He closed his eyes against the entreaty in hers. Like a lost soul he was drawn to her goodness and her sunny nature. “You are too fragile a flower for the Never-Never.”
He felt her lips brushing his chest, where his tunic lacings were spread open. “A flower that will wither without your nourishing rain, Sin.”
He gave a shuddering sigh. “Your mother is adamantly opposed to your marrying me. She has other plans for you, Celeste. Grand plans.”
Celeste displayed an unexpected strength. “She can’t control my life like she does New South Wales Traders. I’ll make her change her mind, I swear. Oh, kiss me, Sin! Kiss me and let me know you need me and want me and love me.”
He silenced her with a kiss that was full of ail the sweetness and goodness he had buried where even his soul refused to tread.
“You have been raised to be a lady of first quality. Your father and I haven’t struggled all these years to make a place in society for you to squander it on an ex-convict, for God’s sake!”
Celeste’s hands knotted into fists. “I might remind you that not only are you an ex-convict yourself, but you have several times professed your skepticism about a superior being, so please don’t call upon his name, Mother.”
Nan stopped brushing her hair, turned from her dressing table and stared at her daughter. “You are overwrought. It must be this muggy weather. I would suggest you go to your room and lie down a while.”
“I am no longer a child.”
“I know what’s best for you. Trust me, Celeste. You think you love Sinclair. Tis because he’s different, and so he’s intriguing to—”
“He is different. He’s not preoccupied with making money and acquiring things. Or acquiring people.”
Nan laid aside her brush. “Just what does that mean?”
“That he wouldn’t accept your offer of a share in the company.”
“I didn’t tender such an offer.”
“Papa did.”
“I see.”
“Mother, I am going to marry Sinclair.”
“If you love him, you won’t. I am telling you truly, Celeste. Where he’s going, the country is rough and unforgivable. You would be a liability to him. His kind needs a strong, hard worn—”
“Liability? Assets? Must you always think in monetary terms, Mama? What about personal terms like warmth, love, compassion, caring? Do you even know what those mean?”
Nan stiffened. Celeste saw the pain in her eyes and ran to drop down on her knees before her. “Oh, Mother, I know the sacrifices you have made out of your love for Papa and me, but it’s my turn to make sacrifices for the ones I love. I really do love Sin. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved him.”
“Do you love me, Celeste?” her mother asked quietly.
She hugged her mother’s waist. “Oh, you know I do!”
“Then do this one thing for me. Wait.”
She opened her mouth to protest, and her mother said, “Hush, darling, hear me out. I’m not saying you can’t marry Sin. But wait a year. Give him a chance to get settled on his land. At least, let him build some kind of home for you, not just the shelter of a canvas tent. Those bachelor halls are no way to start out a marriage. Then, if you still want to marry him after a year, you have your father’s and my blessing.”
What her mother was asking was so difficult: to watch Sin leave without her. “Mother, he might get out there and decide I'm better off here.”
“If he does, then the two of us agree. I think what I’m asking is fair. Are you afraid to put your love to the test?”
She closed her eyes, hoping to find the strength needed to agree. Regrettably, she wasn’t strong like her mother or Amaris. Whatever needed to be done, they did it. She was like her father. Passive, a pacifist, wanting only to please the ones they loved.
She sighed and opened her eyes. Her smile was tremulous. “All right, Mama. I love you and Sin both. If by waiting the year, I can still have both of your hearts, then it’s worth the sacrifice.”
Her mother squeezed her hand. “You’ll see that I was right, that you made the right decision.”
“Amaris! Amaris!”
Amaris’s eyelids seemed as heavy as pressing irons. Surely it wasn’t time to awaken already. It seemed as if she had just collapsed on her bed only minutes before. Her mother’s pinched face, haloed by the light of the candle she carried, was a blur above her.
“Amaris, wake up.”
The hand that joggled her shoulder was real. She struggled to an upright position. “What is it, Mother?” Then she saw her mother’s expression. “Pulykara? Tis Pulykara?”
“She’s taken a turn for the worse, luv. She’s asking for you. Only you, no one else.”
Amaris swung her long legs over the side of the bed, slid her feet into her slippers, and grabbed her chenille bed robe from the foot of the mattress. Knotting her robe around her, she tugged her braid loose from the back of the collar and hurried up the stairs. Her slippers thudded in time to the rapid beat of her heart.
For the first time, Pulykara looked ancient, her skin as wrinkled as wadded-up paper. A week of lingering in the devil’s grip had taken its toll of the ailing and aged aborigine woman. Her eyes were closed, and Amaris wasn’t certain she was even breathing.
Sitting gingerly on the bed, Amaris touched her leathered cheek with a loving reverence. “Pulykara?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
Slowly, the old woman’s lids fluttered open. “Baby.” The aborigine’s eyes cleared. “Miss Priss. Tis time.”
“No!” she cried. “Damn your Dream Time people and fairy rings and all that bloody mystic stuff. I won’t listen to it!” Like a child, she put her hands to her ears. Tears trickled down her face and dripped off. “Oh, please, Pulykara, don’t die! Don’t die, I need you. I need you!”
Pulykara’s breath came in raspy gasps. “You must . . . listen to me.”
Weeping audibly, Amaris obediently let her hands drop. Just as she had always been obedient to this cherished old woman.
“You are special... a gift from the Dream Time . . . people to . . . to Nan Livingston.”
It was Amaris now who ceased to breathe. Then, “What? What do you mean?”
“Nan Livingston . . . not Rose Wilmot . . . gave birth . . . to you.”
“How do you know this?”
“She saved . . . me from being beat. After that . . . I worked for her. When you were . . . born and she asked me to find a home . . . for you, I did . . . as she asked, anything she would have asked.”
“Who is . . . my father?”
The old woman’s eyes glazed over. “The Dream Time people. They . . . are your father. You are . . . one of the gods . . . a part of this land. Don’t ever forget . . . .”
Amaris, weeping hot tears now, leaned over and kissed the wrinkled brow. “I love you, Pulykara,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t you ever forget. Ever!”
Rose and William Wilmot gave Pulykara a Christian burial, although Amaris privately held to the conviction that the aborigine woman was somewhere scoffing at the ritual of such a newborn religion. After all, hers was hundreds of thousands of years old—a worship of the divine forces that created her beloved land.
A mist, blue and powerfully scented, hung over the graveyard that afternoon, as if the Dream Time people blessed her arrival among them with a supernatural gift.
Pragmatists would have said it was merely one of those weather phenomena that caused the mists of the mountain eucalypti to settle over the lower areas.
Rose wept as her husband read aloud from his Bible. Dry-eyed, Amaris paid no heed. She’d already said her farewell to the aborigine woman.
Pulykara deserved an aboriginal burial. She would want to be wrapped in a sheet of paperbark and placed on a platform high in a tree. A year or so later, her bones could be removed, painted with red ocher, and ceremonially placed in a small cave. Pulykara believed that these formalities had to be done correctly to liberate the person’s spirit.
Someday, Amaris promised herself, she would return to the cemetery and carry out the burial ritual for Pulykara. First, there was something more important to be taken care of.
When the last word was spoken, she whirled from the grave site and, bypassing the waiting carriage, struck out for Wooloomooloo. Rose and William called after her, but there was no way she would have heard. Her head was filled with a deafening, incessant buzzing.
While Rose and William took the carriage to hunt for her along the roadside, she cut across fields overgrown with thorny brush that tore at her good black dress. Enraged, embittered, and heart-wounded, she entered the Livingston mansion, swept past the butler and the startled guests, to confront Nan Livingston, her mother.
§ CHAPTER ELEVEN §
The young woman was as out of place in that glittering gathering of Sydney’s select as an aborigine strolling naked in Covent Gardens.
The low hum of polite party conversation diminished as one by one each guest in the ballroom of the Livingstons’ Georgian mansion turned to stare at the creature in the doorway.
Towering almost six feet, the rather plain-looking young woman in black mourning crepe felt very fragile at that moment. She had known coming here was a risk she was running. Since no one could see that her insides had shattered into thousands of ice-cold slivers, she took one deep breath and let her gaze travel over the room of plumed and jewelry-bedecked guests— until it collided with that of the pale, middle-aged hostess.
Fury and heartbreak gnashed inside the young woman, then coalesced into courage she had momentarily lost. She bypassed silver and sideboards.
In three long easy strides, she crossed the intervening space to stand before the diminutive Mrs. Livingston. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You knew and never said a word.”
“We can discuss this in my office.” Before the blast of barely contained rage, another might have quailed. Not Nan Livingston. Calmly, she turned and led the way to her office.
Once inside, she turned to face the younger woman. “Yes?”
“I am the daughter you so easily rid yourself of twenty-five years ago!”
If she had hoped her revelation would stun Nan Livingston, the young woman realized now she had miscalculated. Nan Livingston’s controlled countenance showed boredom and not a whit more.
Her famous and terrible pride would never permit her to betray the shame and agony of this moment. Casually, carelessly almost, she replied, “I often wondered what you would do if you ever found out your origins.”
It was a clash between two strong-willed females—and the younger vowed that she would leave the victor. “I’m sure you did. But not often enough. The other daughter you hold so dear—I swear I’ll destroy your glorious plans for her. This I swear!” With that, she strode from the office, past the influential guests, leaving them to believe that they might have seen an apparition.
§ CHAPTER TWELVE §
For several minutes Nan stared into her reflection in the mirror. Since she had been no beauty, time did not have much to tamper with.
Indeed, she had weathered the years better than other women her age. She was middle-aged and looked it. No less, no more.
Beneath that structure of flesh and bones was the essence of Nan Briscoll Livingston. All that she inherited, all that she experienced had gone into her making. Her need for legitimacy and a sense of place had been so important to her that she could not openly acknowledge Amaris. And yet, at forty-eight, she sadly recognized that the young woman who had boldly, brashly, appeared in her drawing room this evening was closer to her in spirit and soul than Celeste.
Tonight had been a clash of two strong-willed women. Nan sensed that the confrontation was just beginning. Could she—would she—destroy her offspring?
Always there was her survival duel with Miles . . . now Amaris. Amaris would never understand . . . Amaris and Miles, these two people who made her the most vulnerable.
She dipped a finger into her rouge pot and marked with determined strokes two X’s onto her mirror.
“Miss Wilmot, what a surprise. I wasn’t sure that was you riding toward me.”
Amaris pulled on the bow beneath her chin and removed her broad-brimmed leghorn hat. “I suppose my old nag betrayed my identity?”
Francis laughed. “Well, aye.” Frivolity, his black stallion, pranced smartly.
With her hat, she fanned her face. She missed riding bareheaded, but there was much to be said for a woman’s hat besides the fact it was proper attire for a well-brought-up young woman and it kept that damaging sunlight off the face. A hat also added that allure of mystery. “I felt I couldn’t write another stroke and had to get out of the house.”
He stared at her as if seeing her for the first time. “You are an unusual woman, Miss Wilmot.”
“You’ve said that about me before. Shall we ride a little while together?”
He looked uncertain. “I was supposed to ride over to the Livingstons’.”
A fact Amaris knew well. Nan had taken to staging whist parties on Thursday afternoons. Mostly young people made up the tables of foursomes. Naturally, Amaris was not among the invited. Once, about two weeks earlier, right after Pulykara’s burial, Celeste had come to the Female Immigrants’ Home. “I don’t understand it, Amaris. Mama absolutely refuses to invite you to the house, where before she was indifferent.”
“Does that mean we won’t be seeing each other anymore?” she asked Celeste. It was difficult for Amaris to look at her lovely friend and remind herself that Celeste was her half-sister!
“Of course not! The house may be Mama’s, but my life isn’t. We’ll simply meet elsewhere.”
The hair at Amaris’s nape prickled. Here she was, meeting Francis instead. Fear suddenly struck at her. Was the darkness inside her the mirror of her mother? The mirror of Nan Livingston? Would she, like Nan, become a calculating, domineering old woman?
“Well, then Francis, I’ll ride a ways with you. I am taking some sweetcakes to the miller’s wife for Mother.”
Not waiting for an answer, she pulled on her reins and trotted her mare up beside his stallion. “How is the shipping business?”
His finely drawn brows met over the bridge of his nose, and she was reminded how very handsome the man was. “It couldn’t be better.”
“Ahh,” she teased, “but you don’t discuss business with women?”
“No, that’s not it. It’s—my part in New South Wales Traders is limited. Nan is in control and has her finger on its pulse.”
“And you don’t feel needed. That’s it, isn’t it?”
He inclined his head toward her. Uncertainty passed over his face. “You’re a perceptive woman.” He paused. “But it’s more than that. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t some fatal flaw in my character.” He looked relieved at his admission. “What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Every attempt I make to establish something of my own is thwarted. Accidents, poor timing, bad weather. Nothing that I can say is absolutely my fault, but too many adverse events to be mere coincidence.” He shrugged. “Mayhap I’m just one of those fellows dogged by ill luck. Or, at least, it seems that way for as long as I can remember.”
“Ill luck? How can the rich have ill luck?”
He tossed her a withering glance. “When I was small, I had a high fever. Money can’t buy back the hearing in my right ear.”
So that was why he tilted his head toward the person speaking. In silence, she rode on with him. She set aside her compassion and concentrated on steering the subject to her purpose. “Francis, your problem might be the area of your business pursuits.”
He stared at her with a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe you don’t belong in the office. You’re a man who enjoys the physical challenge—riding to the foxes, pheasant hunting, boxing. I imagine you would find the detail work of an office tedious.”
“I do.” His scowl ebbed. “Say, why don’t you ride all the way to t
he Livingstons’ with me? Whist can get bloody boring if your partner doesn’t—come to think of it, why haven’t I seen you at the Livingstons’ recently?”
So, gossip of that confrontation with Nan had not reached him.
Amaris let a wistful smile touch her lips. “You’ll have to ask Nan about that.”
“You are being mysterious. Then you won’t come?”
She drew back on her reins and began repinning her hat. “No. But I’m sure our paths will cross again.”
“I hope they do, Miss Wilmot. I enjoy talking to you. When I’m with you, ’tis not merely drawing-room chitchat.”
She peered up at him from beneath her upraised arm, a definitely seductive glance. “I feel the same way.” Her hat secure, she smiled and said, “Until next time.” Then she tugged her mount in the opposite direction.
“Next time” wasn’t that long in coming. Celeste came to the rectory the next morning. “Mother is abed with one of those awful headaches,” Amaris said, inviting her in.
As Celeste’s gaze took in the shabby furnishings, Amaris realized again the disparity between her life and that of her half-sister’s.
The thought crossed Amaris’s mind that perhaps she should tell Celeste of their relationship, but Amaris knew it would serve no beneficial purpose. Only bring pain to Celeste.
Celeste took off her bonnet, hugged her, and stepped back. “I miss you. We’re going boating on the Hawkesbury. Won't you come along?”
“Who’s we?”
“Francis. Thomas Rugsby from Wales. He’s visiting Major Hannaby. Their daughter Eileen is taken with him. And Lieutenant O’Reilly, you remember him. He was courting Becky Randolph. Most of the regular whist players. Do say you’ll come, Amaris.”
Guilt pricked her conscience. More than being with her friend, she wanted to take advantage of Francis’s presence at the boating party. “All right. How are you getting to the landing?”
Dream Time (historical): Book I Page 13