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CHAPTER
EXTRACT
From
the bestselling author of Reach for the Dream comes a bittersweet
tale of love and heartache, set against the vast wheatfields of Queensland
and the glittering opera houses of Europe and America.
By
channels of coolness the echoes are calling,
And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling:
It
lives in the mountain where moss and the sedges
Touch
with their beauty the banks and the ledges.
Through
breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers
Struggles
the light that is love to the flowers;
And,
softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,
The
notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing.
BELL-BIRDS, (first verse) by Henry Kendall
PART
ONE Chapter
One
The newborn foal contentedly suckled its mother.
Peering into the stall, fourteen-year-old Lizzy Foster should have
been bursting with happiness. Her
two great passions in life were horses and singing.
Three weeks ago she had been given the lead role in the end-of-year
musical at her Catholic boarding school in Toowoomba, and now this perfect
little creature had been born when she was home for the weekend on
Kinmalley, the family wheat and sheep property in Queensland’s Darling
Downs. Yet on this crisp
early September morning the one thought Lizzy kept going over and over was
that there was no way she could tell her father about her singing role.
The
sweet scent of fresh hay filled the big barn.
Beside her, saddled and groomed, Woeful, Lizzy’s twelve year old
mare waited patiently, nibbling occasionally at her shoulder and blowing
down the back of her T-shirt. In
the next stall Lizzy could hear her best friend, Marcia Pearce who was
staying for the weekend, humming the opening chorus of Okalahoma!
as she clattered about saddling up Misty.
Marcia’s parents owned Four Pines an hour or so’s drive away,
where they bred fat lambs for
meat.
Mucking
out the stables and exercising the horses were activities Lizzy eagerly
looked forward to, but today her dark eyes were clouded with worry.
Sighing deeply, one hand fiddling with the silver medallion around
her neck, a present from her father on her 6th birthday, she turned and
laid her cheek against Woeful’s warm brown coat, trying to figure a way
out of the mess she had got herself into.
Woeful it was. She should have never have accepted the role. Kidding herself
she could win her father over by waiting until the dress rehearsal had
been madness. Trouble was, it wasn’t just that Lizzy had accepted the
part. Dan Foster believed his
daughter was singing in a church service.
It had been hard enough to get him to agree to her singing at all. If he found out that she had deceived him he was just as
likely, with his Irish temper, to pull her out of school altogether.
She tried to ignore the sickening sensation in her stomach knowing
she had to tell him she was taking part in a musical with all the colour,
dancing and noise that she knew he detested.
Yet once he had loved them. How
could she make him understand that when the female lead singer had dropped
out and darling Sister Angelica had offered her the part with so much
excitement and enthusiasm, she just hadn’t been able to say no?
Worse, for the last three weekends, she had been staying with
Marcia to hide her activities, eking out the delicious stolen time, losing
herself in the music while she worked out how to win her father over.
Last
night the timing had been perfect. Relaxing
on the wide veranda before dinner with ‘the boys’, Lizzy’s
twenty-two year old cousin, Bob, and Ken the 38 year old rodeo rider and
rouseabout, who had given her Woeful, Dan Foster had been in one of the
happiest moods Lizzy had seen for ages.
Stretched out beside him lay his two hardworking kelpies, Ned and
six month old Gyp. Taking a long pull from his bottle of beer, he had scratched
Ned’s belly and announced the finally the bumper crop was almost all in.
By the following day they’d be finished harvesting, the wheat
safely stored in the silos in town, easily beating the predicted storms.
It had been the start of a great evening and with Marcia there to back her
up Lizzy had really believed she stood a chance.
Then the foal decided to arrive and Lizzy’s chance had vanished.
Nature
had been generous to Lizzy Foster. Burnished
lights gleamed in her freshly washed jet black hair.
Luscious dark lashes fringed her large almond shaped eyes, above
high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Most
people still thought of her as a tomboy, yet behind her larrikin behaviour
was emerging a sensuous young woman.
While still shedding her puppy fat, there was a voluptuousness
about Lizzy that hinted of pleasures to come.
Her smooth skin tanned almost black, added to her beauty and her
naturally rhythmic movements and musical aptitude, both inherited from her
Polynesian grandmother, gave her an air of mystery.
A mixture of fire and ice, Lizzy knew the only way out of her
present trouble was to smother the passion that burned within her, accept
the outcome and wait. She had tasted life on the stage. That was a start.
Lizzy
had been eight when her mother had walked out on them.
She remembered it was a Wednesday.
She vaguely remembered the darkly handsome man with the deep
baritone voice, who had come to town with a travelling show, and who made
her father angry. Before the man, Dad used to love listening to Lizzy and her
mother sing.
It
was her mother who had given Lizzy her love of the stage, and who had
filled her head with dreams of great shows in far off places, dreams that
had never left her. She had
told Lizzy how her grandmother had been a Polynesian princess who had run
away to sing and how music was in thier blood.
In her soprano voice she had taught Lizzy all the songs she knew -
songs from the old vaudeville shows, love songs, Polynesian folk songs -
and they would sing and dance together, playing to imaginary
audiences, her mother thumping out the beat on the old upright piano, or
playing the scratched records on the old gramophone.
Twirling around in her mother’s battered fancy hats and boa
feathers, the two would run around the sofa, laughing and kicking up their
legs. Once she took Lizzy to
the natural amphitheatre on a neighbour’s property in the hills not far
from Kinmalley and they had sung together, their voices carrying across
the bush. It was a memory Lizzy cherished. Mostly her father just watched
and clapped, but sometimes he’d join in singing in his tuneless drone,
which made them laugh all the more. A
big, loving man Dan Foster would then clasp his precious women to him and
they would kiss and hug like the tight knit family Lizzy believed them to
be. Then suddenly her mother
was gone and there was just her and dad and a sadness that never left them
but was never spoken about and dad had forbidden her to sing ever again.
When
Lizzy had started at Saint Cecilia’s Convent School, Dan had been forced
to capitulate. Sister Angelica had seen to that explaining patiently that as
a condition of entry all the girls sang in the school choir.
Afterwards on the way home he had said ‘never let me catch you
doing any of that ‘theatre stuff’.’
God! how she hated those words.
They were a jail sentence when song threatened to burst out of her
at every turn. Sometimes she
had felt she would suffocate at home for lack of singing.
While
the loving easygoing man she remembered as a young child had vanished, she
never questioned her father’s churlishness and bad temper because she
loved him dearly and she knew he loved her too.
Yet she longed for him to understand her passionate need to sing,
that singing to her was like breathing and not to sing was not to breathe.
Woeful, tired of standing still tossed her head jerking Lizzy back
to the present.
‘You
understand, don’t you, you beautiful creature.’ she murmured. Tucking
her thick black hair back off her face, Lizzy jammed her wide akubra on
her head, mounted Woeful and led her into the sunshine
‘OK
Marcie, let’s get up to these bores and see what needs doing, before the
storm comes through’ called Lizzy, smothering a yawn.
No one had got much sleep the night before with the excitement of
the new foal and Lizzy had been up again before dawn to prepare breakfast
before Dan and the boys headed off to finish harvesting.
Her father had asked her to check two of the bores that provided
water for the two thousand head of sheep.
It would take most of the morning but if they got a move on Lizzy
reckoned they should still have time to have the picnic they had planned
and beat the storm before Marcia’s brother arrived to take her home
‘What
storm?’ scoffed Marcia trotting out on Misty, glancing around.
Only a few harmless white fluffy clouds forming to the far west
marred the perfect blue, yet both girls knew how fast storms could build
across the Downs and the havoc they could wreak. ‘Right, I’m ready,
what’s the wait?’ she said, comically wriggling her bottom into the
saddle
‘Dad
reckons the storm they’ve been promising all week’ll hit today.’
explained Lizzy, her earlier gloom starting to lift.
A good head shorter, Marcia was the antithesis of Lizzy.
Slim, blue eyed, her cropped mouse-brown hair tinged with the
remains of a bright red tint, it was difficult to be dismal around Marcia. Turning Woeful’s head sLizzy urged the mare forwards.
Then, saddlebags bulging, the two girls set off at a smart pace
across the paddock.
Reaching
the stubble paddock they nudged the horses into a canter and sped along
the dirt track at the edge of the sun drenched paddocks, the crisp breeze
bringing a rosy flush to their cheeks.
Small bundles of tumble weed ran along beside them, a flock of long
beaked ibises soared from nowhere circling in the rising wind currents,
turning and gliding against the cobalt sky.
Feeling the rhythm of Woeful’s powerful body under her, catching
the familiar country smells, and with the vast undulating, countryside
stretching before her, Lizzy’s usual exhilaration returned. Out here she
could sing to her heart’s content, with only the birds, the kangaroos
and the wind to hear her and no one to stop her or tell her to stop
dreaming. Here the world
seemed to go on for ever. Here
everything was possible, Out
here she really believed dreams could come true.
‘Beat you to the gate.’
she shouted to Marcia, digging her heels into Woeful’s flanks,
her eyes full of fire.
.
©
Simon
&Schuster Australia
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