After swimming awhile, her aching muscles looser, she turned and floated on her back, gazing up at the perfect, cloudless blue sky. She remembered being in awe of it when she’d first arrived in Australia. At seven years of age, she had wondered how it was possible that there was so much sky. No clouds, no mist and such a bright blue, it seemed unnatural. There was none of the drabness that she remembered held England in its grasp at least eight months of the year.
Time meant nothing as she floated in the river, looking up at the tall trees that waved overhead, listening to the parrots fight over the sweet nectar of the honeysuckle. They almost sounded human. She frowned, straining her ears.
Dammit!
They were human.
Her peace was about to be shattered. She was too far from the bank to make a swim for it, so she stayed in the river, treading water quietly. Hoping that whoever the voices belonged to would bypass the river, and her, and continue on their way.
As the voices grew louder, she remembered her clothes. They would see her clothes, even if they didn’t see her. She hoped and prayed that they were too busy talking to notice.
‘Hey! What’s this?’
‘Bollocks,’ she murmured.
She never had believed in the power of prayer.
***
Will rode his horse slowly through the bush. He’d needed to get out of the camp for a few hours. Since the arrival of the contingent of the Fortieth regiment, the camp was claustrophobic to say the least and he was slowly going mad. He needed air. And there was plenty of fresh air to go around, if you knew where to look for it. Many of his colleagues preferred to stay in town during their leisure time, playing cards or visiting their whores at the camps on the edges of the goldfields. He knew the non-commissioned soldiers certainly spent a lot of their free time at the many bars, drinking their meagre wages away.
‘What else is there to do?’ Timmons had baulked when Will had questioned him about the recent upswing in his drinking and whoring ways.
Will couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to explore this incredible landscape. To take the roads less travelled, out of the squalor of Ballarat, and into the untouched countryside. So much space for the taking. He didn’t think he would ever get used to all the space. He could ride for miles and never come across another soul.
Bright yellow flowers exploded from a tree as he passed through a narrow section of the path. Wattle he’d heard them called. Not a flower you would pick and give to a woman like roses or carnations, but it was pretty and pungently fragrant, even if they did make him sneeze.
Jovial jeering and catcalls reached him before he could see who the perpetrators were. As he moved his horse into the clearing, he spotted the group of soldiers standing beside the river where it widened into a small lake. So it seemed some of his cohorts had ventured out of camp and into the bush as well. He was almost sorry to have his peace shattered. Then he noticed that one of them had his bayonet out and on the tip hung some sort of billowing fabric.
‘Carter!’ Will called out to the corporal he recognised.
The soldiers turned towards the voice then quickly stood to attention at the sight of an officer.
‘Sir!’
‘What have you there?’ Will asked as he walked his horse closer.
‘Ah …’ Carter held up his bayonet again.
‘Give me back my dress you English pond scum!’
Will shaded his eyes against the sun and peered out across the water. His shock was quickly replaced by knowing resignation and he rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘Miss Wallace. Why am I not surprised?’
She was hidden up to her neck by the water but he had absolutely no doubt the girl was bathing naked. Will climbed lithely down from his horse and took the dress from Carter. ‘Gentlemen, if you would be so kind as to make your way back to camp and leave Miss Wallace to retrieve her garments.’
The soldiers did as he said, but not without a chuckle and a last look out to where the girl was now swimming towards shore.
‘Have fun, Lieutenant,’ one brave soul called back.
Once the soldiers had gone far enough, Will walked towards the sandy little beach beside the river.
‘Are you completely out of your mind or just mildly insane?’ he asked her as she continued to swim closer.
‘Why? Because I like to bathe?’ she returned.
‘Despite it being a lovely sunny day that water must be freezing. But that’s not what I meant. There are many who would take advantage of a girl alone and naked. What if I had not come by? I cannot guarantee my colleagues would be so gentlemanly as I.’
‘You have that disapproving line betwixt your brows again, Lieutenant Marsh,’ she teased, as she reached the shallows. ‘I much prefer it when you smile.’
His face remained rigid. He was angry at her ridiculous lack of self-protection and not in the mood to joke about it.
‘I bet I can remove that stony look on your face,’ she called out.
Too late he understood the devious grin she sent him. He could only gape as she stood up out of the water so that her entire naked body was his for the looking. Frozen with shock, he couldn’t help but stare before good sense returned and he spun on the spot to put his back to her. Not only had she knocked the stony look off his face, she’d blown the top of his head off.
Although no longer facing her, he could still see her in his mind’s eye. Her skin glowing in the midday sun, droplets of water glistening on small breasts before running down the curves of her body. Had he really thought her a child once? Just now she’d looked like a siren. A siren sent to taunt brave men and call them to their deaths. Oh, and he would follow blindly along behind them, without question. He already knew the vision of her perfect naked body would torment his days and nights.
Then she was next to him, taking the clothes he still held in his hand. But he dared not look back from where his eyes were firmly fixed on the odd red flowers that reminded him of the brushes used to clean bottles. He only glanced at her when she had taken the last piece of clothing from his hand and he could see in that quick peek that she was once again properly attired.
‘Do you not wear undergarments?’ He’d noted the lack of it in the pile of clothes.
She gave an unladylike snort. ‘My mother can’t get me to wear undergarments, what makes you think you can? And haven’t we already had this conversation? You seem to have a healthy regard for what’s under my clothes, Lieutenant.’
‘I have a healthy regard for propriety, Miss Wallace,’ he said. But, proper or not, there was no way he would ever get the image of her beautiful, pale-skinned, naked body out of his mind. It was fixed there for all eternity.
‘What’s the big deal? It’s just my body, not my soul. Whether I wore thirty layers or none, a man would use me if he wished to. Men believe it is their God-given right to use women for their pleasure and walk away. Do you not see how many unwed mothers there are in the camps these days? Men are happy to take their pleasure, but not so happy to take on the consequences of a progeny, nor to make an honest woman of the girl in question.’
‘That’s quite a speech, Miss Wallace,’ he said, unmoved.
‘Come now, Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ve taken women to your bed. You are too handsome a fellow to be a monk. Perhaps you have even slept with women who take money in exchange for the pleasure?’
‘I am not a monk, Miss Wallace,’ he agreed. ‘And I would be lying if I pretended not to be affected in the general way of men by the fairer sex. But I believe in control, Miss Wallace, in all things. I also believe making love should be consensual and pleasurable for both parties. A woman is not just a receptacle for a man to use and then leave after dropping shillings on the night stand.’
‘Now who’s making speeches,’ she mocked. ‘And do you believe that a man should marry a woman if he got her pregnant? Were you, for instance, to have an affair and that girl found herself with child, would you make an honest woman of her?’
�
�Yes,’ he said with an easy shrug. ‘I would marry the woman should she find herself in trouble.’ She graced him with a look of utter disbelief and it irritated him. ‘It takes two to tango, as they say. And, considering my own parents abandoned me as a babe, I would take care of any child I fathered and raise it in as loving a home as I could possibly give it.’
Disbelief turned to shock at his revelation. Pity usually came next, whenever he told anyone the sad tale of his birth. But Miss Wallace’s expression now held nothing more than surprised interest. He wished to hell he’d never said anything, and walked to the water’s edge hoping to change the subject.
***
Indy mulled over his revelation as the Lieutenant paced along the small sandy beach by the river. He’d been abandoned as a child? But he was a soldier. A commissioned soldier. It took money to buy a commission. An orphan couldn’t possibly have afforded it. She wanted to ask him about it, but his turned back and shuttered expression told her that this particular conversation was over.
Though she was now dressed, the excess water on her skin soaked her clothes. The thin cotton clung and her nipples, tight from the cold, were clearly visible. Feeling unusually shy, and surprised by his recent honesty, she crossed her arms to cover herself.
‘Well, it’s not always a blessing to have two parents. I see you’ve met my darling daddy?’
Will turned his head and gave her a wary look. ‘So you do know he’s your father?’
‘Of course I know,’ she said, with a shrug to show him it didn’t bother her. ‘I’ve known for years. My mother does not keep secrets from me. She thought it better that she tell me than if I were to find out from someone else.’
‘How is it that you have such a hatred for one another? He’s your father.’
She sat down on a flat rock. The spot caught the sun and she closed her eyes, lifting her face to revel in its warmth. ‘He raped my mother back in England. That is how I came to be.’
He stayed silent for so long that Indy opened one eye to peek at him. He was looking at her so oddly.
‘I see,’ was all he said, but the war of emotions on his face had her staring at him, captivated.
‘Do not concern yourself, sir,’ she said, smiling to make him feel better. ‘As I said, my mother does not lie to me. She told me everything. She was a kitchen maid in a house in London, and Donnelly was a friend of the master’s son. She’d catch him watching her when she served meals to the family in the dining room. Made her skin crawl like a thousand spiders, she said.’ Indy spread her dress out to catch the sun’s rays in hopes of drying it. The shiver she felt was not from cold, but from the memory of the story her mother had told her on her eighteenth birthday. ‘Late one night, Ma was finishing in the kitchen. She took the vegetable scrapings out to the compost pile in the rear courtyard and he followed her. He dragged her into the little garden shed and assaulted her.’
Will turned and strode away from her then, and she watched perplexed at his sudden animation. She sighed. Clearly, he did not wish to hear her sad story. She was about to stand, when he turned again and walked back to her.
‘What girl needs to hear that? Why did your mother find it necessary to tell you that?’
The judgement emanating from him irked Indy. ‘Because he found us. He already knew I had been born in London before we left and, according to my mother, he knew I was his. I was only seven years old when we left England. We took assisted passage to this new colony of Victoria to find a better life, and lived in Melbourne happily for ten years, with my mother thinking we had left that ugly history behind. I don’t think he deliberately followed my mother and me to Australia. Too many years had passed. In all honesty, I don’t know why he ended up here and I couldn’t care less.’
He was listening intently so she went on. ‘Then, on my birthday, I came home from the market to find Warren Donnelly just leaving the boarding house where we rented a room. I didn’t know who he was of course, but when I got inside Ma was there, shaking and crying. That’s when she told me who he was and what he’d done.’ She took a cleansing breath as the old anger flooded through her. ‘Not long after that, the first gold was found. I hitched a ride out to Ballarat with a mother and her son, whom I’d met at the boarding house.’
‘Annie and Sean?’
Indy nodded. ‘They were headed to the goldfields, along with the rest of the city it seemed. I remember the mass exodus from Melbourne. It was like Moses leading the Jews across the Red Sea. People just up and left their jobs at the post office, the ship docks. Teachers abandoned schools, farmers gave up their properties and cattlemen and shearers left stations to travel to these rural fields to stake a claim.’
‘The lure of the get-rich-quick fantasy.’
Indy heard the sarcasm in his tone and smiled. ‘It wasn’t a fantasy. But I didn’t need to get rich. All I really wanted was to give my mother a life where she didn’t have to work so hard. I wanted to get her out of Melbourne, away from Donnelly and into the country. She’d always dreamed of a country home.’
‘So you, like everyone else, came looking for gold.’
She smiled, but said nothing more.
‘Your mother is lucky to have you.’
She blinked, surprised at his compliment. ‘Donnelly doesn’t agree.’
‘From what I’ve seen of Donnelly he is not fit for anything except being buried up to his neck in bullock waste.’
Indy chuckled, delighted. ‘And I’ve no doubt that is exactly where he will end up.’
They sat in companionable silence a moment before Will’s horse whinnied.
‘I should go,’ he said and made a move to his horse. But he suddenly stopped and turned to face her again. ‘It may have been calm and friendly when you first came to the fields of Ballarat, but these are dangerous times, Miss Wallace. Please have a care where you bathe.’
‘My name is Indy,’ she told him, smiling softly. ‘And I thank you for your concern, Lieutenant.’
‘But you will ignore it just the same.’
She was amused at the resignation in his tone, but said no more, just grinned and stood from her rock to watch him mount his horse with no effort at all. She enjoyed watching him. A strong man with long muscular legs he sat a saddle well, she noted, his uniform trousers stretched taut across his thighs.
‘Good day, Miss Wallace, Miss Indy,’ he said, dipping his head in that polite way of his.
She chuckled at his fumbled farewell. It was obvious he didn’t quite know what to call her. She curtsied poorly. ‘Good day, Lieutenant.’
Her eyes stayed on him until he and his horse disappeared into the towering forest of eucalypts. She exhaled heavily, and her smile fell to a frown. She had just told the man her most secret history. A story she’d told no one else in such detail. What was it about him that had such a calming effect on her? Made her feel comfortable in a way that allowed him to glean truths she would normally keep hidden deep down inside? It was disconcerting and dangerous. Then again, he’d also told her a moment of his life story too.
An orphan boy. It made him seem human and not just the tight-arsed, strict soldier she had originally thought him. It still didn’t mean he could be trusted.
‘Stupid girl,’ she admonished herself aloud.
As she grabbed up her boots and headed back to town, she decided she needed to be on better form around him.
‘Next you’ll be telling him where your gold is hidden.’
***
As was often the custom after dinner, Indy joined Annie and Sean and their neighbours in a good sing-a-long. Wonderful Irish folk tunes filled the air as Walter O’Shanahan played his fiddle in accompaniment.
‘You ran off so fast from the meeting this afternoon, you never heard the amazing story of that soldier friend of yours,’ Sean said to Indy during a break in the music.
‘I have no soldier friend,’ she denied quickly, not wanting any of the other miners to hear that she’d been conversing with the military.
<
br /> ‘That Lieutenant Marsh fellow,’ Sean went on regardless. ‘Father Smythe went to the camp again to see his man, Gregorius, but they wouldn’t let him in. He said at the meeting today that the Lieutenant saw him at the gate and approached him. He took the priest to the jail personally to see that his servant boy was safe and well.’
‘He did what?’
‘Father Smythe said he was terribly generous and kind and promised to look out for Gregorius until Father Smythe could raise the second lot of pounds for his release,’ Sean went on. ‘The bastards are charging Smythe double the usual fine since they say Gregorius attacked that policeman.’
But Indy had stopped listening. The Lieutenant had already proved himself to be a fair man in his disapproval of the violence carried out in the licence raids. Now it seemed she could add generous and kind to the list of astonishing personality traits piling up against the Lieutenant’s name.
She knew him to be a gentleman since their encounter at the river. A gentleman he may be, but her whole body warmed as she recalled the look on his face when she’d stood up from the water. Even in that split second before he’d turned his back on her, he couldn’t hide the desire in his eyes upon seeing her fully naked. And once she was dressed, his eyes had kept wandering to her breasts where the cotton dress clung to her with the water still on her skin.
While his interest was clear, his upbringing had her baffled. How did a man change his fortunes so dramatically? How did he go from being a poor orphan boy, to becoming a gentleman in both station and nature? By the time Indy fell into her bed at the end of the day, she was determined to learn more about the mysterious and intriguing Lieutenant Marsh.
Chapter 9
All night long Indy listened to the man in the tent next door abusing his wife. Becoming more and more agitated, she tossed and turned in her bed. There was no privacy in the camps. You could hear all manner of things from domestic arguments and beatings, to crying babies and the screaming tantrums of children. Not to mention having to listen to the making of those babies.
The Girl From Eureka Page 10