She glanced wildly to where Gideon knelt on the dock, one arm wrapped around each small son, his eyes squeezed shut in joyful thanksgiving. Over his head her pain-filled eyes met the troubled gaze of Mary Shanaghan, and held it.
"Sure then, Madeline," said Mary Shanaghan soothingly. "Didn't I say we'd all be goin' to Jindabyne together?"
"I don't want to go with her at all! Never!" wailed Madeline. Whirling about, she flung herself against Mary Shanaghan's apron.
Before Bryony could stop it, a low, keening moan escaped from her lips. Hayden pulled her back against the solid line of his body and pressed a kiss on the top of her head.
"She'll come around, Bryony," he said, his voice oddly strained. "It's going to take time, but it will happen. You must believe that."
She turned within his arms and buried her tear-streaked face against his chest. "What have I done to her? What have I done?"
They went back to Jindabyne two days later.
All the way up the coast and into the mouth of the river, Gideon Shanaghan's two boys scampered about the sloop, dodged busy seamen, and exclaimed excitedly each time they spied a stray kangaroo, or whenever a great, noisy flock of cockatoos took to the sky.
But Madeline stood quiet and aloof beside the railing, her sturdy little body stiff and still as she gazed out over the long, golden beaches and exotic, olive-green stands of eucalypti slowly slipping past. Bryony tried to talk to her about New South Wales, about the homestead on the Hawkesbury that was now their home. Madeline listened to her with wide, blank eyes, and said nothing.
It was a solemn homecoming.
Bryony stood on the veranda, watching Madeline and the two Shanaghan boys play chase around the men's huts.
It was only at moments like this, when Madeline was with the Shanaghans, that the child seemed to relax. For an all-too-brief instant, the hard, protective shell she wrapped around herself would crack, and Bryony would catch distant, tantalizing glimpses of the child Madeline once had been.
Madeline laughed as Patrick tagged her, and a fierce, howling kind of loneliness suddenly caught at Bryony, shocking her, shaming her. It was wrong, this desperate longing that sometimes came over her. She should have been content with what she had—her daughter once more beside her, a home, a husband she loved with an intensity that transcended life itself.
She sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to look back on the blackest days of her despair, when she'd been bereft of everything a human being stood to lose.
She knew how lucky she was now. But that unfilled need within her remained, desperate and frightening.
A spur rasped across the stone flagging of the veranda, and Hayden's arm came around her waist, pulling her up against the warm, hard line of his body. She clutched at his arm, holding onto him, wanting him, wanting him to want her and love her the way she loved him.
"She seems happy," he said, nodding to where Madeline stood with her arms braced against a slab hut, her face buried in the crook of her elbow as she chanted:
four,
five,
six—
"When she's not with me, yes." Bryony leaned against him with a sigh.
There was a brief pause. Then he said, "Bryony—"
"I know," she said quickly. "I know it's only been a few weeks. It's just that I..." She found she had to swallow hard before she could continue. "I'm so terribly afraid she's never going to forgive me. That I'm never going to get back what she and I had before."
Nine, ten. Ready or not, here I come.
Together they watched the children run, laughing, toward the far end of the yard. "I think maybe part of the problem is me," he said thoughtfully.
She twisted her head so she could look up at him. His brows were drawn together, his eyes dark and serious with concern for her. She suddenly felt ashamed of herself. Ashamed of that earlier rush of loneliness and fear that seemed now more like a weak indulgence in self-pity than anything else. "What do you mean?" she asked him, staring up at his lean, handsome face.
His eyes narrowed, his attention still focused on the distant children. "I think she resents me. Resents me being with you." He rubbed his hand down Bryony's hip, then back up in a lazy caress. "Has Madeline ever said anything to you about her father?"
Bryony thought about it. "No."
"Don't you find that strange?"
A cold wind, blowing up from the icy regions of the
south hit them with a blast of damp, frigid air. "She knows he's dead," Bryony said.
"Yes. But they told her you were dead, remember? You turned out to be alive. Maybe she expected to find Oliver here, too. Maybe she's angry because I'm here instead."
"But Oliver is dead. You're my husband now."
Hayden's hand slid around to come to rest against the swell of her belly. "She's not even five yet, Bryony. It's a lot to ask her to try to understand how we all fit together. You, Oliver, me, her, Simon, the baby you're carrying."
Bryony pressed both her palms against Hayden's strong, tanned hand. He brought his other arm up and hugged her against him. She felt him kiss her hair, just above her ear, and her love for him swelled within her. Not hot and urgent and desperate, the way it usually was; but gentle and comforting, warm and calming.
Warm enough to thaw the chill of loneliness in her soul. And calming enough to soothe the fear in her heart.
For a while.
July turned into August, and an unusually bitter cold settled on the Hawkesbury. Rain fell incessantly. The men cursed the clouds and worried about the crops. The women sighed and tried to dry the washing in front of fires that burned sluggishly on their hearths.
And Hayden ordered the station's bricklayer to build an indoor oven for Bryony.
It was midway through the morning, while he was in the kitchen checking on the progress of the construction, that Madeline confronted him.
"What are you building?" she asked. She came no closer than the open doorway. Her voice was hostile rather than curious, and when he turned to look at her, he saw undisguised animosity spill across her face before she shut it off, hiding behind that blank stare that so worried her mother.
The winter light was flat, the air damp and filled with
the pungent scent of wood smoke. She was wearing sturdy leather boots and a thick red wool cloak that flapped in the cold breeze. But the pinched, miserable look about her face had nothing to do with the cold. Her hair fluttered loose about her shoulders, fine silken hair the color of a gold guinea. Oliver's hair had been like that, Bryony had told him. But the child's eyes were a deep, earthy brown, and her long, graceful neck and strong jaw were all Bryony.
He felt a tug of compassion for this forlorn, lost child. Compassion, and something else. Something that owed its existence to the way he felt about her mother. He nodded to the bricklayer, and walked toward her.
"It's an oven," he said, pausing in the doorway. She retreated a few steps, out into the yard, then stood her ground. "Your mama wants a proper oven, so she can bake real bread and cakes and pies. Do you like pies?"
She didn't answer him, just stared at him with those wide, disturbing brown eyes. After a moment she jerked her chin at the brick building behind him and said, "Why is the kitchen out here, instead of in the house where it belongs?"
Hayden propped his foot up on the section of log that served as a rough stool. "Two reasons, really. First of all, it gets so hot around here in the summer, you wouldn't want anything adding to the heat in the house. And then we need to worry about things catching fire. It's much safer to keep the kitchen away from the main house."
She turned half away from him, and he thought she was going to leave without saying anything more. Then she spun back around and pinned him with a fierce frown. "Mama told me she has your baby in her tummy."
He was so surprised his foot slipped off the stool. He straightened up and returned her intense regard. "Yes, she does."
"My mama's other baby had the same papa I did. His name was Philip."
"That's right." Hayden was beginning to feel dangerously out of his depth. He glanced toward the house. Bryony was nowhere in sight. "He died," said Madeline.
Hayden wasn't sure if she was referring to the baby, or her father. "Yes, he did," he answered noncommittally. "I'm sorry."
"I remember my papa. He used to read me stories and take me with him when he went down to the village."
"He sounds like a nice father." It didn't square with what Bryony had told him about Oliver Wentworth, but perhaps it was better that Madeline remember him as she wished he'd been, rather than as he was.
There was a sudden explosion of fury and movement as Madeline hurled herself against him. She caught him off guard, her tight little fists flailing against the hard ridges of his stomach as she screamed at him over and over again, "I don't want you for my papa. I want my own papa back."
He tried to put his arms around her thin, trembling shoulders, to comfort her. She reared back, unwilling to let him touch her.
She was breathing hard and fast. The cold wind caught her red cloak and billowed it out behind her. She snatched at it, hugged it close. They stared at each other for a frozen moment. Then she sucked in a deep breath and said, "I wish you were dead instead." Her voice ended on a strangled sob. She whirled around, heading for the house.
The French doors from the dining room opened, and Bryony stepped out onto the veranda, holding Simon by the hand. At the sight of her mother, Madeline's step faltered for only an instant before veering off toward the hut Hayden had given to the Shanaghans.
Even across the span of the muddy yard, Hayden could see the hurt that crumpled Bryony's face as she watched Madeline change direction and run away from her. She watched the child until Madeline had disappeared into the hut, the door banging shut behind her.
Bryony's gaze swung back to him. He saw her breasts heave as she sucked in a deep breath. Hot anger swept through him, seeing her suffer, guessing at how much more she suffered than she let him see. But it was a directionless rage, for what he felt toward Madeline was a kind of helpless, gut-wrenching compassion that left no room for anger.
She turned away from him and stooped to sweep Simon up into her arms. He watched her hug his child close, watched her struggle to hide her pain. And he knew that he would never tell her about those furious words of hatred Madeline had just hurled at him. Or about the deep, disturbing trauma they hinted at.
Time. He kept telling Bryony the child needed time. Time to grow accustomed, time to heal.
Only there were some things no amount of time could heal. And he was suddenly very much afraid that maybe this was one of them.
It was a week later when the stranger rode into the yard.
The day was unusually fine, the air cold but clear, the sky a deep, cobalt-blue. Hayden was working with some of the men, rebuilding a section of fence down by the barn. Bryony, Mary Shanaghan, and Ann McBride had loaded all the children and an enormous pile of laundry into the cart and disappeared toward the river.
Hayden paused, his elbows resting on the top rail of the fence, and watched the rider rein in and take stock of his surroundings.
He was a gentleman, of average height and build, mounted on a showy chestnut. His bottle-green coat was of an inimitable cut that could only have come from one of the best tailors in London. His cravat was meticulously tied, his gleaming Hessians sported white tops and tassels. Except for the mud that splattered the chestnut's legs clear up to its flanks, he might have been a Town Beau, out for a trot in Hyde Park.
A cold wind flattened Hayden's shirt against his
sweaty body. He climbed through the rails of the fence and strolled toward the stranger. "May I help you?"
The man's head swung around. He was young, Hayden noticed, probably in his mid-twenties. A handsome man, with delicately chiseled features and a head of guinea-colored curls.
"I'm looking for Hayden St. John." The voice was cultured, educated. A gentleman's voice, with the vaguest hint of a Cornish burr.
Hayden came to a halt some ten feet from the horseman and stood with his legs spread wide, his hands on his hips as he eyed the man before him. His gaze settled on those guinea-gold curls, and a strange tremor of disquiet shimmied through him.
"I am St. John."
The man's eyes widened in a quickly hidden start of surprise. The work in the paddock was dirty, and Hayden had long since tossed aside his coat and neck cloth. The quality of his waistcoat, shirt and breeches might be finer than the rough convict garb of his men, but there was a smear of mud across his chest, and a rent in his sleeve that Bryony would need to mend.
Bryony...
The stranger swung down out of the saddle. The two men stared at each other across the space of ten feet that separated them. From somewhere on the hill above the homestead, a kookaburra laughed, its call long and guttural and oddly mocking.
"My name is Wentworth," said the stranger. "Oliver Wentworth. I understand my wife is here."