Margaret Way - The Man From Southern Cross

Margaret Waytakes great pleasure in her work and works hard at her pleasure. She enjoys tearing off to the beach with her family at weekends, loves haunting galleries and auctions and is completely given over to French champagne ‘for every possible joyous occasion’. She was born and educated in the river city of Brisbane, Australia, and now lives within sight and sound of beautiful Moreton Bay.

by

Margaret Way

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Chapter One

HE LEFT the mustering camp late afternoon, when the still-blazing sun was slipping down the sky in a glory of red, gold and amethyst.

Every bone, every muscle in his body was throbbing with fatigue. It had been a long hard day made doubly frustrating because he and a handful of the men had to fight yet another brushfire at the old “dancing grounds.”

The aboriginals claimed, perhaps with perfect truth, that the grounds were sacred and the brushfires, which had gone on for as long as anyone could remember, were the work of Jumboona, one of the more mischievous of the ancient gods. Sometimes when he was tired, like now, he accepted that possibility with a laconic shrug. Unless the fires were lit deliberately—and no one had ever found any evidence of it—there seemed to be no easy explanation. As his father used to say, “Old Jumboona strikes again!” Charlie Eaglehawk, their best tracker, claimed to have seen Jumboona through the flames, but then Charlie specialized in stories that made the hair on the back of one’s neck prickle.

He rode on, allowing the splendor of the sunset to revive him. The muster would resume at dawn the next day, but there was a tension in the men and in the cattle he didn’t much like. The hot winds had a bearing on it. As well, for the aboriginal stockmen, Jandra Crossing was the site of an old ritual killing by one of the dreaded kurdaitcha men, dispensers of justice since the Dreamtime. Stories about the ritual kurdaitcha killings were interwoven with the legends of Southern Cross; so were the stories about Jumboona and his hostile cavortings. Jumboona certainly liked to keep them all busy, he thought now with a sort of rueful humor.

A wallaby jumped out in front of his big stallion, The Brigadier, who executed a high-stepping dance. He reined the horse in, then pushed his akubra farther back on his head, looking up at the sky. It was pearlescent with smoke, the smell of burned bush land hot in his nostrils. Even the birds seemed disturbed, sending up spine-tingling shrieks as they flew home to the billabongs and swamps. The kurdaitcha man’s victims, transgressors of the tribal laws, were said to wander the lignum swamps at night. Many a stockman over the long years had claimed to see their spirits setting up camp near the water. He had never seen anything paranormal himself, and he didn’t expect to. But even his so-called iron nerves had been tested now and again in the hill country, where the extensive network of caves served as immensely old galleries for images of love magic and sorcery.

Southern Cross, the Mountford desert stronghold since the 1860s, was also a mythical place for the Jurra Jurra tribe. So the legends had begun and were allowed to grow. This was his country and he loved it with a passion. No woman could ever hold him in the same way. At thirty, with half a dozen affairs behind him, he had reason to know. He’d come close to marriage once—it was expected that at some stage he would provide the historic Mountford station with an heir—but he’d found himself unable to take the final step. No woman had ever fired his blood.

Dusk saw him riding through the main compound on his way to the huge complex of stables at the rear of the homestead. He dismounted in the circular courtyard, looking around. Where the hell was Manny? Probably whittling away at one of his little wooden sculptures; they were so good, he thought it was about time he encouraged the boy to do something with his skill. He summoned him with a loud whistle and Manny came running, his face split in a wide grin.

“Old Jumboona get yah again, Boss?”

Tired as he was, he couldn’t help returning Manny’s infectious grin. “The worst thing, Manny, is that you seem to enjoy it.”

“No, Boss.” Manny shook his curly head. “You’ll cut ‘im down to size and that’s a fact. I’m beginnin’ to wonder if the old boy ain’t losin’ his powers.”

His laugh rasped in his dry throat. “You should have spent the day with me. And I wouldn’t speak too loudly, either. The old boy might hear you.”

“Wouldn’t bother about the likes o’ me.” Manny took charge of The Brigadier’s saddle. “Saw Miss Annabel a while ago. She was all excited about her friend.”

Her friend! God, he didn’t know whether to laugh or bang his head against the stone wall. He’d clean forgotten about Annabel’s friend. She would be up at the homestead right now.

“Everything okay, Boss?” Manny asked anxiously.

“I just need an ice-cold beer, Manny. And a hot tub. In that order.” He didn’t say the thought of having to make small talk with a strange woman intensified his feelings of tiredness and irritation. He swept off his akubra and ran an impatient hand through his hair, black and shiny as a magpie’s wing. It was too thick and too long at the back and, he supposed, that together with the marks of grime and smoke gave him the appearance of a wild man. Not exactly what Miss Roishin—what kind of name was that?—Grant would expect to see. He laughed out loud remembering how some women’s magazine had voted him one of the sexiest men in the country. Eligible and rich. The rich surely helped; the sexy bit amazed him. He knew he was attractive to women, but he didn’t flatter himself unduly. Most women were very frivolous, he’d found. They had this big ongoing affair with glamour and glitz.

His thoughts inevitably shifted to the wedding. In a few days’ time, Annabel, his stepsister—the elder, by fully five minutes, of identical twins—was to be married in the homestead’s ballroom, with the reception in the Great Hall. The whole thing had gotten a little out of hand as far as he was concerned. And he was footing the bill.

To be fair, as a leading “landed” family, their guest list had to be long. The extended Mountford family was spread over three states, with Southern Cross the ancestral home. They all expected to be represented, along with close friends, business friends, the usual socialites, assorted politicians and a fair sprinkling of the legal profession to which the groom, Michael Courtney, belonged. It sometimes seemed to him that half the country had been invited, but Annabel assured him 250 guests was the lowest possible count. Roishin—was it Gallic for rose?—was one of the four bridesmaids. She had been a close friend of the twins at university, yet strangely enough he had never met her. The one time she’d visited the station he’d been on a business trip to Texas, seeing a fellow rancher. The girls, Annabel and Vanessa, spent a lot of time with her in Sydney where she lived and he maintained an apartment as a family pied-à-terre. When he’d had time to listen, he’d learned that her father was a merchant banker, her mother a divorce lawyer. Roishin probably arranged flowers. The twins, “the Mountford heiresses” as they were usually referred to in the press, didn’t work much, either. He, as head of the Mountford clan since the untimely death of his father, worked like a dog and always had.