Dream Time (historical): Book I (22 page)

That summer, Baluway was a remarkable sight, proudly dressed in a short breechcloth, spurred Hessian boots that had been worn to the sole, and a
station owner’s bush hat. Amaris had put it on her list when she ordered stores from Melbourne, the closest port.

Flour, sugar, pepper, mustard, fencing wire—each order had to be prepared with great care as anything overlooked had to wait for the next order, which would be another six months away.

Baluway had become so efficient that he had taken over keeping an inventory of what needed to be ordered to maintain the sheep stock. His inventory was a mental one, since he could neither read nor write, but she could depend on it to be as accurate as her own.

Because she relied upon her aborigine overseer, she felt at ease in leaving him in charge while she was away for several days. The major and Elizabeth were hosting a celebration of the January twenty-sixth founding of Australia in 1788. Amaris and Francis planned to travel to the major’s station, some twenty kilometers distance, in the company of Celeste and Sin.

When Molly discovered Amaris and Francis were going to Never-Never before journeying on to the major’s, she said, “Oh, missus, please let me go with you to Never-Never. With you gone, I don’t need to be a’cooking. I want to see me Jimmy.”

Amaris stared down at that once world-wearied face. It was radiant. She envied the woman, who felt no guilt in her passion for her middle-aged swain. In the outback, no impropriety was found in a courting couple sleeping together.

“Of course, Molly. There’s plenty of room on the dray.”

They set out early in the morning. The flat bed of
the open dray was covered with a layer of straw. Boxes were used for seats. The oxen were slow but hardy. By midday, they reached Never-Never.

Molly jumped down from the dray and ran to Jimmy, who swept her off the ground with a shout of “Whahoo!”

“You don’t mind if she stays while we are at the major’s, do you?” Amaris asked Celeste.

Celeste’s eyes twinkled. “It looks as if we will be needing your father to come out here and officiate at a wedding.”

At that moment, Amaris decided to write her parents and persuade them to come to Dream Time. After all, Nan and Tom had traveled this far to visit Celeste.

Waving good-bye to the couple, the Tremaynes and the Marlboroughs set out once more. Amaris drove the bullock team so Celeste could ride with her and they could talk, while Francis and Sin rode horseback.

All were in high spirits. None more so than Celeste. Taking off her broad-brimmed hat, she turned her sun-browned face to the sky to soak up the sunshine. Her skin had once been pure alabaster. A heated breeze tickled the wisps of hair at Celeste’s nape. “Ahh, Amaris, I love it out here!”

“So do I. Until the sun boils, or the sky pours rain, or the earth puffs up dust storms for days on end. You know what I want on the next stores shipment? A hip bath. My legs are so long I have to stand in the half barrel we use.”

“Not I. Not with my short legs. No, I want a set of long-stemmed glasses. I remember Mama’s pale pink crystal.”

“You miss your old life, Celeste?”

She looked thoughtful. “I miss the rituals. There was something lovely and reassuring about them. Tea at four. Wine with dinner. But my life has purpose here, with Sin.”

Amaris cast her a sidelong glance. For all her contentment, she appeared tired. Her rounded figure was gone, replaced by that drawn, thin look.

“Let’s stop there for our afternoon break,” Celeste said, pointing at a small pond hole bordered by the ubiquitous gray-green gum trees. “I’d like nothing better than to unbutton my shoes and wade into that water.”

Amaris laughed. “Then let’s do it.” She turned around and signaled to Sin to halt.

The wagons stopped in a spot where the grass was plentiful. Celeste spread a blanket, and Amaris took from her basket wedges of bread and paper-thin slices of mutton.

Sin surprised everyone by producing a bottle of sherry. “From a drover, looking for work. I couldn’t afford him. But he was in need of a billy and willing to trade the sherry bottle that another soul had paid him for shearing the day before.”

“So even you miss the amenities of civilization,” Francis said, opening the bottle.

Though his tone had been a little pompous, it had been amiable enough and the remark well intentioned.

For some reason Sin took umbrage. The dark side of his Irish nature turned his beautiful voice caustic. “Though a former convict, I nevertheless share with mere humans their affinity for simple pleasures such as this.”

Celeste put her hand over his. “You deserve more
than simple pleasures, darling, and one day you will have those and more.”

There was such tenderness and love in her eyes. In Sin’s presence, she was a woman content, while Amaris was still restless and disturbed. Watching the smile of contrition he sent his young wife, Amaris felt that old stab of jealousy. Except now the jealousy was worse because its recipient was the sister she had come to love.

Amaris knew that jealousy could destroy her soul, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t fight the attraction she felt for Sin. She disguised her discordant feelings with banter. “I don’t know about you men, but Celeste and I are going wading.”

They reached the major’s station just before sunset. The big house the major had built was impressive. Of two stories, there had to be at least eight rooms.

Elizabeth had surrounded it with an aesthetically laid-out, very English garden. With care and maintenance to be considered, due to climate difference, the garden was all the more lovely and unexpected there in the outback.

In the parlor, ornate oil lamps and porcelain objets d’art filled the room. Portraits of family members looked down from gilt-papered walls. French doors opened onto a veranda bordered by a section of Elizabeth’s garden.

Pre
-dinner drinks were served in the parlor as refreshment for the travel-weary guests. Naturally, the men and women divided into separate groups. The men discussed the usual: drought, stock disease, wool prices, and aborigine attacks.

The women discussed recipes, children, the lack of supplies for running the household efficiently.

Amaris was in the enviable position of being capable of joining either group. Usually, because of her interest in running sheep, she joined the men. This evening, she joined neither group. Standing a little apart, she observed.

Her gaze quickly passed over Sin. To think about him only invited dissatisfaction with her life. From among the group of men, she sought out her husband’s face.

Despite the accumulation of the day’s dust on his clothing and in his hair, which was beginning to thin slightly at the crown, he was by far the most handsome man in the room.

Two years before, he wouldn’t have mingled with egalitarian ease among the squatters, who were from all ranks of society. The outback was gradually eroding Francis’s vanity. Grudgingly, she conceded it wasn’t that difficult to love her husband.

He caught her watching him and gave her a roguish grin. She knew that message. The opportunity of sleeping with her in a different setting excited his passions.

She had to admit, also, that over the last two years his values had changed. Still headstrong, he amazed her by occasionally being willing to forsake his own selfish drive for little pleasures that made her happy. Smiling back at him over the rim of her glass, she recalled the afternoon she had been riding the south paddock. Foolishly, she had stepped in a wombat hole and twisted her ankle.

When she had limped into the house later that evening, he had been quite concerned and had knelt to help her remove the boot from her rapidly swelling ankle. He had been wearing his red-and-black hunting attire, once used to ride to the foxes, now used whenever he hunted the ferocious dingoes, another of his grand passions these days. That and drinking. But that afternoon, as he had knelt before her, she thought how princely he looked. She might have been Cinderella.

Well, she was Lady Marlborough, for all she cared.

“Crystal stemware,” Celeste said at her side, disturbing her reverie. Smiling, the younger woman held up her wineglass. “My wish today was granted, temporarily, at least. Shall we change for dinner?”

“I don’t need any further encouraging.”

Excusing themselves, they left the parlor. Before they reached the staircase, just off the entry, they passed the library, and Amaris paused at the open door. Three walls were lined with books. In her mind flashed the scanty collection of her father’s—Burns, Browning, and a complete Shakespeare, and a few other works. How she treasured those few bound volumes she had brought from her father’s house. She had read and reread them many times.

“Are you coming?” Celeste asked, waiting patiently at the bottom of a staircase of carved cedar.

“Yes,” she replied absently. She was feeling the sting of homesickness. She, who had always considered herself independent and rootless. She hoped her parents, she never thought of them as her adoptive parents, would decide to come and live at Dream Time.

Her distraction was immediately arrested when she and Celeste began to change their dusty travel clothes. Clad only in her chemise, Amaris poured a pitcher of fresh water in a daisy-painted basin. She was washing her face, throat, and arms, when Celeste mumbled something about needing help with her petticoat ties.

Turning around, Amaris stopped short. Celeste was silhouetted against the candlelight. Her thin frame was abruptly distorted by her obviously mounded stomach. “You’re with child again!” Amaris exclaimed in a tone more accusatory than questioning.

Celeste looked at Amaris. A flush washed over her pale cheeks. “Yes. I haven’t told anyone because I wanted to be certain I could carry this one past the first six months.”

“How far along are you?”

Her smile was
Madonna-soft. “Nearly five months.”

“But you—shouldn’t you have waited a year or so, until you get your full strength back?”

She smiled shyly. “We want children. And . . . well, I guess I am sort of . . . brazen, Amaris. Whenever Sin pulls me close to cuddle me in the night, I, uh, can’t help but want to, hmmm, touch him. His body is so beautiful. I get so . . . excited. I suppose I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

“No, that’s all right, I understand.”

But she didn’t. Why didn’t she feel that way about having sex with Francis? It wasn’t the repugnant act that some women in the home had made it out to be. Yet neither was it . . . exciting, nor did it make her breathless like Celeste when she thought about it.

“Here,” she said to Celeste, “let me help you with the ties. One is knotted.”

Later, when she and Celeste joined the other guests, who had also changed, she couldn’t help but dart speculative glances at Sin. Already she knew she enjoyed being with him more than any other man she had known. He had her father’s erudition and a stockman’s rapport with the land. Men from every walk of life respected him.

And the women?

She glanced along the dinner table at the various women who occasionally chatted with Sin and the other men. She couldn’t believe it. Why had she never noticed? The women—from old Elizabeth to her young daughter, Eileen, now engaged to Thomas—flirted behind their fans with him. With Sin, the ex-convict, not Francis, the nobleman.

She glanced back to Sin. He was taking their flirting in good-natured stride. Still, there was an undeniably heavy-lidded look in his gaze and a sensual curve in his smile that were all the more appealing because he was unconscious of it.

“A toast,” he said, raising his glass. “To Australia. May her star shine as brightly as the Southern Cross.”

“Here, here,” the others chimed in, and lifted their glasses in unison.

After dinner the major and Elizabeth led the guests back to the parlor, which a servant had cleared of furniture and rugs. Two men, who must have been shearers or drovers for the station, if their weather-beaten faces were any indication of their occupation, stood ready to play a fiddle and a Jew’s harp. Elizabeth sat down at the piano and launched into a Beethoven sonata. Candles in their elaborate holders lit the music sheet.

The sonata soon lapsed into a popular quadrille. At once the guests began to clap to the music, and the braver ones sallied out to dance in the room’s center. Francis and Amaris joined them. Recalling all those dance lessons at the Livingston mansion, she performed the steps smoothly and easily.

At one point, she and Sin were momentary partners. Looking up into those keen blue eyes, she knew that he, too, was recalling that afternoon he had been forced to serve as her partner.

Lately she wondered if he felt any of the attraction for her that she felt for him.

If he did, God help their souls. The dancing lasted far into the night, for such get-togethers were rare in the bush. Finally, Francis, who had been enjoying the nicotine-spiked brandy, grew sleepy. She wasn’t. She couldn’t remember smiling so much.

“Shall we go on up to bed, darling?” Francis said with a suggestive smile.

“No, I don’t think I’m quite ready.”

He looked surprised. For a moment, amidst the trappings of polite society, he had once again reverted to the role of lord and master. Forgotten were all those times she had toiled side by side with him in the bush.

“Go on to bed, Francis. I’ll be up shortly.”

His mouth curled in a petulant pout, then he inclined his head in that familiar way, nodded, and weaving only slightly, headed for the doorway.

No sooner had he left, than she was besieged by several men, each claiming her for a dance. "One at a time,” she said, laughing. She knew she could have looked like Jimmy’s prize pig, and she still would have been sought after, since white women were as scarce as black swans in Europe.

She danced with a cook, a bullocky, a forwarding agent, and a shearer. She was whirled around the room so much that it began to spin even after she stopped. “No more,” she begged off, trying to catch her breath.

She turned toward the French doors and their promise of fresh air. Several men were outside, smoking their pipes and doubtlessly discussing either sheep or Australian politics.

She was no different from those men. Sheep was the foundation of all their plans, their schemes. Like them, she rarely wasted an opportunity to soak up any kind of information.

Politics, however, touched an emotional spot. She realized now that her rage with the injustice of female transportation had been just one portion of her rage with the whole system of British tyranny. Only now was she beginning to experience that entire spectrum of repression of personal freedoms.

Nevertheless the men felt unaccountably reluctant to discuss politics in her presence. She had demonstrated her competence running a sheep station, which was certainly not a woman’s domain. But politics was definitely out of the question in regard to female mentality.

The men all glanced up as she stepped through the double doorway. “Major, Sykes, Jimmy, Thomas . . . Sin,” she said acknowledging them.

“Evening,” the major said. Over the years, his stern military countenance had mellowed to that of a prophet, framed by white hair and beard. His smile welcomed her as if she were one of their gender. None of the men came to their feet in deference to her sex. By now, they were accustomed to her trading off sheep stories with them and probably would not have been astounded if she had produced a pipe to smoke.

“Harry here,” the major said in his clipped voice, “says that a drover who came through last week reported several hundred sheep infected with catarrh up in the Blue Valley.”

“My word for it,” said the old-timer known as Harry. “Had to be killed and burnt. All of them.”

“Could be worse,” she said, settling alongside Sin on the bench. His back was to the veranda’s cedar post and one leg was drawn up on the bench. “Could be scab.”

“Then there’s nothing to do but sell the place and stock for what they will fetch,” Sykes said.

“No, there’s a lot more a man can do,” Sin drawled in that seductive brogue. “He can fight to his last breath.”

“And face certain ruin,” another added in a reproving tone.

She stared through the lantern-lit night at the stocky man called Brantwell. “Nothing is certain.”

“The lass is right,” the major interjected.

She was particularly conscious of Sin’s steady gaze upon her. She grew uncomfortable, and when the conversation turned to tail docking of the lambs, she excused herself and went up to the bedroom she and Francis had been given.

The candle had burned low. Even as she undressed, it sputtered out. In the dark, she groped for the nightgown she had laid out on the back of a rocking chair. How wonderful it would be, she thought, to go to bed with nothing on. No worry about the hot muslin sticking to her thighs or the ties binding her wrists and neck.

But Francis would be shocked. And after that, aroused. Then later, shocked again. Sighing, she pulled the gown over her head and climbed into bed beside him. He turned over, and she lay still, hoping he wouldn’t awaken.

He didn’t, and she relaxed, listening to his light snoring.

Before drifting off to sleep she thought of two things—about how much cooler it would be if she could open the shutters, but the bugs would devour them; and about Sin and Celeste. Even now, were they making love? Did a man, could a man, make love to a woman if she were five months with child? Celeste’s ecstatic face when she talked of lying in Sin’s embrace continued into Amaris’s restive dreams.

The following day was reserved for games and relaxation. One game consisted of throwing an ax at a small mark on a tree while riding past on a galloping horse. All the men participated. There was no doubt in Amaris’s mind that Sin was by far the best horseman and so had the advantage of burying the ax blade closest to the mark.

Wagering was made all around, even among the women—a pair of gloves against a parasol and so on. “A dance tonight with your husband if he shouldn’t win,” a heavy-jowled woman called to Celeste.

Celeste, who sat with Amaris on a blanket spread beneath a gum tree, laughed lightly. “I have no fear of forfeiting even one dance with him. Sin shall win handily.”

Amaris attempted to appear indifferent to the contest. The contestants were eliminated one by one until only Sin and a scraggly bearded squatter from over Yarrow way remained.

“A tight match,” Francis said, dropping down on the blanket between Celeste and his wife. He gave her a sheepish grin. She hadn’t seen him all morning, since he was still sleeping when she arose and went down to breakfast. “It’s said the overseer can cut the eye out of a flying mosquito with his stock lash.”