Dream Time (historical): Book I (32 page)

What the Lord had taken from Amaris, He restored in the birth of hers and Sin’s babies. Twins: a daughter whom Amaris named Celeste Anne and a son Sin named Daniel for one of the great Irish leaders.

During the year since their marriage, she and had divided their time between their stations and the mining camps of Victoria. She had followed Sin and taken up his cause for a free Australia. If ever there was hope of that happening, it was symbolized in the men who had had the courage to follow their dreams of gold and glory to the Never-Never.

Once more, Sin delivered her of her babies—in a tent in the mining camp of Gresham, while Molly delivered minute-by-minute reports of her progress to Dick, Josiah, and the rest of the male populace gathered outside.

“The gold fever must be rotting me brain,” Sin said, sitting beside her and stroking her damp hair, “but I feel the mighty urge just to hold ye and cry.”

She stared lovingly up at him, cradling a squalling infant in each arm. Tears glistened in his dark eyes. Could anything ever ruin the happiness she was feeling at this precious moment?

§ CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE §

In the afternoon, a crowd gathered on Bakery Hill under the Southern Cross flag, the first one to fly without the Union Jack on it. It was only October and already one of the hottest days of the year.

For days, the diggers had been fomenting and fuming, but with no direction. This Thursday, a leader was thrust forth before them: the Irish rebel, Sin Tremayne.

The diggers went wild with cheering, but he held up his hands for quiet. “Think seriously about the consequences of what we must do. Would a thousand of you, no four thousand, volunteer to liberate any man dragged to the lockup for not having a license? Are you ready to die?”

Watching from the crowd’s perimeter, Amaris shuddered. Had she waited all these years, wandered the outback, only to lose Sin at the last, when she finally found him, when he finally loved her so completely that she often cried secret tears of joy as they made love?

A roar of “Aye!" exploded from the mass of diggers. While a sort of military organization took shape over the next few minutes, with the election of captain and divisions of men, she kept her eye focused on Sin.

A council was appointed and Sin was elected commander in chief. She wanted to fix this moment in her memory forever, every detail about him. A warm breeze ruffled his silver-winged locks. His eyes glowed with an inner fire, with that purpose for which he had hunted—and been haunted by—all of his adult life.

He was truly alive now.

With more than five hundred armed men, he knelt to take an oath. With his right hand held up, he intoned in that beautifully rich Irish resonance, “We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.”

Years before, she might have been jealous of Sin’s passion for Australia and the rights of its inhabitants. Now she could understand his intense nature and deep emotions, because now her own were allowed to run as deep and intensely as his.

As commander in chief, Sin was required to be away from her for days at a time. She would hear word of him exhorting the diggers up on Mount Alexander, arguing with the territorial parliament in Melbourne, or issuing ultimatums to the colonial governor, Miles Randolph.

If she had expected to be lonely in his absence, she found instead she had no privacy. In Sin’s absence, and as the commander in chief’s wife, she was sought out by men and women alike for an audience to which they could present their problems.

J
osiah and Dick acted as sergeants at arms. She could only promise supplicants who came to her tent that she would discuss their appeals with her husband, but more often than not the petitioners wanted and needed advice immediately, and she would give her best counsel.

With Dick and Josiah, she ran the operations for reform through disbursing information: newspaper editorials, flyers, placards.

In her own right, she was making a name for herself again. She was becoming a crusader once more, but writing more passionately from the perspective of experience than she ever had from idealistic youth. She was no longer looking through the window from the outside. At forty-two, she had become the beautiful woman the child never was. Sin, the twins, her writing, fulfilled her to such a point that serenity graced her sculpted face.

“A
Madonna,” people remarked of her and she had to smile wistfully, thinking how paradoxically she had so often envied that same quality in her half-sister.

Sin went among the people of the territory of Victoria—down on Melbourne’s wharves to talk with the sailors, in the wool sheds, through mining camps scattered in the hills.

One day as she sat nursing the twins and wondering if the rest of her life were to be spent longing for her beloved, he pushed back the tent flap to enter unexpectedly. “Sin!” she cried out in happiness.

Careful of the infant she held, he nevertheless bent and pressed an impassioned kiss on her cheek. “I’ve missed you like hell, me luv.”

“Don’t go away, ever again.”

He pushed back a lock of hair. His mouth tightened. “I’m only here for a little while. I have to go to Sydney. Parliament’s meeting, and I mean to be there for Miles Randolph’s speech. Now that he’s been elected governor, he believes he can make his own policies. ’Tis time his policies were challenged.”

She swallowed her protest and turned away to lay a sleeping Anne in her crib before cradling a fussing Daniel to her other breast. “How long is a little while?”

“Twenty-four hours.” He sighed. “While I am gone, I have arranged for Josiah and Dick to have a cabin erected. You and the twins need something more substantial than this.”

She knew she should be pleased that he had thought of her and Anne and Daniel when there were so many other things to occupy his mind, but she felt perverse. She should have been jubilant with motherhood, but that same creative force was demanding expression in other ways.

“We need you, Sin,” she said softly and nudged her breast against Daniel’s rosy little cheek.

Sin leaned close to stroke his son’s downy hair. Such a look of tenderness passed over Sin’s countenance that she was surprised his next words were not of their son but of her. “You are more beautiful than I have ever seen you.”

She felt her face suffuse with pleasure. How could such simple words elicit such overflowing joy in her? “Hurry back,” she whispered.

“Save some for me,” he said, smiling. His finger tucked her nipple into the little mouth frantically searching for sustenance. “I’ll come back to take me turn as soon as possible.”

Sin came back—but not to her.

Irishmen tended to rebel regardless of the odds. For them, the tradition of glorious failure ran deep. It was as if they were preparing less for a fight than for an act of communion. The love of freedom and the wrongs of Ireland brought a hundred and fifty men to lie down and sleep beside guns, pistols, and pikes in the Eureka stockade. It had been
erected on the night of December 2, 1854 from slabs of timber they used to line their mine shafts. No longer would they submit to brutal police searches and the license tax on gold mining—a revolt against taxation without representation.

From her cabin window, Amaris watched Sin stride up the hill to meet with the miners. He had come straight from Sydney to be met by Josiah and Dick and ushered to the stockade. Only Sin had been allowed inside.

For the past several days, Dick and Josiah had insisted neither she nor Molly leave the cabin for fear the situation would turn violent. It appeared their fears bordered on manifestation.

Sin hoped to dissuade the diggers from their folly. His point was that until they had enough political and military clout it would be suicidal to bait the queen’s soldiers.

Fires still burned late on the night of the third in the stockade when soldiers of the Twelfth Regiment, mounted police, and troopers charged it. Amaris heard the shots and sat upright in her bed. Fear prickled the hair at her nape. In the other room, the year-old babies started crying.

She sprang from her bed and ran to fling open the front door. Mounted soldiers flashed by as they charged up the hill. Cold moonlight and colder firelight gleamed on bayonets they wielded.

On bare feet, Molly descended from the loft where she slept and came up behind her. “H'it’s come, h’ain’t it?”

“Aye. As Sin expected, only too soon.”

She ran back to her babies and picked up Daniel, balancing him on her hip. Her free hand caressed Anne’s cheek. “Sssh,” she cooed to the tots. “Oh, please don’t cry. Not now.”

At the
bedroom’s doorway, Molly said, “If Dick should be—”

A rapid rapping at the front door interrupted her. Dick burst in. “It’s over! Ten minutes and the police have won!”

“Sin?”

Behind him, a bleeding Josiah said, “Alive but chained. Those who lived through the massacre—a score or so—are being marched to the lockup at the government camp.”

She forced her words past the cork of fear in her throat. “What will happen to him?”

Josiah shrugged and wiped the trickle of blood from his cheek. The small gash welled with blood again. “Just what you think. A hasty trial before the miners across the country can band together in outright defiance. Governor Randolph and the colonial office don’t want another American rebellion on their hands.” She didn’t have to ask what would be the outcome of a hasty trial.

Thirteen leaders were arrested and tried for high treason. Because of the volatile feelings of the citizens of the territory of Victoria, Sin, as commander in chief, was transferred to Sydney.

“He’s to be incarcerated at Fort Dennison,” Dick told Amaris two days after the rebellion. He and Josiah had spent money and precious time trying to ascertain Sin’s fate. Both men had returned to the cabin exhausted and sat at the table trying to hold their heads up and their eyes open.

Like them, she had not eaten or slept. At the mention of Fort Dennison, she shuddered. The island just off Sydney’s shore had been known to the early settlers as Old Pinchgut.

Molly returned from the kitchen lean-to with hot hoecakes, cheese, and ale. “H’if you don’t eat, you three won’t be any good to Sin.”

Listlessly, Amaris poked at the food while plans were arranged for travel to Sydney. “We can’t do anything here,” Josiah was saying and chased a large mouthful of hoecake with a swig of ale.

“The quicker the better,” Dick said. “The guards and Sin have a twenty-four-hour start from what I can tell.”

“Could we intercept them?” she asked, pushing her filled plate away.

“Too many guards,” Josiah said. “Sin’s valuable as a scapegoat. Punish him and let the rest go free. The lesson is made without inflaming the entire countryside.”

“I’m leaving now,” she said, rising from the bench.

“Whoa,” Dick said. “You can’t get to Sydney any quicker than if you wait and catch a paddle steamer out of Echuca tomorrow morning.”

He was right, of course. With Molly and the twins, she boarded the steamer that next day. Travel by river would have been lovely, but impatience, frustration, and paralyzing fear kept her from doing little more th
an standing at the gingerbread-ornamental railing with her gaze focused on the eastern horizon.

When at last they docked at the semicircular quay in Sydney, she stared in wonder at the improvements that had taken place in her years of absence: a sparkling museum and a university instigated under the auspices of the grand dame Nan Livingston now made Sydney respectable. Woolclippers bearing New South Wales Traders registry bobbed like cork-studded nets in the cove.

Compared to the self-satisfied mediocrity of the model British colony of New Zealand, Sydney, settled by its brash, tough convicts, was a bustling, expanding nerve center.

For Amaris, it was more than returning home. A strange combination of exhilaration and terrible dread seesawed her emotions: exhilaration at being a part of a battle waged against Great Britain for Australians’ self-rule; dread that she would not win Sin’s release.

Governor Randolph let her cool her heels in the Government House’s anteroom four hours before his secretary came out. The peanut of a man fiddled with his spectacles, before saying, “Ahh, Governor Randolph has declined to see you.”

Hands braced primly on her parasol knob, she
glared at the little man. “I’ll be back again tomorrow. And every day until he will see me.”

But time was running out. She summoned Josiah and Dick to a counsel in the tiny room they were renting above a butcher shop. “No amount of appeal is going to sway Randolph. Not with my notoriety as a reformer. Is there any possibility we can break Sin out of Fort Dennison?”

Dick rubbed his chin. “With enough men behind us, a good plan laid out, aye. But we’d have to have an element of surprise.”

Josiah shook his shaggy head. “You don’t know your husband very well, Amaris, if you think he’d trade off the lives of any of his supporters for his own. That’s what he’s fighting for, isn’t it? Equality?”

Her head bowed. “Yes,” she said so softly they almost didn’t hear her. If Sin were executed, a vital part of herself would be destroyed.

“There is one possible source of help,” Josiah said, his voice heavy. “New South Wales Traders.”

Dick shifted his wad of tobacco to the other cheek. “Why would Tom Livingston help him? Sin has actively campaigned against some of the Livingstons’ business dealings.”

“Tom Livingston is noted for being a fair business-man.”

“Fair is one thing,” Dick said. “Foolish is another. Tom Livingston wouldn’t be that foolish.”

“He’s Sin’s former father-in-law.”

Dick gaped.