The Stars Blue Yonder (26 page)

Tulip, when cornered in the little yard behind the house, couldn't tell her much about what was in the brown salve that he carried in a glass jar, other than he got it from his brother whenever he went to visit his people. Jodenny took a sniff and felt her eyes water. She wasn't sure she wanted to spread something that powerful on her skin, where it could be absorbed into her bloodstream and then into junior.

“Thanks anyway,” Jodenny said, handing back the jar. The day was hot but the yard was shadowed. Some flowers were wilting in a raised garden and there were rain buckets for water, but few other amenities. “Lilly says you sleep out here?”

“On the grass,” he said. “Better than some stuffy-up house.”

“Have you worked for Lady Scott long?”

“Twenty years, missus.” He was seated on a stool, mending a bucket that Sarah had accidentally put a hole through. He didn't say if they'd been happy years or sad ones, or if he liked being in Lady Scott's employment, or if he'd rather be out in the bush somewhere. Osherman had told Jodenny that sometimes he disappeared for weeks or months on end, on walkabout, later showing up on the doorstep as casually as if he'd never left. His tribe was called the Eola. Like most Aboriginal Australians, they weren't faring well under British rule. The convict ships had brought disease, pestilence, and the dangers of alcohol. The government treated them with disdain. Their culture, history, and way of life hadn't been completely destroyed, but they had centuries of hardship still ahead of them.

Jodenny wanted to tell Tulip all was not lost—the Alcheringa itself would be discovered by an indigenous astronaut, and in her time the injustices of the past would have been mostly righted. But she had no idea of how to broach such a conversation, or if it would bring comfort to him, or if he'd just think she was crazy.

“Missus?” he asked, because apparently she'd been standing there and staring at him for several moments.

“Nothing.” She took the jar back from him. “I think I will try a little after all. Thank you.”

Osherman didn't seem bothered by the heat, the smell, or the flies, but he patiently listened to her complaints about bugs, bacteria, germs, and viruses crawling over everything.

“We've got plenty of vinegar,” Osherman said. He was sitting in her room. “It's a natural disinfectant. And alcohol. Plenty of that, too. This isn't the stone ages, Jodenny. There are doctors and medicines—morphine, laudanum, chloroform, lots of things.”

“Painkillers. Not antibiotics. I have no idea how you can stay calm with all these diseases running around,” Jodenny said.

Osherman said, “I stay calm because freaking out is not going to help.”

“I'm not freaking out.”

“So does that mean you're coming with us to Government House tomorrow? The farewell lunch for the governor?”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

Lady Scott, however, was not to be deterred. That evening she swept into Jodenny's room with a new yellow dress over her arm, extolled the virtues of Sir FitzRoy, the governor, and promised that the event wouldn't last very long at all. Best of all, it would do good for Osherman to be seen in public with his wife.

“No one believes he's married,” Lady Scott said. “It'll do all the desperate women good to see the real live Mrs. Osherman. They'll stop pestering him so.”

“Pestering him how?” Jodenny asked curiously.

“In the way desperate women will, my dear. You know what a handsome and intelligent man he is. Yours must be a very happy marriage.”

“Many beautiful, intelligent people are unhappily married.”

Lady Scott fingered the yellow dress, which she'd laid out on Jodenny's bed. “Of course you're right. But the way he looks at you! The devotion he shows. Surely you've noticed. That man would throw himself off a cliff if you asked him to.”

Jodenny didn't like that one bit.

“It could mean very much to his career if you go,” Lady Scott said.

“What career, ma'am?”

“The import business, of course. He's trying to establish himself as a broker. You need connections for that. If his lovely wife were to smile at the right people, to take tea with their wives, then surely more doors would open in his favor. Would you really disappoint him by sending him off with only silly old me for company?”

Jodenny put on the damned dress and let Sarah pin up her hair. The pins hurt and the curls look ridiculous, but the end result was someone who looked like a Victorian lady, or at least like someone masquerading as one. Lady Scott insisted on lending her some jewelry to wear, including earrings and a thin string of pearls that felt cool against her skin. Jodenny was too bulky to lace her shoes properly and so Sarah helped her with that, and then a bell was jangling from their coach in the street below.

Osherman had been waiting nervously in the parlor. He was resplendent in a crisp summer coat and matching trousers, hat, and tie. His hair had been slicked back and his sideburns recently trimmed. Quite the gentleman of the age, even if he wasn't of this age at all.

“You look lovely,” he told Jodenny.

“I look like a beached whale,” she said.

He winced.

Jodenny regretted her asperity. “What I meant to say was ‘thank you.' ”

The ride in the carriage was worse than she'd feared—all that jostling and rocking back and forth, and the heat was horrible, and the streets were full of pedestrians, carts, Aboriginals, immigrants, sailors, and stray dogs, lots of stray dogs. Jodenny saw dirt-poor women with babies on both hips, and malnourished children darting through traffic. The squalor of it all made her ashamed in her fine dress. The stench of it had her sniffing through a handkerchief doused in perfume. Osherman had mused that her pregnancy made her more susceptible to smells but she told him that, on the contrary, his olfactory senses had obviously been burned out by prolonged exposure to Sydney's sewers.

“I can still smell the roses,” he'd said dryly.

That was the old Osherman, one she hadn't seen in a long, long
time. Since before the destruction of the
Yangtze
, when they were lovers and he was using her to get information about the Supply Department—no, she told herself, she'd forgiven him for that on Providence, during the nights he'd lain shaking and terrified on their sofa as his Roon captivity played out in night terrors. He'd paid for his sins and paid more than he owed.

The trip to Government House was soon over. Their carriage joined a line of coaches curving up the driveway to what looked like a stone castle hauled over from England and reassembled stone by stone. The Gothic stonework and crenellated towers reminded her of old romantic vids replete with dashing heroes, beautiful damsels in distress, and disputes resolved by swordfights. The finest citizens of Sydney disembarked their carriages or arrived by foot with parasols to protect the women from the hot summer sun. Footmen in finery stood at the ready, and somewhere nearby a string quartet was playing classical music.

Jodenny accepted Osherman's help stepping down. The salty breeze was steady and refreshing, the lawn wide and luscious, and she could see the beginnings of an ornate garden filled with shrubs and trees. Suddenly she didn't regret coming.

“I told you it wouldn't be so bad,” Osherman said.

Just a few steps inside the house, and Jodenny was changing her mind again. The ballroom was lovely—hand-carved wooden panels, high ceilings, beautiful paintings. The state apartments were closed but the dining room was open, with its ornate chandeliers and high windows full of light. The thick stonework kept the interior cool and there were sideboards full of fruits, desserts, and little appetizers. All in all, it was the finest Sydney had to offer.

And all those citizens who also considered themselves the finest had turned out for the occasions. Too many of them, Jodenny decided. Hundreds of people had jammed their way inside, the women in their fancy gowns, the men in their tailored coats. Conversation and laughter bounced off the walls and contributed to a loud, confusing din. Lady Scott immediately disappeared into the fray, her face and voice a blur. Jodenny was afraid to move through the crowd—if not for her own sake, then for junior's.

“Captain!” a boisterous man said, gripping Osherman's hand. “So good to see you.”

A woman in a tight blue dress eyed Jodenny over the tip of her Oriental hand fan. “We thought you might not come.”

“I wouldn't miss it,” Osherman said. “May I introduce my wife, Josephine?”

He made the introductions but Jodenny immediately forgot the other couple's names. She forgot the next set of introductions as well, and the ones after that. The part of her that had once been able to memorize dozens of invoices and hundreds of names had evaporated like smoke into the blue Australian sky. She blamed junior for stealing away her brain cells but she supposed she wasn't very motivated, either. All these people in their fine clothes, ignoring the poverty and problems of the colony outside Government House's fine doors. They weren't here to make Australia a better place for women or Aboriginals or immigrants. They were here for their own selfish interests, and the interests of commerce.

“Did you hear me?” Osherman asked.

Jodenny blinked at him. “What?”

He steered her to a small corner alcove by the staircase. “Stay here,” he said. “I'll get us something to drink. And there are some people you should meet.”

He moved off into the crowds. Jodenny lasted all of two minutes, feeling huge and ridiculous and out-of-place, before she had to go out for fresh air. A pair of open side doors led her to a small water garden with an exquisite view of Sydney Harbor. Men and women glided by, arm in arm, smiling with their nineteenth-century dirty teeth and sweat-stained clothes. Jodenny headed for a marble bench and sat heavily, gripped the stone beneath her to keep steady.

“Madam Scott?” a concerned voice asked. “Are you all right?”

Jodenny looked up into a stranger's face. “Osherman,” she said immediately. “That's my name.”

“My apologies.” The man tipped his hat. “I saw you arrive with Lady Scott and assumed you were her daughter, visiting from England.”

“No.” Jodenny said. “And you are?”

Again, a deferential tip. “Benjamin Cohen, Esquire, at your service.”

He was about forty years old, maybe forty-five. He wore a dapper suit and hat and looked as uncomfortable in the heat as she was. He signaled a servant and sent the man to fetch fresh juice. Jodenny was grateful for the kind gesture. She kept herself talking and focused on him. “Are you a native of Sydney, Mr. Cohen?”

“Of London,” he said. “May I sit?”

“Of course.”

He sat with her on the bench and gazed across the lawn at the harbor. “I've been here thirty years, more or less. Long before this house was even built. The city's changing faster than old men like me can keep track of it.”

“I'm sure men of all ages say that,” Jodenny replied. She felt steadier now that she was sitting down. “Progress never stops.”

“Sometimes it does,” he said. “The local tribes, for instance. We usurped their entire way of life by sending our convicts here. Destroyed it, for all intents and purposes.”

“Are you a lawyer for native rights?”

He blinked at her. “A what?”

Jodenny supposed that was a concept yet to make its debut. “You could represent them in court.”

Cohen made a harrumphing noise in the back of his throat. “You strike me as a lady of radical thought, Mrs. Osherman. How stand you in disposition to the Queen?”

She sensed she might get herself in trouble. Australia belonged to England and Victoria was the sovereign. “I've never met her, Mr. Cohen. She has my loyalty, of course.”

The words were thick on her tongue. Team Space had her loyalty, but it was an organization hundreds of years away. Fortune held her loyalty, but she had her doubts about ever seeing her home planet again. Most of Fortune's colonists had come from Australia and the Pacific Rim and so she supposed she owed something to this century, to these people, but did it mean bowing before a monarch? She didn't even know what rights she had as a citizen here.

“Long live the Queen,” Cohen murmured.

The servant returned with some apple juice for Jodenny. She inspected
it for impurities and winced at the idea of how many germs might be crawling across the glass, but was too thirsty to turn it down. She was about to ask Cohen more about law and justice in Sydney when a middle-aged blond woman in a stunning green dress interrupted them.

“Benjamin, are you bothering Mrs. Osherman?” she asked, smiling warmly.

Cohen rose to his feet. “Lady Darling,” he said, in a tone that wasn't quite cordial.

“You can prattle on, you know,” Lady Darling said. “You wouldn't want to abuse Mrs. Osherman's kindness by boring her, would you?”

Jodenny's impression of Cohen was distinctly opposite. She thought he wasn't much for prattling on at all. She wondered what history the two of them had, what quarrel or fundamental disagreement.

Cohen had flushed in the cheeks but was standing his ground. “I thought you were in Katoomba, my lady.”

“The farm and village grow tiresome when so many exciting things are happening here,” Lady Darling said. “Won't you find me a glass of wine? My throat is parched.”

Cohen backed away with a small bow and hurried into the house.

Lady Darling sat beside Jodenny on the bench. She really was a striking woman, all of her teeth intact, her complexion healthy and undamaged by sun. The jewels around her neck sparkled in the sunlight—blue and green on silver filaments, with similar rings on her fingers. She gave junior's bump an appraising glance, but Jodenny couldn't decipher if that was envy or disgust in her gaze.

“We shouldn't speak long,” Lady Darling said, lifting her eyes. She leaned forward in earnest. “Too many prying ears and eyes. But you must understand. We have a mutual friend.”