Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  * * *

  Kitty took a long time to fetch one bucket of unneeded water. First she sat beside the spring and smoldered for a while, then held the bucket beneath the main fall to fill it, after which she set it on the ground and sat down again. Her outburst had caught her unaware, she had not realized that these resentments simmered so near the surface; her days were too busy to permit the luxury of self-examinations. The reason why her feelings had come tumbling out today was manifest: Richard did not want a second child so soon—if he wanted one at all. But these were not things in his province! God had made her to procreate and she loved procreating. The words of workhouse days and workhouse sermons rattled off as fingers were busy embroidering held meaning now. Adam may have been the first person on earth, but until Eve appeared he was an—an—an exhibit! Eve was more important than Adam. Eve made the children and a house a home.

  Richard could not have it entirely for himself because he won their bread. She baked their bread! And in future, she vowed, jumping up and lifting the twenty-pound bucket with ease, he was going to have to take notice of her wishes. I am not a mouse and I am not a boot-scraper. I am a person of consequence.

  The picture he presented as she walked up the path through the vegetables from the spring was, she admitted, softening, truly heart-warming. Her heart warmed. Unnoticed, she stood still to watch him with the baby, turn her to face him, talk solemn words to her, kiss her hand and gaze down on it with a face filled by love and wonder. The way he cuddled her then. The way he stared over her head into nothing.

  Move, Richard, move! Kitty stood willing him to move, but he would not. The sun always set behind the house and its front lay in shadows, yet the light was absolutely clear, fell on father and child as if they had been petrified, stilled to stone. A very old memory came surging up from the depths, of the Master at the workhouse presiding over the Sunday service, sitting in his chair of state looking into nothing while the chaplain preached the sins of a flesh none of his listeners comprehended. The Master continued to stare vacantly; the chaplain ended, the orphan audience remained without stirring, the stiff and bitter spinster mistresses let their eyes patrol the ranks to make sure no girl wore an unchurchlike expression; and the Master sat gazing into the distance as if he saw a vision neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was only when the chaplain took him timidly by the shoulder that he moved. Moved to fall forward out of the chair onto the chapel flags and lie there as shapeless as the stockings half-full of sand with which the inmates were beaten so that the marks did not show.

  Move, Richard, move! But he did not, while time flowed on and the child in his arm slept obliviously. Suddenly she knew that he was dead. It broke on her in an instant and drove her to her knees, the bucket falling, water cascading, the world a thing of utter silence. Even then he did not move. He was dead! He was dead!

  “Richard!” she screamed, scrambling up, running.

  Her cry dragged him out of his abstraction, but not in time to catch her. She was upon him in the same moment, weeping and keening, her hands plucking at his shoulders, his chest.

  “Kitty! What is it, my love? What is the matter?”

  She wailed and howled, tears streaming down her face, lost to all reason. When Kate joined her mother to bawl in her own key, Richard got to his feet with two demented female creatures clinging to him as to a lifeline, his head spinning. Kate he dumped in her cradle unceremoniously, where she yelled in outrage at being so cavalierly discarded; Kitty he sat in the armchair by the stove, where she sobbed as if her heart were broken. Out came the rum; fussing and clucking, he forced Kitty to drink.

  “Oh, Richard, I thought you were dead!” she moaned, choking, looking up at him with eyes and nose running. “I thought you dead! I thought you dead!” She flung her arms about his hips and pushed her face against him, weeping afresh.

  “Kitty, I am not dead.” He disengaged her hands, picked her out of the chair and sat down in it with her on his lap. The hem of her calico dress was the only available rag, so he took it and wiped her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her chin, her throat—the spate of tears had even soaked into the yoke of her dress. “My dearest love, I am not dead. See?” he asked, smiling tenderly. “Corpses cannot deal with fits of the vapors. Though it is nice,” he added, heart full, “to know that I am so desperately mourned. Here, have another sip of rum.”

  Kate’s tantrum in the bedroom was increasing in volume, but she would get over it faster than Kitty would get over her shock, so he turned his head and shouted sternly, “Kate, hush your roars! Go to sleep!” Much to his surprise, his daughter’s howls subsided into blessed silence.

  “Oh, Richard, I thought you were dead like the Master, and I could not bear it! You were dead—and you had loved me so much—and I had never understood—and I had hurt you and spurned you—and then it was too late to tell you that I love you. I love you the way you love me, more than life itself. I thought you were dead, and I did not know how to live in a world without you! I love you, Richard, I love you!”

  He pushed her hair off her face, did some more work with his makeshift rag. “All my Christmases have come at once,” he said. “I know there have been a lot of tears, but why are ye so wet?”

  “I lost the bucket of water, I think. Kiss me, Richard! Oh, kiss me with love and let me kiss you with love.”

  Love reciprocated, they both discovered, turned lips into the thinnest possible of skins between body and spirit. From now on, thought Richard, there need be no secrets. I can tell her anything. Kitty simply knew the bliss of music in her heart and wings on her soul. Love had been there all along.

  Stephen came out to see them on Kate’s first birthday, the 15th of February, 1793, bearing an amazing gift.

  But it was not the gift which caused Richard, Kitty and the child to stare: Lieutenant Donovan was clad in the full glory of his Royal Navy rank—black shoes, white stockings, white breeches and waistcoat, ruffled shirt, cutaway Navy coat, a few touches of gold braid, sword by his side, wig on his head, hat tucked beneath his arm. Not merely strikingly handsome—also strikingly impressive.

  “You are going!” said Kitty, eyes filling with tears.

  “What a figure ye cut!” said Richard, concealing his grief with a laugh.

  “The uniform came from Port Jackson—not a bad fit,” said Stephen, preening, “though the coat needs work about the shoulders. Mine are too broad.”

  “Broad enough for command. Congratulations.” Richard held out his hand. “I knew there was some significance in the name of this wretched ship just arrived.”

  “Aye. Kitty. I wore the uniform in honor of young Kate, I do not go immediately. Kitty will not sail for at least a week, so we still have a little time.” He pulled the wig off to reveal that he had imitated Richard and cropped his hair. “Christ, these things are hot! Meant for the English Channel, not Norfolk Island in humid Februaries.”

  “Stephen, your beautiful hair!” Kitty cried, looking closer to weeping. “Oh, I loved it! I keep trying to persuade Richard to grow his, but he says it is a nuisance.”

  “He is absolutely right. Since I cut mine I feel as free as a bird—except when I have to put the wig on.” He went to Kate, sitting in a high chair Richard had made, and put his parcel on its tray. “Happy birthday, dearest little godchild.”

  “Ta,” she said, smiling and reaching out to touch his face. “Stevie.” She looked beyond him to Richard and beamed. “Dadda!”

  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 the advent 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.

  “Yet somehow we have survived the first five years of this ill-conceived, misshapen experiment in men’s and women’s lives. I am not sure how this has happened, except that it is perhaps evidence of the persistence and perseverance of men and women. It would be wrong to say that England offered us a second chance here. We were not offered any chance, first or last. Rather, we behaved according to our natures. Some of us simply vowed to survive and, having survived, then hurried ‘home’ or still skulk about. And some of us, having survived, were determined to begin again as best we can with what we have. I put myself in the second group, and say of it that while we were convicts we worked hard, we incurred no official displeasure, we were not lashed or ironed, we effaced ourselves in some situations and made ourselves useful in others. After being freed by pardon or emancipation, we have
taken up land and begun the alien business of farming.

  “How much of England has England wasted! The intelligence, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness, the hardiness. A list of assets I could make pages long. And all of the owners had sat in English gaols and hulks utterly wasted. What is wrong with England, that England is blind enough to throw such assets away as worthless rubbish?

  “It is fair to say that very few of us had any idea what sort of stuff we were made of. I know that I did not. The old tranquil, patient Richard Morgan who could not even bring himself to care about the loss of £3,000 has died, Jem. He was passive, content, unambitious and small. His griefs were the griefs of all men—loss of what he loved. His vices were the vices of all men—self-absorption and self-indulgence. His joys were the joys of all men—taking his pleasure in what he loved. His virtues were the virtues of all men—belief in God and country.

  “Richard Morgan was resurrected in the midst of a sea of pain, and finds the pain of others more unbearable than his own. He takes nothing for granted, he speaks out when necessary, he guards his loved ones and his fortune with his very life, he trusts hardly anybody, and he relies on one person only—himself.