The Stars Blue Yonder (37 page)

“I think I do,” she said.

The ride back to Lady Scott's house was made in silence and contemplation. Osherman would look at nothing but the view out the jostling window. Lady Scott snoozed, her head tipping against Jodenny's shoulder, and that was fine. Jodenny herself felt exhausted. When they reached Lower Fort Street, Professor Wallace hurried from his house to meet them.

“There's been terrible news,” he told them breathlessly. “Tragic!”

Lady Scott allowed Tulip to help her down to the ground. “What happened?”

“They found Lady Darling murdered! Past Parramatta, on the way to Katoomba.”

Jodenny couldn't help a little startled noise. Dead. Murdered. And all her secrets, gone with her.

Osherman, quick and angry, demanded, “Murdered? By who?”

Wallace's expression was stricken. “No one knows. The body was discovered half buried in the woods by a farmer out walking with his dogs. The corpse was in a sorry state. They identified her by her clothing and a ring the robbers overlooked.”

Osherman stepped from the carriage and stalked inside the house. Jodenny tried to maneuver herself out and down, but Junior's bump made balancing difficult. She was grateful for Tulip's helping hand and told him so.

“You're welcome, missus,” he said, ducking his head.

She had the strangest feeling, then, that she'd known him at some other time outside of this tidy house. Not quite déjà vu, but something close. Jodenny bit her lower lip, thinking hard, but Tulip moved to help with the horses, and the feeling vanished.

Lady Scott and Professor Wallace continued to commiserate about the murder. Jodenny went in search of Osherman, who was in the dining room pouring himself some whiskey from a decanter. He downed three gulps, steadied himself, and splashed some more into the glass. His hat had been carelessly tossed on the table and he'd ripped open the collar of his shirt.

“Sam, tell me,” Jodenny said.

He glared at her. “Tell you what?”

Though she too felt unsteady with shock, Jodenny followed her instincts. “Who she was to you. Why you're so distraught.”

“I don't get distraught,” he said, but that was patently untrue. He wiped his hand across his eyes. “It doesn't matter.”

“Did you love her?”

Osherman turned away from her. Jodenny wanted to step forward and put her hand on his shoulder, but she didn't think he wanted that. He had always had more pride than was good for him. It was a pride that had been badly battered these last years, but had finally regained some footing here in Australia.

Either Lilly or Sarah had partially closed the curtains against the blazing afternoon sun. The stripes of light fell over Osherman like long
streaks of paint. Lady Scott and Professor Wallace murmured outside, the words indistinguishable.

“We were involved,” Osherman finally said. “Before you came. And that's all I can say about it. Excuse me.”

He left her standing alone in the dining room—alone but for a new idea about why Darling's helpfulness had seemed subtly laced with resentment. She wondered how far their romance had advanced before Jodenny's arrival had disrupted it. Maybe they'd been engaged. Maybe Darling had been hoping for a ring or a promise from a man who understood what it was like to be trapped in an age that was not her own.

Osherman went out for the rest of the day, and returned stinking drunk long after midnight. Lady Darling's murder was reported in the
Sydney Morning Herald
the next morning, with sensationalistic headlines. Murder was not uncommon in the colony but it didn't usually occur to women of high society. It was through the article that Jodenny learned that another body had been located along with Darling's. Her paid assistant. Both women were presumed to have been killed on the road by thieves. Their private coach driver was being sought for questioning.

The funeral was held the next day at St. Mary's Cathedral on Church Hill. On the way Lady Scott delivered a history lesson about Irish convicts and hidden sacraments, most of which Jodenny missed because she was too busy trying not to throw up. Her acclimatization to carriage travel had disappeared. Perhaps it was because Osherman was miserable company—withdrawn, haggard—or because the morning was abysmally hot. The breeze smelled like the slaughterhouses and flies were out everywhere.

“Why did people have to hide being Catholic?” she asked, to keep the conversation going.

“The government was Church of England, of course. Most of the Irish convicts were Catholic and obviously, that meant Catholics were troublemakers. The only Services you could attend were Protestant.” Lady Scott looked ill at the prospect, or maybe the carriage ride was nauseating her as well. “You actually had to go, or be flogged for being absent.”

The cathedral was a large Gothic building built entirely of local stone. The mourners were arriving by foot, carriage, and horseback, decked
out in their finest clothes and carrying on them the dust and sweat of the day. The dim interior was much cooler than the day outside, even with all the bodies crowding inside. It was long and narrow, running east to west, with small clerestory windows, a high arched ceiling, and an enormous stained glass window fronting the street. Lady Scott's stature got them to a row of hard pews cushioned by thin pillows, and Jodenny was happy to sit. Catholicism was mostly unknown to her. She didn't know the differences between one saint and another, or one Bible and the next, and the few Catholics she'd met in Team Space weren't especially illuminating on the matter.

“The organ came from London,” Lady Scott murmured.

It played loud enough to be heard back in London as well. Jodenny fought the urge to hold her hands over her ears as a thin, bald organist worked the stops and pedals. She could still hear the echo in her head as the congregation rose for the arrival of Bishop Polding in his fine robes and very tall hat. When he began the service she thought maybe she was mishearing him, because not a single word made sense.

“Latin,” Osherman murmured.

“I knew that,” Jodenny whispered back.

It seemed to her that a bishop shouldn't be doing the Mass himself, but maybe the junior priest was sick or Darling's wealth earning her special note. Polding was sweating copiously under his layers of clothes. She was sweating, too, in a dress that ballooned around her like a camping tent. She hoped Myell, wherever he was, appreciated just how much she was going through in this semitropical limbo, and abruptly missed him so much that her eyes began to tear up.

She didn't want to weep in the middle of these strangers, in this strange and awkward land, so she concentrated on the unfamiliar Latin words and the response of the congregation when called upon. She assured junior there would be no Catholicism in their future. Then again, she couldn't predict anything about their future at all. In her best wild hopes it would involve Terry Myell at her side, and a healthy junior in her arms, and beyond that she could make no presumptions on the universe. None at all, not sitting there in her enormous dress in this Gothic cathedral with the heat and light of colonial Australia outside the windows.

She lost track of the Mass. She might have even dozed off once or twice. Certainly she wasn't the only one, because Bishop Polding's no doubt fine qualities did not, it seem, include succinctness. More than one elderly man and woman across the aisle nodded off during an exceptionally long passage. At one point the congregation stood and began to line up at the altar for communion, and Jodenny felt her dress and throat tighten so constrictively that she feared fainting. Even though they hadn't reached the part of the ceremony that would commemorate Darling, she tugged on Osherman's sleeve.

“I have to go outside,” she told him.

He immediately ushered her to the side aisle. She took one look at the distance to the front door and gauged it at a thousand steps, maybe a million. Osherman must have realized she wouldn't make it, and steered her instead into an alcove and out into the sunshine. She felt as if she were falling, spiraling into darkness, so maybe she did faint after all. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on a bench in a garden adjacent to the cathedral. Osherman fanned her with his sleeve.

“Better now?” he asked.

“A little,” she said. “I hate this.”

“I know. Stay here, I'll go get some water.”

She was sitting upright, fanning herself, when a concerned man's voice said, “Mrs. Osherman?”

Jodenny blinked up at the man. He looked vaguely familiar, but his name eluded her.

“Benjamin Cohen,” he supplied. “We met at Government House.”

The same day she'd met Darling. Jodenny tried to look more alert and not like a miserable pregnant woman. “I remember.”

“Is there anything I can get for you?” he asked.

“No. My husband will be back in a minute or two. Do you want to sit?”

Cohen awkwardly sat on the far end of the bench. “Such a terrible shame about Lady Darling. There have always been robbers on the roads outside the city but this kind of violence, this mayhem—it makes me think the colony's no safer today than it was thirty years ago. A trip to Katoomba should be as safe as a walk down King Street.”

“Was she a good friend of yours?” Jodenny asked.

“The most valued kind of friend. One who knows you from the heart inside out, and still accepts your weaknesses and foibles. The kind you might not speak to for years and years, and then the day you cross paths again, it's as if the conversation never had a pause. Do you have a friend like that, Mrs. Osherman?”

From inside the church came the murmur of the faithful.

“Not here,” she answered.

Cohen smiled sadly. “I understand. When we first got here, it was a terrible adjustment. Learning the local dialects, customs, how to hide ourselves, protect ourselves. Some of us didn't make it. Cassandra never gave up, though. Surrender was not in her vocabulary.”

Jodenny blamed the heat for the slowness of her thoughts. But she eventually collected enough of them to piece the story together.

“You were one of the children,” she said. “You're from the future.”

He replied, “My nickname then was Speed. I know that Cassandra told you part of the story, but I suspect she didn't tell you all. How we came here through the Painted Child. Where the Child is. And what happened to Chief Myell.”

Which was exactly when Osherman returned and found them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Well, you see, I'm Chief Cappaletto and that's Chief Myell. He's the Hero of Burringurrah. Haven't you heard of him?”

Cappaletto had to do some fast talking under the aim of Ensign Darling's mazer. Myell would have interjected a word or two but he was sprawled on the floor, retching. He didn't know how many more trips he could make with Cappaletto's weight; the screech of the ouroboros was still ringing in his ears, and the migraine was so bad that the passageway flickered in his vision.

“Honest truth,” Cappaletto was saying. “We're time travelers. The Roon army's going to be here in a few hours to destroy the Painted Child you're hiding somewhere in this mountain. But we've got a better plan.”

Myell heard mazer fire. Cappaletto slumped to the floor.

“Search that one for weapons, Speed,” Darling ordered. She crouched
over Myell. “Now, you. Tell the truth. And I don't want to hear anything about time travel.”

He took a steadying breath past the pain. “Your name is Cassandra Darling. You're in charge here because you're the oldest and no one else is suited for the job. There's Speed, Bell, Nelson, and the other girl—another little girl. I don't remember her name.”

Darling stared at him, giving him nothing in her expression.

“The Roon army is on its way. They want the Painted Child. But you're going to blow the base up rather than let them get it, and everyone here's going to die. But if you let me help you, you can escape and still keep the Roon from getting what they want.”

Silence. She squinted at him, tilted her head. “Okay, Future-man. You know everything? What's my middle name?”

“I have no idea.”

“Fair enough. I don't have one. Come on. Sit up. No funny stuff.”

He didn't think he was going to be able to stay upright, not with the passage lurching wildly around him, but Darling sent Speed for a medical kit and, once in hand, gave Myell a painkiller. She handed him a canteen as well.

The water was flat and stale-tasting, but he was glad for it. Myell said, “So it's true? You've got a Painted Child somewhere on this base.”

Darling sat down across from him in the middle of the dusty passage. Cappaletto was still mostly unconscious, but he was beginning to stir.

“Speed, go keep watch with the others,” she ordered.

The boy looked rebellious. “Why?”

“Because I said so!”

He moved off, sulking. Darling said to Myell, “Tell me everything. As fast as you can, if it's true what you say about the Roon coming. Are you really the Hero of Burringurrah?”

“So they say,” Myell replied.

“Jungali.”

He gave a start at the name. “It's a long story.”

“You better start talking.”

So he told her as much as he could, as quickly as he could, as persuasively
as he could. It wasn't easy. The migraine was fading but leaving him muddy-headed. Many of the details of his travels were confusing despite the fact he'd lived through them. Darling was a tough audience, neither encouraging nor questioning him, until the end.

“So you think this Painted Child will let you save mankind,” she said.

“Something like that.”

“And if I take you to it, and the Roon get it, nothing matters because this has all already happened?”

Myell nodded.

“Protecting that Sphere is the only thing my dad ever made me promise to do,” Darling said. She chewed on a dirty fingernail. “Don't let them get it, he said. Me and my mother both. Before they died in the bombs.”