The Australians' Brides. Lilian Darcy

“What’s the lady’s name?”

      Jacinda looked at Callan and shrugged, asking a question with her face. Kerry or Gran? They’d discussed it—that joke about Goldilocks—but Jacinda clearly didn’t know what to say. She had that vulnerable look about her again—the loss of grace, the slight slouch to her shoulders. It made her look thinner. And it made him want to give her promises about how he’d look after her that she would be bound to read the wrong way.

      Before he could answer, Kerry stepped off the veranda.

      “It’s Gran, love,” she said, in her usual plainspoken way. As she spoke, she leaned down to admire the eggs that had made Carly so excited. “You can call me Gran.”

      Jet lag crept up on Jacinda and Carly a short while after the evening meal. Jac tried to hide her yawns and droopiness, but Carly wasn’t so polite. “Mommeee! I’m so tired! I wanna go to bed right now!” They were both fast asleep before eight o’clock.

      At midnight, according to the clock on the table beside the bed, Jac woke up again. At first she couldn’t work out why, then she saw the pale child-size shadow moving near the door. Carly was sleepwalking, and subconsciously she’d heard her daughter’s familiar sounds.

      She caught up to her in the corridor and tried to steer her back to bed. Carly wouldn’t come. “Honey? This way … Come on, sweetheart.”

      “Butter banana on the machine in the morning.” She talked in her sleep, too, and it never made any sense.

      “Let’s turn around and come back to bed,” Jac repeated.

      Carly’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t awake. She had a plan. She wanted something. And as always when sleepwalking, she was hard to dissuade. “I’m coming in the morning up,” she said, pushing at Jac with firm little hands.

      “Well, let’s not, honey.”

      “No!” Carly said. “Up in the, in the out.”

      Maybe it was best to let her walk it off. The doctor had said that it wasn’t dangerous to waken her, contrary to popular myth, but it did always end with Carly crying and talking about bad dreams that she would have forgotten by morning if Jac could get her back to bed while she was still asleep.

      “Okay, Carly, want to show me?” She took her daughter’s hand and let her lead the way.

      They crept along the corridor, through the big, comfortable living room and out of the front door, first the solid wooden one and then the squeaky one with the insect-proof mesh. Oh, that squeak was loud! Would it wake Callan and the boys? Jac tried to close it quietly behind her.

      Carly looked blindly around the yard, while Jacinda waited for her next move. An almost full moon shone high in the sky, a little flat on one side. It didn’t look quite right, because it was upside-down in this country. Even with the moon so bright, the stars were incredible, thousands of pinpoints of light against a backdrop of solid ink. No city haze.

      Carly went toward the steps leading down from the veranda, and Jac held her hand more tightly. She didn’t stand as steady on her feet when she was asleep, even with her eyes open. She could easily trip and fall. At the last moment, she turned. Not going down the steps after all. There was a saggy old cane couch farther along the veranda, with a padded seat, recently recovered in a summery floral fabric with plenty of matching pillows, and she headed for that.

      Jac thought, Okay, honey, we can sit here for a while. There was a mohair blanket draped over the back of it.

      Carly nestled against her on the couch. “Yogurt, no yogurt,” she said very distinctly. Then her face softened and she closed her eyes.

      “No yogurt. I’ll carry you back to bed in a minute,” Jac whispered.

      She unfolded the blanket and spread it over them both because the night had chilled considerably from the moment the sun had dropped out of sight. The blanket was hand-knitted in bright, alternating squares of pink and blue, and it was warm and soft. No hurry in getting back to bed. So nice to sit here with Carly and feel safe.

      Callan found them there several minutes later. He’d heard that screen door, had guessed it was probably Jacinda, unable to sleep. They didn’t lock doors around here at night. If anyone showed up with intentions good or bad, you’d hear their vehicle a mile off and the dogs would bark like crazy.

      Still, after thinking about it and feeling himself grow more and more awake, something made him get up to check that everything was all right.

      Yeah, it was fine. The two of them were dead to the world, snuggled together under the blanket. The fuzz of the fabric tickled Carly’s nose and she pushed at it with her hand in her sleep. He moved to go back to bed himself, but the old board under his foot creaked and, coupled with Carly’s movement, it disturbed Jacinda and she opened her eyes.

      “Was she sleepwalking?” he asked.

      “Yes, and we ended up here. I didn’t mean to fall asleep myself. Did we waken you?” She looked down his body, then back up. He wore his usual white cotton T-shirt and navy blue pajama pants—respectable, Dad-type nightwear that couldn’t possibly send the wrong message.

      “I heard the screen door,” he confessed.

      She was wearing pink pajamas, herself, in kind of a plaid pattern on a cream background, and her dark hair fell over her shoulders like water falling over rock. Her skin looked shadowy inside the V of the pajama front, and even when she smiled, her lips stayed soft and full.

      “Why does your mother sleep over at the little cottage?” she asked.

      “Oh … uh …” He had no idea why her thoughts would have gone in that direction. “Just to give the two of us some space. She moved in there when I married Liz.” Newlyweds … privacy … he didn’t want to go there in his thoughts, and continued quickly, “She’ll sleep in the main house if I’m away, of course, but she works pretty hard around here and sometimes she needs a break from the boys.”

      “Right. Of course.”

      “Why did you ask?”

      She blinked. “I don’t know. Gosh, I don’t know!” She looked stricken and uncomfortable.

      They stared at each other and she made a movement, shifting over for him, finding him a piece of the blanket. Without saying anything, he sat down and took the corner of the blanket. Its edges made two sides of a triangle, across his chest and back across his knees. A wave of warmth and sweetness hit him—clean hair and body heat and good laundering.

      The old cane of the couch was a little saggy in the center, and his weight pushed Jacinda’s thigh against his. Carly stretched in her sleep and began to encroach on his space, which stopped the contact between himself and her mom from becoming too intimate. This felt safe, even though it shouldn’t have.

      “Well, you know, ask anything you like,” he told her. “I didn’t mean you had to feel it wasn’t your business.”

      Silence.

      “It’s so quiet,” she murmured.

      “Is it spooking you?”

      “A little. I guess it’s not quiet, really. The house creaks, and there are rustlings outside. Just now I heard … I think it was a frog. I’m hoping it was a frog.”

      “You mean as opposed to the notorious Greerson’s death bat with its toxic venom and ability to chew through wire window screens to get to its human victims?”

      “That one, yes.”

      “Well, their mating cries are very similar to a frog’s, but Greerson’s death bats don’t usually come so close to the house except in summer.”

      She laughed. “You’re terrible!”

      “We do have some nice snakes, however, with a great line in nerve toxins.”

      “In the house?”

      He