“I have just been given my notice,” Lizzie managed to say through hiccoughs and tears. “Mr. King has just told me.”
“Here, drink your tea. Come, ’twill make you feel much more the thing, truly,” coaxed Kitty, stroking the black hair.
Lizzie mopped her eyes with her apron and stared at her nemesis ruefully. “Ye’re really a nice little girl,” she said, the tea beginning to warm the other contents of her stomach.
“I hope I am,” said Kitty, sipping daintily. Why did tea taste so wonderful sipped from a china cup? “Do you like your hat?”
“As ye said, it is a very splendid hat. Major Ross would have whistled and told me I looked like a queen in it, but Mrs. King will only try to be complimentary. She is a very pleasant person with excellent manners, so I cannot say she is to blame for my going. Commander King is responsible. And that Chapman fellow, the crafty booby! An eye to the main chance, that one! Already scheming how to make money out of the place. Brings out the worst in Mrs. King too—which the Commander is starting to realize, let me tell you! I predict that Willy Chapman will shortly be packed off to Queensborough or Phillipsburgh. But Commander King don’t like me, Kitty, and that is a fact I cannot get around. Too vulgar for the likes of Mrs. King, is how he put it. Vulgar! Me? He don’t know what vulgar is! Said he don’t want his children to hear me—sometimes I forget myself and out pops a fuck or two. But never a cunt, Kitty, never a cunt, I swear! It ain’t my fault—blame gaol. Never used to swear and curse.”
“I understand completely,” said Kitty fervently.
“Anyway, he cannot just throw me out, he will have to do the decent thing by me,” growled Lizzie, thrusting out her chin. “I am a free woman, not a convict. And d’ye know who he is going to put in my place?” she demanded, outraged.
“No, who?”
“Mary Rolt. Mary Rolt! Says cunt as well as fuck, I do assure you! Huh! ’Tis all because Mary Rolt fucks Sam King the marine, and he is settling here, and all that. King. Same name, y’see. Makes anyone better in the Commandant’s eyes. Huh!” She sipped a little more tea and stared at the hat. “I wish I had a mirror.”
“Mrs. King must have one.”
“Oh, she does, a big one in her bedroom.”
“Then ask her if you may look. If she has excellent manners and is kind, then she will not say no.”
“It is a fine hat, ain’t it?”
“The finest I have ever seen. Mr. Thistlethwaite said in his letter that it is all the crack—exactly what duchesses and other high ladies are wearing. He says you cannot tell high-born women from whores these days—” She broke off, horrified at where her tongue had led her, but Lizzie was staring fixedly at the medicine bottle. “Perhaps,” Kitty rushed on, “the Kings might keep you on as cook? Richard told me that Major Ross said your cooking was the best he had ever tasted.”
“I,” said Lizzie haughtily, “have other ideas.”
Kitty’s heart soared; some of it was rawness, some of it was shock, but underneath both Lizzie Lock was already springing back. Of course she was! So do we all, we convict women. We have not come this far and survived without being able to spring back. Lizzie is tough. Not hard, just tough. She has had to be. No doubt everybody free will prate their admiration for Mrs. King’s courage in coming so far and putting up with inconveniences, but Mrs. King has never been a convict woman and Mrs. King will never be as admirable in my eyes as Lizzie Lock. Or Mary Rolt. Or Kitty Clark. So there, Mrs. King! said Kitty to herself. Drink your tea from your fine china cups after the convict servant girl has made it and served it to you! Pin on your course clouts after the convict servant girl has washed your blood from them and hung them out to dry! You may be everything a prison commandant’s wife should be, but you are not our equal.
“What ideas do you have?” she asked.
“I have gotten over hating ye for stealing Richard,” Lizzie said, getting up to refill the pot, chip off a bit more sugar, pour more tea.
“Truly I did not steal him!”
“I know that! He stole you, more like. Peculiar, ain’t they? Men, I mean. As far as most of them are concerned, keep the belly and what hangs off it well fed, and they are happy. But Richard was always different, right from when he stalked into Gloucester Gaol like a prince of the blood—you know, sort of cool and royal and quiet. Never needed to raise his voice. Mind you, he is a big man, ha ha ha! Eh, Kitty? Ain’t that right?”
“Yes,” said Kitty, blushing.
“Took on Ike Rogers—an even bigger man—without the blink of an eye. Faced him down. Yet I heard that later on they was real good friends. That is Richard. I am in love with him, but he was never in love with me. No hope. No hope.” Voice teary, Mrs. Richard Morgan got up again to tip the contents of the medicine bottle into her tea. “There! That will ginger it up a treat. Like some?”
“No, thank you. What are your plans, Lizzie?” Kitty realized that whatever Lizzie had gurgled into her tea had been sipped at for some time, probably since the moment Mr. King had walked out after giving her her notice.
“I am thinking of Thomas Sculley, a marine just arrived back to take up land here. Not far from Morgan’s Run. Quiet sort of man, a bit like Richard in that respect. Don’t want no children, but. He ain’t got a woman, and he made me an offer after tasting my banana fritters in rum. I turned him down, but now that the Commandant says I have to go, I may as well move in with Sculley.”
“It will be nice to have you as a neighbor,” Kitty said with sincerity, preparing to take her leave.
“When is the baby due?”
“About another two and a half months.”
“Thankee for bringing the hat. Mr. Thistlethwaite, ye said?”
“Yes, Mr. James Thistlethwaite.”
A great deal more at peace, Kitty pattered off to find Joey and the two dogs waiting for her at the foot of Mount George.
“You were quite right to insist that I take the hat,” she said to Richard as she sliced their own salt pork thinly, spooned gravy over it made with lots of onions, and piled potatoes and fresh beans onto the pewter platters. “Lizzie and I will become friends.” She giggled. “The two Mrs. Richard Morgans.” She put a plate in front of Stephen and another in front of Richard, then carried her own to the table and sat down. “Commander King gave the poor thing her notice this morning.”
“I was afraid of that,” said Stephen, cutting busily with his knife until everything could be scooped up with the spoon. How good it would be to have a fork! “King is a strict husband, wants to shelter his wife from all undignified or sordid phenomena, and Lizzie Lock is definitely an undignified phenomenon. A pity, really. Mrs. King is a tall, gangling sort of creature who does not present as particularly prudish, especially when Willy Chapman is with her.” He pulled a face. “Now there’s a sordid phenomenon, William Neate Chapman. A natural leech.”
“They have china cups and saucers,” said Kitty, busy eating for two, “and I drank my tea out of one. Since there are china cups and saucers even in the kitchen, I think that Mrs. King must be very genteel.”
“I would gladly give ye china cups and saucers of your own, Kitty,” said Richard, “but it is more than a question of money.”
Attention caught, Stephen looked up. “Exactly,” he agreed. “For a long time to come, I suspect, the closest thing Norfolk Island will have to a shop is a stall set up on the straight beach by some ship’s captain. Unfortunately such stalls do not contain fribbles like china tea sets and silver forks. ’Tis always the same kettles, stoves, calico, cheap paper, ink.”
“We need kettles, stoves and calico more than fribbles,” said Richard, God the Fathering. “There are clothes occasionally.”
“Aye, but I notice they never appeal to the women,” Stephen objected.
“That is because men chose them,” said Kitty, smiling. “They always think women would rather buy clothes than china or window curtains, then they choose the wrong clothes anyway.”
“Ye’d rather have
window curtains?” Stephen asked, wondering to himself why Kitty seemed not to care that she couldn’t marry Richard. “The two Mrs. Richard Morgans”—said without a qualm.
“Oh, yes.” Kitty put her spoon down to gaze about the living room, which was coming on; the interior walls were all up and most of them were polished, there were now several shelves of books one beneath the other, and she had found a flowering plant to put in a battered mug. “I love my home best. Rugs and curtains would be truly wonderful, and vases, and pictures on the walls. If I had embroidery silks, I could work tapestry cushions for the chairs and samplers for the walls.”
“One day,” Richard promised. “One day. We will just have to hope that one day a more enterprising ship’s captain comes along to sell lamps and oil, embroidery silks, china teasets and vases. Government Stores are not very imaginative. Slops, shoes, wooden bowls, pewter spoons and mugs, blankets, dippers and tallow candles.”
After the meal was done the men settled to talk of what the flimsies and gazettes said, then drifted to more important things like wheat, clearing, sawing, lime, and the changes Commander King was implementing.
“For all his fine talk, he has not managed to cut punishments down,” said Richard. “Eight hundred lashes, for pity’s sake! Far kinder to hang a man. The most Major Ross ever levied were five hundred, the bulk forgiven, and I note that the surgeons are not allowed to intervene as freely as they used to.”
“Be fair, Richard. The fault lies with the New South Wales Corps, who are brutes commanded by brutes. I wish they would not single out the poor Irish, but they do.”
“Well, the Irish come from outside the Pale and few of them speak English. The soldiers insist that they do, but will not admit it. How can they work when they do not understand their instructions? Yet I have found one man among them with whom it is a pleasure to saw—the best partner since Billy Wigfall. Cheerful, obliging—does not understand a word I say to him any more than I him. Put a rip saw between us, and we are in utter communion.”
“What is his name?”
“I have no idea. Flippety O’Flappety, it may as well be. I call him Paddy, and give him a good lunch of bread and vegetables at the sawpit. Cold meat too. A man cannot saw without plenty of food, I will have to reinforce that with Mr. King.”
Suddenly Kitty laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, Richard, do stop talking about your sawpits! Stephen has big news.”
Richard stared. “Do you? Tell us!”
“King summoned me this morning and informed me that I am to be the official pilot for Norfolk Island. I think he and Major Ross must have had a talk about the number of longboats, cutters and jollyboats which have been wrecked coming across the reef against orders and signals not to attempt to land. Or even defying advice not to return to their ships from the beach. So from now on I and I alone have the ordering of it, no matter what any ship’s master might have to say on the subject. My word is law—and that includes a ship in the roads—when she may bear in, or go to Cascade, or Ball Bay. I am pilot! Had I been pilot when Sirius was here, she would never have gone on the reef.”
“Stephen, that is truly splendid!” cried Kitty, eyes shining.
Richard wrung his hand. “That is not all, is it?”
“There is more, I admit.” He looked lit from within, a fine man not many years past thirty with a whole new world spread before him. “I am in the Royal Navy with a temporary rank of midshipman, but as soon as Commander King can get permission from His Excellency I am to be commissioned a lieutenant—for rank, probably to some ship permanently in Portsmouth harbor. I will be staying here, however, so do not panic. When a genuine lieutenancy comes up, then I am afraid I will have to go. Not an immediate prospect. Meanwhile I am pilot, shortly ye’ll have to address me as Lieutenant Donovan, and in my spare time I have been placed in charge of men clearing forest on Mount George, so I am out of that wretched stone quarry.”
“This calls for a small celebration,” said Richard, rising to dig behind a bookshelf. Out came a bottle. “’Tis my own rum—Morgan’s special blend. Major Ross gave me a good supply of it when he left, but I have not tasted it. So you and I will see what the local rum is like after it has aged a while in a cask with some decent Bristol spirits to help it along.”
“Here is to you, Richard.” Stephen lifted his mug and sipped, expecting to flinch or at least grimace. Surprise spread over his face, he took a full mouth of it. “Richard, not bad at all!” The mug was tipped in Kitty’s direction. “And here is to Kitty and the baby, whose godfather I demand to be. May she be a girl and may ye call her Kate.”
“Why Kate?” asked Kitty.
“Because in this part of the world ’tis better to be a shrew than a mouse.” Stephen grinned. “Do not blanch so, little mother! Some man will tame her.”
“What if it is a boy?” the little mother enquired.
Richard answered. “My first boy will be William Henry, and he will always be called all of it. William Henry.”
“William Henry. . . . I like it,” said Kitty, pleased.
Head bent over his mug, Stephen concealed a sigh. So she did not know. Would she ever know? Richard, tell her! Admit her as an equal, I beg you!
“I have news too, Lieutenant—and may ye be an Admiral of the Blue one day,” Richard announced, toasting Stephen. “Tommy Crowder has been ordered by Mr. King to start a register of land and land owners. I am to go down in it as Richard Morgan—free man—possessed of twelve acres in his own right and not by power of the Crown. I am also to have ten acres at Queensborough on part of the treeless area. That will come next June or thereabouts as a grant from the Crown. So I will grow wheat on Morgan’s Run and Indian corn at Queensborough to feed my pigs.” He lifted his mug. “I drink a second toast to ye, Lieutenant Donovan, for all your many kindnesses through the years. May ye command a hundred guns in a big sea battle against the French before ye become an Admiral of the Blue. Kitty, turn your back and do not peek.”
The twenty gold coins were slipped into Stephen’s palm; he raised his brows, then put them into the pockets of his canvas jacket. When Kitty was told that she could look, she found them laughing, for what reason she did not know.
1792 came in dry, though there had been the usual rain around Christmas, luckily just after reaping had ended. Kitty grew heavier, but she was not one of those women who looked as if they might burst; she carried small and could keep busy without too much extra effort.
“You know, Richard, it truly ought to be you having this poor baby!” she said to him, exasperated. “You fuss and cluck so!”
“I do think that ye ought to go into Arthur’s Vale and stay with Olivia Lucas,” he said anxiously. “Morgan’s Run is isolated.”
“I am not going to stay with Olivia Lucas!”
“What if the baby comes earlier than ye expect?”
“Richard, I have had a long talk with Olivia—I know all about it! Believe me, I will have plenty of time to let Joey know and let you know and let Olivia know. This is a first baby. They do not come in a hurry,” she said firmly.
“You are sure?”
“Truly,” she said in the voice of a dying martyr, walked to a chair lithely, sat down without making a difficulty of it, and looked at him very seriously. “I have some questions to ask you, Richard, and I insist upon some answers,” she said.
An air of authority surrounded her; fascinated, Richard could not take his eyes off her. “Then ask,” he said, sitting down where his face was on full display to her. “Go ahead, ask.”
“Richard, shortly I am to have your child, but I know next to nothing about your life. What little I know is thanks to Lizzie Lock. What she told me amounts to a pinpoint, and I think I am entitled to know more than Lizzie Lock. Tell me about the daughter who would be my age now.”
“Her name was Mary, and she is buried next to her mother in the burying ground of St. James’s, Bristol. She died of the smallpox when she was three. One reason why I would rather my children
grew up here. The worst we have to worry about is dysentery.”
“Did you have other children?”
“A son, William Henry. He drowned.”
Her face crumpled. “Oh, Richard!”
“Do not grieve, Kitty. It was all a very long time ago, and in a different country. My children will not grow up with the same sort of risks.”
“There are risks here, and drowning is the most common one.”
“Believe me, the way my son drowned could not happen here. His was a death happens in cities, not on small islands where we all know each other. There are bad folk here and we do not mix with them, but when a school is organized, we parents will know a great deal more about the schoolmasters than Bristol parents do. William Henry died because of a schoolmaster.” Head to one side, he looked at her quizzically. “Any more questions?”
“How did your Bristol wife die?”
“Of an apoplexy, luckily before William Henry went. She did not suffer at all.”
“Oh, Richard!”
“There is no need to be sad, my love. You are why it happened, I am sure of it. In that I was not meant to know the joy of a real family in Bristol, where I never knew the joy of living in my own house. All I ask from you is that ye keep a small corner of your heart for me as the father of your children. That and the children will be enough.”
Her mouth parted, she almost said that he had more than a small corner of her heart, but she closed it with the words unspoken. To say them would be a promise, a commitment that she was not sure she would be able to honor. She liked him enormously, and, liking him, did not think it decent to imply that he was more than he truly was. No music in her heart, no wings on her soul. Did he give her those, it might be different. Did he give her those, she would be able to call him “my love.”