Night in Eden (22 page)

He never mentioned the shooting lessons again.

By silent, mutual consent they stayed away from each other, for to be physically near each other was an agony. To be alone together was to invite disaster.

The weather grew hot. The cooling breezes turned warm, then died completely as the Australian summer sank its teeth into the Hawkesbury and didn't let go. Hayden, busy with his harvest, welcomed the long hours of sweat-drenching, mind-numbing work that kept him away from the house. Bryony took off all her petticoats and still felt damp and listless in the sweltering heat. Even Simon fretted and grew troublesome.

It was one day when Bryony was having trouble getting Simon to settle for his morning nap that Hayden forgot something and came back to the house unexpectedly. She'd been singing a soft lullaby, the baby at her breast, when she heard Hayden's quick step in the hall and looked up to find him standing on the threshold.

He stared at her exposed breasts. His head reared back, and his nostrils flared like a stallion scenting a mare in heat. She could feel his gaze on her naked flesh as surely as if he had touched her there. Her gaze roamed over his lithe, hard body. She tried to swallow, but found she couldn't. The simple sight of him, standing there lean and beautiful, was enough to take away her breath and send shafts of desire darting through her body.

Their gazes caught and held as the silence stretched long and taut between them. The heat in the room was
palpable. She felt a bead of sweat form and roll down between her shoulder blades. Then he spun around on his heel and left.

It was two days later, when Bryony and Louisa were down by the river doing the laundry, that the weather suddenly turned.

The day had begun as hot as the ones before. By mid-morning the sun was already so bright and fierce that it seemed to have bleached all the color from the sky. Bryony stood over a pot of boiling sheets. Heat roiled up from the fire until she thought she might be sick.

Then, as if from nowhere, a breeze licked across her sweat-streaked face, as cool and clean as if someone had just opened the door of an icehouse. She lifted her head in wonder.

"Well, Satan's whores," gasped Louisa, straightening up slowly, for the washing was always hard on Louisa's back. "Three bleedin' weeks without a bleedin' storm, and it has to bleedin' rain
today!"

Bryony glanced up at the sky. Tiny puffs of clouds had appeared, scuttling across the deepening blue of the heavens as if pushed by an unseen hand. "It doesn't look like rain to me."

"No? Look behind you." She motioned to the south.

Bryony whirled around. Dark, heavy thunderheads loomed ominously up over the horizon, like some kind of evil, threatening presence. She glanced about in dismay at the pots of laundry at various stages of boiling, scrubbing, and rinsing. "Will we finish?"

"Aye. But gettin' it all dry is goin' to be another thing entirely."

They worked quickly, and within half an hour had the cart loaded up. By that time the sky was a solid wall of gray and the temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees, but the rain held off.

"Come on then, Sarey," Louisa called. "We gotta go."

Sarah came skipping up, her fists full of flowers, her fair hair fluttering behind her in the wind, her little bells tinkling. "Look, Mama," she said, proudly displaying her collection of native daisies and flannel flowers. "I picked some flowers for Nathan and Thomas and Joseph. Now I need to get some for Mary."

"We'll get Mary's flowers later, sugar. I want to get these clothes hung up and let 'em dry some in the wind before the rain hits."

"But I saw some pretty yellow flowers under the red gums down by the creek," said Sarah insistently. "Yellow was Mary's favorite color."

Bryony hid her smile. Bryony had no idea what Mary's favorite color had been, but she knew Sarah loved yellow. Bryony had planted a yellow rose in her garden, just for Sarah. Hayden had brought it back to her from one of his trips into Green Hills.

"Later, pet." Louisa lifted the protesting child into the cart.

Back at the homestead, Bryony dropped Simon in his bed and hurriedly strung a line between the posts on the veranda so she could hang up her clothes there. By now the wind was blowing fiercely, whipping the linens back and forth with a snap that was uncomfortably reminiscent of the crack of a cat-o'-nine-tails. It was hard work, struggling to keep the clean clothes from being carried away by the wind. When a sudden gust snatched one of Hayden's shirts from her fingers and sent it sailing into the dust, she swore and tore them all down. She hoped they didn't start smelling musty before the storm blew itself out, otherwise she'd have to wash them all over again.

She was rolling up the last of the sheets when she caught the faint tinkling of bells. She looked up, expecting to see Sarah and Louisa. Instead she saw only Louisa, coming down the hill at an ungainly lope. She had Sarah's sash of little silver bells gripped in one big fist, and a look of stark terror on her homely face.

"Bryony! Oh, for the love of God, Bryony," she gasped as she ran. "It's me Sarey! She was sittin' by the side of the hut playin' with some blocks of wood Will made once for Thomas, while I hung up me clothes. I was sure she was there, 'cause I never heard her bells. Only when I turned around, she was gone! She took off her bells, Bryony. She took them off, and I don't know where she's gone."

Bryony fought to swallow her own panic. "Sit down, Louisa, and catch your breath. We'll find her. She can't have gone far. Did you check the cemetery? She had those flowers—"

"I done looked there already. Oh, Bryony! You don't think she went back down by the river to pick flowers for Mary, do you? That bank's so steep, and it would be so easy..." But at this point Louisa's voice became suspended. She shoved one work-worn fist into her mouth, and just sat there, rocking back and forth on the chair.

Bryony squeezed the older woman's shoulder reassuringly. "She'll be all right, Louisa. You just sit here and get your breath back. I'll run down to the barn and find someone to send out to the fields for the men, and then we'll go look by the river ourselves. We'll find her, don't worry."

Bryony flew down the yard, thankful that ever since the incident with the Aborigines' dogs, Hayden had made sure that at least one man was always around the homestead. She found McDuff in an empty paddock, working with his greyhounds. She was afraid he'd scoff at her for her concern, but his ruddy face grew grim when she told him what had happened, and he took off at a lope toward the far field, where the men were working to bring in the last of the crops before the rain hit. For McDuff knew only too well that the Australian bush had a bad habit of swallowing children. Too many of those that wandered off were never found. Or found too late.

Bryony hurried back up to the house, snatched a sleepy
Simon from his nap, and went with Louisa back down to the river.

The wind ravaged the trees overhead, thrashing them wildly back and forth against the steadily darkening sky as the women searched frantically, up and down the river. They smashed through undergrowth, called Sarah's name, shouted until they were hoarse in an effort to be heard above the fury of the coming storm.

They found the yellow flowers that looked almost like buttercups growing under the red gums by the creek, but they didn't find Sarah. And then the rain came, slashing out of the unforgiving sky, and Bryony had to draw her shawl over Simon's head and hurry with him back to the house.

By that time the men had come in from the fields and were spread out over the surrounding area, beating their way through the bushes and trees and fanning across the grasslands.

Hayden finally brought Louisa back up to the house. She was half fainting with exhaustion and fear. But no sooner had Bryony succeeded in pressing her onto one of Laura's silk-covered settees with a cup of hot tea, then it suddenly occurred to Louisa that Sarah might somehow find her way home, and that if there were no one at the hut waiting for her, then she'd very likely wander off again.

Louisa shot up off the settee, determined to go back to the hut. Unable to dissuade her, Bryony finally went with her.

They waited together as the long afternoon wore on, listening to the rain pound on the bark roof and the wind howl around the pitiful hut. At one point Bryony went out and gathered up Louisa's forgotten laundry and brought it inside, but Louisa was past caring. She sat on a stool beside the hearth, rocking back and forth with Sarah's bell sash cradled in her arms. "Why'd you take it off, Sarey?" she kept saying. "Why? Why?"

Then Bryony became aware of another sound, audible only when there was a lessening in the roaring of the wind and the drumming of the rain. It was her cows, lowing to be milked. She walked over and threw open the hut's only door. She stared out at the driving rain and the churning mud, and she found herself cursing the cows and the dairy and New South Wales. But most of all she cursed the men, for it was the men who brought women out here so selfishly, to slake their male lusts and make their lives a bit more comfortable. They didn't seem to care—if they even thought about it at all—that by bringing women here they were condemning them to bear and try to rear their children in this harsh, unforgiving environment. It was difficult enough to keep children alive in England, where there were other women around to help and support and advise, where no one had ever heard of funnel web spiders or tiger snakes. Where it wasn't so hot that meat could turn putrid in a few hours. Where children didn't just wander off into the bush, never to be seen again.

"Go on, Bryony," said the onetime Dublin thief who'd already lost four children to this merciless land. "Go milk
yer cows."

Bryony looked back at her friend. Louisa sat huddled on her stool, the only movement that of her hands, skimming back and forth across the little bells. She seemed to have shrunk, to have aged. Bryony wanted to go to her and put her arms around her and hold her and cry for her—and with her.

Instead she said, "Come with me."

Louisa shook her head. "No, I'll stay here, 'case Sarey comes back. You can leave Simon, if you want."

But Bryony took Simon with her. She wasn't sure Louisa was in any condition to watch him.

It was when she was coming out of the dairy, after filling and covering the settling bowls, that she saw Hayden's big bay turn into the yard. He came at a walk,
but not from the direction of the river. He was coming from the Carvers' hut.

And she knew. She knew from the way he sat his horse, from the cold and forbidding harshness of his face. She knew.

She stood in front of the dairy, her hands pressed to her sides, watching him ride up to her. The rain lashed her, the wind swirled around her, but she was aware of none of it.

He swung off his horse and tossed the reins to one of the men who followed him. "You found her," she said.

"Yes." He studied her through narrowed eyes, but she knew he could see nothing in her face because she wasn't feeling anything. Just a cold, numbing emptiness. "She was on the far side of the hill, at the bottom of a steep embankment. She must have lost her footing and slipped in the storm. Her head hit a rock. She..." He paused for a moment, and Bryony knew what he was seeing. Fair, baby-soft ringlets, darkened with blood. "She'd been picking some yellow flowers. She still had them in her hand when we found her."

Yellow flowers. Yellow flowers for Mary. She'd gone back to get the flowers for her sister's grave.
Dear God,
thought Bryony.

"You'd better go sit with Louisa," he said, turning away.
"I
don't think she should be left alone."

Bryony's head snapped around. "But Will—"

"He doesn't know yet. He's still searching the sandbars downriver. I sent one of the men to tell him."

She grabbed Hayden's arm, her fingers digging frantically into his warm, solid flesh. "You told Louisa? You took the dead child to her?"

"Yes.
I—"

"Dear God." She picked up her skirts and ran. Not toward the hut but to the river. "Louisa!" she called frantically, her feet slipping and
sliding through the rain-churned mud of the yard. "Louisa!" She ran down the long, grassy slope. She was gasping for breath, and her lungs felt as if they might explode, and still she ran on. The wind whipped her hair in front of her eyes, and the rain stung her shoulders and mingled with the tears that coursed unchecked down her cheeks. "Louisa," she screamed, over and over again. "Louisa, don't do it! Louisa!
No."

She never knew if Louisa heard her. For one instant Bryony saw her, poised on the edge of a great boulder that thrust out deep into the current. Then Louisa took a step forward and disappeared.

"Louisa, no!"
Bryony plunged into the storm-swollen river. She was up to her knees in the swirling water when strong arms closed about her waist, lifting her high.

"No, let me go," she gasped, struggling against him. "I can reach her. I must—"

Hayden turned her around and swept her into his arms, wading back out of the treacherous waters. "No, Bryony. No. You can't save her."