The Isis Knot Read online

  A faint male voice muttered something, and she curled the sharp rock into her chest, preparing. The man climbed down from the wagon seat. Her vision was far from clear, but she could make out the general shape of his narrow body against the dark of the wagon and horse. As he limped toward her, his image sharpened: an old man, a long white beard covering the lower half of his severely weathered face. He was barefoot, his clothes barely tatters. The drab, filthy shirt stuffed into brown pants would have fallen off his body if it weren’t for his suspenders.

  As the old man leaned over her, just out of reach, he used a thumb to tilt back his wide-brimmed hat. “Another one of you. Jesus.”

  His scratchy voice whistled a little on the S. His accent was unfamiliar and it took her a few moments to comprehend what he said.

  “Where did you come from, girl?”

  His red-rimmed eyes widened as they set on her body. She realized that even though she was clothed—in black pants and a long-sleeved shirt that she didn’t recognize and didn’t remember putting on—she still felt completely naked. Vulnerable.

  The rock dug sharp and dangerous in her hand. If he touched her, he’d soon limp on the other leg, too.

  He waved a gnarled hand and blinked. “No matter. I think I know.” He tsked. “You’re in poor shape. Must’ve been terrible. What were you thinking, heading off into the bush alone?”

  It had been terrible, only she couldn’t remember why.

  With a grunt and a mighty creaking and popping of joints, he knelt beside her. “Let’s get you away before they come a-looking. And they will, believe me, for a pretty one like you.”

  He shoved one bony arm under her shoulders and wedged the other under her knees, enveloping her in his body stink—layers of sweat and old man and the sour tang of stale alcohol. She wasn’t going anywhere with him.

  Fight. Get away.

  What little strength she owned she channeled into the hand that held the rock. Panic swung her arm into action, making a great arc out and away from her body. She brought it down upon him, all ferocity and power. She’d knock him senseless, this man who thought to pick her up like a doll and take her who knows where. She’d knock him out and run. Just watch me.

  The old man’s hairy-knuckled hand caught hers with terrible ease. He stared down at her, brow furrowed. Behind the sunburn and underneath his hat, she didn’t know how to read his expression, whether or not retaliation would come. Then some of the wrinkles in his face unfolded and his gray eyes softened. Taking her wrist, he lowered the hand holding the rock back to her chest and gave it a patronizing pat.

  “Good girl. Good girl.” He chuckled low in his throat. “You won’t need that with me. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll let you hold on to it.”

  Frustration and confusion filled her eyes with tears.

  “It’s all right,” he cooed, taking his hands off her. “I want to help you.”

  She noted that he trilled his Rs, and that the ends of each word faded before the next one came out.

  He sat back on his haunches and frowned at her clothing. Random facts popped into her head—her pants and shirt were made of linen, and that hard point gouging into the side of her ribs was the underwire to her bra. Why did that seem to matter now?

  The man swept off his hat and scratched his sweaty head, making a shock of pure white hair stand straight up. “Been a long time since I was in England, but I never thought I’d see a woman dressed as a man. I’m not sure that was the smartest thing to do, lassie. The soldiers won’t shoot a woman bolter, but they’ll shoot a man. Only after they came to inspect your body would they know what you really were.”

  Soldiers? Bolter?

  “Do you have papers?” he asked.

  “P-papers?” she managed to whisper.

  “Ah, so you can talk. And the King’s English at that. Good.” As he slipped his hat back on, his loose shirt went askew and a mat of opaque white chest hair peeked out from the V. “Papers. Ticket of leave. Did you lose yours out there in the bush or did you never have one to begin with?”

  Ticket of leave? The bush? His terminology was as alien as this place. Nothing he said seemed remotely familiar. Triggered no memories. Everything about his words felt…off.

  And yet, something deep inside reassured her that this was, in fact, exactly where she was supposed to be. Why? She wanted to scream the question to the sky but couldn’t draw out the ability or the sound.

  The man waited for her response, bushy eyebrows pushed upward. Never say more than you have to. It was a lesson she’d learned early on in life. From that life she couldn’t remember. The circumstances surrounding that particular lesson refused to come back to her, but she knew its teachings. Understood them very, very well.

  “No…papers,” she croaked out.

  “Well.” His cracked lips rolled inward as he gazed somewhere far away. “That tells me a lot.”

  It told her nothing. Nothing at all.

  “I can hide you.” He returned his gaze to her. She noticed that the wagon and the sunbaked landscape just beyond were more in focus now. “Until you’re better. I have my own lands now. My own farm, my own sheep. Macquarie saw to that after my sentence was complete. You can stay with me until you feel well enough to…do what you feel you have to.”

  She couldn’t deny it, hiding sounded good. Real good. But could she trust him? Should she trust him? She was not, by nature, a trusting person. Someone—or many someones—had made her so. But she didn’t like feeling that way. It made her uneasy to be so suspicious. And yet…in this situation, she had to listen to that doubt.

  The rock gouged into her palm as her fingers tightened around it. “Why…would you…help me?”

  He stared hard into her face, sighed, and scratched again at the back of his head. “Because you’ll die if you walk back out there.” His eyes flicked out into the bright, empty, quiet wilderness stretching beyond her vision. “I know that for a fact. Whatever you’re running from—a man, likely—it can’t be as bad as leaving your bones to the creatures and the savages out there in this God-cursed land.” He swallowed and dropped his chin, but not before she saw his eyes fill. “And because you remind me of someone. Of my Mary.”

  Mary. The name meant nothing to Sera, but apparently everything to this man. Heartfelt honesty softened the craggy skin around his eyes.

  She would let him hide her until she got her strength back, and then…what?

  She nodded once, because it was all the movement she could manage.

  The man exhaled in relief, enveloping her in a cloud of vapors that could no longer be mistaken for anything other than alcohol consumed continually over the past ten years. Or perhaps his entire life.

  Again he slipped his arms around her, this time more tentatively. She didn’t fight him, though she clutched the rock close and kept a keen eye on his face. His ribcage poked through the sweat-soaked cloth of his scratchy shirt and she had to breathe through her mouth so she wouldn’t pass out from his odor. He wheezed as he struggled to stand with her in his arms, but eventually he did it, pivoting them both toward his wagon. His limp jostled her body.

  “I’ve got a few ideas about you,” he rasped. “Just nod if any of these are true. Your master sent you for bread or cloth or rum or other, and you just decided not to go back.”

  Master. The word rankled, again clanging the warning bells inside her head, but she said nothing. The truth would come to her if she kept her mouth shut, and her eyes and ears open. She had to believe that, had to trust in it.

  “All right, then,” he continued, “seeing as we’re this close to Parramatta, I’ll guess that you’ve escaped from the Female Factory.”

  That term actually made her shudder.

  She shook her head against his chest, wanting him to talk more, to reveal more about where she was. Not that any of it made any sense, but like a puzzle, she’d spread out all the pieces first, and figure out where they went later.

  He released that awkward, whis
tling chuckle again. “Wouldn’t have believed someone as pretty as you would’ve been sent to the Factory in the first place. Which leads me to another conclusion.” He was starting to slur his words, making her think the liquor vapor on his breath wasn’t so old. “The man who took you as wife—he was a settler, perhaps? An emancipist or a government type? He didn’t treat you as a woman ought to be treated. And so you bolted.”

  More new terms that meant nothing to the grasping, empty fingers of her memory. Settler. Emancipist.

  Her mind must be lying to her. She didn’t belong here after all.

  They reached his wagon, and with a grunt he heaved her up and onto the rickety, splintered planks of the bed. The landing sent shocks of pain into her body and, groaning, she rolled until she was more comfortable.

  “I’m Viv.” He planted his hands on the edge of the wagon. His arms shook.

  Odd name for a man.

  “I’m Sera,” she whispered. “I don’t remember anything else.”

  The old man made a sound of sympathy. “Nothing?”

  She gave a tight shake of her head.

  He gazed toward the horizon that wavered in the heat. “Maybe it’s better that way. Many of us wish we could forget what we did to get sent here.”

  Sent here…yes, she’d been sent here, but not in the way he’d been thinking.

  Viv lifted a hand, paused and seemed to consider something, licked his lips, and then reached out toward her. She flinched and tried to lift the rock, but only managed to make it scrape across the wagon bed in a muted, completely nonthreatening way. He gave her a smile that had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with sadness and pity, and then nudged a piece of knotted hair off her forehead.

  “That’s all I meant to do. Didn’t mean to cause alarm. I won’t hurt you.” Stepping back, he glanced down at his crotch, and one side of his nearly toothless mouth ticked up ruefully. “I’m too old for that. Besides, it doesn’t work anymore anyway.”

  It calmed her some, though she didn’t release the rock.

  Her shoulder ached where it pressed hard into a nail and she shifted her weight backward. The long sleeve of her shirt snagged on the nail, and the fabric pulled back from her wrist to bunch near her elbow. The sun streamed down, striking something bright and shiny that wrapped around her forearm. The burst of light nearly blinded her.

  Gold. A brilliant, yellow band of pure gold. On her arm.

  Viv gasped, and then choked.

  Hide it, came a desperate demand from deep inside her soul. Keep it secret.

  His eyes bulged as he stared at the precious metal. He wove a little on his feet. When he reached out again, it was for her arm. It was for the gold! She desperately tried to free the shirt sleeve from the nail and re-cover her arm. But it was too late.

  His hand kept coming, closer and closer…until his fingers took the snagged fabric and unhooked it from the nail.

  Frantically, she tugged down her sleeve and covered the gold. When she looked up, he wasn’t staring at the jewelry, but at her face.

  “You should keep that covered,” he murmured, “considering where you are.”

  She took a chance. “And where am I?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  She shook her head.

  He bent to rub the knee of the leg he favored, grimacing. “You made it about two miles from Sydney Town. Parramatta is nearly thirty miles that way.”

  That told her nothing.

  “There are people here,” he said quietly, seriously, “who would cut off your arm to get that fancy piece. I’m just not one of them.” He squinted at her face, ignoring the gold altogether. “You’ve got no food, no water. You’re lucky I found you and not one of the men in uniform. It’s easy to escape once you’re in New South Wales. Damn near impossible to survive once you do.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Feet planted firmly on dry land, William focused on the horizon of shimmering trees to harden his stomach. The world was no longer pitching underneath him, but it still felt like it. When he’d been younger, when the sea had been his life, the transition from water to land had never affected him like this. But of course, everything had changed.

  One convict behind him vomited into the shallow water. Many others walked in wavy lines as soldiers prodded the sentenced into a loose group near the water’s edge, where the jagged lines of docks met the muddy patches of land. The air stank of fish and men who’d been confined to a ship for a year.

  Sydney had existed only thirty years. Wildness fed right up to its edges, creating an island of humanity in a virgin land. Stories of black-skinned primitives, and deadly snakes and spiders the size of one’s hand abounded. The look of this place was cloaked in uncertainty. Danger and the unknown seemed to be mixed with the dirt and swirled in the air. William had sailed to many places in his former career with the Royal Navy—the Caribbean, France, Malta, Egypt—yet no place, no matter how far away, felt as isolated and strange as New South Wales.

  And yet he was prepared to run straight into it. To find her. To end the madness. A quivering anxiety raced through him, but he rooted his feet and stared straight ahead, assessing. Waiting.

  A crowd had turned out for the arrival of the John Barry. Fifty or so male onlookers formed a broken crescent around the muddy harbor. To the left, crude hitched wagons stood waiting, surrounded by dirty men. To the right, a line of English soldiers watched the convicts with keen eyes, rifles at the ready.

  William, too, was ready, and he pushed to the front of the group, the other convicts easily letting him pass. Jem clung close to his side. Perhaps too close, because here was where they would be forced apart.

  A man with a strong chin, neat short hair, and a long proud nose broke from the soldiers and approached the convicts. Even in the heat, he wore the thick blue coat of a decorated man. Hands clasped behind his back, he smiled at the unwashed mass of criminals. It was the first true smile William had seen in almost a year.

  “I am Governor Macquarie.” He boasted a Scottish accent that carried easily through the crowd. “I would like to personally welcome you to New South Wales. You’ve been sent here, to this fine, fruitful colony, for two purposes. First, for rehabilitation from your crimes.” Some of the convicts shifted and muttered. “Yes, rehabilitation. My predecessors may have viewed you as a burden, but I do not.

  “The second reason is to help build this colony into the strong extension of England it is destined to be. I am here to create a country from a prison, a self-sustaining home from a lawless land. Look around you.” He swept an arm toward the quiet cluster of buildings framing the water. “Look at the birth of this beautiful town built by convict hands. Hands just like yours. Hands of men who have served their sentences and since moved on to build their own homes, and tend their own fields and herds. I hope you will do this, start a new life here, instead of choosing to return to England.”

  The murmurs intensified. Questions, mostly. Confusion. William crossed his arms and kept his surprise quiet. This wasn’t how he’d expected their arrival to go at all. Even if this man did speak of eventual freedom, William could never—would never—wait seven years to begin his search. The itch the Spectre had planted in him had grown painful.

  Macquarie began to walk slowly in front of the convicts, never looking at his shoes or the sky—never anywhere but at the criminals before him. “Many of you will find better lives here than you had back in England. I can do much for you”—he waggled a finger as if they were children—“if your conduct merits it. In New South Wales you will not be placed in chains or in cells unless your behavior tells me otherwise.”

  At that, excitement skittered just beneath William’s skin. Beside him, even Jem seemed to stand a little taller. William, for the first time since taking the lad under his arm, allowed himself to think that perhaps Jem might be all right without him.

  Until a convict chuckled close by. Riley.

  William edged closer to Jem, knowing deep down that
it was futile. In a few minutes, everything could change. The Spectre ruled him, and if it meant for William to abandon Jem in favor of finding the woman, that was what he would have to do, no matter how much he wanted the opposite.

  “Some of you will be placed in private assignment with colonists—those who have chosen to come to New South Wales—or emancipists—men who were once like yourselves but have served their sentences and are now free,” Macquarie continued. “But most of you will go to government service, to help strengthen the colony and grow it into a sustainable, powerful arm of our mother country, in King George’s name. We have even recently completed construction on new barracks for your comfort.” He clapped his hands once. “Know that your efforts—your sweat and your labor and your heart—will better your lives and the lives of future generations. Again, welcome.”

  Macquarie fell back as soldiers prodded the convicts into a line.

  “You’ll now be sorted,” called out an unseen speaker whose voice had a harsh, raspy quality.

  A hand on William’s arm pulled him to the side. Alastair’s low voice in his ear. “Regret your decision yet?”

  The woman’s face—which he was now beginning to hate—flashed in his mind. “No.”

  Alastair sighed. “Then stay by my side. I’ll get you into private service. You don’t want to work for the government, no matter what fine words were just spoken. Trust me. Macquarie takes the skilled labor for himself and works them harder than anyone in private assignment.”

  On a rise to the west, a large plot of land had been stripped of trees and topsoil, its innards bared as convicts mined sandstone. The sounds of picks on rock reached the harbor on a delay, sharp pings that transcended the murmur of the crowd. William would not spend the next seven years trapped shuffling between the barracks and a quarry. If he were in private service, he might have a greater range of movement. A better chance for escape.

  He nodded to Alastair. “That I’ll agree to.”

  A furtive glance at Jem made William’s heart twist. This was it. This would have to be good-bye. He hated it. He could have done more. He could have been more like Alastair was, even now.