An Unconventional Heiress Read online

  ‘Aye and I don’t care for them, either,’ retorted Tom, ‘and as for Sarah being safe, she’d never have been anything else if O’Connell and that brother of hers had any sense between them.’ And on that he and Alan rode off to try to find her.

  It was almost mid-day when the rutted road that led out of Sydney turned into a track through the bush along which a carriage might just make its way. It was plain by its condition that a large party of men had recently used it. They passed one body, dragged into the bush and left behind in the rush for safety. There were no signs that soldiers had come this far. Later they were to learn that O’Connell had ordered that the rebels were not to be followed very far into the bush on the grounds, that when previous malcontents had escaped there, it had been almost certain death for them.

  At the point where the track turned sharply to the right they saw the Langleys’ carriage standing across it, apparently empty. There was no sign of John’s matched pair of horses.

  The further they had ridden, the more Tom and Alan had feared it might be so. If Carter had left the farm early—which had been his instructions—they should have come across him and Sarah some little time ago.

  There was no sign of either Carter or Sarah. Sarah’s luggage had gone—only her painting equipment had been left behind. There was blood on the driver’s seat. Sarah’s reticule was caught on one of the wheels. Alan, his face a mask of grief, picked it up and put it in his pocket, fearing that it might be the last relic of his apparently doomed love.

  They looked at one another. Alan swore again. ‘I had hoped,’ he began, his voice breaking.

  ‘Don’t despair,’ Tom said. ‘They’ve apparently taken her and Carter with them—perhaps as hostages. One good thing is that we can easily follow their trail through the bush. It’s plain that they’ve left the track. There’s been talk of a camp in it, and they’re probably making for that.’

  ‘So,’ said Alan, trying to dismiss the hateful image of Sarah as a prisoner and a hostage, ‘what do we do now?’

  ‘Follow their track on horseback until it becomes impossible to ride. Then abandon the horses.’

  Alan nodded agreement and they set off, their pace slowed to a walk. They had not gone very far when they heard someone weakly calling. It was Carter, lying half on and half off the track. He had been left for dead, but had crawled out of the sun and into the relative shade of the bush. He was covered in blood from a head wound and a gentle examination by Alan showed that he was suffering from a broken leg as well.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he whispered. ‘I thought that I was going to perish here without telling anyone that those devils have dragged Miss Sarah off into the bush with them. Now I may die easy.’ He coughed and slid into half-consciousness.

  ‘Not if we can help it,’ Alan said. Tom went to his horse and found the spirits and a skin of water that he always carried with him. He handed them to Alan, who helped Carter to drink a little of the brandy to relieve his pain and then allowed him a small measure of water.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Tom, sitting back on his heels. ‘You can take Carter back to Sydney—he’ll die here else—and I’ll go on to try to find Sarah.’

  Alan shook his head. ‘No, Tom, no. Sarah is my love. I lost her once, but I’m damned if I’m going to lose her again. It’s my duty to try to find her, yours to go back with Carter so he can be treated—he’ll die otherwise. Drew and old Wentworth will look after him. Tell the military to send a detachment into the bush after us—you can lead them here—while I go after her.

  ‘Besides, it’s my own folly that has partly caused this. If I hadn’t hidden away from her when I heard that she was going home to marry her former suitor I would have urged her to delay her visit until the rumours of a rising were over.’

  I should have let her marry whom she liked, he told himself, and stayed her friend—and now I might never see her again because I was stiff-necked in my hurt pride and love.

  Tom demurred a little, but a glance at Alan’s face checked him. ‘It’s right that you should be the one to go,’ he said, ‘even if you’re not so used to roving in the bush as I am but, since that is your wish, I’ll indulge you. I only ask that you be wary. I don’t want to lose the only real friend I’ve ever had.’

  The two men shook hands. Alan took the proffered skin of water and set off, his thoughts spinning round in his head. He could not pray, he dare not hope, that Sarah might yet be saved, if not for him then for the unknown man back in England. He told his God that he would be resigned to giving her up if only she were saved. More he could not ask of himself.

  Tom watched Alan until he was out of sight, his own thoughts nearly as tormented. He could not have stopped his friend from going on an errand that might end in his death, nor could he go with him. There was Carter to save, John Langley to see, O’Connell to confront as well as the Governor.

  He, too, set off, but in the opposite direction.

  On the first part of her journey home from Grimes’s Farm Sarah spent a great deal of time thinking about her own situation, and comparing it with Carter’s. Shortly after they had started out—she was seated beside him—he had said to her in the quiet but respectful manner that he always used with her, ‘I think that I ought to tell you, Miss Sarah, that I have finally decided not to return to England with Mr John. I have no family waiting for me there. I have asked Sukie to marry me, and Mr Dilhorne has offered me a post as his man of all work. He’s a hard man, but I think that I shall enjoy working for him.’

  ‘I can only say that I shall be sorry to lose you, Carter, but I fully understand your reasons for settling here,’ she told him.

  Oh, yes, indeed, she fully understood them, and she also understood how much simpler it was to be a man. Carter had made his decision and no one could stop him. She, however, was bound by all the conventions that surrounded an upper-class, moneyed woman. She could not be alone in a room with a man before marriage—that she had been alone on more than one occasion with Alan, was, she knew one reason for John’s disapproval of her and for his determination to make her return home as soon as possible.

  Home! She had no home—she might have had one if she had not lost Alan, and why she had lost him she could not fathom. She looked sideways at Carter, that man of sound common sense, and she might even have asked him for his advice had not the whole world suddenly turned on its axis and presented her with a new and different face.

  They had heard the sounds of men shouting and women screaming even before the escaping rebels, waving an assortment of weaponry, burst into their view just at the point where the track swung to the left.

  ‘What the devil…?’ began Carter, turning the horses to prevent the carriage from running the mob down. He never completed the sentence. The leaders of the pack sprang forward, while others tried to control the horses, and attempted to drag Carter and Sarah from the carriage.

  Shocked, barely aware of what was happening to them, they both put up as valiant a resistance as their dreadful circumstances permitted. Carter managed to pick up one of his pistols but, before he could use it, he was knocked down by a big, burly fellow, who took it from his lax hand and shot him with it. Sarah, struggling spiritedly, marked the face of one of her attackers with her nails before a sharp slap on her own face knocked her sideways, so that she hung, half-stunned, over the side of the carriage.

  One of the men, believing her to be comatose, dragged her out of the carriage, but as soon as she was on her feet she managed to break free for a moment to kneel beside the body of her faithful servant, who had been thrown out of the carriage to lie in the dirt against one of its wheels. She was immediately pulled upright by the burly man who seemed to be the mob’s leader.

  ‘None of that,’ he shouted, ‘you’re coming with us, you’ll make a useful hostage if we ever need one.’ He flung her towards his applauding followers, reviving in her all the painful memories of the assault upon her on the cliffs.

  A hostage! And what el
se? The feral expression of both the men and their women, and what they were shouting at her, told Sarah that they must be part of a rising which had failed—with the result that they were fleeing into the relative safety of the bush. They also told her—in blunt and hateful terms—what her fate would be once they had reached their camp.

  Only the need to continue their flight at top speed, so that they could get as far away from Sydney as soon as possible, was stopping them from raping her on the spot. For the moment dishonour, and perhaps death, were not immediate things—but in the future, what then?

  She had no time for further thought. The rebels renewed their headlong flight through the bush, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. They smashed their way through the abundant vegetation, brilliant with flowers, occasionally shadowed by giant eucalyptus trees. They stopped once to eat and drink from the packs that they carried with them.

  Sarah sat a little apart, panting and exhausted, her head sunk apathetically on her breast. One of the younger men, kinder than the rest, took pity on her and offered her a tin cup of water.

  ‘Fancy her, do you, Stevie?’ the burly fellow called to him jovially. ‘Well, you can have your turn later. For now let’s get the goods safely back to camp before we have our fun. The damned lobsterbacks might capture us if we don’t get a move on.’

  Coarse laughter followed his little speech before they turned to discussing why the Rising had been so easily put down and cursing those convicts, the overwhelming majority, who had not seen fit to join them. She could only hope that the men in her life were safe, had not been killed or wounded in whatever fighting there might have been.

  It seemed strange to think that she might never see Alan, Tom Dilhorne or her brother again. Her throat closed when she thought of Alan and the last few wasted weeks apart from him. She should have damned convention, gone to him and found out what was wrong, why he had been avoiding her. In danger, lost in the bush, the polite rituals of her world had never seemed so petty.

  If by some chance she survived this, her life would be different. Alan or no Alan, she would not go home. If Carter could have stayed, so could she. Carter! Her worries for herself seemed selfish when she feared that he might be lying dead beside the carriage. At least she was still living, though whether that was a blessing only time would tell.

  Whatever else she must not give way, she must be brave—though God knew how hard that was already, even before the rebels finally reached safety. The world swam about her: shock and the exhausting run through the bush had made her drowsy. Stevie came over, took the cup from her and shook her gently. She thanked him politely. Even in this dire situation the good manners that had been drilled into her were still part of her behaviour—but they could not save her.

  He avoided looking at her directly, but she was touched to notice that during the subsequent forced march through the bush he frequently found an opportunity to come to her side and to help her when she stumbled. Her stockings were already torn, her neat kid shoes were ripped beyond repair and her feet were blistered and bleeding.

  Cool, collected Miss Sarah Langley looked as though she had been pulled through a hedge backwards, a phrase her old governess was fond of using whenever Sarah’s appearance deviated ever so slightly from a ladylike norm.

  If only the dear woman could see me now, was Sarah’s bemused thought.

  Exhaustion, the lack of food and water, for after the first stop she was not given anything to eat or drink, combined to make her slightly light-headed. Heavy exercise was something that ladies never took. A quiet walk down the road, or along a country lane, a turn about the room, or in a shrubbery was as far as one usually went. Being hurled at speed across country, sworn at, struck and pushed if she faltered was alien to everything that Sarah had experienced before.

  Consequently, when they arrived at the camp Sarah resembled Nellie and Sukie as she had first seen them, rather than her usual charming self. Her face was red, she was soaked in sweat, her clothing stuck to her body and her hair had come down, giving her an abandoned appearance, much appreciated by her captors, or so they told her.

  ‘Not such a fine lady now,’ one of them jeered at her when they stopped for the last time. They had reached a clearing full of makeshift shacks and lit by home-made lanterns gleaming in the gathering dusk.

  ‘Look what we’ve found,’ the party’s leader called out boisterously, ‘a fine lady of our own to play with and to barter with for our lives if we’re caught.’

  Ragged men, women and a few children emerged from the huts. They fixed their fierce eyes on Sarah.

  ‘That’s a fine lady?’ sneered one of the women, pointing at Sarah’s ruined appearance.

  ‘Well, she was when we caught her,’ shouted one of the men, a statement that was greeted with ironic cheering and which confirmed Sarah’s sad belief as to the destruction of her usual cool charm. The women surrounded her. One of them tore off the brooch at her throat, another the fichu which it had held in place. The third removed her shawl, which had somehow not been lost on her breakneck journey.

  She began to shiver with fear that the rest of her clothing might follow suit, a fear reinforced by the comments of some of the men. She was beginning to grasp that the miniature camp was composed of more than the Irish rebels. There were also the more hardened of the ordinary convicts who had joined the Rising to escape from the restrictions placed on their freedom, imposed by reason of their violence. They were fiercer and more dangerous than the political prisoners.

  She found that she could no longer stand and sank to the ground, only to be dragged to her feet and told to let everyone have a good look at her. Facing the laughter and the repeated promises of her fate, she could only hope that God would let her bear what was going to happen to her. She could not pray that she might be spared: that would be too much to hope for.

  Light-headed from exhaustion and fear, she seemed to stand outside of herself so that when deliverance came she was hardly aware of it. As soon as they had arrived, a group of her captors had gone into one of the shacks where they were joined by other rebels who had come from a different direction. From what had already been said she grasped that nothing would be done to her without the permission of the leaders.

  Sarah swayed as she stood, but each time that she threatened to fall she was pushed upright with ungentle, and sometimes cruel, hands. Her arms were pinched and when her head began to droop it was slapped erect again. She was saved from further indignities when a number of men emerged from the shack.

  One of them, a tall man, better dressed than the others, took her chin and tilted her face towards the rising moon.

  ‘I’ve met you before, have I not?’ he asked.

  Sarah was so far gone that he had to repeat his question. She looked at him dazedly before saying, ‘I can’t remember.’ There was something familiar about him. ‘Perhaps you did.’

  He shook her slightly. ‘You’d best think. Your honour and your life might depend on it.’

  ‘My honour!’ This struck her as so absurd that she almost burst out laughing.

  The hand that held her chin dropped. ‘I see that you are near collapse. Best you tell me your name.’

  ‘My name?’ She lifted her head, suddenly proud. ‘Why do you wish to know my name? What is my name to you?’

  This sudden outburst of haughty spirit caused some of the onlookers to shout, ‘Leave her to us, Kevin. She’ll tell us her name soon enough then.’

  The name startled Sarah into awareness. ‘Kevin! I met a Kevin once. Nellie Riley had a brother called Kevin.’ She paused and then added as an afterthought, ‘I was on my way home after visiting Nellie and her baby Sarah when you kidnapped me.’

  Her captor drew a deep breath. ‘I thought that I knew you. You’re the sister of John Langley, the painter. You saved my sister Nellie’s life—and her baby’s, too. Sukie Thwaites told me all about it.’

  He turned to the waiting crowd. ‘I’ll not have her harmed. You understand me.
She did my sister the greatest favour a woman can do. She may be a fine lady who is now our prisoner, but I can’t let you hurt someone who went out of her way to help one of us—when many wouldn’t have done.’

  An angry roar went up. ‘You promised, Kev, you know you did,’ shouted the man who had jeered at Stevie for giving Sarah water in the bush.

  ‘I know what I promised, but that was before I knew who she was. I told Nellie when I visited Grimes’s farm that no harm would come to her through me. It was bad luck that you found her, but I gave my solemn promise to my sister nigh on a year ago.’

  Sarah listened to them wrangling over her: her kindness to Nellie, given almost idly at the time, was going to be the means of saving her from dishonour and a likely death. For the first time since she had been kidnapped she was roused from her apathy and began to hope that the worst might not befall her.

  Kevin was their leader and his will prevailed. Sullen agreement was given that she should be left unharmed, but that she would be used as a hostage, if necessary.

  ‘She’s no fine lady, here,’ called one of the women. ‘She’ll have to do her share of the work.’

  Sarah would have walked back to Sydney on her knees to save herself from shame so that being made to work did not distress her. She tried to thank Kevin, but he silenced her with, ‘Thank yourself, woman. Had you not cared for Nellie I’d have thrown you to them without a thought.’

  He motioned to the shack, which was apparently his headquarters, as well as a home to several other men and women, and indicated that she was to follow him inside, after saying, ‘You’ll have to work your keep and be careful where you go. There are many who are not best pleased that I’ve spared you.’

  He could be as harsh as he liked. He had saved her. Sarah bent her head in the low doorway and entered the ill-smelling, dark and grimy room. He called to one of the women, the thin one who had baited and slapped her, ‘Fill her up with whisky, Moll. I don’t want her trying to escape, she’s valuable to us as a possible hostage.’