Read Online The Touch by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page A

different accents without realizing that her own Scots accent was so thick that some of her auditors didn’t understand what she said. Jade spoke like a colonial—a trace of East London Cockney intermixed with North of England, Irish, and something more distinctively local than any of those.
    “My father came from China twenty-three years ago and took up with my mother, who was Irish. I was born on the Ballarat goldfields, Marm. We’ve been following the gold ever since, but once Papa fell in with Miss Ruby, our wandering days were over. My mother ran away with a Victorian trooper when Peony was born. Papa says that blood calls to blood. I think she was tired of having girl children. There are seven of us.”
    Elizabeth tried to find something comforting to say. “I won’t be a hard mistress, Jade, I promise.”
    “Oh, be as hard as you like, Miss Lizzy,” said Jade cheerily. “I was Miss Ruby’s maid, and no one’s as hard as her.”
    So the Ruby person was a hard woman. “Who’s her maid now?”
    “My sister, Pearl. And if Miss Ruby gets fed up with her, there’s Jasmine, Peony, Silken Flower and Peach Blossom.”
    Some enquiries made of Mrs. Summers revealed that Jade was to occupy a shed in the backyard.
    “That isn’t good enough,” said Elizabeth firmly, surprised at her own temerity. “Jade is a beautiful young woman and must be protected. She can move into the governess’s quarters until such time as I need a governess’s services. Do the Chinese men live in sheds in the backyard?”
    “They live in town,” said Mrs. Summers stiffly.
    “Do they ride up from town in the car?”
    “I should think not, Marm! They walk the snake path.”
    “Does Mr. Kinross know how you run things, Mrs. Summers?”
    “It ain’t none of his business—I’m the housekeeper! They are heathen Chinee, they take jobs away from white men!”
    Elizabeth sneered. “I have never known a white man, however poor and indigent he may be, willing to soil his hands on other people’s dirty clothes to earn a living. Your accent is colonial, so I presume you were born and brought up in New South Wales, but I warn you, Mrs. Summers, that I will have no prejudicial treatment of people of other races in this house.”
     
     
    “SHE REPORTED me to Mr. Kinross,” said Mrs. Summers angrily to her husband, “and he got the pip something horrible with me! So Jade gets to live in the governess’s rooms and the Chinee men get to ride the car! Disgraceful!”
    “Sometimes, Maggie, you’re a stupid woman,” Summers said.
    Mrs. Summers sniffed. “You’re all a pack of unbelievers, and Mr. Kinross is the worst! Consorting with that woman, and marrying a girl young enough to be his daughter!”
    “Shut your mouth, woman!” Summers snapped.
     
     
    AT FIRST IT was difficult for Elizabeth to fill in time; in the wake of that exchange with Mrs. Summers, she found herself disliking the woman so much that she avoided her.
    The library, for all its fifteen thousand volumes, was not much of a solace; it was overloaded with texts on subjects that did not interest her, from geology and engineering to gold, silver, iron, steel. There were shelves of various committee reports bound in leather, more shelves of New South Wales laws bound in leather, and yet more shelves filled with something that rejoiced in the title of Halsbury’s Laws of England. No novels of any kind. All the works on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the other famous men he mentioned from time to time were in Greek, Latin, Italian or French—how educated Alexander must be! But she found a simple retelling of some myths, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the complete works of Shakespeare. The myths were a delight, the others hard going.
    Alexander had instructed her not to attend service at St. Andrew’s (the red-brick Church of England with the spire) until she had been in residence some little while, and seemed to think that Kinross town