The lonely headlights of a white Jaguar roadster arced up the darkening range like a fallen star struggling back to the heavens.
Between mountain’s sheer face and its breathtaking edge, the roadster slewed, gravel spitting under wheel, engine straining. Six hundred and thirteen bends comprised that Range Road — an ascent so narrow, so vertiginous, only a single direction of traffic was permitted, at allotted times, through manned gates.
Cycads and towering rose gums clung to the rocky ravine, but there were no safety rails. At a plummeting distance below, rippled an endless counterpane of peaks and vales.
A young woman hunched over the steering wheel, squinting through tears, bracing hard against each hairpin turn. The sheath skirt of her going-away suit was rumpled and travel-worn, her butter blonde waves, so carefully set three days earlier, long since flattened by sultry air and cheap hotel pillows. Her ears protested this climb, her stomach revolted, but on she went, sliding and bracing, lashed by an internal chant: keep going, keep going, keep going.
There was no turning back for Vivienne George. She had ruined everything.
Balled up in the passenger seat footwell were umpteen unfinished epistles, penned during rest stops. All variations on the same plea…
Dear Mother, forgive me—
I must unmake my bed; I will not lie in it.
You cannot force me to marry him, and I will not compel myself.
I need to be free, to figure out what I want.
For once, please let me choose…
On the passenger seat, her honeymoon trousseau perched beside a single wedding present — the last left to unwrap. At least she’d saved her mother returning this one gift.
Vivienne skimmed a breathless glance over the rearview mirror, and those dark corners in her wake. She drew up the collar of her jacket, unable to shake the sense that matrimony itself had become a dark beast roaring up the range after her.
But no one could be possibly tailing her up this mountain. Her car had been the very last one through the Bottom Gate before it closed to
up-traffic for several hours. And her plan, once so preposterous sounding, had almost reached its zenith.
She’d put half a continent, and a guarded mountain pass, between herself and jilted groom, Howard Woollcott III, heir apparent of the Woollcott winemaking dynasty. Yet, how would she ever outrun the ignominy she’d wrought?
Vivienne saw again the crisp white, gold-embossed wedding invitations sent out to the Who’s Who of Australian business, politics and academia…
Leave a Reply