In every camp she visited, he had been exhorting crowds, stumping for changes in the territorial government. Apparently he had become a grass-roots politician. The very thing he had railed against, she thought.
Josiah and Dick accompanied her as if they were her personal bodyguards. They were. In their company, no man made more than one off-color remark. The glare in the eyes of her protectors made the unwise man back off.
The days grew colder. Freezing drizzle sometimes made travel out of the question, and the three of them would be sequestered in a camp for a week or more. With Josiah and Dick, she would take her turn cooking, an event that invariably lured additional guests, hungry for home cooking. Soon, diggers sought her out to bind injuries and treat wounds.
Word preceded her. When her quest led her and her two male companions back to Eureka Valley and Ballarat, she had two callers. Both known to her.
The first was female—Molly Finn. The freckled, flighty Molly Finn no longer existed. A tired, wasted woman who looked more fifty than forty sat forlornly on the cot next to Amaris and talked.
“Me man up and left me within a year after I moved away from Never-Never.” She hung her head and twisted her reddened hands. “I was too ashamed to get Jimmy to take me back. So I—I became a . . . gray dove.”
Amaris said nothing.
Encouraged by Amaris’s nonjudgmental expression, she continued. “Now the men no longer want me. With the gold rush, too many pretty faces . . .”
Amaris took her shabby coat and tawdry feathered hat from her. “Why don’t you lie down? Once you’ve rested and eaten, we can better chat.”
Those chats over the following days became more open: “I felt a man in me life would be the answer,” Molly said while she was helping wash the pans and tin plates one evening. “But no man had the answer.”
Amaris passed her a plate. “The answer is in yourself.”
“Aye. I’m a little late in finding that out.”
Amaris smiled wistfully. “I’m still discovering that. My strengths grow in number each day. Yet I also feel there is a mate for me. A soul mate.”
“Ye looking for Sin, h’aint you? That what is said around the camps.”
“Aye.” The word was almost a sigh. Her gaze flickered back to Molly. “You’ve seen him?”
“No. Nor has any of my sisters serviced him, if that’s any relief for ye. Let me help. Let me be a part of ye search group. If ye remember, I can cook a mean meal.”
In astonishment, she stared at Molly. Such a yearning colored the woman’s voice. “I would welcome that. But my friends—Dick and Josiah—have their own say.”
Of course, Dick and Josiah would never turn a woman away. Dick, in particular, took it upon himself to be Molly’s protector. Absurd, when Molly could handle herself quite well in the boomtowns. Yet, wondrously, she softened and acquired an innocence in his circle of light.
Amaris’s second caller was the least expected, especially considering the weather conditions. It was an August evening so bitterly cold that trees snapping sounded like pistol fire. Dick was mumbling about it being the worst winter he had ever spent. “Up in North Dakota, being the exception. Got so cold that my horse’s breath froze in a steam from its muzzle to the ground. Swear to God, you could thump the vapor and it would shatter like crystal. Damnedest thing I ever—”
Suddenly, the tent flap was thrown back. A man stepped through. He was big enough for his presence to fill the tent. He wore a fur cap and greatcoat. His beard and mustache were white with frozen moisture. Above the red, chapped cheekbones, the chilly blue eyes burned like steam off ice. “You were looking for me?”
Uncomprehendingly, she stared at the man. Then the timbre of the voice reached her, that rich, deep Irish resonance. “Sin!” she cried and rushed to throw her arms around his neck.
He caught them and held her away from him. “Why are you looking for me?”
She met his hard stare. “Because I want to be a part of your life, to share it.”
His gaze flicked to Josiah, who understood the question in it. “You be a fool, Tremayne. Apparently, you don’t remember me. Josiah Wellesley. I did business with New South Wales Traders.”
Sin said nothing. His eyes moved to Dick and Molly. If he recognized her, he didn’t acknowledge it. Then his gaze returned to Amaris.
She started talking. Rapidly. She didn’t know how long he would listen to her. “It matters not how many women you take to ease your pain of losing Celeste. I’m still here, loving you. And I’ll eat humble pie the rest of my life, even if it means being second to a ghost in your affections.”
A vein ticked in his temple. If only she knew what he was thinking. He slung a glance at Dick, who smiled cheerfully. “Dick Cooper. I’ll kill for Amaris. She has only to order.”
Sin’s gaze settled on her upturned face. “Well, are you going to have me slain?”
She pretended to give the idea consideration. “No,” she said at last. “I want you alive. So that I can take pleasure in tormenting you the rest of your natural life. By the way, did you know you look like hell?”
He laughed. “I’ve missed you, Amaris, me own.”
It was a dance of love.
Josiah, Dick, and Molly had tactfully retreated to a neighboring tent for the night. Shed of his greatcoat, Sin took both her hands and stood facing her. “Do you know that I am at last doing something I really wanted?”
Her gaze intertwined with his. “And that is?”
“Working for a new order, a better system for people to live within.” He smiled. “Even doing what I wanted, a part of me was still empty, an aching need filling the void.”
She leaned toward him and lightly kissed his cheek. “Why?”
“Because you weren’t there.” He pulled her close, her hands still clasped in his. His head lowered, and his lips claimed hers in a butterfly-gentle kiss. His mustache softly tickled the edges of her lips in a disturbingly exciting fashion.
Against her mouth, he whispered. “From the day I set foot on Australian soil, you’ve been there, ever in me thoughts. So that you and the country are one, intermeshed in me heart.”
“Like freedom is one with commitment and responsibility?”
“Aye.” His tongue parted her lips.
Her mouth sheathed that lovely sword, and she swayed against him. A wondrous knotting feeling began in her stomach, then burst to radiate through her chest and throat and her thighs. All the while, his hand stroked her neck. Her fingers crept into his thick, raggedly cut hair.
“So,” he said, releasing her from the aching sweet kiss, “I believe a marriage is in order.”
She leaned into him and kissed his ear, taking delight in the tremble her touch elicited from him. “Do I have any say in this?”
He turned his head and gave her a worried look. “This isn’t a forever thing for you?”
She chuckled and pulled his shirt from his trousers. “You are a forever thing for me. Marriage, I’m not so certain of.” Her hands slid around his waist, her fingers taking delight in feeling the ridges his muscles made.
He smiled slyly. Tugging her plaid shirt one arm at a time from her, he began talking, as if he were undressing a child for bed. “Well, ’tis an independent lass you’ve become." He ducked his head to trace the line of her chemise with light kisses. “I see I shall have to convince you of the benefits that come with the bonds of marriage.”
She laughed outright. “Bonds is an accurate term.” Then her laughter died away as he lightly kissed her nipple through the chemise’s flimsy material. Shudder after shudder rippled through her.
Slowly, he lowered her chemise, kissing as he went. All the while holding tightly and stroking her back. “Then I shall have to convince you of the benefits that come with me loving you. Ahh, so wildly, so wantonly, Amaris!"
And that it was. Wildly, passionately manifesting what she had only dreamed and imagined all those years. Clothes shed and with a cot their bridal bower, he kissed he
r breasts with a vibrating tongue, then rained kisses all over her upper body. With deliberate, prolonged love play, his kisses descended downward past her breast toward her navel.
Whatever chill lingered with the removal of her clothes was quickly chased by the flush of heat radiating from a place low in her stomach. His fingers stroked the paths of his kisses, past her navel, along the indentation of her hip bone. Her breath sucked in.
“Do ye give, Amaris?” he asked in a passion-filled voice. “Will ye surrender your independence?”
“Aye, for an interdependence.” His body was so beautiful, features so powerfully carved, his mouth so gentle. It touched inside her thigh and she gasped.
“Interdependence? You already have that from me. Lo, all these years.” His head lowered again between her legs, and his tongue began a love play that sent pleasurable shock waves rolling through her. Her body arched, and his hands captured her hips to hold her quiescent.
Something happened then. Something she had not expected or believed in: that total letting go of self-will. In doing so she left her body in a flight of exquisite freedom. Soared. Experienced a sensation of colors and sounds and feelings so intense, so beautiful that she wanted to weep when her body ceased its spasmodic response.
She didn’t realize she was crying until Sin moved up over her and began kissing away her tears. “We’re beginning late, me luv, but we’re only just beginning,” he whispered. “Loving ye as I do, as I always have, the best is yet to come.”
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO §
The harshest of winters make for the most glorious springtimes, in life as well as nature.
Brilliant daisies dazzled the eye by laying thousand- acre carpets of gold over Dream Time and Never-Never. Workers from both stations turned out for the wedding, held outdoors on the banks of Yagga Yagga Creek.
Amaris had never looked more beautiful, more softly, eternally feminine. She wore a cream-colored gown of lace and silk with leg-of-mutton sleeves. Her hair was unbound and clasped at her nape with a large ecru sateen bow. She smiled rapturously.
Gazing down at his bride as he took his vows, Sin had never appeared more gentle, more tender. Time had tempered his features. A distinguished, handsome man had emerged from the rough-and-bitter looking convict.
After the vows were exchanged, Amaris and Sin greeted the guests and thanked them for coming. As they moved among their friends, the couple continually touched each other. During all those years when they each belonged to another, it was enough to know that the other was there in the Never-Never. To have wanted or dreamed of anything more would have been to invite disaster, to destroy all that was good and fine in themselves and others.
Now that they could turn their dreams to reality, there would never be enough time in all the years left to them to touch and love and look into each other’s eyes and read the intimate thoughts finally and fully revealed.
At one point in the evening, Amaris singled out Baluway and hugged his wiry body. “You’ve taken care of Dream Time and Never-Never well during my absences. This land once belonged to your people. So be it again. For your continued care, one half of Dream Time is yours.”
Those surrounding the newlyweds—the major and Elizabeth; Eileen and Thomas; Sykes and his new bride, the schoolmarm Mary; Josiah; Dick and Molly; old Jimmy, who had his own sweetheart, Brighton Station’s wizened widow; the workers and their family members—all stared with incredulity. Surely they hadn’t heard correctly.
She wanted to know what Sin thought of her gesture, but she knew his expression would tell her nothing. Later that evening, he did tell her, or rather he questioned her in the privacy of their bedroom. He had backed her against the door, his strong, weathered hands at either side of her head. His lips nuzzled her neck. The house was filled with sleeping guests, but sleep these two could not.
“A good portion of your life has been invested in Dream Time,” he murmured. “Giving up half of it . . . you are sure about this?”
“I’m not giving it up,” she whispered against his cheek. “I’ve become a part of it. My breath is the wind that rustles the eucalypts and wattles, my flesh is the soil that nourishes the crops, and my blood the water that assuages the animals’ thirst. You and I are the land, Sin.”
He lifted his head and looked down at her upturned face. “I know that now. Australia can never be taken from us.” His fingers played with a swath of her ebony hair. A curious smile crossed his marvelous mouth. “Our wedding night. I would like for tonight to be spent out in the Never-Never, beneath the Southern Cross.”
“Sin.” It was all she could say. What other man would appreciate and share that same love and longing for something so intangible, something that no deed or title could ever validate?
They rode out from Never-Never in the deep of night. The wind stroked their cheeks and tousled their hair. From sheer delight, they laughed. He stretched his arm across the intervening space of their two mounts to take her hand and squeeze it. “You are beautiful,” he said. “And I love you. So bloody much!”
They found their trysting place. Instinctively, intuitively, they returned to that stretch of prairie where she had watched him, arms outstretched, chase the whirlwind—and where, chagrined, he had later joined her.
With a tenderness and adoration that brought tears from the outer comers of her eyes, he removed her riding boots, jacket and skirt, then her blouse and chemise. She stripped him of his silk shirt and his tight breeches. The warm sand was their bridal sheet, the orange flowers of the wattles their bridal bouquet, the cool, yellow moonlight their protective bedcurtains. In that vast land, there were only the two of them, coming together, making love, joining in a wondrous union.
“Pulykara was wrong,” she said, lazing in his arms.
“How so, me love?” His fingers traced lazy concentric circles around her gradually hardening nipple.
“She said that the sex act was only that—like the mating of the dogs or horses.”
His laugh was low and husky. “Oh, no. What took place between us tonight was so much more. When the mind and heart and soul are involved, there is nothing in all the world to equal this.”
The night air was cooling her feverish skin, and she snuggled closer to Sin’s bare body, honed to muscle and bone by years of competing against the elements of the outback. “I remember the journey out to the Never-Never. I remember sitting beneath our wagon that first night and changing into a stuffy nightgown and thinking how glorious it would be to sleep naked on the prairie.”
“Then sleep, me Amaris.” His fingers touched her eyelid. “Sleep and let me hold you and let me love shelter you. For now and ever.”
What the Lord had taken from Amaris, He restored in the birth of hers and Sin’s babies. Twins: a daughter whom Amaris named Celeste Anne and a son Sin named Daniel for one of the great Irish leaders.
During the year since their marriage, she and had divided their time between their stations and the mining camps of Victoria. She had followed Sin and taken up his cause for a free Australia. If ever there was hope of that happening, it was symbolized in the men who had had the courage to follow their dreams of gold and glory to the Never-Never.
Once more, Sin delivered her of her babies—in a tent in the mining camp of Gresham, while Molly delivered minute-by-minute reports of her progress to Dick, Josiah, and the rest of the male populace gathered outside.
“The gold fever must be rotting me brain,” Sin said, sitting beside her and stroking her damp hair, “but I feel the mighty urge just to hold ye and cry.”
She stared lovingly up at him, cradling a squalling infant in each arm. Tears glistened in his dark eyes. Could anything ever ruin the happiness she was feeling at this precious moment?
§ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE §
In the afternoon, a crowd gathered on Bakery Hill under the Southern Cross flag, the first one to fly without the Union Jack on it. It was only October and already one of the hottest days of the year.
For
days, the diggers had been fomenting and fuming, but with no direction. This Thursday, a leader was thrust forth before them: the Irish rebel, Sin Tremayne.
The diggers went wild with cheering, but he held up his hands for quiet. “Think seriously about the consequences of what we must do. Would a thousand of you, no four thousand, volunteer to liberate any man dragged to the lockup for not having a license? Are you ready to die?”
Watching from the crowd’s perimeter, Amaris shuddered. Had she waited all these years, wandered the outback, only to lose Sin at the last, when she finally found him, when he finally loved her so completely that she often cried secret tears of joy as they made love?
A roar of “Aye!" exploded from the mass of diggers. While a sort of military organization took shape over the next few minutes, with the election of captain and divisions of men, she kept her eye focused on Sin.
A council was appointed and Sin was elected commander in chief. She wanted to fix this moment in her memory forever, every detail about him. A warm breeze ruffled his silver-winged locks. His eyes glowed with an inner fire, with that purpose for which he had hunted—and been haunted by—all of his adult life.
He was truly alive now.
With more than five hundred armed men, he knelt to take an oath. With his right hand held up, he intoned in that beautifully rich Irish resonance, “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”
Years before, she might have been jealous of Sin’s passion for Australia and the rights of its inhabitants. Now she could understand his intense nature and deep emotions, because now her own were allowed to run as deep and intensely as his.
As commander in chief, Sin was required to be away from her for days at a time. She would hear word of him exhorting the diggers up on Mount Alexander, arguing with the territorial parliament in Melbourne, or issuing ultimatums to the colonial governor, Miles Randolph.
Dream Time (historical): Book I Page 28
