Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

He did, however, set up a stall on the straight beach.

“Stephen,” said Richard, “I am going to call in a brother’s promise. Will ye lend me gold? I can pay ye for it in notes of hand with interest.”

“I will gladly lend ye the gold, Richard, but I will wait for repayment until ye can give me gold,” said Stephen craftily. “How much d’ye require?”

“Twenty pounds.”

“A trifle!”

“Ye’re sure?”

“Like you, brother, I have plenty of credit with Government. Two or three hundred pounds by now, I expect-I never can bother asking Freeman to tot it up. My wants are simple and not usually to be assuaged by gold or notes of hand. Whereas you have a wife and family to provide for, not to mention a new and much bigger house of two storeys.” Closing all the shutters, he reached into the skeletal maw of a shark he had caught on Alexander and fiddled until a catch sprang, revealing a small door in the wall. The purse he removed was a fat one.

“Twenty pounds,” he said, dropping them into Richard’s palm. “As ye see, I am not skint because of the loan.”

“What if someone fancies a pair of shark jaws?”

“Luckily I deem them last on a thief’s list.” He shut the door and adjusted his trophy. “Let us go, or some other hoarder of gold will beat us to the best bargains.”

Richard bought several lengths of sprigged muslin, well aware that Kitty had told him a small lie; servant maids wore wool, and ten yards of muslin were worth three guineas. The jury had felt sorry for the weeping, devastated girls. As well the jury might. He also bought cheap cotton calico which would make everyday dresses for dealing with pigs and poultry, sewing thread, needles, scissors, some yard rules and trowels for himself, and an iron stove with a fire grate and ashpan in its base surmounted by an oven with a flat top and a hole for a chimney. Captain Monroe had sections of thin steel chimney pipe of the kind installed on ships; they cost more than the stove. What pounds were left he spent on thick napped cotton cloth he knew would make excellent diapers, and dark red woolen serge to make winter coats for Kitty and the baby.

“Ye’ve just spent almost as much as ye did on twelve good acres,” said Stephen, testing the rope binding the goods to the sled. “Monroe is a robber.”

“Land requires labor, and that I give free,” said Richard. “I would have my wife and children as comfortable as Norfolk Island life permits. This is no climate for woolen or canvas slops, and the clothing already made up falls apart on first washing. We are swindled by London over and over again. Kitty sews even better than she cooks, so she can make things to last.” He eased his shoulders into the sled harness and buckled it across his chest. The sled moved off effortlessly, though its contents weighed over 300 pounds. “Ye’re welcome to come up the vale for supper this evening, Stephen.”

“Thankee, but nay. Tobias and I are celebrating the departure of the fucken Mt. Pitt bird by eating two splendid snappers I caught on the reef this morning.”

“Christ, ye’ll be killed doing that!”

“Not I! I can smell the big wave coming a mile away.”

Which he probably could, reflected Richard; Stephen’s gift for wind, weather, current and waves was uncanny, and no one knew more about Norfolk Island’s conditions than he.

Wanting to drop the stove off at the site of the new house first, Richard commenced to toil up the steep slope of Mount George on the Queensborough road. This one-mile slog was nothing new; he had dragged the sled laden with calcarenite stone up the hill time and time again. Wheels would have made the pull even harder, for the sled moved in smooth tracks its runners had worn when the road was muddy. Not a frequent occurrence this year, a dry one. Only an occasional night of heavy rain was bringing the wheat and Indian corn on superbly.

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.