Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband Read online

  Mr Thomas asked some very short questions concerning income, which she answered untruthfully as best she could, and then he offered a series of explanations that brooked no argument. She had the house, but the house was in need of repair. Even if it hadn’t been, until she could prove some way of repaying any loan he might make, she was a very poor investment. He was sorry, he had the greatest respect for her late father and late husband – her mother wasn’t late as well, was she; so many people had gone – but he could make no advance against her house or her horses.

  ‘I have forty-three,’ she said.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ was his unhelpful advice. And she could. She could shoot the lot and what would that make her in the eyes of the world? A horse murderer, when at the moment she was their saviour, accommodating them in a large paddock with plenty of grass. She was now, like it or not, potty Mrs Worthington, widow of the apparently not-rich-after-all Lieutenant Worthington, in her grief collecting horses and with harebrained schemes about what she could do with them.

  If the general view was humiliating, the truth was even more so. The late Lieutenant had been so far from rich that despite being up to his eyes in mud and combat, he’d entered into an insane arrangement with unknown creditors to ensure her future comfort. There was to be no comfort, only poverty. Unpaid for and now unwanted horses, destined for the Front at his instigation, would continue to be delivered to her paddock in the dead of night until she found the money he’d agreed to pay for them. But there was no money and never would be.

  The air was so chilly when she was shown out of the bank that she began to shiver. Her whole body shook. Her brain seemed to be shaking, unable to control itself in its panic. No brave soldier husband to help her. No Daddy. Only her mother who, in widowhood, had removed herself to the south of France from where she had written, ‘Louisa, you were warned.’ Ahead of her lay ruin.

  Across the road to taunt her was Nightingales, where possibly her tea was waiting but what did it matter when she couldn’t pay for it, when all it represented was everything she no longer had or would ever have again? How dare Adelaide treat her so rudely, knocking her to the ground and stalking off without a word of comfort? How dare great galumphing Adelaide, never as beautiful or clever or graceful as she was, now have everything she didn’t have, like a husband, a baby and money to burn.

  Poor Louisa, walking so slowly back along Hope Street that other pedestrians trod on her heels, wondered what would become of her. She didn’t know how to be poor.

  Maggie O’Connell, on the other hand, with only vague memories of being anything else, rarely fretted about what would become of her. ‘Hello, Maggie,’ Louisa said dully when she reached the Arts and Crafts Hall to find the third resident from Beyond the Arch reattaching the sign by weaving bits of wire around hooks and nails. ‘Heading home?’ It was less the question than the way it was asked that startled them both. It was full of need and melancholy that suggested, what? They walk together? They had never walked together even though they had lived within coo-ee of each other for five years.

  ‘I’m going to work, Mrs Worthington,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Of course,’ said Louisa. ‘The Mayberrys.’ She lingered as Maggie gave the main wire a final twist. ‘What do you think she has to tell us?’

  Maggie picked up her basket. ‘Search me. She’s been to Melbourne, that’s all I know. She’s been to Melbourne and seen the light.’

  ‘Surely not God.’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Maggie. ‘She’s very pleased with herself.’

  They faced each other awkwardly, buffeted by the wind but no longer threatened by the sign. ‘What do you make of the Nightingales’ new housekeeper? Not very friendly, is she?’ Louisa said, so clearly wanting company that Maggie edged away.

  ‘Theresa Fellows says she’s got airs and graces.’

  ‘Does she? Not that Mrs Fellows would know.’ The neighbours stared at each other, one dark, the other fair, one elegant, the other making-do, one parading as rich, the other quite plainly poor. How little they had in common.

  ‘I’d better get a move on,’ said Maggie, and off she headed to clean the Mayberrys’ rambling house, leaving Louisa shuddering at the possibility that, any day now, she too might be reduced to drudgery.

  Maggie, just eighteen and as fair and fresh-faced as a newly bloomed tea rose, though less fashionable, rarely shuddered at her lot. She worked at the Mayberrys’ every day for five hours and although that house never grew any cleaner, it didn’t bother her a bit. Maggie’s thoughts turned mostly on pleasant things. Today these included the serial she was reading in Mrs Mayberry’s latest copy of A Lady’s Leisure, some cheese she would buy from Nightingales on the way home, her brothers having stayed at school all morning, and the possibility she might come back into town after tea to listen to her employer speak.

  Hers were simple pleasures. She accepted that she had no money and that her house was so dilapidated her neighbours would cheerfully have kicked it down had ever they mustered that degree of civic pride and cruelty in the one breath. The farm had had gone to rack and ruin but it was still hers; her twin brothers were a trial but she loved them, not just for themselves but also for the mother who’d died the minute they’d left her womb and she’d understood there were two of them. She loved them more than she loved their father who’d seen the war as his best chance to run off with the redhead being trained in the telegraph at the Post Office saying, ‘My country needs me’ and not been heard of since. She loved Ed and Al more than anyone else on earth, which was just as well when everyone else on earth struggled to tolerate them. That anyone did even a little bit was a credit to the way she’d raised them for the past three years. Now they were ten, they very nearly had some manners.

  Florence Mayberry let it be known that she employed Maggie out of the goodness of her heart because Maggie was The World’s Worst Cleaner. Theresa Fellows, who had a son the same age and fed the boys once a week, laughed her head off about that. Everyone knew Mrs Mayberry paid poor Maggie a pittance. And she knew in her heart that her own kindness to the boys was self-interest. If Maggie slit her throat from desperation, Father Kelly would expect her to take them in.

  It goes to show how little she knew. Maggie might have had just cause to be an own-throat-slitter, but nothing was less likely. She could make the most of simple pleasures because her dreams were as large and starlit as the Prospect sky on a clear December night. Her faith in glorious outcomes was so glowing and shiny and uplifting that it held her aloft through the very bleakest of times.

  Her most brilliant dream was that any day now, with the railway on their doorstep, a handsome stranger would seek her out and transform her life, as well as the lives of her wretched brothers, forever. He’d arrive without ceremony, and without ceremony he would restore to her the wealth and property that had been wrenched from her family by her neighbours, the wicked Bluetts. True love, she was certain, would triumph over the injustice that stained her past. True love, along with the passion, the riches and the muscular care she knew was in her future. And no one would have guessed any of this because Maggie’s demeanour suggested only that she was a tough little blighter, taking life on the chin, a blessing when it had so very little to offer.

  It was only now and again that things got the better of her and today wasn’t such a day. Today, she knew that Florence Mayberry would be so distracted by the enormity of her first public appearance as a solo performer that she wouldn’t care less whether her daily help scrubbed or ironed or plonked herself down in the scullery to smear polish over the family silver while reading her magazines from England. Maggie had no qualms about shirking. The magazines compensated for the very low wages and the long hours she spent working her fingers to the bone. She told herself as she passed Nightingales, I’m better off than Adelaide Bluett, in any case, and she found that heartening.

  Where Louisa looked into the world and saw only horses and darkness, Maggie showed a lively interest. She had
no love for any Bluett, even one who was now a Nightingale, but she’d heard Adelaide’s baby screaming, seen her husband’s madness and beadily diagnosed her as a woman about to crack from nerves.

  Adelaide might not have swapped places with Maggie – who in their right mind would clean for Florence Mayberry or raise two criminal boys single-handed unless they had to? – but if they were talking about getting enough sleep, then everyone was better off than she was. As Maggie decided she would buy not only cheese but also pickles on the way home, Adelaide was asking herself where she would be without Pearl McCleary and how on earth she’d ever managed without her.

  Thanks to the new housekeeper she’d suffered just the single minute of panic when she’d marched away from Louisa, slammed the front door and found each successive room so empty of babies that the only possible explanation was infanticide. Panic mixed with elation, if she were honest. But the baby had been far from dead, and now that he was no longer hungry he slept in his pram by the open kitchen door and the house was calm.

  The house was calm because Pearl McCleary was calm. Everything about her conveyed calm. Her low and measured tone, her even moods, her ready smile, her gentle laugh, her pleasant looks, her intelligent gaze, not to mention the sure and certain manner so easily mistaken by Theresa Fellows for airs and graces. ‘Tea?’ she suggested to Adelaide once the baby was fed. ‘And what about a sandwich?’

  You’d have thought she was born to restore order to a troubled household, but no such thing. Pearl McCleary was in that household under false pretences, fooling everyone with her calm. She might have been valued for her quick solutions and decisive planning, but beneath that calm exterior was a skittish interior.

  She was no more calm than the next woman struggling to track down the newly returned but vanished soldier she no longer loved even though she had promised to marry him. She was no less jumpy than anyone else hunting a man so determined to avenge an unspecified wrong done to a barely known fallen comrade that he had placed himself in mortal danger with no thought whatsoever for the ailing sister who was pining for him.

  Pearl McCleary betrayed nothing of this, and it was easy; a housekeeper is required to have no past of any consequence. The only bit of it that mattered, in any case, was very recent, so she had no qualms about concealing the crisis that had overtaken it.

  She might have tolerated a longer parting from her missing fiancé, but his frail sister, Beattie, could not. Little Beattie’s sixteen-year-old heart was so exhausted from flu and waiting for her brother to return unscathed from war it now threatened to stop beating altogether. ‘Please find him, Pearl,’ she’d begged when Pearl had explained he wouldn’t be coming home as planned. ‘Promise me you’ll find him. If anyone can, you can.’

  Pearl had cradled the little thing and promised. And now here she was, doing her best to find him but her best was turning out to be so useless that every nerve in her outwardly unruffled body jangled. She feared for the hearts of both sister and brother. Daniel Flannagan had certainly lost touch with the proper demands on his. The fallen soldier wasn’t even a proper comrade. His dying moments were the only ones they’d shared. In her pocket, as she fussed about the Nightingale kitchen, was the letter that proved it.

  I went to war to make you proud of me, Pearl, he’d written not two weeks before. But I’m not proud of myself. Heroes fell when I didn’t fall and one of them died for me. He died in my arms, Pearl, from the sniper’s bullet that should have killed me. He was a Catholic man and he died, not with a prayer on his lips, but cursing a villain whose cruelty has deprived his children of their birthright.

  Kneeling in the blood-soaked mud of Ypres, Daniel had pledged to right the terrible wrong done to that man even though he didn’t know him from Adam and the wrong had been done many years ago in a place even less accessible than Woop Woop. Worse, by the sound of it, the mission was no less dangerous than Ypres. The wretched soldier had made that clear. His enemy was ruthless. But Daniel had sworn before God he would see the family right and now, he said, he must square himself in the eyes of God.

  ‘Who cares about God, Annie? What about his own sister?’ Pearl had said bitterly on reading the letter. And Annie McGuire, as good as a mother to Pearl for twenty-three years and Beattie for the past eight, had ordered her not to blaspheme. ‘I’m going to find him,’ Pearl had vowed, ‘and I’m going to shake some sense into the idiot. He’s not even that religious.’

  Annie had urged restraint. ‘You don’t know what passes between a man and his Maker,’ she’d said. ‘Read the letter again,’ she’d advised. ‘He says, “Don’t try to find me.” He has his reasons, Pearl. Please, think before you act.’ But it wasn’t in Pearl’s nature.

  The most significant part of the letter, as far as she was concerned, had been its postmark. ‘Where is Prospect?’

  The journey had been slow and tiring, via train to Cooma, then by coach across the Monaro, but Pearl had been rewarded for her trouble by the Divine Providence Annie had prayed for. On Annie’s advice – ‘The man is struggling with his immortal soul’ – she’d made her way directly to the presbytery attached to St Benedict’s where, miraculously, Father Kelly had agreed he had heard the confession of a man resembling her missing friend. Then Providence, for reasons best known to itself, had shot through. The man had left the day he arrived. Going where? Pearl had wanted to know, but the priest had said even if he knew, he couldn’t reveal what had been said in the confessional.

  ‘He wouldn’t have told you this, I bet,’ Pearl had said angrily. ‘He’s looking for a wronged family who has nothing to do with him and he’s turned his back on his own sister who is dying.’

  The priest had shaken his head. He was sorry, he’d said, but he couldn’t help. He could only advise caution and patience. Daniel wouldn’t be the first returning soldier to need time to himself before facing his loved ones.

  ‘He needs to face them,’ Pearl had snapped, ‘while they live and breathe.’

  And the priest had sighed. He’d stared for a few minutes at the statue of The Sacred Heart on the mantelpiece and then he’d said as if the Sacred Heart had told him to, ‘Have you thought about the railway?’ She’d asked what railway and he’d said the one connecting Cooma to Prospect due for completion within the year. It was hiding all sorts of misfits and desperate men.

  Pearl might have said, He’s not a misfit, but it had seemed to her that the priest was giving her the most helpful information he could, so she’d gathered her gloves and bag. ‘I’ll go at once.’

  ‘You can’t!’ Father Kelly had cried in alarm. It wasn’t safe for a woman to go alone to such a place. No one would countenance it. He most certainly wouldn’t. Why didn’t she hire a man to find her friend? It would be so much simpler.

  A lesser woman might have wept. The priest had plainly expected tears. He’d offered her tea and a copy of The Gazette to console her, and here Providence had relented and come up with a suggestion. In The Gazette under a heading in bold that read Very Urgent, Pearl had found Adelaide’s plea for a desperately needed housekeeper, a sign if ever there was one that Prospect was where she should station herself.

  Adelaide had interviewed her that afternoon and given her the job on the spot, to start immediately. ‘Of course it’s a good idea,’ Pearl had insisted impatiently to Annie in a phone call from the Post Office mainly concerned with the trunk she needed to be packed and sent at once. ‘Think about it, Annie. Who cares about a housekeeper?’

  On this score, at least, she’d turned out to be right. She’d no sooner unpacked the meagre contents of her overnight bag in the small room assigned to her than who she was or had ever been disappeared from public view. Within minutes, Adelaide had sat her at the kitchen table to talk and talk and talk at her, and she’d showed positively no interest in the whys and wherefores of her new employee’s existence. She now knew only as much as was required by protocol.

  Miss McCleary was a woman whose fiancé was missing in action, who’d
been raised in Sydney by an Irishwoman, not her mother, called Mrs McGuire who took in unwanted children. She had no brothers or sisters that she knew of and she was a Catholic. ‘We are Church of England,’ had been her only comment and Pearl had waited for the implications but there hadn’t been any. That was it. That was enough. It suited them both down to the ground.

  Pearl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned and slender, might have been better looking than Adelaide, younger than Adelaide, as educated as Adelaide and in many respects as well dressed, well mannered and cultured as Adelaide but, in the very few days they’d lived under the one roof, Adelaide had appeared neither to notice nor care so they were a perfect match. Adelaide needed kindness, her housekeeper was happy to provide it.

  ‘Why don’t you put your feet up while I get on with dinner?’ Pearl suggested now that order had been thoroughly restored. But Adelaide didn’t feel like putting her feet anywhere except under the table opposite an adult who would listen to her with interest.

  ‘Let’s not worry about dinner for a minute. Sit down and have a cup of tea with me,’ she said. ‘The shop was full of gossip this morning. The Mayor’s wife has done something extraordinary but I still have no idea what.’

  Pearl sat and handed Adelaide a copy of The Gazette, which she’d scoured for descriptions of random strangers and wronged families. ‘Was it this?’ she asked.

  Adelaide scanned the article without understanding it. ‘What on earth is she talking about? Addressing the nation. Florence Mayberry is the most ridiculous woman on earth.’

  ‘I thought I might go,’ Pearl said.

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ Adelaide replied. Then they looked at each other in silence, equally puzzled because Adelaide’s opinion hadn’t been sought and Pearl wasn’t sure why it had been offered.

  ‘Rabbit pie?’ she suggested, getting to her feet.

  ‘Why not?’ Adelaide poured herself more tea. Nothing in Pearl’s manner suggested injured feelings or impending scandal. Just unflappable composure. ‘I ran into Mrs Worthington on the way home.’