Lieutenant (5 page)

Even his pinched face was creased with excitement. For the first time, Rooke could see the eager boy he must once have been.

Weymark went one better, made a looking-glass flash.

‘Look, sir,’ he cried. ‘I will let you have it for your very own, if only you will come close enough to take it! By Jove they are cautious, Barton, look at them like a cat that wants the cream but fears the milkmaid!’

He laughed his tremendous laugh, and Rooke thought that made the men braver. The grey-haired one took a step forward.

‘Yes, that’s the way, Mister Darkie, come, come!’

The surgeon did a ponderous little jig and the man took a fresh grip on his spears.

In front of his sailors Barton could not caper the way Weymark was doing, but he had a string of beads too and was twirling it.

‘Rooke, lad, get yourself some trinkets and try your luck!’ he called.

Rooke picked out a looking-glass and walked a few steps
towards the nearest native, a man perhaps his own age, whose eyes darted from Rooke to Barton and back again, as flighty as a greyhound.

Rooke held up a hand.

‘Good afternoon!’

It was like tossing a stone into a bush and wondering what bird would fly out.

This man was well made, his chest sculpted with muscle, his bearing very straight. His chest was marked with a neat pattern of raised scars, the skin decorated like a garment.

He glanced at Rooke, his mouth ajar as if to speak, the whites of his eyes stark in the blackness of his skin. In one quick movement he stepped forward, took the looking-glass and stepped back. He showed it to the man beside him and they murmured over it.

Then they lost interest. The man dropped the looking-glass on the sand, as casually as a boy in Portsmouth might let go the core of an apple. They all moved a few steps backwards and seemed to wait.

For some better gift? Some other gesture?

Weymark decided the next move. Perhaps he thought of it as entertainment, of a piece with the looking-glasses and the beads. He went boldly to the eldest of the men, a wiry grey-haired fellow, took his shield—
just to borrow
, he tried to explain by signs—and propped it up in the sand. He loaded his pistol, aimed from a short distance, cocked the hammer and fired. The
native men jumped back from the explosion.

The smoke floated away. A smell of gunpowder filled the air.

The shield was a solid thing, a slab of wood two feet long and a good inch thick, but the ball had gone clean through it and left a ragged hole and a long split top to bottom. The old man picked it up. In his hands it fell into two pieces and he fitted them back together and touched with long fingers at where the ball had burst through the wood. He held the shield up against his belly and gestured, would it do the same thing to him?

‘Oh my very word, yes, my black friend,’ Weymark cried encouragingly. ‘Split you from skull to arsehole, by God!’

Weymark thought it a fine joke, and so did Captain Barton, and by a kind of contagion Rooke laughed too.

The black men were not entertained. They frowned and spoke to each other urgently.

‘Upon my word, Weymark,’ the commodore called. ‘You have frightened them now, what were you thinking?’

But the surgeon was untroubled. ‘Well, sir, if they do not care for my exhibition of sharp-shooting, perhaps they would prefer a little music, they will find I am a man of multitudinous talents.’

Pursing up his lips, he began to whistle. Only the surgeon, Rooke thought, could be so casual with the commodore, but when a man had palpated your side day after day you would perhaps allow him a certain liberty.

It seemed that the natives did not like the surgeon’s music any more than they had enjoyed his performance with the pistol. Their faces were stony. After a minute they took the two pieces of shield and disappeared into the woods.

T
he small bay soon had a name: Sydney Cove. It seemed made according to a different logic from the world Rooke knew. There were trees, as there were in other places, but each was stranger than the last. Some were mops, with a bare pole for a trunk and a bush of foliage twenty feet above the ground. Gnarled pink monsters twisted arthritic fingers into the sky. The squat white trees growing by the stream were padded with bark that flaked in soft sheets like paper.

Red parrots sidled along branches, chattering and whistling. Could they be taught to talk, he wondered, or learn a tune, like the one old Captain Veare had in his parlour in Portsmouth? Catching one would be the first difficulty. The birds watched him sideways, cannily. Birdlime, or a net. He had no birdlime, no net. And he could whistle a tune for himself, although he had
to admit that there was something about these woods of New South Wales that made a man fall silent.

Buxtehude seemed another species here, the dialogue of a fugue from another world.

Even the rocks were not like any others he had seen, monstrous plates and shards piled haphazardly on each other. How might he describe them to Anne? Thinking of her face, the look she had as she listened to him—her head tilted, her eyes watching him, patient while he found words—he remembered the French pastry he had eaten with her at the teashop in St George’s Street a few days before the fleet sailed. Layers of pastry interleaved with layers of custard, it was somewhat along the same lines as the stony parts of this landscape.

It had been impossible to eat, the custard squirting out at each mouthful. He and Anne had begun by being embarrassed but ended by laughing at each other’s efforts.
My dear Anne, I find
myself in a land remarkably like the pastry we had that day at Pennycook’s,
that needed to be eaten in private, in other respects it is a dry and stony
place
.

He pictured her reading it in the little parlour. He hoped it would make her smile.

Within a day of the fleet dropping anchor, the work parties of prisoners had begun to hack at the bushes and trees. Two weeks
later the head of the cove was a clutter of bleeding timber, scraped yellow earth and tents that tilted and sagged. As soon as a large enough piece of ground was cleared, the population was assembled for the commodore to address it.

He was given a sea-chest to stand on in the shade of a sprawling tree and the prisoners were herded onto the rocky ground in front of him. They shuffled and muttered, indifferent to the significance of the moment. The redcoats made a ragged circle around them. In round numbers, eight hundred prisoners, two hundred marines. Now that they were off the ships, it seemed to Rooke that the mathematics of control were precarious.

Major Wyatt, his thrust-out jaw making him look somewhat like a carp, stood in a blaze of gold braid. His face was tilted up towards the commodore beside him on the chest, but Rooke could see his eyes flicking, watching the prisoners. He had distributed the three captains of marines at equal distances around the perimeter of the crowd. Rooke saw Silk, somehow contriving to stand at attention while looking as relaxed as a man about to step into a dance. Rooke had not met Captain Gosden until they landed in New South Wales, but he thought the man should never have been accepted for the expedition. His face was pouchy, pale but for hectic spots high on his cheeks, and it cost him a visible effort to hold himself straight. As usual he had his handkerchief in his hand and the preoccupied gaze of a man trying not to cough. Silk had amused Rooke by
describing the third captain, Lennox, as a human string bean. Lennox and his musket stood together, two long thin military machines waiting to do their duty.

Rooke sweated into his red jacket. The humid air held the heat and the blue sky beat down headachy light. He could feel his eyes squinting against it, envied Gilbert in his patch of shade.

Barton and Gardiner and the other naval officers had come ashore in their best blue coats for the ceremony and stood watching. They were simply onlookers. They would sail away again before long. For a moment Rooke wished that he were one of them.

When Wyatt shouted his order Rooke adopted the regulation stance for the salute, musket against his shoulder, left foot forward. As he pulled his finger back against the trigger and braced himself for the noise, he had a moment’s nausea.

The volley of shots rang out, a little more ragged than Major Wyatt would no doubt have liked. A flock of big white parrots erupted out of a tree nearby. They heeled and flapped over the humans gathered by the stream, making harsh metallic noises somewhat in sympathy with the ringing that the gunfire had awoken in Rooke’s head.

He lowered the musket and stood it upright beside him. How happy he would be if today, the seventh of February 1788, were the last time he ever fired it.

The commodore strained himself upright on his box, shouting to make himself heard against the parrots. He read
aloud his commission from King George the Third in which, between one word and the next, James Gilbert became monarch by proxy. Like His Majesty, the brand-new governor of New South Wales had been granted the power of life and death over his subjects.

Every time Governor Gilbert uttered the name of His Majesty, from some anonymous place within the restless mass of prisoners there was the unmistakable sound of a hawk and spit.

The white parrots flew off and there was silence in the little valley. On behalf of His Majesty, the governor proclaimed sovereignty over the territory called New South Wales, and for the first time it was given a shape and size. North to south it extended between latitude ten degrees thirty-seven minutes and latitude forty-three degrees forty-nine minutes. East to west it contained all the land between where they presently stood and one hundred and thirty-five degrees of longitude east.

Rooke applied his mind to some interesting mental arithmetic. Thirty-three degrees of latitude was a distance north to south of over two thousand miles. Sixteen degrees of longitude represented about eight hundred miles east to west. At a rough estimate, His Majesty had just acquired a plot double the size of France, Spain and Germany combined.

Governor Gilbert was still reading. ‘The natives are on all occasions to be treated with amity and kindness,’ he shouted above the increasing swell of sound from the prisoners.

Some small object flew out of the middle of the crowd towards him and fell into a bush nearby.

‘It is of the utmost importance to open friendly intercourse with them,’ he pressed on. ‘Without their cooperation, the progress and even the existence of this colony will be threatened. His Majesty has instructed me to establish good relations with the greatest possible despatch, and to become familiar with the native tongue as swiftly as opportunity may make possible.’

This was an aspect of New South Wales that Rooke had not considered: the colony needed an astronomer but it might also need a linguist. It was true that, in the two weeks since the day of beads and looking-glasses, the natives had appeared only once or twice, and then fleetingly. Rooke had been on board each time and not seen them. He had glimpsed figures across the port on the opposite shore, smoke rising from various distant points, and canoes silhouetted against the bright water. But so far there had been no opportunity to show the natives
amity and kindness
.

It seemed to Rooke that the governor was hurrying to bring the assembly to a close.

‘I ask that you kneel with me now,’ he cried. ‘The reverend will give thanks on behalf of us all, kindly step up Mr Pullen.’

From the crowd a female voice guffawed. ‘Thanks! Thanks for what?’

He thought he recognised the voice of a handsome foul-mouthed woman who, off Rio, had been dunked in the sea to quieten her. She set them all off now, the prisoners on their feet
shouting and whistling, threatening to overrun the line of marines.

Rooke steeled himself to do his duty, but Wyatt spoke to Lennox with a twitch of an eyebrow, and Lennox waded into the crowd. The prisoners must have been familiar with the captain. Lennox had only to lay about him briefly with the butt of his gun and they subsided, so that Rooke was not obliged to do any more than grip his musket and look alert.

But there would be other times, he thought, endless other times when every man in a red coat would be required to act. On the voyage he had established his distinction from the other marines. He must continue as he had begun. The western headland of the cove had a high remote look that might suit an observatory, and would certainly suit a man who had no wish to play the part of prison guard. He would investigate it as soon as he could and make sure that Lieutenant Rooke was seen to be too busy with the celestial bodies for any terrestrial duty.

The reverend was up on the box now, unwinding his usual endless flowery prayer. For his homily he had taken a line from Psalms:
What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits toward me?
Rooke thought it might have been especially selected to provoke a congregation of men and women who had no choice about being in a place where benefits promised to be thin on the ground. The governor’s face was entirely without expression as he listened, but Rooke thought he saw more tightness than usual in his narrow jaw.

When the reverend paused for a breath the governor was ready.

‘Amen,’ he announced, and Pullen was obliged to move on to the benediction.

The assembly dispersed, the work parties were chivvied back to their axes and picks. Rooke slipped away, avoiding the eye of anyone who might call,
Oh, Lieutenant Rooke, might I trouble
you to give me some assistance here?
To get to that promising headland, though, he had to pass the space being cleared on the western side of the stream. Major Wyatt referred to it as the parade ground, although as yet it was nothing more than a slope of grey dirt bristling with stumps.

Walking briskly, as if on some urgent errand, Rooke heard the major’s unmistakable roar and saw him out of the corner of his eye, red-faced with heat and rage, step over to a prisoner. He prodded him hard between the shoulderblades so the wretch hefted his axe and squared up to a tree, and the others bent to their inept chopping and chipping. One tall fellow in a suit of striped slops much too small for him—the trousers up around his calves, the sleeves almost at his elbows, the jacket gaping open on his massive chest—dabbed at the ground with his pick. He was moving fast enough to avoid Wyatt’s stick, but making no impact on the stump he was attacking.

Next to him a man with the hollow cheeks of toothlessness grubbed away at another stump. Rooke saw how each blow of his pick struck a root and bounced but the man did not try
another spot, lifting the pick, bringing it down, taking the recoil in his scrawny arms.

Stupidity, Rooke wondered, or indifference? For Major Wyatt, the grubbing-out of a stump was a step on the way to a parade ground. For this man, it must be a task as pointless, as punitive, as the treadmill in the prison he had been plucked from.

Thank God for astronomy, he thought, and kept walking.

It seemed he was not the only officer keeping out of the way of duties. Away from the work parties, Silk was sitting on a rock scribbling in a notebook and smiling to himself. When he saw Rooke he moved over hospitably.

‘The natives seemed at a loss to know of what sex we were
,’ he read aloud, ‘
which having understood, they burst into the most immoderate fits
of laughter
. You missed that encounter, Rooke, but is it not entertaining in the greatest degree? We had one of the sailors give a visual demonstration of the truth—by chance an individual supremely equipped for the task. The natives were so astonished that I am sorry to say they vanished again soon after. My puzzle now is to keep the humour of that extraordinary encounter while finding the words for it which will not bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek.’

‘Yes, excellent,’ Rooke said, thinking
I hope Silk does not put
me in his book
. But Silk did not hear any reservation in his friend’s praise.