February was blowy and wild, hurricanes lurking. At least the crops were all in and the grain under shelter; a harvest big enough to feed every person in Norfolk Island, though there would be none to spare for New South Wales. Just a lot of lime, a little timber.
On the 15th of February, Richard hurried home, late and very anxious because the Lieutenant-Governor had delayed him with more questions than Kitty could think of in a week. Kitty was not yet due, but the head had engaged, so Olivia Lucas had told him, and Joey Long was nobody’s idea of a midwife. Comforted by Olivia’s and Kitty’s assurances that first babies did not come in a hurry, he headed down the track to the house. No smoke issued from the tall stone chimney; his pace quickened. Even at almost nine months, she still insisted upon baking her own bread.
Not a sound.
“Kitty!” he called, bounding up the three steps to the door.
“I am here,” came a small voice.
Heart drumming a tattoo against his rib cage, Richard burst through the door, taking in the room with a single glance. Not a sign of her. In the bedroom—Christ! It had begun!
She was sitting on the bed propped against two pillows, her face turned toward him with a beatific smile. “Richard, meet your daughter,” she said. “Say good evening to Kate.”
His knees sagged but he managed to reach the bed, sit on its edge heavily. “Kitty!”
“Look at her, Richard. Is she not beautiful?”
A pair of work-scarred hands offered him a tightly wrapped bundle—oh, it was not fair that his hands should be better cared for by far than hers! He took the bundle and delicately pushed the swaddling away from a tiny folded face, its mouth a perfect O, its puffy eyelids shut, its skin too dark to be red, surmounted by a shock of thick black hair. The ocean of love opened and swallowed him whole; he sank without a protest back into that magical realm, leaned forward to kiss the weeny creature upon her forehead, felt the tears come.
“I do not understand! Ye were so well when I left for the afternoon. Ye said nothing.”
“There was nothing to say. I was truly well. It happened all in a muddle, I had no warning. My water broke, I had a gripey pain, and then I felt her head. So I spread a clean sheet on the floor, squatted down and had her. The whole did not take above a quarter of an hour. As soon as the afterbirth came I found some thread, tied the cord and cut it with my scissors. She was screaming—oh, what a voice! I cleaned her, tidied up the floor, put the sheet in to soak, and bathed myself.” Bursting with pride, she beamed complacently. “I truly do not know what all the fuss is about.” She pushed her calico house shift aside and displayed one exquisite breast, its dark red nipple beaded. “My milk has come in already too, though Olivia said to wait a while before giving suck. Am I not clever, Richard?”
Careful not to squash the bundle, Richard leaned forward to kiss her reverently upon the lips. His eyes worshiping her, he brushed the tears from his face and smiled shakily. “Very, very clever, wife. Ye did it as if ye’d done it twenty times.”
“I have no scales so I cannot weigh her, but she seems to be a good size—quite long too. She looks a Morgan, not a Clark.”
He squinted at Kate’s face and tried to verify this, but could not. “She is very beautiful, wife, that is all I can see.” After that he looked more closely at Kitty. She seemed a little tired, but glowed so radiantly that he could not believe she stood in any danger. “Ye’re well? Honestly?”
“Truly. Just weary. She slipped out so easily that I am not even uncomfortable. Olivia recommended that I squat. That is the natural way, she says.” Kitty took Kate back to look at her again. “Richard!” she exclaimed, her tone reproachful. “She is your image—how can you not see it?”
“Are ye happy to call her Catherine, like yourself?”
“Yes. Two Catherines—one Kitty, one Kate. We will call our next girl Mary.”
He could not help it; he wept until Kitty put the baby down and took him into her arms.
“I love you, Kitty. I love you more than life itself.”
Again her lips parted to say something offering him herself. Then Kate yelled lustily. So instead she asked, “Will you listen to that? I think Stephen is right, we have a shrew to rear. And that settles it. I am going to give her suck.”
She slid both arms out of the shift and let it drop to her waist, unwrapped the little creature and held her naked against her own skin with a sensuous pleasure that devastated Richard. The O of mouth fastened around the nipple offered it; Kitty emitted a huge sigh of utter pleasure. “Oh, Kate, this makes you truly mine!”
It had never occurred to Kitty to doubt one fact: that Richard would be a wonderful father. What surprised her was his complete surrender to fatherhood. So many of her women friends and acquaintances complained that their men were wary of being seen as unmanning themselves if they had too much to do with the children or domestic chores. To carry a tired child was permissible, to kiss and cuddle a small one was permissible, but nothing to what they deemed excess. Whereas Richard simply did not care what any of his men friends thought of him. If one was visiting, he would cheerfully change Kate’s dirty clouts, did not even care if he was discovered washing them or hanging them out to dry. And apparently his masculine image did not suffer in their eyes. Or if it did, he never noticed. Or if he noticed, he did not consider such opinions worth valuing. In one respect he was lucky: he did not look like a milksop. Had he, things might have been different for him.
He worked too hard because he tried to fit more into less time, always eager to be off home to see Kitty and Kate. When Kitty timidly suggested that perhaps he could do less sawing and more farming, he looked horrified—no, no! His job as supervisor of sawyers was well paid, and every note of hand he accumulated on the Government books was an insurance against the future of his children. He would manage to saw and farm, he was not dead yet.
Kate was six months old at the moment when Tommy Crowder came to the second sawpit looking for Richard, enquiring when Richard intended putting baby Kate on the Government Stores list.
“I can keep my wife and child off the Stores,” said Richard with dignity.
“Commander King insists that they be on the Stores. Come to my office and we will do it now.” Off trotted Crowder, not pausing to see if Richard followed.
“I do not see why my wife and child should be on the Stores,” said Richard stubbornly in Crowder’s tiny office. “I am the head of the family.”
“That is just it, Richard. Ye’re not the head of a family. Kitty is a convict woman and a spinster. That is why she is still on the Stores list and her baby must go on it too. I simply need ye here as a witness,” Crowder explained.
Richard’s eyes had gone completely grey and dark. “Kitty is my wife. Kate is my daughter.”
“Catherine Clark, spinster. . . . Yes, here she is,” Crowder burbled on, finding the right line on the right page in his big register. He picked up a quill, dipped it in his inkwell and added, speaking aloud as he wrote, “Catherine Clark, child.” He looked up brightly. “There! That is done and ye’ve seen me do it. Thank you, Richard.” He put the quill down.
“The child’s name is Catherine Morgan. I acknowledge her.”
“No, ’tis Clark.”
“Morgan.”
Tommy Crowder was not a very perceptive man; he spent too much of himself upon becoming invaluable to people who could help him get ahead. But suddenly, looking up into eyes as stormy as Sydney Bay during a squall, he felt the blood leave his face. “Do not blame me, Richard,” he stammered. “I am not your judge, I am merely a servant of the Norfolk Island Government. Commander King wants everything”—he simpered—“shipshape and Bristol fashion. As a Bristolian, ye should be pleased.” He was babbling now, could not stop babbling. “I have to put the baby on my lists, and I have to ask ye to witness the fact that I have. Her name is Clark.”
“It is not fair!” Richard said to Stephen later, fists clenched. “That trained monkey in Government service
wrote my daughter’s name in his fucken register as Catherine Clark. And rubbed my nose in it by making me watch.”
Stephen eyed the muscles tensing under the skin of Richard’s arms and shivered involuntarily. “For God’s sake, Richard, hold your temper! It is not Crowder’s fault, nor is it King’s fault. I agree that it is not fair, but there is nothing ye can do about it. Kitty is not your wife. Kitty cannot be your wife. She still has some years of her sentence left to serve, which means that the Government is entitled to do what it wills with her. And Kate’s surname officially is Clark.”
“There is one thing I can do,” said Richard through his teeth. “I can murder Lizzie Lock.”
“Ye’re not capable of that, so stop talking as if ye are.”
“While Lizzie lives, my daughter is a bastard. So will the other children I sire on Kitty be bastards.”
“Look at it this way,” Stephen coaxed, “Lizzie Lock is well settled with Tom Sculley, but Tom Sculley is learning fast that he is not a farmer, hence his move from grain to poultry. Sooner or later he will sell out and quit the island. From what the marine free settler gossip tells me, he says he wants to visit Cathay and Bengal before he is too old. D’ye think for one moment that he will sail for the Orient without Lizzie Lock on his arm?”
Closing his eyes, Richard slumped despondently. “I am trying to look at it your way. Ye mean that if Lizzie departs for the Orient, I can wait a while and then pretend I am a single man.”
“Exactly. If necessary, I will pay some furtive forger in a London alley to use some Wampoa merchant’s address and write a touching letter to the Gentlemen Sheriffs of Gloucester explaining that Mrs. Richard Morgan, née Elizabeth Lock, has passed away in Macao, and does Gloucester know of any relatives? That will prove that she is dead, after which ye can marry Kitty.”
“Sometimes, Stephen, ye’re the bitter end.” But the ploy worked; Richard opened his eyes and managed a laugh. “Does this fine consoling speech containing references to London alleys mean that ye’re leaving us soon?”
“I have had no word beyond the lieutenancy, but ’twill happen.”
“I will miss ye something terrible.”
“And I you.” Stephen threw his arm about Richard’s shoulders and propelled him gently in the direction of home. Good, his rage had cooled. Superficially at least. God rot the Reverend Johnson!
“It affects him far more than it does me,” said Kitty when Stephen related what had happened. Richard had gone off to the bath pool he had made, there to wash himself clean of the sawpits and Thomas Restell Crowder. “I am sorry that Kate’s name is not Morgan, but who could deny that she is a Morgan? What is marriage anyway? At least half of us convict women are not officially married, but that does not make us any less wives. I do not repine, Stephen, truly I do not.”
“Richard is a churchgoing believer in God, Kitty, and thus he finds it extremely difficult to deal with the fact that his progeny are bastards in the eyes of the Church of England.”
“They will not be bastards after Lizzie dies, and she is old,” said Kitty comfortably.
How to explain to her that marriage later could never remove the slur? Stephen decided not to bother trying. Instead he grabbed at Kate. “Hello, my peach! My darling angel!”
“Kate is not an angel—she is exactly what you called her, a shrew. Strong willed! Goodness, Stephen, she is but six months old and already she rules us with a rod of iron.”
“Nay,” said Stephen, holding the mite’s serious stare with smiling eyes, then kissing her on both plump cheeks, “she needs no rod of iron to rule Richard. A wisp of thread or a feather would do equally well. Is that not so, my Kate? Where is your Petruchio, I wonder? In what guise will he come?” He handed Kate back.
“Petruchio?”
“The Shakespearean gentleman who tamed Kate the shrew. Take no notice, ’tis just my whimsy.”
A silence fell. Stephen contented himself with contemplating this Norfolk Island madonna, a study in rag-quality calico. No matter where her life may have led her, Kitty would always have been best at this, mothering a child. Here was this powerful baby who ought to be filled with thundering rages, yet with Kitty for a mother she was a peach, an angel. Good tabbies have good kittens. A good tabby is our Kitty.
What else was she? Not intellectually brilliant, but not stupid by any means. The mouse who had hidden in the forest had long gone. During the two years she had lived with Richard Morgan she had blossomed into a plain-faced, fabulously seductive woman. The trouble was, did Richard have her love? Stephen was never sure because he fancied she was never sure herself. What she feels for Richard is sexual enchantment. That binds her to him, as babies do, but still. . . . She does not see any allure in him—why, I will never know. Is it his years? Surely not! He carries them with as little effort as he saws.
“D’ye love Richard?” he asked.
Those ale-and-pepper eyes looked sad. “I do not know, Stephen. I wish I did, but I do not. I am not educated enough to make those sorts of judgments. I mean, how do you know that you love him?”
“I just do. He fills my eyes and my mind.”
“He does not do that to me.”
“Do not hurt him, Kitty, please!”
“I will not hurt him,” she said, jigging Kate on her knee, then smiled and patted his hand. “I will stick to Richard through thick and thin, Stephen. I owe it to him, and I pay my debts. That is what transportation is supposed to teach us, and I have learned all my lessons. Except that somehow I never get around to reading and writing. House and babies come first.”
When Kitty told him she was with child again, Richard was appalled. “Ye cannot be! It is too soon!”
“Not really. There will be fourteen months between them,” she said placidly. “They will fare better if they are close in age.”
“The work, Kitty! Ye’ll be old before your time!”
That made her laugh. “Gammon, Richard! I am very well, I am young, and I am looking forward to the arrival of William Henry.”
“Kitty, I was happy to wait, truly—oh, damn that word, I am picking up the habit of it!”
“Do not be angry,” she pleaded. “Olivia said that I would not fall while ever I gave Kate the breast.”
“An old wives’ tale! I should have waited.”
“Why?”
“Because another one will be too much for you.”
“I say another one will not be too much for me.” She handed Kate to Richard and picked up an empty bucket. “I am off to get water for the house.”
“Let me get it.”
Her teeth showed, her eyes blazed. “For the hundredth time, Richard Morgan, will you stop fussing and clucking? Why do you never want to give me the credit I deserve? I am the one grows the babies! I am the one says when that will be! I am the one lives in this house for all of my days and nights! I am the one decides what is too much for me and what is not! Leave me alone! Stop making all my decisions for me! Let me do as I want without forever plaguing me—this is too much, that is too little, why did I not ask you to do it—I have had enough! I am not an orphan child anymore, I am grown up enough to have babies! And if I want another one, I will have another one! You are not my lord and master, His Majesty the King is!”
She marched off with the bucket, radiating rage.
Richard sat down on the top step with Kate on his knee, both of them silenced.
“I think, daughter, that I have just been put in my place.”
Kate sat bolt upright, unsupported, and looked at her father out of speckled eyes neither William Henry’s nor Kitty’s; hers were a fawnish grey which tended to disguise the presence of the dark dots peppering them. Those who found them had looked deeply. Her beauty was manifest, though perhaps it was simply the beauty of babyhood, but her coloring, like Richard’s two dead children’s, was striking—masses of black curls, finely marked black brows, thick black lashes around those widely opened storm-hued eyes, a full red mouth and Richard’s flawless brow
n skin. Kitty was right, she was definitely a Morgan. A Morgan named Clark.
He writhed, cursed himself for the millionth time. All his children would be born bastards; Lizzie Lock was not going to oblige him by dying in a hurry. Of course he could not murder her, but there was no one save God to say that he was not allowed to wish her dead.
Why can we never seem to keep the threads which weave into the pattern of our lives untangled? I did not think when I went into marriage with Lizzie Lock. Or rather, I did not think of myself or the future. I pitied her, I fancied I owed her a debt—I thought like a head man and I still think like a head man. Stephen warned me, I seem to remember that, but I did not listen. The people I have harmed are my own children—the dear soul who is my heart’s wife is dismissed as my “woman.” They never even say “mistress.” The term is “woman.” A word which suggests that she has no identity, absolutely no status of any kind. A simple convenience. I can, as some men are already doing, throw her to one side without any kind of compensation to her. Sentences are up, those who have hoarded enough gold are buying their passages to England, or Cathay, or anywhere else that takes their fancy. Old faces like Joe Robinson’s are disappearing. But so many of them are leaving their women here to fend for themselves. As well that, like Major Ross, Commander King is as willing to grant a lone woman land as a lone man. These sad abandoned creatures do not need to hawk their favors around the barracks of the New South Wales Corps soldiers. What we do to women is unforgivable. They are not whores by nature. We force them to it.
Kate gurgled, smiled, revealed that she was cutting teeth. My firstborn, my daughter. My bastard. Hugging her, Richard put his lips to the unbelievable sleekness of her skin, inhaled the fresh clean smell of it, aware that Kate adored to be adored.
“Kate,” he said to her, turning her within his hands so that she faced him and could give him seductive glances—in that she took after her mother—and he could talk to her as if she understood what he was saying. “My Kate, what is to become of you? How can I ensure that ye’re never reduced to the sort of life God inflicted upon your mother? How can I turn ye from the bastard child of two convict parents into a well-schooled young lady with her pick of every young man in this part of the world?” He kissed her tiny hand, felt its fingers curl strongly around one of his. Then he snuggled her into the crook of his arm, tucked her head beneath his chin and looked into the distance, his mind filled with the dilemma of her fate.