The Isis Knot

by Hanna Martine

  “No. Not the ring. That woman. You attacked her, tried to rob her in broad daylight. I knew you were stupid, but not that stupid.”

  “She has something of mine. I want it back—”

  “You shot a man!”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Yes. Yes, she had. And Moore wasn’t here for confession. Without him, the guilt lingered.

  She’d been so close. So close! The cuff had been right there in front of her, within inches of her grasp. It looked exactly like Moore had described it to her many a time, exactly like the drawings he’d had made. Together they’d suffered years upon years of fruitless searching and frustration back in England.

  Only for her to have found it here in the colony.

  Moore had dismissed her too soon. His faith in her had died when truly it should have grown stronger. She always knew she’d be victorious. She’d always believed in herself. Why couldn’t he have done the same?

  “I didn’t mean to shoot him.”

  “No, you meant to shoot the woman.”

  If Thomas was trying to be righteous, he would never succeed. She lifted herself onto an elbow, turning her face slightly to give him a decent view of what his own morality had done to her. He looked unaffected and she changed tactics.

  She tried to sound as apologetic and meek as possible. “May I please have my ring back?”

  He surged to his feet, striding toward the bed. “Do you mean this?” He dangled the gold circle before her eyes.

  The sight of it injected life into her broken body. She grabbed for it. He lifted it higher. She kicked off the blankets and jumped to her feet, her pained body protesting. He swung the ring behind his back, a terrible laugh rolling through his scrawny chest.

  She thrust out her hand. “I asked you nicely.”

  He shook his head, his oily hair swinging about his shoulders. “I held on to it to keep you under control. I’d say that’s not working out as planned. I’m taking it to the smith tomorrow, having it melted down so I can sell it. It’ll be more than enough to buy—”

  “No!”

  Her vision blurred with hatred and she lunged for him. He tried to skip away, but he wasn’t fast enough for a woman powered by obsession and love. She slammed into him and the force threw him backward. He stumbled into the main room and fell against the little table in front of the fireplace. It screeched across the floor. They grappled for the ring, arms flailing, legs kicking. In the end, even though Elizabeth was taller, Thomas was much stronger.

  Clamping her arms to her sides, he wrenched her over the table. New pain mixed with the old, and her vision winked in and out. Above her, his face glowed red. Rivulets of sweat trickled down his brow and onto her face. Since her arms were pinned helplessly to the tabletop, all she could do was spit in his eye.

  “Bitch!” He spit back.

  One of his hands was still clutching the ring, and it dug hard into her wrist. The gold thrummed against her pulse, and she could feel Moore’s presence within it. Thomas had no idea that the ring’s touch fed her courage and determination.

  She slammed a knee good and hard into the sensitive, evil shaft that had befouled her more times than she could count. He groaned, his eyes bulging, and doubled over. His grip on her released.

  She kicked him again, this time on the knee. He toppled to one side and she rolled off the table. The fireplace was in front of her. On the brick hearth, where she’d left it that morning after pressing her yellow dress, lay the iron. The heavy metal handle curled warm and wonderful in her hand. She swung it around with all her strength.

  Only a glimmer of surprise and fear flashed in Thomas’s eyes before the iron’s point struck him in the side of the head.

  The reverberations crawled up her arm. She dropped the iron with a thunk. Thomas, too, crumpled to the floor, his limbs twitching. Several moments passed before she could bring herself to slither over to him. Blood pooled under his cheek. His sightless eyes slanted toward the bedroom.

  Death relaxed his fingers and the ring tumbled out. It rolled across the floorboards to land at her knees. Gravity, magnetism, fate…whatever it could be called, she wasn’t about to question it. Breathing heavily, she reached down and cradled the ring in one palm.

  Moore’s voice, rich and lovely, came back from memory. Take one of my rings, dearest Elizabeth. You see I wear its match? Someday, when you find our quarry, these rings will reunite us.

  “Then can we be married?” Love and devotion and a strange tingling between her young legs had made her light with hope.

  He’d smiled and patted her on her head. Then you will be mine.

  It was all she’d ever wanted.

  But she’d failed Moore time and time again over the years, and her punishment had been his final rejection. Her chance for redemption—to win him back and to prove to all who’d claimed she’d merely been his pawn—was here. In New South Wales. On the arm of that woman.

  Elizabeth staggered outside. She would never go back into that house, not even for one minute. She easily turned her back on it, and the death and suffering inside. One of those wild yellow dogs howled somewhere in the night. It was late, much later than she’d previously thought.

  She slept huddled underneath a bush somewhere on the border of Thomas’s farm, but it wasn’t a solid sleep. She awoke countless times, jolted from rest by the feel of Thomas’s skull breaking under the iron. That sickening thud. The way his dead stare had followed her out of the house.

  She didn’t need Mr. Moore to confess to this time. She felt no guilt.

  How long would it be before someone found Thomas’s body? How long before they realized the woman who’d shot that man in Parramatta was the same woman who’d killed her own husband? She had to move quickly, but where to start? The answer was the last place she wanted to go, but the only place that might give her a clue to that woman’s whereabouts.

  The landmarks pointing the way to Parramatta were easy enough to recall the next morning, and it was barely midday by the time the river and the town’s cluster of buildings along the bank appeared.

  People were shot all the time in New South Wales. It was a colony of criminals. Lawlessness abounded. A woman accidentally shooting a man was insignificant compared to other stories Thomas had grumbled about on occasion: shootings after gambling losses, the murder of colonists during robbery, even cannibalism among bolters. The fact that the constable had released her spoke volumes about how little a concern she was to them.

  Yet as she made a brisk course through Parramatta’s dirty streets, the white slats of the chemist’s shop in her sights, her stomach tangled with nerves. A patch of blood darkened the mud between the chemist’s and the brothel, where the blond man had taken her bullet. Elizabeth took a deep breath, one hand steadying herself on a porch post. The day’s walk, compounded with the soreness of her beaten body and the tightness of her cut face, had drained her strength.

  The door to the chemist’s squeaked as someone stepped out. She heard the telltale scrape of flint, then smelled smoke and the sharpness of tobacco. Memories of Moore, painful and dear, pricked at her eyes and made her nose tingle.

  “Shame.” The man with the pipe walked over to her. He held a box of something with the chemist’s seal on the side, and gestured with it to the patch of blood in the street.

  She kept her head down, her bruised cheek and the dried blood streak near her ear facing away from him. “What happened? I heard it was something awful.”

  The man shrugged. “Two female colonists fought and one tried to shoot the other, when a man stepped between them and got shot instead. He survived, I’m told, and stole off with the other woman. The stories are fanciful and muddled, as you can imagine. It’s been speculated the injured man is a bolter. Or was, as it were. He likely didn’t survive.”

  How fortuitous.

  “Female colonists? Do you know which ones? There aren’t many of us here. Perhaps I know the one who was attacked and could call on her to make sure she’s well.�
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  He jabbed a thumb toward the chemist’s. “Amherst in there mentioned that the second woman, the one who escaped being shot, is Viv’s wife.”

  “Viv?” She started to tap a finger against her lips but then had to stop because of the tender split. “Hmm, do I know him?”

  “Old fella. Lives out west? Last farm before the bush?” He gestured at the wagon ruts snaking out of town.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I do know his wife. Oh, that’s terrible. I must make sure she’s safe and, if she is, not too shaken.”

  “Please tell Viv our prayers are with him then.” He paused, and she hoped he’d leave, but he did not. “Miss, are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes. Quite.” She kept her eyes on the boardwalk.

  The man hesitated, then his shadow mimicked the tipping of his hat, and he finally walked away.

  This woman—Viv’s wife—would not escape from her a second time. They were both trapped on this accursed island. There were few places the woman could run to and still survive.

  Who was she? And how in the world had she managed to obtain what Elizabeth had been searching for for nearly thirteen years? Why had she been chosen to wear it when it was so clearly meant for Elizabeth?

  Excitement, intensified by hatred and determination and shame, quickened her steps out of Parramatta. Ignoring hunger and thirst, she imagined that Moore stood waiting at the end of the wagon ruts that curved into the untamed parts of the colony. It had been almost two years since he’d sent her away and at last they would be reunited. She would make him regret this separation and see that they belonged together.

  She would place his ring on one finger, slip the gold bracelet onto her arm, and he would take her away from this place. He would bring her home.

  #

  The sun burned the sky with pale pink and vibrant orange by the time Elizabeth stumbled through the gate of Viv’s sheep farm. Indeed, this place was the last outpost before the unexplored wildness of New South Wales began.

  She felt as if she stood on the edge of the world, triumph laid out like a blanket at her feet. Elation coursed through her. Moore’s face, his sleek hair and dimpled chin, came to her so clearly it made her heart ache.

  As she crossed the yard an old man descended the few steps from the shack that served as the main house. And she’d thought Thomas was destitute. This man had a pronounced underbite, which he filled every so often with swigs from a mug. He was small and frail, with blinding white hair.

  She tottered up to him, deliberately exaggerating her weakened state and letting him see the brunt of her facial injuries. “Oh, thank the good Lord someone is here. Are you Viv?”

  “Yes.” He wavered on his bowed legs. The spidery red veins in his eyes betrayed his drunkenness. This might be easier than she’d thought. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jane. I was sentenced to Transportation a few years ago and am now married to a colonist. When I came here I was separated from my family, as you can suppose. Well, imagine my shock when the other day I overheard someone in town talking about my sister.” Elizabeth gave him a huge, fake smile. Viv looked at her blankly. “She has dark hair cut to about here. Brown eyes. Shorter than me, slight in frame.”

  Viv squinted. “Sera?” The name seemed to tumble out before he realized it.

  “Sera! Yes.” Tears brimmed in Elizabeth’s eyes. She should have joined the playhouses in London; Moore had always said so. And her skills in lying had only grown under his tutelage.

  Viv searched Elizabeth’s oval face and her pale hair. “My Sera is your sister?”

  “Half sister. We shared a mother.” She recalled the darker tint to Sera’s skin. “Her father was a Spaniard; mine a Scot.”

  After a long moment, Viv’s dubiousness began to melt—or it could have been the rum easing the restraint on his emotions—and he nodded slowly. She should keep talking; he wanted to believe her.

  “At first I couldn’t believe it when I heard the townspeople talking. We weren’t well-off back in London, but she was always the better-behaved child. Mother wasn’t surprised when I was shipped here. I simply could not believe it when I heard she’d been sent to New South Wales, but I suppose they’re transporting anyone who so much as sneezes incorrectly these days. You know how long it takes to communicate with the homeland. It’s possible she contacted me and I never received it. When I asked after Sera in town, I was told you took her as wife.”

  The old man blinked slowly and even that much sent him off balance. “Something like that.”

  “Please.” She took his hand—the one not clutching the mug. “May I speak with her? I’m so desperate to see her again after being so long apart. It’s lonely here, as you know. My husband, the man who claimed me after my arrival, well…he…” She pulled out a false tear and shook her head, making sure to show every bruise and laceration to the old man. “I ran from him and I want to find Sera. I miss our home, our life together. I miss her.”

  “I know. I miss her, too.” Viv sighed, long and resigned. “She isn’t here.”

  Elizabeth tried not to scream in frustration. “Oh. Well, do you know when she’ll return?”

  “She won’t.” His chin began to quiver and his eyelids drooped heavily. He took a step back, wobbled, then caught himself. “Your sister, she’s gone to Sydney.”

  CHAPTER 14

  London, 1806

  Elizabeth knew every cobble on Whitechapel Road. She knew exactly where to place her feet so her ankle wouldn’t turn. She could tell which stones, slippery from blood or grease or human waste, to avoid.

  It was five paces from the alley in which she slept to Mr. Portney’s butcher shop. Seventeen more to the corner where Natalie and the other painted women squeezed their breasts and jutted out their hips as men strolled by. Maybe someday Elizabeth would grow as tall as Natalie; she could only hope and pray.

  The women were always together, always talking. She had no one like that. So one day, she joined them on the corner.

  The women found something about Elizabeth’s presence entertaining, and she began to mimic their actions. She sashayed around a lamppost. She squeezed her flat chest, wishing for something to grab, but at ten years old, breasts were still a few years away. Natalie laughed and pointed, making Elizabeth smile. Making her feel part of the world outside her alley that lived under the gas lamps and mist of London evenings.

  Natalie licked her lips, smearing the cakey cosmetics Elizabeth had watched her steal yesterday from a woman’s pocketbook. She copied Natalie, also licking her lips. Natalie smiled even wider, and so did the man with the crooked jacket and jaunty hat across the road. He waited for a carriage to lumber past, then crossed the dark street toward the women. Elizabeth could feel his eyes on her.

  “Looks like you got your first customer,” Natalie said, her voice scratchy and uneven, as unattractive as her oddly angled face.

  At first, Elizabeth didn’t understand what Natalie meant. Then the man jumped onto the curb, one hand pulling a coin from his pocket, the other playing with the buttons of his trousers. And then she understood.

  “You’ll need three times as much as that.” Natalie shoved Elizabeth behind her skirts, the fringe of her shawl dusting Elizabeth’s face. “It’s her first time. Ain’t it, love?”

  The man smiled so big his face almost split in two. There were spaces where teeth should have been, and rot where the remaining teeth jutted out from red gums. He reached out and dragged a grimy finger down Elizabeth’s cheek, leaving a smear of something that smelled foul.

  She knew him. He was the stablehand at The Goose in the Heather. He knew how to filch just enough from saddlebags so the owners wouldn’t notice; that was how he’d gotten the pence, no doubt. She was trembling all over now, wondering what she’d started, whether she could take it back. Her knees shook under her skirts and her trembling hands clung to the worn fabric of Natalie’s dress. The hidden place between her legs felt numb, and it scared her.

  It was twenty-
two steps back to the alley—maybe fifteen if she ran fast and hard.

  “I’ll give you double.” The stablehand produced another coin from his pocket.

  Natalie sighed and reached behind her to unlock Elizabeth’s hands from her clothing. The harder the older woman pulled, the stronger she resisted.

  “No!” Elizabeth shouted. “I don’t want to!”

  “Now, now, love,” Natalie said between clenched teeth. “Don’t be a tease. You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

  A huge shadow, unwashed and reeking of liquor, hurled into the would-be customer. The stablehand fell on his arse in the street. He cried out when his backside struck the one cobble with the rounded point that always seemed to catch wagon wheels.

  “The girl’s not for sale,” slurred the shadow. “Move on.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes. “It’s only a matter of time. Let her get started early. Make some money for the two of you.”

  Three of you, Elizabeth almost corrected her, catching Stumpy’s squat little shadow peering around the corner. Always watchful, always silent.

  “My daughter won’t turn out like you,” the shadow growled, pulling Elizabeth into his arms.

  The comfort her father gave her—squeezing her shoulders and patting her head—would be short-lived. Already his fingers were turning to fists and she could feel the sting of the beating to come. She’d left the alley again without his permission. The beatings were almost worth it though, to move among the twisting lanes, to listen to adults speak to her, to watch the colorful carriages of the West Enders rumble past on their way from the country or other such wonderful places she would never see.

  “What are you doing out here? You worried me,” Father said to her, loud enough for Natalie to hear before she sauntered away. Then, harshly into his daughter’s ear: “You little bitch. What did I tell you about leaving without telling me? Get back to the alley. Now.”