Whispers of Heaven

by Candice Proctor

  She swung her head to look at him over her shoulder. "Heaven help me. You sound like Harrison."

  "Miss?"

  "Never mind." She gave the boy another smile, so he'd know she wasn't irritated with him. "I looked in on Old Tom, but he's not well and I didn't want to trouble him." Gathering the reins, she reached for the pommel.

  "I can get Gallagher," said Charlie, still dancing nervously about her. "He's just in the south paddock, working with a chestnut gelding the master's been having trouble with."

  Jessie settled into the saddle with practiced ease. "I don't need Mr. Gallagher, thank you. I'm not going any appreciable distance." And then, before he could say anything more, she touched her heel to the mare's side and cantered away.

  She took the track toward the rainforest-clad mountains, although she wasn't intending to ride that far. The clouds had cleared, so that the sun shone warmly out of the clear blue sky and she was glad for the forest of myrtle beech and gum, musk and blackwood that soon closed in around her, bathing her with cooling shade. She didn't understand the reckless moodiness that drove her, that squeezed at her chest and left her aching for things she couldn't name. She urged the mare into a trot, going farther than she'd meant to, not even knowing why she'd come this way, or why she felt such a driving need to be alone, far away from everyone. It was one of the burdens of being an unmarried gentlewoman. One was never allowed to be alone.

  Once she was married to Harrison, she thought, at least some of the restraints under which she labored would ease. But the thought brought her no comfort, only a sick twisting of her stomach that both shocked and confused her. And then she wondered when it had happened, when she had stopped knowing her own thoughts and understanding her own feelings. When she had begun hiding her wants and needs and desires so deeply, she could no longer recognize them herself.

  She drew rein abruptly. It was only when she lifted her head and glanced around that she realized where she had come, and why. She was in a small glade of open grass scattered with native blue orchids and fiery Christmas bells and delicate white butterfly iris. Surrounded by feathery ferns sheltered beneath tall stringybarks and silver wattles, the meadow seemed steeped in a timeless kind of peace. Yet it was here, seven years ago, that Jessie's brother Reid had been killed, the second of Beatrice Corbett's children to meet a violent death. He'd been only seventeen, that day, when a small band of Aboriginals had caught him on his way back from a hunting expedition and struck him with their spears and waddies so many times, his casket had had to be kept discreetly closed. But the Aborigines were all gone now, the last ones rounded up like wild animals and herded off to a small, distant island, where they were slowly dying of the white man's diseases and alcoholism and hopelessness. Here, she could be utterly alone.

  The weight pressing down on her chest seemed suddenly worse, and she slid out of the saddle, her boots sinking into the soft green grass that grew high in the clearing. There was a log lying at the edge of the clearing, and she went to it, her breath leaving her lungs in a soft sigh as she curled down to wrap her arms around her bent legs and press her forehead against her knees.

  She didn't know how long she sat there, her eyes squeezed closed her nose burning with unshed tears. She heard the wind rustling through the grass. The pink robin that had been singing suddenly fell still, and her heart began to thump wildly in her breast with an unidentified but very real fear. She knew, quite certainly, that she was no longer alone.

  Twisting her head sideways, she opened her eyes to find herself staring at a man's thin, dirty leg, scarred and covered with the torn, ragged remnant of a convict's coarse duck trousers. He wore no boots, only badly cured kangaroo skins wrapped around his feet and tied with thongs about the ankles. Ankles which showed the dreadful, brutalizing legacy that only iron shackles could leave.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A cold, helpless terror seized her, squeezing Jessie's lungs so that she couldn't even cry out. She let her head fall back, her gaze traveling upward.

  The man was emaciated, his shoulders hunched forward in a stoop, and his body, where it showed through the jagged rents in his trousers, looked to be covered in weeping sores and streaked with grime. He wore a gentleman's fine linen shirt, gaping open at the neck and barely soiled, but his dark brown hair and beard both hung long and matted with twigs and dirt, his eyes shining out at her from a curtain of reeking filth. He looked wild and crazy, not human at all.

  She surged to her feet and took a step back so quickly she stumbled. The man's lips pulled open into a smile, revealing blackened teeth. "Well," he said. "Look what we got us here."

  Another man laughed, drawing her attention. There were two others, she now realized. A younger, bearded man with dirty blond hair and what looked like a gentleman's jacket pulled over his bare chest and tattered convict trousers, and another man, a black man. Not an Aboriginal black, but an African black, by the looks of him, although he must have been in the bush for a very long time, for his clothes were entirely made of animal skins. He wasn't as dirty as the other two, but for some reason, he frightened her more.

  "What do you want?" she asked, or tried to ask, for her throat was so tight with fear, she barely pushed the words out.

  The younger man, the blond man, wore a pair of fine boots and held a double-barreled flintlock pistol cradled in one .

  hand. It was a gentleman's pistol, the handle inlaid with a design in mother of pearl. She wondered if the pistol had belonged to the same gentleman as the coat and boots and fine shirt, and what had happened to him.

  She watched as the blond convict caressed the pistol handle, his gaze traveling over her in a way that made her stomach lurch. "What do you think we want, then?" He lifted his chin as he spoke, the words coming out soft and mocking.

  "If you want my horse," she said, trying desperately to keep the quaver out of her voice, "you'd best take him and be on your way, quickly, before someone catches you."

  "Oh, we'll take your horse, all right," said the other white man, the one with the dirty brown hair and the sickening smile. "But we'll take a ride, first."

  Jessie had been raised with three brothers, and they hadn't always been as careful in their speech around her as they might have been. She recognized the expression and knew what it meant.

  She ran.

  The blond man stood between her and the downhill track, so she ran the only direction she could ducking beneath one of the low wattles that edged the clearing. She had to hold up the long, heavy train of her riding habit in one hand, which pulled the skirt tight against her knees, hobbling her. The frond of a tree fern slapped her in the eyes and she threw her free arm in front of her face, so that she missed seeing the rock half buried beneath a drift of old leaf litter until it caught her foot and sent her crashing down, her hands and knees sinking into the damp, spongy humus of the forest floor.

  Desperately sucking air into her heaving lungs, she tried to scramble to her feet, and felt a man's bony hand clamp hard around her ankle. "Now, you weren't trying to run away, were you?" said the soft voice of the blond man behind her.

  "Let me go." Rolling sideways, she kicked out at his face with her free foot, but he only jerked his head sideways and laughed at her.

  "You fools," she heard the black man say from some distance away. "Let her go so we can get out of here. You do this, and her people will never rest until they've hunted us down."

  "You don't want a turn, you don't got to take one." The dark-haired man loomed over her, his fine linen shirt glowing white in the gloom. "But I'll be damned if I'll pass up a chance like this."

  "You'd be better off listening to your friend," said Jessie. The fear rose hot and thick in her throat, but she swallowed it down, trying to make herself sound confident. Credible. "My groom is right behind me."

  The blond man grinned. "Now why don't I believe you?"

  "Someone is coming."

  The black man's hissed warning cut through the trees, wiping the smile from the b
lond man's face. Reaching out, he grabbed her arm in a painful grip and hauled her upright with him. She tried to jerk away, yanking at his hold on her, and felt the muzzle of the gun pressing cold against the side of her head. She breathed in the cloying scent of decaying vegetation and burnt powder and her own sick fear. Before she could stop it, a sound like a low whimper escaped from between her lips.

  "Shut up," he whispered, dragging her with him back to the clearing. "Make another sound and I'll kill you. You and who- ever's coming, both."

  His fingers tightened on her arm, digging into her flesh, wrenching her to a halt so that they stood facing the spot where the track emptied out of the forest gloom into the meadow. It felt almost hot in the open, the sun pouring down bright and sickening through the yawning gap in the trees. She realized her hat was gone, lost somewhere in the woods. A bead of sweat formed on her forehead to trickle painfully down the side of her face. She heard a fly buzzing past, and the steady clip-clop of a horse, ridden up the hill fast. Held tightly in a savage grip, she stared across the clearing and saw a gleaming chestnut appear from between the trees. The man on its back reined in sharply.

  "Make any sudden moves," said the blond man, pushing the gun muzzle into Jessie's cheek hard enough for her to feel it against her teeth, "and her brains will be decorating this pretty little glade."

  The chestnut gelding was notoriously bad tempered. It sidled nervously, its head jerking up, its ears lying flat against the poll, its hooves prancing on the ground, as if it could smell the fear hanging heavy and rank in the air. For one fleeting instant, Lucas Gallagher's gaze met hers across the hot, tense clearing, his face set in hard, impassive lines. She could read nothing in his dark, hooded eyes—not sympathy, not alarm, not comfort. He was, after all, a convict. A convict, just like the three half-crazy, desperate bushrangers who held her. He had no reason to try to help her, and every reason, like them, to hate her. Jessie sank her teeth into her lower lip, biting deep to keep it from trembling.

  Controlling the restless horse with ease, Gallagher settled back in his saddle, his free hand lying relaxed and idle on his thigh. "Now why the hell should I care what you do with her brains?" he said calmly.

  The blond man laughed and shifted the gun so that it now pointed at Gallagher instead of her. "No reason I can think of." The smile on his face hardened. "Just make sure you get down nice and easy. All we want from you is the horse. And the clothes."

  Gallagher paused in the act of throwing his leg over the pommel, his head coming back as he stared down at the outlaw. Bushrangers often stole a man's clothes, along with his money and his horse. The bush was hard on clothes, and most escaped convicts weren't very good at making do with kangaroo skins. "I don't particularly mind giving up the horse. It's not mine." He slid to his feet in one, graceful motion. "But the clothes are a different matter entirely."

  "Why? They'll give you new ones," said the dark-haired man, scratching his chest as he walked over to lay a hand on the chestnut's reins. The big gelding jerked up its head and whinnied sharply in a way that had the bushranger stepping back nervously.

  "Once I get back to the estate," said Gallagher, his gaze shifting, assessingly, between the three men. "But I'm thinking the trip downhill won't be too comfortable, me on foot and exposed to the elements in every sense of the word. Besides..." He nodded to where Jessie stood, her fists knotted in the skirt of her riding habit. "There's also a lady present."

  "That there is," said the blond man. His gaze shifted to her, his face going oddly, frighteningly taut as he let go of Jessie's arm to run his hot, spread hand up her shoulder and down over her breast in a way that made her stomach heave. "And a mighty fine one she is, too, isn't she?"

  "Keep your filthy hands off me," she said in a tight voice, wrenching sideways and brushing his hand away as if it were some giant insect.

  Looking up, she found herself staring down the twin black holes of the pistol's muzzle. "Do that again," said the blond man, "and I'll kill you."

  "You've got her horse," said Gallagher, beginning to strip off his rugged gray coat. He tossed it, inside out, toward the dark-haired man. His waistcoat followed. "Why don't you let her go?"

  The blond man laughed, swaggering slightly as he swung to face Gallagher again. "You, my friend, don't have much of an imagination." Reaching sideways, he caught Jessie behind the neck in a killing grip and shook her, hard. This time, she didn't move. "But I'm willing to let you have a turn on her anyway." His lips curled as he nodded toward the black man standing motionless at the edge of the clearing, who seemed to want to disassociate himself from the events taking place before him. "Maybe we'll even let you have her before Parker there."

  "Not me," said the man he called Parker, folding his arms over his massive black chest. "I don't hold with forcing women."

  Still struggling to turn Gallagher's coat right side out, the third man looked up, his dark hair falling in front of his face. "Why the hell not? They're going to hang you anyway, and the Lord knows you're already on your way to hell."

  Parker only shook his head, while the blond man waggled the muzzle of his gun at Gallagher again. "What about you? You got some moral objection to rape?"

  Gallagher stood there, his hands on his lean hips, his eyes narrowed and hard. "No." Watching him, Jessie had to gulp down deep breaths to keep from sobbing out loud.

  "Good." The blond man's smile dissolved into a cold, frightening stare as he leveled the gun, once again, at Gallagher's chest. "Now keep stripping."

  For one burning instant, their gazes locked, Gallagher's and the blond man's. Then Gallagher shrugged and turned half away. "All right," he said, and Jessie felt some secret hope she hadn't even dared to acknowledge drain out of her, leaving her weak and numb. She watched him loosen the ties at his neck and pull off his coarse shirt in one easy motion. "Here." Bunching the shirt into a wad, he sent it sailing through the air toward the blond man, who had to let go of Jessie's neck and lunge forward to reach it. "Catch."

  Crouching down, Gallagher fumbled with the laces of his boots. "Think these are going to fit those big feet of yours, Parker?" He cast a sideways glance up at the black man who still stood impassively, watching.

  "I don't need 'em," said Parker, his wide nostrils flaring with a quickly indrawn breath.

  "Might as well try them, if you're going to hang for them." Tugging off his boot, Gallagher tossed it into the thick grass a short distance in front of the black man.

  The black man was still bending over to pick up the boot when Jessie caught a glimpse of the knife that had appeared in Gallagher's hand. With a quick flick of his wrist, he sent the blade flashing through the air with a lethal whistle that ended in a scream as the knife imbedded itself in the blond man's bare chest.

  She felt a scream rise in her own throat and bit it back hard. The man stumbled, his stolen coat tails swinging, his gentleman's boots crunching in the grass. He dropped his chin to his neck, his eyes widening as he stared down at the knife sticking out of the naked white flesh of his chest, as if he couldn't understand how the thing came to be there. For the space of a heartbeat he wavered in the warm sun, the light of life slowing fading from his eyes. Her hands covering her mouth, holding back another scream, Jessie watched him die. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  By then, Gallagher was already moving, curling forward into a roll that carried him across the meadow, toward the chestnut. He came up clutching a thick branch in both hands that he swung like a shillelagh into the side of the other white man's filthy head, hard enough to spin the man around and send him careening into the horse's gleaming flanks. The gelding reared up, its hooves flailing the air. The dark-haired man disappeared.

  Sobbing out loud now, Jessie fell to her knees, crawling on all fours through the high grass toward the dead bushranger and the pistol he still held loosely gripped in his outflung, motionless hand.

  "It's been a while, Gallagher," she heard the black man, Parker, say.

  She looked
to where Gallagher stood, his half-naked body in a low fighter's crouch as he faced the remaining bushranger across some ten feet of sunlit meadow. "I have no quarrel with you, Parker."

  "No," said Parker, as Jessie's hand closed around the handle of the pistol. "But I reckon she does."

  Jessie surged to her feet, the gun clutched in both hands before her and leveled on the black man's bare chest. Her breath came so hard and fast her entire body was shuddering, but she held the gun steady. "That's right," she said, her voice cold and tight with rage. "And I intend to see you hang."

  The black man froze, his hands splaying out at his sides.

  Gallagher swung to stare at her. For a moment, all was silent except for the rustle of the wind in the grass and the click of one of the horse's teeth on its bit. "You know how to use that thing?" he asked.

  She nodded, not looking at him. "I could outshoot my father by the time I was twelve."

  "Ever shoot a man?"

  "No. But I could, if I had to."

  He took a step toward her, and then another and another, until he was close enough that she could see the faint gleam of amusement lightening his shadowed eyes. "I do believe you could." Reaching out, he laid his hand over hers on the ornate handle of the gun. He was suddenly, intensely serious. "But I'm asking you not to."

  "What?"

  His hold on her was light, nonthreatening, although he didn't remove his hand. She could feel the scars on his palm, warm and rough through the thin leather of her glove. He was close enough that she could see his naked, sun-darkened chest lift as he breathed, see the corded muscles of his throat work as he swallowed. "I'm asking you to let him go. I know him. He's not a dangerous man. And he did you no real harm."

  Her hair had fallen into her face and she shook her head, trying unsuccessfully to clear her eyes. "No real harm? If you hadn't come when you did, those men would have raped me."

  "I wasn't no part of that," said Parker, his wide-eyed gaze fixed on the pistol in Jessie's hand as if he expected it to go off accidentally at any moment. "You know I wasn't."