Whispers of Heaven (2 page)

Lucas straightened his back, a smile curling his lips as he watched the high-strung stallion. "Huh. If that's the horse I think it is, Warrick Corbett's going to be in for a wee surprise the first time he tries to mount his fine new hunter."

The sound of a young female voice, unusually low-pitched and rich, drew Gallagher's attention to where Warrick Corbett and the woman now stood, looking out over the valley toward the big house. Lucas had been at Castle Corbett for less than two weeks, but he still knew who she was: Miss Jes- mond Corbett, only daughter of the estate's late owner and sister to the present one. At the age of eighteen, she had talked her father into letting her pursue her interest in geology, of all things, and sailed off to attend some Ladies' Academy of Science in London. Now, two years later, she was back.

She intrigued him, this woman, with her reputation for being unorthodox and adventurous, this woman who jumped unaided from her carriage and wasn't too self-conscious to throw back her head and laugh with honest abandon. She was not beautiful like her brother, Lucas thought, watching her walk up to the big stallion and laugh again when the hunter lipped her fingers. Her features were not so classically perfect, and her hair was a warm, sunny gold rather than the striking, white-blond of Warrick Corbett. But there was something about her that drew Gallagher's attention, and held it.

"Ah, laddie," said Daniel beside him with a low laugh. "You'd do better to keep your covetous eyes on yon horse. Fine English misses such as that one are not for the likes of us, mate."

Lucas grinned. "Neither is the blood stallion." He hefted the pickax, then paused again, his attention drawn back, in spite of himself, to the woman in rose poplin. "She's something though, isn't she?"

A gruff shout floated across the quarry as the overseer cracked his whip warningly into the air. Daniel jerked away, while Gallagher let his body fall once more into the endless swing and heft of the pickax. He didn't look up again until the carriage and its occupants had long vanished from sight.

CHAPTER TWO

Sparkling white in the bright spring sunshine, the long drive of crushed shells wound through carefully tended, parklike grounds planted with sycamore and birch, English oak and black locust, Dutch elm and ash. As a child, Jessie had taken for granted the estate's broad lawns and stately, English trees, the formal walled garden and hedges of rose and lilac, camellia and clipped box. Now, newly returned from the land all colonists still thought of as home, she looked at the garden with fresh insight and realized just how hard her parents must have worked to re-create this miniature enclave of England in the midst of the Tasmanian wilderness.

Anselm Corbett had built his home along stately lines, a full two stories tall, of carefully crafted sandstone blocks. Although the sun shone less fiercely in Tasmania than in other parts of Australia, summers here could still be hot—especially to those accustomed to gentler English climes. And so, as was the colonial custom, he had wrapped his house in double verandas, built not of wood, as was usual, but of stone as well, in the form of wide gothic arches. The effect was something like a cross between a double-decker medieval cloister and a Levantine Crusader castle. Originally, Anselm had named his new estate Ravenscroft, but when a spate of attacks by bushrangers led him to add a protruding front porch surmounted by a high, square tower, people took to calling the place Castle Corbett. Not that Anselm Corbett minded. It was a fine thing, surely, for the son of a common Lancashire mill owner to live in a house grand enough to be called a castle.

Thinking again, sadly, of her father, Jessie listened to the tiny shells crunch beneath the wheels with welcome familiarity as the carriage bowled up the avenue toward the house. All those long months on the ship, she had dreamt of this moment. In her imagination, her mother would hear the jingle of harness and the rattle of the wheels and be there, on the tower-topped porch, waiting for her when the carriage swept up before the house. Except, of course, that Beatrice Corbett would never do something so vulgarly impetuous as to rush from the house to welcome home her only surviving daughter, no matter how long she'd been gone. When the horses swung around the last bend, Jessie saw the porch standing shadowed and empty.

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 surroundings."

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.