Read Online Summer at Mount Hope by Rosalie Ham - Free Book Online

shot straight up in the air. ‘Hand me my corset.’
    Beside her, Lilith rolled over and raised her tousled head. ‘I’ll need to borrow your blouse, Phoeba.’
    â€˜You don’t need my blouse, Lilith. Just bat your lashes.’ And she headed in to her own room. ‘Upsy-daisy.’
    â€˜You know I have not been blessed with a morning temperament,’ said Aunt Margaret, wriggling deeper into the mattress.
    â€˜If you stopped anointing yourself with sherry you’d be blessed enough to paint sunrises. Now come Aunt, the squattocracy is visiting – the one Lilith’s got her eye on. We need to be at our best if we want to unload her.’ If she could just make that happen, thought Phoeba, the pressure would be off and life would be perfect.
    Lilith ran into the room, grabbed Phoeba’s new blouse from the wardrobe and ran out calling, ‘The wands, Phoeba, put them on!’
    Margaret pushed back the bed sheet. ‘I didn’t know Lilith could run.’
    Robert milked the goat, left the bucket in the cool under the tank-stand, chopped some wood, liberated the chooks and then sat on the veranda with his newspaper and looking glass while the house rumbled with thrupping skirts, yelled instructions – ‘Phoeba. We cannot serve rabbit!’ – and doors snapping open and slamming.
    He watched a group of swaggies jump down from the livestock trucks on the nine o’clocker and straggle up the lane towards him, and he nodded to the dusty men as they passed though his yard humping their swags. Shearers. They didn’t ask for bread or tea and they were neater than itinerant workers, but not as neat as the fallen city men, the depression victims, the dispossessed bankers and factory workers, the shopkeepers and merchants. At least they would eat a few rabbits.
    Maude called, ready for her final armouring, and Robert took himself inside to the bedroom where she waited, her large, cotton bottom hovering in front of the mirror and her whalebone corset in place. He took the laces, Maude placed her forearm under her very long, round breasts, lifted them and positioned a curved horsehair bustpad underneath. ‘Right,’ she inhaled. Robert pulled, pulled again and then tied the laces firmly. His wife turned to him, her high cleavage forced up from the satin and bone contraption like pink porridge.
    â€˜You must ask Marius Overton to stay for lunch,’ she said.
    â€˜Must I? You only want to boast to old pigwidgeon Pearson.’ But he held her long, chocolate brown serge frock patiently while Maude dived under the hem and manoeuvred it down over her now firm form.
    â€˜The ploughing match is on Saturday and the dance is coming up,’ she said, forcing her arms into the dress’s narrow forearms. ‘We don’t want wallflowers.’
    â€˜Certainly not,’ said Robert, thinking of the available men in the district – dozens of farmers, at least sixty shearers and rouseabouts at Overton, not to mention stockmen and yardmen, swaggies and sundowners, boundary riders and city guests.
    Maude dragged the last yards of gathered cloth down over her hips and twisted them about until they sat neatly where her waist had once been. She turned again and Robert adjusted his eyeglasses to button her frock at the back. But his fingers were too coarse to manage the small, cloth-covered buttons.
    â€˜Get Phoeba to do this,’ he said at last. ‘I’m too old.’
    She bustled out, a rustling cloud of brown ruches and tucks, calling back to him, ‘and clear out the dining room.’
    Phoeba pulled her sister’s corset strings. Lilith’s face went red and the veins in her neck stood out. She leaned her torso sideways, reaching over her hip to her knee.
    â€˜One more,’ she gasped.
    â€˜Lilith, you’ll faint into your salad.’
    â€˜One more!’
    The one thing Phoeba knew was that the day