Dream Time (historical): Book I (11 page)

Celeste climbed on the bottom railing to watch the next horse paraded out by a little man in red livery. A mustachioed old man and plump little woman appeared to recognize Celeste and began discoursing. Protective and concerned, Sin positioned himself closer to Celeste.

Startled, the girl glanced up, then grinned. “Sin, this is Mr. Ba
rnaby and his wife. Mr. Barnaby is our banker.”

Noting the deplorable state of Sin’s only jacket, a threadbare worsted item of clothing belonging to a former servant, t
he old man nodded condescendingly. The woman barely acknowledged him.

Their pompous attitude bothered him little. In fact, reflecting that it would be the banker who would eventually have to approve Celeste’s selection for draft on his bank, he relaxed.

He concentrated on the horse being led around the ring. The mare was well formed, with a deep-barreled chest, straight legs, and a good slope to the shoulders.

“She’s got a glossy coat, doesn’t she?” Celeste said. “Can we get her?”

“Tis up to you. Your mother said that you were to decide which ...”

His words trailed away as he watched the horse move, too slow for such a young one. The mare walked as if her hooves were sore. “No, I don’t think this one, Celeste. I’d wager someone has ridden the mare hard for a couple of days so it would be too tired to show its true nature. You don’t want to be buying a ‘throwing’ horse.”

Celeste’s large brown eyes shadowed with disappointment, then just as quickly cleared to watch in absorption the next horse led into the corral.

An uneasiness assailed Sin. Amaris was missing.
  He scanned the crowd. The girl was old enough to take care of herself. Servant gossip implied that Nan Livingston wouldn’t be disappointed if Amaris never showed her face around the place again. Yet he felt responsible.

“Celeste, where did Amaris go?”

The girl looked up in amazement. “I didn’t see her leave, Sin.”

He let out an exasperated sigh. He hated to take Celeste away from the fun of the action. Hell! When he found Amaris
. . .

“Mr. and Mrs. Barnab
y, would you mind watching Miss Livingston for a moment?”

The gray mustache lifted in a perfunctory smile. “Not at all, Tremayne.
I trust you won’t be gone any longer than it would take to gain your freedom?”

He looked the man directly in the eye. “
I don’t think you need that reassurance. I’m here precisely because Mrs. Livingston trusts me not to escape.”

Mr. Barnaby looked skeptical, and his wife interjected, “We’ll watch Celeste.”

After telling Celeste he had something to check on, he struck out in long, rapid strides for the picket area, where he had hitched their horses. Amaris was not there. Damn her! Where could she have wandered?

His boots thudded on the encircling veranda of the Macarthur house and he knocked on the door to inquire of the dowdy housekeeper if a young woman had entered.

“Not to me knowledge,” the woman said, “but you might try the tent erected for repast after the auction.”

Amaris wasn’t there either, although the
table, spread with kidney pie, mutton, and at least half a dozen different meat dishes, tempted his hungry stomach. Concern drove him on past the tent toward the various outbuildings, sheds, and barns.

A quarter of an hour later he found Amaris behind the sheep ba
rn. She knelt over a ragged-looking puppy that had the wild look of the dingo about it. “What in the hell are you doing?" he demanded. She sprung up and whirled around, her expression startled. When she saw that it was he, annoyance replaced her momentary dismay. Her almond-shaped eyes narrowed to slits. “Oh, 'tis just you.”

Anger roiled through him. His hands gripped her upper arms. “Do not ever take for granted the saying that Irishmen are wild and lawless.”

Nonplussed, she stared at him. Without thinking, he bent his head and kissed her open mouth. He felt her stiffen beneath his hands and realized instantly what folly he had committed. Where such desire had come from, he couldn’t fathom, but he knew he didn’t want to serve an additional fourteen years for forcing himself on an unwanting maiden.

He set her from him and watched her wipe his kiss from her mouth with the back of her hand.

His smile was grim. “I didn’t think you were enough woman to appreciate that.” He turned his back on her before she could retort with that sharp tongue of hers. Over his shoulder, he said, “Get back to the auction before I decide to take you in the hay here and now.”

He strode on out into the sunlight with her curse of “Paddy!” tingling his ears
.

§ CHAPTER NINE §

“Proper young women don’t go without petticoats, Amaris.”

“Proper young women don’t wear secondhand petticoats donated by the prostitutes of Brigsby Pub.”

Rose Wilmot’s face blanched, and Amaris was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry, Mama. I just don’t want to—”

“Stand still, gal,” Pulykara said. The wrinkles around her mouth undulated her once arrow-straight facial tattoos. With bare feet splayed, she squatted on her haunches before Amaris and stuck pins in the ruffled material to mark a long hem.

“Stand straight, luv,” Rose said.

“—go to the Livingston dance,” she continued, “because not only am I too tall, I am too old.”

Rogue, the half-dingo stray she had insisted on carting back from Elizabeth Farm two years before, darted in and out beneath her ruffled hem.

Avoiding the playful dog, Rose stepped back to
observe the new hem length. The first hints of gray tinted the hair at her temples, and her once elfin frame was softened by middle-age weight. “Twenty isn’t too old, and if a man loves you, he will ignore your height.”

“Mother, I don’t want a husband. Nan Livingston does. She’s matchmaking for her daughter.”

“Turn around,” Pulykara grunted.

“Who does Nan have her eye on?”

Amaris turned and faced the open shutters. Across the street a drunk staggered from the George IV pub, the first grog shop to set up trade in what had been a largely rural district. Beyond, she could make out the Livingstons’ red-bricked, turreted house on Darlinghurst Road. “Francis Marlborough.”

Rose pushed back a lock that had fallen over her forehead. Hard work had etched her once-girlish face but not her champagne-fizzy personality. “An earl’s son most likely.”

“No, but the prime minister's nephew. Celeste says that although the law of entail has debarred him from inheritance, his prospects are excellent.”

Not that his financial status was important to Celeste, or Nan Livingston for that matter. Nan had money. She wanted connections.

Francis Marlborough definitely had connections. Not only was he the prime minister’s nephew, but his b
rother-in-law was Lord Hallock, vice admiral. Francis had made the grand tour of Europe the year before.

When Celeste, standing in the receiving line, offered him her hand, he made a leg and lowered his
head to kiss her fingertips with all the grace of royalty.

Observing him from her vantage point slightly behind Celeste, Amaris found the man intriguing. Beneath the effete mannerism of the aristocrat ran a current of confident masculinity. For just a moment, his gaze brushed hers. The brown eyes twinkled. Then he moved on.

Curious about what made one a blueblood, Amaris continued to observe and listen to Francis. He engaged Sydney’s prominent denizens one by one in what seemed to be fascinating conversation, because both male and female guests appeared disinclined to leave his presence. A suggestion of a smile invited the privileged recipient to partake of the man’s warm and worldly charm. His manners were exquisitely and unfailingly courteous. He had a habit of tilting his head slightly to the side and forward, as if engrossed in his companion of the moment. His curling fair hair and lively walnut brown eyes only added to his appeal.

The women smiled coyly or giggled shyly. The men solicited his opinion about such a variety of subjects that Francis had to be a veritable Renaissance man to be so knowledgeable.

Soon the doors to the ballroom were thrown open and hired musicians began to play a minuet. Francis began his enchantment of one after another of the ladies, but Celeste Livingston was singled out in particular.

Amaris watched the dancing from the vantage point of a wallflower. At sixteen, Celeste had received at least half a dozen proposals, while at twenty Amaris had received only one. In the journal she kept, she made a notation that she suspected her outspoken manner and strong will had put off any would-be suitors.

A lusty sea trader with his tales of adventure mildly interested her for a while. His fumbled kiss that missed her mouth was the only romantic overtone in her life, unless she counted that bold kiss Sin had given her. But then at eighteen she had been inexperienced.

Her gaze moved over the resilient strong-willed women in old silks dancing beneath crystal chandeliers with tough and ambitious men. They signaled that Sydney society, though a child Europe had rejected, was nevertheless the best of Europe’s offspring. Amaris felt a kinship with these visionary people, and yet felt an outsider.

At midnight, after the last minuet was played, the doors were thrown open to the dining room, and the guests paired off, with Celeste and the guest of honor leading the grand march. Francis Marlborough might be a charmer, certainly as irresistibly cocky as an Australian cockatoo, but his partner was clearly charming him at the moment. Her brown eyes sparkled, her cupid bow-shaped lips laughed.

Amaris melted farther back into the shadows of the staircase. She really had no desire to eat or make polite chatter. By the time Molly closed the dining-room doors, Amaris was already slipping out the garden door. She was to have spent the night at the Livingstons’, but, as often happened, she felt the need to be alone.

Her parents’ tiny, impoverished home beckoned, and she started along the moonlit, pebbled carriage drive. Careful to preserve the dress Pulykara and her mother had labored over, she picked up the ruffled hem of her blue satin skirt.

She was not at all afraid to walk the darkened
cobblestone street. The Wilmot family members, including Pulykara, wore an invisible shield of protection. This was due to the respect the clergyman’s family had earned by its work among the jetsam of humanity crowded into the rabbit warrens down in the Rocks. No one would be foolish enough to lift a hand against a Wilmot.

No one but the lean-eyed ex-convict who lounged in tree-dappled shadows at the end of the drive. “Time for Cinderella to hurry home to her hearth?”

She stiffened. “Sin?”

“Certainly not Prince Charming.”

“Certainly not. He’s inside courting Celeste.”  She moved close, lured by her insatiable curiosity. “Are you jealous?”

“Are you?”

She could smell rum on his breath. “You’re drunk.”

In the darkness, his smile gleamed white. “No. I’m drinking but not yet drunk.” He held up a brown bottle. “Rum—the real currency and social anesthetic of New South Wales.” Then, with a vicious whack he smashed the bottle against the tree trunk.

The following instant, she winced at the sharp sensation on her cheek. Her fingers flew to her face and came away scarlet-tipped.

“What is it?” Sin flung away the neck of the broken bottle to stride toward her.

“I’m cut.” Surprised more than hurt, she stared at the blood.

His fingers cupped her cheek and tilted her head toward the moonlight.

“I’m all right.”

“The cut needs attention. Come
on.”

He tugged her along behind him, but she soon caught up. “I can take care of myself.”

He ignored her and strode on—toward his room, she soon discovered.

At the threshold, she yanked her hand away. “I can’t go in there.”

His laughter rent the deep serenity of the night. “Since when have you ever observed propriety?”

“Sin, stop this.”

Inside, he released her. There came the sound of flint rasping against tinder. Soft candlelight spread a glow over the room, mellowing its harsh austerity. In two strides, he crossed the room’s narrow confines and poured water from a pitcher into a chipped basin. From a peg, he removed a frayed towel to dip in the water. He turned to her. “Come here, Amaris.”

She stared back at him. The candlelight muted his harsh features. Still, he looked every year his twenty-seven. Bitterness carved a hard line to his mouth. That mouth had possessed hers once, and recalling that kiss, she recoiled. That moment was the closest she had come in her brief span of twenty years to losing her sense of will. “No.”

His smoky gaze held hers. “Don’t be a child. You know I won’t hurt you.”

“No, I don’t know that.”

He canted his head. “Why not?”

“You kissed me once.”

“And that hurt you?”

She paused. “You didn’t ask my permission. That’s as painful as a lash across your back—having no choice is.”

His mouth lost the one-sided curve of its smile. His rugged visage took on what her mother called that Irish black look. “You be right,” he said at last. “Tis an apology I owe you.”

Even as he talked, he moved toward her, like a stockman gentling a wild horse. “I know that feeling. Of having no choice. Ah, but that’s a nasty cut now.” He stopped only inches away and, without touching her otherwise, gingerly dabbed at the cut. “Of course, we fighting Irish have seen worse. Now hold still while I pluck out the glass sliver.”

His thumb and forefinger cupped her chin and tilted her head. With someone standing so close, his face so near, it was impossible to focus properly. She closed her eyes, which made her vitally aware of his scent, his gentle touch, his warm, even breath. Then a tiny prick of pain made her twitch. Her eyes flew open. “Ohh!”

He grinned, and she was struck by the change in his looks. The fierce countenance was gone. His eyes danced with a vibrancy that was compelling. “I think an old Irish remedy will help.” He crossed to a battered seaman’s chest and took out a jar. “Axle grease, but it will lessen the scarring.”

With slow, patient strokes that said he had all the time in eternity, he applied the unguent. She stood motionless, savoring the pleasant feeling of being cared for—and yet feeling uneasy.

His fingertip stopped its stroking. “I’m that terrifying.”

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You’re trembling. And it’s not because you’re cold.”

“You make me nervous.”

“I told you I wouldn’t kiss you again. Unless you want me to.”

She shrank back. “No!”

One angled brow soared. “So, ’tis not fear you feel but loathing. Tell me, do you loathe me because I am Irish or because I have not the handsome features of your Francis Marlborough?”

“He’s not my Francis Marlborough. He’s Celeste’s.”

He stared steadily into her eyes. “You did not answer me. Which is it?”

“Both,” she blurted. She was anxious to be gone yet hated her cowardice at the same time.

That the gentle Celeste was unafraid of this man amazed her. She thought of all the barbarous men who frequented or lived in the Rocks. They were unconscionable in their treatment of women. She shuddered at the memories of how often she had seen the females—wives, mistresses, daughters even—battered by men. Like Celeste, Rose accepted these men, loving them despite their brutality.

“Well, you are at least honest. I can rest assured me ego will not inflate me head.”

“Are you finished ... tending my cut?”

“Tending your cut, aye. But not finished lecturing. You are a user, Amaris. You trade on Celeste’s fondness for you so that you can ride the coattails of Sydney society. You’ll never—”

“I do not! Tis Celeste who seeks me out!”

“—be accepted.”

She stepped away and faced him, hands braced on her hips. “Why not? Nan Livingston is an ex-convict. And Sydney accepted her.”

“They accepted her money.”

“They’ll accept me—and on my terms, Sinclair Tremayne.”

His mouth twitched with a repressed smile that his fierce gaze belied. “I’ll be watching over your shoulder. I don’t want Celeste hurt."