Page 160 of The Pearl Sister
* * *
Kitty sipped her tea as the ship sailed her and her dark thoughts further from England. She had had almost twenty years to ponder the mystery of how Camira and her daughter had disappeared from Broome within a few months of each other. And plenty of time to berate herself for never confronting the situation. She’d ignored Charlie’s obvious devastation when Alkina had disappeared the night before his twenty-first birthday and instinct told her the two events were connected. To this day, she missed Camira, who had stood by her side and kept secrets that were beyond keeping.
Kitty took a bite of a sandwich that tasted as bland and as empty as her life had been since everyone she loved had left her. Yet – she cautioned herself against falling into self-pity – there had been one bright light that had arrived out of the blue four long years after Charlie’s death.
In the immediate aftermath, she had once more by default become the caretaker of the Mercer empire. Beside herself with grief, she had been unable to rouse herself to visit the opal mines, drive up to the vineyards or glance at the figures from the cattle station. Nor had she read the company bank statements that piled up unopened on her desk. She had – as they termed it in Victorian novels – gone into a decline and become a virtual recluse, the guilt of all she had done and not done beating down on her day and night.
During those years of darkness, she’d longed for death but had been too cowardly to approach it.
Then, one evening in 1946, her maid had knocked on her bedroom door.
‘Mrs Mercer, there’s a young man downstairs who says it’s urgent he speaks to you.’
‘Please, you know I do not receive visitors. Send him away.’
‘I have tried to, ma’am, but he refuses to go. He says he will sit outside the gate until you receive him. Do I call the police?’
‘What is his name?’
‘He’s a Mister Ralph Mackenzie. He claims he’s your brother.’
Kitty had cast her mind back across the years to think who this man might be. A man with the same name as her father . . .
And then it had come to her.
* * *
Kitty rose from the elegant silk-covered sofa and walked to one of the large picture windows, the ship now gliding gently out on the open sea. Ralph Mackenzie had arrived in her life at just the right moment, a reminder of at least onegooddeed she’d accomplished.
She remembered descending the sweeping staircase, stopping halfway down to view a tall man, clutching his hat anxiously. He’d raised his head as he’d heard her footsteps, and in the shadowy gloom of dusk, Kitty had wondered if she was seeing a replica of her father in his younger days. This young man bore the same charismatic blue eyes, strong jaw and thick auburn hair.
‘Mr Mackenzie. Please come through.’
In the drawing room, he’d sat nervously on the edge of the sofa as the maid had poured their tea.
Ralph had cleared his throat. ‘Ma told me about you. She always said how kind you’d been to her when she was . . . encumbered with me. When I told her I was coming to seek out a new life here in Australia, she gave me your address. She’d kept it for all these years, you see. I never thought that you would still be here, but . . . you are.’
Then he’d taken out the silver cross Kitty had handed all those years ago to Annie. She had stared at it, remembering her white-hot anger at her father’s duplicity.
They’d talked then, and Ralph had told her how he’d been a junior accountant at a shipyard in Leith. Then she’d invited him to stay for dinner as he recounted how difficult things had become since the war had ended. She’d heard how hard his wife had taken it when he’d had to tell her he’d been laid off due to the order books being empty.
‘It was Ruth, my wife, who encouraged me to come over here and see for myself what Australia could offer a man like me.’
Kitty had asked a question she had been holding back since the beginning of the evening.
‘Did you ever speak to my . . .ourfather?’
‘I didn’t know hewasmy father until Ma, God bless her soul, died. I’d seen the Reverend McBride when Ma took me to church, where we’d sit in the back pew. Now I understand why she was always so very angry after the service. She’d been using me to remind him of the sin he’d committed.’ He’d glanced up apologetically at Kitty, but she had only nodded grimly.
‘When I was thirteen,’ he’d continued, ‘I was sent on a scholarship to Fettes College. It was the best chance I got to improve my circumstances and make a life for myself. I didn’t know until much later, that he – my father – had arranged it for me. Despite everything, I’m grateful to him for that.’
By the end of the evening, she had offered him a job as accountant to the Mercer companies. Six months later, his wife, Ruth, had sailed over to join him.
* * *
Kitty moved away from the view of the grey waves beyond the private deck area outside the picture window, pondering on the fact that Ralph’s arrival in Adelaide had undoubtedly saved her. After the unbearable loss of Charlie, Kitty had found herself stirred to focus her energy on this young man – her half-brother and over eighteen years her junior – who had appeared so unexpectedly in her life.
And over the past few years, Ralph had proved himself bright, eager to learn and had subsequently become her right-hand man. Even though the pearling business in Broome had never recovered after the war, just as Charlie had foreseen, the profits of the opal mine and the vineyard were growing by the day. Between the two of them – brother and sister – the Mercer finances were slowly being restored again. The only sadness was that Ruth, after years of trying, had recently been told she would never have children. Ralph had written to Kitty in Scotland to tell her that they had bought a puppy, which was currently soaking up Ruth’s thwarted maternal urges.
