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‘Of course it’s our business. Amy’s part of the ballet company your grandfather and I practically founded. I usually keep track of the members of our company and it was a shock to hear she’s retired. Since James fell ill, of course, I haven’t heard a thing. I need to get back in touch. But then, it’s her sister who looks ill. She’s not in the ballet scene. If I wasn’t on this train I could make some phone calls…’
‘It’s not our business!’ he repeated.
‘Of course it is,’ she snapped. ‘They’re two nice girls and anyone can see they’re in trouble. It’s our job to help them. And it was very nice of you to give Amy your steak.’
‘I…’ She’d seen, then. He might have known.
No. Not worth arguing.
‘Though cold steak will be horrid as a late night snack,’ Maudie said, and he could tell she’d already included the girls in her list of responsibilities. Maudie’s principal skill was picking people up and making them feel better. Hugo loved her for it, but every now and then it got her into trouble. And now, like always…
Now he hadn’t a snowball’s chance in a bushfire of stopping her.
‘If Amy wants to bully Rachel into eating later on, she’d be better with sweets,’ she was saying thoughtfully. ‘We have complimentary chocolates in our sitting room. Do you think you should take them some?’
‘No. I don’t know where to find them.’
‘You can find them if you want to.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Hugo…’ Her voice was filled with reproach.
‘No.’
‘What a waste,’ she said sadly. But her indomitable spirit had been stirred and it wasn’t about to settle. ‘Still,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘We’ll probably see them at breakfast and if we don’t then I’ll track them down. And the house at Uluru… The more I think of it, the more perfect it seems.’ She smiled again, the smile that Hugo had wanted to return, but the smile that now meant trouble. ‘We might just have some fun, and heaven knows we all need it.’
Fun, Hugo thought.
He’d wanted his grandmother to have fun, but now he wasn’t too sure what fun entailed. Trouble?
Two single women and Maudie? Trouble indeed.
CHAPTER TWO
‘SO TELL me who they are,’ Rachel demanded.
To say Amy was disconcerted was an understatement. She needed to catch her breath, get her composure back and feed Buster.
Instead, for the first time in this trip, for the first time in months, she had her sister asking questions.
But Buster first. She locked their compartment door, opened the wardrobe and Buster nosed out.
Buster was a tiny fox terrier, the size of half a cat. He was fourteen years old, he was missing an ear and he had one gammy leg.
Rachel had found him over twelve years ago. He’d been tossed from a car like litter, and Rachel had come home holding the bedraggled creature as if he were diamonds.
‘Amy, we have to keep him. We have to. Please let me…’
They’d been staying with the last of their succession of foster parents and, as usual, Amy had pleaded on behalf of her younger sister.
‘He’ll stay outside. I can build him a kennel. We can use my allowance to feed him. I swear he’ll be no trouble.’
The couple they’d been staying with had been one of their kinder sets of foster parents and he’d been allowed to stay. At night they’d sneaked him in through their bedroom window. He’d slept with them then, and he’d been with them since.
Rachel had left him behind two years ago—he’d stayed with Amy during her sister’s doomed marriage—but they were together again now, and it was Rachel who needed Buster rather than the other way round.
The little dog nosed out of the tiny wardrobe and looked around with caution, as if he understood he was in hiding. Then his ears pricked and his disreputable tail started to wag.
He’d been on dog pellets for two days. He was clever. The smell from Amy’s purse was not dog pellets.
‘It’s rump steak,’ she said, and grinned. ‘With a tiny smear of béarnaise sauce for m’lor’s satisfaction.’ She set it on the table napkin on the floor.
Buster looked up at them first, his great brown eyes adorably expressive. His wagging tail meant he wagged his whole body. Joy was Buster and rump steak, and even Rachel was smiling.
But… ‘So who are they?’ she asked again and Amy thought: nope, she wasn’t about to be deflected.
‘The old lady’s Dame Maud Thurston,’ she told her sister. ‘She’s been a major patron of the Australian ballet for as long as I can remember. She’s a gem, and her husband was just as lovely. He made a fortune from mining—you must know Thurston Holdings—and together they’ve run one of the biggest charitable foundations in Australia. It’s not just the ballet that benefits.’
‘And the guy?’
For some reason Amy wasn’t sure of talking about the guy. He’d made her… edgy. ‘That’d be her grandson,’ she said.
‘So tell me about him.’ Rachel perched on her seat and hugged her knees.
Rachel? Interested in a guy?
A waft of remembrance flooded back, making Amy wince. Two years ago, Rachel had come backstage after a performance, her normal prosaic, academic self starry-eyed about the Spanish dancer who’d danced opposite Amy. ‘Tell me about him. Can you introduce me?’
It was the beginning of a tragedy which had left Rachel with shattered dreams and aching loss. Now… She must have seen what Amy was thinking because she rushed in.
‘I don’t mean that,’ she said, sounding angry. ‘He’s gorgeous but you needn’t think I’m ever going down that path again. And it’s you he’s interested in.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘He is.’
‘Rachel…’
‘Okay, he isn’t,’ Rachel said, and astonishingly she was smiling. ‘But you know about him. Tell me all.’
‘We’re not staying with them at Uluru.’
‘Of course we’re not,’ Rachel said equably. ‘But tell me about him all the same.’
‘I don’t know much. Only what’s spread in ballet circles and that’s only as much as affects the ballet. We’re a self-centred lot.’
‘But you do know something.’
She nodded, strangely reluctant. What was it about the guy that made her want to shut up, not probe further? But Rachel was interested and, the way Rachel had been for the last twelve months, any interest at all was to be encouraged.
‘The family’s been in the media for ever,’ she said, thinking it through as she spoke. ‘I don’t read gossip mags but because they’re important to the ballet world, I can’t help but keep up with them. Sir James owns… owned… Thurston Holdings. You know it’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world? It’s also the most principled. Thurston’s has a reputation for fair dealings, for treating their people right, for restoring land after mining’s finished. Sir James and Dame Maud have tried to keep a low profile but, with that much money, that much power, it’s impossible.’
‘I have heard of them,’ Rachel admitted, which was a huge concession from someone who spent her life in books. ‘I did hear Sir James had died—it was all over the papers. So Hugo’s the grandson. Is his dad taking over the reins?’
‘That’s just it,’ Amy told her. ‘He’s dead. Bertram was a disaster but we know nothing about this guy.’
‘We?’
Amy flushed. She was no longer part of the Australian ballet scene, she told herself. Move on.
But Rachel wanted to know, and this wasn’t ballet. She could force herself to gossip a little.
‘The Thurston Corporation sponsors so much—the ballet, the theatre, sports for the disabled, medical research… So many organisations rely on them. But when Bertram was alive and we thought he’d inherit, it seemed like it’d all stop as soon as Sir James died.’
‘So Bertram was Hugo’s dad?’
‘Yep.’ Amy settled back onto her seat-cum-bed and decided she might as well recall all she knew. ‘According to gossip, Bertram was wild. Really wild. He was into parties, gambling, drugs, all the things his parents weren’t. His marriage lasted about two minutes—rumour is his wife suicided later on, but it could have been an overdose. She was a media bimbo. That set a pattern for Bertram. He moved from woman to woman, every one of them media darlings, every one of them self-destructing on the lifestyle. It must have broken his parents’ hearts, but there was no way they could stop him. He finally did the same.’
‘Why did I not know this?’ Rachel demanded.
‘Because most of it happened when we were kids,’ Amy said patiently. ‘I only know because Bertram died in unsavoury circumstances about eight years ago. By then he was so burnt out that even the gossip mags weren’t interested, except to up their interest in Hugo. But I was a baby dancer then, and I heard the relief in dance circles. Our director was trying hard not to be ecstatic. His take was that we’d have more chance of continued support from an unknown grandson than we ever had from Bertram. But Hugo didn’t come home, even then. He’s been in the army since he was a teenager, in some secret unit no one knows about. He’s made a couple of flying visits since and the press has gone nuts every time—Australia’s most eligible bachelor, that sort of thing—but he’s always looked like he hates it. There was a fuss when he came home for his grandfather’s funeral, but then he went to ground again. Everyone’s wondered what will happen to Thurston Holdings—and lo, here he is, on our train.’
‘Home to pick up where his grandfather left off?’ Rachel said doubtfully. ‘He doesn’t look like a businessman about to sponsor the ballet. He looks… tough.’
‘Like a warrior,’ Amy agreed, starting to enjoy herself. They were safely back in their cabin. Why not let herself wallow? ‘I was thinking that,’ she confessed, letting her mind meander over the man she’d just met. ‘That gorgeous, deep black hair, sun-bleached at the tips. All those muscles… And he’s weathered and so fit it’s scary. The bone structure of his face—it’s like it’s sculpted. It must be from years of living hard. And did you see the way his shirt strained? No shirt’s ever been built to accommodate that type of chest.’ She grinned at Rachel, enjoying startling her. ‘And those blue eyes with crinkles at the edges like he spends his time looking into the sun… Whew.’
‘You really did look at him,’ Rachel breathed, stunned.
‘Um… yep. There’s no harm in admiring beauty,’ she admitted. ‘A girl can admire—from a distance.’
Rachel’s smile widened. Maybe she was starting to enjoy herself as well.
‘I guess he’ll have spent his life looking into the sun through machine gun sights,’ she suggested. ‘That’d make anyone’s eyes crinkle.’
‘I bet you’re right,’ Amy agreed. ‘And field glasses. He’ll have stood in dugouts in the searing sun, field glasses trained for the enemy…’
‘Or on hilltops?’
‘I don’t think you look for the enemy on hilltops,’ Amy said doubtfully. ‘Wouldn’t you get shot? It’d be such a shame to shoot a body like that.’
‘It would,’ Rachel said definitely. ‘No one could shoot such a man. Did you see the muscles on his arms?’ Rachel was following on with relish. ‘Maybe that’s from hand-to-hand combat?’
‘With sumo wrestlers,’ Amy guessed. ‘I’d imagine he takes on ten every morning before breakfast.’
‘And now we’ve taken his steak,’ Rachel said mournfully. ‘Buster, how could you?’ She giggled and Amy thought wow, her sister was giggling. She giggled back and it was a gorgeous moment.
And then a camel hove into view. Another one, racing the train.
But only one?
In the dining car they’d been able to see out both sides of the train. Now, back in their tiny compartment, they could only see the right side of the train.
Rachel was looking out, entranced, at the lone camel and Amy couldn’t resist; she opened the door to the corridor to see if more camels were racing on the far side.
There were. Five of them.
‘Oh,’ Rachel breathed. ‘I wonder if Maudie’s seeing…’
‘Buster!’
And for one fatal moment they’d been distracted. For one moment they’d had the door wide open and had been staring in delight at camels.
And Buster, fourteen years old, sleeping out his days content to be with the people he loved and the occasional sunbeam, had just had rump steak for dinner—and he’d looked up and seen camels!
The camels were gaining on the train. They were stretching out away from the near windows.
And Buster, a tiny dog in spirit but a guard dog at heart, went flying along the corridor in pursuit, barking as if he were a hound in full cry.
No!
Amy flew along the corridor after him, her heart in her mouth. Luckily, the end of the carriage was the door through to the next car. He could go no further—but he was still barking.
No!
She reached him and scooped him up and tucked him under her sweater, just as compartment doors started to open.
‘A dog…’ An elderly man with a walking stick was staring in horror in both directions. ‘Did you see a dog? Who’s barking?’
‘It must have been outside the train,’ Amy said, beetling past him with her bulge held away. Praying his eyesight wasn’t good.
‘I heard a dog.’ It was a young mother. ‘I hate dogs. Our Polly’s allergic.’
‘I didn’t see a dog,’ Amy lied and bolted for their compartment.
‘Did you see a dog?’ the young woman demanded of Rachel, who was outside their compartment looking worried.
‘It was racing the camels,’ Rachel managed, trying to retreat as well. ‘I think it was a dingo.’
‘But it sounded like it was in the train,’ the woman said.
‘I think you should report it to the conductor.’
‘I need to go to bed,’ Rachel said, and retreated into the compartment after Amy.
She slammed the door, still giggling.
But Amy wasn’t giggling. That had been too close for comfort.
