“Irish?”
“Who else?” Molly went back to her rolling. “It’s his station. Knows every inch of it. He can’t go everywhere these days, not that he doesn’t want to, but that contraption he rides in will take him most places.”
“You mean his wheelchair?”
“I mean his buggy.”
Irish was surprised by Lydia’s request to accompany her. He also accepted with such alacrity that Lydia knew Molly had been right to suggest it. Lydia’s mount was a ginger mare, sure-footed, the men in the stable said, and responsive to light handling. Jack and Pooley saddled the mare for her, tripping over each other in their eagerness to help. Harnessing Irish’s gray gelding and hitching the specially made, one-seater buggy was accomplished with much less fanfare. He was lifted easily into his seat and given his buggy whip. There was no fussing, a situation he would have abhorred, as a wool rug was placed over his legs.
“It’s not a bad way to travel,” Irish told Lydia as they rode over the bridge, “but I get a little tired of staring at Horatio’s hindquarters, if you take my meaning.”
Lydia took his meaning very well. His buggy was low to the ground, more like a racing sulky. It was supported by two large narrow wheels at the rear and tilted backward so that Irish sat at a restful angle rather than stiffly upright. In order to see precisely where he was going he had to look to the left or right of his horse; mostly he just gave Horatio a general direction and relied on the horse to get him there.
“Nathan never let on that Ballaburn was so grand,” Lydia said. Although Irish shrugged as if it were a matter of indifference to him, Lydia thought she glimpsed a smile on his craggy, weather-worn face. “He said it was big, but not grand.”
“He probably thought you wouldn’t think so. He told me the kind of place you lived in. Ballaburn can’t be half the size of it.”
“I didn’t live in a palace, Irish. It was huge, yes, but not that enormous.”
“But bigger than Ballaburn,” he said.
“Yes. Why does it matter so much?”
“It doesn’t.”
Lydia knew he was lying, yet she couldn’t fathom the reason. She looked back over her shoulder at the house and saw an inviting warmth there in the gold-and-brown stone that was never any part of her home on Nob Hill. “Your property is much bigger,” she said.
“It has to be. Samuel isn’t a grazier. I am.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Irish was bent on making comparisons and still he undervaluated the breadth and beauty of what he had. Who did he think he had to impress? “I’m not my mother,” Lydia said with sudden insight.
“God forbid,” said Irish, raising his eyes heavenward. “As if I’d want that she-devil here.”
She persisted, slowing her mare to a walk and coming immediately abreast of Irish’s buggy. “You know what I mean. I don’t understand why, but you’re gauging all you’re showing me by her standards. Quite honestly, Irish, she’d hate it—all of it. The isolation alone would drive her to madness. She needs to be in the heart of the city and Sydney wouldn’t do at all for her. The house is too rustic, too small, inadequately staffed, and, worst of all, serves as a way station for the Cobb & Co. line. You may be rich as Croesus, Irish, but my mother would still turn her nose up at what you’ve built here.”
“I didn’t bloody well build anything for your mother.” He gave his horse a flick with his whip. The buggy rattled ahead of Lydia. “I built it for you,” he muttered.
“What?” Lydia kicked her mount to follow. “What did you say?”
“I said I built it for you,” he snapped. “Now, do you want to learn something about your heritage or carry on about your mother?”
Lydia’s mouth closed abruptly and she hung back again, stunned by what he had to say and by the way he said it. When she caught up to him on the rise of a hillock she said, “You’re a thorough boor, Irish, but I want to hear about Ballaburn.” This time she was certain she saw his thick mustache lift to one side as he smiled.
Ballaburn’s landscape was dotted with sheep. Four thousand, she learned, were scattered all over the station, some grazing in loose flocks where the vegetation was rich, others foraging singly where food and water was sparse. Most of them were Merino, a breed with a heavily wooled head and excellent soft fleeces that brought Ballaburn its largest return pound for pound. Hornless Southdown sheep, with their small round bodies and short fleece, were raised mainly for mutton. The medium-sized, white-faced Dorset yielded milk, and the ewes had a tendency toward birthing twins, which kept their number high. All the sheep had especially thick fleeces now. Come September and springtime, when the worst of the cold nights had passed, the Merinos would be mustered in mobs to the shearing sheds and relieved of their coats.
There was cattle also, but only what the station needed to supply the men with an alternative to mutton. Horses were raised strictly for working; no one had any dreams of entering one in the Melbourne Cup. A garden behind the kitchen supplied tomatoes and maize and other vegetables, and wild blackberries grew in abundance on thorny bushes in the hills. What Ballaburn didn’t have naturally was delivered from town on one of the coaches or done without. Molly and an entourage of helpers and hell-raisers only went to Sydney three times a year for supplies.
Lydia and Irish sat in the spotted sunlight under a coolabah tree, she on a blanket, he in his buggy, which she unhitched from Horatio and swung around to face her. They chose food from the basket Molly had packed for them—cold meat, fresh fruit, her sweet and gooey raisin and nut tarts, and drank warm beer from a jug.
Replete, Lydia leaned back against the dense trunk of the coolabah. “I like your land, Irish. I like your smelly sheep and your blue ribbon streams. The sky is almost impossibly wide here and the light…the light touches everything. What did you call those birds? The ones that were laughing when we rode near them.”
“Kookaburras.”
“Yes, kookaburras. Well, I even like them.”
His dark blue eyes narrowed, watching her, and Irish felt the light from her gentle smile touch him as sunlight never could. “You’re more beautiful than your mother ever was,” he said.
Lydia’s response was immediately to begin packing the basket. “We should be getting back,” she said flatly.
