Kenny, A [2021] Those Hamilton Sisters by Averil Kenny

Author:Averil Kenny
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781760686895
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

THE BUTTERFLY PATCH

November 1960

Fable was on her belly in the luxuriant tangle of her garden, ministering to a sketchbook – oblivious to both the spring sunshine overhead and the barefoot visitors approaching the gate, towels slung over shoulders.

Around her, bloomed the pentas and ixora flowers she’d taken as cuttings from gardens all over the valley. Her foraged flowers thrived like weeds, attracting her two favourite butterflies to the garden: the peridot Birdwing, and cerulean Ulysses. Hidden inside the flowers, slept Fable’s faerie garden; rather, Olive’s tiny tombstones.

Fable hated how weird Sonnet got whenever the graves were mentioned. Even after all these years, the adults maintained the pretence that they were faerie houses. So, faerie houses Fable had defiantly made them, weaving Olive’s river stones into her drawings of ferny glens and linns. Long had she laboured over this theme, adapting it from her water nymphs of earlier years.

In the last two years, as Fable’s garden had sprung into glorious, fertile life, so too had her journals burgeoned. Between the pages lived a bevy of faerie folk, with butterfly wings draped around whimsical figures, and clothes spun from rainforest blooms or fruits.

Today she was filling in the iridescent peridot wings of a faerie frolicking on a bird of paradise flower. Absinthe, she had named this, her favourite heroine. She had resolved at day’s beginning, not to get sidetracked by yet another rendering of blue eyes.

*

Two young men leant over the fence to watch Fable, her face hidden by a long fall of red-gold, feet kicking together. Their convivial chatter dwindled into silence.

The first young man smiled at his friend as one might an endearing toddler. The playful urge to ruffle Fable’s hair, however, had melted into distant memory. Marco never touched Fable these days, except inadvertently, and each time it nearly stopped his heart with fear she’d think it deliberate, and incongruous with his loyally platonic presence. Always lurking, was his terror she might withdraw from him, as she had every other male of the old Glade Gang.

Ever since that hullabaloo with her sister’s bookshop sign – no, earlier than that, ever since the hurriedly stamped-out controversy with Vinelands – Fable had removed herself entirely from their group.

Marco knew just enough about Fable’s near-miss at Vinelands to guess why. But only because he’d been there the night Raff came over to the Lagorios’ and ripped shreds off Vince about his involvement in it. If not for overhearing that, Marco wouldn’t have had a clue why Fable went so cold, so quickly on the Gang. The Hulls, after all, had put a self-serving embargo on the whole topic. Marco had never pressed Fable directly to explain herself, though Fable, guardedly, and only once, had offered this: ‘Boys have changed.’

And sure, boys had. Although Marco, loath to contradict Fable, might have pointed out that girls had changed first, and with few exceptions for the better. Gone was the easy mateship of the Glade Gang days. Now it was impossible to find a

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