Meggie had put Hal back in the bassinet, and gone to stand beside her mother. There was another one wasted. The same proud, sensitive profile; something of Fiona about her hands, her child’s body. She would be very like her mother when she, too, was a woman. And who would marry her? Another oafish Irish shearer, or a clodhopping yokel from some Wahine dairy farm? She was worth more, but she was not born to more. There was no way out, that was what everyone said, and every year longer that he lived seemed to bear it out.

Suddenly conscious of his fixed regard, Fee and Meggie turned together, smiling at him with the peculiar tenderness women save for the most beloved men in their lives. Frank put his cup on the table and went out to feed the dogs, wishing he could weep, or commit murder. Anything which might banish the pain.

* * *

Three days after Paddy lost the Archibald shed, Mary Carson’s letter came. He had opened it in the Wahine post office the moment he collected his mail, and came back to the house skipping like a child.

“We’re going to Australia!” he yelled, waving the expensive vellum pages under his family’s stunned noses.

There was silence, all eyes riveted on him. Fee’s were shocked, so were Meggie’s, but every male pair had lit with joy. Frank’s blazed.

“But, Paddy, why should she think of you so suddenly after all these years?” Fee asked after she had read the letter. “Her money’s not new to her, nor is her isolation. I never remember her offering to help us before.”

“It seems she’s frightened of dying alone,” he said, as much to reassure himself as Fee. “You saw what she wrote: ‘I am not young, and you and your boys are my heirs. I think we ought to see each other before I die, and it’s time you learned how to run your inheritance. I have the intention of making you my head stockman—it will be excellent training, and those of your boys who are old enough to work may have employment as stockmen also. Drogheda will become a family concern, run by the family without help from outsiders.’”

“Does she say anything about sending us the money to get to Australia?” Fee asked.

Paddy’s back stiffened. “I wouldn’t dream of dunning her for that!” he snapped. “We can get to Australia without begging from her; I have enough put by.”

“I think she ought to pay our way,” Fee maintained stubbornly, and to everyone’s shocked surprise; she did not often voice an opinion. “Why should you give up your life here and go off to work for her on the strength of a promise given in a letter? She’s never lifted a finger to help us before, and I don’t trust her. All I ever remember your saying about her was that she had the tightest clutch on a pound you’d ever seen. After all, Paddy, it’s not as if you know her so very well; there was such a big gap between you in age, and she went to Australia before you were old enough to start school.”

“I don’t see how that alters things now, and if she is tight-fisted, all the more for us to inherit. No, Fee, we’re going to Australia, and we’ll pay our own way there.”

Fee said no more. It was impossible to tell from her face whether she resented being so summarily dismissed.

“Hooray, we’re going to Australia!” Bob shouted, grabbing at his father’s shoulder. Jack, Hughie and Stu jigged up and down, and Frank was smiling, his eyes seeing nothing in the room but something far beyond it. Only Fee and Meggie wondered and feared, hoping painfully it would all come to nothing, for their lives could be no easier in Australia, just the same things under strange conditions.

“Where’s Gillanbone?” Stuart asked.

Out came the old atlas; poor though the Clearys were, there were several shelves of books behind the kitchen dining table. The boys pored over yellowing pages until they found New South Wales. Used to small New Zealand distances, it didn’t occur to them to consult the scale of miles in the bottom left-hand corner. They just naturally assumed New South Wales was the same size as the North Island of New Zealand. And there was Gillanbone, up toward the top left-hand corner; about the same distance from Sydney as Wanganui was from Auckland, it seemed, though the dots indicating towns were far fewer than on the North Island map.

“It’s a very old atlas,” Paddy said. “Australia is like America, growing in leaps and bounds. I’m sure there are a lot more towns these days.”

They would have to go steerage on the ship, but it was only three days after all, not too bad. Not like the weeks and weeks between England and the Antipodes. All they could afford to take with them were clothes, china, cutlery, household linens, cooking utensils and those shelves of precious books; the furniture would have to be sold to cover the cost of shipping Fee’s few bits and pieces in the parlor, her spinet and rugs and chairs.

“I won’t hear of your leaving them behind,” Paddy told Fee firmly.

“Are you sure we can afford it?”

“Positive. As to the other furniture, Mary says she’s readying the head stockman’s house and that it’s got everything we’re likely to be needing. I’m glad we don’t have to live in the same house as Mary.”

“So am I,” said Fee.

Paddy went into Wanganui to book them an eight-berth steerage cabin on the Wahine; strange that the ship and their nearest town should have the same name. They were due to sail at the end of August, so by the beginning of that month everyone started realizing the big adventure was actually going to happen. The dogs had to be given away, the horses and the buggy sold, the furniture loaded onto old Angus MacWhirter’s dray and taken into Wanganui for auction, Fee’s few pieces crated along with the china and linen and books and kitchen goods.

Frank found his mother standing by the beautiful old spinet, stroking its faintly pink, streaky paneling and looking vaguely at the powdering of gold dust on her fingertips.

“Did you always have it, Mum?” he asked.

“Yes. What was actually mine they couldn’t take from me when I married. The spinet, the Persian carpets, the Louis Quinze sofa and chairs, the Regency escritoire. Not much, but they were rightfully mine.” The grey, wistful eyes stared past his shoulder at the oil painting on the wall behind him, dimmed with age a little, but still showing clearly the golden-haired woman in her pale-pink lace gown, crinolined with a hundred and seven flounces.

“Who was she?” he asked curiously, turning his head. “I’ve always wanted to know.”

“A great lady.”

“Well, she’s got to be related to you; she looks like you a bit.”

“Her? A relation of mine?” The eyes left their contemplation of the picture and rested on her son’s face ironically. “Now, do I look as if I could ever have had a relative like her?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve cobwebs in your brain; brush them out.”

“I wish you’d tell me, Mum.”

She sighed and shut the spinet, dusting the gold off her fingers. “There’s nothing to tell, nothing at all. Come on, help me move these things into the middle of the room, so Daddy can pack them.”

* * *

The voyage was a nightmare. Before the Wahine was out of Wellington harbor they were all seasick, and they continued to be seasick all the way across twelve hundred miles of gale-stirred, wintry seas. Paddy took the boys up on deck and kept them there in spite of the bitter wind and constant spray, only going below to see his women and baby when some kind soul volunteered to keep an eye on his four miserable, retching boys. Much though he yearned for fresh air, Frank had elected to remain below to guard the women. The cabin was tiny, stifling and reeked of oil, for it was below the water line and toward the bow, where the ship’s motion was most violent.

Some hours out of Wellington Frank and Meggie became convinced their mother was going to die; the doctor, summoned from first class by a very worried steward, shook his head over her pessimistically.

“Just as well it’s only a short voyage,” he said, instructing his nurse to find milk for the baby.

Between bouts of retching Frank and Meggie managed to bottle-feed Hal, who didn’t take to it kindly. Fee had stopped trying to vomit and had sunk into a kind of coma, from which they could not rouse her. The steward helped Frank put her in the top bunk, where the air was a little less stale, and holding a towel to his mouth to stem the watery bile he still brought up, Frank perched himself on the edge beside her, stroking the matted yellow hair back from her brow. Hour after hour he stuck to his post in spite of his own sickness; every time Paddy came in he was with his mother, stroking her hair, while Meggie huddled on a lower berth with Hal, a towel to her mouth.

Three hours out of Sydney the seas dropped to a glassy calm and fog stole in furtively from the far Antarctic, wrapping itself about the old ship. Meggie, reviving a little, imagined it bellowed regularly in pain now the terrible buffeting was over. They inched through the gluey greyness as stealthily as a hunted thing until that deep, monotonous bawl sounded again from somewhere on the superstructure, a lost and lonely, indescribably sad noise. Then all around them the air was filled with mournful bellows as they slipped through ghostly smoking water into the harbor. Meggie never forgot the sound of foghorns, her first introduction to Australia.

Paddy carried Fee off the Wahine in his arms, Frank following with the baby, Meggie with a case, each of the boys stumbling wearily under some kind of burden. They had come into Pyrmont, a meaningless name, on a foggy winter morning at the end of August, 1921. An enormous line of taxis waited outside the iron shed on the wharf; Meggie gaped round-eyed, for she had never seen so many cars in one place at one time. Somehow Paddy packed them all into a single cab, its driver volunteering to take them to the People’s Palace.