Mango Hill

by Patricia Shaw

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

A hunger for land and a hatred for each other... Patricia Shaw transports readers to the land of danger, passion and promise in her stunning saga Mango Hill, the sequel to Valley of Lagoons. The perfect read for fans of Tricia McGill and Fleur McDonald. A ruthless aristocrat and an Irish squatter, Lord Jasin Heselwood and Pace MacNamara, arrived in Australia with a hunger for land and a hatred of each other. Pace's pioneering spirit lives on through his three sons, John Pace, Paul and Duke, who find themselves at odds over their late mother Dolour's extraordinary will. Youngest son Duke is determined his brothers will not stand in the way of his ambitions, and purchases the splendid Mango Hill cattle station. Eager for land and rejected by the woman he loves, he joins a team heading west with a thousand head of cattle and encounters Edward, son of scheming Lord Heselwood. But bloodshed is on the horizon, as the group moves relentlessly towards a gathering storm of war with the warrior tribes of the great Kalkadoon nation... What readers are saying about Mango Hill : 'A good read that represents the young Australia ' ' Another great book from Patricia Shaw' ' Fascinating '

Release date: October 27, 2011

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 448

Sample

She was about nineteen years old, a lean, muscular woman with wiry black hair drawn back from a strong, angular face, and she had a baby in a sling across her back. She wore a ragged shirt, dusty dungarees and a fringed shawl, but no boots, the usual mismatch foisted on Aborigine women thrust into the white world.

Despite her odd appearance, she carried herself well, striding steadily towards the three horsemen with a confidence that startled them, though her voice was gentle.

She addressed Paul. ‘You maybe boss man here, eh?’

He stared down at her, astonished at the serenity in her dark eyes, feeling as if he’d suddenly come upon a benign force.

‘What do you want?’ he stammered.

‘Come find uncle in that place!’ She pointed in the direction of the blacks’ camp, located near the western boundary of Mango Hill Station. ‘Him old fella, allasame call Guringja.’

‘Hey! Look out, boss!’ called Sam, reaching down for his rifle. ‘Look over there!’

‘Jesus wept!’ blurted Noah, the other stockman.

Not more than thirty yards away from them, a huge Aborigine warrior in full ceremonial dress was standing on an elevated rocky ledge. His hair was piled high and decorated with plumes of cockatoo feathers. His coal-black face, with a bone through the nose, was striped with white paint, and tufts of black hair jutted from his jaw. His powerful body was daubed with paint as if outlining the bone structure, and he wore ankle bands of white feathers.

‘Steady,’ murmured Paul, looking warily at the tall spear the black man had jammed firmly in front of him as if he were throwing down a challenge. He turned to the woman. ‘Who’s he?’

‘That my husbin,’ she said proudly, her eyes glistening. ‘He brung me here. For safe.’

Paul frowned. None of the blacks on this property were hostile, and they certainly did not march about got up like this fellow. Their war days were long gone.

‘You go,’ he said to her. ‘I don’t want either of you here. You don’t belong with our mob. Go back to your own mob, and take him with you.’ He jerked his head at the husband.

The woman drew an arc in the dust with her toe, and studied it for a few minutes as if deciding what to do.

Sam patted his rifle. ‘Do you want me to show the big feller the gate, boss?’

The woman looked at Paul. ‘My husbin he go way now. He bring me long walk.’

‘Good. You go with him. You can’t stay here.’

She seemed not to have heard him. She hitched the baby higher and began to walk up the track towards the homestead.

Paul gazed uncertainly at the husband, who was watching them, and then back at the woman.

‘Whoa!’ he called. ‘Come on back here. I told you. You don’t belong here. What mob are you?’

‘Kalkadoon!’ she said, head high.

‘Never heard of them.’

‘Yes you have,’ Noah reminded him. ‘They’re the mob Duke talked about. They hail from the back country. Plenty trouble too. Do you reckon they’re coming this way now?’

‘What? An army of two? Turn it up!’ Paul called after the woman: ‘You come back now. You and your husband, out! Do you hear me?’

She turned and looked up at him, tears welling onto her grimy cheeks. ‘He gone, boss.’

Her grief confused Paul. His horse reared suddenly, spooking the other mounts and causing them to back away, bumping into one another. As he dragged at the reins to keep his horse in check, he saw old Guringja wobbling down the track with the aid of a stout stick and his two wives.

‘The big bloke’s disappeared,’ Sam said, pulling his mount into line. ‘I’d better go and round him up.’

‘He gone,’ the woman insisted. She ran towards Guringja, babbling in her own language.

‘What’s she saying, Sadie?’ Paul asked one of Guringja’s wives.

Sadie shrugged. ‘Doan know that talk.’

Eventually Guringja explained. ‘She Kalkadoon. Her name Wiradji. My mumma Kalkadoon so she kin of me. Big trouble where she comen from so she come here for safe with babba.’

‘What about her husband?’ Paul asked. ‘I’m not having him here.’

Guringja’s eyes seemed to flatten. ‘No husbin, boss.’

‘Don’t give me that! He’s lurking over there somewhere. She knows he’s here.’

‘Ah! Dat no one, boss. No one.’

‘She said he was her husband,’ Sam growled at him. ‘I heard her.’

Paul turned to Sadie. ‘You saw him when you were walking down here, didn’t you? You must have …’

She shook her head and trudged over to the woman. ‘Where your husbin?’

‘He gone,’ Wiradji replied sadly.

‘Gone where?’ Paul demanded, but Guringja grabbed Sadie’s arm. He whispered something to her and the men saw her dark face blanch.

‘Mr Paul,’ she said quietly, ‘better we take her longa camp, eh?’

‘Not until I know where her husband’s got to! I won’t have him hanging about.’

Sadie sighed and walked over to Paul. She patted his horse gently and spoke so softly he had to lean down to hear her.

‘No husbin here. Him fight big war. Got killt dead. She still makin’ crying time.’

‘What? Bloody rubbish! He was here! We saw him!’

Sadie lowered her eyes and scratched the back of her neck, obviously anxious not to discuss this any further.

Inadvertently Paul scratched the back of his own neck, maybe for the same reason. The hairs there felt like needles, and a shudder ran through him. For a minute he was at a complete loss to decide what to do.

Noah shifted uneasily in his saddle. ‘Are they trying to tell us that blackfeller wasn’t there?’

‘No,’ Paul said. ‘It’s just their usual double talk.’

‘Where has he gone anyway?’

‘I don’t know!’ Paul said crankily. ‘He’s just gone. Let me know if you spot him again.’

He nodded to the little group of Aborigines. ‘Go on then. Take her up to your camp. She looks as if she needs a good feed.’

As the three horsemen rode away, Sam laughed. ‘If Noah ever sights that husband feller again, you won’t see him for dust!’

‘What about you?’ Paul asked.

Sam shrugged. ‘Me? I never saw no one.’

Intrigued by the occasion, the crowds stood stoically outside St Stephen’s Cathedral on this hot and humid morning, breathing air drenched with the perfume of frangipani. Normally the buttery white blooms would have a lighter scent, more refined, but the low-set tree near the arched entrance to the cathedral had grown into a large and splendid specimen, almost vulgar in its profusion of delicate flowers. The residents of this newly acclaimed northern city were proud of the tree, along with the tall palms, flamboyant purple jacarandas and massive Moreton Bay figs that shaded their streets. Nature in this sub-tropical location seemed a little ‘too much’, as genteel newcomers were wont to say behind their fans, disassociating themselves from earlier settlers who had known the district as the infamous Moreton Bay penal settlement.

Ah yes. Not the most prestigious of foundations. But when that establishment was closed down, and the site renamed Brisbane, it had begun to blossom into respectability.

The streets were regally named after English kings in one direction and queens in the other: Elizabeth – which boasted the cathedral – Charlotte, and so forth. Botanic gardens had been founded along the banks of the wide river, while proud public buildings like Parliament House and the stately museum added dignity.

The rich squatters who had arrived early enough to grasp huge tracts of land for sheep runs had always been the elite of the Australian colonies, but in Brisbane another powerful group was emerging. They were the cattlemen, pushing their herds northwards into the wild and mostly unexplored colony of Queensland.

Seafarers, watchful of the reefs that guarded the shores of this colony, estimated that the coastline ran to more than a staggering three thousand miles, and what lay beyond had been a mystery until Leichhardt, the German explorer, told of great plains well watered by a succession of fine rivers.

‘A land of plenty, and plenty for all,’ was the cry, and a rush was on, halted very suddenly in its tracks by the discovery that the owners of these bounteous pastures were unwilling to move on, and were in fact downright savage in their attitude to trespassers.

But the ambitious white settlers did not regard themselves as trespassers.

‘There are no houses, no towns,’ they said. ‘No one lives here, so it’s ours for the taking.’

When it was pointed out that people did live there, Aborigine people, they answered: ‘No they don’t. They’re just nomads. There are no boundaries and there aren’t even any villages.’

This particular river area was the meeting place of three nations, Undangi, Jagaro and Jukambe, and their various associated clans. To them the boundaries of the nations were as clear as day, and the laws regarding them had to be respected. No one in his right mind would enter another’s territory without invitation or permission. It was a very dangerous thing to do and could cause nasty repercussions. When the white men came blundering in, the same rules applied. There were paybacks.

But the white men kept coming, with their amazing weaponry. They were simply ‘opening up the land’.

The Aborigines had another name for these operations. They called them war.

Not far from the cathedral, not too long ago, in front of the GPO to be exact, the hero of the Aborigines’ resistance, Dundalli, was hanged. In retaliation, the blackfellows killed Captain Logan, the commandant of the penal settlement, though that was not a bad thing, according to the convicts who had suffered under his merciless reign and regarded the man as nothing less than a vicious monster.

Then the war moved on, moved north and west with the tide of settlers and was mostly forgotten in Brisbane, but it did come to mind for Milly Forrest, who was in the crowd outside the cathedral with her daughter Lucy Mae. They were here to attend the funeral service of their dear friend Dolour Rivadavia.

An emotional woman, Milly dabbed at her eyes as she recalled Dolour’s first husband, Pace MacNamara, who’d been murdered by blacks in the far north. That friendship went back a long way, she reflected sadly. Pace had voyaged to the colony on the same ship as Milly and her late husband Dermott, all three of them young and eager to start new lives.

She gave a half sob. They’d all done well too. In cattle, of all things. First as station managers, then with their own properties. But in the beginning, outback country life had been hard for a little English girl like Milly, who’d not ventured beyond the outskirts of Manchester until her beloved Dermott had swept her off her feet and brought her out to this strange world.

It was Dolour, a feisty Irishwoman, who’d taught her to stand up for herself, Milly recalled. And it was Dolour who was there to help when she and Dermott were struggling. Poor Dermott. Only two years back, when everything was going so well for them, when they’d retired to their lovely house overlooking the river, he’d been struck down by diphtheria, and within weeks had breathed his last breath.

Milly sighed. Still getting over the shock, she told herself. And then Lucy Mae’s husband, that scoundrel Bartling, had drowned in a shipwreck off Fraser Island. He was no loss, but she’d been devastated to hear that Dolour was dying of the dreaded cancer.

‘Shouldn’t we go in?’ Lucy Mae said.

‘Not yet,’ Milly hissed. She wanted to wait and see who’d come; you’d miss too much sitting in the family pews at the front with your back to the congregation.

Juan Rivadavia was a leading citizen in this country these days. A cattle man from Argentina, he’d come here many years ago and immediately set about buying properties. Milly had always liked him – he was absolutely charming, no doubt about that – but she’d been surprised when Dolour had married him so soon after Pace’s death.

‘Who’s that?’ Lucy Mae asked, as a carriage pulled in and a young woman wearing a mantle of black lace instead of a hat stepped down.

‘Dolour’s stepdaughter, Rosa,’ Milly replied, as people about her surged forward to get a better look at this darling of the society pages, where she was often referred to as ‘the Spanish beauty’, with airy disregard for her Argentinian parentage. ‘That’s her husband, Charlie Palliser. He’s a famous surgeon.’

Lucy Mae sighed. ‘What a beautiful gown. So elegant!’

‘Imported!’ her mother commented as she cast her eyes over Lucy Mae’s outfit. ‘You could do with a new black. That dress is too loose on you. It doesn’t give you any shape.’

‘I’ve lost weight since Russ died.’

‘You look better for it. We’ll go shopping tomorrow.’

Milly watched Rosa Palliser pluck a frangipani bloom, take in the scent, then toss it away as she entered the cathedral with her husband.

‘Typical,’ she snorted.

‘What is?’

‘Nothing. Oh dear, here comes Juan.’

Milly watched as Rivadavia hurried up the steps, head down, acknowledging no one. He looked tired and drawn, she thought, but just as suave and handsome as ever. That Dolour, she smiled, you had to hand it to her: she married two of the nicest men in town. And the two best-looking in their day. And her just a little Irish convict girl. Few knew that, though Dolour wouldn’t have cared if they did. She was her own person, thought Milly, my word she was.

There was another surge in the crowd as the Governor’s carriage arrived. One of the liveried footmen sitting atop jumped down to place a footstool by the door to assist the Governor, the Marquis of Normanby, and his lady wife to step from the ornate carriage down to earth.

Someone clapped and was frowned upon by the Marchioness as they progressed up the short path. Her husband, sweat trickling from his florid face under his large plumed hat, hurried her along, but already interest had swerved to a gentleman who’d come dashing across the road.

‘I told you everyone who’s anyone would be here today,’ Milly said, nudging her daughter as the Premier of Queensland approached, handshaking the lucky front-rowers. When he came to Milly, he stopped.

‘Well, God spare me days! It’s you, Mrs Forrest. What are you doing out here in the heat?’

‘Um, waiting, Mr Palmer,’ Milly stammered. ‘It’s so difficult. The crowds … We were just about to … You know my daughter Lucy Mae?’

‘Yes, of course. Mrs Bartling! Now come along, ladies. I’ll escort you in myself.’

Just then the MacNamaras, John Pace and Paul, arrived with their families and several friends, and they were all caught up in a muddle of sorrowful greetings at the door. Eventually they filtered into the scent-laden gloom of the cathedral, where the Premier, Sir Arthur Palmer, charged off with Lucy Mae on his arm.

Milly was rather taken aback. It was then that she saw the coffin, covered in wreaths with stands of candles on either side, and it hit her! That was Dolour! That was her friend!

She burst into tears, sobbing uncontrollably as she stumbled into the arms of a gentleman nearby. She wept even more when she recognised Duke MacNamara, Dolour’s youngest son and the spitting image of his father!

The choir began to sing: ‘Faith of our fathers …’

‘Oh! I’m sorry, Duke,’ Milly cried. ‘Perhaps I’d better go outside. I’ll just upset everyone.’

‘No, Milly, it’s all right. We’ll help each other get through this. Would you walk down with me? I’m sure Mother would like that.’

His words almost sent her off into another paroxysm of grief, but she took a deep breath and kept control as he offered her his arm.

Turning, she saw more people hurrying into the cathedral and moving out to the side aisles, and then, just for a second, she spotted a familiar figure silhouetted against the light in the open doorway.

Milly Forrest almost tripped when the realisation of who it was came to her.

‘Good Lord!’ she said, leaning heavily on Duke.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, embarrassed. These days she had what was known as an ample figure. No lightweight. ‘Yes thank you, Duke.’

When they took their places she did not dare twist round to make sure. The cathedral was packed anyway. And she really didn’t need to. She knew who it was. The cheek of him! Heselwood! Lord bloody Heselwood!

Streaming through a pane of stained glass, the sun seemed to be aimed deliberately into the eyes of Charlie Palliser, who was sitting in the front pew with his wife, his father and his father-in-law Juan Rivadavia. He was fretting, certain that his late mother was deliberately trying to blind him, because he couldn’t escape the sharp rays no matter which way he leaned his head. Punishment, he supposed, for throwing in his lot with foreigners. There had been no logic to her fear of foreigners of any description, so she had been extremely upset when he’d broken it to her that he intended to marry the daughter of Juan Rivadavia.

‘That foreigner!’ she’d cried, aghast.

His father, Duncan, had mollified her somewhat by explaining that Rosa was only half a foreigner, her mother being a titled Englishwoman. It took time, and constant persuasion for the formidable Dora Palliser to receive Miss Rivadavia, though on the day in question she seated herself across the room at a safe distance from her guest. Fortunately Rosa’s charm got Charlie through the nerve-wracking encounter. The best that could be said of Dora, in this situation, Charlie reflected, blinking, was that she finally agreed to endure her younger son’s choice of bride.

But the problem with his mother hadn’t been half as traumatic as the time he’d told his father that he had decided to study medicine at Sydney University. He was living at home then, on their head station by the Darling River, and at first Duncan hadn’t understood. He was a rugged country man who’d started on the lowest peg in the cattle business, working for years as a stockman on an outback property, where all he owned was a horse and a rifle. But he’d loved the life and the everyday challenges of station work.

‘I don’t know where you’ll find time to do that,’ he’d said. ‘You’re sixteen now. I’ve been waiting for you to leave school. I want you to get out and run the Blackbutt Station. That clown of a manager is losing too many cattle in the scrub and your brother hasn’t got time to sort him out. You can take some stockmen out there, get rid of him and do a muster. Find out what’s going on. It’s my bet the bastard’s been selling them himself.’

‘Do you want me to stay on there?’

‘Why don’t you listen? I said I want you to run it, not drift in, do a count and wander off.’

Charlie shuddered, recalling the explosion when he explained that he had already enrolled in a medical college in Sydney.

His mother had come running. ‘What’s all this noise about?’

‘Him!’ Duncan had shouted. ‘And it’s all your fault. Putting ideas in his head. Sending him off to that fancy school. Now look at him! Wanting to go back and learn how to be a bloody doctor. He doesn’t mind the money the stations bring in, does he? But he won’t lift a finger to contribute.’

She’d tried to calm him. ‘I think we should consider it. Give the idea a few days. We’ll think about it for a while.’

‘I don’t need to think about it!’ Duncan roared. ‘I know what’s at the bottom of this and don’t either of you try to deny it. He doesn’t like work. Why can’t he get into it like Langley does? And like I do? I’ve had to work hard all my life, and glad to do it, to get ahead in the world. But not him, he’s a taker …’

‘Now you know that’s not true, Duncan,’ she’d said. But as he listened to them arguing, Charlie knew his father was right, to a certain extent. Life on a cattle station was hard work, day in and day out. Their stations were so huge, the men had to camp out several nights a week to cover the territory. Charlie had often gone out to work with them, once his father had considered he was strong enough to handle a stock horse, and as a youngster he had enjoyed himself, but the novelty had been worn down by the heat and dust and the surprisingly cold nights in the open, as well as having to swallow greasy camp stews thrown together by men too tired to fuss about quality as long as there was enough for all.

Langley had always looked out for his younger brother, and this time he didn’t let him down, arguing that Charlie had a right to please himself in what he did. But in the end it was their mother who saved the day. She talked Duncan around, and even suggested that as soon as Charlie finished the course and became a real doctor, he could come back home and help out. Her reasoning astonished Charlie. She seemed to think that medicine sat quite well with veterinary work. He didn’t enlighten her, and he was amused to find that from the first day he entered medical school, she referred to him as Dr Palliser.

‘Ah well.’ Duncan shrugged. ‘Rosa will own a string of cattle stations when Rivadavia passes on. So will you when I kick the bucket. I suppose the two of you will sell up and let all our good work go for nothing.’

‘Don’t start that again. You ought to be pleased. You’ll have grandchildren to pick up the reins. Anyway, Rosa might be his only daughter, but he has three stepsons, and they’re in the cattle business too.’

‘And who might they be?’

‘The MacNamaras.’

‘Where from?’

‘Kooramin Station and Oberon up north. And they’ve got other runs, I believe.’

‘You don’t mean Pace MacNamara’s sons?’

‘Yes. I think so. Juan married his widow.’

‘God Almighty! So he did. Now you listen to me, Charlie. You’re getting into a hornets’ nest there. Pace had enemies. He crossed a few influential characters in his time. I knew him; he wasn’t a bad feller, always on the hunt for land, but he pushed his luck. Went too far too soon. Rivadavia has probably told you about that.’

Charlie could see from his father’s smug raised eyebrows that he’d guessed Juan had not.

‘Why would he? It’s not important, whatever it was.’

‘Maybe not,’ Duncan said. ‘But you take a word from the wise: I’d give this a lot more thought. Get to know one another better. There’s no rush, is there?’

‘No, except I love her, and she loves me.’

Duncan reached for his pipe and began stuffing it with tobacco. ‘You don’t think she might be a bit hi-falutin’ for us?’

Charlie was stung into anger. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can read. I see her in the papers. She’s a high stepper, you have to grant that. Always about here and there. In our day people who had their picture in the paper were either common or criminals.’

‘Oh for crying out loud! What other logs can you throw on the road? I’m going; I’ll come back when you’re in a better mood.’

The funeral service, a requiem mass, was interminable. The cathedral felt like a steam bath, and Charlie’s stiff collar was too tight. Rosa, by his side, was fanning herself, and on his other side Duncan was probably regretting his kind decision to attend – the second time he’d graced St Stephen’s with his presence.

The congregation stood, and Charlie hoped it was to depart, but more ceremony followed, and then a hearty hymn.

Rosa whispered to him: ‘I’m feeling faint. I have to go outside for air.’

He clasped her hand. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, no, no. Don’t fuss.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She kissed him on the cheek and slipped out through a side door. It occurred to Charlie that she might be pregnant, and he hummed along with the hymn, his heart full of joy.

As she stepped outside, Rosa put a hand on the cool stone wall to steady herself for a few minutes, relieved to feel her head clearing. This pain had begun earlier, when her maid had brought flowers into the breakfast room. She’d immediately begun sneezing and snuffling, and when the headache developed, Charlie had brought her a draught that had dulled it a little. Normally she wasn’t prone to headaches, but she’d worked out that acacia plants were the villains of the piece, and tried to avoid them.

She sighed and walked into the side garden, hoping there were no acacias loitering here, and along the shaded path towards the front of the cathedral. The mass was almost over now, so they’d be coming out and the tears would start all over again.

Rosa had liked Dolour, more so than Delia, her own mother, who had not been able to cope with this climate, or with station life. An English gentlewoman, she’d left Juan and returned home, taking Rosa with her. But she’d always been difficult to please, and was determined to be unhappy; her letters to Juan were a litany of complaints. Finally she’d written that she could not be expected to bring up a ten-year-old girl on her own – though Juan had seen to it that she had a lovely home in Kensington and wanted for nothing.

Rosa still suffered from bouts of anxiety that emanated from the day she heard her mother tell the housekeeper that she could no longer bear the wretched child mooning about the house.

‘I’m simply not well enough,’ Delia had explained. ‘I’m a frail person, anyone can see that. I cannot abide noise of any sort. I’m sending her off to her father. I want you to take her.’

‘Where to, madam?’ the woman asked fearfully.

‘To Argentina, of course!’

‘Oh no, madam, I couldn’t do that!’ the woman shrieked. ‘I’m not knowing where is such a place.’

She threw her apron over her face and dashed from the room. Rosa wished she had an apron to throw over her own face, which was glowing red with humiliation. She peered into her mother’s boudoir. She had always loved it: a rainbow room of coloured satin pillows, embroidered, beaded and pleated, large and small, scattered everywhere – on the bed, the chaise, the big plump armchair, banked up high on the window seat and even thrown willy-nilly about the floor.

Delia was seated at her dressing table, her long hair brushed down over her shoulders.

‘What do you want?’ she called.

Rosa scowled. She was never allowed in this room, so she called back: ‘I don’t want to go to Argentina.’

‘Of course you don’t. You never want to do anything you’re told.’

‘I do so. How long would I have to stay there?’

Delia waved a white-gloved hand. ‘I don’t know. That’s up to your father.’

‘What if he doesn’t want me either?’

‘Then he’ll probably send you back.’ Delia yawned. ‘For heaven’s sake, stop nagging me. Tell that woman I’ll have tea now, and a boiled egg.’

‘What woman?’ Often Rosa took revenge on her vague mother by pretending not to understand instructions.

‘The person who just left here.’

‘What person?’

‘Oh, any person, you stupid girl!’

‘I’ll see if I can find one.’

She made no attempt to deliver the message. There was nothing wrong with her mother, the doctor had said.

‘She stays in bed too much, Rosa. You should encourage her to get up and take walks or her joints will stiffen up.’

Rosa decided that problem could be easily solved.

‘We’ll starve her out,’ she informed the cook, who took no notice at all. Nor did the housekeeper.

The plan to ship Rosa off to Argentina seemed to have been forgotten, so she continued attending St Mary’s College across the square until a week after her twelfth birthday, when she came home to find her father waiting for her in the parlour.

She barely knew this softly spoken man, with his dark eyes and blinding smile, so she sat giddily on the edge of a chair, answering his polite little questions, wishing he would go away, until her mother swept in wearing the swishest grey lace dress with a short fishtail train, and a beautiful hat covered in grey georgette. She looked fantastic!

‘Are you going out?’ Rosa asked, incredulous. On the rare occasions when Delia did go out, she bundled herself up in coats and scarves to protect her fragile constitution.

‘Yes.’

‘Not just yet,’ her husband said. ‘Sit down, Delia.’

‘I prefer to stand,’ she said haughtily.

‘And I want you to sit, so please do so.’

She sulked into the nearest chair, sitting upright without the assistance of cushions. Rosa wished the doctor could see her now.

‘I understand you would like to come to live with me,’ her father said.

Rosa sat mute, red-faced again. Had Delia lied? She wouldn’t put it past her. But did her father want her? He didn’t sound too enthusiastic. She frowned.

‘I can’t speak Spanish.’

‘They speak English in the Australian colonies.’

‘I thought you lived in Argentina.’

Irritated, he shook his head at Delia. ‘I come from Argentina originally. We have family and property in that country. But my home is Rosario Station, north of Brisbane.’

‘Rosario?’ His daughter was enchanted. ‘Did you name your house after me?’

‘More than a house,’ Delia sniffed. ‘It’s the size of a county. A big empty county.’

‘Yes, it was named after you, Rosa. Now, your mother and I are going to tea at the Grosvenor, which I’m told is very pleasant. If you would care to join us, we could talk more.’

‘The Grosvenor?’ Rosa cried. ‘I’d love to.’

‘She can’t come, she doesn’t have anything to wear,’ Delia said, smoothing her gloves.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Juan sounded displeased,