But the young woman stood her ground. She wouldn’t stay on in Coleraine another minute, not for all the gold in the world. ‘You’re more stubborn than a bloody sheep!’ shouted Bernhard, changing his whining tone for insults in Yiddish.
Helena glared at him icily and, without another word, she went back to her room to finish packing her things. Bernhard followed her and stood in the doorway, continuing to proffer insults but not daring to actually step in. Without saying a word, Helena went out into the street, dragging her heavy trunk behind her. He didn’t lift a finger to help her.
A neighbour was waiting outside in his cart, a kind farmer who had agreed to drive her to Sandford. She climbed up on the seat and adjusted her hat, while the good man put her trunk in the back along with all the sheep.
‘Good riddance,’ was Bernhard’s blessing, as the horses pulled away.
The pharmacist set her salary at twenty-two shillings a month to work all day long without interruption. It wasn’t much, but it was a first taste of independence. Besides, Helena enjoyed meeting the customers. The women sought her out, just as they had done in her uncle’s store. She listened to them with a mixture of curiosity and empathy, asking questions about their children, their husbands, their health. She did everything she could to help them, went to fetch the potions they needed from the back of the shop, filled their prescriptions. Working in the pharmacy gave her a heady feeling: she never tired of the infinitesimal sense of power her customers gave her by blindly following her advice.
Old Henderson taught her what he knew. Learning as she went, she mixed spermaceti and lily bulbs, paraffin and almond peel, wax and herbs, lavender and honey. She read the scientific treatises he recommended and more than once she rued the fact that she had not been allowed to study medicine. And she thought about handsome Stanislaw, the boy she had loved in Kraków, but less and less often now. His features had faded long ago. He must be married by now, she mused, with a horde of children. Helena was not the sort of woman to pine for a lost love, whether real or imaginary.
Helena took the last remaining jar of Lykusky’s cream and examined it under the microscope, trying to identify its ingredients. She stayed up late night after night, straining her eyes and nearly falling asleep on her feet as she climbed the staircase leading up to her attic bedroom. In the morning she would get up before sunrise to clean the pharmacy, mop the floors and wipe the jars with a dust rag. In the evening she had to count up the day’s takings after exhausting hours on her feet where she hadn’t a moment to catch her breath. She didn’t complain. She had always been a hard worker and now she was driven by her plan.
Gitel eventually wrote to her. She sent a few jars of cream with her letter. ‘I can’t send you more than that, my girl, everything is expensive here. Money doesn’t grow on trees in Szeroka Street.’
Helena quickly read the two pages filled with news, but that was not what interested her. Gitel had no end of complaints: ‘Oy gevelt, your sisters are growing up, it’s hard to marry them off without a dowry, your father is bankrupt again.’
She was beginning to feel discouraged when she came to the postscript: here was what she had been waiting for so impatiently. The magic formula. Or at least what her mother had gleaned of it. Herbs, pine bark, sesame, almond essence, oil, wax … With the letter in one hand and a pestle in the other, Helena scurried back to her research. It couldn’t be as complicated as all that. And yet it was. She could not get the texture right. It was too liquid, or not liquid enough; too dry or too sticky.
Helena became her own guinea pig. Every night before going to bed she would try some of the day’s mixture on her face. There were times she panicked: what if she woke up with her face covered in pimples? No, there could be no danger of that, at least not with these ingredients. But there was still something missing if she was to make her haphazard concoctions resemble a beauty cream worthy of the name.
Until one night a flash of inspiration came to her. It happened by chance, just as she was about to drift off. This often occurred between wakefulness and sleep, in that strange in-between state where thoughts and dreams collide and great revelations appear out of nowhere. Just when she least expected it, Helena started thinking about sheep. She had read in one of Mr Henderson’s old books, hardly paying attention at the time, that their wool secreted a substance that was indispensable for the manufacture of cold cream (as the English ladies would say, carefully rounding their lips). That ingredient was lanolin. And suddenly she remembered what she had read. It all became crystal clear; it was as if the last piece of a jigsaw had fallen into place. Lanolin was exactly what she needed to add in order to obtain a cream that would be both soft and moisturising.
In one of the pharmacist’s old tomes on cosmetology she found everything she needed to know about the softening properties of lanolin and also how to extract it from the fleece and purify it, because in its raw state suint – sheep sweat – gives off an unbearable stench.
She remembered how she used to wrinkle her nose whenever she went along certain narrow streets in Kazimierz where the tanners dried animal hides before transforming them into leather. To get rid of the smell, she would have to add rosewater or lavender and then water, too, which was essential for moisturising.
Lanolin was the missing link that would change lead into gold. Or more precisely, the lumpy mixture in her kettle into a finished product. Just a bit more patience and she would be rich. She was already savouring her revenge. But it would require a lot more hard work if she was to afford all the costly ingredients she needed, particularly with the pittance that Mr Henderson paid her. Helena was in a hurry. The years were flying by.
Then she recalled the pleasant face of Lady Susanna, the wife of the aide-de-camp to the Governor of Queensland who she had met on the Prinz Regent Luitpold on her crossing to Australia. Helena had her address in the little white silk purse in which she put her most precious documents for safekeeping. She wrote to Lady Susanna straight away and received a reply by return of post. Of course Susanna remembered Helena very well. How could one forget such a charming person? She finished her letter with an invitation to Brisbane. ‘Stay as long as you like, my dear. You’ll see, you’ll love the town. Of course it’s a bit provincial, it’s not London or Melbourne, but you can find everything here.’
By now Helena was a master at packing her trunk, and she put together a few reasonably presentable outfits. Then she said farewell to her benefactor and boarded the train that would take her to a new life. It was a long journey, particularly for a young woman travelling on her own, but Helena was starting to get used to it. To reach Brisbane she would have to travel 1,200 miles through three colonies: Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.
At last, after an endless week spent sleeping and staring at the landscape, Helena arrived, exhausted and dusty, at the central station in Brisbane.
But she was free, once again.
As she looked out from the hackney carriage taking her to her friend’s house, Helena was mesmerised by all there was to discover around her. Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, was a pleasant, modern city, with wide avenues flanked by low buildings, restaurants, theatres, clothing stores and a brand-new electric tramway. English and German colonists had built the city fifty years earlier on the banks of the river of the same name, notorious for its repeated flooding. The last and most terrible flood had been in 1893, and everyone had a vivid memory of it. Every time the Brisbane flooded they had to rebuild all the houses along the river banks.
Helena took in all the sights of the city like a person starved of beauty for too long. She gazed in awe at the monuments in the classical style: the cathedral, the parliament, and the old mill that had been built by convicts; the entire country had been created by the sweat of their brows. The first convicts had arrived in Sydney in 1788, transported from England on the eleven ships of the First Fleet. At a time when British prisons were overflowing, Australia had become the ideal place to get rid of the surplus criminals. For nearly a century, convicts had been put to work building the country, often in terrible conditions. Transportation finally ended in 1868. Altogether, 160,000 souls