He grinned. ‘Well I’ve asked four times and you’ve bedded me.’
Lauren pulled on her skirt, did up her blouse. ‘Come back soon and we’ll see.’ She slid the coin from the bed into the palm of her hand and, slipping on her shoes, she left the room.
The wife of a boundary rider, Lauren thought as she walked downstairs. That would be all the boy was offering: Overseer, blah. Still, it was the first offer she’d had. On the landing Lauren looked over the bannister to make sure no one she knew was in the bar, and then she ran lightly across the floor and out the back. The yard was crowded with Mr Morelli’s hens, and the remains of his vegetable garden were a wilted testament to summer and the limited novelty of bucketing water from the hotel’s well. At the splintered gate, Lauren checked the coins in her hand before lifting the latch and running down the side street to her house.
Mrs Grant was in the backyard, leaning over a fire, stirring a blackened cast iron pot bubbling with water and something grey in colour that Lauren imagined had once been white. The baby, her youngest brother, was lying on the grass balling his eyes out, her sister Annie playing in a patch of mud from used wash water. Mrs Grant was a big woman with thinning blonde hair beneath which were round bloody scabs; some dried, some freshly picked and bleeding. She looked up from the copper and grunted towards a balled-up mess of wet clothes, steam rising from the pile into the hot air. Lauren dropped the bundle into another pot of cold water and swished them about with a wooden paddle before proceeding to pull sheets, long johns, petticoats and towels from the tangled mess to throw over the paling fence to dry. Some of the wet things looked clean, others smelled liked boiled rats. Lauren turned her nose up at the stench. No wonder the clothes usually dried and aired for two days.
‘Well?’ Mrs Grant said in a husky voice grown deep with steam and heat. ‘You missed your sister Susanna. She’s gone and got herself with child. Of course the father wants nothing to do with her, called her a slavering whore or some such.’ Mrs Grant wiped her dripping nose with the back of her hand. ‘Don’t blame him.’
The baby was screaming. Lauren digested her sister’s shocking news as the baby digested the thick mud his two-year-old sister was shoving down his throat and up his nose. ‘Mary, Jesus and Joseph, Annie, but you’re a terror.’ Lauren, glad to be distracted, rushed to the screeching, mud-covered blob on the ground. ‘Mother?’ she screamed.
‘Dump him in the bucket,’ Mrs Grant offered helpfully without looking up from the steaming boiler.
Lauren found the three-parts-filled cast iron bucket sitting under the gum tree. She lifted the now silent baby and dunked him three times by the ankles up and down. He came out purple and crying, which clearly was better than muddy and quiet, for Mrs Grant gave a perfunctory look over her shoulder and nodded. With the subdued, spluttering baby on her hip, Annie sulking in readiness for her mother’s sharp backhand, Lauren decided good news was required if she were to have a peaceful night.
‘I’ve an offer of marriage, Mother.’
Mrs Grant dropped the great wooden stirring paddle and, wiping her hands on her apron, trundled across the withered grass. ‘Who is ’e?’
‘A stockman from Wangallon Station, name of McKenzie.’
Mrs Grant rubbed her red peeling hands together. ‘Scottish? Well, the Scots are not bad, you know. Good workers. Serious minded, especially if he be a Presbyterian. Gawd, now there are a mob of churchgoers. And Wangallon, eh? Them Gordons have money. I’ve seen that Jasperson here at the store buying up like he was the King of England himself. You’re not with child? Not that it matters if you’re to be married.’
‘No and I’ve not given him an answer … yet.’
‘What? Are you daft? An offer of marriage from a man who’s not a drunkard, a thief or an old man is as scarce as feathered frogs.’
Lauren placed her hand on her mother’s muscled shoulder. ‘I’ve said nothing for I’m hoping for a better offer.’
Mrs Grant took Lauren’s face in her hand and squeezed her cheeks until her lips popped out an inch from her face. ‘Who?’
Lauren shook herself free, prodding her bruised cheeks. ‘Another from Wangallon.’
Mrs Grant laughed. A great belly laugh that set the