“God bless ye, Richard!” Stephen ran off, shouting and waving to his men.
That evening,
armed with a pine-knot torch to find his way back up the vale in the darkness (curfew was set for eight o’clock), Richard ventured into Sydney Town in search of the faces he had seen amid the assembly. Tents were pitched behind the row of huts on the beachfront, but many of the convicts were doomed to sleep in the open, Sirius’s crew taking precedence in the matter of tents. By tomorrow, he hoped, Sirius’s sails would roof them over.
A big fire of pine scraps burned where the shelterless would lie down their heads. Though he had been on the island for sixteen months, it still amazed Richard how suddenly the air chilled once the sun went down, no matter how hot the day had been; only when humidity descended did this cooling off not happen, and so far 1790 had not been at all sultry. A sign, he thought, that the weather this year would be drier, though how he came to that conclusion he did not know. Instinct arising from some Druid ancestor?
About a hundred people were huddled together around the tall blaze, belongings strewn about them. Unlike the marines and their officers, the convicts had been disembarked together with all they owned, including their precious blankets and buckets. Feet were universally bare; shoes had run out months ago, nor did Norfolk Island have any. He prayed that it would not rain that night; much of the island’s rain fell at night, and out of what had been a clear sky moments before. The convicts had all been landed in downpours, had not had sufficient fine weather yet to dry out completely. There would be an epidemic of chills and fevers, and perhaps the island’s record would be broken: not one person in it had died of natural causes or disease since Lieutenant King and his original 23 companions had come ashore over two years ago. Whatever else Norfolk Island might or might not be, its climate engendered splendid health.
Sirius wallowed on the reef, a mournful sight. The grapevine had already informed Richard that Willy Dring and James Branagan—the latter a man he did not know—had volunteered to swim out to the wreck, toss the remaining poultry, dogs and cats over the side, and heave floatable kegs and casks into the water. Dring was not the right man for this; the Yorkshireman and his crony Joe Robinson, once steady fellows, seemed to have deteriorated.
He spied Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott sitting with women who must be theirs—that was a good sign!—and began to pick his way through the crowd.
“Richard! Oh, Richard my love, Richard my love!”
Lizzie Lock threw herself upon him, twined her arms about his neck and covered his face with kisses, crooning, weeping, mumbling.
His reaction was utterly instinctive, over and done before he could think of suppressing it, of waiting until some more private opportunity arrived to tell her that he could not share any part of himself with her, wife though she was. No one had told him that she was here, and he had not thought of her once since that magical day when William Henry, little Mary and Peg had returned to live in his soul. Before he could control them, his hands had gone to fasten about Lizzie’s arms and wrench her away.
Flesh crawling, hair on end, he stared at her as if she were a visitation from Hell. “Don’t touch me!” he cried, white-faced. “Don’t
touch
me!”
And she, poor creature, staggered plummeting from ecstatic joy to horror, to bewilderment, to a pain so great that she clutched at her meager chest and looked at him out of eyes blinded to everything but his revulsion. Breath gone, her mouth opened and closed without a sound; she fell to her knees, powerless.
The moment she had uttered his name the whole group turned to look, and those in it who knew him, who had so eagerly anticipated this reunion, gasped, gaped, murmured.
“I am your wife!” she screamed thinly from her knees. “Richard, I am your wife!”
His eyes were clearing, took in the sight of her at his feet, took in the growing anger and outrage on the faces of his friends, took in the greed of the uninvolved to eat up as much of this show as its participants were willing to enact. What to do? What to say? Even as one part of him asked these unanswerable questions, a second part of him was noting the onlookers, and a third part of him was shrinking in horror—she was going to touch him! The visceral part won: he backed away, out of her reach.
The die was cast. Better then to finish it the way it had started, by the glaring light of a public bonfire in the midst of a collection of people who would—and rightly so—condemn him as a heartless wretch in sore need of a flogging.
“I am very sorry, Lizzie,” he managed, “but I cannot take up with you again. I—just—cannot.” His hands lifted, fell. “I want no wife, I—”
He could find nothing else to say, and having nothing else to say, turned and left.
The next
day, Tuesday, he met Stephen as usual at Point Hunter to watch the sunset. It was one of those cloudless evenings when the massive red disc had slid into the sea with what Richard always fancied should be a boiling sizzle, and as the light died out of the sky and the vault darkened to indigo, the vanished sun seemed to bend its rays back through the vast depths of the water to endow it with a pale, milky-blue luminousness far brighter than the heavens.
“This is a wondrous place,” said Stephen, who must surely have heard what the whole settlement was saying, but chose not to mention it. “Here is where the Garden of Eden was, I am convinced of it. It ravishes me, it calls to me like a siren. And I do not know why, only that it is unearthly. No parallel anywhere. But now that men are here, they will ruin it. ’Twas Man ruined Eden.”
“No, they will merely try to ruin it, mistaking it for other earth they have ruined. This place looks after itself because it is beloved of God.”
“There are ghosts here, you know,” Stephen remarked idly. “I saw one as clear as day—it was day, as a matter of fact. A giant of a fellow with huge calf muscles, golden skin, naked save for a piece of papery cloth marked in brown across his loins. His face was sternly beautiful, patrician, and both his thighs were tattooed in a pattern of curliqued stripes. A kind of man I have never set eyes upon, could not have imagined in my dreams. He came down the beach toward me, then, when I might almost have touched him, he turned and walked straight through the wall of Nat Lucas’s house. Olivia began to scream the place down.”
“Then I am glad I live up the vale. Though Billy Wigfall told me recently that he saw John Bryant on the hillside where the tree killed him. One moment he was standing there, the next moment he was gone. As if, said Billy, he was startled at being discovered.”
The surf was pounding in; Supply had sailed from the roads, was working her way around to Cascade. Embarkation would not be easy for Mr. King’s pregnant lady, forced to leap from that rock into a heaving longboat.
“Is it true that Dring and Branagan got into the rum last night aboard Sirius and set fire to her?” Richard asked.
“Aye. Private John Escott—he is Ross’s servant—spotted the flames after dark from Government House’s eminence and volunteered to swim out. Ross agreed because the man is very strong in the water. Escott found Dring and Branagan almost insensible from rum, busy warming themselves at the fire. He threw them into the sea, put out the conflagration—it had burned right through the gun deck—and stayed on Sirius until this morning, when they got him off together with the rum. Dring and Branagan have been clapped in irons and put in Lieutenant King’s new guardhouse. The Major is livid, having left the rum aboard Sirius thinking ’twould be much safer there than ashore. I suspect that as soon as the old commandant has sailed on Supply, the new commandant will administer either capital punishment or five hundred lashes. He cannot afford to ignore this first infringement of his Law Martial.”
Very dark in the failing light, Stephen’s eyes turned to Richard, sitting coiled as tensely as a steel spring. “I hear that ye had a visit from the Major early today?”
Richard smiled wryly. “Major Ross’s ears belong to a bat. How or from whom I cannot hazard a guess, but he heard what went on last night at the bonfire. Well, ye know him. Waited until I went home for breakfast, barged in, sat himself down and looked at me very much as he might have inspected a new sort of grub. ‘I hear that ye publicly repudiated your wife,’ he said. I answered with a yes and he grunted. Then he said, ‘Not what I might have expected from ye, Morgan, but I daresay ye have your reasons, ye usually do.’ ”
Stephen chuckled. “He really does have a way with words!”
“He then proceeded to ask me if I thought my wife would make a suitable housekeeper for an officer! I told him she was clean, tidy, an excellent mender and darner of clothes, a good cook, and—as far as I knew—a virgin. Whereupon he slapped his hands on his knees and stood up. ‘Does she like children?’ he asked. I said I thought so, judging from her behavior with the children in Gloucester Gaol. ‘And ye’re sure she is not a temptress?’ he asked. I said I was absolutely positive about that. ‘Then she will suit me down to the ground,’ he said, and marched out looking as pleased as the cat that got to the cream.”
Stephen doubled up with laughter. “I swear, Richard,” he said when he was able, “that ye cannot put a foot wrong with Major Ross. For some reason quite beyond me he likes you enormously.”
“He likes me, “ said Richard, “because I am not a bit afraid of him and I tell him the truth, not what I think he wants to hear. Which is why he will never esteem Tommy Crowder the way King did. When I stood up to King he had half a mind to flog me, whereas I have never needed to stand up to Major Ross.”
“King is an English King,” said Stephen rather tangentially, “not an Irish King. The Celt in him is pure Cornish, far more akin to the Welsh. Which means he is touchy and moody. And Royal Navy down to his marrow. Ross is your classical Scotchman with but one mood—dour. His roots lie in a cold, bleak land that either makes or breaks.” He rose to his feet and held out his hand to help Richard up. “I am glad that he has solved the problem of what was going to happen to your repudiated wife.”
“Well, ye told me not to marry her,” said Richard with a sigh. “Had I known she was here I would have been prepared, but it was a bolt from the blue. My eyes were on Will Connelly when suddenly she was hanging around my neck smothering me in wet kisses. I—I smelled her and felt her, Stephen. She was far too close to see. As long as I have known her there have been other smells, and none of them nice. Port Jackson stank, just as the old castle stank. But the rank smell of woman in my nostrils—I have been alone too long, and things smell sweet away from the sawpits and Sydney Town. ’Tis not that she actually stinks, she does not, only that I could not bear how she smelled. My reasons are not very reasonable, even to myself, and God knows I am not proud of what I did. All I was conscious of at the time was revulsion—as if I had walked after dark straight into a spider’s web. My gut reacted, I struck out blindly. And after that it was too late to mend any of my fences, so I tore them out of the ground.”
“I can understand,” said Stephen gently. “What I do not begin to understand is how ye could have forgotten she was likely to be here with the rest.”
“Nor do I, looking back on it.”
“My fault too. I should have said something.”
“Ye were too busy with Sirius and the consequences. But there is another thing torments me—she was ashore for days and she knew I was here—why did she wait?”
They had reached Stephen’s house; he slipped inside without answering, then watched through the window as Richard’s torch went away up the vale and winked from sight. Why did she wait, Richard? Because in her heart of hearts she knew that were she to approach you in private, you would do what you ended in doing anyway—rejecting her. Or perhaps, being a woman, she longed for you to seek her out and claim her. Poor Lizzie Lock. . . . He has been entirely alone for six months up there in his solitary house with only his dog for company, and he is very content. I do not know what goes on in his mind, except that until fairly recently he had put his emotions to sleep like a bear through winter. His marriage to Lizzie was a thing done in that sleep, from which I think he did not expect to awaken. Then suddenly he did—I saw him do it.
Time was getting on. Stephen looked at his watch, pressed his lips together and debated about whether he was hungry enough to bother heating broth to go with his bread supper. Captain John Hunter was in residence at Government House, and Johnny—oh, well. Heat the soup, Stephen, it is chill enough for a fire.
“All I want,” said Richard, erupting into the room as Stephen blew on the reluctant flames, “is to be left alone with my books and my dog! To have a meed of privacy!”
“Then what are ye doing here?” Stephen asked, sitting back on his heels. “The meed of privacy is up yon vale.”
“Aye, but—but—” said Richard, floundering.
“Why not simply admit to yourself, Richard,” Stephen said, in no mood to put up with megrims, “that ye’s consumed with guilt over what ye did—all right,
had
to do!—to Lizzie Lock? Ye’re not a man finds it easy to live with a you who did not come up to expectations. In fact, I never saw anybody with such high standards of self-conduct—ye’re a fucken Protestant martyr!”