Welfare authorities wearing well-meaning smiles had stepped in to deal with the Forrester kids. The girls had been fostered out back in Sydney. The boy had been just old enough to slip into the shadows of the outside world.
Now Parry felt her glance darting between the urn that contained the senior Forrester’s ashes and the coolly seething face of the son.
“Is that what your dad wanted?” Parry grabbed a tea towel and began drying glasses with undue vigour. “To be laid to rest, here!”
“At the old cemetery.” Forrester picked up the urn and wrapped it again in the cloth. “You got a law against it?”
The convicted thief’s son didn’t wait for an answer, and Parry’s copper training told her not to attempt one. But the change of direction with the next question surprised the woman who’d once claimed she’d heard everything.
“Want to buy some honey? On commission? It’s local.”
“Where’d you get it?”
Forrester didn’t rise. “Mudgee, Sofala, far north as the Burrendong. I’m an apiarist. It’s what I do.”
The retired copper’s relief was such that she heard herself gushing. Hadn’t the father kept bees? To supplement the meagre living he’d made as a prospector who did a bit of rabbiting on the side.
If only he hadn’t been fool enough to get greedy.
And to get caught with evidence linking him with the theft of one of the biggest gold nuggets west of the Great Dividing Range.
Parry shook her head, rejecting the memory. If the boy had made good, then that was some sort of atonement.
“Show me what you’ve got,” she said, opening the till.
It took Forrester the best part of a warm afternoon to track the bees to the orchard surrounding Kelly’s hut.
He’d seeded a small wooden box with honeycomb and brushed the cork from a bottle of anise oil lightly across the lid. Then he lured four workers from a patch of Paterson’s Curse, fluoro mauve in the syrupy heat, into the bee box and felt it throb with their wrath.
“It doesn’t take long for their greed to overcome their outrage...” His father’s homily carried to him on the wind. Across the purple flower heads. From an afternoon in a long-ago September when the earth surrendered the scent of dust and pollen to him. In that moment he’d realised his destiny would be inextricably linked with the annual honey trail.
Within minutes, the angry buzzing gave way to silence and he knew the bees had begun gorging themselves on the sweet liquid.
Soon, the first had returned to the hive and within thirty minutes one bee line was established. He tracked the line through a stand of red gums, down into Kelly’s land. Then he pulled a contour map from his backpack, plotted the course, packed up the box of bees, and moved to another paddock one kilometer west.
The move took Forrester across the Mudgee road. He parked his Land Rover near a crumbling chimney stack and repeated the tracking. When he finished, he made sure there were still a half-dozen workers feasting inside the bee box, then he locked it.
The sun was sinking low by the time he discovered the hive. It was humming in the belly of a Bramley apple, not one hundred metres from the humpy belching a twisted curl of smoke.
The bees began their assault on him when he was a good five meters from their cache.
But Forrester had been stung four times before it registered.
Gwynneth Davies found herself stopping yet again on the way back from nursing a client to read the headstones in the Protestant cemetery. It was in a clearing amongst stringybarks, just off the Mudgee road, a million miles from Caernarfon, where Dafydd had decided he’d been too young for marriage. After they’d been married eight wasted years.
There was a fascination about the inscriptions that lured her there. Week after week. “George Griffiths, who was killed through carelessness in the Newcastle Co. Claim, Tambaroora, October 4, 1872...” She couldn’t help saying the words aloud, savouring every syllable, even though she’d recited them a dozen times before. “...Sacred to the memory of Thomas William Anderson, who was accidentally killed whilst working in Rawsthorne’s Mine, Hawkins Hill...”
“Keep that up and they’ll lock you away.”
Gwynneth jumped. She hadn’t seen the tall stranger, clutching a thermos and paper cup, looking for all intents and purposes like a tourist searching for a good spot for a picnic.
“You scared me!” Hadn’t Dafydd always said she had an irritating habit of stating the bleeding obvious.
“Did not. You scared yourself.”
He was Australian. That was certain. Since the cave man, there’d surely been no race of male more infuriatingly direct. She fumbled in her holdall, finally extracting a mobile phone.
He laughed. “Reception out here stinks.”
Gwynneth glared. She’d plenty of experience with difficult patients. And at maintaining a diplomatic silence. But the inland heat laced with fear caused a rush of blood to her head. She waved the useless phone. “What gives you the right to go skulking about headstones, scaring innocent women?”
The man moved off the path to walk around her. Then paused and looked back. “I’m saying goodbye to my father,” he said. And suddenly she realised the thermos wasn’t a thermos after all and felt herself start to apologise. Until the stranger cast his unfathomable eyes over the pillars of sandstone and added: “Where’re the innocent women?”
And then, partly due to nerves and heat and partly because the situation was so ridiculous, she started to giggle.
Forrester felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth as the pert blonde he apparently had the capacity to incense just by breathing the same air failed to contain her laughter.
The music that bubbled from her lips both refreshed and saddened him. It’d been a long time since he’d heard laughter like that. It reminded him of his youngest sister. Adie. The giggler. The thought of Adie’s bruised body killed the smile on his lips.
Gwynneth misinterpreted the stranger’s melancholic look and felt suddenly contrite. “You’ll be wanting to scatter the ashes.” She slid the mobile back into her holdall, immediately businesslike. “There’s a clearing amongst the stringybarks up the back, filled with the most stunning purple flowers...”
“Paterson’s Curse.” The man’s voice flickered with interest. “Salvation Jane. Echium plantagineum...” He was gazing off into the distance, looking past her white rayon uniform and sensible shoes, and the hair she’d washed that morning in lavender-scented rainwater. “A lot of folk say it’s a weed, but my dad always said it made some of the best honey.”
He looked at Gwynneth, as if seeing something in her for the first time. “It’d be right to rest him there.”
She held the paper cup while he poured out the ashes. They were clumped into balls, like something from the bottom of a kettle barbecue.
“Do you have a prayer?” she asked.
For a moment he looked as lost as an unprepared little boy invited to say Grace at his first meal away from home.
“No, I...” He turned to her, at last taking in the uniform, the white stockings, and the nametag that announced “Gwynneth Davies, R.N.”
“If you’d like me to, I could say a few words?”
Assuming his nod to be a sign of assent, she continued. “...As we return to the earth from whence we came... even though the spirit is already with you, we ask that you receive these ashes of the one that you created, that you might create again from them life anew.”
Her somber words carried through the airless heat and the scattered ashes, craving a breeze, stuck fast in the purple flower heads and on the taut, hairy stems.
“We need some spring rain,” she said, then hurriedly added. “To freshen up the place, put a bit of life back into the soil.”