Dream Time (historical): Book I by Parris Afton Bonds Read Free Book Online Page A

to my commander about placing the baby.”
    She knew Tom was hoping she would change her mind. After the door shut behind him, she allowed herself to turn her gaze on the baby. The child was healthy. And so tiny. A mite of a human being. Reluctance to give away the baby constricted the muscles in her throat. She found it difficult to speak but forced out the next words. “Pulykara, get your belongings together.”
    They were few enough. A blanket, a tin cup, a woven reed basket of trinkets, which she ascribed to as a source of power.
    Nan watched the baby’s tiny fists beat against empty space until Pulykara caught them in the folds of the blanket in which she wrapped the baby. “You want me to find a place for her now?” she asked.
    The aborigine’s eyes held no reproach, yet Nan felt guilty. She was feeling maternal pangs. No, her decision was the right one. The child would be better off growing up in a household where it was loved.
    She turned her face to the other side of the pillow. “Pulykara, you are to stay with the baby. I helped you once, now you must help me. Guard the infant as your own for as long as the child lives.” Tears dampened the pillow. “Promise me this.”
    Over the strips of tattoos, the luminous black eyes were sorrowful. “I promise, baby.”

 
    § CHAPTER FIVE §
     
     
    The Reverend William Wilmot watched his young wife suckle the infant in her arms. Her round face glowed. At that moment, she resembled a Botticelli Madonna. At seventeen, she was fully a woman.
    When he had married her, she was a mere thirteen, a child. A child who had been sentenced to seven years for plucking cucumber plants from a private garden.
    He had been thirty and sent out by the London Missionary Society with his wife. Clara had died en route, and he had ended up rescuing the elfin Rose from servitude through marriage to her.
    His eyes fell on her breasts, engorged with milk from the stillborn she had lost two days earlier. He recalled how hard had been his struggle over that first year of marriage to restrain his growing passion for her. Then had come the night she had turned to him in bed and begun caressing him. All hope of restraint had vanished the moment her hand had found his manhood.
    “I know ’tis shameful of me,” she had whispered, “but I cannot be helping meself, husband.”
    He had taken her in lust and should doubtlessly spend the rest of his life repenting. But he wasn’t yet, God help him.
    Rose looked up at him. “Oh, Willy, h’aint’ she lovely?”
    “Isn’t, dear. Isn’t she lovely.” His long, bony fingers ruffled Rose’s deep red hair, then he gingerly touched the baby’s pitch black, downy fuzz. “She is, indeed, beautiful. And nigh as bald as I. At least, I have teeth.”
    Rose chuckled. In the candlelight, her freckles glinted like half-pennies. “You say the drollest things, Willy.”
    “We must remember in our prayers the mother. One of the convict women, most likely. The Lord knows how they suffer so. Does the aborigine woman give you any clue about the mother’s identity?”
    “Nary a word. Like I told you, she just trotted out of the woods with the bundle like one of those dingoes.”
    William thought of the aborigine woman, squatting outside their timber-and-stone cottage. The cottage was on the edge of Sydney in a rural area known as Wooloomooloo for the mobs of gray kangaroo that inhabited the area. Dingoes that howled in the night, kangaroos that boxed like Welsh prize fighters, and aborigines that would have no qualms about slitting the throat of an Englishman who befriended them. That was Australia. A wild land with wild people. Still, this black woman was one of God’s creatures.
    “What shall we name ’er, Willy?”
    “I suggest something biblical.”
    Rose’s little nose wrinkled. “Bible names are so . . . so . . .”
    “Unimaginative? ” He mused a moment, then, leaning over the rocker to better study the precious gift, said, “What about