The Isis Knot (18 page)

Because of course Viv would never wish hardship on another criminal. Of course the large-hearted man would want to see them fed rather than send for the soldiers.

Sera went to the door and stepped out onto the porch.

Viv scrambled to his feet, his bowl tipping soup over the lip. “No, no, girl. I didn’t say to trust them. Get back in here before they see you.”

She raised a hand. “It’s all right. I know one of them.”

Confusion flickered across his face, beads of rum shining in his beard. “Is that the trouble you spoke of?”

She nodded and turned to see William standing in the middle of the farmyard, bathed in moonlight. The warm, liquid hum inside her returned, and she sighed under its pressure.

William’s lanky companion stood far back, hands shoved into his armpits. She couldn’t see his face.

“Sera.” William’s voice was a caress on the wind.

She stepped to the porch edge. “Any problems? Were you followed?”

“No. But we shouldn’t stay here long.”

She warily eyed the tall man behind him, wondering how this stranger would fit into their strange puzzle. Wondering if he
should
. Why had William brought him?

William scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Jem. Come forward.” The tall one slowly came to William’s side. “Jem, this is Sera.”

Jem was barely a man, young and innocent in the face. There was bitterness and sadness in the twist of his mouth, and though he gave her a slight bow, he wouldn’t meet her eye.

Slowly she descended the stairs and crossed the yard to the men.

“Don’t touch my wife!” Viv’s heavy footsteps stumbled out of the house, clomped across the porch, and tottered down the stairs.

She turned to him. “No, it’s okay—”

Viv waved his hands and screeched drunkenly, “Be gone, bolters! Pay your penance and leave us in peace! My wife is not yours to take!”

She inserted herself between Viv and William, but Viv just kept shouting around her.

“Easy, old man.” William showed his palms. “We mean neither you nor Sera harm.”

“How do I know that?” Viv demanded.

William answered quietly, “Because I don’t fight those who don’t want to feel a fist. And I’d die before I hurt her.”

The immediate silence weighed something mighty, the sincerity of the words filling the yard.

She faced Viv. The stink of liquor leaked from his mouth and the rims of his eyes burned red. “I’m going to speak to William. Alone. You heard him. He won’t hurt me.”

Viv considered the two of them for many long moments, then started to back away. His legs struck the porch and he collapsed backward into an off-kilter sit.

“He’s drunk,” she said to William and Jem. “Forgive him.”

William put his hands on his narrow hips. “You’re his
wife
?”

“No. He just says that.”

William exhaled. He looked a little cleaner than earlier, and she wondered if he’d doused himself in the river. The new scar was bright against the rest of his skin.

“When it got dark I started to worry.” She lifted her eyes to his face. “But you’re here.”

And the path to answers stretched long and dark ahead of them.

“What’re we doing here, Will?” Jem asked, eyes narrowed on Sera. “You said we were leaving. Escaping.”

She looked to William, curious and apprehensive about what he might say.

“We are,” he told Jem. “We’re going back to Sydney. Do you remember Alastair—er, Lieutenant Chatham—from the
John Barry
?”

“Yes. He was one of the kind ones.”

“Well, we were mates once. Father and son, nearly. Served for many years together at sea. When we landed here he offered to smuggle me back to England, saying other officers and midshipmen had done it for other convicts before. It’s our only chance.”

Sera frowned. Their only shot to get out of New South Wales? It sounded risky and awful.

“But we have to hurry,” William added. “I don’t know how much longer the
John Barry
will be in port.”

Jem looked stricken. “You never told me about that, about what the lieutenant offered.”

William eyed Jem carefully. “There are many things I haven’t told you. Just as you’ve kept secrets from me. It’s the way of the world.”

That didn’t seem to make Jem feel any better. In fact, he looked even more hurt. Like William had owed him this piece of information. Sera began to get a funny feeling in her gut.

William nodded toward Viv. “Will you go and keep him company, Jem?”

But Jem just stood there, glaring at Sera down his long, hawkish nose. “I know you. We saw you the day we arrived. Lying in the back of a wagon.” Then his round eyes bugged out. “Will tried to go after you and it almost got ’im shot.”

“That’s not—”

But Jem ignored William and continued to squint at Sera. “And now we left Brown’s and bolted because of
you
?”

“Now wait a minute—” she began.

“Jem,” William barked, finally snapping Jem’s hard attention away from her. “
We
didn’t leave Brown’s.
I
left Brown’s and you chose to follow.” His tone was low and careful, and it made her shiver. “You’d be good to remember that.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed to slits, and the message was clear.
She
was the reason for all his trouble, all the confusion.
She
was the reason William had hidden things from him and placed them both in danger. And forgiveness was a long way off.

In the end, though, Jem obeyed William and loped over to sit next to Viv, kicking rocks as he went.

William took her elbow and guided her closer to the barn.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she whispered. “Do you trust him?”

He threw a glance across the barnyard, where Jem and Viv were sitting many feet apart, not talking. “As much as a man can trust another, I suppose.”

“Is that good enough?” She was so used to working alone. Being alone. Her whole life, even when she’d been surrounded by people, in the end she’d only ever relied on herself.

“It’s good enough for me. It has to be. I assumed responsibility for him on the voyage here. We’re family. Of sorts.”

“And you and I are something else. Something that needs to be figured out. I’m sorry, but I can’t help feeling like this will just make things more difficult.”

He sniffed and considered the starlit sky. “He forged papers for us. We were stopped yesterday morning and the papers allowed the soldiers to let us go. If it weren’t for him, I would be chained and headed for the gallows right now for bolting. I wouldn’t have found you.” A muscle in his jaw clenched. “I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to him. He’s useful. He can help us move about New South Wales. And he’s a bolter now, too. I can’t just leave him behind.”

A large piece of her understood that last part very well. And if Jem could possibly help them in this land of criminals, who was she to turn him away?

On the porch, Viv swigged more rum. Jem was staring at her. Hard.

When she turned her head back to William, he was already watching her. It made her catch her breath. “So…Sydney?”

William dipped his chin once.

“Elizabeth—”

“Is either in the custody of the constables or released to the care of her husband.”

She slowly shook her head at the ground, that feel of unease only growing stronger. “It won’t stop her. She’ll still come for me.”

“And I’ll be in front of you again, if that happens.”

What was this man doing to her? To the presence inside her connected to the cuff? And how would she ever learn to separate the two?

She looked away. She had to. All that she hadn’t told him created a wall between them, and until they were alone and able to lay everything all out, that wall would have to remain. Otherwise this crazy desire would only get in the way.

Sitting on the porch, Viv swayed ever so slightly from side to side. When he lifted his rheumy eyes to her, she realized they weren’t filled with drink as much as with emotion.

Her impulse was to touch William, but that would breach the self-created wall. Instead she crossed her arms at the waist. “Wait here.”

She went back to Viv. There was no sense beating around the bush. “I’m leaving.”

He took another swig. He’d already gone through half a bottle since she’d returned hours earlier. “With the bolters?”

She nodded.

He set the bottle down. “Oh, wife. You’ll get caught and sent to the Factory—or worse—and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

The worry in his watery eyes broke her heart.

“You’re not really my wife. I can’t forbid you, though I don’t want to see you leave. I’ll be honest about that.”

“I’ve been very thankful for your honesty. Among everything else.”

“Where will you go?” His wrinkled face fell. “Not to the mountains, I hope. Please don’t say the mountains.”

How she wanted to tell him, if only to ease his fears.

“I don’t want to hear of you dying up there with all the other bolters, not when you could’ve survived by staying here, with me. You may not be my wife, my Mary, but you’ve filled a space here.”

“I’m glad I could’ve done that. Even for a short time.” She gave him a sad smile. The new Sera, the person she’d tried to become since fleeing Las Vegas, approved, and it made her heart swell.

“Take anything you need.” He waved a hand at the house and barn. “Clothes, food, rum if you want.”

The man with nothing, giving her all he had.

Had it been only yesterday morning when she’d placed her hands on him, first sensing what the magic could give back? She crouched before him.

“Viv.” She fingered the uneven glass of the bottle near his hip, considering whether she should ask this, then decided she had nothing to lose and he had everything to gain. “If you could not need the rum anymore, if you could wake up every day without headaches or work without shivering just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“would you give it up?”

He looked like she’d slapped him. He curled the bottle into his chest like a baby. “What’re you talking about, girl? It’s all I have, most days. And I don’t have many of those left, that I know. But for the ones that I do, I don’t want to remember what was taken from me back home, how I lost my Mary. I don’t want to remember what I did to get sent here, how I threw my life into the rubbish bin. I just want to forget. And sleep.”

She exhaled and straightened. You couldn’t help someone if they didn’t want to be helped. He knew that she’d understand that.

When she embraced him, he felt so fragile in her arms, so small and bony. The magic seemed to have listened to him, and remained inert and quiet. He patted her back, and there was nothing but sadness behind it.

“Thank you. For everything, Viv.”

She turned away before emotion got the better of her, and headed for William. Behind her, Viv let out a choking sob.

“Don’t go to the mountains. I beg you. You’ll be a pile of bones by week’s end.”

When she turned back around, Mary’s ghost haunted Viv’s eyes. Poor Mary, whose story she never knew. And poor, dear Viv, left behind.

Anyone could’ve found her lying in the bush that day—a soldier, an unfriendly emancipist, a violent criminal—but it had been Viv. He’d merely glanced at her odd clothes, shrugged at her unfamiliar speech, and accepted what little information she offered about herself as a good trade for fair company.

If she were in her own time, she would’ve tried to keep in touch, to have checked in on him once in a while. Maybe sent some covert help when she couldn’t be there herself. But she was here, and she was now, and there was nothing left to do but leave. This kind of regret and sense of loss felt brand new to her, and was almost too much to bear.

“I’ll take care of myself.” And then, to smooth the deep worry lines between his bushy eyebrows, she took a chance and told him, “I’m not going to the mountains. I’m going to Sydney.”

The grin he gave her was rum-stained and relieved. “Anyone who asks, I’ll tell them you went west, not east.”

“Thank you. I’d do the same for you.”

“I know you would.”

#

Sera brought no skirts or dresses, not even a hairpin, as they fled the old man’s farm much later that night. William might’ve found it odd for a woman to leave such things behind, except that in the brief time he’d known her, he assumed she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t have worn those things in the first place. He might’ve found it even more odd if she had.

They hiked silently, Jem between them and a carpet of stars above, making William feel far too distant from the woman who walked so near.

“There.” He squinted into the darkness, to where the moon made a clump of white tree trunks glow soothingly. “That’s the stand of trees I saw earlier today. It’s thick enough and far enough away from any homesteads. We can sleep there tonight then head to the river tomorrow and follow it east.”

The close bunch of trees, with their strange, shedding bark, created a pocket braced from the wind that was starting to kick up. The space inside was filled with the lovely sweet smell that blessed this whole wretched colony. It might have been the most beautiful thing about this land.