The Cowgirl Page 4

  She cracked dark chocolate into a bowl, listening to the happy clicking noises it made as it hit the ceramic base. Once the cream was heating on the hob and beginning to flow gently around the saucepan, she took it off the flame and gazed at its milky paleness. When Teddy was young she had told Deirdre it was the colour of princesses’ skin.

  What? Don’t talk nonsense. What would you know about princesses? Deirdre had snapped.

  I know they have skin the colour of cream, she’d answered. How do you reckon Snow White got her nickname? She smiled into the bowl. Her grandmother didn’t approve of flights of fancy, and she wasn’t interested in dreams. Deirdre concerned herself with the cold hard light of day.

  It wasn’t long before a large leg of lamb was sizzling in the oven. Teddy collected her milking bucket and headed out to milk the cow. As she was walking to the milking shed she saw him again. The damn Carnaby cockatoo was back. She shook her head at him and he shrieked at her.

  Go away!’ she called. ‘Go find a girlfriend!’

  The cocky shrieked again and raised his crest in alarm. The milk bucket in Teddy’s hand was metal but light and she swung it as she strolled to the old cattle yards where she could see Cow approaching, waiting for dinner. She swung it up and over her head in case she could scare the cockatoo, but the gesture seemed to entertain him and he circled overhead, landing in the enormous York gum by the side of the shed.

  ‘Dumb bloody bird,’ she muttered.

  Barnaby the Carnaby had been a chick when she had found him in a hollow in an old stump behind the hay shed. There were feathers nearby and she’d assumed his mother had been taken by a cat.

  Best just to kill the poor little chap, Deirdre had said. He’ll only suffer.

  She knew it was true. If he was an orphaned lamb she’d have disposed of him swiftly. No, she’d said. I want to give him a chance. Just a day. I’ll see if he’ll eat in a day. He’s nearly grown.

  And now he wouldn’t leave. But Windstorm wasn’t the place for Carnaby cockatoos – they were more likely to be found at Kellerberrin or Esperance. He was too far north, too far west and he was never going to find a partner. Occasionally he vanished for a while and she’d hope he’d worked it out and moved away, but then she’d hear him shrieking down in the bush, telling some pink and grey a joke he was never going to get.

  Cow arrived in her own time with her udder swinging beneath her.

  ‘Afternoon, Cow,’ Teddy said and pulled up the stool. She didn’t mind milking; it was relaxing. Well, it was relaxing when she didn’t have to rush home from town or from drenching sheep, or cut a weekend in Perth short. Then it was a pain in the bum, pure and simple.

  She had time to think while she squeezed the fresh milk into the bucket. Today she thought about Will and wondered why he owed Audrey, then she thought about the buried house and wondered why it had never been mentioned before. Life was often pretty quiet on the farm; it wasn’t like they weren’t hard-up for conversation sometimes. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

  The sky was blue; it was always blue in the wheatbelt. Sometimes blue and hot, sometimes blue and windy, and sometimes cold icy blue. But blue. When Teddy was out here, gazing upwards, she often thought the sky was deeper than the earth, and richer – with the dreams and wishes of millions of souls sewn into its fabric through time and space, and across maps that had long since disappeared. When she was younger, she had photographed the sky for days at a time, trying to capture its exact blue shades, trying to map them all. How she loved feeling the wind on her face from a thousand years ago, from a cave on a hillside in Turkey or from a field by a loch in Inverness. Blue. Unchanging air on her skin, slipping freely past the dark cold earth that chained her there. Spurt, spurt, spurt.

  Cow kicked at the bucket. Her feed had run out and she was bored. ‘Sorry, old girl,’ Teddy muttered and quickly finished. Then she stood slowly and, glancing at the blue sky above, took the afternoon’s milk to her grandmother, who she knew would be waiting.

  A few hours later Will arrived at the door freshly showered and holding a bottle of wine.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ Teddy said, startled. ‘Come in.’

  Will glanced about as he stepped cautiously into the kitchen. ‘I thought you were expecting me?’

  ‘I was,’ she answered. ‘I just wasn’t expecting —’ Stop speaking. She stopped speaking. She hadn’t been expecting it to feel like a date.

  Maybe it was the advent of the wine that had made the difference or maybe it was the way he looked at her, like she was really there. The looking unsettled her and if there was anywhere Teddy Broderick didn’t feel unsettled, it was on her farm. She was so settled on the farm she was almost buried. Except that Will appeared to notice her and he was looking at her as if he was very pleased to see her. Before she could panic he had a glass of wine in her hand.

  ‘What shall we drink to?’ he asked.

  ‘Grandma’s hole?’ she asked. Oh, well done.

  He had the good grace to ignore her. ‘Let’s drink to digging up the past,’ he said.

  ‘Why drink to that?’ she asked, because every word they uttered now was another word further away from Grandma’s hole.

  He grinned at her. ‘Because I get the sense your grandma has a couple of secrets – secrets that this house is ready to tell.’

  Teddy looked at him in surprise. ‘You think Grandma has secrets?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m willing to bet.’

  ‘Why has she never mentioned them before?’

  ‘Because they’re secrets?’ he said. He took a large sip of red and regarded her. ‘You have a secret or two as well, I’ll bet.’

  Teddy laughed awkwardly. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time for secrets.’

  He leaned forward and she had an impulse to do the same. ‘Everybody has secrets,’ he said. ‘Some are just more interesting than others.’

  His eyes were deep blue, his lashes black, his brows heavy. She stared at him, unwilling to open her mouth because something dumb was just waiting to come out.

  She bet he had secrets and she bet they were pretty fantastic. He had the kind of face that had been in a few scrapes, told a few lies and maybe kissed a few people. She was surprised to find he was watching her with the same interested inspection and in the pause that fell between them, Deirdre arrived.

  ‘Smells good,’ she announced. ‘That the hogget from the last kill?’

  Teddy snapped to attention. ‘Hi, Grandma, and yeah, Hamish let me keep most of the carcass. I’ve nearly finished it already – I took a few kilos of chops to the Hofmanns.’

  Deirdre sniffed in approval.

  ‘Dog said you had lamb cooking over here, so I came round a bit early.’

  ‘Your dog can talk?’ Will asked.

  Deirdre glared at him. ‘You ever had a dog? Don’t talk nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘Of course he can.’

  Teddy pursed her lips together and filled a pot with water. Oh, geez, her grandma was bringing her A game. ‘Grandma likes dogs,’ she explained and Will nodded slowly.

  Deirdre sat down without ceremony at the kitchen table. ‘Nothing like a lamb roast, eh?’ she declared to Will. ‘You agree?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s the best. I must say, I don’t get to enjoy much home cooking. This will be a real treat.’

  ‘There! You see!’ Deirdre announced triumphantly to Teddy. ‘No home cooking!’

  ‘Deirdre hates to think there are men out there without the benefit of a home-cooked meal.’

  Deirdre’s eyes were trained keenly on Will.

  ‘It looks like she thinks you’re a good project.’

  ‘Good project!’ she barked. ‘Don’t be silly. But you like to cook, and he needs feeding.’ She stood up and went to find the flour on the top shelf in the cupboard above the coffee pot. ‘Now,’ she announced. ‘You get the meat out, and I’ll make the gravy. We’ll give it a bit of a rest.’

  The two women moved around the kitchen in perfect time with each othe
r, and they had the whole meal served in minutes. Will watched with evident admiration.

  ‘You both know your way around this kitchen,’ he said. ‘Do you cook together often?’

  ‘It was Grandma who taught me to cook,’ Teddy explained. ‘She still comes in if she can smell something going on, just to make sure I’m getting it right.’

  Deirdre looked proud. ‘She does a good job in the kitchen,’ she declared.

  Teddy smiled at the floor. A good job in the kitchen. She knew Will could hear it and it embarrassed her. She had another drink and stood in the pantry for a moment while she pretended to look for the pepper and told herself not to care what he thought of her.

  Deirdre drank water from a beautiful glass Teddy kept on hand for her and she grumbled comfortably throughout the meal like a grumpy third wheel.

  ‘Dennis Larkim’s gone and died,’ she announced.

  ‘Gone and died’ meant that the death, while a surprise, wasn’t entirely unexpected, because the departed was old. The ‘gone and died’ conversation was generally an afternoon tea one. Teddy and Deirdre had them at least once a month. The conversations began with a biography of the departed, a review of sorts. They then moved onto the funeral, and followed with a social pages debrief.

  The only old person Deirdre hadn’t deemed to have ‘gone and died’ was her old friend Ida Christie. Ida had died of heart failure at home, and Deirdre still visited her, along with Teddy’s father and grandfather, on the way into town every Friday afternoon. But the ‘gone and died’ conversation was not the ‘in front of a handsome man’ conversation.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she replied politely, wishing Deirdre had some better material.

  ‘Heart got him. Chasing down a ewe. Dead when he hit the ground.’

  ‘Oh, so nice and quick, then . . .’

  ‘Who’s Dennis Larkim?’ Will asked, and Teddy turned to him quickly.

  ‘I’ll fill you in later,’ she lied. ‘So tell us more about Devon. Where are you going, exactly?’ Perhaps it was time Deirdre found out he wasn’t hanging around.

  ‘The site’s at a village near Newton Abbot in Devon,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there for a month or so, I imagine. A lot of the area is owned by a local farmer, so we’ll try to work quickly to get out of his hair. Then I’ll spend time with an old friend at Oxford. After that, I’m not sure where I’ll go.’

  ‘You’re not settling down anytime soon, then?’ Deirdre asked, her faded grey eyes flickering across him with interest.

  ‘No, not really. I like this lifestyle. I get to travel, meet people, travel some more, meet some more people . . .’

  ‘So you just gallivant about the place, and never put down any roots? Never make a home? Never even look after a pet?’ Deirdre was peering at him as if he’d just been invented.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Will admitted. ‘Maybe it won’t be forever. Who knows?’

  ‘Harrumph,’ said Deirdre, but it was a gentle harrumph, so it may have just been a general disapproval of something that had happened last week and not at all directed at Will.

  ‘What do you think of our Teddy?’ Deirdre asked.

  ‘Grandma!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What kind of question is that? You don’t ask a person what they think of another person!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s weird, that’s why!’ She took a good swig of wine and turned in her chair to Will. ‘Please don’t answer that question.’

  ‘What if I want to?’

  ‘Resist the urge.’ Teddy glared at her grandmother who glared benignly back.

  ‘Well then,’ she said. ‘What’s for dessert?’

  ‘Like you don’t know. It’s chocolate tart.’

  ‘Good.’ Deirdre stood up and took the plates over to the sink. Her brow furrowed when she assessed the tart. ‘Looks fine,’ she announced. ‘Cut me a piece. I’m heading home.’ She loaded the plates into the dishwasher.

  ‘You’re not staying?’ Teddy asked, both horrified and relieved. She cut a piece and shoved it onto a plate.

  ‘No. I’m too old to stay up late. I’ve got to milk the cow in the morning, you know.’ Deirdre was at the door, plate in hand. She turned. ‘Good night. Don’t feed Dog. He’s got diarrhoea,’ she said. ‘Probably worms.’ And with that, she marched out into the night.

  Teddy watched her go like the iceberg was floating away from the Titanic, leaving it to its socially awkward dinner.

  ‘Wow,’ Will said. ‘She’s not exactly brimming with joie de vivre, is she?’

  ‘Well, no – she thinks it’s a venereal disease,’ Teddy answered. ‘Chocolate tart?’ She was slicing it even before he gave her the thumbs up. ‘You don’t miss it?’ she asked.

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘Not having a permanent home?’

  ‘Nah – well, not most of the time,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘Maybe sometimes.’

  ‘So you do have a thing for Deirdre!’ she said as she handed him his plate. ‘Don’t be embarrassed. It happens. She’s got the sturdiest legs in the district in the over-eighty set.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I already noticed.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘So the genes are looking good,’ he added. She rolled her eyes and tasted her slice of tart. It was dark, sweet and bitter. She took another bite. Not bad.

  ‘Who does Dog belong to?’

  Teddy shrugged. ‘Deirdre, really.’

  ‘Good name.’

  ‘She’s a woman of few words, and not all of them are the ones you want to hear.’ Like diarrhoea.

  ‘But she likes Dog.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, she loves him. She’s always telling him off, of course, but I remember one time he had a broken leg and it was in a cast. She pushed him around in a wheelbarrow for ages. Dog bloody loved it! She would grumble away and threaten to take him back and have him put down, and he would just sit up there on the pile of old rags she’d provided, grinning like he owned the place.’ She put her plate down. ‘One night I went over to drop off the milk and she had him sitting with his wheelbarrow jammed in the open doorway, letting the cold air in – so he could watch the news. She told me it cheered him up.’

  Will laughed. ‘He’s a lucky dog,’ he observed.

  ‘Well, I think Dog returns the love. He’s kind of lazy for a sheepdog, but if Deirdre is even slightly unwell, he sits on the doormat or under her window until she’s up and about. Occasionally he’ll bring her something dead to perk her up a bit.’ Teddy smiled shyly because she realised she was talking too much. ‘It doesn’t work.’

  ‘It sounds like they’re a good pair,’ he remarked. ‘What about your name? How did you cop a name like Theodora?’

  She shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Grandma demanded it, apparently. Mum still bitches about it – I think she mistakenly believed she had the right to name her own child, but Dad already wanted the name too, for some reason.’ Teddy smiled. ‘It became Teddy pretty quickly, which I think she found easier.’

  ‘I get the feeling your mum and Deirdre aren’t close.’

  ‘No. My grandma can be tough. She’s loyal, but she can be a bit uncompromising.’ Will nodded.

  ‘I can imagine,’ he said. ‘And she named you after a Byzantine empress. She must have high hopes.’

  ‘I’m a disappointment.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that. The old girl dotes on you.’

  ‘Are we talking about the same woman?’

  Will considered her. ‘Of course you know the story about Theodora?’

  ‘Yeah, she was a prostitute. And her dad owned some bears.’

  He laughed and took a sip of wine. ‘True! But she was also empress of Constantinople. A fine leader. Despite her humble origins, she ruled alongside her husband, Justinian, as an equal. She was quite a woman – we’re talking the sixth century.’

  Teddy waited for him to continue.

  ‘Constantinople is a fascinating city. It was at the centre of the civilised world for
centuries, the joining of the Eastern and Western empires. It eclipsed Rome and for a time it was ruled by Justinian and Theodora. They were a bit of a glamour couple, a hugely successful union. But it was Constantinople, and shit happened. So, there was a time that the people of Constantinople were rioting. They wanted Justinian gone and they rampaged through the streets, destroying part of the Great Palace and releasing prisoners from the city prison. Then they started setting fire to the city. Justinian called his ministers together to discuss what to do. In the face of the raging crowds, the men lost their collective nerve, and they all agreed that the best thing to do was to flee the city.’

  Will held out the bottle and Teddy held up her glass for him to top up. The wine tinkled into the glass, glistening like magic. ‘Anyway, here you come. Even though women weren’t really allowed to speak in council Theodora stood up and she said, May I never be deprived of this purple robe. May I never see the day, when I am not empress. Lords – if you want to leave and live in exile, we are wealthy, there are the ships. Go. But I would rather die here and now, and be buried in my purple robes, than flee and live without them.’ He glanced at her, smiling. ‘She shamed them into manning up. They changed their minds, and they kept the throne.’

  ‘Wow. Good result.’

  ‘Well, for them it was. Then they sealed off the doors to the Hippodrome and slaughtered everyone in it. By the time they’d finished they’d killed over thirty thousand – maybe as many as fifty.’

  ‘So Theodora was a bloodthirsty hooker?’

  ‘Yeah, but damn charming along with it. Do you think your grandma was trying to tell you something?’

  Teddy nodded. ‘She wants me to go on the game.’

  ‘Nah.’ Will finished his wine. ‘But I think it’s a pretty interesting choice.’

  Teddy didn’t want to talk about herself and her name. She wanted to talk about the places he’d been and what he’d seen there, who he’d met and what they’d unearthed.

  She cut them both another slice of chocolate tart, settled in with with her wine and questioned him closely. Teddy listened in wonder, as he told her about Vietnam, Peru, Mexico and Ethiopia. She paid careful attention to his stories, the details of where they dug, what they found, what disasters had befallen the civilisations relegated to the dust. After a time, Teddy looked up at the clock and saw with a start that it was almost midnight. She’d kept him too long.