Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Sirius wallowed on the reef, a mournful sight. The grapevine had already informed Richard that Willy Dring and James Branagan-the latter a man he did not know-had volunteered to swim out to the wreck, toss the remaining poultry, dogs and cats over the side, and heave floatable kegs and casks into the water. Dring was not the right man for this; the Yorkshireman and his crony Joe Robinson, once steady fellows, seemed to have deteriorated.

He spied Will Connelly and Neddy Perrott sitting with women who must be theirs-that was a good sign!-and began to pick his way through the crowd.

“Richard! Oh, Richard my love, Richard my love!”

Lizzie Lock threw herself upon him, twined her arms about his neck and covered his face with kisses, crooning, weeping, mumbling.

His reaction was utterly instinctive, over and done before he could think of suppressing it, of waiting until some more private opportunity arrived to tell her that he could not share any part of himself with her, wife though she was. No one had told him that she was here, and he had not thought of her once since that magical day when William Henry, little Mary and Peg had returned to live in his soul. Before he could control them, his hands had gone to fasten about Lizzie’s arms and wrench her away.

Flesh crawling, hair on end, he stared at her as if she were a visitation from Hell. “Don’t touch me!” he cried, white-faced. “Don’t touch me!”

And she, poor creature, staggered plummeting from ecstatic joy to horror, to bewilderment, to a pain so great that she clutched at her meager chest and looked at him out of eyes blinded to everything but his revulsion. Breath gone, her mouth opened and closed without a sound; she fell to her knees, powerless.

The moment she had uttered his name the whole group turned to look, and those in it who knew him, who had so eagerly anticipated this reunion, gasped, gaped, murmured.

“I am your wife!” she screamed thinly from her knees. “Richard, I am your wife!”

His eyes were clearing, took in the sight of her at his feet, took in the growing anger and outrage on the faces of his friends, took in the greed of the uninvolved to eat up as much of this show as its participants were willing to enact. What to do? What to say? Even as one part of him asked these unanswerable questions, a second part of him was noting the onlookers, and a third part of him was shrinking in horror-she was going to touch him! The visceral part won: he backed away, out of her reach.

The die was cast. Better then to finish it the way it had started, by the glaring light of a public bonfire in the midst of a collection of people who would-and rightly so-condemn him as a heartless wretch in sore need of a flogging.

“I am very sorry, Lizzie,” he managed, “but I cannot take up with you again. I-just-cannot.” His hands lifted, fell. “I want no wife, I-”

He could find nothing else to say, and having nothing else to say, turned and left.

The nextday, Tuesday, he met Stephen as usual at Point Hunter to watch the sunset. It was one of those cloudless evenings when the massive red disc had slid into the sea with what Richard always fancied should be a boiling sizzle, and as the light died out of the sky and the vault darkened to indigo, the vanished sun seemed to bend its rays back through the vast depths of the water to endow it with a pale, milky-blue luminousness far brighter than the heavens.

“This is a wondrous place,” said Stephen, who must surely have heard what the whole settlement was saying, but chose not to mention it. “Here is where the Garden of Eden was, I am convinced of it. It ravishes me, it calls to me like a siren. And I do not know why, only that it is unearthly. No parallel anywhere. But now that men are here, they will ruin it. ’Twas Man ruined Eden.”

“No, they will merely try to ruin it, mistaking it for other earth they have ruined. This place looks after itself because it is beloved of God.”

“There are ghosts here, you know,” Stephen remarked idly. “I saw one as clear as day-it was day, as a matter of fact. A giant of a fellow with huge calf muscles, golden skin, naked save for a piece of papery cloth marked in brown across his loins. His face was sternly beautiful, patrician, and both his thighs were tattooed in a pattern of curliqued stripes. A kind of man I have never set eyes upon, could not have imagined in my dreams. He came down the beach toward me, then, when I might almost have touched him, he turned and walked straight through the wall of Nat Lucas’s house. Olivia began to scream the place down.”

“Then I am glad I live up the vale. Though Billy Wigfall told me recently that he saw John Bryant on the hillside where the tree killed him. One moment he was standing there, the next moment he was gone. As if, said Billy, he was startled at being discovered.”

The surf was pounding in; Supply had sailed from the roads, was working her way around to Cascade. Embarkation would not be easy for Mr. King’s pregnant lady, forced to leap from that rock into a heaving longboat.

“Is it true that Dring and Branagan got into the rum last night aboard Sirius and set fire to her?” Richard asked.

“Aye. Private John Escott-he is Ross’s servant-spotted the flames after dark from Government House’s eminence and volunteered to swim out. Ross agreed because the man is very strong in the water. Escott found Dring and Branagan almost insensible from rum, busy warming themselves at the fire. He threw them into the sea, put out the conflagration-it had burned right through the gun deck-and stayed on Sirius until this morning, when they got him off together with the rum. Dring and Branagan have been clapped in irons and put in Lieutenant King’s new guardhouse. The Major is livid, having left the rum aboard Sirius thinking ’twould be much safer there than ashore. I suspect that as soon as the old commandant has sailed on Supply, the new commandant will administer either capital punishment or five hundred lashes. He cannot afford to ignore this first infringement of his Law Martial.”

Very dark in the failing light, Stephen’s eyes turned to Richard, sitting coiled as tensely as a steel spring. “I hear that ye had a visit from the Major early today?”

Richard smiled wryly. “Major Ross’s ears belong to a bat. How or from whom I cannot hazard a guess, but he heard what went on last night at the bonfire. Well, ye know him. Waited until I went home for breakfast, barged in, sat himself down and looked at me very much as he might have inspected a new sort of grub. ‘I hear that ye publicly repudiated your wife,’ he said. I answered with a yes and he grunted. Then he said, ‘Not what I might have expected from ye, Morgan, but I daresay ye have your reasons, ye usually do.’ ”

Stephen chuckled. “He really does have a way with words!”

“He then proceeded to ask me if I thought my wife would make a suitable housekeeper for an officer! I told him she was clean, tidy, an excellent mender and darner of clothes, a good cook, and-as far as I knew-a virgin. Whereupon he slapped his hands on his knees and stood up. ‘Does she like children?’ he asked. I said I thought so, judging from her behavior with the children in Gloucester Gaol. ‘And ye’re sure she is not a temptress?’ he asked. I said I was absolutely positive about that. ‘Then she will suit me down to the ground,’ he said, and marched out looking as pleased as the cat that got to the cream.”

Stephen doubled up with laughter. “I swear, Richard,” he said when he was able, “that ye cannot put a foot wrong with Major Ross. For some reason quite beyond me he likes you enormously.”

“He likes me, “ said Richard, “because I am not a bit afraid of him and I tell him the truth, not what I think he wants to hear. Which is why he will never esteem Tommy Crowder the way King did. When I stood up to King he had half a mind to flog me, whereas I have never needed to stand up to Major Ross.”