The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “He’s here?” Jodenny demanded.

  Another knock.

  “One moment, Maude!” Darling said, louder than before. “No, Commander. He’s not here. Not now. Remember, this was thirty years ago from my perspective. I haven’t seen either of them since. Four of us from the future settled here and have done reasonably well with our lives. But when I met Sam, I recognized his name. And, of course, yours. Chief Myell spoke highly and well of you.”

  A third knock, and then the side door opened. Maude said, “Madam, you must not be tardy.”

  Lady Darling stood up with a cross expression. “Yes, Maude. I know. The entire industry of charity in New South Wales will grind to a halt if I’m late.” To Jodenny she added, “It’s for the hospital. They have no nurses here, no comprehensive system of care. We’re trying to change that. Won’t you come back and see me tomorrow morning? We can further this discussion.”

  Still dazed from course of the conversation, Jodenny stood up. Her balance felt off, though her feet were flat on the floor. Junior, who’d been quiet for most of the morning, shifted around and poked Jodenny’s kidneys with a foot or a fist.

  “I’ll be happy to,” Jodenny said, but only got as far as the door before a question made her turn back. “Why doesn’t he want me to know?”

  Lady Darling had turned her attention to a sheaf of papers that Maude had brought in. “Hmm?”

  “Sam. Why didn’t he want me to learn this from you?”

  A pause. Lady Darling glanced back down at the papers. The church bells had stopped, but Jodenny’s ears were ringing.

  “He doesn’t want you to think about Chief Myell,” Lady Darling finally said. “His heart is large, but not large enough for all three of you.”

  Jodenny made her way back through the hotel’s corridors to the lobby and the hot, dusty street outside. She didn’t remember much of the walk back to Lower Fort Street, or even how long it took her. The city swirled around her with noise and color and sewage, the dogs and goats wandering freely, the ex-convicts and immigrants all building up and out, transforming the harsh land into civilization. She saw bloody carcasses hanging in the windows of the butcher shops, dark mottled meat covered with flies. She passed urchins sitting on doorsteps or playing in the streets, with their thin faces and crooked teeth and threadbare clothes. By the time she saw Lady Scott’s house in front of her, she had sweated through her dress, and blisters covered her heels. Lilly met her at the door, all concerned.

  “We thought you were lost, ma’am!” she said. “The Captain and Tulip, they’re out looking for you. Sarah said you were going to see the sights but that was hours and hours ago!”

  “I’m fine,” Jodenny said. Just looking at the steep staircase made her dizzy, though, so she sat on the sofa in the front parlor. The urge to lie down struck her as an extremely good idea, and the next thing she knew, Lilly was putting a cold wet cloth on her forehead and saying, “Sarah, go find the Captain.”

  “No,” Jodenny murmured. The very last person she wanted to see was Osherman. Yet the next time she opened her eyes he was there, leaning over the sofa with his fingers taking her pulse.

  “Stop it,” she sat, batting him away.

  Osherman didn’t move. “Stay still. You fainted.”

  “I did not,” she said.

  Still, she didn’t have the strength to sit up or push him away. Jodenny lay quietly for a few more minutes while Lilly fetched more cold cloths. Someone had undone the collars of her dress, which was a nice gesture. Her feet were up on a pillow and Sarah was fanning her with a large hand fan.

  “All right, enough fussing,” she finally growled. “I just walked too far, that’s all.”

  “Where did you go?” Osherman asked.

  Jodenny sat up, waving off their helping hands. “The museum. The park. Nowhere special. It was good exercise.”

  Osherman frowned. “It was too much exercise.”

  “I’ll decide what’s too much exercise,” she retorted.

  “Didn’t you take a parasol?”

  Jodenny blinked at her hands. “I must have dropped it.”

  “Dropped it,” Osherman repeated. He shook his head. “Let’s get you upstairs. You can rest more comfortably there.”

  It was true that she felt more comfortable once she’d shed the dress, and it was easy to slip off to sleep once the curtains had been drawn against the bright sun. Still, the room was hot and she missed air-conditioning with every ounce of her being. When she woke from the nap it was night, and Osherman was reading in the corner chair by the light of a lantern.

  “She lied,” Jodenny said.

  “Hmm?” Osherman put his book aside and stretched his arms in front of him. He looked tired. “Who lied?”

  Jodenny rubbed her eyes with her hand. “No one. I was dreaming.”

  “About who?”

  She didn’t answer. There was no easy way to tell him that Darling had been in her dream, and in fact no compelling reason to tell him at all. She sat up, happy to discover that her head didn’t spin.

  “You really overexerted yourself today,” Osherman said. “You do that, and you could endanger the baby.”

  Perhaps he didn’t mean to sound so condescending, but Jodenny certainly interpreted it that way. “Thanks for the medical advice, but she’s not your baby.”

  That last part slipped out before she could stop herself. Osherman blinked, surprised. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “I know she’s not,” he said. “I’m not trying to take Chief Myell’s place.”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “I know,” he insisted.

  Jodenny groped for the glass of water someone had left on the bedside table. The water tasted lukewarm but soothed her dry throat.

  “I can’t take his place,” Osherman repeated, “but I can try to repay the debt, Jodenny. He gave me my life back. The least I can do is look after his wife and child.”

  “How did he save your life?” she demanded.

  Abruptly he turned his attention to his shoes, and made to undo the laces. His fingers were long and strong, but now they were shaking.

  “He yanked me out of Providence,” Osherman replied. “If he’d left me there, I’d still be the gibbering town idiot. The one everyone was afraid of, the one who couldn’t be trusted around sharp knives or small children. The monster.”

  Jodenny put the water glass down so abruptly that it clanged against the wooden tabletop. “You were not the town idiot.”

  “For months and months I was the fool.” His voice was low and angry. “You think I didn’t know how people talked, what they said about me? Dangerous. Psychotic.”

  “They were wrong.”

  “They weren’t wrong. I was dangerous. Because of the fucking Roon. You were the only thing—the only solitary damned thing—keeping me sane. And then Chief Myell showed up. Next thing I know I’m in the infirmary on the Confident and they cured me. The miracles of modern medicine. So who do I have to thank for that?”

  “You don’t sound particularly grateful,” she observed.

  He wrenched off his left shoe and set to work savagely unlacing the other one. “Your husband. That’s who. Who, if I’d listened to the first time around, would have saved me from the damned Roon in the first place. Go through the Child Sphere, he said. Both of you did. You begged me come with you. And I was so smart, I said no. I was going to get home on my own.”

  The leather laces in his hands broke off. He threw them into the corner and pulled off his shoe, only to throw the shoe after the laces.

  Jodenny decided silence was the best option.

  Osherman gazed after the shoe bleakly. “Now I’m here. Stranded in medieval Australia. You’re pregnant and who’s going to take care of you, if I don’t? Like I should have from the beginning, on the Yangtze, and spared you all of this.”

  From out in the hall there was the sound of someone coming up the stairs. The footsteps continued past Jodenny’s roo
m to Lady Scott’s room. Jodenny listened for the snick of the bedroom door closing, unwilling to have this conversation when there might be eavesdroppers.

  Jodenny said, carefully, “I’m not your responsibility, Sam. And no matter how much you regret it, you can’t change the past.”

  “No, I can’t.” Osherman rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I can’t. Can’t change how you feel about him or about me. But I know that in our original timeline we married and had our own children, and I think it can happen here, too. If you let it. I want you to marry me, for real. Here and now. You loved me once and you could love me again.”

  The bed didn’t feel strong enough to support her. Jodenny imagined it splintering out from under her, and the floor breaking as well, and then the foundation of the continent itself.

  “He’s not dead,” she said. “I know he’s not.”

  She knew it even without Darling’s story; she knew it in her heart, and in the beat of Junior’s heart as well.

  Osherman gave her a bleak look. “How long do we have to be stranded here for you to accept that he’s not coming back?”

  Jodenny twisted her wedding ring.

  “Until my dying breath,” she said.

  Any hopes she had of returning to Lady Darling’s hotel the next day were dashed by Osherman, Lilly, Sarah, and Lady Scott, all of them determined to hover over Jodenny until she squeezed junior out in sheer exasperation.

  “I’m fine!” she told them

  None of them believed her.

  “Best that you rest in bed all day,” Lady Scott said. “Did wonders for me during my childbearing years. I added it up. I spent over three years in bed while in your condition!”

  “But I want to walk around,” Jodenny protested.

  Osherman said, “You can walk anywhere you want, as long as one of us is with you. What if you faint in the street?”

  Jodenny seethed, but she didn’t see any clever way around their helpfulness and truth be told, her back and legs did ache. But she was desperate to see Lady Darling and hear more about Myell, as well as dig for more inconsistencies.

  It was obvious, in retrospect, that Darling had been vague in some areas and downright deceptive in others. The question was why, and what secrets she was holding back.

  “I’m at least going downstairs,” Jodenny insisted. “It’s cooler down there, and I can sit by the parlor windows.”

  The breeze through the front was thin, but much better than no breeze at all. The morning paper had come in. The pages were full of announcements and classifieds, notices from ship’s captains, tales of crime or social news. Junior was kicking up a storm and breakfast was giving her heartburn. She wanted to take Lady Scott’s advice and go back to bed, but pride kept her on the sofa. Osherman was writing out notes on a desk, something for his shipping business. When he was done he called on Tulip to deliver a batch of them to the post office.

  “Can’t,” Tulip said, worrying his hat between his fingers.

  Sarah, who was dusting Admiral Scott’s portrait, offered more of an explanation. “They don’t let Aboriginals into the post office, sir.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Osherman said. He looked as if he wanted to say more but was holding himself back.

  Jodenny said, “Go take them yourself. I’ll be fine here.”

  “I don’t trust you to stay put,” he said.

  She sent him a scowl that would have made her sailors scurry for cover, if she were still a division officer.

  Hastily he said, “I’ll be back soon.”

  Jodenny did not take his absence as an opportunity to go off to Lady Darling’s hotel, but she did pen a hasty note and asked Tulip to deliver it. It took him an hour to go there and return, but at least he did it before Osherman made it back to the house.

  “The clerk said Lady Darling had to go away,” Tulip told Jodenny. “Very quick, this morning.”

  Dismayed, Jodenny asked, “Where did she go?”

  “Maybe Melbourne, he said. Wasn’t sure.”

  Melbourne was hundreds of miles away. Devastated, Jodenny slowly paced around the room. Her back hurt from Junior’s weight but sitting was proving to be just as uncomfortable these days. She needed to talk to Darling, needed to know more. About why she’d lied, for instance. Myell and Cappaletto couldn’t have come to 1855 by the blue ring. It was before Myell’s date of birth by hundreds of years, and the cone of space-time that Perry had drawn on the Confident didn’t allow for that.

  Either Perry was wrong, or Darling had come to Australia’s past by some other means.

  Maybe she’d gone not to Melbourne but back into the future.

  Jodenny’s worried thoughts were interrupted by Sarah, who’d been in the kitchen fixing supper. Now she was standing in the doorway with an unhappy frown and her hands knotted together. “I hate to bother you, ma’am . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Molly. One of my other sisters. Maybe you could help her?”

  Jodenny followed Sarah to the kitchen, where a redheaded girl was sitting on the floor with her legs drawn up and spread wide. Molly was younger than Sarah, with a strong family resemblance in the nose and jawline. Molly was also extremely pregnant, with both hands clenched around her tummy and air bellowing in and out of her lungs.

  “Stop pushing,” Lilly was ordering, from between Molly’s knees. “It’s not time!”

  “The midwife’s drunk,” Sarah explained. “She had nowhere else to go.”

  Lilly surrendered a brief glance toward Jodenny. “I don’t need any fancy help. I helped bring you into this world, Sarah-girl, and aside from dropping you on your head, look how you turned out.” Turning back to Molly she said, “Just push when I tell you to and not just because you want to.”

  Another contraction gripped Molly. Sarah clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream. “Not yet,” Lilly warned. When the spasm passed, Molly panted and gasped for air.

  “Let’s get her to your room,” Jodenny suggested.

  The airless room behind the kitchen was barely big enough for Lilly and Sarah’s single beds, but Molly was happy to be off the floor and said so. Sarah lit a lantern, then bathed her sister’s head with a cold cloth. When another contraction hit, Lilly shook her head.

  “That baby just doesn’t want to come out,” Lilly said.

  Jodenny checked with the Digital Duola. “Maybe her cervix isn’t fully dilated.”

  “Her what?” Sarah asked.

  Damn this era, and the prurients who kept women ignorant of their own body parts. Jodenny said, “If she rests on her hands and knees, that’ll take the pressure of the baby off. The swelling will go down and her opening might get wider.”

  “I’ll do anything if it’ll help,” Molly panted.

  Jodenny guided her up on her hands and knees with her head down and her butt sticking up in the air. “It’s indecent,” Lilly said, with a sniff, but she didn’t stop it. The Digital Duola instructed Jodenny on how to do a vaginal exam but she held off, afraid of spooking the girl more.

  “Now what?” Sarah asked, her voice a whisper.

  Jodenny said, “We wait. Boil some water, won’t you? We need clean cloths, too.”

  Sarah looked at Lilly, who nodded in agreement.

  They didn’t wait long. Within an hour the cervix had opened, Molly was unable to stop pushing, and the baby’s head was crowning. Jodenny let Lilly take over for that part. “You’re doing fine,” Lilly said, as the tiny head emerged facing sideways. Lilly glanced up at Jodenny, fear in her eyes. Sideways wasn’t a good position at all. The next few contractions didn’t push the baby out any further, and his skin began to turn blue.

  Jodenny forced herself to sound calm. “His shoulders are stuck.”

  “I’ll pull him out by the head,” Lilly said.

  “No, wait.” Jodenny bent low. “See if you can get your finger up there and find his arm. If you get the arm out, the rest may follow. But you need to wash your hands first. S
arah, here, hold the head up.”

  While Lilly washed up, Molly sobbed and sweated and swore in fear. Jodenny looked her straight in the eyes and addressed her like any young sailor. “Listen to me. The baby’s stuck. It happens all the time. But we’re going to get him out, okay?”

  Molly nodded.

  Five minutes later, her baby was born. Alive and kicking. Jodenny sagged back on the other bed, her hands leaving prints on her dress. She felt exhausted, and this wasn’t even her delivery. And as far as deliveries went, it hadn’t even been a bad one. A hundred different things could have gone wrong. Without medicine, equipment, or any kind of decent hospital, Molly and the child could have both died.

  “What should I call him, miss?” Molly asked. “You pick. You saved him.”

  “I couldn’t,” Jodenny said.

  “Please. For good luck.”

  “Terry,” she said. “Call him Terry.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Myell blinked his eyes open to find himself covered with a bright yellow bedspread. He bolted upright so fast the room spun out from underneath him, and the next time he woke, his daughter Lisa was peering down at him in concern.

  “That was a nasty dizzy spell, wasn’t it?” she said. “Feeling a bit better?”

  “There was someone with me,” Myell said. “Right? Someone else?”

  “Two of you,” Lisa confirmed. “Showed up here stark naked and bleeding. You don’t get that around here every day.”

  “Cappaletto?”

  “That’s him,” she said. “Quite a fellow.”

  Myell sank back into the mattress in relief.

  Lisa said, “I know who you are, and maybe you know who I am. You’ve obviously been through hell but there’s nothing wrong with you a nice stretch of bed rest wouldn’t cure. Still, I want to ask. Why did you scratch the name ‘Kay’ into your arm?”

  “I promise I’ll tell you everything later,” he said. “Where’s Cappaletto now?”

  “He’s off with the sheriff and my mother and the town council, telling them about the Roon.”