Whispers of Heaven Read Free

Fine English misses such as that one are not for the likes of us, mate."
    Lucas grinned. "Neither is the blood stallion." He hefted the pickax, then paused again, his attention drawn back, in spite of himself, to the woman in rose poplin. "She's something though, isn't she?"
    A gruff shout floated across the quarry as the overseer cracked his whip warningly into the air. Daniel jerked away, while Gallagher let his body fall once more into the endless swing and heft of the pickax. He didn't look up again until the carriage and its occupants had long vanished from sight.
    CHAPTER TWO
    Sparkling white in the bright spring sunshine, the long drive of crushed shells wound through carefully tended, parklike grounds planted with sycamore and birch, English oak and black locust, Dutch elm and ash. As a child, Jessie had taken for granted the estate's broad lawns and stately, English trees, the formal walled garden and hedges of rose and lilac, camellia and clipped box. Now, newly returned from the land all colonists still thought of as home, she looked at the garden with fresh insight and realized just how hard her parents must have worked to re-create this miniature enclave of England in the midst of the Tasmanian wilderness.
    Anselm Corbett had built his home along stately lines, a full two stories tall, of carefully crafted sandstone blocks. Although the sun shone less fiercely in Tasmania than in other parts of Australia, summers here could still be hot—especially to those accustomed to gentler English climes. And so, as was the colonial custom, he had wrapped his house in double verandas, built not of wood, as was usual, but of stone as well, in the form of wide gothic arches. The effect was something like a cross between a double-decker medieval cloister and a Levantine Crusader castle. Originally, Anselm had named his new estate Ravenscroft, but when a spate of attacks by bushrangers led him to add a protruding front porch surmounted by a high, square tower, people took to calling the place Castle Corbett. Not that Anselm Corbett minded. It was a fine thing, surely, for the son of a common Lancashire mill owner to live in a house grand enough to be called a castle.
    Thinking again, sadly, of her father, Jessie listened to the tiny shells crunch beneath the wheels with welcome familiarity as the carriage bowled up the avenue toward the house. All those long months on the ship, she had dreamt of this moment. In her imagination, her mother would hear the jingle of harness and the rattle of the wheels and be there, on the tower-topped porch, waiting for her when the carriage swept up before the house. Except, of course, that Beatrice Corbett would never do something so vulgarly impetuous as to rush from the house to welcome home her only surviving daughter, no matter how long she'd been gone. When the horses swung around the last bend, Jessie saw the porch standing shadowed and empty.
    Hopping out first, Warrick turned to wrap his hands around Jessie's waist, then paused at something he must have seen in her face. "Don't tell me you expected to find Mother out here waiting for you?" He swung Jessie down to the drive.
    "No." She let go of her brother's shoulders and turned to look up at the house's massive fagade. "But I guess a part of me was still hoping."
    Reaching out, he touched her elbow, lightly, stopping her as she took a step toward the porch. An unexpected shadow of concern, perhaps even remorse, darkened his face. "She's probably been waiting for you in the morning room since breakfast, unable to do anything except pretend to embroider, and fret. She did miss you, you know. Terribly."
    "I know," said Jessie, giving him a reassuring smile before running up the steps and letting herself in the wide double doors. In England, such a stately county home would have had a butler, or at least a footman, stationed ready to open the front door for the members of the household. But house servants had always been a problem in