Whispers of Heaven (6 page)

"Is he all right?" Warrick Corbett limped up to them, one sleeve of his finely cut riding jacket hanging torn and dirty, his neck cloth dangling askew.

"Aye," said Gallagher. "Although the tendon of that near front leg might bear watching."

Corbett nodded briskly. "You, Charlie," he said, turning to the skinny stableboy of about eleven or twelve who stumbled to a halt beside him. "Go find Old Tom and tell him there's a horse I want him to take a look at. And you—" Corbett's gaze flicked, assessingly, over Gallagher. "Take this stallion to the stables, and wait there while I get cleaned up."

His sister laid her hand on his arm. "Warrick—"

He shook her off with a curt, "Don't you say a word," and limped toward the house.

Miss Jesmond Corbett stayed where she was, the early morning sunlight falling clear and golden on smooth, fine skin as she watched him go, an anxious frown on her face. Then she drew in a deep breath, her nostrils flaring wide as she swung back to Lucas. "I'll admit you were right," she said, her features hardening, her voice coming so icy and crisp he decided he must have imagined that earlier, brief hint of vulnerability. "It was a mistake to mount this horse in the open." She punched one finger into the air between them, as if making a point with a child. "But don't you
ever
speak to me like that again."

He felt the anger rise within him, hot enough to scald his veins and burn the base of his tight throat. Sometimes, he thought it might choke him, the anger he had to hold inside. But he could only stand there, hating her, hating the nation and system she was a part of, hating himself as he kept his jaw clenched against the kind of scathing retort the man he used to be would have made. The kind of response no sane convict would ever allow himself to make.

She started to follow her brother, then paused. "How did you know?" she asked, her head tilting as she looked back at him.

Somehow, he managed to keep everything he was feeling out of his voice. "How did I know what?"

The wind blew her long, unbound hair across her face, so that she had to put up one hand and hold it back, the loose strands shimmering golden in the morning sunshine as she nodded toward the stallion. "How did you know his name is Finnegan's Luck?"

Deliberately, Gallagher gave her a slow, easy smile. "I recognized him."

Surprise caused that haughty demeanor of hers to slip a bit, so that she suddenly seemed more human, although no more likable. "You recognized him?"

"Aye." He let his smile broaden. "The Gallaghers and the Finnegans are cousins. Of a sort."

She stared at him, her gaze hard and intense and seething with quiet indignation. "So you knew he would buck and run. You knew it, yet you didn't think to suggest he should be mounted in a paddock?"

Lucas ran his hand, slowly, down the stallion's glossy neck, and let his brogue turn as broad and thick as an Irish bog. "Sure but it wouldn't be keeping to my place, now would it, for me to be so forward?"

"You don't strike me as the sort of man who worries a great deal about keeping his place, Mr. Gallagher," she said. And then she did leave him, standing there, holding her horse and watching her.

"So it's working in the stables you are now," said Daniel O'Leary, "and not just toiling away at the building of it." Shifting a wad of tobacco from one freckled cheek to the other, the big Irishman tipped the laddered back of his chair against the stone outer wall of the barracks and tossed the small leather tobacco pouch to Lucas. "You're a wonder to me, lad."

His left shoulder braced against a rough-hewn veranda post, Lucas snagged the bag out of the air and smiled as he tucked the tobacco into the pocket of the rough jacket he wore against the chill of early evening. He didn't chew himself, but Warrick Corbett provided all of his men—even the assigned convicts—with a ration of tobacco. Most settlers considered the practice generous, maybe even a tad indulgent, but Lucas knew Corbett was only being prudent. Men had been known to kill for tobacco in places like Port Arthur and Macquerie Harbor, and on the chain gangs.

It'd been on a chain gang that Lucas and Daniel had met, just over a year ago now. Without Daniel, Lucas knew he never would have made it through the grinding hopelessness and despair of those first weeks on the gang. Once, when they were building a road through a gorge south of Hobart Town, Daniel fell into the river and would have drowned, weighed down as he was with chains, if Lucas hadn't ignored the overseer's threats and jumped in to pull the big Irishman out. Daniel always said he owed Lucas his life, but Lucas knew that if they were keeping score, he was still deeply in Daniel's debt. For while Daniel's death would have had the grace of fate, if it weren't for Daniel, Lucas would have killed himself.

The front legs of Daniel's old wooden chair hit the flagstones with a thump as he leaned forward, elbows on knees, his lips pursed, and let loose a stream of yellowish-brown juice that shot off the edge of the veranda to plop in the hard dirt of the yard. He cast a quick glance around, and even though the rest of the men were too far away to overhear, he kept his voice low. "All you've got to do now is take one of them horses out for a wee bit of exercise one day, and never come back. If you choose that red stallion, they'll never catch you."

Lucas shifted so that his spine pressed against the post. "No, they wouldn't catch me on the first day. And maybe not the second. But they would catch me in the end; make no mistake about that. And then they'd hang me for a horse thief." Lifting his head, he looked out across the fields, lit now with the golden light of a setting sun that threw long, bluish shadows across the rich green of the valley floor. From here, he couldn't see the sea. But he knew it was there, swelling restless and eternal beyond that low rise of hills. If a man breathed deeply, he could smell the hint of distant brine on the breeze. The hint of brine and the promise of freedom it brought.

"I'll be riding out of here one day, sure enough," he said softly, his attention still caught by the purpling hills. "But not before I know I've a way off this island already waiting for me." He brought his gaze back to the big, red-haired Irishman. "And I'll be taking you with me, boyo." He smiled, and jerked his head toward the man approaching them from the yard. "You and yon Fox."

"Huh," grunted the Fox, walking up to them. The Fox's real name was Todd Doyle, from Tipperary. He was built small and skinny, with a sharp-boned face and big, pointed ears, so that with a name like Todd, everyone had called him the Fox for so long now he sometimes forgot to answer to Todd. Once, before he'd managed to get himself transported for embezzlement, he had been head gardener to the Earl of Swath- more. But the Fox had a taste for the finer things in life, things a gardener's salary didn't stretch to cover.

He had been at Castle Corbett for a good year before Lucas and Daniel's arrival. But the Fox and Lucas had known each other before, since that day over two years ago now when they'd been thrown together as messmates in the dark, dank, foul-smelling hold of the transport ship that was to bring them both across the oceans to Her Britannic Majesty's southern colonies. If Lucas were the Fox's employer, he wouldn't dream of trusting him with a spare load of fence posts or the payment for the nurseryman's delivery boy. But the Fox would give his last crust of bread to a friend, and it hadn't taken Lucas long to realize that.

"I can tell you right now," said the Fox, curling down to perch on the edge of the veranda, his bony forearms resting on his drawn-up knees, "if I have to make my escape clinging to the back of some four-footed beast, then I fear I am destined to tend Mrs. Beatrice Corbett's prize roses until I'm too old to hold a watering can." His feral-looking, yellow eyes gleamed as he cast a contemptuous glance back at Daniel. "And if that great clumsy oaf has ever sat a horse in his life, then you're an English lord, and I'm the archbishop of Canterbury."

"A body'd think you were an English vicar at the least," said Daniel, his fists tightening around the worn wooden arms of his chair, "to hear the mouth on you."

Daniel didn't like the Fox's affected ways any more than the Fox liked Daniel's unpredictable temper and hot-headedness, and Lucas knew it. But he was getting used to these kinds of exchanges, and only laughed softly. "It's a carriage we'll be needin' then, from the sounds of it."

"What we need is a boat," said Daniel.

"That we do." Lucas smiled. "But there's no point in worrying about getting our hands on one until we find someplace to hide it."

"Where in the name of the Virgin—" Daniel began, then broke off, his head jerking around at what sounded like a child's gasp of pain, followed closely by a man's rude laughter and a single, choked-off sob.

His back still pressed against the veranda post, Lucas shifted toward the yard, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the stableboy, Charlie, held fast in the grip of a black-haired, bearlike Englishman from Newcastle called John Pike. Pike was the estate's blacksmith, and he had one of his beefy fists clenched in the boy's shaggy hair, yanking his head back at a painful angle while he twisted the boy's right arm awkwardly behind his back in a way that brought the boy to his knees in the dirt. Tear tracks streaked the boy's dusty cheeks as his wide, terrified gaze fastened on a green glass jar sitting in the dirt some two or three feet in front of his face. Through the wavy round glass, Lucas could see something moving. Something big and brown and hairy that he realized after a moment was a spider. A huntsman spider.

Lucas straightened slowly. The Fox shot up. "It's not our affair, Lucas."

"No," agreed Lucas, a smile tightening his mouth. "It's not."

"You like spiders, lad?" Pike was saying. "Because I've one here, waitin' for you. And there's plenty more, where this one come from." The big man's grip shifted, causing the boy to wince, although he didn't cry out again. "The way I see it, you've two choices. You already know what the first one is. And the second?" Pike brought his face down until it was level with the boy's own. "Well, your second choice is to eat this here big, hairy mother for breakfast tomorrow morning. And the next day? Why, there'll be another just like him, waiting for you. And then another, and another. Every day. Think about it, lad. I ain't never gonna run outta spiders. When do you think you're gonna run outta the guts to keep tellin' me no?"

Lucas stepped off the veranda, his rough boots thudding softly in the hard-packed earth of the yard. "Let the boy go," he said, his voice low and lethal.

CHAPTER FIVE

John Pike's head fell back, his protuberant black eyes shifting sideways to meet Gallagher's cold stare across the ten or so feet of beaten earth that separated them. Slowly, the big man straightened and swung around, dragging the boy with him. "Talking to me, are you?"

Gallagher took another step forward, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, his weight shifted, significantly, to his back leg. "I said let him go."

John Pike had a reputation as a mean son of a bitch, and he outweighed Gallagher by a good four or five stone. But Lucas Gallagher had a reputation of his own. Pike gave the boy a rough shove that sent him sprawling facedown in the dirt. "I'll let him go. For now."

"For good." Lucas watched the boy scramble backward in the dirt, out of the big man's way. "Find someone who's willing, Pike."

The evening breeze blew between them, cold and lonely and scented with dust. The sun was almost down now, the light leaching from the sky to leave it pale. Soon, they would all be locked in together for the night. A slight movement drew Gallagher's attention to the two-story, sandstone barracks beside them, where Corbett's overseer, Dalton, had finally bestirred himself enough to appear in the open doorway. What bullies like John Pike did to vulnerable young boys in the dark recesses of the barracks at night was one thing. But open fighting between the men out in the yard where the master might see was something else entirely.

Pike had noticed the overseer, too. He jerked his head toward the barracks, his lips curling away from his teeth in an ugly caricature of a smile. "You know what I want the lad for, do you?" He leaned forward, his fingertips tucked in the waistband of his coarse canvas trousers. "Maybe you'd like to take his place. I hear you've experience."

Daniel's big hand shot out just in time to snag Gallagher's arm and haul him back. "Don't do it." Daniel cast a significant glance toward the overseer, watching them through slitted eyes. Throwing a punch at Pike, now, would earn Gallagher a week in solitary confinement. Or a flogging.

Lucas sucked in a deep, steadying breath, and Daniel let him go.

Lucas shook himself. "There's only one thing you need to remember, Pike: Touch that boy again, and I'll cut out your guts and use them to make a nest for those spiders you're so fond of." Deliberately, he turned his back on the burly Englishman and walked over to reach out his hand to the stableboy and haul him to his feet.

"You all right, lad?"

"Yeah," said Charlie, dragging a dirty sleeve across his wet face. "But you shouldna done that. He won't forget it, and he'll get you back for it, one way or another. You ain't been here long enough to know what Pike's like."

"I know what he's like." Lucas stooped to scoop up the boy's hat and set it on his head. "Mr. Corbett has asked me to start working with Finnegan's Luck in the morning. You want to help?"

Charlie's gray eyes went wide in a way that reminded Lucas that the stableboy was still very much a child, even if he had been transported for theft, even if he did know more than any child should have to know about things like starvation, and the kind of depravity men could sink to when they'd been deprived of women for too long.
"Gor"
whispered Charlie. "You mean it? That big red stallion?"

"Sure I mean it." Lucas lifted his head, his gaze drawn one last time toward the distant purpling hills and the rolling sea they hid. "It's getting dark." He smiled down at the boy again. "There's a space beside the Fox where you can sling your hammock from now on, if you like."