Whispers of Heaven Page 2

  Hopping out first, Warrick turned to wrap his hands around Jessie's waist, then paused at something he must have seen in her face. "Don't tell me you expected to find Mother out here waiting for you?" He swung Jessie down to the drive.

  "No." She let go of her brother's shoulders and turned to look up at the house's massive fagade. "But I guess a part of me was still hoping."

  Reaching out, he touched her elbow, lightly, stopping her as she took a step toward the porch. An unexpected shadow of concern, perhaps even remorse, darkened his face. "She's probably been waiting for you in the morning room since breakfast, unable to do anything except pretend to embroider, and fret. She did miss you, you know. Terribly."

  "I know," said Jessie, giving him a reassuring smile before running up the steps and letting herself in the wide double doors. In England, such a stately county home would have had a butler, or at least a footman, stationed ready to open the front door for the members of the household. But house servants had always been a problem in Tasmania. London pickpockets and Irish Whiteboys didn't usually make good butlers.

  Jessie's quick footsteps echoed down the wide, black-and- white marble hall. Despite the house's exterior medieval trappings, its floor plan was very much that of a Palladian villa, divided into a cross by two intersecting hallways, a main hall running through to the wide rear door, and a smaller hall, running east to west, which contained the grand main staircase of polished blackwood at one end and the servants' stairs at the other.

  The morning room occupied the northeast corner of the house and had been placed to catch the morning sun, although Beatrice usually kept the shutters half closed at the room's twin sets of French doors, so that only a pale light suffused the space. It was a feminine room decorated in rosewood and ivory-toned floral damask, with a white marble mantelpiece surmounted by a massive, gilt-framed mirror. It was there that Jessie found her mother, gowned in the black silk of mourning and seated on a settee dating back to late in the last century. Her embroidery frame lay idle in her lap.

  In her youth, Beatrice Corbett had been considered quite a beauty, her figure slender and tall, her features striking and regal. She was still a striking woman, her attire always ruthlessly neat and correct, her hair never anything but impeccably coifed, although affluence combined with repeated childbearing had thickened her figure, while the passing of the years had hardened her once soft, pretty mouth into a sour downward tilt.

  She didn't rise when her daughter entered the room, although she did set aside her embroidery and stretch out her fine white hands, a suspicion of wetness adding a shine to her pale gray eyes. "Jesmond. Thank goodness. I was beginning to fear something had happened to your ship. The winds along the coast have been dangerous lately."

  Tossing aside her bonnet, gloves, and handbag, Jessie stepped forward to take the tips of her mother's carefully manicured fingers, surprised almost to the point of speechlessness by her mother's words. It was the closest Jessie had ever heard her mother come to mentioning what must surely have been the most wrenching, unforgettable tragedy of her life, the tragedy that explained why Beatrice Corbett had not traveled to the small neighboring port of Blackhaven Bay to meet the coastal ketch bringing her daughter from Hobart Town, where all the London ships docked. The same tragedy lay behind Warrick's brooding restlessness and the aimless rebellion of his life, but no one in the family ever mentioned it.

  "I'm fine, Mother. The voyage was blessedly uneventful. We're late because I asked Warrick to stop at the quarry on the way here. I've always so loved that view of the house. I am sorry."

  Beatrice shook her head and smiled. "I should have known." Her grip on Jessie's hands tightened as if with a sudden spasm of emotion. "It's so good to have you home." And then, unexpectedly, she rose with the graceful elegance for which she had always been famous, and enfolded Jessie in such a crushing embrace that Jessie could feel her mother's heart beating hard and fast. For one long, unforgettable moment, Jessie held her mother close, breathed in the familiar lilac- scented talc that brushed her mind with sweet whispers of gentle, half-forgotten childhood memories. Then Beatrice dropped her arms and stepped back, her gaze falling away from her daughter's as she self-consciously brought up one hand to touch the flawless French roll just above the nape of her long neck.

  Jessie watched her mother resume her seat and reach for her embroidery frame, and knew that they would never speak of her mother's reaction to either her absence or her homecoming again. Emotional moments, like tragic ones, were never spoken of in the circles through which Jesmond Corbett moved. It was the English way, to go through life with a stiff upper lip, no matter how unpleasant or even heartbreaking current circumstances or events might be. And afterward, one never mentioned such occurrences. One certainly never hinted at or even acknowledged their private inner anger or pain. To do so would be not only un-English, but ungenteel. When one lived on the edge of the world, surrounded by English criminals, Irish rebels, and their free but tainted offspring, one had to be very careful of such things.

  "I've arranged a homecoming party for you," Beatrice said, her hand flashing as she set a tiny row of neat stitches in her embroidery cloth. "A formal reintroduction to society, to be held next month. And I'm going to insist that you rest until then. No riding about the countryside studying rock formations, or investigating reports of some strange new variety of orchid, or... or such things. You'll need time to recover from the voyage."

  "I'm not tired, Mother." Jessie sank onto a small stool near her mother's feet. "I certainly don't need a month to recover." And then she wondered why she had bothered to say it, because she already knew what her mother's reaction would be.

  "A lady should always rest after strenuous exertion. Your sisters understood that." She paused, but Jessie sat with her hands gripped tightly together and didn't say a word. Ever since she was a young girl, she'd heard herself compared unfavorably to her two dead sisters. No matter how hard she tried—and she did try, very hard—she always fell short.

  "I wouldn't even have invited Harrison and Philippa to join us for supper tonight," Beatrice continued, her attention fixed on her embroidery, "except that Harrison is so anxious to see you." She looked up and gave her daughter a warm smile. "He has missed you terribly. I couldn't make him wait any longer."

  Harrison Tate was their closest neighbor and Jessie's dearest friend. He was also one of the wealthiest men in the colony since five years ago when, at the age of nineteen, he had inherited his father's vast estates. They had all played together as children—Harrison, Warrick, Jessie, and Harrison's younger sister, Philippa. And two years ago, on Jessie's eighteenth birthday, he had quietly taken her hand and asked her permission to announce their engagement.

  That had been only a formality, though, for it had all been settled long before between Anselm Corbett and Malcolm Tate, Harrison's father. Anselm's son and heir would marry Philippa Tate, while Harrison would marry Jesmond. Jessie had grown up knowing of the arrangement. It had never oc- curred to anyone that she might someday object to it, and she hadn't objected to it. Only, she had wanted her time of study in London first, and Harrison had taken what her mother called "Jesmond's headstrong folly" in good part, even going so far as to promise to wade out to meet her ship with a bouquet of red roses clutched in one hand and her wedding ring in the other. Jessie had laughed when he said it, of course, because she had known it for the joke it was. Harrison was too punctiliously proper, too English, to ever seriously entertain doing something so emotional and demonstrative. Besides, public displays of affection always embarrassed Harrison.

  "At one time he spoke of going with Warrick to meet you," Beatrice was saying, as if following the train of Jessie's thoughts. "But I discouraged him."

  "You discouraged him?" Jessie linked her hands over her bent knees and leaned forward. "Whatever for?"

  Beatrice glanced up again from her embroidery. "I thought it appropriate that your reunion with your betrothed take place in more... formal surro
undings."

  Jessie rocked backward with a quick, startled burst of laughter. "My betrothed? Goodness, you make him sound like some awe-inspiring stranger for whom I must be sure to display my most proper manners, rather than someone I've known since—since I was a babe in leading strings, and he was a grubby little boy in shortcoats."

  "I don't remember Harrison ever being grubby, even as a little boy. You're thinking of Warrick." Jessie laughed again, but Beatrice cast her a disapproving look. "You can laugh if you want, Jesmond. But you're far from being a babe in leading strings these days. And Harrison Tate knows what is due a young lady."

  Jessie felt the laughter die, suddenly, from her lips as an indefinable sense of restlessness settled over her. Pushing up from her stool, she went to stand beside the partially shuttered French doors looking out over the formal gardens at the rear of the house.

  All the house's windows were shuttered on the inside, so that they could be quickly barricaded against attacks by gangs of escaped convicts or marauding Aborigines. The Aborigines were all gone now, and even the bushrangers weren't the threat they once were, although the shutters and their carefully placed musket loops remained, silent witnesses to those dangerous times and the loved ones who had died, victims of savage violence.

  But that was another family tragedy, one remembered only with quiet and private pain.

  Jessie placed her hands on the edges of the frames and widened the gap between the shutters. From here, she could look beyond the walled garden to the quadrangle of farm buildings and, to the right of that, the ornamental pond that marked the site of the old clay pit that had furnished the material for the estate's brick barns and sheds and huts. The family cemetery lay beside the pond. From the morning room, Jessie could just see the gleam of placid waters and the new stone wall Warrick was building at their mother's request. If a monument had been raised there to Anselm Corbett, it was hidden by the trees. Later, she would force herself to walk down there, to see where her father now lay, beside his dead sons and daughters. But not yet.

  "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 t
he 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.