Pearl in a Cage Read Online Free PDF Page B

well before they’d come knocking and there was no sleep left in her.
    The wind had dropped sometime during the night. She hadn’t noticed when. The sky to the east was growing lighter. Dawn wasn’t far away, and maybe a better dawn.
    She glanced at the bloody towels, blanket and stained clothing piled against her outside wall. If she was going to get that blood out, she’d need to get them soaking. She gathered the load, carried it across to her shed-cum-washhouse, where she dumped the lot into a single wooden wash trough.
    A rainwater tank on her west wall supplied the water, though rain hadn’t supplied what was in it. Through the summer months she and her horse spent many an evening hauling water from creek to tank — and they’d be at it again by nightfall. It took eight buckets of water to half-fill that wash trough, which was as much as she could do in the dark.
    Little Elsie was still asleep in her corner. If she’d been aware of what had taken place in this room tonight, she’d made not a murmur. A shy and frightened little girl, it was unlikely she’d have murmured no matter what she’d seen.
    Wood in the stove, kettle filled, and Gertrude walked out into the first light to cut greens for her hens and goats, to beat the birds to two buckets of apricots. Each year she made a few dozen pots of apricot jam.
    She had four goats milking. It all took time. She fed her chooks, collected her eggs, and by seven was back at the trough, wringing out her washing for the clothes line.
    There was a bulge in one of the coat’s pockets. She reached in and withdrew a small purse, a pretty, hand-embroidered thing, six inches by four, the type of purse a woman might like to take out with her in the evening. Using the flat of her palms, she pressed excess water from it, then carefully opened it, seeking something that might identify the woman. There was little to find. A wet ten-shilling note, a few coins, a handkerchief and a soggy piece of brownish cardboard, which threatened to disintegrate when she tried to straighten it. She was using newspaper to press moisture from it when Ernie Ogden came back, Moe Kelly and his funeral van behind him.
    Moe took the stranger away. Ernie stayed on to drink a mug of tea and to study the stranger’s purse and its contents. The cardboard was still damp, but once flattened, it proved to be an old luggage label.
Destination
was printed clear, printed black, but where that destination might have been wasn’t clear. The ink used was red and had bled. They could make out a definite
T
and maybe what could have been an
R
or a
P
, then a clear
V
and a very definite
Wood
followed by a
C
, which had to be Woody Creek.
    â€˜The T and V could be a name.’
    â€˜Tom Vevers,’ Ernie said.
    â€˜Could be.’
    â€˜I’ll have a word with him.’ He spread the handkerchief on the table. It was a white lace-bordered thing with a blue
JC
embroidered in one corner.
    â€˜She didn’t leave us much to go on,’ Gertrude said.
    â€˜She could be one of Jenner’s Italians. I’ll get out there when the hour’s a bit more reasonable.’
    â€˜You know his infant was born with a crippled foot?’
    â€˜I heard. Damn unfair. He went right through that war, you know.’
    â€˜Damn unfair.’ Gertrude turned again to the handkerchief. ‘At least we’ve got her initials.’
    â€˜I wouldn’t place too much store in initials on a hanky, Trude. Folk find, borrow, lend, steal hankies.’
    â€˜It looks like her — fits with what she was wearing. Dainty, pretty, city things. And look at that shoe.’
    â€˜Not the sort most would choose to go walking across the countryside in.’
    â€˜It screams of city store to me,’ Gertrude said. ‘Everything about that woman screams city store and money to spend in it. The frock she was wearing — the beadwork alone on it must have taken