It had become a temptation to skimp his Government work—a temptation others also felt, wanting to get their own land cleared and bearing, but Richard had sufficient sense to resist such urges. Poor George Guest had succumbed before he was out of his sentence—so ambitious!—and been flogged for it.
The lash ruled more and more as Major Ross and Lieutenant Clark—and Captain William Hill of the New South Wales Corps—struggled to maintain some kind of control over a people existing without solidarity or rhythm. They flew in a hundred directions according to their origins, their limited experiences and their ideas of what constituted a happy life. All too often the idea of a happy life was an idle life. In England most of them would never have rubbed shoulders, and that fact was as true of the marines and soldiers as it was of the convicts. Exacerbated by a further fact: that almost everybody in military command was Scotch, yet of Scotch felons or enlisted troops there were virtually none.
We are ruled by the lash, exile to Nepean Island and being chained to the grindstone because not a soul in English government can see any other way to rule than to punish mercilessly. There must be another way, there must be! But what it is, I do not know. How does one make a better marine out of the likes of Francis Mee or Elias Bishop? How does one make a better man out of the likes of Len Dyer or Sam Pickett? They are lazy, greedy weasels who derive their chief pleasure from making mischief and creating chaos. Punishment does not transform the Mees, Bishops, Dyers and Picketts into hardworking, responsible citizens. But then again, nor did the relatively benign rule of Lieutenant King in days when this place held less than a hundred souls. His kindness was repaid by mutinies and plots, contempt and defiance. And when toward the last his domain grew to near a hundred and fifty souls, Lieutenant King too resorted to the lash with greater severity and ever greater frequency. When their backs are to the wall, they flog. There is no answer, but oh, how I wish there were! So that my Kitty and I could rear our children in a clean and better ordered world.
In such manner did Richard render the ordeal of pulling his sled up the terrible hill of Mount George endurable; he put his back to the work and his mind to conundrums beyond his understanding.
Once atop the mount it was much easier; the road went up and down somewhat, but never so dreadfully. Morgan’s Run came into sight and he turned off the road down a track into the trees, many of them reduced to stumps already. His intention was to leave a border of pines fifty feet deep all around the perimeter and clear the middle of the flat section entirely. There he would plant his wheat, a delicate crop, protected from the mighty salt-bearing winds which blew from every point of the compass; the island was not large enough to render any wind free of salt. The less steep slopes of the cleft wherein the run of water originated he would put to Indian corn for his multiplying pigs.
At the top of the cleft he undid his harness, though he had made a good clear track down to the shelf where the house was going up. Strong though he was, he knew he could not hold the sled downhill with all that iron upon it. He unloaded all but the stove itself, then transferred himself and his harness to the back of the sled, digging in his heels as he and the sled gathered momentum, sled in front, he behind. The distance was almost too great; the sled ran up a banked slope he had installed as a brake, overshot it slightly, and came to a halt with a thump that had Kitty up from her garden in a hurry.
“Richard!” she squawked, arriving at a run. “You are mad!”
Too out of breath to refute this accusation, he sat upon the ground and panted; she brought him a beaker of cool water and sat beside him, worried that he had done himself an injury.
“Are you all right?”
He gulped the water down, nodded, grinned. “I have a stove for ye, Kitty, with a baking oven.”
“Captain Monroe had his stall!” She got to her feet and inspected the new arrival eagerly. “Richard, I will be able to bake my own bread! And make cakes when I have enough crumbs and egg whites. And roast meat properly—oh, it is wonderful! Thank you, thank you!”
A hoist was rigged on one of the roof beams, so getting the big stove off the sled was not as difficult as had been keeping it from whizzing off the end of the brake slope into the valley below. He and Kitty walked together to the crest, where she found all the fabrics, threads, sewing apparatus.
“Richard, you are too good to me.”
“Nay, that is not possible. Ye’re carrying my child.” He began to load the sled for another trip down the slope with the chimney, which of course Kitty had dismissed as uninteresting. That delivered, they walked home down the Queensborough road with Richard pulling a much lighter sled.
Robert Ross, standing outside Government House to appreciate a magnificent sunset, watched them get the sled down Mount George. He had seen Richard expending his Saturday hauling it up that cruel hill several hours ago, marveling at the stamina of the man. So clever! He was a Bristolian, of course. A city of sledges. If ye cannot have wheels, have runners. I doubt a mule has more pure strength, and he with only two legs. I am but eight years older than he, but I could not have done that at twenty. The girl, he decided, was Morgan’s indulgence. A sweet wee mite, and oddly genteel. A workhouse brat, Mrs. Morgan had informed him, sniffing. But then, workhouse brats from strict Church of England workhouses like the girls’ in Canterbury (he had her papers) usually were genteel. Morgan himself was an educated man from the middling classes, so a workhouse brat was a comedown. But not, thought the Major cynically as he turned away, as big a comedown as his legal wife was.
Richard and Kitty moved house on Saturday and Sunday the 27th and 28th of August, 1791. The several working bees had gotten beams, scantlings and cladding up, shingles on the roof and a path from the front doorstep down to the spring; for the time being they would finish only the ground floor, deal with upstairs when an upstairs was necessary. There was a long way to go before his new home looked as nice as the old, but Richard did not care.
They had several tables, a kitchen bench, six fine chairs, two fine beds (one with a feather mattress and pillows), shelving for all Richard’s bits and pieces, and a stone chimney with a big hearth. The iron stove sat within the fireplace, its steel smokestack thrust up into the chimney’s maw; from now on they would have no open fire, which would darken the interior after nightfall, but was much safer.
Housewarming presents were tendered from folk who had little to give save plants or poultry. Richard and Kitty accepted them with full hearts, knowing their real value. Nat and Olivia Lucas gave them a female tortoise-shell kitten, Joey Long another dog. The two more prosperous members of the Morgan circle were typically generous: Stephen donated an oak kitchen cabinet that he had bought from Surgeon Jamison, and the Wentworths a cradle. The cat they named Tibby and the new female pup Charlotte because it looked like a King Charles spaniel. MacTavish approved of both; he remained the sole male animal.
The pigsty and privy were difficult to site until Richard thought of a way to determine the course of the underground stream which fed the spring; nothing must contaminate it. Remembering what Peg’s brother had done when he had needed to dig a new well, Richard cut a forked rod from a sappy green shrub, held on to each fork with a hand, and attempted to divine. The sensation was curious when it happened, as if suddenly the wood shivered into life and fought him gently. Yet Kitty could not make the tip stir any more than could Stephen.
