September Moon

by Candice Proctor

  She could see the bullockies' camp through the red gums down by the creek. The men had built a fire and rigged up a spit on which a side of mutton slowly roasted, sizzling and dripping fat into the leaping orange-and-gold flames. She heard the crackle of the fire, smelled the roasting meat on the tangy, eucalypt-scented smoke. She had half expected to find Mr. O'Reilly here, too, but she could see only the two bullockies and Liam.

  At some point the boy had retrieved his shirt and a light jacket as the sinking sun drained the unseasonable warmth from the day. He sat on a fallen log, his legs sprawled out in front of him in a posture that reminded Amanda, strongly, of his father. Beside him, Barrister lay panting happily. When the dog saw Amanda, his tail began to thump in greeting.

  It was still light, the sun only just slipping below the horizon to splash the high, wispy clouds with touches of gold and vivid pink. But the three human males by the fire were so absorbed by their pursuit of vice that no one but the dog noticed her approach.

  "Shi-it," said Liam, drawling out the syllables in a perfect imitation of his father. "You should see the gen-u-ine, rarefied, corset-pinched lady my aunt Hetty sent us for a governess this time. I heard Father tell Mr. Campbell he wouldn't be surprised if she wears her corset to bed." The two bullockies laughed like a couple of braying jackasses while Liam wrapped his fist around the neck of a bottle and raised it to his lips.

  "Liam O 'Reilly." Amanda's voice rang out as she stalked into the small clearing. Barrister stood up and trotted forward expectantly, but she only patted him absently on the head. "I hope for your sake that is not an alcoholic beverage in your hand."

  Caught in the act of swallowing, Liam looked up, choked, and fell to coughing. The dirty, smelly, unshaven rustics by the fire guffawed again, one even going so far as to slap his thigh.

  "And you." She whirled on the two men. "Have you no shame? Corrupting an innocent child?"

  "Innocent?" One of the bullockies—a fat, middle-aged man with a balding pate and a bulbous nose—stared at her in confusion. Then his frown cleared and enlightenment dawned. "Oh, you mean Liam here." He snickered and elbowed his companion in the ribs. "Hear that, Sweeny? She thinks Liam here is an innocent." He gave her a broad grin that displayed a checkerboard of missing teeth. "Innocent. Tee-hee. That's a good one."

  With an inelegant noise that came out sounding suspiciously like a snort, Amanda swung back to the boy. "Liam, put down that bottle and come away this instant."

  "Why?" Liam sneered with a swaggering kind of bravado she suspected was half-false, half-rum. "Father doesn't mind. He's even taken me into Hornbottom's hotel."

  It probably wasn't true, but at that moment, Amanda thought she wouldn't put anything past the wretched man. Wore her corset to bed, indeed. She lifted her chin and said loftily, "I am unaware of your father's sentiments on this matter. I, however, object to this behavior most strongly. And if I must, I will request Ching and Chow to accompany me here and physically drag you back to the house." It was an outrageous bluff, of course; she hadn't the faintest idea if they would do such a thing for her or not.

  Liam's eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in disbelief. "You wouldn't."

  Amanda put her hands on her hips and stared down her nose at him. "I would."

  She might be a small woman, but as long as he stayed sprawled on the ground like that, he had to tilt his head back at a painful angle just to look up at her. It put him at a distinct disadvantage. Yet for him to stand up would be to admit a small but nevertheless significant defeat.

  He squirmed uncomfortably but stayed where he was.

  "Liam," she began threateningly.

  One of the bullockies—the thin, rabbit-toothed one named Sweeny this time—shook his head sadly and said, "Better go then, lad. We wouldn't want you gettin' in trouble with your new lady governess."

  She thought for a moment the boy still meant to refuse. He glared up at her, his chest heaving with impotent indignation, fury, and what she feared looked very much like a promise of revenge shining in his hazel eyes. Then he levered up off the ground and took off at a run across the rocky stream bed, the dog at his heels.

  A gust of wind eddied the fire, sending sparks shooting up into the sunset-streaked sky and billowing the blue smoke into her eyes. "Thank you, gentlemen." She turned away hastily, her eyes stinging from the smoke.

  "Anytime, ma'am." Sweeny bit off a plug of tobacco with his prominent rabbit teeth. "Pleasure to have made yer acquaintance."

  The other bullocky heaved to his feet and lumbered over to retrieve the bottle abandoned by Liam. "Sorry if we caused you any trouble, ma'am. We didn't mean no harm. We wouldna let him have more'n a taste."

  "I am relieved to hear that, gentlemen. Good evening." Rubbing her sore eyes with a thumb and index finger, Amanda headed blindly back toward the homestead.

  Behind her, she heard one of the ignoramuses make a lowly muttered, crudely worded sexual suggestion she only half understood. The other bullocky grunted. "Hell, I don't care what color hair she has. I know that type of female. And I'd rather try to poke one of those bullocks over there than get it on with a tight-assed old maid like that."

  Both men chuckled. Amanda kept walking, her head held high, her back ramrod straight, and within her a fierce determination to find Patrick O'Reilly and tell him exactly what she thought of him, his friends, and the way he was raising his children.

  An unseen magpie warbled its heartbreaking song as Amanda strode purposefully across the garden toward the small square stone office building where she'd last seen O'Reilly. In the distance, the sun disappeared behind a ragged peak, leaving the long, buckled line of the Flinders Ranges to stand out purple and fierce against the fire-washed sky.

  Through the small-paned window to the left of the office door she saw a faint light that wavered, then grew stronger as someone set a match to an oil lamp. After the curtest of knocks, Amanda threw open the door and stalked inside.

  Mr. Campbell, in the act of replacing the chimney on the lamp, started so violently, he almost dropped it. "Lord, Miss," he gasped, peering at her with bloodshot eyes. "You nearly scared me to death."

  "I beg your pardon." The stench of rum and stale sweat emanating from the man hit her in the face, almost staggering her. She retreated back over the threshold to the porch and sucked in a clean breath of fresh air.

  She supposed she shouldn't find it so surprising that O'Reilly allowed his son to drink, Amanda decided, when he openly tolerated such disreputable drunken behavior among his men. "I am looking for Mr. O'Reilly," she said in her best, most repressive diction. And when I find him, she thought, I am going to tell him what I think of his bookkeeper as well as his bullocky friends.

  Campbell scratched his long, filthy black beard. "Well, he ain't here no more. You might try down by the cart shed. He were there a minute ago. Saw him talkin' to some of Sally's people."

  "Sally's people?"

  "Aborigines."

  "Oh, I see. Thank you."

  Her indignation rising with every step, Amanda left the office and marched downhill to the cart shed.

  She could see him now, in the distance. Even in the gloom, his coiled, lazy stance was unmistakable. He stood with one hip cocked to the side, his arms crossed over his chest. She was so intent upon the man himself that it wasn't until Amanda was almost upon him that she realized the two dusky-skinned figures he was talking to were clothed only in the colors of the setting sun. One was male, the other female, and both were quite, quite naked.

  Amanda gasped and would have turned to leave, only O'Reilly heard her and swung around.

  "Miss Davenport. Come over here. There's someone you might be interested to meet. This here is Sally's brother, Pinba. And that's Gabby, his lubra."

  Slowly, reluctantly, Amanda edged closer. She stood rigid, her hands clasped firmly behind her back. Somehow she managed to murmur a stiff, formal, "How do you do?" The problem was, she didn't know where to look. She could not look at the naked man;
she found the idea of simply being close to one both mortifying and alarming. Yet she could not look at the naked woman, either. The Aboriginal woman was younger than her husband. Her healthy, upright breasts seemed almost to thrust out at Amanda. And while painfully conscious of Patrick O'Reilly standing beside her, she found she could not look at him, either. All she could seem to think was, He can see that woman's naked breasts. Amanda refused to think about what else was visible on the woman.

  "When you have a free moment, Mr. O'Reilly, there is something I wish to discuss with you," Amanda said, staring determinedly at the tips of the mountains, turning black and mysterious now as evening descended upon them.

  Pinba said something in his native tongue that Amanda could not understand. O'Reilly laughed, and Amanda's concentration wavered. Her gaze drifted downward. She realized the Aboriginal man was not entirely naked. He wore a brief loincloth fashioned of netting and tied around his bare hips with something that looked like string.

  "It's made from rushes," said O'Reilly, apparently aware of the object of her fascination. "They .weave it into a kind of string, and use it for everything from nets and cradles to billy bags and..." He paused for emphasis. "Loincloths."

  He s enjoying this. The thought exploded in her brain as her head snapped up, her gaze flying to his. He knows I'm mortified by these people s nudity and he's deliberately tormenting me with it. She saw the laugh lines beside his eyes deepen as a lazy smile curled the edges of his lips, and her own lips parted on a quickly indrawn breath.

  Exposure to such brazen nudity was not only shocking, she decided, it was also dangerous. Why else would she suddenly find herself wondering what Patrick O'Reilly must look like without his clothes on? She remembered stolen glimpses of a hard, tanned chest and a flat stomach, ridged with muscle, and it was easy to imagine the rest. The lean line of his flanks. His long legs strapped with muscle. The taut curve of his buttocks.

  Her heart pounded hard and fast, sending the blood coursing through her, making her painfully aware of her own body, normally so buried beneath layers of cotton, linen, wool, and whalebone that she scarcely gave it a thought. It was as if her breasts had swelled, pressing against the stiff bodice of her gown. She felt an ache, a familiar, dreaded need way down low in her belly that made her want to gasp. Suddenly terrified that he might be able to read in her eyes the wayward direction of her thoughts, she turned away, her cheeks burning with mortification.

  "We can talk now," he said. "If you like."

  "What? Oh. Oh, no." Amanda's hands flew to her hot cheeks. "Later." She swallowed convulsively. "Later will be fine."

  With a hastily murmured apology, she picked up her skirts and fled.

  Too agitated to reenter the house, Amanda paced the flag- stoned paths of the garden, her narrow-heeled shoes tapping a brisk click-click on the paving. From down the hill came the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle as O'Reilly's breeding stock settled down for the night; farmyard sounds, as unfamiliar to Oxford-bred Amanda as the screech of the cockatoos nesting in the creek-bed gums.

  Suppressing a sigh, she tilted back her head and gazed up at the first stars glimmering out of the darkening sky. She told herself she was upset by her encounter with the naked Aborigines. It was shock that made her pulse beat rapidly, her breath come in quick little pants. Her maidenly sensibilities had been affronted. Anyone would believe that.

  Or at least someone like Christian Whittaker would believe it, even if Patrick O'Reilly did not.

  She caught a faint scent of tobacco smoke, mingling with the sweetness of the garden's rose and honeysuckle. A pipe glowed red out of the darkness, and she knew he stood there, watching her.

  She paused some ten feet from the house. She could see him now, leaning against a veranda post, one thumb hooked in his belt in a way that drew her attention to his lean hips.

  "Nice evenin'," he said, blowing out a short puff of smoke.

  She jerked her head up. "Yes."

  "Somethin' botherin' you?" . "Bothering me? No."

  "You left in kind of a hurry down there by the cart shed. I thought maybe you were frightened of Pinba and Gabby. I figured you might like to know you've nothing to worry about. They wouldn't hurt anybody on my run."

  "I was not frightened," she said. Not of what you think.

  His cheeks hollowed as he sucked on his pipe. "You looked pretty shook up to me."

  "If I were overset, it was entirely due to the natives being—" She couldn't bring herself to say the word nude aloud to this man, and took refuge in obscurity. "In puris naturalis."

  "You mean buck naked?" She was too far away to see his eyes in the darkness, but she could hear the laugh in his voice.

  "Yes," she said tersely, feeling her cheeks burn. She was glad it was dark.

  "You'll get used to it."

  "But I have no desire to get used to it—or to any of the other unsavory aspects of this colony." She knew she sounded insufferably pompous and self-righteous, but she didn't care. It was as if she were using words as a kind of shield, a buffer, to keep as much distance as possible between herself and this disturbing man. "Circumstance might have forced me to live in Australia temporarily," she said loftily, "but I have no intention of forgetting that I am English. I will never surrender my gentility to your bush."

  His lips curled away from his pipe. "Is that the way you see it? That if something's un-English then it must be unladylike? So while you might have to put up with life here— temporarily—you would never consider adapting to it?"

  "Adapt to this?" She spread her hand in a wide arc, taking in not so much the pale, sun-dried hills and looming Flinders Ranges, but the very essence of life in Australia. "Of course I would never adapt to this. To do so would be to lose myself. My sense of who and what I am."

  "Don't you mean lower yourself?"

  She did, of course, but she wasn't about to go so far as to say it. "Even you must admit that there is a certain level of depravity and"—her lip curled as she remembered the bullockies—"vulgarity in the common Australian character."

  "Depravity."

  "That's right. Although I suppose it's hardly surprising, given the circumstances."

  "Such as what, exactly?" He tapped his pipe against the veranda post, knocking out the ashes that fell in a shower of sparks to be ground beneath the heel of his boot.

  She found she could not continue to look at him and turned away, her arms crossed at her chest, to watch the rising moon. Big and round and quite breathtakingly lovely, it shone with an unearthly white light. She had never seen anything like it. "Well," she said slowly, searching for an appropriate example. The one she chose was unfortunate. "Take this continual exposure to native men and women in a state of complete—"

  "Nudity," he supplied.

  "Precisely. It cannot help but have a disastrous effect on the moral fiber of the colony's white inhabitants."

  "Why?" he asked, his voice deceptively smooth. "Do you feel your moral fiber unraveling, Miss Davenport?"

  "Me?" She swung back around, her arms dropping to her sides as she watched him step out of the shadows of the veranda and come at her, moonlight limning the hard planes of his face and causing the sun-bleached highlights in his tawny hair to glow like silver.

  His hair was too long, she decided. It curled against his forehead and hung over his collar in the back, making him look rough and uncivilized. She noticed he had his shirt open at the neck, too; just a couple of buttons, but it was enough to show her the tanned, strong column of his throat. Enough to trigger dangerous tremors, way down low in her belly.

  He came to a halt in front of her. "Why don't you just admit it?"

  A wind blew up, flapping her skirts, wrapping them around the hard length of his leg. He was too close. She waited for him to step back, but he didn't. "Admit what?" she asked, her voice sounding oddly thick.

  "That being here unsettles you. Only it's not for the reasons you try to pretend. It's because life here is too honest. Too fundam
ental. It strips away all those polite falsities you've always lived with, and now that you find yourself face-to-face with raw reality, you don't know how to handle it."

  "No." She stared up into his lean, taut features. Against her will, her gaze fastened on his mouth, and she watched the dimples form in his cheeks as he spoke.

  "Yes."

  For one intense moment, they looked at each other. Then she sucked in a quick breath of air that was like a gasp and spun away from him. Away from the truth of what he was saying. Away from what she knew would happen if she let herself stay and be trapped by the moonlight and the heat of his big male body and the inevitability of her own unwilling response.

  "Oh, God," she cried, hugging herself, unable to understand what was happening to her. "I don't belong here. Everything's too unfamiliar, too confusing, too wild. I wish I had never come here."

  "So why did you? Why didn't you stay in Adelaide?"

  "Why? Because I was desperate, that's why." She gave a harsh laugh that came out sounding suspiciously like a sob. "I've always worked as a private secretary. But most people seem to think impoverished gentlewomen should be governesses. So I thought I'd try becoming a governess."

  She knew she shouldn't be saying these things to him, but at the moment she didn't care. "Only problem was, Adelaide is full of English governesses—experienced governesses. By the time I answered your sister's advertisement, I had begun to wonder if I was going to be able simply to keep a roof over my head, let alone earn enough to get back to England."