September Moon

by Candice Proctor

  And in the midst of the ruined laundry rested Amanda's dark brown dress. It sprawled across the earth as limp as a corpse, its arms upflung, the cuffs still pinned to a clothesline now neatly severed by a well-aimed bullet.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  O'Reilly lifted the tin cup and drank deeply, the water sluicing nice and easy down his parched throat. A surprisingly cool breeze had kicked up since the sun started slipping behind the Ranges. After so many stinking hours in the stuffy atmosphere of the woolshed, it felt bloody damn good.

  "Reckon it'll only be a few more days, mate?" said one of the Derwent Drums, swiping the back of one arm across his freckled forehead as he strolled over to where O'Reilly stood, hip-shot, beside the water tank outside the shearers' quarters.

  "Yeah, looks like it." O'Reilly reached to refill the cup, just as the crack of a rifle shot echoed down the hill.

  His head jerked around. "Christalmighty.'The tin pannikin hit the flagging with a clatter as he yanked his horse's reins loose from the nearby post. He had the chestnut stretched out in a canter before his seat even hit the saddle.

  His eyes narrowed as he scanned the distant cluster of buildings for signs of some unnatural movement. The shearing had ended for the day, but most of the men were still mingling around the shearers' quarters. A shot that close to the house could only mean trouble.

  Raking his spurs across the gelding's sides, he urged the chestnut into a wild-eyed, foam-flecked run that sent a choking cloud of red dust billowing out around him. Bushrangers weren't as common in South Australia as they were in Victoria or New South Wales, but three of them had raped and cut up a woman at an outstation down by Melrose not very long ago. And although he got on pretty well with the blacks, one could never really be sure...

  He reined the chestnut in hard by the garden, where he could see a few stockmen and a shepherd crowding around the side gate. Swinging out of the saddle, he threw his reins to one of the stockmen and pushed his way through the knot of men.

  He checked for the briefest instant when he caught the sound of Amanda's laughter, floating to him from out of the gathering darkness. He'd never heard her really laugh before, but that deep, throaty gurgle could come only from her. It occurred to him for an instant that she might be hysterical, but there wasn't anything wild or mindless about that laughter. It was rippling and hearty, the kind of laugh that made you want to smile, just hearing it.

  And then he saw her.

  She knelt in a bed of creeping thyme. Snowy white handkerchiefs and dainty feminine underthings lay scattered around her like fallen flags of surrender. Her head was thrown back and her eyes squeezed shut, and she held her left hand pressed to her ribs, as if she'd laughed so hard her side hurt. He could see something lying across her lap. As he drew closer, he realized she held her ugly brown dress grasped in her arms like a dying lover. Missy leaned against her shoulder, giggling.

  Neither the woman nor the child had seen him yet, and for a moment he let himself simply enjoy looking at this unexpected side of Miss Amanda Davenport. Her cheeks were flushed and streaming with tears of laughter, her hair tumbling half-down arOund her shoulders, her prim gray gown stained green around the knees. He thought she had never looked more beautiful, and something swelled within him, something sweet and aching and unwelcome.

  And for a moment, it was as if the years had fallen away and he could see her as she must once have been—could imagine her as the child she'd left behind. An exuberant and rebellious child with her dog barking at her heels and her brilliant, flame-colored hair bouncing against her back as she ran, laughing, to escape the tedious disapproval of some stern piano teacher. And he could imagine her as a young woman, too; her eyes squeezed shut, her lips parted in rapture as she allowed some unnamed man to touch her body in ways she had been trying to forget ever since.

  Missy glanced up then and saw him. "Oh, Papa! Guess what? I thought I saw a strange man, watching us from the bottom of the garden. So Miss Davenport got your rifle and shot at him, to scare him away. Only it wasn't a man at all, just Miss Davenport's dress, hanging on the line with the rest of the laundry!"

  At the sound of Missy's voice, Amanda's head snapped around and her eyes flew open. The laughter died on her lips.

  She scrambled to her feet, embarrassment deepening the flush in her cheeks. "Mr. O'Reilly! I... I don't know what to say. I am most dreadfully sorry to have caused such a disturbance." She reached quickly to retrieve something from the bed of thyme. When she straightened again, he realized it was his rifle. She handled it competently, if not comfortably, and it made him realize how little he really knew about this woman.

  "Where did you learn to shoot?"

  Her eyes widened in surprise. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I said, who taught you to handle a gun?"

  She glanced down at the rifle in her hands, then away. She did not meet his gaze. She was so obviously, painfully mortified by all the commotion she'd caused that he was hard put not to laugh. "My uncle." She swallowed. "The country squire I told you about."

  He reached to take the gun from her slack grasp. She released it immediately. "Who'd you think you were shootin' at, anyway?" he asked, automatically checking the rifle's mechanism. "Bushrangers? Or blackfellows?"

  She shook her head. "I wasn't sure. Missy saw the man— or rather, thought she saw him—right after the didgeridoo stopped. I suppose—"

  He saw her stiffen. Turning, he realized Liam had come up, his thin chest heaving with the effort to draw breath after his run up the hill. Her lips tightened at the sight of him, and O'Reilly knew she was regretting letting the boy scent her fear. Liam could be a bit like a shark: let him smell your blood and hed go for the kill.

  But the look the boy gave her was more one of surprise than satisfaction. "You found out what it was, then?"

  Her cool gray eyes met Liam's turbulent hazel ones. "Yes," she said. "Ironic, isn't it, that I should prove to be more rattled by the reality than by your invention?"

  "But you weren't really rattled, were you? I mean, when Missy thought she saw someone, you got Father's gun and you shot at him."

  "Not at him, no. I shot wide and high. I could hardly aim at him when it might have been you, playing another one of your tricks."

  Liam stared down at the neatly severed clothesline. A muscle worked in his tight jaw. He threw a considering look, sideways, back up at his governess. "For all you knew, it coulda been a bushranger or some renegade black after you, yet you had the guts to come down here and check on him anyway, all by yourself? Not knowing if he was dead or just hurt?"

  She drew in a shaky breath and O'Reilly thought he had some idea of what it must have cost her, to force herself to walk to the bottom of the shadowy garden and face the man she thought she'd shot. "Well," she said, obviously trying to make her voice light but not quite succeeding, "if I had hit someone, I could hardly leave him down here, alone, to bleed to death, now, could I?"

  Liam didn't say anything, just gazed down at the clothesline again.

  O'Reilly had spent the last six years watching his son make life hell for a succession of nervous, impotent gentlewomen. He had seen governesses thrown into rages, reduced to tears, even driven to near madness. And not once had he seen the boy betray the least sign of remorse for any of the things he had done to them.

  Yet as he watched Liam's stare swivel from Amanda's composed face to the gun to the decimated laundry and back again, O'Reilly caught a glimpse of what might have been regret shadowing his son's sharp features. Regret, and something else O'Reilly recognized as reluctant, grudging respect.

  O'Reilly shifted his gaze back to the woman beside him. She was so dainty and soft and feminine, he thought; yet she was tough. Tougher maybe even than she realized herself. He let his gaze drift over the flushed line of her cheek. The curve of her full lip. The blaze of her glorious hair where it caught the last rays of the setting sun. And he felt it again, that wild, sweet surge of emotion that took his breath away.
r />   And scared the hell out of him.

  O'Reilly held a match to his pipe, his eyes narrowing against the smoke as the tobacco ignited. He shook the match to extinguish it and then held it until it was cold. A man couldn't be too careful about fires in the bush.

  Somewhere in the distance a boobook owl hooted its monotonous call and a dingo howled at the wide, uncaring, cloudless night sky. He tossed the cold match into the void of the darkened garden, then propped himself against a veranda post and stared across the creek at the endless expanse of hills, looking empty and dead in the silver moonlight.

  Another two days and the shearing would be finished. Then they'd have the after-shearing races and the ball. And after that, he would be leaving to drive a mob of sheep south.

  He'd decided to take only part of the sheep he'd selected to the slaughterhouses in Port Augusta. The rest he thought he'd try driving to the southern hills, see if he couldn't find some pasturage to rent near Melrose, or even Clare. Someplace far enough south that drought wasn't a problem.

  He shifted his shoulders against the post. It was a risk, of course. He could lose the whole mob on the road or drive them halfway to Antarctica without finding any place to graze them. But if he was lucky and he did somehow manage to keep part of the mob alive, then he'd be in a better position to restock the station when the rains came next autumn.

  Always assuming, of course, that the drought broke and the rains did come.

  He cupped his palm around the bowl of his pipe, then real- ized it had gone out and grown cold. Shoving away from the post, he knocked the pipe against the weathered wood and slipped it back into his pocket as he wandered one of the garden paths.

  He hated this garden. Oh, not the fruits and vegetables, of course. Out here in the bush, if you wanted things like grapes and pears and beans and tomatoes, you had to raise them yourself. What he hated was the stocks and forget-me-nots, the hollyhocks and Canterbury bells and lavenders and roses- all the useless, pretentious trappings of an English garden that Katherine had missed living here in the Ranges.

  He could never figure out why Chow didn't just let the damn things die. But whenever O'Reilly tried to talk to him about it, Chow just blinked and nodded his head and went right on watering and pruning and deadheading.

  Swearing under his breath, O'Reilly swung around to stare at his house. The house he'd built for Katherine.

  If a man was smart, O'Reilly thought, he didn't waste his money building his wife a big fancy house and filling it with imported Italian marble mantelpieces and crystal chandeliers and lead-light windows that had to be hauled in over rough tracks at a ruinous cost. No, if a man was smart, he put his money into wells and tanks and fences, and built up runs in different parts of the country, so that he could move his stock when drought threatened one area or the local government suddenly started casting covetous eyes on the big leaseholds. If a man was smart...

  If a man was smart, he kept away from gently bred Englishwomen with impeccable accents and refined habits and expensive tastes.

  He kept away from women like Miss Amanda Davenport.

  From here, he could see the French doors on the side of her room. She had her curtains closed against the night, but her lamp was still on and he could see her shadow moving around the room as she got ready for bed. The curtains were thin enough that he could even tell what she was doing. She was brushing her hair.

  He watched her shadow elbows point to the ceiling, then sweep downward as she drew the brush through her long, thick hair. He could imagine the silky, flame-colored strands gliding over her shoulders, over the mounds of her breasts. He remembered the way shed looked earlier that evening when he'd come upon her in the garden: her head thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut, her face flushed. She would look like that, he imagined, when a man took her.

  At the thought, O'Reilly spun around on his heels and swore into the dark, empty garden. Christalmighty. Didn't he ever learn?

  It had to be some kind of a family affliction, he decided, this penchant the O'Reilly men had for the wrong kind of women. Because like his father before him, it seemed all he had to do was meet a good-looking woman with a pommy accent and a snooty attitude, and he got hard.

  Like his father before him...

  He had a memory of his mother that haunted him always, a memory of a night only a week or so before she went away. He'd awakened in the still hours of the night to find her sitting at her piano. His father had bought the piano for her after Luke was born, the year wool prices were higher than anyone had ever seen them. It was the only thing like that Patrick could remember his father ever buying his mother; his father's money normally all went into building up his run.

  His mother had loved that piano. She used to sit and play it by the hour, a peaceful, faraway look on her face. But over the years the piano had grown more and more out of tune. Without anyone to tune it, his mother had eventually stopped playing it. She hadn't been playing it that night, just sitting there, running the tips of her fingers up and down the keys, so lightly they didn't make a sound.

  In the dim light cast by the foul-smelling slush lamp, she'd looked young, pretty. Thinking about it now, O'Reilly realized she couldn't have been more than thirty-six or thirty- eight at the time. Years of hard work and unhappiness had blurred her features and etched sad lines between her nose and mouth, but that night she'd been beautiful, her face relaxed, her eyes dreamy.

  "Why don't you play anymore?" he'd asked.

  He had to repeat the question twice before she turned her head. She stared at him oddly, as if she were looking through him more than at him. "It's out of tune," she said.

  "You could still play it, couldn't you?"

  "No."

  "Then what are you doing?"

  "I'm just listening," she said. And a week later, she left.

  O'Reilly pursed his lips and blew out his breath in a long sigh. She'd been so unhappy. At the time, he'd blamed his father for it. His father, who had married a woman raised with music and books and gentle, cultivated conversation around candlelit dinner tables, and then made her live in a slab hut with a dirt floor and a calico ceiling that rippled eerily whenever a snake slithered across it. He'd made her scrub clothes in copper pots over open fires and butcher hogs and wash with harsh lye soap and birth her babies in a crude hide bed without even another woman there to help her through the pain and the fear. Often his father would go off for weeks at a time— mustering his sheep, branding calves—and leave her alone in that miserable hut. With only the wind and her fears and her ruined dreams for company.

  She'd hated it, of course. And after a while, she got to where she hated his father. By the time she left, she must have decided she hated her children, too. She sure didn't take them with her.

  Against his will, O'Reilly found his gaze drifting back to Amanda's room. The windows were dark. She'd gone to bed.

  There was a time when O'Reilly thought he'd learned from his father's mistake. He'd learned that you don't marry a woman who's been raised to think that things like a comfortable house and close neighbors are necessary for her happiness, and then put her in a crude hut and expect to keep her happy.

  So he'd taken the money that should have gone into sinking wells and buying more land, and he'd built Katherine the best house he could afford. He'd hauled his mother's piano up from

  Victoria so Katherine could make music, and he'd bought her fine china so she could set a pretty table, and gentle, rose- scented soaps to make her feel pretty and pampered.

  But shed left him anyway. Because the truth ... the truth he should have learned from what happened to his father was that women like his mother, and Katherine, and Amanda Davenport, hate the bush.

  It wasn't just the primitive conditions and the shimmering heat and the howling wind and the endless flies they hated. It was the stark, inescapable brutality of ancient, scarred ridges thrusting up bold and broken and bloodred against a hard blue sky. It was the endless, aching vistas of a land empty
of all pretense, where everything was raw and vast and awe- inspiringly magnificent. A land as wild and wide open and untamable as a man's soul.

  Everything he loved most about this land, they hated.

  The next morning, Amanda awoke to find herself staring into Missy's solemn face, just inches from her own.

  "Missy?" She sat up with a start and rubbed her hand over her eyes. "What are you doing here?"

  "Sally's gone walkabout."

  Amanda lowered her hand and swiveled her head to stare at the little girl. Missy was still in her nightdress, her hair a tangle. "She what?"

  "She's gone walkabout."

  "And what exactly does that mean?"

  Missy shrugged. "It means, she's gone."

  Amanda swung her legs out of bed and felt with her feet for her slippers. "What do you mean, gone? She's probably just slept late. What time is it?"

  "No. She's gone."

  Amanda reached for her father's old pocket watch, which she kept on her bedside table. Six o'clock. With a groan, she shrugged into her wrapper. "Let's go and see, shall we?"

  She took Missy's hand and together they walked through the quiet parlor and dining room to the back veranda, where

  Sally slept on a pallet near the corner of the house. Amanda had once asked why Sally didn't sleep in the house, or at least in one of the outbuildings, but Missy said Sally couldn't rest easy unless she was in the open air.

  Amanda stopped. In the thin, crisp light of dawn, the pallet lay empty except for the pale blue of Sally's loose cotton dress cutting a swath across one end. "See," said Missy.

  Amanda stared at the empty bed and abandoned dress. The woman must have walked off naked. "But why? Has she ever done this before?"