Chapter One

 

“Mrs. White hates you, Harriet. I think it’s because you have such lovely red hair.” Elsie, the seventeen-year-old scullery maid examined an encrusted pan.

“Pretty!” Harry slammed a saucepan down on the sink. “I’m a wreck.”

Six days a week scrubbing and scraping for the tyrannical Mrs. White had seen to that. She pushed irritably at a curl slipping out from under her cap.

Her cheek still smarted from the slap she had received half an hour before, when the horrible witch of a housekeeper accused her of not making the floor of the entrance foyer gleam. Desperation for money and a place to live near the convalescent hospital stopped her from telling Mrs. White exactly what she thought of her.

“She gets angry when you go off to visit your brother,” Elsie continued.

“I don’t care what the old cow thinks of me. Once Gil recovers we’ll leave Melbourne. I’ll never come back here again.” She hated the city with its crowds of bustling people, noise and selfish, hypocritical society types.

Their employer, Sebastian Littlejohn, carried his head high, and liked to think of himself as a respected pillar of society. The whole family wallowed in luxury while a sadistic housekeeper treated their servants like slaves. Harry scrubbed with vigor, wishing she could scrub those hypocrites off the face of the earth.

She’d give up ten years of her life to expose them for their stinginess. Dark stuffy attic rooms shared by the servants and dreadful, inedible food. They treat us worse than their dogs. She whipped up her anger to give her the energy to keep on scrubbing.

Squalor and poverty prevailed in the poorer suburbs. She shuddered. On their rundown farm they at least had plenty to eat and fresh air to breathe. The dilapidated boarding house in Collingwood, her first taste of Melbourne life, still haunted her dreams at night.

Thank goodness it had been summertime when she stayed there. Judging by the damp smell of decay, the building would have leaked when it rained. Huge rats more than a foot long scurried around the back alleys, where rotting garbage and excrement from overflowing privies mingled, giving off the vilest of smells. Whole families lived in one or two rooms in buildings in such a state of decay, they should have been demolished years ago.

We are definitely going to take those farmhand jobs advertised by Ross Calvert at his cattle ranch, Devil’s Ridge. She used her fingertips to wipe the perspiration off her brow. She couldn’t bear working here for much longer, and pretending to be Gil’s kid brother what a lark that would be.

Cutting her hair and wearing loose, baggy clothes to hide her feminine shape would be easy. Luckily she was finely built. Skinny Gil always said. Buying horses that were experienced with cattle, and finding their way up to an isolated property like Devil’s Ridge were their main obstacles.

“Do you want to go to a picture show with Ted and me?” Elsie asked, interrupting her train of thought. “He could bring a friend along from camp. That’s if the old dragon lets us off.”

“No thanks.”

Harry recalled the gangling, awkward Ted who served as a cook at the Broadmeadows Army Camp. His friends were probably of the same stature, whereas Gil had been so handsome when he marched off to war, the khaki army uniform suiting his blond good looks and lithe athletic build. He had inherited their mother’s big blue eyes; whereas she had been stuck with nondescript, not quite green ones.

“I won’t go out with a soldier, Elsie. They go off to war and get themselves killed or come back maimed. Anyway, after I’ve seen Gil I’ll hang around here in case they need help at the garden party. The old battle-axe would make you stay otherwise, even if it is Saturday.”

“I don’t know how you can bear going to that convalescent hospital all the time, seeing those poor crippled soldiers. If something like that happened to Ted, I’d die.” Elsie sobbed into her apron.

“It’s terrible, but I have to go. Gil needs me.”

They were once fine, dashing young men. Harry blinked back tears as she started scrubbing a baking dish encrusted with burnt cake. How did cook manage to burn everything? The unfairness of it all. The gallant warriors, blinded and limbless from the 1915 Turkish campaign on Gallipoli had returned home, not to a hero’s welcome, but to be shunted off to makeshift hospitals. Hidden away so the public would not feel sickened by the sight of them. The papers, egged on by the politicians, mentioned only valiant battles and the glorious dead.