“Och, it’s the wee bairn’s bonnie Hielan’ hair,” she explained to the priest once when he questioned her, amused; Annie wasn’t given to liking little girls, and had deplored the presbytery’s proximity to the school.

“Come now, Annie! Hair’s inanimate; you can’t like someone just because of the color of her hair,” he said, to tease her.

“Ah, weel, she’s a puir wee lassie—skeggy, ye ken.”

He didn’t ken at all, but he didn’t ask her what “skeggy” meant, either, or pass any remarks about the fact that it rhymed with Meggie. Sometimes it was better not to know what Annie meant, or encourage her by paying much attention to what she said; she was, in her own parlance, fey, and if she pitied the child he didn’t want to be told it was because of her future rather than her past.

Frank arrived, still trembling from his encounter with his father in the bar, and at a loose end.

“Come on, Meggie, I’ll take you to the fair,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Why don’t I take you both?” Father Ralph asked, holding out his.

Sandwiched between the two men she worshipped, and hanging on to their hands for dear life, Meggie was in seventh heaven.

The Gillanbone showground lay on the banks of the Barwon River, next door to the racecourse. Though the floods were six months gone, the mud had not completely dried, and the eager feet of early comers had already pulped it to a mire. Beyond the stalls of sheep and cattle, pigs and goats, the prime and perfect livestock competing for prizes, lay tents full of handicrafts and cooking. They gazed at stock, cakes, crocheted shawls, knitted baby clothes, embroidered tablecloths, cats and dogs and canaries.

On the far side of all this was the riding ring, where young equestrians and equestriennes cantered their bob-tailed hacks before judges who looked, it seemed to a giggling Meggie, rather like horses themselves. Lady riders in magnificent serge habits perched sidesaddle on tall horses, their top hats swathed with tantalizing wisps of veiling. How anyone so precariously mounted and hatted could stay unruffled upon a horse at anything faster than an amble was beyond Meggie’s imagination, until she saw one splendid creature take her prancing animal over a series of difficult jumps and finish as impeccable as before she started. Then the lady pricked her mount with an impatient spur and cantered across the soggy ground, reining to a halt in front of Meggie, Frank and Father Ralph to bar their progress. The leg in its polished black boot hooked round the saddle was unhooked, and the lady sat truly on the side of her saddle, her gloved hands extended imperiously.

“Father! Be so kind as to help me dismount!”

He reached up to put his hands around her waist, her hands on his shoulders, and swung her lightly down; the moment her heels touched the ground he released her, took her mount’s reins in his hand and walked on, the lady beside him, matching his stride effortlessly.

“Will you win the Hunting, Miss Carmichael?” he asked in tones of utter indifference.

She pouted; she was young and very beautiful, and that curious impersonal quality of his piqued her. “I hope to win, but I can’t be sure. Miss Hopeton and Mrs. Anthony King both compete. However, I shall win the Dressage, so if I don’t win the Hunting I shan’t repine.”

She spoke with beautifully rounded vowels, and with the oddly stilted phraseology of a young lady so carefully reared and educated there was not a trace of warmth or idiom left to color her voice. As he spoke to her Father Ralph’s own speech became more pear-shaped, and quite lost its beguiling hint of Irishness; as if she brought back to him a time when he, too, had been like this. Meggie frowned, puzzled and affected by their light but guarded words, not knowing what the change in Father Ralph was, only knowing there was a change, and not one to her liking. She let go Frank’s hand, and indeed it had become difficult for them to continue walking abreast.

By the time they came to a wide puddle Frank had fallen behind them. Father Ralph’s eyes danced as he surveyed the water, almost a shallow pond; he turned to the child whose hand he had kept in his firmly, and bent down to her with a special tenderness the lady could not mistake, for it had been entirely lacking in his civil exchanges with her.

“I wear no cloak, darling Meggie, so I can’t be your Sir Walter Raleigh. I’m sure you’ll excuse me, my dear Miss Carmichael”—the reins were passed to the lady—“but I can’t permit my favorite girl to muddy her shoes, now can I?”

He picked Meggie up and tucked her easily against his hip, leaving Miss Carmichael to collect her heavy trailing skirts in one hand, the reins in her other, and splash her way across unaided. The sound of Frank’s hoot of laugher just behind them didn’t improve her temper; on the far side of the puddle she left them abruptly.

“I do believe she’d kill you if she could,” Frank said as Father Ralph put Meggie down. He was fascinated by this encounter and by Father Ralph’s deliberate cruelty. She had seemed to Frank so beautiful and so haughty that no man could gainsay her, even a priest, yet Father Ralph had wantonly set out to shatter her faith in herself, in that heady femininity she wielded like a weapon. As if the priest hated her and what she stood for, Frank thought, the world of women, an exquisite mystery he had never had the opportunity to plumb. Smarting from his mother’s words, he had wanted Miss Carmichael to notice him, the oldest son of Mary Carson’s heir, but she had not so much as deigned to admit he existed. All her attention had been focused on the priest, a being sexless and emasculated. Even if he was tall, dark and handsome.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be back for more of the same,” said Father Ralph cynically. “She’s rich, so next Sunday she’ll very ostentatiously put a ten-pound note in the plate.” He laughed at Frank’s expression. “I’m not so much older than you, my son, but in spite of my calling I’m a very worldly fellow. Don’t hold it against me; just put it down to experience.”

They had left the riding ring behind and entered the amusement part of the grounds. To Meggie and Frank alike it was enchantment. Father Ralph had given Meggie five whole shillings, and Frank had his five pounds; to own the price of admission to all those enticing booths was wonderful. Crowds thronged the area, children running everywhere, gazing wide-eyed at the luridly and somewhat inexpertly painted legends fronting tattered tents: The Fattest Lady in the World; Princess Houri the Snake Dancer (See Her Fan the Flames of a Cobra’s Rage!); The India Rubber Man; Goliath the World’s Strongest Man; Thetis the Mermaid. At each they paid their pennies and watched raptly, not noticing Thetis’s sadly tarnished scales or the toothless smile on the cobra.

At the far end, so big it required a whole side for itself, was a giant marquee with a high boardwalk along its front, a curtainlike frieze of painted figures stretching behind the entire length of the board bridge, menacing the crowd. A man with a megaphone in his hand was shouting to the gathering people.

“Here it is, gents, Jimmy Sharman’s famous boxing troupe! Eight of the world’s greatest prize fighters, and a purse to be won by any chap game to have a go!”

Women and girls were trickling out of the audience as fast as men and boys came from every direction to swell it, clustering thickly beneath the boardwalk. As solemnly as gladiators parading at the Circus Maximus, eight men filed onto the bridge and stood, bandaged hands on hips, legs apart, swaggering at the admiring oohs of the crowd. Meggie thought they were wearing underclothes, for they were clad in long black tights and vests with closely fitting grey trunks from waists to midthighs. On their chests, big white Roman capitals said JIMMY SHARMAN’S TROUPE. No two were the same size, some big, some small, some in between, but they were all of particularly fine physique. Chatting and laughing to each other in an offhand manner that suggested this was an everyday occurrence, they flexed their muscles and tried to pretend they weren’t enjoying strutting.

“Come on, chaps, who’ll take a glove?” the spruiker was braying. “Who wants to have a go? Take a glove, win a fiver!” he kept yelling between the booms of a bass drum.

“I will!” Frank shouted. “I will, I will!”

He shook off Father Ralph’s restraining hand as those around them in the throng who could see Frank’s diminutive size began to laugh and good-naturedly push him to the front.

But the spruiker was very serious as one of the troupe extended a friendly hand and pulled Frank up the ladder to stand at one side of the eight already on the bridge. “Don’t laugh, gents. He’s not very big but he is the first to volunteer! It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, you know, it’s the size of the fight in the dog! Come on now, here’s this little bloke game to try—what about some of you big blokes, eh? Put on a glove and win a fiver, go the distance with one of Jimmy Sharman’s troupe!”

Gradually the ranks of the volunteers increased, the young men self-consciously clutching their hats and eyeing the professionals who stood, a band of elite beings, alongside them. Dying to stay and see what happened, Father Ralph reluctantly decided it was more than time he removed Meggie from the vicinity, so he picked her up and turned on his heel to leave. Meggie began to scream, and the farther away he got, the louder she screamed; people were beginning to look at them, and he was so well known it was very embarrassing, not to mention undignified.

“Now look, Meggie, I can’t take you in there! Your father would flay me alive, and rightly!”