Dust of the Land Read online

  DUST OF THE LAND

  J.H. FLETCHER

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  To Selwa

  Agent and friend

  To whom I owe so much

  I do not support Queen Elizabeth’s nonsense about having a man’s heart in a woman’s body. I have a woman’s body and a woman’s heart, and together they make me a match for any man.

  Bella Tucker

  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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bella Tucker woke at four-thirty, as she did every morning. As disciplined in mind as body, she never needed an alarm: this had been her time for getting up for as long as she could remember.

  That it was a Sunday and her sixty-fifth birthday made no difference to her routine. She was one day older than yesterday, not one year, and the fuss made about such things always amazed her. Most women retired from work before they were sixty but Bella felt as young and vital as always. She had no plans to hand over the day-to-day management of the business any time soon; should she ever decide to do so, there was still a world beyond mining and iron ore. New challenges had always supplied the oxygen her spirit demanded and there were many projects out there to excite her. Retirement? Death? There was no room in her plans for either.

  She got out of bed, feet sinking into the luxurious carpet, and headed for the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, after her customary workout, her mind already grappling with the challenges of the coming day, she went barefoot into the jarrah-panelled study next to her bedroom.

  Unlike the downstairs office where Bella met staff and advisers, this was the place where she kept her personal mementos: photographs of her husband Garth and their two children, Peace and Richard; a snap of her mother taken forty-seven years earlier; and a more recent one of Maisie, the Aboriginal friend who had taught her so much about the bush and who had helped keep her sane during the bad times. On a side wall hung an oil painting of her grandfather, the earl, sitting on the terrace at Ripon Grange, his favourite gun dog at his feet.

  This room was the thinking place where Bella planned her business strategies and the future. Apart from a leather-bound blotting pad and gold pen and pencil set, the desk was bare. She sat down, opened a drawer and took out a file containing the text of the speech she would be making that morning. Ten minutes later she put it to one side, satisfied she knew what she wanted to say and how to say it, and turned to the documents that Martin Dexter, her financial director, had sent over the night before. Sixty-fifth birthday or not, there was still work to be done.

  For the next two hours she studied cash-flow projections, anticipated ore tonnages, details of the delivery of the last freight wagons, safety reports from the mine… Occasionally she jotted a note to remind her of a point that needed clarification, but in the main everything seemed in order.

  At seven o’clock, half an hour after the first light had started stealing through the curtains, Bella locked the papers away and went into the bedroom to put on her riding gear. She pulled on her freshly polished boots, ran down the sweeping staircase to the marble-floored hallway and headed for the stables at the rear of the house.

  She was wearing breeches, woollen shirt and heavy sweater: it was August, after all. She rode every morning she could manage; with two hundred and fifty acres of grounds, she had plenty of space. She saddled up, slapped on her hard hat and rode out as the sun rose in a festival of birdsong. She saw no one. The staff knew to keep out of her way; this was still her thinking time, and woe betide anyone who intruded on it.

  Riding brought Bella closest to her husband and the days when they had mustered cattle together across the unfenced miles of the north. Dear Garth, who had given her so much. His death, twenty-one years earlier, was an enduring wound.

  Riding also reminded her of her adolescence in Yorkshire, where she had first learnt about horses and the saddle. The memories returned every morning: childhood in the cottage with her unmarried mother; Ripon Grange and her wicked witch of a stepmother; her lost love; marriage to Garth Tucker; and the one-and-a-half-million-acre Miranda Downs in Australia’s far north…

  She welcomed them because they reminded her not only of how far she had come but how far she still had to go. It was the future that mattered and the future was glorious. Tomorrow she would sign the ten-year lease of a rail link owned by rival company BradMin. This would enable her to go on delivering ore to the Baoshan blast furnaces at Shanghai long and profitably enough to build her own railway and escape from reliance on a rival she did not trust. After all the years of struggle, the future of the company she had built from nothing and of her family would be secure.

  It was a thought to bring music to her day.

  She reached the gallop she’d had opened at the edge of the woodland so that both horse and rider could get the workout they craved. She leant forward to murmur in Caliph’s ear. ‘Let’s go!’

  She thumped her heels firmly against the gelding’s flanks. At once they were flying, the cold air bringing tears to her eyes, the reins taut in her gloved hands. All too soon they reached the end of the ride and drew up, both panting. Bella patted Caliph’s flank. ‘Well done, boy.’

  At one time she’d joined the breakfast gallops at Ascot, with its thousand-metre straight, but the media had got on to that and she had found she couldn’t go out without some journo shouting inane questions at her.

  ‘Mining, Ms Tucker? You reckon a woman’s up to it?’

  Darn right I do.

  She walked Caliph more quietly, remembering how she had presented the draft agreement to the previous week’s board meeting. Martin Dexter apart, these were family gatherings – her children Peace and Richard, daughter-in-law Su-Ying and her
self – but Bella insisted that meetings of the board be conducted formally, with her in the chair.

  ‘Of course we must sign,’ said instant-action Peace. A top mining engineer, she was as fiery as Vesuvius when the mood was on her. ‘We can hardly carry the ore on our backs and pack mules went out a century ago.’

  Richard was an accountant, shrewd but cautious. ‘Certainly we need an agreement,’ he said. ‘But not this one.’

  ‘Why not?’ Bella said, to test him.

  ‘I don’t like the clause that says we can’t build our own rail link for five years after signing the agreement. It puts us too much in their hands. They can close us down any time –’

  ‘Typical accountant,’ Peace interrupted. ‘A problem for every solution. Why should they do that? They’ll be making good money out of us. And in five years we’ll have enough stashed away to fund our own railway.’

  ‘BradMin is not in the business of helping us deliver,’ Richard said. ‘What they really want is our ore and our contracts. A typical accountant can see that, even if a mining engineer can’t.’

  ‘I’ve convened this meeting to review our options,’ Bella said tartly. ‘I am not interested in your childish bickering.’

  She studied her two children.

  Peace, face like flame, was in no doubt, but Peace was never in doubt about anything. Thirty-nine years old and unmarried, she was an honours graduate of the University of Western Australia and the Camborne School of Mines, with an extraordinary nose for land and minerals. Physically she resembled no one in the family. She was five feet seven inches tall and broad-shouldered, with brown hair and eyes. She was practical and intensely competitive; faced with opposition, her instinct was to kick it to death. Bella knew Peace would have dominated her, too, given half a chance: not that there was any likelihood of that.

  Richard was a different proposition. Two years younger than his sister, just under six feet and slender, with Bella’s dark good looks, he was a stiletto to Peace’s battleaxe. Studious and reserved by nature, he was a financial whiz who was not only married to a Chinese woman but spoke fluent Mandarin, qualities that would be increasingly valuable to the group, with iron ore deliveries to China set to increase rapidly.

  Brother and sister stood shoulder to shoulder against the outside world, yet in the privacy of the boardroom they were always picking on each other: Peace thought Richard not confrontational enough; he returned the compliment because she lacked subtlety.

  Bella didn’t let it worry her too much; it might present a problem down the track but for the moment she never let their conflicts get out of hand and their complementary skills were of huge value to the company.

  Martin Dexter had been in favour of the deal. Bella had expected nothing else, because Martin had ambitions of his own. Not only did he want to remain financial director of the group; for years he had been sending her signals that he would like a personal relationship with her. In some ways she would have liked that, too. Sixty-five or not, she was by no means too old for a frolic if the opportunity arose. From time to time she indulged herself by imagining what such an affair would be like – Martin was almost the same age as she was but still a bundle of sexual promise, with good shoulders and a backside to die for – but she knew she would never allow it to happen. A woman in her position was often the target of ambitious men hoping to talk her into mixing business with pleasure but Bella was too much in control of her life to fall for that one, however charming the men might be.

  She would go ahead, she told herself as she rode up the slope behind the house. Tomorrow she would sign. Delivery of ore to China’s steel mills would continue far into the future: each of the especially commissioned locomotives drawing its load of two hundred wagons, eighty thousand dollars’ worth of ore in each. Sixteen million dollars per trainload: it was a mind-boggling thought.

  She reached the summit and reined in, looking down at the house she had named Desire. The grand building, white-painted, stood on a bluff overlooking Perth’s Swan River. There was a five-acre garden around the house; the rest was scrub and eucalyptus bush with riding trails cut through it.

  Garth had complained that the building, with its Corinthian pillars and portico, was ostentatious. He had been right. It was why Bella had bought the land in the first place. It was in the days when only a handful of people had known about the discoveries she and her husband had made in the far north, and she had intended the house to show the world that the Tuckers had arrived. At vast expense she had retained a world-famous architect to design the building in accordance with her wishes and a former curator of the Botanical Gardens to advise on the layout of the grounds. Even now it was a show place, demonstrating how far she – and Garth, before his death – had come from Miranda Downs, the property she still owned in the far north, home to snakes, dingoes, kangaroos, countless birds and approximately forty thousand head of cattle: no one knew exactly how many. Now she could foresee the time when Tucker Mining would be one of the wealthiest and most powerful operations in the country, because development of their open-cut mine in the Pilbara was only a beginning. With funds from the mine she would expand the company’s operations to fifty times their present size. They would prospect for new ore deposits. They would diversify. They were already developing an open-cut coalmine in New South Wales. They were exporting live cattle to Indonesia, the construction company was doing good business and the engineering works was flat out satisfying the growing needs of the mining industry. Later there would be real estate, financial services and transportation. There was talk overseas of permanently renewable power, obtained from the sun and wind. Wouldn’t that be something? she thought. There was a man in Denmark who was said to be an authority; she would get her London agent to contact him, confidentially. What about water? Australia was perennially short of water. Maybe they could resolve that, too, in time and with sufficient resources. Make the desert rejoice: wasn’t that what the Bible said? They would fund hospitals, adventure schools, institutes of higher learning, medical research… Excitement swarmed through her as she rode. So many marvellous challenges lay ahead. And she would be equal to them. At that moment she was twenty again, the world at her feet. There was nothing she could not do. Once the lease was signed.

  Back at the house she dismounted, casting her eye around the sky. It was cloudless – just as well, with two hundred guests for lunch. Bella handed Caliph’s reins to a waiting groom and walked to the western side of the house where a large marquee had been erected on the lawn below the terrace. Teams of men were setting out tables and chairs; an electrician was running cables for the lights, microphones and band. The dais and lectern were in place and a bar had been set up along one of the canvas walls.

  Deborah Smith, Bella’s thirty-year-old assistant, was keeping an eye on things. She had been a member of the team for eleven years and Bella trusted her completely. Sunday or not, Bella expected her staff to work when required, although she always compensated them with extra pay and time off later. She walked over to her.

  ‘Caterers?’

  ‘Coming at eleven,’ Deborah said. ‘They’ll bring their own cookers and portable barbecues but I told them they could also use our kitchens if they wanted.’

  ‘Let me see the menu.’ She studied it for a minute, pleased that her instructions had been carried out to the letter, then handed it back without comment. ‘Flowers?’

  ‘Within the hour.’

  ‘The bar?’

  ‘All the usual things plus soft drinks, tea and coffee. Twenty cases of champagne on ice.’ Deborah smiled. ‘Only domestic, but the premier won’t be able to complain, will he? Not with us a wine-growing state.’

  ‘Two hundred and forty bottles,’ Bella said. ‘Over one a head. Will they really drink that much?’

  ‘Some will,’ Deborah said. ‘Especially the journos.’

  Bella supposed she was right. She walked into the house and went upstairs to her bedroom. She stripped off and went into the bathroom, wher
e Annie had prepared her bath. For much of her life such indulgence had been out of the question; mustering cattle in her Miranda Downs days even a simple sluice-down had often been impossible. She thought perhaps that was why she valued it so highly now. Whatever the reason, she regarded her daily bath as one of her most important rituals. It was not simply a question of cleansing her body: she had always believed that it cleansed her mind, too, leaving it free to concentrate on the problems and challenges of the day ahead. It had other benefits as well. Being rich and powerful had its dangers and she had known many who had let that sort of thing go to their heads. She was determined it would not happen to her. I may be an autocrat, she thought, because I know no other way to run my life, but I have always despised self-importance. Having her daily wallow was, absurdly, the best way she knew of keeping her feet on the ground.

  She lay in the giant circular tub, letting her body soak in the scented water, while she considered the responsibility that she carried for the continuing success of the company. Upon that depended not only her legacy, what she had been able to achieve by a lifetime of struggle, but also the long-term well-being of the family. It was a glorious burden and she did not regret it for a moment. She was as fit as a flea, thank God, but her sixty-fifth birthday was an appropriate time to remind herself that the future would eventually lie in the hands of the next generation – Peace, Richard, Su-Ying and their children – and it was her duty to ensure they were ready to take over when the time came. It would not be easy – Peace and Richard had somehow to reconcile their differences – but somehow she must find a way. If she failed they could be looking not at triumph but disaster.

  Pray God it will not come to that, she thought. If it does, all my life will have been in vain.

  She allowed herself her usual ten minutes in the bath then climbed out, towelled herself dry and dressed in the same style of sober business suit that she wore every day of her working life. As she began putting on her make-up she rang the bell. Three minutes later Annie brought breakfast on a tray: a croissant with a miserly portion of imported cherry jam on the side, a thimble-sized helping of natural yoghurt and a pot of green tea, which Annie poured; this, too, was part of Bella’s morning ritual.