Francis, Pickett, Watson, Peck and others off Golden Grove were cutting timber on Mount George when-who knew how, who knew why?-Bryant stumbled into the path of a falling pine. His head crushed, he died two hours later and was buried on the same day. Half crazed with grief, his widow wandered Sydney Town keening and moaning like an Irishwoman who spoke no English.
“The mood is very nasty,” Stephen said as he walked back to Richard’s house after the funeral.
“It had to happen” was all Richard said.
“That poor, wretched woman! And no priest to bury him.”
“God will not care.”
“God
“It had to happen,” Richard repeated.
MacTavish, in whom the Scotch terrier line had run true, leaped into Richard’s arms without making a nuisance of himself in the usual manner of a young dog; he has trained it, Stephen thought, with the same thoroughness he devotes to everything. How does he manage to look exactly as he did when I first met him? Why have the rest of us aged and hardened while he has preserved intact every iota that he always was? Only more so. Much more so.
“If ye get me a few stalks of the sugar cane running riot,” said Richard, gently thumping the dog’s lower spine with the flat of his hand, “in two years I will give ye all the rum ye can drink.”
“Oh, plus two copper kettles, some copper sheet, a few lengths of copper tubing and some casks cut in half,” Richard went on with a smile. “I can distill, Mr. Donovan. ’Tis another of my hidden talents.”
“Christ, Richard, ye’re a commandant’s dream! And for the love of God, will you please call me Stephen? I am so tired of this lopsided friendship! Surely after so many years it is time ye gave in, convict though ye may still be? ’Tis that Bristol prudishness, and I hate it!”
“Sorry, Stephen,” said Richard, eyes twinkling.
“Begorrah! Victory at last!” Tremendously pleased at hearing his name come from Richard’s lips, Stephen concealed his joy by frowning. “The marines are boiling because there is never enough rum to give them their full ration-Lieutenant Cresswell is at his wits’ end. Nor does he do any better. King does not care, of course, as long as his port does not run out. Cresswell would far rather drink rum. Port Jackson has little rum either. I warrant that a rum distillery in Norfolk Island would receive full sanction from His Excellency. ’Twould cost far less to make rum than to bring it out on storeships, for even the most idealistic official understands that rum is as necessary as bread and salt meat.”
“Well, there is certainly nothing to stop my growing my own patch of sugar cane. This soil loves it, and the grubs hate it. Though despite the rats and the grubs, we will harvest both wheat and Indian corn this summer, I am sure of it.”
“I hope so, for all our sakes. Harry Ball of Supply says that there are many more to be shipped here soon. In Port Jackson things are much worse, despite the lack of grubs.” Stephen shivered. “I do not think, even including the hurricane, that I have ever been so terrified as when the whole vale was one heaving mass of grubs. Not one million but millions upon millions, an army on the move that left Attila’s hordes looking minuscule. Maybe ’twas my Irish blood, but I swear I thought that the Devil had cursed us. Brr!” Shivering again, he changed the subject. “Tell me, Richard, who is attacking the Government sows? One dead and one maimed.”
Richard studied Stephen’s face with an affection bordering on love. That he felt he could not call what he experienced “love” was not because of its lack of a sexual element; it was because “love” was an emotion he associated with William Henry, with little Mary, with Peg. Whom he had kept below the level of all thought for what had piled up into years.
Yet now their names fell inside his mind as clear and limpid as the brook farther up across a pattern of stones, as distant as the stars, as close as MacTavish on his lap. It was Stephen, it was calling Stephen by his name. The other names came rushing up, rang on a peal of memories not all the time and all the things that had happened to him could tarnish, diminish, expunge. William Henry, little Mary, Peg… Gone forever, yet not gone at all. I am a vessel filled with their light, and somewhere, sometime, I will know that love again. Not in an after life. Here. Here in Norfolk Island. I am awake again. I am alive. So alive! I will not waste my essence in a thankless exile. I will not belong to that segment of this place who would ruin it for sheer spite. Peg, little Mary, William Henry. They are here. They are waiting to be with me. And they will be with me.
This had occurred in the silence between two beats of a heart, yet Stephen understood that some enormous change in Richard had just come about. As if he had sloughed off a skin and stood forth in all the splendor of new raiment. What did I say? What brought it to pass? And why did the privilege of seeing it fall to me?
Richard answered Stephen’s question about the sows. “That is easy,” he said. “Len Dyer.”
“Why Len Dyer?”
“He fancies Mary Gamble, who will not give herself to anyone. When he solicited her attentions, he did so as any weasel would-without respect or acknowledgment of her humanity. You know what I mean: ‘Hey, Gamble, how about a fuck?’ So she told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his tossle-
“Not now she will not be.” Stephen got to his feet and blew Richard an impudent kiss. “I know how to deal with Dyer. Call me Stephen again, please.”
“Stephen,” said Richard, laughing. “Now leave me to get on with my polishing.”
Lieutenant King had discovered an easily quarried rock underlying all the land between the old garden hillock and Point Hunter at the far end of Turtle Bay, and also found that it burned to make excellent lime, though his primary purpose had been to use it for stone chimneys and ovens.
When Supply arrived in December with enough convicts to bring the population up to 132, she bore orders from Governor Phillip that rations were to go down to two-thirds, as they were already at Port Jackson. For the growing Norfolk Island this news was not so calamitous; though the millions of grubs had eaten every leafed thing they crawled on, the wheat crop off eleven acres came in splendidly and the rain held off right through its harvesting. The Indian corn did even better, the pigs were multiplying quickly-as were the ducks and chickens-and it was banana season. For those who would eat fish, there was fish.
Endurance and tenacity had turned Richard Morgan into one of the more privileged convicts, for no other reasons than that he gave absolutely no trouble, worked indefatigably and was never sick. So to Richard went enough of this new stone and mortar to build himself a decent chimney. All the sawpits were sawing flat out-what more could a commandant ask of his supervisor of sawyers? Luckily more saws arrived from Port Jackson on Supply; Governor Phillip, planning to more than triple Norfolk Island’s population, had decided that Port Jackson needed saws less than Norfolk Island did. A decision he would find reinforced when Supply returned bearing the first consignment of splendid clean lime.
When Supply also brought more women than Lieutenant King could find a use for, Richard had a brilliant inspiration: he put six of them to sharpening saws. It was, he admitted to himself ruefully, an alternative he should have thought of long before. The work suited females of a certain temperament-it could be done sitting down in the shade, it was not exhausting, it required fine attention to detail and yet could be pursued in a spirit of camaraderie. As one woman was needed at each pit to touch up the saws halfway through each cut and yet more women were put to stripping logs of bark, romances developed between those who were unattached. Though a woman soon learned that Richard Morgan was married already and not interested in amorous intrigues.
Two-thirds rations were a symptom of the fact that two years had gone by without a single ship from England; the long-awaited Guardian storeship which carried so much marine private property as well as tons of flour, salt meat, other provisions and animals had never arrived, and no one knew why. Every day on top of South Head at the entrance to Port Jackson the sentinel on watch gazed out to sea with painful urgency, had been doing so for a year; a whale spout was a sail, a water spout was a sail, a little low white cloud was a sail. But none of them was a sail. The foods that Sirius had fetched back from the Cape of Good Hope in May of 1789 were running
