Morgan’s Run

PART SEVEN

From

June of 1791

until

February of 1793

“Peg,” faid Richard, for once in a mood to volunteer emotional information, “was first love. Annemarie Latour was purely sex. Kitty is last love.”

Eyes twinkling, Stephen contemplated him, wondering how he had managed to turn what ought to be infatuation into what would undoubtedly be an enduring passion. Or is it perhaps that he has gone so far for so long that whatever he feels is magnified a thousandfold?

“Ye’re living proof of the fact that there’s no fool like an old fool. But ye’re wrong about one thing, Richard. Kitty is love and sex rolled up in the same parcel. For you, at any rate. For myself-I used to think that sex was-well, if not the most important, certainly the most urgent, the one I had to satisfy. But ye’ve taught me a great many things, one of which is the art of going without sex.” He grinned. “As long, that is, that no one absolutely delectable comes along. Then I am all to pieces. But it passes, and so does he.”

“Like every man, ye need both.”

“I have both. Just not rolled up in the same parcel. Which, I have come to realize, suits me very well. I certainly do not repine,” he said with genuine cheerfulness, jumping up. “Out of my stint on Norfolk Island I am going to get a commission in the Royal Navy, I am determined upon it. Then I will strut around a quarterdeck in my white, gold and Navy blue with a spyglass tucked under my arm and forty-four guns at my command.”

They had paused for a drink of water and a brief rest from digging the foundations of Richard’s new house. Joseph McCaldren had been granted his 60 acres and happily parted with the best 12 of them for the sum of £24; he drove a hard bargain. Then D’arcy Wentworth bought the other 48 acres as well as a part of Elias Bishop’s 60 acres at Queensborough. Major Ross had endorsed the transfer of deeds with great good will.

“I am very pleased ye’ll occupy McCaldren’s land,” he said to Richard. “Ye’ll have it cleared and under cultivation in no time, and that is what the island needs. More wheat, more Indian corn.”

There were only four lots in Norfolk Island which incorporated both sides of a stream in them; they immediately became known as “runs,” prefixed by the name of the owner. Which gave Norfolk Island four new landmarks to add to Sydney Town, Phillipsburgh, Cascade and Queensborough: Drummond’s Run, Phillimore’s Run, Proctor’s Run and Morgan’s Run.

Unfortunately the sawpits left Richard little time to get on with building his new house. Barracks had to be constructed in Sydney Town and reasonable huts for the New South Wales Corps at the place the Sirius seamen had occupied; a proper gaol had to be finished, more civilian officials’ houses-Major Ross’s list seemed endless. Nat Lucas, who had over fifty carpenters toiling under his command, was frantic.

“I cannot guarantee the quality of the work anymore,” he said to Richard over Sunday dinner in Richard’s domain at the head of the vale. “Some of the buildings are downright shoddy, hammered together without thought or care, and I cannot divide myself into enough of me to keep an eye on Queensborough, Phillipsburgh and all the rest. I run, run, run, Lieutenant Clark yapping at my heels about the western settlement, Captain Hill rudely poking my shoulder because the New South Wales Corps huts are leaky, or drafty, or-truly, Richard, I am at my wits’ end.”

“Ye can do no more than ye’re able to, Nat. Has the Major himself complained?”

“Nay, he is too great a realist.” Nat looked a little worried. “I heard this morning that Lieutenant Clark had been deputed to take divine service because the Major is not well. Not well at all, according to Lizzie Lock.” None of Richard’s close friends ever called the Major’s housekeeper “Mrs. Richard Morgan.”

The food had been delicious. Kitty had killed two fat ducks and roasted them in her big oven-kettle with potatoes, pumpkins and onions around them; she had taken Olivia and the twins outside to look at Augusta and her rapidly growing female offspring, soon either to be killed and sold to the Stores or sent with their mother to a different Government boar. Thank God Richard had built a large sty!

“When your foundations are in, Richard,” said Nat, changing the subject, “George and I have organized a working bee for two weekends in a row to put up your house, and I have secured the Major’s permission to absent ourselves from Sunday service. That way, with any luck ye’ll be able to move from here before the next transport arrives. ’Twill be rudimentary but livable, and ye can continue with the finishing unaided. Have ye enough timber?”

“Aye, from my own land. I put a sawpit on it and Billy Wigfall, God bless him, saws with me. Harry Humphreys and Sam Hussey turn up on some Saturdays, while Joey Long debarks the logs. I thought I may as well start clearing my own land rather than use trees from other locations.”

He is, thought Nat, a very happy man, and I am so glad for him. When Olivia told me that he was keeping Kitty as a friend-oh, and he was so much in love with her!-I prayed that the girl would grow some sense and see her luck. Olivia insists that most women swoon away at the mere sight of him, but women are very queer cattle. To me, he appears a fine-looking man who happens to be a decent man. I am even more pleased that Kitty is no minx.

The women came inside laughing and talking rather feverishly, Kitty holding baby William with such a glow in her eyes that Nat blinked, wondering why he had ever considered her plain. Little Mary and Sarah remained outside to play with an utterly bewildered MacTavish; whether he looked to his left or to his right, he saw an identical child.

“I am very fond of all your friends and their wives, Richard, but I confess I like the Lucases best,” said Kitty after they had gone, coming to stand behind his chair and draw his head against her belly. Eyes closed, he rested there contentedly.

Her world had opened up beyond imagination, in so many different directions. That first night of love had been a dazzling dream; she called it so because dreams to her were far nicer than life. In dreams, magical and impossible things happened, like farmhouses in Faversham surrounded by flower gardens. Yet the night had been a reality that continued into the following night, and all the nights thereafter. The hands she had thought beautiful to look at had moved upon her body with the cool smoothness of silk velvet.

“Why are your hands not hard and calloused?” she had asked at some moment, stretching and flexing under their rhythmic caress.

“Because I am a master gunsmith by craft, so I value them. Every corn and scar destroys a part of the sensitivity a gunsmith cannot work without. I wrap them in rags whenever I cannot find gloves,” he had explained.

And that had answered one of her questions. The trouble was that the majority of them he refused to answer, like what sort of life had he lived in Bristol? What were the details of his conviction? How many wives had he had? Did he have living children in Bristol? How had the daughter who would be her age die? His reply was always a smile, after which he would turn her queries aside firmly but kindly. So she had ceased to plague him. If and when he was ready to tell her, he would. Perhaps he was never going to be ready.

Oh, how he could make love! Though she had listened to literally hundreds of conversations between women about the sexual importunities of men, the nuisance it was to have to oblige them, Kitty looked forward to her nights. They were the greatest pleasure she had ever known. If she felt him reach for her in the early hours she turned to him in delight, roused by a kiss on her breast, his mouth against the side of her neck. Nor was she a passive recipient; Kitty adored learning how to rouse and please him.

But she did not believe that she was in love with him. Yes, she loved him; that was true. His immense age, she had concluded, served only to make him a better lover, a better companion. Yet simply looking at him did not arouse desire in her, nor did her heart flutter, her breath vanish. Only when he touched her or she touched him did the warmth and want begin. Every day he would tell her as naturally and spontaneously as a child that he loved her, that she was the beginning and the end of his world. And she would pay attention, flattered that he said such gratifying things, body and soul unmoved.

Today, however, was special. For once she initiated a demonstration of affection by cradling his head against her.

“Richard?” she asked, gazing down at his cropped dark hair and wishing that he would grow it; it had the potential to curl.

“Mmmmm?”

“I am with child.”

At first he stilled absolutely, then looked up at her with a face transfigured by joy. Leaping to his feet, he whirled her off the ground and kissed her and kissed her. “Oh, Kitty! My love, my angel!” The exaltation faded, he looked afraid. “Ye’re sure?”

“Olivia says I have fallen, though I was already sure.”

“When?

“Late February or early March, we think. Olivia says that you quickened me at once, just like Nat. She says that means we will be fruitful, that there will be as many children as we wish.”

He took her hand and kissed it reverently. “Ye’re well?”

“Very, all considered. I have had no courses since you took me. I am a little sick sometimes, but nothing like being at sea.”

“Are ye pleased, Kitty? It is very soon.”

“Oh, Richard, it is a dream! I am”-she found a new word-“ecstatic. Truly ecstatic! My own baby!”

On Monday morning Richard heard through the grapevine that Major Robert Ross was gravely ill. On Tuesday morning he was summoned by Private Bailey to wait upon the Major at once.

Ross had been put upstairs in the large room he usually used as a study because one floor up insulated him from importunate visitors. When Richard followed Mrs. Richard Morgan-very anxious and subdued-up the stairs and entered the room, he was shocked. The Major’s face was greyer than his eyes, sunken glazed into black sockets; he lay as rigid as a board with his arms by his sides, their hands curiously expectant.

“Sir?”

“Morgan? Good. Stand where I can see ye. Mrs. Morgan, ye can go. Surgeon Callam will be here soon,” Ross said steadily.

Suddenly his body spasmed dreadfully and his lips drew back in a rictus from his teeth; fight though he did to remain silent, he emitted a groan that Richard knew in any other man would have emerged a scream. He suffered through the bout, groaning, hands clenched into the counterpane like claws; this was what they had expected, must be ready for. Richard waited quietly, understanding that Ross wanted neither sympathy nor assistance. Finally his agony retreated to leave his face drenched in sweat.

“Better for a while,” he said then. “’Tis a kidney stone, Callam says. Wentworth agrees. Considen and Jamison disagree.”

“I would believe Callam and Wentworth, sir.”

“Aye, I do. Jamison could not castrate a cat and Considen is a wonder at drawing teeth.”

“Do not waste your energies, sir. What can I do?”

“Be aware that I may die. Callam is giving me something he says relaxes the tube between kidney and bladder in the hope that I may pass the stone. To do so is my only salvation.”

“I will pray for ye, sir,” said Richard, meaning it.

“’Twill help more than Callam’s medicaments, I suspect.”

Another spasm came on, was endured.

“If I die before a ship comes,” he said when it was over, “this place will be in parlous condition. Captain Hill is a fucken fool and Ralph Clark is mentally about the same age as my son. Faddy is a simpleton as well as a child. War will break out between my marines and the soldiers of the New South Wales Corps, with every felon villain from Francis to Peck enlisting with Hill. It will be a bloodbath, which is why I intend to pass this fucken stone no matter what. No matter what.”

“Ye’ll pass it, sir. The stone does not exist can break you,” said Richard with a smile. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Aye. I have already seen Mr. Donovan and some others, and authorized the issue of muskets. Ye’ll be given one too, Morgan. At least the marine muskets fire, thanks to ye. The New South Wales Corps take no care of their weapons and I have not volunteered your services to Hill. Keep in touch with Donovan-and do not trust Andrew Hume, who has sided with Hill and participates in his felonies. Hume is a fraud, Morgan, he knows no more about flax processing than I do, but he sits there in Phillipsburgh like a spider fancying that between himself and Hill, they control half of this island.”

“Concentrate upon passing your stone, sir. We will not let Hill and his New South Wales Corps take over.”

“Oh, here it comes again! Go, Morgan, and stay wide awake.”

Mind whirling, Richard stood outside on the landing trying to visualize Norfolk Island without Major Ross. It was boiling already, thanks to marine private Henry Wright. Wright had been caught in the act of raping Elizabeth Gregory, a ten-year-old Queensborough girl. To make matters worse, this was Wright’s second offense; he had been sentenced to death in Port Jackson two years earlier for raping a nine-year-old girl, but His Excellency had reprieved him on the condition that he spend the rest of his life at Norfolk Island. Thereby transferring his problem to Major Ross. Wright’s wife and toddling daughter had come with him, but in the aftermath of Elizabeth Gregory the wife had petitioned to take her daughter back to Port Jackson on the next ship. Ross had agreed. He had sentenced Wright to run the gauntlet three times: first at Sydney Town, then at Queensborough, and then at Phillipsburgh. The Sydney Town gauntlet had happened the very day Major Ross fell ill; stripped to breeches, Wright had been made to run between two lines of people from all walks, thirsting for his blood and armed with hoes, hatchets, cudgels, whips.

The child rape had destroyed the reputation of the marines, even among many of the law-abiding convicts, though the whole of the old Norfolk Island community was equally angered by Governor Phillip’s developing tendency to rid himself of his troublemakers at Norfolk Island’s expense.

Ross was absolutely right, Richard thought. If he dies, there will be war.

But, being Major Ross, he did not die. His life hung in the balance for a week during which Richard, Stephen and their cohorts prowled regularly, then the pain began to diminish. Whether he had passed the stone or whether it had retreated back into the kidney Surgeon Callam had no idea, for the pain did not lift in an instant; it dwindled away gradually. Two weeks after the onslaught he was able to go downstairs, and a week after that he was the same brisk, snarling, caustic Major Ross everybody knew and either loved or feared or loathed.

The balance tipped more in favor of the New South Wales Corps when Mary Ann arrived midway through August of 1791, the first ship since Supply in April, and the first transport in a year. She brought 11 more soldiers with 3 wives and 9 children belonging to the New South Wales Corps, and 133 felons-131 men, a woman and a child. By the time she had unloaded her human cargo, the population of Norfolk Island had risen to 875. Mary Ann was supposed to have nine months’ supplies aboard for the contingent she brought, but, as usual, whoever determined how much the newcomers would eat had grossly erred. Five months’ supplies, more like.

The fresh influx consisted of 32 intractables who had long plagued Governor Phillip and 99 sick, half-starved wretches off another ship which had arrived in Port Jackson, Matilda. Matilda and Mary Ann were the first two of ten ships sailed from England around the end of March, which meant that vessels were making the journey faster with fewer and shorter ports of call along the way. Matilda had made the run in four months and five days without stopping at all, Mary Ann almost as swiftly. The brevity of the passage was what saved the convicts they carried, for the same slave contractors had victualled 1791’s transports: Messrs. Camden, Calvert & King. Only the Royal Navy storeship, Gorgon, would be delayed by a long port of call; she was to stay in Cape Town and buy as many animals as possible. As Gorgon carried most of the mail and parcels, the old inhabitants of Norfolk Island settled in with a sigh to wait several more months for news. Oh, the frustration of never knowing what was happening in the rest of the world! Added to which, Mary Ann’s captain, Mark Monroe, was so ignorant of world events that he could contribute nothing.

He did, however, set up a stall on the straight beach.

“Stephen,” said Richard, “I am going to call in a brother’s promise. Will ye lend me gold? I can pay ye for it in notes of hand with interest.”

“I will gladly lend ye the gold, Richard, but I will wait for repayment until ye can give me gold,” said Stephen craftily. “How much d’ye require?”

“Twenty pounds.”

“A trifle!”

“Ye’re sure?”

“Like you, brother, I have plenty of credit with Government. Two or three hundred pounds by now, I expect-I never can bother asking Freeman to tot it up. My wants are simple and not usually to be assuaged by gold or notes of hand. Whereas you have a wife and family to provide for, not to mention a new and much bigger house of two storeys.” Closing all the shutters, he reached into the skeletal maw of a shark he had caught on Alexander and fiddled until a catch sprang, revealing a small door in the wall. The purse he removed was a fat one.

“Twenty pounds,” he said, dropping them into Richard’s palm. “As ye see, I am not skint because of the loan.”

“What if someone fancies a pair of shark jaws?”

“Luckily I deem them last on a thief’s list.” He shut the door and adjusted his trophy. “Let us go, or some other hoarder of gold will beat us to the best bargains.”

Richard bought several lengths of sprigged muslin, well aware that Kitty had told him a small lie; servant maids wore wool, and ten yards of muslin were worth three guineas. The jury had felt sorry for the weeping, devastated girls. As well the jury might. He also bought cheap cotton calico which would make everyday dresses for dealing with pigs and poultry, sewing thread, needles, scissors, some yard rules and trowels for himself, and an iron stove with a fire grate and ashpan in its base surmounted by an oven with a flat top and a hole for a chimney. Captain Monroe had sections of thin steel chimney pipe of the kind installed on ships; they cost more than the stove. What pounds were left he spent on thick napped cotton cloth he knew would make excellent diapers, and dark red woolen serge to make winter coats for Kitty and the baby.

“Ye’ve just spent almost as much as ye did on twelve good acres,” said Stephen, testing the rope binding the goods to the sled. “Monroe is a robber.”

“Land requires labor, and that I give free,” said Richard. “I would have my wife and children as comfortable as Norfolk Island life permits. This is no climate for woolen or canvas slops, and the clothing already made up falls apart on first washing. We are swindled by London over and over again. Kitty sews even better than she cooks, so she can make things to last.” He eased his shoulders into the sled harness and buckled it across his chest. The sled moved off effortlessly, though its contents weighed over 300 pounds. “Ye’re welcome to come up the vale for supper this evening, Stephen.”

“Thankee, but nay. Tobias and I are celebrating the departure of the fucken Mt. Pitt bird by eating two splendid snappers I caught on the reef this morning.”

“Christ, ye’ll be killed doing that!”

“Not I! I can smell the big wave coming a mile away.”

Which he probably could, reflected Richard; Stephen’s gift for wind, weather, current and waves was uncanny, and no one knew more about Norfolk Island’s conditions than he.

Wanting to drop the stove off at the site of the new house first, Richard commenced to toil up the steep slope of Mount George on the Queensborough road. This one-mile slog was nothing new; he had dragged the sled laden with calcarenite stone up the hill time and time again. Wheels would have made the pull even harder, for the sled moved in smooth tracks its runners had worn when the road was muddy. Not a frequent occurrence this year, a dry one. Only an occasional night of heavy rain was bringing the wheat and Indian corn on superbly.

It had become a temptation to skimp his Government work-a temptation others also felt, wanting to get their own land cleared and bearing, but Richard had sufficient sense to resist such urges. Poor George Guest had succumbed before he was out of his sentence-so ambitious!-and been flogged for it.

The lash ruled more and more as Major Ross and Lieutenant Clark-and Captain William Hill of the New South Wales Corps-struggled to maintain some kind of control over a people existing without solidarity or rhythm. They flew in a hundred directions according to their origins, their limited experiences and their ideas of what constituted a happy life. All too often the idea of a happy life was an idle life. In England most of them would never have rubbed shoulders, and that fact was as true of the marines and soldiers as it was of the convicts. Exacerbated by a further fact: that almost everybody in military command was Scotch, yet of Scotch felons or enlisted troops there were virtually none.

We are ruled by the lash, exile to Nepean Island and being chained to the grindstone because not a soul in English government can see any other way to rule than to punish mercilessly. There must be another way, there must be! But what it is, I do not know. How does one make a better marine out of the likes of Francis Mee or Elias Bishop? How does one make a better man out of the likes of Len Dyer or Sam Pickett? They are lazy, greedy weasels who derive their chief pleasure from making mischief and creating chaos. Punishment does not transform the Mees, Bishops, Dyers and Picketts into hardworking, responsible citizens. But then again, nor did the relatively benign rule of Lieutenant King in days when this place held less than a hundred souls. His kindness was repaid by mutinies and plots, contempt and defiance. And when toward the last his domain grew to near a hundred and fifty souls, Lieutenant King too resorted to the lash with greater severity and ever greater frequency. When their backs are to the wall, they flog. There is no answer, but oh, how I wish there were! So that my Kitty and I could rear our children in a clean and better ordered world.

In such manner did Richard render the ordeal of pulling his sled up the terrible hill of Mount George endurable; he put his back to the work and his mind to conundrums beyond his understanding.

Once atop the mount it was much easier; the road went up and down somewhat, but never so dreadfully. Morgan’s Run came into sight and he turned off the road down a track into the trees, many of them reduced to stumps already. His intention was to leave a border of pines fifty feet deep all around the perimeter and clear the middle of the flat section entirely. There he would plant his wheat, a delicate crop, protected from the mighty salt-bearing winds which blew from every point of the compass; the island was not large enough to render any wind free of salt. The less steep slopes of the cleft wherein the run of water originated he would put to Indian corn for his multiplying pigs.

At the top of the cleft he undid his harness, though he had made a good clear track down to the shelf where the house was going up. Strong though he was, he knew he could not hold the sled downhill with all that iron upon it. He unloaded all but the stove itself, then transferred himself and his harness to the back of the sled, digging in his heels as he and the sled gathered momentum, sled in front, he behind. The distance was almost too great; the sled ran up a banked slope he had installed as a brake, overshot it slightly, and came to a halt with a thump that had Kitty up from her garden in a hurry.

“Richard!” she squawked, arriving at a run. “You are mad!”

Too out of breath to refute this accusation, he sat upon the ground and panted; she brought him a beaker of cool water and sat beside him, worried that he had done himself an injury.

“Are you all right?”

He gulped the water down, nodded, grinned. “I have a stove for ye, Kitty, with a baking oven.”

“Captain Monroe had his stall!” She got to her feet and inspected the new arrival eagerly. “Richard, I will be able to bake my own bread! And make cakes when I have enough crumbs and egg whites. And roast meat properly-oh, it is wonderful! Thank you, thank you!”

A hoist was rigged on one of the roof beams, so getting the big stove off the sled was not as difficult as had been keeping it from whizzing off the end of the brake slope into the valley below. He and Kitty walked together to the crest, where she found all the fabrics, threads, sewing apparatus.

“Richard, you are too good to me.”

“Nay, that is not possible. Ye’re carrying my child.” He began to load the sled for another trip down the slope with the chimney, which of course Kitty had dismissed as uninteresting. That delivered, they walked home down the Queensborough road with Richard pulling a much lighter sled.

Robert Ross, standing outside Government House to appreciate a magnificent sunset, watched them get the sled down Mount George. He had seen Richard expending his Saturday hauling it up that cruel hill several hours ago, marveling at the stamina of the man. So clever! He was a Bristolian, of course. A city of sledges. If ye cannot have wheels, have runners. I doubt a mule has more pure strength, and he with only two legs. I am but eight years older than he, but I could not have done that at twenty. The girl, he decided, was Morgan’s indulgence. A sweet wee mite, and oddly genteel. A workhouse brat, Mrs. Morgan had informed him, sniffing. But then, workhouse brats from strict Church of England workhouses like the girls’ in Canterbury (he had her papers) usually were genteel. Morgan himself was an educated man from the middling classes, so a workhouse brat was a comedown. But not, thought the Major cynically as he turned away, as big a comedown as his legal wife was.

Richard and Kitty moved house on Saturday and Sunday the 27th and 28th of August, 1791. The several working bees had gotten beams, scantlings and cladding up, shingles on the roof and a path from the front doorstep down to the spring; for the time being they would finish only the ground floor, deal with upstairs when an upstairs was necessary. There was a long way to go before his new home looked as nice as the old, but Richard did not care.

They had several tables, a kitchen bench, six fine chairs, two fine beds (one with a feather mattress and pillows), shelving for all Richard’s bits and pieces, and a stone chimney with a big hearth. The iron stove sat within the fireplace, its steel smokestack thrust up into the chimney’s maw; from now on they would have no open fire, which would darken the interior after nightfall, but was much safer.

Housewarming presents were tendered from folk who had little to give save plants or poultry. Richard and Kitty accepted them with full hearts, knowing their real value. Nat and Olivia Lucas gave them a female tortoise-shell kitten, Joey Long another dog. The two more prosperous members of the Morgan circle were typically generous: Stephen donated an oak kitchen cabinet that he had bought from Surgeon Jamison, and the Wentworths a cradle. The cat they named Tibby and the new female pup Charlotte because it looked like a King Charles spaniel. MacTavish approved of both; he remained the sole male animal.

The pigsty and privy were difficult to site until Richard thought of a way to determine the course of the underground stream which fed the spring; nothing must contaminate it. Remembering what Peg’s brother had done when he had needed to dig a new well, Richard cut a forked rod from a sappy green shrub, held on to each fork with a hand, and attempted to divine. The sensation was curious when it happened, as if suddenly the wood shivered into life and fought him gently. Yet Kitty could not make the tip stir any more than could Stephen.

“It is our skin,” said Stephen, ruefully eyeing his palms. “Hard, dry and calloused. Your skin, Richard, is soft and moist. I think the diviner’s skin completes the water chain.”

Whatever lay at the root of the magic in it, Richard had no choice other than to site both pigsty and privy north of the house; there were underground streams everywhere south of it.

The saddest consequence of the move no one could have predicted, though Richard blamed himself for not foreseeing it. On the very Sunday that they said an unregretful farewell to the acre at the head of Arthur’s Vale, John Lawrell was caught by a married marine corporal playing cards with William Robinson Two in his hut. Major Ross had told the marine that he might shift himself and his family into the vacated house for the last few months of his duty, and the fellow had eagerly rushed to see it. Fervently religious, he was scandalized by what he saw as he peered through Lawrell’s hut door. Playing cards on Sunday! Lawrell and Robinson were sentenced to 100 lashes each for gambling on a Sunday.

“Oh, it is too bad!” Richard cried to Stephen. “They meant no harm to God or men. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong in it, they are simply friends who spend Sunday afternoons with a deck of cards. Not gambling, just amusing themselves. If I spoke to the Major-”

“No, you cannot,” said Stephen firmly. “Richard, leave it go! Since his near-mortal illness the Major has had a bee in his bonnet about God and our lack of a chaplain here. He is now quite convinced that the rising incidence of local crime is thanks to godlessness and improper observance of Sundays. Well, he is a Scotchman, and much influenced by that pitiless Presbyterian ethic. Lawrell is no longer under your protection-nothing ye could say will alter the Major’s decision. In an odd way it reflects well on you, or so the Major sees it. You depart, Lawrell sins.”

“I want no approbation at the cost of another man’s flesh,” said Richard bitterly. “Sometimes I hate God!”

“’Tis not God ye hate, Richard. ’Tis the fools of men who call themselves God’s servants ye really hate.”

Salamander arrived on the 16th of September carrying 200 male convicts and more men of the New South Wales Corps. By the time she sailed the population of Norfolk Island had risen to 1,115. Both deaths and floggings had soared since Mary Ann; the first death from illness or natural causes had not occurred until the end of 1790, when John Price, a convict off Surprize, had expired from the after-effects of his awful voyage.

Now the ratio of males to females increased dramatically in favor of males, but not strong, healthy males. Many of the new arrivals were so sick that they would eventually die, while some of the less enfeebled ones preyed constantly upon gardens or tried to rob the Stores, after anything to make life more comfortable. Governor Phillip’s intractables gravitated immediately into the Francis-Peck-Dyer-Pickett camp, joined by scarred and disillusioned men like Willy Dring, whom Richard remembered from Alexander as not a bad sort of young fellow. Fierce quarrels broke out every day and the gaol was always full, the grindstone fully powered. The sight of ironed men, even an occasional ironed woman, became more common. Sydney Town, Queensborough and Phillipsburgh were good places to be out of. Nat Lucas, closest to Sydney Town among Richard’s friends, had commenced to clear the upper slopes of his increased Arthur’s Vale portion and was building a new house as far from the flat as he could.

Of course Richard had brought cuttings and small offshoots of his bamboo and sugar cane, having removed enough of the grown bamboo to provide himself with several fishing poles. He no longer went to Point Hunter to fish with a hand-line; Stephen had also abandoned that site. Too many used it, and it necessitated a walk through Sydney Town besides. More and more Sydney Town looked as Richard fancied Port Jackson must, except that the buildings were wood. Norfolk Island lime had gone back to His Excellency in Port Jackson aboard Mary Ann and Salamander to provide mortar for bricks and sandstone blocks; Port Jackson, more usually called “Sydney” these days, was also expanding.

Now that Richard lived on Morgan’s Run, he and Stephen had taken to fishing from the rocks near a small, sandy beach between Sydney Bay’s landing place and its western headland, Point Ross. The walk was no longer than that to Point Hunter, the eastern headland, and having poles to fish with greatly helped their chances of kingfish and other large denizens of surface waters.

“What d’ye think of these rumors that a huge revolution has happened in France?” Stephen asked as they cleaned a six-foot kingfish under the shade of an overhanging rock.

“It happened in the American colonies, so why not? I wish that Mary Ann or Salamander had carried gazettes from London, but I think we will have to wait until Gorgon arrives in Port Jackson before we find out what actually has happened. Gorgon will also carry more than personal letters from wives to men like Ross and Ralphie darling.”

“Have ye ever written home, Richard?”

“Nay, never. I want to have something to say before I do.”

Stephen gazed at him in wonder. Something to say? What was Alexander? What was Port Jackson? What was Norfolk Island?

“I see no point in writing sad letters,” Richard explained. “When I write, I want to be able to tell my family and friends in England that I have survived and even prospered a little. That my life in the Antipodes is not an empty vessel.”

“Yes, I understand. Then ye’ll be writing soon. If, that is, ye have not forgotten how to form the alphabet.”

“I do that as well as ever. I do not write letters, but if I am not too tired, I transcribe notes upon whatever I am reading.”

They walked back to Morgan’s Run the long way to give some of the magnificently meaty fish to Olivia Lucas, met D’arcy in town and gave him some, then waded upstream past Richard’s old house and climbed the cleft.

Kitty was beginning to look a little pregnant, and had shown that she was an ideal wife for a Norfolk Island settler by learning to ply a hammer, cope with minor emergencies like one of Augusta’s daughters in the vegetable patch, sand and polish interior walls as Richard put them up, chop down quite large trees, deal with the firewood, carry water, wash, cook, clean, and sew. In her spare time, she informed Richard gravely, she was unraveling some linen cloth and weaving the strands into what she hoped would form wicks. Then she would make tallow out of the hard back fat when Richard killed a pig, and dip candles. That way they would not have to purchase tallow candles from Stores, which charged a penny each.

“Ye’re doing too much,” Stephen chided her as they sat to eat the kingfish, baked in the oven wrapped in plantain leaves.

“Stephen, do not start!” she said dangerously, eating with gusto all the while. “Richard is always at me about it. Truly I am well, strong and full of vim. And I have discovered that I am happiest when doing things. Especially because this is my house, I have been with Richard since before its beginning.”

“When I find a man I can trust, Kitty, I will pay the Government for his labors and put him to the tasks ye’ll not be able to do once ye become heavy.”

“That is where George Guest went wrong,” said Stephen. “If he had waited until he was out of his sentence and then come to an arrangement with Major Ross about hiring two laborers, neither he nor they would have been flogged.”

“George is a good fellow, but too keen to get on. He thought to get the work done cheaper by hiring two marines directly rather than paying the Government to hire on his behalf. That is not how English government works. I deplore English government, but I see no sense in trying to hoodwink it. I will get my man for ten pounds a year, which I can afford. After, that is,” he said with a smile, “I have paid my debts.”

“Ye work too hard yourself, Richard.”

“I do not believe so. Rock fishing on a Saturday morning is a wonderful rest, so is gardening and mucking out the pigsty after Sunday service. Luckily the Major’s objections to Sunday activities do not extend to things which might eventually arrive in the Stores. His shibboleths are limited to drinking and gambling.”

“On the subject of drinking, the New South Wales Corps men have set up a very nice still with Francis Mee and Elias Bishop.”

“Well, that had to happen, especially after the Major grew so religious. Besides, he shipped a good deal of what we made to Port Jackson on Supply last February. ’Tis amazing how the total soars when ye have a humble little pair of kettles going day and night-and on Sundays,” Richard said, laughing.

After Stephen left, Richard and Kitty worked side by side in the garden until supper time, eaten just before night fell. The small citrus trees had survived transplanting, as had almost everything. The year had been a fairly grubless one and dry enough that the Government wheat in Arthur’s Vale and the Government corn at Queensborough looked like yielding bumper crops. Of course there had been salt winds galore, but luckily most had been accompanied by squally showers, which reduced their blighting effect. There had been just enough rain to keep the grain coming on. Even with 1,115 inhabitants, Norfolk Island seemed likely to provide its own bread and surplus pork to salt for Port Jackson.

In Sydney Town, Queensborough and Phillipsburgh the same old squabbles recurred between industrious convict gardeners and lazy marines and soldiers. There were now a great many very sick convicts who literally could not work; some died, and some were subject to the kind of thing rife in Port Jackson-the strong robbed the weak of sustenance and clothing. Those upon whom devolved the burden of feeding the indigent-through-illness men grew sour about having to do so. Especially if they were not yet pardoned or emancipated, and therefore free to keep what they grew on their own blocks or sell to Stores.

Hunger still stalked on the Phillipsburgh-Cascade side of the island; only three miles away by road, it may as well have been as far as Port Jackson, so isolated was it. Phillipsburgh grew less edibles in order to cultivate flax, and importation of edibles from the south side of the island was the responsibility of Mr. Andrew Hume, the superintendent. He did a brisk trade in the acquisition of convict slops and constantly incurred Major Ross’s wrath by short-rationing his workers in order to sell to the New South Wales Corps soldiers, living somewhat closer than the middle of the Cascade road. As almost all the Lieutenant-Governor’s troops were now New South Wales Corps soldiers, Ross found it impossible to police Phillipsburgh and the alliance between Hume and Captain Hill. One starving flax worker ate a forest plant he mistook for cabbage, and died; even then Hume continued in his peculations and frauds, abetted by Hill and his soldiers.

The growing evil was the act of growing food, and the chasm between those who grew plenty and ate well and those who grew nothing widened every day to the whistles and screams of floggings, floggings, floggings. A surgeon was required to witness the application of the cat, so Callum, Wentworth, Considen and Jamison entered into a conspiracy; whichever one was deputed to watch would call a halt after somewhere between 15 and 50 of the total number had been laid on, then make sure that the next installment was not administered before healing was complete. It could take a long time for a convict to receive all 200 lashes, and what usually happened was that Major Ross forgave the culprit the rest before too much damage had been done.

Courts martial also increased as the differences of opinion and resentments arising out of rank and precedence rubbed rawly at abraded military feelings, real or (all too often) imagined. Most of the marines and soldiers, including their officers, were uneducated, narrow, impressionable, hottempered, appallingly immature, and prone to believe whatever they were told. A fancied slight became inflated into an unpardonable insult before it had finished traveling the gossip grapevine, as efficient and widespread among the free as among the felon.

The indefatigable Lieutenant Ralph Clark endeared himself even more to Major Ross by (snooping just a little) detecting the presence of an illicit letter from the Major’s clerk, Francis Folks, to the Judge Advocate in Port Jackson, Captain David Collins. The document accused Ross of extreme cruelty, oppression, depriving the free as well as the felon of rations, and so on, and so forth. Included with it were supporting papers and some opinions on the Lieutenant-Governor’s conduct of Norfolk Island’s affairs which depicted him as a mixture of Ivan the Terrible and Torquemada. Ross’s response was to clap Folks in irons, confiscate the letter, papers and opinions as concrete evidence, and order Folks tried at Port Jackson by the addressee, Collins. Who, though a marine officer, loathed Robert Ross passionately. Even as he acted, the Major knew whom Collins would believe. No matter. The protocols were specific, and Law Martial was a thing of the past. Alas.

Atlantic arrived on the 2nd of November with news that came as a bolt from the blue to all save Major Ross himself. She brought the mail and parcels Gorgon had carried from Portsmouth: yes, Gorgon had finally arrived. Atlantic also brought a new Lieutenant-Governor for Norfolk Island, Commander Philip Gidley King, who had returned from England on Gorgon and brought his bride, Anna Josepha, with him. By the time they quit Atlantic at Norfolk Island she was in the last stages of pregnancy, coddled and cossetted by young William Neate Chapman, King’s protégé and (officially) his surveyor. To a community used by now to the reign of Major Ross, it was hard to tell which of the two, Anna Josepha or Willy Chapman, was the sillier; they called themselves “brother” and “sister,” giggled a lot, eyed each other archly, and drew everybody’s attention to the similarity of their facial features. King’s two boys by Ann Innet did not come, though rumor said that Norfolk, the elder, was being cared for-in England-by Mrs. Philip Gidley King’s parents. King’s own parents were more rigid, which led some to speculate that Anna Josepha’s family was more accustomed to bastards, so perhaps Anna Josepha and Willy Chapman were…

Also disembarked from Atlantic were Captain William Paterson of the New South Wales Corps and his wife-Scotch, of course-and the Reverend Richard Johnson, who had come to bless, marry, and also to baptize 31 Norfolk Island babies. Some of the visitors were staying a short time only. Queen, newly arrived in Port Jackson, was to bring the island yet more convicts-genuinely Irish convicts this time, embarked in Cork.

All of which spelled an end to the marine presence. Major Ross, Lieutenants Clark, Faddy and Ross Junior, and the last of the enlisted marines were to depart the island on Queen. They would spend time in Port Jackson to await the return of Gorgon from a food voyage to Bengalese Calcutta, the home of a sturdy, hardy kind of cattle. The years had gone by in Port Jackson, but of that vanished Government herd no sign had ever been seen.

So confusing! So upsetting! It all seemed to happen in the twinkling of an eye-ships and commandants coming and going, yet more mouths to feed. The old inhabitants of the island walked around in a daze, and wondered whereabouts it was all going to end.

Commander King was horrified at what he saw in his beloved Norfolk Island. Dammit, the place was no better than a wooden version of that den of iniquity, Port Jackson! As for Government House-! How could he ask a new bride to live in such a run down, ramshackle, hideously small residence? And under the aegis of a vulgar trollop like Mrs. Richard Morgan, who had donned all her finery to greet him and usher him through the premises? She would have to go, the sooner the better.

King’s mood was not improved by the knowledge that the large supply of livestock that he had acquired on his own initiative at Cape Town had not thrived during Gorgon’s onward passage; a tiny remnant only came with him on Atlantic-a few sickly sheep, goats and turkeys, not a cow left alive.

Oh, the whole place was so dilapidated and slipshod! How had Major Ross allowed his jewel in the ocean to sink to this? Yet what else could one expect from a boorish Scotch marine? A trifle full of his own importance and with the Celtic side of him uppermost for the moment, King itched to do great things even as he despaired of Norfolk Island’s ability to give him the opportunity. Ever the romantic, he had genuinely expected a settlement of more than 1,300 people to look exactly like a settlement of 149 people. The only cheering fact apart from his darling little Anna Josepha was that his supply of port was wellnigh infinite.

He and Major Ross, thrown together for a number of days at least, eyed each other as warily as two dogs debating which would win a possible fight. With characteristic bluntness the Major made neither excuses nor apologies for the awful condition of the island, merely confined himself to clipped summaries of what his papers and records said at more length. What might have developed into a brawl over dinner in the sadly overcrowded Government House did not, thanks to the tact of the Reverend Johnson, the presence of the twinned Anna Josepha and Willy Chapman, the delicious food served by Mrs. Richard Morgan, and a number of bottles of port.

Captain William Hill of the New South Wales Corps did his level best to ruin the departing Major Ross’s reputation by having selected convicts examined on oath before the Reverend Johnson and Mr. William Balmain, surgeon, arriving to take the place of Denis Considen. Hill and Andrew Hume threw a great deal of dirt, but the Major fought back, establishing without much difficulty that the convicts were perjurious villains and Hill and Hume not far behind. The battle was bound to continue in Port Jackson, but for the time being the combatants declared a cessation in hostilities and set about packing or unpacking trunks and bags.

Richard remained carefully out of the way, very sorry that Major Ross was going, and not at all sure whether he wanted to see Lieutenant-oops, Commander-King take the Major’s place. Whatever Ross was or was not, he was first and foremost a realist.

The official changeover occurred on Sunday, the 13th of November, after the Reverend Johnson had taken divine service. The entire huge population was assembled in front of Government House and Commander King’s commission read out. Atlantic was making sail and Queen was retreating to Cascade, the two ships passing in the morning. Major Ross requested of the new Lieutenant-Governor that all the convicts in detention or under sentence of punishment be forgiven; Commander King graciously acquiesced.

“We did all save kiss,” said the Major to Richard as the big crowd dispersed. “Walk a little way with me, Morgan, but send your wife ahead with Long.”

My luck persists, thought Richard, nodding to Kitty that she and Joey should proceed without him. His transaction with Ross to secure the services of Joseph Long, a fourteen-year man, as his laborer and general hand for the sum of £10 per annum had only recently been signed into effect. For after considering a number of men, he had decided that simple, faithful Joey Long was preferable to any other. As several of the recent arrivals were cobblers, Major Ross had been willing to let Joey go. This change of employment was as well for Joey too; Commander King was not likely to have forgotten the loss of his best pair of shoes.

“I am glad of the opportunity to wish ye well, sir,” said Richard, dawdling. “I will miss ye greatly.”

“I cannot return the compliment in exactly the way ye mean yours, but I can tell ye, Morgan, that I never minded the sight of your face nor the words that came from your lips. I hate this place every bit as much as I hate Port Jackson, or Sydney, or whatever they are calling it these days. I hate convicts. I hate marines. And I hate the fucken Royal Navy. I am obligated to ye for the services of your wife, who has been precisely what ye said-an excellent housekeeper but no temptress. And I am obligated to ye for both wood and rum.” He paused to think, then added, “I also hate the fucken New South Wales Corps. There will be a reckoning, never doubt it. Those idealistic Navy fools will let a pack of wolves loose in this quadrant of the globe, wolves who masquerade as soldiers of the New South Wales Corps, which I gather marine wolves like fucken George Johnston intend to join. They care as little for convicts or these penal settlements as I do, but I will return to England a poor man, whereas they will return fatter by every carcass they can sink their teeth into. And rum will be a very large part of it, mark my words. Enrichment at the expense of duty, honor, King and country. Mark my words, Morgan! So it will be.”

“I do not doubt ye, sir.”

“I see your wife is with child.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Ye’re better off out of Arthur’s Vale, but ye were wise enough to see that for yourself. There will be no trouble for ye with Mr. King, who has little choice other than to honor those transactions I have negotiated as His Majesty’s legally appointed Lieutenant-Governor. Of course your pardon ultimately rests with His Excellency, but ye’re out of your sentence in a few months anyway, and I cannot see why ye will not get your full pardon.” Ross stopped. “If this benighted isle ever succeeds, ’twill be because of men like you and Nat Lucas.” He held out his hand. “Goodbye, Morgan.”

Blinking back tears, Richard gripped the hand and wrung it. “Goodbye, Major Ross. I wish ye well.”

And that, thought the desperately sorry Richard as he hurried after Kitty and Joey, is one half of the work done. I have yet to deal with the other half.

It happened as Queen discharged cargo and convicts first at Cascade and then at Sydney Bay; Richard was sawing with a new man because Billy Wigfall was going, and was too busy shouting instructions to his partner below to bother looking up. When the cut was done he noticed the figure in its Royal Navy uniform aglitter with gold braid, unwrapped the rags from around his hands and walked across to salute Commander King.

“Should the supervisor of sawyers actually saw himself?” King asked, staring at Richard’s chest and shoulders with some awe.

“I like to keep my hand in, sir, and it informs my men that I am still better at it than they are. The pits are all working well at the moment and each has a good man at the helm. This one-your third pit, sir, d’ye remember?-is where I saw myself when I do saw.”

“I swear ye’re in far finer body than ye were when I left, Morgan. I understand ye’re a free man by virtue of pardon?”

“Aye, sir.”

His mouth pursing, King tapped his fingers a little peevishly against his brilliantly white-clad thigh. “I daresay I cannot blame the sawpits for the shockingly bad buildings,” he said.

The gulf yawned, but had to be leaped. Richard set his jaw and looked straight into King’s eyes, more aware these days that he possessed a certain power. Thank you, Kitty. “I hope, sir, that ye’re not about to blame Nat Lucas.”

King jumped, looked horrified. “No, no, Morgan, of course not! Blame my own original head carpenter? Acquit me of such idiocy. No, ’tis Major Ross I blame.”

“Ye cannot do that either, sir,” said Richard steadily. “Ye left this place twenty months ago, a week or two after the people in it had jumped from a hundred and forty-nine to more than five hundred. During the time ye’ve been away, the population has gone to over thirteen hundred. After Queen, more, and Irish Irish at that-they’ll not even speak English, most of them. ’Tis simply not the place ye left, Commander King. Then, we enjoyed good health-we lived hard, but we managed. Now, at least a third of the mouths we are feeding are sick ones, and we have besides Port Jackson’s leavings when it comes to utter villains. I am sure,” he swept on, ignoring King’s mounting indignation and annoyance, “that while ye were in Port Jackson ye discussed with His Excellency the terrible difficulties His Excellency is suffering. Well, it has been no different here, is all. My sawpits have produced thousands upon thousands of superficial feet over the last twenty months. Much of it ought to have been seasoned for longer than it did because the new arrivals kept coming and coming. Ye might say that Major Ross, Nat Lucas, I and many others here have been caught in the middle. But that was nobody’s fault. At least not on this side of the globe.”

Eyes still fixed on King’s, he waited calmly. No servility, but not a trace of impudence or presumption either. If this man is to survive, he thought, then he must take notice of what I have said. Otherwise he will not succeed, and the New South Wales Corps will end in ruling Norfolk Island.

The mercurial Celt struggled with the coolheaded Englishman for perhaps a minute, then King’s shoulders slumped. “I hear what ye’re saying clearly. But it cannot continue thus, is what I meant to say. I insist that whatever is built is constructed properly, even if that means some have to live under canvas for however long it takes.” His mood changed. “Major Ross informs me that the harvest will come in magnificently, both here and at Queensborough. Many acres and none spoiled. I admit that is an achievement. Yet we have to put men on the grindstone.” He gazed at his dam, still holding up very well. “We need a water-wheel, and Nat Lucas says he can build one.”

“I am sure he can. His only enemies are time and lack of materials. Give him the latter and he will find the former.”

“Aye, so I think too.” His face assumed a conspiratorial look as he moved completely out of earshot. “Major Ross also told me that ye distilled rum for him during a time of crisis. That rum also saved Port Jackson from mutiny between March and August of this year, with no rum and no ships.”

“I did distill, sir.”

“D’ye possess the apparatus?”

“Aye, sir, very well hidden. It does not belong to me, it is the property of the Government. That I am its custodian lies in the fact that Major Ross trusted me.”

“The pity of it is that those wretched transport captains have not been above selling distillation apparatus to private individuals. I hear that the New South Wales Corps and some of the worst convicts are distilling illicit spirits. At least Port Jackson can grow no sugar cane, but here it grows like a weed. Norfolk Island is potentially a source of rum. What the Governor of New South Wales has to decide is whether to continue importing rum from thousands of miles away at great expense, or to start distilling here.”

“I doubt His Excellency Governor Phillip would consent.”

“Aye, but he will not be governor forever.” King looked very worried. “His health is breaking down.”

“Sir, there is no point in fretting about events which still lie very much in the future,” Richard said, relaxing. He had leaped the chasm, things would be all right between him and King.

“True, true,” said the new Lieutenant-Governor, and hied himself off to spend an hour or two in his office, with perhaps a tiny drop of port to palliate the monotony.

“Ye’ve a box at Stores,” said Stephen not long after this encounter. “What is it, Richard? Ye look exhausted for someone who thinks nothing of ripping a dozen gigantic logs apart.”

“I have just spoken my mind to Commander King.”

“Ooooo-aaa! Well, ye’re a free man, so he cannot have ye flogged without trial and conviction.”

“Oh, I survived. I always do, it seems.”

“Do not tempt fate!”

Richard bent and knocked on wood. “This time, anyway,” he amended. “He had the sense to see I spoke naught but the truth.”

“Then there is hope for him. Did you hear the first thing I said, Richard?”

“No, what?”

“There is a box for you at Stores. It came on Queen. Too heavy to carry, so fetch your sled.”

“Dinner this evening? Then ye can help me explore the box.”

“I will be there.”

He collected his sled at midday and was led to the box by Tom Crowder, taken under Mr. King’s patronage at once. Someone had broken into it-no one here in Stores, he decided. On Queen or in Port Jackson. Whoever had inspected it had had the courtesy to hammer the lid back on. Pushing at the box, he decided from its weight that little had been confiscated, from which he assumed it contained books. A great many books, since it was bigger than a tea chest and made of stronger wood. When he bent to pick it up and heft it onto the sled, Crowder squealed.

“Ye cannot do that alone, Richard! I will find ye a man.”

“I am a man, Tommy, but thankee for the offer.”

RICHARD MORGAN • CONVICT OFF ALEXANDER had been lettered large on every one of the box’s six sides, but there was no shipper’s name.

That afternoon he pulled it home. There were still some hours of daylight left; the nature of the work meant that the sawpits closed earlier than common labor. He was, besides, a free man, at liberty to go home early once in a while.

“You bloom more beautiful each time I see you, wife,” he said to Kitty when she came skipping down the steps to greet him.

They kissed lingeringly, her lips promising lovemaking that night; physically, he knew, he enchanted her. Fearing harm to the baby, he had wanted to stop, but she had looked amazed.

“How can anything so lovely hurt our baby?” she had asked in genuine puzzlement. “You are not a hell-for-leather rammer, Richard.”

His mouth had tugged into a smile at her choice of words, which occasionally reflected that long sojourn aboard Lady Juliana.

“What is inside?” she asked now as he removed the box from the sled.

“As I have not yet opened it, I do not know.”

“Then do so, please! I am dying!”

“It came on Queen rather than Atlantic from Port Jackson, but on Gorgon from England. The delay in Port Jackson is a mystery. Maybe someone wanted to know the name of the shipper.” Richard used a claw hammer to prise the lid off-too easily. Without a doubt the box had been opened and its contents examined.

As he suspected, books. On top of the books and deprived of whatever had surrounded it as packing-clothes, probably-sat a hat box. Jem Thistlethwaite. He untied the tapes and took out the hat to end all hats, of scarlet silk-covered straw with a huge, warped brim and a profusion of black, white and scarlet ostrich feathers fixed under a preposterous black-and-white striped satin bow. It tied under the chin with similarly striped satin ribbons.

“Ohhhhh!” said Kitty as he lifted it up, her mouth sagging.

“Alas, wife, ’tis not for you,” he said before she could get any ideas. “ ’Tis for Mrs. Richard Morgan.”

“I am so glad! It is very grand, but I have not the height or the face-or the clothes-to wear it. Besides,” she confided, “I think people like Mrs. King and Mrs. Paterson would deem it dreadfully vulgar.”

“I love you, Kitty. I love you very, very much.”

To which she returned no answer; she never did.

Stifling a sigh, Richard discovered that the hat box also held a few small items wrapped in screws of paper, all of which had been opened, then closed again. How odd! Who had opened the box, and why? The hat could have bought the least attractive male in Port Jackson a year with that place’s best whore, yet the hat had not been appropriated. Nor the objects wrapped in paper. Unrolling one, he found a brass seal attached to a short wooden handle; when he mentally mirrored its emblem he saw that it consisted of the initials RM entwined with unmistakable fetters or manacles. The other six papers contained sticks of crimson sealing wax. A hint.

On the bottom of the hatbox sat a fat letter, its JT-and-quill seal definitely unbroken, though fingerprints upon its outside said that it had been carefully felt and squeezed. At which moment he understood why his box had been opened, and by whom. In Government Stores at Port Jackson, by a high official in search of gold coin. Had any been found, it would have gone into the Government coffers, very short of gold. Richard knew that the box did contain gold, though he very much doubted from its condition that gold had been found. High officials did not have much imagination.

He found Jethro Tull’s book on horticulture and a set of the second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica; three-volume novels by the dozen, a whole collection of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and several London gazettes, the works of John Donne, Robert Herrick, Alexander Pope, Richard Dryden, Oliver Goldsmith, more of Edward Gibbon’s master-work on Rome; some parliamentary reports, a ream of best paper, more steel pens, bottles of ink, laudanum, tonics, tinctures, laxatives and an emetic; several jars of ointments and salves; and a dozen good candle molds.

Kitty hopped from one foot to the other, a little disappointed that the box held books rather than a dinner service by Josiah Wedgwood, but very pleased because Richard was pleased. “Who is it from?”

“A very old friend, Jem Thistlethwaite. With inclusions from my family in Bristol,” said Richard, the letter in his hand. “Now, if ye will excuse me, Kitty, I am going to sit down on the doorstep and read Jem’s letter. Stephen is coming for dinner, then I will tell both of ye all my news.”

Kitty had planned on bread and salad for dinner that day, but rose to the occasion by producing a salt pork stew with peppered dumplings; the meat was excellent and newly done, for it was their own produce.

When Stephen saw the hat he roared with laughter, insisted upon setting it on Kitty’s head and artistically tying its ribbons. “I fear,” he said, still chuckling, “that the hat wears you, not you the hat.”

“I am aware of that,” she said loftily.

“How are your family?” Stephen asked then, replacing the hat.

“All very well, save for Cousin James-the-druggist,” Richard said sadly. “His eyesight has almost failed, so his sons have taken over the business and he has retired to a very nice mansion outside Bath with his wife and two spinster daughters. My father has removed to the Bell Tavern around the corner because the Corporation is in the throes of another building orgy and has pulled the Cooper’s Arms down. My brother’s oldest boy is with them-a great comfort. And Cousin James-of-the-clergy has been awarded a canon’s stall at the Cathedral, much to his joy. My sisters are thriving too.” A shadow crossed his face. “The only death among those I knew is that of John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian, who died of a surfeit-what sort of surfeit is a mystery.”

“Soporifics and ecstatics, most likely,” said Stephen, who knew the story in its entirety. “I rejoice.”

“There is a lot of general news, and many flimsies to plump the news out. France did indeed have a revolution and abolished its monarchy, though the King and Queen are still alive. Much to Jem’s surprise, the United States of America continues to be an entity, is drafting a radical kind of written constitution and fast regaining its moneys.” Richard grinned. “According to Jem, the only reason the Frogs revolted was because of Benjamin Franklin’s fur hat. What does Jem write?” Richard shuffled the pages. “Ah! ‘Unlike the Americans, who have scientifically calibrated a system of parliamentary checks and balances, the French have decided to institute none. Logic will perforce have to do what the Law does not allow to be done. As the French have no logic, I predict that republican government in France will not last.’ ”

“He is right about that.”

Kitty sat with her eyes going from one face to the other, not really following very much, but delighted that Richard and Stephen were so absorbed in things at the right ends of the earth.

“The King was very ill in 1788 and certain elements tried to have the Prince of Wales installed as regent, but the King recovered and Georgy-Porgy failed to lift himself out of his mire of debt. He still refuses to marry suitably, and Roman Catholic Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert is still his great love.”

“Religion and religious differences,” Stephen said with a sigh, “are the greatest curses of mankind. Why cannot we live and let live? Look at Johnson. Insisted the convicts marry each other but gave them no opportunity to get to know each other first because fornicating is a part of knowing. Pah!” He suppressed the flash of temper and changed the subject. “What of England?”

“Mr. Pitt reigns supreme. Taxation has absolutely soared. There is even a tax on news sheets, gazettes and magazines, and those who advertise in them must pay a tax of two-and-sixpence irrespective of the size of the advertisement. Jem says that is forcing small shops and businesses out of advertising their wares, leaving the field to the big fellows.”

“Does Jem have anything to add to the fact that the first mate and some of the crew of Bounty mutinied and put Lieutenant Bligh in a longboat? ’Tis the mutiny on Bounty everybody is talking about, not the French Revolution,” Stephen asked.

“Oh, I think interest in Bounty arises from the fact that the crew preferred luscious Otaheitian maidens to breadfruit.”

“Undoubtedly. But what does Jem say? ’Tis a huge scandal and controvery in England, apparently. Bligh, they say, is not blameless by any means.”

“His best snippet concerns the genesis of the expedition to Otaheite to bring back the breadfruit, which I gather was intended as cheap food for the West Indian negro slaves,” said Richard, hunting through pages again. “Here we are… Jem’s style is inimitable, so ’tis best to hear it direct from him. ‘A naval lieutenant named William Bligh is married to a Manxwoman whose uncle happens to be Duncan Campbell, proprietor of the prison hulks. The convolutions are tortuous, but probably through Mr. Campbell, Bligh was introduced to Sir Joseph Banks, very occupied with the mooted breadfruit pilgrimage to Otaheite.

“ ‘What fascinated me was the incestuous nature of the final outcome of the expeditionary marriage between the Royal Navy and the Royal Society. Campbell sold one of his own ships, Bethea, to the Navy. The Navy changed her name to Bounty and appointed Campbell’s niece’s husband, Bligh, commander and purser of Bounty. With Bligh sailed one Fletcher Christian of a Manx family related by blood to Bligh’s wife and Campbell’s niece. Christian was the second-in-command but had no naval commission. He and Bligh had sailed together previously, and were as close as a couple of Miss Mollies.’ Say no more, Jem, say no more!”

“That,” said Stephen when he could for laughing, “just about sums England up! Nepotism reigns, even including incest.”

“What is incest?” asked Kitty, well aware of Miss Mollies.

“Sexual congress between people very closely related by blood,” said Richard. “Usually parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles or aunts and nieces or nephews.”

“Ugh!” Kitty exclaimed, shuddering. “But I do not exactly see how the Bounty mutiny fits in.”

“’Tis a literary device called irony, Kitty,” said Stephen. “What else does Jem write?”

“Ye can have the letter to read at your leisure,” Richard said, “though there is another thought in it worth airing ahead of that. Jem thinks that Mr. Pitt and the Parliament are very afraid that an English revolution might follow the American and French ones, and now deem a Botany Bay place a necessity for the preservation of the realm. There is huge trouble brewing in Ireland, and both the Welsh and the Scotch are discontented. So Pitt may add rebels and demagogues to his transportation list.”

He did not discuss Mr. Thistlethwaite’s personal news, which was excellent. The purveyor of three-volume novels to literate ladies had become so adept at the art that he could produce two a year, and money flowed into his coffers so copiously that he had bought a big house in Wimpole Street, had twelve servants, a carriage drawn by four matched horses, and a duchess for a mistress.

After Stephen left carrying Mr. Thistlethwaite’s letter and the dishes were washed up, Kitty ventured another remark; to do so no longer terrified her, for Richard tried very hard to restrain his God the Father tendencies.

“Jem must be very grand,” she said.

“Jem? Grand?” Richard laughed at the idea, remembering that burly, bulky figure with the red-tinged, pale blue eyes and the horse pistols protruding from his greatcoat pockets. “Nay, Kitty, Jem is very down-to-earth. A bit of a bibber-he was one of my father’s most faithful customers in his Bristol days. Now he lives in London and has made a fortune for himself. While I was aboard Ceres hulk he enabled me to safeguard both my health and my reason. I will love him for it all of my life.”

“Then I will too. If it were not for you, Richard, I would be far worse off than I am,” she said, thinking to please him.

His face twisted. “Can ye not love me at all?”

The eyes turned up to his were very earnest; they no longer seemed the image of William Henry’s eyes, but rather had become her own, and equally-nay, more-loved.

“Can ye not love me at all, Kitty?” he repeated.

“I do love you, Richard. I always have. But it is not what I believe is true love.”

“You mean I am not the be-all and end-all of your existence.”

“You are, such as my existence is.” Her eloquence was a thing of gesture, expression, look-her words, alas, fell down badly; she had not the knack of finding the right ones to explain what was going on in her brain. “That sounds ungrateful, I know, but I am not ungrateful, truly I am not. It is just that sometimes I wonder what might have happened to me had I not been convicted and sent to this-this place so far from home. And I wonder if there was not someone for me in England, someone I will never have the chance to meet now. Someone who is my true love.” Seeing his face, she hurried on in a fluster. “I am very happy, and I like working in the garden and around the house. It is a great joy to be with child. But… Oh, I wish I knew what I have missed!”

How to answer that? “Ye do not pine for Stephen anymore?”

“No.” It came out confidently. “He was right, it was a girlish passion. I look at him now and marvel at myself.”

“What d’ye see when ye look at me?”

Her body hunched and she squirmed like a small, guilty child; he knew the signs and wished he had not asked, provoked her into being obliged to lie. As if he could see into it, he knew that her mind was racing in circles to find an answer that would satisfy him yet not compromise herself, and he waited, feeling a twinge of amusement, to hear what would emerge. That of course was true love. To understand that the beloved was flawed, imperfect, yet still to love completely. Her idea of true love was a phantom, a knight in shining armor who would ride off with her across his saddle bow. Would she ever attain the kind of maturity that saw love for what it was? He doubted it, then decided it was better that she did not. Two hoary-headed sages in a family were one too many. He had enough love for both of them.

Her answer was honest: she was learning. “I truly do not know, Richard. You are not a bit like my father, so it is not in-incest… I like to see you, always… That I am carrying your child thrills me, for you will be a wonderful father.”

Suddenly he realized that there was one question he had never asked her. “D’ye want a girl or a boy?”

“A boy,” she said without hesitation. “No woman wants a girl.”

“What if it should be a girl?”

“I will love her very much, but not with hope for her.”

“Ye mean that the world belongs to men.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Ye’ll not be too disappointed if it is a girl?”

“No! We will have others, and some will be boys.”

“I can tell you a secret,” he whispered.

She leaned into him. “What?”

“ ’Tis better if the first child is a girl. Girls grow up much faster than boys, so when the first little man comes along, he will have at least two mothers-one close enough to his own age to grab him by an ear, take him to a quiet place, and drub the daylights out of him. His real mother will not be so ruthless.”

She giggled. “That sounds like experience.”

“It is. I have two elder sisters.” He stretched like a cat, elongating every fiber. “I am very glad that they are all well in Bristol, though my cousin James’s sight is a grief. Like Jem Thistlethwaite, he was the saving of me. I never suffered the illnesses most convicts do, especially in a gaol or on board a transport. That is why, at three-and-forty, I can labor like a much younger man. And make love to you like a much younger man. I have kept my health and vigor.”

“But you went as hungry as the rest, surely.”

“Aye, but hunger does no harm until it chews away a man’s muscles beyond repair, and my muscles I suppose had more substance than most. Besides, the hunger never lasted quite long enough. There were oranges and fresh meat in Rio-meals on a Thames dredge-an occasional bowl of fish-chowder-a man named Stephen Donovan who fed me fresh buttered rolls stuffed with Captain Hunter’s cress. That is luck, Kitty,” Richard said, smiling, his eyes half-closed. Today seemed to be a day for memories.

“I cannot agree,” she said. “I would rather call it some quality many men do not possess, but you do. So does Stephen. And I always fancied Major Ross had it too, from listening to you and Stephen talk. Nat and Olivia Lucas both have it. I do not. That is why I am glad ’tis you is the father of my children. They have a chance of inheriting more than I am.”

He picked up her hand and kissed it. “That is a very pretty compliment, wife. Perhaps ye do love me just a little.”

She huffed a sound of exasperation and turned to look at the tables and chairs, strewn with books. One chair held the hat box. “When will you deliver Lizzie’s hat?” she asked.

“I think you should deliver it and heal the breach.”

“I could not!”

“I will not.”

The question of the hat was still undecided when they went to bed, Kitty so tired that she fell asleep before she could make overtures of love.

Richard dozed for two hours, his half-dreams a parade of old faces transformed and distorted by the years between. Then he woke and slid out of the bed, donned trowsers and stepped outside softly. Tibby had been joined by Fatima and Charlotte by Flora; the two pups and two kittens stirred until Richard hushed them. They were curled together inside a piece of hollow pine Richard had thought an ideal kennel; more dogs and cats having the run of the house would discourage them from ratting. MacTavish was a law unto himself, too late to change his habits now. And he was still the sole male, ruler of the roost.

The moon was full and rising into the eastern sky, snuffing out the blazing stars as its cold pale brilliance poured upward; one could read by it easily when it was overhead. Not a cloud in the sky and the only sounds the gurgle and gush of the spring, water pelting away downhill, a great murmur from pines, the skreek-skreek-skreek of a pair of white fairy terns in black silhouette against the silvered heavens. He lifted his head and inhaled the night, the clean purity of it, the comfort in its loneliness, the distance, the utter peace.

On Sunday after divine service he would write to his father, to the Cousins James and Jem Thistlethwaite to tell them that he had managed to make a home for himself in this southern immensity. He had hewn a niche, helped by a little gold, for which he had to thank them. But gold or no gold, he had hewn it with his own hands and his own will. Norfolk Island was home now.

In the meantime there was a box to examine before Kitty and Joey Long took it into their heads to chop it up for kindling or use it to hold mulch for the garden. Rather than walk up the cleft, he walked down it; Joey’s tiny house was just inside the Queensborough road boundary of Morgan’s Run along the edge of the track down to the main house. Joey and MacGregor were his sentinels, his first line of defense in case of predators. Not that he expected any yet. But who knew how many and what kind of convicts His Excellency would send here as his task over there in New South Wales grew ever harder?

Having found a cleared patch in the moonlight he began to attack the box with a chisel and a small hammer, tapping quietly; sure enough, once the heavy border was removed, the space between inside and outside skins sprang into sight as white lint wadding. Not many minutes later the box was in pieces and he had amassed £100 in gold. Removing his trowsers, he piled the coins into their middle, gathered up the fragments of wood, put the trowsers on top of the pile, and walked back to his house. Kitty had said it was not luck. For himself, he was never sure whether he had luck or the grace of God. Though was there any difference?

When building his house he had thought of this eventuality; around the back and against the western slope he had randomly chosen one stone pier and constructed it with a hollow center. No one knew, and no one would know. Retaining twenty of the coins, he put the other eighty into his hiding place, then padded silently inside and into bed. Kitty murmured, purred; MacTavish’s tail thumped against the blanket. Richard patted the dog and folded Kitty’s back into his front, stroked her flank and closed his eyes.

The hat box was still on the chair when Richard went to work in the morning; it sat reproaching Kitty as she moved about the room, dusting, washing, tidying books, preparing the ingredients for a cold lunch; too hot to eat the main meal in the heat of the day, and perhaps if she took Joey and walked into Sydney Town she could find Stephen, persuade him to join them for a hot supper.

Oh, how thoughtful Richard was! The remains of the box were stacked in the kindling heap to one side of the front door, chopped to precisely the right size to start the stove fire-too hot to light it now, she would wait until mid afternoon, then bake bread. This typical kindness from him gave her pause; already outside, she turned back to look into the room and at the hat box. Sighing, she went back to pick it up and started the walk to the Queensborough road. Joey was chopping pines; Richard was determined that he would clear enough of Morgan’s Run to plant several acres of wheat and Indian corn next June, and though Joey could not saw, he could fell timber competently. MacGregor warned him of her advent-no danger of dropping a tree in the wrong place with MacGregor on duty!

“Joey, do you mind walking me to Sydney Town?”

Puffing, the simple soul looked at her with adoration and mutely shook his head. He snatched his shirt off a nearby branch and donned it eagerly, then the pair of them set off toward Mount George, MacGregor and MacTavish frisking around them.

“My own errand is to Government House,” she said, “and while I do that, Joey, find Mr. Donovan and ask him to come to supper this evening. I will meet you here. Do not dawdle!”

Government House was in the throes of huge alterations and additions. Men were crawling all over it, Nat Lucas was barking instructions and the others were very quick to obey. It was a stupid convict took his time over work for the Commandant himself, and surprisingly few convicts were stupid. These renovations were of a temporary nature; Commander King had still not made up his mind whether Government House should remain on its present knoll or move to the other knoll where Richard said the original gardens had been. Never having been to Government House, Kitty did not know whether as a convict she ought to find a back door, or whether all traffic went to the front door, facing the sea.

“Who are ye looking for, Kit-kat?” Nat Lucas asked.

“Mrs. Richard Morgan.”

“In the kitchen house. Around there,” he said, pointing and giving her a wink.

She walked along the side of the main house to the separate building which housed the kitchen.

“Mrs. Morgan?”

The stiff, dark-clad figure hovering over the stove turned, the black eyes widened; a young convict girl peeling potatoes at the work table laid down her knife and stared with mouth adenoidally agape. Staggering a little, which seemed peculiar to Kitty, Lizzie walked to the table and gave the girl a thump. “Take that outside and do it!” she snapped. Then, to Kitty, “What d’ye want, madam?”

“I have brought you a hat.”

“A hat?”

“Yes. Would you not like to see? It is very splendid.”

Kitty looked absolutely blooming, belly protruding a little, fair skin shaded by a wide sun hat made of a local strappy grass (the convict transports had contained far more milliners than farmers), fair hair straggling in fetching wisps from beneath its brim, fair lashes and brows giving her face a slightly bald look that somehow managed not to be a disfigurement. Plain she was, but plain she definitely was not. Gossip had told Lizzie that Kitty Clark was beautifully shaped these days, was far from the thin scrawn she had been when Mrs. Richard Morgan had marched up the garden path. Well, now she could see for herself, which was no comfort. Nor was that bulging belly. Waves of sorrow and disappointment swept over her-where was that bottle of medicine?

“Sit down,” Lizzie said curtly, then gulped furtively from a medicine bottle, its contents catching her breath.

Kitty held out the hat box, smiling gravely. “Please take it.”

Taking it, Lizzie sat on a chair, untied the tapes, lifted the lid. “Ohhhh!” she sighed, exactly as Kitty had. “Ohhhh!” Out it came to be examined, held, gazed at raptly. Then, so unexpectedly that Kitty jumped, Lizzie Lock burst into noisy tears.

Calming her took some time; in an odd way she reminded Kitty of Betty Riley, the tough older servant girl who had led all four of them to disaster. “It is all right, Lizzie, it is all right,” she crooned as she stroked and patted.

There was a small spouted kettle on the hob and an old china teapot on the table. Tea. That was what Lizzie needed, tea. A search unearthed a jar of tea and a jar containing a huge rock of sugar together with a sugar hammer; Kitty made the tea, let it steep, chopped off some sugar, then poured the steaming liquid into a china cup and saucer-how well equipped Government House was! China cups and saucers in the kitchen! Kitty had not seen a cup and saucer since she had been arrested, now here were two cups and two saucers-matching!-in a mere kitchen. What sort of treasures did Government House itself contain? How many servants were there to wait on Mr. and Mrs. King? Was there tea on demand without fear of its running out, were there china bowls and plates and soup tureens? Pictures on the walls? Chamber pots?

“I have just been given my notice,” Lizzie managed to say through hiccoughs and tears. “Mr. King has just told me.”

“Here, drink your tea. Come, ’twill make you feel much more the thing, truly,” coaxed Kitty, stroking the black hair.

Lizzie mopped her eyes with her apron and stared at her nemesis ruefully. “Ye’re really a nice little girl,” she said, the tea beginning to warm the other contents of her stomach.

“I hope I am,” said Kitty, sipping daintily. Why did tea taste so wonderful sipped from a china cup? “Do you like your hat?”

“As ye said, it is a very splendid hat. Major Ross would have whistled and told me I looked like a queen in it, but Mrs. King will only try to be complimentary. She is a very pleasant person with excellent manners, so I cannot say she is to blame for my going. Commander King is responsible. And that Chapman fellow, the crafty booby! An eye to the main chance, that one! Already scheming how to make money out of the place. Brings out the worst in Mrs. King too-which the Commander is starting to realize, let me tell you! I predict that Willy Chapman will shortly be packed off to Queensborough or Phillipsburgh. But Commander King don’t like me, Kitty, and that is a fact I cannot get around. Too vulgar for the likes of Mrs. King, is how he put it. Vulgar! Me? He don’t know what vulgar is! Said he don’t want his children to hear me-sometimes I forget myself and out pops a fuck or two. But never a cunt, Kitty, never a cunt, I swear! It ain’t my fault-blame gaol. Never used to swear and curse.”

“I understand completely,” said Kitty fervently.

“Anyway, he cannot just throw me out, he will have to do the decent thing by me,” growled Lizzie, thrusting out her chin. “I am a free woman, not a convict. And d’ye know who he is going to put in my place?” she demanded, outraged.

“No, who?”

“Mary Rolt. Mary Rolt! Says cunt as well as fuck, I do assure you! Huh! ’Tis all because Mary Rolt fucks Sam King the marine, and he is settling here, and all that. King. Same name, y’see. Makes anyone better in the Commandant’s eyes. Huh!” She sipped a little more tea and stared at the hat. “I wish I had a mirror.”

“Mrs. King must have one.”

“Oh, she does, a big one in her bedroom.”

“Then ask her if you may look. If she has excellent manners and is kind, then she will not say no.”

“It is a fine hat, ain’t it?”

“The finest I have ever seen. Mr. Thistlethwaite said in his letter that it is all the crack-exactly what duchesses and other high ladies are wearing. He says you cannot tell high-born women from whores these days-” She broke off, horrified at where her tongue had led her, but Lizzie was staring fixedly at the medicine bottle. “Perhaps,” Kitty rushed on, “the Kings might keep you on as cook? Richard told me that Major Ross said your cooking was the best he had ever tasted.”

“I,” said Lizzie haughtily, “have other ideas.”

Kitty’s heart soared; some of it was rawness, some of it was shock, but underneath both Lizzie Lock was already springing back. Of course she was! So do we all, we convict women. We have not come this far and survived without being able to spring back. Lizzie is tough. Not hard, just tough. She has had to be. No doubt everybody free will prate their admiration for Mrs. King’s courage in coming so far and putting up with inconveniences, but Mrs. King has never been a convict woman and Mrs. King will never be as admirable in my eyes as Lizzie Lock. Or Mary Rolt. Or Kitty Clark. So there, Mrs. King! said Kitty to herself. Drink your tea from your fine china cups after the convict servant girl has made it and served it to you! Pin on your course clouts after the convict servant girl has washed your blood from them and hung them out to dry! You may be everything a prison commandant’s wife should be, but you are not our equal.

“What ideas do you have?” she asked.

“I have gotten over hating ye for stealing Richard,” Lizzie said, getting up to refill the pot, chip off a bit more sugar, pour more tea.

“Truly I did not steal him!”

“I know that! He stole you, more like. Peculiar, ain’t they? Men, I mean. As far as most of them are concerned, keep the belly and what hangs off it well fed, and they are happy. But Richard was always different, right from when he stalked into Gloucester Gaol like a prince of the blood-you know, sort of cool and royal and quiet. Never needed to raise his voice. Mind you, he is a big man, ha ha ha! Eh, Kitty? Ain’t that right?”

“Yes,” said Kitty, blushing.

“Took on Ike Rogers-an even bigger man-without the blink of an eye. Faced him down. Yet I heard that later on they was real good friends. That is Richard. I am in love with him, but he was never in love with me. No hope. No hope.” Voice teary, Mrs. Richard Morgan got up again to tip the contents of the medicine bottle into her tea. “There! That will ginger it up a treat. Like some?”

“No, thank you. What are your plans, Lizzie?” Kitty realized that whatever Lizzie had gurgled into her tea had been sipped at for some time, probably since the moment Mr. King had walked out after giving her her notice.

“I am thinking of Thomas Sculley, a marine just arrived back to take up land here. Not far from Morgan’s Run. Quiet sort of man, a bit like Richard in that respect. Don’t want no children, but. He ain’t got a woman, and he made me an offer after tasting my banana fritters in rum. I turned him down, but now that the Commandant says I have to go, I may as well move in with Sculley.”

“It will be nice to have you as a neighbor,” Kitty said with sincerity, preparing to take her leave.

“When is the baby due?”

“About another two and a half months.”

“Thankee for bringing the hat. Mr. Thistlethwaite, ye said?”

“Yes, Mr. James Thistlethwaite.”

A great deal more at peace, Kitty pattered off to find Joey and the two dogs waiting for her at the foot of Mount George.

“You were quite right to insist that I take the hat,” she said to Richard as she sliced their own salt pork thinly, spooned gravy over it made with lots of onions, and piled potatoes and fresh beans onto the pewter platters. “Lizzie and I will become friends.” She giggled. “The two Mrs. Richard Morgans.” She put a plate in front of Stephen and another in front of Richard, then carried her own to the table and sat down. “Commander King gave the poor thing her notice this morning.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Stephen, cutting busily with his knife until everything could be scooped up with the spoon. How good it would be to have a fork! “King is a strict husband, wants to shelter his wife from all undignified or sordid phenomena, and Lizzie Lock is definitely an undignified phenomenon. A pity, really. Mrs. King is a tall, gangling sort of creature who does not present as particularly prudish, especially when Willy Chapman is with her.” He pulled a face. “Now there’s a sordid phenomenon, William Neate Chapman. A natural leech.”

“They have china cups and saucers,” said Kitty, busy eating for two, “and I drank my tea out of one. Since there are china cups and saucers even in the kitchen, I think that Mrs. King must be very genteel.”

“I would gladly give ye china cups and saucers of your own, Kitty,” said Richard, “but it is more than a question of money.”

Attention caught, Stephen looked up. “Exactly,” he agreed. “For a long time to come, I suspect, the closest thing Norfolk Island will have to a shop is a stall set up on the straight beach by some ship’s captain. Unfortunately such stalls do not contain fribbles like china tea sets and silver forks. ’Tis always the same kettles, stoves, calico, cheap paper, ink.”

“We need kettles, stoves and calico more than fribbles,” said Richard, God the Fathering. “There are clothes occasionally.”

“Aye, but I notice they never appeal to the women,” Stephen objected.

“That is because men chose them,” said Kitty, smiling. “They always think women would rather buy clothes than china or window curtains, then they choose the wrong clothes anyway.”

“Ye’d rather have window curtains?” Stephen asked, wondering to himself why Kitty seemed not to care that she couldn’t marry Richard. “The two Mrs. Richard Morgans”-said without a qualm.

“Oh, yes.” Kitty put her spoon down to gaze about the living room, which was coming on; the interior walls were all up and most of them were polished, there were now several shelves of books one beneath the other, and she had found a flowering plant to put in a battered mug. “I love my home best. Rugs and curtains would be truly wonderful, and vases, and pictures on the walls. If I had embroidery silks, I could work tapestry cushions for the chairs and samplers for the walls.”

“One day,” Richard promised. “One day. We will just have to hope that one day a more enterprising ship’s captain comes along to sell lamps and oil, embroidery silks, china teasets and vases. Government Stores are not very imaginative. Slops, shoes, wooden bowls, pewter spoons and mugs, blankets, dippers and tallow candles.”

After the meal was done the men settled to talk of what the flimsies and gazettes said, then drifted to more important things like wheat, clearing, sawing, lime, and the changes Commander King was implementing.

“For all his fine talk, he has not managed to cut punishments down,” said Richard. “Eight hundred lashes, for pity’s sake! Far kinder to hang a man. The most Major Ross ever levied were five hundred, the bulk forgiven, and I note that the surgeons are not allowed to intervene as freely as they used to.”

“Be fair, Richard. The fault lies with the New South Wales Corps, who are brutes commanded by brutes. I wish they would not single out the poor Irish, but they do.”

“Well, the Irish come from outside the Pale and few of them speak English. The soldiers insist that they do, but will not admit it. How can they work when they do not understand their instructions? Yet I have found one man among them with whom it is a pleasure to saw-the best partner since Billy Wigfall. Cheerful, obliging-does not understand a word I say to him any more than I him. Put a rip saw between us, and we are in utter communion.”

“What is his name?”

“I have no idea. Flippety O’Flappety, it may as well be. I call him Paddy, and give him a good lunch of bread and vegetables at the sawpit. Cold meat too. A man cannot saw without plenty of food, I will have to reinforce that with Mr. King.”

Suddenly Kitty laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, Richard, do stop talking about your sawpits! Stephen has big news.”

Richard stared. “Do you? Tell us!”

“King summoned me this morning and informed me that I am to be the official pilot for Norfolk Island. I think he and Major Ross must have had a talk about the number of longboats, cutters and jollyboats which have been wrecked coming across the reef against orders and signals not to attempt to land. Or even defying advice not to return to their ships from the beach. So from now on I and I alone have the ordering of it, no matter what any ship’s master might have to say on the subject. My word is law-and that includes a ship in the roads-when she may bear in, or go to Cascade, or Ball Bay. I am pilot! Had I been pilot when Sirius was here, she would never have gone on the reef.”

“Stephen, that is truly splendid!” cried Kitty, eyes shining.

Richard wrung his hand. “That is not all, is it?”

“There is more, I admit.” He looked lit from within, a fine man not many years past thirty with a whole new world spread before him. “I am in the Royal Navy with a temporary rank of midshipman, but as soon as Commander King can get permission from His Excellency I am to be commissioned a lieutenant-for rank, probably to some ship permanently in Portsmouth harbor. I will be staying here, however, so do not panic. When a genuine lieutenancy comes up, then I am afraid I will have to go. Not an immediate prospect. Meanwhile I am pilot, shortly ye’ll have to address me as Lieutenant Donovan, and in my spare time I have been placed in charge of men clearing forest on Mount George, so I am out of that wretched stone quarry.”

“This calls for a small celebration,” said Richard, rising to dig behind a bookshelf. Out came a bottle. “’Tis my own rum-Morgan’s special blend. Major Ross gave me a good supply of it when he left, but I have not tasted it. So you and I will see what the local rum is like after it has aged a while in a cask with some decent Bristol spirits to help it along.”

“Here is to you, Richard.” Stephen lifted his mug and sipped, expecting to flinch or at least grimace. Surprise spread over his face, he took a full mouth of it. “Richard, not bad at all!” The mug was tipped in Kitty’s direction. “And here is to Kitty and the baby, whose godfather I demand to be. May she be a girl and may ye call her Kate.”

“Why Kate?” asked Kitty.

“Because in this part of the world ’tis better to be a shrew than a mouse.” Stephen grinned. “Do not blanch so, little mother! Some man will tame her.”

“What if it is a boy?” the little mother enquired.

Richard answered. “My first boy will be William Henry, and he will always be called all of it. William Henry.”

“William Henry… I like it,” said Kitty, pleased.

Head bent over his mug, Stephen concealed a sigh. So she did not know. Would she ever know? Richard, tell her! Admit her as an equal, I beg you!

“I have news too, Lieutenant-and may ye be an Admiral of the Blue one day,” Richard announced, toasting Stephen. “Tommy Crowder has been ordered by Mr. King to start a register of land and land owners. I am to go down in it as Richard Morgan-free man-possessed of twelve acres in his own right and not by power of the Crown. I am also to have ten acres at Queensborough on part of the treeless area. That will come next June or thereabouts as a grant from the Crown. So I will grow wheat on Morgan’s Run and Indian corn at Queensborough to feed my pigs.” He lifted his mug. “I drink a second toast to ye, Lieutenant Donovan, for all your many kindnesses through the years. May ye command a hundred guns in a big sea battle against the French before ye become an Admiral of the Blue. Kitty, turn your back and do not peek.”

The twenty gold coins were slipped into Stephen’s palm; he raised his brows, then put them into the pockets of his canvas jacket. When Kitty was told that she could look, she found them laughing, for what reason she did not know.

1792 came in dry, though there had been the usual rain around Christmas, luckily just after reaping had ended. Kitty grew heavier, but she was not one of those women who looked as if they might burst; she carried small and could keep busy without too much extra effort.

“You know, Richard, it truly ought to be you having this poor baby!” she said to him, exasperated. “You fuss and cluck so!”

“I do think that ye ought to go into Arthur’s Vale and stay with Olivia Lucas,” he said anxiously. “Morgan’s Run is isolated.”

“I am not going to stay with Olivia Lucas!”

“What if the baby comes earlier than ye expect?”

“Richard, I have had a long talk with Olivia-I know all about it! Believe me, I will have plenty of time to let Joey know and let you know and let Olivia know. This is a first baby. They do not come in a hurry,” she said firmly.

“You are sure?”

“Truly,” she said in the voice of a dying martyr, walked to a chair lithely, sat down without making a difficulty of it, and looked at him very seriously. “I have some questions to ask you, Richard, and I insist upon some answers,” she said.

An air of authority surrounded her; fascinated, Richard could not take his eyes off her. “Then ask,” he said, sitting down where his face was on full display to her. “Go ahead, ask.”

“Richard, shortly I am to have your child, but I know next to nothing about your life. What little I know is thanks to Lizzie Lock. What she told me amounts to a pinpoint, and I think I am entitled to know more than Lizzie Lock. Tell me about the daughter who would be my age now.”

“Her name was Mary, and she is buried next to her mother in the burying ground of St. James’s, Bristol. She died of the smallpox when she was three. One reason why I would rather my children grew up here. The worst we have to worry about is dysentery.”

“Did you have other children?”

“A son, William Henry. He drowned.”

Her face crumpled. “Oh, Richard!”

“Do not grieve, Kitty. It was all a very long time ago, and in a different country. My children will not grow up with the same sort of risks.”

“There are risks here, and drowning is the most common one.”

“Believe me, the way my son drowned could not happen here. His was a death happens in cities, not on small islands where we all know each other. There are bad folk here and we do not mix with them, but when a school is organized, we parents will know a great deal more about the schoolmasters than Bristol parents do. William Henry died because of a schoolmaster.” Head to one side, he looked at her quizzically. “Any more questions?”

“How did your Bristol wife die?”

“Of an apoplexy, luckily before William Henry went. She did not suffer at all.”

“Oh, Richard!”

“There is no need to be sad, my love. You are why it happened, I am sure of it. In that I was not meant to know the joy of a real family in Bristol, where I never knew the joy of living in my own house. All I ask from you is that ye keep a small corner of your heart for me as the father of your children. That and the children will be enough.”

Her mouth parted, she almost said that he had more than a small corner of her heart, but she closed it with the words unspoken. To say them would be a promise, a commitment that she was not sure she would be able to honor. She liked him enormously, and, liking him, did not think it decent to imply that he was more than he truly was. No music in her heart, no wings on her soul. Did he give her those, it might be different. Did he give her those, she would be able to call him “my love.”

February was blowy and wild, hurricanes lurking. At least the crops were all in and the grain under shelter; a harvest big enough to feed every person in Norfolk Island, though there would be none to spare for New South Wales. Just a lot of lime, a little timber.

On the 15th of February, Richard hurried home, late and very anxious because the Lieutenant-Governor had delayed him with more questions than Kitty could think of in a week. Kitty was not yet due, but the head had engaged, so Olivia Lucas had told him, and Joey Long was nobody’s idea of a midwife. Comforted by Olivia’s and Kitty’s assurances that first babies did not come in a hurry, he headed down the track to the house. No smoke issued from the tall stone chimney; his pace quickened. Even at almost nine months, she still insisted upon baking her own bread.

Not a sound.

“Kitty!” he called, bounding up the three steps to the door.

“I am here,” came a small voice.

Heart drumming a tattoo against his rib cage, Richard burst through the door, taking in the room with a single glance. Not a sign of her. In the bedroom-Christ! It had begun!

She was sitting on the bed propped against two pillows, her face turned toward him with a beatific smile. “Richard, meet your daughter,” she said. “Say good evening to Kate.”

His knees sagged but he managed to reach the bed, sit on its edge heavily. “Kitty!”

“Look at her, Richard. Is she not beautiful?”

A pair of work-scarred hands offered him a tightly wrapped bundle-oh, it was not fair that his hands should be better cared for by far than hers! He took the bundle and delicately pushed the swaddling away from a tiny folded face, its mouth a perfect O, its puffy eyelids shut, its skin too dark to be red, surmounted by a shock of thick black hair. The ocean of love opened and swallowed him whole; he sank without a protest back into that magical realm, leaned forward to kiss the weeny creature upon her forehead, felt the tears come.

“I do not understand! Ye were so well when I left for the afternoon. Ye said nothing.”

“There was nothing to say. I was truly well. It happened all in a muddle, I had no warning. My water broke, I had a gripey pain, and then I felt her head. So I spread a clean sheet on the floor, squatted down and had her. The whole did not take above a quarter of an hour. As soon as the afterbirth came I found some thread, tied the cord and cut it with my scissors. She was screaming-oh, what a voice! I cleaned her, tidied up the floor, put the sheet in to soak, and bathed myself.” Bursting with pride, she beamed complacently. “I truly do not know what all the fuss is about.” She pushed her calico house shift aside and displayed one exquisite breast, its dark red nipple beaded. “My milk has come in already too, though Olivia said to wait a while before giving suck. Am I not clever, Richard?”

Careful not to squash the bundle, Richard leaned forward to kiss her reverently upon the lips. His eyes worshiping her, he brushed the tears from his face and smiled shakily. “Very, very clever, wife. Ye did it as if ye’d done it twenty times.”

“I have no scales so I cannot weigh her, but she seems to be a good size-quite long too. She looks a Morgan, not a Clark.”

He squinted at Kate’s face and tried to verify this, but could not. “She is very beautiful, wife, that is all I can see.” After that he looked more closely at Kitty. She seemed a little tired, but glowed so radiantly that he could not believe she stood in any danger. “Ye’re well? Honestly?”

“Truly. Just weary. She slipped out so easily that I am not even uncomfortable. Olivia recommended that I squat. That is the natural way, she says.” Kitty took Kate back to look at her again. “Richard!” she exclaimed, her tone reproachful. “She is your image-how can you not see it?”

“Are ye happy to call her Catherine, like yourself?”

“Yes. Two Catherines-one Kitty, one Kate. We will call our next girl Mary.”

He could not help it; he wept until Kitty put the baby down and took him into her arms.

“I love you, Kitty. I love you more than life itself.”

Again her lips parted to say something offering him herself. Then Kate yelled lustily. So instead she asked, “Will you listen to that? I think Stephen is right, we have a shrew to rear. And that settles it. I am going to give her suck.”

She slid both arms out of the shift and let it drop to her waist, unwrapped the little creature and held her naked against her own skin with a sensuous pleasure that devastated Richard. The O of mouth fastened around the nipple offered it; Kitty emitted a huge sigh of utter pleasure. “Oh, Kate, this makes you truly mine!”

It had never occurred to Kitty to doubt one fact: that Richard would be a wonderful father. What surprised her was his complete surrender to fatherhood. So many of her women friends and acquaintances complained that their men were wary of being seen as unmanning themselves if they had too much to do with the children or domestic chores. To carry a tired child was permissible, to kiss and cuddle a small one was permissible, but nothing to what they deemed excess. Whereas Richard simply did not care what any of his men friends thought of him. If one was visiting, he would cheerfully change Kate’s dirty clouts, did not even care if he was discovered washing them or hanging them out to dry. And apparently his masculine image did not suffer in their eyes. Or if it did, he never noticed. Or if he noticed, he did not consider such opinions worth valuing. In one respect he was lucky: he did not look like a milksop. Had he, things might have been different for him.

He worked too hard because he tried to fit more into less time, always eager to be off home to see Kitty and Kate. When Kitty timidly suggested that perhaps he could do less sawing and more farming, he looked horrified-no, no! His job as supervisor of sawyers was well paid, and every note of hand he accumulated on the Government books was an insurance against the future of his children. He would manage to saw and farm, he was not dead yet.

Kate was six months old at the moment when Tommy Crowder came to the second sawpit looking for Richard, enquiring when Richard intended putting baby Kate on the Government Stores list.

“I can keep my wife and child off the Stores,” said Richard with dignity.

“Commander King insists that they be on the Stores. Come to my office and we will do it now.” Off trotted Crowder, not pausing to see if Richard followed.

“I do not see why my wife and child should be on the Stores,” said Richard stubbornly in Crowder’s tiny office. “I am the head of the family.”

“That is just it, Richard. Ye’re not the head of a family. Kitty is a convict woman and a spinster. That is why she is still on the Stores list and her baby must go on it too. I simply need ye here as a witness,” Crowder explained.

Richard’s eyes had gone completely grey and dark. “Kitty is my wife. Kate is my daughter.”

“Catherine Clark, spinster… Yes, here she is,” Crowder burbled on, finding the right line on the right page in his big register. He picked up a quill, dipped it in his inkwell and added, speaking aloud as he wrote, “Catherine Clark, child.” He looked up brightly. “There! That is done and ye’ve seen me do it. Thank you, Richard.” He put the quill down.

“The child’s name is Catherine Morgan. I acknowledge her.”

“No, ’tis Clark.”

“Morgan.”

Tommy Crowder was not a very perceptive man; he spent too much of himself upon becoming invaluable to people who could help him get ahead. But suddenly, looking up into eyes as stormy as Sydney Bay during a squall, he felt the blood leave his face. “Do not blame me, Richard,” he stammered. “I am not your judge, I am merely a servant of the Norfolk Island Government. Commander King wants everything”-he simpered-“shipshape and Bristol fashion. As a Bristolian, ye should be pleased.” He was babbling now, could not stop babbling. “I have to put the baby on my lists, and I have to ask ye to witness the fact that I have. Her name is Clark.”

“It is not fair!” Richard said to Stephen later, fists clenched. “That trained monkey in Government service wrote my daughter’s name in his fucken register as Catherine Clark. And rubbed my nose in it by making me watch.”

Stephen eyed the muscles tensing under the skin of Richard’s arms and shivered involuntarily. “For God’s sake, Richard, hold your temper! It is not Crowder’s fault, nor is it King’s fault. I agree that it is not fair, but there is nothing ye can do about it. Kitty is not your wife. Kitty cannot be your wife. She still has some years of her sentence left to serve, which means that the Government is entitled to do what it wills with her. And Kate’s surname officially is Clark.”

“There is one thing I can do,” said Richard through his teeth. “I can murder Lizzie Lock.”

“Ye’re not capable of that, so stop talking as if ye are.”

“While Lizzie lives, my daughter is a bastard. So will the other children I sire on Kitty be bastards.”

“Look at it this way,” Stephen coaxed, “Lizzie Lock is well settled with Tom Sculley, but Tom Sculley is learning fast that he is not a farmer, hence his move from grain to poultry. Sooner or later he will sell out and quit the island. From what the marine free settler gossip tells me, he says he wants to visit Cathay and Bengal before he is too old. D’ye think for one moment that he will sail for the Orient without Lizzie Lock on his arm?”

Closing his eyes, Richard slumped despondently. “I am trying to look at it your way. Ye mean that if Lizzie departs for the Orient, I can wait a while and then pretend I am a single man.”

“Exactly. If necessary, I will pay some furtive forger in a London alley to use some Wampoa merchant’s address and write a touching letter to the Gentlemen Sheriffs of Gloucester explaining that Mrs. Richard Morgan, née Elizabeth Lock, has passed away in Macao, and does Gloucester know of any relatives? That will prove that she is dead, after which ye can marry Kitty.”

“Sometimes, Stephen, ye’re the bitter end.” But the ploy worked; Richard opened his eyes and managed a laugh. “Does this fine consoling speech containing references to London alleys mean that ye’re leaving us soon?”

“I have had no word beyond the lieutenancy, but ’twill happen.”

“I will miss ye something terrible.”

“And I you.” Stephen threw his arm about Richard’s shoulders and propelled him gently in the direction of home. Good, his rage had cooled. Superficially at least. God rot the Reverend Johnson!

“It affects him far more than it does me,” said Kitty when Stephen related what had happened. Richard had gone off to the bath pool he had made, there to wash himself clean of the sawpits and Thomas Restell Crowder. “I am sorry that Kate’s name is not Morgan, but who could deny that she is a Morgan? What is marriage anyway? At least half of us convict women are not officially married, but that does not make us any less wives. I do not repine, Stephen, truly I do not.”

“Richard is a churchgoing believer in God, Kitty, and thus he finds it extremely difficult to deal with the fact that his progeny are bastards in the eyes of the Church of England.”

“They will not be bastards after Lizzie dies, and she is old,” said Kitty comfortably.

How to explain to her that marriage later could never remove the slur? Stephen decided not to bother trying. Instead he grabbed at Kate. “Hello, my peach! My darling angel!”

“Kate is not an angel-she is exactly what you called her, a shrew. Strong willed! Goodness, Stephen, she is but six months old and already she rules us with a rod of iron.”

“Nay,” said Stephen, holding the mite’s serious stare with smiling eyes, then kissing her on both plump cheeks, “she needs no rod of iron to rule Richard. A wisp of thread or a feather would do equally well. Is that not so, my Kate? Where is your Petruchio, I wonder? In what guise will he come?” He handed Kate back.

“Petruchio?”

“The Shakespearean gentleman who tamed Kate the shrew. Take no notice, ’tis just my whimsy.”

A silence fell. Stephen contented himself with contemplating this Norfolk Island madonna, a study in rag-quality calico. No matter where her life may have led her, Kitty would always have been best at this, mothering a child. Here was this powerful baby who ought to be filled with thundering rages, yet with Kitty for a mother she was a peach, an angel. Good tabbies have good kittens. A good tabby is our Kitty.

What else was she? Not intellectually brilliant, but not stupid by any means. The mouse who had hidden in the forest had long gone. During the two years she had lived with Richard Morgan she had blossomed into a plain-faced, fabulously seductive woman. The trouble was, did Richard have her love? Stephen was never sure because he fancied she was never sure herself. What she feels for Richard is sexual enchantment. That binds her to him, as babies do, but still… She does not see any allure in him-why, I will never know. Is it his years? Surely not! He carries them with as little effort as he saws.

“D’ye love Richard?” he asked.

Those ale-and-pepper eyes looked sad. “I do not know, Stephen. I wish I did, but I do not. I am not educated enough to make those sorts of judgments. I mean, how do you know that you love him?”

“I just do. He fills my eyes and my mind.”

“He does not do that to me.”

“Do not hurt him, Kitty, please!”

“I will not hurt him,” she said, jigging Kate on her knee, then smiled and patted his hand. “I will stick to Richard through thick and thin, Stephen. I owe it to him, and I pay my debts. That is what transportation is supposed to teach us, and I have learned all my lessons. Except that somehow I never get around to reading and writing. House and babies come first.”

When Kitty told him she was with child again, Richard was appalled. “Ye cannot be! It is too soon!”

“Not really. There will be fourteen months between them,” she said placidly. “They will fare better if they are close in age.”

“The work, Kitty! Ye’ll be old before your time!”

That made her laugh. “Gammon, Richard! I am very well, I am young, and I am looking forward to the arrival of William Henry.”

“Kitty, I was happy to wait, truly-oh, damn that word, I am picking up the habit of it!”

“Do not be angry,” she pleaded. “Olivia said that I would not fall while ever I gave Kate the breast.”

“An old wives’ tale! I should have waited.”

“Why?”

“Because another one will be too much for you.”

“I say another one will not be too much for me.” She handed Kate to Richard and picked up an empty bucket. “I am off to get water for the house.”

“Let me get it.”

Her teeth showed, her eyes blazed. “For the hundredth time, Richard Morgan, will you stop fussing and clucking? Why do you never want to give me the credit I deserve? I am the one grows the babies! I am the one says when that will be! I am the one lives in this house for all of my days and nights! I am the one decides what is too much for me and what is not! Leave me alone! Stop making all my decisions for me! Let me do as I want without forever plaguing me-this is too much, that is too little, why did I not ask you to do it-I have had enough! I am not an orphan child anymore, I am grown up enough to have babies! And if I want another one, I will have another one! You are not my lord and master, His Majesty the King is!”

She marched off with the bucket, radiating rage.

Richard sat down on the top step with Kate on his knee, both of them silenced.

“I think, daughter, that I have just been put in my place.”

Kate sat bolt upright, unsupported, and looked at her father out of speckled eyes neither William Henry’s nor Kitty’s; hers were a fawnish grey which tended to disguise the presence of the dark dots peppering them. Those who found them had looked deeply. Her beauty was manifest, though perhaps it was simply the beauty of babyhood, but her coloring, like Richard’s two dead children’s, was striking-masses of black curls, finely marked black brows, thick black lashes around those widely opened storm-hued eyes, a full red mouth and Richard’s flawless brown skin. Kitty was right, she was definitely a Morgan. A Morgan named Clark.

He writhed, cursed himself for the millionth time. All his children would be born bastards; Lizzie Lock was not going to oblige him by dying in a hurry. Of course he could not murder her, but there was no one save God to say that he was not allowed to wish her dead.

Why can we never seem to keep the threads which weave into the pattern of our lives untangled? I did not think when I went into marriage with Lizzie Lock. Or rather, I did not think of myself or the future. I pitied her, I fancied I owed her a debt-I thought like a head man and I still think like a head man. Stephen warned me, I seem to remember that, but I did not listen. The people I have harmed are my own children-the dear soul who is my heart’s wife is dismissed as my “woman.” They never even say “mistress.” The term is “woman.” A word which suggests that she has no identity, absolutely no status of any kind. A simple convenience. I can, as some men are already doing, throw her to one side without any kind of compensation to her. Sentences are up, those who have hoarded enough gold are buying their passages to England, or Cathay, or anywhere else that takes their fancy. Old faces like Joe Robinson’s are disappearing. But so many of them are leaving their women here to fend for themselves. As well that, like Major Ross, Commander King is as willing to grant a lone woman land as a lone man. These sad abandoned creatures do not need to hawk their favors around the barracks of the New South Wales Corps soldiers. What we do to women is unforgivable. They are not whores by nature. We force them to it.

Kate gurgled, smiled, revealed that she was cutting teeth. My firstborn, my daughter. My bastard. Hugging her, Richard put his lips to the unbelievable sleekness of her skin, inhaled the fresh clean smell of it, aware that Kate adored to be adored.

“Kate,” he said to her, turning her within his hands so that she faced him and could give him seductive glances-in that she took after her mother-and he could talk to her as if she understood what he was saying. “My Kate, what is to become of you? How can I ensure that ye’re never reduced to the sort of life God inflicted upon your mother? How can I turn ye from the bastard child of two convict parents into a well-schooled young lady with her pick of every young man in this part of the world?” He kissed her tiny hand, felt its fingers curl strongly around one of his. Then he snuggled her into the crook of his arm, tucked her head beneath his chin and looked into the distance, his mind filled with the dilemma of her fate.

Kitty took a long time to fetch one bucket of unneeded water. First she sat beside the spring and smoldered for a while, then held the bucket beneath the main fall to fill it, after which she set it on the ground and sat down again. Her outburst had caught her unaware, she had not realized that these resentments simmered so near the surface; her days were too busy to permit the luxury of self-examinations. The reason why her feelings had come tumbling out today was manifest: Richard did not want a second child so soon-if he wanted one at all. But these were not things in his province! God had made her to procreate and she loved procreating. The words of workhouse days and workhouse sermons rattled off as fingers were busy embroidering held meaning now. Adam may have been the first person on earth, but until Eve appeared he was an-an-an exhibit! Eve was more important than Adam. Eve made the children and a house a home.

Richard could not have it entirely for himself because he won their bread. She baked their bread! And in future, she vowed, jumping up and lifting the twenty-pound bucket with ease, he was going to have to take notice of her wishes. I am not a mouse and I am not a boot-scraper. I am a person of consequence.

The picture he presented as she walked up the path through the vegetables from the spring was, she admitted, softening, truly heart-warming. Her heart warmed. Unnoticed, she stood still to watch him with the baby, turn her to face him, talk solemn words to her, kiss her hand and gaze down on it with a face filled by love and wonder. The way he cuddled her then. The way he stared over her head into nothing.

Move, Richard, move! Kitty stood willing him to move, but he would not. The sun always set behind the house and its front lay in shadows, yet the light was absolutely clear, fell on father and child as if they had been petrified, stilled to stone. A very old memory came surging up from the depths, of the Master at the workhouse presiding over the Sunday service, sitting in his chair of state looking into nothing while the chaplain preached the sins of a flesh none of his listeners comprehended. The Master continued to stare vacantly; the chaplain ended, the orphan audience remained without stirring, the stiff and bitter spinster mistresses let their eyes patrol the ranks to make sure no girl wore an unchurchlike expression; and the Master sat gazing into the distance as if he saw a vision neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was only when the chaplain took him timidly by the shoulder that he moved. Moved to fall forward out of the chair onto the chapel flags and lie there as shapeless as the stockings half-full of sand with which the inmates were beaten so that the marks did not show.

Move, Richard, move! But he did not, while time flowed on and the child in his arm slept obliviously. Suddenly she knew that he was dead. It broke on her in an instant and drove her to her knees, the bucket falling, water cascading, the world a thing of utter silence. Even then he did not move. He was dead! He was dead!

“Richard!” she screamed, scrambling up, running.

Her cry dragged him out of his abstraction, but not in time to catch her. She was upon him in the same moment, weeping and keening, her hands plucking at his shoulders, his chest.

“Kitty! What is it, my love? What is the matter?”

She wailed and howled, tears streaming down her face, lost to all reason. When Kate joined her mother to bawl in her own key, Richard got to his feet with two demented female creatures clinging to him as to a lifeline, his head spinning. Kate he dumped in her cradle unceremoniously, where she yelled in outrage at being so cavalierly discarded; Kitty he sat in the armchair by the stove, where she sobbed as if her heart were broken. Out came the rum; fussing and clucking, he forced Kitty to drink.

“Oh, Richard, I thought you were dead!” she moaned, choking, looking up at him with eyes and nose running. “I thought you dead! I thought you dead!” She flung her arms about his hips and pushed her face against him, weeping afresh.

“Kitty, I am not dead.” He disengaged her hands, picked her out of the chair and sat down in it with her on his lap. The hem of her calico dress was the only available rag, so he took it and wiped her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her chin, her throat-the spate of tears had even soaked into the yoke of her dress. “My dearest love, I am not dead. See?” he asked, smiling tenderly. “Corpses cannot deal with fits of the vapors. Though it is nice,” he added, heart full, “to know that I am so desperately mourned. Here, have another sip of rum.”

Kate’s tantrum in the bedroom was increasing in volume, but she would get over it faster than Kitty would get over her shock, so he turned his head and shouted sternly, “Kate, hush your roars! Go to sleep!” Much to his surprise, his daughter’s howls subsided into blessed silence.

“Oh, Richard, I thought you were dead like the Master, and I could not bear it! You were dead-and you had loved me so much-and I had never understood-and I had hurt you and spurned you-and then it was too late to tell you that I love you. I love you the way you love me, more than life itself. I thought you were dead, and I did not know how to live in a world without you! I love you, Richard, I love you!”

He pushed her hair off her face, did some more work with his makeshift rag. “All my Christmases have come at once,” he said. “I know there have been a lot of tears, but why are ye so wet?”

“I lost the bucket of water, I think. Kiss me, Richard! Oh, kiss me with love and let me kiss you with love.”

Love reciprocated, they both discovered, turned lips into the thinnest possible of skins between body and spirit. From now on, thought Richard, there need be no secrets. I can tell her anything. Kitty simply knew the bliss of music in her heart and wings on her soul. Love had been there all along.

Stephen came out to see them on Kate’s first birthday, the 15th of February, 1793, bearing an amazing gift.

But it was not the gift which caused Richard, Kitty and the child to stare: Lieutenant Donovan was clad in the full glory of his Royal Navy rank-black shoes, white stockings, white breeches and waistcoat, ruffled shirt, cutaway Navy coat, a few touches of gold braid, sword by his side, wig on his head, hat tucked beneath his arm. Not merely strikingly handsome-also strikingly impressive.

“You are going!” said Kitty, eyes filling with tears.

“What a figure ye cut!” said Richard, concealing his grief with a laugh.

“The uniform came from Port Jackson-not a bad fit,” said Stephen, preening, “though the coat needs work about the shoulders. Mine are too broad.”

“Broad enough for command. Congratulations.” Richard held out his hand. “I knew there was some significance in the name of this wretched ship just arrived.”

“Aye. Kitty. I wore the uniform in honor of young Kate, I do not go immediately. Kitty will not sail for at least a week, so we still have a little time.” He pulled the wig off to reveal that he had imitated Richard and cropped his hair. “Christ, these things are hot! Meant for the English Channel, not Norfolk Island in humid Februaries.”

“Stephen, your beautiful hair!” Kitty cried, looking closer to weeping. “Oh, I loved it! I keep trying to persuade Richard to grow his, but he says it is a nuisance.”

“He is absolutely right. Since I cut mine I feel as free as a bird-except when I have to put the wig on.” He went to Kate, sitting in a high chair Richard had made, and put his parcel on its tray. “Happy birthday, dearest little godchild.”

“Ta,” she said, smiling and reaching out to touch his face. “Stevie.” She looked beyond him to Richard and beamed. “Dadda!”

Stephen kissed her and removed the parcel, which did not upset her in the least; while her father was in the same room she saw little beyond him.

“Put it away for her,” Stephen said, giving the parcel to Kitty. “’Twill be some years before she can appreciate it.”

Curious, Kitty undid the wrappings and stared in awe. “Oh, Stephen! It is beautiful!”

“I bought it from Kitty’s captain. Her name is Stephanie.”

She was a doll with a delicately painted porcelain face, eyes which had properly striped irises, minutely drawn lashes, a mop of yellow hair made from strands of silk, and she was dressed like a lady of thirty years ago in a panniered pink silk gown.

“Ye return to Port Jackson in Kitty, I gather?” Richard asked.

“Aye, and then on her to Portsmouth in June.”

They ate roast pork and then a birthday cake Kitty had managed to make feather-light on a rising ingredient no more substantial than white-of-egg beaten in a copper bowl with a whisk Richard had made her out of copper wire. He was so good with his hands, could make her anything she asked for.

The sporadic visits of ships had provided tea, real sugar, various small luxuries including Kitty’s pride and joy, a frail porcelain teaset. The unglazed windows fluttered green Bengalese cotton curtains, but pictures and forks still eluded her. Never mind, never mind. William Henry was perhaps three months from his birth; she knew he was William Henry. Mary would have to wait until the next time-not as long a wait as Richard would choose, but never mind, never mind. Children were all she had to give him. There could never be too many; Norfolk Island had its dangers too. Last year poor Nat Lucas, chopping down a pine, watched in horror as it fell with a monstrous roar upon Olivia, baby William in her arms and her twin girls clinging to her skirts. Olivia and William had escaped almost unharmed, but Mary and Sarah died instantly. Yes, of children there must be many. One mourned their passing dreadfully, yet thanked God for those still living.

Her life was filled with happiness, for no better reason than that she loved and was loved, that her daughter was bursting with good health and the son growing inside her drove her mad with his incessant kicking. Oh, she would miss Stephen! Though not, she knew, one-tenth as much as Richard would. Still, these things happened. Nothing remained the same, everything kept marching to somewhere else that was a mystery until it arrived on the doorstep. Stephen was sailing in her all the way to England, and that meant much. Kitty would keep him safe, Kitty would skim the waves like a petrel.

“May we have Tobias?” she asked.

The mobile brows flew up, the vivid blue eyes twinkled. “Part from Tobias? Not likely, Kitty. Tobias is a Navy cat, he sails with me wherever I go. I have trained him to think of me as his place.”

“Will you visit Major Ross?”

“Definitely.”

Richard waited to ask his burning question until he strolled up the cleft with Stephen toward the Queensborough road. “Will ye do me a favor, Stephen?”

“Anything, ye know that. Would ye like me to see your father, Cousin James-the-druggist?”

“If ye’ve time, not otherwise. I want ye to carry a letter from me to Jem Thistlethwaite in Wimpole Street, London, and give it to him in person. I will never see him again, but I would like someone who knows this Richard Morgan to vouch for him.”

“It shall be done.” At the white boundary stone Stephen took the wig and clapped it on with a rueful look at the grinning Richard. “Ye have a week to write your letter. Kitty is in the roads until I say otherwise.”

With the advent of the Reverend Mr. Bain as resident chaplain in Norfolk Island, the pressure to attend Sunday service had eased a little. Commander King insisted that every felon be present, so if all the free came as well, the crush was dreadful. Felons were deemed to need God’s attention more than did the free.

Knowing therefore that his face would not be missed if he missed service on the morrow, Richard warned Kitty that he would be up late on Saturday night writing a letter to Mr. Thistlethwaite, and would sleep on when morning came. Delighted that he would gain a few extra hours of rest (writing a letter was not like sawing a log, after all), Kitty took herself off to bed.

Richard lifted the oil lamp off its shelf with great care; it had been bought at the same stall as the teaset, and cost more because it was accompanied by a fifty-gallon keg of whale oil. His use of it was sparing-sheer weariness did not permit nightly reading-but possessing it had meant that he could pore over the treasure trove of books Jem Thistlethwaite had sent in the only leisure activity did not make him feel a traitor to his family. Kitty, he understood now, would never learn to read and write because neither was important to her. The sole fount of knowledge in their house was he, therefore he had to read.

Paper bathed in a golden glow from the two-wicked lamp, he dipped one of his steel pens into the inkwell and began to write with scant hesitation; what he wanted to say had already been rehearsed in his mind over and over again.

“Jem, this letter is borne by the best man I have ever known, and the only consolation I have in losing him is that you will come to know and love him. Somehow we have trodden the same path through all the years since Alexander sat in the Thames, from ship to ship and place to place. He a free man, I a convict. Always friends. Did I not have Kitty and my children, losing him would be a mortal blow.

“What I write of on these pages is different from the letter I sent after your box came. That one went by any official hand it encountered, at the mercy of prying eyes and prurient minds. The miracle is that our letters ever do reach their destination, but the trickle of replies which arrived during 1792 (and on Bellona and Kitty so far this year) tells us that those who bear our letters to England pity us enough to make good their promises. Some of us, however, never do receive word from the place most of us still call ‘home.’ I am unsure whether that is accidental or on purpose. This one will never leave Stephen’s care. I can say anything, and, knowing Stephen, he will sit in silence to let ye read this before he speaks, and that frees me too.

“This year, 1793, I will turn five-and-forty. How I look and how I have physically weathered this span Stephen will relate better than I, for we lack mirrors in Norfolk Island. Save that I have kept my health and can probably work harder for longer now than ever I could when a young man in England.

“As I sit here in the night the only sounds which reach my ears are of mighty trees moving in a rising wind, and the only smells which assail my nostrils are sweetly resinous or indefinable relics of the rain which fell a few hours ago and wetted the soil.

“I will never return to England, which is a place I no longer think of as, or call, ‘home.’ Home is here in Norfolk Island and always will be here. The truth is, Jem, that I want no truck with the country sent me to Botany Bay jammed aboard a slaver for just over twelve months amid misery and suffering still haunt my dreams.

“There were good times and good moments, none of them given us by those who shipped us off-greedy contractors, indifferent shufflers of paper, port-swilling barons and admirals. And we on the first fleet which sailed for Botany Bay enjoyed luxury compared to the horrors those who follow us must endure-ask Stephen to tell you what they found aboard Neptune when she anchored in Port Jackson.

“To be the first for Botany Bay was at once the best and the worst of it. No one knew what to do, Jem, not even the sad and desperate little governor, Phillip. It was neither planned nor decently equipped. Not one person in Whitehall worked out the logistics, and the contractors cheated on both the quality and the quantity of the clothing, tools and other essentials that were sent with us. I keep imagining the look on Julius Caesar’s face did he know of our shambles.

“Yet somehow we have survived the first five years of this ill-conceived, misshapen experiment in men’s and women’s lives. I am not sure how this has happened, except that it is perhaps evidence of the persistence and perseverance of men and women. It would be wrong to say that England offered us a second chance here. We were not offered any chance, first or last. Rather, we behaved according to our natures. Some of us simply vowed to survive and, having survived, then hurried ‘home’ or still skulk about. And some of us, having survived, were determined to begin again as best we can with what we have. I put myself in the second group, and say of it that while we were convicts we worked hard, we incurred no official displeasure, we were not lashed or ironed, we effaced ourselves in some situations and made ourselves useful in others. After being freed by pardon or emancipation, we have taken up land and begun the alien business of farming.

“How much of England has England wasted! The intelligence, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness, the hardiness. A list of assets I could make pages long. And all of the owners had sat in English gaols and hulks utterly wasted. What is wrong with England, that England is blind enough to throw such assets away as worthless rubbish?

“It is fair to say that very few of us had any idea what sort of stuff we were made of. I know that I did not. The old tranquil, patient Richard Morgan who could not even bring himself to care about the loss of £3,000 has died, Jem. He was passive, content, unambitious and small. His griefs were the griefs of all men-loss of what he loved. His vices were the vices of all men-self-absorption and self-indulgence. His joys were the joys of all men-taking his pleasure in what he loved. His virtues were the virtues of all men-belief in God and country.

“Richard Morgan was resurrected in the midst of a sea of pain, and finds the pain of others more unbearable than his own. He takes nothing for granted, he speaks out when necessary, he guards his loved ones and his fortune with his very life, he trusts hardly anybody, and he relies on one person only-himself.

“The tragedy of it, Jem, is that despite these new beginnings we have dragged the worst of England with us-coldhearted arrogance from those who govern us or hold sway over us, the unwritten laws which make some men better than others by virtue of rank or wealth, the stigmata of poverty and despicable origins, the mistaken creed that Crown and Church can do no wrong, the ignominy of bastardy.

“So I fear for my children, who must carry the burden of my sins as well as their own. Yet I hope for them in a way I could never have hoped for my Bristol children. There is room here for them to fly, Jem. There is room here for them to matter. And when all is said and done, what more could I ask of God than that?

“I had thought to write at much greater length, but I find that I have said my piece. Look after yourself-have a care for Stephen, who brings my love with him-and write soon. Ships from England now make the voyage in under six months, and Norfolk Island is a watering place for vessels sailing to Cathay, Nootka Sound or Otaheite. With any luck, I will be able to reply to your answer before too many more children have been born. I cannot get Kitty out of the habit of conceiving, and I am too weak to say no when she throws her leg over.

“By the grace of God and the kindness of others, I have had a fine run.”

He signed it, folded the pages so that their corners met in the middle, melted wax and applied his seal. RM in chains. Then, leaving the letter to lie on his table, he leaned to blow out the lamp and went to Kitty.

Finis