Often, too tired at night to change out of her clothing, she would wonder how Sin was coping with the loss of labor. Or, for that matter, with the loss of money. All the station owners were in dire straits financially.
And she would wonder if he ever went to nearby Ballarat to appease his sexual hunger. Or maybe of the workers left at Never-Never, one of the wives or daughters attracted his interest.
She could stand that, she thought. Just as long as she knew he was close by. Somehow beneath the Southern Cross, they might have been star-crossed as lovers and soul mates, but at least she could occasionally see him or hear word of him.
Then, one afternoon he rode into Dream Time to change even that.
“My heart is no longer in the station. I’m assigning Never-Never to you.”
She stood facing him, her office desk between them. He removed his bush hat and tossed it on the rocking chair. The thick hair was much grayer now and mussed where the sweat band had been.
Slowly she rose and came around to stand only inches from him. Those intense blue eyes gave her no quarter. They challenged her to emotional honesty.
“Get to the point. You’re leaving. Why? Where are you going?”
He took her hand—she didn’t realize she had made a fist—and smoothed out her fingers, one by one. Her hand stiffened with that old urge to hide, and he said, “No.”
“Don’t do this.” Her voice was a raw whisper.
Still cradling her hand, palm up in his bigger one, he said, “I’ve always admired your hands, Amaris. Capable. Capable of work. Capable of giving love. They’re caring hands.”
Tears welled in her eyes. With her free hand, she pushed back the thick mahogany lock that had fallen across his brow. “Why do you have to go? I love you, Sin.”
His smile was sad. “You love your autonomy. Think of it. With Never-Never and Dream Time as one, you’ll be a powerful woman, a worthy opponent of your mother. That is something that ye must come to terms with, Amaris. I have my own past to come to terms with.”
She jerked her hand from his. “Damn it, Sin. The past is dead!”
His finger stole out to touch the scar on her cheek. The scar was faint after all these years, but nevertheless it was his brand, a result of that day long ago when he had smashed the rum bottle against a tree. Sighing inwardly for what might have been and would never be, he reached down and collected his hat. “I’m going to prospect for gold."
The breath went from her. “You, too? You're selling out for gold? You’re sailing for California?”
“Mayhap, I’m prospecting for meself. The adventurer in me is calling, I suppose. But not to California. Gold has been discovered here, in the Never- Never, if you haven’t heard. You once said that whatever any other place had, Australia would have it twice as big, twice as much.”
He wasn’t asking her to go with him. She braced her hands on the desk edge behind her to sustain her weight. She was so damn tired. But he mustn’t know this. He thought she was strong. Capable. “You don’t have to assign Never-Never to me. I’ll hold it in trust for you until you return.”
“I’ll not be returning, Amaris.” There was an adamant glint in his eye.
“I see. Then God go with you, Sin. I hope you find more than gold—I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.”
He took her face between his large hands. His eyes searched hers. “You are looking too, me luv. And I am not what you are looking for. I can’t be to you or anyone the answer.”
He lowered his head over hers and kissed her very softly. She stood still, eyes closed, savoring the exquisite feeling that would have to last forever.
Helplessly responding, she wrapped her arms around his neck. She would make him respond to her as well. Her lips parted. Her tongue grazed his lips, seeking entry.
He put her from him. “Don’t make the parting any worse than need be.” His tone was unyielding, his mouth set in a determined line.
Dry-eyed, too anguished to permit herself the luxury of tears, she whispered, “Then good-bye it is, my darling.”
Amaris now divided her time between the two stations. The pleasure she had once thought would be hers at owning what amounted to an empire was nonexistent. Most of the time, she was exhausted at the end of the day—which was good, because then she was too tired to ache for Sin.
But she was a woman, with a woman’s needs. How many years had gone by since she had felt a man’s hands on her? At night, her body cried out for a man’s touch to assuage her rampaging desires.
It was Baluway who forced her to look at the truth of her life. She was working on the station’s books when he knocked at her office door. Even after all these years, his appearance still elicited amusement from her. His hair and beard were not completely gray.
“You smile,” he said, then added, “but not much anymore.”
“Too much work and too little time.” She was wondering just why he had come up to the office. Usually any request or anything he needed to tell her he saved until she came down to the yard.
“Your time is going.”
She tilted her head. “What?”
“One day, no more time. No more hope. No more nothing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No more nothing, eh?”
His head bobbed. “Bloody right.”
She laughed. She laughed until tears streamed down her cheeks. “You’re bloody right, Baluway.”
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE §
One might have thought a plug had been pulled and the male population of the outback had emptied like a cistern in a rush toward the diggings at Ballarat, a mere seventy-five miles west of Melbourne. In Eureka Valley, where Ballarat was nestled, the earth’s seams and surfaces contained gold almost as a man’s flesh and veins contained blood.
Melbourne itself was said to be both a ghost-port and a continuous saturnalia. Almost two-thousand people were arriving weekly, lured by the fabulous reports of gold finds in northern Victoria. Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay had become a Sargasso Sea of dead ships. With the desertion of the captains and the crews for the gold fields, the ships rocked empty at anchor, bilges unpumped, their masts a barren forest.
By the time Amaris arrived in Ballarat in May the driving rains of the Australian autumn had turned the newly created town into a mud bath.
Reins in hand and with Wind Runner trailing behind her, she joined a sluggishly winding column of men: grocers and sailors, lawyers and army deserters, oyster sellers and ex-convict shepherd, Italians, Americans, Maltese, Greeks, Chinese—all nationalities were to be seen trudging beneath the weight of tents, blankets, crowbars, picks, shovels, pans, and billycans, hastily bought at gougers’ prices.
Along with them, she stumbled toward a dream: theirs was incredible wealth; hers, incredible love.
Was it possible, or only a dream, this love for this one man who had been in her mind and her heart since she was twelve years old?
She meant to find out.
As she slogged through the mud toward the shanty towns and bark huts in the valley below, she committed herself to giving unreservedly. At thirty-eight, she was too old to settle for less. Sin was everything to her. A reflection of herself. Without him, her complement, she was incomplete.
If he was not willing to surrender himself to a love that could move beyond the common, then she was unwilling to settle for less. She would return to Dream Time and Never-Never, supervised in her absence by her loyal Baluway, and would live out the rest of her years alone. Not lonely, maybe, but unfulfilled.
This was her resolve, but her feelings churned in her like Sin’s untamed horses, stampeding, restive, wild. Her heart wanted and waited to be conquered. Only Sin could do so.
After stabling her horse in a livery that had no stalls left, only the corralled yard behind, she set off in quest of Sin. In the grog shops and hotels that lined the filthy, traffic-jammed streets of Ballarat, she almost sank to her knees in mud when she inadvertently stepped off the boardwalk. Rather than watchi
ng where she was going, she was looking for Sin’s face in every clay-colored man.
Around her, diggers, a name they wore with pride, were lurching down the rain-sluiced street, drinking their gold away. She watched a gray-whiskered miner who stood beneath a storefront awning lighting his pipe with a five-pound note. Another man, accompanied by his floozy, poured gold dust into the cupped hands of a hackney driver. When she observed a drunken septuagenarian digger pouring bottle after bottle of champagne into a horse trough and inviting passersby to drink up, she wondered if she could stay in Ballarat, even to be with Sin.
Of course, the ultimate decision as to whether she stayed or not would be up to Sin. At that thought— and the realization that he had to be somewhere nearby—her heart started to beat double-time.
Every so often, she would stop and inquire of the whereabouts of a Sin Tremayne, but there were so many new people deluging the town that no one knew anyone else. No one bothered her because most mistook her for one of them—a filthy, wet, and hungry stranger.
As the afternoon waned, she knew she was going to have to find a place to stay and belatedly realized that it was going to be difficult.
Time and again she entered the hastily, and shabbily, erected hotels only to be turned away. Strangers were sharing beds, and the floors were covered with blankets. The only beds left were those in the government camp’s military barracks, and that was only because a troop of its soldiers were policing the gold fields.
Pausing in front of a red-painted Chinese joss house, she took off her bush hat and stared dejectedly at its sodden mass. She wanted simply to lie down and sleep in a dry place.
A big man with a strong accent took her under his wing. “You look mighty dragged out, miss.”
She stared back at the robust man through the drizzle. Grizzle-bearded, he was much older than she had first thought, maybe sixty-five or even seventy. There was something about him . . . “I know you?”
“Yes.”
“You worked at Dream Time?”
“No.”
“Never-Never?”
“No. You need a place to stay?”
She should have been cautious, but she was tired and dirty and wet. And, for some reason, she trusted him. “Aye. Who are you?”
He took her arm and started walking away from the government camp. “Josiah Wellesley. I occasionally had some dealing with Nan Livingston.”
She stiffened. For all his years, he held her arm with a firm grip. “I won’t harm you, gal. Come along. My place is up on the ridge. Me and Dick been here four months now. Got us enough bags of gold dust to live comfortably. But it’s not the gold I’m after. It’s the adventure. Life’s getting short on me.”
He was talking, she knew, to put her at ease. “Dick?”
“Me partner. Dick Cooper. Any gear with you?”
“All I have is tied to my saddle. Over at the livery stable with my mount.”
“Let’s get it and head for home.” He grinned broadly. “If you can call a tent home. It ain’t much smaller than me ship cabin was, and that was for lo many years. ’Course home, I always contended, was made by a woman’s touch."
“You never married?"
“The right woman didn’t want me."
“Nan?” she asked incredulously.
“Sin?" he said. “You’re wanting him?”
A sad smile touched her lips. “Always.”
Tents of every color flowered the ridge. They, and a few bark huts, were of primitive construction. Only a few yards of calico stretched between a few poles provided all the protection most diggers needed against sun, wind, or rain.
She ducked her head and entered a blue calico tent Josiah pointed out as his. His partner wasn’t inside. He sat her down on one of the cots while he poured a cup of tea from the billy and explained to her that most of the diggers worked in teams of two to six men.
“One man picks and shovels the earth, while the other wheelbarrows it from the hole to the water. Then we take turns cradling it until any gold is parted from the earth.” He passed her some damper bread. “Problem is the government limits us to claims no more than eight feet square. Then twice weekly they descend on us for permit searches. No permits and we’re hauled off to jail. The permits are damnably expensive to boot.”
“How many men do you think are camped here?”
His grin split his gray beard. “Half of Australia’s entire population I hear. Maybe 350,000.”
She sat stunned. How would she ever find Sin? She had been foolish to abandon all to come here. Suddenly, she felt very tired—and very old.
“Look, why don’t you stretch out and rest a mite. Dick would be coming in and we’ll fix up a bit of stew. That should bring you ’round.”
Dare she trust him? On the other hand, she had so little to lose. If she weren’t to awaken, would it be so bad? “Thank you, Josiah. I think I shall rest awhile.”
Her sleep was deep and dreamless. She awoke to the tempting smell of food cooking. For a second she didn’t know where she was. Without moving, she glanced quickly around. She spied a strange man at the foot of her cot. He was removing one of her muddied boots.
Maybe ten years younger than she, he had a boxer’s battered face and glorious hair like the gold everyone in Ballarat was seeking. He appeared thoroughly mean until she glimpsed in the depths of his brown eyes that eager puppy-dog-with-a-wagging-tail look. He wore a digger’s coarse dungarees.
He smiled sheepishly. “I thought you’d sleep better.” Having a man do something so intimate, something a woman usually did for a man, shook her composure. “I was awakening anyway.” She swung her feet over the side of the cot. “What do I smell?”
“Digger’s stew.” He stood quickly and bumped his head against the low ridge pole. “Yowl!”
She sprang up to console him and banged her own head. Gingerly, her fingers probed the swelling knot. “Ooohhh!”
They both began to laugh. Their initial embarrassment was over.
The tent flaps were pushed aside, and Josiah’s rusty-hinged voice preceded him. “I see you’re showing her how to do the Virginia Reel. Amaris, my partner, Dick Cooper.”
Dick surveyed her like an assayer and determined she was genuine and not fool’s gold. “Pleasure, ma’am.”
“Dick’s from Georgia. Swears he’s gonna return to the United States and live like a gentleman the rest of his life. Wagered with him that after he’s seen the Never-Never, he’ll never, never want to go back to Georgia.”
Abashed, Dick rolled his eyes. “For a salty dog, Josiah, you sure can blather.”
“Just being friendly. Stew’s ready.”
When Amaris went outside, night had completely settled on Ridge Creek Camp. The rain had stopped, and stars twinkled. Camp fires flickered like fallen stars. Josiah hunkered over his stew. At his feet sat a half pint of gin with which he liberally seasoned his concoction and taste buds.
She helped herself to the stew and observed the approval in Dick’s expression. Josiah noted it, also. “She’s looking for a man, Dick.”
He looked crestfallen. “Enough of us around.”
“One man in particular,” she said between bites. The flavor wasn’t bad at all. “Sin Tremayne. He’s tall, as tall as Josiah, with brown hair going gray, blue eyes, a broken nose, and an Irish brogue that is as thick as this stew.”
Dick chewed thoughtfully. And loudly. The way he sat, a lackadaisical slump, told her nothing really bothered him.
“’Fore we teamed up, Josiah, there was one of those micks that fit that description. He was raising a ruckus about rights. Diggers’ rights.”
She swallowed acrid tea from a can Josiah passed her. “No, that’s not like Sin to get invol—” she broke off, recalling what he had told her about himself as a young law student. “What kind of ruckus?”
“Challenging the mayor and the council, while they were visiting the camps. He’s hot—like all of us—about the latest miner’s tax. We Yanks call it taxation wit
hout representation.”
“That might be him.” Excitement rushed through her. “Tomorrow I will start searching the other camps around Ballarat.”
“A digger camp ain’t safe for a woman alone,” Josiah said.
“I’ll be all right. I have survived in the bush, I can survive in a miners’ camp.”
Over the fire, Josiah’s eyes sought out Dick’s. “Well, what do you say, mate?”
“Sounds like an adventure. Count me in.”
Josiah set down his tin plate and slapped his hands on his knees. “Well then, Amaris, there are three of us to hunt for Sin. Three musketeers. Three wise men. Three—”
“Three blind mice.” Dick laughed.
She stared at the two men, seeing the reflection of the firelight in their eyes. “Why? Why are you two doing this?”
“I for one,” Josiah said, “believe in everything coming full circle. I try to do my part to keep my beliefs intact. It reassures me that I’m not crazy.”
“And you?” she asked Dick.
He took a swallow of his tea, as if fortifying himself. “Me? I’ve decided that I like you and want you for mine. You won’t be as long as you are hankering after him, this Sin fellow. Find him, and then make up your mind.”
She peered at him with new respect. “One day spent with someone and you know something like that?”
The mouth crimped. “We Yanks are more open.”
“Dick, I’m at least ten years older than you.”
“Doesn’t matter a whit. I still want you.”
Sin proved to be elusive. Wherever she asked of him, she was told he had been there but had just moved on. Sandhurst, Bunninyong, Bathurst, Warrandyte. All mining towns. All looked the same. Canvas towns of intense suffering and unbridled wickedness and sensational wealth.
Dream Time (historical): Book I Page 27