Colleen McCullough: Morgan’s Run

Stephen kissed her and removed the parcel, which did not upset her in the least; while her father was in the same room she saw little beyond him.

“Put it away for her,” Stephen said, giving the parcel to Kitty. “’Twill be some years before she can appreciate it.”

Curious, Kitty undid the wrappings and stared in awe. “Oh, Stephen! It is beautiful!”

“I bought it from Kitty’s captain. Her name is Stephanie.”

She was a doll with a delicately painted porcelain face, eyes which had properly striped irises, minutely drawn lashes, a mop of yellow hair made from strands of silk, and she was dressed like a lady of thirty years ago in a panniered pink silk gown.

“Ye return to Port Jackson in Kitty, I gather?” Richard asked.

“Aye, and then on her to Portsmouth in June.”

They ate roast pork and then a birthday cake Kitty had managed to make feather-light on a rising ingredient no more substantial than white-of-egg beaten in a copper bowl with a whisk Richard had made her out of copper wire. He was so good with his hands, could make her anything she asked for.

The sporadic visits of ships had provided tea, real sugar, various small luxuries including Kitty’s pride and joy, a frail porcelain teaset. The unglazed windows fluttered green Bengalese cotton curtains, but pictures and forks still eluded her. Never mind, never mind. William Henry was perhaps three months from his birth; she knew he was William Henry. Mary would have to wait until the next time-not as long a wait as Richard would choose, but never mind, never mind. Children were all she had to give him. There could never be too many; Norfolk Island had its dangers too. Last year poor Nat Lucas, chopping down a pine, watched in horror as it fell with a monstrous roar upon Olivia, baby William in her arms and her twin girls clinging to her skirts. Olivia and William had escaped almost unharmed, but Mary and Sarah died instantly. Yes, of children there must be many. One mourned their passing dreadfully, yet thanked God for those still living.

Her life was filled with happiness, for no better reason than that she loved and was loved, that her daughter was bursting with good health and the son growing inside her drove her mad with his incessant kicking. Oh, she would miss Stephen! Though not, she knew, one-tenth as much as Richard would. Still, these things happened. Nothing remained the same, everything kept marching to somewhere else that was a mystery until it arrived on the doorstep. Stephen was sailing in her all the way to England, and that meant much. Kitty would keep him safe, Kitty would skim the waves like a petrel.

“May we have Tobias?” she asked.

The mobile brows flew up, the vivid blue eyes twinkled. “Part from Tobias? Not likely, Kitty. Tobias is a Navy cat, he sails with me wherever I go. I have trained him to think of me as his place.”

“Will you visit Major Ross?”

“Definitely.”

Richard waited to ask his burning question until he strolled up the cleft with Stephen toward the Queensborough road. “Will ye do me a favor, Stephen?”

“Anything, ye know that. Would ye like me to see your father, Cousin James-the-druggist?”

“If ye’ve time, not otherwise. I want ye to carry a letter from me to Jem Thistlethwaite in Wimpole Street, London, and give it to him in person. I will never see him again, but I would like someone who knows this Richard Morgan to vouch for him.”

“It shall be done.” At the white boundary stone Stephen took the wig and clapped it on with a rueful look at the grinning Richard. “Ye have a week to write your letter. Kitty is in the roads until I say otherwise.”

With theadvent of the Reverend Mr. Bain as resident chaplain in Norfolk Island, the pressure to attend Sunday service had eased a little. Commander King insisted that every felon be present, so if all the free came as well, the crush was dreadful. Felons were deemed to need God’s attention more than did the free.

Knowing therefore that his face would not be missed if he missed service on the morrow, Richard warned Kitty that he would be up late on Saturday night writing a letter to Mr. Thistlethwaite, and would sleep on when morning came. Delighted that he would gain a few extra hours of rest (writing a letter was not like sawing a log, after all), Kitty took herself off to bed.

Richard lifted the oil lamp off its shelf with great care; it had been bought at the same stall as the teaset, and cost more because it was accompanied by a fifty-gallon keg of whale oil. His use of it was sparing-sheer weariness did not permit nightly reading-but possessing it had meant that he could pore over the treasure trove of books Jem Thistlethwaite had sent in the only leisure activity did not make him feel a traitor to his family. Kitty, he understood now, would never learn to read and write because neither was important to her. The sole fount of knowledge in their house was he, therefore he had to read.

Paper bathed in a golden glow from the two-wicked lamp, he dipped one of his steel pens into the inkwell and began to write with scant hesitation; what he wanted to say had already been rehearsed in his mind over and over again.

“Jem, this letter is borne by the best man I have ever known, and the only consolation I have in losing him is that you will come to know and love him. Somehow we have trodden the same path through all the years since Alexander sat in the Thames, from ship to ship and place to place. He a free man, I a convict. Always friends. Did I not have Kitty and my children, losing him would be a mortal blow.

“What I write of on these pages is different from the letter I sent after your box came. That one went by any official hand it encountered, at the mercy of prying eyes and prurient minds. The miracle is that our letters ever do reach their destination, but the trickle of replies which arrived during 1792 (and on Bellona and Kitty so far this year) tells us that those who bear our letters to England pity us enough to make good their promises. Some of us, however, never do receive word from the place most of us still call ‘home.’ I am unsure whether that is accidental or on purpose. This one will never leave Stephen’s care. I can say anything, and, knowing Stephen, he will sit in silence to let ye read this before he speaks, and that frees me too.

“This year, 1793, I will turn five-and-forty. How I look and how I have physically weathered this span Stephen will relate better than I, for we lack mirrors in Norfolk Island. Save that I have kept my health and can probably work harder for longer now than ever I could when a young man in England.

“As I sit here in the night the only sounds which reach my ears are of mighty trees moving in a rising wind, and the only smells which assail my nostrils are sweetly resinous or indefinable relics of the rain which fell a few hours ago and wetted the soil.

“I will never return to England, which is a place I no longer think of as, or call, ‘home.’ Home is here in Norfolk Island and always will be here. The truth is, Jem, that I want no truck with the country sent me to Botany Bay jammed aboard a slaver for just over twelve months amid misery and suffering still haunt my dreams.

“There were good times and good moments, none of them given us by those who shipped us off-greedy contractors, indifferent shufflers of paper, port-swilling barons and admirals. And we on the first fleet which sailed for Botany Bay enjoyed luxury compared to the horrors those who follow us must endure-ask Stephen to tell you what they found aboard Neptune when she anchored in Port Jackson.

“To be the first for Botany Bay was at once the best and the worst of it. No one knew what to do, Jem, not even the sad and desperate little governor, Phillip. It was neither planned nor decently equipped. Not one person in Whitehall worked out the logistics, and the contractors cheated on both the quality and the quantity of the clothing, tools and other essentials that were sent with us. I keep imagining the look on Julius Caesar’s face did he know of our shambles.