Colleen McCullough - The Thorn Birds

“Oh, Mum, I hope they find him! I don’t want Frank to go away!”

Fee slapped the contents of the butter churn onto the table and attacked the watery yellow mound with two wooden pats. “None of us want Frank to go away. That’s why Daddy’s going to see he’s brought back.” Her mouth quivered for a moment; she whacked the butter harder. “Poor Frank! Poor, poor Frank!” she sighed, not to Meggie but to herself. “I don’t know why the children must pay for our sins. My poor Frank, so out of things…” Then she noticed that Meggie had stopped ironing, and shut her lips, and said no more.

Three days later the police brought Frank back. He had put up a terrific struggle, the Wanganui sergeant on escort duty told Paddy.

“What a fighter you’ve got! When he saw the army lads were a wakeup he was off like a shot, down the steps and into the street with two soldiers after him. If he hadn’t had the bad luck to run into a constable on patrol, I reckon he’d a got away, too. He put up a real wacko fight; took five of them to get the manacles on.”

So saying, he removed Frank’s heavy chains and pushed him roughly through the front gate; he stumbled against Paddy, and shrank away as if the contact stung.

The children were skulking by the side of the house twenty feet beyond the adults, watching and waiting. Bob, Jack and Hughie stood stiffly, hoping Frank would put up another fight; Stuart just looked on quietly, from out of his peaceful, sympathetic little soul; Meggie held her hands to her cheeks, pushing and kneading at them in an agony of fear that someone meant to hurt Frank.

He turned to look at his mother first, black eyes into grey in a dark and bitter communion which had never been spoken, nor ever was. Paddy’s fierce blue gaze beat him down, contemptuous and scathing, as if this was what he had expected, and Frank’s downcast lids acknowledged his right to be angry. From that day forward Paddy never spoke to his son beyond common civility. But it was the children Frank found hardest to face, ashamed and embarrassed, the bright bird brought home with the sky unplumbed, wings clipped, song drowned into silence.

Meggie waited until after Fee had done her nightly rounds, then she wriggled through the open window and made off across the backyard. She knew where Frank would be, up in the hay in the barn, safe from prying eyes and his father.

“Frank, Frank, where are you?” she said in a stage whisper as she shuffled into the stilly blackness of the barn, her toes exploring the unknown ground in front of her as sensitively as an animal.

“Over here, Meggie,” came his tired voice, hardly Frank’s voice at all, no life or passion to it.

She followed the sound to where he was stretched out in the hay, and snuggled down beside him with her arms as far around his chest as they would reach. “Oh, Frank, I’m so glad you’re back,” she said.

He groaned, slid down in the straw until he was lower than she, and put his head on her body. Meggie clutched at his thick straight hair, crooning. It was too dark to see her, and the invisible substance of her sympathy undid him. He began to weep, knotting his body into slow twisting rails of pain, his tears soaking her nightgown. Meggie did not weep. Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed; she sat rocking his head back and forth, back and forth, until his grief expended itself in emptiness.

The road to Drogheda brought back no memories of his youth, thought Father Ralph de Bricassart, eyes half shut against the glare as his new Daimler bounced along in the rutted wheel tracks that marched through the long silver grass. No lovely misty green Ireland, this. And Drogheda? No battlefield, no high seat of power. Or was that strictly true? Better disciplined these days but acute as ever, his sense of humor conjured in his mind an image of a Cromwellian Mary Carson dealing out her particular brand of imperial malevolence. Not such a highflown comparison, either; the lady surely wielded as much power and controlled as many individuals as any puissant war lord of elder days.

The last gate loomed up through a stand of box and stringybark; the car came to a throbbing halt. Clapping a disreputable grey broad-brimmed hat on his head to ward off the sun, Father Ralph got out, plodded to the steel bolt on the wooden strut, pulled it back and flung the gate open with weary impatience. There were twenty-seven gates between the presbytery in Gillanbone and Drogheda homestead, each one meaning he had to stop, get out of the car, open the gate, get into the car and drive it through, stop, get out, go back to close the gate, then get in the car again and proceed to the next one. Many and many a time he longed to dispense with at least half the ritual, scoot on down the track leaving the gates open like a series of astonished mouths behind him; but even the awesome aura of his calling would not prevent the owners of the gates from tarring and feathering him for it. He wished horses were as fast and efficient as cars, because one could open and close gates from the back of a horse without dismounting.

“Nothing is given without a disadvantage in it,” he said, patting the dashboard of the new Daimler and starting off down the last mile of the grassy, treeless Home Paddock, the gate firmly bolted behind him.

Even to an Irishman used to castles and mansions, this Australian homestead was imposing. Drogheda was the oldest and the biggest property in the district, and had been endowed by its late doting owner with a fitting residence. Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story. Gracing the sides of every window were black wooden shutters, not merely ornamental but useful; in the heat of summer they were pulled closed to keep the interior cool.

Though it was autumn now and the spindling vine was green, in spring the wistaria which had been planted the day the house was finished fifty years before was a solid mass of lilac plumes, rioting all over the outer walls and the veranda roof. Several acres of meticulously scythed lawn surrounded the house, strewn with formal gardens even now full of color from roses, wallflowers, dahlias and marigolds. A stand of magnificent ghost gums with pallid white trunks and drifting thin leaves hanging seventy feet above the ground shaded the house from the pitiless sun, their branches wreathed in brilliant magenta where bougainvillaea vines grew intertwined with them. Even those indispensable Outback monstrosities the water tanks were thickly clothed in hardy native vines, roses and wistaria, and thus managed to look more decorative than functional. Thanks to the late Michael Carson’s passion for Drogheda homestead, he had been lavish in the matter of water tanks; rumor had it Drogheda could afford to keep its lawns green and its flower beds blooming though no rain fell in ten years.

As one approached down the Home Paddock the house and its ghost gums took the eye first, but then one was aware of many other yellow sandstone houses of one story behind it and to each side, interlocking with the main structure by means of roofed ramps smothered in creepers. A wide gravel driveway succeeded the wheel ruts of the track, curving to a circular parking area at one side of the big house, but also continuing beyond it and out of sight down to where the real business of Drogheda lay: the stockyards, the shearing shed, the barns. Privately Father Ralph preferred the giant pepper trees which shaded all these outbuildings and their attendant activities to the ghost gums of the main house. Pepper trees were dense with pale-green fronds and alive with the sound of bees, just the right lazy sort of foliage for an Outback station.

As Father Ralph parked his car and walked across the lawn, the maid waited on the front veranda, her freckled face wreathed in smiles.

“Good morning, Minnie,” he said.

“Oh, Father, happy it is to see you this fine dear mornin’,” she said in her strong brogue, one hand holding the door wide and the other outstretched to receive his battered, unclerical hat.

Inside the dim hall, with its marble tiles and great brass-railed staircase, he paused until Minnie gave him a nod before entering the drawing room.

Mary Carson was sitting in her wing chair by an open window which extended fifteen feet from floor to ceiling, apparently indifferent to the cold air flooding in. Her shock of red hair was almost as bright as it had been in her youth; though the coarse freckled skin had picked up additional splotches from age, for a woman of sixty-five she had few wrinkles, rather a fine network of tiny diamond-shaped cushions like a quilted bed-spread. The only clues to her intractable nature lay in the two deep fissures which ran one on either side of her Roman nose, to end pulling down the corners of her mouth, and in the stony look of the pale-blue eyes.

Father Ralph crossed the Aubusson carpet silently and kissed her hands; the gesture sat well on a man as tall and graceful as he was, especially since he wore a plain black soutane which gave him something of a courtly air. Her expressionless eyes suddenly coy and sparkling, Mary Carson almost simpered.

“Will you have tea, Father?” she asked.

“It depends on whether you wish to hear Mass,” he said, sitting down in the chair facing hers and crossing his legs, the soutane riding up sufficiently to show that under it he wore breeches and knee-high boots, a concession to the locale of his parish. “I’ve brought you Communion, but if you’d like to hear Mass I can be ready to say it in a very few minutes. I don’t mind continuing my fast a little longer.”