“Well, that stands to reason.” Richard hesitated, then decided to take the plunge. “Mr. Donovan, there is a matter I need to talk about, and ye’re the only one I trust to advise me truthfully. Ye have no personal interest in the way my men do.”
“Speak, then.”
“One of my chatterboxes in Government Stores said too much—Furzer has discovered that Joey Long can mend shoes. So I am going to be without my house guard. I asked Furzer for a week’s grace because we have a few vegetables coming up in our garden thanks to Joey’s labors, and Furzer is a man one can talk business with. I got my week’s grace in return for a share of whatever survives,” Richard said without resentment.
“Vegetables are almost as good a currency as rum” was Donovan’s dry comment. “Go on.”
“While I was in Gloucester Gaol I had an arrangement with a woman convict named Elizabeth Lock—Lizzie. In return for my protection, she looked after my belongings. I have just found out that she is here. I have a mind to marry her, since no less formal way to obtain her services exists.”
Donovan looked startled. “For you, Richard, that sounds sadly cold. I had not thought you so”—he shrugged—“detached.”
“I know it sounds cold,” said Richard unhappily, “but I can see no other solution to our problems. I had hoped that one of my men might wish to marry—most of them visit the women in spite of the Governor’s threat—but so far none of them shows a desire to.”
“Ye’re talking about inanimate possessions in the same breath as a legal union for life—as if the first is worth the second and no different in nature. Ye’re a man, Richard, and a man for women. Why can’t ye simply admit that ye’d like to take this Lizzie Lock to wife? That ye’re as starved for feminine company as most others are? When ye said that ye gave her your protection in Gloucester Gaol, I presume that meant ye had sex with her. I presume ye intend to have sex with her now. What baffles me is how cold-blooded ye sound—noble for the wrong reasons.”
“I did
not
have sex with her!” Richard snapped, angry. “I am not talking about sex! Lizzie was like my sister, and so I still think of her. She is terrified of conceiving, so she did not want sex either.”
Hands cupping his face, Donovan leaned his elbows on his knees and stared at Richard in consternation. What
was
the matter with him? All this because of too much pleasure? No! He is a subtle man who gets his own way by being in the right place at the right time and knowing how to approach those who rule him. Not a crawler like most such because he has too much pride to crawl. I am looking at a mystery, but I do have some ideas.
“If I knew the story of your life, Richard, I might be able to help,” he said. “Tell it to me, please.”
“I cannot.”
“Ye’re very much afraid, but not of sex. Ye’re afraid of love. But what is there to be afraid of in love?”
“Where I have been,” said Richard, drawing a breath, “I would not go again because I do not think I could survive it a second time. I can love Lizzie like a sister and you like a brother, but further than that I cannot go. The wholeness of the love I had for my wife and children is sacred.”
“And they are dead.”
“Yes.”
“Ye’re young still—this is a new place—why not begin anew?”
“All things are possible. But not with Lizzie Lock.”
“Then why marry her?” Donovan asked, eyes shimmering.
“Because I suspect her lot is very hard, and I do love her in a brotherly way. Ye must know, Mr. Donovan, that love is not a thing expedience can conjure up. Were it, then I would perhaps elect to love Lizzie Lock. But I never will. We were a whole year together in Gloucester Gaol, it would have happened.”
“So what ye’re proposing is not so cold-blooded after all. And ye’re right. Love is not a thing expedience can conjure up.”
The sun had gone behind the rocks on the western side of the cove and the light was long and golden; Stephen Donovan sat and thought about the vagaries of the human heart. Oh yes, he was right. Love came unasked, and sometimes was an unwelcome visitor. Richard was attempting to insulate himself from it by espousing a sister whom he pitied and would help.
“If ye marry Lizzie Lock,” he said finally, “ye’ll not be free to marry elsewhere. One day that might matter very much.”
“You would advise me not to, then?”
“Aye.”
“I will think about it,” said Richard, scrambling up.
* * *
On Monday
morning Richard secured permission from Major Ross to see the Reverend Mr. Johnson, and asked him for permission to see Elizabeth Lock, convict woman in the women’s camp, with the
possible
intention of asking her to marry him.
In his early thirties, Mr. Johnson was a round-faced, full-lipped and slightly feminine-looking man of carefully episcopal dress, from his starched white stock to his black minister’s robe; this latter garment tended to conceal his paunch, for naturally he did not want to look
too
well fed in this hungry place. The pale eyes burned with the kind of fervor Cousin James-of-the-clergy called Jesuitically messianic, and at New South Wales he had found his mission: to uplift the moral tone, care for the sick and the orphaned, run his own church his own way, and be deemed a benefactor of humanity. His intentions were genuinely good, but the depth of his understanding was shallow and his compassion entirely reserved for the helpless. The adult convicts he regarded as universally depraved and hardly worth the saving—if they were not depraved, then why were they convicts?
On learning that Richard’s first cousin (once removed) was the rector of St. James’s, Bristol, and discovering that Morgan was an educated, courteous and apparently sincere fellow, Mr. Johnson gave him his pass and provisionally arranged that Richard should marry Elizabeth Lock during next Sunday’s service, when all the convicts could see how successful his policy was.
As soon as the sun went down Richard walked from his bark shelter to the women’s camp, presented his pass to the sentry and asked whereabouts lay Elizabeth Lock. The sentry had no idea, but a woman hefting a bucket of water overheard and pointed to a tent. How did one knock on a tent? He compromised by scratching at the flap, which was closed.
“Come in if ye’re good-looking!” cried a female voice.
Richard pushed the flap aside and entered a canvas dormitory which would have held ten women comfortably, but instead had been made to house twenty. Ten narrow stretcher beds were jammed cheek by jowl down either long wall, and the space between was littered with impedimenta varying from a hat box to a mother cat nursing six kittens. The inhabitants, having eaten at the communal cooking fire outside, were disposed upon their beds in various stages of undress. Thin, frail and indomitable, all of them. Lizzie was on the bed owned the hat box. Of course.
An absolute silence had fallen; nineteen pairs of round eyes surveyed him with keen appreciation as he threaded his way between the impedimenta to the hat box and the dozing Lizzie Lock.
“Asleep already, Lizzie?” he asked, a smile in his voice.
Her eyes flew open, stared up incredulously at the beloved face. “
Richard!
Oh, Richard my love!” She launched herself off the bed and clung to him in a frenzy of weeping.
“No tears, Lizzie,” he said gently when she quietened. “Come and talk to me.”
He guided her out, an arm about her waist, all eyes following.
“Half your luck, Lizzie,” said one woman, not young anymore.
“A quarter of it would do,” said her companion, very pregnant.
They walked down to the water of the cove near the temporary bake-house, Lizzie hanging on to his hand for dear life, and found a pile of quarried sandstone blocks to sit on.
“How was it after we left?” he asked.
“I stayed on in Gloucester for a long time, then was sent to the London Newgate,” she said, shivering. It was beginning to be cool, and she was wearing a skimpy, tattered slops dress.
Richard took off his canvas jacket and draped it around her emaciated shoulders, studying her closely. What was she now, two years past thirty? She looked two years past forty, but the beady black eyes had still not given up on life. When she threw her arms around him he had waited for a surge of love or even of desire, but felt neither. He cared for her, pitied her. No more than those. “Tell me all of it,” he said. “I want to know.”
“I am very glad I did not stay long in London—the prison is a hell-hole. We were sent on board Lady Penrhyn, which carried no male convicts and no marines worth speaking of. The ship was much as it is in the tent—shoved together. Some women had children. Some were heavy and bore their babes at sea. The babes and children mostly died—their mothers could not give them suck. My friend Ann’s boy died. Some fell on the voyage and are heavy now.”
She clutched his arm, shook it angrily. “Can you imagine, Richard? They gave us no rags for our bleeding courses, so we had to start tearing up our own clothes—slops like this. Whatever we wore when we came on board went into the hold for here. In Rio de Janeiro the Governor sent us a hundred hempen bread sacks to wear because no women’s clothing reached Portsmouth before the fleet sailed. He would have done us a better turn to send us some bolts of the cheapest cloth, needles and thread and scissors,” she said bitterly. “The sacks could not be used for rags. When we stole the sailors’ shirts to use as rags they flogged us, or cut off our hair and shaved our heads. Those who gave them cheek were gagged. The worst punishment was to be stripped naked and put inside a barrel with our heads, arms and legs poking out. We kept washing the rags as long as we could, but sea-water sets the blood. I was able to make a few pence by sewing and mending for the surgeon and the officers, but many of the girls were so poor that they had nothing, so we shared what we had.”
She shivered despite the coat. “That was not the worst of it!” she said through shut teeth. “Every man on Lady Penrhyn looked at us and spoke to us as if we were whores—whether we were whores or not, and most of us were not. As if to them, we had no other thing to offer than our cunts.”
“That is what many men think,” said Richard, throat tight.
“They took away our pride. When we arrived here, we were given a slops dress and our own clothes out of the hold if we had any—my hat box came, is that not wondrous?” she asked, eyes shining. “When came Ann Smith’s turn, Miller of the Commissary looked her up and down and said nothing could improve her slovenly appearance—she had naught, being very poor. And she
threw
the slops on the deck, wiped her feet on them and said he could keep his fucken clothes, she would wear what she had with pride.”
“Ann Smith,” said Richard, in agonies of anger, grief, shame. “She absconded soon after.”
“Aye, and has not been seen since. She swore she would go—the fiercest monsters and Indians held no terrors for her after Lady Penrhyn and Englishmen, she said. No matter what they did to her, she would not truckle. There were others who would not truckle and were sad abused. When Captain Sever threatened to flog Mary Gamble—that was just after we boarded—she told him to kiss her cunt because he wanted to fuck her, not flog her.” She sighed, snuggled. “So we had our few victories, and they kept us going. Samsons that we are, it was always the women who broke through the bulkhead to get in among the sailors,
lusting
after men! Never the men doing the lusting or the breaking in, saints that they are. Still, never mind, never mind. It is over and I am on dry land and you are here, Richard my love. I have prayed for nothing more.”
“Did the men come after you, Lizzie?”
“Nay! I am not pretty enough or young enough, and the first place I lose weight is where I never had any to begin with—in the tits. The men were after the big girls, and there were not a lot of men—just the sailors and six marines. I kept to myself except for Ann.”
“Ann Smith?”
“No, Ann Colpitts. She is in the next bed to me. The one who lost her baby boy at sea.”
Darkness was falling. Time to go.
Why
did this happen? What under the sun could these poor creatures have done to deserve such contempt? Such humiliation? Such misery, beggared even of their pride? Given sacks to wear, reducing themselves to rags to get rags. How could the contractors have forgotten that women bleed and must have rags? I want to crawl away and die. . .
Poor wretch, not young enough or pretty enough to attract a satiated eye—what a time of it the sailors must have had! And what kind of fate does Lizzie face here, where nothing is different from Lady Penrhyn save that the land does not move? I do not love her and God knows she does not stir me, but it is in my power to give her a little status among old friends. Stephen might say that I am playing God or even condescending, but I do not mean it thus. I mean it for the best, though whether it is for the best I do not know. All I do know is that I owe her a debt. She cared for me.