Dream Time (historical): Book I

by Parris Afton Bonds

  No one but the lean-eyed ex-convict who lounged in tree-dappled shadows at the end of the drive. “Time for Cinderella to hurry home to her hearth?”

  She stiffened. “Sin?”

  “Certainly not Prince Charming.”

  “Certainly not. He’s inside courting Celeste.” She moved close, lured by her insatiable curiosity. “Are you jealous?”

  “Are you?”

  She could smell rum on his breath. “You’re drunk.”

  In the darkness, his smile gleamed white. “No. I’m drinking but not yet drunk.” He held up a brown bottle. “Rum—the real currency and social anesthetic of New South Wales.” Then, with a vicious whack he smashed the bottle against the tree trunk.

  The following instant, she winced at the sharp sensation on her cheek. Her fingers flew to her face and came away scarlet-tipped.

  “What is it?” Sin flung away the neck of the broken bottle to stride toward her.

  “I’m cut.” Surprised more than hurt, she stared at the blood.

  His fingers cupped her cheek and tilted her head toward the moonlight.

  “I’m all right.”

  “The cut needs attention. Come on.”

  He tugged her along behind him, but she soon caught up. “I can take care of myself.”

  He ignored her and strode on—toward his room, she soon discovered.

  At the threshold, she yanked her hand away. “I can’t go in there.”

  His laughter rent the deep serenity of the night. “Since when have you ever observed propriety?”

  “Sin, stop this.”

  Inside, he released her. There came the sound of flint rasping against tinder. Soft candlelight spread a glow over the room, mellowing its harsh austerity. In two strides, he crossed the room’s narrow confines and poured water from a pitcher into a chipped basin. From a peg, he removed a frayed towel to dip in the water. He turned to her. “Come here, Amaris.”

  She stared back at him. The candlelight muted his harsh features. Still, he looked every year his twenty-seven. Bitterness carved a hard line to his mouth. That mouth had possessed hers once, and recalling that kiss, she recoiled. That moment was the closest she had come in her brief span of twenty years to losing her sense of will. “No.”

  His smoky gaze held hers. “Don’t be a child. You know I won’t hurt you.”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  He canted his head. “Why not?”

  “You kissed me once.”

  “And that hurt you?”

  She paused. “You didn’t ask my permission. That’s as painful as a lash across your back—having no choice is.”

  His mouth lost the one-sided curve of its smile. His rugged visage took on what her mother called that Irish black look. “You be right,” he said at last. “Tis an apology I owe you.”

  Even as he talked, he moved toward her, like a stockman gentling a wild horse. “I know that feeling. Of having no choice. Ah, but that’s a nasty cut now.” He stopped only inches away and, without touching her otherwise, gingerly dabbed at the cut. “Of course, we fighting Irish have seen worse. Now hold still while I pluck out the glass sliver.”

  His thumb and forefinger cupped her chin and tilted her head. With someone standing so close, his face so near, it was impossible to focus properly. She closed her eyes, which made her vitally aware of his scent, his gentle touch, his warm, even breath. Then a tiny prick of pain made her twitch. Her eyes flew open. “Ohh!”

  He grinned, and she was struck by the change in his looks. The fierce countenance was gone. His eyes danced with a vibrancy that was compelling. “I think an old Irish remedy will help.” He crossed to a battered seaman’s chest and took out a jar. “Axle grease, but it will lessen the scarring.”

  With slow, patient strokes that said he had all the time in eternity, he applied the unguent. She stood motionless, savoring the pleasant feeling of being cared for—and yet feeling uneasy.

  His fingertip stopped its stroking. “I’m that terrifying.”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re trembling. And it’s not because you’re cold.”

  “You make me nervous.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t kiss you again. Unless you want me to.”

  She shrank back. “No!”

  One angled brow soared. “So, ’tis not fear you feel but loathing. Tell me, do you loathe me because I am Irish or because I have not the handsome features of your Francis Marlborough?”

  “He’s not my Francis Marlborough. He’s Celeste’s.”

  He stared steadily into her eyes. “You did not answer me. Which is it?”

  “Both,” she blurted. She was anxious to be gone yet hated her cowardice at the same time.

  That the gentle Celeste was unafraid of this man amazed her. She thought of all the barbarous men who frequented or lived in the Rocks. They were unconscionable in their treatment of women. She shuddered at the memories of how often she had seen the females—wives, mistresses, daughters even—battered by men. Like Celeste, Rose accepted these men, loving them despite their brutality.

  “Well, you are at least honest. I can rest assured me ego will not inflate me head.”

  “Are you finished ... tending my cut?”

  “Tending your cut, aye. But not finished lecturing. You are a user, Amaris. You trade on Celeste’s fondness for you so that you can ride the coattails of Sydney society. You’ll never—”

  “I do not! Tis Celeste who seeks me out!”

  “—be accepted.”

  She stepped away and faced him, hands braced on her hips. “Why not? Nan Livingston is an ex-convict. And Sydney accepted her.”

  “They accepted her money.”

  “They’ll accept me—and on my terms, Sinclair Tremayne.”

  His mouth twitched with a repressed smile that his fierce gaze belied. “I’ll be watching over your shoulder. I don’t want Celeste hurt."

  When Amaris peered into a looking glass, the scar on her cheekbone, though paling with time, was visible enough to remind her of Sin’s warning.

  Perhaps that was why she stayed away from the Livingstons over the successive months. Celeste’s time was being dominated by Francis, so the girl did not have the opportunity to miss her friend.

  In turn, Amaris now had more time to devote to a project that was bringing her a great deal of satisfaction: writing. Once she had helped Rose collect and distribute clothing and food, the rest of the afternoon was hers. In that land of male dominance, Amaris’s restless intellect drove her to champion her sex.

  One afternoon, as she sat writing at the dining table, her father joined her to begin his own writing, his Sunday sermon. “Want a cup of tea, Papa?”

  His eyes, surrounded by a netting of wrinkles, twinkled. “No, but I would like a peek at what you’re writing.”

  She picked up the stack of papers lined with her neat penmanship and held them close against her chest. “Never,” she laughed. “You would definitely not approve.”

  “Why not?”

  She stared him straight in the eye. The subject was one they never discussed. “For one, I advocate less breeding.”

  A blush suffused his face and climbed upward to the line of his receding hair.

  “See, you are shocked. But why, Papa? How can you turn a blind eye to what excessive childbearing does to the women who live in the Rocks? They are carrying a child on each hip and one in the belly and all the while the women’s bodies are succumbing to all sorts of diseases from being weakened by childbearing.”

  He opened his mouth, as if to refute her, closed it, then said, “And there is more?” His hand gestured at her manuscript. “More such scandalous subjects?”

  She smiled. “Yes. Remember Annie O’Malley? The washerwoman who left her husband?”

  “A pathetic woman. She had been fetching until she turned to the bottle.”

  “Papa, she turned to the bottle because t
he judge gave her children to her husband! Don’t you find it scandalous that a wife has no legal claim to her children? Yet a mistress’s rights as mother are secure—because the wife, unlike the mistress, is the man’s property.”

  He bowed his head, then peered up at her with a rueful smile. “’Tis a shame women aren’t barristers, because you would have made a fine one, Amaris.” That was what she loved about her father, that he accepted her as she was and did not demand she conform to his religious idea of propriety.

  “Yes, it is a shame that women aren’t barristers,” she said, her eyes alight with having made her point. “However, ’tis not a barrister I want to be. I want to be a writer. No London publisher will touch my material.”

  “London is staid and set in its ways. Why not try America? Tis as rebellious as you are.”

  “You truly think I am? Rebellious? Have I been that difficult for you?”

  He smiled at her fondly and covered her hand with his veined one. “You’ve been a blessing. Although your adventures to the wharves occasionally made Rose and me feel like Job, unsure of God’s intentions.”

  “So you know about them? I really didn’t sneak out that often. Maybe half a dozen times.”

  He squeezed her hand. “Amaris, I’m not reproving you. About you sneaking out or your writing. I don’t understand you or it, but I trust you. Do what you have to.”

  She did.

  She reworked her manuscript and sent it to a publisher in Boston. Then she put her literary efforts from her mind. Yet, she was restless. She dallied with her poetry, grew bored, and realized she wanted a diversion that wasn’t sedentary.

  She found it that fall during one of her excursions to the wharves. By now, its riffraff, as Nan Livingston termed the wharves’ denizens, knew Amaris on a familiar basis. So they weren’t surprised the afternoon she walked into one of the seedier pubs, a black-timbered and bottle-glass-windowed bastion of sailors and quay hands. She slid into one of the booths close to a window, so she could watch the cove activity.

  “A sherry, dearie?” the frowsy maidservant taunted, not unkindly.

  Amaris smoothed her skirts with ladylike motions, glanced up and said, “No, I’ll have a pint o’porter.”

  Her wide-brim hat lent her a certain privacy. Some of the customers, all male, of course, glanced at her and returned to their bawdy conversations. Others called a greeting. All politely left her alone. Had there been any drunk to bother her, he would have been summarily tossed over the edge of the quay.

  Sipping her drink, she watched as a dozen females were discharged from a lighter, a small vessel used for transferring from ship to dock all manner of freight, including convicts. More lighters were going and coming from the convict transport ship anchored in the cove. She observed the drabs put ashore with guards. They looked starved and cowed and stunned by the sudden swarming of randy male colonists. Even the pub’s clientele, accustomed to such events, emptied to watch what was in actuality a slave market.

  The men ogled the women and waited impatiently for the military officers to get first pick. Some of the women stood apathetically but others posed and flirted, tossing a shoulder, winking an eye, as they waited for the rivets to be knocked out of their irons upon the anvil.

  Those who played coy knew what the other women didn’t: that their fate depended upon being selected by a man. The alternative could be the female factory at Parramatta. There their heads were shaved and they were forced to wear spiked iron collars and work a treadmill. Usually, the women sent here were ugly, old, mad, or pregnant.

  Most of these girls and young women, Amaris knew, had not been convicted of any crime but had been swept off the streets of London and Dublin.

  Then they were taken from workhouses and slums and orphanages for one reason—to satisfy the sexually starved male colonists of Australia. Many of these women would be forced to seek prostitution when a soldier or settler tired of them or threw them out.

  The scene that unfolded several times a year on the wharves was a bizarre one. The women lined up in their coarse flannel dresses, some scowling and others primping hopefully. The bachelors, often elderly and tongue-tied and from the back country, made their way along the line. Once a woman was selected, that was the conclusion to the colonial mating ritual.

  One man in particular stopped to watch the spectacle—and Amaris watched him. He was of medium height, dressed in the latest fashion of tight pantaloons, blue riding coat, and Wellington boots. His presence commanded attention. Yet with all attention centered on the poor females huddled on the quay, he stood unnoticed. Except by Amaris.

  Finishing the last of her pint o’porter, she gathered her pad and pencils and slipped out the shanty door to join the aristocrat. “Planning on buying yourself a woman?”

  Francis Marlborough’s head jerked around, and at the sight of her he grinned. “If I were, I would select a better market. I’m told the quays of Calais offer the most beautiful women in the world.”

  “But, of course, you’ve never had that opportunity to establish the rumor as fact.”

  He held up his palms. “I surrender. I’m guilty of lusting in my heart after the female sex.” Under finely drawn brows, his brown eyes twinkled. “Now, let’s turn the tables and let me question you. Just what are you doing down in the most unsavory part of Sydney?*

  “I don’t recall you told me what you were doing down here?”

  He inclined his head in that way that made him seem most attentive. “Shall we both agree to table this issue and move on to something more pleasant?”

  His mischievous grin brought a slight smile to her own lips. She understood at once why the females were attracted to him. “Aha, then you are guilty of soliciting a woman!”

  “My dear girl, I am guilty of soliciting for a woman. Mrs. Livingston.”

  “What?”

  “Now I have your complete attention. Before, on the times our paths have crossed, you appeared somewhat disinterested in the affairs at hand.”

  She wanted to be away from the sorry spectacle of the female convicts and began walking in the opposite direction. Francis Marlborough fell into step with her. “You are not to be let off that easily,” she told him. “Explain your remark about Nan Livingston.”

  He tapped his cane on each successive wharf piling. “Merely that the woman has suggested we might find a partnership profitable. With my connections, I could set up an import/export trade with London.”

  Nan Livingston, Amaris knew, had long considered the mother country as a potential source of revenue that she intended to one day tap. Francis Marlborough could prove useful but certainly not a necessity. “And what is in it for you?"

  He glanced around at her with a stunned expression. “Don’t you play the harp or something?”

  She caught at her shepherdess hat as the sea wind bandied its ribbons. “No, I try to think for the most part.”

  He laughed. “Well, my dear, you should know that most men find women who try to think an annoyance.”

  “Does that include women like Nan Livingston?” she prodded.

  “I’ve confessed my reason for being at the Rocks. Now what is yours?”

  She nodded at the pad and pencil she carried. “Observation.”

  “Yes, I have noticed you tend to observe more than participate. What are you observing? Those woebegone women back there?”

  “Yes.”

  She kept walking, her gaze on the sea gulls prancing along the dock and looking for edibles, while she analyzed Francis’s statement: she had become an observer.

  Somehow, over the past five years, she had stepped back from Celeste and watched the younger girl emerge from her parents’ protective cocoon to become an inquisitive partaker in life’s experiences. At the moment, the girl was enjoying the pleasure of being courted.

  For her part, Amaris would have found the proprieties of courtship tedious and without spontaneity. But then, since she had never been courted, she had little on which to base her o
pinion, other than observation.

  Which was exactly her problem, as Francis had unwittingly pointed out.

  “You are a deucedly odd young woman,” he said, peering at her through long black lashes that any maiden would have envied.

  They had begun climbing the cobbled road leading upward and out of the Rocks. “Why?” she teased. “Because I think?”

  “It’s what you think. Miss Livingston adores you. She tells me you are the daughter of missionaries, that you want to be a writer.”

  “I am a writer.”

  “I envy that—that you know what you are.”

  His expression was wistful, and without the cocky attitude, she decided she liked him even better. “You have all that a person could want. Good birth, breeding, financial resources, appearances.”

  “Legacies of my predecessors. I want to make my own mark on the world.”

  “So that’s why you came to Australia?”

  “Here I can do it. Everything, everyone, is starting afresh.” His eyes were alight with enthusiasm. His words were charged with excitement. “The increase of commerce between Australia and the rest of the world has resulted in the Sydney merchants’ need of protection. With the income I have accumulated from several rental properties and farms, I would like to create an insurance company that one day would rival Lloyds.”

  Gazing at him, she wondered at the sudden attraction she felt for Francis Marlborough. In the next instant, she wondered why she would ever want to suffer the pangs of love, when she owed no one her time or thoughts. She laughed aloud, and Francis stared at her as if she were even odder than he had imagined.

  Francis Marlborough wasn’t the only one who found Amaris Wilmot odd. Those who had heard of the young woman who distributed clothes and food along the Rocks’s seedy streets attributed her unconventional behavior to her aborigine nanny. Maybe, after all, she was a changeling, as the stories ran.

  When Amaris Wilmot sold her first book that following year, the news elicited only mild surprise.