The Touch by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

well,” she said stiffly, offended, “though I have lacked history books. I did learn to write, but I haven’t been able to practice—Father kept no paper.”
    “I’ll buy you a copy-book, a book of example letters that you can use until your thoughts go down on paper easily—and reams of the best paper. Pens, inks—paints and sketchbooks if you want them. Most ladies seem to dabble in watercolors.”
    “I have not been brought up as a lady,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster.
    His eyes were dancing again. “Do you embroider?”
    “I sew, but I do not embroider.”
    And how, she wondered later in the morning, did he manage to deflect the conversation from himself so neatly?
     
     
    “I THINK I may be able to end in liking my husband,” she confided to Mrs. Augusta Halliday toward the end of her second week in Sydney, “but I very much doubt that I will ever love him.”
    “It’s early days yet,” said Mrs. Halliday comfortably, her shrewd eyes resting on Elizabeth’s face. There were big changes in it: gone was the child. The masses of dark hair were piled up fashionably, her afternoon dress of rust-red silk had the obligatory bustle, her gloves were finest kid, her hat a dream. Whoever had wrought the image had been wise enough to leave the face alone; here was one young woman who needed no cosmetic aids, and Sydney’s sun didn’t seem to have the power to give her quite extraordinary white skin a glaze of pink or beige. She wore magnificent pearls around her neck and pearl drops in her ears, and when she drew the glove off her left hand Mrs. Halliday’s eyes widened.
    “Ye gods!” she exclaimed.
    “Oh, this wretched diamond,” said Elizabeth with a sigh. “I really detest it. Do you know that I have to have my gloves specially made to go over it? And Alexander insisted that the same finger on the right-hand glove be similarly made, so I very much fear that he intends to give me some other huge stone.”
    “You must be a saint,” said Mrs. Halliday dryly. “I don’t know of any other woman who wouldn’t be swooning over a gem half as splendid as your diamond.”
    “I love my pearls, Mrs. Halliday.”
    “So I should think! Queen Victoria’s aren’t any better.”
    But after Elizabeth had departed in the high-sprung chaise drawn by four matched horses, Augusta Halliday succumbed to a little weep. Poor girl! A fish out of water. Loaded down with every luxury, thrust into a world of wealth and prominence, when by nature she was neither avaricious nor ambitious. Had she remained in her Scottish ken she would no doubt have continued to look after her father, then turned into a maiden aunt. And yet been comfortable with her lot, if not idyllically happy. Well, at least she thought she could like Alexander Kinross, and that was something. Privately Mrs. Halliday agreed with Elizabeth; she couldn’t see Elizabeth coming to love her husband either. The distance between them was too vast, their characters too much at odds. Hard to believe that they were first cousins.
    Of course by the time that Elizabeth came to visit in her chaise-and-four, Mrs. Halliday had found out a great deal about Alexander Kinross. Quite the richest man in the colony, for unlike most who found paydirt on the goldfields, he had hung on to every grain he dredged from the alluvium, and then sniffed out the reef. He had the Government in one pocket and the Judiciary in the other, so while some men might suffer shockingly from claim-jumpers, Alexander Kinross was able to deal with them and other nuisances summarily. But though he went into society if he was in Sydney, he wasn’t a society man. Those worth knowing he tended to beard in their offices, rather than wine and dine them; sometimes he accepted an invitation to Government House or to Clovelly at Watson’s Bay, but never to a ball or soirée held just for enjoyment. Therefore the general consensus was that he cared about power, not about people’s good