The Isis Knot

by Hanna Martine

  William frowned and she touched his arm.

  “You have a good heart, an excellent heart, but he seems to be more of a…” She faded off.

  “A hindrance?”

  Her eyes softened. “Yes. I guess.”

  He considered the sky, which was intensely blue that day, then lowered himself to the top step. Patting the spot next to him, she also sat.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, “but you’re becoming resentful of him. And he believes you’re taking me away from him. Maybe you should know.”

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I never told you how he and I met.”

  “On the ship. The John Barry.”

  “We were sitting in Portsmouth harbor for six months before we set sail, to allow the prisoners to fill up the hold, you see. I kept to myself because I was lost, wondering why the bloody hell the Spectre wanted me to get pinched and sentenced overseas. Then they brought aboard Richard Riley.” When her eyes widened, he nodded. “Yes, the man I fought last night. He quickly took over the ship, made two other convicts his mollies. They enjoyed it, though. They wanted his attention and loved to follow.”

  “Sorry. ‘Mollie’?”

  He couldn’t look at her. “I heard Jem before I saw him. Heard his screams, and his pain and humiliation. The two mollies were holding him down and Riley was behind him…”

  She gasped. “Holy shit. Mollie.”

  “Yes.” His throat hurt. He could still see the scene as plain as day, even though he’d tried hard to forget. “Jem was crying and screaming and there was blood… So even though I’d spent the better part of my life with my head down and mouth shut, I still had my fists. Still had my days of street fights. So I stepped in, pulling Riley off Jem. And I made sure that Riley never touched the lad again. Or anyone else who didn’t want it.”

  He finally looked at her, and she had both hands pressed to her lips, her eyes wide and wet.

  “I’ve gladly stood in front of him because of that, and because he’s been unable to stand on his own. But I’ve been hoping that he would grow over time, to learn not to need me. I had someone like that once. I wasn’t assaulted as Jem was, but I had someone who showed me what it was to be a man. I keep hoping that one day Jem will find that in himself. That’s why I haven’t been able to leave him.”

  Her hands dropped from her face and wrapped around her waist. She bent forward. “Oh God, I’ve been thinking the most awful things about him. Getting frustrated and feeling selfish, thinking only about how he’s been such a handicap. But now so much makes sense.”

  He gripped her gently just above the elbow. “You can’t say anything to him. You can’t let on that you know, or that I’ve told you.”

  “No, of course I won’t.”

  She looked heartsick, and even though he felt terrible for telling her Jem’s ugly secret, perhaps it would change things for the better between them. Perhaps, now that Jem had taken pleasure in teaching William his letters and sounds, things would be better overall.

  He sighed, stretching out his legs and leaning back on his hands. He wanted to ask her about the word mollie, about what something like that would mean in her time. He wanted to ask her everything about her time. He wanted her to draw pictures of what it looked like, and to tell him stories, and to—

  Above, where the staircase switchbacked higher into the Rocks, a portly woman exited a door and started stringing up the wash. She saw the two of them sitting on the stairs and paused, her expression growing wary.

  William tried to stay off the streets during the day, and he quickly jumped up, giving the woman his back.

  “I’m going to dice at Cook’s,” he mumbled to Sera. “The man writing those newspapers frequents there and he might have information about new ships coming in. Or about the Remembrance.”

  Her face was as full of questions as his. As full of words and stories and futures unspoken. She reached for him, sliding her hand into his. She bounded down the stairs, pulling him along behind.

  The bottom of the steps emptied into the cool, shadowed courtyard. The lanes leading into and out of the heart of the Rocks snaked off in opposite directions. It reeked of piss and rot, but it was out of the eye of the curious woman above.

  Sera pulled him next to her, their backs against a sandstone wall. “Don’t go. Stay here.”

  He tightened his fingers around hers. “Would you like to go back inside?”

  “No. Not at all. That room suffocates me. It depresses me. I need air.”

  “Even this air?” The stink singed his nostrils.

  She made a face but then somehow managed to smile through it. “Even this air.” She breathed in. “The smells here are so different.”

  He turned to her, pressing his shoulder into the rock. “Tell me about it. Tell me more.”

  She opened her mouth and searched a spot over his head, looking overwhelmed. “I don’t even know where to begin. We have—I mean, in my time there are so many machines. So many things that spew out chemicals that clog up the air. You don’t even know how much they change the atmosphere until you’re away from them.”

  “Chemicals…machines… Will you tell me about them?”

  She blew out a breath. “I can try.”

  So she did—explaining things like cars, and airplanes, and lawnmowers, and refrigerators—which he listened to with great fascination and half disbelief. He might’ve thought her the greatest storyteller in existence if it weren’t for her unflinching confidence.

  And for the sight of the gold cuff on her arm.

  When a man ambled into the courtyard, heading toward the staircase, William calmly turned his body so the stranger couldn’t see his face. Now he also stood right in front of Sera, forcing her to lift those big dark eyes up to his. He pressed her body lightly into the rock, silently asking her to touch him.

  She wordlessly complied, her hands sliding up his chest. Any satisfaction Amonteh felt was eclipsed by his own joy and excitement. Sera’s fingers trembled. For a moment her gaze turned inward, and he knew she was trying to parse out what was real and what came from the gold.

  He longed to kiss her again, to show her exactly what was real, but restrained himself.

  “What do you think about all that?” she asked after the stranger had trudged up the steps.

  “About what?” He tried desperately to think of anything besides how he was beginning to grow hard.

  “My world.”

  He looked deep into her beautiful, beautiful eyes. “I think that I could listen to you talk for hours. I think that I still don’t want to believe it, and yet I do.”

  Her fingers tightened on his chest, little points of pressure around his nipples, a kind of touch that he was surprised to discover he loved.

  “Tell me about your world now,” she said.

  He frowned. “I already have. You’re standing in it.”

  “No, no. Before Egypt. Before the Royal Navy. What was your childhood like? Your family?”

  He pulled away slightly. “I haven’t thought about that, or them, in a very long time.”

  “Where were you born?”

  The scent of English rain and soil came back from memory and snuffed out the odor of the New South Wales Rocks. “Lancashire. My family owned land and I worked on that with them—I had two older sisters and a younger brother—until we lost the land and had to move away. We didn’t move far. The Dolphin Holme Mill needed labor so we worked with worsted wool for many years. But I hated it, hated being trapped inside a building every day. So I volunteered for the navy.”

  “How old were you?”

  He had to think. “Fifteen.”

  She gasped.

  “Is that so strange?”

  “To me, yes. Fifteen? By yourself on a ship at sea serving in the navy?”

  “At least I wasn’t a pressed man. Someone forced into serving,” he added when she looked confused. “Volunteers were paid more. Had right to shore leave. And it got me out of
the wool mill.” He grinned. “I was seventeen when my frigate helped defeat Napoleon in the Mediterranean, nineteen when I was in Egypt.” He whistled to himself. “Jem’s age now. Imagine that.”

  “I’m trying to,” she murmured. “Did you ever go back to visit your family, to see how they were?”

  “No. The visions—Amonteh—would never let me. He was too busy driving me toward you, as it would seem. They all died anyway. In a house fire.”

  “Oh. I’m so—”

  At the other end of the courtyard the Waldgrave’s door opened. Francine came out, shading her eyes against the sun. “Sera?” she called. “Are you out here? Are you all right?”

  With a sound of regret, William released her. Sera slid out from between him and the wall and replied, “Here, Francine. I’m down here.”

  “Oh good.” The other woman sighed, relieved, then took a few steps toward the sound of Sera’s voice. “I was—”

  Francine tripped. Pitched forward. One foot tried to find purchase, tried to find a step, but the stairs spilled out from underneath her. Her arms flailed. Her body fell.

  Sera cried out. William was already running for the stairs, but there was nothing he could do as Francine’s body tumbled and rolled, striking the hard stone time and time again, until she finally landed with a thud, in a pile of pale, dirty fabric, at the very bottom.

  He reached Francine, crouched beside her, and cradled the back of her skull. She was unconscious, one side of her face scraped badly from ear to chin.

  “Oh God, no.” Sera, too, fell to her knees, took the injured woman’s face in her hands, and…gasped in terror. A wail streamed out of her lips. “No no no no.”

  Eyes shut tightly, Sera pressed her forehead to Francine’s.

  William fell back and watched, frozen and transfixed and helpless, as Sera’s lips began to move. “Isis, Isis, Isis.”

  The magic wasn’t meant for him this time, but it touched him nonetheless, shivering through his blood. A heat emanated from Sera, rolling in waves over and through Francine’s body, the edges stretching out to lick at William. It spoke greatly of Sera’s power and compassion. It was shocking and beautiful to witness from this side. Implausible and, yes, godlike.

  For the first time in a long while, Amonteh’s voice came to him, and it was in clear, reverent prayer to the deity Sera now beseeched.

  The magic kept flowing as she clung to Francine. Finally the healing dissipated, the sense in the air crackling away into nothing.

  Francine’s eyes flickered open. She groaned.

  Sera smoothed back the other woman’s stringy hair and cleared her throat. “You fell down the steps. Can you hear me?”

  Francine slowly came back into remembering, her body jerking into movement as she tried to sit up. Her hands swept over her belly. “Oh my Lord. Oh my sweet Jesus. My baby!”

  “You’re all right,” Sera soothed, rubbing a hand up and down Francine’s arm. “You and the baby are fine. How do you feel?”

  Francine stopped panicking long enough to take a few deep breaths. With each one she seemed to calm, her eyes flicking back and forth, her hands running across her abdomen. “I…I feel well. Nothing feels…wrong.”

  “It was just a fall,” Sera said, “but a pretty bad one. You scared me. You scared both of us. Can you move?”

  Francine found her feet and stood. Then she pressed a hand to the big scratch on her face that Sera hadn’t healed. Her fingers came away red, and she hissed through her teeth as the pain from that wound finally hit her.

  Sera said, “You’re lucky all you did was scrape your cheek there and knock yourself out for a bit. Here, let me help you back up the steps. You should probably clean that out and lie down.”

  William sat back on his heels and watched, dumbfounded, as Sera took the other woman’s hand and led her slowly up the stairs. He was still sitting there when she came back down, a glow in her cheeks and a supreme sense of calm and satisfaction shimmering around her. It called to Amonteh. William rocked to his feet and took her face in his hands.

  “What did you do?” An echo of his question after she’d healed his gunshot wound out in the bush.

  She smiled. “Francine is pregnant. The fall almost made her lose the baby. She was bleeding inside and would’ve eventually died, too.” She pressed her fingers to her mouth, her eyes shining, as if she couldn’t believe it herself. “But I…I saved them both.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The next day, William left the secret room to go ply some guy who worked on the docks for information about the captain of the Remembrance, and Sera watched Jem watch William depart.

  The look and longing in the young man’s eyes was unmistakable, and now that she knew all that William had done for him, it was easy to see how gratitude for protection from such a horrible crime could easily transform into something else—something grand and passionate, but also unrequited.

  Something that was vilified and looked on with disgust here and now, but more readily accepted in her time.

  Jem hunched over the table, picking at the pen and paper he’d used to work with William that morning on letters and sounds. Even though Jem viewed her as one big thing that stood between him and William, this whole situation presented her with the chance to be something better. She could offer Jem something that likely no one else in 1819 Australia could: acceptance, understanding, and support.

  When she pulled out the chair opposite and sat, Jem looked up at her, one eye pinched nearly closed in suspicion and distaste.

  She would have to approach it carefully. She couldn’t let on that William had told her of Jem’s awful situation aboard the John Barry. She didn’t want him to think she had any agenda other than to be on his side. “I think what you’re doing, teaching him to read, is a wonderful thing.”

  Jem said nothing, just peered at her even more askance. She’d declined to read to William for Jem’s sake, and she hoped he could see that she’d been trying to throw him an olive branch.

  “He deserves that,” she added. “Knowledge and education. Everyone does.”

  A little hole formed in her heart, remembering how she’d scoffed at school because that was what her mom had done, and how horribly she’d regretted that later on.

  Inch by inch, his body seemed to relax. “’ow is it you learned?”

  She shrugged, but only to bide time on how to answer. She settled on something noncommittal. “Teachers. I was lucky.”

  A cup of water sat nearby and she took a sip. Though it had been boiled down by half, it still never tasted quite right. “I’d like to ask you something.”

  The squint came back. “What is it?”

  “But first I want you to realize that we are alone, and that nothing I say will ever be repeated outside this room. The same goes for whatever you say to me. We’ve had our differences, and I know you think of me as some sort of competition—”

  “Competition?” His eyes rounded.

  She just kept going. “—but I wanted to ask you how you feel about William.”

  His body stiffened so quickly it was like he’d been sprayed with water and flash frozen.

  “What did you say?”

  She pressed her palms to the tabletop and took care to keep her tone soft. “William is an extraordinary man. Determined. Loyal. Caring. It wouldn’t surprise me, or offend or shock or hurt me, if you felt something for him other than friendship.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Every word came out clipped and harsh, and she feared she was going about this in the wrong way, that she could’ve chosen different words. But she couldn’t go back, only forward.

  “I know it might be difficult to believe, or to accept, but you have to know that I’m your ally. I’m not your enemy, not your competition for William’s affections. If you love him, more than a brother or a father or even a friend, I’ll understand.”

  The docile, intimidated young man shattered and fell away. His lip curled. “Dear Lord.”

  “It’s all righ
t. I’m telling that it’s all right if you feel that.”

  She stretched out a hand to him, but he recoiled violently, the chair shooting back and clattering to the floor. He rose, all gangly six-feet-five-inches of him, and sneered down at her with disgust. “Do you know what you’ve just asked me?”

  Did she? “Yes. And it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “It bloody well matters to me! And to him, and to everyone else!”

  “But it wouldn’t matter to William.” She believed that in her heart. “It truly wouldn’t. And it doesn’t matter to me. I just don’t want you to feel alone, like we’re pushing you away.”

  She hadn’t been on board that ship, hadn’t seen what William had, but she could only imagine the shame Jem carried with him, and how that shame either defined—or enhanced—what he so clearly felt for William.

  Jem snarled, “Only the devil’s men think that way about another man.”

  But his eyes were watering.

  She sat back, collecting herself. She didn’t want to back down, didn’t want to give up on this young man who was clearly in deep pain, but felt that maybe she had to. At least now it was out, and maybe, later on after he’d had time to think about it all, he would realize that she was on his side.

  So she slid her hands to her lap, lowered her eyes, and prayed to no one in particular that she hadn’t just royally fucked up. “I understand. I’m sorry.”

  “You well should be.”

  “Please believe me. I didn’t mean to offend you. Honestly.”

  Her apologetic words were just bouncing right off him. For a second she thought he might spit on her. “You did offend me. How dare you try to make me think you were a decent human being.”

  “I won’t ever mention it again.”

  “No. You won’t ever think it again.” He stormed out of the room.

  She continued to sit there at the table all day in the dimness of the lone lantern, sewing and stabbing her fingers until they bled, turning her words and the scene with Jem over and over in her head, until William finally returned.