divided into large paddocks intended to confine stock when they were brought down for shearing and lambing.

As she rode up, Owen straightened, shoved his pliers into his back pocket and smiled up at her.

‘Good morning, Mrs Murdoch,’ he said, politely touching the brim of his battered old work hat.

Tamar dismounted and pulled her smart kid riding gloves off finger by finger; they looked quite out of place next to the tatty old trousers and shirt she was wearing — her habitual riding outfit around the station — but she was a little vain about her hands, and the gloves protected them from the unyielding leather of the reins. She settled herself comfortably on a nearby rock, appreciating its warmth on her backside.

‘Now, there’s something I need to talk to you about, if you don’t mind.’

Owen raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

Tamar patted the boulder in a wordless invitation to him to
also sit, and looked up at him from under the brim of her hat, a rather smart stockman’s affair imported from Australia by Andrew several summers ago after her nose had received a particularly bad sunburn. She smiled to put Owen at ease as he perched warily on the other end of the rock.