“Where will you sleep?” she asked.
“On the floor.”
Her lips parted to say something else, but sleep claimed her with the words unsaid, and Richard knew that no amount of noise or movement would wake her. So he stripped off his clothes, put them in a bucket and carried it outside before walking to his pool, there to make sure he harbored no louse. Shivering with cold, he returned to warm by the fire, donned a pair of old trowsers, made a bed of Sirius canvas on the floor and lay down in perfect content. His eyes closed and he slept immediately.
To wake before dawn to the sound of John Lawrell’s rooster crowing. The fire was embers but retrievable; he piled wood on it and inspected the contents of his larder, no better stocked than any other Norfolk Island larder. Most of the provisions were still to come ashore. As usual, what had already come ashore consisted of rum and clothing, the two least useful items in his opinion. But he had a loaf of Aaron Davis’s corn bread, made with just enough precious wheat flour to render it edible, and the garden was full of good things—cabbages, cauliflowers, cress down by the stream, broad beans—parsley and lettuce, which grew all year round.
Dawn came, then sunrise. He walked across to his bed to look down at Kitty, who seemed not to have moved. Lying on her back in the modified man’s shirt Olivia Lucas had donated, arms and chest uncovered. With her eyelids down, he could study her more dispassionately than when she gazed at him through William Henry’s eyes. Fair, fine straight hair that could not be called either gold or flaxen; fair brows and lashes; white skin gone only a little pink, which led him to assume she had not gone on deck very often; a rather big and bumpy nose; a sweet pink mouth which reminded him of Mary’s; a prominent chin above a long, slender neck; fine hands with tapering fingers.
Major Ross held divine service at eight, and, like King (a later riser), would tolerate no absentees; Richard would have to go, though she, not yet on the island’s register, would not be missed. Expose her to Lizzie Lock unprepared? Never! So he went up the brook to his bath, donned his only pair of carefully preserved breeches and stockings, his coat, greatcoat and tricorn, one of his two remaining pairs of shoes. She slumbered on. He debated whether to leave her a note, then concluded that she probably could not read or write. So in the end he departed in the hope that she would not wake until he returned in an hour and a half.
“How is Kitty?” Stephen asked, joining him after the service.
“Asleep.”
“Johnny will bring ye a second bed this afternoon, but I am afraid ye’ll have to stuff its mattress and pillow with straw.”
“Ye’re very good.” He whistled up MacTavish, who had accepted the presence of a stranger in his house by retreating outside before she could see him.
“I will try to get ye some extra stores, but they may have to wait until the morrow. Ralphie darling does not have the keys anymore, and Freeman is a cold bastard, not prone to put himself out.”
“Well I know it. I had best be off.”
Stephen cuffed him affectionately on the shoulder. “Richard, ye’re as clucky as an old hen.”
“I have a chick,” grinned Richard. “Come, MacTavish!”
Morning had apparently generated a change of heart in the dog, which bounded through the door and leaped onto Richard’s bed, there to lick Kitty’s arm, flung across the pillows. She woke with a start, stared into a whiskery canine face, and smiled.
“That,” said Richard, removing his hat, “is MacTavish. Are ye well, Kitty?”
“Very,” she said, struggling to a sitting position. “Is it so late? You have been out already.”
“Divine service,” he explained. “Get out of bed and I will take ye to my bath. The ground is fairly soft, ye’ll not hurt your feet. Tomorrow ye’ll probably have shoes.”
She visited the privy, then followed him to the small pool in the forest, alongside which he had put soap and a rag towel.
“The water is cold, but ye’ll enjoy it once ye’re in. ’Tis very Roman—deep enough to submerge ye, not deep enough to drown in. When ye’re done, come back to the house and I will give ye breakfast, such as it is. Mrs. Lucas will visit later to talk to ye about your needs, though I fear ye’ll have naught but convict slops to wear, and horrible shoes—no heels or buckles. Did ye have nice things in your bundle?”
“No, just slops.” She hesitated. “I had a bath last night. Must I have another this morning?”
Now was the time to get some things straight. Richard looked stern. “This climate is not England’s and this place is not England. Ye’ll have to work in the garden, care for a sow, find food for it with a hatchet or carry cobs of Indian corn from the granary for it. Ye’ll sweat, just as I sweat. Therefore ye’ll bathe every evening after the work is done. Today ye can have two baths—ye’ll not wash the last of Surprize away with one scrub, particularly your hair. If ye’re to share my house, I require that your person be as clean as my house and my own person.”
She blanched. “But this is open! I might be seen!”
“No one ventures into my domain, and this is my domain. I am not a man others take liberties with.”
He left her then, sorry to be hard on her, but determined that she would understand the rules.
The pool was peculiarly constructed, with a channel from it to the stream blocked off by a wooden sluice; another channel, similarly blocked, led off downhill to his vegetables. The reason for this arrangement escaped her, not because she lacked the mental acuity to plumb its purpose, but rather because of the hideously narrow existence she had lived.
Having been given the rules and made aware that Richard was not a person to be disobeyed, she pulled off the shirt and jumped into the water before any man spying on her from the undergrowth could glimpse much. The coldness made her gasp, but within a short while it vanished; the sensation of being immersed to her neck was very pleasant. She could dunk her head to get all the soap out of her hair, scrub her scalp properly, her armpits and groin. When she used the fine-toothed comb, eyes watering at the pain, it came out virtually clean.
Getting out was not difficult; there was a block of stone on the pool’s bottom to use as a step. The ground about it was thick with cress to keep the feet clean until they dried and the rag was capacious, hid her until she was dry enough to don her shift and convict-issue slops dress, donated it seemed by Mrs. Lucas, who, with the rest of these people, had been at the far ends of the earth for over two and a half years.
Now that she was at the far ends of the earth too, she had no idea whereabouts the far ends of the earth were; all she knew was that it had taken nearly a year to sail to them, calling in at a series of ports she hardly saw. Kitty had been one of those who hid, did not go on deck much, always tried to avoid being noticed by a member of Lady Juliana’s crew. Her plight had not broken her heart the way it had the poor little Scotch girl who died of shame before the ship had left the shelter of the Thames; Kitty had no parents to grieve and disgrace, and that, the Scotch girl’s fate had taught her, was a mercy. Illness had isolated her too; no sailor could be bothered philandering with a retching girl, even if he had fancied her because of her eyes. Those, she knew, were her sole claim to beauty.
Safely clothed and secure in the knowledge that Richard’s house was within hailing distance, she stared about her in wonder. Norfolk Island bore no more resemblance to Kent than had Port Jackson.
When Lady Juliana had arrived in Port Jackson she was so heavy and sluggish that she had been towed from the Heads by longboats and moored well off the shore. A very strange place, so frightening! Naked black people had paddled a bark canoe alongside and jabbered, pointed, brandished spears just as she had found the courage to go up on deck; she had fled back below and hardly ventured out again. Some of the convict women—oh, how much she admired them!—had dressed in the finery Captain Aitken had stored for them during the voyage and strutted about the deck preening, sure of their reception once ashore. What courage they had! One could not live for eighteen months among them, no matter how cowed and seasick, without understanding that Lady Juliana’s 204 women were as different as chalk was from cheese, and that even the hardened madams owned a kind of dignity and self-respect. More by far than she did.
