Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) (2 page)

Samantha sat and scooted in her chair. “The ogre complimented me references and politely said he was considering someone else, thank ye anyway. ’Twould’ve served me quite as well to stay home.”

“Hope ye told ’m what he can do with his stinking nanny position.”

“No, Edan, I didn’t. Perchance I’ll have to seek employment from him some time in the future. Bridge-burning, ye know. Besides, one troublemaker in the family is already one too many. Grandmum said a meeting tonight.”

“Griffith is making us official; organizing the cause, even giving it a name.
Sinn Fein
.”

Samantha translated mentally.
We ourselves
. Poetic, in a way. “Five years into the twentieth century, and already ye’re trying to revolutionize it.”

“Aye. We’re getting together tonight to discuss it, see what we’ll be doing next.” Edan reached for a slice of bread. Mum rapped his knuckles.

“And what’s yer own part in that newspaperman’s mischief?”

Edan grinned. “Why, Sam, in the midst of the meeting, meself shall stand up straight and proud and announce to all Ireland’s fine young men there that me three sisters be seeking husbands and ye can sign up at the back of the hall.”

Grandmum hooted. “Ye want to help yer sisters find men? Best to tend yer own garden. Marry some lass yerself and set a grand example. Ye be only two years younger’n Samantha and men don’t become spinsters. Twenty-five’s more’n old enough to be settling down.”

Samantha couldn’t quite decide whether to laugh or scream, so she did neither. “Ye don’t think I’ll ever marry, do ye?”

“Ye haven’t so far. Nae even a close call.” Grandmum popped her false teeth out and rubbed with a finger at some imperfection in the upper plate.

Samantha studied the toothless lady, decided that you can’t argue with an edentate, and buried herself in her favorite retreat, her own imagination. She thought of the nanny’s position she had just been rejected for and how she didn’t really want it anyway. She was hardly fond of children; they were, in fact, rather low on her list of tolerable necessities. She thought of the job she had heard about today, the one purchasing fresh fish for the inn down on Market Street. Come home smelling like a cod every day? At least it paid money. And she thought about the yellow paper pinned to the board by the meat market, the invitation with such bright and frightening promise.

Margaret at twenty-three was well employed as a typist, having mastered that new-fangled and mysterious printing machine. Linnet, barely seventeen, clerked in a tobacconist’s. Edan, for all his caustic political polemic, still managed to draw a paycheck as an assistant in the Gleason law offices—prestigious, at the very least. Even Ellis, not yet fourteen, drove a wholesaler’s pony cart down on the wharf. Why could Samantha never find a good, solid, comfortable position? What was wrong with her, anyway?

The rest of the family came straggling in and supper commenced. Papa intoned a blessing, crossed himself and picked up his fork.

Samantha crossed herself without thinking about it, for her thoughts kept drifting, as if drawn to a nightmare so horrible as to be absolutely fascinating. She was mad to even consider it. She’d better air it and get it out of the way, though. There was a pall over this meal, an ominous discomfort you could feel, and it was no doubt all Samantha’s doing. Confession clears the air, they say.

“Papa, I saw an interesting notice at the butcher’s today.”

“Spare me more politics.”

“Nae politics. Employment. A man named Cole Sloan seeks indentured domestics. Methinks I’ll apply.” There. It was out.

“Indenture?” Edan looked up from his dinner and laughed. “Sam, nobody does that anymore.”

Her father snorted a whirlwind through his shaggy gray moustache. “T’ America? Surely ye heard that letter Sean Galbraith got from his son in Boston. They treats the Irish like dirt in America, lass. ‘No Irish need apply’ sign in every office window.”

“Australia.”

That pall of discomfort had been nothing compared with this overcast of silence now.

Margaret’s merry laughter broke the quiet. “Austerailia! Ah, sure’n that’d cure yer spinsterhood, Sam. Ye could marry one of them abba-driggidies.”

“Or a convict.” Edan wagged his head. “Better ye let me try to find ye someone here on yer own sod.”

“One of yer fire-breathing political buddies? Nae. Besides, Margaret’s on the verge of marrying Sean Morley, and he’s a hothead after yer own heart. I’ll let her be the one to put up with that nonsense.”

Edan’s doleful eyes skewered her and made her feel ashamed. “Ye think nothing of honor and freedom, do ye.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. And it was almost true.

“We get enough troubles in life without buying deliberately into more.”

Papa’s shaggy head wagged. “Hear the lass. She talks of bobbing across the wicked sea clear to Australia, as she accuses her brother of buying trouble.”

Samantha sputtered a bit. “Let me rephrase. If one must invite trouble, wisdom dictates that one choose manageable troubles so much as possible. ’Tis the practical, logical way of dealing with life. These political upheavals aren’t in the least controllable, nae even by the powers directing them. Too much blind emotion, too much obstinacy. They be nae subject to reason.”

“Right.” Edan washed down the last of his potato with a hearty draft of water. “Sure, and the ocean ye can control by reason. A ship out in hundred-foot swells is subject to reason. I see. Aye, I see.” Edan pushed his chair back. “Ye ready, El?”

Papa’s eyes squinted down and buried themselves somewhere within his bushy eyebrows and graying sideburns. “The lad stays home. Too young.”

“He does a man’s work, Papa. And ’tis his future; he should get a glance at it, ye think?”

“And if there be trouble … ?”

“Nae tonight. Just talking tonight.”

“Mmph.” Ellis jammed in half a potato, no doubt lest Edan notice that his plate wasn’t empty and steal his food. Edan did that. His parents had named their son “Edan,” a “consuming flame”—and Edan lived up to his name, consuming food like wildfire.

Papa flicked an eye toward Ellis, his grudging consent. “
Sinn Fein
; Australia; and what other delights have ye children to share, to gladden the heart of yer aging papa?”

“Ye’ll nae find me floating round the world. I’ll stay here and work on Sean Morley. Of course”—Margaret’s eyes crackled—“I be nae so desperate as yerself, Sam.”

“Meg, for shame.” Linnet turned her sweet, glowing, gray-green eyes to Samantha. “Ye know, Sam, I don’t think I could ever leave me home and country. Nae for someplace so … so different. So ungreen. So very unhomely. And I dinnae know how yerself can be thinking of it.”

“The thing’s nae said and done yet. Let it lie a bit, girls, and quit yer nattering.” Papa folded his napkin, his unmistakable sign that the conversation was ended.

Edan and Ellis trooped off to their meeting of—what did he call it?
Sinn Fein
—and the house seemed empty again. It was Linnet’s turn with the dishes, but somehow Samantha ended up in the kitchen. Grandmum settled back into the inglenook and took a nail file to her upper plate. All appeared normal on the surface, but the night still felt strangely out of joint, hanging dark and heavy on the spirit.

Papa traded his emptied teacup in on his cap and jacket and off he went without a word into the murky night for a round at the pub. He didn’t have to announce where he was going—his routine was fixed and familiar, rutted and well-worn—unlike the future of his eldest daughter.

Australia. What could she be thinking of? A world that was a world away, literally; an alien world of freaky little animals and equally freaky little black semi-humans with spears; a world deemed so desolate by the British Empire that it hosted the Crown’s ultimate penal colony. And she thought she felt some call to go there?

Well, she had nothing here; no marriage prospects, no job at the moment, no expectations. It could be no worse there.

But Samantha felt at home here. The sod under her, the gray sky above, the mist and rain between; they were as much a part of her as her dark brown hair. She couldn’t rip herself apart and send half off to foreign soil while the other half remained, hopelessly rooted. It’s not natural. It’s just not done.

And yet she knew that millions of Irish lads and lasses like her, men and women with no prospects or expectations, had done exactly that. For the last sixty years, ever since the potato famine, more Irish had left the auld sod than had been born on it. There were fewer eligible men now than when she was a child. And the young men were still emigrating, chasing rainbows—and girls—across alien meadows.

The kitchen finally put in order, Samantha took a light up to her room and dug out her atlas. She hadn’t looked at this old book in years. It hadn’t been the biggest or most accurate of atlases when it was new, and Samantha had not purchased it new; she had no money for that sort of extravagance. But it contained maps, scores of maps, some in color, and it fueled dreams as no other book can. Samantha loved maps. What was the term? Cartophile. She might not be good enough to land a husband or a good job, but she was a grand cartophile.

The map of Australia was as she remembered it—a huge expanse of blankness. The artist didn’t have the imagination to populate its vast unknown reaches with fantastic monsters the way medieval cartographers filled unknown oceans of yore. And no one had explored most of the continent, apparently.
Mossman.
The man purchasing indentures wrote from Mossman. But these map-makers had never heard of any Mossman. She tried to picture what this flat white surface must look like for real.

Here were some scraggly lines where Burke and Wills traversed the land a few scant years before the book was printed. Here was the penal colony, and there was Sydney. The great clippers had sailed from Sydney on the wool runs—
Cutty Sark, Thermopylae
…

A wail in the night—someone had cried out! Samantha tried to sit up straight, but a painful crick in her neck kept her S-shaped. Her lamp fizzed and flickered, nearly dry. She was scrunched in her chair like a ball of wadded-up paper. How long had she slept? Several hours, quite probably.

Her mother moaned. She could tell Papa’s rumbling voice and even upstairs here, through two closed doors, she heard the anguish in it. She bolted downstairs.

The parlor was filled, but not by Edan. In the middle of the room stood a constable, shuffling from foot to foot, and a crisp young British army officer of some type. Papa stood rigid, his arms wrapped around Mum, and his cheek buried in her hair. Margaret draped across the divan sobbing. Grandmum sat on the ottoman by the clock and simply stared at the rug, rocking mindlessly back and forth.

Samantha almost missed Ellis. The stripling, devoid of his veneer of manhood, had melted into the corner under the staircase. It was his den, his hiding place, the hole he always curled up in when his world had gone drastically awry.

Linnet—Linnet’s tender face told Samantha the news; she didn’t need these bumbling talebearers. The shock and grief in Linnet’s face told all.

“Edan. ’Tis Edan, aye? There was some sort of trouble and Edan was—”

“Trouble of the worst sort, yes.” The officer’s voice crackled, just as sharp and unyielding as his expertly pressed uniform. “Illegal meeting and public disturbance. Mr. Connolly here—you’re the father, I presume?—called the army to fault. As I pointed out to him, the queen’s army
will
maintain order, and by whatever means necessary to assure control. Persons fomenting disorder know that before they begin.” He jabbed the constable’s arm. “We’ve done our duty.” They nodded brusquely. “Ladies—” and they were gone into the wet night.

Samantha stood transfixed, but only for a moment.
Edan … ?
She needed facts, she needed the truth, and Ellis, poor Ellis, had been there. He knew. She crossed to the boy and put her hands on his shoulders. “Please tell me.”

Ellis stared numbly at her sleeve. “The meeting was all shouting at each other ’til some soldiers marched in unexpected. Then the yelling was at them. I was in back; couldn’t see; after the shooting, there was …” The frail shoulders shrugged. “There was Edan and Sean Morley and one other fellow on the floor and all the blood …” The fragile voice drifted to silence.

Samantha wrapped her arms around her brother, and Ellis, flaccid Ellis, did not resist.

Margaret stirred on the divan. “Sam? I’ll walk along with ye on the morrow when ye apply for that indenture.”

Samantha shuddered, a wrenching sob-turned-sigh. Tears were coming now, at last, to help ease the pain. “Do ye suppose there’s any place where warriors laugh, and are kind, instead of striking down our brightest and best? Bright light and warm cheer instead of … instead of this?”

Chapter Two

With Fear and Trembling

Did the storm seem to be dying a bit? It didn’t matter. Samantha mourned her lost homeland, the gentle yesterdays of her youth, and nothing the wind could do now would mollify her. She’d return to her Ireland this moment if she could, but she’d not be able to do that for a long time to come. For the moment she had no money, no influence, no luck. She was trapped on an alien continent, in the claws of a typhoon the likes of which she had never ever seen.

Loose sheets on the galvanized metal roof started banging wildly. That was a good sign; until now they had been held to one stiff and unwavering position by the constant gale. Something in the darkness above her ripped away; rain pelted her face. Another tree went down in the garden.

Finally, by degrees, the storm was easing; Samantha could tell. The wild wind slowed. Rain by the gallon drenched the world and everything in it. Only here in the tropics did such dense deluges fill earth and sky. She curled tightly in her corner another hour as rain dumped on her through the ripped roof.

“Sam? Sam! Where are you?” The thick baritone came booming across from somewhere near the dining room.

Samantha’s heart leaped. His plantation was ruined, his house broken, and yet it was she he thought of first! “Here, Mr. Sloan! I’m coming!” She squirmed to untangle her legs from her skirts, to stand erect. “I’m here.”