Cattle Rancher, Secret Son Read online

  MARGARET WAY

  Cattle Rancher, Secret Son

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  FATE, Destiny, Chance: call it what you will, it has a hand in everything.

  Gina Romano, a young woman of twenty-four, whose classical bone structure, golden skin, lustrous dark eyes and hair richly proclaimed her Italian heritage, was walking to her friend Tanya’s front gate. It had been a lovely relaxing afternoon with Tanya and her beautiful new baby, Lily-Anne.

  Tanya, cradling tiny Lily-Anne, naturally the most beautiful baby in the world, was standing at the front door, waving Gina off: Gina’s hand was on the wrought-iron gate making sure it was closed securely after her, when she felt a tingle like an icy finger on her nape. It alerted her, bringing on a familiar feeling of alarm. Every time she felt that icy finger, and she had felt it many times in her life, she took it as a signal something was about to happen.

  She pulled away from the gate, moving swiftly out onto the pavement, hands shaking, legs shaking, head humming as if it were filled with high tension wires. She was no clairvoyant but she had come to accept she had an extra sense most people either didn’t have or didn’t get to develop. It was a gift, simultaneously a curse; an inheritance handed down through the maternal line of her family as other families claimed the second sight.

  The noise came first. One minute the leafy suburban street was drowsing under a turquoise sky, the next, a range of things happened. An early model car with its engine roaring and trailing grey-black clouds of exhaust fumes turned into the street without slowing at the corner. Gina watched the driver correct the skid, only to gun the engine even though the left front wheel was wobbling. Gina estimated he was doing a good fifteen to twenty kilometres over the fifty kilometre speed limit.

  From the property directly opposite, the real estate agent overseeing the forthcoming auction, camera in hand, strode out onto the pavement on the way to his car. He stopped, took in the situation and cried out. Simultaneously a flame-haired cherub called Cameron from the house next door to Tanya’s came bounding down his unfenced driveway and ran pell-mell onto the street without so much as a glance in either direction. He was totally oblivious to danger, his mind was set solely on retrieving his blue beach ball, which was fast bouncing away from him into the opposite gutter.

  The estate agent, a man of sixty, to his everlasting horror was assailed by such a terrible feeling of helplessness he simply froze, but Gina, who didn’t even hear Tanya yelling frantically so focused was she on the child, reacted like an Olympic sprinter coming off the blocks. Adrenaline poured into her body, causing a surge of power. She flew after the little boy, at one point her long legs fully extended front and back as she rose in an extravagant leap. Or so it appeared to the neighbours alerted by Tanya’s screaming and the awful din set up by the smoking bomb. As one of them later confided to the television reporter, “It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. The young lady was moving so impossibly fast she was all but airborne. Ought to make the headlines!”

  So this then was much more than a simple good deed. It was seen to be on the heroic scale. But Gina herself felt no sense of valour. She did what she thought anyone would have done in the circumstances. A child’s life was on the line. What option did she have but to attempt to save it? Her very humanity demanded she act and act fast.

  Heart almost bursting through her rib cage, she scooped up the child in the bare nick of time, her body sparkly all over as though wired, and then flew on to the safety of the grassy verge thinking there was no way she could avoid taking an awful fall or being pulverized by Tanya’s formidable brick and wrought-iron fence. She had a vision of herself lying on the grass, moaning because of broken bones, maybe even covered in blood. But for now, her main thought was how to cushion the child whose vulnerable little head was buried against her breast.

  Please, God…please, God! Every atom in her body braced in case He didn’t hear her.

  She needn’t have worried. It had been decided all would be well. What could so easily have been a tragedy—glittering metal pulverising two tender bodies—turned into a feel-good human-interest story. A workman built like a double-door refrigerator but as light on his feet as a ballet dancer in his prime appeared out of nowhere to gather Gina and child in like it was a set piece of choreography. Little Cameron, now the drama was over, broke into frightened howls of “Mum-eee! Mum-eee! Mum-eee!” the ees mounting ever higher.

  A distraught young woman, with orange locks that refused to lie down, was running to him, calling repeatedly, “My darling, my darling, my baby!” Gina, her own body trembling in aftershock handed Cameron over to his mother to an outpouring of thanks. Cameron, for some reason common to children, stopped his heart-wrenching wailing and began to laugh merrily. He reached into the pocket of his little blue shorts to hand Gina a couple of jelly beans he hadn’t touched, presumably as a reward.

  Incredibly it was all over in a matter of seconds, only now there was a small crowd surrounding them who burst into spontaneous applause as though they had witnessed a great piece of stunt work. The battered car, scruffy young man at the wheel, didn’t stop or even slow though he did flash a nonchalant hand out of the open window, obviously taking the philosophical view “all’s well that ends well.”

  Angry fists were raised in his direction, cries of condemnation. A silver-haired old lady added a few words one would have thought she wouldn’t even know, much less use, but he accelerated away, apparently with a clear conscience, mobile now glued to his ear. He would later be picked up by the police who were delighted to have his licence number handed to them on a plate. There was also the matter of a stack of parking fines he had completely ignored.

  Praise shifted to the real estate agent. Belatedly, he had done something right. Momentarily transfixed by horror he might have been, but he had immediately swung into action on witnessing Gina’s spectacular transformation into “Wonder Woman you’d have to call her! Used to love that show!” He was ready for a laugh now. Hadn’t he snapped out of his sick panic to get “the whole blessed thing” on film?

  Thus it was, Gina Romano found herself an unwilling heroine and would remain so for some time. Cameron’s immensely grateful parents later went on television to say they would never forget what Ms Romano had done. In fact, viewers got the decided impression Gina was now part of the family. Tanya took the welcome opportunity to show off her beautiful baby to the larger world, added her own little bit. “Gina’s so brave! Why only a few months back she saved Cameron from a big black dog.”

  “Let’s hope there won’t be a third time for wee Cameron!” the woman reporter joshed, smiling brilliantly into the camera.

  Gina, the heroine of all this, prayed inwardly: Don’t let anyone recognise me.

  But recognised she was. By her colleagues and friends, just about everyone who knew her at her local shopping centre, the inhabitants of the small North Queensland sugar town a thousand miles away where she had been born and raised, and most crucially by the last person on earth she wanted to see her captured image; the man she had fallen hopelessly, madly, irrevocably in love with four years before. The man Fate had denied her. The man she had so carefully hidden herself away from. Not even her closest friends even suspected she knew him. Or had known him.

  Intimately.

  Gina never discussed her former life, her secrets and her haunted past. She had a good life now fo
r which she was very grateful. It had all the trappings of normality. She had an attractive apartment in a safe area with importantly a lovely little park nearby with a kiddies’ play area. She had a well-paid job with a stockbroking firm who valued her services. She had men friends who admired and desired her. At least two of them definitely had marriage on their minds if mentioning it meant anything. Men, generally speaking, had to be helped along in these matters.

  She couldn’t commit. And she knew why. Hardly a day went by that she didn’t think of the man who had taken her: body, mind and soul. Trying to forget him hadn’t just been one long struggle: It was a battle she had come to accept she was doomed to lose.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Coronation Hill Station

  The Northern Territory

  FROM the crest of Crown Ridge, tumbled with smooth, near perfectly round boulders like a giant’s marbles, Cal sat his magnificent silver-grey stallion, watching a section of the lowing herd being driven towards the holding yards at Yering Springs. From this incomparable vantage point on top of the ancient sandstone escarpment, the whole of Jabiru Valley was revealed to him. Silver billabongs lined by willowy melaleucas and groves of pandanus wound away to the left and right, the sun flashing off surfaces as smooth as glass. He could see the flocks of magpie geese and whistling ducks congregated around the banks and exploding from the reed beds. Wildlife was abundant in the Valley: native mammals, reptiles, trillions of insects and above all, the birds. The gloriously coloured parrots, the cockatoos, galahs, rosellas and lorikeets, countless other species, the beautiful wat er birds and, at the top of the chain, the reigning jabiru. It was the great numbers of jabirus, the country’s only stork, fishing the billabongs and lagoons that had given the Valley its name.

  The Territory was still a wild paradise with a mystical feel about it that he firmly believed derived from the aboriginal culture. The Dreaming. The spirit ancestors had fashioned this ancient land, creating everything in it. Where he now sat on his horse had provided natural art galleries in its numerous caves and rock shelters. Many of the walls were covered in ancient rock paintings, art treasures fiercely protected by the indigenous people and generations of McKendricks who had taken over the land.

  In whatever direction he looked, the landscape was potent with beauty. He supposed he would have made a good pagan with his nature worship. Certainly he was very much in touch with the natural world. He even knew, like the aboriginals on the station, the places where great energy resided, certain sandstone monuments, special caves, rock pools and particular trees. The lily-covered lagoons on Coronation Hill were filled with magnificent waterlilies of many colours: pink, red, white, yellow, cream. His favourite was the sacred Blue Lotus. Underneath those gorgeous carpets it had to be mentioned, glided the odd man-eating croc or two. They had learned to take crocs in their stride. Crocodiles were a fact of life in the Territory. Don’t bother them. They won’t bother you.

  God it was hot! He could feel trickles of sweat run down his nape and onto his back. He lifted a hand to angle his wide brimmed Akubra lower on his head, thinking his hair was getting much too long. It was curling up at the back like a girl’s. He would have to get it cut when he found time. The mob had been on the move since the relative cool of dawn but now the heat was intense. The world of sky above him was stunningly clear of clouds, an infinity of burning blue. He loved his home with a passion. He loved the colours of the land. They weren’t the furnace-reds of the Centre’s deserts but cool blues and silvers, the deeper cobalts and amethysts. Instead of the rolling red sand dunes of the central part of the Territory, in the tropical north, the entire landscape was covered in every conceivable shade of lustrous green.

  And flowers! Extraordinary flowers abounded in the Valley. The grevilleas, the banksias, the hakeas, the native hibiscus and the gardenias everyone knew, but there were countless other species unique to the far-away regions that had never been named. No one had ever had the time to get around to it. Australia was a dry, dry continent but oddly produced the most marvellous wildflowers that were becoming world renowned. Everywhere he looked exquisite flowers unfurled themselves on trees and shrubs, others rode the waving tops of the savannah grasses that could grow after the Wet a good four feet over his head and he was six feet two.

  It was here in the mid-l860s, that his ancestor, the Scot, Alexander Campbell-McKendrick swore an oath to found his own dynasty in the savage wilderness of the Australian Outback. It was quite an ambition and a far, far, cry from his own ancestral home in the Borders region of Scotland. But as it stood, a second son, denied inheritance of the family estates by the existence of an elder brother, Alexander McKendrick, an adventurer and a visionary at heart, found an excellent option in travelling halfway across the world to seek his own fortune in the Great South Land, where handsome, well-educated young Scotsmen from distinguished families were thin on the ground. McKendrick had been very favourably received, immediately gaining the patronage of the Governor of the then self-governing colony of New South Wales.

  The great quest had begun.

  It had started in the colony of New South Wales, but was to finish far away in the Northern Territory, the wildest of wild frontiers, where a man could preside over a cattle run bigger than many a European country. This was the mysterious Top End of the great continent, deeply hostile country, peopled with a nation collectively called the Kakadu.

  McKendrick had been undaunted. It was from this very escarpment he had named on the spot Crown Ridge because of its curious resemblance to an ancient crown. He had looked out over a limitless lushly grassed valley and he had recorded as “knowing in his heart” this was the place where the Australian dynasty of the Campbell-McKendrick family would put down roots. Land was the meaning of life. The land endured when mighty monuments and buildings collapsed and dissolved into dust.

  So that was my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Cal thought with the familiar thrill of pride. Some guy! And there is my inheritance spread out before me. The McKendricks—they had abandoned their double barrel name by the turn of the twentieth century—were among the great pioneers of the Interior.

  By late afternoon he was back at the homestead, dog-tired, bones aching after a long, hard day in the saddle. It was truly amazing the amount of punishment a young man’s body could take. His father, Ewan, so recently a dynamo had slowed down considerably this past year. Ewan McKendrick was a legendary cattleman like the McKendricks before him. There had only been one black sheep in the family, the third heir, Duncan, the supposed quiet one, whose exploits when he came to power got him killed by an unerring aboriginal spear, the terrible consequence of ill-treating the black people on the station. It was a crime no McKendrick had committed before him and none ever did again.

  Cal found his mother and father and his widower uncle Edward, his father’s brother, in the library enjoying a gin and tonic and talking horses, a never-ending topic of conversation in the family. Their faces lit up at his arrival as if he had just returned from an arduous trek to the South Pole.

  “Ah, there you are, darling,” cried his mother, Jocelyn, extending an arm.

  He went to her and put his hands lightly on her thin shoulders. A beautiful woman was his mother. She had made a great wife to his father, a fine mistress of Coronation Hill but she had never been a particularly good mother. For one thing she was absurdly wrapped up in him when sadly, she had spent little time or attention on her daughter, his younger sister, Meredith.

  “Settle this for me, will you, son?” His father immediately drew him into an argument he and Ed were having about blood lines. The McKendricks had a passion for horses. Coronation Hill, named at the time of settlement in honour of the British queen, Victoria, was very serious about its breeding and training programme, not just for their own prized stockhorses, horses capable of dominating not only rodeos, gymkhanas and cross country events, but the racehorses on the bush circuit. Bush race meets were enormously popular, drawing people from all over the far-f
lung Outback.

  Ewan clapped gleefully as Cal confirmed what he had been maintaining was correct. “Sorry, Uncle Ed.” Cal slanted his gentle uncle a smile. “You were probably thinking of ‘Highlander.’ He was a son of ‘Charlie’s Pride.’”

  “Of course.” Edward nodded his head several times. Edward had never been known to best his elder brother. Though the family resemblance between the brothers was strong, Edward had always been outshone by Ewan in all departments, except Cal thought, in sensitivity and the wonderful ability to communicate with children and people far less fortunate than the grand McKendricks.

  “Thanks for arriving just in time,” his father crowed, giving his loud hearty laugh and stabbing a triumphant finger at his brother. “Fancy a cold beer, son? I know G&T’s aren’t your tipple.”

  “I’ll go and get cleaned up first, Dad,” Cal replied, quietly dismayed at how much pleasure his father took in putting his brother down.

  “Did you sack young Fletcher?” Ewan grunted, shooting his son a startling, blue glance.

  Cal shook his head, not prepared to alter his decision. “I’ve decided to give him another chance. He’s young. He’s learning. He takes the pain.”

  “Very well,” was all his father said with a rough shake of his handsome head, when once he would have barked “You’re not running Coronation yet, son.”

  Except these days he was, or close enough. It was, after all, his heritage. Irresistibly, Cal’s gaze went to the series of tall arched stained-glass windows that dominated the library. The sinking sun was starting to stream through the glass, turning the interior of the huge room into a dazzling kaleidoscope of colour; ruby, emerald, sapphire, gold. Ceiling-high mahogany bookcases in colonnaded bays were built into the walls on three sides of the library housing a very valuable collection of books of all kinds: literature, world history, ancient and modern, mythology, science, valuable early maps, family documents, colonial history. It was a splendid collection that desperately needed cataloguing and maybe even re-housing. When his time came he would make it his business to hire someone well qualified to carry out this long-needed important work. Sadly neither his grandparents nor his father and mother had felt impelled to have the arduous task begun. Uncle Edward knew better than to interfere. Since he had tragically lost his wife to breast cancer ten years before, Ed had lived with the family.