The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

River Lily

Meaning: Love concealed

Crinum pedunculatum | Eastern Australia

Very large perennial usually found on the edge of forests, but also at the high-tide level close to mangroves. Fragrant, white slender star-shaped flowers. Seeds sometimes germinate while still attached to the parent plant. The sap has been used as a treatment for box jellyfish stings.

Alice spent the rest of the week following the Flowers around the farm while they worked. At morning tea, she and Boo did the newspaper crosswords; Boo knew a lot of words. Later she collected honey from the hives with Robin, who let her wear some of the red lipstick she kept in her apron pocket, and showed her how to eat honeycomb fresh from the hive. She tagged along behind Olga, Myf and Sophie as they went up and down the rows of flowers cutting new blooms. She helped Tanmayi make rosewater from fresh rose petals, enchanted by her stories about Sita, the princess who surrendered herself to the earth after being accused of sorcery, and Draupadi, the princess who cursed one hundred men for mistreating her. In the afternoons, Alice hung around the workbenches in the workshop, making necklaces out of petals, stems, leaves and string, while Francene, Lauren, Caroline and Amy filled flower orders, wrapping bouquet after bouquet in brown paper and twine. She hummed along with Rosella in the seedling houses, and helped Vlinder water the wild cotton bushes; monarch butterflies swooped in to feed and fluttered over them.

On Friday, Alice, Twig and Candy joined the twelve women on the back verandah at the end of the day. They all untied their aprons, took their big straw hats off and fanned their faces. June brought an Esky filled with frosty bottles of ginger beer and handed them around like amber treasures. The Flowers sat with their heads leant back and their eyes half-closed. The rows of blooming flowers, the hoop houses, the white beehives and the thick silvergreen bush in the distance wavered in the twilight like a dream.

While Alice sipped her drink she snuck glances at their faces. Most of the time the Flowers were jovial and hardworking. But that afternoon on the verandah, something changed. Everyone fell silent. As the sun went down, all the stories the Flowers lived, loved and left behind crowded in on them. The women’s shoulders sagged inwards. Some of them cried. They turned to comfort each other. And June sat in the middle, her face composed and her back straight.

Alice had realised she wasn’t so different from any of the Flowers. Even June. Everyone needed silence sometimes. And that was the magic of Thornfield; it was a place where it was possible to say the things you could not speak. And, in her own way, Alice was beginning to understand the power of a language spoken in flowers. Ever since her trip to the river, every night after dinner when she went to her room, a new flower sat in her baby-blue boots at the end of her bed.

June sat on the back verandah, watching the sun rise over the flower farm while she blew the steam off a cup of strong black coffee. The morning held a faint crispness, a first hint of winter. She took the flask out of her pocket and poured a splash into her cup. Pressed the rim of the cup to her lips and took small sips, savouring the warmth.

As the flower fields absorbed the light, it occurred to June that she could be watching the sun come up on any day when Thornfield was in bloom. It could have been eighty years earlier. Ruth Stone could easily have come around the corner from the workshop, backlit by the copper wash of dawn, her hands deep in her pockets and her eyes not yet lined by sorrow.

June finished her coffee, picked up her gardening gloves, and stuffed them into the pocket of her vest. She walked into the brightening morning, through the fields towards the seedling houses her mother had built. Sometimes her longing to have just one more conversation with her mother made her feel as if she might splinter to bits if she breathed too hard. Knowing that Alice was aching for Agnes in the same way tormented June. History’s inclination to repeat itself was nothing but cruel.

The air inside the seedling houses was dense with the promise of new beginnings. June closed her eyes for a moment. They’d spent hours in there together, gathering the longings of people’s hearts in fistfuls of shoots and seeds while her mother told her Thornfield’s stories. Pay attention now, Junie, Wattle Stone used to say. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.

As a child June’s imagination was captured by stories of her grandmother. She spent hours down by the river, running her fingertips over Ruth’s name carved into the trunk of the giant gum, and Jacob Wyld’s name carved beside it.

When she first appeared in town, rumours about Ruth Stone were rife. Some said she was born to a woman on the last convict ship sent to Australia. Others said she was the descendant of a Pendle Hill witch who escaped fate. Reportedly, her only possession was a small notebook filled with a strange language. Some argued it was a spell book. Others swore they’d seen the inside of it; filled with flowers, they said. The only thing unanimously agreed upon was that Ruth Stone had been traded by Madame Beaumont, owner of a roadhouse brothel in the next town, in exchange for the last dairy cows from Thornfield, a crumbling farm on the outskirts of town. The reclusive owner, Wade Thornton, watched helplessly as his farm turned to dust during the worst drought in the town’s history. He had his own share of town gossip to contend with. Wade Thornton was known for trying to drown his demons in rum; once Ruth Stone arrived, helping himself to her body became his preferred method of exorcism.

It didn’t take long for Ruth to figure out when to flee the house. After Wade finished whatever gruel she’d been able to make for dinner, she would slip out for more stove wood before his fourth drink, and run to the drought-stricken trickle of a river. There, Ruth found a place to hide until Wade inevitably drank himself into oblivion. At the base of a giant river gum, Ruth sat and let herself sing and cry. Books and singing were all that kept her mind strong. She sang stories her mother had taught her, about flowers that spoke things words could not. She was singing by the giant gum the night an out-of-work drover, with nothing but seeds in his pockets, wandered into the cracked riverbed spellbound, as if her song led him right to her. At the sight of Ruth, singing and crying in the moonlight, they say Jacob Wyld crouched wordlessly and planted seeds at her feet, in the earth between the roots of the gum tree. What grew from that night, where Ruth’s tears fell to the earth, was a heath of wild vanilla lilies, and an equally heady love affair between Ruth and Jacob.

They met at the river whenever Ruth could get away. He brought her flower seeds and she brought him whatever meagre food scraps she could sneak from the house.

Soon Ruth had enough seeds to till a small, shaded corner of dirt near the house, where a nearly dead, lone wattle tree stood. The dirt was so dry it took her a month to soften it with whatever water she could carry from the river. Eventually, the wattle tree exploded into flower, a winter blaze of sweet yellow. Ruth fell to her knees at the sight. The scent floated all the way into town. Bees droned around the tree, drunk on its nectar. Beneath the wattle were circles of green shoots. Ruth sketched each one in her small notebook. As they bloomed, so different to the foxgloves and snowdrops of her mother’s songs, Ruth noted down what they meant to her, adapting the Victorian language of flowers. The strange and beautiful native flowers, able to flourish in the harshest conditions, enchanted Ruth; none more so than the deep scarlet flowers with red centres the colour of the darkest blood. Meaning, Ruth wrote in her notebook, have courage, take heart.

In the grip of an extreme drought, farms were dying, farming families were going bankrupt and nothing would grow from the earth; when the town looked set to be scorched off the map forever, Ruth Stone started a native flower farm.

News spread quickly. People came to see for themselves the shock of colour among the dust and cow bones. Soon they returned bringing cuttings from their dying gardens. Ruth planted them and under her care, they grew rampant. Wade Thornton stopped drinking. He opened the doors to Thornfield and let people in. They brought their hoes, their water drums, their precious seeds. Ruth told them where to go and what to plant. They constructed greenhouses. They worked from sunup to sundown, tending new shoots. The air was heavy with the green smell of expectation. When Thornfield bloomed, people came together with Ruth to harvest the flowers, make bouquets, and drive through the night to the biggest fresh flower markets in the country; every bunch was tied with a handwritten card explaining Ruth’s meaning for each flower. They’d sold out before lunch. And took orders back to Thornfield for more of the native flowers that spoke the language of Ruth’s heart. The townspeople began to hope.

Days passed. Winter flowers bloomed. Plans were made for more flower market trips. As Wade Thornton stood sober in the shadows of his house and watched Ruth’s flushed and smiling face among the locals, something bitter grew inside him.

One night, not long after Ruth’s first successful harvest, Wade drank enough rum to convince Ruth he’d passed out, then waited until he heard her footsteps fade on the dirt outside. Under the cold and starry sky he followed her along the path he’d long ago hand-cleared to the river. There, behind the bushes, he waited. When a man rose from the riverbed to take Ruth in his embrace, Wade’s vision was blurred by rage. Every time he forced himself upon Ruth he had to spit on his fingers just to get inside her, and she turned her face away, her eyes empty, her body lifeless. But in this man’s arms Ruth was alive, silver and luminous. In the pale winter moonlight, Ruth took the man’s hand and pressed it to her stomach. She smiled. Her eyes glittered. With a roar Wade Thornton lunged from the bushes and knocked Jacob Wyld unconscious with a river stone. He gagged and tied Ruth to a tree and made her watch as he drowned her lover with his bare hands.

June shuddered, rubbing her arms against the damp air of the seedling house. The weight of Thornfield’s legacy pressed as heavily upon her as when she was a teenager, when she’d been devastated by the story of what happened to her grandmother. Pay attention now, Junie, her mother would say when she was teaching her about the flowers. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.

What would her mother tell her now, June wondered as she set about scarifying new seedlings so they could grow. Wattle Stone would say to her daughter, Junie, Thornfield is Alice’s birthright. Which she should learn about from you.

‘Alice, let’s get this show on the road.’ June’s voice spiralled up the stairs.

Alice sat on her bed in her stiff and starched uniform. Harry licked her knee. Alice sighed. She hauled her new schoolbag off her bed, and dragged her feet downstairs.

‘Now, don’t be like that,’ June snorted as she crossed the kitchen, holding Alice’s lunchbox out to her. ‘You’re going to have a great time. You’ll make new friends.’

Outside, June opened the farm truck. Harry leapt inside. Alice stood at the top of the verandah. Her feet wouldn’t work. June held a hand out to her.

‘Harry’s going to be with you.’ June gestured for her to join him. Alice stomped down the front steps, just to be clear. June helped her up into the truck. Harry yapped. Alice huffed. June shut the door, her bracelets chiming.

‘Off we go,’ she said, jogging around the truck to get in. As she drove away from the house a chorus of squawks and hoots erupted behind them. Alice turned to look through the back window. The Flowers ran after them, crowing and catcalling, throwing spools of streamers, and popping confetti bonbons.

‘You’ll be great, Alice!’

‘Go Alice!’

‘Have a great first day at school, Alice!’

Alice leant out of the truck, waving madly. June pressed on the horn as they drove away. Alice saw her wipe her eyes.

When they reached the road into town, June put her foot down. Alice hung on to Harry’s collar so tightly her fingers ached.

The town primary school was a cluster of small weatherboard cottages, canopied by gum trees. Leaves and gum nuts crunched under June and Alice’s feet, releasing their lemony scent. Harry strained against his lead, sniffing everything, nearly pulling Alice over. Outside the main building June squatted down to straighten Alice’s collar. Her breath smelled minty. Alice studied her face, so close. June’s eyes were just like her father’s. June stood and squared her shoulders.

‘Come on, now. You can do this.’

Walking into reception, Alice wasn’t sure which one of them June was talking to.

Alice sat waiting with June and Harry. The receptionist said Alice’s new teacher would come and meet her soon, at little lunch. June chewed on her peppermint gum like a cow with its cud. Her leg jiggled nonstop. Alice held Harry’s lead, stroking his smooth flanks. June checked her watch.

A bell shrilled.

‘Any minute now, Alice,’ June muttered. Harry reached forward to lick her hand reassuringly. June rubbed his ears. He arched his back to stretch, and released a long, loud fart. June coughed but kept her expression deadpan. Alice’s cheeks flamed. The receptionist cleared her throat. When the smell hit them, June got the giggles. Her eyes watering, she coughed again as if she might mask the smell with sound, and stood, hurriedly fumbling for the window latches. While Alice tried to help her, Harry sat panting, smiling.

‘I’m so sorry,’ June croaked at the receptionist. ‘So sorry.’ The woman nodded, holding a handkerchief to her nose. They got the windows open and sagged in relief. Alice peered at children of all ages pouring from the school rooms. She turned and sat back in her seat. Imagined Harry farting beside her in class. After a moment she leant forward and gave him a big hug, then handed June his lead. June looked at it and then at Alice, her eyes softening.

‘You can do this on your own, Alice,’ she said, smiling. Alice nodded.

The door opened. A young man with a streak of white chalk on his cheek walked in.

‘Alice Hart?’

As he approached, his nose twitched. He sniffed a couple of times, then glanced at Harry. June stood to meet him. Alice hung back. One of the man’s knee socks was falling down. His legs were covered in fine blonde hairs, not dark coarse ones like her father’s.

‘Well, Alice,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m Mr Chandler. Your new teacher.’

He dusted his hand on his shorts and held it out. Alice glanced at June. She nodded encouragingly. Mr Chandler’s hand hovered, outstretched. June mumbled something to him, out of Alice’s earshot. He dropped his hand. After a moment, he rubbed his chin, the same way Alice had noticed Twig sometimes did when she was deep in thought.

‘Tell me, Alice, do you happen to like books? I need a helper with our class library and I think you might have come along at the right time.’

After another moment, Alice offered her his hand.

The hours until the three o’clock bell went by as slow as cold molasses.

‘See you all tomorrow,’ Mr Chandler called as Alice’s classmates surged outside.

Alice dawdled, packing her schoolbag.

‘How did you go, Alice? First day okay?’

Alice nodded, keeping her head down. She didn’t make any friends. Because she didn’t talk. Because everyone acted like she smelled as bad as Harry. She should have kept him with her after all. Then she would at least have had one friend.

‘Are you being picked up?’ Mr Chandler asked.

‘I’m here to pick her up.’ Candy Baby stood in the doorway, chewing pink bubble gum, as startling and out of place as a spring flower in winter. Harry sat beside her, his tail wagging. Alice sniffled, beaming at the sight of them.

On their way out to the car park, as Candy asked Alice questions about her day and Harry excitedly licked her face, they passed a group of girls Alice recognised from her class.

‘There she is. The Spaz,’ one called.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’ Candy asked.

Alice wanted to go home, to her room with her books, overlooking the Flowers. As she fidgeted with her schoolbag zipper, she heard someone whimpering. She stopped to listen. Heard it again. Wandered away from Candy and Harry. Behind one of the school cottages, she found the boy from the river, lying in a patch of bindies. One of his cheeks was bruised and his lip was split. His legs were covered in fine, bleeding scratches.

‘Alice?’ Candy called, alarmed. ‘Oggi!’ she exclaimed as she came up beside Alice. ‘Oggi, what happened?’

‘I’m okay,’ he said as they helped him sit up. He looked Alice in the eye. ‘You’re not the only one that gets picked on for being different.’

‘Spazzos love each other!’ A snigger came from nearby bushes. Candy lurched at them, shaking the branches, sending Alice’s classmates scattering. Alice didn’t care; whatever Oggi was, she didn’t mind a bit if everyone thought she was the same.

He winced as Alice helped him to his feet. She picked up his schoolbag and swung it over one shoulder then offered the other to Oggi to lean on. He was easier to support than her mother when she was hurt; he was Alice’s size.

Together they hobbled to the front gate. Candy opened the truck, stowed their schoolbags, clipped Harry onto his lead in the back, and helped Alice get Oggi up onto the passenger seat.

‘Let’s get you home, mate. Put some calendula on those scratches and bruises, and you’ll soon be right as rain. Can’t say the same for whoever did this to you, though. God help them when Boryana finds out.’

‘Which is why we won’t tell her,’ Oggi begged.

Candy shook her head as she put the truck into reverse. They rode silently while Harry paced the tray, occasionally sticking his head into the wind. As they drove down Main Street, Alice drank in the pastel colours of the shopfronts. In her mind’s eye she emerged from the sugar cane again, taking in the dress shops, the cafe with the yellow flower on the table, and the library across the street, with the librarian who had a kind smile and gave her the book on selkies. Sally. Alice tried to see her more clearly, but Sally’s face drifted away.

Just past the town limits sign, Candy angled the truck onto a dirt track.

‘How beautiful are these old giants?’ Candy said, leaning forward over the steering wheel to look up. Alice admired their white and silver trunks, thinking of her mother’s stories of places so heavily covered with snow that trees and earth and sky were the same thing. ‘Here we are.’ Candy pulled up at a small clearing by the river. Alice watched it flow. So that’s how he’d found her; the river had led Oggi right to her.

Oggi eased himself out of the truck and limped towards a small timber house with a wide, low-set front verandah, red cotton curtains and an open front door.

‘Oggi?’ A voice called from inside. The black-haired woman with the red lipstick emerged from the house. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Oggs had a bit of trouble at school,’ Candy said as she got out of the truck.

Boryana spoke a torrent of words in a language Alice didn’t understand. She fussed over Oggi’s purpling bruises and spinifex cuts. He held his hands up as if in surrender and replied in the same bubbling language. Harry barked from the back of the truck until Candy let him off his lead. He sailed off the tray and ran to Boryana’s side, yapping at her hands as she gesticulated.

‘Sorry, sorry, Harry.’ Boryana patted Harry’s head to reassure him. ‘Everything’s all right. Ognian here is a big boy who can take care of himself, apparently, and won’t tell me who did this.’ Boryana crossed her arms.

‘We’d better get going, Bory, and leave you two to it,’ Candy said, nodding. ‘C’mon Harry.’

‘What? No! You have to come in. For a quick tea. June won’t mind.’

‘She bloody well will,’ Candy said. ‘It was this one’s first day at school’ – Candy put her arm around Alice – ‘and June will be keen to hear all about it. Bory, this is Alice. June’s granddaughter. Our newest Flower.’

Alice smiled shyly, though couldn’t take her eyes off Oggi.

‘Well, now, how lovely it is to meet you.’ Boryana’s words sounded like they were coated in something thick and rich. She took Alice’s hand and pumped it up and down.

‘You and my Oggi are friends?’

‘We go to school together.’ Oggi stepped forward.

Boryana nodded. ‘Very good.’ She glanced at Candy. ‘You really won’t stay for a quick cuppa? Looks like there’s a lot to catch up on.’ Boryana raised an eyebrow. Alice looked pleadingly up at Candy.

‘All right, all right. A quick one,’ she surrendered.

Candy and Boryana walked arm in arm into the house, their heads bent together, gossiping. Oggi and Alice stood awkwardly.

‘I’ll show you around.’ Oggi gestured to the river. Alice nodded. She clicked her fingers behind her. Harry licked her wrist as he followed.

Behind the house was a small, well-kept rose garden and a coop holding three fat chickens. Alice sat under a paperbark tree as Oggi opened the coop to let the chickens roam. Harry sniffed after them but then curled up, uninterested.

‘This one’s Pet, she’s my favourite,’ Oggi pointed out a fluffy black chicken, wincing when he stretched his bruised arm too far. Alice squeezed her eyes shut but could still see her mother’s naked body, covered in bruises, coming out of the sea.

‘Are you okay, Alice?’

She shrugged. Oggi went to his mother’s rose garden and gathered a collection of fallen petals and leaves. When his hands were full he carried them back to Alice and placed them on the dirt around her. Back and forth he went, between the rose garden and Alice, until his circle was complete. He jumped inside it and sat down.

‘After my dad died I did this to make myself feel better.’ Oggi wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘I told myself, anything inside the circle is safe from sadness. I’d make the circle as big or as little as I’d like. Once when Mum wouldn’t stop crying I made a circle around the whole house. Except I had to use all of the petals on her roses to do that, and she didn’t react the way I thought she would.’

Yellow butterflies fluttered over the roses. As Alice watched their wings, tiny lemon flames, she remembered how they hovered over the sea in summer, basked in the casuarina trees, and tapped against her bedroom window at night.

‘The mine Dad was working in collapsed. For a while Mum sat on the verandah every day waiting for him to come home. Always with a rose.’

Just like the queen who waited for her love to come home for so long she turned into an orchid. Alice rubbed a shiver from her arms.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked. She shook her head. They both sat looking at the river.

‘That’s why I pick you flowers and leave them in your boots at night,’ Oggi said, quietly.

Alice let her hair fall down over her face.

‘I know how it feels. To be sad and alone.’ Oggi turned a rose petal over in his hands. ‘We were only meant to be here for a little while, until Dad made enough money for us to move on, but since he died we have to stay here now. Mum doesn’t have the papers to do anything else.’

Alice tipped her head to one side.

‘We’re not Australian. I mean, Mum wasn’t born here. So we’re not officially allowed to be here. If we try to leave town or go anywhere else, Mum says we could be arrested and separated; she could get sent home and never be allowed to come back again. Which Mum doesn’t want, because this is – was – Dad’s country. That’s why we keep to ourselves and Mum doesn’t work anywhere too much, and I’m not allowed to have friends at school. Besides, no one wants to be my friend. They call my mum a witch. Like they call all the women at Thornfield.’

Alice’s eyes widened.

‘No, no, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s not true.’

She sighed, relieved.

Oggi picked at a stone in the dirt. ‘Mum dreams about going back to Bulgaria one day, so that’s what I’m going to do when I grow up. Make enough money to take her home to the Valley of the Roses.’

Alice lifted a rose petal to her nose. The fragrance reminded her of dreams of fire.

‘That’s where Mum says I was born. In the Valley of the Roses, back in Bulgaria. Not that it’s a place. Mum says it’s more a feeling. I don’t really know what that means, though. Except kings are buried there, and the roses grow as sweet as they do because there’s gold buried in the ground with their bones.’

Alice raised an eyebrow.

‘Okay, so I made up that last bit about the gold and the bones. But wouldn’t that be cool? If the bones of kings and treasure were buried underneath these magic valleys of roses?’

Footsteps approached.

‘We gotta get going, sweetpea,’ Candy called.

Alice and Oggi stepped outside the rose petal circle and followed Candy to the front of the house where Boryana was waiting for them.

‘Here, Alice. A little something to say welcome.’ Boryana handed her a small glass jar topped with cloth and tied with ribbon. Inside glistened pink jam. ‘It’s made from roses,’ she said. ‘It does magic things to toast.’

‘Bye, Alice,’ Oggi called. ‘See you at school tomorrow.’

Tomorrow. Alice waved back at him as Candy drove towards Main Street. She’d see him tomorrow.

As they headed home, she touched her fingertips to her hot cheeks. Sunbeams, she imagined, were shining out of her face.