Song of the Spirits (26 page)

“Your granddaughter is in love again,” Daphne said flatly over tea with Helen. “It appears she has a weakness for men that make my hair stand on end.”

“Daphne!” admonished Helen. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

Daphne smiled. “Forgive me, Helen. I meant to say that Miss O’Keefe is drawn to men who fill me with a vague feeling of unease.”

“Have you ever made a kind remark about any man of your acquaintance?” Helen inquired. “With the exception of those who… er… are in a certain sense self-sufficient?”

Daphne demonstrated a pronounced preference for barkeepers and bellboys who felt themselves more drawn to the same sex. She had always spoken very warmly of Lucas Warden; she had gotten to know him shortly before his death.

She laughed. “I’ll remember that expression! Drinking tea with you is still so informative after all these years, Helen. As for the boys, homosexuals are simply more practical, since they don’t bother the girls.
Besides, normal men are boring. Why should I waste kind remarks on people who aren’t even clients? These Sideblossoms, however. The boy never comes by, but the old man is not exactly among our favorite guests, and that’s putting it mildly.”

“I don’t want to know about that, Daphne,” Helen declared energetically. “Even disregarding the fact that Thomas Sideblossom’s behavior here has been above reproach, Elaine is really flourishing.”

“It might be a short bloom though,” Daphne noted. “Do you really think he has honorable intentions? And even if he does, Fleur won’t be happy.”

“That goes without saying,” Helen said. “But the same goes for her as for you, Daphne. Thomas and John Sideblossom are not the same person. Whatever the elder Sideblossom’s failings, he must not have passed them on to his son. My Howard was no gentleman either, but Ruben does not take after him one bit. It could be the same with the Sideblossoms.”

Daphne shrugged.

“
Could
,” she noted. “But if I remember correctly, you, too, only discovered the truth about Howard after you were already established in the Canterbury Plains.”

Inger was more direct with Elaine, even if she did not go into all the details of her experience with John Sideblossom.

“Daphne would only let him have the experienced girls. There were always discussions about it. He only wanted the very young ones, and, in a certain sense, we wanted that too, because it… well, there was always extra money for men like that and we often got a few days off too. But Daphne only gave in once because Susan really, really needed the money.”

Inger pointed a little ashamedly at her pelvis, a gesture that Elaine did not know how to interpret, however.

“After that”—to her astonishment, Elaine saw her friend blush for the first time—“but after that, she didn’t need the extra money
anyway. Her… expectation did not survive the night. But Susan was rather… that is, she was not well. Miss O’Rourke had to get the doctor. And after, she would always run off when Mr. Sideblossom came. She couldn’t look at him anymore.”

Elaine found Inger’s story very strange. What “expectation” had Mr. Sideblossom destroyed? But she did not want to hear about him anyway. She wanted to talk about Thomas. When she described to her friend in minute detail what they did when they were together, Inger could not find fault with any of it. If there was any cause for concern, in fact, it was that Thomas’s behavior was so reserved.

“Strange that he’s never tried to kiss you,” she said after an excruciatingly long description of a ride during which Elaine and Thomas had done nothing more than exchange glances.

Elaine shrugged. She would not allow herself to admit that it was precisely that aspect of Thomas’s behavior that she liked most. After the incident with William, she was anxious about touching. She did not want anything else awakened within her that would find no fulfillment. “He is a true gentleman, you know, and he wants me to take my time. Sometimes I think he has serious intentions.” She blushed slightly.

Inger laughed. “Let’s hope so! When boys don’t have serious intentions, they go after what they want quicker. Not even ladies are spared.”

Thomas was still uncertain. On the one hand, Elaine was appearing more and more often in his dreams, and she was, of course, a suitable bride. On the other hand, he felt almost unfaithful—a completely ridiculous feeling, as he had never once touched Emere. She would never have permitted it, not even when he was a little boy yearning for innocent tenderness. Yet it was almost as though a window would close—an era would be brought to an end—if he seriously courted Elaine and ended up bringing her back to Lionel Station. Thomas could not bring himself to make a decision, though he would soon
have to, because his father was pushing him. He was more than happy with his son’s choice—and was already looking forward with devilish glee to dancing with Fleurette O’Keefe at Thomas and Elaine’s wedding—but for the time being, he wanted to return to his farm. Queenstown had run out of charm for him; he had seen to all the business he needed to and visited every whore Daphne would let him. He had also begun to miss his young wife, Zoé, and the work on the farm. It would soon be time to herd the sheep out of the highlands, and he needed Thomas back for that.

“What reason do you have for wanting to stay here?” he asked his son. “Does a Sideblossom hang around a woman’s front door like a male dog in front of a bitch’s doghouse? Strike while the iron is still hot! Ask the girl and then her father. It’d be better the other way around, but nobody does that anymore. You’ve got the girl eating out of your hand, don’t you?”

Thomas grinned. “The girl is ripe for the picking, though I’m not sure she knows what that means. It doesn’t seem that this Martyn fellow could have taught her much, being as timid as she is. How could I ever have doubted that she was a virgin? She shrinks whenever I so much as accidentally touch her. How long will you give me?”

John Sideblossom rolled his eyes. “After you’ve got her in bed, three minutes. Otherwise, I’d like to leave in no more than a week. By then, I should hope that you will have gotten your yes.”

“But I
want
to marry him!” Elaine held her head up defiantly, and almost stomped her foot. For the first time in months, Fleurette and Ruben caught a glimpse of their old vivacious and contentious daughter. They just wished it had happened under different circumstances.

“Elaine, you don’t know what you’re saying,” Ruben said. Unlike Fleurette, who had reacted hysterically to Elaine’s announcement of her engagement to Thomas Sideblossom, he tried to remain calm. “Do you really want to marry a complete stranger whose family history is, to put it mildly, questionable at best?”

“One of my grandfathers was a rustler, and the other was a murderer! I think we’re quite well suited to each other,” Elaine objected.

Ruben rolled his eyes.

“A family with whom we haven’t had the best experiences, then,” he corrected himself. “If you marry him, you’ll be moving off to a farm in the middle of nowhere. Lainie, Nugget Manor is practically on Main Street compared to Lionel Station.”

“What of it? I have a horse, and I know how to ride. Kiward Station is isolated as well, and it doesn’t bother Grandmum Gwyn. Besides, there are other people there: Zoé, Mr. Sideblossom…”

“An old womanizer who just bought a young girl for his love nest!” Fleur cursed him, leaving Elaine speechless for a moment. She would have expected an expression like that from Daphne, but never from her well-bred mother.

“He did not buy Zoé,” Elaine said.

“Didn’t buy her? Half the West Coast is talking about how he did.”

Fleurette had evidently not spent the last few weeks only doing housework, but had also found time to visit her neighbors near and far, during which all the gossip that the South Island had to offer was discussed at length.

“Zoé Lockwood’s father was looking at total ruin,” she said. “He had completely overreached with his farm and his high living, another self-important braggart who came into a fortune though gold mining but had no idea how to hold onto it. Sideblossom paid Lockwood’s debts and offered him a few sheep to breed. He got the girl in a trade. I’d call that ‘buying.’”

Fleur glared at her daughter.

“But Thomas and I love each other,” Elaine maintained.

“Oh, do you?” Fleurette retorted. “You thought that about William too!”

That was too much. Elaine vacillated between bursting into tears and throwing something at her mother.

“If you won’t let me, we’ll just wait until I’m of age. But I’ll marry him one way or another. You can’t stop me!”

“Then wait!” Fleur yelled angrily. “Maybe you’ll come to your senses.”

“I could elope with him.”

Ruben thought with dread of his daughter sulking for several years. He did not think Elaine capricious enough to change her mind. Moreover, he, too, had noted the changes in his daughter. Thomas Sideblossom seemed to have done her quite a bit of good. If only Lionel Station were not so awfully far away.

“Fleur, maybe we should talk about this alone for a moment,” he said in an attempt to intercede. “It won’t do any good for us to keep yelling at each other. If we arranged a sufficiently long engagement…”

“Out of the question!” Fleurette was still haunted by the memory of the night John Sideblossom had cornered her in Kiward Station’s stables. Fortunately, her mother had arrived just in time, but then Fleur had crossed paths with Gerald Warden and several of his drinking buddies while on her way through the salon in a torn dress. It was the most mortifying episode of her life.

“Mother, you don’t even know him! You haven’t said so much as a word to Thomas, but you speak of him as though he were Satan himself,” Elaine argued.

“You’re right,” Ruben observed. “Come on, Fleur, give him a chance. Let’s invite the young man over, and hear what he has to say.”

Fleurette flared up at him. “Because that worked out so well with William!” she remarked. “In the end, everyone was taken in by him except me. Dinner is no test of human nature. This is about Lainie’s future.”

“That’s right, about
my
future! But you always want to interfere.”

Ruben sighed. This could go on for hours. Fleurette and Elaine rarely argued, but when they did, they fought tooth and nail. He could not bring himself to listen anymore. He stood up calmly, went to the stables, and readied his horse. Perhaps he would simply go have a talk with the Sideblossoms himself—something best done with
both
father and son.