The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart

Vanilla lily

Meaning: Ambassador of love

Sowerbaea juncea | Eastern Australia

Perennial with edible roots found in eucalyptus forests, woodlands, heaths, and sub-alpine meadows. Grass-like leaves have a strong scent of vanilla. Flowers are pink-lilac to white, papery, with sweet vanilla perfume. Resprouts after fire.

June swung the screen door open. A hush fell over the seated women. She turned and gestured for Alice to follow.

‘Everyone, this is Alice. Alice, these are the Flowers.’

Their murmured greetings fluttered over Alice’s skin. She pinched her wrists, trying to distract herself from the uneasy feeling in her belly.

‘Alice is,’ June paused, ‘my granddaughter.’ A few cheers rose from the Flowers. June waited for a moment. ‘She’s come to join us here at Thornfield,’ she stated.

Alice was curious about whether the woman with blue hair was among them, but that wasn’t enough to make her look any of them in the eye. No one spoke. Harry sidled up and sat on her foot, leaning his bulk against her. She patted him gratefully.

‘Okay,’ June broke the silence. ‘Let’s eat then. Oh no, hang on, wait.’ She scanned the women. ‘Twig, where’s Candy?’

‘Finishing up. She said to go ahead and eat without her.’

Alice followed the voice to a willowy woman with a halo of dark hair and a clear, open face. She smiled at Alice in a way that warmed her skin, as if she was standing in full sun.

‘Thanks, Twig.’ June nodded. ‘Alice, this is Twig, she looks after the Flowers, and she keeps Thornfield running.’

Twig smiled and waved. Alice tried to smile back.

June continued around the table, introducing the Flowers. Sophie wore the glamorous glasses. Amy had the feathers in her hair. Robin wore the red lipstick. And Myf was the one with bluebirds tattooed across her pale throat; when she smiled and nodded at Alice, their wings moved. The names of the other Flowers flowed over Alice. Some – Vlinder, Tanmayi, Olga – she’d never heard before. The rest – Francene, Rosella, Lauren, Carolina, Boo – she’d come across in stories. Boo was the oldest person Alice had ever seen; her skin was papery, crinkled and folded as if she was a living page from a book.

Once June was done with the introductions, she showed Alice to her seat. Around her place setting was a wreath of yellow flowers, each one like a little crown.

‘Yellow bells offer welcome to a stranger,’ June said stiffly as she sat beside Alice. Her hands didn’t ever seem to stop shaking. Alice swung her feet under her chair. ‘Dig in, Flowers,’ June said with a wave, her bracelets chiming.

At her command, the verandah came to life. Bowls were passed, and glasses clinked together in iced relief. The clatter and din of spoons scooping dips, and tongs pinching eggplant slices, met with the occasional excited bark from Harry. The volume of the talking women rose and fell between mouthfuls. In Alice’s mind, a flock of seagulls cawed over a feast of yabbies on wet sand. She kept her chin down, vaguely aware that June was speaking to her as she served a little bit of everything onto Alice’s plate. Alice was too preoccupied with the wreath of yellow bells to think about eating. Welcome to a stranger. June was her grandmother and her guardian, but she was a stranger. Despite the heat, Alice shivered. When she was sure no one was looking, she tugged a few of the yellow bells free from the wreath and slipped them into her pocket.

She studied the women seated around the tables. Some of them had sad eyes that welled when they smiled. A few had hair like June’s, streaked with silver. When they caught Alice’s eye they all waved at her like she made them happy, like she was something they’d lost and found. Watching them, the way they interacted, so in sync with each other, it seemed as if they were doing a dance they’d done a thousand times before. Alice recalled a story she and her mother had read together, about twelve dancing sisters who disappeared every night from their castle. Sitting among these women who each wore sadness as if it were the finest dancing gown, Alice felt like she’d fallen asleep and awoken in one of her mother’s stories.

After lunch was cleared away and the Flowers went back to work, June and Alice stood together on the back verandah. The mellowing afternoon was layered with the scent of hot-baked earth and coconut sunscreen. In the distance magpies warbled and kookaburras cackled. Harry sprawled out beside them, full of leftovers.

‘C’mon, Alice,’ June said, stretching her arms wide. ‘I’ll show you around.’

Alice followed her down the back steps towards the rows of flowers. At eye level, they were taller than they appeared from upstairs. It was so much like being between sugar cane stalks that Alice stopped in momentary confusion.

‘These are our cutting gardens.’ June pointed ahead. ‘We mostly grow native flowers. That’s what Thornfield has always been built on, our native flower trade.’ Her speech sounded stiff and sharp, like she was talking with a slice of lemon on her tongue.

June walked to the far side of the field, pointing out the hoop houses and greenhouses towards the back, and the workshop opposite, where the Flowers worked in the afternoons to avoid the heat.

‘Beyond the farm is wild bushland until you get to the river. The river is …’ June faltered.

Alice looked up.

‘The river is another story altogether. I’ll tell you another time.’ She turned to face Alice, who was distracted by the thought of water being close by. ‘All of it is Thornfield land. It’s belonged to my family for generations.’ She paused. ‘Our family,’ she corrected herself.

One hot afternoon in the kitchen at home, Alice had sat at her mother’s feet reading a book of fairytales while Agnes made dinner. Fairytales taught her that when it came to family, things weren’t always as they seemed. Kings and queens lost their children like they were odd socks, not finding them again until they grew very old, if they ever found them at all. Mothers could die, fathers could disappear, and seven brothers could turn into seven swans. To Alice, family was one of the most curious stories of all. Overhead, the powdery flour her mother was sifting drifted down onto the pages of Alice’s open book. She’d caught her mother’s eye. Mama, where’s the rest of our family?

Agnes dropped to her knees, holding her finger over Alice’s lips. Her eyes darted past Alice towards the lounge room where Clem snored softly. It’s just us three, Bun, she said. It always has been. Okay?

Alice nodded quickly. She knew the look on her mother’s face, and she knew not to ask again. But from that day on, when she was alone down on the beach with the pelicans and gulls, Alice loved to imagine what it would be like if one of the birds suddenly turned into her long-lost sister. Or aunt. Or grandmother.

‘Why don’t I take you into the workshop?’ June asked. ‘You can see the Flowers at work.’

As they walked among the rows of flowers, Alice didn’t recognise many at all. But then, in front of her, she spotted a bush of scarlet kangaroo paw. And ahead of her, bindweed flower. Alice spun around, searching the rows. There they were, to her right: the fluffy yellow heads of lemon myrtle. Alice could almost smell the air, full of sweetly rotting seaweed, and green sugar from the cane fields. Her fingers twitched at the memory of the glossy surface of her desk under their tips. The smell of wax and paper when she lifted the lid, revealing her boxes of crayons, pencils and exercise books. Her mother, gliding past the window, her hands running over the heads of her flowers, speaking her secret language. Sorrowful remembrance. Love returned. Pleasures of memory.

Questions tangled with memories. The anxiety of waking up every morning and not knowing who she would find in the house with her: her spirited mother full of stories or the ghostly heap that couldn’t get out of bed. The fear as oppressive as humidity in the moments waiting for her father to come home, his behaviour as unpredictable as a westerly storm. Then, Toby’s smiling face. His big eyes, fluffy fur, and perky ears that couldn’t hear. A question she hadn’t thought of before hit her suddenly.

Was Toby dead?

Nobody mentioned Toby. Not Dr Harris, nor Brooke, nor June. What happened to Toby? Where exactly was her dog? What happened to animals when they died? Was there anything left of everything she loved? Was she to blame? By lighting that lamp in her father’s shed …

‘Alice?’ June called, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun.

Flies swarmed around Alice’s face. She swatted them away, staring at June, the grandmother neither of her parents ever told her about. June, her guardian, who took her from the sea and brought her to this strange world of flowers. She hurried towards Alice and crouched down to her level. Galahs screeched in pink streams overhead.

‘Hey,’ June’s voice was warm, sweetened with genuine concern.

Alice took great gulps of air, trying to breathe normally. Her whole body hurt.

June opened an arm to her. Without any hesitation Alice stepped forward, into her embrace. June picked her up. Her arms were strong. Alice tucked her head into June’s neck. Her skin smelled salty, laced with the scents of tobacco and peppermint. Fat tears rolled down Alice’s cheeks from a place inside her as deep and frightening as the darkest parts of the sea.

As June carried her up the steps and onto the verandah, Alice glanced back over her shoulder. Leading from the flower field up to the house was a trail of picked flowers, fallen from her pocket.

The Thornfield kitchen was full of cicada song and twilight. Candy Baby stopped washing the dishes and leant towards the window to breathe in the autumn air. It carried the watery scent of moss and reeds from the nearby river. Goosebumps covered her skin. June had explained that it was around this time of year Candy had been born, but where, and to whom, no one knew. The date she celebrated as her birthday was the night June and Twig found her abandoned, swaddled in a blue ball gown, floating in a bassinet on a waterlogged heath of vanilla lilies between the river and the flower field. They’d been in the house putting two-year-old Clem to bed when they heard her cries. When June’s torch beam found her and Twig crouched to pick her up, Clem cooed and clapped his hands. The air was so dense with the scent of vanilla, the women called her Candy Baby. By the time June and Twig became her legal guardians, the name had stuck.

She plunged her hands back into the dishwater as she studied the streaky indigo sky. Within the wood and mortar of Thornfield’s walls the pipes groaned as the shower turned on. Candy emptied the sink and dried her hands on a tea towel. She went to the kitchen door and peeked down into the hall. June sat waiting against the closed bathroom door, her head leant back, her eyes closed, her arms resting on her knees with her fingers interlaced. In the low and pale lamplight, her wet cheeks shone silver. Harry sat at June’s feet, one paw on her foot, as he often did when she was upset.

Candy stepped back into the kitchen. She polished the countertops until they gleamed. While the others tended the flowers outside, the kitchen was her garden, where feasts and banquets bloomed. At twenty-six, she couldn’t imagine ever loving anything as much as cooking. Nothing fancy though; no big white plates and tiny morsels. Candy cooked to feed the soul. Flavour and quantity were of equal importance. She had become Thornfield’s resident cook when she dropped out of high school and convinced June she was safe with knives. It’s in your blood, Twig said after a bite of her first cassava cake, fresh from the oven. These are your gifts, June said when Candy served her first platter of spring rolls with mango chutney, made from homegrown vegetables and herbs. It was true; when she was cooking or baking, it was almost as if a deeper, hidden knowledge took over her hands, her instincts, her tastebuds. She thrived in the kitchen, spurred by the idea that maybe her mother was a chef, or her father a baker. Cooking soothed the incision-like cut she felt inside whenever she thought that she might never know.

The house shuddered as water pipes shut off. Candy stopped polishing. She leant against the counter, listening. There was a shuffling in the hall and, after a moment, the sound of the bathroom door opening.

It was always hard when someone new arrived: another woman needing a safe place to sleep stirred up dust and memories for everyone at Thornfield. But this was different. This was Clem’s child. Who wouldn’t speak. More so, this was June’s family, when the story everyone knew best about June was that she had none. Flowers are my family, she was often heard to say, with a sweep of her arm towards the fields and the women at her table.

But now the myth surrounding June’s family had crumbled. A child had returned.

To Alice’s great relief, June left her alone to shower. She let the water run over her face. She wished for depths she could immerse herself in, water to dive into and under, salty enough to sting her lips and cool enough to soothe her eyes. There was no sea she could run to here. She remembered the river and itched to find it. First chance she got, she decided. Something to look forward to, no matter how small.

Alice waited until her fingers pruned before she turned the shower off. Her towel was fluffy and plump. She put on the pyjamas June gave her and brushed her teeth. Her toothbrush was pink with cartoon princesses on it. The toothpaste was filled with sparkles. They were so pretty that for a moment Alice wasn’t sure if they were playthings or real. She remembered her clear plastic toothbrush with the frayed bristles standing in a Vegemite glass next to her mum’s on the bathroom counter. That deep and dark place swelled again, and down the tears came. The more she cried, the more Alice believed she really did have some of the sea inside her.

After she’d finished in the bathroom, Alice followed June upstairs. Harry pushed past them to gallop ahead.

‘I know he can seem like a bit of a clown, but don’t let Harry fool you.’ June winked at Alice. ‘He’s got a very special magic power. He can smell sadness.’

Alice paused at the door, watching Harry settle at the end of her bed.

‘Everyone works here, and that’s Harry’s job: to look after anyone who’s sad, and help them to feel safe again.’ June’s voice softened. ‘Harry has a secret language too, so that if for whatever reason he’s not aware you need his help, you can tell him you’d like some. Would you like to learn it?’

Alice picked at the skin on the edge of her thumbnail. Nodded.

‘Excellent. That’s your first job, then. To learn how to “speak” Harry. I’ll get Twig or Candy to teach you.’

Alice’s spine straightened the tiniest bit. She had a job.

June walked around her room closing the curtains; they billowed like dancing skirts.

‘Would you like me to tuck you in?’ June asked, gesturing to Alice’s bed. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed. Alice followed her gaze.

On her pillow sat a small rectangular tray holding a glittering white cupcake, decorated with a pale-blue sugared flower. Dangling from the cupcake was a paper star that read, EAT ME. Next to it sat a cream-coloured envelope bearing Alice’s name.

A smile squeezed through the tangles and hurts inside, warming her cheeks. She ran to her bed.

‘Goodnight, Alice,’ June said, standing at her door.

Alice gave a small wave. Once June was gone, she tore open the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter on matching cream-coloured paper.

Dear Alice,

Here are three things I know for sure:

1.When I was born, someone – I like to think it was my mother – wrapped me in a blue ball gown.

2.There is a colour in this world that was named after a king’s daughter, who always wore gowns that were made of exactly the same shade of blue. The stories about her make me wish sometimes I could have been friends with her; she smoked in public (at a time when women didn’t), once jumped fully clothed into a swimming pool with the captain of a ship, often wore a boa constrictor around her neck, and another time shot at telegraph poles from a moving train.

3.My favourite story goes like this: once, on an island not far from here, there was a queen who climbed a tree waiting for her husband to return from a battle. She tied herself to a branch and vowed to remain there until he returned. She waited for so long that she slowly transformed into an orchid, which was an exact replica of the pattern on the blue gown she was wearing. Here’s one more thing that I know for sure is true.

On the day June told us she was going to hospital to bring you home, I was in the workshop pressing blue lady orchids. I’ve always loved them best because their centres are my favourite colour: the colour of the gown I was once wrapped in. The colour a king’s wayward daughter favoured. A colour called Alice blue.

Sweet dreams, sweetpea. See you at breakfast.

Love,

Candy Baby

Alice’s mind filled with images of newborn babies, wild women, and blue gowns that turned into flowers. Suddenly ravenous, she picked up the cupcake, peeled back the patty paper, and sank her teeth into the rich vanilla sweetness.

She fell asleep with crumbs on her face, clutching Candy’s letter to her heart.

Candy filled an old tomato can to water the herbs in the alcove behind the sink. The fragrance of fresh coriander and basil rose in the air. She set four mugs by the kettle for the morning. June’s soup bowl that she liked to call a coffee cup, the chipped enamel camping cup Twig insisted on drinking her tea from, and her own porcelain teacup and saucer, hand-painted in vanilla lilies for her by Robin. The fourth cup was small and plain. At the thought of the child’s grief-stricken face, Candy looked up at the ceiling, wondering if Alice had found her cupcake yet.

She was hanging up the tea towels when June came downstairs and into the kitchen. The pool of light falling from the range hood cast her face in deep shadows.

‘Thanks, Candy. For the cupcake. That’s the first time I’ve seen her smile.’ June rubbed her jawline roughly. ‘It’s uncanny,’ she said, her voice pinched by tears, ‘how she can look so much like both of them.’

Candy nodded. It was for that very reason she hadn’t been ready to meet Alice yet. ‘Tomorrow you can start over. That’s what you always tell us, right?’

‘Not so easy, is it?’ June muttered.

Candy gave June’s arm a squeeze on her way out of the kitchen. As she went into her bedroom, she heard the liquor cabinet squeak open. Candy had never known June to drink as heavily as she had been since the police came with the news about Clem and Agnes. People searched in all kinds of places for an escape; June found it at the bottom of a whisky bottle. Her own mother, Candy imagined, found it in a heath of wild vanilla lilies. Candy had learned the hard way that her escape was Thornfield’s kitchen.

She closed her bedroom door and switched on her bedside lamp, casting her room in diffuse light. Nearly everything she loved was here. The wide window seat with the big windows. Twig’s framed botanical sketches on the wall, all of the vanilla lily. Each one was dated, the first from the night she and June had carried Candy home from the heath. In the corner, her chair and desk, topped with her recipe books. Her single bed covered by the blanket of gum leaves that Ness, a past Flower, had hand-crocheted for Candy’s eighteenth birthday. A postcard had arrived a few years back, from a small banana plantation town up north where Ness said she’d bought a house. Some women, like Ness, came to Thornfield, took what time and strength they needed, and then left. Others, like Twig and Candy, knew they’d found a permanent home.

She sat and opened her bedside-table drawer, reaching inside for the necklace she always took off when she cooked. Slipped it over her head and held the pendant to the light. A fan of vanilla lily petals, preserved in resin, edged by sterling silver on a cob chain. June had made it for her sixteenth birthday, just before Candy had opened her bedroom window to a moonless sky and slipped out into the shadows, trying to outrun a loss that cut her to the core.

June had named her son after clematis, a bright and climbing star-shaped flower, and that’s exactly what Clem was to Candy growing up – a boy as beguiling as a star, a boy she was besotted with. She was always following him around, which he scowled about, but he still checked over his shoulder frequently to make sure she was there.

Candy went to her window and let her eyes rest upon the path at the bottom of the fields, which curled into the bush and led to the river. She was about Alice’s age the first time June allowed her to go to the river by herself. Candy thought she was alone running the winding path through the trees but, of course, she should have known better than to think Clem would let her have an adventure on her own. When she reached the river he swung from a rope tied to the river gum overhead and dropped screeching into the water, making her scream. After she’d recovered, Clem took Candy into the secret cubby house he’d built from branches, sticks and leaves in a clearing near the giant gum. Inside he had a sleeping bag, a lantern, his pocketknife, river stone collection and favourite book. They sat together, their knees touching while he read to her, tracing his finger around the illustration of Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on for him.

We’re stitched together, like this, Candy, he said. And we’ll never grow up. He flicked open his pocketknife. Swear it.

She offered the tender centre of her palm to him. I swear, she said, gasping at the quick, piercing pain.

Blood promise, he crowed as he sank the knife tip into his own palm and pressed his hand to Candy’s, lacing his fingers between hers.

Candy rubbed the tiny, faint scar on her palm with her fingertip.

As she grew up, Clem was indeed the bright and ever-climbing star in Candy’s sky. But when she was fourteen years old, and Clem was sixteen, everything changed the day the Salvation Army brought Agnes Ivie to Thornfield. Clem turned pale, moody, and his eyes no longer fully focused on Candy; he was fixed upon Agnes. She was the same age as Candy, and an orphan too. Arrived with sprigs of wattle in her hair, a copy of Alice in Wonderland, and big, deep eyes that followed you wherever you went, like a painting. June set her straight to work and Agnes took to her tasks as if she had a fight to win. Out in the flower fields from dawn to dusk, she worked until her hands blistered, and then until they split and bled. She worked until her spindly arms gave out, carrying buckets of fresh cuts from the flower fields into the workshop. She studied the Thornfield Dictionary with a furrow in her brow. At night she sat in the bell room and sang what she had learned of the language of flowers to the moon. Candy started following Agnes around Thornfield, hovering in long shadows as she worked, studying the girl Clem loved more. She followed her to the river and hid in the bushes watching as Agnes took a pen and wrote stories on her skin, down each forearm, up each leg, before she undressed and swam in the green river water until she was washed clean. When a twig snapped nearby, Candy saw Clem hidden, watching Agnes in the river too, with a look upon his face as if he’d found a star fallen to earth. When Candy saw he’d carved his and Agnes’s names into the trunk of the giant gum, she knew she’d lost him. All she could do was watch on, helpless, as everyone at Thornfield fell under Agnes’s spell, most of all Clem. Agnes seemed to wake something inside him, something entitled, something cruel. He was never the same with Candy again.

When Clem and Agnes left Thornfield, the wake of his violent rage and the totality of his absence tore the belly out of Candy’s world. She had splinters for a month after she scratched Agnes’s name from the giant gum in a grief-stricken frenzy. Nothing eased the pain. Not even leaving Thornfield herself.

Her memories of the night she ran away were still visceral: the burn in her legs as she ran in the moonlight through the bush to the road, lured by a lover’s promise to be there waiting for her. Candy had been sneaking into town to meet with him ever since the afternoon he’d pulled up in his car alongside her on her walk home from school. He gave her vodka and smokes. Told her stories about where he’d come from, a place like paradise on the coast. He was passing through town on his way back there. Did she want to go with him? He’d teach her how to ocean-swim, and get them a place with her own garden. The sense of freedom Candy had felt the night she met him on the highway was intoxicating. She got into his car, he put his foot down and they launched into the pale silver night, headed for a place where the haunting pain of Clem’s absence wouldn’t find her. But, only a few months later, Candy walked up Thornfield’s driveway with no more than the cotton dress she was wearing and the vanilla lily pendant hanging from her neck. June and Twig had been sitting on the front verandah. They took her in, set a third place at the table, and didn’t say a word. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it; she was crushed to find it unchanged. June and Twig knew Candy had acted a fool and would be back. They’d seen her mistake before she’d made it. Candy had thought she could escape grief.

Candy looked at the ceiling again, thinking about Alice, Agnes and Clem’s silent daughter, caught in her own world of memories, sifting through them, trying to understand what had happened to her life. Candy had overheard June telling Twig the story: Clem had beaten Alice unconscious, and Agnes’s pregnant body wore bruises that told a similar story. What sort of coward did that? What kind of beast had he become? And what now of Clem’s baby son, Alice’s brother?

She pushed the questions away. Ran the pad of her thumb over the pendant, focusing on the language of the vanilla lily: ambassador of love. Since June’s great-grandmother Ruth Stone created a flower farm from drought-stricken land in the nineteenth century, Thornfield’s motto had remained the same: Where wildflowers bloom. It was the one thing Candy and every other woman who came to June for safety knew to be true.

As she readied herself for bed, Candy wondered if Alice knew yet, in even the smallest way, that no matter where she’d come from, or what had happened to her, she had come home.