“Wattle,” he said.
“Golden wattle,” she corrected.
“You’re right.”
“Did you know,” she began, “that the seedlings from a golden wattle can live for up to fifty years?”
“That so?”
“That’s a long time.”
“It is.”
“How old are you?”
“Younger than fifty.” He was thirty-six, in fact.
“Wattle seeds are germinated by bushfires.” Evie Turner nodded with vague disdain toward her parents, still engaged in heated discussion in the distance. “She’sfrightened of bushfires. That’s because she’s English. But I’m not. I’m Australian and golden wattles are my favorite flower and I’m not going to live in England no matter whatshethinks.”
With that, before Percy had a chance to tell her that golden wattles were his favorite, too, she’d run off to join the adults, sun-browned legs leaping over fallen logs with the expertise of one who seemed more familiar with this lonely place than she ought to be.
Percy shook the memory away. It was replaced, despite his best efforts, with an image of the same child lying still and silent as the grave on a picnic blanket that very afternoon, a line of ants crawling over her skinny wrist. A surge of sickness overwhelmed him, and he planted his palm against the smooth wet trunk of a gum, retching hard.
The fertile smell of rain and earth mingled with other rich, secretive bushland scents. With a swipe at his chin, Percy pressed on, eager now to get away from this place, away from the memories of that little girl and the warring couple and the nagging sense of disquiet he carried about Merlin Stamp. Finally, he reached the edge of the woods and emerged where the Onkaparinga Valley Road made its narrowest bend. On the other side was the beginning of Willner Road. Percy came to a standstill, deliberating for a moment, and then he crossed over.
He didn’t follow the road, choosing instead to slip beneath the fence and onto Turner land. The route was longer, but more concealed. He knew now why he was walking. He knew what he was doing out, what he was looking for. He was retracing his steps in the hope that he might find the little wooden wren. After so much loss today, the need to possess it again was imperative. It was a gift, chosen with love, and it was out there in the darkness somewhere. He imagined that he could hear the rapid quiver of small wings, its tiny heart. Most likely he had lost it at the spot where he had knelt, stumbled backward, where his thoughts had begun to multiply and collide and break.
The ground was wet and the grass long, but Percy moved swiftly. The wind had died down now; the storm had settled into a lull. He skirted around the edge of the foothills, sticking to the hard-beaten cow paths that cut across the undulating slopes. To his right, the land rose steeply, sweeping up to the plateau at the top. Old Mr. Wentworth had come from a family of seamen; it was no surprise that he’d chosen the highest ground on which to build his home.
Percy stopped walking and looked back toward the town. There was very little to see: here and there the faint glow of a solitary light. He hoped that Meg was still asleep. She’d been exhausted, having spent most of the night fussing and worrying. He didn’t want her to wake and wonder where he was. He didn’t want her to know that he’d been out. He just wanted to find the carved wren and take it home.
Meg would have liked six kids. She’d loved their boys as babies; she’d been a natural, even during the difficulties with Marcus. Sitting up at night when they were ill, nursing them when they were struggling to sleep. She’d had a knack, a real baby charmer. Many times, Percy had frowned with fearful incomprehension at the irate mewling face of the tiny creature in his arms, refusing to settle no matter how he rocked or patted, only to hand the little one to Meg and have the crying ease at once.
Once Marcus had settled into himself, she announced that she was ready for another. Percy wasn’t in the habit of denying her the things she desired, though privately he’d worried. It was a daughter she wanted, he knew, even though she never would’ve said it out loud. “Happy with whatever God sees fit to give me,” she always insisted, “so long as the baby’s healthy.” But he’d seen the way she watched the little girls at church, a fond smile on her face as she admired their hair and their manners, shooting a glance sideways at their boys and laying a careful, warning hand on the nearest one’s knee, lest he forget where he was and start brawling.
He’d noticed, too, the way she kept adding to that glory box of hers. The hand-carved wooden chest, with its smell of ancient European forests, was the only thing she’d insisted on keeping from the shack by the river that passed for a family home when she was growing up. That, and the old book of family recipes. Both had come from Germany with the Lutheran ancestors on her mother’s side, when they boarded a boat alongside the other sick, broke, and hungry willing to roll the dice and gamble on a better life in an unknown country on the opposite side of the world.
Inside the chest, Meg had amassed a trove of treasured items. The boys’ best articles of clothing, once outgrown; a bisque doll with an exquisite painted face; a miniature Blue Willow tea set; a guilloche hairbrush and hand mirror. Her prize possession, though, and one she took out to inspect when she thought he wasn’t watching, was a collection of soft pink cashmere balls of yarn, purchased at greatexpense when they made their trip to Sydney some months after they’d lost their little girl. “I’ve got a feeling, Perce,” Meg had said earnestly, as she clutched the bag from the haberdasher’s. “One of these days we’ll be glad we bought them; you’ll see.”
Alas, they had not been blessed with another child after Marcus, boy or girl. Percy felt guilty about this. Even though he knew it was superstitious rubbish, he felt as if the fates, God, whoever it was that decided such things, had known that his heart wasn’t in it. Sometimes he even wondered whether it was his fault, with his hankering to live a different life, that they’d lost the first. Meg had taken it stoically. Each year that passed, she’d softened her language around the subject, until Marcus turned ten and she put the matter to rest. That’s when she started saying, “Never let yourself get outnumbered!” as cheerfully and as often as she could. “Children are God’s gift, but two’s my limit.”
Funny enough, it was around that time, as Marcus came good and Meg let go, that Percy started to feel the lack of another. As the boys got older, he began to glimpse how brief the window was before they drifted away and family life as he knew it—the fishing trips, the laughter and ribbing around the dinner table, the line of boots he was always tripping over by the door—would be over.
Lightning whitened the sky and a long, low howl, like a dingo’s call, reverberated across the foothills. It was as if the two had conspired to jolt him from his introspection, reminding him that he was out here for a reason, with limited time remaining before the skies reopened and rain began bucketing down.
He started walking again, his torch lighting the way ahead. A second howl came, desperate and raw, matched this time by a rumble of thunder that rolled around the hills. He quickened his pace as another flash of lightning illuminated a great dark shape beforehim: the hollow tree, a local landmark known by all the kids. The ancient gum had a trunk so wide you could walk right through the center, a clearing large enough for a group of eight—nine or ten at a squeeze—to shelter from the rain. A traveling bush poet had written a poem about it once, which, in Tambilla’s great claim to fame, had wound up in theSydney Morning Herald. Meg kept a yellowed copy of the poem, trimmed from the newspaper, on the wall behind the register, because it mentioned the “sturdy shoulder of the good shopkeep of Tam-billa”—a moniker she wore like a badge of honor, even though the poem had been written about another shopkeeper, a century before.
Meg was exactly the sort of person the poet had described. After those six children she’d expected failed to show, she became mother to the town, always busy in the evenings knitting a pair of bootees for this new baby, or a jumper for that scrappy child she reckoned could use it. A couple of winters before, Percy had glanced around the congregation at church one Sunday and counted no fewer than nine children wearing Meg’s creations.
It wasn’t just the children, either: people were always dropping into the shop to tell her their problems. She’d listen with that kind, focused expression of hers, never leaping to talk over the other person, and then she’d call Percy, or one of the boys, to take over at the counter. “I’m just going out back to have a cuppa with my friend here,” she’d say, before disappearing with whichever local woman had come in need that day.
Even Isabel Turner had sat across the flimsy card table in the back room of the shop, sharing a pot of tea with Meg. That must have been around the time Percy had seen her in the woods near Merlin Stamp’s. Meg hadn’t mentioned what they’d talked about, other than to offer the general observation that she was “homesick, poor thing.” His wife never divulged a confidence; she was a secret keeper, all right, the good shopkeep of Tambilla. But he’d noticed Isabel Turnerdabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief and nodding as Meg spoke to her in a quiet voice.
By the time Percy reached the picnic site, his vision had adjusted to the dark and he could make out the shape of the willow tree by the water hole. He couldn’t help turning to look down the hill to where he and Blaze had been walking earlier, when he’d chanced to spot the Turner family.
Even without the torch, Percy could tell that the place where the Turners had been was a mess. He switched on the feeble light and surveyed the area. There was no sign of the wren. The storm had been heavy, the sort of rain he’d heard about them having up in the tropical north of the country. Where policemen and photographers had walked back and forth earlier was now a mudslide, with not a single footstep visible. The picnic items had been removed by someone, the Turners taken away. The morgue, Percy knew, was down in Adelaide, in the middle of the city, and the thought of them all down there, cold bodies waiting in the dark, made him retch again. It was a nightmare.
His torchlight grazed the base of the willow and he noticed that the crib was also gone. Someone had taken it down. Returned it to the house, he supposed. The earth was churned up beneath the tree, but less rain-affected than elsewhere. If only he’d gone to look inside the basket that afternoon. If he’d looked then, he might have seen the baby still sleeping and taken her down to the Hughes house with him, kept her safe until the police could be told and arrangements made for her care. He hated to think of the search that had yielded nothing, the party out so long once the rain had started falling, a child without her mother.
