Circling the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

task. “There won’t be room for everyone.”
    Everyone?
“Are guests coming, then?”
    Without answering, he climbed behind the wheel and pulled away, pummelling us with clouds of rosy dust. Within the hour, we heard the buggy chugging back up the hill and caught glimpses of white. A dress. A hat with ribbons, and to-the-elbow gloves. This was a woman in the car, a beautiful one with a pile of glossy hair the colour of raven feathers, and a fancy lace-trimmed parasol that didn’t look as if it had seen a day in the bush.
    “Beryl, this is Mrs. Orchardson,” my father said as they stepped out of the buggy. Two large trunks towered behind in the boot. She wasn’t here for tea.
    “I’m so happy to finally meet you,” Mrs. Orchardson said, quickly looking me up and down.
    Finally?
I think my mouth fell open and stayed like that for a good long minute.
    When we got inside the main house, Mrs. Orchardson looked around at everything with her hands resting lightly on her hips. Though my father had designed it simply, the place was solid, and a vast improvement from the hut it once was. But Mrs. Orchardson had never seen anything of that. She strode back and forth. There were cobwebs at all the windows, and the hearthstones were covered in layers of thick soot. The oilcloth on our table hadn’t been changed in years, not since my mother left. The narrow charcoal cooler we stored butter and cream in smelled rancid, like muck at the bottom of a pond. We’d grown used to it like everything else. The walls were hung with bits and bobs from hunting adventures—leopard pelts, lion skins, long, corkscrewing kudu horns, an ostrich egg the size and heft of a human skull. There was nothing fine or very posh in sight—but we’d been all right without niceties.
    “Mrs. Orchardson has agreed to be our housekeeper,” my father explained as she pinched off her gloves. “She’ll live here in the main house. There’s plenty of room.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling punched in the windpipe. There was a room that could be used for sleeping quarters, but it was filled with tack and paraffin and tins of food and any number of things we didn’t want to see or deal with. The room meant we didn’t really
need
a housekeeper. And where would guests stay now that this woman, who was not a guest, had come to change everything?
    “Why don’t you go out to the stables while we get settled here?” my father said in a tone that left no room for wriggling.
    “How nice, then,” Mrs. Orchardson said. “I’ll get the tea ready.”
    All the way across the yard, I fumed. The world was squeezing in on me, narrowing to the sudden fact of Mrs. Orchardson and what she might mean to do or be. When I returned, she had changed into a simple skirt and shirtwaist, and tied a clean white apron over the top. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. A lock of her silky hair fell over her forehead as she refilled my father’s cup, the kettle steaming in her hands. My father had settled into our one comfortable chair, his feet up on a low table. He was gazing at her familiarly.
    I blinked at them both. I hadn’t been gone an hour, and she had already taken over the room. The kettle was hers. She’d scrubbed the oilcloth. The cobwebs were gone and might have never existed at all. Nothing would need much coaxing or breaking in. Nothing seemed ready to resist her.
    —
    I was to call her Mrs. O, my father said. Over the coming days, she unpacked her steamer trunks and filled them again with things from the house—dusty hunting spoils, odd trinkets or bits of clothing my mother had left behind. It was all part of her plan to run a “tight ship”—two of her favourite words. She liked order and soap and the day sliced up into manageable portions. Mornings were for book learning.
    “I have to be at gallops,” I told her early on, feeling fully confident that my father would take my part.
    “They’ll make do without you for the time being, won’t they?”