The Touch Read online

  “Young men? Little boys?” asked Jade.

  Theodora squawked and fluttered madly. “Jade! Really! No, I do not mean that! I mean that he’s happy with his life the way it is, I suppose. There are several widows who have made—er—overtures to him, but he turns them aside so tactfully that no one is hurt. Mrs. Hardacre is quite young and pretty and has a considerable amount of money, but Sam wouldn’t even paint her house.”

  “You defend him so well, Miss Theodora, that I must accept your judgment of him.”

  Theodora got up to clear the dishes, suddenly sorry that she had allowed Jade to stay with her. What if Jade was nasty to dear Sam, or asked impertinent questions? The last thing in the world Theodora wanted was to drive away her house painter and odd-job man. Oh dear, oh dear!

  WHEN SAM O’DONNELL turned up at seven the next morning to start stripping the old paint off Theodora’s house, Jade was by Theodora’s side to welcome him.

  Very handsome in a white man’s way, she decided. Tall, a graceful mover with the overly long, sinewy arms of someone who had shorn sheep for a number of years, fair hair, and endowed with a pair of twinkling eyes whose color changed—blue, grey, green. They slid over Jade without lighting up as the eyes of a man who lusts after women do, and not because she was Chinese. Jade was still a beautiful woman, and the white blood in her gave her large, well-opened eyes the look of a deer—she knew she was as attractive to white men as she was to Chinese. But Sam O’Donnell was unmoved. His manner toward Theodora, who had turned twittery at the sight of him, was impeccable. He gave her no hope whatsoever, yet was warmly friendly.

  In his wake stalked a big dog of the very new kind specially bred to heel cattle—a dappled blue-grey coat and a black head containing a large brain pan. The animal’s amber eyes were alert, watchful, slightly sinister. As if it knew it had to behave, but some primitive instinct inside it hungered to tear throats.

  Sam checked what Theodora had assembled, nodded and unearthed a blowtorch from his tool bag. “Thanks, Miss Jay, she’s apples,” he said, beginning to fill the blowtorch’s reservoir with spirits.

  Obviously they were dismissed. Theodora went back into the house, Jade following her with a backward look. But Sam O’Donnell was not staring after them; he was still preparing his blowtorch. No, sighed Jade to herself, I don’t think it’s Sam O’Donnell.

  For seven days she prowled the town, including the Chinese village and Sung’s pagoda city hill, talking to every person she encountered, even if some of the whites and Chinese didn’t want to talk to her. Prejudice from both races was a part of Jade’s inheritance, so her skin was thick and her persistence oblivious to lack of co-operation. Probe, pick, push. Jade on this errand was not to be deflected.

  She asked about Sam O’Donnell, with mixed results. The wives of miners spoke of him scathingly, whereas most Kinrossians not concerned with actual mining spoke of him favorably. The Reverend Mr. Peter Wilkins, caught titivating the altar, knew Jade well as Anna’s attendant who always stood outside St. Andrew’s church gate and waited for morning service to be over. He was happy to discuss the subject of Anna’s seducer, but had nothing to offer. Of Sam O’Donnell he said,

  “A good chap, always comes to Evensong rather than the morning service. Despite his actions when the miners were laid off, he is a good chap. He used to be a shearer, and they’re always militant in union matters, Jade.”

  “Do you think he’s a good chap because he goes to Evensong?” Jade asked, her humble tone stripping the question of offense.

  “No, I don’t,” the minister said. “Sam’s a good person. I had a plague of rats in the rectory just after half the town employees were laid off, and he got rid of them in two days. We’ve not seen a rat since. He fulfills a necessary function in Kinross by doing all the odd jobs one cannot find a Chinese to do. No insult is intended, Jade. The Chinese like permanent work.”

  “I understand, Mr. Wilkins. Thank you,” said Jade.

  Even so, she kept a wary eye on Sam O’Donnell as he assaulted the exterior of Theodora’s house, working so hard that Jade wondered why some miners called him lazy. Perhaps, she thought, Sam O’Donnell had liked the money gold mining had paid him, yet hated to be underground? So after the union man Bede Whatsit left, Sam discovered a niche in Kinross that no other man wanted. He was in the fresh air, he could have his dog at his side all the time, and, if Theodora Jenkins was any guide, he ate better than campers usually did. Even the dog was the recipient of scraps and bones from the butcher. If he had a fault, it was that suddenly he would exclaim that he had to nip over to Mrs. Murphy’s or Mrs. Smith’s to help her for a couple of hours, but he’d be back. He didn’t lie; Jade followed him and verified that he did help them. Vexatious for Theodora, perhaps, in that his absences meant his work for her suffered a little. Not that Theodora complained.

  Jade became used to the sight of him leaning in the kitchen window at ten in the morning and there in the afternoon, sipping at his enamel mug of steaming tea and crunching on the bikkies Theodora baked; for his lunch he took another mug of tea and two huge bread-and-butter-and-cheese sandwiches and ate them in the shade of a tree in Theodora’s backyard. At the end of each day Theodora gifted him with a loaf of her wonderful bread, and off he would go, Rover at his heels, his tool bag in his hand, to walk the five miles back to his camp at the dam.

  Never once, she thought as she took the cable car back to Kinross House at the end of her “holiday,” had Sam O’Donnell or any other likely suspect given her an indication of guilt by word, look, or action.

  AND SO THINGS might have stood forever were it not for Jim Summers, growing sourer and dourer with each passing year. His home life, it was common knowledge, was bitterly unhappy, Maggie Summers having retreated into a state bordering on dementia; at times she didn’t know who Jim was, at other times she knew him and would fly at him tooth and nail. Summers had also witnessed his own eclipse in Alexander’s estimation, especially after the advent of Lee. With Lee’s defection, Alexander remembered that the faithful Summers existed, and had asked for his company on this latest trip when Ruby said no. But Summers had had to refuse; he couldn’t leave Maggie unless he put her in an asylum, and that the poor fellow just could not bring himself to do. Her life had been a series of disappointments, and though Alexander argued that she was too far gone to know where she was, Jim Summers remembered the asylum in Paris where he and his mother had visited her demented sister. When he wouldn’t budge, Alexander was not pleased.

  Just when Jade’s suspicions shifted from Sam O’Donnell to Jim Summers she didn’t know, save that a tiny succession of events finally added up to his guilt. The first, that she caught him trying to rape her second-youngest sister, Peach Blossom, who escaped with her virtue intact thanks to Jade’s intercession. The second, that she saw the expression in his eyes when he watched Elizabeth walk in the garden. The third, that he looked at her, Jade, with hatred for spoiling his fun with Peach Blossom. And the fourth, that he was a little too familiar with Nell while helping her to mount a fractious horse; Nell had retaliated by lashing his face with her riding crop.

  Jim Summers! Yes, why not? Why should years of constant service preclude him? He had access to everything, to every part of Mount Kinross, from its forests and bridle paths to the house itself. He had once lived on its third floor. His wife had once been housekeeper. And now his wife was incapable of fulfilling her marital duties, yet he didn’t dare avail himself of the doxies who lived in a big house on Kinross’s outskirts, and teetered there precariously as the town became more and more respectable, more and more at the command of God’s moral police.

  So Jade set out to stalk Jim Summers while ever he was on the mountain rather than at the works below. It was easier to do this because the rudderless Butterfly Wing grabbed eagerly at the offer to share custody of Anna, Dragonfly was back, and Elizabeth too took her turn in the nursery.

  THE NURSERY had turned into a childing room, Dr. Wyler having insisted that ev
erything be ready in case Anna went into an early labor. The most competent of the Wong girls, Pearl, had learned to drip chloroform on to a gauze muzzle at the right rate to ensure anesthesia but not asphyxiation, and Dr. Burton had been instructed in the new technique in case Dr. Wyler wasn’t there. Kinross also boasted a midwife these days, Minnie Collins, who was, in Dr. Wyler’s opinion after he talked to her, more equipped to deal with a difficult birth than old Doc Burton. Thus the room had a glass cabinet full of shiny instruments sitting in carbolic, as well as another cabinet containing bottles of chloroform, carbolic and alcohol. Carbolic-reeking drawers held linens and swabs as well as a number of gauze muzzles.

  Anna herself was more patient with her condition than anyone had expected; as her body swelled she became proud of it, would display it on the slightest provocation. When the baby kicked inside her, she shouted in glee. But she had taken against Nell, a painful business for Nell, who wanted desperately to help, to be a part of Anna’s pregnancy and delivery.

  Tired of mathematics, history, novels and anatomy, Nell moped until Ruby came to her rescue.

  “It’s high time you got some experience in the affairs of Apocalypse Enterprises,” Ruby said to Nell in that tone that brooked no argument. “If Constance can learn to take Charles’s place and Sophia’s husband to take over the books, then you can certainly start learning to take Lee’s place. You have a brain stuffed with theory, but now is the moment to learn to deal with facts. Sung, Constance and I have agreed that you should work five days a week—two in the town offices, three inspecting the mine, the refinery and the workshops. They aren’t exactly new to you because Alexander used to cart you along whenever he could. If you’re going to survive engineering at the university, you’d better know first what handling men who resent you will be like.”

  For Nell, salvation. She had soaked up engines and mines at her father’s knee, then at his side, and, clad in a pair of baggy overalls—shocking!—soon proved to the men who eyed her in outrage that she knew one end of a locomotive from the other, and everything there was to know about cyanide refining. She could use a wrench with the best of them, didn’t mind being covered in the new lubricating oils, and had an ear for flaws in metal as she tapped and clanged around a machine or train wheels. What had been male ire turned to admiration, the more so because Nell ignored the novelty of her sex and appeared to regard herself as one of the boys. She also had Alexander’s innate authority; when she gave an order, she expected it to be obeyed because it was the right order; and if she didn’t know the answer, she asked.

  A boon for Elizabeth, who worried more about Nell than she did about Anna. It was Nell going into a man’s world, and Nell who had the intelligence and sensitivity to suffer when she was repulsed. Though she had all of Alexander’s steel, she had some of Elizabeth’s enigmatic diffidence too, and while she wasn’t close to her mother, Elizabeth understood her far better than Nell knew—or would have wanted. Daddy’s girl, that was Nell, in exile because Daddy wasn’t here. So to know that she was busy at Daddy’s business was a relief.

  AS ANNA approached her eighth month, which was March of 1891, her heaviness curtailed those long walks the women had insisted she take; there were no signs of pre-eclampsia, but the weight she had to carry around now made her fretful and difficult to entertain.

  Jade’s favorite place to put Anna when she was in attendance was the rose garden, in full late summer flower. There, after a short and gentle walk, Anna could be ensconced in a cane chair and kept amused by trying to guess the color of the roses. Though she understood the concept of color, she couldn’t give a specific color a name. So Jade would make a game of it and have her giggling at the way she spoke the names of those colors.

  “Maaaauve!” Jade would say, pointing to a bloom. “Piiiiink! Whiiiite! Yellllow! Creeeeam!”

  Anna would repeat the sounds, but never remember which rose was mauve, which pink or cream. Still, it passed the time and kept her mind off her condition.

  They were playing this game in the rose garden when Summers walked across the lawn some distance away; in his wake strolled a big blue cattle dog. Jade had heard that he now owned a dog, apparently for company; his wife liked the animal, a bonus.

  Suddenly Anna squealed with joy and stretched out her arms. “Rover!” she cried. “Rover, Rover!”

  The day went dark, as if the moon had drifted across the face of the blazing sun; Jade stood amid the roses and felt the full force of this innocent betrayal, discovered the awful difference between suspicion and certainty. Anna knew the name of Sam O’Donnell’s dog.

  But Anna didn’t know Sam O’Donnell! During her week in the town, Jade had questioned everybody as to whom Anna met if she wandered into the town, who talked to her, who took charge of her and notified Kinross House. Suspicious of Sam O’Donnell, she had asked specifically about him, but he was not on the list of Anna Kinross’s acquaintances. If she did get as far as the town, she headed for Ruby at the hotel or the Reverend Wilkins at the rectory. Was that where? When O’Donnell had been getting rid of the rats? Not according to the minister, anyway, and he would remember. Yet Anna knew the name of Sam O’Donnell’s dog, and that meant she knew Sam O’Donnell very well.

  “Rover! Rover!” Anna was still calling, arms extended.

  “Mr. Summers!” Jade shouted.

  He came over, the dog at his heels.

  “Is this Rover?” Jade asked as the dog, an amiable creature, went straight to Anna and responded to her ecstatic greeting with slurps and whipping tail wags.

  “No, its name’s Bluey,” said Summers, whose expression didn’t alter. “Bluey, Anna, not Rover.”

  Summers did not know the name of Sam O’Donnell’s dog. Feeling as if she waded through a syrupy lake, Jade let Anna make a fuss of the dog, let her wave goodbye to Summers as he went on his way, and continued to play with Anna until lunch time. When Jade saw that Anna was becoming susceptible to the sun, for as they went inside she complained that her head was “sore.”

  “You’re more patient with her when she’s sick,” Jade said to Butterfly Wing, hovering anxiously with a draft of laudanum. “Do you mind staying with her? I need to go into Kinross.”

  While Butterfly Wing administered the potion to Anna (who rather liked it, a blessing), Jade went to the bottle cabinet and took one marked CHLOROFORM. Then, as Butterfly Wing settled on the edge of Anna’s bed to lay a cold wet cloth on her brow, Jade took one of the gauze muzzles from its drawer. It was all done so quickly that Butterfly Wing never looked around, even when Jade, burdened, closed the door too loudly.

  How many times in her mind she must have thought about this! Every move had been plotted, every complication sorted out. Jade went about her purpose with the smooth ease of familiarity, from the nursery to a shed in the backyard wherein, years ago, Maggie Summers had determined Jade would live. After that it had been transformed into a temporary prison for an assistant cook who went mad and had to be confined until he could be manacled and taken off to an asylum, and a detention cell it had remained just in case. So its windows were barred and shuttered, its walls thickly padded with straw-filled canvas, and its bed was a heavy iron affair bolted to the floor. The bed had been stripped to its mattress, but Jade had brought linen with her, and made it up neatly. A table, a chair and a beside table with a drawer in it, all of iron bolted to the floor, completed the furnishings. Though scrubbed out many times, it retained a faint odor of feces and vomit; Jade opened all the windows and lit thin sticks of incense in an old jam jar on the table. Back and forth she trotted to the house kitchen, where Chang and his assistants thought nothing of her conduct, too used to her comings and goings. She took a small spirit stove fitted with a copper kettle for boiling water, some Chinese tea bowls and a packet of green tea.

  The backyard was deserted, as this wasn’t a washing day and all Chang’s attention was focused on preparing dinner. Once she was satisfied at the appearance of the shed, its window shutters now closed and the
room equipped with six kerosene lamps, Jade stole inside and went to her quarters. There she put on her most attractive dress, a slim tube of embroidered peacock-blue silk split up both sides of its skirt to enable her to walk. Under normal circumstances no Chinese woman would have worn such a dress in a white town, so Jade donned an overcoat despite the heat. She took a small bottle of laudanum from her bathroom cabinet and slipped it into one coat pocket.

  Then, bold as brass, she asked for the cable car and went down into Kinross; it was nearly four in the afternoon, and she knew that Theodora Jenkins would be at St. Andrew’s practicing on the organ for a special Sunday service, the last before the start of Lent. The mining shift wouldn’t change until six, so she had the car to herself, noting that the poppet heads were relatively deserted. At the bottom she walked swiftly, avoiding Kinross Square, to the house of Theodora Jenkins.

  Sam O’Donnell hadn’t changed his schedule, which was to work until five every day, Monday to Friday; if he popped off to see someone else, it was always just after lunch, so he would be back. The dog growled before Jade came into view, so when she turned the corner Sam O’Donnell already knew someone was coming, and stood, brush in hand, expecting Theodora. When he saw Jade in an overcoat his brows flew up quizzically and he grinned, put the brush down carefully athwart his can of paint.

  “Aren’t you roasting in that?” he asked.

  “Terribly, like being baked in an oven,” said Jade. “Would you mind if I took my coat off, Sam?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He hadn’t thought Theodora’s Chinesey friend—a half-caste, for sure—attractive, but the moment she shrugged the coat off and revealed that incredible dress, he experienced a shaft of want he hadn’t felt since he last saw Anna Kinross. The slut was really gorgeous! Her waist was tiny, her breasts pertly upright, and her legs shimmered in silk stockings to lacy garters above her knees, then displayed a tantalizing hint of sleek bare thighs. And her hair—straight, black, thick, as full of light as a racehorse’s hide—hung down her back, tucked behind each perfect little ear. There were only two kinds of women appealed to Sam O’Donnell: virginal young girls and amateur sluts.