As she snuggled down against him once more, Thomas smiled. The misgivings and uncertainty of the last weeks had left him. They had a great deal yet to learn about each other, some of it a filling in of the past, but he no longer doubted that they would survive the truth.
She loved him—at least she was beginning to do so. His welcome into her bed the night before would remain in his memory if he lived to be a hundred.
As for the other, he did not know what to think of it. In fact, he shied from an examination of it. If he thought about it too hard and too long, he might grow wary of her or of himself. It was not a natural gift, of that he was certain. As to its purpose, there seemed to be none. Accept and forget: that would be his advice to her. He would take it himself.
He bent and touched his cheek to Aisleen’s brow, his gaze settling blandly upon the taller of the two pipe smokers, who seemed to find the curves of Aisleen’s bodice of irresistible interest. With an easy movement, he reached inside his coat and lifted his pistol so that the butt of it
peaked through the opening He saw the thin woman across from him stiffen in fright, but he merely smiled and nodded at her. His point had been made with the diggers.
The coach swayed on its leather supports, and the driver cursed the horses around a tight bend in the canyon road. All at once the driver’s cry split the air, and the coach veered sharply toward the edge of the precipice as he fought to bring the animals to a halt. Aisleen slid forward on the seat with a cry of fright, but Thomas caught her, bracing them with a boot against the opposite seat.
“Ambush!” the driver cried over the protest of his passengers. “All out, lads!”
The diggers were the first to jump from the coach, and as they left, Aisleen saw the burning tree that had been dragged across the road.
Thomas reached for his pistol, but it was too late to prevent an attack. Half a dozen men rushed from the bushes that flanked the mountain side of the road.
“Bail up!”
The cry was followed by the crack of pistol shots and then the thud of a body as one of the diggers dropped onto the roadside.
The thin woman screamed, and the child with her wailed in fright as he threw himself into her arms. The remaining digger leaped back in beside the hysterical woman and winked at Thomas. “Bushrangers! Half a dozen!”
Aisleen clutched Thomas’s arm. Thomas gave her a quick, reassuring smile and tucked his hand with the pistol in it into her skirts. “Say nothing.”
A moment later, the coach door was thrown open and the driver was shoved into the breach, a pistol at his temple.
“All out or he’s dead!”
“If it’s gold ye’re after, lads, ye’ll be finding it with the luggage on top.” Thomas’s voice was amused and slightly bored.
The digger fired a shot past the driver in the open doorway, and the bushranger was thrown back by the bullet that bored his forehead. The driver was thrust aside as a second robber turned his pistol into the coach’s interior and fired. With a cry of pain the digger collapsed onto the terrified woman’s lap.
Aisleen’s screams were muffled by the weight of Thomas’s body as he covered her. From the opposite side, new shots entered the coach, and the digger jerked and moaned as several bullets found their mark.
“Bail up!” came the shout a second time.
“We surrender!” Thomas reached over and threw the dead digger’s pistol from the window. “We’ve women and a child!”
A man moved into the breach of the open coach door, and a face out of a nightmare stared in on them. Aisleen gasped and recoiled. It was a travesty of a human being: the mouth wide and lipless, above a thin beard the cheeks seamed and furrowed, ravaged by the harshest elements of the sun and pitted by disease. The eyes were almost lost in a permanent squint. It was a face to be remembered with a shudder and a prayer, and when she turned to Thomas she saw her own revulsion reflected in his contracted pupils.
But he did not withdraw. A bemused smile flickered on his lips. “Sean O’Leary.”
The man stared at Thomas; then a slow, gap-toothed grin spread over his face. “By hell and the devil! If’n it isn’t me old friend Tommy!” The small man’s wild eyes seemed to drink in Thomas, his grin widening to imbecilic proportions. “God rot me if I don’t have ye at last!”
“I’ve heard ye were looking for me,” Thomas said politely, but he did not release the pistol he held hidden in Aisleen’s skirts. “Well, here I am.”
“So ye are,” the man answered and thrust his pistol in
the weeping woman’s face. “Step out, Thomas, me boy. We’ve things to discuss.”
“I think I’ll be keeping me seat,” Thomas answered and slid his arm free of Aisleen’s grasp, leaving the pistol in her lap.
The man’s squinty gaze shifted to Aisleen. “Be that yer lass?” Thomas shrugged. “Heard ye was wed a few weeks back.” The man’s tongue rimmed his gash of a mouth as he stared at Aisleen’s red hair. “Haven’t seen a lass the likes of her in fourteen years.”
His gaze moved back to Thomas. “Ye were always the one with the most luck. Seamus and Michael died on the hillside above Schull Harbor. They were the lucky sort, too, to me way of thinking. Thought I’d been hanged, did ye, Tommy? Well, I wasn’t! Now there’s just ye and me, and the score will be settled between us.”
Thomas stared at the man a moment. “Very well,” he said in Gaelic. “For ye, Sean, I’ll be stepping out.” He pressed Aisleen’s thigh hard to keep her from moving. “But I’ll be asking ye, as one Corkman to another, to let the ladies be. Ye’ve no quarrel with them.”
“Sean! For God’s sake! Hurry up!” one of the bushrangers cried.
“Hold yer tongue!” Sean roared back, his pistol moving to point at Thomas. “Nae, I’ll nae kill ye. ’Twould be too easy. I’ll nae have ye die easy. Stand down, Tommy, lad. Stand down with me, just like the old days when we were rebels together against the English. Only this time, ye’ll nae be seeing us grabbed!”
“No!” Aisleen clutched Thomas’s arm as he rose to leave the coach. Sean turned his pistol on her, but she was too frightened for Thomas to judge the danger in which she also stood. She lunged for the pistol that was sliding free of her skirts and lifted it.
Thomas saw what she was about to do and deflected the
barrel with the back of his hand before jumping free of the coach.
“Thomas!” Aisleen cried, but he shut the door before she gained the exit.
For an instant, his face was framed in the coach window. “I’ll be meeting ye in Sydney,
macushla.
Tell Jack about Sean!” The next moment he was felled by a blow from Sean’s pistol butt.
“Tom!” Aisleen threw her weight against the door, but the latch held. A moment later Sean’s ugly face reappeared. “Ye’ll nae see him again, lass! I’ll be taking him to hell with me!”
“Drive on!” came a cry from beyond the coach, and all at once they began to move.
Realizing that she lay half-sprawled over a dead man’s body, Aisleen rose to push herself back in one corner of the coach seat, numbed by misery and fear. She sat a short while in silence, scarcely aware of her surroundings as the wails of the woman and child filled the interior. But gradually the hysteria that raged across the small space drew her attention, and she stared at the woman. What was she wailing about? She had lost nothing to the bushrangers.
“Shut up!” she cried as the woman continued to keen wildly. “Shut up or I’ll strike you!”
The woman halted abruptly to stare at her, but Aisleen turned her head away and began to weep softly. The weeping did not last long. Something must be done, but what?
Aisleen reached up and began pummeling the coach ceiling with her fists. “Stop! Stop at once!”
At first, she did not think the driver would heed her pleas, but finally he brought the coach to a halt. The moment it stopped, she grabbed Thomas’s pistol and climbed down.
“What’d ye be doing, miss?” the driver called as she stepped down. “We’ve another four miles before we reach the coaching station.”
“I’m not going there. I’m expecting a friend along shortly.”
“Are ye mad, miss? Those bushrangers could come this way, and where would you be?”
Aisleen pointed at her bags. “Leave our things at the next station. We’ll be coming back for them.”
The driver gaped at her. “I can’t leave a woman passenger on the roadside.”
Aisleen lifted her pistol. “Drive on!”
With an amazing string of profanity, the driver whipped up his team, and the coach rolled on.
When it was out of sight, Aisleen wiped the perspiration from her face with a hand and then found a large rock on which to sit to wait for Jack. Her perch was out of the sunlight and away from casual view from the road, but it allowed her sight of anyone traveling the highway.
She did not know how far behind them Jack might be, but she suspected that he kept the pace fairly well. She refused to think about what she would do if he did not come before dark, or worse, took a different route that would not bring him along this road. Thomas had said there was only one pass over the Blue Mountains. He must come this way.
“He must!” she whispered fiercely.
The sight of a man on horseback did not kindle her hopes. Several had passed in the intervening two hours. It was the oversized length of the late-afternoon shadow he cast before him that drew Aisleen to the edge of the road.
When she stepped up onto the roadway, he paused but did not seem surprised to find her standing alone on an empty road.
“G’day,” was all he said.
Aisleen blinked back new tears. “We were held up by bushrangers. The one named Sean took Tom.”
Jack looked up, his eyes narrowing against the sun. “How long ago?”
“Two hours, maybe nearly three,” she answered, her hand held to shade her eyes. “Help me find him, Jack. Please.”
When he looked down at her, Aisleen was surprised to see that he was smiling. It was not a pleasant smile, but it gave her heart. “Maybe Tom’s dead.”
Aisleen shook her head. “No, I’d know it.”
Jack stared at her a long time, and she felt the weight of his stare like a heavy hand upon her head. Finally, he nodded once and tossed her the lead reins to Thomas’s horse.
She did not bother to tell him that she had never ridden alone. He knew that. She gathered the reins and then set her foot in the stirrup and hoisted herself inexpertly into Thomas’s saddle. When she had pulled herself upright, she looked across at the man who towered above her in his saddle.
“Which way?” he asked quietly.
Aisleen shut her eyes. How was she to find Thomas? Until this moment, she had believed that Jack would help her find him. Now she understood that the burden was hers.
She touched the pistol she had tucked into her waistband. She was in a strange land, in unfamiliar territory. Where in all the wilds of the Blue Mountain bush did one search for a man?
There was no answer and so she simply turned her mount, handling the reins as she had watched Thomas do so often, and dug the heels of her boots into the horse’s flanks to urge her mount back down the road. Jack followed her, walking his horse behind her and then riding abreast.
When they reached the site of the ambush, Aisleen did not stop. She did not glance at the dead body that had been left on the roadside. She did not think of what might be happening to Thomas. She turned her horse down the steep embankment off the road and into the twilight of the underbrush with Jack riding like an otherworldly sentry at her side.
* * *
“I’m not finished with ye, ye miserable, traitorous cur. Just ye wait till daylight. Ye’ll wish ye’d swung all them years ago! I’ll be giving ye ten stripes for every one of mine, before I’m done with ye! See if I don’t! Only enough life’ll be left in ye to hang!”
The maddened voice roared through her mind, but she could not find the source. Bonds held her securely, and there was no light when she tried to open her eyes. She was blind!
Pain radiated through every fiber of her body, excruciating white-hot flashes of agony that she could not move from or cry out to prevent. Face, chest, stomach, and back: the blows came repeatedly until she knew she would die!
*
Aisleen sat up with a gasping cry. For a moment, her dream-blocked eyes saw nothing. And then she saw Jack standing over her, his craggy face immutable as always.
“Tom dead?”
Aisleen shook her head. “No.”
Jack watched her with a predatory gleam, but she did not fear him. “Knew a woman once, same as ye. She saw things, heard things. Never liked her.”
Aisleen blushed furiously as he turned away. Is that how she seemed to him—a mad woman who claimed to hear and see things that no one else did? It was not true. She had suffered a nightmare, nothing more. But she knew Thomas was still alive; she could feel it inside her. Alive, but for how long?
She scrambled to her feet. They had spent the darkest hours of the night in the shelter of great, gloomy trees. The
thin light of early dawn lent an eerie, brooding quality to the air. The silence seemed pregnant with treachery and danger. She shivered with cold and dread.
“Cha,” Jack muttered and motioned to her. She saw that he had made a very small fire over which he had swung his billy can. She gratefully took the cup he offered her.