The Landowner's Secret Page 20

  She should’ve, she told herself silently, taken off before things had got so complicated. It was going to be a lot harder to do now, if it came to it.

  The sun would set soon, would be down by the time she sneaked back, and she didn’t relish the thought of making this same journey without light to guide her way. Above her the sky was turning a brighter and brighter shade of orange, and the sun, unencumbered by clouds, was blinding in its intensity, in the minutes before it dropped behind the hills.

  Alice kept her head down and prayed she’d not been spotted.

  And so, when she came across her destination more suddenly than she expected, she stopped abruptly as a jolt of fear hit her square in her centre. Up ahead no smoke rose from the small shelter’s chimney, and as she noticed that fact, Alice was jolted again.

  What if she’d missed him? The thought set her off walking again, rushing now.

  The door to the hut opened before she reached it, and a tall, slim man appeared in the entrance.

  Alice’s step faltered, and she pressed her hand to her chest to try and stop her heart from beating quite so fast. It made the packet inside her bodice crinkle, which reminded her of why she was there. It gave her the motivation to keep walking.

  ‘I thought,’ she said when she was inside the rapidly darkening hut, forcing her eyes to make out the guilty-looking figure of her brother, ‘that you might’ve come to your senses in the past couple of months.’

  ‘I didn’t rob the coach, Alice.’ His voice was so familiar, but also brought with it a very familiar frustration. No, she amended silently, not frustration anymore. Pure, bloody anger.

  ‘Why should I believe you?’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  It didn’t matter. Not really. He was still part of it in some way.

  ‘Two people got shot. One of you lot shot a fancy lady from town, and nobody’s goin’ to forget it.’

  ‘I heard the driver’ll survive.’

  ‘And that makes it better?’

  He shook his head, and had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  ‘What about the fancy lady?’

  Alice shook her own head. ‘Why’d you keep fallin’ in these holes, Ian? Why not just do what other folks do and stay on the right side of the law?’

  He looked belligerent, but then he sighed and stepped back.

  ‘Don’t know, Alice. But it’s too late to change now, isn’t it?’

  Alice thought not, but she’d not come out at sunset to repeat a conversation they’d had over and over in the past. She sneaked a hand inside her coat and felt around clumsily, hoping she wasn’t revealing things a brother ought not to see. Her fingertips found a corner of paper, and she tugged and tugged until she had the money free of her frock.

  Almost, almost, she didn’t hand it over, but she was quite sure money was the only thing that Ian would respond to. It was worth the sacrifice if it worked.

  ‘Me savin’s from … before ... It’s not much, but it’ll get you out of town.’

  It was the money she’d kept when she’d had hopes and dreams of leaving Barracks Flat, back when she’d never’ve dared dreamt of the life she had now.

  Her brother took the packet and opened it, flipping through the cash before looking back at her. She understood what he was feeling. He wanted that money badly. But what was left of good in him remembered it was bad to take money from his little sister. It was embarrassing to do so.

  ‘You know you must leave here, Ian. You know that, yes?’

  He sighed again, and she was almost inclined to feel sorry for him. But not quite.

  ‘I sure do now.’

  She turned to go.

  ‘Alice?’

  She paused on the threshold and looked back, a question in her eyes.

  Almost nothing that day had shocked her more than when he thrust the envelope back out to her.

  ‘It’s not mine to take.’

  She looked at the money, held out between them. ‘Just take it and use it to go away. A long way away.’

  And then he came closer and took her hand, putting the money into her palm. Reluctantly, she closed her fingers around it.

  ‘Can’t be caught with that much money right now. People’ll suspect me then for certain.’

  Chapter 20

  By the time the sun set Miss Martha Wright was alive still, if not awake and talking. That was the news John Stanford brought out to the house a few hours later, when he arrived on horseback, armed, and with a bag of provisions large enough to keep him comfortable for a few days’ stay at Endmoor.

  Robert’s old love had been moved to the Wrights’ house, which Alice knew was a big, two-storey place near the river, the kind of household where nobody wanted for anything, and the family was hiding away behind those expensive walls from busybodies and gossipmongers. If she’d a chance of recovering, there would be the best place for it.

  Alice felt an acute pang of sadness about the whole thing. It was nothing if the lady didn’t live, but she couldn’t help thinking beauty like that shouldn’t be marred by bullets. It went against the natural way of things.

  She wasn’t envious of the lady anymore. Not in any way.

  ‘I’ll spend the night here, and we’ll start the hunt in the morning,’ Mr Stanford said. ‘We ought to warn the Ngambri people, and see if they know anything we don’t.’

  Alice’s innards plunged at the thought of the two of them rushing off to play vigilante. She didn’t want them shot. She didn’t want anyone else shot, but it was time for this to end one way or another.

  ‘The driver—who is badly hurt but expected to survive, by the way—swears the shooter is the same man on the Wanted posters in town. He couldn’t have had a terribly good look at the chap before he was shot, but I’m inclined to believe him.’

  Mr Stanford turned to her then, expression grave. Alice braced herself for what she already suspected.

  ‘While nobody’s said he was part of what happened today, more than one person is saying they recognise one of the men hanging about the outskirts of town as the fellow who used to deliver the milk.’

  Ian, in other words.

  Alice felt like she’d been stung by something. ‘Who’s saying that? How many people?’

  Did it really matter? Once one person started the gossip, it was bound to spread. It wasn’t as though the people of Barracks Flat would be discussing anything else in the coming days.

  ‘It’s not important,’ Robert’s friend said softly, but everybody in that room knew he was only saying it to be kind. Of course it mattered.

  Alice willed the pounding in her head away.

  ‘We all knew Ian was a fool,’ she said, trying to keep her chin high, but it wasn’t easy. ‘We knew it already. It’s no secret.’

  She tried a small smile for Mr Stanford, but it felt wrong to give one to Elizabeth, considering what’d just happened. Robert, though … Alice couldn’t even bring herself to look straight at him.

  Instead she devoted a ridiculous amount of time to fussing over Gertrude, who’d wandered into the room midway through Mr Stanford’s update and arranged herself in a big ball in the middle of the floor. It seemed even the cat wanted to lounge about in company that night, rather than taking off into the darkness to stalk the shadows.

  Servants came and went. There were a lot more people about the house that evening than usual, and it didn’t need saying why. Mrs Adamson came to the threshold and took Elizabeth away for some reason or another; Alice was too distracted to notice why.

  After that she sat there alone, listening to the men murmur to each other while Gertrude gave herself a thorough wash.

  As the discussion continued around her something important crystallised in Alice’s mind. The room was well heated, perhaps even a little overhot with the fire so strong and so many people about, but in those minutes she felt cold on the inside. Her world became small as the solution to many a problem presented itself to her in all its awfulness.

  ‘I’
ll be goin’ off to bed then,’ she said, rising before anyone could voice their objections. The men both rose out of manners that still bemused her.

  She looked hard at Robert, trying to read his mood, but not confident enough to make assumptions.

  ‘With me gone the two of you can discuss … whatever manly things you obviously don’t want to say in front of me.’

  First, however … she surprised him utterly by stepping up to him, chest to chest, and on her toes in an attempt to meet his height.

  ‘Do not get hurt. Do not get shot. And don’t do anything foolish because you think it’s heroic. All right?’

  He clasped her to him for a long moment, releasing her only when she pulled away.

  ‘I’ll try my best, Alice. I’ll try my best.’

  She gave both men a stern look before turning to go.

  ‘Alice,’ Robert called after her, and when she looked his way he seemed like a man about to apologise and tell her she was welcome to stay.

  She smiled and felt a traitor, and hated herself for it.

  ‘In truth, I’m tired. And you two ought to discuss guns and such. I am really sorry, Robert, about Miss Wright. I reckon I have to say it ’cause Ian never will.’ She got herself on the other side of the threshold before anyone responded to that.

  ‘Good night.’

  Robert and John left soon afterwards, John turning in one direction, and Robert in the other. They were to meet some of the other men from town, Alice had learnt from the discussion earlier. It seemed that it took an actual robbery, and two people being shot, for people to take the threat as seriously as it should have been from the start.

  She went to the window of her old room to watch them disappear into the night. The moon shone brightly, reflecting off the corrugated iron above the veranda, allowing her to watch Robert and his horse until the trees swallowed them up.

  Only then, when she knew they’d not be back in the near future, did she return to the bedroom she shared with him, take down a bag and begin to pack.

  ***

  Alice stashed her things and then went about the process of sneaking out of the house. It wasn’t hard. Elizabeth had thrown herself into a frenzy of cleaning up her art supplies, almost silent while she waited for news of her friend. The household staff were on edge, waiting for anything that might come by that night.

  Because she couldn’t simply stand around making up her mind about whether she’d stay or go, she drifted to the veranda, and then took the steps down and continued beyond it. Nobody wanted her crusading, going after the outlaws, wherever they were, but she could at least stand guard of Endmoor.

  The clear sky was lit up with a thousand stars—maybe more. She looked up at them a long time, listening for anything wrong in the night. But in the end it wasn’t her hearing or her sight that picked up on the danger; it was her nose.

  Smoke.

  Alice whirled, searching, wondering. It wasn’t smoke from a chimney, it was more than that, and growing fast. Suddenly the stars didn’t seem so bright, nor the night so clear. She picked up her skirts and dashed around the side of the house. It was when she reached the back of it that she caught sight of the growing orange glow.

  ‘My God,’ she said.

  Someone gasped, and she turned to find Elizabeth behind her.

  ‘It must’ve just happened,’ she told her. ‘We’ve gotta do somethin’.’

  The two women watched in shock as a stockman ran past with a bucket of water, his panic and speed making him lose half of the contents along the way. The closest outbuilding to the house was burning fast.

  ‘We’ve gotta do somethin’,’ she said again, and surged forwards. She made it a step and a half before a rough hand caught her by the arm.

  ‘Mrs Farrer, stay back.’ Mr Adamson’s voice was as rough as his skin, and she turned to him in desperate bewilderment.

  ‘But, if there’s a fire it could spread to—’

  ‘This is no normal fire.’ Two more men ran past them from the stables, buckets of water sloshing madly.

  ‘Oh, I know. An ember caught in the chimney, most likely. But if the grass around it catches, too—’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. That fire’s burnin’ from the outside in.’

  She realised his meaning immediately. Bumps broke out across her skin and something prickled at the back of her neck. ‘Someone set it on purpose?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt of it.’

  He released her and began to stride away, pausing only to point at the house.

  ‘Stay in there until I know it’s safe.’

  Alice might have argued more, and on another night, under other circumstances, she would have held her ground and made her case.

  But this was fire, on dry, dry land, and she wasn’t going to hold everyone up while she debated the merits of her taking part.

  ‘We’ll go to the kitchen,’ Elizabeth said, relenting before Alice could get the words out. ‘We’ll find things to fill at the well.’

  Alice trotted after her as they retraced their steps, and for a reason she’d not know when she looked back on it, she glanced behind herself as they passed through the main hall.

  Her feet skidded to a stop.

  A silhouette of a man moved by the window at the other end.

  Tall, unfamiliar, and skulking about when every other man on the property battled the blaze, she froze where she stood, barely daring to breathe as she watched it—him—edge around the front of the house.

  Iciness, a particular kind of fear she’d not felt since April, slipped through her, but determination also came with it. She’d a job to do here, and right then she was the only person able to do it.

  But there was more at stake now, not just her little house in the bush.

  Keeping her focus on the fellow, she backed up, praying and then praying some more that the floorboards wouldn’t creak and give her away. She silently cursed her voluminous skirts, knowing she was so easily seen through the windowpane beside the door.

  She shuffled back another step, and then another. The man, the intruder, had stopped moving entirely, his back flattened against the glass.

  She ought to shout for help, Alice thought. But there was nobody around except Elizabeth, and she couldn’t …

  Another step and she came into contact with the entrance to Robert’s office.

  With a big breath for luck, she dropped to her knees and crawled into the darkness. Thanks to her eternal curiosity, she was well acquainted with where her husband kept his old cricket gear.

  She might be making a grave mistake, she worried once the bat was in her hand and she’d crept back towards the front of the house.

  ‘Stay where you are, Elizabeth,’ she said as loudly as she dared when she passed through the kitchen. There wasn’t time to see if her sister-in-law followed the order, and Alice slipped out the back door and darted around to the left, taking a breath with each corner she turned.

  It was the final corner before the front of the house that she found the mysterious man. He’d backed away from the window a few steps, and held something suspicious in both hands, but it was too dark to make out the particulars of it—or him.

  Whatever it was he held, the bat was bigger, and it gave Alice a touch of confidence. She’d simply creep up his way, and then use the element of surprise to take care of matters.

  She was about to do that when a second figure appeared.

  Alice pulled back with a short gasp, and scanned the darkness beyond the house for any more men. Nothing else stirred; nobody else came forward.

  She couldn’t take on two men, could she? Or, maybe …

  The second man moved again, and this time she noticed the limp.

  ***

  Robert didn’t know what he expected when he searched the hut on the fringes of his property, but what met him when he approached it from the front and pushed the door open without warning was Ian Ryan, alone, the sparse space neat as a pin and the fire already extinguished. A small
lamp gave off the only light, but the place was too small for any other men to be hiding in the shadows.

  Years. It must have been two years at least since he’d last got a good look at the man, and he was a man now, not the boy he’d first been when they’d given him a chance at Endmoor. Grown now, if still lanky, he was too old for the antics he’d pulled in his earlier years.

  There was only one reason Robert wouldn’t grab him then and turn him over to the authorities to do with him whatever they would, and she was back at the homestead, hopefully doing exactly what he expected her to: staying safe.

  The brother’s reaction to Robert’s appearance was a fraction too late. By the time he’d stirred from his nap in the hard wooden chair and reached for the rifle beside him, Robert was fully inside the hut and staring the fellow down.

  ‘Don’t even think about it, Ryan. We’ve things to discuss and I doubt you want my murder added to your list of crimes. Surely not even you could be so foolish.’

  It took him another couple of seconds, but then the man relented.

  ‘Took your time about findin’ me,’ he finally said, trying only half-heartedly for bravado.

  ‘Well … It’s been a busy day.’

  ‘Is she dead?’ The man looked ragged. Red-eyed and scruffy, with unevenly barbered stubble that wasn’t quite a beard, it didn’t much look like the criminal lifestyle was treating him well. Robert searched for anything of Alice in the man’s face, and was relieved to find it only in his eyes. Brother and sister weren’t alike in looks then, either.

  Troubled for a number of reasons, he looked away a moment before fixing him with a hard stare. He wasn’t going to discuss Martha Wright with this man.

  ‘Are you here alone?’

  ‘’Course I am. I’m no genius, but I’m not stupid enough to be bringin’ those men onto Farrer land.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Robert said, inclined to believe it. ‘Did you play a part in it? In what happened this afternoon?’