The Loving Heart: An Australian Outback Romance, page 1
The Loving Heart
Lucy Walker
Copyright © The Estate of Lucy Walker 2021
This edition first published 2021 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1960
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover artwork images © Nataliya Sdobnikova / Marc Witte (Shutterstock)
Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd
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Books by Lucy Walker
from Wyndham Books
The Call of the Pines
Reaching for the Stars
The River is Down
Girl Alone
The One Who Kisses
The Ranger in the Hills
Come Home, Dear
Love in a Cloud
Home at Sundown
The Stranger in the North
Wife to Order
A Man Called Masters
Follow Your Star
Down in the Forest
The Runaway Girl
Kingdom of the Heart
The Other Girl
The Loving Heart
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Books by Lucy Walker
Chapter One
Elizabeth Heaton worked as a typist in a woolbuyer’s firm in the City of London. She had been in this office four years now … ever since she was eighteen, in fact. It was on her twenty-second birthday that something strange, wonderful, and earth-shaking happened to her.
She was sitting before her typewriter, just before ten o’clock in the morning, when the most junior typist, who often acted as office girl, came into the main office.
‘Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Mr. Ashby wants to see you. At once, he said.’
Elizabeth knew that when Mr. Ashby said at once he meant instantly, regardless of what you were doing at the moment. Mr. Ashby was the staff manager for Small and Smallwoods, woolbuyers for the British Isles and Continent. His word was law and his position in relation to the girls in the office was that of omnipotence.
Elizabeth Heaton was a shy girl with light brown curly hair and pretty forget-me-not blue eyes, a sensitive mouth and a generous smile. In the four years she had been with ‘Small’s’ she had held an unpretentious place in an office full of girls who, she thought, had much more glamour than herself. The other girls seemed to get engaged and then married off, mostly to the woolbuyers engaged by the firm who travelled to remote places like Australia, Spain and South Africa in pursuit of their firm’s business. The girls had then been able to go off globe-trotting with their husbands.
Elizabeth was not envious of these successes in the marriage market because tucked quietly away in her background home in Mereton, north of London, was Ralph Dalton.
Ralph was a Mereton boy with whom Elizabeth had grown up. They had been inseparable friends ever since Sunday School days and village tennis played once a week in the summer at the vicarage. Ralph was a young man of strong purpose who sometimes assumed a flippant attitude to other people’s important problems.
When Elizabeth had been seventeen and Ralph twenty they had talked about marriage. For two years after that they had talked around marriage. For two years now there had been silence on the subject and Elizabeth knew it was because Ralph was trying to establish himself firmly as a law clerk before he undertook responsibilities that would be a financial strain. Elizabeth lived in a lovely rose-bowered cottage with her widowed mother; her salary at Small’s helped in keeping that tiny ménage in a degree of comfort. Patiently she waited for Ralph to ‘establish’ himself.
Now on Elizabeth’s twenty-second birthday, a cold March morning, the staff manager sent for her. At once.
In the office of Small & Smallwoods it was known, in a strange grape-vine way, that the wife of a senior partner in the firm had come home to England from one of the firm’s big sheep stations in Australia. Mrs. Seaton Morgan was a woman of great charm, distinction and wealth. They also knew she had been travelling backwards and forwards between England and Australia all her life. The most junior employee of the firm knew that the finest merino wool was grown in Australia and a big share in Australia’s merino wool clip was grown on one or two stations owned or financed by the company that also owned Small’s.
Mrs. Morgan’s presence in England was one of those titillating pieces of gossip that kept the ebb and flow of office life alive. She was a director of Small’s in her own right.
Mrs. Morgan, Mr. Ashby told her, had fallen and fractured her hip and broken her right wrist on the steps of a West End store. She was in a Kensington nursing home and wanted a stenographer to do her correspondence for her.
Mr. Ashby did not ask Elizabeth would she go. He merely said:
‘Here is the address, Miss Heaton. See if you can be back and get the correspondence typed off by lunchtime and back to Mrs. Morgan for her signature early, this afternoon. Take a taxi both ways. And Miss Heaton …’
‘Yes, Mr. Ashby?’
‘You are the quietest of the typists so I thought you would be the best person to send forward to a patient in a nursing home. Especially,’ he added meaningly, ‘to Mrs. Seaton Morgan who is, I believe, suffering a great deal of pain.’
‘I understand, Mr. Ashby,’ Elizabeth said gravely.
‘Good girl,’ he said, for once unbending.
As Elizabeth put on her coat and small head-hugging hat and drew on her gloves she had thought that this was the first time being ‘quiet’ had proved to be an asset.
She was not only going to see the fabulous Mrs. Morgan, but Mr. Ashby had trusted her to carry out what was probably a diplomatic mission.
On the way to the nursing home Elizabeth conjured up visions of a haughty aristocratic lady made slightly difficult by injury and pain.
When Mrs. Morgan’s special nurse showed Elizabeth into the flower-bedecked room she received one of the pleasantest surprises of her life. Mrs. Morgan, a handsome, middle-aged woman with dark questing eyes and a humorous mouth, was sitting up against her pillows, her head only just appearing over the great cradle that protected her splinted leg from the bedclothes and her bandaged wrist and hand resting on a pillow beside her.
‘Come in, my dear,’ she said gaily. ‘So you’re the stenographer. I hope you can bear with the sight of this frightful hump in the middle of the bed. If you can’t, my dear, just keep your eyes on the flowers. Aren’t they gorgeous? And in England, at this time of the year!’
One quick glance at the roses, sweet peas and carnations told Elizabeth they either came out of a hothouse or didn’t come out of England at all. Delivered by air from one of the Continental agencies of Small’s probably.
‘How do you do, Mrs. Morgan,’ Elizabeth said gravely. ‘I’m Elizabeth Heaton and Mr. Ashby sent me from the head office. May I be of assistance to you?’
Mrs. Morgan put her head on one side and regarded Elizabeth with a smile.
‘As long as you’re not too serious about it, my dear. What I really want is someone young to cheer me up. Did you know that every Small, Smallwood and Morgan in the firm is over sixty? Not that they haven’t been blessedly kind to me. They have. But I miss my young people out there in Australia.’
Elizabeth smiled. Mrs. Morgan reflected the smile and suddenly Elizabeth’s smile had reached her eyes, her lovely white teeth gleamed in a face made young and pretty.
‘I’m so sorry about your accident,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I can quite understand how you miss your family …’
‘They’re not exactly my family. They
re all my friends’ families. Have you ever been on a sheep station? But, of course not. Well, my dear, a big station is just a mass of families. There’s the manager, the overseer, the stockmen … all with wives and families. I regard them all as my own.’
Mrs. Morgan indicated a chair and Elizabeth sat down.
‘Take off your coat, Elizabeth. May I call you Elizabeth? You’ll get too hot in this centrally heated room and then be cold when you go outside.’
While Elizabeth was taking off her gloves and coat and taking out her note-book and pencil Mrs. Morgan went on to explain how she wrote every week to ‘all her families’ and told them about her adventures in England.
‘Of course I’m an Englishwoman,’ she said, ‘but every time I come back I find fresh wonders in a country where I was born and educated and married. Does that seem strange to you, Elizabeth?’
Elizabeth shook her head.
‘I don’t think anyone would live long enough to know England so well there was nothing fresh left to discover and love,’ she said.
‘Ah, but you should go away, my dear. It is the coming back that is so truly wonderful.’
Elizabeth remembered her mother’s wish that she, Elizabeth, should take a holiday on the Continent. She said nothing, however, but smiled and prepared to take down the invalid’s letters.
Elizabeth was both charmed and fascinated by Mrs. Morgan and when presently she began to take the dictation she found herself quietly enjoying her employer’s descriptive and amusing accounts of all she had been seeing and doing in the week before her accident. Elizabeth found a new and entrancing view of London that warmed her own heart. Mrs. Morgan’s account of her accident made it sound light and trivial, even amusing.
The longer Elizabeth stayed in this woman’s presence the more she both liked and admired her.
When it was time to pack up and go Elizabeth thanked the other for her kind welcome and said she had really enjoyed the visit.
‘Of course you did,’ said Mrs. Morgan unexpectedly. ‘I could see you laughing behind that correct stenographer’s manner of yours. I enjoyed watching you thaw out too, my dear. Now tell Mr. Ashby you’re to come back next week and we’ll have some more smiles together. Now, off you go. I’m not going to let them send you back in this raw weather to-day. I’ll telephone Mr. Ashby from my bedside to send a messenger boy back with the letters.’
Mrs. Morgan had been so gay Elizabeth did not know whether she should shake hands on departure or not. The older woman had been more like a friend than an employer and for this very reason Elizabeth was anxious not to overstep the bounds set down by Mrs. Morgan herself.
The patient resolved the matter by just waving her own hand, so Elizabeth smiled, drew on her gloves and walked quietly to the door.
‘I shall tell Mr. Ashby to send you next week,’ Mrs. Morgan said again.
Elizabeth went through the door and down the lift out into the street. There she took in a deep breath of cold March air. It was all the more bracing because she felt she had just left the delights of a warm cosy fireside.
On two other occasions Elizabeth went to the nursing home to take Mrs. Morgan’s letters. Then the outings ceased as the patient was transferred to her own home at Leath Manor with a trained nurse.
The three weeks had been like a holiday to Elizabeth because she had had the pleasure of this unusual work and then later the joy of recounting her experiences first to Ralph, waiting for her at the appointed spot outside the Underground, and then her mother over the supper table.
The only chill in the whole encounter was the casual reception Ralph gave to the accounts of it. Elizabeth had a vague feeling that Ralph either disapproved or was not impressed by Elizabeth keeping company with people who were rich and powerful in the wool industry. Perhaps he thought it would all go to her head. Well, she would soon show him she was capable of accepting the experience joyfully and then putting it away without regrets when it was over.
Six weeks later the junior typist came in and said once again:
‘Elizabeth, Mr. Ashby wants you. At once.’
The at once made Elizabeth think it was not advisable to delay even to draw out the typing she was now engaged on. She felt a lilt of excitement and anticipation. Last time that order had come she had had the delightful experience of working for Mrs. Morgan. What now? But such good luck couldn’t happen twice!
She pushed back her chair and went quickly to the door.
‘Don’t run, Elizabeth,’ laughed Bessie Wainwright ‒ another girl who had just become engaged to a woolbuyer from one of the Continental firms. She wore an enormous single diamond engagement ring that had made even Elizabeth feel faintly envious. It wasn’t the size of the ring so much as the brave advertisement that soon the hat would go round in the office for another typist about to turn into a young matron. And there would be gift parties and presently little cartons of wedding cake for every member of the staff.
One day perhaps … she and Ralph …
‘Don’t run,’ Bessie Wainwright laughed. ‘It won’t be a second director’s wife with a broken hip.’
When Elizabeth entered the staff manager’s office he stood up and offered her a seat. He smiled on her.
‘Well, I’ve news for you, Miss Heaton,’ he said. ‘First, you live alone with your mother, don’t you? Could she spare you for six or eight weeks? Is there any reason why you should not go abroad on the firm’s business for a period as long as that?’
Elizabeth looked at him in astonishment. The only people in ‘Small’s’ who were important enough to go abroad on the firm’s business were the woolbuyers and the directors.
‘Abroad, Mr. Ashby?’ she stammered.
The staff manager watched the girl closely as he added his next words.
‘Mrs. Seaton Morgan, to whom you have already rendered some service, is returning to Australia. The firm has agreed to send someone with her as she is still not able to use her right hand or walk without the help of sticks. She has specifically asked for you.’
Elizabeth felt as if she had been hit on the head with a million pound note.
She did her best to maintain her correct stenographer’s demeanour but her words came stammering out.
‘You mean … go away with Mrs. Morgan, Mr. Ashby?’
To the place from whence the best merino wool came … and from which Small and Smallwood made its fortune? The place that was so far down under the curve of the world that it was in another world altogether?
And as these bewildering questions flashed through her head there came fleeting images of Ralph waiting outside the Underground for her; and her mother sitting alone at the supper table in the rose-bowered cottage.
Her mother would be glad, she knew that instantly. But Ralph? She remembered his flippant disapproval of her happy visits to Mrs. Morgan in the nursing home. She saw mental images of Ralph walking home alone … and later, perhaps, growing used to it. Used to freedom. Perhaps not wanting to return to the tie of a companionship that had lost the gay rainbow colours that had once adorned it.
In the midst of her surprise and bewildering pleasure at the request, she knew fear.
Six or eight weeks was a long time. Perhaps Ralph might …
The colour mounted in Elizabeth’s cheeks. Mr. Ashby was talking about the arrangements for passages, a travelling allowance and a dress allowance in order that Elizabeth should be suitably clothed for the voyage. Elizabeth heard it all yet her mind was fleeing away down long dark tunnels of thought. How long had this fear of Ralph’s lack of adventurousness in the matter of an engagement and later marriage really troubled her?
How long had she known, deep in her heart, that Ralph had got too used to her? As her mother once had said … like an old cloak?
The only other friends she had were mere pleasant acquaintances with whom she and Ralph played tennis at the vicarage. Without him her whole world would wobble off its axis.
‘I see this has come as a shock to you, Miss Heaton,’ Mr. Ashby said. ‘I want you to leave what work you are doing now. I’ll get Miss Wainwright to take it over. You had better take the rest of the day off in order to consult your mother. I’d like you to telephone me as to her reaction by two o’clock and then take a quick train out to Leath Manor and get there for tea with Mrs. Morgan by four-thirty. Can you arrange to do that?’
