Whether the Headmistress of Appleyard College […] had any previous experience in the educational field, was never divulged. It was unnecessary. With her high-piled greying pompadour and ample bosom, as rigidly controlled and disciplined as her private ambitions, the cameo portrait of her late husband flat on her respectable chest, the stately stranger looked precisely what the parents expected of an English Headmistress. And as looking the part is well known to be more than half the battle…
“I have instructed Mademoiselle that as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves after the drag has passed through Woodend. You will partake of luncheon at the Picnic Grounds near the Rock. Once again let me remind you that the Rock itself is extremely dangerous and you are therefore forbidden to engage in any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes. […] I think that is all. Have a pleasant day and try to behave yourselves in a manner to bring credit to the College.”
Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.
If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again. He sat down on a fallen log, heard Albert calling him through the trees, and knew that this was the country where he, Michael Fitzhubert, was going to live.
“I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?” Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking —sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet… […] “Come back, all of you! Don’t go up there – come back!” She felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace collar. […] To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith.
The Headmistress, after a night passed in staring at the wall of her bedroom interminably whitening to the new day, was on deck at her usual hour with not a hair of the pompadour out of place. Her first concern this morning was to ensure that nothing of yesterday’s happenings should be so much as whispered beyond the College walls.
For three consecutive mornings the Australian public had been devouring, along with its bacon and eggs, the luscious details of the College Mystery as it was now known to the Press. Although no further information had been unearthed and nothing resembling a clue, […] the public must be fed. To this end, some additional spice had been added to Wednesday’s columns’ photographs of the Hon. Michael’s ancestral home, Haddingham Hall […] and of course Irma Leopold’s beauty and reputed millions on coming of age.
“All my life I’ve been doing things because other people said they were the right things to do. This time I’m going to do something because I say so —even if you and everyone else thinks I’m mad.”
The road wound its charming leisurely way between sleeping gardens still heavy with dew and shadowed by the upper mountain slopes. Swathes of virgin forest ran right down to an immaculate tennis lawn, an orchard, a row of raspberry canes. […] Mike was enchanted by this strangely favoured country where palms, delphiniums and raspberry canes grew side by side.
He laid his head on a stone and fell instantly into the thin ragged sleep of exhaustion, waking with a sudden stab of pain over one eye. A trickle of blood was oozing on to the pillow. The pillow was as hard and sharp as a stone under his burning head. […] At first he thought it was the sound of birds in the oak tree outside his window. […] It seemed to be coming from all round him —a low wordless murmur, almost like the murmur of distant voices, with now and then a sort of trilling that might have been little spurts of laughter.
Greatly to Mrs. Cutler’s surprise the lamb had been brought in just as she had been lying on the Rock, without a corset. A modest woman, for whom the word corset was never uttered by a lady in the presence of a gent, she had made no comment to the doctor […] Thus the valuable clue of the missing corset was never followed up nor communicated to the police. Nor to the inmates of Appleyard College where Irma Leopold, well known for her fastidious taste […] had been seen by several of her classmates, on the morning of [the picnic] wearing a pair of long, lightly boned, French satin stays.
Sara had just reached the door when she was called back. “I omitted to mention that if I have not heard from your guardian by Easter I shall be obliged to make other arrangements for your education.”
For the first time a change of expression flickered behind the great eyes. “What arrangements?”
“That will have to be decided. There are Institutions.”
“Oh, no. No. Not that. Not again.”
“One must learn to face up to facts, Sara. After all, you are thirteen years old. You may go.”
The girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent specialists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. “Like a clock, you know,” the doctor explained. “A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point.”
“If I may say so, now that you are no longer under my care, your teachers were continually complaining to me of your lack of application. Even a girl with your expectations should be able to spell.” The words were hardly out of her mouth before she realized that she had made a strategic blunder. It was above all things necessary not to further antagonize the wealthy Leopolds. Money is power. Money is strength and safety. Even silence has to be paid for.
They see the walls of the gymnasium fading into an exquisite transparency, the ceiling opening up like a flower into the brilliant sky above the Hanging Rock. The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plain and they are at the picnic, sitting on the warm dry grass under the gum trees. […] The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave.
The clock on the stairs had just struck for half past twelve when the door of Mrs. Appleyard’s room opened noiselessly, inch by inch, and an old woman carrying a nightlight came out on to the landing. An old woman with head bowed under a forest of curling pins, with pendulous breasts and sagging stomach beneath a flannel dressing-gown. No human being - not even Arthur - had ever seen her thus, without the battledress of steel and whalebone in which for eighteen hours a day the Headmistress was accustomed to face the world.
“You know very well I’m not one for gossip. What is it you want to find out?”
He grinned. “Shrewd little woman, aren’t you? I’ve been wondering if you ever heard any of your lady friends mention Mrs. Appleyard at the College?” In Bumpher’s experience it was amazing how an ordinary housewife seemed to know by instinct things that might take a policeman weeks to find out.
About ten minutes later she was out in the drive waiting for the trap at the front door. She was wearing a long navy blue coat and a brown hat with a feather sticking up that I’ve seen her wearing when she goes to Melbourne. She was carrying a black leather handbag and black gloves because I wondered why a person would think of gloves at such a time.
Nothing else was said until we came to the bend in the road where you can first see the Hanging Rock coming up out of the trees in the distance. I pointed it out to her and said something about the Rock having made a lot of trouble for a lot of people since the day of the Picnic. She leaned right across me and shook her fist at it and I hope I never have to see an expression like that on another face.
To the left, on higher ground, a pile of stones . . . on one of them a large black spider, spread-eagled, asleep in the sun. She had always been afraid of spiders, looked round for something with which to strike it down and saw Sara Waybourne, in a nightdress, with one eye fixed and staring from a mask of rotting flesh.
An eagle hovering high above the golden peaks heard her scream as she ran towards the precipice and jumped. The spider scuttled to safety as the clumsy body went bouncing and rolling from rock to rock towards the valley below. Until at last the head in the brown hat was impaled upon a jutting crag.
