kettles, a spouted kettle for boiling water, frying pans, little pots, tin dishes and tubs, pewter plates and mugs, knives and spoons, unbleached calico-even, when I asked for it, emery powder. Look, Kitty! I bought a pound of Malabar peppercorns and a mortar and pestle for grinding them.” He dumped a wooden box a foot cubed down on the desk. “And here is a chest of hyson tea just for you.”
Her hands to her cheeks, she stared at him tearily. “Oh! You thought of
“Why should I not?” he asked, surprised. “I knew ye missed a cup of tea. I bought a teapot too. Sweetening it will not be hard. I will cut ye a stalk of sugar cane and chop it into short bits. All ye’ll have to do is crush it with a hammer and boil it to make syrup.”
“But this cost money!” she cried, appalled.
“Richard is a warm man, girl,” Stephen said, beginning to take articles off Richard as he handed them up from the sled. “I must say ye did amazing well, my friend, considering who ye dealt with. Nick Anstis is hard- headed.”
“I slapped gold coin on the board,” said Richard, coming inside again. “Anstis has to wait for money when it is tendered in notes of hand, whereas gold is gold. He was happy to quarter his prices for coins of the realm.”
“Just how much gold have ye got?” Stephen asked, curious.
“Enough,” said Richard tranquilly. “You see, I inherited from Ike Rogers as well.”
Stephen gaped, thunderstruck. “Is
“Joey looked after Ike. Now I look after Joey.”
They sat down at the table to do justice to the food, all three too active to scorn a diet banal and repetitive in the extreme.
“I gather that ye spent today at Charlotte Field, so ye may not have heard what happened to Kitty’s assailant,” Stephen said to Richard when they were done and Kitty stood happily washing their bowls and spoons in a new tin dish-no more bucket!
“Ye’re right, I have not heard. Tell me.”
“Tommy Two did not like being chained to the grindstone in the least, so last night he picked the locks on his irons and absconded into the forest, no doubt to join Gray.”
“With the birds gone, they will starve.”
“Aye, so I think. They will end up back on the grindstone.”
Richard rose, so did Stephen; Richard threw his arm about Stephen’s shoulders and steered him doorward, out of earshot. “Ye might,” he said quietly, “inform the Major that there may be a small conspiracy going on. Dyer, Francis, Peck and Pickett apparently have some purloined sugar cane growing somewhere off the track, and all four were sniffing around Anstis’s stall enquiring after things like copper kettles and copper pipe.”
“Why not tell the Major yourself? ’Tis you who is involved in that sort of activity.”
“Exactly why I would rather not be the one to tell the Major. In that respect, Stephen, I walk very carefully. Were I the one to speak of it, the Major might-should illicit spirits appear among the convicts and private marines- think I had concocted the tale to cover my own guilt.”
What are they muttering about? wondered Kitty, drying the bowls and spoons with a rag and putting them on their shelf before starting to wash the new pewter plates, mugs and eating utensils. Oh dear, I truly do cramp their style!
Though her world still consisted of Richard’s acre, Kitty was too busy to think of exploring; her only trip to Sydney Town apart from divine service had been to identify her attacker, neither an occasion to take notice of her surroundings. All her farmer’s bones were asserting themselves; Richard could not have picked a better kind of woman than Kitty for the kind of life she was called upon to lead.
She kept hearing about “the grubs,” and on the 18th of October she experienced them at first hand. The wheat on Richard’s acre was in ear and thriving, but the Government wheat in the more open parts of the vale had been hit by high, salty winds and blighted, though by no means all of it was ruined. The year was a dry one, the crops saved only by an occasional night of heavy rain which had vanished by the morning. Perhaps for this reason, the grubs had not come during winter. Then suddenly it seemed as if every growing thing was covered with a heaving green blanket-the caterpillars were bright green, about an inch long, and thin. Again Richard was lucky, for Kitty had no fear of wrigglers, crawlies and bugs. She was able to pick the creatures off without revulsion, though the solution of tobacco and soap was more effective. Every woman on the island save those who danced attendance on the marines and the sawpits was put to picking and sprinkling. Within three weeks they were gone. There would be a harvest, very soon for the Indian corn, early in December for the wheat. Though under Major Ross’s new scheme everything the freed Richard grew was his, he was very scrupulous about sending excess produce to Stores, for which he accumulated more notes of hand. What he kept was either eaten by the humans or Augusta, or saved for seed.
The weather in Norfolk Island, she occasionally thought as she toiled with her hoe or got down on hands and knees to weed, was truly delightful-balmy, warm, never hot out of the sun. And just when things began to wilt from lack of water, one of those nights of solid rain would roll in, disappear at dawn. The soil, blood-red and very friable, grew anything. No, Norfolk Island could not compete with Kent in her affections, yet it did have a magical quality. Rainy nights, sunny days-that was the stuff of fairies.
Some of those she had known on Lady Juliana had fallen to the lot of Richard’s friends. Aaron Davis, the community baker, had taken Mary Walker and her child. George Guest had taken eighteen-year-old Mary Bateman, whom Kitty had known very well, had liked, but yet sensed a strangeness, as of madness yet to come. Edward Risby and Ann Gibson were happily together and planning to marry as soon as a person empowered to marry visited the island. These women and Olivia Lucas visited-how delightful it was to be able to offer them a mug of tea with sugar in it! Mary Bateman and Ann Gibson were both expecting babies; Mary Walker, whose child Sarah Lee was toddling, was also expecting her first by Aaron Davis. The only barren one was Kitty Clark.
Of fish there were none. Sirius’s cutter, which might have ventured well outside the lagoon to fish, was smashed to pieces trying to land six women convicts off Surprize, one with a child. The oarsmen drowned, as did a man swimming to their rescue; one of the three women who survived was the drowned child’s mother. So the very occasional catches of fish the coble managed all went to the officers and marines; neither Sirius’s seamen nor freed convicts received a share. But Justinian had carried plants, including bamboo, and Richard was given one small piece of it from which to grow a clump of potential fishing poles. Hand-lines caught nothing fishing off rocks.
There was a panic at Charlotte Field, where the paddocks were hedged in by a mixture of creeper skeleton and a very thorny bush; one of the fences accidentally caught fire and the flames spread into ripe Indian corn. At first Sydney Town heard that all the corn had been burned to the ground, but Lieutenant Clark, speeding there at a run, reported back to the distraught Major Ross that only two acres had perished thanks to the great exertions of the convicts, who beat the fire out. So grateful was Lieutenant Clark to the damned whores of Charlotte Field that he gave each of them a new pair of shoes from the Government supplies.
D’arcy Wentworth was deputed to move to Charlotte Field with his mistress Catherine Crowley and little William Charles as soon as a house could be built for him; he was to be superintendent of convicts and also Charlotte Field’s surgeon. The duties of this latter position varied from midwifing to deciding when a convict being flogged could bear no more strokes. If the culprit were a woman, Wentworth tended to be lenient, whereas Lieutenant Clark, who despised the women of Charlotte Field, would of choice have had Richardson lay a meaner cat on harder.
Much to Kitty’s pleasure, the variety of food increased. She now had a wonderful cooking area because Richard had fixed an iron shelf across two-thirds of the big fireplace and a rod over the naked flames of the other third. She had covered kettles for braising, open ones for stewing or boiling, pans for frying and a spouted kettle she kept perpetually simmering on a coolish back corner of the shelf so that she could make herself or her visitors a pot of tea, tip a dollop of hot water into her washing-up dish. Richard had even made her what he called a soap-saver: a wire basket attached to a wire handle in which she could put a chunk of soap and swish it through the water without losing the soap.
Richard told John Lawrell firmly that he must give up some of his chickens and ducks, so Kitty added to her living charges and was able on special occasions to put eggs on the menu. Augusta farrowed twelve piglets and
