“But with a really long neck.”
“And fins.”
“But also a snout.”
“That hides in the swamp—”
“—andgrabschildren if they come too near.”
The story had given her chills, but of recognition rather than fear. Mythical though the creature might have been, inherent in her children’s description was a recognizable truth about this place: the uncomfortable but certain sense that danger, the unknown, was always lurking in the dark spaces “out there.” This continent was one where beauty and terror were inextricably linked. People died here from thirst if they took a wrong turn. A single spark of fire could grow to consume an entire town. Children who wandered beyond the back fence disappeared into thin air.
***
3
As the morning lightened and the fog began to thin, Mrs. Turner set her journal on the wicker table. She scratched Barnaby’s golden head and he stirred to attention. Taking her teacup with her, she gathered the kitchen scrap bucket from the spot near the eastern door where young Becky Baker had left it the day before. Two lines of plane trees stretched up the rise from the house, rounding a bend to arrive at the farm sheds near the bore tank. Halfway along, beside a small sunny garden bed, was the chicken coop. The Hen Hilton, Mr. Turner had christened it, having stayed at the new Hilton hotel in West Berlin the year before.
Barnaby lolloped ahead, looping back to rejoin his mistress, who was walking with less haste than usual, stopping every so often to inspect the garden. She had never gardened in England and hadtaken to it at Halcyon with a zeal that surprised her. Glossy agapanthus spears lined the gravel driveway, their purple spangles erupting with exultant cheer, and on the other side of the fence, beyond the greenhouse with its broken pane (care of John’s ongoing obsession with Australia’s homegrown cricket champion, Donald Bradman), fields of yellow grass shimmered in the morning light. It was still a shock to see them empty. She had loved the optimism and purpose of the vines, but her husband, immovable once his mind was made up, had insisted on the change.
She wondered sometimes what Mr. Drumming thought of the new direction—it was he, after all, who had poured his energies as farm manager into the vines for the past decade. But for all the private frustration she felt toward her husband, Mrs. Turner would never have asked the manager outright, and Mr. Drumming was not one to offer an opinion unsought.
He was a well-liked fellow, with a reputation in the village for keeping his business to himself. No need to share it, of course; in a place the size of Tambilla there was a good chance one’s business was already known. But Henrik Drumming’s reserve went beyond the constitutional. His habit of silence was philosophical. He carried in the serious lines of his face and the enduring set of his shoulders a history of personal grief.
Mrs. Turner had gleaned the story of his wife via the same system of community osmosis by which she knew that Miss Marian Green at the telephone exchange had been sent away for a month the summer she turned seventeen, only to return with a picture of her new baby “niece” in a locket around her neck. More than mere gossip, this was a vital underground flow of information that strengthened the community by letting its members know when and to whom they ought to be extending extra understanding and assistance. So Mrs. Turner had come to recognize the dates each year on which Mr. Drumming requested a late start, and to anticipate his drawn and sober mood when he arrived for work.
Only once had she breached their tacit agreement not to admit the matter. She had come across him accidentally in the manager’s office at the back of the house, a terrible sight, his back turned, his lean shoulders visible through the thin cotton of his shirt, shaking as he wept. She’d failed to close the door without drawing attention; he’d stumbled in providing an explanation, and she’d said, very quickly, with the wave of a hand, “Please, Mr. Drumming. My mother suffered from a similar affliction to your wife. You have my deepest sympathies.”
Mrs. Turner followed the narrow herringbone-brick path that ran behind the yew hedge and finished at the gate. The henhouse was almost obscured by the rich green leaves of a Virginia creeper, interwoven in places with a thorny deep-red rose. Sensing her proximity, Dickens the rooster let out a rousing crow. He was a relatively new addition, and his proud, demanding nature had been the cause of some unsettlement lately in the coop. He’d taken to foisting his attentions on the smaller of the Araucana hens when she was least expecting to receive them.
Mrs. Turner had a great affection for her girls and a deep antipathy toward the aggressive overtures of the cock, but she couldn’t deny he’d kept his harem safe. There’d been wild dogs skulking for the last few months, and one dreadful night, before the arrival of the rooster, they’d managed to breach the wire fence and help themselves to two of the hens. One had been carried away, never to be found, while the other—Evie’s favorite—had been left behind in a ghastly state. Mrs. Turner and the children had buried the discarded body in the garden, performing a short ceremony before planting a delicate pink-and-white floribunda over the top of the small hen’s corpse. Evie, stoic in grief, had read a poem she’d written about “Henny” in honor of the occasion, and Becky Baker had served tea afterward, along with ribbon sandwiches—cucumber and, in an acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation, Meg Summers’s famous fish paste, the latter allowed by special permission from Mrs. Turner’s very own supply.
Now, Mrs. Turner balanced her teacup on the corner of the garden bed, where the wooden railway sleepers met. She unlatched the henhouse gate and scattered yesterday’s kitchen scraps in the yard. The hens, released from their overnight roosting boxes, clucked and tumbled their way toward the bounty, pecking determinedly through the spoils as Dickens strutted the perimeter, ruffling his feathers. They were all present and accounted for this morning, thank goodness.
Locking the gate behind her, Mrs. Turner collected her teacup and started back along the path. The fog had lifted now, and the day was warming. Sunlight glowed orange through the lacework of slender eucalyptus trees that lined the ridge to the east, and in the vegetable garden, directly across the driveway, pale purple garlic flowers swayed at the top of their stems. The sweet scent of basil reached her with the breeze and, on a whim, Mrs. Turner crossed the driveway to inspect the beds. The four square planters were set like windowpanes and divided by truncating brick paths, each box overflowing with carefully-tended strawberries, tomatoes, and spinach, as well as copious herbs. A row of bay trees lined the back wall of the garden, either side of a wooden arch trailing white wisteria flowers.
A sundial marked the middle of the garden, standing where the paths crisscrossed, and in the far back corner a wooden bench beneath the shade of a crabapple tree was home to the whimsical flowerpot man.
“Mrs. Turner came up with the design,” Mr. Drumming was to tell police in the days that followed. He had been deeply affected by her death, and though a private man by nature, not given to speaking out of turn, was determined that she should be remembered well. “I had to work out how to thread the terra-cotta pots onto the metal rods to make limbs and then solder it all together, but it washer idea. Mrs. Turner thought it would amuse the children. She was always thinking of them. They were well loved, those kids. I tell you: they were well loved.”
As Mrs. Turner took what would be her last walk around the vegetable garden, Smarty, the ginger tabby, materialized to sit beside the flowerpot man, a position that afforded him a bird’s-eye view of thepetitfishpond. There was a larger, more formal water feature on the western side of the house, a rectangular pool with a leafy canopy above it and marble tiles around the rim, well-fed goldfish gleaming beneath glistening lily pads, but this little pond was far more cheerful: small and shallow, with fallen petals floating on its surface. The cat’s focus was absolute as he watched for flickers of rose gold in the water, paw at the ready.
But Mrs. Turner was paying no notice to the cat. From where she stood, at the highest corner of the vegetable garden, she was able to see through a break in the yew hedge to the eastern wall of the house. The rising sun had flooded the white render, giving it the temporary sheen she’d sometimes likened to the iced edge of a wedding cake. The cake her husband’s parents had organized for their wedding reception in the gardens of Darling House in Sydney had been similarly grand and glossy. There’d been much tense discussion in preceding weeks as to how many tiers the cake should have, one view being that three layers was traditional. But the groom’s mother had been set on four: “If it’s good enough for the Queen of England,” she’d said, “then it’s good enough for me.” With Isabel disinclined to argue over cake, the older woman had prevailed.
It had occurred to Isabel Turner, at certain times over the course of her marriage, that antipodeans were more concerned with tradition and its observation than any of the so-called aristocrats she’d known in England. She had written letters home to old school friends in which she’d said she thought she was coming to a countrywhere she’d be free from the weight of her past; she’d been eager, after the war, for something new and different. It had surprised her to hear so much talk when she arrived about the way things were done “back home,” particularly from people who’d never left Australia. The romance around stately houses struck her similarly. Her husband was far more impressed than she was by the history of their home.
It was a not-altogether-comfortable thing to live in a house built to woo another woman. Mrs. Turner thought about the ill-fated Miss Stevenson sometimes. A young bride-to-be who had never made it to Australia, let alone this house, and yet whose doomed presence seemed to animate every corner. Mrs. Turner had wondered whether the reason she’d never felt completely at home was because the home had never really belonged to her. How could it, when every stone and cornice had been put in place with another woman in mind?
The Turners had called the house “Halcyon” in an attempt to “make it their own.” The name had been Mr. Turner’s idea, and one to which he’d become very attached. Indeed, he had already placed his order with Galloway Bros. Signwriters in Double Bay when he presented the name to his wife for her consideration. She had agreed without debate—as with the number of tiers on the wedding cake, she cared little what they called the house, and a great deal, at the time, for him. The suggestion had seemed to her romantic, very much in keeping with his nature; it was this nature, after all, that had attracted her in the first place, shining as it had, like a rare and precious gem, in the grime of wartime London.
He had proclaimed his grand plan to her during the first supper they shared, on the very night they’d met by chance in October 1944 in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge. She had been walking, he had asked directions, and somehow she’d found herself some hours later sitting across from him at a table in an underground club, the likesof which she hadn’t known existed anymore. He was Australian, on leave and eager for the war to end so he could go back home. She’d asked what his plans were when he got there.
Without the merest hint of a gloat, he’d told her about the fortune he’d come into in the early years of the war. Imprisoned in France, he’d found himself in the same cell as a wounded English officer; when he decided it was time to break out, he’d taken the other man with him. “It would have been rude not to,” he said modestly, by way of explanation. He hadn’t realized that “old mate” was the “Duke of something-or-other” until he was back in England, recuperating at the RAF hospital in Ely. A gray-haired woman “draped in furs and strings of pearls” had appeared at his bedside one day and said, “Is this him?” to someone over his shoulder. “Apparently, I was,” he said. “Turned out old mate was her eldest son and his father’s heir. What are the chances of that?”
Thomas Turner had been rewarded with a small fortune and somehow, in his telling, it made perfect sense that he should have used this newfound wealth to buy a manor house and plant a vineyard on the outskirts of a town in South Australia that he was still yet to visit.
And so, Halcyon it was. But a name is just a name, wishing does not make it so, and the township of Tambilla was home to many people with prodigious memories. Thus, it had not taken long after their arrival for Mrs. Turner to learn the sad tale of Miss Arabella Stevenson. Wherever Isabel went in those early months, to church or to a meeting of the local Country Women’s Association, someone was eager to tell the tragic tale of the house into which she had moved. The locals enjoyed what they saw as a kinship between the two women. Both English, each having left her homeland with the intention of living in the grand house on the edge of their town. It didn’t matter how profusely Mrs. Turner denied feeling any such tie to the stranger who had died at sea before she herself had even been born; the community had spoken.
Fourteen years later, in the aftermath of “that Christmas Eve,” the evergreen idea that the fates of the two women were entwined was to gain new currency.
