Free The Tartan Touch by Isobel Chace Page B

glad you didn’t! What would the Frasers have done without you?”
    I loved her dearly at that moment. I had no heart to be jealous of her shining beauty. Mary Fraser might take everything I wanted for myself, but I knew then that I would never dislike her for it.
    Andrew had left us when we had had our first glimpse of the sheep, leaving us to watch from the top of the hill, and so he was not there when we rode back to the homestead and the time came for me to dismount. Following Mary’s instructions, I wrenched myself out of the saddle and landed more or less on my feet, the reins still wrapped tightly about my fingers.
    Mary took them from me and led Birrahlee away to his stable. Left alone, I staggered into the house and flung myself, fully dressed, on to my bed. Andrew had said I’d be stiff that night, and here I was like a poker and it was scarcely breakfast time!
    “A hot shower is what you need!” Mary said heartlessly, strolling into my room without a by-your-leave.
    I summoned up a groan, wondering if my hunger was greater than my stiffness, making it worthwhile to struggle to the breakfast table .
    “I’ll give you a rub down if you don’t get up,” Mary threatened. “And I have very hard hands!”
    I believed her, I pulled myself off the bed and disappeared into the bathroom. The warm water rushed out at me, making my skin tingle with the force of it. I felt distinctly better and some of the stiffness left me.
    “Tell me about the shearing?” I called out to Mary.
    “Tell you what?”
    “I’ve read about it,” I told her, not without pride, “Will they be here long?
    “A fortnight maybe,” she said. “You’ll soon get the hang of it. We spend the whole time cooking for the gang, or that’s what it feels like. But it’s fun!”
    “I enjoy cooking,” I said with satisfaction.
    “Not for those brutes, you won’t! They put away the most enormous quantities of food, the duller the better.” She laughed. “If they don’t get the right food, there’s trouble, and then Andrew goes spare!”
    “I see,” I said. I would have to ask Andrew to tell exactly what the men ate, if I was to do a good job, I thought. When I knew what they ate and the times of their meals, I would plan my campaign carefully to please them. I was used to hard work and I felt completely at home in a kitchen. To be honest, I welcomed the prospect of having something to do that would take my mind off the problems of being the temporary Mrs. Andrew Fraser .
    But that was the last I heard about the shearing for the first week that I was on Mirrabooka. I occupied myself by making a garden in front of the house, digging the rough ground in the evenings when it was a little cooler . Mary would have nothing to do with the project, but, to my surprise, Andrew took quite an interest, even taking the trouble to divert some of the water from the reservoir (which also served as the swimming pool), to irrigate the beds of flowers I put in.
    We were fortunate on Mirrabooka not to be short of water. It seemed that when they had been prospecting for min erals on the land, they had found this shelf of water, deep down beneath the first layer of hard rock. An artesian well had soon followed and now there was a windmill too to pump the water up to the surface. You can see these win dmills all over the Outback and hear their sails beating against the lightest breeze.
    But having water didn’t make the heat any less. True, it was a dry heat, dry and dusty. It was a climate to turn the most abstemious man into a beer-drinker. If he was a rich man, he drank it by the schooner, if he was poor, he had to make do with a pony, but he still wasn’t doing too badly to my way of thinking. I drank it only under protest, and, after a while, even Andrew gave up trying to make me like it .
    “Perhaps you’re wise to stick to apples,” he said to me.
    “And flagons,” I said without thought.
    “Flagons of what?”
    I blushed. “J-just flagons.