by Laura Parker
“West?” Aisleen frowned. “You said your station was north of Sydney.”
“And so it is,” he agreed. “We’re nae going home just yet.”
“Then where?”
“West across the Blue Mountains to Bathurst. I’ve agreed to lift this mob of sheep to slaughter.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
He shrugged. “It did nae concern ye.”
“Of course it concerns me,” she answered. “I think I should have been consulted.”
“And I’m thinking ye should be helping with the tucker,” he replied. “When a man’s hungry, his temper’s less than reliable.”
“Does that mean you will do nothing?”
“Ye have a fine way about ye. Ye’ll win him round to yer way of thinking.”
“If you will do nothing, then I must demand to be taken back to Sydney. Immediately!”
“Ye’re me wife and beside me is where ye belong.”
The simple, implacable statement made Aisleen angry. “I will not work beside that man. One of us must leave.”
“If I was to sack the cook, who would be taking his place?”
“I would,” Aisleen answered quickly.
Thomas grinned. “Would ye, lass? Can ye make damper? Slaughter a lamb? Skin a haunch? Who’d carry the water barrels and cure the meat? Can ye start a fire in the rain or drive a team of horses? When we trade them for bullocks…” Words failed him at the thought of his lady wife fighting to control four tons of snorting, intractable oxen as they traversed the Blue Mountains.
Every word he said made Aisleen feel more foolish and useless, but she resented his easy victory over her objections. “You think very little of my abilities.”
“I think enough of ye to not be wanting ye worn and wearied to death.” His grin deepened. “Ye might learn a thing or two from the cook or not. As ye please. Once we’re home, ye can keep me house, cook me meals, and raise me children.”
A blush suffused Aisleen’s face. Raise his children? Did he still harbor the belief that she would agree to have his children when she had spurned his touch? Yet as she stared at his handsome face she was aware of confusion and unease that made her stomach jump and tremble.
When she did not deny his words, relief suffused Thomas. He had been right to hope for a change in her attitude. Instinctively he reached out to touch her, but she wheeled away from him.
“Don’t you dare!” she said sharply, too aware of the need he brought so easily to the surface to temper her response. He had spurned her pleas for help. She must not answer his callousness with weakness or he would use it against her. “I’ve endured enough this day!” She turned and stalked away.
“Damn!”
Thomas kicked the ground. He had been so close to gaining her confidence until he rushed the moment by attempting to touch her. She was as skittish as a brumby. He needed patience. But he had no patience. He wanted his wife.
He rubbed his jaw where a new growth of whiskers bristled. Soon he would have a beard, and that reminded him of a more pressing problem.
They had made good progress the first days, despite the bruising path that had unsettled Aisleen and made him the victim of her wrath. The cook was an irascible old devil but a reliable hand with the tucker. If he was rude, that was small discomfort in return for three hot meals. Aisleen would learn to appreciate that better as the days wore on.
Still, it rankled to know that she still shied from his touch. He groaned. The night was before them. How would she behave when he crawled into the wagon beside her? If she cried out or fought him, they would both be humiliated.
Uncertainty churned his middle. All he could think of was her sweet mouth and the feel of contentment he had awakened to the morning after their wedding night. She had been his only for that one night. And that was not nearly enough.
He turned and began resaddling his horse. When it was done, he walked back to the cookfire to eat the meal the cook had hurriedly thrown together. When he was finished, he volunteered for the first watch with the sheep.
“Makes a man wonder,” one of the remaining drovers mused and nodded toward the wagon where Aisleen had bedded down alone for the night.
“Wonder all ye damned well please,” another drover answered, “but keep yer bloody gaze off his wife or Tom will make ye bleeding sorry ye ever saw her.”
*
Aisleen turned from her side onto her stomach in her sleep, her mind resisting the tug of the dream; but it caught and held, drawing her slowly down into it.
*
…The smell of the sea freshened the breeze that swept the still, dark bulk of the hill. The damp ground beneath her smothered the pounding of her heart but not her starved gasps for breath.
Something was out there in the dark, waiting and watching, stalking her.
She lowered her head, praying that the unknown pursuer would pass her by. She did not know its shape or source, but dread crept up the back of her neck as she lay prone among the gorse bushes of the Irish hillside.
Suddenly the night was alive with the sharp yapping of dogs.
She scrambled to her feet and began to run faster and faster over the boggy ground that sucked at her bare feet and threatened to trip her.
They came upon her swiftly, yaps changed to snarls as she spun about to face them. She saw it from the corner of her eye, the gold-and-white sheep dog, an instant before it lunged and sank its teeth into her leg…
*
Aisleen awakened with a cry. The canvas cover brushed her face as she tried to rise from the shallow space of the wagonbed, and she cried out again, fighting the material that would not allow her to sit. Suddenly it was lifted, and the cool breath of the night reached her as the spangled sky appeared.
“Lass! What’s wrong?”
Hands reached out for her, and she slid unhesitatingly from the wagon into Thomas’s embrace.
“A horrible dream!” she whispered as his arms enclosed her. “The sheep dog! Terrible! Terrible!”
“It’s dead,” Thomas answered and cradled her against his chest. “I killed it, remember.” He reached up to stroke her hair tenderly. “Hush, lass, hush. ’Twas a sad thing ye witnessed, and I’m sorry for it. But ’twas only a dream frightening ye now. ’Twas only a dream.”
Aisleen clung to him. The images had been so real. “My leg!” she said suddenly. She reached down and touched her calf beneath the tangle of her petticoats, half-expecting to feel torn flesh, but it was whole. “I thought—the dream. It was like one so long ago. I was just a child, but I remember.”
Thomas stiffened. “What did ye say?”
“I dreamed I had been savaged by a dog. I limped for days.” The words sounded so silly a small self-conscious laugh escaped her. “You must think me a foolish woman.”
“Nae, lass,” he answered in an oddly strained voice. “I’ve no fondness for dogs meself. Kelpies are quiet as ye like most times, but I’ve seen a pack of them take a dingo apart. When I think what could have happened to ye!” His arms tightened convulsively about her.
Under the cover of the canvas, she had shed her gown to sleep in her chemise. The heat of his chest seeped through the thin material onto her skin as she stood within his strong grip. The intimacy was not repugnant to her. The flesh-and-blood reality of him was a welcome protection against the phantoms of the night. Yet even as she registered her change of heart, he withdrew from her.
“’Twill be daylight soon,” he said absently as he reached for the canvas cover. “This day will be harder than the last.”
Reluctantly Aisleen climbed into the wagon and lay back as he pulled the canvas tight over her head. In the darkness, she felt unexpectedly bereft. She had hoped that he would pull her back into his arms for a moment, perhaps kiss her. How strange. They had hardly spoken the last few days. When they had, the exchanges had been marred by argument and violence. He had refused to take her side against the obnoxious cook and chided her attempts to defend herself. Yet one brief in
stant of tenderness had eradicated her anger, her embarrassment, and her feelings of misuse. In his arms, she had felt healed and safe. And that was the most devastating revelation of all.
Gradually she realized that he had not crawled in to sleep beside her as she had feared—and hoped—that he would. That should have pleased her, she thought as she drifted back to sleep. It did not.
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet
—The Rose of the World
W. B. Yeats
Chapter Eleven
The first hint of dawn tinted the sky as Thomas leaned against the wagon wheel drinking tea from a tin cup. The voices of the drovers carried across the cool morning air. If he did not want to eat the dust of his men, he would have to move quickly.
Yet he did not. He had been awake the entire night, nursing the pain in his left leg, a pain that would only grow worse with hours in the saddle. Most often he shrugged off the discomfort, had over the years learned to carry the affliction with a certain pride of will over flesh; but during the night old memories had gathered. They circled now, darkening the bright morning with a past buried but not forgotten.
So long, it had been so long since he had allowed himself to remember.
…He lay on his belly in a bog, his heart thundering in his ears. It was black as pitch on the western Cork hillside above Schull Harbor; but dogs had sharper sight than men, and the English had brought dogs with them. The howls echoed eerily in the stillness, growing nearer with each minute.
He turned his head to one side and lifted it cautiously but saw nothing and dropped flat again. Sean and Virgil had been with him until the last shots rang out, and then he had lost count of the number of lads running beside him.
A bark sounded clearly to his left. He considered gaining his feet and running once more, but fear stopped him. The night was unusually still. Wherever his companions were, they were lying low, as he was. While he was not afraid of a good fight, the thought of being torn apart by the jaws of a huge dog made his bowels churn, and he pressed his body deeper into the mud.
Still, he could not resist a smile of satisfaction that cracked the mud which he had applied to his face to lessen his chances of being spotted. He was only fifteen, several years younger than the other lads, yet he had been a part of the night’s work. The blaze from the military munitions hut had lit the sky with an orange flare bright enough to rival a sunset. No doubt it had been seen as far away as Baltimore Harbor across the bay.
He was a fisherman by trade and patriot by conscience. He was not an ambusher or cold-blooded murderer. Blowing up the shot powder was merely a warning to the English that they were an unwelcome presence along the southwest shores of Cork.
His father, too, was a patriot, but he was tired of the struggle. And there was his grandma. She disapproved of his fervent desire to exact retribution by force. She said he was marked for greatness but that he must be patient. She was dear to him but she was old, and patience was the weapon of the aged. Audacity belonged to youth.
As the minutes passed, the barking ranged closer and then away, as if the animals were confused by the direction their prey had taken. He hoped it was the odor of his clothes that confused them. He had rubbed them with fish oil.
They came upon him with unexpected swiftness. The baying hounds erupted from the top of the hill with a suddenness that made Thomas shudder.
He did not have time to think. He was up and running in an instant, scarcely aware that his companions were doing the same. The darkness and rocky outcroppings made caution impossible, and he tripped repeatedly; yet the terror of the snarls at his back kept him from slowing down.
And then he heard a cry from the man at his left and the growling of a dog. A second later he felt a sharp pain in his left calf as if a knife had been driven through it, and he was jerked off his feet. As he tumbled helplessly forward he felt his flesh separate from the bone as the dog’s grip did not slacken.
*
“…has been found guilty of acts of insurrection. It is the sentence of this court that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and be thence drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and be there hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
Thomas felt nothing as the sentence was passed on him: not the outrage expressed by the gasps and cries of the audience in the gallery or the fear that caused Sean O’Leary, standing on his right, to erupt in prayer.
Hanged. He was to die. That could not be right. He and his friends had done nothing that deserved so final a solution. Death in battle seemed a glorious end. Dancing at the end of the hangman’s knot was…obscene.
He swallowed with difficulty. Feeling was coming back and with it a sickening nausea. Somewhere behind him his parents stood. He should offer them some solace, reassure them that he was man enough to face his death, but he could not move. The room tilted. A roaring like the sea sounded in his ears.
*
Seated on a pile of moldering hay, his arms and legs fettered to the wall behind him by heavy links of rusty iron, Thomas waited for dawn and the hangman. Dirt, the beginnings of a beard, and long, greasy ropes of hair nearly obscured his face. His clothes, such as they were, were in tatters, and through the rents his painfully thin body was exposed. When the door creaked open, he raised his head reluctantly to find his father standing motionless in the entrance of the windowless cell.
“Thomas, lad,” Thaddeus said hoarsely.
“Stay back!” He raised a hand to fend off his father, but his weakness and the weight of the chain dragged it back to the ground. “I’ve prison fever. Keep back, Da,” he added softly.
Cursing roundly, Thaddeus knelt in the straw and drew his son roughly into his arms. “Damn ye, Tommy, I told ye ye were a fool to go with them. Sean and the rest, they knew what they were doing. But ye, ye great fool, how could ye know ’twould come to this?”
Thomas allowed his head to sink against his father’s chest. The tight embrace hurt him, but the pain was better than all the gentle touches he had ever known. “They…they’re going to hang me…in the morning,” he said between dry sobs.
“Nae! They’ll not be doing that now,” Thaddeus answered. “’Tis why I’m here, Tommy. I’ve come to set ye free.”
Thomas heard his father’s voice, but his words did not make sense. He had known since his morning in court a week earlier that he was to die, to hang by the neck until dead.
“Did ye not hear me, lad?” his father asked, shaking him slightly.
Thomas moaned low in pain as the blessed peace of oblivion loomed, but he struggled to keep conscious. “Free?” he murmured.
“Aye, lad, that’s the very thing I’m telling ye. ’Tis come in handy, that money I’ve been saving to take yer ma and the lasses to America. A few coins in the right hands has done it, Tommy. Yer sentence has been commuted to seven years’ transportation. Do ye hear me? Ye’re to live!”
Thomas stirred in his father’s embrace, lifting his head to meet his father’s gaze. “We’re saved, then, Sean and all the rest?”
Thaddeus drew in a deep breath. “Nae, lad. Only ye.”
Thomas smiled. It quite surprised him that he could do it. “Then I’ll be staying with the others. They’ll be expecting me, ye see. I’m nae afraid any longer. I’ll not let them down.”
*
The stars had never seemed closer, Thomas thought as he stared through a porthole of the prison ship at the star-spangled effulgence of the Milky Way. After a moment, he weakly turned his head away. The stars were close, but his family and homeland were far away.
He could not remember much of the past weeks, only the pain and fever and a dread of dying that had ebbed into weary resignation. He had been too weak to understand what was happening…until now.
He was aboard a prison ship bound for the Australian colony called Van Diemen’s Land. He looked down at the fetters locked about his wrists and attached to the bulkhead behind him with a length of ch
ain. Other shackles chained his feet to the opposite bulkhead. Fear coiled in his belly and sweat broke out on his brow. Grandma was wrong. Marked for greatness? He had been marked for servitude and perhaps death under the indifferent eye of a foreign sun…
*
Thomas awakened with a start, sweat pouring from every pore. His cup had fallen from his hand, and he sat in a puddle of tea. He scrambled to his feet just as Aisleen emerged from the back of the wagon.
Aisleen started at the sight of Thomas. She had thought to brace herself against the cook’s ill temper. But seeing Thomas’s haggard expression and the guarded look in his eyes, she realized how unprepared she was to face him. Self-consciously she began smoothing her skirts with a hand. She hoped that he would speak first, but he did not.
“I overslept,” she said finally, with a sideways glance toward the place where the cook prepared breakfast.
She started past him, and Thomas nearly let her go. At the last second, as her skirts swished his legs, he reached out and captured her wrist. “Wait!” He licked his lips nervously. “I—I’m sorry about, well, me temper the other day. I should have explained to ye what we are about.”
Aisleen shook her head, unable to meet his eyes. “I should have realized that it was none of my business. I am a wife, bound to obey.”
“Did ye sleep well, after the trouble?” he questioned for want of conversation.
“I suppose it seems a pathetic excuse to you, but dreams can sometimes seem very real,” she answered, remembering how shamefully she had clung to him and had wanted to go on clinging.
Thomas regarded her solemnly. “I believe in dreams.” He released her wrist. “There’s tea in the billy for ye. We’ve a long day ahead, and there’ll be no more till supper.”
Aisleen watched him stride toward his horse, her eyes narrowing on the leg he still favored. What was the cause? She heard him groan softly as he mounted and promised herself that she would inquire about the source of his discomfort. The worst thing that would happen was that he would be angered and rebuff her. If he did she would comfort herself with the knowledge that she had inquired about her husband’s health as any wife would and that he should not find fault with her for that.