“I am off to see to the new pits, Billy,” he said to Private Wigfall, whom he counted a good friend. He winked, laughed. “And make sure we don’t get any fucken Williams as sawyers.” He thought of something else. “If a Welshman named Taffy Edmunds reports in, sit him down in the shade—not with the women!—and tell him to wait until I get back. He will be our master sharpener. A pity he does not like women, but he will have to learn to.”
Three of the new pits lay beyond the limits of Sydney Town to the east, where the hillsides were still heavily forested. Somehow Ross had already managed to find time to think out what he wanted, and issued instructions that trees were to be felled in a strip twenty feet wide from Turtle Bay to Ball Bay as the start of a proper road. Those on the slopes leading to Turtle Bay would be laid lengthwise and slid downhill; once the tilt switched to Ball Bay, another sawpit would be dug at Ball Bay to deal with that timber. It was going to be impossible for one man to keep an eye on so many pits so far apart, which meant that he would have to make sure he picked a head sawyer for each pit who would not slacken the pace because the supervisor was elsewhere. Nor was this the only road: a strip twenty feet wide was to be cleared to Cascade, and a third, the longest, westward to Anson Bay. Sawpits and more sawpits, those were the Major’s orders.
On the way back he skirted the unnamed beach which seemed to act as a net to catch any pines which tumbled down the cliffs into the water, piling them up while the sea pushed them inland to form a raft of logs so ancient that they had turned to a kind of stone. And there, washing back and forth in the water—the wind was too far west to lash up a heavy surf—was a convoluted heap of canvas sail off Sirius. Useful, he understood immediately, quickening his pace. The tide was just beginning to come in, so it was unlikely that the sail would wash out to sea again, but he thought the find too important to risk losing by dawdling.
The first man in authority he saw was Stephen, deputed to the stone quarry these days.
Wreathed in smiles, Stephen promptly abandoned his workers. “Plague take this huge influx! I’ve hardly seen ye in a week.” His face changed. “Oh, Richard, the shame of it!” he cried. “To lose Sirius—what evil forces are conniving against us?”
“I know not. Nor do I think I want to know.”
“What brings ye down here?”
“New sawpits, what else? With Major Ross as commandant, we are to go from the idealism of Marcus Aurelius to the pragmatism of Augustus. I do not say the Major will leave Norfolk Island marble, as he did not find it brick, but he will certainly give it roads—a hint, I am sure, that he is going to send people elsewhere than Sydney Town.” He looked brisk. “Can ye spare some time and men?”
“If the reason be good enough. What’s amiss?”
“Nothing for a change,” grinned Richard. “In fact, I am the bearer of good news. There is a huge mass of Sirius’s sail lying in the far beach, and more may come around the point with the tide on the flood. It will serve as canopies for those untented. Once people are properly housed it can be cut into hammocks, sheets for the officers’ beds—a thousand and one things. I imagine that quite a lot of the officers’ property will be spirited away by the likes of Francis and Peck.”
“God bless ye, Richard!” Stephen ran off, shouting and waving to his men.
That evening, armed with a pine-knot torch to find his way back up the vale in the darkness (curfew was set for eight o’clock), Richard ventured into Sydney Town in search of the faces he had seen amid the assembly. Tents were pitched behind the row of huts on the beachfront, but many of the convicts were doomed to sleep in the open, Sirius’s crew taking precedence in the matter of tents. By tomorrow, he hoped, Sirius’s sails would roof them over.
A big fire of pine scraps burned where the shelterless would lie down their heads. Though he had been on the island for sixteen months, it still amazed Richard how suddenly the air chilled once the sun went down, no matter how hot the day had been; only when humidity descended did this cooling off not happen, and so far 1790 had not been at all sultry. A sign, he thought, that the weather this year would be drier, though how he came to that conclusion he did not know. Instinct arising from some Druid ancestor?
About a hundred people were huddled together around the tall blaze, belongings strewn about them. Unlike the marines and their officers, the convicts had been disembarked together with all they owned, including their precious blankets and buckets. Feet were universally bare; shoes had run out months ago, nor did Norfolk Island have any. He prayed that it would not rain that night; much of the island’s rain fell at night, and out of what had been a clear sky moments before. The convicts had all been landed in downpours, had not had sufficient fine weather yet to dry out completely. There would be an epidemic of chills and fevers, and perhaps the island’s record would be broken: not one person in it had died of natural causes or disease since Lieutenant King and his original 23 companions had come ashore over two years ago. Whatever else Norfolk Island might or might not be, its climate engendered splendid health.
Sirius wallowed on the reef, a mournful sight. The grapevine had already informed Richard that Willy Dring and James Branagan—the latter a man he did not know—had volunteered to swim out to the wreck, toss the remaining poultry, dogs and cats over the side, and heave floatable kegs and casks into the water. Dring was not the right man for this; the Yorkshireman and his crony Joe Robinson, once steady fellows, seemed to have deteriorated.
He spied Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott sitting with women who must be theirs—that was a good sign!—and began to pick his way through the crowd.
“Richard! Oh, Richard my love, Richard my love!”
Lizzie Lock threw herself upon him, twined her arms about his neck and covered his face with kisses, crooning, weeping, mumbling.
His reaction was utterly instinctive, over and done before he could think of suppressing it, of waiting until some more private opportunity arrived to tell her that he could not share any part of himself with her, wife though she was. No one had told him that she was here, and he had not thought of her once since that magical day when William Henry, little Mary and Peg had returned to live in his soul. Before he could control them, his hands had gone to fasten about Lizzie’s arms and wrench her away.
Flesh crawling, hair on end, he stared at her as if she were a visitation from Hell. “Don’t touch me!” he cried, white-faced. “Don’t touch me!”
And she, poor creature, staggered plummeting from ecstatic joy to horror, to bewilderment, to a pain so great that she clutched at her meager chest and looked at him out of eyes blinded to everything but his revulsion. Breath gone, her mouth opened and closed without a sound; she fell to her knees, powerless.
The moment she had uttered his name the whole group turned to look, and those in it who knew him, who had so eagerly anticipated this reunion, gasped, gaped, murmured.
“I am your wife!” she screamed thinly from her knees. “Richard, I am your wife!”
His eyes were clearing, took in the sight of her at his feet, took in the growing anger and outrage on the faces of his friends, took in the greed of the uninvolved to eat up as much of this show as its participants were willing to enact. What to do? What to say? Even as one part of him asked these unanswerable questions, a second part of him was noting the onlookers, and a third part of him was shrinking in horror—she was going to touch him! The visceral part won: he backed away, out of her reach.
The die was cast. Better then to finish it the way it had started, by the glaring light of a public bonfire in the midst of a collection of people who would—and rightly so—condemn him as a heartless wretch in sore need of a flogging.
