He continued west into the afternoon sun, but on the outskirts of Tambilla encouraged Blaze away from the street and down a steep grassy gully. The creek was narrow here, a tributary of the Onkaparinga River that rose in the foothills of Mount Lofty and wound its way through the valley. Blaze met the water gladly, nosing the reeds as she continued downstream. She reached the gap where the wire-and-wood fence had pulled away from its post and Percy hesitated briefly before giving her a small prod of consent. He was on Turner land now, but the house itself was still some distance away.
It was from this very direction that he’d approached the house the first time he saw it. Funny—he hadn’t thought back to that day in years. He’d been thirteen years old, returning to the shop after making a delivery. The polio might have taken away his speed on the cricket pitch, but up on Prince, his father’s horse, he was no different from anyone else. His father had approved wholeheartedly—anything was better than finding his son inside with a book in hand—and took it a step further by offering Percy after-school work.
On horseback he could cover all of Hahndorf, out as far as Nairne, and then back toward Balhannah and Verdun. Piccadilly Valley strained things a bit, but his father was never one to turn down anorder, so Percy just learned to ride faster. He was supposed to take the most direct route, but Percy always went cross-country. This was his place, these hills his home, and he loved them.
There were hardly any houses on Willner Road, and never any deliveries to make, but he went out of his way to ride along it because he liked the smell of wattle, and the road was lined with large, silvery-green bushes that erupted with yellow pompoms each August. It was late in the season, but on this particular day, in this particular year, there was still an abundance. Percy had taken a deep breath, savoring the sensation of the sun on his shirt and the pleasant earthy fragrance of eucalyptus and soil and sun-warmed flowers, and he’d leaned forward to lie across Prince’s broad back, letting the rhythm of the horse’s gait lull him like a baby in its mother’s arms. In such a way he traveled for some time, until a call overhead drew his attention.
He blinked up toward the sheer, bright sky, where a couple of wedge-tailed eagles were turning lazy wheels together on the warm thermal currents. He followed them with his eyes before encouraging Prince onto the verge, through the gap in the fence, and onward in the direction of the pair. The top of the hill above which they were circling was covered with dense foliage. Percy began to wonder whether he might discover their nest. He’d heard that there’d been eagles sighted up near Cudlee Creek, but he’d never known them to settle this far south.
As Prince proceeded boldly uphill through the lank lean gums, Percy scanned their highest limbs. He was looking for a platform made from sticks and covered with leaves. Glancing between the lattice of branches and the sky—determined not to lose the eagles themselves—he didn’t initially realize that he had crossed an invisible line into a different type of terrain. It was the altered sound that caught his attention first, as if a domed lid had been lowered and the canopy had suddenly drawn closer.
There had been a profound shift in the foliage around him, too, he now noticed. The run of gums and long yellowing grass had beeninfiltrated by other vegetation, so that silver trunks mingled with thick woody oaks, textured elms and cedars. Tangled brambles covered the ground and leafy creepers scrambled upward, stretching between the trees so that it was difficult to find a large enough break through which to glimpse the sky.
The temperature had dropped by degrees within the shaded world. Birds were chattering to one another above him, silvereyes and lorikeets, swallows and honeyeaters and wrens. The whole place was teeming with life, but there was little chance, he realized, of spotting his eagles’ nest.
He was turning Prince around to head back into town when a light caught his eye. The afternoon sun had hit something beyond the trees, causing it to shine like a torch through a gap. Curious, Percy urged Prince onward up the dense, wooded slope. He felt like a character in a book. He thought of Mary Lennox as she discovered her secret garden.
The blackberry bushes had become too thick to ride through and Percy dismounted, leaving Prince beneath the shade of a thick-trunked oak tree. He chose a strong whip of wood and started carving his way through the knotted vines. He was no longer a boy whose legs didn’t always do as he wished; he was Sir Gawain on the lookout for the Green Knight, Lord Byron on his way to fight a duel, Beowulf leading an army upon Grendel. So keen was his focus on his swordplay that he didn’t realize at first that he’d emerged from the forested area and was standing now on what must once have been the top of a gravel driveway.
Looming above him was not so much a house as a castle. Two enormous floors, with mammoth rectangular windows along each face and an elaborate stone balustrade of Corinthian columns running around all four sides of its flat roof. He thought at once of Pemberley, and half expected to see Mr. Darcy come striding through the big double doors, riding crop tucked beneath his arm as he jogged downthe stone steps that widened in an elegant sweep as they reached the turning circle where he stood.
He knew then what this place was. This was the house that Mr. Wentworth had built. It was a ridiculous folly, most people said, a grand stone hall like that, out here in the middle of nowhere. Only love or madness, they said, or perhaps a good dose of each, could have inspired a man to envisage—let alone build—such a house. There was no shortage of impressive stone dwellings in the Hills; from the earliest days of the South Australian settlement, the wealthy gentry had snapped up land on which to build country residences where they could wait out the summer in a kinder climate. But this house was like nothing Percy had seen before.
Mr. Wentworth had had the plans drawn up in London and tradesmen shipped all the way from England. The cost had been astronomical—forty times the price of the next best house in South Australia. Imagine spending all of that money, people whispered incredulously, only to end up rattling around alone in an enormous monstrosity.
Percy agreed that the house was enormous—no one with eyes could argue against that—but he didn’t think it a monster. On the contrary. It reminded him of the illustration on the frontispiece of his favorite book.
After that first day, he returned whenever he could. He didn’t tell his friends about the house. Not at first. A strange, possessive feeling came over him whenever he thought about it. The house had chosen to show itself tohim.But being the sole keeper of such a tremendous secret soon became a burden, and he grew tired of being alone, and the value of the news was irresistible and got the better of him. He regretted the disclosure as soon as it was made. His friends wanted to race up to the house immediately. They wanted to see it for themselves, to go inside. When they smashed the window to gain entry, Percy felt the breakage like a wound.
Once or twice, he’d followed his mates inside. Most of the furniture that Wentworth had ordered and shipped from England was still there, covered with dust sheets. A large portrait of the old man hung on the wall above the stairs. Percy had sensed the eyes of the painting upon him—accusatory, betrayed—and he’d felt ashamed. Later, when he learned the story of Edward Wentworth, he realized why. The house had been built for love, but the young woman who’d inspired it had died from sunstroke on the sea voyage out to Australia. Mr. Wentworth, who’d been waiting for her on the dock in Adelaide when the news arrived, never regained himself, bolting the doors so as to remain alone with his grief. The house became a shrine to his broken heart.
Eventually, Percy’s friends grew tired of the place and moved on to new adventures. Percy, too, became busier: he married Meg, they took over the shop, and then there was the war. Next thing he heard about the house was that a fellow from Sydney had bought it. Turner was his name, and once the war ended, word spread around the town that he and his English wife would be moving in that spring.
That had been fourteen years ago now. There’d been a lot of changes to the place since then. The land had been cleared and the bones of Wentworth’s garden discovered within the wildness and restored. Tradesmen, local and otherwise, had been engaged, and a great deal of money spent (or so the local rumor mill went) to bring the house itself back to order.
Percy had been up there many times with groceries, and never failed to marvel, as he made his way around the graceful curves of the restored driveway, at the transformation. Sometimes, when he stopped to let Blaze catch her breath at the westernmost point of the climb, he would gaze up through the formal gardens toward the house and admire the verdant sweep of lawn and stone walls, the crabapples and camellias, and for a split second, if he let his eyes glaze, he would glimpseinstead—as if through a veil—the overgrown, primordial approach as it had been for so long before the Turners had come...
But he wasn’t going near the house today. Blaze had no interest in the climb up Wentworth Hill and Percy hadn’t the time. He loosened the horse’s reins and followed her lead. He knew where she was going. The old girl was making her way north to a place she loved, where the willow-lined banks widened, and the riverbed grew deep enough to form a water hole, perfect for swimming.
The first thing he saw that was out of the ordinary was the jaunty flag suspended from a branch of the largest willow tree.
Percy pulled Blaze up short and lifted his hand against the sun. The scene came into focus. Several folks were lying beneath the tree, he realized, on blankets, and with baskets nearby. They were having a picnic. In the tree, along with the flag, someone had threaded a paper Christmas chain from branch to branch.
Percy was mildly surprised. In the middle of summer, at that point in the waxing afternoon, most sensible people were inside, doing their best to escape the heat; he hadn’t expected to come across anyone out here. He stroked Blaze’s warm neck, deliberating. He was trespassing, and although he knew they wouldn’t mind—Mrs. Turner herself had invited him to cut across the paddocks whenever he was running deliveries—he didn’t want to be seen to be overstepping the mark, taking advantage of her kindness. Like any man in town, he’d been made nervous by Mrs. Turner when she first arrived. New people rarely moved to Tambilla, let alone to take up residence at the Wentworth place, and she was refined, dignified, very English.
He ought to turn around and leave. But if she were to wake and see him slinking away—well, wouldn’t that be worse? More incriminating somehow?
Later—and he would be asked many times over the days, weeks, and years ahead, including in the coming hours by the policemen intheir interviews—he would say that a sixth sense had told him things were not quite as they seemed. Privately, he would wonder whether that was right; whether the scene had really seemed eerie or he simply remembered it that way because of what came next.
All he knew for sure was that, faced with the choice, he had given Blaze a gentle nudge and started toward the Turner family beneath the willow tree.
The sleeping children, he remembered thinking, looked like the etchings in his mother’s precious family Bible, brought with her grandparents when they emigrated from Liverpool. Beautiful children they were, even the boy, John. Blond curls, like their father must have had when he was a child, and striking sea-blue eyes—all except the eldest girl, Matilda, whose dark hair and green eyes made her the spitting image of her mother. He knew Matilda a little. She had been in Kurt’s class at school since they were small, and lately the two had become sweet on one another. She was lying in the shade nearest the tree trunk, her straw hat on the ground beside her. The warm wind ruffled the hem of her skirt. Her feet were bare.
The other two children were on the blanket with their mother, wearing trunks with towels wrapped around their middles as if to dry off. John was on his back, while the girl, Evie, was curled up on her side, her right arm outstretched. Percy was reminded of the many times he’d taken his boys swimming—in the creeks and lakes of the Hills, but also down at the beach, to Port Willunga and Goolwa and the other places that his own father had taken him when he was a boy, to fish and hunt for pipis. He could almost feel the happy post-swim drowsiness that came from having sun-dried skin.
An old-fashioned wicker crib hung from the straightest bough of the willow. It was Meg who’d told him that Mrs. Turner had finally been delivered. They’d just come in from church a month ortwo before and she’d stopped at the hall mirror to unpin her hat and straighten her hair.
“Did you hear that Mrs. Turner’s had her baby?” she’d called after Percy, who was by then in the kitchen filling the kettle. “Tiny little thing with a serious face.”
