Carrie corrected, looking as cool as a cucumber. ‘He’s already moved into Jimboorie.’
‘For now.’ Natasha made no effort to hide her outrage and anger. ‘Just see if people deal with him. My father has a great amount of influence.’
Carrie frowned. ‘What are you saying? Your family is readying to make life even more difficult for him?’
‘You bet we are!’ Natasha’s blue eyes were hard. ‘He’d be mad to stay around here. Old Angus only left him Jimboorie to spite us.’
‘Be that as it may, your cousin must intend to stick around if he’s looking for a wife,’ Carrie said, really pleased that after a moment of stunned silence the crowd erupted into loud, appreciative applause and even louder whistles. They were willing to give the newcomer a fair go even if Natasha’s vengeful family weren’t. ‘Well there you are!’ she said brightly. ‘No one rated his chances yet your cousin came out the clear winner.’
‘We’ll see what Scott has to say,’ Natasha snorted with indignation, visibly jangling with nerves. ‘For all we know there could have been interference near the fence.’
‘There wasn’t.’ Carrie dismissed that charge very firmly. ‘I know Scotty doesn’t like to lose, but he’ll take it well enough.’ Some hope, she thought inwardly. Her fiancé had a considerable antipathy to losing. At anything.
‘I’ll be sure to tell him how delighted you were with my cousin’s performance,’ Natasha called quite nastily as she walked away.
‘I bet you will,’ Carrie muttered aloud. Since she and Scott had become engaged, two months previously, Natasha always gave Carrie the impression she’d like to tear her eyes out.
A tricky situation was now coming up. It was her job, graciously handed over to her by her mother, to present the Cup. Not to Scott, as just about everyone had confidently expected, but to the new owner of historic Jimboorie Station. The Cunningham ancestral home was falling down around his ears and the once premier cattle and sheep station these days was little more than a ruin said to be laden with debt. In all likelihood the new owner would at some stage sell up and move on. But for now, she had to find her way to the mounting yard for the presentation and lots of photographs. Come to that, she would have to take some herself. For two years now since she had returned home from university she had worked a couple of days a week for Paddy Kennedy, the founder and long time editor of the Jimboorie Bulletin. Once a senior editor with the Sydney Morning Herald, chronic life-threatening asthma sent him out to the pure dry air of the Outback where it was thought he had a better chance of controlling his condition.
That was twenty years ago. The monthly Jimboorie Bulletin wasn’t any old rag featuring local gossip and kitty-up-the-tree stories. It was a professional newspaper, covering issues important to the Outback: the fragile environment, political matters, social matters, health matters, aboriginal matters, national sporting news, leavened by a page reporting on social events from all over the Outback. The rest of the time Carrie was kept busy with her various duties on the family station she loved, as well as running the home office, a job she had taken over from her mother.
Her work for the Bulletin stimulated her intellectually and she loved Paddy. He was the wisest, kindest man she knew whereas her father—although he had always been good to her in a material fashion—was not a man a daughter could get close to. A son maybe, but her parents had not been blessed with a son. She was an only child, one who was sensitive enough to have long become aware of her father’s pain and bitter disappointment he had no male heir. He had already told her, although she would be well provided for, Victory Downs was to go to her cousin, Alex, the son of her father’s younger brother. Uncle Andrew wasn’t a pastoralist at all, though he had been raised in a pastoral family. He had a thriving law practice in Melbourne and was, in fact, the family solicitor.
Alex was still at university, uncertain what he wanted to be, although he knew Victory Downs would pass to him. Carrie’s mother had fought aggressively for her daughter’s rights but her father couldn’t be moved. For once in her married life her mother had lost the fight.
‘You know how men are!’ Alicia had railed. ‘They think women can’t run anything. It’s immensely unfair. How can your father think young Alex would be a better manager than you?’
‘That’s not the only reason, Mum,’ Carrie had replied, thinking it terrible to be robbed of one’s inheritance. ‘Dad doesn’t want the station to pass out of the family. Sons have to be the inheritors. Sons carry the family name. Dad doesn’t care at all for the idea anyone other than a McNevin should inherit Victory Downs. He seems to be naturally suspicious of women as well. Why is that? Uncle Andy isn’t a bit like that.’
‘Your father just doesn’t know how to relax,’ was Alicia’s stock explanation, always turning swiftly to another topic.
It had been strange growing up knowing she was seriously undervalued by her father but Carrie was reluctant to criticise him. He was a good father in his way. Certainly she and her mother lacked for nothing, though there was no question of squandering money like Julia Cunningham, who spent as much time in the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne as she did in her Outback home.
People in the swirling crowd waved to her happily—she waved back. Most of the young women her age were wearing smart casual dress, while she was decked out as if she were attending a garden party at Government House in Sydney. Alicia’s idea. Carrie’s hat was lovely really, the wide dipping brim trimmed with silk flowers. She wore a sunshine-yellow printed silk dress sent to her from her mother’s favourite Sydney designer. Studded high heeled yellow sandals were on her feet. Her long honey-blond hair was drawn back into a sophisticated knot to accommodate the picture hat her mother had insisted on her wearing.
‘I want you to look really, really good!’ Alicia, a classic beauty in her mid-forties and looking nothing like it, fussed over her. ‘Which means you have to wear this hat. It will protect your lovely skin for one thing as well as adding the necessary glamour. Never forget it’s doubly essential to look after one’s skin in our part of the world. You know how careful I am even though we have an enviable tawny tint.’
Indeed they had. Carrie had inherited her mother’s beautiful brown eyes as well. Eyes that presented such a striking contrast to their golden hair. Carrie, christened Caroline Adriana McNevin had no look of her father’s side of the family. She didn’t really mind. Alicia, from a well-to-do Melbourne family and with an Italian Contessa as her maternal grandmother, was a beautiful woman by anyone’s standards.
‘You’re a lucky girl, do you realise that? Scott Harper for a fiancé.’ Alicia fondly pinched her daughter’s cheek. ‘I don’t think the Cunninghams will ever get over it. Julia worked so hard to throw Scott and Natasha together.’
As if you didn’t do the same thing with Scott and me, Mamma, Carrie thought but didn’t have the heart to say. Scott Harper was one of the most eligible bachelors in the country. His father’s property ventures were huge. Even Carrie’s father had been ‘absolutely delighted’ when she and Scott had become engaged. Obviously the best thing a daughter could do—her crowning achievement as it were—was to marry a handsome young man from a wealthy family. To prove it her father seemed to have a lot more time for her in the past few months. Could he be thinking of future heirs, not withstanding the fact he had already made a will in favour of Alex? It wouldn’t be so bad, would it, to pass Victory Downs on to someone like Scott Harper, rich and ambitious?
Sometimes Carrie felt like a pawn.
Clay was agreeably surprised by the number of people who made it their business to congratulate him.
