The Landowner's Secret Read online

Any way it worked she was pretty sure she’d lose her home, small as it was. Maybe her cow and her chickens, too. She had a vague recollection of being told someone from Endmoor was looking after the animals for her, and she sure hoped they were going armed with something more than a kitchen knife.

  Once again she patted the front of her frock, hand trembling with illness. The staff must all think her mad with fever but she’d argued hard and long to be allowed to keep her clothes on in bed, and so far nobody’d managed to wrestle her out of them.

  If they saw that money she was hiding they might think she’d got it by illegal means. No, they’d definitely make assumptions she had.

  The papers crinkled reassuringly and she let out a little sigh. She needed that cash more than ever if she was going to make a future for herself. It wasn’t much but she worked hard and might find some decent employment. Ryan was a common enough name in the colonies, and if she headed north surely she’d be able to outrun a sullied reputation. It was a lucky thing she was good with a needle, as it’d provided her with an income during Ian’s many absences.

  ‘I can’t stand this,’ she announced to the ceiling, as she’d done more than once in the past day.

  Soon, she promised herself. Any hour now she’d find the strength to get up and get out of the big, grand homestead unnoticed—and without puking again.

  More voices floated towards her from another corner of the house. It was not that the property was loud as much as that it was populated. There always seemed to be something happening and someone around. Such a big house and yet every corner of it seemed to be busy. Something clattered, and she caught a whiff of … food? And—

  ‘Oh!’ Alice’s eyes shot open and she clamped her lips together as tightly as she could, holding her hand to her nose against the smell.

  She focused intently on the painting on the wall opposite. It was one of those pictures of the countryside that people with money put in their houses, or so it seemed in Alice’s limited experience. But to her eyes it was painted all wrong.

  There was a town with a church—definitely not Barracks Flat or anywhere Alice’d ever been. The fields were a mad shade of green, and the sheep’s faces were black. Who’d ever seen a sheep with a face that colour? She saw Robert Farrer’s Merinos most days; she knew what a sheep looked like.

  Cross with the artist’s fantastical imagination, she struggled up onto her elbows to take a better look at it, and then she—

  ‘Ah!’ The sickness swept back up and took her by surprise.

  She rolled onto her side in the hope of curling in a wretched ball, but forgot about her throbbing bite. A sob escaped as she rolled back, more carefully this time, and used what strength she had to get her foot back up on the pillow.

  Five minutes, she decided. She’d give herself five minutes to recover and then she’d come up with a proper plan for her escape.

  Time passed, and then more voices came—men’s voices that were low, but loud in that way whispers sometimes were.

  It was Robert Farrer speaking she decided, the fancy tone of his voice different to every other in the household.

  The voice that responded was rougher, less refined, and far more Australian.

  ‘We haven’t had a murder out this way in a long time. Wonder if they’ll do the hangin’ out here or take it up north.’

  Good God, had they caught a culprit already? Alice pushed herself up onto her elbows. Was it Ian—please, please not Ian.

  Could she let her brother hang if he was guilty?

  The voices trailed off into the distance, and Alice was so busy fretting she didn’t notice Mrs Adamson until she was in the room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ the housekeeper said, taking in the sorry situation. ‘I left the bell there for you to use when you needed it—and no, don’t you dare open that mouth to tell me again you don’t want to be a bother.’

  With deft, impersonal assessment, the woman ascertained what needed doing and called for Bessie and a bucket of water.

  Good Lord, this was embarrassing. Alice rested the back of her wrist over her eyes.

  ‘I’m sure I’m dyin’, Mrs Adamson.’

  There was a pause, and then the splash of water on the side table, and her hand was carefully removed and a cool cloth wiped across her forehead.

  ‘No, you’re not. As long as you can tell me you’re dying, then you’ve the energy to stay alive.’

  Well, that might’ve been the truth, but it didn’t mean Alice didn’t feel like dying right about then. She wouldn’t, though. She had a relation to find and strangle some sense into before the authorities got to him.

  ‘I’ll clean it,’ she protested when Bessie, a maid a few years older than she was, came back into the room, bucket sloshing.

  ‘You certainly will not. You’ll stay as you are and rest.’

  ‘Oh, all right, but this is mortifyin’,’ she said in a meek voice, making the other two laugh.

  Trapped. She was well and truly trapped for another whole day, she thought with more misery than before. As the people around her fussed and fixed and cleaned she felt the weakness pulling at her again.

  But when she went to sleep it was with a plan forming in her mind.

  Chapter 4

  By the end of the second day of the Ryan girl in his home, Robert was giving up on propriety and made his way to the sickroom.

  Something the whole lot of them had learnt over the course of thirty-six hours was that it was impossible to sustain the sort of fear and suspicion they’d all felt the morning before. No matter what else happened in the region, the animals still needed tending, the housework still needed doing, and the accounts still needed attention. With the dead—and still unidentified—man’s body taken into the care of the police magistrate in town, there were a great many questions that needed answering, but for the time being, they all had to wait.

  Another day was drawing to an end with an orange-tinged sky and a growing chill in the air, and Robert was glad to be stepping inside for the first time in many hours.

  Perhaps Miss Ryan needed something. It had to have been half a day since he’d heard anything of her, and it was possible she’d been forgotten in the hive of activity around the estate since the drama began.

  He was halfway to her temporary room when he heard the distinct splash of water in a bucket coming directly towards him and he ducked into the shadows of the nearest doorway. Bessie, cast all in silhouettes, emerged from a room, bucket clasped in both hands, and then rounded a corner, taking herself towards the back of the house, none the wiser she’d an audience.

  Robert stepped back out into the hall.

  ‘Good God,’ he muttered, embarrassed with himself. What kind of man was caught slinking around the halls of his own home?

  ***

  When he was certain the servants were all gone from neighbouring nooks and crannies, he gripped the handle of the partially open sickroom door and slipped partway inside.

  Silence greeted him, though the air was full enough that he knew Miss Ryan was not only there, but alive and better than she’d been the day before. Embers from the recently stoked fire cast the space in a dim golden glow, the warmth of it in stark contrast to the increasingly foggy land beyond the shuttered windows, and it revealed the steady rise and fall of the blankets covering her.

  All was well, then. Robert felt better for seeing it with his own two eyes instead of learning it from others’ reports. He could go, then, and be satisfied if she was asleep.

  At the last moment instinct had him turning back and stepping a little closer. Miss Ryan was not asleep after all.

  Just as he’d suspected.

  Though her eyes seemed colourless, their grey-blue indiscernible, in the shadowy room, he still felt that wary, near defiant stare as she took his measure—or so that seemed to be what she was doing, despite her illness and submissive position on the bed.

  ‘Are you perhaps a little better?’ His voice sounded rough in the heavy air between them.


  She seemed to consider the question carefully before answering.

  ‘Well, I’m not dead yet,’ was the response he eventually received, and he fought against a smile.

  ‘No, I can see that. Please, try and stay that way.’

  The snort that it earned him was anything but ladylike, but it did coax his smile all the way out.

  Again, he began to retreat from the room, feet dragging for a number of reasons.

  He wanted to ask her questions; no, he had to leave the room. Working class or not, she was still a young lady and he a man who’d no place in there.

  ‘Sir?’

  Robert paused, turned back, raising his brows in query.

  ‘It weren’t just two of ’em out there in the bush. I dunno how many there were, but more than two.’

  ‘You knew them?’ Surely it wasn’t this easy to get the facts out of her. He’d been prepared for a battle.

  She barely hesitated before answering, but it was still a hesitation.

  ‘Can’t say. I reckon they were drunk. And I bet they weren’t so interested in me as in money. I’d say they were idiots for pickin’ me—my house out for that.’

  If she wasn’t so ill, Robert suspected she would’ve laughed at her own comment.

  ‘Someone died here yesterday,’ she continued. A statement, not a question.

  Another young lady and Robert might have lied. ‘They did. Who told you?’

  ‘I’ve a fat ankle, not deaf ears. If it were a secret, I’d say you all ought to speak more quietly.’

  Oh dear.

  Robert glanced over his shoulder at the empty hall and then folded his arms.

  ‘Yes, someone died. So far we don’t know who he is.’

  ‘And they’ve arrested someone else?’ She sounded sleepy, but content to continue the discussion.

  ‘Yes. Another man whose identity we still don’t know.’

  He didn’t miss her audible breath at that little piece of news.

  She shifted to look at him more squarely, and immediately winced.

  ‘Don’t move on my account. You need to rest and get better.’

  Of course she shifted anyway, and Robert winced with her the second time.

  ‘The rest of those men wouldn’t be stupid enough to stay about these parts, right? They’d be on to Captains Flat or Goulburn or even Cooma by now.’

  Those light, feverish eyes probed his hopefully. ‘Am I right?’

  Oh, she certainly wanted to be right, he could see that.

  ‘You may be. Until then, we’ll stay cautious.’

  He hadn’t a clue if he’d reassured her or not, but she closed her eyes then, and Robert stood there an unaccountably long while—obscenely long, if he were thinking straight. It was rude on his part, but he was taking stock of Ian Ryan’s sister as her own person for the first time.

  He wondered when Miss Alice Ryan had gone from the girl he used to pass on the town road—all plaited hair and big eyes, staring at him as if he were a prince rather than a mere landowner—to … this …

  Good God, he supposed he’d changed a great deal in the past five or so years, too. He’d buried himself in his work on purpose, needing the distraction.

  A bark from one of the dogs drew him back to himself, and he went in search of his evening meal.

  Later, he would realise he should’ve been more interested in the fact the invalid was wearing her day dress, clearly poking out in various places from the blankets.

  ***

  Robert hardly slept. He made a go of it sometime long after the household had settled for the night. But there wasn’t much point trying when each rustle of a branch in the breeze outside had him assuming the worst, and so his mind refused to settle.

  He was beyond the point of tiredness, and had entered that odd state where the more his body demanded rest, the more alert he became. Not even the wine at dinner had helped dull his senses. Frustrated, he flipped onto his stomach, and then onto his back once more. The high-pitched cries of a colony of Chiroptera crossed the sky.

  ‘Bloody bats,’ he said to the ceiling. The creatures had been scared inland years earlier, back when he was a boy and summer fires took over the coast. There was no getting rid of them now.

  He cast his senses out, listening for anything out of the ordinary. He was acutely aware of the guest in his house, and of the otherwise emptiness of the place, with his sister away in the city for so long. At night the distance from town always seemed so much greater.

  In his youth the bush had been both exciting and terrifying. The threat of animals so alien to him after the squirrels and otters of Cumberland was adventure enough in those first weeks in New South Wales. Learning what creatures’ bites would cause death, and which would only cause a temporary but unholy pain, was a process of trial and error—and sheer luck on his family’s part.

  Then there were the floods and the fires. The dry winters and sudden frosts that killed off most of what they planted, and the droughts and the extreme heat in the summer months. They were all threats in their own way, especially when a man relied on the land to make his fortune.

  What he wouldn’t give for a threat like that now instead of those that they faced; a challenge he could understand and tackle with confidence.

  Despite everything, and unlike his parents, who’d sensed danger at every turn in New South Wales and been happy to return to England, after only a few weeks in Australia, Robert had felt he belonged.

  Distracted, and fully awake, he considered the days-old newspaper on the desk near the lamp, and then discarded it. He didn’t need news of the panic arriving from South Australia and across the Tasman Sea. The so-called Russian scare striking fear into people all over the colonies—as far as New Zealand—looked like it would amount to nothing, despite plans to build fortifications along the coast just in case.

  For the time being he had enough immediate problems.

  Groaning loudly as sleep continued to elude him, Robert tucked both his hands behind his head and settled in for a long, dull night.

  ***

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Alice nearly clean jumped out of her skin at the sound of a man’s voice behind her. She whipped round on unsteady feet, a hand pressed to her chest. The papers crinkled, and she waited in dreadful anticipation, certain the man behind her had heard.

  ‘Lord,’ she said when she recognised the fellow. Young for a butler, with the hair to match his name, Albert Brown’s present expression made him look more like a schoolteacher than the boy whose bare arse she’d seen a time he’d swum in the Murrumbidgee only a few years before.

  She strove to collect herself. ‘Don’t scare me like that, Bertie.’

  She straightened to her not considerable height while he winced at the childhood name, trying, trying to look innocent, as though it was perfectly normal for an invalid to be creeping out the door at daybreak.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said when he didn’t make a grab for her, injecting as much confidence as she could into her voice. Turning to continue on her way, she silently prayed that he wouldn’t do anything rash like … slide neatly in front of her to block her way.

  Bertie raised an eyebrow at her, and Alice wished she weren’t so small.

  ‘Where are you going with your foot like that?’ he asked, but she knew he knew.

  She sighed, and—despite her best intentions of looking strong—reached out to use the small hall table for balance. That awful pain in her leg was back again, even if the puking had stopped, thank God.

  ‘I’m goin’ home,’ she informed him in the strongest voice she could muster. ‘And I’d thought to do it before the whole household caught me makin’ an escape.’

  At the risk of toppling over with dizziness, she let go of the table and held her arms out for inspection. ‘I’ve not taken anythin’ that’s not mine, if you’re worried.’

  Her piece said, the weakness came back in a surge and she got a hold of that table again.
/>   Bertie’s face dropped and he gave her an odd look. ‘I know that, Miss Alice.’

  He might have said more had he not swivelled at the sound of a clatter some distance from them, in a different part of the house. The place was already coming to life for the day, which meant the escape plan was already beginning to unravel.

  Alice took advantage of the butler’s moment of distraction and shoved away from the table and towards the front door. The pain streaked up her leg sharply, and she almost turned back and begged her reluctant pursuer to carry her off to the nearest bed.

  But no. She wasn’t the responsibility of any of these people, and she was likely putting them in some danger, and she had to find Ian … somehow …

  When she was home she’d be shoving the old trunk in front of the door and sleeping with the fire poker next to the bed, but it was all right. She’d a strong enough arm to whack an intruder pretty well, she reckoned. It couldn’t be much different to chopping wood.

  Cool air met her when she stepped outside, and she grimaced as she made her way down the few steps to the ground. Turning carefully, like a drunkard pretending to be sober, she faced the butler once more. He watched her warily from the top of the steps.

  ‘Bertie, will you do a favour for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, hovering with his hands half extended her way, like he might grab her, given the opportunity.

  ‘Will you wait ten minutes before you go runnin’ to tell them I’ve made me escape?’

  He grumbled something she was probably lucky not to hear, and then he got that stern look again.

  ‘Of course you’d ask for that.’

  ‘Will you? Promise?’

  He grumbled under his breath again and then nodded jerkily. ‘All right.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and set off.

  When Alice next looked over her shoulder he was still there, holding his ground, but at least he hadn’t run off to tattle yet.

  ‘All right,’ she muttered through gritted teeth as she put her mind to getting one foot in front of the next. Gravel shifted with each step. ‘Good.’

  It would’ve been better if she’d asked Bertie for half an hour to make her getaway, because she was certain somebody had doubled the length of the drive overnight. Even reaching the end of the carriage loop seemed an exhausting improbability.