Silence.
She was staring blindly at Mathew now, but she wasn’t seeing him. Instead she was seeing elephants. She’d watched them perform as a child, she’d learned to work with them and she’d loved them. Then, as a teenager she’d started seeing the bigger picture. She’d started seeing the conditions they lived in for what they were, and she’d railed against them.
She remembered the fights.
‘Grandpa, I know we’ve always had wild animals. You’ve lived with them since you were a kid, too, but it’s not right. Even though we do the best we can for them, they shouldn’t live like this. They need to be somewhere they can roam. Grandpa, please …’
As she’d got older, full of adolescent certainty, she’d laid down her ultimatum.
‘I can’t live with you if we keep dragging them from place to place. The camels and dogs and ponies are fine—they’ve been domestic for generations and we can give them decent exercise and care. But not the others. Grandpa, you have to do something.’
‘The circus will lose money …’ That was her grandfather, fighting a losing battle.
‘Isn’t it better to lose money than to be cruel?’
She remembered the fights, the tantrums, the sulky silences—and then she’d come home from one of her brief visits to her mother and they’d gone.
‘We’ve sent them to a zoo in Western Australia,’ Gran had told her, and shown her pictures of a gorgeous open range zoo.
Then, later—how much later?—they’d shown her pictures of a house. Her mind was racing. That was right about the time she was starting to study bookkeeping. Right about the time Henry was starting to let her keep the books.
‘The house …’ she whispered but she was already accepting the house was a lie.
‘If they’ve been showing you the books, maybe the house is a smokescreen. I’m sorry, Allie, but there is no house.’
Her world was shifting. There was nothing to hold on to.
Mathew’s voice was implacable. This was a banker, here on business. She stared again at that bottom line. He was calling in a loan she had no hope of paying.
No house.
The ramifications were appalling.
She wanted this man to go away. She wanted to retreat to her caravan and hug her dogs. She wanted to pour herself something stronger than tea and think.
Think the unthinkable?
Panic was crowding in from all sides. Outside, the circus crew was packing up for the night—men and women who depended on this circus for a livelihood. Most of them had done so all their lives.
‘What … what security did he use for the loan?’ she whispered.
‘The circus itself,’ Mathew told her.
‘We’re not worth …’
‘You are worth quite a bit. You’ve been running the same schedule for over a hundred years. You have council land booked annually in the best places at the best times. Another circus will pay for those slots.’
‘You mean Carvers,’ she said incredulously. ‘Ron Carver has been trying to get his hands on our sites for years. You want us to give them to him?’
‘I don’t see you have a choice.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense. Why?’ she demanded, trying desperately to shove her distress to the background. ‘Why did Bond’s ever agree to such a crazy loan? If this is true … You must have known we’d never have the collateral to pay this back?’
‘My Great-Aunt Margot,’ he said, and he paused, as if he didn’t quite know where to go with this.
‘Margot?’
‘Margot Bond,’ he said. ‘Do you know her?’
She did. Everyone knew Margot. She’d had a front row seat for years, always present on the first and last night the circus was in Fort Neptune. She arrived immaculately dressed, older but seemingly more dignified with every year, and every year her grandparents greeted her with delight.
She hadn’t been here this year, and Allie had missed her.
‘My grandfather and Margot were brought to Sparkles as children,’ Mathew told her. ‘Later, Margot brought my father, and then me in my turn. When your grandfather couldn’t find anyone to fund the loan, in desperation he asked Margot. He knew she was connected to Bond’s. When Margot asked my grandfather—her brother—he couldn’t say no. Very few people can say no to Margot.’
He hesitated then, as if he didn’t want to go on, and the words he finally came out with sounded forced. ‘Margot’s dying,’ he said bleakly. ‘That’s why I’m in Fort Neptune. We could have foreclosed from a distance but, seeing I’m here, I decided to do it in person.’
‘Because now she’s dying you don’t need to make her happy any more?’
Her tea slopped as she said it, and she gasped. She stood up and stepped away from the table, staring at the spilled tea. ‘Sorry. That … that was dreadful of me—and unfair. I’m very sorry Margot’s dying, and of course it’s your money and you have every right to call it in. But … right now?’
‘You’ve been sent notices for months, Allie. Contrary to what you think, this is not a surprise. Henry knows it. This is the end. I have authority to take control.’
She nodded, choked on a sob, swiped away a tear—she would not cry—and managed to gain composure. Of a sort. ‘Right,’ she managed. ‘But there’s nothing you can do tonight. Not now.’
‘I can …’
‘You can’t,’ she snapped. ‘You can do nothing. Otherwise I’ll go straight to the local paper and tomorrow’s headlines will be Bond’s Bank foreclosing on ancient circus while its almost-as-ancient ringmaster fights for his life in the local hospital.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Fair,’ she said savagely. ‘You don’t know what fair looks like. I haven’t even started. Now, I’m going to the hospital to see how Grandpa really is. Meanwhile, you need to get off circus land.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and suddenly the emotion, the anger, the distress built up and she could no longer contain it. ‘Now. If I so much as see you skulking …’
‘I do not skulk …’
‘Or any of your heavies …’
‘I don’t have heavies.’
‘I’ll call the police.’
‘I have the right …’
‘You have no rights at all,’ she yelled, and she’d really lost it but right now she didn’t care. ‘The moral high ground is mine and I’m taking it. Get off circus land, Mathew Bond. I’ll sort this mess, somehow, some way, but meanwhile I have my grandfather in hospital, I have a circus to tend and you have no place here.’
She