The Midwife's Secret Child

She breathed out and those standing next to her murmured their own awe. This was why she loved these tours. When she felt the connection from others at the opportunity to see something so few people had.

‘If you look across from us—’ she angled her head and the light shone on the roof ‘—hanging from the low roof like eyelashes, those are thin tendrils of tree roots that are searching for the water that left eons ago, but the moisture remains and even though the roots don’t touch any water the filaments absorb moisture from the air.’

Someone said, ‘Amazing.’ She smiled in their direction.

‘There’s no natural light—the creatures who live here are small, without eyes, their bodies are see-through, almost like albino slaters.’ She crouched down and drew an example the size of a cat in the red dirt with her finger.

Her comedian said in the darkness, ‘That looks too big for comfort,’ and laughed nervously. Several other voices murmured.

Faith grinned. ‘Not drawn to scale.’ She pointed out a tiny white beetle-like creature on a tree root. ‘But if you see one of them in front of you when you’re crawling, please scoop up a handful of dirt and shift him aside.’

The young woman next to Faith who’d changed into jeans said in a small voice, ‘You say we are crawling?’

‘Yep, we’re sliding under that overhang on our stomachs, using our elbows, for about thirty metres, but it opens into a small cavern after that.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said in her lilting accent, ‘I can stay here and mind the bags?’

Faith looked at her and noted her pinched nostrils and darting eyes. ‘Perfectly fine. We’ll only be about ten minutes’ crawl away, though you mightn’t hear us because the riverbed bends a little. Then it opens into another cavern where we can sit up. We’ll be gone for about thirty minutes by the time we spend ten minutes there as well as crawling there and back. Will you be fine with that?’

She laughed nervously. ‘I find it very peaceful here.’

‘I’ll stay with her,’ one of the teenage boys offered with pretended resignation. It was so obviously what he wanted to do that everyone laughed.

Faith nodded. ‘The rest of us can drop all our extra stuff, like cameras and jumpers, here. Too hard to crawl on your belly dragging a drink bottle or camera.’

There was a small wave of tense laughter as people dropped surplus bits and crouched down. The black semi-circular opening above the red sandy floor looked about three feet high and maybe ten feet wide, based with the red sand of the ancient river. A little too much like a mouth that would eat them, Faith had thought the first time, and she guessed a few of the others now thought the same.

‘I’ll go belly down into the damp dirt first so you know I’m ahead, but I need a volunteer to go last. Someone needs to make sure we all keep going.’

‘I will go last.’ Raimondo spoke quietly, his thick accent rolling calmly around the tiny space. When the others expelled breaths of relief he said, ‘I have been on this tour before and have no concerns.’

Faith knew this last stretch tested the first timers’ resolve as they slithered forward in the dark, seeing the backside and feet of the person in front, the circle of light from the person behind washing over them, the roof closing in over their helmeted head. She’d had the occasional talk down of a panicked group member at this part but in the end they all agreed the challenge was worth it.

Faith knelt down until she was lying on the damp sand and glanced at Raimondo, looming above her. He nodded calmly and with a last flashing grin at the rest of the group she propelled herself forward along the riverbed, the circle of her headlamp piercing the darkness ahead with its warm glow.

She heard them behind her and the flicker of the others’ lights occasionally shone past until she’d crawled all the way to the cavern.

She sat up and waited, watching the circles of light approach one by one as each crawled out of the hole and into the circle of the cavern.

‘You can sit up now. There’s a good foot over your head.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ the first arrival, the other of the solid woman’s sons, muttered mock complainingly, and she grinned in his direction.

‘Just shimmy around so the next person can sit up and move next to you until we have a circle.’ It didn’t take long for all of them to arrive and she wasn’t sure how Raimondo ended up sitting next to her, but she doubted it was by accident.

Faith cleared her throat. She couldn’t change the next bit and he probably knew it. ‘We’re going to turn out all our lights and just sit here, in the belly of Mother Earth, in the dark, and soak in the wonder of what we are experiencing.’

The same smart alec said, ‘Why not?’ But everyone laughed. Except Raimondo.

There was a murmur of further surprise and then slowly, as they all began to feel the magic of the space, she could feel the agreement.

She pushed on. ‘And we’ll sit in silence for a minute or two just to soak it in—where we are, how long this cavern has been here, and how amazing you all are to do this and still be having fun.’

A few murmurs of pride.

‘After the silence I’ll share an Aboriginal legend I was told about a good spirit from the ocean and a bad spirit from the cave, and how these caves were formed.’

Like good children, one by one they turned out the lights until the darkness fell like a blindfold over them.

Faith closed her eyes. She always found this moment, this silence, incredibly peaceful. The air she breathed felt moist on her nose and throat as she inhaled and she dug her fingers into the damp earth and collected two handfuls of the sleeping riverbed and held them with her eyes shut tight—not that it made any difference, open or shut, in the total dark.

She always felt blessed to have been given this moment in time to embrace the idea of being a part of this river under the earth. Breathing in and out quietly as the silence stretched for several minutes. Nobody fidgeted or spoke until she judged enough time had passed. Then she began to tell the story of the battle of the ancients.

CHAPTER TWO (#u5f79a074-63af-5b7a-9b8b-0f3bce7bdb6b)

RAIMONDO BRUNO SALVANELLI closed his eyes as Faith’s lilting voice rose from the darkness beside him. He allowed her words to flow over and through him because he’d heard the cave story before, privately, and he wanted to find the peace she’d once told him she found here—for himself.

So, instead of listening to the story, he savoured the cadence of her voice and the reality that she had still been exactly where he’d left her so long ago. Again, he inhaled the oh, so subtle scent of her herbal shampoo and welcomed the warmth in the air from her body so close to his.

The sudden rush of possessiveness he’d felt when he’d first seen her from the tourist shop door had shocked him. An emotion he had no right to, a stranger very briefly in her life almost six years ago, a stranger still, and one who had told her he would never return after he had broken her heart.

That first time had been Sydney Airport where he’d caught her eye, she’d smiled, and he’d instantly invited her to join him when he’d seen her flight had been postponed along with his.

Then, hours later, because still he wasn’t ready to lose his new companion, they’d shared dinner in an airport bar, jostled by other stranded passengers yet alone in their own world of discovery, and she had captivated him. He’d watched her mobile face as she’d described her beautiful Lighthouse Bay. Her work as a midwife, her hobby of cave tours and her love of life.

Their flights had been rescheduled again and they’d spent the night stranded, and then, imprudently, tangled together making love in an airport hotel, lost to the wild weather outside that had grounded their aircraft.

The crazy urgency had grown until he’d done something so out of character, so reckless and impulsive, even years later he was still surprised. He’d changed his flight to match her re-booked one, delayed his return to Italy for two days, followed her home to the house on the cliff for the one night and two days he hadn’t scheduled and found himself lost in unsophisticated and trusting arms.

This was a world of tenderness he hadn’t known since he’d been a child and his parents had been alive.

When she’d taken him the next morning for a personal cave tour before he’d left he’d been captivated again by her passion for the natural wonders she’d shared. Had silently begun to plan to return and see where this craziness between them might lead.

Then the return to sanity from the craziness that had come upon him with Faith. He could have vanished into it for ever if not for that call from his brother—his grandfather lay dying, the man who had raised them since he was seven. The news had been a deluge of cold water that had dashed his dreams and dragged him home to filial duty and deathbed requests. His brother had warned him what lay in store so he had said goodbye to Faith with finality.

Never to return because they were from different worlds. Because of the commitment he’d made to his dying grandfather—one he would never have broken until it had self-destructed—his fault, his ex-wife’s fault and also partly this woman’s fault because his heart had not been available. His new wife had seen that and hardened her own heart even more. Then his twin brother’s tragedy and the need for Raimondo to shoulder the leader’s role until Dominico could recover.

At the time, returning to Australia had seemed impossible. His brother had agreed that the woman he’d had so brief a liaison with would have married by now, then the years had slipped by so fast after his marriage had dissolved—his new direction into a general practice for the needy, and the occasional international aid work, placating his feelings of failure and he didn’t have the time to fly across the world on a whim.

There had never seemed a future, with Faith settled here and him a son of Italy for ever. Had he been wrong?

He would never have come back except for the news he’d heard.

News he hadn’t believed.

News he hadn’t been able to risk not investigating.

It had been the mention of a place called Lighthouse Bay in Australia, in a discussion of a wedding one of his colleagues had attended before she’d returned to Florence.