ot until the Emperor Hirohito’s delegate signed Japan’s official surrender did Gillanbone believe the war was finally over. The news came on Sunday, September 2, 1945, which was exactly six years after the start. Six agonizing years. So many places empty, never to be filled again: Dominic O’Rourke’s son Rory, Horry Hopeton’s son John, Eden Carmichael’s son Cormac. Ross MacQueen’s youngest son, Angus, would never walk again, Anthony King’s son David would walk but never see where he was going, Paddy Cleary’s son Patsy would never have children. And there were those whose wounds weren’t visible, but whose scars went just as deep; who had gone off gaily, eager and laughing, but came home quietly, said little, and laughed only rarely. Who could have dreamed when it began that it would go on so long, or take such a toll?

Gillanbone was not a particularly superstitious community, but even the most cynical resident shivered that Sunday, September 2nd. For on the same day that the war ended, so did the longest drought in the history of Australia. For nearly ten years no useful rain had fallen, but that day the clouds filled the sky thousands of feet deep, blackly, cracked themselves open and poured twelve inches of rain on the thirsty earth. An inch of rain may not mean the breaking of a drought, it might not be followed by anything more, but twelve inches of rain means grass.

Meggie, Fee, Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy stood on the veranda watching it through the darkness, sniffing the unbearably sweet perfume of rain on parched and crumbling soil. Horses, sheep, cattle and pigs spraddled their legs against the shifting of the melting ground and let the water pour over their twitching bodies; most of them had been born since rain like this had last passed across their world. In the cemetery the rain washed the dust away, whitened everything, washed the dust off the outstretched wings of the bland Botticelli angel. The creek produced a tidal wave, its roaring flood mingling with the drumming of the soaking rain. Rain, rain! Rain. Like a benediction from some vast inscrutable hand, long withheld, finally given. The blessed, wonderful rain. For rain meant grass, and grass was life.

A pale-green fuzz appeared, poked its little blades skyward, ramified, burgeoned, grew a darker green as it lengthened, then faded and waxed fat, became the silver-beige, knee-high grass of Drogheda. The Home Paddock looked like a field of wheat, rippling with every mischievous puff of wind, and the homestead gardens exploded into color, great buds unfurling, the ghost gums suddenly white and lime-green again after nine years of griming dust. For though Michael Carson’s insane proliferation of water tanks still held enough to keep the homestead gardens alive, dust had long settled on every leaf and petal, dimmed and drabbed. And an old legend had been proven fact: Drogheda did indeed have sufficient water to survive ten years of drought, but only for the homestead.

Bob, Jack, Hughie and Patsy went back to the paddocks, began seeing how best to restock; Fee opened a brand-new bottle of black ink and savagely screwed the lid down on her bottle of red ink; Meggie saw an end coming to her life in the saddle, for it would not be long before Jims was home and men turned up looking for jobs.

After nine years there were very few sheep or cattle left, only the prize breeders which were always penned and hand-fed in any time, the nucleus of champion stock, rams and bulls. Bob went east to the top of the Western slopes to buy ewes of good blood line from properties not so hard hit by the drought. Jims came home. Eight stockmen were added to the Drogheda payroll. Meggie hung up her saddle.

It was not long after this that Meggie got a letter from Luke, the second since she had left him.

“Not long now, I reckon,” he said. “A few more years in the sugar should see me through. The old back’s a bit sore these days, but I can still cut with the best of them, eight or nine tons a day. Arne and I have twelve other gangs cutting for us, all good blokes. Money’s getting very loose, Europe wants sugar as fast as we can produce it. I’m making over five thousand quid a year, saving almost all of it. Won’t be long now, Meg, before I’m out around Kynuna. Maybe when I get things together you might want to come back to me. Did I give you the kid you wanted? Funny, how women get their hearts set on kids. I reckon that’s what really broke us up, eh? Let me know how you’re getting on, and how Drogheda weathered the drought. Yours, Luke.”

Fee came out onto the veranda, where Meggie sat with the letter in her hand, staring absently out across the brilliant green of the homestead lawns.

“How’s Luke?”

“The same as ever, Mum. Not a bit changed. Still on about a little while longer in the damned sugar, the place he’s going to have one day out around Kynuna.”

“Do you think he’ll ever actually do it?”

“I suppose so, one day.”

“Would you go to join him, Meggie?”

“Not in a million years.”

Fee sat down in a cane chair beside her daughter, pulling it round so she could see Meggie properly. In the distance men were shouting, hammers pounded; at long last the verandas and the upper-story windows of the homestead were being enclosed by fine wire mesh to screen out the flies. For years Fee had held out, obdurate. No matter how many flies there were, the lines of the house would never be spoiled by ugly netting. But the longer the drought dragged on the worse the flies became, until two weeks before it ended Fee had given in and hired a contractor to enclose every building on the station, not only the homestead itself but all the staff houses and barracks as well.

But electrify she would not, though since 1915 there had been a “donk,” as the shearers called it, to supply power to the shearing shed. Drogheda without the gentle diffusion of lamps? It wasn’t to be thought of. However, there was one of the new gas stoves which burned off cylindered gas on order, and a dozen of the new kerosene refrigerators; Australian industry wasn’t yet on a peacetime footing, but eventually the new appliances would come.

“Meggie, why don’t you divorce Luke, marry again?” Fee asked suddenly. “Enoch Davies would have you in a second; he’s never looked at anyone else.”

Meggie’s lovely eyes surveyed her mother in wonder. “Good Lord, Mum, I do believe you’re actually talking to me as one woman to another!”

Fee didn’t smile; Fee still rarely smiled. “Well, if you aren’t a woman by now, you’ll never be one. I’d say you qualified. I must be getting old; I feel garrulous.”

Meggie laughed, delighted at her mother’s overture, and anxious not to destroy this new mood. “It’s the rain, Mum. It must be. Oh, isn’t it wonderful to see grass on Drogheda again, and green lawns around the homestead?”

“Yes, it is. But you’re side-stepping my question. Why not divorce Luke, marry again?”

“It’s against the laws of the Church.”

“Piffle!” exclaimed Fee, but gently. “Half of you is me, and I’m not a Catholic. Don’t give me that, Meggie. If you really wanted to marry, you’d divorce Luke.”

“Yes, I suppose I would. But I don’t want to marry again. I’m quite happy with my children and Drogheda.”

A chuckle very like her own echoed from the interior of the bottle-brush shrubbery nearby, its drooping scarlet cylinders hiding the author of the chuckle.

“Listen! There he is, that’s Dane! Do you know at his age he can sit a horse as well as I can?” She leaned forward. “Dane! What are you up to? Come out of there this instant!”

He crawled out from under the closest bottle brush, his hands full of black earth, suspicious black smears all around his mouth.

“Mum! Did you know soil tastes good? It really does, Mum, honestly!”

He came to stand in front of her; at seven he was tall, slender, gracefully strong, and had a face of delicate porcelain beauty.

Justine appeared, came to stand beside him. She too was tall, but skinny rather than slender, and atrociously freckled. It was hard to see what her features were like beneath the brown spots, but those unnerving eyes were as pale as they had been in infancy, and the sandy brows and lashes were too fair to emerge from the freckles. Paddy’s fiercely red tresses rioted in a mass of curls around her rather pixyish face. No one could have called her a pretty child, but no one ever forgot her, not merely on account of the eyes but also because she had remarkable strength of character. Astringent, forth-right and uncompromisingly intelligent, Justine at eight cared as little what anyone thought of her as she had when a baby. Only one person was very close to her: Dane. She still adored him, and still regarded him as her own property.

Which had led to many a tussle of wills between her and her mother. It had been a rude shock to Justine when Meggie hung up her saddle and got back to being a mother. For one thing, Justine didn’t seem to need a mother, since she was convinced she was right about everything. Nor was she the sort of little girl who required a confidante, or warm approval. As far as she was concerned, Meggie was mostly someone who interfered with her pleasure in Dane. She got on a lot better with her grandmother, who was just the sort of person Justine heartily approved of; she kept her distance and assumed one had a little sense.

“I told him not to eat dirt,” Justine said.

“Well, it won’t kill him, Justine, but it isn’t good for him, either.” Meggie turned to her son. “Dane, why?”

He considered the question gravely. “It was there, so I ate it. If it was bad for me, wouldn’t it taste bad, too? It tastes good.”

“Not necessarily,” Justine interrupted loftily. “I give up on you, Dane, I really do. Some of the best-tasting things are the most poisonous.”

“Name one!” he challenged.

“Treacle!” she said triumphantly.

Dane had been very ill after finding a tin of treacle in Mrs. Smith’s pantry and eating the lot. He admitted the thrust, but countered. “I’m still here, so it can’t be all that poisonous.”

“That’s only because you vomited. If you hadn’t vomited, you’d be dead.”

This was inarguable. He and his sister were much of a height, so he tucked his arm companionably through hers and they sauntered away across the lawn toward their cubbyhouse, which their uncles had erected as instructed amid the down-drooping branches of a pepper tree. Danger from bees had led to much adult opposition to this site, but the children were proven right. The bees dwelled with them amicably. For, said the children, pepper trees were the nicest of all trees, very private. They had such a dry, fragrant smell, and the grapelike clusters of tiny pink globules they bore crumbled into crisp, pungent pink flakes when crushed in the hand.

“They’re so different from each other, Dane and Justine, yet they get along so well together,” said Meggie. “It never ceases to amaze me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them quarrel, though how Dane avoids quarreling with some one as determined and stubborn as Justine, I don’t understand.”

But Fee had something else on her mind. “Lord, he’s the living image of his father,” she said, watching Dane duck under the lowest fronds of the pepper tree and disappear from sight.

Meggie felt herself go cold, a reflex response which years of hearing people say this had not scotched. It was just her own guilt, of course. People always meant Luke. Why not? There were basic similarities between Luke O’Neill and Ralph de Bricassart. But try as she would, she could never be quite natural when Dane’s likeness to his father was commented upon.

She drew a carefully casual breath. “Do you think so, Mum?” she asked, nonchalantly swinging her foot. “I can never see it myself. Dane is nothing like Luke in nature or attitude to life.”

Fee laughed. It came out as a snort, but it was a genuine laugh. Grown pallid with age and encroaching cataracts, her eyes rested on Meggie’s startled face, grim and ironic. “Do you take me for a fool, Meggie? I don’t mean Luke O’Neill. I mean Dane is the living image of Ralph de Bricassart.”

Lead. Her foot was made of lead. It dropped to the Spanish tiles, her leaden body sagged, the lead heart within her breast struggled against its vast weight to beat. Beat, damn you, beat! You’ve got to go on beating for my son!

“Why, Mum!” Her voice was leaden, too. “Why, Mum, what an extraordinary thing to say! Father Ralph de Bricassart?”

“How many people of that name do you know? Luke O’Neil never bred that boy; he’s Ralph de Bricassart’s son. I knew it the minute I took him out of you at his birth.”

“Then—why haven’t you said something? Why wait until he’s seven years old to make such an insane and unfounded accusation?”

Fee stretched her legs out, crossed them daintily at the ankles. “I’m getting old at last, Meggie. And things don’t hurt as much anymore. What a blessing old age can be! It’s so good to see Drogheda coming back, I feel better within myself because of it. For the first time in years I feel like talking.”

“Well, I must say when you decide to talk you really know how to pick your subject! Mum, you have absolutely no right to say such a thing. It isn’t true!” said Meggie desperately, not sure if her mother was bent on torture or commiseration.

Suddenly Fee’s hand came out, rested on Meggie’s knee, and she was smiling—not bitterly or contemptuously, but with a curious sympathy. “Don’t lie to me, Meggie. Lie to anyone else under the sun, but don’t lie to me. Nothing will ever convince me Luke O’Neill fathered that boy. I’m not a fool, I have eyes. There’s no Luke in him, there never was because there couldn’t be. He’s the image of the priest. Look at his hands, the way his hair grows in a widow’s peak, the shape of his face, the eyebrows, the mouth. Even how he moves. Ralph de Bricassart, Meggie, Ralph de Bricassart.”

Meggie gave in, the enormity of her relief showing in the way she sat, loosely now, relaxed. “The distance in his eyes. That’s what I notice myself most of all. Is it so obvious? Does everyone know, Mum?”

“Of course not,” said Fee positively. “People don’t look any further than the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the general build. Like enough to Luke’s. I knew because I’d been watching you and Ralph de Bricassart for years. All he had to do was crook his little finger and you’d have gone running, so a fig for your ‘it’s against the laws of the Church’ when it comes to divorce. You were panting to break a far more serious law of the Church than the one about divorce. Shameless, Meggie, that’s what you were. Shameless!” A hint of hardness crept into her voice. “But he was a stubborn man. His heart was set on being a perfect priest; you came a very bad second. Oh, idiocy! It didn’t do him any good, did it? It was only a matter of time before something happened.”

Around the corner of the veranda someone dropped a hammer, and let fly with a string of curses; Fee winced, shuddered. “Dear heaven, I’ll be glad when they’re done with the screening!” She got back to the subject. “Did you think you fooled me when you wouldn’t have Ralph de Bricassart to marry you to Luke? I knew. You wanted him as the bridegroom, not as the officiating cleric. Then when he came to Drogheda before he left for Athens and you weren’t here, I knew sooner or later he’d have to go and find you. He wandered around the place as lost as a little boy at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Marrying Luke was the smartest move you made, Meggie. As long as he knew you were pining for him Ralph didn’t want you, but the minute you became somebody else’s he exhibited all the classical signs of the dog in the manger. Of course he’d convinced himself that his attachment to you was as pure as the driven snow, but the fact remained that he needed you. You were necessary to him in a way no other woman ever had been, or I suspect ever will be. Strange,” said Fee with real puzzlement. “I always wondered what on earth he saw in you, but I suppose mothers are always a little blind about their daughters until they’re too old to be jealous of youth. You are about Justine, the same as I was about you.”

She leaned back in her chair, rocking slightly, her eyes half closed, but she watched Meggie like a scientist his specimen.

“Whatever it was he saw in you,” she went on, “he saw it the first time he met you, and it never left off enchanting him. The hardest thing he had to face was your growing up, but he faced it that time he came to find you gone, married. Poor Ralph! He had no choice but to look for you. And he did find you, didn’t he? I knew it when you came home, before Dane was born. Once you had Ralph de Bricassart it wasn’t necessary to stay any longer with Luke.”

“Yes,” sighed Meggie, “Ralph found me. But it didn’t solve anything for us, did it? I knew he would never be willing to give up his God. It was for that reason I was determined to have the only part of him I ever could. His child. Dane.”

“It’s like listening to an echo,” Fee said, laughing her rusty laugh. “You might be me, saying that.”

“Frank?”

The chair scraped; Fee got up, paced the tiles, came back and stared hard at her daughter. “Well, well! Tit for tat, eh, Meggie? How long have you known?”

“Since I was a little girl. Since the time Frank ran away.”

“His father was married already. He was a lot older than me, an important politician. If I told you his name, you’d recognize it. There are streets named for him all over New Zealand, a town or two probably. But for the purpose, I’ll call him Pakeha. It’s Maori for ‘white man,’ but it’ll do. He’s dead now, of course. I have a trace of Maori blood in me, but Frank’s father was half Maori. It showed in Frank because he got it from both of us. Oh, but I loved that man! Perhaps it was the call of our blood, I don’t know. He was handsome. A big man with a mop of black hair and the most brilliant, laughing black eyes. He was everything Paddy wasn’t—cultured, sophisticated, very charming. I loved him to the point of madness. And I thought I’d never love anyone else; I wallowed in that delusion so long I left it too late, too late!” Her voice broke. She turned to look at the garden. “I have a lot to answer for, Meggie, believe me.”

“So that’s why you loved Frank more than the rest of us,” Meggie said.

“I thought I did, because he was Pakeha’s son and the rest belonged to Paddy,” She sat down, made a queer, mournful noise. “So history does repeat itself. I had a quiet laugh when I saw Dane, I tell you.”

“Mum, you’re an extraordinary woman!”

“Am I?” The chair creaked; she leaned forward. “Let me whisper you a little secret, Meggie. Extraordinary or merely ordinary, I’m a very unhappy woman. For one reason or another I’ve been unhappy since the day I met Pakeha. Mostly my own fault. I loved him, but what he did to me shouldn’t happen to any woman. And there was Frank…. I kept hanging on to Frank, and ignoring the rest of you. Ignoring Paddy, who was the best thing ever happened to me. Only I didn’t see it. I was too busy comparing him with Pakeha. Oh, I was grateful to him, and I couldn’t help but see what a fine man he was….” She shrugged. “Well, all that’s past. What I wanted to say was that it’s wrong, Meggie. You know that, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. The way I see it, the Church is wrong, expecting to take that from her priests as well.”

“Funny, how we always infer the Church is feminine. You stole a woman’s man, Meggie, just as I did.”

“Ralph had absolutely no allegiance to any woman, except to me. The Church isn’t a woman, Mum. It’s a thing, an institution.”

“Don’t bother trying to justify yourself to me. I know all the answers. I thought as you do myself, at the time. Divorce was out of the question for him. He was one of the first people of his race to attain political greatness; he had to choose between me and his people. What man could resist a chance like that to be noble? Just as your Ralph chose the Church, didn’t he? So I thought, I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get of him, I’ll have his child to love at least.”

But suddenly Meggie was too busy hating her mother to be able to pity her, too busy resenting the inference that she herself had made just as big a mess of things. So she said, “Except that I far outdid you in subtlety, Mum. My son has a name no one can take from him, even including Luke.”

Fee’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Nasty! Oh, you’re deceptive, Meggie! Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it? Well, my father bought my husband to give Frank a name and get rid of me: I’ll bet you never knew that! How did you know?”

“That’s my business.”

“You’re going to pay, Meggie. Believe me, you’re going to pay. You won’t get away with it any more than I did. I lost Frank in the worst way a mother could; I can’t even see him and I long to…. You wait! You’ll lose Dane, too.”

“Not if I can help it. You lost Frank because he couldn’t pull in tandem with Daddy. I made sure Dane had no daddy to harness him. I’ll harness him instead, to Drogheda. Why do you think I’m making a stockman out of him already? He’ll be safe on Drogheda.”

“Was Daddy? Was Stuart? Nowhere is safe. And you won’t keep Dane here if he wants to go. Daddy didn’t harness Frank. That was it. Frank couldn’t be harnessed. And if you think you, a woman, can harness Ralph de Bricassart’s son, you’ve got another think coming. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If neither of us could hold the father, how can we hope to hold the son?”

“The only way I can lose Dane is if you open your mouth, Mum. And I’m warning you, I’d kill you first.”

“Don’t bother, I’m not worth swinging for. Your secret’s safe with me; I’m just an interested onlooker. Yes indeed, that’s all I am. An onlooker.”

“Oh, Mum! What could possibly have made you like this? Why like this, so unwilling to give?”

Fee sighed. “Events which took place years before you were even born,” she said pathetically.

But Meggie shook her fist vehemently. “Oh, no, you don’t! After what you’ve just told me? You’re not going to get away with flogging that dead horse to me ever again! Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish! Do you hear me, Mum? You’ve wallowed in it for most of your life, like a fly in syrup!”

Fee smiled broadly, genuinely pleased. “I used to think having a daughter wasn’t nearly as important as having sons, but I was wrong. I enjoy you, Meggie, in a way I can never enjoy my sons. A daughter’s an equal. Sons aren’t, you know. They’re just defenseless dolls we set up to knock down at our leisure.”

Meggie stared. “You’re remorseless. Tell me, then, where do we go wrong?”

“In being born,” said Fee.

Men were returning home in thousands upon thousands, shedding their khaki uniforms and slouch hats for civvies. And the Labor government, still in office, took a long, hard look at the great properties of the western plains, some of the bigger stations closer in. It wasn’t right that so much land should belong to one family, when men who had done their bit for Australia needed room for their belongings and the country needed more intensive working of its land. Six million people to fill an area as big as the United States of America, but a mere handful of those six million holding vast tracts in a handful of names. The biggest properties would have to be subdivided, yield up some of their acreages to the war veterans.

Bugela went from 150,000 acres to 70,000; two returned soldiers got 40,000 acres each off Martin King. Rudna Hunish had 120,000 acres, therefore Ross MacQueen lost 60,000 acres and two more returned soldiers were endowed. So it went. Of course the government compensated the graziers, though at lower figures than the open market would have given. And it hurt. Oh, it hurt. No amount of argument prevailed with Canberra; properties as large as Bugela and Rudna Hunish would be partitioned. It was self-evident no man needed so much, since the Gilly district had many thriving stations of less than 50,000 acres.

What hurt the most was the knowledge that this time it seemed the returned soldiers would persevere. After the First World War most of the big stations had gone through the same partial resumption, but it had been poorly done, the fledgling graziers without training or experience; gradually the squatters bought their filched acres back at rock-bottom prices from discouraged veterans. This time the government was prepared to train and educate the new settlers at its own expense.

Almost all the squatters were avid members of the Country Party, and on principle loathed a Labor government, identifying it with blue-collar workers in industrial cities, trade unions and feckless Marxist intellectuals. The unkindest cut of all was to find that the Clearys, who were known Labor voters, were not to see a single acre pared from the formidable bulk of Drogheda. Since the Catholic Church owned it, naturally it was subdivision-exempt. The howl was heard in Canberra, but ignored. It came very hard to the squatters, who always thought of themselves as the most powerful lobby group in the nation, to find that he who wields the Canberra whip does pretty much as he likes. Australia was heavily federal, its state governments virtually powerless.

Thus, like a giant in a Lilliputian world, Drogheda carried on, all quarter of a million acres of it.

The rain came and went, sometimes adequate, sometimes too much, sometimes too little, but not, thank God, ever another drought like the great one. Gradually the number of sheep built up and the quality of the wool improved over pre-drought times, no mean feat. Breeding was the “in” thing. People talked of Haddon Rig near Warren, started actively competing with its owner, Max Falkiner, for the top ram and ewe prizes at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. And the price of wool began to creep up, then skyrocketed. Europe, the United States and Japan were hungry for every bit of fine wool Australia could produce. Other countries yielded coarser wools for heavy fabrics, carpets, felts; but only the long, silky fibers from Australian merinos could make a woolen textile so fine it slipped through the fingers like softest lawn. And that sort of wool reached its peak out on the black-soil plains of north-west New South Wales and southwest Queensland.

It was as if after all the years of tribulation, a just reward had arrived. Drogheda’s profits soared out of all imagination. Millions of pounds every year. Fee sat at her desk radiating contentment, Bob put another two stockmen on the books. If it hadn’t been for the rabbits, pastoral conditions would have been ideal, but the rabbits were as much of a blight as ever.

On the homestead life was suddenly very pleasant. The wire screening had excluded flies from all Drogheda interiors; now that it was up and everyone had grown used to its appearance, they wondered how they had ever survived without it. For there were multiple compensations for the look of it, like being able to eat al fresco on the veranda when it was very hot, under the tapping leaves of the wistaria vine.

The frogs loved the screening, too. Little fellows they were, green with a delicate overlay of glossy gold. On suckered feet they crept up the outside of the mesh to stare motionless at the diners, very solemn and dignified. Suddenly one would leap, grab at a moth almost bigger than itself, and settle back into inertia with two-thirds of the moth flapping madly out of its overladen mouth. It amused Dane and Justine to time how long it took a frog to swallow a big moth completely, staring gravely through the wire and every ten minutes getting a little more moth down. The insect lasted a long time, and would often still be kicking when the final piece of wingtip was engulfed.

“Erckle! What a fate!” chuckled Dane. “Fancy half of you still being alive while the other half of you is busy being digested.”

Avid reading—that Drogheda passion—had given the two O’Neill children excellent vocabularies at an early age. They were intelligent, alert and interested in everything. Life was particularly pleasant for them. They had their thoroughbred ponies, increasing in size as they did; they endured their correspondence lessons at Mrs. Smith’s green kitchen table; they played in the pepper tree cubbyhouse; they had pet cats, pet dogs, even a pet goanna, which walked beautifully on a leash and answered to its name. Their favorite pet was a miniature pink pig, as intelligent as any dog, called Iggle-Piggle.

So far from urban congestion, they caught few diseases and never had colds or influenza. Meggie was terrified of infantile paralysis, diphtheria, anything which might swoop out of nowhere to carry them off, so whatever vaccines became available they received. It was an ideal existence, full of physical activity and mental stimulation.

When Dane was ten and Justine eleven they were sent to boarding school in Sydney, Dane to Riverview as tradition demanded, and Justine to Kincoppal. When she put them on the plane the first time, Meggie watched as their white, valiantly composed little faces stared out of a window, handkerchiefs waving; they had never been away from home before. She had wanted badly to go with them, see them settled in for herself, but opinion was so strongly against her she yielded. From Fee down to Jims and Patsy, everyone felt they would do a great deal better on their own.

“Don’t mollycoddle them,” said Fee sternly.

But indeed she felt like two different people as the DC-3 took off in a cloud of dust and staggered into the shimmering air. Her heart was breaking at losing Dane, and light at the thought of losing Justine. There was no ambivalence in her feelings about Dane; his gay, even-tempered nature gave and accepted love as naturally as breathing. But Justine was a lovable, horrible monster. One had to love her, because there was much to love: her strength, her integrity, her self-reliance—lots of things. The trouble was that she didn’t permit love the way Dane did, nor did she ever give Meggie the wonderful feeling of being needed. She wasn’t matey or full of pranks, and she had a disastrous habit of putting people down, chiefly, it seemed, her mother. Meggie found much in her that had been exasperating in Luke, but at least Justine wasn’t a miser. For that much be thankful.

A thriving airline meant that all the children’s vacations, even the shortest ones, could be spent on Drogheda. However, after an initial period of adjustment both children enjoyed their schooling. Dane was always homesick after a visit to Drogheda, but Justine took to Sydney as if she had always lived there, and spent her Drogheda time longing to be back in the city. The Riverview Jesuits were delighted; Dane was a marvelous student, in the classroom and on the playing field. The Kincoppal nuns, on the other hand, were definitely not delighted; no one with eyes and a tongue as sharp as Justine’s could hope to be popular. A class ahead of Dane, she was perhaps the better student of the two, but only in the classroom.

The Sydney Morning Herald of August 4th, 1952, was very interesting. Its big front page rarely bore more than one photograph, usually middle and high up, the interest story of the day. And that day the picture was a handsome portrait of Ralph de Bricassart.

His Grace Archbishop Ralph de Bricassart, at the present time aide to the Secretary of State of the Holy See of Rome, was today created Cardinal de Bricassart by His Holiness Pope Pius XII.

Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart has had a long and illustrious association with the Roman Catholic Church in Australia, extending from his arrival as a newly ordained priest in July 1919 to his departure for the Vatican in March 1938.

Born on September 23, 1893, in the Republic of Ireland, Cardinal de Bricassart was the second son of a family which can trace its descent from Baron Ranulf de Bricassart, who came to England in the train of William the Conqueror. By tradition, Cardinal de Bricassart espoused the Church. He entered the seminary at the age of seventeen, and upon his ordination was sent to Australia. His first months were spent in the service of the late Bishop Michael Clabby, in the Diocese of Winnemurra.

In June 1920 he was transferred to serve as pastor of Gillanbone, in northwestern New South Wales. He was made Monsignor, and continued at Gillanbone until December 1928. From there he became private secretary to His Grace Archbishop Cluny Dark, and finally private secretary to the then Archbishop Papal Legate, His Eminence Cardinal di Contini-Verchese. During this time he was created Bishop. When Cardinal di Contini-Verchese was transferred to Rome to commence his remarkable career at the Vatican, Bishop de Bricassart was created Archbishop, and returned to Australia from Athens as the Papal Legate himself. He held this important Vatican appointment until his transfer to Rome in 1938; since that time his rise within the central hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has been spectacular. Now 58 years of age, he is rumored to be one of the few men actively concerned in the determination of papal policy.

A Sydney Morning Herald representative talked to some of Cardinal de Bricassart’s ex-parishioners in the Gillanbone area yesterday. He is well remembered, and with much affection. This rich sheep district is predominantly Roman Catholic in its religious adherence.

“Father de Bricassart founded the Holy Cross Bush Bibliophilic Society,” said Mr. Harry Gough, Mayor of Gillanbone. “It was—for the time especially—a remarkable service, splendidly endowed first by the late Mrs. Mary Carson, and after her death by the Cardinal himself, who has never forgotten us or our needs.”

“Father de Bricassart was the finest-looking man I’ve ever seen,” said Mrs. Fiona Cleary, present doyenne of Drogheda, one of the largest and most prosperous stations in New South Wales. “During his time in Gilly he was a great spiritual support to his parishioners, and particularly to those of us on Drogheda, which as you know now belongs to the Catholic Church. During floods he helped us move our stock, during fires he came to our aid, even if it was only to bury our dead. He was, in fact, an extraordinary man in every way, and he had more charm than any man I’ve ever met. One could see he was meant for great things. Indeed we remember him, though it’s over twenty years since he left us. Yes, I think it’s quite truthful to say that there are some around Gilly who still miss him very much.”

During the war the then Archbishop de Bricassart served His Holiness loyally and unswervingly, and is credited with having influenced Field Marshal Albert Kesselring in deciding to maintain Rome as an open city after Italy became a German enemy. Florence, which had asked in vain for the same privilege, lost many of its treasures, only restored later because Germany lost the war. In the immediate postwar period, Cardinal de Bricassart helped thousands of displaced persons seek asylum in new countries, and was especially vigorous in aiding the Australian immigration program.

Though by birth he is an Irishman, and though it seems he will not exert his influence as Cardinal de Bricassart in Australia, we still feel that to a large extent Australia may rightly claim this remarkable man as her own.

Meggie handed the paper back to Fee, and smiled at her mother ruefully.

“One must congratulate him, as I said to the Herald reporter. They didn’t print that, did they? Though they printed your little eulogy almost verbatim, I see. What a barbed tongue you’ve got! At least I know where Justine gets it from. I wonder how many people will be smart enough to read between the lines of what you said?”

“He will, anyway, if he ever sees it.”

“I wonder does he remember us?” Meggie sighed.

“Undoubtedly. After all, he still finds time to administer Drogheda himself. Of course he remembers us, Meggie. How could he forget?”

“True, I had forgotten Drogheda. We’re right up there on top of the earnings, aren’t we? He must be very pleased. With our wool at a pound per pound in the auctions, the Drogheda wool check this year must have made even the gold mines look sick. Talk about Golden Fleece. Over four million pounds, just from shaving our baa-lambs.”

“Don’t be cynical, Meggie, it doesn’t suit you,” said Fee; her manner toward Meggie these days, though often mildly withering, was tempered with respect and affection. “We’ve done well enough, haven’t we? Don’t forget we get our money every year, good or bad. Didn’t he pay Bob a hundred thousand as a bonus, the rest of us fifty thousand each? If he threw us off Drogheda tomorrow we could afford to buy Bugela, even at today’s inflated land prices. And how much has he given your children? Thousands upon thousands. Be fair to him.”

“But my children don’t know it, and they’re not going to find out. Dane and Justine will grow up to think they must make their own ways in the world, without benefit of dear Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart. Fancy his second name being Raoul! Very Norman, isn’t it?”

Fee got up, walked over to the fire and threw the front page of the Herald onto the flames. Ralph Raoul, Cardinal de Bricassart shuddered, winked at her, and then shriveled up.

“What will you do if he comes back, Meggie?”

Meggie sniffed. “Fat chance!”

“He might,” said Fee enigmatically.

He did, in December. Very quietly, without anyone knowing, driving an Aston Martin sports car all the way from Sydney himself. Not a word about his presence in Australia had reached the press, so no one on Drogheda had the remotest suspicion he was coming. When the car pulled in to the gravelly area at one side of the house there was no one about, and apparently no one had heard him arrive, for no one came out onto the veranda.

He had felt the miles from Gilly in every cell of his body, inhaled the odors of the bush, the sheep, the dry grass sparkling restlessly in the sun. Kangaroos and emus, galahs and goannas, millions of insects buzzing and flipping, ants marching across the road in treacly columns, fat pudgy sheep everywhere. He loved it so, for in one curious aspect it conformed to what he loved in all things; the passing years scarcely seemed to brush it.

Only the fly screening was different, but he noted with amusement that Fee hadn’t permitted the big house veranda facing the Gilly road to be enclosed like the rest, only the windows opening onto it. She was right, of course; a great expanse of mesh would have ruined the lines of that lovely Georgian facade. How long did ghost gums live? These must have been transplanted from the Dead Heart interior eighty years ago. The bougainvillaea in their high branches was one sliding mass of copper and purple.

It was already summer, two weeks left before Christmas, and the Drogheda roses were at their height. There were roses everywhere, pink and white and yellow, crimson like heart’s blood, scarlet like a cardinal’s soutane. In among the wistaria, green now, rambling roses drowsed pink and white, fell off the veranda roof, down the wire mesh, clung lovingly to the black shutters of the second story, stretched tendrils past them to the sky. The tank stands were quite smothered from sight now, so were the tanks themselves. And one color was everywhere among the roses, a pale pinkish-grey. Ashes of roses? Yes, that was the name of the color. Meggie must have planted them, it had to be Meggie.

He heard Meggie’s laugh, and stood motionless, quite terrified, then made his feet go in the direction of the sound, gone down to delicious giggling trills. Just the way she used to laugh when she was a little girl. There it was! Over there, behind a great clump of pinkishgrey roses near a pepper tree. He pushed the clusters of blossoms aside with his hand, his mind reeling from their perfume, and that laugh.

But Meggie wasn’t there, only a boy squatting in the lush lawn, teasing a little pink pig which ran in idiotic rushes up to him, galloped off, sidled back. Unconscious of his audience, the boy threw his gleaming head back and laughed. Meggie’s laugh, from that unfamiliar throat. Without meaning to, Cardinal Ralph let the roses fall into place and stepped through them, heedless of the thorns. The boy, about twelve or fourteen years of age, just prepubescent, looked up, startled; the pig squealed, curled up its tail tightly and ran off.

Clad in an old pair of khaki shorts and nothing else, bare-footed, he was golden brown and silky-skinned, his slender, boyish body already hinting at later power in the breadth of the young square shoulders, the well-developed calf and thigh muscles, the flat belly and narrow hips. His hair was a little long and loosely curly, just the bleached color of Drogheda grass, his eyes through absurdly thick black lashes intensely blue. He looked like a very youthful escaped angel.

“Hello,” said the boy, smiling.

“Hello,” said Cardinal Ralph, finding it impossible to resist the charm of that smile. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dane O’Neill,” answered the boy. “Who are you?”

“My name is Ralph de Bricassart.”

Dane O’Neill. He was Meggie’s boy, then. She had not left Luke O’Neill after all, she had gone back to him, borne this beautiful lad who might have been his, had he not married the Church first. How old had he been when he married the Church? Not much older than this, not very much more mature. Had he waited, the boy might well have been his. What nonsense, Cardinal de Bricassart! If you hadn’t married the Church you would have remained in Ireland to breed horses and never known your fate at all, never known Drogheda or Meggie Cleary.

“May I help you?” asked the boy politely, getting to his feet with a supple grace Cardinal Ralph recognized, and thought of as Meggie’s.

“Is your father here, Dane?”

“My father?” The dark, finely etched brows knitted. “No, he’s not here. He’s never been here.”

“Oh, I see. Is your mother here, then?”

“She’s in Gilly, but she’ll be back soon. My Nanna is in the house, though. Would you like to see her? I can take you.” Eyes as blue as cornflowers stared at him, widened, narrowed. “Ralph de Bricassart. I’ve heard of you. Oh! Cardinal de Bricassart! Your Eminence, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Though he had abandoned his clerical regalia in favor of boots, breeches and a white shirt, the ruby ring was still on his finger, must never be withdrawn as long as he lived. Dane O’Neill knelt, took Cardinal Ralph’s slender hand in his own slender ones, and kissed the ring reverently.

“It’s all right, Dane. I’m not here as Cardinal de Bricassart. I’m here as a friend of your mother’s and your grandmother’s.”

“I’m sorry, Your Eminence, I ought to have recognized your name the minute I heard it. We say it often enough round here. Only you pronounce it a bit differently, and your Christian name threw me off. My mother will be very glad to see you, I know.”

“Dane, Dane, where are you?” called an impatient voice, very deep and entrancingly husky.

The hanging fronds of the pepper tree parted and a girl of about fifteen ducked out, straightened. He knew who she was immediately, from those astonishing eyes. Meggie’s daughter. Covered in freckles, sharp-faced, small-featured, disappointingly unlike Meggie.

“Oh, hello. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we had a visitor. I’m Justine O’Neill.”

“Jussy, this is Cardinal de Bricassart!” Dane said in a loud whisper. “Kiss his ring, quickly!”

The blind-looking eyes flashed scorn. “You’re a real prawn about religion, Dane,” she said without bothering to lower her voice. “Kissing a ring is unhygienic; I won’t do it. Besides, how do we know this is Cardinal de Bricassart? He looks like an old-fashioned grazier to me. You know, like Mr. Gordon.”

“He is, he is!” insisted Dane. “Please, Jussy, be good! Be good for me!”

“I’ll be good, but only for you. But I won’t kiss his ring, even for you. Disgusting. How do I know who kissed it last? They might have had a cold.”

“You don’t have to kiss my ring, Justine. I’m here on a holiday; I’m not being a cardinal at the moment.”

“That’s good, because I’ll tell you frankly, I’m an atheist,” said Meggie Cleary’s daughter calmly. “After four years at Kincoppal I think it’s all a load of utter codswallop.”

“That’s your privilege,” said Cardinal Ralph, trying desperately to look as dignified and serious as she did. “May I find your grandmother?”

“Of course. Do you need us?” Justine asked.

“No, thank you. I know my way.”

“Good.” She turned to her brother, still gaping up at the visitor. “Come on, Dane, help me. Come on!”

But though Justine tugged painfully at his arm, Dane stayed to watch Cardinal Ralph’s tall, straight figure disappear behind the roses.

“You really are a prawn, Dane. What’s so special about him?”

“He’s a cardinal!” said Dane. “Imagine that! A real live cardinal on Drogheda!”

“Cardinals,” said Justine, “are Princes of the Church. I suppose you’re right, it is rather extraordinary. But I don’t like him.”

Where else would Fee be, except at her desk? He stepped through the windows into the drawing room, but these days that necessitated opening a screen. She must have heard him, but kept on working, back bent, the lovely golden hair gone to silver. With difficulty he remembered she must be all of seventy-two years old.

“Hello, Fee,” he said.

When she raised her head he saw a change in her, of what precise nature he couldn’t be sure; the indifference was there, but so were several other things. As if she had mellowed and hardened simultaneously, become more human, yet human in a Mary Carson mold. God, these Drogheda matriarchs! Would it happen to Meggie, too, when her turn came?

“Hello, Ralph,” she said, as if he stepped through the windows every day. “How nice to see you.”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“I didn’t know you were in Australia.”

“No one does. I have a few weeks’ holiday.”

“You’re staying with us, I hope?”

“Where else?” His eyes roamed round the magnificent walls, rested on Mary Carson’s portrait. “You know, Fee, your taste is impeccable, unerring. This room rivals anything in the Vatican. Those black egg shapes with the roses are a stroke of genius.”

“Why, thank you! We try our humble best. Personally I prefer the dining room; I’ve done it again since you were here last. Pink and white and green. Sounds awful, but wait until you see it. Though why I try, I don’t know. It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“Not while there’s a Cleary alive, Fee,” he said quietly.

“How comforting. Well, you’ve certainly come up in the world since your Gilly days, haven’t you? Did you see the Herald article about your promotion?”

He winced. “I did. Your tongue’s sharpened, Fee.”

“Yes, and what’s more, I’m enjoying it. All those years I shut up and never said a thing! I didn’t know what I was missing.” She smiled. “Meggie’s in Gilly, but she’ll be back soon.”

Dane and Justine came through the windows.

“Nanna, may we ride down to the borehead?”

“You know the rules. No riding unless your mother gives her permission personally. I’m sorry, but they’re your mother’s orders. Where are your manners? Come and be introduced to our visitor.”

“I’ve already met them.”

“Oh.”

“I’d have thought you’d be away at boarding school,” he said to Dane, smiling.

“Not in December, Your Eminence. We’re off for two months—the summer holidays.”

Too many years away; he had forgotten that southern hemisphere children would enjoy their long vacation during December and January.

“Are you going to be staying here long, Your Eminence?” Dane queried, still fascinated.

“His Eminence will be with us for as long as he can manage, Dane,” said his grandmother, “but I think he’s going to find it a little wearing to be addressed as Your Eminence all the time. What shall it be? Uncle Ralph?”

“Uncle!” exclaimed Justine. “You know ‘uncle’ is against the family rules, Nanna! Our uncles are just Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims and Patsy. So that means he’s Ralph.”

“Don’t be so rude, Justine! What on earth’s the matter with your manners?” demanded Fee.

“No, Fee, it’s all right. I’d prefer that everyone call me plain Ralph, really,” the Cardinal said quickly. Why did she dislike him so, the odd mite?

“I couldn’t!” gasped Dane. “I couldn’t call you just Ralph!”

Cardinal Ralph crossed the room, took the bare shoulders between his hands and smiled down, his blue eyes very kind, and vivid in the room’s shadows. “Of course you can, Dane. It isn’t a sin.”

“Come on, Dane, let’s get back to the cubbyhouse,” Justine ordered.

Cardinal Ralph and his son turned toward Fee, looked at her together.

“Heaven help us!” said Fee. “Go on, Dane, go outside and play, will you?” She clapped her hands. “Buzz!”

The boy ran for his life, and Fee edged toward her books. Cardinal Ralph took pity on her and announced that he would go to the cookhouse. How little the place had changed! Still lamplit, obviously. Still redolent of beeswax and great vases of roses.

He stayed talking to Mrs. Smith and the maids for a long time. They had grown much older in the years since he had left, but somehow age suited them more than it did Fee. Happy. That’s what they were. Genuinely almost perfectly happy. Poor Fee, who wasn’t happy. It made him hungry to see Meggie, see if she was happy.

But when he left the cookhouse Meggie wasn’t back, so to fill in time he strolled through the grounds toward the creek. How peaceful the cemetery was; there were six bronze plaques on the mausoleum wall, just as there had been last time. He must see that he himself was buried here; he must remember to instruct them, when he returned to Rome. Near the mausoleum he noticed two new graves, old Tom, the garden rouseabout, and the wife of one of the stockmen, who had been on the payroll since 1946. Must be some sort of record. Mrs. Smith thought he was still with them because his wife lay here. The Chinese cook’s ancestral umbrella was quite faded from all the years of fierce sun, had dwindled from its original imperial red through the various shades he remembered to its present whitish-pink, almost ashes of roses. Meggie, Meggie. You went back to him after me, you bore him a son.

It was very hot; a little wind came, stirred the weeping willows along the creek, made the bells on the Chinese cook’s umbrella chime their mournful tinny tune: Hee Sing, Hee Sing, Hee Sing. Tankstand Charlie he was a good bloke. That had faded, too, was practically indecipherable. Well, it was fitting. Graveyards ought to sink back into the bosom of Mother Earth, lose their human cargo under a wash of time, until it all was gone and only the air remembered, sighing. He didn’t want to be buried in a Vatican crypt, among men like himself. Here, among people who had really lived.

Turning, his eyes caught the glaucous glance of the marble angel. He raised his hand, saluted it, looked across the grass toward the big house. And she was coming, Meggie. Slim, golden, in a pair of breeches and a white man’s shirt exactly like his own, a man’s grey felt hat on the back of her head, tan boots on her feet. Like a boy, like her son, who should have been his son. He was a man, but when he too lay here there would be nothing left living to mark the fact.

She came on, stepped over the white fence, came so close all he could see were her eyes, those grey, light-filled eyes which hadn’t lost their beauty or their hold over his heart. Her arms were around his neck, his fate again within his touch, it was as if he had never been away from her, that mouth alive under his, not a dream; so long wanted, so long. A different kind of sacrament, dark like the earth, having nothing to do with the sky.

“Meggie, Meggie,” he said, his face in her hair, her hat on the grass, his arms around her.

“It doesn’t seem to matter, does it? Nothing ever changes,” she said, eyes closed.

“No, nothing changes,” he said, believing it.

“This is Drogheda, Ralph. I warned you, on Drogheda you’re mine, not God’s.”

“I know. I admit it. But I came.” He drew her down onto the grass. “Why, Meggie?”

“Why what?” Her hand was stroking his hair, whiter than Fee’s now, still thick, still beautiful.

“Why did you go back to Luke? Have his son?” he asked jealously.

Her soul looked out from behind its lucent grey windows and veiled its thoughts from him. “He forced me to,” she said blandly. “It was only once. But I had Dane, so I’m not sorry. Dane was worth everything I went through to get him.”

“I’m sorry, I had no right to ask. I gave you to Luke in the first place, didn’t I?”

“That’s true, you did.”

“He’s a wonderful boy. Does he look like Luke?”

She smiled secretly, plucked at the grass, laid her hand inside his shirt, against his chest. “Not really. Neither of my children looks very much like Luke, or me.”

“I love them because they’re yours.”

“You’re as sentimental as ever. Age suits you, Ralph. I knew it would, I hoped I’d have the chance to see it. Thirty years I’ve known you! It seems like thirty days.”

“Thirty years? As many as that?”

“I’m forty-one, my dear, so it must be.” She got to her feet. “I was officially sent to summon you inside. Mrs. Smith is laying on a splendid tea in your honor, and later on when it’s a bit cooler there’s to be roast leg of pork, with lots of crackling.”

He began to walk with her, slowly. “Your son laughs just like you, Meggie. His laugh was the first human noise I heard on Drogheda. I thought he was you; I went to find you and I discovered him instead.”

“So he was the first person you saw on Drogheda.”

“Why, yes, I suppose he was.”

“What did you think of him, Ralph?” she asked eagerly.

“I liked him. How could I not, when he’s your son? But I was attracted to him very strongly, far more so than to your daughter. She doesn’t like me, either.”

“Justine might be my child, but she’s a prize bitch. I’ve learned to swear in my old age, mostly thanks to Justine. And you, a little. And Luke, a little. And the war, a little. Funny how they all mount up.”

“You’ve changed a lot, Meggie.”

“Have I?” The soft, full mouth curved into a smile. “I don’t think so, really. It’s just the Great Northwest, wearing me down, stripping off the layers like Salome’s seven veils. Or like an onion, which is how Justine would rather put it. No poetry, that child. I’m the same old Meggie, Ralph, only more naked.”

“Perhaps so.”

“Ah, but you’ve changed, Ralph.”

“In what way, my Meggie?”

“As if the pedestal rocks with every passing breeze, and as if the view from up there is a disappointment.”

“It is.” He laughed soundlessly. “And to think I once had the temerity to say you weren’t anything out of the ordinary! I take it back. You’re the one woman, Meggie. The one!”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Did I discover even Church idols have feet of clay? Did I sell myself for a mess of pottage? Am I grasping at nothing?” His brows drew togther, as if in pain. “And that’s it, perhaps, in a nutshell. I’m a mass of clichés. It’s an old, sour, petrified world, the Vatican world.”

“I was more real, but you could never see it.”

“There was nothing else I could do, truly! I knew where I should have gone, but I couldn’t. With you I might have been a better man, if less august. But I just couldn’t, Meggie. Oh, I wish I could make you see that!”

Her hand stole along his bare arm, tenderly. “Dear Ralph, I do see it. I know, I know…. Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that’s all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, it’s driven to. We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can’t affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it’s the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. The pain.” He glanced down at her hand, so gently on his arm, hurting him so unbearably. “Why the pain, Meggie?”

“Ask God, Ralph,” said Meggie. “He’s the authority on pain, isn’t He? He made us what we are, He made the whole world. Therefore He made the pain, too.”

Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims and Patsy were in for dinner, since it was Saturday night. Tomorrow Father Watty was due out to say Mass, but Bob called him and said no one would be there. A white lie, to preserve Cardinal Ralph’s anonymity. The five Cleary boys were more like Paddy than ever, older, slower in speech, as steadfast and enduring as the land. And how they loved Dane! Their eyes never seemed to leave him, even followed him from the room when he went to bed. It wasn’t hard to see they lived for the day when he would be old enough to join them in running Drogheda.

Cardinal Ralph had also discovered the reason for Justine’s enmity. Dane had taken a fancy to him, hung on his words, lingered near him; she was plain jealous.

After the children had gone upstairs, he looked at those who were left: the brothers, Meggie, Fee.

“Fee, leave your desk for a moment,” he said. “Come and sit here with us. I want to talk to all of you.”

She still carried herself well and hadn’t lost her figure, only slackened in the breasts, thickened very slightly in the waist; more a shaping due to old age than to an actual weight gain. Silently she seated herself in one of the big cream chairs opposite the Cardinal, with Meggie to one side, and the brothers on stone benches close by.

“It’s about Frank,” he said.

The name hung between them, resounding distantly.

“What about Frank?” asked Fee composedly.

Meggie laid her knitting down, looked at her mother, then at Cardinal Ralph. “Tell us, Ralph,” she said quickly, unable to bear her mother’s composure a moment longer.

“Frank has served almost thirty years in jail, do you realize that?” asked the Cardinal. “I know my people kept you informed as we arranged, but I had asked them not to distress you unduly. I honestly couldn’t see what good it could do Frank or yourselves to hear the harrowing details of his loneliness and despair, because there was nothing any of us might have done. I think Frank would have been released some years ago had he not gained a reputation for violence and instability during his early years in Goulburn Gaol. Even as late as the war, when some other prisoners were released into armed service, poor Frank was refused.”

Fee glanced up from her hands. “It’s his temper,” she said without emotion.

The Cardinal seemed to be having some difficulty in finding the right words; while he sought for them, the family watched him in mingled dread and hope, though it wasn’t Frank’s welfare they cared about.

“It must be puzzling you greatly why I came back to Australia after all these years,” Cardinal Ralph said finally, not looking at Meggie. “I haven’t always been mindful of your lives, and I know it. From the day I met you, I’ve thought of myself first, put myself first. And when the Holy Father rewarded my labors on behalf of the Church with a cardinal’s mantle, I asked myself if there was any service I could do the Cleary family which in some way would tell them how deeply I care.” He drew a breath, focused his gaze on Fee, not on Meggie. “I came back to Australia to see what I could do about Frank. Do you remember, Fee, that time I spoke to you after Paddy and Stu died? Twenty years ago, and I’ve never been able to forget the look in your eyes. So much energy and vitality, crushed.”

“Yes,” said Bob abruptly, his eyes riveted on his mother. “Yes, that’s it.”

“Frank is being paroled,” said the Cardinal. “It was the only thing I could do to show you that I do care.”

If he had expected a sudden, dazzling blaze of light from out of Fee’s long darkness, he would have been very disappointed; at first it was no more than a small flicker, and perhaps the toll of age would never really permit it to shine at full brightness. But in the eyes of Fee’s sons he saw its true magnitude, and knew a sense of his own purpose he hadn’t felt since that time during the war when he had talked to the young German soldier with the imposing name.

“Thank you,” said Fee.

“Will you welcome him back to Drogheda?” he asked the Cleary men.

“This is his home, it’s where he ought to be,” Bob answered elliptically.

Everyone nodded agreement save Fee, who seemed intent on some private vision.

“He isn’t the same Frank,” Cardinal Ralph went on gently. “I visited him in Goulburn Gaol to tell him the news before I came here, and I had to let him know everyone on Drogheda had always been aware what had happened to him. If I tell you that he didn’t take it hard, it might give you some idea of the change in him. He was simply…grateful. And so looking forward to seeing his family again, especially you, Fee.”

“When’s he being released?” Bob asked, clearing his throat, pleasure for his mother clearly warring with fear of what would happen when Frank returned.

“In a week or two. He’ll come up on the night mail. I wanted him to fly, but he said he preferred the train.”

“Patsy and I will meet him,” Jims offered eagerly, then his face fell. “Oh! We don’t know what he looks like!”

“No,” said Fee. “I’ll meet him myself. On my own. I’m not in my dotage yet; I can still drive to Gilly.”

“Mum’s right,” said Meggie firmly, forestalling a chorus of protests from her brothers. “Let Mum meet him on her own. She’s the one ought to see him first.”

“Well, I have work to do,” said Fee gruffly, getting up and moving toward her desk.

The five brothers rose as one man. “And I reckon it’s our bedtime,” said Bob, yawning elaborately. He smiled shyly at Cardinal Ralph. “It will be like old times, to have you saying Mass for us in the morning.”

Meggie folded her knitting, put it away, got up. “I’ll say good night, too, Ralph.”

“Good night, Meggie.” His eyes followed her as she went out of the room, then turned to Fee’s hunched back. “Good night, Fee.”

“I beg your pardon? Did you say something?”

“I said good night.”

“Oh! Good night, Ralph.”

He didn’t want to go upstairs so soon after Meggie. “I’m going for a walk before I turn in, I think. Do you know something, Fee?”

“No.” Her voice was absent.

“You don’t fool me for a minute.”

She snorted with laughter, an eerie sound. “Don’t I? I wonder about that.”

Late, and the stars. The southern stars, wheeling across the heavens. He had lost his hold upon them forever, though they were still there, too distant to warm, too remote to comfort. Closer to God, Who was a wisp between them. For a long time he stood looking up, listening to the wind in the trees, smiling.

Reluctant to be near Fee, he used the flight of stairs at the far end of the house; the lamp over her desk still burned and he could see her bent silhouette there, working. Poor Fee. How much she must dread going to bed, though perhaps when Frank came home it would be easier. Perhaps.

At the top of the stairs silence met him thickly; a crystal lamp on a narrow hall table shed a dim pool of light for the comfort of nocturnal wanderers, flickering as the night breeze billowed the curtains inward around the window next to it. He passed it by, his feet on the heavy carpeting making no sound.

Meggie’s door was wide open, more light welling through it; blocking the rays for a moment, he shut her door behind him and locked it. She had donned a loose wrapper and was sitting in a chair by the window looking out across the invisible Home Paddock, but her head turned to watch him walk to the bed, sit on its edge. Slowly she got up and came to him.

“Here, I’ll help you get your boots off. That’s the reason I never wear knee ones myself. I can’t get them off without a jack, and a jack ruins good boots.”

“Did you wear that color deliberately, Meggie?”

“Ashes of roses?” She smiled. “It’s always been my favorite color. It doesn’t clash with my hair.”

He put one foot on her backside while she pulled a boot off, then changed it for the bare foot.

“Were you so sure I’d come to you, Meggie?”

“I told you. On Drogheda you’re mine. Had you not come to me, I’d have gone to you, make no mistake.” She drew his shirt over his head, and for a moment her hand rested with luxurious sensitivity on his bare back, then she went across to the lamp and turned it out, while he draped his clothes over a chair back. He could hear her moving about, shedding her wrapper. And tomorrow morning I’ll say Mass. But that’s tomorrow morning, and the magic has long gone. There is still the night, and Meggie. I have wanted her. She, too, is a sacrament.

Dane was disappointed. “I thought you’d wear a red soutane!” he said.

“Sometimes I do, Dane, but only within the walls of the palace. Outside it, I wear a black soutane with a red sash, like this.”

“Do you really have a palace?”

“Yes.”

“Is it full of chandeliers?”

“Yes, but so is Drogheda.”

“Oh, Drogheda!” said Dane in disgust. “I’ll bet ours are little ones compared to yours. I’d love to see your palace, and you in a red soutane.”

Cardinal Ralph smiled. “Who knows, Dane? Perhaps one day you will.”

The boy had a curious expression always at the back of his eyes; a distant look. When he turned during the Mass, Cardinal Ralph saw it reinforced, but he didn’t recognize it, only felt its familiarity. No man sees himself in a mirror as he really is, nor any woman.

Luddie and Anne Mueller were due in for Christmas, as indeed they were every year. The big house was full of light-hearted people, looking forward to the best Christmas in years; Minnie and Cat sang tunelessly as they worked, Mrs. Smith’s plump face was wreathed in smiles, Meggie relinquished Dane to Cardinal Ralph without comment, and Fee seemed much happier, less glued to her desk. The men seized upon any excuse to make it back in each night, for after a late dinner the drawing room buzzed with conversation, and Mrs. Smith had taken to preparing a bedtime supper snack of melted cheese on toast, hot buttered crumpets and raisin scones. Cardinal Ralph protested that so much good food would make him fat, but after three days of Drogheda air, Drogheda people and Drogheda food, he seemed to be shedding the rather gaunt, haggard look he had worn when he arrived.

The fourth day came in very hot. Cardinal Ralph had gone with Dane to bring in a mob of sheep, Justine sulked alone in the pepper tree, and Meggie lounged on a cushioned cane settee on the veranda. Her bones felt limp, glutted, and she was very happy. A woman can live without it quite well for years at a stretch, but it was nice, when it was the one man. When she was with Ralph every part of her came alive except that part which belonged to Dane; the trouble was, when she was with Dane every part of her came alive except that which belonged to Ralph. Only when both of them were present in her world simultaneously, as now, did she feel utterly complete. Well, it stood to reason. Dane was her son, but Ralph was her man.

Yet one thing marred her happiness; Ralph hadn’t seen. So her mouth remained closed upon her secret. If he couldn’t see it for himself, why should she tell him? What had he ever done, to earn the telling? That he could think for a moment she had gone back to Luke willingly was the last straw. He didn’t deserve to be told, if he could think that of her. Sometimes she felt Fee’s pale, ironic eyes upon her, and she would stare back, unperturbed. Fee understood, she really did. Understood the half-hate, the resentment, the desire to pay back the lonely years. Off chasing rainbows, that was Ralph de Bricassart; and why should she gift him with the most exquisite rainbow of all, his son? Let him be deprived. Let him suffer, never knowing he suffered.

The phone rang its Drogheda code; Meggie listened idly, then realizing her mother must be elsewhere, she got up reluctantly and went to answer it.

“Mrs. Fiona Cleary, please,” said a man’s voice.

When Meggie called her name, Fee returned to take the receiver.

“Fiona Cleary speaking,” she said, and as she stood listening the color faded gradually from her face, making it look as it had looked in the days after Paddy and Stu died; tiny and vulnerable. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up.

“What is it, Mum?”

“Frank’s been released. He’s coming up on the night mail this afternoon.” She looked at her watch. “I must leave soon; it’s after two.”

“Let me come with you,” Meggie offered, so filled with her own happiness she couldn’t bear to see her mother disappointed; she sensed that this meeting couldn’t be pure joy for Fee.

“No, Meggie, I’ll be all right. You take care of things here, and hold dinner until I get back.”

“Isn’t it wonderful, Mum? Frank’s coming home in time for Christmas!”

“Yes,” said Fee, “it is wonderful.”

No one traveled on the night mail these days if they could fly, so by the time it had huffed the six hundred miles from Sydney, dropping its mostly second-class passengers at this small town or that, few people were left to be disgorged in Gilly.

The stationmaster had a nodding acquaintance with Mrs. Cleary but would never have dreamed of engaging her in conversation, so he just watched her descend the wooden steps from the overhead footbridge, and left her alone to stand stiffly on the high platform. She was a stylish old girl, he thought; up-to-date dress and hat, high-heeled shoes, too. Good figure, not many lines on her face really for an old girl; just went to show what the easy life of a grazier could do for a woman.

So that on the surface Frank recognized his mother more quickly than she did him, though her heart knew him at once. He was fifty-two years old, and the years of his absence were those which had carried him from youth to middle age. The man who stood in the Gilly sunset was too thin, gaunt almost, very pale; his hair was cropped halfway up his head, he wore shapeless clothes which hung on a frame still hinting at power for all its small size, and his well-shaped hands were clamped on the brim of a grey felt hat. He wasn’t stooped or ill-looking, but he stood helplessly twisting that hat between his hands and seemed not to expect anyone to meet him, nor to know what next he ought to do.

Fee, controlled, walked briskly down the platform.

“Hello, Frank,” she said.

He lifted the eyes which used to flash and sparkle so, set now in the face of an aging man. Not Frank’s eyes at all. Exhausted, patient, intensely weary. But as they absorbed the sight of Fee an extraordinary expression came into them, wounded, utterly defenseless, filled with the appeal of a dying man.

“Oh, Frank!” she said, and took him in her arms, rocking his head on her shoulder. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she crooned, and softer still, “It’s all right!”

He sat slumped and silent in the car at first, but as the Rolls picked up speed and headed out of town he began to take an interest in his surroundings, and glanced out of the window.

“It looks exactly the same,” he whispered.

“I imagine it does. Time moves slowly out here.”

They crossed the rumbling wooden-planked bridge over the thin, muddy river lined with weeping willows, most of its bed exposed in a tangle of roots and gravel, pools lying in still brown patches, gum trees growing everywhere in the stony wastes.

“The Barwon,” he said. “I never thought I’d see it again.”

Behind them rose an enormous cloud of dust, in front of them the road sped straight as a perspective exercise across a great grassy plain devoid of trees.

“The road’s new, Mum?” He seemed desperate to find conversation, make the situation appear normal.

“Yes, they put it through from Gilly to Milparinka just after the war ended.”

“They might have sealed it with a bit of tar instead of leaving it the same old dirt.”

“What for? We’re used to eating dust out here, and think of the expense of making a bed strong enough to resist the mud. The new road is straight, they keep it well graded and it cut out thirteen of our twenty-seven gates. Only fourteen left between Gilly and the homestead, and just you wait and see what we’ve done to them, Frank. No more opening and closing gates.”

The Rolls ran up a ramp toward a steel gate which lifted lazily; the moment the car passed under it and got a few yards down the track, the gate lowered itself closed.

“Wonders never cease!” said Frank.

“We were the first station around here to install the automatic ramp gates—only between the Milparinka road and the homestead, of course. The paddock gates still have to be opened and closed by hand.”

“Well, I reckon the bloke that invented these gates must have opened and closed a lot in his time, eh?” Frank grinned; it was the first sign of amusement he had shown.

But then he fell silent, so his mother concentrated on her driving, unwilling to push him too quickly. When they passed under the last gate and entered the Home Paddock, he gasped.

“I’d forgotten how lovely it is,” he said.

“It’s home,” said Fee. “We’ve looked after it.”

She drove the Rolls down to the garages and then walked with him back to the big house, only this time he carried his case himself.

“Would you rather have a room in the big house, Frank, or a guesthouse all to yourself?” his mother asked.

“I’ll take a guesthouse, thanks.” The exhausted eyes rested on her face. “It will be nice to be able to get away from people,” he explained. That was the only reference he ever made to conditions in jail.

“I think it will be better for you,” she said, leading the way into her drawing room. “The big house is pretty full at the moment, what with the Cardinal here, Dane and Justine home, and Luddie and Anne Mueller arriving the day after tomorrow for Christmas.” She pulled the bell cord for tea and went quickly round the room lighting the kerosene lamps.

“Luddie and Anne Mueller?” he asked.

She stopped in the act of turning up a wick, looked at him. “It’s been a long time, Frank. The Muellers are friends of Meggie’s.” The lamp trimmed to her satisfaction, she sat down in her wing chair. “We’ll have dinner in an hour, but first we’ll have a cup of tea. I have to wash the dust of the road out of my mouth.”

Frank seated himself awkwardly on the edge of one of the cream silk ottomans, gazing at the room in awe. “It looks so different from the days of Auntie Mary.”

Fee smiled. “Well, I think so,” she said.

Then Meggie came in, and it was harder to assimilate the fact of Meggie grown into a mature woman than to see his mother old. As his sister hugged and kissed him he turned his face away, shrank inside his baggy coat and searched beyond her to his mother, who sat looking at him as if to say: It doesn’t matter, it will all seem normal soon, just give it time. A minute later, while he was still searching for something to say to this stranger, Meggie’s daughter came in; a tall, skinny young girl who sat down stiffly, her big hands pleating folds in her dress, her light eyes fixed first on one face, then on another. Meggie’s son entered with the Cardinal and went to sit on the floor beside his sister, a beautiful, calmly aloof boy.

“Frank, this is marvelous,” said Cardinal Ralph, shaking him by the hand, then turning to Fee with his left brow raised. “A cup of tea? Very good idea.”

The Cleary men came into the room together, and that was very hard, for they hadn’t forgiven him at all. Frank knew why; it was the way he had hurt their mother. But he didn’t know of anything to say which would make them understand any of it, nor could he tell them of the pain, the loneliness, or beg forgiveness. The only one who really mattered was his mother, and she had never thought there was anything to forgive.

It was the Cardinal who tried to hold the evening together, who led the conversation round the dinner table and then afterward back in the drawing room, chatting with diplomatic ease and making a special point of including Frank in the gathering.

“Bob, I’ve meant to ask you ever since I arrived—where are the rabbits?” the Cardinal asked. “I’ve seen millions of burrows, but nary a rabbit.”

“The rabbits are all dead,” Bob answered.

“Dead?”

“That’s right, from something called myxomatosis. Between the rabbits and the drought years, Australia was just about finished as a primary producing nation by nineteen forty-seven. We were desperate,” said Bob, warming to his theme and grateful to have something to discuss which would exclude Frank.

At which point Frank unwittingly antagonized his next brother by saying, “I knew it was bad, but not as bad as all that.” He sat back, hoping he had pleased the Cardinal by contributing his mite to the discussion.

“Well, I’m not exaggerating, believe me!” said Bob tartly; how would Frank know?

“What happened?” the Cardinal asked quickly.

“The year before last the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization started an experimental program in Victoria, infecting rabbits with this virus thing they’d bred. I’m not sure what a virus is, except I think it’s a sort of germ. Anyway, they called theirs the myxomatosis virus. At first it didn’t seem to spread too well, though what bunnies caught it all died. But about a year after the experimental infection it began to spread like wildfire, they think mosquito-borne, but something to do with saffron thistle as well. And the bunnies have died in millions and millions ever since, it’s just wiped them out. You’ll sometimes see a few sickies around with huge lumps all over their faces, very ugly-looking things. But it’s a marvelous piece of work, Ralph, it really is. Nothing else can catch myxomatosis, even close relatives. So thanks to the blokes at the CSIRO, the rabbit plague is no more.”

Cardinal Ralph stared at Frank. “Do you realize what it is, Frank? Do you?”

Poor Frank shook his head, wishing everyone would let him retreat into anonymity.

“Mass-scale biological warfare. I wonder does the rest of the world know that right here in Australia between 1949 and 1952 a virus war was waged against a population of trillions upon trillions, and succeeded in obliterating it? Well! It’s feasible, isn’t it? Not simply yellow journalism at all, but scientific fact. They may as well bury their atom bombs and hydrogen bombs. I know it had to be done, it was absolutely necessary, and it’s probably the world’s most unsung major scientific achievement. But it’s terrifying, too.”

Dane had been following the conversation closely. “Biological warfare? I’ve never heard of it. What is it exactly, Ralph?”

“The words are new, Dane, but I’m a papal diplomat and the pity of it is that I must keep abreast of words like ‘biological warfare.’ In a nutshell, the term means myxomatosis. Breeding a germ capable of specifically killing and maiming only one kind of living being.”

Quite unself-consciously Dane made the Sign of the Cross, and leaned back against Ralph de Bricassart’s knees. “We had better pray, hadn’t we?”

The Cardinal looked down on his fair head, smiling.

That eventually Frank managed to fit into Drogheda life at all was thanks to Fee, who in the face of stiff male Cleary opposition continued to act as if her oldest son had been gone but a short while, and had never brought disgrace on his family or bitterly hurt his mother. Quietly and inconspicuously she slipped him into the niche he seemed to want to occupy, removed from her other sons; nor did she encourage him to regain some of the vitality of other days. For it had all gone; she had known it the moment he looked at her on the Gilly station platform. Swallowed up by an existence the nature of which he refused to discuss with her. The most she could do for him was to make him as happy as possible, and surely the way to do that was to accept the now Frank as the always Frank.

There was no question of his working the paddocks, for his brothers didn’t want him, nor did he want a kind of life he had always hated. The sight of growing things pleased him, so Fee put him to potter in the homestead gardens, left him in peace. And gradually the Cleary men grew used to having Frank back in the family bosom, began to understand that the threat Frank used to represent to their own welfare was quite empty, Nothing would ever change what their mother felt for him, it didn’t matter whether he was in jail or on Drogheda, she would still feel it. The important thing was that to have him on Drogheda made her happy. He didn’t intrude upon their lives, he was no more or no less than always.

Yet for Fee it wasn’t a joy to have Frank home again; how could it be? Seeing him every day was simply a different kind of sorrow from not being able to see him at all. The terrible grief of having to witness a ruined life, a ruined man. Who was her most beloved son, and must have endured agonies beyond her imagination.

One day after Frank had been home about six months, Meggie came into the drawing room to find her mother sitting looking through the big windows to where Frank was clipping the great bank of roses alongside the drive. She turned away, and something in her calmly arranged face sent Meggie’s hands up to her heart.

“Oh, Mum!” she said helplessly.

Fee looked at her, shook her head and smiled. “It doesn’t matter, Meggie,” she said.

“If only there was something I could do!”

“There is. Just carry on the way you have been. I’m very grateful. You’ve become an ally.”