so surprised?” His expression conveyed his reaction. “She lost her father, and now she’s lost her mother, Gran.” Emotion tightened his striking features.
He’s never forgotten her, Ruth thought. The knowledge made her feel more vulnerable and frightened than she’d ever felt in her life. What if he found out? What if Sarah suddenly decided to tell him? Well, if Sarah tried it, she wouldn’t know what she was letting herself in for.
“I did my level best to help her, Kyall. I didn’t have to pay for her education, then send her on to medical school. Sometimes I think I was a damned fool. She’s never appreciated it. One doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Muriel was the same, even though I put plenty in her pocket. She didn’t have to continue to work at that shop. She wanted to.”
“Why exactly did you do it, Gran?”
Shocked, she detected an undertone of bitterness and skepticism in the way he said it. “I carried on from your grandfather and his father before him. The McQueens are philanthropists. Isn’t that the truth?”
“When it’s worth it to you.”
“Kyall!” his mother gasped, her strong-featured, aristocratic face turning pale.
“Mum, must you always be such a hypocrite?” he asked coldly. “Let it go. This news has upset me if it hasn’t upset you.”
Ruth’s glittering black gaze flickered. “I can scarcely believe that my grandson, my splendid grandson, never in awe of me or our fortune, can’t escape that girl. Did she steal your heart, my boy?” For once Ruth allowed herself to show her contempt for Sarah.
Kyall stood up, the last rays of the sinking sun striking blue out of his raven hair and turning his skin gold. “Don’t overplay your hand, Gran. You have a tendency to do that, but I’m not one who’s going to listen.”
“Kyall, darling, don’t!” his mother pleaded, stretching out a hand that shook slightly with nervous tension.
“I certainly never meant to hurt you, Kyall,” Ruth said, aware that someplace inside her was trembling, as well.
“But that’s your problem, Gran,” Kyall said, standing up and turning away, not waiting for her answer. “You do hurt people.”
Normally charming, courteous, above all a gentleman, he spoke like a man who could say anything he wanted to.
These next few days were going to be terrible, Ruth thought. She could hardly have foreseen that Muriel Dempsey would die so soon.
CHAPTER TWO
A FUNERAL WAS an opportunity for the whole town to come together, to reaffirm the bush tradition of “mateship,” of offering real comfort and support in times of trouble and grief.
Father Bartholomew of the Aerial Ministry conducted the service, talking about Muriel Dempsey and her late husband, Jock, in a way that Sarah really appreciated. She’d known Father Bartholomew all her life. He had never failed to give Sarah and her mother comfort and hope. Father Bartholomew was a man you could really talk to, laugh with, whose shoulder you could cry on.
There were no tears today. Sarah sat in the front pew of the small all-denominational church, her features composed. In her short years as an intern and then in private practice, she had seen many tragic things. Everybody lost a loved one at some time or other, many of them far too early—children with terminal leukemia, young women with breast cancer, adolescents overdosing on drugs, young drivers involved in horrific road accidents. She had seen and attended them all. That was part of her profession, what she believed with all her heart was a noble calling.
But this was different. This was saying her final goodbye to her cherished mother. The one who’d loved her absolutely, unconditionally.
Her mother. So lovely. Her mother had always called her “my angel.” Her long mane of curly blond hair, Sarah supposed, plus she’d never been a moody, rebellious child. She and her mother had been too crucially interdependent to allow disharmony into their lives. They’d been mutually supportive and caring. Her mother had continued to call her “my angel” even when she’d had to confess in floods of tears that she was pregnant.
My Rose. I, too, would’ve had a girl. I would’ve had a wonderful, meaningful relationship. Little more than a child she’d been, but she had really wanted her baby. The child in Kyall’s image. Rose Red. Just like in the old fairy tales. She had since learned that everyone had to cope with dreadful losses over a lifetime, but it was something that shouldn’t have happened to her at fifteen.
Joe had tried to talk her out of attending her mother’s cremation. He and Sister Bradley would act as witnesses. But she intended to be with her mother to the very end. Afterward she would borrow Joe’s vehicle to drive out into the desert to scatter her mother’s ashes. She knew where. Around a particularly beautiful ghost gum that had held some special message for her mother. Sarah never knew what.
She would’ve given anything to be talked out of the wake, but she knew she had to go. Her mother had many, many good friends in the town. Attending the wake was expected. Harriet, that eternal tower of strength, had arranged it at her place. “Harriet’s Villa,” the town had always called it. A building considerably grander than those usually allotted to an outback town’s schoolteacher. Convincing evidence of Harriet Crompton’s regal, no-nonsense presence. The villa was really a classic old Queenslander with the usual enveloping verandas, lacework balustrades and valances. As a child Sarah had loved it. What made the villa truly extraordinary was Miss Crompton’s remarkable collection of native artifacts. She’d gathered them from all over—the Australian outback, New Guinea, where she’d been reared by her English parents on a coffee plantation, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, which she’d visited in her youth. There was hardly a field of learning Harriet didn’t know about or couldn’t talk intelligently about. She was an inveterate reader with an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Miss Crompton—she hadn’t become Harriet until a few years ago—had sensed the day after Sarah and Kyall had made love that something new had taken over her favorite student’s life. Sarah had sometimes thought Miss Crompton had sensed the very day she knew she was pregnant. Certainly Miss Crompton had said Sarah could come to her at any time if she needed help.
“My door is always open to you, Sarah. Whatever problems we experience in life, we can get through them with friends.”
She was two and a half months pregnant, her body as slim and supple as ever, showing no outward changes, when Ruth McQueen put a name to her condition and in so doing put a name to her.
“You little slut! What were you thinking of? What were you and your mother thinking of? That you’d trap my grandson? As though I’d allow it for one minute! It’s unthinkable. You’ll go away and you’ll stay away. You have no future here.”
What did it concern her that the baby was someone she and Ruth McQueen’s adored grandson had created together?
“I’ll protect my grandson in any way I have to. Understand me. I’m a powerful woman. Do you think I’ll listen to your stupid prattle about loving Kyall? This will ruin him, bring him and my family down. It will never happen. You’ll go away if I have to drag you off myself. If you truly love my grandson, you’ll recognize that this pregnancy has the potential to destroy his life. God almighty, girl, he’s only sixteen! Do you think I’m going to allow him to waste his life on someone like you? You’re fortunate you haven’t told him your little secret, or God knows what I’d do.”
Sarah hadn’t doubted then, nor did she now, that Ruth McQueen would have taken drastic steps to shut her up. But basically it had come down to one thing. She did love Kyall. His happiness was very important to her. She’d never seen them in terms of a committed relationship; their backgrounds were too far removed. She’d accepted what Ruth McQueen and to a certain extent her own mother had told her. Exquisitely painful as it was, it would be better for her, for her baby and for Kyall if the child was adopted out to a suitable young couple who would give it a good, loving home.
She remembered