Dream Time (historical): Book I (8 page)

A M A R I S

§ CHAPTER SEVEN §

There is that secret yearning, that secret belief, in some women that they will find their soul mate, if not in this lifetime, then in another. Amaris Wilmot didn’t know it, but she was one of those women. To dream is to acknowledge the possibility of fulfillment.

From her position outside the wrought-iron gate, the girl watched the birthday party for maybe as much as five minutes, a long time for twelve-year-old Amaris Wilmot to stand still.

Occasionally, Amaris’s aborigine nanny, Pulykara, went in the place of Amaris’s mother to collect unwanted clothing, goods, and foodstuffs donated to the church. And occasionally Amaris wangled her way into accompanying Pulykara.

When Amaris discovered there was to be a pickup at the Livingston household for a bag of cast-off
clothing, she had begged her mother to let her go.

In the midst of making quince pie for an ailing parishioner, Rose had paused and smiled. “Just what is h’it that’s so important at the Livingston place?”

“It’s the Livingston woman.”

“Aye?”

“She’s the ship woman, Mother. The woman who does men’s work.”

“Well, not all men’s
work. But Nan Livingston is generous. Just don’t pester her with your questions, Amaris. She might not be as willing to explain as your father.”

As it was, Amaris never got as far as the front door with Pulykara. In passing an ivy-walled garden, Amaris heard the children’s laughter. At the gate, her footsteps lagged. “I’ll wait for you here, Pulykara.” The aborigine woman frowned. “Don’t go getting ideas, Miss Priss.”

Amaris’s hands tightened on the bars and she peered between them. “I just want to look.”

She didn’t even hear Pulykara shuffle away. Several boys and girls were chasing a peacock through the manicured garden. Two girls swung on roped seats suspended from an old red ironbark tree. Three boys rolled a wagon wheel’s metal hoop.

Amaris felt she was the outsider, always looking in, watching from behind a wall of bars or bricks.

At that moment, a girl who could have been no more than six or seven skipped down the carriage drive toward the gate. “My name’s Celeste Anne. Would you like to come to my birthday party?”

Amaris stared at the apparition. Surely one of her mother’s angels, made human. She was small, softly rounded, and blessed with creamy skin and pink cheeks and lips. Shiny light brown hair puffed like cotton fluffs around a face full of sweetness. Obviously, those rabbit-like brown eyes had never seen the rum-drunks of the Rocks.

But then, Amaris reflected, her mother had, on those occasions she helped her husband administer to “those lost souls." And Rose’s eyes still held that same innocence. Amaris shook her head. “Birthdays are for children.”

“You’re not a child?” the little girl asked, her eyes large with wonder.

Amaris straightened her already too-tall frame. “Do I look like a child? I’m thirteen. Almost.”

“I am seven years old today. Old enough Mother said to go down and see the Livingston ships.”

Amaris tossed her head, and her long, black pigtails bounced against her shoulder blades. “I’ve seen them. They’re all right, nothing special. Not when there’s a whole forest of shipmasts in the harbor.” “You’ve been down to the Rocks?”

The little girl drew closer to the gate’s spiked bar. “What’s it like? Horridly dangerous?”

Amaris paused and drew upon her few memories of her trips to the Rocks. “No. Sad. And exciting. Ships from China and South America and the United States of America dock there. And all sorts of queer people, not just pommies and paddies. They stroll the wharves and visit the pubs.”

“You’ve been to a pub?” With awe enlivening its usually serene expression, the round face turned up to Amaris’s.

“Wellll, yes.” In the alley behind one, if that counted. It had been a Sunday afternoon, and her father had stopped on the way to the fort chapel to aid a body sprawled in drunken stupor.

“Sometime, could I go with you?”

Amaris thought quickly. “Of course not.” She tapped the gate’s ornamental bars. “You’re in prison here. Convicts can’t go wherever they want.” The shadow that crossed the small, upturned face made Amaris immediately feel contrite.

“Mother says only riffraff go down to the dock.” The eyes brightened and the voice lowered to a whisper. “I could sneak away. That would really be fun, wouldn’t it? Can you come tomorrow?”

Amaris nodded at the gate. “How would you get out?”

“I don’t know.” The crestfallen countenance became animated again. “Could you help me?”

Something in the girl’s appeal struck a chord in Amaris. “I’ll think about it.” Feeling very grown-up and omnipotent, she almost swaggered away from the gate.

A voice behind her brought her up short. “Don’t you go and get that child into trouble, Miss Priss.” Amaris spun around to see Pulykara, toting the burlap bag of the Livingston’s old clothes. The knotty little woman would scare a sailor, but to Amaris’s way of thinking, Pulykara was a spritely old fairy left over from the Dream Time.

Dream Time was that time when the country being called Australia, the
southern land, was a vast, featureless place. It was inhabited by giant spirit creatures that made epic journeys across the land, creating mountains, rivers, rocks, animals, and plants.

Pulykara told of Marrawuti, the sea eagle, who snatches away the spirit when a person dies; about Warramurungundjui, a female who came out of the sea to give birth to the people; and about Dreaming sites that contain power and energy of the Dream Time.

At least, that was how Pulykara related the legends. Amaris found her nanny’s bedtime legends far more exciting than her mother’s and father’s obligatory prayers.

“She wants me to come see her tomorrow, Pulykara.”

The old nanny’s dark and scarred face darkened even further, if that was possible. “Amaris, you don’t want to go mixing with them people.”

She fell into stride with the aborigine woman, who was no taller than she. “Why not?”

Those rheumy eyes scanned Amaris’s face with a love that was as powerful as a mother’s, then shifted away from the girl’s direct gaze. “Them people ain’t like you.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Celeste.”

“Aye.”

“And rich.”

“Aye.”

“I bet she never swears.”

“Not at seven years old.”

“I did.”

Pulykara grunted and shifted her load to her other shoulder. “Your mama and papa, they don’t know you do, lessen you go and forget yourself.”

“They don’t swear either.”

“Their god will strike them with lightning.”

Amaris’s mouth screwed up. “I don’t believe that.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not like them either.”

“Then who am I l
ike?” she asked, her voice plaintive. She felt gauche and awkward, someone who belonged nowhere.

“You’re a changeling, placed at the Wilmot household by the aborigines’ gods.”

“Bah. I used to believe you, Pulykara, did you know that? I really did.”

“I don’t lie. Wait and see. You’re one of the Dream Time people.”

Such was the intensity in the eyes and voice of the woman that Amaris was half-willing to believe her. Pulykara had certainly made the statement often enough for Amaris to give it credibility.

Not that Amaris was a silly, mindless girl. But at twelve, there was still enough of the child left, and a wise child knows anything is possible.

“You came!”

“Of course, I did.” Amaris strolled closer to the garden gate. “I keep my word.”

Celeste’s light brown eyes reflected sunshine. “You’ll take me to the wharf?”

The girl fascinated Amaris. She was everything Amaris wanted to be. Fleeting across her mind was a memory of the child’s incredibly lovely dresses made of satin, faille, and zephyr, all tossed carelessly in the burlap sack. “Won’t your mother miss you?”

“No, she’s working in her office.”

A woman with an office! “What about your nanny?”

“
She sleeps when I play in the garden.” A prankster’s naughty smile curled her tiny bowed lips. “Only we made a pact that I don’t tell my mother she takes naps. That way we both get to do what we want to. Where’s your nanny?”

Amaris grinned. “Drinking Brazilian
aguardiente
.” Experimentally, she placed her foot on the gate’s bottom railing and pressed her leg between the bars. “Here, step on my knee.”

Biting her lower lip, Celeste gathered her courage, grasped the bars, and levered herself to a standing position on Amaris’s knee. “Now what?”

“Why, grab hold of the top railing and pull yourself up.”

“I’m too short and not strong enough.” The little girl’s tone was not whiny but apologetic.

Amaris thought for a moment. “All right. You can’t get out, but I can get in. We’ll work from that side of the fence.”

Grabbing high on the railing, she easily hauled herself up, but the spiked bars caught on her long skirts. “Bugger the skirts,” she mumbled beneath her breath. Two years before, her mother had made her start wearing long skirts because not only was she as tall as any woman but also she had already started filling out.

“You can curse?”

“Very well, as a matter of fact.” Amaris dropped lightly to the other side and heard with a grimace the ripping sound. Looking behind her, she saw that her petticoats had snagged on a spike. With a shrug, she jerked hard, rending the cheap, coarse material even more, but at least the offending garment was loosed.

She turned back to Celeste, who barely came to her chest. “Ready?”

Celeste nodded enthusiastically.

“After I kneel, you climb onto my shoulders. When I stand up, you grab hold of the railing and perch there till you get your balance.”

Celeste’s eyes widened. “Then what do I do?”

Disgust curled her lips. “You drop to the other side, goose.”

The young girl bit her lip, nodded, and taking a deep
breath, followed Amaris’s instructions. When Amaris felt the slight weight lift from her shoulders, she glanced up to check on her protégé. Balanced precariously, Celeste was clutching the spikes in a death grip.

Disregarding propriety, Amaris lifted her skirt and, drawing her tattered petticoats between her legs, quickly tucked them into her skirt waistband like the women who cleaned fish at the docks. Then, with an economy of motion, she began to scale the gate. Beneath the weight of both girls, it swung slightly on its hinges. Celeste drew in a sharp breath. Her creamy skin paled.

Amaris pushed off and landed on the far side, purposely making the gate shift slightly. With approval, she noted that the frightened girl didn’t cry out. She looked up at her. “Go ahead, jump. It’s not that far down.”

Eyes squinched shut, Celeste let go—and fell atop Amaris.

“Damn!” she said in a whoosh of breath. Amaris pushed the welter of limbs and crinoline off her. “Don’t you know a bloody thing about climbing up and down things?”

Her lower lip trembling, Celeste shook her head. “Mama says a lady doesn’t climb.”

Amaris pulled the younger girl to her feet and started down the hill toward the cove.

Celeste hurried to catch up. “Where did you learn to swear so wonderfully?”

“In brothels and pubs along the wharf.” It sounded impressive, she thought; only the curse words came, for the most part, from the vagrants who let one slip occasionally when panhandling for food at her father’s door. Only a few were acquired during her infrequent ventures down to Sydney’s wharves.

Sydney was an unplanned straggle of shacks that perched on the rim of the shining, amethyst harbor. Discounting the Randolph mansion and a few other grand homes, the remainder of the buildings looked more like pigsties. There were no hospitals, and, like her father’s church on the outskirts of Sydney, the few other churches were little more than huts.

The main road she and Celeste took to the wharves was a dusty track, and after a rain it was a creek bed. Celeste daintily lifted her skirts to sidestep the sewerage that ran down the center of the street. Amaris strode on, unheeding of the filth and stench.

The new governor, Macquarie, was zealously attempting to reconstruct Sydney into a Georgian city, financed with rum, by giving building contractors a trading monopoly on the spirits.

An ant string of convicts was working on a general hospital and the Hyde Park Barracks, designed to house all convicts employed by the government in Sydney.

Celeste’s enthusiasm waned as they bypassed each gang of sweating, stinking, grunting men. With draught animals few in the colony, the human body served to move the quarried rock to its destination. The little girl’s gaze fell on bloodied hands and tears rushed to her eyes. She turned on Amaris. “Why are they working so hard?”

Her wide mouth set in a grim line, Amaris nodded toward the end of the line, farther down the hill, where the overseer played out his lash on bare backs. “That’s why, and you don’t see them all teary-eyed. Tears don’t get you anywhere, so stop your sniffling. I would never submit to being beaten.”  In dismissal, she turned her back on the motley waste of men dressed in coarse dingy-white woolen paramatta trousers.

‘Would you fight that man with the whip?”

“Wouldn’t need to. Escape is too easy here. Those convicts aren’t chained, and the overseer is far at the other end.”

“How would you escape?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“But how would yo
u?” Celeste persisted, fascinated by the knowledgeable older girl.

“Well, I’d wait until a whaling captain put in and stow away. The American whalers are always needing new crewmen.”

Celeste wiped her eyes. “This isn’t fun.”

“Come on. We’re not there yet.”

The wharves excited Amaris’s senses. The brilliant colors, smells, and sounds washed away the drabness of the town climbing the hill around the multi-lobed bay. Overhead, in an acid-blue sky, sea gulls shrieked. Corked nets draped fishing boats so they looked like clove-studded hams. In the turquoise water, dead fish bobbed alongside refuse. Salt-laden air tingled her skin and tantalized her mind about the far places from which the wind had come. Caged cockatoos and rosellas plumed in gaudy reds and greens shrieked among the overflowing fruit stalls.

Determinedly she put away the sight of the silent caged men just off the convict ship and began to shoulder her way through the people of every color and race who thronged the wharves.

Then she realized Celeste wasn’t with her. She spun around, her gaze darting from the water’s edge to the ships and back to the stalls and shops. In front of the parrot cages stood Celeste, her little mouth pen in awe. Amaris grabbed her hand. “Come on, we don’t have long.”

“It talks. The bird talks.”

“No telling what all it says.”

“Your legs are too long.”

“I doubt it says that.”

Celeste doubled her steps. “No, your legs are too long. I can’t keep up.”

She shortened her stride. “Don’t you want to see the Rocks?”

Its name was well deserved as the rowdiest and most dangerous thieves’ kitchen in the colony. The two girls strode through it with innocent impunity, oblivious to the stares.

Nantucket whalers, Chinese traders, Portuguese sailors, and the jetsam of Australia’s five thousand souls vied for the charms of doxies. They dressed in remnants of British finery donned with disregard to color, pattern, or material. Frayed plumes, shabby satins, and battered chapeaus were flashed in enticing movements designed to catch the eye of prospective customers.

“Oh, they’re beautiful,” Celeste whispered.

“They’re whores.”

“What’s that?”

She decided that Pulykara’s explanation would not do for a seven-year-old. “Whores are women who take money to make men happy.”

“Oh. Could we make money making people happy? I think that would be ever so nice.”

“Not the way they do.”

“How do they do it?”

“You ask too many questions, Celeste. There it is, what I wanted you to see.”

Celeste halted alon
gside her and stared at the monkey and the street musician. An enthralled smile played across her cherubic face. “Oh, Amaris! A real capuchin.”

“A what?”

“The monkey is a capuchin. My tutor has a drawing of one.”

Amaris’s education at William Wilmot’s knee was less eclectic and more philosophically oriented. That a five-year-old should know more than she dampened her spirits. “Well, ’tis time we started back afore you’re missed.”

“What about you?”

“Pulykara thinks I am—”

The rest of her words never reached her tongue as she stumbled on her trailing strip of tattered petticoat and went sprawling. The wharf’s wooden platform scraped her palms with splinters. Hands beneath her armpits hauled her to her feet. “Thank—” She looked up into eyes that were as blue—and empty—as a summer sky. Shivering, she staggered backward.

“A colleen who dresses like a wharf doxie should know how to walk like one,” was the rough-voiced reply.

The straggly haired convict wore no shirt, and scars that were still fresh pink crisscrossed the taut and sallow skin of his prominent ribs and shoulders. He was skeletally thin. Chains shackled his ankles. His stench overwhelmed her, and she wrinkled her nose reflexively. “A man who is chained like a slave should know when to speak.”

For a moment, the c
reature’s eyes lost their eons-old look and flashed with that youthful resource, fury. Amaris stared back, snared by the power of the dark soul encased in the thin body.

The overseer’s whip cracked, and his lash curled around the convict’s left shoulder. Instantly, the glare in the convict’s eyes was obliterated, replaced by pain. The glare, but not the inner power. His body jerked as the whip popped again in a backlash release.

“Get your bloody Irish carcass back in line, Tremayne.”

“Oh, that horrid man!” Celeste said of the overseer. She turned to Amaris. “Do something, please!”

Amaris had to fight back displaying her surprise. Celeste clearly thought she could do anything. Her gaze returned to the convict. He shuffled back into line with the others, all who were fresh off the convict ship. A bloody stripe traced the path the lash had left. “Your mother and father hire convicts, Celeste. Talk to them.”