The Secret Rose (41 page)

“Bushrangers’ll be moving soon,” Jack offered as he hunkered down to douse his fire. He looked up at her, his eyes almost on a level with her own as she stood beside him. “They’ll kill him before that.”

Aisleen met his cold gray eyes. “Then we must find them first.”

Jack nodded and pointed at the pistol in her waistband. “You’re a shot?”

“I’ll learn,” she answered defensively.

She was not certain that she liked his gallows smile any better than his funereal stare. He reached out to touch her sore chin, and though she winced she did not back away. “Maybe Tom had the right of ye. Can’t always count a man’s flock by the sheep ye can see.”

It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make, and she was flattered. “What do we do?”

Jack said nothing as he took the pistol from her waistband and examined it. He opened the revolver, took several bullets from his shirt pocket, and placed them in the empty chambers. Then, without speaking a word, he spun her about so that her back was braced against his chest. He took her right hand and wrapped her fingers about the butt, curving her forefinger over the trigger. He brought her left hand up to brace the pistol and, hunkering down over her shoulder, raised the weapon to her eye level and took aim on a tree limb.

“Two hands and squeeze!” he said, the ghastly whisper grating into her ear. “You aim to kill, every time.
Every
time. Heart or head. Nothing else.”

Aisleen felt the iron pressure of his huge hands over hers and smelled his stale tobacco breath and knew that had she searched a year she could not have found a more deadly companion. When he released her she looked at him askance. “You’ve killed men before?”

He grinned. “Not enough.”

Aisleen’s skin shrank against her bones. She was not afraid for herself. She understood that he was totally indifferent to her as a woman. She suspected that he did not possess the usual human lusts. He was curiously devoid of all passion. Nothing burned deep inside his pale eyes. She did not even know why he was helping her. But she was very grateful that he was.

“Will you use it?” He pointed to the gun she held.

Aisleen nodded. “What do we do now?”

He lifted a long arm and pointed south. Aisleen saw nothing. “Smoke,” he said as though it were a complete explanation. “Saddle up.”

They wound a slow path through the silent forest of the somber mountain, this time Aisleen trailing Jack. They did not travel far before he put up a hand and lifted one long leg over his horse to dismount.

Less easily, Aisleen slipped from her saddle. A dozen unanswered questions buzzed in her head, but it was too late. Jack was moving away on that silent tread she had never become accustomed to. She hurried after him, glad that his huge body provided a shield between her and what lay ahead.

When he halted suddenly, she nearly collided with him. He caught her by the shoulder and pointed again.

At first, she saw nothing in the gloom, but gradually she saw the faint glow of a fire in the center of a ring of trees and then the dark humps of men sleeping on the ground. At the base of a large tree, another body was slumped over. Her
skin tingled as she looked up into Jack’s face, and he nodded.

She clutched her pistol tighter. She knew she could not shoot a man. Everything in her rose up in protest at the thought. But she would fire in their direction and hope that it would frighten them.

Jack stood still so long a time she would have thought him made of stone had she not felt the tense alertness emanating from his huge frame. Finally he moved, veering off to the left. After quickly tucking up her skirts to keep them from dragging over twigs and rocks, she followed. They made a wide circle about the sleeping bushrangers as her heart hammered in her chest. Where was Tom?

Jack’s long arm shot up suddenly, stopping her, and he pointed at the ground. Aisleen squatted down, too daunted to question his order. Where was Tom? Why was there no sign of him? Even as her thoughts raced round and round, she saw Jack move forward into the shadow of a huge gum tree and seemingly disappear.

Aisleen swallowed repeatedly as she crouched in the near-dark. Insects clicked and buzzed and rustled close by. In the distance, the
gawk
of a parrot was heard. The morning air hung cold and still and damp. Her face was sticky with the sweat of fear. And still nothing happened.

A man’s moan, so low and muffled she doubted its reality, wafted over the clearing. Aisleen clutched the pistol tighter, willing her forefinger to grasp the trigger, but it would not.

A flash of memory that seemed another lifetime ago came and went. Had it been less than two months since she had pointed this pistol at Thomas in anger because he had demanded his rights as her husband? How foolish and empty the gesture had been. Now the danger was very real and very deadly. At any moment, the bush would come alive with men who would not hesitate to kill. To save Thomas’s
life, she would do whatever was necessary. Her finger closed gently on the trigger.

The second moan was louder but instantly cut off. Aisleen shuddered as sweat trickled down between her breasts. Who was hurt so badly? Was it Thomas? She could see nothing though her eyes ached with the strain of effort. Where had Jack gone? Did he intend to rush the camp alone?

A branch snapped nearby. The crisp
crack
of the wood sent fear screaming along her nerve endings as her hands flexed on the pistol she lifted. Other, softer sounds of footsteps thudded the earth. Aisleen’s arms trembled under the weight of the weapon she held at eye level. Whatever it was, whoever it was, could be halted by her shot.

A hulking grotesque shadow reared suddenly before her, and Aisleen fell back with a muffled gasp, the hair bristling on her arms. The grotesquerie resolved into Jack and the inanimate man he bore on his back. “Tom!” she whispered in shivering amazement. “Is he—?”

Before she could finish the question, Jack bent and dragged her to her feet and roughly shoved her before him back toward the way they had come.

Joy flowing through her, Aisleen beat a path for them with her hands through the thickly laced bush. Resilient twigs whipped back to lash her face, but she did not mind the stinging pain. Thomas was alive! Of course he was alive. Jack would not have brought out a dead man. Less cautious than before, she hurried through the canopied twilight of early dawn. Their horses had been tethered nearby. She had not seen horses in the bushrangers’ camp. They would escape.

The pistol’s report that rent the silence of the morning brought Aisleen to a stumbling halt, but Jack was there behind her to shove her along with a mumbled, “Get shot with ye!”

The camp behind them exploded with sounds of curses
and running feet. Aisleen ran faster than she had ever run in her life, faster than up the hillside of Slieve Host as a child. The horses were so close. It did not matter if they were heard. Their pursuers would not be able to catch them once they were mounted.

“Bail up!”

The cry was familiar, but Aisleen did not slow her pace even as a wild shot flew past her and struck the trunk of a nearby tree. Jack was at her back, prodding her with his gun barrel; she feared failing him more than anything else.

The nervous whinny of a horse was the sweetest sound she had ever heard, she thought in the moment she burst into the glade where the animals stood. She ran for Thomas’s horse, but Jack’s cry made her pause as she lifted a foot into the stirrup.

“Mine!” and he gestured at the larger horse, where he had thrown Thomas crosswise over the saddle.

She had no time to argue. He grabbed her about the waist and slung her up on the back of his mount. The next instant reins were shoved in her hands. With a sharp turn, Jack reached for the reins of the second horse.

The report of a rifle startled the horses. Thomas’s horse tore the reins from Jack’s grip and bolted. Aisleen’s mount reared, pawing the air in fright. She threw herself forward across Thomas’s back to grip the horse’s neck. She heard Jack curse, then the explosion of his pistol and a man’s cry of pain as she clung breathlessly to the horse, frightened that at any moment she would be flung to the ground. Then, amazingly, the horse’s head was jerked down and Jack’s face appeared level with hers.

“Tell Tom we’re even at last!” he shouted and smiled at her. “You’re a good’n yourself!”

A pistol went off. Jack’s smile froze. He whipped about, his own weapon aimed for the delivery of shot. Aisleen saw two men race out of the underbrush with pistols, the
orange/red flares of explosion from Jack’s weapon and theirs, and then the blinding white smoke of gunfire misting the air.

“Jack! Hurry,” Aisleen cried, reaching out to shake the big man’s shoulder.

He turned to her slowly, his smile still in place. So fierce was his grimace she did not at first notice the red roses blooming on his shirtfront. “Get shot of here!” he shouted and brought the flat of his massive hand down on the horse’s rear.

The slap startled the horse, and it danced away from the man at a gallop as new gunfire split the morning. Aisleen cried out in protest, but it was useless. She could not control her mount. A single backward glance was all she had of Jack. He was still standing as a man rushed him. There were new shots and then a deathly stillness punctuated by the galloping hooves of her horse.

She had no time to think of what had happened behind her. Underneath her, Thomas stirred and moaned, and she knew that he was wounded but not how badly. She had not had a single glimpse of him. She tugged on the reins but to no avail. The animal was too frightened to heed her tentative struggle and so she gave the beast free rein, holding Thomas across the saddle with one hand and clinging to a handful of mane with the other. She did not know where they were headed or how they would find the Great Western Road. She only knew that every stretch of the horse’s stride took them farther away from the bushrangers and closer to safety.

The horse ran for miles, dropping into a trot when the bush gave way to the rough, broken country of a valley between the somber naked peaks of the mountains.

Finally, the sound of rushing water attracted the animal’s attention, and it gentled its stride to a walk that brought it to the banks of a stream.

Aisleen slid immediately from its back and caught the reins, gulping in breath after breath. Her throat was so dry that every gasp pained her lungs, and she was drawn with the horse to the edge of the riverbank in hopes of taking a drink. Instead she found herself on one side of a deep chasm through which a roaring river ran, its surface churned to white foam as it rushed down the narrow slope between rocky walls.

With regret, she turned the horse back from the precipice and led it to the shade of a tree not far away. The horse followed her uncomplainingly, too weary and lathered with sweat to object. When she had wound the reins securely about a branch, she reached for Thomas to help him down. He had not moved or spoken but lay as Jack had tossed him, meal-sack fashion, across the saddle.

He was heavier than she expected as she tugged him feet first off the horse. When he slipped free, she was unable to balance his weight, and she sprawled with him onto the grass. He groaned terribly, and a shudder shook him.

“Oh, Thomas, I’m sorry!” Aisleen said as she scooted out from under him. “Let me help you.” On her knees, she reached for his shoulder and turned him onto his back.

“Oh, dear God!”

He was unrecognizable. His face was a mass of blood, caked dry in places and with fresh, oozing wounds. His lips were puffed and broken, his nose a swollen lump of flesh. His eyes were sealed shut by the swelling that made his face seem twice its normal size.

Bile rose in her throat as she tore her gaze away to find other, less repulsive, sights. But everywhere she looked there was more evidence of torture. There were lacerations on his chest and arms. The ends of leather thongs still hung from his wrists where he had been tied. Where his ribs showed through the rents in his shirt there were long,
blue-red bruises. He had been beaten mercilessly. How could he breathe?

She backed away. She did not want to touch him. She did not know this battered hulk of a man. He was not her lovely, handsome Thomas. He did not even seem human. She could not help him.

She turned away and choked. She was sick, over and over again, until there was nothing left but the dry heaving that turned to tears. She stretched full on the ground, unmindful of the beauty of the sunshine, of the green and brown tapestry of the valley, or of the silver laughter of the river racing by at her feet, and wept until she was dry.

So here ye are, with a real, thoroughgoing adventure before ye at last, and what do ye do? Lasses! Trust them to weep a sea over a little blood and spit every time!

Aisleen’s head shot up at the sound of the mocking laughter and she glanced at Thomas, but he lay still.

The day cooled suddenly, the drifting of a cloud across the sun. The smell of the sea rode the softer air textured with mist. The tang of bog and the floral scent of heather invaded the day.

Is it that game ye’re still playing?
came the cocky retort.
Wirra! I should have known.

Aisleen turned around very slowly. In the shade of a flowering wattle the familiar shadow stood. She glanced again at Thomas’s prone body and then at the apparition, “Is Thomas dead?”