Morgan’s Run (86 page)

“Good day, madam,” said Kitty.

“And good day in return, Mistress Clark, for so I believe you are called,” said the visitor, sweeping inside. There she looked about with some awe. “He does do good work, don’t he?” she asked. “And more books than ever. Read, read, read! That is Richard.”

“Do sit down,” said Kitty, indicating a handsome chair.

“As fine as the Major’s,” said the red-and-black person. “I am always amazed at Richard’s run of good luck. He is like a cat, falls on his feet every time.” Her little black eyes looked Kitty up and down, straight, thick black brows frowning across her nose. “I never thought I was anything to look at,” she said, inspection finished, “but at least I can
dress.
You are as plain as a pikestaff, my girl.”

Jaw dropped, Kitty stared. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. Plain as a pikestaff.”

“Who
are
you?”

“
I
am Mrs. Richard Morgan, what do you think about that?”

“Nothing very much,” said Kitty when she got her breath back. “I am pleased to meet you, Mrs. Morgan.”

“Christ!” Mrs. Morgan said. “Jeeesus! What
is
Richard up to?”

As Kitty did not know what he was up to, she said nothing.

“You ain’t his mistress?”

“Oh! Oh, of course!” Kitty shook her head in vexation. “I am so silly—I never thought—”

“Aye, silly is right enough. You ain’t his mistress?”

Kitty put her chin in the air. “I am his servant.”

“Hoo hoo! Hoity-toity!”

“If you are Mrs. Richard Morgan,” said Kitty, growing braver in the face of her visitor’s derision, “why are you not living in this house? If you were, he would have no need for a servant girl.”

“I am not living here because I do not want to live here,” Mrs. Richard Morgan said loftily. “
I
am Major Ross’s housekeeper.”

“Then I need not detain you. I am sure you are very busy.”

The visitor got up immediately. “Plain as a pikestaff!” she said, mincing to the door.

“I may be plain, Mrs. Morgan, but at least I am not beyond my last prayers! Unless you are also the Major’s mistress?”

“Fucken bitch!”

And off down the path she went, feathers bouncing.

Once the shock wore off—at her own temerity rather than at Mrs. Morgan’s conduct and language—Kitty reviewed this encounter more dispassionately. Well on the wrong side of thirty, and, under the outrageous apparel, quite as plain as she had professed to know herself. And not, if she had read Major Ross aright at her only meeting with him, his mistress. That was a very fastidious man. So why had Mrs. Richard Morgan come—and, more importantly, why had Mrs. Richard Morgan gone in the first place? Closing her eyes, Kitty conjured up a picture of her, saw things that sheer amazement had veiled in the flesh. Much pain, sadness, anger. Knowing herself a pathetic figure, Mrs. Richard Morgan had presented herself to her supplanter with a great show of haughty aggression that overlay grief and abandonment. How do I know that? But I do, I do. . . . It was not her left him.
He
left her! Nothing else answers. Oh, poor woman!

Pleased with her deductive powers, she sat up in her bed in her convict-issue slops shift and waited by the dying light of the fire for Richard to come home. Where
does
he go?

His torch came flickering up the path two hours after night had fallen; he had, as on most evenings, eaten quickly at the pit and hied himself off to the distillery to make sure all was well and personally measure the amount of rum, enter it in his book. Time shortly to close it down. Casks and sugar were running low. All told, the installation would have produced about 5,000 gallons.

“Why are you awake?” he demanded, closing the door and tossing logs on the fire. “And what was the door doing open?”

“I had a visitor today,” she said in meaningful tones.

“Did ye now?”

He was not going to ask who, which rather spoiled things.

“Mrs. Richard Morgan,” she said, looking like a naughty child.

“I was wondering when she would appear” was all he said.

“Do you not want to know what happened?”

“No. Now lie down and go to sleep.”

She subsided in the bed, quenched, and tired enough that lying flat out induced immediate torpor. “You left her, I know it,” she said drowsily. “Poor woman, poor woman.”

Richard waited until he was sure she was asleep, then changed into his makeshift nightshirt. The timber for her room was piling up, and he would begin to pull stones for its piers home on his sled this coming Saturday. A month from now he would be rid of her, at least from the room where he slept. She could have her own door to the outside as well, and he would cozen a bolt out of Freeman for his side of the communicating door. Then he could return to the freedom of sleeping naked and feeling as if he owned some part of himself. Kitty. Born in 1770, the same year as little Mary. I am an old fool, and she a young one. Even admitting this, the last thing he saw before weariness turned into sleep was the lump she made in his bed, silent and unmoving. Kitty did not snore.

“What,” she asked the next day when he came home for a hot midday dinner, “is a Miss Molly?”

The bolus of bread in his mouth was in the act of sliding down his throat; he choked, coughed, had to be banged on the back and given water. “Sorry,” he gasped, eyes tearing. “Ask again.”

“What is a Miss Molly?”

“I have absolutely no idea. Why d’ye ask? Was it something Lizzie Lock said? Was it?” His expression boded ill.

“Lizzie Lock?”

“Mrs. Richard Morgan.”

“Is
that
her name? What an odd combination. Lizzie Lock. It was you left her, is that not so?”

“I was never with her in the first place,” he said, deflecting her attention from Miss Mollies.

The eyes were bright and sparkling, fascinated. “But you did marry her.”

“Aye, in Port Jackson. ’Twas a chivalrous impulse I have since regretted bitterly.”

“I understand,” she said, sounding as if she actually did. “I think you suffer from chivalrous impulses you later regret. Like me.”

“Why should ye think I regret you, Kitty?”

“I have cramped your style,” she said candidly. “I do not truly believe that you wanted a maidservant, but Major Ross said you must take one of us in. I happened by, so you took me.” Something in his eyes gave her pause; she put her head on one side and regarded him speculatively. “Your house was complete without me,” she said then, voice wobbly. “Your life was complete without me.”

In answer he got up to put his bowl and spoon on the bench beside the fireplace. “No,” he said, turning with a smile that tugged at her heart, “life is never complete until it is over. Nor do I refuse gifts when God offers them to me.”

“What time will you be home?” she called to his retreating back.

“Early, and with Stephen,” he shouted, “so dig potatoes.”

And that was life: digging potatoes.

In fact she loved the garden and was busy in it whenever the wretched sow gave her a spare moment. Augusta had arrived already pregnant by the Government boar, and had the most voracious appetite. If Kitty had preserved sufficient sense to wonder what serving out her sentence might entail before Richard had enlightened her—but she had not preserved sufficient sense—she would never have guessed that it would be spent waiting upon a four-trottered, mean-spirited glutton like Augusta. Since Richard was always absent, she had to learn the hard way how to take an axe and chop down cabbage palms and tree ferns, chip their skins off and feed the pith to Augusta, guzzling away; she carted baskets of Indian corn from the granary; she recited Kentish farmer’s spells over their own Indian corn, coming on nicely. If Augusta was bottomless now, what would she be like when she was nursing a dozen piglets?

Those three months attending Cook in the kitchen of the manor at St. Paul Deptford had proven invaluable, for though she had not been allowed to cook anything, Kitty had watched with interest, and found now that she was quite capable of preparing the simple fare Norfolk Island provided. With no cows and only enough goats for babies and children, of milk there was none; fresh meat was rare now that the Mt. Pitt bird had gone (though Kitty had merely heard of it, came too late to taste it); vegetables varied from green beans to, in winter, cabbages and cauliflowers; Richard had harvested a fine crop of calavances—chickpeas; and, with the arrival of Justinian, there was bread of some kind every day. What she missed most was a cup of tea. Lady Juliana had provided both tea and sugar for its women convicts; though some of them preferred wheedling rum out of the seamen, most enjoyed sweetened tea more than anything else. It had been almost the only thing the seasick Kitty had been able to keep down, and now she missed it badly.

So when Richard and Stephen arrived she had a meal of boiled potatoes and boiled salt beef ready to put upon the table together with a loaf of wheaten bread.

They trooped in laden with pots and boxes.

“Captain Anstis had a stall on the beach today,” said Richard, “and everything I wanted to buy was on it. Open kettles, a spouted kettle for boiling water, frying pans, little pots, tin dishes and tubs, pewter plates and mugs, knives and spoons, unbleached calico—even, when I asked for it, emery powder. Look, Kitty! I bought a pound of Malabar peppercorns and a mortar and pestle for grinding them.” He dumped a wooden box a foot cubed down on the desk. “And here is a chest of hyson tea just for you.”

Her hands to her cheeks, she stared at him tearily. “Oh! You thought of
me?
”

“Why should I not?” he asked, surprised. “I knew ye missed a cup of tea. I bought a teapot too. Sweetening it will not be hard. I will cut ye a stalk of sugar cane and chop it into short bits. All ye’ll have to do is crush it with a hammer and boil it to make syrup.”

“But this cost money!” she cried, appalled.

“Richard is a warm man, girl,” Stephen said, beginning to take articles off Richard as he handed them up from the sled. “I must say ye did amazing well, my friend, considering who ye dealt with. Nick Anstis is hard-headed.”

“I slapped gold coin on the board,” said Richard, coming inside again. “Anstis has to wait for money when it is tendered in notes of hand, whereas gold is gold. He was happy to quarter his prices for coins of the realm.”

“Just how much gold have ye got?” Stephen asked, curious.

“Enough,” said Richard tranquilly. “You see, I inherited from Ike Rogers as well.”

Stephen gaped, thunderstruck. “Is
that
why Richardson would not lay it on when Lieutenant King sentenced Joey Long to a hundred lashes for losing his best pair of Royal Navy shoes? Christ, ye’re close, Richard! Ye must have paid a little something to Jamison as well for insisting that Joey’s mental condition was too frail to sustain the whole flogging—Christ!”

“Joey looked after Ike. Now I look after Joey.”

They sat down at the table to do justice to the food, all three too active to scorn a diet banal and repetitive in the extreme.

“I gather that ye spent today at Charlotte Field, so ye may not have heard what happened to Kitty’s assailant,” Stephen said to Richard when they were done and Kitty stood happily washing their bowls and spoons in a new tin dish—no more bucket!

“Ye’re right, I have not heard. Tell me.”

“Tommy Two did not like being chained to the grindstone in the least, so last night he picked the locks on his irons and absconded into the forest, no doubt to join Gray.”

“With the birds gone, they will starve.”

“Aye, so I think. They will end up back on the grindstone.”

Richard rose, so did Stephen; Richard threw his arm about Stephen’s shoulders and steered him doorward, out of earshot. “Ye might,” he said quietly, “inform the Major that there may be a small conspiracy going on. Dyer, Francis, Peck and Pickett apparently have some purloined sugar cane growing somewhere off the track, and all four were sniffing around Anstis’s stall enquiring after things like copper kettles and copper pipe.”

“Why not tell the Major yourself? ’Tis you who is involved in that sort of activity.”

“Exactly why I would rather not be the one to tell the Major. In that respect, Stephen, I walk very carefully. Were I the one to speak of it, the Major might—should illicit spirits appear among the convicts and private marines—think I had concocted the tale to cover my own guilt.”