Verwandte Artikel zu Whispers of Heaven

Whispers of Heaven - Softcover

Proctor, Candice

 
9780804119313: Whispers of Heaven
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804119317 ISBN 13: 9780804119313
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

After years of attending school in England, Jesmond Corbett returns to her family's Tasmanian estate, expecting to marry the wealthy neighbor chosen for her by her parents, but an encounter with a seductive stranger who works in the stables ignites an unexpected--and dangerous--passion. Original.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Candice Proctor is also the author of Night in Eden, The Bequest, September Moon, and The Last Knight. She lives near New Orleans, with her two young daughters.

Aus dem Klappentext

Acclaimed for her unforgettable characters and bold storytelling, bestselling author Candice Proctor takes readers to the lush vistas of Australia for this magnificent tale of two people who share a love as forbidden and dangerous as the land that surrounds them. . . .

After years of schooling in England, Jesmond Corbett finds little has changed on her family s estate along the sea-battered coast of Tasmania. Betrothed since childhood to a wealthy neighbor, Jessie comes home determined to conform to the expectations of her family and the society in which they live. But nothing in Jessie s life has prepared her for the mysterious stranger who works in the stables, a man with searing eyes who haunts her dreams and awakens passions she never knew existed.

Irishman Lucas Gallagher arrived on the island in chains, a convict sentenced to a lifetime of slave labor for the English gentry. For four years he has lived a dead man s existence, using every spare moment to plan his escape. But when he meets Jessie, she touches his cold, angry heart. And although their love has no future, he finds himself unable to deny the longings of his battered soul longings that threaten to destroy what may be his last chance to reach for freedom. . . .

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CHAPTER ONE

Tasmania, September 1840

Jesmond Corbett tightened her gloved hand around the strap, the starched skirts of her poplin traveling gown crackling as she leaned forward in anticipation, her gaze fixed on the familiar weeping gums and silver wattles flashing past the open carriage window. Soon, she thought, her heart humming with joy. Soon.

The sharp snap of the driver’s whip cut through the crisp spring air to mingle with the thud of hooves on the trampled road and the creak of harness as her brother’s team of smart dapple grays plunged up the incline. The finely built carriage bumped and swayed around a wide bend, then a thick stand of native beech gave way to an outcropping of bare sandstone and she could see the lush, gently undulating valley spreading out below her. Jessie held her breath, and waited.

Two years. It had been two long years since she had been home. She had never been away before, so she hadn’t expected to miss it so very badly. Oh, she hadn’t let her homesickness spoil the excitement of learning new things and meeting new people. Yet each day away had held its own private pain. And as she caught sight of her childhood home’s cluster of soaring chimneys and single, golden stone tower thrusting above the feathery treetops, she knew a rush of emotion that caught at her chest and brought the tingle of unshed tears to her face.

“Warrick—” She grasped the arm of the elegantly dressed young man who slouched on the maroon leather seat beside her. “Stop here. Please. I want to get down.”

Her brother shifted sideways and stared at her. “Get down? Here? At the quarry?” He thumped the carriage roof to order the coachman to stop, then cast a significant glance at the hillside above the road, where a dozen or so ragged, sullen convicts toiled with pickax, wedge, and sledgehammer to cut blocks of golden sandstone from the Corbett estate’s yawning quarry. “Whatever for?”

“Because you get the best view of the house from here.” Gathering her rose-colored skirts in one fist, she thrust open the carriage door.

“Did you miss it so much?” said Warrick, an odd smile touching the edges of his gently sculpted lips. “I thought you wanted to go.”

Without waiting for one of the men to let down the steps, she jumped to the road, her low-heeled kid boots landing softly in the dirt, her poplin skirts twirling about her ankles as she turned to watch her brother straighten languidly from the seat. “Just because I wanted to go to London to study doesn’t mean I wanted to leave Tasmania.” She tilted her head as she looked up at him. “Haven’t you ever wanted two contradictory things at the same time?”

He paused, his hands braced against the sides of the carriage doorway, the smile fading slowly from his features to be replaced by a sad, haunted look. “No. Never. In fact, I can’t think of anything I’ve truly wanted for years now.”

Yes, you can, she almost said, but swallowed the words along with a lump of emotion in her throat.

He hesitated another moment, then hopped lightly to the road beside her. He’d grown taller while she was away, she noticed; taller, and, at twenty-two, broader through the shoulders. Yet he was still slender, and very fair. With his head of flaxen curls and smooth, almost too-beautiful face, he had often reminded Jessie of one of Botticelli’s angels. Except that there was nothing angelic about the brooding slant that often spoiled the curve of his full, graceful lips, or the dangerous, discontented fire that could smolder as it did now in the depths of his strange, crystal-gray eyes.

A sudden silence yawned between them, filled with unspoken thoughts oddly underlined by the thwack of metal hitting stone and the sharp crack of splintering rock from the quarry. The tang of dust and sweat mingled with the scent of eucalyptus riding on the September breeze, and Jessie shifted her gaze to the hillside above, where the swinging pickaxes and hunched backs of the convicts working the quarry rose and fell with monotonous predictability.

She had been born and bred here, in the Colonies, so the sight of convicts didn’t shock her the way it did settlers newly arrived from England. Gangs of convicts were as much a part of the Tasmanian landscape as the vast herds of sheep and fields of grain that brought so much wealth to the island’s free land owners. Of course, most people called them “government men,” rather than convicts—as if the term convict was somehow more demeaning than the chains that so often dragged from their wrists and ankles, or the cat-o’-nine-tails and triangle that brought fear and humiliation to the men’s existence. Whatever term one used, nothing could alter the reality of what the men working the quarry really were.

As she watched, one of the men near the edge of the hillside straightened. He was a wiry man of above-average height, his bare, sweat-slicked torso slim but well-formed, his even features set into a hard, angry line. Irish, she thought, by the look of him, with that midnight-black hair and sharp-edged, aggressive bone structure. And young; he probably wasn’t that much older than Warrick. For one, unexpected moment, his narrowed, hooded gaze met hers across the distance that separated them. Then the man beside him clapped him on the shoulder and said something that made the Irishman shake his head and swing away.

Jessie had grown up surrounded by convicts: convict house servants, convict grooms—she’d even had a convict dancing instructor. She didn’t usually give them a second thought. But today, perhaps because of her long absence, the sight of this unknown man’s shuttered face and the thought of his shattered, wasted life, suddenly filled her with an unexpected, desperate kind of sadness.

Turning her back on the workers, she nodded toward the roughly cut stone blocks stacked at the side of the road. “What are you building?”

“Well, let’s see . . .” Warrick blew out his breath in a long, exasperated sigh. “I was expanding the stables. But Mother decided the old picket fence around the cemetery needed to be replaced with a stone wall, so of course the stables will just have to wait.”

Jessie laughed softly. “She hasn’t changed, I gather.”

Warrick arched his eyebrows in surprise. “Did you think she would?”

“I thought, perhaps, with Papa gone . . .” She swallowed hard, the thought too painful to finish. Anselm Corbett had been a healthy, energetic man in his fifties when Jessie sailed for England. But he had died of a seizure just three short weeks later, although she hadn’t heard about it for six months. Even now, she found it difficult to believe he wasn’t waiting for her in that big stone house he had built in the valley below.

“She’s the same,” said Warrick, his gaze drifting over the activity in the quarry, his features impassive. “Only, more so. She has embraced the images and duties of widowhood with the same brutal correctness as she shouldered the roles of wife and mother all these years—although perhaps embraced is too passionate a word to apply to our mother.”

“You’re not very kind to her, Warrick.”

He swung his head to look at Jessie, his eyes wide and a little wild. “Am I not? And when was she ever kind to us, sister?”

“Many times,” said Jessie, warmed by gentle memories of bedtime lullabies and veranda-shaded, white-linen tea parties attended only by a little girl’s collection of beloved and...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804119317
ISBN 13 
9780804119313
Einband
Taschenbuch
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