Dream Time (historical): Book I (17 page)

Amaris was all too eager to put the Blue Mountains between herself and Nan. Traveling by covered wagon, she and Francis, along with Sin and Celeste, began their honeymoon in the company of ten other families—graziers and squatters. Some of them, like Francis, were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.

A dozen or so people walked or rode pack animals. Among those walking was Jimmy Underwood, whom Sin had hired away from New South Wales Traders. Thomas Rugsby, a friend of the family, traveled with Major Hannaby, his wife Elizabeth, and their daughter Eileen.

Molly Finn had petitioned Amaris to take her with her. “Ye will need an extra hand, ye will. I’ll work cheap.” Nan’s carriage driver had forsaken Molly, and the girl was desolate.

Apparently, half of the females in Sydney Cove were desolate at t
he loss of such a wonderful candidate for a husband. That Francis Marlborough had chosen to marry a mere rector’s daughter, a plain spinster at that, astounded the Exclusionists.

With her own money, Amaris purchased a hundred
sheep, merinos brought in from the Cape of Good Hope. Rogue kept a mother hen’s eye on them, herding them in the trail of the wagons, along with two milk cows.

For his part, Sin had decided to wait until he was settled on a run before he bought sheep. “In addition,” he had said, “I want to diversify. I don’t like being completely dependent on sheep. Maybe start a horse farm.”

By the end of that first day of traveling, dust had mixed with sweat to form a gritty paste that the sunlight baked on Amaris’s face.

In the brief hour that she had spelled Francis at the reins, her gloved hands ached from controlling the plodding bullocks with whip and reins. Her hips hurt from sitting on the wagon’s board seat. No cushion alleviated the continual jouncing. She rubbed the area at either side of the back of her waist. The hard monotony of miles was also mentally strenuous.

Riding on his sleek black steed, Francis asked, “Spine ache?”

She managed a smile that she envisioned as more resembling a grimace. Even Molly had grown tired of riding and had elected to walk awhile. “Everything aches. How about you?” She didn’t need to ask. Since leaving Sydney, he had been in high spirits.

“You were right.” The man she had considered a London dandy cast her what was almost a shy smile. With one slender hand dangling his mount’s reins, he flung the other out to indicate the vast vista of prairie and mountain. “Out here, Amaris, I am my own man. I am being judged not on my background or my financial portfolio but on me. On me alone!”

This was something they both shared: Their marriage
union was symbolic of their joint commitment to create a place for themselves in the Never-Never. Some of Celeste’s joy that came from being caught up in the “great adventure,” as she had termed it, was apparently rubbing off on Amaris.

“Why don’t you let me take back the reins now,” Francis said. “Frivolity has had his exercise for the day.”

She readily acquiesced. While Francis tied Frivolity’s reins to the rear of their wagon, she turned back and searched along the string of wagons. Dust hazed the air, but she was able to find Sin’s wagon two back of their own. Celeste’s face was upturned to his, and they appeared to be engaged in deep conversation.

Evidently, this trek was liberating in more than just the physical sense of the word. Today, Sin’s scowl was noticeably absent. This morning, when he had assisted Celeste in boarding the wagon, she had thanked him with a smile, her hand briefly touching his chest. The gesture could have meant little, but Amaris had seen the intimate glance that had passed between the two.

Around late afternoon covies of partridges began to scatter before the thudding of the wagon wheels. Francis quickly pulled his flintlock from the floorboard, loaded a ball in the muzzle, and took aim. The thunder of the shot was deafening, but his aim was true.

“Partridge for dinner tonight,” he said with a smile and handed the reins to her.

She watched him alight and retrieve a bird some yards away. Pleasure that her husband would be a good provider filled her. She had made a good choice. She recalled her mother’s concern, expressed only an hour before the wedding. “Ye forceful nature, luv, may have compelled Francis to marry you. Mayhap it would have been best to let nature take its course.”

If nature had taken its course, she might have been an unwed mother. As it was, she had had her anxiously awaited monthly.

At the front of the wagon train, Major Hannaby was waving his upraised arm in a signal for the wagons to encircle and make camp. The dreaded ascent of the steep Blue Mountains would be postponed until after dawn of the morrow.

After a full day of working the reins, Francis was becoming remarkably proficient as a teamster. “Ha ya!” he shouted at the two plodding bulls. Steam rose off their flea-coated flanks, and the smell traveled with the dust.

Francis’s slender hands snapped the reins and whip with a strength that surprised her. The bullocks fell into place in a circle rapidly forming near a line of pink eucalyptus that marked a creek. At the creaking sounds the wagons made, a screaming cloud of white cockatoos exploded out of the trees.

When Amaris climbed down from her wagon, encircled with the others, pain shot through her hips. Francis had bounded from the wagon to help her step down, but she noticed he moved with as little agility as she.

“Do you hurt as much as I do?” she asked with a small laugh that was close to a groan.

The groan turned to an audible sigh at the thought that the most difficult portion of their journey was only hours away. Once through the pass, the weeks of travel to the confluence of the Darling and Murray
rivers would be less arduous but certainly more hazardous. Or so the stories went from the few stouthearted pioneers who had started farms and ranches in the outback of the past decade.

In the dusk, camp fires took spark like lightning bugs within the contained encampment. The fires then erupted into blazes that lit the tired faces of the men and women as they began to fish pots and pans from their traveling chests.

There was little enough within the wagons: the most important items—a rifle and an ax, a few pots and pans, a little extra clothing, several blankets, perhaps a spinning wheel, and such prized possessions as a clock or a family Bible.

While Molly gathered firewood, Amaris lugged out a kettle, and Francis took it from her with a gallant flourish. “You should not be carrying heavy things like that.”

She had to laugh. “Francis, I have lifted a lot heavier things than this at the Female Immigrants’ Home. If you’ll start the fire, I’ll begin to peel—”

“Start a fire?” He looked at her blankly.

It was her turn to look blank. “You don’t know how to start a fire?”

In the half light, his face was visibly red. “Of course, I do. In a fireplace. But what about containment and—”

“You have never camped out on your pheasant or partridge hunts or whatever it is you shoot?”

“That’s what servants are for, Amaris. That’s why we hired Molly.”

She ignored his caustic tone. “Why don’t you amble over and talk with Sin.”

Relief and gratitude crossed her husband’s face. She observed him as, spurs tinkling, strolled over to the Tremayne wagon. He knelt with Jimmy over the fire they were building.

Molly returned, her arms laden with twigs and branches from the wattles that lined the nearby creek. She set to building a fire with the twigs and smaller branches. Every so often, she would glance toward Sin’s wagon.

Amaris thought Molly might be watching Francis or Sin. That Molly liked men, any man, was the general assumption. Then she surprised Amaris. “Jimmy Underwood, does he have a wife waiting somewhere, missus?”

Amaris hid a smile. So forty-year-old Jimmy Underwood and not Francis had been the object of Molly’s intentions all along. “Not that I know of.” She set aside the kettle of plucked birds Francis had shot. “I’m going for more water.”

Close by, Celeste was stirring a broth while the three men chatted. Amaris was about to join her friend, when she saw Sin quickly rise from his camp stool to lift the heavy kettle from the fire. Celeste thanked him with a smile, her hand briefly touching his arm. His glance lingered on her hand. There was a world of gentleness in his gaze. Celeste had tamed the beast.

Amaris wisely left the couple alone and walked on down to the creek. It was a wide and shallow meandering stream. In the rainy season, so she had heard, it would overflow its boundaries and carry away any sheep and cattle grazing nearby.

When she returned
with her pail of water, Molly already had the birds skewered on a makeshift spit. Dripping juice sizzled in the fire. Amaris’s mouth watered. She was tired, and her appetite voracious.

At last, dinner was ready, and she and Francis and Molly filled their plates and joined the others. Talk of the next day’s haul up the mountain, of the latest trouble with the aborigines and what kind of grazing land could be found in the Never-Never, that unknown interior, was bantered around by the pioneers.

Afterward, when the dishes had been cleaned and the men got together to smoke a pipe, Amaris and Celeste walked down to the creek. Several other women were already there, delighting in the fresh water that soothed away their aches and cleansed the dust off their skin.

“Ah, Celeste," called Elizabeth Hannaby. Her husband, after soldiering for thirty years, had sold his commission for acreage in the outback. Like most, they aspired to become landed gentry. “Tis a grand evening, isn’t it."

Her smile even included Amaris, who was now the wife of a nobleman, no less. Amaris took the change of attitude in good stride. These people would be neighbors, and it was best to be on good terms with neighbors who could mean the difference between life and death.

“Lovely,” Celeste said, “but I miss the sunrises against the ocean horizon.”

“I imagine, dearie, we’ll see sights quite as beautiful. So ’tis brides you two are.”

Her patronizing tone went over Celeste’s head. The moon’s light betrayed her blushing face.

Amaris had put from her mind later tonight, when she would go to bed with Francis. That one time, when he had taken her virginity there on the Paramatta River, she had been overwhelmed by all the discoveries and revelations that had only been whispered about by both women who had husbands and those at the home who had already been “deflowered.”

Only Pulykara had addressed her question of how a man and woman make a baby. “Watch the dogs and cats and sheep and horses. No different, Miss Priss.”

Pulykara had been right. After all the impassioned words, the act itself was little more.

After Elizabeth left, Amaris knelt where the creek pooled over a bowl of shale and scrubbed her arms and face. The water smelled stale.

By the time she finished, Celeste was already rebuttoning her sleeves. She reached out and touched Amaris on the shoulder. “You’re happy aren’t you, Amaris?”

She stared down at the young bride. In the moonlight, she was like a pale blossoming flower. “I’m tired,” she told the younger woman. “Let’s go on back.”

But returning to the wagon wasn’t exactly something to which she was looking forward. Honesty compelled her to admit that she had bartered herself for the opportunity not only to seek retribution against Nan but also to escape the mundane life: her writing was mediocre: her social work was less than fulfilling. She feared she had Nan’s grandness of vision.

A sheep station! How grandiose of her to think she and Francis could create an empire out of unseen, infinite stretches of the Never-Never.

Francis had trusted her wisdom. Had married her. She knew she owed Francis devotion. Any more than that she did not know if she was capable of giving.

When she returned to the camp, he was kneeling to spread out their bedrolls beneath their wagon, where it was cool. Molly was already inside, seeking sleep as a relief from her hard day.

Amaris glanced back over her shoulder. Strange, to be looking to Celeste for reassurance. The girl stood, her hand in Sin’s, peering at whatever it was he pointed out on the dark-fringed horizon.

Resolutely, Amaris switched her gaze back to Francis. When she knelt beside him, he said, “Tired?”

She saw the desire in his eyes. Her smile was forced. “No.”

In the deep darkness beneath the wagon, she peeled down to her petticoat and chemise. The nightgown she tugged overhead was voluminous— and hot. As she divested herself of the remaining underclothes, she couldn’t help but think how wonderful it would be to sleep naked on the prairie, at one with nature, as Pulykara had once told her she had always done until being sold off to the white man’s lumber camp.

Far in the distance a dingo howled. Looking out at the night sky, she felt pulled upward into that shimmering immensity. She experienced a certain affinity for its stars. She felt a reassurance seeing the Southern Cross tilting on its side, its points ever northward. She had a personal position on infinity.

Francis gathered her against him. “The others,” she protested.

“There were others nearby that day on the river,” he said, kissing her neck, “and that made it all the more exciting.”

She steeled herself. His kisses were no less hungry. If anything, he seemed more ravenous for her. She was amazed to find herself responding.