Bittersweet by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

could behave like that over Edda, about whom she didn’t care, what would she be like when Kitty’s turn came?
    Friendship was all it could be, of course. Virginity was highly prized, and the Rector’s daughters brought up to believe that a decent man expected his wife to be a virgin on her wedding night; pregnancy out of wedlock was the worst sin imaginable.
    There were reasons, of course, and the Rector, as religious instructor to his daughters, made sure they understood that this was not a caprice, but a logical law. “A man has only one proof that he is the father of his wife’s children,” said the Reverend Latimer in his most serious voice to his fifteen-year-old girls, “and that is his wife’s virginity on her wedding day, coupled to her fidelity during the marriage. Why should a man give foodand shelter to children who are not his? Both Old and New Testaments condemn unchastity and infidelity.”
    From time to time Thomas Latimer repeated this sermon, though without understanding that his greatest help in assuring the innocence of his girls was the fact that none of them was tempted to throw her cap over the windmill, including Edda.
    For all his attractions, Jack Thurlow didn’t tug at Edda’s heart. Nor had any other man, for that matter. Knowing herself capable of fascinating men, Edda waited for the tug at her heart that never came. Because it is human nature to blame the self, she ended in deciding that she lacked profound emotions. I am a cold person, she said to herself; I can’t feel as others feel. Not one of the boys and men who have kissed me since the C.L.C. ball in 1921 has provoked a deep response. A bit of a pash-up in a dark corner that I inevitably remember as ending in my slapping sweaty male hands away from my breasts — what on earth gets them so excited ?
    Despite such fancies, she continued to encounter Jack Thurlow on the bridle path, grateful because he never tried to embrace her or kiss her. Oh, there was a definite physical attraction between them, but clearly he disliked its ruling him as much as she disliked its ruling her.
    Then in January of 1926, she kissed him.
    The moment he saw her he kicked the grey gelding to a hasty meeting, slid off its back, and yanked her from Fatima with trembling hands.
    He was shaking and openly weeping, which didn’t stop his lifting her off the ground and twirling her in a crazy, stepless dance — a kind of fool’s caper.
    “A new Burdum heir has crawled out of the woodwork!” he said, putting her down. “Edda, I’m let off old Tom’s chain! At ten this morning I became the legal owner of Corundoobar free and clear, and signed a paper renouncing any other claims on old Tom’s estate. Free, Edda! I’m free!”
    She couldn’t help it; she kissed him on the lips, a warm and loving message of congratulations that went on for long enough to hover perilously on the brink of becoming something more serious, more intense. Then he broke away, face wet with tears, and took her hands in one of his.
    “I am so happy for you,” she said huskily, smiling.
    “Edda, it’s my dream!” He groped for his handkerchief to mop his eyes. “ Corundoobar is a prime property of just the right size, and there’s not a ruby within cooee of it anywhere, so money and power will pass me by.” Grinning, he ruffled her bobbed hair, something she hated. “With you going nursing in three months and our rides at least curtailed, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I even thought of going out west to merino country. Now this!”
    “We can still ride on my days off,” she said seriously.
    “I know, and it’s a factor.”
    Old Tom Burdum, apparently, had finally found a suitable heir, and the entire district naturally expected the new heir to appear off the Sydney or Melbourne train. But he never did, and old Tom refused to say why.
    When news of the heir did come, it consisted of miserable little snippets devoid of hard facts, and never sufficient to sate