There, sitting on the floor by her bed, were her baby-blue boots.
In one of them was a bunch of vanilla-scented wildflowers.
Twig was rolling a third smoke when she heard the thud at the side of the house. She held her breath to sharpen her hearing. Footsteps crunched down the dirt path to the flower fields until the young boy came into view. Twig narrowed her eyes. She exhaled slowly. Held her unlit rollie in one hand and her lighter in the other, waiting to see if he’d look back. Just before the path went into the forest, he turned, his face in full moonlight.
There he stood, Boryana’s boy. With his eyes so locked on Alice’s lamp-lit window, Twig doubted he’d have noticed her on the back steps even if she was lit up in flames.
When he turned back to the path and disappeared into the forest, Twig lit her smoke with shaky hands. She’d seen this all happen before. When Agnes Ivie was the child in the bell room. And Clem Hart was the one sneaking through her window to give her flowers.
11. River Lily
Meaning: Love concealed
Crinum pedunculatum | Eastern Australia
Very large perennial usually found on the edge of forests, but also at the high-tide level close to mangroves. Fragrant, white slender star-shaped flowers. Seeds sometimes germinate while still attached to the parent plant. The sap has been used as a treatment for box jellyfish stings.
Alice spent the rest of the week following the Flowers around the farm while they worked. At morning tea, she and Boo did the newspaper crosswords; Boo knew a lot of words. Later she collected honey from the hives with Robin, who let her wear some of the red lipstick she kept in her apron pocket, and showed her how to eat honeycomb fresh from the hive. She tagged along behind Olga, Myf and Sophie as they went up and down the rows of flowers cutting new blooms. She helped Tanmayi make rosewater from fresh rose petals, enchanted by her stories about Sita, the princess who surrendered herself to the earth after being accused of sorcery, and Draupadi, the princess who cursed one hundred men for mistreating her. In the afternoons, Alice hung around the workbenches in the workshop, making necklaces out of petals, stems, leaves and string, while Francene, Lauren, Caroline and Amy filled flower orders, wrapping bouquet after bouquet in brown paper and twine. She hummed along with Rosella in the seedling houses, and helped Vlinder water the wild cotton bushes; monarch butterflies swooped in to feed and fluttered over them.
On Friday, Alice, Twig and Candy joined the twelve women on the back verandah at the end of the day. They all untied their aprons, took their big straw hats off and fanned their faces. June brought an Esky filled with frosty bottles of ginger beer and handed them around like amber treasures. The Flowers sat with their heads leant back and their eyes half-closed. The rows of blooming flowers, the hoop houses, the white beehives and the thick silvergreen bush in the distance wavered in the twilight like a dream.
While Alice sipped her drink she snuck glances at their faces. Most of the time the Flowers were jovial and hardworking. But that afternoon on the verandah, something changed. Everyone fell silent. As the sun went down, all the stories the Flowers lived, loved and left behind crowded in on them. The women’s shoulders sagged inwards. Some of them cried. They turned to comfort each other. And June sat in the middle, her face composed and her back straight.
Alice had realised she wasn’t so different from any of the Flowers. Even June. Everyone needed silence sometimes. And that was the magic of Thornfield; it was a place where it was possible to say the things you could not speak. And, in her own way, Alice was beginning to understand the power of a language spoken in flowers. Ever since her trip to the river, every night after dinner when she went to her room, a new flower sat in her baby-blue boots at the end of her bed.
June sat on the back verandah, watching the sun rise over the flower farm while she blew the steam off a cup of strong black coffee. The morning held a faint crispness, a first hint of winter. She took the flask out of her pocket and poured a splash into her cup. Pressed the rim of the cup to her lips and took small sips, savouring the warmth.
As the flower fields absorbed the light, it occurred to June that she could be watching the sun come up on any day when Thornfield was in bloom. It could have been eighty years earlier. Ruth Stone could easily have come around the corner from the workshop, backlit by the copper wash of dawn, her hands deep in her pockets and her eyes not yet lined by sorrow.
June finished her coffee, picked up her gardening gloves, and stuffed them into the pocket of her vest. She walked into the brightening morning, through the fields towards the seedling houses her mother had built. Sometimes her longing to have just one more conversation with her mother made her feel as if she might splinter to bits if she breathed too hard. Knowing that Alice was aching for Agnes in the same way tormented June. History’s inclination to repeat itself was nothing but cruel.
The air inside the seedling houses was dense with the promise of new beginnings. June closed her eyes for a moment. They’d spent hours in there together, gathering the longings of people’s hearts in fistfuls of shoots and seeds while her mother told her Thornfield’s stories. Pay attention now, Junie, Wattle Stone used to say. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.
As a child June’s imagination was captured by stories of her grandmother. She spent hours down by the river, running her fingertips over Ruth’s name carved into the trunk of the giant gum, and Jacob Wyld’s name carved beside it.
When she first appeared in town, rumours about Ruth Stone were rife. Some said she was born to a woman on the last convict ship sent to Australia. Others said she was the descendant of a Pendle Hill witch who escaped fate. Reportedly, her only possession was a small notebook filled with a strange language. Some argued it was a spell book. Others swore they’d seen the inside of it; filled with flowers, they said. The only thing unanimously agreed upon was that Ruth Stone had been traded by Madame Beaumont, owner of a roadhouse brothel in the next town, in exchange for the last dairy cows from Thornfield, a crumbling farm on the outskirts of town. The reclusive owner, Wade Thornton, watched helplessly as his farm turned to dust during the worst drought in the town’s history. He had his own share of town gossip to contend with. Wade Thornton was known for trying to drown his demons in rum; once Ruth Stone arrived, helping himself to her body became his preferred method of exorcism.
It didn’t take long for Ruth to figure out when to flee the house. After Wade finished whatever gruel she’d been able to make for dinner, she would slip out for more stove wood before his fourth drink, and run to the drought-stricken trickle of a river. There, Ruth found a place to hide until Wade inevitably drank himself into oblivion. At the base of a giant river gum, Ruth sat and let herself sing and cry. Books and singing were all that kept her mind strong. She sang stories her mother had taught her, about flowers that spoke things words could not. She was singing by the giant gum the night an out-of-work drover, with nothing but seeds in his pockets, wandered into the cracked riverbed spellbound, as if her song led him right to her. At the sight of Ruth, singing and crying in the moonlight, they say Jacob Wyld crouched wordlessly and planted seeds at her feet, in the earth between the roots of the gum tree. What grew from that night, where Ruth’s tears fell to the earth, was a heath of wild vanilla lilies, and an equally heady love affair between Ruth and Jacob.