Whispers of Heaven (11 page)

"Your brother says you'll be wanting to ride out to the cove," said Gallagher, his brogue ostentatiously, provocatively in place. She turned her head and glanced toward him. He still had his back to her, his fingers busy adjusting the stirrup leather on the roan's saddle, but she could hear the laughter in his voice.

"That's right." She wished he would go away. She didn't understand this effect he had on her. He made her feel edgy and unsettled, not like herself at all. "Where is Old Tom?"

"He's not well. Your brother sent him back to his bed."

She swung about in surprise. "His bed?" Never in her life had she known Tom to admit to being sick enough to take to his bed. "What's wrong with him?"

"Twinges of rheumatism, he says." Gallagher slid down the stirrup iron. "But his heart 'tis more likely. All the signs are there."

"His heart?" Jessie stared at that distant line of huts, deserted now in the heat of the day. She knew the oddest sensation, as if her entire world had tipped slightly, so that she had to reach out her hand and steady herself by bracing her palm against the mare's saddle. The universe righted itself almost at once, of course, and yet... And yet she knew that nothing was quite the way it had been before. All her life, Tom had been there, strong and reliable, at her side. It had often occurred to her, when she looked back at her childhood, that she had more memories of Old Tom than of her mother and father put together.

It had been Old Tom, not Anselm Corbett, who held Jessie on her first pony when she was barely old enough to walk. It was Tom who had encouraged her wonder at the joys and mysteries of the world around her, who had taught her to recognize and name the myriad of fascinating things, living and nonliving, that formed her surroundings. It was Tom who had explored with her the labyrinth of caves that honeycombed the nearby mountains, and shared a thousand other adventures of her growing years. He had always been called "Old" Tom, but she'd never really thought of him as old. Not old enough to be so ill now, perhaps even dying. All that time she had spent with him the other day, she thought; all that time, and he hadn't said a word to her about his failing health. But then, she'd told him she wouldn't be riding to the cove soon.

She lifted her head to find the Irishman watching her, his eyes narrowed. "Why are you here?" she asked suddenly.

"Your brother has assigned me to be your new groom."

"You?"

Something in her voice made him smile, bringing a softening to the edges of his lips, a lightening to the hard glare in those fierce green eyes. "Aye."

But I don't want you,
she almost said, only just catching herself in time. She felt buffeted by an overwhelming tangle of emotions, concern for Tom's health oddly mixed up with dismay and an inexplicable breathlessness that might have been excitement, except that made no sense.

Giving the roan's withers a friendly pat, the Irishman came toward her, his face impassive, his cabbage palm hat tipped low to hide those brittle, angry eyes. He wasn't a big man, yet he seemed somehow to loom over her, tense and threatening. It was all she could do not to take a step back. She tried to imagine this man as her groom, riding beside her as Old Tom had done, and knew it was impossible.

Summoning up a polite society smile of the kind that had been drilled into her since childhood, she said in her best drawing room voice, "Thank you, Mr. Gallagher, but I wouldn't want to take you away from your new responsibilities with the horses. If you would be so kind as tell that young stableboy, Charlie, that I—"

"No."

The abruptness of the word startled her into silence. He was unlike any servant she'd ever known. In fact, he wasn't like a servant at all. He was too self-possessed, too self-assured, too aggressively masculine in a way she did not like.

"I suggested Charlie myself," he said, gathering up her mare's reins, "but your brother seems to think bushrangers might not find a small, underfed boy much of a deterrent to mayhem and murder." He tipped back his head, so that the sun fell full on the finely sculpted planes of his face. "If you're ready to mount then, Miss?"

Jessie knew all about the bushrangers that infested the island. Most were escaped convicts: desperate men, ill-clothed and ill-fed, for the Tasmanian wilderness was not kind to those unfamiliar with its ways. Not long before she left for England, three bushrangers had jumped a farmer's wife, just outside Blackhaven Bay. They'd dashed her baby's head against a tree, then taken turns at the woman herself. The problem was, the longer the convicts remained at large, the more dangerous and ruthless they became, for they knew that their recapture could mean only death—or worse. Most convicts considered being sent to someplace like Norfolk Island or Port Arthur much worse than death. And from what Jessie had heard about those places, she figured they were probably right.

The Irishman's gaze was still on her, hard and challenging, as if he were hoping she'd change her mind and not go for a ride at all. "I'm ready," she said. With this man at her side instead of Old Tom, she wouldn't be able to visit the cottage on Last Chance Point, but she could still ride out to the cove.

Taking the reins, she let him boost her up, her right leg hooking automatically around the pommel. He backed away quickly, as if he couldn't wait to put some distance between them. But he could go only as far as his own horse.

She watched through lowered lids as he swung into the saddle, his movements fluid and practiced in a way that spoke of a childhood spent on horseback. So few of the convicts sent to Tasmania knew anything about horses. Those who did had most often been grooms or stableboys back home. But not Gallagher. He might do his best to play it down, but he was inescapably the kind of man who had grown up, as she had done, with a groom running beside his first pony. And she found herself wondering exactly what he had done to bring him so low, to bring him to this.

His head snapped around, his gaze tangling with hers, and for a moment, she saw it all in his eyes, all of his rebellious pride, all of his angry, tortured self-loathing. He had such a striking face, the cheekbones wide and flaring, the eyes beautiful and brilliant and frightening. So very frightening. Wordlessly, she kneed her horse forward, leaving him to follow or not. For one wild moment, she actually hoped he would not.

Except that he could no more disobey an order than she could ride, alone and unattended, beyond the castle's drive. In single file, they trotted out the yard, toward the road.

She sent her horse at a canter down the sunlit, rutted road. A rich aroma of warm earth and sweet, growing things rose from the fields of wheat and pasturage beside her. The rushing wind battered her cheeks until they stung and whipped her hair loose from beneath the low crown of her beaver hat, but she didn't care. She felt the mare's strength surging beneath her, becoming a part of her, the great muscles bunching, hooves pounding in a joyous, primitive rhythm of speed and freedom.

But no matter how hard she rode, she found she couldn't forget the Irishman, there, behind her. He kept intruding on her thoughts, on her peace. Awareness of his nearness shadowed her, the persistent drumming of his roan's hoofbeats chasing her, so that she urged the mare on faster, and faster.

The track began to climb as they reached the hills that separated the fertile, cultivated valley from the sea. Here, fields of wheat and barley and hay gave way to open forest, the great beech and blue gums casting patterns of dusky shadow and golden spring sunlight across the narrow lane, the air smelling heavily of eucalyptus oil and damp earth. Reluctantly, she slowed the mare to a walk. Only, without the distractions of noise and speed, she found herself more and more aware of the man who rode silently behind her. Twice, she barely stopped herself from glancing over her shoulder at him. She found it increasingly unsettling to think of him watching her, when she could not see him. Abruptly, she checked the mare and waited for him to ride up abreast of her.

He cast her a quizzical sideways glance, which she ignored. "So, Mr. Gallagher," she said, reaching down to pat the mare's sweat-stained withers, "tell me. Have you tried to ride Finnegan's Luck yet?"

She slanted a look up at him from beneath the brim of her beaver hat. He had his gaze fastened on the winding dirt track ahead, but she saw the creases beside his mouth deepen, as if with an inner smile. "Not yet."

"Not yet? You astonish me, Mr. Gallagher. Perhaps, unlike your cousin Mr. Finnegan, you have some aversion to hitting the dust first thing in the morning?"

"Aye, that's the way of it," he said, putting on the Irish for her, so that she had to smile.

"I haven't heard precisely how you intend to cure Lucky of his famous habit. You did tell Old Tom you have an idea, didn't you?"

"I've a few notions." He tilted his head back, his gaze lifting to the rosellas that flitted, chirping and squawking, through the branches of the black wattle above them. "But I'll not be gettin' any closer to him than a longeing rein for a while yet."

She watched him, still watching the parrots. He had several days' worth of beard darkening his cheeks, and his hair was too long and ragged, so that with his head tilted back like that it hung to his shoulders. He looked rough and dark and dangerous. Yet she knew that he was not, entirely, what he seemed. What he liked to appear. "Why do you do that?" she asked suddenly.

He brought his gaze back to her face. "Do what?"

"Put on the Irish the way you do. You're an educated man. I hear it in your speech when you forget to watch yourself. Yet you deliberately make yourself sound like ..." She hesitated.

"Like a bog-trotting Irishman?" His voice grated harshly, his eyes narrowing to glittering green slits. "Isn't that what we all are to you lot? Just so many ignorant, potato-grubbing Irish—good for nothing but being conquered and ruled by Britannia's fine sons?"

She sucked in a quick, startled breath. He swung his head away, his gaze focused once more on the road ahead. "Besides, it's not put on," he added more quietly, the soft Irish lilt still there, even if no longer exaggerated. "It's the way the men and women I grew up around speak—the fisherman and farmers, the shopkeepers and day laborers. To them, your English is as foreign as your queen, something imposed on them by outsiders. In their own homes, amongst their own kind, they still speak their own language."

He drew the long length of the reins through his free hand, the leather straps twining over his bare fingers, for he had no riding gloves to protect his work-hardened hands, as she did. "My mother, she always spoke the Gaelic at home. She loves Ireland as fiercely as she loves each of her own children, you see, and she was determined to make sure we all learned its language. She wanted us to be able to teach it to our children, and to our children's children."

"And your father?"

An echo of a smile touched his lips. "My father? Oh, he's a patriot, but he's also a practical man. So while my mother worked on our Gaelic, he concentrated on our English. He always said keeping traditions alive is one thing, but a man's family needs to eat, and a Dublin barrister can't afford to sound like one of your
bog Irish."

She could no longer look at his face. Dropping her gaze, she found herself staring at his hands instead. They held the reins so lightly, so effortlessly. He had such beautiful, almost delicately shaped hands, even battered and scarred as they were by brutal, endless labor. He'd taken off his jacket in the midday sun and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing strong, tanned forearms and fine-boned wrists marred by ugly rings of scars.

She'd seen scars like that all of her life. Irons did that to a man. Iron shackles worn month after month as a man toiled in the heat and rain. The flesh chafed and festered, sometimes wearing down to the very bone. Even after the chains were struck off, their marks remained, a shameful, telltale legacy of past servitude. He would have scars like that on his ankles, too, she thought. So many scars.

"Is that what you were, before?" she asked quietly. "A Dublin barrister?"

He shook his head, a smile that was more mean than amused tightening his lips." 'Tis what I was aiming for, brave- hearted, idealistic young lad that I was. I was going to fight for Ireland's freedom in the courts and in Parliament, using words and grand ideas, not guns and cudgels."

So what happened?
she wanted to ask, but didn't. Her throat felt tight, her eyes stinging as if with unshed tears, although that was ridiculous, for why should she feel like crying? She wished she hadn't talked to him about his past at all. She didn't want to think about the life this man had lived before, back in Ireland. About the parents and brothers and sisters he'd been forced to leave behind. She didn't want to have to think of him as anything other than what he was now: a convict groom.

Her gaze fixed on the road through the dry forest ahead, she kneed the mare forward and left him to ride behind her, as was proper.

The breeze hit them, strong and laden with brine as they came out of the forest at a heath-covered bluff overlooking the distant sea. Sunshine sparkled off shifting waves of a deep, beautiful aquamarine, dazzled with glimmers of silver by the brilliant light.

From here they could look down, to the right, on the broad sweep of the town of Blackhaven Bay, with its neat stone houses and shops, its weathered gray docks and warehouses, its military barracks and whaling tryworks strung out along a two-mile stretch of shingled beach. Just offshore, in the deep, calm waters of the bay itself, a small fleet of fishing boats and coastal ketches rode at anchor beside two great whalers, their bare, idle masts rocking back and forth against the clear blue sky.

Only the cradling arm of the wooded headland known as Last Chance Point separated this gentle bay from Shipwreck Cove, the deeply cut inlet to the north. If a ship anchored too far out in Blackhaven Bay, and if the wind was blowing a gale and the riptides running, the unwary could be swept out around the headland and onto the rocks at the base of the jagged, blackened cliffs that plunged into the waters on the far side of the cove. But on this bright spring morning, the cove lay peaceful and serene below them, the rocks hidden by the tide that rolled softly in to break on the sandy curve of the beach.