“I’m not hungry,” I said. I was ravenous.
“Your hair is wilder every time I see it.” She gently nudged the plate of biscuits in my direction. “It’s such a wonderful colour, though. A little like Coquette’s, actually.”
That got me. “Do you think so?”
She nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d let me brush it?”
I was too out of sorts to enjoy sitting still and having my hair fussed over, but I let her do it. She had a silver-handled brush with beautiful soft white bristles that I always liked to run my fingers over. There was nothing feminine in our house any more, no silk or satin or perfume or jewellery or powder puffs. The brush was exotic. While Lady D worked, humming a little, I fell on the biscuits. Soon the plate was nothing but buttery crumbs.
“Where’d you get that fierce-looking scar?” she asked.
I looked down at the jagged worst of it poking from beneath the frayed hem of my short trousers—a long rippled wound that went halfway up my thigh. It did look pretty rough. “Wrestling totos.”
“Totos or bushpigs?”
“I trounced one of the Kip boys and threw him over my shoulder onto the ground. He was so embarrassed he waited for me in the forest and slashed out at me with his father’s knife.”
“What?” She made an alarmed noise.
“I had to go after him, didn’t I?” I couldn’t keep the pride out of my voice. “He looks far worse than I do now.”
Lady D sighed into my hair. I knew she was concerned, but she didn’t say anything else for the moment, and so I gave myself up to the tug of the brush and the way it rubbed against my scalp. It felt so good I was half asleep when the men finally stood and shook hands. I jumped to my feet, nearly landing in Lady D’s lap. “She’s ours?” I asked, rushing at them.
“Clutt bargains like a hyena,” D said, “just latches on and doesn’t let go. He nearly stole that mare from under me.” As he laughed, my father laughed, too, and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Doesn’t Beryl look pretty?” Lady D asked. She came up behind me and rested one hand on the top of my head. “I wondered if I’d find a nest of titmice tangled up behind one of her ears.”
Reddening, my father cleared his throat. “I’m not much of a nursemaid, I’m afraid.”
“Nor should you be,” D barked in his defence. “The girl’s fine. Just look at her, Florence. She’s as strong as a mule.”
“Ah, yes. We all of us want mules for daughters, don’t we?”
The whole exchange was good-natured, and yet it gave me a strange topsy-turvy feeling. When we started for home again, an hour later, after the money and the details of Coquette’s delivery were sorted, I could tell my father was unsettled, too. We rode in silence as the red sun inched lower and lower in the flat sky. In the distance, a dust devil churned like a dervish, whirling into a patch of flame trees and unhousing a fat band of vultures. One flew past, his shadow crawling over us so slowly it made me shudder.
“I’ll admit it all gets away from me sometimes,” my father said when the vulture had gone.
I could guess at what he meant from the way Lady D had blanched at my scar and general upkeep. I knew “it all” meant me, his daughter.
“I think we’re doing all right,” I said, and reached to pat Wee MacGregor’s neck. “I don’t want anything to be different.”
He said nothing as the sun continued its descent. This close to the equator, we had almost no twilight. Day turned to night in minutes, but they were lovely ones. Around us the yellow grasses stretched and moved like the sea, sometimes dipping into antbear burrows and pig holes, or lifting towards the knuckled spires of termite mounds, but never truly ceasing. There was a powerful illusion that the bush didn’t end—that we could ride for years like this, carried by the grasses and the sense of distance, on and on for ever.