Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1)

by Sandra Dengler

  Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1)

  Austrailian Destiny [1]

  Sandra Dengler

  Baker Books (1988)

  * * *

  Tags: Fiction, Christian, Historical, General

  Turn-of-the-century Australia holds one of the world's most magnificent settings for Book One of the new Australian series. From the jungles of the Queensland coast to the servitude of the sugar plantations to the mysterious lives of the Aborigines, here is an exciting story with all the elements you would hope for in Christian fiction.Samantha Connolly and her sisters have attempted to escape the bleak future in Ireland by emigrating to Queensland in response to an offer of indenture. Circling half the globe she discovered a world she had never anticipated or desired--yet her home was now a world away!Their master, sugar planter Cole Sloan, is embroiled in legal tangles and economic woes, trying to keep his plantation afloat. Samantha's middle sister is fortunate to find a beau in the local preacher while Samantha is drawn to Sloan. But callousness, unethical dealings, enslavement, and eventually murder sully the man--or is he a victim of his past and present circumstances?Tangeld paths weave together as the brief white occupancy of Australia crosses the lengthy past of the Aborigines. How will the Gospel find its way into their lives, and will morals be upheld even at the cost of sacrifice?

  © 1988 by Sandy Dengler

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomingon, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  eISBN 978-1-4412-6254-7

  Editorial work by Penelope Stokes

  Cover illustration by Dan Thornberg

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  With Memories and Regrets

  1. With Grief

  2. With Fear and Trembling

  3. With Malice Toward Some

  4. Victor

  5. Rotten Cane

  6. Ruin

  7. Unanswered Questions

  8. Coral Reef

  9. By Hook or Crook

  10. Just Plain Pain

  11. The Thrill of the Chase

  12. Fossicker

  13. Obsession

  14. Kanaka

  15. Butting Heads Together

  16. Desperation

  17. Up and Down the Hills

  18. Sweet Savour

  19. Exploration and Discovery

  20. Encounters With History

  21. Disaster and Tragedy

  22. The Theme of Time

  23. Crescendo

  24. Fire and Fury

  25. In Ashes

  About the Author

  Books by Sandy Dengler

  Back Cover

  With Memories and Regrets

  A splintering crack!, the rumble of whispered thunder; the ancient mango tree by the garden fell unseen in the night.

  Samantha Connolly, brave enough to circle half the globe and strong enough to make her own way once she got here, wedged herself in a corner, trembling. She covered her face and wished that her long slim fingers were fatter, that they might cover more. Twenty-eight next month, she thought, and I’m acting like a four-year-old. Honestly!

  Crashing surf, normally a quarter mile away, flung itself across the front lawn to spend itself at the very doorstep.

  Samantha pressed deeper into the corner between the treadle organ and the Regency bookcase. She was letting a mere typhoon reduce her to a gibbering idiot. She should be … uh, she should be … surely, she should be doing something! She should be taking command, as she so often did when a crisis struck. Logic ruled her life. Fear was, in certain circumstances, also logical—but this behavior certainly was not. For shame, Miss Connolly! She drew her long legs in tighter against her chest.

  The eggshell of walls between her and the storm vibrated with every gust. Then the eggshell exploded as the pandanus palm that used to sway so gracefully above the house came slashing down through the roof to thunk against the organ. With an exuberant shriek the storm, victorious, slung its cold, stinging rain through the shattered shell.

  Whatever strong reserve Samantha imagined for herself flew out through the roof into the whipping storm. Samantha Connolly was a person in control, a person to be trusted in a crisis situation. She always took care of things. Everyone knew that. But she had no control now; all the power lay in the hands and teeth of a mindless enemy; and that terrified her most of all. She was helpless, at the mercy of a merciless freak of weather.

  Margaret had a comforting God to pray to; Samantha had none. Margaret had a young man to cling to; Samantha cowered here alone. If the storm destroyed her as it was destroying the house, no one would know until tomorrow, until this fiendish fury had passed—if it ever would. Samantha’s tidy little paradise was ripping itself apart with an insane violence she could never have imagined back home.

  Home. Ireland. Distant Ireland a world away. Gentle, soggy Erin with her misty hills, her boggy glens, her slick cobbled streets and muted beauty in grays and vivid greens. Why, dear God, did you ever let me come here?

  Chapter One

  With Grief

  1905

  Once upon a time, so the storytellers claimed, when Ireland was young and her green face as yet not marred by cities, Dagda the giant built for the Celtic titans a series of magnificent palaces hidden away within great hollow hills. Their outside appearance, upon which anyone might gaze, was that of any hill—ragged, verdant, softened by mist. But deep inside, safe from mortal eyes, warriors and demi-gods made merry amid bright light and splendor.

  Once upon a time, when the century had not yet turned and the world still tasted sweet, Samantha Connolly herself had climbed to the top of just such a hill palace in the mountains north of Cork. She knew her hill was one of the titan hills because Papa had said so.

  But that was another century, another Ireland, and Samantha had been a child. She was an old maid now, already turned twenty-seven, and she no longer so readily believed whatever her father told her. Yet she still believed about Dagda’s hill palaces, for they beckoned to her too strongly for denial. Her soul yearned bitterly for the brilliant light and warm cheer hidden from her mortal eyes somewhere within the wet, rolling, gray-green wilderness of Ireland’s yesterdays.

  When Dagda built, he kept the green. Ireland looked exactly the same when he finished as it had before he began. These days Ireland’s fair face bore blemishes of gray, because mortal builders are not nearly so clever. Cork, a town made by men and practically devoid of brilliant light and warm cheer, perched like a lackluster scar on the edge of the sea.

  Samantha was somehow, inexplicably, becoming bored with her native Cork. Today she walked nearly the length of Patrick Street without noticing a single patch of true Irish green. Blackish ragged moss between the cobbles sometimes showed a bit of color. Here an unkempt wisp of grass, there some plants in a window box—everything else sprawled beneath the overcast in shades of listless gray.

  The wind shifted and gusted suddenly as she was crossing Connor Street; it dashed cold rain in her face and pushed her hood back. She grabbed the hood below her chin to snug it down close around her ears, then s
hort-cutted through the little cobbled lane behind Marquardt Street and bounded up the back stoop into the house she knew best.

  “There ye are! We were afraid ye’d miss supper.” Grandmum Connolly creaked to her feet from the settle in the inglenook and began the laborious process of moving her aged bulk out to the dining table.

  Samantha followed the little lady into the dining room, dragging her wool cape off along the way. “I be nae late, so supper must be early.”

  “‘Nuther meeting.” Grandmum’s voice rasped tight and thin. The sound and fury of this political fight over an Irish free state was accomplishing what the mere march of years could never do—it was making an old woman of her.

  Papa was home already. He had loosely arranged his broad trunk and thick limbs into his overstuffed chair, all asprawl. With the barest smile of bemusement he watched Mum hack thick, jagged slices off a leg of roast mutton. He could do the carving better himself; he was a master carpenter whose cabinets and joinery were second to none; but as he so often claimed, he never interfered in Mum’s trade and expected none of her interference in his.

  Mum bent over the table with the sort of dogged determination that had forged a couple of small North Sea islands into an empire. She spared Samantha a brief glance. “Where’s yer sisters?”

  “Margaret just happened to bump into Sean Morley—sheer coincidence, mind you, that they both chanced to be in the same street of a large town—so don’t hold yer breath waiting for her. Where Linnet might be is anyone’s guess. She’d already left the shop when I passed by there.”

  Samantha’s strapping brother filled rooms simply by entering them. The dining room filled now as Edan came striding through. “How’d it go?” He plopped down at his place and stretched out a burly arm to help Grandmum with her shawl.

  Samantha sat and scooted in her chair. “The ogre complimented me references and politely said he was considering someone else, thank ye anyway. ’Twould’ve served me quite as well to stay home.”

  “Hope ye told ’m what he can do with his stinking nanny position.”

  “No, Edan, I didn’t. Perchance I’ll have to seek employment from him some time in the future. Bridge-burning, ye know. Besides, one troublemaker in the family is already one too many. Grandmum said a meeting tonight.”

  “Griffith is making us official; organizing the cause, even giving it a name. Sinn Fein.”

  Samantha translated mentally. We ourselves. Poetic, in a way. “Five years into the twentieth century, and already ye’re trying to revolutionize it.”

  “Aye. We’re getting together tonight to discuss it, see what we’ll be doing next.” Edan reached for a slice of bread. Mum rapped his knuckles.

  “And what’s yer own part in that newspaperman’s mischief?”

  Edan grinned. “Why, Sam, in the midst of the meeting, meself shall stand up straight and proud and announce to all Ireland’s fine young men there that me three sisters be seeking husbands and ye can sign up at the back of the hall.”

  Grandmum hooted. “Ye want to help yer sisters find men? Best to tend yer own garden. Marry some lass yerself and set a grand example. Ye be only two years younger’n Samantha and men don’t become spinsters. Twenty-five’s more’n old enough to be settling down.”

  Samantha couldn’t quite decide whether to laugh or scream, so she did neither. “Ye don’t think I’ll ever marry, do ye?”

  “Ye haven’t so far. Nae even a close call.” Grandmum popped her false teeth out and rubbed with a finger at some imperfection in the upper plate.

  Samantha studied the toothless lady, decided that you can’t argue with an edentate, and buried herself in her favorite retreat, her own imagination. She thought of the nanny’s position she had just been rejected for and how she didn’t really want it anyway. She was hardly fond of children; they were, in fact, rather low on her list of tolerable necessities. She thought of the job she had heard about today, the one purchasing fresh fish for the inn down on Market Street. Come home smelling like a cod every day? At least it paid money. And she thought about the yellow paper pinned to the board by the meat market, the invitation with such bright and frightening promise.

  Margaret at twenty-three was well employed as a typist, having mastered that new-fangled and mysterious printing machine. Linnet, barely seventeen, clerked in a tobacconist’s. Edan, for all his caustic political polemic, still managed to draw a paycheck as an assistant in the Gleason law offices—prestigious, at the very least. Even Ellis, not yet fourteen, drove a wholesaler’s pony cart down on the wharf. Why could Samantha never find a good, solid, comfortable position? What was wrong with her, anyway?

  The rest of the family came straggling in and supper commenced. Papa intoned a blessing, crossed himself and picked up his fork.

  Samantha crossed herself without thinking about it, for her thoughts kept drifting, as if drawn to a nightmare so horrible as to be absolutely fascinating. She was mad to even consider it. She’d better air it and get it out of the way, though. There was a pall over this meal, an ominous discomfort you could feel, and it was no doubt all Samantha’s doing. Confession clears the air, they say.

  “Papa, I saw an interesting notice at the butcher’s today.”

  “Spare me more politics.”

  “Nae politics. Employment. A man named Cole Sloan seeks indentured domestics. Methinks I’ll apply.” There. It was out.

  “Indenture?” Edan looked up from his dinner and laughed. “Sam, nobody does that anymore.”

  Her father snorted a whirlwind through his shaggy gray moustache. “T’ America? Surely ye heard that letter Sean Galbraith got from his son in Boston. They treats the Irish like dirt in America, lass. ‘No Irish need apply’ sign in every office window.”

  “Australia.”

  That pall of discomfort had been nothing compared with this overcast of silence now.

  Margaret’s merry laughter broke the quiet. “Austerailia! Ah, sure’n that’d cure yer spinsterhood, Sam. Ye could marry one of them abba-driggidies.”

  “Or a convict.” Edan wagged his head. “Better ye let me try to find ye someone here on yer own sod.”

  “One of yer fire-breathing political buddies? Nae. Besides, Margaret’s on the verge of marrying Sean Morley, and he’s a hothead after yer own heart. I’ll let her be the one to put up with that nonsense.”

  Edan’s doleful eyes skewered her and made her feel ashamed. “Ye think nothing of honor and freedom, do ye.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. And it was almost true.

  “We get enough troubles in life without buying deliberately into more.”

  Papa’s shaggy head wagged. “Hear the lass. She talks of bobbing across the wicked sea clear to Australia, as she accuses her brother of buying trouble.”

  Samantha sputtered a bit. “Let me rephrase. If one must invite trouble, wisdom dictates that one choose manageable troubles so much as possible. ’Tis the practical, logical way of dealing with life. These political upheavals aren’t in the least controllable, nae even by the powers directing them. Too much blind emotion, too much obstinacy. They be nae subject to reason.”

  “Right.” Edan washed down the last of his potato with a hearty draft of water. “Sure, and the ocean ye can control by reason. A ship out in hundred-foot swells is subject to reason. I see. Aye, I see.” Edan pushed his chair back. “Ye ready, El?”

  Papa’s eyes squinted down and buried themselves somewhere within his bushy eyebrows and graying sideburns. “The lad stays home. Too young.”

  “He does a man’s work, Papa. And ’tis his future; he should get a glance at it, ye think?”

  “And if there be trouble … ?”

  “Nae tonight. Just talking tonight.”

  “Mmph.” Ellis jammed in half a potato, no doubt lest Edan notice that his plate wasn’t empty and steal his food. Edan did that. His parents had named their son “Edan,” a “consuming flame”—and Edan lived up to his name, consuming food like wildfire.

  P
apa flicked an eye toward Ellis, his grudging consent. “Sinn Fein; Australia; and what other delights have ye children to share, to gladden the heart of yer aging papa?”

  “Ye’ll nae find me floating round the world. I’ll stay here and work on Sean Morley. Of course”—Margaret’s eyes crackled—“I be nae so desperate as yerself, Sam.”

  “Meg, for shame.” Linnet turned her sweet, glowing, gray-green eyes to Samantha. “Ye know, Sam, I don’t think I could ever leave me home and country. Nae for someplace so … so different. So ungreen. So very unhomely. And I dinnae know how yerself can be thinking of it.”

  “The thing’s nae said and done yet. Let it lie a bit, girls, and quit yer nattering.” Papa folded his napkin, his unmistakable sign that the conversation was ended.

  Edan and Ellis trooped off to their meeting of—what did he call it? Sinn Fein—and the house seemed empty again. It was Linnet’s turn with the dishes, but somehow Samantha ended up in the kitchen. Grandmum settled back into the inglenook and took a nail file to her upper plate. All appeared normal on the surface, but the night still felt strangely out of joint, hanging dark and heavy on the spirit.

  Papa traded his emptied teacup in on his cap and jacket and off he went without a word into the murky night for a round at the pub. He didn’t have to announce where he was going—his routine was fixed and familiar, rutted and well-worn—unlike the future of his eldest daughter.

  Australia. What could she be thinking of? A world that was a world away, literally; an alien world of freaky little animals and equally freaky little black semi-humans with spears; a world deemed so desolate by the British Empire that it hosted the Crown’s ultimate penal colony. And she thought she felt some call to go there?

  Well, she had nothing here; no marriage prospects, no job at the moment, no expectations. It could be no worse there.

  But Samantha felt at home here. The sod under her, the gray sky above, the mist and rain between; they were as much a part of her as her dark brown hair. She couldn’t rip herself apart and send half off to foreign soil while the other half remained, hopelessly rooted. It’s not natural. It’s just not done.