The Touch Read online

  And that had been the end of the subject; the next time Elizabeth saw him was inside the church.

  Now she was his wife, and had somehow to eat a meal she did not want.

  “I am not hungry,” she whispered.

  “Yes, I can imagine that. Hawkins, bring Mrs. Kinross some beef consommé and a light savory soufflé.”

  The rest of their time in the dining room became locked in a mental cupboard she could never afterward pry open; later she would understand that her confusion, the agitation and alarm within her, were due to the swiftness of events, the crush of so many foreign emotions. It wasn’t the prospect of her wedding night that lay at the base of her state of mind, it was the prospect of a lifelong exile with a man she couldn’t love.

  THE ACT (as Mary phrased it) was to take place in her bed; no sooner was she in her nightgown and the maid had withdrawn than a door on the far side of the room opened, and her husband came in wearing an embroidered silk robe.

  “Into bed with you,” he said, smiling, then went around all the gas jets, turning them out.

  Better, much better! She wouldn’t be able to see him, and, not seeing him, might manage the Act without disgracing herself.

  He sat sideways on the edge of the bed, turned with one knee under him to gaze down at her; apparently he could see in the dark. But her desperate attack of nerves was abating; he seemed so relaxed, so loose-boned and calm.

  “Do you know what must happen?” he asked.

  “Yes, Alexander.”

  “It will hurt at first, but later I hope you’ll learn to enjoy it. Is wicked old man Murray still the minister?”

  “Yes!” she gasped, horrified at this description of Dr. Murray—as if it were Dr. Murray who was the Devil!

  “There’s more blame for human misery to be laid at his door than at the doors of a thousand decent, honest heathen Chinee.”

  Came the rustle of silk, his full weight on the bed, movement in the coverings as he slid beneath them and gathered her into his arms. “We’re not here together just to make children, Elizabeth. What we’re going to do is sanctified by marriage. It’s an act of love—of love. Not merely of the flesh, but of the mind and even the soul. There’s nothing about it you shouldn’t welcome.”

  When she discovered that he was naked, she kept her hands as much to herself as she could, and when he tried to take the nightgown off her, she resisted. Shrugging, he peeled it up from the hem and ran those rough hands over her legs, her flanks, until the change came that prompted him to mount her and thrust hard. The pain brought tears to her eyes, but she had known worse pangs from Father’s stick, falls, bad cuts. And it was over quickly; he behaved exactly as Mary had said he would—shuddered and swallowed audibly, withdrew. But not from her bed. There he remained until the Act happened twice more. He hadn’t kissed her, but as he left he brushed her lips with his.

  “Goodnight, Elizabeth. It’s a fine start.”

  One comforting thing, she thought drowsily; he hadn’t felt like the Devil. Sweet of breath and body scent. And if the Act was no more fearsome than this, she knew that she would survive—might even, eventually, enjoy whatever life he intended her to lead in New South Wales.

  FOR THE NEXT few days he stayed with her, chose her maid, supervised modistes and milliners, hosiers and shoemakers, bought her lingerie so lovely that her breath caught, and perfume and skin lotions, fans and purses, a parasol for every outfit.

  Though she sensed that he thought himself considerate and kind, he made all the decisions—which of the two maids she had liked would get the job, what she would wear from colors to style, the perfume he liked, the jewels he showered on her. “Autocrat” was not a word she knew, so she used the word she did know, “despot.” Well, Father and Dr. Murray were despots, for that matter. Though Alexander’s imperiousness was subtler, sheathed in the velvet of compliments.

  At breakfast on the morning after that surprisingly bearable wedding night, she tried to find out more about him.

  “Alexander, all I know about you is that you left Kinross when you were fifteen, that you were an apprentice boilermaker in Glasgow, that Dr. MacGregor thought you very clever, and that you have made a wee fortune on the New South Wales goldfields. There must be far more to know. Please tell me,” she said.

  His laugh was attractive, sounded genuine. “I might have known that they’d all shut their mouths,” he said, eyes dancing. “For instance, I’ll bet they never told you that I knocked down old man Murray, did they?”

  “No!”

  “Oh, yes. Broke his jaw. I’ve rarely felt such pleasure. He’d just taken over the manse from Robert MacGregor, who was an educated, cultured and civilized man. You might say I left Kinross because clearly I couldn’t stay in a town of Philistines led by the likes of John Murray.”

  “Especially if you broke Dr. Murray’s jaw,” she said, feeling a secret, guilty satisfaction. Most definitely she couldn’t agree with Alexander’s opinion of Dr. Murray, but she was beginning to remember how many times he had made her miserable, or shamed her.

  “And that’s really the sum of it,” he said, lifting his shoulders. “I spent some time in Glasgow, took ship for America, went from California to Sydney, and made somewhat more than a wee fortune on the goldfields.”

  “Will we live in Sydney?”

  “Not in a fit, Elizabeth. I have my own town, Kinross, and you’ll live in the new house I’ve built for you high on Mount Kinross and out of sight of the Apocalypse—my mine.”

  “Apocalypse? What does it mean?”

  “It’s a Greek word for a frightful and violent event like the end of the world. What better name is there for something as freeing and earth-shaking as a gold mine?”

  “Is your town far from Sydney?”

  “Not as distances go in Australia, but far enough. The railroad—railway, I mean—will take us within a hundred miles of Kinross. From there we will travel by carriage.”

  “Is Kinross big enough to have a kirk?”

  His chin went up, making the beard look more pointed. “It has a Church of England, Elizabeth. I’ll have no Presbyterian parsons in my town. Far sooner the Papists or the Anabaptists.”

  A suddenly dry mouth made her gulp. “Why do you wear those strange clothes?” she asked to divert him from this sore subject.

  “They’ve become an idiosyncrasy. When I wear them, everyone deems me an American—thousands of Americans have come here since gold was discovered. But the real reason I wear them is that they’re soft, supple and comfortable. They don’t chafe and they wash like rags because they’re chamois skin. They’re also cool. Though they look American, I had them made in Persia.”

  “You’ve been there too?”

  “I’ve been everywhere that my famous namesake went, as well as places he didn’t dream existed.”

  “Your famous namesake? Who is that?”

  “Alexander…the Great,” he added when her face remained blank. “King of Macedonia and just about the whole known world at the time. Over two thousand years ago.” Something occurred to him, he leaned forward. “You are literate and numerate, I hope, Elizabeth? You can sign your name, but is that the size of it?”

  “I can read very well,” she said stiffly, offended, “though I have lacked history books. I did learn to write, but I haven’t been able to practice—Father kept no paper.”

  “I’ll buy you a copy-book, a book of example letters that you can use until your thoughts go down on paper easily—and reams of the best paper. Pens, inks—paints and sketchbooks if you want them. Most ladies seem to dabble in watercolors.”

  “I have not been brought up as a lady,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster.

  His eyes were dancing again. “Do you embroider?”

  “I sew, but I do not embroider.”

  And how, she wondered later in the morning, did he manage to deflect the conversation from himself so neatly?

  “I THINK I may be able to end in liking my husband
,” she confided to Mrs. Augusta Halliday toward the end of her second week in Sydney, “but I very much doubt that I will ever love him.”

  “It’s early days yet,” said Mrs. Halliday comfortably, her shrewd eyes resting on Elizabeth’s face. There were big changes in it: gone was the child. The masses of dark hair were piled up fashionably, her afternoon dress of rust-red silk had the obligatory bustle, her gloves were finest kid, her hat a dream. Whoever had wrought the image had been wise enough to leave the face alone; here was one young woman who needed no cosmetic aids, and Sydney’s sun didn’t seem to have the power to give her quite extraordinary white skin a glaze of pink or beige. She wore magnificent pearls around her neck and pearl drops in her ears, and when she drew the glove off her left hand Mrs. Halliday’s eyes widened.

  “Ye gods!” she exclaimed.

  “Oh, this wretched diamond,” said Elizabeth with a sigh. “I really detest it. Do you know that I have to have my gloves specially made to go over it? And Alexander insisted that the same finger on the right-hand glove be similarly made, so I very much fear that he intends to give me some other huge stone.”

  “You must be a saint,” said Mrs. Halliday dryly. “I don’t know of any other woman who wouldn’t be swooning over a gem half as splendid as your diamond.”

  “I love my pearls, Mrs. Halliday.”

  “So I should think! Queen Victoria’s aren’t any better.”

  But after Elizabeth had departed in the high-sprung chaise drawn by four matched horses, Augusta Halliday succumbed to a little weep. Poor girl! A fish out of water. Loaded down with every luxury, thrust into a world of wealth and prominence, when by nature she was neither avaricious nor ambitious. Had she remained in her Scottish ken she would no doubt have continued to look after her father, then turned into a maiden aunt. And yet been comfortable with her lot, if not idyllically happy. Well, at least she thought she could like Alexander Kinross, and that was something. Privately Mrs. Halliday agreed with Elizabeth; she couldn’t see Elizabeth coming to love her husband either. The distance between them was too vast, their characters too much at odds. Hard to believe that they were first cousins.

  Of course by the time that Elizabeth came to visit in her chaise-and-four, Mrs. Halliday had found out a great deal about Alexander Kinross. Quite the richest man in the colony, for unlike most who found paydirt on the goldfields, he had hung on to every grain he dredged from the alluvium, and then sniffed out the reef. He had the Government in one pocket and the Judiciary in the other, so while some men might suffer shockingly from claim-jumpers, Alexander Kinross was able to deal with them and other nuisances summarily. But though he went into society if he was in Sydney, he wasn’t a society man. Those worth knowing he tended to beard in their offices, rather than wine and dine them; sometimes he accepted an invitation to Government House or to Clovelly at Watson’s Bay, but never to a ball or soirée held just for enjoyment. Therefore the general consensus was that he cared about power, not about people’s good opinion.

  CHARLES DEWY, Elizabeth discovered, was a minor partner in the Apocalypse Mine.

  “He’s the local squatter—used to run two hundred square miles until the gold arrived,” said Alexander.

  “Squatter?”

  “So called because he ‘squatted’ on Crown Land until—as possession does indeed tend to be nine-tenths of the Law—he virtually owned it. But an Act of Parliament changed things. I softened his attitude by offering him a share in the Apocalypse, and thereafter I can do no wrong.”

  They were leaving Sydney at last, no grief to Mrs. Kinross, who now owned two dozen large trunks, but no personal maid. Having, it appeared, made a few enquiries about the town of Kinross and its location, Miss Thomas had quit that morning. Her desertion did not distress Elizabeth, who genuinely preferred to look after herself.

  “Never mind” was Alexander’s response to the news. “I’ll ask Ruby to find you a good Chinese girl. And don’t start saying you would rather not have an abigail! After two weeks of having your hair dressed, you ought to know that you need a pair of hands to do it that are not attached to your own arms.”

  “Ruby? Is she your housekeeper?” Elizabeth asked, aware that she was going to a house staffed with servants.

  That made Alexander laugh until the tears ran down his face. “Ah—no,” he said when he was able. “Ruby is, for want of any better words, an institution. To refer to her in a less grand way would be to demean her. Ruby is a master of the acid remark and the caustic comment. She’s Cleopatra—but she’s also Aspasia, Medusa, Josephine and Catherine di Médicis.”

  Oh! But Elizabeth had no opportunity to pursue this avenue of conversation because they had reached Redfern railway station, a bleak area of sheds and braided iron tracks.

  “The platforms here are rather derelict because they’re always talking of erecting a palatial terminus at the top of George Street—but that’s all it is, talk,” said Alexander as he helped her down from the chaise.

  The aftermath of seasickness had rendered her incapable of curiosity when she boarded the London train in Edinburgh, but today she gazed at the Bowenfels train in awe and amazement. A steam-wreathed engine mounted on a combination of small wheels and huge ones, the latter joined together by rods, stood panting like a gigantic and angry dog, wispy smoke curling from its tall chimney. This infernal machine was linked to an iron tender full of coal, behind which were eight carriages—six second-class and two first-class—with a caboose (Alexander’s word) on the back to hold the bulky luggage, freight, and the conductor.

  “I know the back of the train moves about more than the front, but I’m compelled to lean out the window and watch the locomotive working,” said Alexander, ushering her into what looked like a plushly comfortable parlor. “For that reason, they couple one first-class car behind all the other cars. This is really the Governor’s private compartment, but he’s happy to let me use it whenever he doesn’t need it—I pay for it.”

  At seven o’clock on the dot the Bowenfels train pulled out of the yard, with Elizabeth glued to a window. Yes, Sydney was big; it was fifteen minutes before the houses became scattered, fifteen minutes of rattling along, clickety-click, at a breathtaking pace. An occasional platform flashed past after that to mark some small town—Strathfield, Rose Hill, Parramatta.

  “How fast are we going?” she asked, liking the sensation of speed, the swaying motion.

  “Fifty miles an hour, though she’s capable of sixty if they really stoke the boiler. This is the weekly through-passenger train—it doesn’t stop before Bowenfels—and it’s a lightweight affair compared to a goods train. But our speed slows down to eighteen or twenty miles an hour once we begin to climb, in some places less than that, so our journey takes nine hours.”

  “What does a goods train carry?”

  “Down to Sydney, wheat and produce, kerosene from the shale works at Hartley. Up to Bowenfels, building materials, stock for country shops, mining equipment, furniture, newspapers, books, magazines. Prize breeding cattle, horses and sheep. Even men going west to prospect or find work on the land—the fare is uncollectable. But never,” he said emphatically, “dynamite.”

  “Dynamite?”

  His eyes went from her animated face to several dozen big wooden cases stacked from floor to ceiling in one corner, each one marked with the skull-and-crossbones.

  “Dynamite,” he said, “is the new way to blast rock apart. It never leaves my custody because it’s so scarce that it’s nigh as precious as gold. I had this lot shipped from Sweden through London—it was with you on Aurora. Blasting,” he went on, voice growing more excited, “used to be a risky and unpredictable sort of business. It was done with black powder—gunpowder to you. Very hard to know how black powder would fracture the rock, what direction the explosive force would take. I know, I’ve been a powder monkey in a dozen different places. But recently a Swede had a brilliant idea that tamed nitroglycerin, which of itself is so unstable that it’s likely to explode if i
t’s jarred. The Swede mixed nitroglycerin with a base of a clay called kieselguhr, then packed them in a paper cartridge shaped like a blunt candle. It can’t go off until it’s detonated by a cap of fulminate of mercury tightly crimped on the end of the stick. The powder monkey attaches a length of burnable fuse to the detonator and produces a safer, far better controlled blast. Though if you have a dynamo, you can trigger the blast by passing an electric current down a long wire. I shall be doing that soon.”

  Her expression provoked a laugh; she was amusing him a lot this morning. “Did you understand a word of that, Elizabeth?”

  “Several,” she said, and smiled at him.

  His breath caught audibly. “That’s the first smile you’ve ever given me,” he said.

  She found herself blushing, looked out the window.

  “I’m going to stand on the plate with the engineers,” he said abruptly, opened the forward door and disappeared.

  The train had crossed a wide river on a bridge before he came back; ahead of it now lay a barrier of tall hills.

  “That was the Nepean River,” he said, “so it’s time to open a window. Our train has to climb a gradient so steep that it has to zigzag back and forth. Within the length of much less than a straight mile, we will ascend a thousand feet, rising one foot for every thirty feet traveled.”

  Even at their much reduced speed, opening a window was ruinous to one’s clothes; big particles of soot flew in and landed everywhere. But it was fascinating, especially when the track curved and she could see the locomotive laboring, black smoke pouring out of its chimney in huge billows, the rods attached to its big wheels driving them around. Occasionally the wheels would slip on the rails, losing traction in a flurry of staccato puffs, and at the end of the first zigzag the train went up the next slope backward, the caboose leading and the locomotive bringing up the rear.

  “The number of reversals has the locomotive leading again at the top,” he explained. “The zigzag is a very clever idea that finally enabled the Government to build a railroad over the Blue Mountains, which aren’t mountains at all. We’re ascending what is called a dissected plateau. On the far side we descend on another zigzag. If these were real mountains we could travel in the valleys and go through the watershed in a tunnel—a far easier exercise that would have opened up the fertile growing country in the west decades ago. New South Wales yields nothing easily, nor do the other colonies of Australia. So when the Blue Mountains were finally conquered, the men who worked out how to do it had to abandon all their European-based theories.”