Eyes still fixed on King’s, he waited calmly. No servility, but not a trace of impudence or presumption either. If this man is to survive, he thought, then he must take notice of what I have said. Otherwise he will not succeed, and the New South Wales Corps will end in ruling Norfolk Island.
The mercurial Celt struggled with the coolheaded Englishman for perhaps a minute, then King’s shoulders slumped. “I hear what ye’re saying clearly. But it cannot continue thus, is what I meant to say. I insist that whatever is built is constructed properly, even if that means some have to live under canvas for however long it takes.” His mood changed. “Major Ross informs me that the harvest will come in magnificently, both here and at Queensborough. Many acres and none spoiled. I admit that is an achievement. Yet we have to put men on the grindstone.” He gazed at his dam, still holding up very well. “We need a water-wheel, and Nat Lucas says he can build one.”
“I am sure he can. His only enemies are time and lack of materials. Give him the latter and he will find the former.”
“Aye, so I think too.” His face assumed a conspiratorial look as he moved completely out of earshot. “Major Ross also told me that ye distilled rum for him during a time of crisis. That rum also saved Port Jackson from mutiny between March and August of this year, with no rum and no ships.”
“I did distill, sir.”
“D’ye possess the apparatus?”
“Aye, sir, very well hidden. It does not belong to me, it is the property of the Government. That I am its custodian lies in the fact that Major Ross trusted me.”
“The pity of it is that those wretched transport captains have not been above selling distillation apparatus to private individuals. I hear that the New South Wales Corps and some of the worst convicts are distilling illicit spirits. At least Port Jackson can grow no sugar cane, but here it grows like a weed. Norfolk Island is potentially a source of rum. What the Governor of New South Wales has to decide is whether to continue importing rum from thousands of miles away at great expense, or to start distilling here.”
“I doubt His Excellency Governor Phillip would consent.”
“Aye, but he will not be governor forever.” King looked very worried. “His health is breaking down.”
“Sir, there is no point in fretting about events which still lie very much in the future,” Richard said, relaxing. He had leaped the chasm, things would be all right between him and King.
“True, true,” said the new Lieutenant-Governor, and hied himself off to spend an hour or two in his office, with perhaps a tiny drop of port to palliate the monotony.
“Ye’ve a box at Stores,” said Stephen not long after this encounter. “What is it, Richard? Ye look exhausted for someone who thinks nothing of ripping a dozen gigantic logs apart.”
“I have just spoken my mind to Commander King.”
“Ooooo-aaa! Well, ye’re a free man, so he cannot have ye flogged without trial and conviction.”
“Oh, I survived. I always do, it seems.”
“Do not tempt fate!”
Richard bent and knocked on wood. “This time, anyway,” he amended. “He had the sense to see I spoke naught but the truth.”
“Then there is hope for him. Did you hear the first thing I said, Richard?”
“No, what?”
“There is a box for you at Stores. It came on Queen. Too heavy to carry, so fetch your sled.”
“Dinner this evening? Then ye can help me explore the box.”
“I will be there.”
He collected his sled at midday and was led to the box by Tom Crowder, taken under Mr. King’s patronage at once. Someone had broken into it—no one here in Stores, he decided. On Queen or in Port Jackson. Whoever had inspected it had had the courtesy to hammer the lid back on. Pushing at the box, he decided from its weight that little had been confiscated, from which he assumed it contained books. A great many books, since it was bigger than a tea chest and made of stronger wood. When he bent to pick it up and heft it onto the sled, Crowder squealed.
“Ye cannot do that alone, Richard! I will find ye a man.”
“I am a man, Tommy, but thankee for the offer.”
RICHARD MORGAN • CONVICT OFF ALEXANDER had been lettered large on every one of the box’s six sides, but there was no shipper’s name.
That afternoon he pulled it home. There were still some hours of daylight left; the nature of the work meant that the sawpits closed earlier than common labor. He was, besides, a free man, at liberty to go home early once in a while.
“You bloom more beautiful each time I see you, wife,” he said to Kitty when she came skipping down the steps to greet him.
They kissed lingeringly, her lips promising lovemaking that night; physically, he knew, he enchanted her. Fearing harm to the baby, he had wanted to stop, but she had looked amazed.
“How can anything so lovely hurt our baby?” she had asked in genuine puzzlement. “You are not a hell-for-leather rammer, Richard.”
His mouth had tugged into a smile at her choice of words, which occasionally reflected that long sojourn aboard Lady Juliana.
“What is inside?” she asked now as he removed the box from the sled.
“As I have not yet opened it, I do not know.”
“Then do so, please! I am dying!”
“It came on Queen rather than Atlantic from Port Jackson, but on Gorgon from England. The delay in Port Jackson is a mystery. Maybe someone wanted to know the name of the shipper.” Richard used a claw hammer to prise the lid off—too easily. Without a doubt the box had been opened and its contents examined.
As he suspected, books. On top of the books and deprived of whatever had surrounded it as packing—clothes, probably—sat a hat box. Jem Thistlethwaite. He untied the tapes and took out the hat to end all hats, of scarlet silk-covered straw with a huge, warped brim and a profusion of black, white and scarlet ostrich feathers fixed under a preposterous black-and-white striped satin bow. It tied under the chin with similarly striped satin ribbons.
“Ohhhhh!” said Kitty as he lifted it up, her mouth sagging.
“Alas, wife, ’tis not for you,” he said before she could get any ideas. “ ’Tis for Mrs. Richard Morgan.”
“I am so glad! It is very grand, but I have not the height or the face—or the clothes—to wear it. Besides,” she confided, “I think people like Mrs. King and Mrs. Paterson would deem it dreadfully vulgar.”
“I love you, Kitty. I love you very, very much.”
To which she returned no answer; she never did.
Stifling a sigh, Richard discovered that the hat box also held a few small items wrapped in screws of paper, all of which had been opened, then closed again. How odd! Who had opened the box, and why? The hat could have bought the least attractive male in Port Jackson a year with that place’s best whore, yet the hat had not been appropriated. Nor the objects wrapped in paper. Unrolling one, he found a brass seal attached to a short wooden handle; when he mentally mirrored its emblem he saw that it consisted of the initials RM entwined with unmistakable fetters or manacles. The other six papers contained sticks of crimson sealing wax. A hint.
On the bottom of the hatbox sat a fat letter, its JT-and-quill seal definitely unbroken, though fingerprints upon its outside said that it had been carefully felt and squeezed. At which moment he understood why his box had been opened, and by whom. In Government Stores at Port Jackson, by a high official in search of gold coin. Had any been found, it would have gone into the Government coffers, very short of gold. Richard knew that the box did contain gold, though he very much doubted from its condition that gold had been found. High officials did not have much imagination.
He found Jethro Tull’s book on horticulture and a set of the second edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica; three-volume novels by the dozen, a whole collection of Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and several London gazettes, the works of John Donne, Robert Herrick, Alexander Pope, Richard Dryden, Oliver Goldsmith, more of Edward Gibbon’s master-work on Rome; some parliamentary reports, a ream of best paper, more steel pens, bottles of ink, laudanum, tonics, tinctures, laxatives and an emetic; several jars of ointments and salves; and a dozen good candle molds.
