Left with no choice, Sarah reluctantly allowed Percival to mount her pillion behind him. The skirt of his saddle was deep and wide. Sarah clung to that rather than to the man; she was determined not to touch him. By the time they arrived back at Lowella, her fingers ached from holding on so tightly. Since the horses were tired and her father refused to abuse good horseflesh, they kept to a walk. Only this enabled Sarah to maintain her balance without wrapping her arms around Percival’s waist. Percival tried once or twice to initiate a conversation with her as they went along, but Sarah affected deafness. As a result, the overseer was fuming; Sarah herself was annoyed at having to put up with his possessiveness. Bringing up the rear of the procession, Gallagher was glowering quite as fiercely as either herself or Percival. Only Edward, riding as usual in the lead, reached the homestead in a fairly sunny humor.
When at long last they drew to a halt in the stable yard, Gallagher dismounted first. Max’s reins in hand, he forestalled Percival, whose own dismount was hampered by Sarah’s presence behind him, and held up his hands to Sarah. Glowering at him for his presumption, which she did not dare refuse for fear of arousing her father’s and Percival’s curiosity, she placed her hands on the hard width of his shoulders. She felt the smooth contraction of his muscles through the damp cotton of his shirt as he placed his hands on her waist and swung her to the ground. Her fingers— the traitors!—ached to stroke that broad expanse, to discover for themselves how such perfection of bone and muscle felt to the touch. Instead, she jerked her hands away. He released her immediately, stepping back. There was nothing in his action that even the closest observer could take exception to. But Sarah felt threatened. She drew away from him immediately, not even deigning to look at him. Her palms tingled from the contact with his hard shoulders, but she ignored the sensation. Leaving the men to see to the horses, she started for the house.
Liza was on the porch at the back of the house, waiting for her. This was the first time she had been out of her room since contracting the catarrh. Sarah felt mildly surprised at seeing her up and around. She could only suppose that Liza had decided to recover, Sarah’s absence having deprived Liza of her captive nurse; certainly Lydia, who was as self-centered as her daughter, would not cater to Liza’s incessant demands for more barley water to drink or for a cool cloth to place across her brow, and Mrs. Abbott, as a former convict, was barely tolerated by both mother and daughter. At any rate, the younger girl was clad in one of the loose white frocks she wore only when there was no danger of being seen by anyone outside the family. She was seated in a slat-backed rocker with a cushioned foot-rest positioned conveniently near. A jug of lemonade rested on a table by her elbow. But instead of reclining languidly, as Sarah would have expected—Liza could usually be counted on to milk a convalescence for all it was worth—her posture was surprisingly alert. Her eyes touched on her sister only briefly; then they moved beyond her, widening and brightening. Nonplussed, Sarah looked over her shoulder. And the reason for Liza’s uncharacteristic behavior was immediately in view. Gallagher! He had had the infernal nerve to follow her up to the house!
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, forgetting their audience as she whirled to face the man whom she was rapidly coming to think of as her nemesis.
“Why, Miss Sarah!” It was not his voice so much as his bright blue eyes that mocked her. “Surely you don’t think I’d follow you up here without a reason? Mr. Markham decided that he didn’t want to leave you ladies alone at the house until the man who attacked you is caught. He thought that you could probably find some work for me to do around the house when I’m not accompanying one of you somewhere. After all, as he said, there’s no point in keeping a man idle. Is there now, Miss Sarah?”
“Oh, you’re a convict.” This, uttered in tones of deepest disappointment, came from Liza.
Sarah, mortified, saw a tiny muscle twitch once at the corner of Gallagher’s mouth before his expression became impossible to read. She turned to frown at her sister. “Where are your manners, Liza?”
The younger girl’s mouth drooped petulantly. She leaned back in the rocker, her attitude evincing her disgust. “I’m sorry.” The apology was grudging, given only because Sarah had silently demanded it. Out and out rudeness, even to a convict, was something that Sarah would not tolerate, as Liza—and Lydia—had discovered early on, when they had attempted to set Mrs. Abbott in what they felt was her place. Liza’s eyes moved broodingly over Gallagher, then brightened a little. “You’re very good-looking, you know. Do you by any chance know how to dance?”
“Liza!”
“Well, my ball is next Friday and I still don’t have the steps of that new dance right. I have to practice with someone, and you know Pa dances like a water buffalo!”
“Liza!”
“I’m afraid the kind of dances I’m used to wouldn’t be at all suitable for a ball,” Gallagher said, and to Sarah’s surprise he sounded amused, instead of angry. She glanced over her shoulder at him. He was smiling beguilingly at Liza, looking so handsome that Sarah felt a stab of what she immediately decided was alarm. It was certainly not jealousy of her young sister and a convict! It was just that Liza was young and impressionable. And very, very foolish. To Sarah’s certain knowledge, Liza had never seen a man whose looks rivaled Gallagher’s; the men and boys of both girls’ acquaintance tended toward the salt-of-the-earth type—steady and dependable, but nothing to dazzle a young lady with dreams of romance.
“Liza, behave yourself! Gallagher, if Pa truly sent you up here to work, then you can wait in the office while I change and then I’ll find you something to do. Come with me.” There was an edge to her voice as she swept up the porch steps, Gallagher obediently following.
“Oh, Sarah, you’re such a stick! If you don’t stop being so proper all the time, you’ll never find a husband!”
Liza’s voice, sulky with the embarrassment of being scolded before a stranger—a very handsome, decidedly male stranger, even if he was a convict—floated after Sarah as she entered the kitchen through the back door. Sarah had to stifle an urge to turn around and throttle her. Controlling it with what she considered true nobility, she battled a similar longing with regard to Gallagher as she glanced at him over her shoulder and saw that he was watching her with cool mockery. Before she could give in to that impulse, or another, equally unworthy one, Mrs. Abbott bustled into the room from the long corridor that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. Designed to spare the house proper from the heat of cooking food, the corridor served that purpose admirably. It meant, however, that the family frequently had to put up with food gone cold between stove and table.
“Why, Miss Sarah, whatever ’ave you done to yourself?” Mrs. Abbott had not lost a syllable of her cockney accent in the fifteen years she had been in Australia. Like most of the women sentenced to transportation, her crime had been prostitution, a fact that had caused Lydia and, following her mother’s example, Liza, when they had first come to live at Lowella, to treat Mrs. Abbott as if she carried the plague. Only Sarah’s staunch championship of the woman who had, whatever her past transgressions, devotedly nursed her mother, coupled with Edward’s slightly grudging recognition that they did indeed owe Mrs. Abbott a debt, had kept her from being sent away as soon as Lydia had come home to Lowella as the second Mrs. Markham. As broad as a barn door and as homely, dressed from neck to toes in a long-sleeved black bombazine that she wore because, despite the heat and Sarah’s pleading, she considered it proper attire for a housekeeper, Bess Abbott had lost whatever degree of beauty she must once have possessed. At least, Sarah had always assumed she must once have been at least marginally attractive; wasn’t that a requirement for success in Mrs. Abbott’s former line of endeavor?
“It’s a long story, Mrs. Abbott,” Sarah answered, not feeling up to going into the details of what had happened. Gesturing at the man who loomed behind her, she said, “This is Gallagher. He’ll be working around the homestead for a while. G
allagher, this is Mrs. Abbott, Lowella’s housekeeper and a very good cook. If you’re hungry, I’m sure she has something about the kitchen that you could eat. After you finish, you can wait for me in the office. Mrs. Abbott will show you where it is.”
“Be that glad to,” Mrs. Abbott said, smiling at Gallagher. “Well, sit, man. I’ve just cooked up some gingerbread, and there’s that, with cream, if you like. Miss Sarah, it wouldn’t ’urt you to stop a minute and eat some too; you’re barely more than skin and bones as it is.”
“I’m not hungry, Mrs. Abbott.” Conscious of Gallagher’s broadening grin, knowing that he was deriving great amusement from her discomfiture, first at Liza’s hands and now at Mrs. Abbott’s, Sarah flashed him a darkling look before fleeing the kitchen. He was already, at Mrs. Abbott’s urging, seating himself at the scrubbed kitchen table. Sarah had no doubt that Mrs. Abbott would serve him an enormous plate of gingerbread with cream before he could blink an eye. She was positively beaming at him. Well, Sarah told herself with a sigh as she let the kitchen door slam, at least I’m not the only one. He seemed to affect every female with whom he came into contact like catnip affected cats.
On the way to her room, Sarah glanced in through the open door of the large parlor at the front of the house and saw Mary and Tess, the two aborigine maids (Lydia had insisted that their names be anglicized; she claimed that she could never remember their native Australian names, which she thought were heathen anyway), hard at work polishing the teakwood floor in preparation for the dancing that would take place on it during Liza’s ball. The rugs and furniture had already been removed and stored in a little-used room at the rear of the house. But the walls still had to be scrubbed and the windows washed, and the enormous chandelier that had traveled with Lydia from England had to be taken down and every separate piece of crystal washed and polished before it could be rehung. All the other rooms, both downstairs and up, had to be brought to their shining best as well. Besides creating many hours of extra work, and much bother for Sarah and the staff, the ball was costing Edward a great deal of money that he could not at the moment afford. But Lydia had insisted that her daughter come out in true English style, and, as usual, Edward had bowed to his wife’s wishes.
“Sarah! You look positively unkempt! If I didn’t know better, I would think you had been cleaning out the stables!” Lydia was coming down the stairs just as Sarah started up them; her distaste made the frown lines that she was usually careful to avoid crease her forehead. Sarah sighed as she approached her stepmother, who swept her skirt aside as though to avoid contamination when they passed on the stairs. An older, plumper version of Liza, with the same dusky brown hair worn in nearly the same artless style and with her daughter’s spaniel eyes, Lydia had never made any secret of the fact that she merely tolerated her husband’s daughter. Sarah, for her part, could not summon for Lydia any of the fondness she had learned to feel for her stepsister. The daughter of a minor baron, Lydia’s first husband had been a wealthy cit, attracted as much, Sarah suspected, by Lydia’s noble connections as by her person. Lydia had come to Australia with the very young Liza in tow when her husband had died and left them, against all her expectations, nearly paupers. Edward had been dazzled by the widow’s charming smiles during one of his twice-yearly visits to Canberra, and had married her within the week. Sarah’s mother had by then been dead for nearly five years, and although Lydia’s and Liza’s advent had been something of a shock, Sarah had been prepared to be fond of her new stepmother. Certainly she had admired her. With her dazzling array of bright silk and satin dresses, her perfumes and lotions and soft femininity, Lydia had seemed to the fifteen-year-old Sarah the very epitome of a lady. For months she had tried—futilely—to emulate her. When, finally, Lydia had driven it home to her that, with her too-thin body and pointy face and hopeless hair, the best Sarah could hope for was to be clean and tidy, Sarah had been crushed. All her secret longings to be beautiful ruthlessly exposed for the idiocies they were, Sarah had determined to eschew fashion entirely. Lydia had made it clear in a hundred different ways that Sarah could never hope to rival her own and her daughter’s looks; Sarah, accepting Lydia’s evaluation with the humility of the young and untried, had never again attempted to compete.
“I had an accident,” she said now, briefly, to her stepmother. She knew Lydia would not be concerned enough to press her for details. Quite simply, she was not interested in what happened to her husband’s daughter, as long as it was not something that would interfere with her own comfort.
“I would hope so.” The faintest suggestion of scorn was discernible through the British upper-class accent Lydia carefully cultivated. “I would hate to think that you had taken to aping the style of a ragamuffin. Although, now I come to think of it, it wouldn’t be much of a difference.”
“Excuse me.” Ignoring Lydia’s dig, as she had learned to do over the years, Sarah passed her stepmother and continued on up the stairs to her room at the back of the house.
Edward and Lydia shared one of the large bedrooms at the front of the second story, and Liza had the other. Sarah’s room overlooked the orchard and was adjoined by a very pretty little sitting room she had converted from an unused bedroom. Furnished in palest green and peach, her bedchamber was dominated by the large four-poster that had been her mother’s marriage bed and in which she herself had been born. Lydia had banished it from her new husband’s bedroom almost as soon as she had hung up her clothes, and Sarah had rescued it from the attic to which it had been ignominously consigned. What Sarah wanted more than anything just at that moment was to fling herself on it and never leave its soft comfort again; what she did was strip off her ruined clothes, sluice her face and body with water, and tidy her hair before donning a clean dress in a nondescript calico print that, like her other clothes, had the advantage of not showing dirt.
Glancing at herself in the cheval mirror to make certain that her dress was properly buttoned and her hair pinned up securely, Sarah was suddenly struck by a wave of dissatisfaction with her looks such as she had not felt in years. With her hair skinned back from her face into the cumbersome knot at her nape, her face looked all eyes. The gold tone of the dress brought out their color but unfortunately made her skin appear sallow. Buttoned primly to the neck, the looseness of the dress disguised what few curves she possessed. Her bare arms looked as brown as an aborigine’s from constant exposure to the sun.
Sarah turned her back on her reflection, disliking it intensely. Why did she have to be so hopelessly plain? And why, suddenly, did it bother her so much? She had thought that she had successfully ridded herself of every last lingering quiver of female vanity years ago. Then, as she forced her mind to turn to the tasks that awaited her downstairs, Sarah realized that the answer to that last question lay there, in a tall, hard-muscled body, a lean, handsome face, and a pair of breathtakingly blue eyes.
VII
Dominic Gallagher flexed his shoulder muscles and grimaced. The pain in his back was almost gone now, but it had been replaced by a lingering stiffness that made it difficult for him to lift his arms above his head and hold them there for any length of time. Not that that scrawny witch could have guessed, of course, when she had set him to washing windows. He would have grimly endured a dozen beatings like the one that had caused his present discomfort before he had confessed any weakness to her—or, for that matter, to anyone. He had never asked for quarter in his life, and he never would—not even if his arms fell off. Which they were clearly threatening to do. Today she had him washing windows, which involved a great deal of reaching and stretching. Yesterday she had set him to whitewashing walls, which called for much the same thing. The day before that, it had been his lot to remove what must have been thousands of tiny pieces of crystal from a chandelier in the front parlor, dip them in soapy water, rinse and polish them, and then rehang them. For someone with no knowledge of his difficulties, she was fiendishly accurate in assigning him jobs that caused him physical discomfort.
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