Dream Time (historical): Book I (7 page)

Applause rippled across the room. Nan’s hands refusal to obey her brain’s command to clap politely. She wanted to appear unaffected by the news, but that moment she could do little more than stand.

It wasn’t as if she still hoped that Miles would come to love her. Yet all of her survival instincts had been grounded in that man-woman thing between them.

“Are you all right, Nan?” Tom asked.

She managed to nod. “Yes, just feeling a little queasy. The beef was stringy, didn’t you think?”

Out of his element at the party, he seized the opportunity. “Let’s go home, then.”

Her father used to quote something about God closing one door and opening another. She didn’t believe his god took an active part in the affairs of man and had told him so. Facetiously, she had said, “If I were omnipotent, I could do a much better job to alleviate suffering and pain.”

The week following what she had come to think of as Miles’s engagement party, she discovered that Miles’s engagement might have closed one door for her, but another indeed opened in the least expected way.

“You are looking bonnier, lass.”

Nan glanced up from the ledger. Josiah materialized out of the warehouse’s gloom into her circle of candlelight. “Your ship’s late by two weeks.”

He peered down at her through narrowed lids. “Don’t be telling me you missed me.”

She bent her head and began tallying. “This is a business deal, Josiah. Purely business.”

He sighed. “Tis a cold heart you have, lass.”

Something about the tone of his voice made her look up at him again. She respected him and was disturbed that he should so categorize her. “Not a cold heart. A numb heart.”

“And I’m not the man to restore feeling, am I now?” He spread his giant hands. “Well, I’m not complaining. For the little you ask of me, I can enjoy a woman’s body with a man’s brain.”

At that she had to smile. “I’m not certain if that is a compliment or not. Shall we do business?”

He thudded one of the crates with the flat of his hand. “Business—and then pleasure. Then I must be on me way. Randolph’s cargo beckons me.”

Her hand tightened on the quill. “What happens when the rum trade is squashed? It will be, you know. The Crown is losing too much money."

“I’ll find other more profitable cargoes. It's not that diffi—”

“No, I mean to Miles Randolph, and the others involved in the rum trade?”

“The others—I don’t know.” Those bulky shoulders rose in a shrug. “As for Randolph, men of his ilk can smell trouble a’coming. He’ll be heading for politics if I know anything.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me about Miles.”

He took the quill and ledger from her and set it on one of the crates. “You aren’t in love with the man, are you now?”

“Love? No. Not love. He’s merely a competitor, a tough one.” Something about Josiah’s expression prompted her to ask, “Why?”

“Randolph is into, er, unnatural things. He buys convicted boys arriving at the docks on the transport ships. Randolph enjoys combining—” he paused, “—sex and sadism.”

“You are sure about this?”

“I found a twelve-year-old, a Morton Freely, stowed away on my ship this morning. The lad appears to be badly beaten. Claims Randolph was responsible. The Freely lad escaped the Randolph mansion last night. Says Randolph would have his throat slit for revealing this.”

“I’d like to see the boy before you sail.”

“Later.” He pinched out the candle, and its acrid smoke filled the darkness. His hands clamped on her shoulders and drew her against him. She liked the feeling of his solidity. Comfort. With Josiah, she felt comfort. With Tom, she had to be the stronger; with Miles, she had to be wary.

Josiah drew her down onto the sawdust floor.

“My dress,” she murmured. “We’re getting it dirty.”

He kissed her neck just below her ear. “Forget the dress. I’ve brought one for you. Made by one of the best seamstresses in London.”

She laughed against his beard. “You wouldn’t be bedding that lass under the same business terms and conditions, would you, Josiah?”

With a chuckle, he loosed the strings of her bodice and palmed one small breast. “No complaining now, me lass. You were the one who specified this was to be a purely business relationship.”

Her body responded to his rough touch with inner tremors. “Subtle whoring, you called it.”

On his knees over her, he pushed up her skirts and parted her thighs. “With your mind and your passions, you would have made a marvelous and most successful madam.”

“Alas, I want respectability more.” She arched when he plunged into her, then began moving in unison with the big man.

Even though September’s spring weather was balmy and cool, inside the warehouse a stagnant heat lay over the two pumping bodies. Sweat rolled off Josiah onto her. Normally fastidious, she reveled in this. That restrained part of her was temporarily free.

Tom would never have understood.

Miles always had.

Shafts of sunlight seeped between the warped door and its jamb. Gazing up at her business partner, she couldn’t help but think what a gentle soul he was despite his rough-hewn ways.

When Josiah, at last, discharged his months of abstinence in a burst, he rolled from her. He stretched out on his side next to her.

Eyes closed, she lay silent, enjoying one of those few moments when her high energy wasn’t in charge. She felt his broad palm splay over her stomach. Her lips curved in a faint smile. “Don’t tell me you are ready to begin again, my lusty whaler.”

“How long has it been since last you had your monthly?”

Her lids snapped open. She turned her head to stare at his ruddy face. “Whatever are you talking about?”

“I know your body well. You’re with child, me lass, or me name isn’t Josiah Wellesley.”

“Well, then, it isn’t!” She pushed up to a sitting position and began tucking in her wayward strands of hair and tugging down her skirts. “It’s probably Smith or Jones.”

His knuckles grazed her cheek. “You didn’t answer me.”

She stilled. After forcing herself to calculate, she replied, “Three months ago, I think.”

He grunted. “Then the child isn’t mine.”

She wasn’t sure if his expression was one of regret or relief. Without any inner searching, she knew exactly how she felt. Her future son was her ticket to the pinnacle of Sydney aristocracy.

“You must do it for the sake of our child. You must resign your commission and devote your energy and time to New South Wales Traders, Limited.”

“Nan, the little you have socked away in that warehouse won’t be enough to open our own business.”

“Bah, leave that to me, Tom.”

“Nothing daunts you, does it? You’re impervious to despair. You survived the Rum Corps coup and maintained your neutrality. Wise, Nan. Wise.”

She paused, the spoonful of gruel halfway to her mouth. She’d never admit it, but one thought did daunt her spirit: that of imprisonment. Losing her freedom again petrified her.

Yet she had risked her freedom to keep her enterprise solvent. Risked her marriage in her sexual business transactions with Josiah.

Did she dread poverty and its stigma even more? She still found it difficult to believe that after five years she was pregnant again. She had even selected the name for her son. Randolph.

And it would be a son.

From bitter experience, she knew that it was the men who had the opportunities in the world. Through a son, she could manipulate those opportunities to work toward her goal, a place in Sydney society.

She encouraged Tom to buy the papers of
Jimmy Underwood. “He’s skilled in boat building. We’ll be needing our own ship, many ships, before another decade is out.”

She didn’t want to be dependent upon Josiah, and she knew she would have to expand if she expected her business to thrive.

Tom simply stared at her and shook his head.

“The profits from the last shipment Josiah is transporting will buy the finished lumber and materials needed.”

Tom’s protest that he knew nothing about navigation elicited no respite for him. She stood firm. “Josiah has agreed to take you on his next voyage. We can always hire our own captain, but you need to learn the business.”

When Tom returned, she intended to drain his brain dry of all he knew. She would never again allow herself to be put in a helpless situation. Wasn’t knowledge power?

“What about you? Will you be all right here alone?”

She sighed. “Tom, I survived alone for six months under far worse conditions.” She kissed his forehead, which was growing broader as his hair receded at his temples. “You just take care of yourself and come safely back to me and our son.”

“I don’t want to be away when the baby is born.”

“You were there when I birthed the first one.”

He eyed her steadily. “And you gave it away.”

She flinched. “This one, I won’t. I swear. The circumstances are different.”

As Nan had predicted, Whitehall had enough of the Rum Corps governing the penal colony, and a new governor arrived. As a token gesture of suppressing the rum trading, Governor Macquarie sent Macarthur back to England as an exile.

This act allowed Nan to come out into the open— as far as she dared.

Conversely, Miles, having remained sub-rosa, was never implicated with the Rum Corps and escaped unscathed. Nan mentally shrugged. She had patience. One day . .
. one day she would find the fitting retribution.

With Tom away, apprenticing under Josiah, she set up an office in her warehouse and hung out her shingle. There was no one with whom she could share her excitement, and so she stood alone in a cold, drizzling autumn rain and gazed up at the signboard proclaiming NEW SOUTH WALES TRADERS, LIMITED. April whipped her soggy skirts around her legs.

Pride filled her. “The first step,” she murmured, then placed her hand on her stomach, as if in benediction. “And you will be the second.”

As the weeks passed, two topics occupied the tongues of the Sydney citizens. The first topic, they placidly accepted—the leaders of the Rum Corps had not actually been ousted; they had merely transferred their operations to another sphere, Tasmania and Norfolk Island.

Miles invested his wife’s money in establishing a newspaper. Considering that seven eighths of the colonists were illiterate, Nan found this amusing. But she knew there was a method to his madness. She sat back and watched.

The Sydneysiders sat back and watched her, because she was the second topic. Privately, she was acknowledged as the backbone of Tom Livingston’s New South Wales Traders, Limited.

“Scandalous!” Major Hannaby’s wife, Elizabeth, pronounced.

“A trifle unseemly for a lady,” Lucy Bentwater said, her tone equivocal, as if Miles's
fiancée followed the wind vane of public opinion.

Nan knew they talked. What they said didn’t bother her. They would accept her sooner or later and eventually they would approve of her. She was breaking new turf as a woman, and it irritated her that she was
having to operate in the background. She was a victim of her times, she lamented more than once. Had she been born in Greece a couple of millennia earlier, she would have had far greater latitude as a woman.

By her reckoning, she was a week or so past her due date, when she began to have labor pains. She was alone in the warehouse. Even in her pain, she pulled on her gloves and collected her parasol for the trip down to the bay, where Jimmy was working on her ship’s wooden skeleton.

He looked up from the rib of lumber his adz shaped and wiped the sweat dripping from his face. Despite all the food she stuffed onto his plate, he still wore that emaciated look that would proclaim him a former convict for the rest of his days. “You all right, Mrs. Livingston?”

Apparently, her suffering showed.

“Jimmy, I want you to do something for me.”

“Anything, Mrs. Livingston.”

“Go to the Reverend Wilmot’s house and ask for Pulykara. Tell her I need her. Tell her to come to my house as soon as possible.”

Her breathing labored, she returned to the little hut on the post she and Tom called home, a far cry from Miles’s handsome establishment in the Rocks.

Within the hour, Pulykara was at the door. “It’s been a long time, baby,” she said, her grin clumping the bands of tattoos on either side of her broad nose.

Nan managed a smile. “I’ve missed you, Pulykara.” Then she groaned and grabbed her stomach. “Tis my time.”

At once, Pulykara went to work, stripping her former mistress of her clothing. Shivering and naked, Nan followed Pulykara’s instruction about when to rise and squat with the labor contractions. Nan’s lids squinched with the pain, and tears streamed from the comers of her eyes, but she did not scream out in those final moments of agony.

Then, the infant squeezed forth with a lusty howl that brought a smile of satisfaction from Nan. Collapsing against the side of the bed, she whispered, “Let me see my son.”

Holding up the red mite of a human being, Pulykara laughed. “You’ve birthed yourself another girl, baby.”