Time was getting on. Stephen looked at his watch, pressed his lips together and debated about whether he was hungry enough to bother heating broth to go with his bread supper. Captain John Hunter was in residence at Government House, and Johnny—oh, well. Heat the soup, Stephen, it is chill enough for a fire.
“All I want,” said Richard, erupting into the room as Stephen blew on the reluctant flames, “is to be left alone with my books and my dog! To have a meed of privacy!”
“Then what are ye doing here?” Stephen asked, sitting back on his heels. “The meed of privacy is up yon vale.”
“Aye, but—but—” said Richard, floundering.
“Why not simply admit to yourself, Richard,” Stephen said, in no mood to put up with megrims, “that ye’s consumed with guilt over what ye did—all right, had to do!—to Lizzie Lock? Ye’re not a man finds it easy to live with a you who did not come up to expectations. In fact, I never saw anybody with such high standards of self-conduct—ye’re a fucken Protestant martyr!”
“Oh, don’t fucken preach!” Richard snapped. “Your trouble is that ye’re never sure whether to be a Catholic or a Protestant anything, let alone martyr! Why not simply admit to yourself that ye’re lovesick for Johnny and want to wallop Hunter?”
Blue eyes blazed at eyes gone absolutely grey for a full minute; neither man moved a muscle. Then both mouths started to quiver at the same instant; they howled with laughter.
“It clears the air,” Stephen said, mopping his face on a rag.
“Aye, that it does,” gasped Richard, borrowing it.
“Ye’d better eat Johnny’s share of the soup now that ye’re here—why did ye come back?”
“I think because you didn’t answer my question, to which I no longer require an answer. Ye’re right, Stephen. Lizzie is something I have to suffer through, including not liking myself.”
John Lawrell moved in, and moved out again so quickly that the poor fellow’s weak head spun; Richard had a comfortable hut up for him within a month, erected at the far end of his little acre with its door and window apertures facing away from his own house. If Lawrell snored after that, Richard was too far away to hear. With regard to his duties he proved excellent, but he had one flaw: he loved to play card games and had to be restrained from gambling away his scant rations.
Sydney Town was mushrooming into veritable streets of small wooden huts, banged together by Nat Lucas and his carpenters as fast as Richard’s sawpits could feed him planks and beams. With neither the time nor the equipment to put a shiplap or dovetail on the boards to join them in a finished way, thin battens were nailed down the gaps—a style not unattractive if, like the interior of Richard’s house, the wood was sanded to a dull polish. Government House, enlarged by King to a size permitting him to entertain half a dozen dinner guests in better days, finally sported sheet glass in its small-paned windows, courtesy of Governor Phillip. Every other residence, including those commodious enough to satisfy the naval and marine officers, had to make do with shutters or naked apertures. One pit was put to sawing the basis for creating shingles; all the roofs would eventually be shingled, though the timber had first to be seasoned in sea-water for six weeks before it could be split. This meant temporary roofs of flax thatch; the task of venturing far and wide in search of flax was handed over to Sirius’s sailors, whom Ross flatly refused to let do nothing.
Liberated from the need to supply Port Jackson with lime, at least for the present, the deposits of calcarenite stone were worked for foundations and chimneys. Having found a good local hardwood the shingle sawpit also cut, the four coopers the island now possessed began to make barrels. Ross had set women to grinding King’s crop of wheat in hand querns, deeming barrels of flour safer from rats than loose grain. Aaron Davis, who had ended in working as a baker at Port Jackson, was appointed community baker. Not that bread was something the community saw every day; Sundays and Wednesdays were bread, Mondays and Thursdays were rice, Saturdays were pease, and Tuesdays and Fridays a porridge of Indian corn mixed with oatmeal.
Eyeing his rapidly proliferating swine, Ross built a small hearth and furnace and started producing salt. What parts of the beast not suitable for salting down were minced and became sausages sheathed in intestine.
“The best thing about a pig,” Major Ross was heard to say, “is that the only inedible part of it is the oink.” As he was known to possess absolutely no sense of humor, the general assumption was that he had spoken seriously.
Sirius, which continued to lie with her stern on and off the reef, was gradually stripped of every salvageable item, from some of her six-pounder guns to the last of the many kegs of nails His Excellency had sent from his settlement, turning to brick and stone, to this settlement of perpetual wood. Saddest loss was the scrap iron Sirius had carried for Norfolk Island’s smithy, still down in her holds and too risky to go after. Almost all the canvas she flew had washed ashore tangled in lines and spars, and her cutter had survived together with its oars; lopping down the masts had wrecked every other boat she owned.
Among the last things to come off her were several casks of tobacco and some crates of cheap Bristol soap. Though the soap did go into Government Stores for general distribution, the tobacco never saw the interior of a pipe bowl—much to the disgust of the seamen, who deemed a puff only slightly less desirable than a swig of rum. George Guest and Henry Hatheway, both from rural parts, went to Major Ross and informed him that in Gloucester gardens wives dealt with slugs, caterpillars and grubs by plundering their husbands’ tobacco. They steeped the leaves in boiling water, then sudsed the liquid with soap and sprinkled the concoction upon their vegetables. The first rain washed it away, but until that fell, wriggly pests turned up their noses and refused to eat such horrid-tasting food.
From that moment on, no one was allowed to throw away a single drop of soapy water. A small group of women was put to stewing the tobacco, which, experience revealed, retained its potency through several infusions. As for soap—why, it could be made just as it was made in poor farmhouses and cottages from one end of the British Isles to the other: fat and lye. Lard was the fat of the pig, and the settlement had plenty of it. To obtain lye was easy: soak the thoroughly burned ashes of unwanted potato, carrot, turnip and beet leaves, boil the mess down a little, and strain. The liquid part was lye. Watering cans were scarce, but a woman armed with a bucket of sudsed tobacco solution and a pewter dipper with holes punched in its bottom sprinkled the growing vegetables—and crops!—quite efficiently enough. To be ready for the next wave, the grub poison was stockpiled in empty rum pipes.
In such practical matters the Commandant shone. His mind had progressed from manufacturing salt, sausages and grub poison to whether he might use some of the sawdust in smokehouses instead of turning it all into the soil. What could not be salted down might perhaps be smoked, including fish. Owning a large work force, Ross was determined no member of it would be idle. The first step was to produce as much food as possible; the second step was to get as many of his charges as possible maintaining themselves without consuming Government food. This latter step was clearly the only justification for the whole Botany Bay experiment—what was the point of dumping thousands of convicts and guards at the far ends of the earth if the Government had to keep feeding them ad infinitum?
At which moment, Supply having gone two weeks earlier to bear the dreadful news about Sirius to His Excellency, the birds arrived on Mt. Pitt, a 1,000-foot sprawl at the northwestern end of the island. A very few days verified King’s report on these big petrels; they came in from the day’s fishing on dusk to waddle to their burrows, equipped with so little brain and so much ignorance of the ways of men that they allowed themselves to be captured without flight or resistance.
