The townspeople became willfully blind to Thornfield after Ruth stopped selling flowers and let her garden wither and die. When they saw Wade in town, no one challenged him about rumours of his violence, and they mostly ignored Wattle, the girl some said had been raised more by the birds than by her own mother. But not Lucas Hart, who first saw Wattle when he was a boy walking alone along the river. He’d thought she was some kind of river mermaid then, the way her skin shone green under the water and her long black hair was tangled with leaves and flowers. Though he never saw her at school, or in the shops, or at church, she irrevocably captured his imagination. Whenever he went to the river he hoped to see her swim. It always struck him that her sinewy limbs cut through the water as if she had a score to settle. Over time, they both grew up. She became a reclusive young woman, hardly ever seen in town, and he went away to finish his medical studies. Neither city life nor an education could distract him; thoughts of Wattle ran through his veins like a fever. He moved home, took up the local GP residency, and walked the river path nightly. He’d heard the rumours about Wade Thornton. No one seemed to have intervened, though; family business was kept private between a man and his wife. Except, Lucas always wanted to say, Ruth Stone never was Wade Thornton’s consenting wife, nor, as the story went, was Wade Wattle Stone’s father. Every night that Lucas walked the river he promised himself he would go up the steps to the front door at Thornfield, knock and introduce himself. Inevitably, every night, he got as far as Thornfield’s boundary and turned on his heels. Until the night he heard a woman scream, followed by a single gunshot. Then silence.
Lucas ran down the path from the river into Thornfield’s dusty yard, where Wattle Stone was holding a rifle, crumpled over Wade Thornton’s body, soaked in blood so dark it could have been ink. Are you hurt? Lucas cried. Is it you bleeding, Wattle? Are you hurt? Wattle sat up, rigid and frighteningly pale, her eyes as dark as the blood around her feet. Wattle? Lucas yelled. Slowly, she shook her head. It’s not me, she whispered, the gun shaking in her hands. They searched each other’s eyes, each making a silent vow.
News of Wade Thornton’s death sent an overnight fire of speculation through town. Some said Ruth bewitched him and made him suicide. Others said it was Ruth’s daughter who murdered him. The Stone women and the language of their flowers were decried as bad luck; a curse on the town since Ruth’s failure to maintain the flower fields had taken away people’s incomes and hopes. Fishermen at the river were quick to join in, claiming they’d seen Ruth at night, talking to something in the shallows. When the sighting of a Murray cod was reported, it caused further uproar. The River King shouldn’t have been anywhere near a waterway that far north; she’d conjured a bad omen. That Ruth Stone and her flower farm once saved the town from drought was forgotten.
The slander didn’t stop until Dr Lucas Hart went public with his testimony: he witnessed Wade Thornton stumbling around in a drunken stupor, firing off his hunting rifle as he tried to clean it, and ultimately shot himself dead. The police wrote his death up as accidental, and the town turned its eye in another direction. Wattle Stone married Lucas Hart, carrying a bouquet of wattle down the aisle. They lived together at Thornfield, with Ruth.
Then we had you, Junie, her mother would always say at that point in the story, looking directly at June, her eyes brimming. And people started to be kind again; you broke Thornfield’s curse.
With June in her bassinet by her side, Wattle blew the dust from Ruth’s notebook. While Lucas was at his clinic, she methodically went about gathering books from the town library, reading them aloud, naming Ruth’s sketches and writing lists of the seeds she would need to order from the city, while June cooed along. Over a dozen seasons, Wattle cajoled her mother’s flower farm back to life. People started to nod approvingly at the bouquets that appeared for sale at the town markets. Return of happiness, spoke one bouquet of waratahs, each the size of a human heart. Devotion, rose boronias said, a bunch of fragrant cupped flowers. Soon the buckets were empty. Once again Thornfield’s flowers were in demand.
Although Wattle revived her mother’s beloved garden, she couldn’t settle the madness in Ruth’s mind. Wattle doted on her mother the way she did on her own child, trying to make her happy, but Ruth still crept out of the house every night. Wattle lay awake listening to the floorboards creak, until one moonlit evening, with June snug against her chest, she decided to follow her mother to the river. She watched as Ruth laid flowers in the water, talking the whole time.
Mama, Wattle stepped onto the sandy river bank in the silver starlight. Her mother’s eyes were lucid and bright. Who are you talking to, Mama?
Your father, my love, Ruth replied simply. The River King.
Bubbles burst on the surface of the river as a flower was dragged under, but by what, Wattle didn’t see. She turned and fled, back to her husband, warm in bed.
Ruth died in her sleep when June was just three years old. The morning Wattle found her, Ruth’s hair was damp from the river, filled with gum leaves and vanilla lilies.
Her will left everything to Wattle. Ruth asked only one thing of her daughter: to ensure Thornfield was never bequeathed to an undeserving man. And in the generations since, it never was. To Clem Hart’s unforgiving fury.
Pay attention now, Junie, her mother’s voice rang in her mind. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.
June sighed deeply as first light appeared in the sky. She stumbled from the couch into a standing position and staggered towards her bedroom, the last of the whisky sloshing in the bottom of the bottle.
On the first day of the winter holidays, Alice stood at her window, gazing at the chalky white path that cut away through the bush to the river. She and Oggi were meeting there the next morning, as soon as they woke up, for her tenth birthday. Oggi was the best friend Alice ever had, which she reasoned was fair because Toby was a dog, and Candy was much older, and Harry was also a dog, and a book wasn’t actually a person.
She turned from the window to her homework, which was spread out on the floor. Harry wagged his tail as she sat down. She had a holiday assignment to do: write a review of a book she loved, and why she loved it. Although the other kids groaned, Alice twitched with excitement when Mr Chandler handed out the assignment sheet. She knew straight away which book she would choose: the selkie stories Sally picked out for her in the library, the book June gave her at hospital before they’d met.
Alice went to the bookshelves, walking her fingers along the spines until she found the selkie book. When she slid it off the shelf another book came with it, falling to the floor. Alice picked it up, a clothbound hardcover with gilded lettering and a faded illustration on the cover. It was the story about the girl with her name, and the wonderland she fell into.
Alice opened the front cover. As she read the inscription, her body went cold.
‘Hey, sweetpea, I brought you some hot cocoa.’ Candy appeared in the doorway carrying a steaming mug. ‘Alice? What is it?’ She put the mug down. ‘Let me see.’ Candy prised the book out of Alice’s hands. Alice watched as Candy read the inscription. ‘Oh …’ she trailed off.