But someplace, deep inside, where it mattered, Louisa Carver truly had gone quietly mad.
And Bryony was afraid, so terribly afraid, that if she didn't stop dwelling on her grief for Philip and her fears for Madeline, the same thing might happen to her.
The haunting strains of Bodin de Boismortier's Suite No. One in E Minor floated away on the late afternoon breeze. Hayden had arranged it himself, for flute and harp. Except there was no flute, only a harp. Laura's harp.
Hayden stopped with one hand clutching the veranda post, conscious of a tightening in his chest, an ache in the region of his heart. For the space of one, pounding heartbeat he thought it wasn't real, that his imagination had conjured up the sound to torment him.
Only he would never have imagined Laura playing like this. Laura had been a skilled, well-trained musician. But whoever was playing Laura's harp was drawing the music from the depths of her very soul.
He entered the house quietly, although the woman who sat at Laura's harp was so lost in her music he doubted she would have heard him had he ridden his bay at a charge right into the hall. He stood in the doorway of the parlor, watching her. Her hair was unbound and tumbled down her back in a cascade of dark, flame-shot curls that made him yearn to lift the heavy mass from her slim shoulders and let it fall again, just so he could feel it as it slipped through his fingers.
She played with her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her fingers moving nimbly over the strings. Her face was suffused with a curious mixture of earthly sadness and sublime joy. He thought she had never looked more beautiful.
He watched her a moment longer, then quietly crossed the hall to his room, to take out the flute he hadn't touched for six long months.
She heard the flute in her mind, its notes high and clear and sweet. Her fingers faltered at the strings, and her eyes flew open.
His brilliant blue gaze met and held hers above the flashing silver of his instrument, but he never missed a note. He wove them around her, a delicate filigree of sound that enticed her, wooed her, seduced her.
Of their own accord, her fingers began once again to pluck the strings. Their gazes remained locked. They talked to each other with their eyes, with the gentle, swaying movements of their bodies, with their music.
At times the music was low and sensual, at other times high and clear and bright. They moved wordlessly from one piece to the next; sometimes one would start a piece, sometimes the other. Once they looked at each other and began the same piece simultaneously. There was no need for speech. They knew each other's pain, each other's fear, each other's sorrow, and they played it, they shared it, they eased it.
They played until the shadows in the room grew long and Quincy came pounding at the door. "Bryony? What the hell ye think yer doin'? I got yer fire started, but if ye don't hustle it, it's goin' to be dark before ye get the Cap'n's dinner ready. Bryony?"
Hayden lowered his flute, Bryony's arms dropped to her sides. They looked at each other and smiled.
Hayden stood with his shoulders against the frame of the French doors and smoked a cigar while he watched Bryony sew in a chair before the empty hearth.
"I thought you'd be angry with me," she said, keeping her gaze focused on the tiny stitches she was setting in a nightgown for Simon. "You told me not to touch it."
He lifted his cheroot, drew in deeply, then exhaled a stream of blue smoke. "I didn't think you knew a damn
thing about harps. What have you been doing? Playing during the day, when I'm not around?"
She didn't say anything, but a telltale stain of color stole up her cheeks. "Ha," he said, shaking his cigar at her. "At least you have the grace to blush."
The blush deepened, and he thought how beautiful she looked, with the golden light of the setting sun streaming in to touch her cheeks with a warm glow. He thought about how much he'd missed their evenings together, talking to her, watching for the elusive smiles that sometimes flitted across her face. He thought about how much he'd hurt her, both by what he'd done to his two men and by what he'd said to her, and he wished he could explain it all to her. Explain how he, too, had been hurt by what he'd had to do. And how he wished he'd never said what he'd said to her that day, in the yard.
There was so much he wanted to tell her. But she was his servant, and he was her master, and although he wanted to subtly alter that relationship, she would have none of it. So he just stood there, listening to a couple of magpies chatter in the distance, and smoked his cigar.
They played together often, in the evenings after Bryony had finished the dishes and put the baby to sleep. When the weather was fine, Hayden would carry the harp and a chair out onto the veranda for her, and they'd play while the sun slipped behind the jagged blue tips of the mountains and the river turned into a streak of silver, gleaming beyond the shadows of the trees.
But it was a dangerous practice, because it meant they were spending time alone together as it grew dark, something she'd avoided doing in the past.
One particularly warm night, he'd been playing in his shirtsleeves as he usually did, but the shirt was damp with his sweat and dirty from a day spent riding the fields, getting ready for the harvest, for he'd ridden in late and there'd been no time to change before dinner. He
finally set aside his flute with a soft oath and stripped the shirt off.
The warm evening breeze curled around his naked torso, cooling him. He lifted his flute again and started to play Purcell's Minuet when he realized Bryony was staring at him.
Her breath came shallow and rapid from between her lips, her beautiful brown eyes were dark with nameless yearnings as her gaze roved over the sweat-sheened muscles of his bare chest and his arms. She jerked her head away almost at once and gave her attention to the music, but he could tell she wasn't concentrating. Every once in a while he'd catch her eyeing him, covertly, from beneath her lowered lashes.
And the knowledge of it brought such a shuddering, aching need that he finally laid down his flute.
She stopped playing at once. "What's wrong?" she asked. Her face was blank with surprise, but her eyes... ah, her eyes burned with the same heat that threatened to consume him.
"Nothing." He turned away before she could bloody well
see
what was wrong with him. "We're starting the harvest tomorrow, and it's going to be a long day. I think I should carry the harp back inside now."
Alone in his bed that night, Hayden tossed and turned for endless hours until the covers were like a twisted rope wrapped around his hot, naked body. He finally swore and kicked them off the bottom of the bed.
He lay in the darkness, breathing heavily, remembering the curve of her wrists as she plucked the harp's strings, the lift of her breasts when she tossed her hair over her shoulder, the light in her eyes as they moved hungrily over his naked chest.
It was the look in her eyes that he kept coming back to. He had seen her watching him at other times over the course of the last few months. But in the past the eyes
that followed him had always shone with a kind of wariness, as if she were aware of his sexuality, his power, but afraid of it.
He'd seen no fear in her tonight. Only an aching want.
He glanced toward the door to her room. If it were true, if she were no longer afraid of him, then he could go to her. He could go to her now. He knew what she would look like, lying in her bed, her breasts swelling above the neck of her night rail, her fire-kissed hair spread across the pillow. He pictured walking up to her and gently lifting the gown from her body and running his hands up her naked thighs, opening her for him. It was an image so vivid, so compelling that he shuddered.
But what if he were wrong? What if he went to her and she was still determined to hold him off in the name of pride and principles? If he went to her now, wanting her the way he did, he wouldn't be able to stop himself from taking her. Not even if she didn't want him. Not even if she fought him. He would have to have her.
With a groan, he rolled out of bed and went to throw open the French doors and the shutters. The night was clear and almost still. He stood listening to the cicadas hum, to the whisper of the wind in the branches of the river gums.
And he found he had to grip the edge of the door, hard, to keep himself there, where the night air washed cold over his hot body.
To keep himself from walking through that other door, the one that led to the room where she lay sleeping in his dead wife's bed.
The long, hot days that followed kept the men out in the fields until it was dark. Hayden St. John worked beside his men, harder than any laborer. Almost everyone on the station was drafted to work in the fields at harvest time, for the wheat not only had to be cut, it also had to be gathered and tied into sheaves in preparation for being picked up and carried to the threshing floor to be
threshed with a flail. Then the fields would be burned and planted again, with corn this time.
With all the men out in the fields, Bryony and Simon were left alone at the homestead during the day. Even Quincy had had to give up the two mornings a week he usually stayed to help with Laura's garden. Normally Bryony didn't mind being alone. But on this particular day she was feeling oddly nervous.
She was down near the creek with Simon tied to her chest with a shawl, picking her first crop of beans for dinner. It was hot. A film of sweat, gritty with dust, glazed her face. The day was oddly still. No wind rustled the gum leaves. Even the birds were silent. She found she kept looking over her shoulder, kept straightening up to scan the nearby trees. She told herself she was being foolish. She told herself it was an effect of the weather, which was cloudy and close without a breath of fresh air moving. But it didn't seem to help. She finally picked up her basket and headed back toward the house.
It was when she came around the side of the kitchen that she saw them. A group of six Aborigines stood outside one of the huts at the bottom of the yard. Three or four of their mangy dogs lay panting in the shade beside them.
She eyed the black men warily. She'd seen Aboriginal people around often enough by now to feel slightly foolish every time she remembered the way she'd run from that first encounter. They regularly came into the yard to sharpen their tomahawks at the grinding stone, as one of them was doing now, or to talk Hayden out of a sack of corn.
But she'd never been entirely alone with such a large group of them, as she was now. She set her basket of beans on the kitchen table and went to lay Simon in his bed in the house. It was time to milk the cows. And although she didn't relish the idea of walking down to the bottom of the yard where those men were, it had to be done.
She felt their eyes follow her as she led the cows to the bail and secured their leg ropes. She was hoping by the time she was done with the milking they'd be gone, but they weren't. Sighing, she set the milk in the dairy and went to take the cows back to the barn.
It was when she was walking the two cows back toward the stockyards that one of the dogs, lying seemingly asleep by the huts, suddenly stood up. He lifted his head, as if sniffing the wind, and whatever it was he smelled, he didn't like. His lips curled back over his teeth, and he let out a deep, throaty growl.
Bryony eyed the dog nervously. He took a step toward her and growled again. It seemed to act as a kind of cue to the other dogs. They all stood up and growled together.
Bryony kept walking. She was almost past them when the dog suddenly lunged at her. She never knew if he was going for one of the cows or for her. She had a brief, terrifying vision of wild eyes and snarling teeth. She lashed out with the end of the lead ropes. They hit with a stinging snap across the dog's nose. He ran off howling across the yard.
The black man stopped grinding his tomahawk. They all stared at her. One particularly big man with an ugly scar on his shoulder strode up and cuffed her hard, on the side of the head. She went sprawling facedown into the dust, dropping the lead ropes. The two cows kicked up their heels and took off bawling.
She rolled over slowly, coming to
a
half-sitting position. Her ears were ringing so badly she didn't think she could stand up. She sat in the dust, holding her head and eyeing the man who stood over her.
Throughout the entire encounter, no one had said
a
word. Now the man who had hit her grunted as if in satisfaction. He said something she couldn't understand to the man with the tomahawk, then turned away from her. The man with the tomahawk took one step toward her...
And Bryony found her legs and her lungs at the same time.
"Hayden!"
She picked herself up out of the dust and bolted, screaming as loud as she could. She knew he probably couldn't hear her, but she kept screaming his name anyway, over and over again, as she dashed toward the house. She wasn't sure what she thought she was going to do when she got there. She only knew she couldn't run off in the other direction and leave Simon there alone.
She never made it to the house. She hadn't even reached the veranda when one of the men tackled her from behind. She rolled over, kicking and biting for all she was worth, until he finally sat on her and pinned her arms down in the dust.
He wasn't a particularly large man, and he wasn't very young, either. When he opened his mouth, she saw he'd already lost a good many of his teeth. "Ba-eel, ba-eel," he said. "No good you run for cooly. You cry to cooly, and cooly come here and kill everybody. No good."