The Herbalist’s Daughters – coming 19 November 2024. Pre-order at a special low price here. Read a sample below.
Chapter One
South Australia, 1997
Yellow ochre paddocks glisten under a fierce early afternoon sun, sheep crowding into the scarce shade of the occasional tree. White heat attacks the car’s windows, ineffectual against the state-of-the-art Audi air conditioning.
Cocooned within the cool, Mara’s stomach doesn’t roil because of the weather. No, the cause is two events which took place less than an hour before. Eighty kilometres apart, she wavers on the tightwire strung between their poles.
She speeds towards one, with all the normal anxiety this event rightfully claims. The other remains behind, physically if not emotionally. Not new, this one, simply resurfaced, and at a time when she can not, will not, deal with it.
A Volkswagen beetle ambles along the outside lane. Mara scowls, indicates, checks her mirrors and slides the Audi to the left, overtaking. A niggle of outrage at the Volkswagen bubbles for an instant before dissolving in immateriality.
The road cuts through serried rows of hot, green vineyards patiently waiting their evening sprinkler appointments. Mara focuses. Her angry disquiet has to take a back seat while she deals with the current emergency, and she works hard to stuff it deep in her ribcage where it has festered for the last six months. Impossible, today, to be faced again with the doubts, the fears.
The low hills force her to slow, winding up and around through drowsy hamlets, finally straightening to gentler curves on the downhill run to the coast. Off to the left she catches sight of Port Elliot and its boulders nestled in the horseshoe cove. Mara keeps right, following the hill’s descent into Victor Harbour, past the Norfolk pines which soar between the seaweed-strewn beach and the tennis courts. In the relative coolness of the seaside, four puce-faced women in short white skirts and tee-shirts lunge across the grey asphalt.
Turning right onto residential streets instead of following the more direct but heavier trafficked coastal road, Mara threads her way past sturdy between-war houses with wilting hydrangeas and blowsy roses, wrought iron gates and sandy verges. Despite the hour-plus drive, she needs the brief diversion past the house. The illusion of coolness given by its stone solidity, curtained windows and deep verandah help gather her scrambled thoughts, eliminate visions of what’s likely going on eighty kilometres north, and concentrate on what waits for her a few hundred metres from here.
At the T-junction, she returns to the main road near the high school. School is coming out, and young cyclists, pedestrians, mums driving station wagons crowd the way. Mara joins the queue created by a lollipop lady’s stop sign held up for a swarm of students with backpacks slung over shoulders. She bites her lip at the delay. Freed from the lollipop lady’s control, Mara drives into Bay Road and slows, watching out for the unfamiliar entrance. She was last here five years ago, once. For her father.
Mara glances at the car clock. Three forty. She has made good time since receiving the call at home not long after finishing her salad lunch. She’d been on the phone to Peter, listening to his bland explanations, when her mobile rang.
‘I have to answer it,’ she told him. ‘Might be a problem.’ Part of her welcomed the distraction, part of her already worried – only her mother and Josie had the number. And Peter.
‘Of course.’ He hadn’t hidden the relief in his voice. ‘Talk to you later.’
Neither had he asked her to ring him if there was a problem. She will call him when she knows more. Before he leaves for his business trip to Sydney. Mara shuts out the unwanted images which insist on dancing in her mind.
A big sign emerges on her left, and Mara swings the Audi into the car park. Nosing into a spot in the shade beneath the fuzzy flowers of a lilly pilly tree, she pulls up, switches off the ignition and waits for the engine to grumble into silence.
‘Coming,’ she murmurs, and opens the door into the heat.
***
The receptionist, hair limp, face pink and damp as she grapples with the unfamiliarities of a computer system – which, she mutters to Mara, is new and sending her mad –nevertheless quickly finds Kathryn Pearce by consulting a paper list under the keyboard. Having beeped a relevant person, she bids Mara take a seat.
‘Water there,’ she adds, pointing to a plastic cooler in a corner of the room.
Mara would prefer tea or coffee. Given neither are on offer, she helps herself to water in its tiny paper cup, gulps the icy liquid down, tosses the cup in the adjacent bin, and sits, as bidden, on a bright orange vinyl chair. Above her, a desultory fan shifts the hot air side to side. Mara squints at it, hoping it’s cooler where her mother lies.
A too-young doctor walks briskly in from one of the two corridors. ‘Mrs Ash?’
Mara stands. ‘Yes. What happened? How is she?’
The doctor gives a professional frown. ‘Seems your mother was in her garden about lunchtime’– he briefly raises his eyebrows to imply his views on an elderly woman being out in the midday sun –‘and fainted.’
‘Oh.’ Heat exhaustion crosses Mara’s mind, cured with water and rest … except the doctor is still speaking.
‘… hit her head on a stone wall, knocked her out.’ He gives a sympathetic moue. ‘Fortunately, a neighbour happened to be at her window and saw what happened, called an ambulance.’
Mrs Bowen, Kathryn’s self-appointed watcher. Thank God for Mrs Bowen.
‘Hit her head?’ Mara chews her lip. ‘Is she conscious? Will she be okay?’
A pained flash in the doctor’s eyes tells Mara the answer, although the spoken words are couched with care. ‘I’m sorry. Your mother hasn’t regained consciousness. As for okay, we have to wait and see. We’ve done a scan and …’
Mara’s natural question, what does the scan show, is strangled at birth by the trailed off sentence.
‘Can I see her?’ she asks.
The doctor shows Mara to a private room and leaves her with a kind, ‘Stay as long as you need. I’ll pop in before I go off shift.’
The gentle whirring of a more efficient fan than the one in reception combines with the steady blinking and beeping of monitoring machines to generate a sense of organised calm. Mara tries, unsuccessfully, to grasp the calm. It holds itself aloof. Calm is for the patient, for the nurses. Not for Mara.
Her mother’s face, usually lightly tanned at this time of year, is pale, thinly delicate. If she presses a finger to Kathryn’s cheek, Mara is certain the indentation would stay. The deep wrinkles in her forehead, the sagging skin at her throat are expected for an 83-year-old. Both arrived late, and appeared to have been invited along solely to keep the laugh lines around Kathryn’s eyes and mouth company. The lustrous dark hair has given way strand by reluctant strand to silver and white. The thickness remains, like Kathryn’s deep blue eyes never lost their glittering golden shards.
Mara’s father used to tease his beautiful wife. ‘What magic keeps you so gorgeous?’ he would say, grinning, and Kathryn would give a deliberately enigmatic smile and remind him she is descended from witches, and not too long ago either. A family in-joke, about the witches, always been around. It’s never occurred to Mara to ask if the silly statement meant anything.
Panic swells in her chest. She wants to ask now, while she can. A thousand questions crowd in, a jumble of half-thoughts, of great black holes of ignorance. Mara lays her fingers tentatively on Kathryn’s thin hand, careful to avoid the tubes. Perhaps her mother will feel her daughter’s presence, loving her, praying. She sits in the vinyl chair – this one green – and speaks softly. They say people in this state are aware of those whom they love, can take comfort from being spoken to.
‘I need you to get better, Mum,’ Mara starts. Appealing to Kathryn’s constant willingness to be helpful might work. ‘I think me and Josie are going to need you soon.’ No, she doesn’t want to bring her other problem into play. Too upsetting for everyone and besides, Mara could be wrong.
‘Do you remember,’ she begins over, ‘when you and Dad first moved here, and how much you loved it? How your favourite place was The Bluff, how you’d follow the path to the top and search for whales like you were a nineteenth century whaler’s daughter ready to call, Thar she blows?’ Mara smiles. ‘You said the landscape, with the sea, the bare cliffs, the open red and brown paddocks, is the opposite to where you grew up, yet you believed there was an affinity between the two.’
Kathryn’s finger twitches beneath Mara’s soft touch. Mara peers into her mother’s face. Her eyelids flicker, remained closed.
‘Mum, can you hear me?’
The beeping of the machine quickens before slowing to its steady rhythm. Kathryn stirs, her lips part.
‘Do you need a drink, Mum?’ Mara lifts the plastic cup with its straw from the bedside table and manoeuvres it to Kathryn’s lips. Her heart beats harder when her mother takes the straw, sucks and swallows. She shakes her head, a mere inch either way, shooing away the drink. Her eyelids flutter.
‘I’m here, Mum. Do you remember what happened?’ Mara grasps Kathryn’s hand. The frail fingers curl, trying to return the hold. ‘You had a fall in the garden, but good old Mrs Bowen saw you, thank God, and called an ambulance.’
Kathryn blinks, her eyes open, unfocused, staring beyond Mara’s shoulder. Her fingers tighten. ‘Should have gone home,’ she murmurs. Her gaze, steadier, shifts to Mara, and the delicate wrinkles on her forehead deepen. ‘Taken you, shown you.’
‘Home? Do you mean London? You and Dad went, remember? Had a ball and couldn’t wait to get back.’ Mara and Peter had also visited, generally business trips. Peter had discouraged any interactions with family, not wanting, he said, to spend time with strangers.
Kathryn’s brow grows more crinkles. ‘The Forest,’ she mumbles. ‘The river. The river’s waiting.’ Her lips curl, the barest semblance of a smile. ‘Been patient too long, the goddess.’
‘The goddess?’ A goddess is a new variation on witches.
‘Yes, the goddess, Sabrina. She loves us, you see …’ Kathryn’s voice fades. She closes her eyes. Her grip on Mara’s hand loosens.
The machines beep more loudly, insistent. Mara jumps from the chair to the door, stepping aside as two nurses run into the room.
Please, God, no. Not yet.
_____________________________________________________________
Pre-order The Herbalist’s Daughters here.
The standalone sequel to River Witch. Find all Cheryl’s books here.