Faded pink curtains hung over French doors that opened onto a side veranda. A very old, silky oak wardrobe with an oval mirror stood against the far wall. Looking about her, Kate was sure it was the room she’d slept in when she’d been here all those years ago.
Yes… She recognised the photo of her grandfather hanging on the wall. With his shock of white hair, thick white moustache and erect posture, and seated in a cane peacock-chair on the homestead veranda with his faithful dog at his feet, he looked like a throwback to the British Raj.
She remembered the emotional storms she’d weathered during the summer she’d spent here, how she’d hovered on the veranda, hoping to catch sight of Noah. The blissful heights and savage depths of youthful passion and unrequited love. The embarrassment. A shiver rustled through her. She hoped Noah didn’t notice.
With her suitcase stowed, they continued on down the passage to the kitchen.
This room hadn’t changed either, Kate decided as she looked about her at the huge black stove set in a galvanized-iron recess, and the big scrubbed-pine table dominating the room’s centre. A crumpled green-and-white-striped tea towel had been flung carelessly over the back of one of the mismatched chairs, and a clutter of kitchen utensils dangled from hooks above the stove.
On the far wall a row of shutters had been pushed wide open to catch the slightest hint of breeze. Everything was unpretentious and homely, just as she remembered, and she found this strangely unsettling. It was like stepping back in time.
Noah put the kettle on the stove and lit the gas beneath it. ‘I have to go into town this afternoon for the reading of the will,’ he said.
‘That’s OK. I’ll be fine here.’
‘You should come too.’
She’d given absolutely no thought to legal matters, but she was sure her uncle’s will would be very straightforward. Angus Harrington had been a bachelor, and she’d always understood that he’d planned to leave this property to Noah.
Noah had been born here on Radnor station. His father, Joe Carmody, had been head stockman, but there’d been a tragic accident—a light-plane crash in which both Noah’s parents had been killed. Uncle Angus had taken the boy into his home and, although he had never adopted Noah formally, he’d raised him as his own son.
Kate watched Noah now as he moved with familiar ease about the kitchen, fetching mugs and a brown china teapot and yellow sugarbowl.
He looked as at home in this kitchen as he had when she’d seen him working outdoors, or riding a stockhorse. He belonged here, and she couldn’t imagine him living anywhere else.
As he set the mugs and sugar bowl on the table, she said, ‘I can’t see why I need to go to the solicitor’s.’
‘You’re Angus’s blood relative. You should be there.’
‘My mother might be Uncle Angus’s sister, but she’s spent her entire life ignoring him.’
Noah simply shrugged. The kettle came to the boil and he turned to the stove to attend to it. Kate watched him pour boiling water into the teapot, and she couldn’t help admiring the way he managed to make a simple domesticated task look manly.
‘If you like,’ he said as he set the teapot on a cane table-mat, ‘I’ll give Alan Davidson, the solicitor, a quick call and ask if there’s any need for you to show up. It’ll only take a tick.’
Kate offered a mystified smile. ‘If you insist, but I hope I’m not needed. I’m dreadfully tired.’
‘The tea will refresh you. Do you mind helping yourself?’
‘Not at all,’ she told his departing back.
She poured a mug of tea. It was a strong brew and piping hot. She added milk and sugar, took her mug to the window and sipped hot tea while she looked out at the scattering of farm sheds and the dry, thirsty paddocks.
This property—named Radnor by Kate’s grandfather after his beloved Radnor Hills in England—didn’t look like a prize inheritance now, in the middle of a drought.
But she could remember her uncle’s boast that, when the rains returned, the Channel Country provided some of the best grazing land in Queensland. One good wet season could change the entire district in a matter of weeks.
Mighty river systems with strangely exotic names like Barcoo, Bulloo and Diamantina would bring water from the north, spreading into tributaries, into hundreds of creeks and billabongs, like blood filling arteries, drenching the hungry earth and bringing it back to life.
People who lived here needed faith to ride out the tough times until the good rains returned and thick feed covered the ground once more. Kate’s mother, sequestered in England, had never understood that.
Noah, on the other hand, knew it implicitly.
Kate drank more tea and sighed heavily. She was deathly tired. Jet lag was making her head spin. And she still felt a crushing disappointment at missing the funeral.
Footsteps sounded in the passage and she turned to see Noah coming through the doorway, his grey eyes unreadable, his mouth a straight, inscrutable line. ‘Alan Davidson was most definite. You should attend the reading of the will.’
Kate shook her head in annoyance. Didn’t people around here understand about jet lag? She couldn’t bear the thought of bouncing back down that bumpy road into Jindabilla. ‘I’m too tired,’ she said, and she yawned widely to prove it. ‘I’ll probably fall asleep in the middle of the reading.’
‘Take another mug of tea to your room and rest for an hour.’ Noah spoke quietly, but with an unmistakable air of authority. ‘Feel free to use the bathroom across the passage from your room. But be ready to leave at two-thirty.’
Kate knew she’d been given an order.
CHAPTER TWO
NOAH shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden chair in the solicitor’s office, and watched a lonely ceiling fan struggle to bring relief to the over-dressed group in the crowded room. Neck ties were a rarity in the summer heat, but he and Alan Davidson had worn them today out of respect for their good friend, Angus.
James Calloway, Liane’s city lawyer, had gone one better and was wearing a spiffy business suit and a striped bow-tie that looked suspiciously like those worn by the old boys’ clubs of Sydney’s private schools. James was, Noah noted, very red in the face.
Old Angus would be chuckling if he could see this mob, suffering on his behalf.
But Noah had little to laugh about. He’d been through one hell of a week—the shock of Angus’s sudden death, the heart-rending task of spreading the sad news, the struggle to focus on arrangements for the funeral and a fitting farewell. And then, everything had been soured by his ex-wife’s unexpected appearance in Jindabilla with her fancy lawyer in tow.
The nerve of Liane—showing up out of the blue and coming to the funeral, as if she didn’t know that old Angus had, in the end, despised her and blamed her for bringing unhappiness to the people he loved.
She was still causing trouble. Noah couldn’t forgive her for neglecting
