She had to stop and draw in a deep, ragged breath before she was able to continue. "I'd heard they would just leave a woman's children on the docks if she were away from her own parish so that the poorhouse wouldn't take them. But I never really believed it until
I
saw them tear that woman from her children and drag her, screaming, on board."
Bryony rested her hand on his chest, absently tracing a pattern along the hollows between his muscles. "Those children were still standing on that dock, holding each
other and staring after us, when we sailed. I'll never forget the sight of them. Their mother of course was out of her mind. They kept her tied down below for days. When they finally let her up on deck, she ran right at the railing and jumped overboard."
Hayden stroked her hair lightly with his hand, wishing he didn't have to hear this, but knowing she needed to tell it, had needed to tell it for months. "I was on deck at the time." Bryony swallowed hard. "I'll never forget her face. When she went over the side, it was twisted with the most unbearable agony. They threw a lifeline to her, but she just ignored it. And then... and then she smiled. She was still smiling when her skirts dragged her under. I remember thinking in that moment how much, how very much I envied her. I was missing Madeline so badly, I didn't see how I could go on living with the pain I was feeling. I remember pressing my hands against my stomach, willing Philip to kick me, willing him to remind me that he still lived within me and that I had to go on living for his sake, if not for my own."
Hayden gathered her in his arms and hauled her up so that she lay full along the length of him. Hugging her close, he ran his hands up and down the swell of her hip, the curve of her waist, and marveled again at the strength and endurance of this woman he held in his arms.
When he'd first seen her on that wet, miserable morning in Parramatta, she had just lost what she considered her last reason for living, but she'd gone on living anyway. She'd suffered pain and degradation and humiliation, yet she'd borne it all and still found the strength to stand up to him when she felt she needed to. Somehow she had managed to build a new life for herself, here.
And in the process she'd also built a new life for him, and for Simon, too.
He wished he could tell her what he thought of her. How much he admired and respected her, how terribly
much he'd come to need her in his life. But he knew he'd never find the right words. So he rolled her over, pinning her beneath his hardness. And told her with his body.
Simon was ten months old when he took his first steps.
He'd been pulling himself up to a stand for weeks, getting a little steadier on his feet each time. And then one hot, late summer's evening when they were sitting out on the veranda, hoping for a faint breeze from the river, he finally made up his mind he was going to walk.
Bryony was sewing at the time. She had her head bent, cursing beneath her breath as she attempted to unravel a snarled thread. Hayden said softly, "Bryony."
She looked up. A gentle smile curled up the edges of his lips in a way that made her heart fill with her love for him. He nodded quietly toward Simon.
She turned her head to look at his son. Simon sat on the low step of the veranda. He was rocking back and forth, grinning up at both of them and making excited little noises in his throat, as if to say,
look at me.
Then he pushed himself up onto his little feet, and walked.
He took four, stiff-legged, tottering steps before tumbling backward onto his well-padded backside. By that time Bryony and Hayden were both there. Hayden lifted him up, high above his head, laughing, while Bryony clasped her hands together and said, "Oh, I wish Laura could have been here to see him!"
Hayden slowly lowered the baby, and the laughter died in his face.
He had never discussed Laura with her, never even mentioned his wife's name in her presence. At first, Laura's death had been so recent she'd assumed it was simply too painful for him to talk about. But lately she'd begun to suspect that his thoughts of Laura were now shadowed with guilt because of what he and Bryony did together every night in that big, carved bed of his.
"I-I'm sorry," she stammered. "I don't know why
I said it, except that it was such a beautiful moment, and... and I couldn't help thinking how sad it was that Laura... that his mother missed it."
Laura.
Her name seemed to hang in the air between them, driving them apart. He didn't say anything. He just handed her Laura's son and walked off into the gathering dusk.
The moon was high and full, throwing a band of silver light across the shadowed floor. Bryony slipped from the bed and padded softly over to the open French doors.
He stood with one shoulder braced against a veranda post, his back to her, his eyes on the distant hillside. She saw the end of his cheroot glow fiery red as he inhaled, then brought the cigar down to dangle half forgotten by his thigh.
She hesitated just inside the door, her love for him an ache in her heart. Had he been her husband, she would have gone to him. But he wasn't her husband, he was her master. And although she was his mistress, she was also his servant. Their relationship was confused, indistinct. In bed they were lovers—profoundly, almost uncannily in tune with each other's needs and desires. But outside of bed she was sometimes so terribly unsure of where she stood with him.
She must have made some small sound because his head swung slowly around. He exhaled a long stream of smoke and regarded her through narrowed eyes. "You should be asleep."
She shook her head. "I can't sleep when you're not in bed."
He turned to stare up the hill again.
"Do you miss her terribly?"
He stiffened, but she went to him anyway. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his hard, broad back. "I found a painting of her, you know, among her things. She was very beautiful."
He lifted his cheroot and inhaled deeply. She thought
he wasn't going to answer her. Then he said, "I never should have brought her here. She didn't belong here. And she hated it so much."
"I think she was afraid of it," said Bryony, remembering those paintings of brooding mountains and haunting, drooping gums. "But surely she didn't
hate
it."
"She hated it. She hated it for what it was. For the mud and the flies and the heat. But she hated it even more for what it wasn't. It wasn't England." He took another drag on his cigar, one corner of his lips twisting up into a sad travesty of a smile. "It was the simple things she missed the most. The sight of brick chimneys, rising above parks full of oaks and chestnuts. The sound of church bells, ringing out the changes on a crisp Sunday morning. She always talked about how empty and quiet it was here. Everything was too new, too wild, too
different."
"And yet she enjoyed India, didn't she?"
He shrugged. "India was... oh, full of pageantry and well-trained servants and a constant whirl of social activities attended by the kind of people she'd known all of her life."
Bryony remembered Laura's pictures. Paintings of officers in smart uniforms, ladies in fashionable dresses. Lawn parties. Picnics. And dark-skinned, obsequious servants.
"But New South Wales..." He paused. "New South Wales is raw, and so are the people. Even in Sydney. Most of the officers here could never have made it into a better regiment, and very few of them bring wives out. Most of them make do with convict mistresses. And they don't take them into society."
Convict mistresses. Women like her, Bryony thought, feeling the heat of shame stain her cheeks. Women who might share a man's bed, but could never aspire to share his table... at least not in the company of ladies such as Laura St. John.
"It wasn't as if she complained," he said, putting out his cigar. "She simply grew silent, nervous. Everything
was too much for her; the weather, the lack of supplies, the servants who weren't really servants at all but thieves who didn't know how to wash clothes or plant a garden or cook a decent dinner. And she didn't have a clue how to teach them. Sometimes I'd come home and find her sitting in her room, quietly weeping with despair." He pivoted in Bryony's arms so that he could look down on her. "She wasn't like you, you see. She gave way to despair."
"I despair," said Bryony quietly.
"Yes. But you don't give way to it."
She stared over his shoulder at the top of the hill, trying to reconcile his words with the image she'd built up in her mind. She'd always thought of Laura St. John as having come to this alien land willingly. And yet how much say had Laura really had in her husband's decision to settle here? In her own way she had been as much a prisoner of New South Wales as Bryony. Thinking always of home, missing the places and people she'd left behind. And finally dying here.
"She didn't give way to it, Hayden. She just... died."
He turned away from her, and she heard him expel his breath in a long sigh. "She didn't just die, Bryony. I killed her. I spilled my seed inside her, even though I knew she never really enjoyed it, even though she'd already miscarried one child, even though I knew she was afraid of having another. I stayed away from her as much as I could, but..." He flung back his head and squeezed his eyes shut. "Oh God, Bryony... In my own way, I killed her, as surely as you killed Oliver."
"No," she whispered, her voice as hoarse and agonized as his.
"Yes. If I hadn't married her, she'd still be alive and happy in England."
"You can't know that, Hayden. Besides, she chose to marry you. She chose to leave England with you."
She went to him again, and he drew her close against his chest and buried his face in her hair. "She begged me
to take her home. We hadn't been here six months when she was desperate to go back to England. But I asked her to give it another year. I hoped that in another year everything wouldn't seem so strange to her. Jindabyne would be more established. I planned to add on to the house, make it something more like what she was accustomed to. But by the end of the year she was dead."
"Would you have gone back to England at the end of that year, if she had still wanted to?"
"Yes. But I'd have hated it." He snagged his fingers in her hair and tipped her head back so he could look into her face. A breeze kicked up, scuttling the dry leaves on the veranda and bringing with it the smell of gum trees and kangaroo grass and wide-open spaces. The smell of Australia.
A light she could only have described as visionary appeared in his eyes, shining through all the pain and the guilt. "This is where I belong," he said quietly. "I never really felt as if I belonged in England. Maybe it was because I wasn't born there, because when my parents sent me away to school there, I didn't want to go. I grew up dreaming about the day I'd leave it again. At first I thought I'd go back to the West Indies, or maybe Canada, but the more I learned about New South Wales..."
He ran his hands up and down her back. "There's something exciting, something wonderful being built here, Bryony, even if the colony hasn't gotten off to the best of starts. I want to be a part of it. I wanted to be here to help make it as good as it can be." The light in his eyes dimmed suddenly. "But not at the cost of Laura's life."
She laid the palms of her hands against his cheeks. "What do you think? That because you were able to stay here when Laura died, that her death was somehow your fault?" His fist tightened in her hair so hard it almost hurt, but she went on. "She must have wanted children, too, Hayden. She must have wanted Simon, even if she was afraid of what she had to go through to have him. I wanted Philip, but I was so terribly afraid of having him.
"A week before I was brought to bed with him, another woman on the ship had a child, only she didn't make it." Bryony stopped. She would never forget the deep and hollow plunge of that woman's dead body hitting the water. "I was so afraid. And I felt so terribly alone."
He drew her head against his chest, and the movement of his fingers in her hair became gentler, more of a caress. "Sometimes I think we men are such a selfish, uncaring lot, I wonder why you women put up with us." His hands trailed slowly down her neck. "We take our pleasures of your bodies, and we take joy and pride in the children you present us with, yet how little thought most of us give to the pain and danger you must suffer for it all."
His hand slid down between her breasts to rest on her stomach. "I could have planted my child in your belly already," he said, his breath soft and warm against her ear. "Does that thought frighten you?"
Bryony laid her hand over his, pressing it to her. "No." And it was only partially a lie. To have another child, Hayden's child... Just the thought of it was enough to send a ripple of desire through her body.
She was fairly certain his child was there already. She thought that maybe now was the time to tell him. But his lips were warm against her neck, his hands soft and moving exquisitely, expertly to arouse her body. "God, Bryony..." he said, his voice hoarse. "I can't seem to get enough of you."
She pressed herself against the hardness of his dark, strong body. "Don't," she said, with more desperation than she'd intended as she reached up to drag his mouth down to hers. "Don't ever get enough of me."