Richard went into Sydney Town but rarely, for it was rapidly mushrooming into an actual street of huts and houses. Save for attending divine service each Sunday and collecting his rations, he had no need to visit the place. MacTavish was every bit as good a watchdog as his father, and all the company Richard wanted save for Stephen, who had become so firmly “Stephen” in his mind that it was increasingly hard to remember that he was “Mr. Donovan.”
His house was ten by fifteen feet, had several big window apertures to let in plenty of light, and Johnny Livingstone had made him a table and two chairs. His roof was thatched with flax, but he had been promised shingles before the end of the year. It had a wooden floor some inches off the ground and foundations of round pine logs; the pine rotted quickly once embedded in soil, so this method of construction enabled him to ease out a rotting foundation post without dismantling the house, which was lined with thin pine boards of the most attractive kind because the Commandant had inexplicably taken against this particular grain—the wood owned a rippling pattern which reminded Richard of sunlight on calm water. Privately he wondered whether the ripples were evidence of the way the pine compensated for the perpetual winds; no one knew of any other tree anywhere which could grow absolutely straight in the teeth of a high prevailing wind, yet the Norfolk pine did, even on the most exposed clifftops. After that colossal hurricane all the young trees had bent over to touch the ground or snapped their tops off, but within two months the bent ones were ramrod straight again and the snapped ones sprouting two separate tops.
Burglaries had increased now that the population stood at 100 souls, but thieves left Richard Morgan severely alone. Anyone who had watched him pull the fourteen-foot saw through three full feet, the muscles of his naked back and chest moving beneath the brown skin, decided that he was not a man to offend. He was, besides, a notorious loner. The community’s loners, of whom there were a number, were viewed with a superstitious shiver of fear; there had to be something mentally wrong with a man who preferred his own company, who did not need to see himself reflected in somebody else’s eyes or hear himself praised, drawn into an entity larger than he was. Which suited Richard perfectly. If people thought him dangerously strange, all the better. What surprised him was that more men did not elect to become loners after years of being jammed cheek by jowl with others. Solitude was not only bliss, it was also a healing process.
The hard core of January’s mutineers got John Bryant at last midway through winter. Francis, Pickett, Watson, Peck and others off Golden Grove were cutting timber on Mount George when—who knew how, who knew why?—Bryant stumbled into the path of a falling pine. His head crushed, he died two hours later and was buried on the same day. Half crazed with grief, his widow wandered Sydney Town keening and moaning like an Irishwoman who spoke no English.
“The mood is very nasty,” Stephen said as he walked back to Richard’s house after the funeral.
“It had to happen” was all Richard said.
“That poor, wretched woman! And no priest to bury him.”
“God will not care.”
“God does not care!” Stephen snapped savagely. He entered the house without needing to bend, noting its scrupulous tidiness, the lined walls and ceiling, and the fact that Richard was slowly polishing them. “Christ,” he said, sagging onto a chair, “this is one of the very rare days in my life when I could do with a beaker of rum. I feel as if I am to blame for Bryant’s death.”
“It had to happen,” Richard repeated.
MacTavish, in whom the Scotch terrier line had run true, leaped into Richard’s arms without making a nuisance of himself in the usual manner of a young dog; he has trained it, Stephen thought, with the same thoroughness he devotes to everything. How does he manage to look exactly as he did when I first met him? Why have the rest of us aged and hardened while he has preserved intact every iota that he always was? Only more so. Much more so.
“If ye get me a few stalks of the sugar cane running riot,” said Richard, gently thumping the dog’s lower spine with the flat of his hand, “in two years I will give ye all the rum ye can drink.”
“What?”
“Oh, plus two copper kettles, some copper sheet, a few lengths of copper tubing and some casks cut in half,” Richard went on with a smile. “I can distill, Mr. Donovan. ’Tis another of my hidden talents.”
“Christ, Richard, ye’re a commandant’s dream! And for the love of God, will you please call me Stephen? I am so tired of this lopsided friendship! Surely after so many years it is time ye gave in, convict though ye may still be? ’Tis that Bristol prudishness, and I hate it!”
“Sorry, Stephen,” said Richard, eyes twinkling.
“Begorrah! Victory at last!” Tremendously pleased at hearing his name come from Richard’s lips, Stephen concealed his joy by frowning. “The marines are boiling because there is never enough rum to give them their full ration—Lieutenant Cresswell is at his wits’ end. Nor does he do any better. King does not care, of course, as long as his port does not run out. Cresswell would far rather drink rum. Port Jackson has little rum either. I warrant that a rum distillery in Norfolk Island would receive full sanction from His Excellency. ’Twould cost far less to make rum than to bring it out on storeships, for even the most idealistic official understands that rum is as necessary as bread and salt meat.”
“Well, there is certainly nothing to stop my growing my own patch of sugar cane. This soil loves it, and the grubs hate it. Though despite the rats and the grubs, we will harvest both wheat and Indian corn this summer, I am sure of it.”
“I hope so, for all our sakes. Harry Ball of Supply says that there are many more to be shipped here soon. In Port Jackson things are much worse, despite the lack of grubs.” Stephen shivered. “I do not think, even including the hurricane, that I have ever been so terrified as when the whole vale was one heaving mass of grubs. Not one million but millions upon millions, an army on the move that left Attila’s hordes looking minuscule. Maybe ’twas my Irish blood, but I swear I thought that the Devil had cursed us. Brr!” Shivering again, he changed the subject. “Tell me, Richard, who is attacking the Government sows? One dead and one maimed.”
Richard studied Stephen’s face with an affection bordering on love. That he felt he could not call what he experienced “love” was not because of its lack of a sexual element; it was because “love” was an emotion he associated with William Henry, with little Mary, with Peg. Whom he had kept below the level of all thought for what had piled up into years.
Yet now their names fell inside his mind as clear and limpid as the brook farther up across a pattern of stones, as distant as the stars, as close as MacTavish on his lap. It was Stephen, it was calling Stephen by his name. The other names came rushing up, rang on a peal of memories not all the time and all the things that had happened to him could tarnish, diminish, expunge. William Henry, little Mary, Peg. . . . Gone forever, yet not gone at all. I am a vessel filled with their light, and somewhere, sometime, I will know that love again. Not in an after life. Here. Here in Norfolk Island. I am awake again. I am alive. So alive! I will not waste my essence in a thankless exile. I will not belong to that segment of this place who would ruin it for sheer spite. Peg, little Mary, William Henry. They are here. They are waiting to be with me. And they will be with me.
This had occurred in the silence between two beats of a heart, yet Stephen understood that some enormous change in Richard had just come about. As if he had sloughed off a skin and stood forth in all the splendor of new raiment. What did I say? What brought it to pass? And why did the privilege of seeing it fall to me?
