“The guards were ruthless. Oftimes they used convicts as guards and they were worse. No man’s life was valued beyond the work he could do. Death was an escape, looked forward to more often than not. On the mainland gold had been discovered and men scrambled for tickets-of-leave to take up a pickax and shovel for themselves rather than work the government land. I waited ten years for mine and by then I had these stripes.
“Twenty-five for tampering with my leg irons. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t walk in them. Twenty-five for losing the shirt of my uniform, even though it was stolen from me. Fifty for fighting with a convict who tried to rape me.” He felt Lydia’s shudder, and knew her well enough to understand that it wasn’t revulsion that made her shiver, but pain. She felt it for him, shared it. There was nothing in her life remotely similar to anything he had suffered, yet her capacity for empathy and acceptance made Nathan feel as if he must protect her from herself. “By the time I left Van Dieman’s Land for Sydney I had spent over two hundred days in solitary confinement. Don’t dwell on that,” he cautioned. “I don’t. For ten years’ time it was not such a bad record.”
She didn’t believe he didn’t think about it. It was part of him, part of the anger that seethed just below his consciousness. He couldn’t talk about the fear, the loneliness, or the deprivation. But he could be angry. It was so much easier. “Did you ever tell me why you were sentenced to the penal colony?”
“Yes.”
Lydia didn’t want to make him repeat it, but she had to know. “Ten years is a long time to be sentenced,” she said. His crime could not have been a trifling one.
“I was sentenced for twenty.”
“But you said you had a ticket…a ticket-of—”
“A ticket-of-leave. But it’s not a pardon, and it doesn’t mean one’s sentence is over. It’s simply a method of allowing convicts to work for someone else, a system of providing laborers and servants to men who can pay them. It decreases the government’s burden of caring for the convicts. All that’s required is accounting for them. A ticket-of-leave does not permit unrestricted travel.”
“Yet you came to San Francisco.”
“An arrangement with my employer.”The bribing of a number of officials,he added silently. “I couldn’t have done it otherwise. I’m not a free man yet.”
Lydia frowned. “Nathan, you must have been a child when you were sentenced. How can that be?”
“I was fourteen. Not so young, Lydia.” He paused as her arms circled his back and she felt the uneven ridges of his scars, the thin white lines of his suffering. “I was convicted of murder,” he told her without inflection. “There are some who say I was fortunate not to get the gallows.” It was only recently that he had begun to believe that sentiment might have been true. Holding Lydia, he could accept Van Dieman’s Land as the only path that could have taken him to her.
“Did you do it?” she asked.
“Not many people ask me that question. You didn’t, you know. Not the first time I told you.”
“Then I married you without knowing.” She shook her head. “No, I must have known the truth somehow.”
Nathan caught her by the shoulders and held her away from him. His eyes were grave, his features set hard. “Don’t make me into something I’m not,” he warned her. “I didn’t kill at fourteen, but I’ve killed since. That’s the legacy of Van Dieman’s Land, the price of living there, sometimes the price of getting out alive. Get rid of your foolish, romantic notions, Lydia, because they can’t last where we’re going. I’d rather not crush them, but I will if it means you’ll survive.”
His hands dropped away. He slid his legs over the side of the bed and stood. Crossing their cabin, he poured water into the blue-and-white spongeware basin, rinsed his face, and began shaving. The small mirror above the stand reflected Lydia’s pale face, the stunned hurt in her cobalt blue eyes. He did not look at her long, but when he dressed he made certain his back was to her so that she could see his scars and know a little better the kind of man he was.
Nathan could protect her from everyone but himself.
When he was gone Lydia rose from the bed. There was an ache between her thighs that was not precisely unpleasant. She could still feel the shape of Nathan inside her, the heat and hardness of him, and in spite of how he had parted from her, she wanted him again. If he had walked in their cabin right now, Lydia would have opened her sheet and drawn him inside. She did not think she had much pride where Nathan Hunter was concerned.
Kneeling beside the tub, Lydia washed quickly with the cool water, then rinsed the sheets clean of the stain of her virgin’s blood. There were six gowns in her wardrobe, including the one she had worn on board, and a riding habit. Lydia chose a hunter green dress with mother-of-pearl buttons trimming the bodice and a high collar that banded her slender throat like a choker. She found a green grosgrain ribbon that nearly matched her gown and used it to loosely pull her hair back.
She was ravenously hungry, but was not free to roam the ship as Nathan was. To pass the time until someone remembered she needed to be fed, Lydia finished unpacking the trunk and valises. Like her own things, Nathan’s clothes were finely made. Nathan told her she came from a wealthy family, but looking at his clothes, Lydia realized she had not married a pauper. She remembered something about gold mining. Was that her family’s fortune or his? She frowned, a furrow between her eyebrows, trying to recall what he had said, and more importantly when.
After struggling a few moments, Lydia went back to her task. She found embroidery hoops, silver-gray thread the exact shade of Nathan’s eyes, and white linen napkins stenciled lightly with an ornate H. Ah, she thought, smiling now, she was most definitely a woman in love if she had set herself this task. Embroidering was not her long suit and she didn’t question how she knew that. Nathan could think what he liked, but some things she justknew.
Scattered among the clothes she also found a deck of cards, two books, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the other a dry account of sheep farming, and at the very bottom of one of the valises Lydia’s hand closed around a nickle-plated derringer.
She was holding it in her open palm, staring at it, completely unaware that her hand was shaking, when Nathan walked into the cabin. He stopped in his tracks and held onto the tray he carried with white-knuckled pressure.
“Put the gun down, Lydia,” he said, forcing calm.
Until he spoke Lydia hadn’t known Nathan was in the room. Surprised, she looked at him over her shoulder. “Why do you have a gun?” she asked.
He tried not to show his relief because surely she would wonder at it. The first thing he thought when he saw her holding the derringer was that she had somehow remembered everything. It could happen that suddenly, Dr. Franklin had told him, and though Nathan had little respect for the doctor, he also had no other information to contradict him.
Setting down the breakfast tray, Nathan went to Lydia and took the gun from her hand. “Why does anyone carry a gun?” he asked, putting it back in the valise. He shoved the valise and its companion under their bed and dragged the empty trunk to the foot of it. “For protection,” he said when she didn’t respond.
“A derringer? It’s a lady’s weapon.”
“How is it that you can recall such odd things and can’t remember important ones?” It was strictly a rhetorical question. “It’s a weapon that can be easily concealed and that suits a man as well as a woman.”
