Those three months attending Cook in the kitchen of the manor at St. Paul Deptford had proven invaluable, for though she had not been allowed to cook anything, Kitty had watched with interest, and found now that she was quite capable of preparing the simple fare Norfolk Island provided. With no cows and only enough goats for babies and children, of milk there was none; fresh meat was rare now that the Mt. Pitt bird had gone (though Kitty had merely heard of it, came too late to taste it); vegetables varied from green beans to, in winter, cabbages and cauliflowers; Richard had harvested a fine crop of calavances—chickpeas; and, with the arrival of Justinian, there was bread of some kind every day. What she missed most was a cup of tea. Lady Juliana had provided both tea and sugar for its women convicts; though some of them preferred wheedling rum out of the seamen, most enjoyed sweetened tea more than anything else. It had been almost the only thing the seasick Kitty had been able to keep down, and now she missed it badly.
So when Richard and Stephen arrived she had a meal of boiled potatoes and boiled salt beef ready to put upon the table together with a loaf of wheaten bread.
They trooped in laden with pots and boxes.
“Captain Anstis had a stall on the beach today,” said Richard, “and everything I wanted to buy was on it. Open kettles, a spouted kettle for boiling water, frying pans, little pots, tin dishes and tubs, pewter plates and mugs, knives and spoons, unbleached calico—even, when I asked for it, emery powder. Look, Kitty! I bought a pound of Malabar peppercorns and a mortar and pestle for grinding them.” He dumped a wooden box a foot cubed down on the desk. “And here is a chest of hyson tea just for you.”
Her hands to her cheeks, she stared at him tearily. “Oh! You thought of me?”
“Why should I not?” he asked, surprised. “I knew ye missed a cup of tea. I bought a teapot too. Sweetening it will not be hard. I will cut ye a stalk of sugar cane and chop it into short bits. All ye’ll have to do is crush it with a hammer and boil it to make syrup.”
“But this cost money!” she cried, appalled.
“Richard is a warm man, girl,” Stephen said, beginning to take articles off Richard as he handed them up from the sled. “I must say ye did amazing well, my friend, considering who ye dealt with. Nick Anstis is hard-headed.”
“I slapped gold coin on the board,” said Richard, coming inside again. “Anstis has to wait for money when it is tendered in notes of hand, whereas gold is gold. He was happy to quarter his prices for coins of the realm.”
“Just how much gold have ye got?” Stephen asked, curious.
“Enough,” said Richard tranquilly. “You see, I inherited from Ike Rogers as well.”
Stephen gaped, thunderstruck. “Is that why Richardson would not lay it on when Lieutenant King sentenced Joey Long to a hundred lashes for losing his best pair of Royal Navy shoes? Christ, ye’re close, Richard! Ye must have paid a little something to Jamison as well for insisting that Joey’s mental condition was too frail to sustain the whole flogging—Christ!”
“Joey looked after Ike. Now I look after Joey.”
They sat down at the table to do justice to the food, all three too active to scorn a diet banal and repetitive in the extreme.
“I gather that ye spent today at Charlotte Field, so ye may not have heard what happened to Kitty’s assailant,” Stephen said to Richard when they were done and Kitty stood happily washing their bowls and spoons in a new tin dish—no more bucket!
“Ye’re right, I have not heard. Tell me.”
“Tommy Two did not like being chained to the grindstone in the least, so last night he picked the locks on his irons and absconded into the forest, no doubt to join Gray.”
“With the birds gone, they will starve.”
“Aye, so I think. They will end up back on the grindstone.”
Richard rose, so did Stephen; Richard threw his arm about Stephen’s shoulders and steered him doorward, out of earshot. “Ye might,” he said quietly, “inform the Major that there may be a small conspiracy going on. Dyer, Francis, Peck and Pickett apparently have some purloined sugar cane growing somewhere off the track, and all four were sniffing around Anstis’s stall enquiring after things like copper kettles and copper pipe.”
“Why not tell the Major yourself? ’Tis you who is involved in that sort of activity.”
“Exactly why I would rather not be the one to tell the Major. In that respect, Stephen, I walk very carefully. Were I the one to speak of it, the Major might—should illicit spirits appear among the convicts and private marines—think I had concocted the tale to cover my own guilt.”
What are they muttering about? wondered Kitty, drying the bowls and spoons with a rag and putting them on their shelf before starting to wash the new pewter plates, mugs and eating utensils. Oh dear, I truly do cramp their style!
Though her world still consisted of Richard’s acre, Kitty was too busy to think of exploring; her only trip to Sydney Town apart from divine service had been to identify her attacker, neither an occasion to take notice of her surroundings. All her farmer’s bones were asserting themselves; Richard could not have picked a better kind of woman than Kitty for the kind of life she was called upon to lead.
She kept hearing about “the grubs,” and on the 18th of October she experienced them at first hand. The wheat on Richard’s acre was in ear and thriving, but the Government wheat in the more open parts of the vale had been hit by high, salty winds and blighted, though by no means all of it was ruined. The year was a dry one, the crops saved only by an occasional night of heavy rain which had vanished by the morning. Perhaps for this reason, the grubs had not come during winter. Then suddenly it seemed as if every growing thing was covered with a heaving green blanket—the caterpillars were bright green, about an inch long, and thin. Again Richard was lucky, for Kitty had no fear of wrigglers, crawlies and bugs. She was able to pick the creatures off without revulsion, though the solution of tobacco and soap was more effective. Every woman on the island save those who danced attendance on the marines and the sawpits was put to picking and sprinkling. Within three weeks they were gone. There would be a harvest, very soon for the Indian corn, early in December for the wheat. Though under Major Ross’s new scheme everything the freed Richard grew was his, he was very scrupulous about sending excess produce to Stores, for which he accumulated more notes of hand. What he kept was either eaten by the humans or Augusta, or saved for seed.
The weather in Norfolk Island, she occasionally thought as she toiled with her hoe or got down on hands and knees to weed, was truly delightful—balmy, warm, never hot out of the sun. And just when things began to wilt from lack of water, one of those nights of solid rain would roll in, disappear at dawn. The soil, blood-red and very friable, grew anything. No, Norfolk Island could not compete with Kent in her affections, yet it did have a magical quality. Rainy nights, sunny days—that was the stuff of fairies.
Some of those she had known on Lady Juliana had fallen to the lot of Richard’s friends. Aaron Davis, the community baker, had taken Mary Walker and her child. George Guest had taken eighteen-year-old Mary Bateman, whom Kitty had known very well, had liked, but yet sensed a strangeness, as of madness yet to come. Edward Risby and Ann Gibson were happily together and planning to marry as soon as a person empowered to marry visited the island. These women and Olivia Lucas visited—how delightful it was to be able to offer them a mug of tea with sugar in it! Mary Bateman and Ann Gibson were both expecting babies; Mary Walker, whose child Sarah Lee was toddling, was also expecting her first by Aaron Davis. The only barren one was Kitty Clark.
