‘Yair.’ She smiled. ‘I would, wouldn’ I?’
*
Ira Thornton sat alone in his office above the warehouse at Sydney Cove. There were no lights in the room although it was almost midnight. Through the windows he could see the expanse of Port Jackson harbour stretching away into the distance.
It was the time of day he liked best, the time when he could come alone to his ambition, to warm himself at its cold and implacable flame.
The last year had been good to him. Getting his pardon, that had been the big thing. That and forming the secret alliance with the governor. They’d both done well out of that, by God. Crabbe wouldn’t have to worry any more about where the pennies were coming from when he retired.
The partnership with Hagwood was going well, too. They’d made good money out of his control of the government store, excellent money. But Jonathan was a man he would always have to watch. He smiled sardonically. In his heart Jonathan thought he was a bit too fancy for the likes of Ira Thornton. There’d come a day when they’d be parting company, no doubt. In the meantime, he had his uses.
Hadn’t liked the arrangement with Jones, though. Hadn’t liked that, at all. Thornton’s lip curled. These fellers were all too soft. They didn’t see that you couldn’t be too gentlemanly about things, not if you wanted to get ahead. A man’s face got in your way, you had to put your boot on it or go under.
Pity about Jones. They could have done things together. Never mind. There’d be others.
They had to get someone on board Nantucket, like he’d told Hagwood, long ago. Someone who could tell them where the sealing grounds were. Then we’ll see about you, Mr Tremain, he thought. By God we will.
Pity about Jack. Would have been useful having a Tremain with those habits. Bit of blackmail might have done wonders. It was still possible, of course. Old Gough Tremain would likely not want the truth of his darling son to come out. It was something to keep in mind, any road.
As for Cuddy Marshall … Beneath his contempt, really, but he didn’t like the idea of anyone who’d done him down getting away with it. Give people the wrong idea, that would. No, indeed, he thought. We can’t have that. There’s no hurry but her day’s comin’.
He sat in the darkness, alone and silent, brooding over the past, planning what was to come.
Aye, he thought contentedly. There’s a grand future waiting.
*
At the end of a hot January day, Jonathan and Elizabeth Hagwood sat alone and enjoyed a drink together on the terrace of their house. There was a breeze from the river and it was cooler out here than indoors. The children had been with them and had only just gone off contentedly with Rosina to have their baths and get ready for bed.
Elizabeth said, ‘I hear that Cash Tremain is to marry Virginia Carter.’
Jonathan frowned; he had heard the news already and it had not pleased him. ‘Trust a Tremain to fall on his feet.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? She is beautiful, certainly, and of course there’s money, but I would not have said the advantages were all on one side. He’s done very well since he got here.’
The frown darkened to a scowl. ‘Chiefly through his association with Silas Pike.’
‘My dear, surely Silas Pike is an old story, now?’ She looked around her at the house behind them, the terrace on which they sat, the grounds extending to the riverbank. ‘Look what you have achieved. Surely we don’t have to grudge the Tremains Silas Pike?’
‘You are wrong, my dear. We have to win all the time, to be secure.’
‘I find that sad.’
‘It is a condition of life. We fight. We win. We survive. For ourselves and for the children.’
‘There are the children of course,’ she conceded. She smiled at him, deliberately wooing him with her dark eyes. ‘But to me you are still the most important treasure of all. Silas Pike or not.’
His throat thickened as he looked at this woman he loved almost beyond bearing. He would not let himself think of Thornton, the dispossessed farmers, the plan that had involved Orville Jones and Cash Tremain. They were only a means to an end. This was what mattered.
He lifted his glass and toasted her, smiling. ‘The two of us,’ he said. ‘And the future.’
*
One thousand miles out in the Pacific Ocean, three Norfolk Island prisoners were informed they were being transferred to the mainland. One was Richard Frampton, the market gardener whose agricultural skills had earned him the promise of a ticket of leave. The others were Gwen and Daniel Penrose.
*
On the evening of 12 February 1794, shortly before dusk, Cash had a word with the sentry and took out his father’s boat. Gulls squawked. The weather was warm, the water calm. He sculled slowly, going nowhere.
A year today we arrived, he thought. He thought of the boy he had been then, the man he was now. That was life in the colony – you had to grow up, to adapt to the new ways, if you wanted to survive.
On the far bank, a thin column of smoke rose above the hills. It reminded him of how he had been kidnapped by the natives and how he had got away from them. We shall have to come to some kind of accommodation with the natives, he thought. This is their land as much as ours. More, because they were here first. Didn’t do much with it, but that’s their way. We can’t just push them out, like some people think we should. Surely this land is big enough for all of us?
He had a hand line with him with a trace and three hooks on it. Off the mouth of the cove he shipped the oars, baited the hooks and lowered the line over the side. He drifted, periodically lifting the line a foot or two and letting it down again.
He had done the same thing that first night, waiting to give Jack a hand to get Gwen Penrose and her brother out of the colony. He wondered what Pike would say if he knew that. Not that it mattered. It was all history, now. Even Jack. Six girls, he thought. There was pain in the memory. There would always be pain.
He had held him, the broken shell that was not his brother. He remembered the dead weight of what had once been Jack, hanging there. Jack had been fond of life, of the farm, of crumbling soil between his fingers, of the solidity of the earth beneath his boots. He had been happy in its lush fertility. He had said he was a man of no courage, yet he had stood up to Jed Smales and taken Cuddy from him because he had believed it was the right thing to do. A man of no courage, he had come out the night that Cuddy arrived and the mob came up the valley from Parramatta to get her back, and stood cover for him. A man of no courage yet, at the end, he had been able to do what had to be done. I will think of you with love, Cash said now to his dead brother. With love and, yes, with admiration.
It was dark now.
He put one scull in the water, pulling the skiff around until he was looking up-river, beyond Parramatta, to the distant and invisible barrier of the Blue Mountains. The boundary dividing the known from the unknown.
I haven’t been there yet but I shall. I shall attack them and, God willing, I shall win. He remembered how Jane Somers had always wanted to go there, had complained bitterly about being prevented from doing so because she was a woman. Recently he had been hearing rumours about her and Hamish Matthieson. Perhaps she will be able to persuade Hamish Matthieson to try to find a way through, he thought. To take her with him, even. She has the will. But after me, by God, after me. The mountains are mine. I’ve known it from the day I set eyes on them.
The tide had reached full flood. The skiff had been carried half a mile up-river so that now he was beyond the furthest limits of the lights. He looked about him, the blackness accentuated by the rash of stars, smelling the dry pepper-smell of the bush. The black and enigmatic land surrounded him. There are people out there, he thought. Animals. Mountains. A vast land, waiting. He remembered what he had thought that first evening, at the governor’s reception. I shall take you, land. Take you and make something of you. Something of us both.
He would word it differently now but essentially his th
oughts were the same. Together we shall make something for the future. For all of us, white and black.
The ebb had begun. He sculled slowly back to the jetty, reported to the sentry and began the climb towards his cottage.
He paused at the lookout point where he had sat the day after the Spanish reception and looked down at the harbour gleaming like black silk in the lights of the settlement. This moment represented for him the rounding of a circle of fate that had brought him from the stark, beautiful cliffs of Cornwall and Virginia from the sweltering heat of Bengal. They had to face the future together. They were the future.
He wondered if they would indeed win the action against the East India Company. He had to think about organising another sealing trip to the south. There was a wedding to arrange. He had a dozen, a hundred things that plucked at his mind, demanding his attention.
Deliberately, he put them to one side. Tomorrow he would think about them. For the moment, he was content to feel the fullness and wonder of life, to know that Virginia was waiting for him, that this time next month they would be married, with everything that entailed.
He turned and walked through the darkness to his house. Above him, the stars turned in beauty.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction and neither the Tremains nor the Hagwoods existed. However, Bellona arrived in the colony on the day stated, bringing the first free settlers to New South Wales. Records show that she brought only seventeen convicts, all female. However, manifests were often wrong.
Convicts stowed away regularly on visiting ships. Mary Bryant and her husband took an open boat to Timor in 1791, as mentioned by Gough. Mary was subsequently befriended by James Boswell (of Doctor Johnson fame) and ended her days where she began, in Fowey, Cornwall.
Many convicts believed they could walk to China from Sydney, or to the imaginary colony of ease where legend had it that escapees would be pampered in return for no labour.
Eight convicts had indeed been speared to death at the time Bliss mentioned the fact to Jonathan Hagwood.
Provisional grants of 100 acres to officers were approved by the British Home Office at that time.
A Spanish scientific expedition visited Sydney in 1793 and the commander (and flagship) had the names mentioned. The merino sheep that Jonathan Hagwood ordered from Don Allessandro during the Spanish visit were obtained from Spain at this time.
The officers of the New South Wales Corps had such a stranglehold on the colony’s trade during the 1790s that it became known as the Rum Corps. Initial funding made use of regimental funds in London.
Sealskins and whale and elephant seal oil were the major exports of the colony until the 1830s, when they were overtaken by wool. Sealers regularly kidnapped Aboriginal women for sexual purposes, frequently murdering them when they grew tired of them.
No church was built in the colony until well after the departure of Governor Phillip. The chaplain protested but was unable to persuade the authorities to do anything about it.
The ploy of seizing developed land in settlement of drinking debts was first employed by Samuel Terry, known to contemporaries as the Rothschild of Botany Bay, who was transported for theft and died rich.
The bizarre incident involving the sending of an Aboriginal head to London for forensic study actually occurred.
The first settlements along the Hawkesbury (and to a lesser degree at Parramatta) were plagued both by flood and Aboriginal raiding parties.
Students of the period will note that I have accelerated the development of the waterfront at Sydney Cove. This took place as described but over a longer period. I plead dramatic licence.
The saga of the Tremains, the Hagwoods and Ira Thornton has barely begun. The colony is poised for the development that led eventually to the settlement of the entire continent. You may be sure that all our principal characters will be heavily involved in this process.
About John Fletcher
John Fletcher is the author of three historical novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim. The author’s plays for radio and television have been produced by the BBC and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and many of this author’s stories have been published in Australia and throughout the world.
John Fletcher was educated in the UK and travelled and worked in France, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house within sound of the sea in a small town on the South Australian coast.
Also by John Fletcher
A Far Country
The Burning Land
Claim the Kingdom
First published by Random House Australia in 1996
This edition published in 2013 by Momentum
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
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Copyright © John Fletcher 1996
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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Claim the Kingdom
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