“Oh, yes. I cannot thank you enough, Mr. Morgan. I have not been able to wash properly since I left Lady Juliana. Aboard her, we managed to keep clean and free of lice. If you give me a pair of scissors I will cut off my hair,” she said, her speech polite but faintly Londonish—Surrey or Kent, perhaps.
Richard looked horrified. “Let us not cut off the hair yet! I have a fine-toothed comb and we will keep using it until your hair is free, even of nits. My name is Richard, not Mr. Morgan. Where are ye from, Kitty?”
“Faversham in Kent. Then the girls’ workhouse in Canterbury, then the manor at St. Paul Deptford as a kitchen servant. I was tried at Maidstone and sentenced to seven years’ transportation,” she recited humbly. “I stole some muslin from a shop. I think.”
“How old are ye?” Stephen asked.
“Twenty last month.”
“Time for that bath.” Richard bent and picked up the tub as if it weighed a feather. “Ye can have the bedroom and the candle, and scrub. Give me your shoes and throw your dirty clothes through the window onto the ground outside. Stephen, carry her new clothes, soap and a brush—look useful, do! Wash your hair, child, scrub your scalp and then comb the hair as if your life depended upon it.” He laughed softly. “The fate of your hair certainly does.”
“Now to Tom Jones Two,” said Richard when they had left her to her own devices. “How do we go about that?”
“Leave it to me.” Stephen lit a candle from the fire, then ladled chowder into two big bowls and broke a loaf of bread into pieces. “I do not think it politic to bother the Major, as Mrs. Morgan is his housekeeper. The news that ye’ve picked up a stray will reach her soon enough as it is. What good fortune that her surname is Clark! I shall go to our Lieutenant Ralphie darling and recount the tale, emphasizing that the girl is not one of his ‘damned whores.’ With a name like Clark, he will be disposed to believe me. Besides, he loathes the second Thomas Jones, in which matter he displays excellent taste. But I fear we will never see her bedding or her property—Jones will already have bestowed them upon some damned whore in return for her favors.”
Picking up her shoes, Richard exchanged a glance with Stephen and grimaced. “They smell worse than Alexander’s bilges,” he said, throwing them into the fire. He washed his hands thoroughly at Stephen’s bench. “See if ye can charm our Lieutenant Ralphie darling into donating her a new pair of shoes now that Stores has some.” He sat down to consume bread and chowder hungrily. “I thought she was a cat,” he said out of the blue.
“Eh?”
“She mewed from the forest. It sounded like cat. I went in hoping to find ye a new Rodney.”
Face softening, Stephen looked at him across the table. If that was not just like him! Did he never think of himself first? And now this girl of wretched circumstances, no more a criminal than the Virgin Mary. Some poor little bumpkin out of a workhouse. What had possessed him to fall in love with her? He was hooked, sad fish. But why her? He had helped dozens ashore, girls and women of great good looks, some of them clearly educated, some of them sprightly, witty, refined even. Not every female convict was a damned whore. So why Catherine Clark? Pinched and plain, fair and foolish. An everyday nobody, devoid of charm, brain, beauty.
“Bless ye for the thought,” Stephen said, “but Olivia has promised me one of her kittens, a marmalade male with no white on him. He already has a name—Tobias.” Chowder finished, he rose to make sure there was enough in the pot to yield them more, yet still leave a bit for the Kitty. “Did ye ever see such eyes?” he asked as he went to the hob.
Because he turned away he missed the sight of Richard’s spasm; by the time he swung back the pain was vanishing, though enough of it lingered to shock him.
“Yes,” said Richard steadily, “I have seen such eyes. In my son, William Henry.”
“Did ye have just the one son, Richard?”
“Just William Henry. His sister died of the smallpox before he was born. His mother died as if felled by a fist when he was eight. He—he disappeared not long before his tenth birthday. People thought he drowned in the Avon, though I did not think so. Or perhaps it is more honest to say that I did not want to think so. He was with a master from Colston’s School. The master shot himself—left a note saying he caused William Henry’s death, which only compounded the confusion. The whole of Bristol searched for a week, but William Henry’s body was never found. I kept on with the search. The worst agony was the doubt—if he died, how did he die? The only one who might have told me was dead by his own hand.”
The wonder of it, thought Stephen, is that he could make a brother out of me, an unashamed Miss Molly. The master—what a fabulous profession for a child molester!—did something. On that I would stake my life, and Richard knows it too. Yet never once has he identified me with that man because of what I am. “Go on, Richard,” he said gently.
“After that I cared not whether I lived or died. I have told ye of the excise fraud and the swindlers who ridded themselves of me by sending me to trial in Gloucester.” His head tilted, he looked down at the tabletop with lashes lowered, face contemplative and smooth. “But now I understand that William Henry is dead. Her eyes are God’s message. They have answered much.”
Stephen wept. Part of his grief was for Richard’s loss, but part was for his own, though he had never hoped, simply attended like an acolyte a priest, waiting for the divine communion to begin. Thinking that, in the absence of love, at least there was the exquisite comfort of knowing that Richard belonged to no one else. But of course he belonged: to his dead family, and most of all to William Henry. Whom he had lost forever. Until God sent Catherine-Kitty Clark to stare at him out of his son’s eyes. A benediction. And that is how it happens. A look, a laugh, a word, a gesture, meaningless to others because meaning lies in the absolutely unique and personal. Time and torment.
“If ye rest easier, I rejoice,” Stephen said.
The inner door opened; both men turned.
To Richard she looked so beautiful, scrubbed clean from baby-floss hair to pearly toenails, smiling as gravely as a child on its first independent errand. Enchanting. So lovable. His own little Kitty, whom he would care for until he died.
To Stephen she simply looked a more palatable version of what she had been dirty—pinched and plain, fair and foolish. The smile? Ordinary, a trifle mawkish. Oh, the machinations of fate! To give this humdrum girl the one thing in all the world could catch and hold Richard Morgan fast.
“Ye need a shirt before we brave Sydney Town’s August wind,” said Stephen, tossing one to Richard. “Kitty, your shoes were so filthy we had to burn them. I will get ye more as soon as maybe, but ye’ll have to let us chair ye to Richard’s house.”
“Could I not stay here?” she asked.
“In a house with naught but hammocks? Besides, I may have a visitor later. Ready?”
Outside he extended his hand to Richard, who gripped it. Kitty hopped onto their linked arms, one of her own arms about Richard’s neck, the other about Stephen’s. Each with a torch in his free hand, the two men bore her down the vale, up beyond King’s dam and pond, to where Richard’s house stood on the edge of the forest.
The fire was set, wood piled alongside the hearth. Stephen saluted Richard, bowed lavishly to Kitty, and left them to their own devices. There was housework to do in his own home and work with the convicts started at dawn. No, it did not! Tomorrow, he remembered, was Sunday.
Richard carried her to his privy, worried that her tender feet would not tolerate the path, then carried her back. “If ye need it in the night, wake me,” he said, tucking her into his feather bed.
