Kingdom of the Heart: An Australian Outback Romance, page 1
Kingdom of the 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 1959
www.wyndhambooks.com/lucy-walker
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 © Viktor Gladkov / totajla (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
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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
Judith read the pilot’s bulletin quickly.
‘Altitude 9500 feet. Outside temperature 54 Fahrenheit. We are passing Sandy Bay six miles east at 5.14 p.m. Landing at Dampier 5.40 p.m. Weather in Dampier ‒ Fine and warm.’
It was five-twenty now so by the time Judith had received the bulletin from the passenger in front of her it was too late to see Sandy Bay. They were still over the sea but she knew they were losing altitude to come into Dampier because her ears were beginning to thrum uncomfortably.
On the long 1200 mile flight, straight up the west coast of Australia, Judith’s ears had told her every time they had been about to make a landing.
She smiled with amusement at the two children in the seats across the aisle. They both had their hands over their ears but they were exchanging mischievous smiles with one another. From the way they had fastened and unfastened their safety belts at each landing Judith knew they were veteran air travellers. Children flying backwards and forwards to school! What would our grandmothers have thought!
What would Judith’s own mother have thought for that matter!
Judith’s mother had been widowed in the second world war and she had put her only child in boarding school, and married again. After that there hadn’t been any room in her life for her daughter. Somehow the girl was a reminder to her mother that because she had had to nurse the child through scarlet fever at the time the soldiers embarked for the Middle East, she had been unable to see her husband off. She had a new husband and a new family now. Judith, in a boarding school, had been allowed to drift away from them all.
Judith had grown into a lovely young woman: brown hair, blue eyes, a mobile mouth that was charming when she smiled and troubled yet firm when she did not smile. She had developed at twenty-one an inclination to battle her own way through life, and she had not been finding it easy. Indeed she had been finding it a lonely business until out of the postman’s bag one day had come a letter from a solicitor informing her that Sander Yates, an eccentric uncle living on a cattle station in the north-west of Australia, with whom Judith had only ever had contact through the exchange of Christmas cards, had died and left her a half share in his station.
Judith hadn’t even known he owned the station. She would have liked to have grieved for her uncle but she was not being very successful. She had never seen him and the only thing she knew of him was his signature on a Christmas card. But oh, how grateful she now felt towards him. She hadn’t been so alone in life after all. Somewhere there had been this strange man who had bequeathed her some estate.
When Judith had got over the shock, and the dismay that there was no way of thanking her uncle, she had begun to get very excited about her station.
It seemed fabulous that one minute she was a lonely girl struggling in the first stages of a business career and the next moment was a property owner of considerable significance.
Everything in the matter of this half share had not been plain sailing for Judith. The other legatee was a man … Andrew Allen. The solicitor, sitting in his dusty office, surrounded by shelves of files that must have dated back half a century, could not tell Judith very much about Andrew Allen.
‘He is a man of very high repute in the north,’ he said. ‘He’s thirty-five and has a reputation of being one of the best cattlemen in the state. He came in here only once. All I can say is that he is very good-looking. A fine stamp of man; but he also looks, and speaks, like a man who knows his own mind and is used to getting his own way. He was very uncommunicative about himself and I saw no reason why I should ask personal questions. His high reputation is quite enough to go on.
‘He had a rather pretty woman with him when he came but she remained in the outer office ‒ so I don’t know who she was. He did not say, and I did not ask. But he is not married at the present time and is living alone at Wongong Station. He has virtually managed the business side of the station for the last ten years.’
Judith had been sitting on the other side of his table trying not to see the dust on all those files. From what he, the trustee, said it seemed a very just thing for her uncle, Sander Yates, to have left half his property to this man, Andrew Allen.
What was not just was the dismaying fact that Mr. Allen absolutely forbade Judith to set foot on the property. His reasons simply were that the lonely north was no place for a young woman. The station was run entirely by servants and two stockmen who had lived in the bush all their lives. There was a good and comfortable homestead … a new one had been built in the last three years … but the nearest neighbouring station was a hundred and twenty-five miles away. They were the nearest neighbours other than the residents of Dampier … airport for trans-Australian planes, and international planes coming into the country. Dampier was a hundred and forty miles from the station.
All sorts of correspondence had flowed back and forth but all to no avail. Judith had, of course, every right to go to the station. The solicitor was careful to explain this to the girl. She owned half of it and unless and until she sold her half … to Andrew Allen … she could take up residence or possession.
From this point onward, however, he, the trustee, was on Andrew Allen’s side. ‘How,’ he asked her, ‘could you stay even a short period on the station if there is no woman to accompany you? And it is very formidable and lonely country. How could a young girl like you find anything to do on such a place?’
‘I’d learn to muster cattle too,’ Judith had said stoutly.
The solicitor had put his hand to his mouth and raised his eyebrows.
‘That takes experience, my dear young woman.’
‘Write and inform Mr. Allen that I will come and see what my property is like and I will arrange to bring a responsible married woman with me,’ she said.
This brought a burst of annoyance from Andrew Allen that was more like shrapnel than correspondence.
There was insufficient accommodation in the homestead, he said. The Aboriginal workers, who had been carefully trained, would be unable to handle the situation ‒ they would pack up and go walkabout and there would be no one to ride the boundaries or attend the bores. It would put the station out of action. There was no possibility of his making Miss Brandon welcome on Wongong even for a short visit.
Judith wrote back that surely somebody would accompany her from Dampier for a short visit of a day or two.
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br /> No, said Andrew Allen, writing angrily. No one would do that. Everyone in Dampier knew what a lonely place was Wongong Station. It was hardly likely anyone would cross a hundred and forty miles of plain and pindan country in the blazing heat in order to dislocate the homestead and the servants for the sake of a rash and unknown young lady.
All this correspondence was through the trustee.
At this point Judith began to get not only stubborn but angry.
How dare Andrew Allen! Was he trying to force her to sell and so wrest her property from her?
Rash, indeed! Why, handfuls of women had helped their husbands pioneer the north and north-west before Andrew Allen was born.
This she said through the medium of the solicitor’s stenographer.
A further burst of shrapnel came from Wongong Station.
‘Exactly,’ wrote Andrew Allen. ‘The only possible way a man and woman could live in these conditions was if they were married.’
Judith was really angry now.
‘All right! In that case tell him I’ll marry him,’ she said to the astonished solicitor and she walked with great dignity from his office.
Judith sat at home in her little one-roomed flat in the southern city and thought about it.
If it was the last thing she did on earth she was going to see that station. She had every legal right and she was cross with the trustee, who, though he agreed she had every legal right, also agreed with Andrew Allen that it was an impractical idea.
All Uncle Sander Yates’s money had been in his station. After taxation was paid there had been only £976 in cash in a savings-bank account. The station was 280,000 acres bordered on the west by the sea and on the east by the desert. It was a narrow strip of country that got sufficient of the tropical rains to rank it as cattle country. And it was worth £30,000. Judith could take her half share of the £976 and sell her half of the station for £15,000 … and go. That was Andrew Allen’s attitude.
Well, she would take half the £976 and go to Dampier and see for herself. And tell the trustee and Andrew Allen about it afterwards.
After she had paid her air fare she placed her small nest egg in the savings bank in the city and had her signature forwarded to the corresponding bank in Dampier so she could draw money there.
Then at five forty-five a.m. on the first day of September she took flight to Dampier.
It was a perfect flight. The only time Judith felt any movement was when the plane descended or ascended at the ports of call. The day might have been made in heaven, it was so blue and gold and shining. Below was the red earth on one side and the green, yellow and blue sea on the other. Way up there in front of her was her station. It was very hard to believe.
Once the air hostess sat beside Judith to fasten on a safety belt as they prepared to make an ascent. She and Judith chatted together pleasantly and Judith discovered the air hostess knew most of the northern station owners, who often had occasion to fly south on business.
‘Do you know Mr. Andrew Allen of Wongong?’ Judith asked
‘Goodness,’ said the air hostess with interest ‘Don’t tell me you’re a relative of his?’
Judith shook her head.
‘I’ve never met him. I just wondered …’
‘You won’t wonder for long once you have met him. He’s got everything that it takes. The girls on this line all get the dithers when he’s flying. Not that he flies much …’ She sighed. ‘There’s no percentage in having a crush on Mr. Allen. He’s as distant as a god on Olympus except when you give him his lunch. Then he smiles …’
The girl rolled her eyes up as if Andrew Allen smiling did weird things to her in the region of the heart.
A god on Olympus, thought Judith? More likely a self-appointed god on Wongong. Just a selfish recluse! But she said nothing of her thoughts to the air hostess.
And here she was now in a plane swooping down low across the bay to turn and land into the wind on Dampier airport to storm that bush citadel of Andrew Allen’s.
The plane came down, bumped three times and taxied to a standstill.
The dry air of the north blew warmly against Judith’s fair unprotected face as she stepped out of the plane and stood a moment at the top of the steps. She said good-bye to the air hostess and followed the other passengers across the gravel square to the iron-wired fence beyond which a small crowd of people stood waiting to welcome their own particular passengers.
Away beyond the confines of the airport was the great stretch of low bush which she was to discover was called the pindan in this northern territory. All around her now were the gleaming buildings of the air company. There was another DC3 aircraft on the ground which, she overheard someone say, was a freighter. There were also two small planes which were feeder planes to the main airline. What vastnesses of bush and desert had they traversed before alighting at Dampier?
It was all new. All exciting. Yet she did feel suddenly very alone.
Hatless, and in her pretty cotton dress, Judith stood helpless for a few minutes. She had sent a telegram to the Inlands Club Hotel through the manager of the bank where her nest egg lay. How did she get there? Airports were always out of town and she would need either the air company’s station wagon or a taxi.
Somehow going in the air company’s wagon looked forlorn when everyone else was tumbling into a car with relatives and friends.
She stood indecisive for a few minutes. There was a taxi there. Perhaps if she took that …
People were looking at her curiously. No northern town is big enough for a stranger to pass unnoticed, much less a stranger who was pretty, charmingly dressed and alone.
A pleasant-looking woman who was about to get last into a car saw Judith. She hesitated and then came across to her with a smile.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked kindly. ‘Were you waiting for someone?’
‘I was thinking of taking a taxi,’ Judith said quietly. ‘I am going to the Inlands Club Hotel.’
‘It’s about ten minutes in a car. I’m so sorry we are full up. We could have offered you a lift.’
Judith smiled her gratitude for the kind thought. As a matter of fact it meant a lot to her. She had suddenly felt unexpectedly desolate standing there alone. The kind words revived her spirits.
‘Thank you very much. I will take the taxi.’
‘I’ll call him for you.’
The woman was a very pleasant person, perhaps halfway through her forties, with the kindly face of one who takes a human interest in other people.
‘Bill,’ she called to the taxi driver. ‘Here’s a passenger for you. Will you get Miss … Miss …’
‘Walters,’ Judith said. ‘Judith Walters.’
Till that very moment it had not occurred to Judith to use only half her name. She was surprised at herself. Had some part of her unconscious mind been plotting this idea of travelling incognito? She was certain she hadn’t thought consciously of it before.
She was so astonished at herself that she watched the taxi driver get her case from the air office and said good-bye to the helpful stranger without knowing she did it.
Her name was Judith Walters Brandon … the Walters being her own father’s name. When her mother had remarried Judith had been a small child and the child’s name had been changed by deed poll to include Brandon, the name of her stepfather.
Uncle Sander Yates had known this because he had left the legacy to ‘My only living relative Judith Brandon’. He had ignored his half-sister who was Judith’s mother. The will stated it was his gesture to Judith’s own father who had been killed in the war.
But the name Walters was the name Judith had been born with. She had always included it in her signature.
For the life of her she couldn’t think now why she had left Brandon off when she had given her name a few minutes ago. But having done so she felt a sense of exhilaration. She was back to who she was when she was born. Moreover she could have a look around Dampier and possibly Wongong Station without having to come to word-blows too early in the adventure with Andrew Allen.
‘Andrew Allen! Andrew Allen!’ she said to herself as the taxi turned off the red earth-track on to the bitumen road that swung around the bay. She was irritated with the way the name kept singing a refrain in her head. It had a mellifluous sound but Judith wasn’t thinking about that. She found herself continuously conducting a private argument with Andrew. She was having a lovely time … in the privacy of her mind … telling him just what she thought of him and his impertinent correspondence.
