Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Cards!” gasped Lawrell, teeth chattering; the wind was due south and very cold.

“Cards.” Richard led him out of the water and patted his welts dry with a rag. “Ye’ll live,” he said then. “Jimmy Richardson did not lay it on hard, ye’re not bleeding much. Were ye a woman, ye’d not have fared so well. And what do cards have to do with it?”

“Lost,” said Lawrell simply, following Richard down the road past the outermost row of houses. “Had to pay somehow. Josh Peck said I could save them a walk and get their birds for them. But I did not know how heavy the sack would be, so I was too slow to get back before curfew.”

“Then learn from this lesson, John, please. If ye must play cards, play with decent men, not cheats and liars like that lot. Now go on up the vale to bed.”

After several moves, Stephen Donovan now had a very good house just to the east of the Cascade road, and Nat Lucas an equally good house on an acre of flat ground beyond him. The swamp did not encroach on this area, but Major Ross was busy trying to drain the swamp by digging an outlet to Turtle Bay. Flat land was arable land, and all the tiny brooks which fed the Arthur’s Vale stream could not contribute enough water to force an exit to the sea; the swamp was a terminus using up growing space.

“Come!” Stephen called when Richard knocked.

“I have just sent my erring guard to bed,” said Richard, sitting down with a sigh. “Peck and the rest called in his card debts by making him bring them birds. Oh, he is a nodcock!”

“But useful. Here, share my fish. The coble got out today and Johnny is dancing attendance on Captain Hunter, so I have his share too. A welcome change from Mt. Pitt birds.”

“I would rather eat fish any day,” said Richard, tucking in, “and why the craze for female birds gravid with egg I do not know. I will repay this kindness by digging ye a handful of potatoes tomorrow. Mine are coming on nicely, one reason why I am glad to have Lawrell back on duty now I can keep a third of my produce.”

“Is anybody speaking to you yet?” Stephen asked when they were done, the dishes washed, the chessboard set up.

“Not among those who have sided with my wife-Connelly, Perrott and a few others from Ceres and Alexander days. Oddly enough, the group who knew her in Gloucester Gaol before my time there-Guest, Risby, Hatheway-have sided with me.” He looked disgusted. “As if there are sides to take. Ridiculous. Lizzie is very satisfied with her lot, up there on the Government House knoll clucking and fussing over Little John, though she don’t try it with the Major.”

“She is in love with you, Richard, and scorned,” Stephen said, thinking that enough time had gone by to bring this aspect up.

Richard stared in astonishment. “Rubbish! There was never love between us. I know you hoped that marrying her might lead to love, but it did not.”

“She loves you.”

Troubled, Richard said nothing for a while, moved and lost a pawn, essayed a knight. If Lizzie loved him, then her hurt was far greater than he had thought. Remembering what she had said about Lady Penrhyn and the stripping of women’s pride, that was how he had seen the worst aspect of his crime against her-as a public humiliation of unpardonable kind. She had never said she loved him, never indicated that by word or look… He lost his knight.

“How goes it between the Marine Corps and the Navy?” he asked.

“Very touchy. Hunter has never liked Major Ross, but his exile here only serves to enhance his loathing. So far they have managed not to have an actual falling out, but that is definitely coming. Limited to Sirius’s cutter, he can undertake no long sea excursions, so he spends most of his time rowing around his nemesis, Nepean Island-looking, I suspect, for navigational evidence to bolster his defense when he comes to court martial in England. Once he has sounded every inch of the bottom and compiled his chart, he will do the same sort of thing everywhere on these coasts.”

“Why has Johnny half-returned to him, if that is not an intrusion into your private world?”

Shrugging, Stephen turned the corners of his mouth down. “No, I will answer. ’Tis very hard for a seaman to resist the authority of the captain unless he is of mutinous make, and that Johnny is not. Johnny is Royal Navy and Hunter next to God.”

“I also heard that Lieutenant William Bradley, Royal Navy, has quit the naval officers’ quarters and moved himself out along the road to Ball Bay.”

“Ye deduced that, no doubt, from sawing timber for his new house. Aye, he has gone, and no one mourns the fact. A very strange man, Bradley-talks to himself, which is why he needs no company other than himself. As I understand it, the Major has put him to rough surveying of the interior. A great affront to Hunter, who is adamant that naval persons of any rank ought not to toil on land.”

Ignominiously beaten, Richard rose to kindle a pine knot in Stephen’s fire. “I would like my revenge, but if I do not go now I will be caught out after curfew. D’ye care to walk to the mountain with me tomorrow for another lot of birds?”

“Since we ate all the fish, gladly.”

Stephen waved him off down the vale, trying to imagine the expression on Richard’s face when he entered his house. Sirius’s sail had been released from duty as shelter and had been divided up among the free men for use as mattresses or hammocks; thanks to King’s wheat crop as well as the fact that the settlement owned neither horses nor cattle, there was ample straw for stuffing. To Stephen, officially the captor of the sail, went as much as he wanted, so he had taken enough for his own needs and Richard’s. Long weathering and a few soapy washes in fresh water softened the canvas sufficiently to turn it into reasonable sheets, not to mention stout trowsers. Parties of women skilled with a needle were sewing away to produce new trowsers for the enlisted marines and sailors, who were obliged to give up a pair of old trowsers to a convict in return for a pair of new ones. No one truly appreciated the amount of sail a ship the size of Sirius carried until it was liberated for other uses.

“I cannot thank you enough for the canvas,” Richard said when he met Stephen on the Cascade road at sundown on the following day. “Using blankets as a bottom sheet on one’s bed wears them out in no time. The canvas will last for years.”

“I suspect it may have to.”

They climbed up the farthest path, which was the least popular one as it involved the longest walk, and gathered a half-dozen birds each high on the mountain, where the creatures still thronged in countless numbers. All that was necessary was to reach down and pick one up; a quick wring of its neck, and into the sack. The eggs were laid now, though the amount of birds being caught had not diminished; Clark’s tally was growing into many thousands, and took account only of birds handed over to Government Stores plus whatever he and his fellow officers collected.

On the way back they passed through a vast clearing where the timber was already felled-some acres of it-on the flattish crest of the hills which divided the direction of the streams from those flowing north to Cascade Bay, those flowing east to Ball Bay, and those flowing south to the swamp or what was becoming known as Phillimore’s stream, around the corner from the far beach. Here in this clearing-what was Major Ross’s purpose?-it was possible to look north at the mountain.

Cloudless darkness had fallen, the stars so dense and brilliant that a man could fancy there must be an intensely glowing white layer behind the darkness of the sky, and that God had pricked the heavens to let some of that silver firmament shine through. Where the bulk of the mountain should have loomed as a black shadow, what looked like streamers of darting fireflies flickered in and out of the gloom, shifting and sparkling rivers of flame; the torches of hundreds of men coming down the slopes.