The English Bride. Margaret Way
moment later Rebecca appeared like a summer breeze, all smiles, touching Francesca affectionately on the shoulder before speaking directly to Grant who came swiftly to his feet. “Don’t bother to get up, Grant,” she said, realising he must be tired. “All over for the day?”
“Thank the Lord.” He gave a wry grin.
“Then you could probably do with a cold beer?”
He laughed aloud and resumed his seat. “Brod sure has his womenfolk trained. Francesca has just offered me one, too. That’d be great, Rebecca. I have to admit it was long, hard and dusty. I’m parched.” He was struck again at how much Rebecca had changed from the enigmatic young woman who had first come to Kimbara to write Fee Kinross’s biography. Fee, Francesca’s mother, had had a brilliant career on the London stage. The biography was due out any day.
Since her marriage to Brod, Rebecca was all friendliness and warmth, happiness and contentment shining out of her quite extraordinary grey eyes. This was a marriage that would work, he thought with great satisfaction. God knows Brod and Ally had one hell of a childhood with their arrogant bastard of a father. Such was Rafe’s persona even Stewart Kinross had approved of Rafe, though he hadn’t lived to see Rafe and his only daughter, Alison, married.
Grant was certain Kinross would never have approved of him. “Too much the hothead!” Kinross had once described him, “with the intolerable habit of expressing his quite juvenile opinions.” Opinions, of course, that ran counter to the lordly Kinross. Still the two families, Cameron and Kinross had always been entwined. Almost kin. Now they were.
When Rebecca returned with his cold beer, just the one—he was too responsible a pilot to consider another—and an iced tea for herself and Francesca, they talked family matters, their latest communications from Rafe and Ally, local gossip, what Fee and David Westbury, the visiting first cousin to Francesca’a aristocratic father, were up to. The two had become inseparable to the extent Francesca told them she wouldn’t be surprised to get a phone call to say they’d popped into the register office that very day. Which would make Fee’s third attempt at making a go of marriage.
They were still talking about Fee and the important cameo role she was to play in a new Australian movie, when they were interrupted by the shrilling of the phone, the latest miracle for the outback that had depended for so long on radio communication. Rebecca went to answer it, returning with an expression that wiped all the laughter from her luminous grey eyes. “It’s for you, Grant, Bob Carlton.” She named his second-in-charge. “One of the fleet hasn’t reached base camp or called in, either. Bob sounded a bit concerned. Take it in Brod’s study.”
“Thanks, Rebecca.” Grant rose to his impressive lean height. “Did he say which station?”
“Oh I’m sorry!” Rebecca touched her creamy forehead in self-reproach. “I should have told you at once. It’s Bunnerong.”
The station was even more remote than they were. About sixty miles to the north-west. Grant made his way through the Kinross homestead, familiar to him from childhood. It was amazingly grand in contrast to the Cameron stronghold with its quietly fading Victorian gentility. Ally, of course, would change all that. Ally the whirlwind but for now his mind was on what Bob had to say.
Bob, in his mid-fifties, was a great bloke. A great organiser, a great mechanic, well liked by everyone. Grant relied on him, but Bob was a born worrier, a firm believer in Murphy’s Law, whereby anything that could go wrong, would. Equally Bob was determined no harm would come to any of “his boys.”
On the phone Grant received Bob’s assurance all necessary checks had been made and the chopper had passed the mandatory 100-hour service. The helicopter was to have set down when the stockmen were camped at Bunnerong’s out station at approximately four o’clock. The pilot, a good one with plenty of experience in aerial muster had not arrived by four forty-five when Bunnerong contacted Bob by radio. Bob in turn had not been able to contact the pilot by company radio frequency.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Grant wasn’t overly concerned at that point.
“You know me, Grant, I’m going to,” Bob answered. “It’s not like Curly. He runs by an inbuilt timetable.”
“Sure,” Grant acknowledged. “But you know as well as I do things can go wrong with the radio. It’s not all that unusual. It’s happened to me. Besides it’s almost dusk. Curly would have put down somewhere and made camp for the night. He’s got all he needs to make himself comfortable. He’d resume again at first light. If he’s anything like me he’s dog-tired. Besides, he’s not actually due to start the muster until morning anyway.”
All of which was true. “There’s an hour or so of light left,” Grant said at length breaking in on Bob. “I’ll take the chopper up and have a look around, though I’m coming from another direction. I need to refuel on Kimbara, if I’m going to get close in to Bunnerong.”
“I suppose we might as well wait for morning,” Bob sighed. “Curly could still turn up. Bunnerong can get a message to us and I’ll relay it to you.”
So it was decided. “Curly” to all because of a single wisp of hair that curled like a baby’s on his bald patch, was a pro. He had food with him. A swag. He’d probably put down near a bush lagoon and set up camp for the night. Nevertheless Grant felt the responsibility to take his chopper up. Initiate a bit of a search before night fell.
Bob’s mood had affected him, he thought wryly. Experience told him Curly, though obviously having problems with his radio was most likely safe and sound setting up camp on the ground. Still he liked to know exactly where every one of his pilots and helicopters in service were.
Grant walked swiftly back through the house, telling the two young women of his intentions the moment he set foot on the verandah.
“Why don’t you let me come with you?” Francesca asked quickly, keen to help if she could. “You know what they say, two pairs of eyes are better than one.”
Rebecca nodded in agreement. “I was able to help Brod once on a search and rescue. You remember?”
“That was from the Beech Baron,” Grant told her, a shade repressively. “Francesca isn’t used to helicopters. The way they fly, the heat and the noise. She could very easily get airsick.”
Francesca stood away from her chair. “I don’t suffer from motion sickness at all, Grant. In the air. On the water. Please take me. I want to help if I can.”
His response wasn’t all that she hoped. The expression in his hazel eyes suggested there was a decided possibility she could become a liability. But in the end he nodded in laconic permission. “All right, lady! Let’s go.”
Minutes later the rotor was roaring and they were lifting vertically from the lawn, rising well above the line of trees, climbing, then steering away for the desert fringe. Francesca like Grant was strapped into her copilot seat, wearing earphones that at least made the loud noise of the swishing blades tolerable. Still she found it a thrilling experience to be up in the air looking down at the vast wilderness with all the rock formations undergoing another change in their astonishing colour display. Even when they flew through thermal cross-winds over the desert she kept her cool as the winds took hold of the small aircraft and shook it so it plunged into a short, sickening dive.
“O.K.?” Grant spoke through the headphones, a deep frown of concern between his eyes.
“Aye, aye, skipper!” She lifted her right hand in a parody of a smart salute. Did he really think she was going to go to pieces like the ladies of old? Have the vapours? She had pioneering blood in her veins as well. Her maternal ancestor had been Ewan Kinross, a legendary cattle king. The fact that she had been reared in the ordered calm of the beautiful English countryside and her exclusive boarding school didn’t mean she hadn’t inherited the capacity to face a far more dangerous way of life. Besides it was as she’d told him. She had a cast iron stomach and she was too excited for nerves. She wanted to learn this way of life. She wanted to learn all about Grant