The Secret Rose

by Laura Parker

  “No!” Aisleen’s finger tightened on the trigger, and the gun in her hands recoiled from the explosion. She heard a man’s cry and then she was running, running toward the spot where Thomas had stood.

  She heard Sean cursing and his running footsteps, and knew that she had missed. “Tom, look out!”

  Sean caught her from behind, by the ragged edge of her shredded skirts and whipped her about. “Ye bloodthirsty bitch!” he cried and struck her full across the face.

  She staggered and tripped, the gun flying from her hand as she sprawled. She was up on her knees in a moment, groping for the lost weapon, but his boot caught her in the stomach and flipped her over.

  “No, ye don’t!” Sean cried. “And I’ll not even waste a bullet on ye!”

  Gasping for breath, Aisleen watched helplessly as he beat the bush until he found what he wanted. “A good head bashing will do for the likes of ye!” he muttered as he bent and picked up a fallen branch and lifted it over his head.

  Aisleen stared up at him as he neared, waiting for the blow to descend, when suddenly Sean’s expression altered. Surprise replaced murdering rage. He turned and looked at his arm. It was crawling with large, blue-green ants. He tossed the branch away and began to howl like a demented creature.

  Aisleen rolled away, more frightened by his actions than by her own death. He was dancing in place, screaming and tearing at his arms with his fingernails. And then he was tearing at the rest of his clothing. When he tore open his shirt she saw that he was half-covered with ants. She looked down and saw them swarming across the ground toward him…and her.

  She turned and ran, Sean’s screams resounding in her ears.

  “Aisleen!”

  She stumbled blindly toward the cry until, suddenly, Thomas was before her on horseback.

  “Ants! Terrible stings! They’re killing him!” she cried as he bent an arm toward her. But she did not need his help. She hurled herself upward with a boost from the stirrup. “Hurry, please! Take me away!”

  Thomas took one backward look. Sean was on the ground, his body twitching as he was covered by a black sea of insects. There was nothing to be done.

  *

  “I’ll never sleep in the bush again!” Aisleen protested for the hundredth time as she stirred the peas boiling in the billy. It was late evening and they had made camp in the open, away from treacherous underbrush that concealed more than beasts.

  Thomas lay quietly. “I’m sorry, lass, that ye had to witness it. “’Twas almost like a plague sent straight from heaven, now wasn’t it?”

  Aisleen gagged but swallowed back her bile. She had been sick enough for one afternoon. “You never saw him?” she questioned softly.

  “How could I, when I was hiding a hundred yards away? ’Twas his shot that brought me back, with me heart in me throat, I can tell ye!” He turned to look at her. “As God is me witness, I never thought Sean would see ye, not when he had me on horseback to follow!”

  Aisleen moved back from the campfire and bent to kiss him. “I know that, Tom. It was me who stopped him. You didn’t have a weapon. He’d have shot you in the back, given the chance. I couldn’t allow him to do that.”

  “Ye couldn’t allow—” Emotion blocked his throat. He looked up at her, his smile a little crooked. “Whyever not, lass?”

  She smiled at him. “Didn’t I tell you? It’s because I love you.”

  She had not said it before, not out loud. It sounded good, it sounded fine, it sounded safe.

  “I’m that honored that ye’ll be trusting me with yer love,” Thomas said after a moment.

  She was not surprised he used the word. “I do trust you, with all my heart, forever.”

  A long while after, when dinner was finished and she had cleaned his wounds and Thomas lay sleeping easily in her lap, Aisleen raised her eyes and found the shadow standing under a nearby tree, where she knew he would be.

  “It was you in the forest,” she said simply.

  So it was, he admitted. This’ll make an end to us, lass.

  “Why?”

  Because, ye great stupid girl, ye’ve found what ye’ve sought yer life long!

  “A riddle!”

  Musha! If ye cannae be satisfied with that after all these years then ye do nae deserve a reply!

  Aisleen regarded him thoughtfully. “Who are you?”

  Two halves of a whole, lass, two halves of a whole, when ye’ve solved that, ye’ll have the answer!

  He winked out like a snuffed wick, and she knew that he was gone forever.

  “Good-by, bouchal.”

  * * *

  “She ain’t dead. She’s sleeping!”

  Aisleen popped her eyes open to find two young boys staring solemnly down into her face.

  “Gor! What’d I say?” said the older of the two.

  She sat up. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Robert. This is Hugh. Who are you?”

  “I’m Mrs. Gibson and this is my husband.” She shook Thomas’s shoulder. “We’ve company, Tom. Where do you boys live?”

  Robert pointed and Aisleen smiled when she saw the answer. They had camped within hailing distance of a good-sized settlement.

  “You lost?” the younger boy questioned.

  “We were,” she replied.

  She saw the boys exchange glances and then the older one bend to whisper to the younger boy contemptuously, “Pommies.”

  Give to these children, new from the world,

  Silence and love…

  -A Faery Song

  W. B. Yeats

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hill End: January 1858

  “Tell us again about fighting off the Abos!” Matt Mahoney encouraged and was enthusiastically seconded by those who sat near the table of honor on the dais.

  Aisleen shook her head. “I’m afraid it was much less glorious than it sounds.”

  “I should say it would pale beside the accomplishment of dispatching a notorious bushranger,” Magistrate Owens interjected. “My dear Mrs. Gibson, you shall be known far and wide as the young woman who broke up a gang of Vandiemonians single-handedly!”

  Aisleen blushed and glanced at Thomas, who sat by her side at the front table. “I was not alone, Mr. Owens.”

  “I was the extra burden weighing her down,” Thomas offered with an indulgent smile “She deserves every bit of praise for what she’s done, and I’ll not have her shirking the hearing of it for modesty’s sake.”

  “Fair go, luv!” came a cry from farther down the banquet hall.

  “And never be forgetting she were a lady to the end!” offered the coach driver, who had been invited because of his presence at the beginning of the adventure. “Her husband captured at gunpoint by a murdering band of bushrangers and what does the lady do, I ask ye? She bails me up with her husband’s pistol and asks, as polite as ye please, to be set down so that she may go after the thieving rogues!”

  Thomas squeezed her hand. “She faced dangers many a man would quail at the thought of meeting.”

  Aisleen’s admirers sat in rapt silence as Thomas continued to regale the company with stories of her exploits in the Blue Mountains. The stories had taken on a life of their own and with each telling became more outrageous and audacious. Entrusted to Thomas’s eloquent care, she was certain they would reach mythic proportions in no time.

  She gazed about the room. This was a party in her honor, thrown by the grateful inhabitants of Bathurst and surrounding communities. To her great embarrassment she had received a letter of commendation from the governor of New South Wales. She spied Mrs. Fahey sitting near the rear of the room talking at a fever pitch with two other ladies. Pleased to have been noticed, Mrs. Fahey waved a lace handkerchief at her. Aisleen smiled and nodded and looked away.

  She was tired. The day of festivities had palled hours earlier. She felt like a carnival freak paraded down the center of town for people to gape at and poke for clues as to the reasons behind her extraordinary adventure. If not for
Thomas and the obvious pleasure he took in her celebrity, she would not have allowed the banquet to take place. The room was thronged with strangers who might wish her well but that was because they did not understand how guilty she felt. She did not deserve their praise. She had not been brave or clever or fearless at all.

  She felt tears prick the back of her eyes as they had done often in the month since their arrival back in Hill End. Sarah had fussed over her until she was afraid the woman would make herself sick. It was Thomas who concerned her.

  She glanced repeatedly at him while he spoke. His face was nearly healed, the swelling all but gone. To her satisfaction and his own not inconsiderable Irish pride, he would soon be as handsome as ever. The broken nose? It was a badge of courage of which many a schoolboy would boast.

  He seemed healthy enough, but he had had to resort to a cane since his recovery. With all the attention lavished on them as they recovered, they had not had a single evening of peace. Her mind seethed with unanswered questions.

  At first she had been too worn and weary to give them much thought, but after a day of constantly being referred to as Mrs. Gibson, she wanted very badly to question Thomas about Sean’s statement that his name was really Fitzgerald. Was that possible?

  As Thomas finished, spontaneous applause broke out, rippled across the tables, and washed back in thunderous waves.

  “Will you not say something in your own words, Mrs. Gibson?” asked a man down front with pencil and pad.

  Aisleen shook her head with a mute plea to Thomas.

  Thomas rose to his feet. “Ladies and gentlemen, me wife and I thank ye for yer considerable good wishes. We’ll be remembering this hour fondly for the rest of our days. But as we’ve a far journey to make, and being that we begin at dawn, we’ll be asking yer indulgence in allowing us to depart. Of course, the champagne, being that it’s free, will continue to flow till the last bottle’s drunk.”

  With a hand under her elbow, Thomas deftly steered her past all but the most persistent admirers. The reporter from Sydney he clipped with his cane.

  *

  “Heavens! I thought we’d all stew in our own juices,” Sarah declared when she and Matt had joined Thomas and Aisleen in the cart for the drive home.

  “Aye, ’tis a fine warm night!” Thomas commented as he drove the cart through the main street of Hill End. “Aisleen, lass, are ye too weary for a starlit ride?”

  Aisleen shook her head. “Not at all,”

  “Sounds fine to me!” Matt agreed heartily. “Ouch! What was that for!”

  “Matt Mahoney! Have you lost entirely your romantic streak?” Sarah scolded. “They wish to be alone, you great clod!”

  “Oh. Oh!” Matt answered as reason dawned. “Well now, I’ll not be standing in the way of a man and his wife. Set us down by the gate, Tom, and a good night to you both.”

  Once they left the Mahoneys at their home, Thomas drove out of town at a leisurely pace. They did not speak. It did not seem necessary. Aisleen had tucked her arm through his and leaned her head against his shoulder. Only her fingers clenched on his sleeve betrayed her discomfort. He drove them out toward the river down below the noise and lights of the mining camp.

  The sky was dusty with stars, hot points of diamond light in a gauze of cosmic shimmer. The cart rolled up a rise to a cliff overlooking the Turon River, and here he reined in and set the brake.

  “Tired?” he questioned quietly as she sat up away from him and released his arm.

  Aisleen shook her head as she stared straight ahead

  “Weary of celebrations?”

  This time she nodded.

  He smiled because he understood her reluctance to speak. It was as though they were strangers, or friends who had just been reunited after a long separation. He felt it, too, the strain of not knowing what to say or in what order things should come. She had confronted and bested a man who had wanted her husband dead, and she did not even know the reasons why. So many questions must be asked and answered. The wrong one first might spoil everything.

  “I’ve never really told ye about me life before I came to New South Wales. Would ye care to hear a bit of it?”

  Aisleen nodded wordlessly.

  “We were fishermen, as I’ve told ye. And ye may suspect that it was a sometimes tedious business for a lad with spirit and a high opinion of himself. Why should he be pulling fishes from the sea when there were worlds abroad to conquer? Oh, aye, a fine opinion Tommy had of himself. He dreamed away many an hour of his youth, a-plotting and a-planning. Still, there came a time, about his fifteenth summer, when he saw that his homeland might be the place for adventure as well.”

  Thomas paused, letting his thoughts range back over the years. “What a fine warm summer night that was. The sky so clear and black a man could nae see his hand before his eyes before moonrise. Some of the local lads thought it a night for mischief. The English were sitting and quaking with fear lest the very soil they trod split open and swallow them whole. ’Twas so easy to set a bit of powder by the munitions hut. A long time after, I wondered where we’d have stopped had we not been caught. We might have taken to murdering redcoats. ’Twas a natural enough inclination after an easy victory. Perhaps the English judge was right to sentence us to be hanged.”

  He shrugged “In any case, hanging was preferable to being torn apart by the jaws of the great bloodthirsty hounds they set on us that night.”

  “Your leg?”

  “Aye. And may the dog who took me flesh have choked on it and died!”

  Aisleen shivered. At last she knew why he had shot out of hand the kelpie that had attacked her. “Sean O’Leary was with you that night?”

  “Aye, Sean was with us. He wasn’t a village lad but a rapparee who roamed the countryside stirring up the hot-blooded among the local lads. He was experienced in bedeviling the English. I didn’t see any of them after the sentencing. Me leg festered and they thought I’d die on me own. ’Twas me da who bribed the courts to commute me sentence to transportation. Until a few months ago I thought the rest had been hanged. When I heard there was a man looking for me by the name of O’Leary, I knew it could be no other but Sean.”

  “He thought you’d betrayed them,” Aisleen said softly.

  “Well now, I guess I’ll never be knowing for certain what the English told Sean and the others. I’d not like to think they all died believing me to be a turncoat.”

  She felt the tremor that passed through him where their shoulders touched. “They couldn’t think that, Tom, not if they knew you.”

  He was silent a moment. “Well, that’s how our Tom came to the colony, aboard a convict ship in chains.”

  Aisleen turned to look at him. His face was a sharp profile before the night. The familiar sight brought a sudden pulsing somewhere deep inside her. She had nearly lost him. Beside that anguish, his convict background was ashes. “Did Tom have his adventure, after all?”

  He turned to her, the corners of his mouth bowed in his cocky smile. “Aye, I did.” He paused. Perhaps later he would tell her about those first years. But not just yet. “I was a man with a willing hand, and as me grandma often said, a bit of luck out of being born. Turned me efforts to shearing when I’d earned me emancipation papers. Became a ringer in a short while, me own boss. I needed that.”

  Aisleen smiled, understanding the need to be independent after her years at Burke’s Academy. “Where did you meet Jack?”

  “I knew him five years, but I’d be less than honest to say I knew Jack Egan a whit better than yerself, lass. He was drowning when we met. That great frame of his was nae meant to float, and so I told him when I’d hauled him out of the Hawksbury during a flood.”

  “Was he a farmer?”

  Thomas’s laughter startled the horse. “Lord love us! Jack was a bushranger! He’d held up the coach from Sydney not an hour before the bridge washed out, and him on it.”

  Aisleen’s lips twitched. “He always did rather remind me of a highwayman. Mercy! Wh
at company you keep, Thomas Gib—”

  “Ah, so it’s that we’ll be discussing next.” Thomas reached out and touched her face. “Ye know me history, lass. So ye’ll be understanding me reasons for changing me name.”

  “Because you did not want it known that you were a convict?”

  “So me family back in Cork would not have to suffer because of me foolishness. The record of me conviction was for Tom Gibson. ’Twas why it took Sean so long to find me.”

  “And your real name?”

  Thomas rubbed her chin with his thumb. “Ye know it.”

  “Fitzgerald.”

  “And so it is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Well now, lass, we weren’t well acquainted, ye and me. It was hard enough to coax ye into marriage without asking ye to believe that ye were marrying a cousin.”

  Aisleen sat up straighter. “Our marriage. If you are not Thomas Gibson then we are not legally wed!”

  “Ye’re vexed,” Thomas said calmly. “I suppose what ye say is true, in a manner of speaking.”

  “In a manner—! You lied to me, not once but repeatedly,” Aisleen cried. “I’m not your wife, I’m your—your mistress!”

  “I confess up to the reality of it,” Thomas agreed pleasantly. “And I don’t mind saying that the situation holds a certain fascination for a man. But being a honest soul, I’ll save ye from a life of sin by offering to wed ye a second time.”

  Aisleen twitched her skirts away as if in anger and said primly, “I would not marry you if you were the last man on earth!”

  “Aye, and I would not be asking ye, for there’d be none to join us,” he retorted in high humor. He could not see her face, but he thought he felt the warmth of her smile. “But we’re among civilized folk, lass, and it won’t do. Maybe we’d nae give a lamb’s tail about what others say, but there’s the bairns to be considered. I don’t much fancy the name bastard being attached to a child of mine.”

  “I’m not bearing a child of yours,” she replied.

  “Aye, but ye will, lass. We’re well matched and ye love it so!”

  “Go away, you horrid man!” she said, slapping away the hands that reached for her. “You’re not well enough to bedevil me in that manner. Besides, until we’re properly wed, you’ll take no more liberties with me!”