by Jo Goodman
Her face flamed. She removed her hand quickly. “Nathan!”
“Try not to affect such shock, Lydia. The matrons are looking now.”
Ducking her head, Lydia applied herself to her meal. In her secret heart of hearts, though, she was pleased.
The first industries of Australia, and therefore the first industries of Sydney, were brickmaking, flourmilling, shipbuilding, and distilling and brewing. George Street was a wide and busy thoroughfare, opening up Sydney south toward Victoria and west to the Blue Mountains. Carriages and horses kicked up plumes of dust in their wake. Women lifted their skirts when they left the sidewalks and took their chances among the coaches, wagons, and carts in the street. Toohey’s Brewery offered ale and porter in bulk or bottled, and from the size of the warehouse, Lydia concluded they turned a handy profit.
Lydia thought they were strolling aimlessly, without any particular destination in mind, simply taking in the sights, when Nathan steered her into David Jones, Ltd., an emporium with the latest in fashion as well as the practical. A visit there, and a later one to Anthony Hordern and Sons in the Haymarket district, yielded Lydia two riding skirts, five cotton blouses, undergarments, stockings, nightdresses, three day gowns that needed only minor alterations, and two evening gowns for which she was measured, poked, and stuck with pins. Nathan chose the fabric and the color and Lydia forgave him his arrogance because he chose so well. He bought her riding gloves and boots, delicate slippers for parties, sturdy walking shoes, and plain leather ankle boots for daily wear. The drapers and haberdashers fitted her with hats for riding in the bush and bonnets for the city.
Nathan approached shopping, she heard one clerk whisper, like a willy-willy—a dry storm tornado. Indeed, he swept up most everything in his path. By the end of the afternoon, Lydia was exhausted. She fell asleep in their carriage, her head resting heavily on Nathan’s shoulder on the journey back to Petty’s Hotel.
When Lydia awoke it was dark. She stretched languidly, shaking off the dregs of sleep slowly. It was lighter outside than it was in the room, thanks to street-lamps and moonlight, and Lydia could see Nathan on the veranda, leaning against the iron railing, his arms braced stiffly in front of him. His posture was of a man deep in thought, of pain, perhaps, certainly of tension. She would have gone to him, but she did not think he would thank her for it. There were times, and surely this was one of them, when Lydia suspected her husband wanted nothing so much as his aloneness. She let him have it.
It wasn’t until he pushed away from the railing, shaking off the tension that made his spine rigid, that Lydia sat up and moved to the edge of the bed. Her dress was hanging over the back of an overstuffed armchair near the fireplace. Lydia didn’t bother with it, pulling her fur-lined cape over her shift instead. She slipped her feet into a pair of flat shoes and opened the French doors to the balcony.
Nathan held out his hand to her and she took it eagerly, allowing herself to be pulled into the warmth of his loose embrace. His arms slid around her from behind and his hands slipped into the opening of her cape, under her breasts.
“Still sleepy?” he asked, kissing the crown of her head.
“A little. Your generosity wore me out today.”
He nipped her ear and his smile and tone were wicked. “That’s too bad. I had planned on being more generous this evening. My God, Lydia, what are you wearing under this cape?”
“You should know. You took my dress off.”
So he had. Not that he hadn’t expected her to put it on again. The circle of his arms tightened and his chin nuzzled her thick hair.
“Even the sky is different here,” Lydia said.
“Hmm?”
“The sky. You must have noticed before. Where’s the Big Dipper?”
He didn’t comment on the fact that she could recall an arrangement of stars and not the faces of Samuel or Madeline. The tenacious hold she had on some parts of her memory still fascinated him, but he was becoming used to it. “There is no dipper Down Under,” he said. “But there, high in the sky to your right. That’s Crux, the Southern Cross.”
Her eyes followed the path of the stars making up the small but brilliant constellation. “It’s beautiful. All of it is, actually. Just different. I’ll grow accustomed.”
Nathan wasn’t so sure. She was determined now, but circumstances could change…would change. Before the end of one year, Lydia might very well change her mind and choose to take a clipper back to California. Nathan wondered what he would do then.
“I have something for you,” he said.
Lydia could tell by the way he spoke that he wasn’t sure of her response. There was just an edge of little-boy bravado to cover his uncertainty. “You’ve already given me so much,” she said, “what could you possibly have for me now?”
“While you were being fitted at Hordern’s I had this taken care of.” He released her long enough to reach into his pocket and placed a small, velvet-covered box in her hand. “If you don’t like it...”
Lydia fumbled with the tiny button and string clasp on the side of the box. When she released the fastener she opened the box quickly, prepared to love whatever it was that Nathan had wanted her to have. There was no pretending involved, however. The opal ring was breathtakingly beautiful.
Taking Nathan by the hand, Lydia pulled him into their suite. She lit an oil lamp on the nightstand and took the ring out of its velvet bed. Mounted in a yellow gold setting, the stone was iridescent, reflecting light in a pyrotechnic play of color. Tiny veins of green and blue fire flashed as Lydia turned it. She could see pink turning to red, a hint of violet, and mother-of-pearl white on the translucent, polished surface.
“Oh, Nathan,” Lydia said softly, wonderingly. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. Words were inadequate to describe her pleasure.
“Here, let me put it on for you.” She gave him the ring and held out her left hand. He slipped it on her ring finger, watching her all the while. “You really like it?”
“Like it? Nathan, you’ve dazzled me.”
He breathed a little easier then. “You could still have a diamond if you wanted it.”
“What would I want with an ordinary diamond? You chose this.”
“I chose it because it’s Australian,” he said. “I found that fire opal years ago at Ballaburn. I’ve never told anyone where it came from. It’s been a talisman for me.”
“Then I’ll treasure it all the more,” she said sincerely. Rising on tiptoe, Lydia kissed him. “How could you think I wouldn’t like this?”
Had he been so obvious, or did she simply know him that well? Both questions were unsettling. “The jeweler told me most women would prefer a diamond.”
“I would take you as the worst sort of man to lump me with most women.”
“Then there was something he said about an opal being bad luck if it wasn’t your birthstone. That would be October.”
“It’s settled then. I say I was born in October. Choose a day.”
He smiled at the blithe way which she settled the problem. “The twenty-third.”
“Close,” she laughed. “It was the twenty-first.”
“All right. The twenty-first.” Because she had laid her cheek against his shoulder, Nathan did not see confusion cloud her eyes or the troubled frown that touched her mouth. “You can have a birthday once each month if you like.”
“No, thank you. I should be older than you in no time at all.”
He gave her a gentle push away from him. Her smile was teasing and her dark lashes fluttered coyly. The effect was spoiled when her stomach growled. “I suppose I’d better feed you, hadn’t I? Here, or the dining room?”
“Here, please.”
They ate a light meal with cheese and fruit for dessert. Nathan fell asleep afterward, his head lying in Lydia’s lap in front of the fireplace. She stroked his dark hair, feathering the silky tuft of the nape of his neck. The back of her fingers caressed his cheek, resting briefly in the faint hollow. She trac
ed the line of his black brows and swept back the lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead.
It was after midnight when he woke. Lydia hadn’t moved, even when the fire went out. He helped her to her feet and they stumbled rather stiffly to the bed, collapsed, and were deeply asleep in moments, hands linked under the covers.
Lydia left Nathan a note on the mantel when she went out the next morning. She had no intention of being gone long, she only knew that she needed to be alone, to think. She had no particular direction in mind as she walked out onto York Street. The metallic call of a loose flock of honeyeaters caught her attention. The small songbirds pranced in the hotel garden, nervously active and noisy as they gleaned the ground for insects and the flowers for nectar. Lydia noticed her presence did not disturb them in the least.
She walked aimlessly, turning left, turning right, taking no real note of her surroundings after the songbirds. Lydia was remembering things, she was sure of it, and while the realization could have been a comfort, it was not. Lydia began to consider whether she really wanted to recall the past. The thought that she might not was a slightly chilling one.
The return of vague memories had really begun in Samoa. The threads of the past were so elusive, so gossamer-like, that Lydia held a memory for only a moment, felt it brush her, then slip out of her grasp. Faint recognitions had happened first on Upolu. Fa’amusami had seemed familiar to her and Nathan had confirmed her suspicion, likening the native girl to someone Lydia had known before. Yet whenever Lydia struggled to gain a clear picture of Pei Ling, she saw only Fa’amusami. Now was no different. It was frustrating and annoying, this state of knowing and not knowing.
Last night, sitting in front of the fireplace with Nathan’s head in her lap, Lydia’s legs had gone to sleep. The numbness itself was not uncomfortable; she had barely noticed it until she wanted to stand. Then blood circulated quickly, tingling, pricking her skin in a hundred different places, and it was then that she really understood how numb she had been.
It was like that now. Her mind was prickly, exploding with tiny sparks that meant she was struggling to wakefulness. She wanted to be blessedly numb again. She wanted to stand. She could not have both.
On the white coral sands of Upolu a second silk thread tugged at her memory when Fa’amusami spoke of the murder of a Samoan woman. It fit with no other fact that she knew about herself, yet Lydia had felt a frisson of awareness then. There had been confusion, a measure of alarm, and when she mentioned Fa’amusami’s words to Nathan, he dismissed them, but he did not ease her mind.
The children in Saint Benedict’s school were wholly unfamiliar as individuals, but collectively they struck a chord, as though the situation itself was not a novel one.
There was a sense of comfort as she had worked with the students. More than that, there was a sense of competence that made her wonder how often she had done the very same thing in the past. She knew about the orphanage in San Francisco, knew about her work in raising money for St. Andrew’s, because Nathan had told her. But this was something different.
Among the sea of faces in that classroom she had a fleeting impression of other young faces, as though a photograph had been waved in front of her and then quickly withdrawn. The picture in her mind was of two boys, alike in enough ways that they could have been brothers. They were grinning at her, one of them gap-toothed, both of them with dark chocolate eyes. She had thought it was their laughter she heard, but it wasn’t. Caught daydreaming, the schoolchildren were giggling because she had stopped reciting. She went on with the lesson as though nothing had shaken her.
Lydia tried to recapture the images of the young boys, or put a name to either one of their impish faces. She could do neither.
So why had she known beyond any doubt that her birthday was October twenty-first? It was a startling revelation when she had chanced upon it. It might not have happened at all without the opal and a silly superstition. Yet when she airily demanded that Nathan pick a date, she knew immediately that he had chosen the wrong one. He had not understood when she corrected him that she had briefly stumbled upon the past, that she had recalled a birthday fourteen years earlier when she had been given a porcelain bisque doll in a starched gingham dress. She even remembered the doll’s name: Emmaline.
Lydia became forcefully aware of her surroundings when a driver bearing down on her in his carriage called out to her. She jumped back on the sidewalk, her face hot with embarrassment, only due in part to what the coachman had called her. Behind her a man chuckled, and when Lydia turned to give him a cold stare, she saw his eyes running over her with an interest that was appreciative in a base, sexual way. Turning her head quickly to avoid the impending proposition, Lydia glanced to either side of her and hurriedly crossed the street.
She did not recognize anything around her. The community was poor. The houses were clustered, the wooden construction sagging. The narrow roads and footpaths were badly in need of repair and generally filthy. Sailors lolled in the doorways of pubs with names like the Cat & Fiddle, Brown Bear, and The World Turned Upside Down. They watched her go by, leering, calling out to her, but their interest was not attached for long as more amenable young ladies strolled in front of them.
There was a large population of Chinese in the area. Except to try to sell her something in their open-air markets, they paid her little attention. She attempted to speak to two vendors on different occasions, but in each instance their knowledge of English was so poor that she could not make herself understood.
Lydia sensed that she was taking a circular route and that her attempt to regain her bearings had come to nothing. Her suspicions were confirmed when she confronted the wooden sign above a pub named the Roo’s Rest for the second time.
Adjusting the wide ribbon on her bonnet and clutching her reticule a bit more tightly, Lydia looked along the street for someone who might be trusted to give her the directions she required back to Petty’s Hotel.
Nathan sat up in bed and threw his legs over the side. He looked around for Lydia, and not seeing her, assumed she had gone to the dining room for breakfast. He had already washed his face, shaved, and combed his hair when he found her neatly folded note on the mantel.
“Bloody hell!” he swore under his breath. Dressing quickly, Nathan went to the front desk to see Henry Tucker. “Did you see my wife this morning?” he demanded without preamble.
Henry blinked widely. Here was the anger Nathan kept tightly leashed given full rein. There had always been a suspicion among the men at Ballaburn that Nathan Hunter was madder than Mad Irish himself. Brigham Moore used to make a joke of it and the graziers would laugh. Seeing it now, Henry could not raise a smile; laughing was out of the question.
“She walked out a little over an hour ago,” he said uneasily. “A stroll, I think. Or shopping. She didn’t say what her intentions were.”
“Did she ask for a direction, mention anything she wanted to see?”
“No.” Henry fidgeted with the register book.
“Did you see which way she went when she left?”
Henry shook his head.
Nathan’s hand clenched in a tight fist. His mouth took the shape of grimness and his angry eyes narrowed. Somewhat to Henry’s amazement, he pushed away from the desk without banging on the top of it.
“Where will you look for her?” asked Henry as Nathan stalked toward the door.
“Wherever there’s trouble.”
The door to the Roo’s Rest banged open and the barrel-chested owner, his broad features ruddy with anger, hefted a small boy into the street. The boy fell on his hands and knees in front of Lydia, yelping as he scraped his palms and shins on the ground.
The pub owner may have been satisfied with throwing out the urchin, but the boy hadn’t the good sense to know what to do with his freedom. He scrambled to his feet and raised his arm in an obscene salute and yelled, “Bloody barstud!”
Accent aside, Lydia realized the boy had called the owner a bastard. She
was knocked aside as the owner came roaring out of the pub, looking angry enough to kill, and made to grab the boy. Lydia managed to keep her balance, and just as the owner’s thick fingers caught his prey by the scruff of the neck, Lydia pelted him with her beaded reticule.
She may as well have swatted him with a pillow for all the good it did. He was startled by the intrusion, but he brushed her off as if she were nothing more threatening or annoying than a blowfly. He shook the boy like a ragdoll so the child’s head flopped one way, then the other, and though the boy kicked and flailed, his strength was pitifully slight compared to his assailant.
Lydia increased her efforts, abandoning the reticule altogether and using her fists. She pounded the man’s back, calling all the while for him to let the child go. The altercation had gathered a small crowd, but no one stepped forward to help her. In fact, Lydia thought she heard wagers being placed on the outcome and the odds makers were not giving her even chances. Thoroughly appalled, Lydia increased her efforts, using the sharp point of her leather shoe to inflict damage.
The Roo’s Rest owner took her seriously now. He released his hold on the boy and took Lydia by the upper arm. She fully expected the boy to run the moment he was loose. Instead, he turned on the owner, scratching the ground and jerking his head like a banty rooster, his fists clenched and raised.
“Leave her be, Bill!” He charged forward with two quick punches to Bill’s middle, retreated, and came back again, butting Bill with his head this time. “D’ye hear me, Bill? Leave her be!”
Lydia thought it was doubtful that Bill responded to anything the boy said. Her heel that was grinding into the toe of his foot probably had more of an effect. He pushed her away hard. She stumbled, twisted her ankle in one of the ruts in the street, and fell down. Pain was instantaneous and sickening. She blinked back tears and sucked in her lower lip.