Dream Time (historical): Book I (34 page)

Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of more than thirty-five published novels.  She is the co-founder of and first vice president of Romance Writers of America.  Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of three best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the award winning Parris Afton Bonds has been interviewed by such luminaries as Charlie Rose and featured in major newspapers and magazines as well as published in more than a dozen languages.  She donates her time to teaching creative writing to both grade school children and female inmates.  The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workshop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers.  Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.

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PARRIS*AFTON*BONDS

DREAM * KEEPER

Published
 by Paradise Publishing

Copyright 2014 by Parris Afton, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

Cover artwork by
Coragraphics

This is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.  No part of this novel may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.  This eBook may not be re-sold or given away.

For Diane Mangum

You are that golden thread that makes the fabric of life brighter and better.

According to the aboriginal people’s “Dreamtime’ legends, Australia was once a vast featureless land inhabited by giant spirit creatures. Over time, the spirits made epic journeys across the land, creating mountains, rivers, rocks, animals, and plants.

To eighteen-year-old Annie Tremayne, her late father and mother were such spirit creatures—larger than life. Over time, Annie’s parents and her grandmother, the renowned old lady, Nan Livingston, had changed the face of Australia with their epic deeds.

They were the Dream Keepers. People who pushed back the boundaries of possibility. Each in search of his or her own Dreamtime.

BOOK ONE

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolibah tree;

And he sang as he watched and he waited

till his billy boiled,

“Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?”

§ CHAPTER ONE §

1870

“I don’t know who I am or what I want to be!” Daniel Tremayne said.

Annie’s backbone slumped lower in her grandmother’s settee, about the only comfortable piece of furniture in the old lady’s office. Annie watched her brother pace before the large leather-top desk. She knew exactly what was going through her twin’s mind.

As much as her brother loved their grandmother, he was weary of being groomed by her to be heir to the powerful New South Wales Traders, Ltd.

“Of course, you do, my pet.” With a veined and liver-spotted hand, the eighty-six-year-old grande dame of Australia patted his arm. “You want to be premier of New South Wales. When the timing is right, naturally.”

Daniel’s boyish mouth drooping like a mournful hound’s, he stepped away from her desk and her clasping hand to move closer to the windows of the New South Wales Traders’ office that overlooked Argyle Street below and the harbor beyond.

Too often, Annie had looked out upon the same scene. Throughout their childhoods, she and Dan had alternated between the wonderful wide spaces of the Dream Time station and the confines of the NSW Traders office in Sydney. Occasionally, they had roamed its wharfs and warehouses. Nan Livingston’s magnificent house overlooking Elizabeth Bay had been merely a showplace to sleep and sometimes eat. Life for Nan Livingston began and ended here at NSW Traders.

Iron-clad ships jostled for space in Sydney Cove with the wool clippers, their masts looking like a leafless forest. Many of those ships carried NSW Traders’ registry. July had brought a wintry storm screeching in from the Pacific, and the ships bobbed liked corks on the turbulent gray water.

Today, the initials C.O. on the post office flag signaled that a telegraph had been received stating that the mail packet had been sighted off Cape Ottway, forty-four days away.

“Aren’t the ships lovely, Daniel?” Nana said. “Look at all their brasswork glinting in the sun. Their fantasy figureheads and crows nests. Where have all those square-rigged sails been blown? How 1 wish I hadn’t been born a woman. I would have shimmied up those foremasts to the crow’s nests with the ease of any buccaneer.”

This was one area that Annie could agree with Nan. To have been born a man would have been ever so much more fun. Perhaps that was why Annie loved Dream Time. There in its untamed expanse she was free to be.

Simply . . . to be.

Why couldn’t she derive pleasure, as did Nan Livingston, from watching NSW Traders’ vessels arrive, putting in from far-flung places? The old woman knew every rivet and every meter of wire rig and wooden mast and spar.

Daniel jammed his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket. Staring out at the symbols of his family’s wealth, he asked quietly in a voice that occasionally still drifted upward into the soprano range, “Lately, Nana, I have wondered what price my parents paid in sharing your dreams for Australia.”

“Their lives,” Annie said softly. She rose and crossed to Dan in that silent feline tread peculiar to her. Just another example of the differences between her twin and her. Dan had confided once that he felt cursed by his small frame—that it was short, delicate, and awkward like a girl’s. Her own rangy frame had the agility of an aborigine experienced in climbing trees and treading their limbs with the precision balance of a tightrope walker.

Unlike her twin, the shy Annie had been saddened but not diminished by their parents’ deaths. Annie’s strength was renewed by her occasional visits to the desolate beauty of the outback, which Daniel could only detest. Australia’s people, not its land, fascinated her brother.

When everything was considered, she and Daniel weren’t alike at all. In looks, there was only the vaguest similarity, with Annie inheriting her parents’ extraordinary height. Rebellious red hair framed her square face with its soft hazel-green eyes, whereas his eyes and hair were “boringly brown,” as he had once complained.

Annie knew who she was and what she wanted. Life at Dream Time.

“1 don’t want death,” he muttered now. “I want life. My life.”

Behind them, Nan said, “You talk as if I don’t want you to have a life of your own. I only want you to have the best life possible. That’s why I’ve been preparing you for a successful takeover at NSW Traders’s helm when I’m gone.”

Preparing?

More like maneuvering and manipulating, Annie thought. She put an encouraging hand on Dan’s shoulder. He turned his head to look at her, and she saw the flicker of a memory they both shared. A beastly painful memory.

Her brother’s gaze moved past her to Nan. It seemed to Annie that he forced himself to turn and face his grandmother. Annie knew her grandmother loved him best. Her biased affection had become overt after her daughter’s and son-in-law’s deaths in an explosion that had ripped apart a paddle steamer on which they had been journeying.

“You called me back from Oxford for some reason. What is it, Nana?”

She shifted her diminutive, mummy-like frame in the wing chair. “Hartford College had let out for the summer, Daniel. It’s not as if I’m taking you away from your studies.”

Annie saw her brother’s hands knot in his pockets. She knew that feeling when trying to hold her own with their grandmother. Sometimes Annie felt as if there wasn’t enough air to breathe. Especially here in NSW Traders’ offices.

Right now, she had the uneasy feeling that her twin was going to be giving up something if he surrendered one more time to the irascible old woman. And, God, they both loved her so much. Owed her so much.

Nana was a tough disciplinarian. She knew the meaning of the word in its fullest sense, because she had been transported to Australia as a convict, sentenced in England for collaborating with the French.

Since Annie and Daniel were nine, when their parents had died, their grandmother had taken over raising them. She had given unstintingly of herself . . . and had demanded everything of Daniel. Annie knew Daniel feared his best was not enough, would never be enough.

“Nana has found a wife for you,” she said. Yesterday morning she had espied him crossing the common between the stock trader’s market and the entry to George Street. He had been with the daughter of a grazier, the holder of a small selection a few miles from Sydney, and so she had avoided them, though she knew he had seen her.

Sensing the showdown that was coming, Annie returned to the settee to sit out the coming scene. She plopped down and stretched out her long legs. Her lean, lithe body was clad with a Dolly Varden dress, named after the heroine in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. The dress was too frilly and did not become her. The printed cashmere material gathered over a bustle in the back accented her slouching position.

“Annie, sit up straight like a lady!” Nan turned her piercing hazel eyes back on Daniel. “I’ve met a charming girl I thought you might have some interest in, Daniel. She is the daughter of the owner of the Broken Hill Silver Mines.”

Daniel visibly shuddered.

Another intrusion in his life, Annie thought.

His gaze flew to her, and she knew he believed she must have gone to their grandmother and told her about sighting him with a mere grazier’s daughter yesterday. Why wouldn’t he think his sister a tattler after that horrible episode with the letter years before?

Her eyes returned to her grandmother’s implacable expression. Nan would never countenance an alliance with a grazier’s daughter. Was this one more of their grandmother’s machinations, a diversionary tactic?

To Daniel’s credit, he managed to keep his voice calm and level. “Really? Why would I be interested in her?”

The old woman’s fingertips pressed against each other and released and pressed again much like the childhood game of spider and mirror. “She is lovely, refined, educated—a graduate of Vassar College in the United States.”

“A graduate? How old is she?”

“Only two years older than you.”

The way her hand waved, as if dismissing the statistic, triggered an alarm clanging in Annie’s ears. Surely Daniel had heard it, too. “Tell him, Nana. He’s going to find out anyway.”

“Tell me what?”

Nan Livingston sighed. “Yesterday’s Sydney Dispatch announced your betrothal to Caroline Balzaretti.”

“What?”

“I had nothing to do with that leak. John Balzaretti and I had merely discussed the possibility and had agreed not to pursue it any further until you and Caroline met.”

“My God!”

“Daniel, the Balzarettis are pure merino sires and dams.”

Annie hated that term, merino. It implied that their blood was not tainted by convict ancestry. She watched Daniel run a finger under his stock collar and knew her brother was, at last, fast reaching his own explosion point. Often, she had felt that same rage coming before she even knew what it was. She and Daniel had never been allowed to be angry openly.

“My God, Nana!”

“Control your temper, young man, or you will be sent to your room.”

“Damn your interfering, dominating soul, Nana! If you want connections, marry off Annie to some lord. After all, Annie is your watchdog!”

With tears in her eyes, Annie sprang to her feet. “You’re all too ready to spend the income from NSW Traders, but you’re not willing to give up your style of living. You’re not the one who has to come second!” Was that her shouting? It must have been.

“I never wanted to be first!”

Their grandmother looked as startled as Annie felt.

Daniel stepped forward, as if he had made a decision. Never before had either her brother or she made a decision. Not one that wasn’t influenced by their grandmother. Or maybe even this one was influenced by her, because Daniel looked as though he were finished with letting her control his life.

Did her brother, like herself, need desperately to find himself? To prove himself?

With her heart afire with fear, she saw her twin silently, coldly, turn and walk out the door, out of the mansion, out of her grandmother’s and her lives.