Whispers of Heaven (7 page)

The boy nodded and darted ahead, but Lucas lingered until the last moment. He sucked the sweet, night-scented air into his lungs, his eyes so dry they hurt as he stared up at the first stars winking at him from out of the darkening sky. Then he went into the barracks with its iron-barred windows and heavily bolted door that closed behind him with a familiar, dreaded
clang.

She knew it was him.

She could see him, standing alone in the quickly darkening expanse of the yard. Impossible, at this distance, to distinguish his features. Yet there was no mistaking the proud line of his head and shoulders as he stared up at the evening sky, no missing the artless grace of his movements as he swung slowly toward the barracks. For one barely perceptible moment he paused, and she could see all of his pain, all of his desperation, all of his fear in the taut line of his back. Then he passed beneath the veranda and out of her sight. She was too far away for the slam of the barracks door or the noise of the bolts being shoved home to reach her. But she could hear it, in her mind.

Jessie's hands clenched around the brass handles of the French doors of her room, but she didn't open them. She had come upstairs to dress for supper, but something had drawn her to the windows overlooking the rear garden and the yard beyond it. Something she didn't understand and didn't want.

"The teal silk, Miss?"

"Yes, please." Jerking the dusky blue damask drapes across the windows, Jessie turned her back on the night. She watched the girl who had come to help her dress dart with a furtive kind of shyness about the room. She looked no more than sixteen, if that. She had a thin, sallow face and short, nondescript dark hair that stuck out from beneath her cap at odd angles. They always cut the women's hair when they put them on board the transport ships in London. The girl must not have been in Tasmania very long.

"What's your name?" Jessie asked.

The girl clutched Jessie's dress to her in a spasm of alarm and dropped into a frightened curtsy. "Emma, Miss. Emma Pope."

Jessie watched the girl duck her head and scurry across the room. Unlike the men, the house servants slept in two rooms in the basement, near the kitchen. But once they had finished their duties, they were locked in for the night, too, the same way the men were locked into the big stone barracks in the yard. Jessie wondered what they thought, what they felt, when they listened to the sound of the key grating in the lock, sealing them into the darkness.

With an awed kind of reverence, Emma spread Jessie's dress in shining teal glory across the plump white softness of the feather bed, with its tall four posters and damask hangings. They slept on hammocks in the men's barracks. Jessie knew that because as a child, she'd sometimes peeked through the open door of the big stone building when she passed it in the yard. She'd heard that the house servants slept on bunks when they were locked in their rooms at the end of their long day. But never in her life had she descended the narrow service stairs to the basement to see for herself.

"Is it comfortable?" she asked suddenly, as Emma unfastened her day dress. "Where you sleep, below stairs?"

Emma looked up, her pale blue eyes widening. "Yes, Miss."

Stepping out of her day dress, Jessie crossed the room to her dressing table and picked up her silver-handled brush. Her eyes met the girl's in the mirror. "Is it really?"

"Oh, yes, Miss. I ain't never been so comfortable in me life. I've a bed all to meself, with two blankets and all the food I can eat, every day. I ain't never known nothin' like it."

Jessie drew her brush through her long hair, her gaze still following the girl in the mirror as she went about her duties. She was a Londoner, her accent broad cockney. She'd probably grown up in some back slum, in an airless, windowless room crowded with anywhere from ten to twenty half-starved, ragged, lice-ridden brothers and sisters. Life as an assigned servant at Castle Corbett would seem comfortable indeed in comparison to such a life, Jessie thought. Perhaps it was only convicts like that Irishman, Gallagher, who found their situation in Tasmania so crushingly onerous. Perhaps convicts like Emma Pope didn't mind what had been taken from them. Their homes. Their families. Their freedom. And yet...

Jessie remembered something Old Tom had said to her that afternoon, when she'd gone to visit him at his hut. Old Tom had been Jessie's groom since she'd been old enough to straddle a pony. He'd been a convict once, but he'd gained his pardon long ago and now lived in one of the huts that straggled out in a line beyond the yard and housed the workers whose sentences had expired, or who had at least earned their tickets-of-leave. There were even a few workers who'd come free, but not many. For all its natural beauty and gentle climate, Tasmania had a bad reputation in Britain; those with a choice normally went elsewhere.

He'd been perched on a stool on his front stoop when she found him, playing his worn old Irish bagpipes, his arm pumping, his fingers flying. He had his eyes closed, lost in the sad wail of the pipes. He looked smaller than she remembered him. Smaller and older, his white hair thinner, the features of his face sunken and blurred by the ravages of the years. She felt a wrenching wave of sadness sweep through her. Then he opened his eyes and saw her. The pipes stopped abruptly. "So, you've come to see me, have you?"

She paused at the base of the rickety wooden steps, her head falling back as she smiled up at him. "Did you think I wouldn't?"

"Sure then, I knew the Miss Jessie who left here two years ago would come. But people change."

She climbed the steps to balance on the porch railing, the light blue fine wool of her skirt flaring out around her. "I haven't."

He didn't say anything to that. Turning with a studied care that spoke of arthritic old bones, he laid the bagpipes on the rough, weather-warped table beside him and slanted a look of pure amusement up at her. "That's some horse you bought, that Finnegan's Luck."

"Huh." She wrapped both hands around the railing at her sides and leaned back, the way she'd done as a child. "Go ahead and say it. I was a green fool to let myself be tricked into buying a horse with that kind of vice."

"Could be vice. Could just be a bad habit." Tom shrugged. "That young Irishman your brother's taken into the stables, now, he thinks it's habit."

Jessie looked up sharply. She hadn't known about Warrick moving Lucas Gallagher to stables' work.
Oh, not daft, Mr. Gallagher,
she thought wryly.
Not daft at all.
Aloud, she said, "And what does he know about it, anyway?"

She was aware of Tom's watery blue gaze fixed on her, hard. He might be old, but he was very, very wise. "More than most, I'd say. He's even got an idea or two about how to fix it."

She looked away, toward the paddocks where the estate's riding horses were put out to graze. She didn't want to talk about that man, with his angry eyes and lean, graceful body. "I took a look at Cimmeria this morning," Jessie said, deliberately shifting the subject. "You've taken good care of her."

"Aye. Yer mare's in fine fettle. I've had Charlie exercising her, getting her back in shape for you." Stretching out his hand, Tom picked up a pen knife and a half-whittled block of wood from the edge of the table. "And will ye be ridin' her tomorrow?" he asked in studied casualness, all his attention seemingly focused on the wood turning slowly between his hand and the blade. "Out to Shipwreck Cove?"

"No. Mother insists I rest for a few weeks." She hopped off the railing and went to stand at the edge of the porch, looking out over the broad, slow-moving River Daymond that curled around the estate's outbuildings. "How is she, Tom?" she asked quietly, without turning around. This time, they both knew Jessie wasn't talking about her horse.

He knew all of her secrets, Old Tom. How could he not, when he'd ridden faithfully behind her wherever she went, for as long as she could remember? And the woman Jessie visited out on the headlands beyond Shipwreck Cove was her deepest and most dangerous secret.

"She's missed you, sure enough," said Tom. "It gets lonely out there sometimes, with only the sounds of the waves on the rocks and the ghosts of the cove's wrecks for company."

Jessie swallowed hard. "I couldn't even write to her. I was too afraid Mother would find out. No one minds their own business on this island."

"Aye. We've a saying in Ireland:
Chan sgeul ruin a chluin- neas triuir"

"Which means?"

"What three people hear is no secret."

Jessie smiled. Looking down, she saw the old man's bagpipes on the table beside her. She reached out her hand and touched the slender reeds. "Do you miss it still?" she asked suddenly, looking up at him. "Ireland, I mean."

"Aye." His face remained impassive, but she heard the rough catch in his voice, saw the over-bright sheen of his eyes before he turned his head away.

"Why didn't you go back? You could have gone, long ago. Your pardon isn't conditional."

He swung to face her again, his throat working. She thought he was going to say something. Then he shook his head and went back to his whittling. "You don't want to hear it, Miss Jessie."

"Yes I do."

He drew the knife with deliberate slowness over the block of wood, one thin shaving curling up to fall to the porch floor, then another, and another. "All right," he said, not looking up. "I'll tell you. I'd rather they'd hanged me, you see, than send me away from Ireland like that. I begged them to hang me. But when those soldiers dragged me onto that ship ... well, I swore then on my mother's grave that I'd never go back. Not until the day there's nary an English boot left on Irish soil."

Jessie sucked in her breath in a startled hiss. "But you live amongst the English here."

"Aye. But it's no' my country, now is it?"

She watched the paper-thin curls of wood drop, one after the other, to the weathered plank floor. She'd never really given much thought to why Old Tom had been transported. If she'd considered it at all, she'd have assumed it must have been for poaching a rabbit or selling an illegal batch of poteen. Now, she wasn't so sure.

"Do you hate us so much?" she said softly. "I never knew."

He shook his head. "Not you, Miss Jessie."

"Why not me? I'm English."

"You are, and you're not. Besides, in your own way, lass, you're as hemmed in and controlled as any convict ever was."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you?" He looked at her shrewdly. "Why did you ask? Why now, after all these years?"

"I don't know."

They'd gone on to talk of other things then. About her mare Cimmeria and her brother's hounds and the homecoming party her mother was planning. But she hadn't forgotten his words. Oh, no. She hadn't forgotten.

"Miss Corbett? Miss Corbett?"

Jessie turned from the dressing table to see Emma Pope waiting in the center of the room, the silk evening gown held ready in her hands. Lifting her arms, Jessie let the girl drop the dress over her head. The teal blue silk shimmered sensuously in the candlelight, then settled in soft whispers about the hard, carefully corseted confines of her body.

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning, Jessie walked down to the stables to watch the Irishman try his hand at "fixing" Finnegan's Luck. She told herself she went because of her interest in the horse. When a nigglingly honest inner voice tried to suggest a different reason, she ignored it.

It had rained during the night, leaving the ground dark and wet, the vegetation of the garden lushly green and dripping. Clouds still bunched low and thick over the valley, turning the park's trees into murkily indistinct shapes that seemed almost to float in the opaque, flat light. The promise of more rain hung heavily in the crisp morning air, along with the scents of wet hay and warm horseflesh that intensified as Jessie neared the stables.

She could hear the drumming of hooves and a man's low, soothing voice even before she drew near the small paddock to the left of the stables. From his perch atop the high, whitewashed fence, Warrick acknowledged her appearance with only a grunt, his attention fixed on the big Irish Hunter that trotted past, powerful muscles bunching and flexing, noble head held high, dark mane and tail streaming in the wind as it circled the paddock, guided only by the sure hands and voice of Lucas Gallagher. She paused beside her brother, the fingers of her gloved hands coming up to curl in ladylike restraint over the top railing as she watched the magnificent, high-spirited horse and the man who worked it.

He stood in the center of the paddock, his long legs braced wide, his dark hair fluttered by the wind as he pivoted grace- fully, the longeing rein held lightly in a series of loops across the palm of his left hand. Slowly, he began to draw out the leather with his right hand, his dark, strong-boned face taut with concentration as he urged the big bay stallion from a fast trot into a rolling canter, which took it in a steady circle around and around the man. A skinny, half-grown boy stood beside him, intently following the man's every move.

He was brutal and lawless, a wild and dangerous rebel of the kind she had been raised both to fear and to despise. Yet the beautiful, evocatively powerful synergy of the man and the beast he controlled stole her breath. For one, unguarded moment, she gave herself up to staring at him, at the artistry of his scarred, long-fingered hands, the curve of his leanly muscled back, the strength of his hard, spread thighs. Then his gaze lifted and for one brief flaring instant their eyes met and held, and the moment spun out of time. She knew an odd tightening in her throat, a squeezing of her chest that left her breathless and light-headed. The relentless, rhythmic pounding of the stallion's hooves seemed to reverberate through her, a primitive, hypnotic beat that thrummed in her blood in a strange evocation of a need only dimly understood.

Frightened and disturbed, she jerked her gaze away. "I fail to see how this is supposed to teach Finnegan's Luck to stop bucking," she said to Warrick, her voice coming out tart and disapproving.

Her brother grunted, his gaze still following the stallion. "The man's simply getting to know the horse for now, Jess. He says these things can't be rushed if they're going to be effective."