The Lieutenant Part 17

'Well, man?' Wyatt was peering into Rooke's face as if to prise the words out of his mouth. 'Well?'

'The natives eluded us, sir,' Rooke said.

'Tch!' The governor's face creased in annoyance. 'Speak up, man, how did that come about?' he demanded. 'Speak up, Lieutenant Rooke, come, man!'

'It was a failure,' Rooke began.

Remembered the firelight, Warungin laughing. The hatchet, shiny along its blade where someone had so recently been employed to put the keenest edge he could on the iron. Silk, smiling, his eyes sliding sideways.

'Sir, it was badly done,' he said.

The words had come back to him. It was a relief like a sneeze to expel them at the governor.

'It was a wicked plan, sir, I am sorry to have been persuaded to comply with the order. I would not for any reason ever again obey a similar order.'

The governor's face was slack with astonishment. Rooke watched him, saw all his prospects wither like a leaf in the fire. It was a weightless sensation. He saw it on the governor's face, irreversible, and felt nothing but relief.

Something was finished for him.

'You are speaking out of turn, Lieutenant,' Wyatt said. 'Mind your words, sir!'

Wyatt was no friend of his but Rooke saw that he was straining, like a man holding a dam, to prevent catastrophe. He was freshly shaved, as was the governor. Rooke caught a whiff of the astringent that Barber used on them.

They were three men on a sandy track, the coa.r.s.e patter of gum leaves around them agitating in the breeze, a bird nearby making a noise like a creaking door.

'Sir, your orders were a most gravely wrong thing, I regret beyond words my part in the business.'

'But was anyone killed, Lieutenant?' the governor insisted as if he had not heard. 'How many were got?'

His prim-lipped manner set Rooke alight.

'I beg your pardon, sir, but that is beside the point. The intention of evil was there which is all that G.o.d sees when he looks into our hearts.'

He saw the governor flinch at the word G.o.d and was surprised at himself for using it. It sounded like a cheap trick to silence the governor, when what he truly felt was that G.o.d was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart.

'By Jove, sir,' the governor said, 'you are mighty sure of yourself for a junior officer, and mighty free with the Almighty's name!'

There was an awkwardness about this-mighty and Almighty-that made all three men pause and listen to the words ringing together.

'I will ask, Lieutenant Rooke, that you attend me at midday at Government House.'

And then he was gone. Wyatt took long strides to catch him up, glancing back at where Rooke was already turning towards his future.

He would go to his hut on the point. He would light his fire, boil water, make tea. Sit outside with his back against the wall, where the morning sun warmed the planks.

Depending on when the ships arrived from England, he might have a few weeks or a few months to sit there. He would go on measuring the rainfall, taking the temperature of the air. He might even find one or two more stars and add a few more words to the notebooks.

But sooner or later, His Majesty's grand machine would take him into itself. He would be sent away. He would stand and listen as a court p.r.o.nounced his sentence. Then he would be taken from that place and be obliged to submit to one kind of death or another: the death of the body or the death of the future.

By the time he entered the settlement, the stars could no longer be seen, the sky arching over him now a limpid early-morning blue. But they were still there, hanging in their appointed places. The earth would turn forever and sunset would follow sunrise into eternity, and the glory of the stars would blaze out whether or not anyone saw them.

Almost fifty years later the earth still turned and the stars still burned, and Daniel Rooke still looked up and watched them.

He had learned that the naked eye could see things a telescope could not. The exquisite instruments of astronomy could add new stars to the sum of the world's knowledge, but it took a soul to wonder at the beauty of those already discovered.

They had not hanged him, for which he had gone on his knees and given thanks to G.o.d. But when they told him he might continue in the service, on condition that he apologise to James Gilbert and accept a loss of rank to ensign, he refused. By then he knew why he had been spared, and it was not to serve His Majesty. He went straight from the court to offer himself to another cause.

That cause had taken him back to a place he had never thought to revisit: Antigua. He marvelled at the symmetry of it. In Antigua he had once watched a young lieutenant of marines hanged for disobeying. He too had disobeyed but had been spared, and it seemed only right that Antigua should take his life and make use of it.

Now that life was fading, a star at dawn. He lay awake in the dark. Sunrise was some time off, but the window was a grey square. The tropical dawn would come too quickly, that brilliant Caribbean light that an invalid longed to shut out. Waiting for darkness was what he did now, as he had done when he was an astronomer. He thought the final darkness might not be far off.

He lay still, hardly breathing. There was a short s.p.a.ce of time in which he was blessedly conscious only of existing. He savoured it. Then the pain returned, the pounding fullness in the head, the pangs behind the eyeb.a.l.l.s, the aching in his shoulders, his back, his legs. It was a matter of willing time to pa.s.s, so that he might either die or recover.

Beyond the window the parrots chattered in the guava tree. Another day had to be lived through in this hot and weary bed.

The curtain, broken along its rings, still dangled lopsided as it had for every day of his illness, a shred of lining hanging down. He knew the curtain, the broken rings, that tongue of fabric, to the point of weariness. Day after day lying on the bed, he had st.i.tched up the rip, reattached the rings, made it neat and orderly. But only in his mind's eye. It was weeks since he had had the strength to do anything more strenuous than sit up in bed, move to the commode, creep back again between the sheets.

Now he could make out his other familiars, the constellations of mildew on the ceiling and the cracks in the floor tile that made the shape of France. In his busy mind he had a pail of hot soapy water, a scrubbing brush. The cracks were full of dirt, the tiles themselves clouded across their terracotta surfaces. It was interesting to observe-or had been, the first hundred times-how the pattern of dirt revealed, in a way otherwise invisible, the slight unevennesses in the laying of the tiles. Where one corner was lower than its neighbour by a fraction, the dirt had settled, undisturbed. Where an edge rode high the pa.s.sage of feet had worn it clean. If for any reason you needed to create an absolutely flat surface-for some experiment involving metal b.a.l.l.s and their movement, for example-this would be a way to make sure of it. If he should ever find himself needing such a perfect surface, he would remember how you could use dirt.

He took it as a good sign, that he could still have such orderly and deductive thoughts.

The servant-woman, Henrietta, was good. But she had enough on her hands looking after him. Even before he fell ill, she stayed only out of a sense of honour. He had not been able to pay her for perhaps a year.

'You have been good for us,' she always said when he apologised. 'For me, and for us.'

She meant, of course, the slaves. He had given his life for them.

Well, that was a little melodramatic. He was not yet thirty when he had begun to give his life for them. He was seventy-four now, lying on this hot bed. Call it two-thirds, roughly, something like two-thirds of a life.

Actually, it was twenty-two thirty-sevenths of a life. He wondered how sick he would have to be for numbers to leave him, that craving for the exact.

Two-thirds of a life, then, let us say, that had begun with such promise. Then he had made his choice, and it had brought him here: to this house on the hill above English Harbour.

All those who had exclaimed at his prospects had fallen away long ago and all those he had loved-wife, son and daughter-were dead or elsewhere now. If a man lived as long as he had, he supposed things could not be otherwise. Now it was just himself and Henrietta.

He could hear her clanking downstairs in the kitchen, and the mewing of the cat wanting its breakfast.

Henrietta would bring him a slice of mango from the tree outside, a plate of cold boiled yam from last night. He wanted neither, but she would bring them and scold him, in her quiet way, hold up the mango until he took a bite, wipe his chin for him when the juice ran down.

A bowl of oatmeal would be good. He had loved oatmeal as a child. Portsmouth, forever shiny in the rain, and his mother's oatmeal, warm and sweet, fat with cream. In Antigua oatmeal was unknown. He supposed it could be bought from the ships that carried other luxuries from England, but only if you had money.

He had bought Henrietta at auction, when he still had money. By then he was used to it, standing with the other men and counting upwards aloud, turn and turn about with them, until they stopped. How many had he bought? He had started a list in the beginning, but left off after a time. For once, the number did not matter. He could only say, I bought as many as I could.

Bought and freed, of course, and how they hated him for that, the men around him in the auction yard. They had agreed among themselves, and bid the price up and up to ruin him faster.

Now there was nothing, just the water in the well, the mangoes on the trees, the yams in the garden.

'Go,' he had said, trying to be stern, when the last of the money was gone. 'I cannot pay you, you must find another place.' She had not tried to argue, only shaken her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing medicine.

He supposed he should be sorry for it now, that choice he had made forty-six years ago. He tried out the idea in his mind. Regret. Remorse. He tested the words against what he felt. His head ached, his body pained him in every joint, the light hurt his eyes. He wished his wife were still alive. He would like to see his sister Anne one more time, and taste oatmeal once more, and feel the soft Portsmouth rain on his face.

All these things he felt. But he did not seem to be feeling regret. The words of regret could be summoned, but not the pang.

Regret, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, flickered, flamed, expired.

He heard Henrietta greeting someone downstairs, the rumble of a man's voice, and could imagine it: Henrietta, a freshly washed once-red bandana bound around her black hair, and Redoubt the postman.

Through the open window he heard sounds of sweeping, and then the regular thump as a rug was beaten. Someone sang a s.n.a.t.c.h of melody, called out, there was a prolonged splash as water cascaded from something into something else. A rooster crowed triumphantly. Soon Henrietta would come up, would push back the ragged curtain and turn to look at him.

Indeed, here was her footfall on the stairs. The matting had gone long ago, so he could hear every step of her bare feet, quiet though they were. Here she was, and in her hand the old white dish with, yes, the slice of mango and there it was too, the wedge of greyish yam.

He would eat a mouthful, just to bring a smile to her face. There was a mock-hurt she did that he could not bear to see. He knew it was only pretence, as you might pretend for a child, but still he would yield to it. He would eat the yam first, that delicate earthen taste, then the mango, sweet, fragrant, its texture almost meaty.

'Slow, Mr Rooke,' Henrietta whispered. 'Slow now and easy.'

When he had eaten a mouthful of each, he lay back. The mango was sweet to the tongue but it left an aftertaste with a bitter element. He wanted to wash it away with a sip of water but could not find the energy to sit up and drink.

The room was growing hot. He could feel the sweat, a cool drop sliding down his cheek. There was the tiresomely familiar curtain, the cracked tile, the mildew. He thought he could not bear to live through another day of the light crawling around the room, waiting for nightfall.

He heard himself sigh out all his air in a sound that was half groan, half wail. Henrietta leaned forward and she sat for a long time holding his fingers in hers, caressing them. He could feel the skin of her fingers, slippery, smooth, warm against his own.

Putuwa. That was the word Tagaran had taught him. Putuwa, and he had written the meaning into his little book: to warm one's hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person.

There, on the far side of the world, it would be dusk. Tagaran, if still alive, would be a grown woman with grown children. She might have grandchildren, skinny and laughing like the child she had been when she had made a friend of Daniel Rooke.

She would remember him. Of that he was certain. She would tell her children about him, the Berewalgal who had been her friend when she was a girl. Who had had such difficulty with her name, she had to say it ten times! Who wrote it all down in two blue notebooks, so that the words would be fixed there forever.

Did she wonder what had become of the notebooks, the record of their conversations, written down for anyone who ever opened them and read? She would know, he thought, that he would keep them always.

The books had travelled with him to London on Gorgon, and then to Africa, all those years, and they were with him still, in the top drawer of the dresser in the corner. But he had never got them out, never read them. It was enough for him to know they were there. When he and Tagaran were both dead, when their children's children were dead, the notebooks would tell the story of a friendship like no other.

He had hoped to go back. He had always hoped that. Here on these islands, with black faces all around, he had seemed closer to her. Had felt himself to be travelling towards her, only a slip of land and a single ocean between him and New South Wales. He knew now, with the clarity of fever, that he would never go back there. New South Wales was as unreachable as any other past.

He did not need to look at the notebooks to remember every detail of New South Wales. He knew how it was there in the twilight. The land lost its light before the sky. The water gathered up the last of the radiance and held it, gleaming and shifting.

If he were to go back to that night on the sand of Botany Bay, would he make the same choice again, knowing that this was where it would lead him: to the raucous birds in the guava tree outside, the voices drifting up to the window, this hot room with the circling flies, the man on the bed looking at the pattern of mildew on the ceiling like dark stars?

On his last morning in New South Wales he had woken before dawn. Through the open door he could see a few stars, although the sky was beginning to lighten around them.

Down in Sydney Cove, Gorgon waited to take him to England. It was bad luck that the long-awaited ships had finally arrived so soon after his interview with the governor. You know I do not have the power to convene a court-martial, His Excellency had said. His voice had trembled with anger. But you will be sent back at the earliest opportunity, Lieutenant, to face the consequences of your actions.

He had once thought to spend the rest of his life in New South Wales, but the earliest opportunity had turned out to be no more than a month.

There was a good breeze, he could hear the harbour slapping itself up against the rocks at the foot of the point. As soon as it was dawn they would ready Gorgon to sail. There would be no timekeeper to be wound on this voyage, and no new land at the end of it, only the unknown years of the rest of his life.

He got up and went outside. There was Betelgeuse and, along with it, as it had always been, the white blaze of Rigel.

They had been there since the beginning. Whatever the beginning was. Would be still there when the speck of matter called Daniel Rooke was no longer even a name on a forgotten gravestone, when the gravestone itself had worn away, grain by grain. Even then, Rigel and Betelgeuse would still be travelling together across the sky.

He had lit his fire, made himself a last dish of sweet-tea. Warraburra. Took his chair outside and sat there with his back to the wall as he had so often before, watching the sun rise one last time. He found himself taking large breaths like sighs and there was a coldness about his heart. A gilded bird, one of the white parrots caught by the sun's first rays, flapped magnificently across the patch of blue sky between the treetops.

At noon Gorgon cast off from its mooring and the blocks rattled and squealed as the sails were raised. He stood at the stern and looked towards the point the natives knew as Tarra, and which he had tried to name after Dr Vickery, but which people seemed determined to call after himself.

He could see the roof of his hut, and the brave little teepee of the observatory. On the very tip of the point, on the rocks below the hut, he could see a few natives. Among them he could just make out the figure of Tagaran.

She had arrived that morning, not leaping down the rocks as she usually did. They had barely spoken. There was nothing to say. But while he buckled up his bag, and clipped the latches on the sea-chest, and sat on it waiting for the men to come and carry it to the ship, she crouched over his little fire. She held her hands out to it-so close he thought she must have burned her palms-and then came over and sat beside him on the chest.

As she had done on another occasion, she took his hands between hers. He felt her fingers pressing and smoothing, transferring their heat to his. He closed his eyes. His skin had taken on the warmth of hers so he no longer knew which was hers and which his.

When the men came for his sea-chest Rooke and Tagaran looked at each other, looked away. He followed the men up the rocks, along the ridge. At the top he did not turn. He kept his hand closed tight around itself, around the warmth she had put there, and went on, down the hill, along the track to where the boats were waiting.

But now, leaning on the stern rail as the ship gathered way, he could see her down on the very end of the point. She was standing on the rock from which he had once watched a man spear a fish and tuck it into his belt cord. She was so far out that the waves were washing over her feet at each respiration of the water. He found himself smiling: she was as close to Gorgon as she could get while remaining on land.

As the wind filled the sails and Gorgon picked up speed down the harbour, he waved, and she answered straight away, her arm drawing one large shape through the air. Between them across the water a long thread stretched out, spinning out longer and longer as their figures grew small.

Soon Tagaran become indistinguishable from the rocks around her, the rocks indistinguishable from the headland, the headland nothing more than a distant part of the landscape. Tagaran was invisible now, but she was a part of everything he could see, like the faintest, most distant star, sending its steady light out towards him across s.p.a.ce.

Author's note.

This is a work of fiction, but it was inspired by recorded events.

Briefly, they are these: on board the First Fleet that brought convicts to Australia in 1788 was a young lieutenant of marines, William Dawes. Although nominally a soldier, he was a considerable scholar in astronomy, mathematics and languages. The record he left of the language of the indigenous people of the Sydney area is by far the most extensive we have. It contains not only word lists and speculations about the grammatical structure of the language, but conversations between him and the indigenous people, particularly a young girl, Patyegarang. Between the lines of these exchanges is what seems to be a relationship of mutual respect and affection.

In December 1790, one of the governor's gamekeepers was mortally wounded by a spear. Dawes was one of a party of soldiers sent out to punish the tribe from which the attacker was said to come. Their orders were to capture six indigenous men and bring them back to the settlement, but if that were not possible they were to kill six, cut off their heads, and bring them back in bags provided for the purpose.

Dawes at first refused to take part, but was persuaded. On his return he announced that he regretted his decision, and if ordered to do anything similar again he would refuse. The governor would have court-martialled him for insubordination if the mechanism for court-martial had been available to him.

Earlier, Dawes had expressed a desire to settle in New South Wales, but was sent back to Britain when his tour of duty ended. He never returned to Australia, but worked for the rest of his life in the movement for the abolition of slavery, in London, Africa and the West Indies. He spent his last years in Antigua where, after Abolition, he established schools for former slaves. He died there in 1836.

I made extensive use of historical sources in this novel, and in particular Dawes' language notebooks. All the Cadigal words and conversations in this book are quoted verbatim from those notebooks with the kind permission of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, (reference MS 41645) and after consultation with a representative of the Cadigal people. I've also made use of direct quotations from A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, by Watkin Tench. I acknowledge these and many other sources with grat.i.tude.

Although I made use of historical sources, I departed from them in various ways. This is a novel; it should not be mistaken for history.

I'd also like to express my deepest thanks to the many generous readers who contributed their knowledge and insight to this book. All errors are my own.

My greatest debt is to Patyegarang and the Cadigal people, who were willing to share their language, and to William Dawes, who wrote some of it down. Without them The Lieutenant could not have been imagined.

Also by Kate Grenville.

NOVELS.