The Dreaming

by Barbara Wood

  PRAISE FOR THE DREAMING

  "Superb storytelling . . . a page turner."

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  "Absolutely splendid . . . it sweeps you away."

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  "Magnificent . . . everything a historical novel should be: Big, Bold, with larger-than-life characters chasing their dreams, and demons with equal fervor. The Dreaming has all that and more."

  —Orange Coast Magazine

  "Appealing, boldly drawn characters . . . dizzying plot turns."

  —New Woman

  "The Dreaming chronicles Australia, grand and still untamed, in a time of tremendous growth . . . tales of the Aboringines' intriguing culture add a particular and welcome atmosphere to the romantic saga."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "Wood makes her fiction come alive with authentic detailing and highly memorable characters."

  —Booklist

  Other Books By

  BARBARA WOOD

  Virgins of Paradise

  Green City in the Sun

  Soul Flame

  Vital Signs

  Domina

  The Watch Gods

  Childsong

  Night Trains

  Yesterday's Child

  Curse This House

  Hounds and Jackals

  The Divining

  Books By

  KATHRYN HARVEY

  Butterfly

  Stars

  Private Entrance

  Turner Publishing Company

  200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950

  Nashville, Tennessee 37219

  445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor

  New York, NY 10022

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  The Dreaming

  Copyright © 2012 Barbara Wood. All rights reserved.

  This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The Dreaming is a work of historical fiction. Although some events and people in this book are based on historical fact, others are the products of the author's imagination.

  Cover design by Gina Binkley

  Interior design by Mike Penticost

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wood, Barbara, 1947-

  The dreaming / Barbara Wood.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59652-860-4

  1. Aboriginal Australians--Fiction. 2. Australia--History--1788-1900--Fiction. I.

  Title.

  PS3573.O5877D7 2012

  813'.54--dc23

  2012006388

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 17 18—0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated with love to my brother, Richard.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Chris Bennett of Newstead, Tasmania, for his careful research, meticulous notes, interviews, tapes, and patient answers to a thousand queries. And also for knowing the Western District so well.

  To the Lewandowski family, also of Tasmania, for their support and confidence in me, and especially for their indefatigable and always cheerful efforts to obtain obscure source material for this book.

  To Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cameron of the Western District, Victoria, for giving me a window into life on a sheep station.

  To Lucy Lewandowski-Porter for her wool samples, spinning-wheel instruction, and particularly sensitive insight into the spirituality of Aboriginal women.

  And lastly, but not leastly, to L and B Research Consultants, whose motto is "Our Business is History."

  PART ONE

  1871

  ONE

  J

  OANNA WAS DREAMING.

  She saw herself leaning on the arm of a handsome young officer, grateful for his support but otherwise immune to his solicitous attentions. She was oblivious also to the British soldiers, standing erect in their smart uniforms, and to the ladies, elegant in their gowns and bonnets. Officers on horseback raised their sabers in salute as the two coffins were lowered into the graves. Joanna was aware of only one thing: that she had lost the only two people she loved, and that, at eighteen, she was suddenly alone in the world.

  The soldiers lifted their rifles and fired into the air. Joanna looked up, startled, as the clear blue sky tore apart. Through her black veil she saw the sun, which seemed too large and too hot and too close to the earth.

  As the commander of the regiment began to read the eulogy over the graves of Sir Petronius and Lady Emily Drury, Joanna gave him a puzzled look. Why wasn't he speaking clearly? She couldn't understand what he was saying. She looked around at the people gathered to pay their final respects to her parents, and noticed that they ranged from servants to the highest army officials and royal elite of India. None of them seemed to find the commander's speech muddled or out of the ordinary.

  Joanna sensed that something was terribly wrong, and she was suddenly afraid.

  Then she froze: At the edge of the crowd was a dog—the dog that had killed her mother.

  But the animal had been shot! Joanna had seen a soldier kill it! And yet here it was. Its black eyes seemed fixed on her, and when it made a move in her direction, Joanna tried to scream, but could not.

  Then the dog was running toward her, it lunged, but instead of attacking, flew straight up into the sky and burst into a thousand hot white stars.

  The stars swirled overhead like a brilliant carousel, overwhelming her with their beauty and power.

  And then the stars began to form a shape across the sky, a long and winding celestial highway paved with diamonds. But it wasn't exactly a road; it moved.

  And then the road became an enormous serpent, slithering across the heavens.

  The diamond-bodied serpent began to uncoil and slide toward her. She felt the cold heat of star-fire wash over her. She watched the massive body grow and grow, until she saw in the center of its head a single, brilliant fiery eye. As the snake's jaws opened, the blackness inside was like a tunnel of death that was about to engulf her.

  She screamed.

  Joanna's eyes snapped open, and for a moment she didn't know where she was. Then she felt the gentle rocking of the ship, saw in the dim light the cabin walls around her. And she remembered: She was on board the SS Estella, bound for Australia.

  She sat up and reached for the matches on the small table by her bed. Her hands shook so badly that she couldn't light the lamp. Drawing her shawl around her shoulders, she got up and made her way to the porthole; after a struggle, she managed to get it open. She felt the cold ocean wind on her face, closed her eyes and tried to calm herself.

  The dream had seemed so real.

  Taking deep breaths, and drawing comfort from the familiar sounds of the ship—the creaking of the rigging, the groan of timber—Joanna slowly brought herself back to reality. It was only a dream, she told herself. Just another dream ...

  "Are dreams our link to the spirit world?" Joanna's mother, Lady Emily, had written in her diary. "Do they carry messages, or warnings, or the answers to mysteries?"

  I wish I knew, Mother, Joanna thought, as she stared at a vast ocean that stretched away to the stars.

  Joanna had thought the stars over India were powerful and overwhelming, but she decided that they were nothing compared to the formidable display in this night sky. The stars were grouped in ways she had never seen before. The reassuring beacons of her childhood were gone, and new ones winked down at her. Because this was the Southern Hemisphere.

  Joanna thought about the dream she had just had, and what it might possibly mean. That she should dream of the funeral was understandable, and
perhaps even of the dog. But why a star-serpent, and why the terror? Why had she felt the serpent was about to destroy her?

  Just weeks before her death, Lady Emily had written in her diary: "I am plagued by dreams. One is a recurring nightmare, which I cannot explain and which terrifies me beyond endurance. The other dreams are strange visions of events that are not frightening but which seem unbelievably real to me. Could these in fact be lost memories? Am I somehow remembering my childhood at last? If only I knew, for I sense that an answer to my life lies in these cryptic dreams. An answer that must soon be found, or else I shall perish."

  Joanna was startled out of her thoughts by sounds drifting in from over the water—a man's voice in the darkness, calling "Stroke, stroke, stroke," accompanied by the sound of oars dipping into the water. And then Joanna remembered that the Estella was becalmed.

  "Never seen anything like it," the captain had said only the day before. "In all my years at sea, never been becalmed at this latitude. Can't explain it for the life of me. Looks like I'll have to put men in the longboats and see if we can pull us out of it."

  And Joanna felt her fears rise again.

  Back in Allahabad, in the sanatorium where she had spent some weeks recovering from her parents' unexpected deaths, Joanna had dreamed that this would happen.

  Why? she wondered, as she shivered beneath her shawl. Could whatever haunted my mother and finally destroyed her be pursuing me out on this ocean?

  "You must go to Australia, Joanna," Lady Emily had said, hours before she died. "You must make the journey you and I were going to make. Something is destroying us, and you must find its source and put an end to it, or else your life will end as mine is, prematurely, without anyone knowing why."

  Joanna turned away from the porthole and looked around the tiny cabin. As a wealthy young woman, she had been able to afford quite adequate accommodations for herself for the long journey from India to Australia, and she was grateful; she would not have wanted cabin companions. She needed to be alone now, with her grief. She needed time to try to unravel what had happened to her family, and to her; to understand what was taking her to the other side of the world, to a land about which she knew so little.

  She looked at the papers lying on the small writing desk, papers that pertained to a legacy from long ago, from grandparents she had never known. She had been working at deciphering them, just as her mother had tried to understand their strange meaning. Her mother's diary, too, lay on the desk—Lady Emily's "lifebook," filled with her dreams and fears and her own futile attempts to understand the mystery of her life: the lost years of which she had no memory, the nightmares that seemed to foretell a frightening future. And there was a property deed, also part of Joanna's legacy from her grandparents. No one knew where the land was that was mentioned in the deed, or why Lady Emily's parents had purchased it or whether they had ever lived there.

  "But I sense very strongly, Joanna," Emily had said toward the end of her life, "that the answer to everything lies in the place located on that deed, named Karra Karra. The property is somewhere in Australia. Possibly it is the place of my birth. I do not know. Sometimes it has occurred to me to wonder whether the woman who haunts my dreams is there, or once was. It is conceivable my own mother is still there, still alive—although that is unlikely. You must find Karra Karra, Joanna. For me. To save yourself. And to save your future children."

  To save myself, to save us all from what? Joanna thought.

  There was also a letter on the desk—an angry letter, saying, "Your talk of a curse is an affront to God." The letter was unsigned, but Joanna knew that it had been written by her Aunt Millicent, the woman who had raised Joanna's mother, Emily Drury, and who had refused to speak of the past, it terrified her so. And finally, there was the miniature of Lady Emily, a beautiful woman with sad eyes. How did these pieces fit together in the puzzle of this woman's life? And, Joanna wondered, into that of her own destiny as well?

  "I have no idea why your mother is dying," the doctor had said to Joanna. "It is beyond my knowledge, my capabilities, to understand. She is not ill, yet she appears to be dying. I believe it is an affliction of the spirit rather than of the flesh, but I cannot explain why, or imagine what is the cause."

  But Joanna had an idea. Several days before, a rabid dog had made its way into the military compound where Joanna's father was stationed. It had cornered Joanna as she had stood, frozen with fear, tensing for an attack. And then Lady Emily had stepped between her daughter and the dog, and just as the animal sprang, a soldier had fired a rifle, and the dog had fallen dead at their feet.

  "Lady Emily seems to have all the symptoms of rabies, Miss Drury," the doctor had said, "but your mother wasn't bitten by the dog. I am mystified as to why she should have such symptoms."

  Joanna returned her gaze to the porthole, and looked out again over the dark ocean. She heard men in boats trying to pull the steamship through the night as if it were a gigantic, sightless creature. And she thought of how her mother had lay dying, helpless against the power that was killing her. And how, just hours after the death of his beloved wife, Colonel Petronius had put his service revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

  "Strange forces are at work, my dearest Joanna," Lady Emily had said. "They have claimed me, after all these years. They will claim you. Please ... please, go to Australia, find out what happened, stop this poison ... this—this curse, from harming you."

  Joanna thought of what her mother had told her long ago. "A sea captain brought me to Aunt Millicent's cottage in England when I was four years old," Lady Emily had said. "I had been on his ship, coming, apparently, from Australia. I had very little with me, I didn't speak. I couldn't. I can only believe that whatever it was that happened in Australia, which I have never been able to recall, must have been somehow, quite literally, unspeakable. Millicent said it was months before I said anything to her at all. Joanna, it's important to know why, and what happened to our family in Australia."

  And then, just over a year ago, when Lady Emily had celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday, she began to have the dreams, which she believed might actually have been memories of those lost years. She had described them in her diary: "I am a small child being held in a young woman's arms. Her skin is very dark, and we are surrounded by people. We are all waiting in silence for something. We are watching the opening of what looks like a cave. I start to speak, but I am told to remain silent. Somehow, I know that my mother is about to come. I want her to come. I am afraid for her. The dream ends there, but it is so vivid, I see things in such detail—I can feel the heat of the sun on my bare body. I cannot help but wonder if it is a recollection from my years in Australia. But what does it mean?"

  Joanna looked up at the collection of stars known as the Southern Cross, the tip of which pointed the way to Australia, which lay just a few days away. She was determined to get there and to find answers. As she had sat at her mother's bedside, watching the beautiful Lady Emily die of a mysterious illness, Joanna had thought: It is over now. Mother, your years of nightmares, of nameless fears, are gone. You are at peace.

  But when she was in the sanatorium, she had been visited by a dream: She saw herself on a ship in the middle of the ocean, and the ship was becalmed, her sails drooping lifelessly from the yards, the captain telling his crew that water and food rations were dangerously low. And in the dream, Joanna had somehow known that she was the cause of these events.

  She had awakened in terror to realize that whatever it was that had haunted Lady Emily all her life had not died with her. It now belonged to Joanna.

  As she listened to the sailors straining at their oars in the darkness, trying to draw the Estella out of the calm, Joanna was gripped with a new sense of urgency. It couldn't be a coincidence—her dream, and now this becalmed ship. There was something, after all, to the mysteries that had so haunted her mother. Joanna, looking out into the night, tried to imagine the continent that lay only a few days away—Australia, wher
e secrets of the past and of her future might be waiting.

  "Melbourne! Port of Melbourne! Prepare to disembark!"

  Joanna stood out on the deck with the rest of the passengers, watching Melbourne Harbor draw close. She was in a hurry to be off the ship, to get away from that small cabin. She looked past the crowd gathered on the dock to meet the ship, lifted her eyes to the city's skyline a short distance away. She wondered if, out there beyond the buildings and the church spires, somewhere in the heart of a country that had for thousands of years known only the nomadic Aborigines, she would find the answers her mother had been looking for.

  As the gangway was raised and the ship's officers gathered to say goodby to disembarking passengers, Joanna gripped the rail and looked up at the sky, overwhelmed by the light. It was like no light she had ever known—not the hot, musky sunlight of India, where she had grown up, nor the soft misty light of England, which she had once seen as a child. The sunlight of Australia was broad and bold and clear; it was almost aggressive in its brightness and clarity.

  She saw a group of men, laborers judging by their clothes, hurrying up the gangway. Once on deck, they began seizing luggage and anything they could lay hand to, promising the disembarking passengers that the job of carting their bags would cost only a penny or two. A young black man approached Joanna. "I take for you, miss," he said, reaching for her trunk. "Only sixpence. Where you want to go?"

  She stared at him. It was her first encounter with an Aborigine, a race she had heard so much about all of her life. "Yes," she said after a moment. "Please. Just down to the dock."

  As he gripped the handle on the end of the trunk and began to lift it, he smiled at Joanna. And then his face changed, and he gave Joanna a long look; his eyes flickered, he dropped the trunk and turned abruptly away. He reached for a wicker basket which an elderly woman was struggling with. "I carry for you, lady?" he said, and moved off along the deck, away from Joanna.