Whispers of Heaven (3 page)

"Do close the shutters, Jesmond. The sun will fade the carpet."

"Yes, Mother." She started to turn away, then paused, her attention caught by the estate's other burial ground, which lay beyond the pond, near the convicts' barracks. Marked with simple wooden crosses instead of marble monuments, the second cemetery was the final resting place of some dozen or so of the estate's assigned servants, for the divisions separating convict from free were so vast and impenetrable that not even in death were those tainted with the stain of con- victry allowed to mingle with the free.

"Jesmond.
The carpet."

Jessie closed the shutters and turned away.

* * *

The westering sun was throwing long shadows across the carefully scythed grass when Jessie left her mother dressing for supper and made her way toward the pond. Most of the big landowning families in the district buried their dead in the churchyard at Blackhaven Bay, but not the Corbetts. The church at Blackhaven Bay had been built on a pretty, windswept hill overlooking the sea. And Beatrice Corbett avoided the sea.

There was no gate yet between the two new stone pillars that marked the entrance to the place where Anselm Corbett had buried his dead sons and daughters so that his wife could visit their graves without being reminded of how the first of them had died. Jessie hesitated at the opening, the bouquet of apple blossoms she'd picked now crushed in one fist, her throat swelling with emotion at the sight of the newest grave in that line of loved ones.

Two years. After two years, freshly turned earth settles, and grass grows thick and green. Her father had lain here, dead, for two years. Yet she hadn't really believed it until now.

Swallowing hard, Jessie pushed away from the gateway and moved forward through a blur of tears to kneel on the grass beside the newest marble headstone. The beech trees on the far side of the stone wall moved mournfully in a breeze sweet with the scent of newly cut grass and apple blossoms.

The apple trees had been blooming the day her father kissed her and told her good-bye. He hadn't wanted her to go to London, had thought the idea of a Ladies' Academy of Science preposterous, perhaps even a shade improper. Yet he had taken her part against her mother's objections, and because of that, Jessie had been allowed to pursue her
unladylike
interest. Now, she would never see her father again.

"Oh, Papa," she whispered, laying the apple blossoms against the white marble headstone. "I miss you." She squeezed her eyes shut against the threat of tears, one splayed hand coming up to hide her face as it crumpled.

She didn't know how long she knelt there, lost in her grief. A pair of crescent honeyeaters rose, screeching, from the clump of white plumbago that grew near the cemetery entrance.

Dropping her hand, Jessie twisted around on her knees to discover one of the assigned servants watching her from the open gateway, a rough-booted foot propped up on a loose stone, a wooden box filled with tools resting on his thigh. He'd put on a cotton shirt and tucked it into his rugged canvas trousers, but she still recognized him. He was the man from the quarry. The one with the Black Irish good looks and the disturbing, angry eyes.

"I thought work had finished for the day," she said, pushing to her feet, both annoyed and embarrassed that someone had come to witness her temporary abandonment to grief.

He walked toward her, disconcerting her. She took a step back, and still he came at her. "There's only a wee bit of the coping left to be bedded in," he said, nodding toward the corner of the wall just beyond where she stood, her spine stiff, her hands fisted in her skirts. "I volunteered to come here after supper and finish it."

He paused some two feet from her. Jessie looked at the unfinished section of the wall, then back at him. "You
volunteered?"

"Faith, but if she doesn't sound just like the lads in the barracks." His white teeth flashed in a smile that came nowhere near to warming the hard glitter in his sea foam-colored eyes. "It's daft they think I am, as well."

She'd been right. He was Irish, the lilt of his brogue so thick and strong she suspected him of exaggerating it, of using it to taunt her. "You were working in the quarry today," she said, then wondered why.

"Aye." He moved over to survey the unfinished section of wall, his hands resting on his slim hips, his back to her. "But it's helping to build the new stables I'll be, come morning."

She understood, then. "Ah. Not so much daft, I think, as very clever. Building walls is surely a far easier task than breaking rocks in the quarry."

"That it is." He pivoted at the waist to regard her thoughtfully over one shoulder. He had a striking face, built wide at the cheekbones, with straight dark brows over deep-set, mys- terious eyes. She found she could not look at those eyes. She looked instead at the wall.

"Do you even know how to lay masonry?"

Turning his back on her, he stooped gracefully to rummage through the tools in his box. "After twelve months building roads and bridges for Her Britannic Majesty?" He paused. "I should think so."

"You were on a chain gang," she said, wondering why she found the thought so disturbing. Wondering why she was standing here, chatting so familiarly with this rough-talking, oddly self-possessed convict.

The wind kicked up again, cool with the promise of approaching evening. She glanced toward the house, where the flicker of the first candles shone golden and warm through the glass of the long French doors. It was time to leave, past time to be dressing for tonight's supper with Harrison and Philippa Tate. Still, she hesitated, aware of a curious impulse to make some courteous comment in parting. But he had his back to her, as if he had forgotten her presence. He was, after all, simply an assigned servant going about his work. She couldn't understand what had led her to speak so familiarly with him in the first place, let alone tarry so long.

Turning without a word, she left him there to his labors while she cut across the lawn toward the glowing warmth of the big house. She didn't turn around to see if he watched her or not. But all the way across the park, she was aware of him, behind her.

CHAPTER THREE

Harrison Winthrop Tate paced up and down before the sweeping stone steps of Beaulieu Hall, the evening sun comfortably warm on the shoulders of his dark dress coat, the fine gravel of the drive crunching sharply beneath the soles of his boots. Up past the open carriage, with its matched pair of snowy white mares. Down past the tan-and-black hound that wagged its tail in anticipation of an evening run, then drooped in mournful resignation as it realized the significance of Harrison's formally cut trousers and the elegant, silver-handled walking stick he carried only when making formal calls or traveling on business.

"Not tonight, old boy," Harrison said, then softened the rejection by stooping to scratch behind the dog's floppy ears. "Sorry." The hound sighed and lay down, its head resting on its paws, its big sorrowful eyes following Harrison as he straightened.

Swinging about, Harrison ran his gaze along the house's upper row of double-hung windows. Ordinarily, the sight of his home's magnificent, two-story, white stucco Georgian facade—its symmetry and restraint embellished by nothing more than the fine iron veranda railings imported directly from Scotland—filled him with a quiet sense of satisfaction and pride. But today his mind was not on the niceties of architectural design. Today, Harrison Tate was laboring under the strain of an emotion he did not often allow himself to experience: impatience.

Slipping one carefully manicured forefinger and thumb
20

into the pocket of his sprigged burgundy satin waistcoat, he extracted the tastefully engraved gold watch his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday Flicking it open, Harrison swallowed an ungenteel exclamation of annoyance. He had planned to be at the castle by seven. It was seven-ten already.

He was seriously considering doing something totally out of character, such as storming into the house and demanding in a raised voice that Philippa
Hurry up, please
, when his sister appeared, trailing a gauze shawl, ruffled parasol, and a fidgety maid who darted down the steps behind her, still straightening flawlessly draped yellow taffeta skirts over wide starched petticoats.

Harrison let out his breath in a quiet sigh of relief. But he kept his watch in his hand a moment longer, to let Philippa know he was displeased with her.

"Don't glower at me, Harrison," Philippa said, tucking her parasol under her arm so that she could draw on her fine kid gloves. "We're not late, and you know it."

"I never glower."

"Of course not. You would never do anything so ill bred as to glower. You simply draw your eyebrows together and look down your long nose at the malefactor in question, like a be- wigged judge on a high bench about to order another execution at dawn."

He opened the carriage door for her himself. "How do you know what a high court judge looks like?"

"I don't." She took his hand and smiled at him as he helped her into the carriage, although her lips remained reposed in a solemn, serene line. She had a way of smiling with only her eyes that most people missed. In fact, Harrison often suspected that there was a great deal about Philippa that most people missed. He was her only brother, yet even he sometimes had the uncomfortable suspicion that he didn't know her at all. That the calm, demure, and biddable face she showed the world was as carefully contrived as the facade of his house—elegant, artificial, and utterly for effect.

"How many times did you change your dress?" he asked, climbing in beside her.

"Only twice." She opened her parasol and held it at just the right angle to protect her delicate complexion. Unlike Jesmond, Philippa knew better than to expose her pale, perfect skin to the Australian sun.

"Warrick might not even be there, you know."

The parasol dipped slightly, as if the hand holding it went slack for a moment, then tightened. "Of course he'll be there," she said, her voice serene, any possible emotion in her light brown eyes hidden by lowered lashes. "It's Jessie's first night home."

Harrison leaned back in his seat, the carriage jerking forward as the coachman gave the horses the office to start. "Well, if he's not, it'll be his loss, for he'll miss seeing how beautiful you look."

She rewarded him with a radiant smile that lit up her entire face. She did look unusually pretty tonight, Harrison thought, her full cheeks flushed with color, her light brown hair worn in clusters of curls falling fashionably from a center part, with the back looped up.

She had been promised since birth to the heir of Castle Corbett, and although the specific identity of that heir had changed over the years as first one brother, then the next died, Philippa's general destiny had never altered. If the death of either Cecil or Reid Corbett had caused her any distress beyond the sorrow to be expected at the premature death of a friend, she'd never shown it. She had accepted Warrick as her future spouse with the same equanimity she had shown toward first Cecil, then Reid.

But Warrick, Harrison knew, was not so sanguine about receiving his late brothers' betrothed along with the rest of the family inheritance. He was to have formally asked for Philippa's hand in marriage when she turned eighteen. Yet Philippa's eighteenth birthday had come and gone several months ago, and Warrick hadn't said a word.

It was an unfortunate thought, for it reminded Harrison that, while Jesmond had accepted his own proposal more than two years ago now, he had not yet succeeded in making her his wife. Instead, she had insisted on sailing off to attend that ridiculous school of hers. Sometimes, he found himself wondering uneasily what kind of an effect her studies and her time away might have had on her. He was sure of her, of course. He had always been sure of her. She wasn't deliberately, provocatively wild or rebellious, like Warrick. But she did have a streak of unpredictability, of almost accidental nonconformity, that caused him no small amount of concern whenever he was honest enough with himself to admit it.

"You're gripping that walking stick as if you'd like to strangle it," Philippa said, the carriage bumping and swaying as it turned out of the drive and onto the main track. "You've been laboring under such a torment of anxiety and impatience these last few days, I'll never understand why you didn't simply go with Warrick to Blackhaven Bay and meet Jessie when she came in."

Harrison glanced at his sister, then swung his face away quickly, his gaze carefully fixed on the rolling green pasture- land, his cheeks heating with a rare betrayal of discomfort. A part of him had wanted desperately to be there this morning, to catch that first, longed-for glimpse of the woman he loved, to touch his fingertips to her soft cheeks, to see her lips part in a welcome smile. And yet he'd been secretly relieved when Beatrice Corbett had gently suggested he come to supper this evening instead. Because the truth was, there existed a dangerously ungenteel, almost animalistic undercurrent to his feelings for Jesmond. On a windswept beach, with the sun hot on his skin and the pounding surge of the waves crashing around them, he could well have forgotten himself and allowed his passion for her to overwhelm him in a way that might frighten her, and would certainly publicly embarrass him. Amongst the cold marble and stiff brocade of the Cor- betts' punctiliously correct drawing room, he would be in no danger.

"Really, Philippa." He let his voice sharpen with a quick spurt of irritation. "Jesmond has just traveled half the way around the world. I would expect you of all people to understand her mother's desire to allow her some time to recover."

Philippa laughed softly. "I would likely need half a year, at least, to recover from such a journey. But not Jessie. When did you ever know Jessie to need to rest after anything?"

The carriage was already slowing for the turn into the tree- lined avenue leading to the castle. They could easily have walked the distance between the two houses—had often done it, in fact, as children. But they were no longer children. Besides, one did not arrive in response to a formal dinner invitation on foot.