Night in Eden (13 page)

It was a beautiful harp, made by a master and painted by an artist of rare skill. Bryony had played the harp since she was five, but she'd never played a harp like this one. This was a harp worthy of a princess. Or a viscount's daughter.

She reached out her hand and ran it across the strings. It was badly out of tune. She plucked a note and was just reaching up to adjust it when hard, cruel fingers closed over her arm and jerked her around so roughly she stumbled. She would have fallen if he hadn't grasped her other arm and yanked her upright with so much force her neck snapped back.

"How dare you?" St. John snarled. "How dare you touch that harp?"

She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "I was going to—"

The next morning Bryony slammed the breakfast plate on the tablecloth in front of him so hard, Hayden was surprised it didn't shatter.

"I should have been out in the fields half an hour ago," he said, reaching for his knife. "Didn't you hear the bell being rung?"

She planted her hands on the far side of the table and leaned into them. "Of course I heard the bell. How could I help but hear the bloody thing, when it's hanging right outside my room? Unfortunately, Simon also heard it. Which meant that before I could fix your breakfast, I had to give your son his. And then I had to get the firewood, and the water, and chase around the yard looking for eggs. Why you don't build a bloody henhouse for your chickens, rather than letting them lay wherever they—"

"I like my steak well-done and my eggs runny." He laid down his knife and fork and glared right back at her. "Not the other way around." The way she was standing made her dress pull tight across her ripe breasts. He had lain awake half the night thinking about those breasts. He didn't need to be confronted with them at the breakfast table. He almost growled. "Where is the damper?"

"I didn't make it."

"You—"

"I didn't have time."

She didn't sound the least bit apologetic about it. In fact, if anything, she sounded as if
she
were angry at
him.
Damned if he'd ever had a servant like her before. She wasn't even afraid of his disapproval.

And it occurred to him that the only time he'd seen her frightened of him was when the sun was going down, or she found herself around him without all her clothes on.

It was an unfortunate thought, since it reminded him all too clearly of what lay beneath that ugly work dress she was wearing.

"God Almighty." He flung down his napkin and stood up, thrusting his chair back so hard it scraped across the
floor. "When I come in tonight, I'm going to be bloody hungry. You'd better have something decent for me to eat, or be prepared to suffer the consequences."

He crushed his hat down on his head and strode from the room. Behind him, he was surprised to hear her breath break on a sob.

It should have pleased him.

She waited until she saw his big bay cantering out of the yard, toward a distant sheep station. Then she went into the parlor and took the cover off Laura's harp. It was a beautiful instrument, she thought as she carefully tuned it. An instrument that should be played, not covered up and preserved as some kind of a monument to the dead woman who had once sat where Bryony now sat, plucking the strings.

She closed her eyes and let herself drift away on her own music. It had been so long, so very long since she had played. She felt the music well up within her and flow out of her, soothing her. It was like a gift, this harp. A gift from one woman to another.

If Laura had played the pianoforte, it would have been useless to Bryony. But the harp... ah, she had played the harp for almost as long as she could remember. It seemed somehow right that Laura had played the harp, too, and that she had left her harp here, for Bryony.

She played Laura's harp until her fingers were raw. And still she sat and played, and played, and played.

Midway through the morning, Bryony finished her cleaning. She stood before the open French doors of the parlor, gazing down at the swift-flowing river at the base of the hill. A desire for fresh air and the warmth of the sun on her face pulled her. She tied Simon to her with a shawl, and went for a walk.

The grass beneath her feet was fresh and green, the grass of spring. Bryony shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up at the awesome blue sky above her. The day was still clean and cool with the newness of the morning, but she suspected that by the middle of the afternoon it would be warm. She thought of the dead, dry grass in Laura's picture, and wondered how long the fresh green grass of spring would last.

She explored the yard, then turned to the garden. Only there was no real garden. The area around the three sides of the house that didn't face the yard had been cleared, and it looked as if someone might have tried to lay out a garden once, but their efforts had not been crowned by success. She saw some scraggly, half-dead lavenders and some thyme and rosemary and wormwood in what looked as if it had once been an herb garden. She saw some blackened sticks which might once have been roses standing in a forlorn circle, while over by the creek she found some carrots that had been left in the ground and allowed to go to seed.

Crossing the cleared area, she climbed to the trees above the house and looked down on Jindabyne. She
could see why St. John had bought this hill from the Carvers and chosen it as the site of his house. It dominated this entire stretch of the Hawkesbury valley. She could see for miles up and down the river. The wild, jagged crests of the Blue Mountains looked so close she fancied she could reach out and touch them.

A parrot flew by, a bright flash of blue and red and yellow that made her smile. She turned and walked along the side of the hill, studying the plants, some of which looked familiar but most of which were unknown to her. She did find wild sorrel and chickweed and dandelion, and she thought she might pick some for a salad before she went back to the house to cook dinner.

The thought of setting another meal before Hayden St. John brought the sting of tears to her eyes, but she wiped them away with the back of a balled-up fist. She would not allow him to defeat her. She had cheated the hangman's noose and the sharks; she wasn't going to be done in by something as paltry as kangaroo steaks and uncooperative hens.

She spotted what looked as if it might be wild cabbage, growing near some bushes. She leaned over to have a better look at it, and found herself staring at a human foot.

A black human foot. Attached to a black leg, above which dangled a male appendage, above which stretched a naked torso. This was surmounted by a short neck and a black face, painted with white wavy lines. Its nose was hideously flattened, its lips puffy and pulled back into an awful grin.

Bryony screamed, picked up her skirts, and ran.

She ran in the opposite direction from the naked black man, which meant she was running uphill, and she got winded fast. She had a stitch in her side, her breath came in ragged, tearing gasps, but still she ran. Simon woke up and began to whimper. She clutched him to her and ran on. A branch dealt her a stinging slap across her cheek, but she barely felt it. She didn't even know if that savage was still behind her. She simply ran.

Abruptly she stumbled out of the trees into a cleared patch of ground and staggered to a stop. An old slab hut squatted in the center of the clearing, the ground around it completely bare even of grass. But nearer to her some stumps still stood, three feet high, showing where once great eucalypti had been felled.

She leaned against one of the old stumps and held Simon to her, gasping for breath.

"Bryony?"

She heard the tinkling of little bells and looked up to see Louisa, trailed by her Sarah, hurrying across the clearing toward her.

"Bryony, what's wrong?"

"A man... a black man," she gasped. "Back there, in the trees." In spite of herself, she shuddered. "He was completely naked, even his..." Her voice trailed off as she waved her hand vaguely back and forth in front of her thighs. "His nose looked like someone had broken it, and he had paint—"

"Paint?" Louisa asked, frowning.

"White paint, on his face, and in wavy lines down his arms. It made him look like a skeleton."

"Well, if it was white paint, you don't got nothin' to worry about," said Louisa, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the house. "It's when they put on red paint you know they mean trouble."

"But he was a savage!"

"Aye. Sounds like you done had your first up-close look at an Aborigine."

She drew Bryony through the door of the hut and pushed her down onto a bench fashioned from a split log with stout sticks hammered into it for legs. A rough-hewn plank formed the table. All the furniture in the hut was homemade, Bryony realized. The two beds were simply hide stretched over four posts driven into the ground and piled with sheepskins.

"Drink this." Louisa poured Bryony a tin mug full of something that smelled suspiciously like rum.

Bryony took a sip. It was rum.

"I admit they're a fright to look at, especially at first, but in general you don't got much to worry about with the Aborigines you see around here. Every once in a while, some settler'll do 'em dirty, and they'll bash his head in or burn his homestead, but the Cap'n, he's always had a pretty good understandin' with 'em. Why, you'll even see 'em come into the yard sometimes to sharpen their knives. You better get used to 'em."

Sharpen their knives?
Bryony shuddered again.

"Here." Louisa pushed the tin mug toward her. "Have some more rum."

"I can't. Captain St. John said if he ever smelled rum on my breath, he'd have me flogged."

She was on the veranda, washing dishes, when Hayden strolled outside to enjoy an after-dinner smoke in the cool evening air. The sun was just slipping below the red gums down by the creek and painting the horizon a brilliant vermilion that brought out the highlights of her hair. She wasn't looking at him.

She hadn't looked at him all the while she was serving him dinner, either. He knew from the proud lift of her chin and the pained way she avoided him that she was still angry with him. Angry over the way he'd yanked her from Laura's harp, and over the things he'd said about her cooking, too.

This was a side of her he'd only glimpsed before. A side she'd always been careful to quickly hide, and he found it intrigued him. But it also annoyed him. They'd developed a wary but unmistakable affinity over the past week; an affinity that was almost a peculiar sort of friendship. He found he missed it.

And he wanted it back.

He walked up to her and said, his tone light, almost teasing, "So you made your first damper."

Her hands stilled at their task, but she didn't look up. "Yes... sir."

"Bit doughy in the middle," he observed casually, sucking on his cigar. She didn't say anything.

"The kangaroo steak, now, that was well-done." He paused to exhale. "So well-done, in fact, I couldn't quite chew my way through it all. But it's not a complete loss. I figure we can save what's left and use it to shoe one of the bullocks."

She still had her head bowed, but he heard her chuckle. It was a nice laugh—low and husky. The kind of sound a woman might make when a man touched her in just the right spot.

Bloody hell.

He jerked his mind away from the thought and went to lean against a veranda post, looking out over his fields, toward the river. He'd come out here looking to reestablish harmony and goodwill between them, he reminded himself. Not to seduce her.

She was his
servant.
His bloody servant. And yet...

And yet all he could seem to think about every time he looked at her was laying her down and tearing the clothes off her and easing himself inside her.

He ground his half-smoked cigar beneath his boot heel, ground it long and hard. Any other man in the colony would have taken her by now without a second thought, and considered it his right. And for one unguarded moment Hayden found he almost wished he was one of those men. He wished he was the kind of man who could satisfy his own sexual hunger without any regard for the wishes or suffering of the woman he took.

But rape was still rape in Hayden's way of thinking, even if it was condoned by the society in which he lived. Even if the woman he took was a felon transported to Botany Bay for killing her husband.

"I saw an Aborigine today," she said.

He swiveled around to look at her. "Did you?"

She'd been studying him, but when his eyes fell on her, her gaze skittered away, as if she knew, just by looking at him, what he'd been thinking. "Louisa Carver says they sometimes come into the yard."

"Yes." He remembered the first time Laura had seen an Aborigine at close quarters. She'd collapsed in a dead faint, and then had hysterics when she came around. He'd had to dose her with laudanum to get her to calm down enough to sleep. "They often use the grinding wheel."

She was staring at him now, with that quiet, intense way of hers. "Is that wise?"

He shrugged. "They don't think the way we do about property. If something is here, they think it's here to be used by everyone. I've found it wisest not to try to change that attitude any more than I have to."

"Are they always... naked?"

He grinned. "Always."

She stared at him with an arrested expression, her dark brown eyes wide and startled, her lips parted almost as if in wonder.

He couldn't begin to fathom what it meant.

He reached out his hand and very gently touched her cheek. "You have a bruise," he said, frowning. "Did someone hit you?"

"A branch." He felt her tremble beneath his touch,
watched the muscles in her slender throat work as she swallowed hard, and knew a tightening in his chest. A throbbing. A wanting. "I... I ran into a branch."

She turned her face away from him and picked up the washtub. It was heavy, and she staggered under the load. The water sloshed from side to side, wetting the swelling curve of her bodice and cascading in a stream down her apron and skirts. She couldn't fling it the way Gideon did, so the water splattered in the dirt off the veranda, splashing mud all over her hem.

Some of her hair fell over her brow. She swiped at it with the back of her forearm as she slammed the empty tub back on the table and reached for the rinse water.

Hayden reached it first. "I'll do it, damn it," he said hoarsely.

There was a noise in the yard, just outside her window.

Bryony paused in the midst of getting ready for bed and listened. Something scraped over the stone flagging of the veranda floor. There was a clattering sound, and someone laughed. Another man swore.

Curious, she refastened her bodice and stepped over to part the heavy curtains she'd just closed against the night.

Through the slats of the shutters she could see two men on the veranda. They had a slush lamp, and a ladder, and they were taking down the bell.

Before she had quite managed to absorb the fact that St. John must have ordered the bell moved, someone knocked at her bedroom door.

She opened it to find a lithe, handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed lad of about fourteen standing in the pool of light cast by the oil lamp on the hall table. Instead of taking off his cabbage palm hat, he simply pushed it back at a cocky angle and scowled at her. "The Cap'n said I was to tell ye I been assigned to fetch yer water and wood every mornin' and night," he said, looking her over in an appraising way she might have expected if he'd been a few years older.

"Why, thank you, Mr....?"

"Quincy."

"Mr. Quincy."

"No, it's just Quincy." He met the question in her eyes and threw it right back at her, challenging her to make something of it. "Quincy's the only name I got."

"Very well, then, Quincy." She smiled at him. She
wasn't sure she knew how to treat this lad, who looked like a child but had doubtless seen more of life than most men twice his age. "I'll see you in the morning."

"I'll tell ye right out I don't like it," he said, his handsome eyes flashing. "It's nothin' against ye, mind. But I'd rather be out in the fields with the other men."

"I suppose you would," agreed Bryony, hiding a smile. "But I'll be very grateful for your help."

"Well, as long as we got that straight." He pulled his hat brim lower and turned to leave just as Hayden St. John walked in the front door of the house.

He brought with him the smell of horses and tobacco and a restless tension that made Bryony feel suddenly hot and slightly breathless.

Quincy's aggressively masculine swagger became decidedly less pronounced. "I was just tellin' her, like ye said, Cap'n."

Hayden held the door open for the boy. "Thank you, Quincy. Good night."