Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“When did ye last inspect, Captain-Lieutenant?”

“I am about to. After I have finished my breakfast.”

“Of rum rather than tea, I note. Ye drink too much, Captain-Lieutenant, and ye’re quarrelsome. Do not quarrel with me.”

Shairp had saluted and disappeared, returning a moment later with MacGregor in one hand. “Here, Morgan, take him. ’Twas one of your men won him, so I am told.” He giggled. “Cannot quite seem to remember, myself.”

Wanting to sink into the ground, Richard took the joyous scrap from Shairp and followed Major Ross down to the ford.

“D’ye mean to carry that thing to the commissary?”

“Not if I can find one of my men, sir. Our camp is on the way,” said Richard with a tranquillity he did not feel; he always seemed to be there when the Major had hard words to say to people.

“Well, ’tis time I visited the surplus. Lead the way, Morgan.”

Richard led the way, hanging on to the struggling MacGregor.

“He will survive by ratting,” said Major Ross as they arrived at the dozen or so shelters dispersed among the trees. “The place has as many rats as London.”

“Give this to Joey Long,” said Richard, thrusting MacGregor at a startled Johnny Cross. “As ye see, sir, we managed to get up a fair sort of frame, but I think convict Crowder has the best idea for walls. The trouble is that without tools and materials the work proceeds at a snail’s pace.”

“I did not know that there was so much ingeniousness among the English” was Ross’s comment, touring thoroughly. “Once ye’re done here, ye can start building another camp between where ye are and the Governor’s farm, which is being cleared and laid out already. If we get no fresh vegetables the scurvy will kill us all. There are too many women all together over on the western side. I will divide them, send some over here. Which does not mean congress, Morgan, understand?”

“I understand, sir.”

They proceeded to the commissariat, where confusion still reigned. The horses, cattle and other livestock had come off and were confined inside hastily erected barricades of piled branches, looking as miserable as everybody else.

“Furzer,” said the Lieutenant-Governor, erupting into the big marquee, “ye’re a typical fucken Irishman. Have ye never heard of method? What d’ye think ye’re going to do with those animals unless ye get them into grazing? Eat them? There is no corn left and very little hay. Ye’re not a quartermaster’s arsehole! Since there is nothing for the carpenters to do until they have some timber, get them onto building pens for the animals right now! Find someone who knows good grazing when he sees it and build the pens there. The cattle will have to be shepherded and the horses hobbled-and God help ye if they get away! Now where are your lists of what was on what ship, if it has come off, and where it is now?”

Lieutenant Furzer could produce no lists worth mentioning, had little idea of whereabouts anything landed had been stored; the only storehouses up were temporary canvas ones.

“I had thought to list things when they went into permanent storage, sir,” he faltered.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Furzer, ye’re a cretin!”

The quartermaster swallowed and stuck his chin out. “I cannot do it all with the men I have, Major Ross, and that is honest!”

“Then I suggest ye conscript more convicts. Morgan, have ye any ideas as to suitable men? Ye’re a convict, ye must know some.”

“I do, sir. Any amount. Commencing with Thomas Crowder and Aaron Davis. Bristol men and fond of clerking. Villains, but too clever to bite the hand gives them clerical work, so they’ll not steal. Threaten to put them to chopping down trees at the rate of a dozen a day and they will behave perfectly.”

“What about yourself?”

“I can be of more benefit elsewhere, sir,” Richard said.

“Doing what?”

“Sharpening saws, axes, hatchets and anything else in need of a keen edge. I can also set a saw’s teeth, which is a craft. I have some tools with me now and if my tool box was put on a ship, I will have everything I need.” He cleared his throat. “I do not mean to cast aspersions on those who are in command, sir, but the axes and hatchets are sadly inferior. So too the spades, shovels and mattocks.”

“I have noticed that for myself,” said Major Ross grimly. “We have been diddled by experts, Morgan, from the penny-pinching Admiralty officials to the contractor and the transport captains, some of whom are busy selling slops and better clothing already-including, I have reason to believe, personal possessions of the convicts.” He prepared to leave. “But I will make it my business to see if there is a tool box for one Richard Morgan. In the meantime, get what ye need from Furzer here, be it awls, nails, hammers or wire.” He nodded and marched out, clapping his cocked hat on his head. Always neat as a bandbox, Major Ross, no matter what the weather.

“Get me Crowder and Davis and ye can have whatever ye want,” said Lieutenant Furzer, beyond mortification.

Richard got him Crowder and Davis, and collected sufficient tools and materials to finish their own shelters and start on more for the women convicts.

Women convictshad suddenly become the focus of all attention as male convicts and single marines attempted to rid themselves of passions and urges largely unfulfilled for a year and more. The comings and goings after dark were so many that not ten times the number of marines on duty could have prevented them, even if the marines on duty had not been equally determined upon sexual relief. Complicated by the fact that there were not nearly enough women to go around, and further complicated by the fact that not all the women were interested in providing sexual relief for starved men. Luckily some women accepted their lot and cheerfully obliged all comers, while others would do so for a mug of rum or a man’s shirt. The rarity of rape lay somewhere between some women’s willingness to serve multiples of men and most men’s scruples about forcing themselves on unwilling women.

From the Governor to the Reverend Richard Johnson, however, those in command were horrified at the comings and goings in the women’s camp, viewing them as depraved, licentious, utterly immoral. Naturally this stemmed from their own access to women, be she Mrs. Deborah Brooks or Mrs. Mary Johnson. Something had to be done!

Richard’s group sneaked off after dark, of course. Except for himself, Taffy Edmunds and Joey Long. For Joey, having MacGregor was apparently enough. Taffy was a different breed, a loner with misogynistic tendencies that the sudden proximity of women actually reinforced. He was odd, that was all. Singing did it for Taffy. Of his own reasons for eschewing the women’s camp Richard was not sure, except that there was some Taffy in him, it seemed; the prospect of succeeding in having a woman after two years away from their company and more than three years since Annemarie Latour was not one he could face. Since Annemarie Latour his penis had not stirred, and why that was he did not know. Not extinction of the life force. More perhaps a terrible shame and guilt, coming as it had in the midst of William Henry and on the heels of so many other losses. But he did not know and did not want to know. Only that a part of him had died and another part of him had passed into a dreamless sleep. Whatever had happened inside his mind had banished sex. Whether that was confinement or liberation he did not know. He did not know. More importantly, it was not a grief to him.

On the7th of February there was to be a big ceremony, the first the convicts were commanded to attend. At eleven in the morning they were marshaled, male separated from female, on the southeastern point of the cove amid ground cleared for the vegetable garden; carrying muskets and properly dressed for parade, every marine marched in to the music of fifes and drums, colors and pendants flying. His Excellency Governor Phillip arrived shortly thereafter, accompanied by the blond giant Captain David Collins, his Judge Advocate; Lieutenant-Governor Major Robert Ross; the Surveyor-General, Augustus Alt; the Surgeon-General, John White; and the chaplain, the Reverend Richard Johnson.