Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1)

Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1)

Austrailian Destiny [1]

Sandra Dengler

Baker Books (1988)

Tags: Fiction, Christian, Historical, General

Turn-of-the-century Australia holds one of the world's most magnificent settings for Book One of the new Australian series. From the jungles of the Queensland coast to the servitude of the sugar plantations to the mysterious lives of the Aborigines, here is an exciting story with all the elements you would hope for in Christian fiction.Samantha Connolly and her sisters have attempted to escape the bleak future in Ireland by emigrating to Queensland in response to an offer of indenture. Circling half the globe she discovered a world she had never anticipated or desired--yet her home was now a world away!Their master, sugar planter Cole Sloan, is embroiled in legal tangles and economic woes, trying to keep his plantation afloat. Samantha's middle sister is fortunate to find a beau in the local preacher while Samantha is drawn to Sloan. But callousness, unethical dealings, enslavement, and eventually murder sully the man--or is he a victim of his past and present circumstances?Tangeld paths weave together as the brief white occupancy of Australia crosses the lengthy past of the Aborigines. How will the Gospel find its way into their lives, and will morals be upheld even at the cost of sacrifice?

© 1988 by Sandy Dengler

Published by Bethany House Publishers

11400 Hampshire Avenue South

Bloomingon, Minnesota 55438

www.bethanyhouse.com

Bethany House Publishers is a division of

Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Ebook edition created 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

eISBN 978-1-4412-6254-7

Editorial work by Penelope Stokes

Cover illustration by Dan Thornberg

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

With Memories and Regrets

1. With Grief

2. With Fear and Trembling

3. With Malice Toward Some

4. Victor

5. Rotten Cane

6. Ruin

7. Unanswered Questions

8. Coral Reef

9. By Hook or Crook

10. Just Plain Pain

11. The Thrill of the Chase

12. Fossicker

13. Obsession

14. Kanaka

15. Butting Heads Together

16. Desperation

17. Up and Down the Hills

18. Sweet Savour

19. Exploration and Discovery

20. Encounters With History

21. Disaster and Tragedy

22. The Theme of Time

23. Crescendo

24. Fire and Fury

25. In Ashes

About the Author

Books by Sandy Dengler

Back Cover

With Memories and Regrets

A splintering
crack!
, the rumble of whispered thunder; the ancient mango tree by the garden fell unseen in the night.

Samantha Connolly, brave enough to circle half the globe and strong enough to make her own way once she got here, wedged herself in a corner, trembling. She covered her face and wished that her long slim fingers were fatter, that they might cover more.
Twenty-eight next month,
she thought,
and I’m acting like a four-year-old. Honestly!

Crashing surf, normally a quarter mile away, flung itself across the front lawn to spend itself at the very doorstep.

Samantha pressed deeper into the corner between the treadle organ and the Regency bookcase. She was letting a mere typhoon reduce her to a gibbering idiot. She should be … uh, she should be … surely, she should be doing
something
! She should be taking command, as she so often did when a crisis struck. Logic ruled her life. Fear was, in certain circumstances, also logical—but this behavior certainly was not. For shame, Miss Connolly! She drew her long legs in tighter against her chest.

The eggshell of walls between her and the storm vibrated with every gust. Then the eggshell exploded as the pandanus palm that used to sway so gracefully above the house came slashing down through the roof to thunk against the organ. With an exuberant shriek the storm, victorious, slung its cold, stinging rain through the shattered shell.

Whatever strong reserve Samantha imagined for herself flew out through the roof into the whipping storm. Samantha Connolly was a person in control, a person to be trusted in a crisis situation. She always took care of things. Everyone knew that. But she had no control now; all the power lay in the hands and teeth of a mindless enemy; and that terrified her most of all. She was helpless, at the mercy of a merciless freak of weather.

Margaret had a comforting God to pray to; Samantha had none. Margaret had a young man to cling to; Samantha cowered here alone. If the storm destroyed her as it was destroying the house, no one would know until tomorrow, until this fiendish fury had passed—if it ever would. Samantha’s tidy little paradise was ripping itself apart with an insane violence she could never have imagined back home.

Home. Ireland. Distant Ireland a world away. Gentle, soggy Erin with her misty hills, her boggy glens, her slick cobbled streets and muted beauty in grays and vivid greens.
Why, dear God, did you ever let me come here?

Chapter One

With Grief

1905

Once upon a time, so the storytellers claimed, when Ireland was young and her green face as yet not marred by cities, Dagda the giant built for the Celtic titans a series of magnificent palaces hidden away within great hollow hills. Their outside appearance, upon which anyone might gaze, was that of any hill—ragged, verdant, softened by mist. But deep inside, safe from mortal eyes, warriors and demi-gods made merry amid bright light and splendor.

Once upon a time, when the century had not yet turned and the world still tasted sweet, Samantha Connolly herself had climbed to the top of just such a hill palace in the mountains north of Cork. She knew her hill was one of the titan hills because Papa had said so.

But that was another century, another Ireland, and Samantha had been a child. She was an old maid now, already turned twenty-seven, and she no longer so readily believed whatever her father told her. Yet she still believed about Dagda’s hill palaces, for they beckoned to her too strongly for denial. Her soul yearned bitterly for the brilliant light and warm cheer hidden from her mortal eyes somewhere within the wet, rolling, gray-green wilderness of Ireland’s yesterdays.

When Dagda built, he kept the green. Ireland looked exactly the same when he finished as it had before he began. These days Ireland’s fair face bore blemishes of gray, because mortal builders are not nearly so clever. Cork, a town made by men and practically devoid of brilliant light and warm cheer, perched like a lackluster scar on the edge of the sea.

Samantha was somehow, inexplicably, becoming bored with her native Cork. Today she walked nearly the length of Patrick Street without noticing a single patch of true Irish green. Blackish ragged moss between the cobbles sometimes showed a bit of color. Here an unkempt wisp of grass, there some plants in a window box—everything else sprawled beneath the overcast in shades of listless gray.

The wind shifted and gusted suddenly as she was crossing Connor Street; it dashed cold rain in her face and pushed her hood back. She grabbed the hood below her chin to snug it down close around her ears, then short-cutted through the little cobbled lane behind Marquardt Street and bounded up the back stoop into the house she knew best.

“There ye are! We were afraid ye’d miss supper.” Grandmum Connolly creaked to her feet from the settle in the inglenook and began the laborious process of moving her aged bulk out to the dining table.

Samantha followed the little lady into the dining room, dragging her wool cape off along the way. “I be nae late, so supper must be early.”

“‘Nuther meeting.” Grandmum’s voice rasped tight and thin. The sound and fury of this political fight over an Irish free state was accomplishing what the mere march of years could never do—it was making an old woman of her.

Papa was home already. He had loosely arranged his broad trunk and thick limbs into his overstuffed chair, all asprawl. With the barest smile of bemusement he watched Mum hack thick, jagged slices off a leg of roast mutton. He could do the carving better himself; he was a master carpenter whose cabinets and joinery were second to none; but as he so often claimed, he never interfered in Mum’s trade and expected none of her interference in his.

Mum bent over the table with the sort of dogged determination that had forged a couple of small North Sea islands into an empire. She spared Samantha a brief glance. “Where’s yer sisters?”

“Margaret just happened to bump into Sean Morley—sheer coincidence, mind you, that they both chanced to be in the same street of a large town—so don’t hold yer breath waiting for her. Where Linnet might be is anyone’s guess. She’d already left the shop when I passed by there.”

Samantha’s strapping brother filled rooms simply by entering them. The dining room filled now as Edan came striding through. “How’d it go?” He plopped down at his place and stretched out a burly arm to help Grandmum with her shawl.