Night in Eden (11 page)

And knew she was there.

He glanced over his shoulder to find that the tilted cart had stopped beside him. Gideon cracked his whip again, shouting at the balking bullocks. But Bryony sat still. She had her head thrown back, following the sun-sparkled ribbon of blue with her eyes, a smile curling her beautiful lips. Then, slowly, as if becoming aware of the heat of his gaze upon her, she turned her head.

They looked at each other. Her deep brown eyes took on a dusky, smoldering look. He felt the ache within him grow until, for a moment, it became something almost desperate. Her lips parted. She breathed in sharply.

And he wanted her.

He wanted to pull her off mat cart seat and lay her down in the sweet, clover-scented grass and take her, right now, beneath the wide, sun-drenched Australian sky. He wanted to smother her smiling lips with his hungry mouth. He wanted to cover her pale woman's flesh with his hard man's body. He wanted to possess
her, to make her his, to master her in every sense of the word. He wanted to hear her moan, to feel her wrap her long, naked legs around his hips and have her beg him to fill her.

And maybe, just maybe, have her fill the desperate emptiness within him.

Jindabyne's yard was crowded. McDuff s greyhounds barked and chased one another in a frenzy of excitement, weaving between the legs of lowing bullocks, sweating horses, and swearing, shouting men. But Bryony stood alone, hugging Simon to her, feeling lost and out of place.

The yard was basically a long, slightly uneven rectangle, half cobbled, half mud. Large sandstone brick barns and stables ranged along one end. She could see a string of stockyards and paddocks stretching beyond them, and a smithy and a carpenter's workshop built to one side of the largest barn. At the far end of the rectangle, opposite the stables and barn, rose the house.

Hayden St. John's house was built of the same sandstone brick as his farm buildings. A wide, stone-flagged veranda held up by trimmed posts ran around all four sides of the house, protecting it from the harsh Australian sun. The house was well built but unpretentious. The barns and stables were considerably larger.

Bryony glanced from the house to the man who had built it. He had dismounted near a stone, prisonlike building with barred windows that lay on the northern side of the yard. Beside him stood a rough-looking man with graying brown hair and a receding hairline who kept casting speculative glances in Bryony's direction.

He was big, although he wasn't as tall as the Captain, and much of his weight was beginning to run to fat. A
week's growth of whiskers shadowed his cheeks, accentuating rather than concealing the livid scar that ran down one side of his face from temple to chin.

But it was something about the way he kept looking at her that made Bryony feel ill at ease. The other men in the yard had taken one quick glance, then studiously avoided letting their eyes drift toward her again. Not this man. He looked her over as freely as if she were a filly about to come up for auction.

Turning away with burning cheeks, Bryony scanned the crowded yard. She was searching for other women among this throng of milling animals and shouting men. There were none.

"Why don't you take Simon into the house?"

Bryony whirled around. Hayden St. John had left the man with the scar and walked up behind her.

His face was so closed and hard, it frightened her. It reminded her of the way he'd looked when she'd first seen him at the Factory in Parramatta, and she knew it was this place—his home—that had changed him. No, not changed him, she realized suddenly. Reminded him. Reminded him of Laura.

"When I can spare Gideon, I'll send him up and he can help you fix something to eat."

"Fix something to eat?" she echoed in dismay.

"You do know how to cook, don't you?"

Bryony thought of all the hours Mrs. Pencarrow had spent with her when she was a child, trying to teach her how to cook. She'd paid very little attention to those patient lessons. She had a feeling she was now going to regret it.

"Well?" The tone demanded a response.

She cast an almost wild look around the yard filled with men. "You expect me to cook for all these people?"

He laughed, momentarily dispelling the harshness of his face. "No. The men live in groups of four or six in those huts there." He nodded to the row of bark-roofed, rough slab cottages on the south side of the rectangle.

"They each have their own hut keeper. You'll only be expected to cook for me."

He would have turned away, but she stopped him. "Don't you have any other female servants here?"

He glanced back at her over his shoulder. "No. I brought several out from Sydney with me at first, but after..." It seemed to Bryony that as she watched, all expression died in his face, and he took on that sculptured cold look she hated. "After Simon went to the wet nurse in Green Hills, I sent them back to the Factory."

Hayden St. John's house contained only five rooms, but they were large rooms, well proportioned and exquisitely decorated. Balancing Simon on her hip, Bryony wandered through the dining room and parlor, noting the silk-covered settees and lace curtains, the long mahogany table and massive, glass-fronted cabinets filled with heirloom china and crystal and silver.

On the opposite side of the hall stood two bedrooms, separated by a large dressing room. Shifting Simon's sleepy weight to her shoulder, Bryony paused to peek through the open door of the first bedroom.

This was a masculine room, the furniture heavy and dark, and much of it Oriental in origin. Two very good watercolors hung on the wall above the desk. One showed Port Jackson, all its heart-stopping beauty skillfully captured with sure lines and gentle nuances of color, while the other was of Jindabyne itself, set high on the side of its hill. Subtle traces of tobacco and leather
scented the air, stamping the room as Hayden's. And Bryony knew, instinctively, that Laura St. John had never shared this space with her husband.

A wide, polished floorboard squeaked as Bryony wandered farther down the hall, past the darkened dressing room, to the final door, the door to Laura St. John's bedroom. A strange tumult of feelings confused her. She had been curious about the rest of the house, but
this
room— this room fascinated her. It was as if she were in some way becoming obsessed with Hayden St. John's dead wife. As if she were driven by a need to understand her, almost to get to know her. As if she needed to apologize to Laura.

But that was ridiculous, she told herself. What would she need to apologize to Laura for? For taking care of the woman's baby son? For letting herself care for Simon, in the hope that it might in some small way ease the permanent ache left within her by the loss of her own two children?

Pushing the thought aside, Bryony stood in the open doorway of Laura's room, holding Laura's sleepy, tousle-haired baby in her arms, and breathed in the faint, musty smell of rose water, which was all that was left of the essence of Laura St. John. Here again was the same, familiar English mahogany and rosewood furniture that Bryony had seen in the dining room and parlor across the hall. No watercolors of Australia hung on Laura St. John's walls. Instead Laura had surrounded herself with pictures of half-timbered, thatched English cottages draped in a riot of roses and honeysuckle, and quaint country churches captured on rainy mornings, then-stones glistening with the wet.

There were pictures of India here, too, and Bryony moved closer to study them in the dim light. She saw gallant English officers, their wives dressed in filmy, high-waisted white muslins, sitting in delicate cane chairs on a carefully manicured lawn, all laughing together and being waited upon by dark-skinned servants. In another
frame a young officer perched atop the gaily-colored trappings of an elephant and laughed down at the artist.

Sucking in a deep breath, Bryony looked closer at the officer's handsome, laughing face. It was Hayden St. John. Younger, more carefree, perhaps, but unmistakably him. As comprehension dawned, she stared down at the signature on the painting.

Laura St. John.

Bryony hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath until she let it out in a long sigh. She glanced around the room at the carefully hung rows of pictures, seeing them with new eyes. In an age when all young ladies were taught to paint as a matter of course, Laura St. John had been an artist of incredible talent. All these watercolors—and the ones in Hayden St. John's room as well, Bryony now realized—were her work. Hayden had kept and framed the pictures she had done of Australia, but Laura...

Laura had covered the walls of her room with pictures of the world she had loved. And left behind.

As if feeling Bryony had neglected him too long, Simon let out a little grunt. She looked down and saw he had his face schooled in an intense look of concentration that could mean only one thing.

Bryony wrinkled her nose and half laughed, half groaned. "Did you have to do that
now,
Simon?" She walked over to the set of French doors that overlooked the yard, pulled open the curtains, and threw back the shutters.

The men were still at the other end of the quadrangle, unloading the supplies from the wagons and carrying them into the stone building that Bryony now realized must be Hayden St. John's version of the government store in Sydney. Flour, salt, tea, tobacco, kegs of nails, even stacks of work clothes were being taken inside. And when she remembered that his men were all felons, and most of them thieves at that, she supposed it made sense
to build the place like a prison. Only in this case, the intention was to keep the criminals out instead of in.

She scanned the milling men for Gideon, but he was nowhere to be seen. She lingered at the window, torn. Simon needed to be changed, but his trunk was still on the tilted cart, and she felt oddly loath to venture back out into the yard, locate Gideon among all those rough, strange men, and ask him to haul Simon's things up to the house for her.

She glanced around the bedroom. Laura's room did not appear to have been touched since her death. Even the canopy bed with its elegant pink silk hangings had been stripped and never remade. Surely during the long months of her pregnancy, Laura had prepared clothes and stacked them away in one of these drawers, so they'd be ready for the day her child was born? There might still be some here.

Folding Simon's blanket into a kind of a pad that she tucked beneath his dirty rump, Bryony laid him on the thick, flower-strewn rug beside the bed and carefully eased open the top drawer of the tall mahogany bureau.

It was filled with underclothes of the finest batiste and lawn, trimmed with satin ribbons and—

"What are you doing?"

Bryony jumped and whirled around, an embarrassed flush staining her cheeks. Hayden St. John stood in the doorway. His face was set in cold, angry lines, but it didn't prevent her from seeing the pain there. It was as if she had stolen a forbidden glimpse of his private hell.

"I—I'm sorry. Simon needed to be changed, and I didn't have his trunk. I thought some of his things might be in here, since..."

"There is nothing of his here." She expected him to walk over, slam the drawer shut, and order her from the room. Instead he turned on his heel and walked out onto the veranda, where she heard him send someone running for Gideon, with instructions to bring the baby's trunk and cradle up to the house.

He appeared again in the doorway, his broad-brimmed hat pulled so low over his eyes, she couldn't see his face. "This will be Simon's room now." His voice was utterly expressionless, but Bryony knew what it must have cost him to say that. "Until he's older, you will share it with him. Gideon can show you where the bedding is kept. I'll have him bring up a trunk in the morning for you to pack away my... the things Simon won't be needing."

He turned around and left her standing there, holding his son, in his dead wife's bedroom.

Between the stone store and the house lay a brick building with a slab lean-to attached. It turned out to be the kitchen.

Bryony stood in its darkened doorway, her nostrils filling with stale wood smoke and the smell of damp clay from the packed earth floor. Shelves took up most of one wall above a crooked cupboard, and a rough bench ran across the opposite wall. A crude table stood in the middle of the room, while most of the rear of the building was taken up by the primitive, open fireplace where Bryony was expected to prepare St. John's meals.

She glanced back at Gideon. "Where's the oven?"

'There." He pointed to a Dutch oven sitting on the shelf.

"No, I mean the
real
oven."

Gideon frowned. "Well, there used to be one out the back, but it ain't been used much lately." He led her around the side of the hut to a weed-grown tumble of bricks. "Looks as if it needs to be rebuilt."

"Outside?" she said, aghast.

"Aye. Sure then, you wouldn't want it inside, not as hot as it gets around here in the summer. On really hot days, we build a fire and roast the meat out here, too."

"And if you want to bake bread when it's raining?" It had been enough of a shock to discover that the kitchen was located in a building separate from the house. But an outside oven?

Gideon shrugged. "Like I said, 'tes not much used." He led the way back into the kitchen.

Hayden St. John had sent Gideon to help Bryony fix dinner. But it was Gideon who built up the fire on the hearth, Gideon who put the salt pork on to fry, Gideon who mixed up the damper and set it to bake in the Dutch oven.

"What kind of vegetables are available?" Bryony asked, standing at his side, watching, and trying desperately to remember what he was doing and how.

Gideon looked up, puzzled. "Vegetables?"

She laughed. "Surely you don't eat just meat and damper?"

"Aye. That we do."

She thought it was a joke... until she saw the serious expression on his freckled, boyish face. She stopped laughing and turned toward the door. "Tell me where the dairy is, and I'll go get some butter and some milk for the tea."

"Oh, we don't have a dairy," he said, flipping the meat.

Bryony paused, her hand resting on the doorjamb, and stared back at him. "No dairy? But I saw lots of cows when we drove up."

"Aye, there's lots of cows. But no dairy." He thought about it a moment. "We did used to have a goat and her kid. One of the girls from the Factory would milk her for Mrs. St. John's tea."

"Goat's milk? In
tea?"

"Aye. Mrs. St. John didn't care too much for it, either," said Gideon, checking his damper. "But then one day the goats up and disappeared. The Cap'n always figured some of the men must have taken and ate 'em, but nothin' was ever proved."

Bryony came back into the kitchen and sank down upon the bench, conscious of an absurd desire to cry. After all she'd been through, what did it matter if there were no vegetables and no milk for tea—or butter for bread, or
even any real bread, for that matter? So what if the kitchen was unbelievably primitive and she had only the vaguest idea of how to go about preparing meals on a stove, let alone over an open fire? She glanced out the open door, where the golden light of evening drenched the yard and its surrounding buildings. She had survived six months expecting to be hanged and another six months of hell battened down in a stinking hull awash with bilge water, urine, vomit, and worse. She could surely survive this.

While Gideon finished fixing dinner, Bryony went to set the mahogany table in the dining room. She found a linen cloth in the bottom drawer of the giant cabinet, then laid out Laura's silver and Laura's china and Laura's crystal.

She stepped back to admire the effect. Laura St. John had set a beautiful table. But it was now a table set for one, and as the evening sun slanted through the open French windows, spilling its golden light across the white cloth and making the facets of the crystal sparkle like diamonds, Bryony thought it looked a bit sad and lonely.

Bryony ate her own dinner in the kitchen, perched tailor fashion on the bench, with Simon nestled in an old packing crate lined with a blanket on the floor beside her.

After dinner Gideon hauled out two half barrels, which he set up on a table on the veranda. Then he showed her the spring near the creek behind the house from which they drew water to drink, and the places where the creek
was deep and it was easiest to fill buckets for the washing. The water needed to be heated in big cauldrons over the fire. Only then could the dishes be washed.

She was standing over one of the steaming barrels when she heard the scrape of boot heels on stone and looked up to see St. John.

"You can come up and help Bryony with breakfast and dinner again tomorrow," he told Gideon. "But after that she's on her own. You'll be working with the stock from now on."

An errant lock of hair fell in front of Bryony's eyes. She lifted her wet hands from the dishwater and tried to swipe it back with her dry forearm, but it only fell forward again. St. John propped one shoulder against the nearest timber veranda post, crossed his long legs at the ankles, and stood watching them. The dark, forbidding look she'd seen on his face this afternoon was still there.

He made her nervous, standing there like that. She wished he would go away. Then she realized he wasn't looking at her anymore. He was staring down at the unlit cheroot he kept drawing between his fingers, over and over again.

Perhaps it was because she'd gone through so much pain lately herself that she recognized the pain she saw in him, and it suddenly clutched oddly at her heart. She felt a ridiculous urge to go to him and soothe the frown from his brow.

Instead she picked up the skillet and plunged it into the dishwater.

"I've already been learnin' about growin' wheat and oats and corn out here," Gideon told her cheerfully. Taking the pan after she rinsed it, he dried it with a linen tea towel. "But the Cap'n, he says the future of this colony lies in sheep, so I want to learn about 'em for when I get my own land grant."

Her hands thrust back in the dishwater, Bryony twisted
around to stare at the little Irishman. "Oh, surely—surely you're not thinking of
staying
here?"

"Why not?" It was Hayden St. John who asked the question. She glanced up into those blue eyes. "In Ireland, he isn't allowed to own a horse worth more than five pounds. But here, once his sentence has expired, he can apply for a grant of forty acres. And if he works hard and makes a go of that, then he can keep right on expanding. One day soon, a lot of people like him are going to pay money to come out here. Why would he think of going back?"

"But Mary," she gasped. "And the boys..."

"Sure I'm plannin' to get them out here real soon," said Gideon, drying the last of the pots. "I been savin' all my money..." He picked up the pan of dirty dishwater and flung it over the side of the veranda. Watching him, it didn't occur to Bryony to wonder until later how an assigned servant could even get his hands on money, let alone save it. "And the Cap'n says we can have one of the huts for ourselves."

Bryony slowly dried her hands on the tea towel, but she couldn't stop her gaze from drifting back to the man who now stood with his back to the post, his hips thrown forward in that pose she found so intimidating.

"Is it so inconceivable to you that anyone would stay here?" he asked.

She thought of the boat ride up the Parramatta River to the Factory, when the boatmen and guards had whiled away the boredom of the long trip by systematically raping the women prisoners until the men were so sated they could barely stand.

She met his gaze squarely. "If they've been transported here, then yes, I do find it inconceivable. How could they ever think of this place as anything other than a prison? And the scene of their ultimate degradation and subjugation?"

He grunted. "Are you trying to say you weren't subjugated and degraded in the prisons of Britain?

She felt the flush steal into her cheeks, but she didn't drop her gaze from his. "Yes. But I will know nothing else here, whereas when I think of Cornwall, I don't remember the prison. I think of the gulls wheeling free over Cadgwith Cove, and..." She stopped for a moment, aware of the dangerous prickle of tears at the back of her eyes, and added more quietly, "And I think of my little girl. Not the way I last saw her, when they took her from me in prison, but laughing on the beach, with the sea foaming around her ankles and—"

But at that point, Bryony's voice caught in her throat, and she had to turn away, toward the house.

"Bryony?"

Hayden came up behind her and put one hand on her shoulder. He felt her tremble beneath his touch. "Bryony," he said again, softly, moving his hand in a comforting gesture that came perilously close to being a caress. "Tell me about your little girl."

She shook her head, sending her flame-shot hair whisking around her shoulders. "I can't. I'll cry."

"There's no shame in crying."

"Isn't there?"

"You cried for Paddy O'Neal."

"No." Beneath his fingers, he felt her back stiffen. He realized he was still touching her, and although he didn't want to, he dropped his hand. "I think I was really crying for myself."

He knew it was true, so he didn't argue. Instead he said, "How old is your little girl?"

"Three." He heard her voice break, and it was all he could do to keep from taking her in his arms and holding her close. It was an impulse as tender as it was sexual, and it disturbed him. "She's only three," Bryony said.

"By the time I get back to Cornwall—if I ever do—she'll be almost grown. She won't even remember me."

She turned around and looked up at him, and he realized how near he was to her. He gazed down into her beautiful brown eyes, as deep and enduring as the earth itself, and at her lips, as soft and dewy as rose petals at dawn. He didn't step back.

A warm evening breeze blew up from the river, flattening the shirt against his back. The sun slipped toward the mountains, the light leached fast from the sky. A curlew called once, twice, from the river gums that grew down by the creek, and she turned toward the sound.

"What is that bird?" she asked, her lips trembling slightly. "I've heard it before, at night. It makes such a mournful sound."

"It's a curlew," he said, only he wasn't looking at the trees by the creek; he was still watching her. "The Aborigines say the curlew was once a woman. She had eight beautiful children—four tall, strong sons and four nubile daughters.

"One day while she was off gathering food for their dinner, some men from a tribe with whom her people were at war came into the camp. They killed her strong sons and carried off her nubile young daughters. The woman came home to find half of her children dead, the rest gone, and in an agony of grief she threw herself on the cold cinders of the campfire and smeared herself with ashes until she was all streaked brown and white. Then she stood up and set out to search for her daughters. She wandered through the bush for days, not eating or drinking, until at last she was too weak to walk any farther and all she could do was call for them, over and over again,
kerlee, kerlee.
It was then that she was changed into a bird, so she could fly over the earth, still calling for them, until one day they say she will find them."

Bryony's chest rose on a quick intake of breath. "It's a very sad story."

His eyes lingered on the long, delicate arch of her neck. He could see her pulse beating, rapidly, at the base of her throat. He wanted to reach out his hand and rub the backs of his fingers, gently, against her smooth skin. "The Aborigines don't think it's just a story," he said.

Her lips parted, as if she were going to say something. He could see the trace of moisture left on her lower lip by her tongue. He lifted his gaze to hers and stared into her dark eyes, and felt a hungry yearning slam into him. It engulfed him, until he thought he might drown in his desire. He sucked in a steadying breath of air, and his nostrils filled with the scent of her. She smelled clean and earthy, like a newly turned field lying in the sun. He pictured laying her down in that field, peeling back her clothes to let the warmth of the sun shine on her pale, pale skin, then spreading her legs and burying himself inside her.

The image was so enticing that he almost shuddered.

And it was so damned near overwhelming that he had to turn on his heel and walk off into the night. Before he took her, right there under the sunset-streaked sky.