Dream Time (historical): Book I

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Eyes closed, she lay silent, enjoying one of those few moments when her high energy wasn’t in charge. She felt his broad palm splay over her stomach. Her lips curved in a faint smile. “Don’t tell me you are ready to begin again, my lusty whaler.”

  “How long has it been since last you had your monthly?”

  Her lids snapped open. She turned her head to stare at his ruddy face. “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “I know your body well. You’re with child, me lass, or me name isn’t Josiah Wellesley.”

  “Well, then, it isn’t!” She pushed up to a sitting position and began tucking in her wayward strands of hair and tugging down her skirts. “It’s probably Smith or Jones.”

  His knuckles grazed her cheek. “You didn’t answer me.”

  She stilled. After forcing herself to calculate, she replied, “Three months ago, I think.”

  He grunted. “Then the child isn’t mine.”

  She wasn’t sure if his expression was one of regret or relief. Without any inner searching, she knew exactly how she felt. Her future son was her ticket to the pinnacle of Sydney aristocracy.

  “You must do it for the sake of our child. You must resign your commission and devote your energy and time to New South Wales Traders, Limited.”

  “Nan, the little you have socked away in that warehouse won’t be enough to open our own business.”

  “Bah, leave that to me, Tom.”

  “Nothing daunts you, does it? You’re impervious to despair. You survived the Rum Corps coup and maintained your neutrality. Wise, Nan. Wise.”

  She paused, the spoonful of gruel halfway to her mouth. She’d never admit it, but one thought did daunt her spirit: that of imprisonment. Losing her freedom again petrified her.

  Yet she had risked her freedom to keep her enterprise solvent. Risked her marriage in her sexual business transactions with Josiah.

  Did she dread poverty and its stigma even more? She still found it difficult to believe that after five years she was pregnant again. She had even selected the name for her son. Randolph.

  And it would be a son.

  From bitter experience, she knew that it was the men who had the opportunities in the world. Through a son, she could manipulate those opportunities to work toward her goal, a place in Sydney society.

  She encouraged Tom to buy the papers of Jimmy Underwood. “He’s skilled in boat building. We’ll be needing our own ship, many ships, before another decade is out.”

  She didn’t want to be dependent upon Josiah, and she knew she would have to expand if she expected her business to thrive.

  Tom simply stared at her and shook his head.

  “The profits from the last shipment Josiah is transporting will buy the finished lumber and materials needed.”

  Tom’s protest that he knew nothing about navigation elicited no respite for him. She stood firm. “Josiah has agreed to take you on his next voyage. We can always hire our own captain, but you need to learn the business.”

  When Tom returned, she intended to drain his brain dry of all he knew. She would never again allow herself to be put in a helpless situation. Wasn’t knowledge power?

  “What about you? Will you be all right here alone?”

  She sighed. “Tom, I survived alone for six months under far worse conditions.” She kissed his forehead, which was growing broader as his hair receded at his temples. “You just take care of yourself and come safely back to me and our son.”

  “I don’t want to be away when the baby is born.”

  “You were there when I birthed the first one.”

  He eyed her steadily. “And you gave it away.”

  She flinched. “This one, I won’t. I swear. The circumstances are different.”

  As Nan had predicted, Whitehall had enough of the Rum Corps governing the penal colony, and a new governor arrived. As a token gesture of suppressing the rum trading, Governor Macquarie sent Macarthur back to England as an exile.

  This act allowed Nan to come out into the open— as far as she dared.

  Conversely, Miles, having remained sub-rosa, was never implicated with the Rum Corps and escaped unscathed. Nan mentally shrugged. She had patience. One day . . . one day she would find the fitting retribution.

  With Tom away, apprenticing under Josiah, she set up an office in her warehouse and hung out her shingle. There was no one with whom she could share her excitement, and so she stood alone in a cold, drizzling autumn rain and gazed up at the signboard proclaiming NEW SOUTH WALES TRADERS, LIMITED. April whipped her soggy skirts around her legs.

  Pride filled her. “The first step,” she murmured, then placed her hand on her stomach, as if in benediction. “And you will be the second.”

  As the weeks passed, two topics occupied the tongues of the Sydney citizens. The first topic, they placidly accepted—the leaders of the Rum Corps had not actually been ousted; they had merely transferred their operations to another sphere, Tasmania and Norfolk Island.

  Miles invested his wife’s money in establishing a newspaper. Considering that seven eighths of the colonists were illiterate, Nan found this amusing. But she knew there was a method to his madness. She sat back and watched.

  The Sydneysiders sat back and watched her, because she was the second topic. Privately, she was acknowledged as the backbone of Tom Livingston’s New South Wales Traders, Limited.

  “Scandalous!” Major Hannaby’s wife, Elizabeth, pronounced.

  “A trifle unseemly for a lady,” Lucy Bentwater said, her tone equivocal, as if Miles's fiancée followed the wind vane of public opinion.

  Nan knew they talked. What they said didn’t bother her. They would accept her sooner or later and eventually they would approve of her. She was breaking new turf as a woman, and it irritated her that she was having to operate in the background. She was a victim of her times, she lamented more than once. Had she been born in Greece a couple of millennia earlier, she would have had far greater latitude as a woman.

  By her reckoning, she was a week or so past her due date, when she began to have labor pains. She was alone in the warehouse. Even in her pain, she pulled on her gloves and collected her parasol for the trip down to the bay, where Jimmy was working on her ship’s wooden skeleton.

  He looked up from the rib of lumber his adz shaped and wiped the sweat dripping from his face. Despite all the food she stuffed onto his plate, he still wore that emaciated look that would proclaim him a former convict for the rest of his days. “You all right, Mrs. Livingston?”

  Apparently, her suffering showed.

  “Jimmy, I want you to do something for me.”

  “Anything, Mrs. Livingston.”

  “Go to the Reverend Wilmot’s house and ask for Pulykara. Tell her I need her. Tell her to come to my house as soon as possible.”

  Her breathing labored, she returned to the little hut on the post she and Tom called home, a far cry from Miles’s handsome establishment in the Rocks.

  Within the hour, Pulykara was at the door. “It’s been a long time, baby,” she said, her grin clumping the bands of tattoos on either side of her broad nose.

  Nan managed a smile. “I’ve missed you, Pulykara.” Then she groaned and grabbed her stomach. “Tis my time.”

  At once, Pulykara went to work, stripping her former mistress of her clothing. Shivering and naked, Nan followed Pulykara’s instruction about when to rise and squat with the labor contractions. Nan’s lids squinched with the pain, and tears streamed from the comers of her eyes, but she did not scream out in those final moments of agony.

  Then, the infant squeezed forth with a lusty howl that brought a smile of satisfaction from Nan. Collapsing against the side of the bed, she whispered, “Let me see my son.”

  Holding up the red mite of a human being, Pulykara laughed. “You’ve birthed yourself another girl, baby.”

  A M A R I S

  § CHAPTER SEVEN §

  There is that secret yearning, that secret belief, in some women
that they will find their soul mate, if not in this lifetime, then in another. Amaris Wilmot didn’t know it, but she was one of those women. To dream is to acknowledge the possibility of fulfillment.

  From her position outside the wrought-iron gate, the girl watched the birthday party for maybe as much as five minutes, a long time for twelve-year-old Amaris Wilmot to stand still.

  Occasionally, Amaris’s aborigine nanny, Pulykara, went in the place of Amaris’s mother to collect unwanted clothing, goods, and foodstuffs donated to the church. And occasionally Amaris wangled her way into accompanying Pulykara.

  When Amaris discovered there was to be a pickup at the Livingston household for a bag of cast-off clothing, she had begged her mother to let her go.

  In the midst of making quince pie for an ailing parishioner, Rose had paused and smiled. “Just what is h’it that’s so important at the Livingston place?”

  “It’s the Livingston woman.”

  “Aye?”

  “She’s the ship woman, Mother. The woman who does men’s work.”

  “Well, not all men’s work. But Nan Livingston is generous. Just don’t pester her with your questions, Amaris. She might not be as willing to explain as your father.”

  As it was, Amaris never got as far as the front door with Pulykara. In passing an ivy-walled garden, Amaris heard the children’s laughter. At the gate, her footsteps lagged. “I’ll wait for you here, Pulykara.” The aborigine woman frowned. “Don’t go getting ideas, Miss Priss.”

  Amaris’s hands tightened on the bars and she peered between them. “I just want to look.”

  She didn’t even hear Pulykara shuffle away. Several boys and girls were chasing a peacock through the manicured garden. Two girls swung on roped seats suspended from an old red ironbark tree. Three boys rolled a wagon wheel’s metal hoop.

  Amaris felt she was the outsider, always looking in, watching from behind a wall of bars or bricks.

  At that moment, a girl who could have been no more than six or seven skipped down the carriage drive toward the gate. “My name’s Celeste Anne. Would you like to come to my birthday party?”

  Amaris stared at the apparition. Surely one of her mother’s angels, made human. She was small, softly rounded, and blessed with creamy skin and pink cheeks and lips. Shiny light brown hair puffed like cotton fluffs around a face full of sweetness. Obviously, those rabbit-like brown eyes had never seen the rum-drunks of the Rocks.

  But then, Amaris reflected, her mother had, on those occasions she helped her husband administer to “those lost souls." And Rose’s eyes still held that same innocence. Amaris shook her head. “Birthdays are for children.”

  “You’re not a child?” the little girl asked, her eyes large with wonder.

  Amaris straightened her already too-tall frame. “Do I look like a child? I’m thirteen. Almost.”

  “I am seven years old today. Old enough Mother said to go down and see the Livingston ships.”

  Amaris tossed her head, and her long, black pigtails bounced against her shoulder blades. “I’ve seen them. They’re all right, nothing special. Not when there’s a whole forest of shipmasts in the harbor.” “You’ve been down to the Rocks?”

  The little girl drew closer to the gate’s spiked bar. “What’s it like? Horridly dangerous?”

  Amaris paused and drew upon her few memories of her trips to the Rocks. “No. Sad. And exciting. Ships from China and South America and the United States of America dock there. And all sorts of queer people, not just pommies and paddies. They stroll the wharves and visit the pubs.”

  “You’ve been to a pub?” With awe enlivening its usually serene expression, the round face turned up to Amaris’s.

  “Wellll, yes.” In the alley behind one, if that counted. It had been a Sunday afternoon, and her father had stopped on the way to the fort chapel to aid a body sprawled in drunken stupor.

  “Sometime, could I go with you?”

  Amaris thought quickly. “Of course not.” She tapped the gate’s ornamental bars. “You’re in prison here. Convicts can’t go wherever they want.” The shadow that crossed the small, upturned face made Amaris immediately feel contrite.

  “Mother says only riffraff go down to the dock.” The eyes brightened and the voice lowered to a whisper. “I could sneak away. That would really be fun, wouldn’t it? Can you come tomorrow?”

  Amaris nodded at the gate. “How would you get out?”

  “I don’t know.” The crestfallen countenance became animated again. “Could you help me?”

  Something in the girl’s appeal struck a chord in Amaris. “I’ll think about it.” Feeling very grown-up and omnipotent, she almost swaggered away from the gate.

  A voice behind her brought her up short. “Don’t you go and get that child into trouble, Miss Priss.” Amaris spun around to see Pulykara, toting the burlap bag of the Livingston’s old clothes. The knotty little woman would scare a sailor, but to Amaris’s way of thinking, Pulykara was a spritely old fairy left over from the Dream Time.

  Dream Time was that time when the country being called Australia, the southern land, was a vast, featureless place. It was inhabited by giant spirit creatures that made epic journeys across the land, creating mountains, rivers, rocks, animals, and plants.

  Pulykara told of Marrawuti, the sea eagle, who snatches away the spirit when a person dies; about Warramurungundjui, a female who came out of the sea to give birth to the people; and about Dreaming sites that contain power and energy of the Dream Time.

  At least, that was how Pulykara related the legends. Amaris found her nanny’s bedtime legends far more exciting than her mother’s and father’s obligatory prayers.

  “She wants me to come see her tomorrow, Pulykara.”

  The old nanny’s dark and scarred face darkened even further, if that was possible. “Amaris, you don’t want to go mixing with them people.”

  She fell into stride with the aborigine woman, who was no taller than she. “Why not?”

  Those rheumy eyes scanned Amaris’s face with a love that was as powerful as a mother’s, then shifted away from the girl’s direct gaze. “Them people ain’t like you.”

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Celeste.”

  “Aye.”

  “And rich.”

  “Aye.”

  “I bet she never swears.”

  “Not at seven years old.”

  “I did.”

  Pulykara grunted and shifted her load to her other shoulder. “Your mama and papa, they don’t know you do, lessen you go and forget yourself.”

  “They don’t swear either.”

  “Their god will strike them with lightning.”

  Amaris’s mouth screwed up. “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re not like them either.”

  “Then who am I like?” she asked, her voice plaintive. She felt gauche and awkward, someone who belonged nowhere.

  “You’re a changeling, placed at the Wilmot household by the aborigines’ gods.”

  “Bah. I used to believe you, Pulykara, did you know that? I really did.”

  “I don’t lie. Wait and see. You’re one of the Dream Time people.”

  Such was the intensity in the eyes and voice of the woman that Amaris was half-willing to believe her. Pulykara had certainly made the statement often enough for Amaris to give it credibility.

  Not that Amaris was a silly, mindless girl. But at twelve, there was still enough of the child left, and a wise child knows anything is possible.

  “You came!”

  “Of course, I did.” Amaris strolled closer to the garden gate. “I keep my word.”

  Celeste’s light brown eyes reflected sunshine. “You’ll take me to the wharf?”

  The girl fascinated Amaris. She was everything Amaris wanted to be. Fleeting across her mind was a memory of the child’s incredibly lovely dresses made of satin, faille, and zephyr, all tossed carelessly in the burlap sack. “Won’t your mother miss you?�
�

  “No, she’s working in her office.”

  A woman with an office! “What about your nanny?”

  “She sleeps when I play in the garden.” A prankster’s naughty smile curled her tiny bowed lips. “Only we made a pact that I don’t tell my mother she takes naps. That way we both get to do what we want to. Where’s your nanny?”

  Amaris grinned. “Drinking Brazilian aguardiente.” Experimentally, she placed her foot on the gate’s bottom railing and pressed her leg between the bars. “Here, step on my knee.”

  Biting her lower lip, Celeste gathered her courage, grasped the bars, and levered herself to a standing position on Amaris’s knee. “Now what?”

  “Why, grab hold of the top railing and pull yourself up.”

  “I’m too short and not strong enough.” The little girl’s tone was not whiny but apologetic.

  Amaris thought for a moment. “All right. You can’t get out, but I can get in. We’ll work from that side of the fence.”

  Grabbing high on the railing, she easily hauled herself up, but the spiked bars caught on her long skirts. “Bugger the skirts,” she mumbled beneath her breath. Two years before, her mother had made her start wearing long skirts because not only was she as tall as any woman but also she had already started filling out.

  “You can curse?”

  “Very well, as a matter of fact.” Amaris dropped lightly to the other side and heard with a grimace the ripping sound. Looking behind her, she saw that her petticoats had snagged on a spike. With a shrug, she jerked hard, rending the cheap, coarse material even more, but at least the offending garment was loosed.

  She turned back to Celeste, who barely came to her chest. “Ready?”

  Celeste nodded enthusiastically.

  “After I kneel, you climb onto my shoulders. When I stand up, you grab hold of the railing and perch there till you get your balance.”

  Celeste’s eyes widened. “Then what do I do?”