Morgan's Run by Colleen McCullough
“So what ye’re proposing is not so cold-blooded after all. And ye’re right. Love is not a thing expedience can conjure up.”
The sun had gone behind the rocks on the western side of the cove and the light was long and golden; Stephen Donovan sat and thought about the vagaries of the human heart. Oh yes, he was right. Love came unasked, and sometimes was an unwelcome visitor. Richard was attempting to insulate himself from it by espousing a sister whom he pitied and would help.
“If ye marry Lizzie Lock,” he said finally, “ye’ll not be free to marry elsewhere. One day that might matter very much.”
“You would advise me not to, then?”
“Aye.”
“I will think about it,” said Richard, scrambling up.
* * *
On Monday morning Richard secured permission from Major Ross to see the Reverend Mr. Johnson, and asked him for permission to see Elizabeth Lock, convict woman in the women’s camp, with the possible intention of asking her to marry him.
In his early thirties, Mr. Johnson was a round-faced, full-lipped and slightly feminine-looking man of carefully episcopal dress, from his starched white stock to his black minister’s robe; this latter garment tended to conceal his paunch, for naturally he did not want to look too well fed in this hungry place. The pale eyes burned with the kind of fervor Cousin James-of-the-clergy called Jesuitically messianic, and at New South Wales he had found his mission: to uplift the moral tone, care for the sick and the orphaned, run his own church his own way, and be deemed a benefactor of humanity. His intentions were genuinely good, but the depth of his understanding was shallow and his compassion entirely reserved for the helpless. The adult convicts he regarded as universally depraved and hardly worth the saving—if they were not depraved, then why were they convicts?
On learning that Richard’s first cousin (once removed) was the rector of St. James’s, Bristol, and discovering that Morgan was an educated, courteous and apparently sincere fellow, Mr. Johnson gave him his pass and provisionally arranged that Richard should marry Elizabeth Lock during next Sunday’s service, when all the convicts could see how successful his policy was.
As soon as the sun went down Richard walked from his bark shelter to the women’s camp, presented his pass to the sentry and asked whereabouts lay Elizabeth Lock. The sentry had no idea, but a woman hefting a bucket of water overheard and pointed to a tent. How did one knock on a tent? He compromised by scratching at the flap, which was closed.
“Come in if ye’re good-looking!” cried a female voice.
Richard pushed the flap aside and entered a canvas dormitory which would have held ten women comfortably, but instead had been made to house twenty. Ten narrow stretcher beds were jammed cheek by jowl down either long wall, and the space between was littered with impedimenta varying from a hat box to a mother cat nursing six kittens. The inhabitants, having eaten at the communal cooking fire outside, were disposed upon their beds in various stages of undress. Thin, frail and indomitable, all of them. Lizzie was on the bed owned the hat box. Of course.
An absolute silence had fallen; nineteen pairs of round eyes surveyed him with keen appreciation as he threaded his way between the impedimenta to the hat box and the dozing Lizzie Lock.
“Asleep already, Lizzie?” he asked, a smile in his voice.
Her eyes flew open, stared up incredulously at the beloved face. “Richard! Oh, Richard my love!” She launched herself off the bed and clung to him in a frenzy of weeping.
“No tears, Lizzie,” he said gently when she quietened. “Come and talk to me.”
He guided her out, an arm about her waist, all eyes following.
“Half your luck, Lizzie,” said one woman, not young anymore.
“A quarter of it would do,” said her companion, very pregnant.
They walked down to the water of the cove near the temporary bake-house, Lizzie hanging on to his hand for dear life, and found a pile of quarried sandstone blocks to sit on.
“How was it after we left?” he asked.
“I stayed on in Gloucester for a long time, then was sent to the London Newgate,” she said, shivering. It was beginning to be cool, and she was wearing a skimpy, tattered slops dress.
Richard took off his canvas jacket and draped it around her emaciated shoulders, studying her closely. What was she now, two years past thirty? She looked two years past forty, but the beady black eyes had still not given up on life. When she threw her arms around him he had waited for a surge of love or even of desire, but felt neither. He cared for her, pitied her. No more than those. “Tell me all of it,” he said. “I want to know.”
“I am very glad I did not stay long in London—the prison is a hell-hole. We were sent on board Lady Penrhyn, which carried no male convicts and no marines worth speaking of. The ship was much as it is in the tent—shoved together. Some women had children. Some were heavy and bore their babes at sea. The babes and children mostly died—their mothers could not give them suck. My friend Ann’s boy died. Some fell on the voyage and are heavy now.”
She clutched his arm, shook it angrily. “Can you imagine, Richard? They gave us no rags for our bleeding courses, so we had to start tearing up our own clothes—slops like this. Whatever we wore when we came on board went into the hold for here. In Rio de Janeiro the Governor sent us a hundred hempen bread sacks to wear because no women’s clothing reached Portsmouth before the fleet sailed. He would have done us a better turn to send us some bolts of the cheapest cloth, needles and thread and scissors,” she said bitterly. “The sacks could not be used for rags. When we stole the sailors’ shirts to use as rags they flogged us, or cut off our hair and shaved our heads. Those who gave them cheek were gagged. The worst punishment was to be stripped naked and put inside a barrel with our heads, arms and legs poking out. We kept washing the rags as long as we could, but sea-water sets the blood. I was able to make a few pence by sewing and mending for the surgeon and the officers, but many of the girls were so poor that they had nothing, so we shared what we had.”
She shivered despite the coat. “That was not the worst of it!” she said through shut teeth. “Every man on Lady Penrhyn looked at us and spoke to us as if we were whores—whether we were whores or not, and most of us were not. As if to them, we had no other thing to offer than our cunts.”
“That is what many men think,” said Richard, throat tight.
“They took away our pride. When we arrived here, we were given a slops dress and our own clothes out of the hold if we had any—my hat box came, is that not wondrous?” she asked, eyes shining. “When came Ann Smith’s turn, Miller of the Commissary looked her up and down and said nothing could improve her slovenly appearance—she had naught, being very poor. And she threw the slops on the deck, wiped her feet on them and said he could keep his fucken clothes, she would wear what she had with pride.”
“Ann Smith,” said Richard, in agonies of anger, grief, shame. “She absconded soon after.”
“Aye, and has not been seen since. She swore she would go—the fiercest monsters and Indians held no terrors for her after Lady Penrhyn and Englishmen, she said. No matter what they did to her, she would not truckle. There were others who would not truckle and were sad abused. When Captain Sever threatened to flog Mary Gamble—that was just after we boarded—she told him to kiss her cunt because he wanted to fuck her, not flog her.” She sighed, snuggled. “So we had our few victories, and they kept us going. Samsons that we are, it was always the women who broke through the bulkhead to get in among the sailors, lusting after men! Never the men doing the lusting or the breaking in, saints that they are. Still, never mind, never mind. It is over and I am on dry land and you are here, Richard my love. I have prayed for nothing more.”
“Did the men come after you, Lizzie?”
“Nay! I am not pretty enough or young enough, and the first place I lose weight is where I never had any to begin with—in the tits. The men were after the big girls, and there were not a lot of men—
“Ann Smith?”
“No, Ann Colpitts. She is in the next bed to me. The one who lost her baby boy at sea.”
Darkness was falling. Time to go. Why did this happen? What under the sun could these poor creatures have done to deserve such contempt? Such humiliation? Such misery, beggared even of their pride? Given sacks to wear, reducing themselves to rags to get rags. How could the contractors have forgotten that women bleed and must have rags? I want to crawl away and die. . .
Poor wretch, not young enough or pretty enough to attract a satiated eye—what a time of it the sailors must have had! And what kind of fate does Lizzie face here, where nothing is different from Lady Penrhyn save that the land does not move? I do not love her and God knows she does not stir me, but it is in my power to give her a little status among old friends. Stephen might say that I am playing God or even condescending, but I do not mean it thus. I mean it for the best, though whether it is for the best I do not know. All I do know is that I owe her a debt. She cared for me.
“Lizzie,” he said, “would ye be willing to take up the same sort of arrangement with me that we had in Gloucester? Protection in return for your looking after me and my men.”
“Oh, yes!” she cried, face lighting up.
“It means marrying me, for I can get you no other way.”
She hesitated. “Do you love me, Richard?” she asked.
He hesitated. “In a way,” he said slowly, “in a way. But if you want to be loved as a husband loves the wife of his heart, it would be better to say no.”
She had always known she did not move him, and thought well of him for being honest. After she landed she had looked in vain for him among the men who thronged the women’s camp, sent out feelers to ascertain if any woman there could boast of bedding Richard Morgan. Nothing. Therefore she had deduced that he was not among the men sent to Botany Bay. Now here he was, asking her to marry him. Not because he loved her or desired her. Because he needed her services. Pitied her? No, that she could not bear! Because he needed her services. That she could bear.
“I will marry you,” she said, “on conditions.”
“Name them.”
“That people do not know how things stand between us. This is not Gloucester Gaol, and I would not have your men think that I am—I am—in need of anything.”
“My men will not bother you,” he said, relaxing. “Ye know them. They are either old friends or the few who came in shortly before we were sent to Ceres.”
“Bill Whiting? Jimmy Price? Joey Long?”
“Aye, but not Ike Rogers or Willy Wilton. They died.”
Thus it was that on the 30th of March, 1788, Richard Morgan married Elizabeth Lock. Bill Whiting stood in dazed delight as his witness, and Ann Colpitts stood for Lizzie.
When Richard signed the chaplain’s register he was horrified to discover that he had almost forgotten how to write.
The Reverend Johnson’s face made his feelings about the union quite clear: he thought Richard was marrying beneath him. Lizzie had come in the outfit she had preserved since entering Gloucester Gaol—a voluminous-skirted lustring gown of black-and-scarlet stripes, a red feather boa, high-heeled black velvet shoes buckled with paste diamonds, white stockings clocked in black, a scarlet lace reticule and Mr. James Thistlethwaite’s fabulous hat. She looked like a harlot trying to make herself respectable.
A sudden, savage urge to wound invaded Richard’s mind; he leaned over and put his lips close to the Reverend’s ear. “There is no need to worry,” he whispered, winking at Stephen Donovan over Mr. Johnson’s shoulder, “I am simply obtaining a servant. It was so clever of ye to think of marriage, honored sir. Once married, they cannot get away.”
The chaplain stepped back so quickly that he trod heavily on his wife’s foot; she yelped, he apologized profusely, and so managed to get away with dignity more or less intact.
“A perfectly matched couple,” said Donovan to their retreating backs. “They labor with equal zeal in the Lord’s Name.” Then he turned his laughing eyes upon Lizzie, scooped her up and kissed her thoroughly. “I am Stephen Donovan, able seaman off Sirius, Mrs. Morgan,” he said, bowing with a flourish of his Sunday tricorn. “I wish ye the whole world.” After which he wrung Richard’s hand.
“There is no wedding feast,” said Richard, “but we would be pleased if ye’d join us, Mr. Donovan.”
“Thankee, but no, I have the Watch in an hour. Here, a small present,” he said, thrust a package into Richard’s hand and walked off blowing light-hearted kisses to a group of ogling women.
The parcel contained butter of antimony and a lavishly fringed scarlet silk shawl.
“How did he know I love red?” asked Lizzie, purring.
How did he? Richard laughed and shook his head. “That is a man sees through iron doors, Lizzie, but he is another ye can trust.”
In May the Governor located a patch of reasonably good land about fifteen miles inland to the west and decided to shift some convicts to the site, crowned by Rose Hill (after his patron, Sir George Rose), to clear it fully and prepare the ground for wheat and maize. Barley he would continue to try to grow on the farm at Sydney Cove. A very little timber was coming out of the sawpits, but quantities of palm logs were now being freighted from coves nearer to the rearing bastions of the Heads. These round, fairly straight boles were flimsy and rotted quickly, but they could be easily sawed and chinked with mud, so most of the increased spate of building was done with palm logs and a thatch of palm fronds or rushes. The casuarina shingles were being weathered and saved for permanent structures, starting with the Governor’s house.
The bricks of the nucleus of this had been landed and the wonderful field of brick clay not so very distant was already being worked—brick making went on as fast as the miserable twelve brick molds put on board could be turned around. There was, however, one problem about building in brick or the stunning local yellow sandstone: no one had found a single trace of limestone anywhere. Anywhere! Which was—it was ridiculous! Limestone was like soil—it was always so abundant that no one in London had given it a thought. Yet how, in the absence of limestone, could any mortar be mixed to join bricks or sandstone blocks together?
Needs must. The ships’ boats were sent out to collect every empty oyster shell dumped around Port Jackson’s beaches and rock shelves, a heavy undertaking. The natives were partial to oysters (very tasty oysters, all the senior officers pronounced) and left the shells piled up like miniature slag heaps. If there was no alternative, then the Government would burn oyster shells to make lime for mortar. Experience proved that it took 30,000 empty shells to produce enough mortar to lay 5,000 bricks, the number contained in a tiny house, so as time went on the forays in search of this only source of lime extended to Botany Bay and Port Hacking to the south and almost 100 miles north of Port Jackson. Millions upon millions of empty oyster shells, burned and ground to dust, went between the bricks and blocks of the first solid, imperishable buildings around Sydney Cove.
Almost everybody began to display the early symptoms of scurvy, including the marines, whose flour rations were being cut back to eke out what flour was left in the stores. The convicts chewed at grass and any sort of tender leaf not redolent with resin. If it stayed down, they ate more of it—if it came up or they collapsed in agony, they avoided it. What else could they do? Having the time and the armaments to venture afield, the senior free men reaped the minute supply of edible greens: samphire (a succulent growing in the salt swamps of Botany Bay), a wild parsley, and a vine leaf which, when infused in boiling water, yielded a sweet, palatable tea.
No matter how many were banished in irons to Pinchgut, flogged, or even hanged, thefts of food continued. Whoever possessed any thriving vegetables was sure to lose them the instant vigilance was relaxed; in that respect Richard’s men were lucky, for they had MacGregor, a splendid watchdog during the night hours, and Lizzie Morgan to watch
The death toll was mounting alarmingly among the free as well as the felon, and included women and children. A few convicts had absconded, hardly ever to be seen again. Some attrition, but not enough; Sydney Cove still held over 1,000 people on Government rations. Scurvy and semistarvation meant that the pace of work was appallingly slow, and there were of course a proportion of convicts—and marines—who objected to work on principle. With a governor like Arthur Phillip they were not flogged to work; an excuse was easy to find.
May also saw the first frosts of coming winter, heavy enough to kill almost everything in the gardens. Lizzie looked at her vegetable patch and wept, then went scratching dangerously farther afield in search of anything she thought green and edible. After two convict bodies were carried naked into the camp, killed by the natives, Richard forbade her to leave the cove environs. They had sour crout and it would be eaten. If the rest of the world chose scurvy in preference, that was hard luck.
On the 4th of June came the King’s birthday and a celebration, perhaps Governor Phillip’s way of injecting some heart into his dwindling, apathetic chicks. Guns thundered, marines marched, a bit of extra food was issued, and after dark a huge bonfire was kindled. The convicts were given a whole three days off work, but what mattered far more was the gift of a half-pint of rum broken down into grog by the addition of a half-pint of water. The free people each received a half-pint of neat rum and a pint of porter, which was a thick, black beer. To mark the occasion with some official deed, His Excellency the Governor determined the boundaries of the first county in New South Wales and christened it Cumberland County.
“Tchah!” Surgeon-General White was overheard to exclaim. “It is without a doubt the largest county in the world, but there is absolutely nothing in it. Tchah!”