The Lieutenant Part 4

'My word, Rooke, I thought myself the quickest jack-in-the-box in the regiment, but I see I must not be complacent!'

Rooke tried to frame a reply, but Silk did not wait.

'p.r.i.c.kles, sunburn, mosquitoes, and, I doubt not, snakes. Perhaps unfriendly natives too. However, the worse it is to experience, the better it will read on the page. The natives are what I need. Their shyness is disappointing. This expedition may provide an opportunity to chat to the elusive fellows. And whatever other outcomes, we will have brought a little favourable attention on ourselves.'

He winked.

'The long view, my friend, never lose sight of the long view of our time in New South Wales.'

The long view was hard to keep sight of when faced with New South Wales one yard at a time. Rooke sat in the cutter with the rest of the party, hearing the dip and suck of the oars as the sailors propelled them along the harbour towards the west. In the bow, the governor had a thwart to himself, peering with his telescope. Silk sat alertly behind him, now and then leaning forward to respond to some remark from the governor that Rooke could not hear. Beside Silk, Lieutenant Willstead also leaned forward, his bony face eager, trying to make his mark. Willstead had been on Sirius. All the way across the Atlantic, all the way across the Great Southern Ocean, Rooke had watched him trying in vain to make his mark with the governor. His ambition was too naked on his lean face, his ingratiating smile too much a matter of mechanics. Silk had just as much ambition, but did not seem to care, and when the governor turned on his thwart to comment on some point of interest, it was always to Silk that he spoke.

Behind Rooke sat two privates on either side of a big bearded prisoner: the governor's shooter, Silk had told Rooke, brought along to bag them their suppers. He was like a haunch of beef himself, Rooke thought, his ma.s.sive shoulders all of a piece with his powerful neck. He met the man's eyes: shrewd, knowing, sceptical.

Lieutenant Gardiner of Sirius was in charge of the boat. He balanced himself in the stern while the sailors laboured over the oars, steering them up the harbour. On the northern sh.o.r.e, high dark prows of headlands hung over the water, the sombre woods pressing down into their own reflections. To the south the land was lower, each bay and promontory shining with the glossy leaves of mangroves. Now and then between them a crescent of yellow sand was like a punctuation mark. Gulls bobbing on the water turned their heads to watch the boat pa.s.s, pelicans seemed to smile to themselves. The tide was behind the boat, sweeping it around bend after bend, the banks narrowing until what had been a harbour became a river.

They rounded a long low promontory and found themselves sliding past a slope of gra.s.s on which four or five natives sat around a fire, staring at the boat. They were like a tableau being dragged across a stage. And of course, from the point of view of the natives, the boatful of staring strangers must be a tableau sliding through their field of view.

'Turn in, Lieutenant,' the governor called along the boat to Gardiner. 'Back oars and bring us in to them.'

He stood up in the bow as the boat drew closer, took off his hat and waved it.

'Good morning!' he shouted. 'Good morning, friends!'

The natives did not wave back. As Rooke watched, the tableau moved and a woman rose from beside the fire, scooping up a child against her breast, and walked away into the bushes. One by one the others got up and followed her. They did not seem to be hurrying but, by the time the boat was close enough to land, the clearing was empty.

'Shall I jump ash.o.r.e, sir?' Willstead asked. 'I could jump ash.o.r.e, sir, and go after them.'

But there was something about Willstead's voice that the governor could not seem to hear.

'Row on, Lieutenant Gardiner,' he called, an edge in his voice. 'We will not waste time here.'

The river narrowed to a stream winding between deep banks and finally their way was blocked by flat slabs of rock piled up in shelves down which water tinkled and shone.

'Terminus, gentlemen!' Gardiner called, and backed the boat in to where one of the slabs of rock fell away into deep water.

Willstead and Silk got out and turned to help the governor, but he was getting his angles and joints out over the gunwale with considerable dexterity.

'Thank you, gentlemen, but as you see, I am already here.'

He looked up at the steep banks on either side, scoured to bare rock in places by past floods, and was already setting off while he gave orders over his shoulder.

'Thank you, Lieutenant Gardiner, I will expect you at this spot in three days' time. Now Captain Silk, come alongside me if you please, we will lead the way. Lieutenant Willstead, will you be good enough to come after us. Lieutenant Rooke, be so kind as to bring up the rear and record our line of march. Sergeant, you and the privates will march with the gamekeeper.'

Rooke laughed, thinking the governor had made one of his rare witticisms, but he turned in his angled way and fixed him with a cold eye. Rooke coughed into his hand.

Gamekeeper! The word suggested the society that Lancelot Percival James had boasted of at the Academy: pheasants and deer in a park artfully planted to enhance the prospect, cheerful peasantry tipping their caps to the squire riding by.

But New South Wales was no gentleman's estate. His Majesty's subjects were perched in a small sour clearing on the edge of the unknown. The land around them seemed without resources either animal or vegetable, and the gamekeeper was a criminal who had been given a gun.

The party fell in behind the governor. From the rear, Rooke could see the line of knapsacks bobbing along, and the heads bowed to avoid the whippy bushes. The prisoner, taller than anyone else, his powerful frame half bursting out of its threadbare check shirt, shouldered through everything in his path. He carried the governor's knapsack as well as his own, but they sat on his back like baubles.

The governor's announced aim had been to strike due west, but the party needed constantly to diverge north or south to avoid muddy creeks too wide to cross and impenetrable thickets where shrubs had engulfed fallen trees. They climbed down ravines full of creepers that caught around their ankles and hauled themselves up the steep rocky slopes on the other side from which they could see only another ravine.

At the back of the line, Rooke had a compa.s.s in one hand, a notebook in the other, his pencil behind his ear, counting his paces and noting each change of direction. He had ruled up the pages beforehand: Number of paces. Direction of march. As he scrawled in the columns he decided that the words march and direction did not do justice to the reality.

The place flowed past, a blur of namelessness. Tree. Another tree. Bush. Another sort of bush. White flower. Yellow flower. Red flower. To be unable to give things their proper names was to be like a child again. He remembered himself on the shingle below the Round Tower, crouching over his pebble collection: big one, small one, light one, dark one.

The governor called a halt for the night beside a stream fringed with tall reeds. Rooke sat down and peeled off the knapsack, stuck to his back with sweat that was cooling unpleasantly as the evening chill came over the woods.

He watched as the sergeant reluctantly gave the prisoner a gun and a bag of shot. The man took the musket-like a toy in his enormous hand-and hefted the bag of shot in a practised way. He smiled from behind his beard, his lips rosy.

'You want supper, sir, it will want to be a d.a.m.ned sight more shot than that!' he said.

'Mind your tongue, man,' the sergeant was beginning, but the governor called out, 'It is all right, Sergeant, Brugden is to have whatever he needs.'

The sergeant's mouth became a compressed line as he doled out another handful of shot. Brugden grinned, showing powerful white teeth.

'Thank you, Sergeant,' he said. 'Thank you so very much indeed, sir.'

The sergeant watched him go, swaggering along the creek, the gun over his shoulder, his shadow long on the gra.s.s. On the hulks, Rooke thought, the man would not have been allowed even a pocketknife for cutting his bread. The sour-faced sergeant looked as though he were thinking the same thing.

The governor saw Rooke watching the man stride off.

'When in Rome, Mr Rooke,' he said. 'I know Brugden from home, he was a gamekeeper for the Duke of Portland before he unfortunately fell foul of the law, he is a rough sort of fellow but I have seen him hit a woodpigeon at a hundred paces.'

'But sir, if he wanders?' Willstead suggested.

The governor gave him a wry look. 'Yes, Lieutenant Willstead, if he wanders? Can you tell me where you think he might get to?'

Willstead blinked but had no answer.

Rooke sat down on a log and got out his notebook to tot up the paces and compa.s.s bearings. Thinking he might find it useful in the wilderness, he had paced out along Church Street, Portsmouth, Anne running beside him with the chalk, marking each step. The average length of stride of Lieutenant Daniel Rooke was thirty-three inches.

Here, stumbling, climbing and creeping by turns, such precision was irrelevant. Like Euclid, he would begin with an a.s.sertion and, since he was inventing, he might as well make the arithmetic simple: Let each pace be thirty-six inches.

When he had tallied everything up he marked their line of march on the sketch map of the place. It was a strange zigzag like the path of a beetle rather than a detachment of the king's armed forces.

He got up to take it to the governor but Silk intercepted him.

'How many miles, Rooke? How far to the west?'

Rooke pointed at where his zigzag line ended.

'By my reckoning, we are four and five-eighths miles southwest of the place we disembarked,' he said.

'Four and five-eighths? My word, you are a marvel, Lieutenant!'

Silk turned to Willstead, who had his shoes and spatter-dashes off and was sitting on a fallen log touching delicately at his blisters.

'Look, Willstead, can you believe it, Rooke can put us exactly here.'

Silk placed his finger with finicking exactness on the spot where the dotted line ended.

Willstead barely looked at the paper.

'My word,' he said. 'Well done, Rooke.'

He did not try to conceal that his blisters were of more interest to him than a mark on a sheet of paper. Silk watched him, his mouth rather set, his chin somewhat drawn in. It was the look he had when Rooke answered a question too exhaustively. Exasperation was the word to describe it, Rooke thought, though Silk was too genial and too gentlemanly to do more than this hardly visible tightening of a few muscles.

'Thank you, Rooke,' he said warmly, as if making up for Willstead's indifference. 'I find it steadying to be able to locate myself so precisely.'

He glanced around at the bushes pressing down the slope towards them so that Rooke wondered whether it was really praise or a subtle mockery.

Leaving the others he paced along the bank of the stream with the compa.s.s in his hand. Establishing the course of the tributary, he explained to some imaginary questioner. Taking advantage of the last of the light. When he pushed aside a bush to get down to the water, a duck burst up from under his feet. He leaped back in fright. It fluttered along and skidded onto the water quacking with a sound like laughter. Heck heck heck! Heck heck!

A place so strange took a layer of skin off a man and left him peeled.

He made a show of noting the way the stream hooked to the north, but the reality was that he wanted simply to be able to see what was around him. Unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding. Without his pack and his notebook, he hoped that his eyes might begin to make distinctions among all those trees and bushes.

The gra.s.s by the stream was tender in the thickening dusk, sucking up the horizontal rays of the sun and turning a green so bright it seemed liquid. Beside the stream the fir trees drooped. Firs: it was what everyone called them. But when he pulled off a spray of the needles he saw that, unlike a fir's, they were jointed, the knuckles packed together more closely at the tip. What leaf grew like a telescope, pushing itself out segment by segment?

He had wanted strangeness. Well, this place was strange beyond comprehension.

The gamekeeper came back just before dark with a brace of parrots and an opossum. His time in the woods had energised him.

'Not much by way of game, sir,' Rooke heard him telling the governor. 'But if it moves, sir, well then I shoot it!'

Brugden was flushed with satisfaction, watching with pride as one of the privates dealt with feathers and fur. The creatures made a stew of sorts that was hardly enticing, but helped the small ration of hard old bread along.

After the meal Rooke, like everyone else, was glad to roll himself into his blanket. His thighs quivered from the day of remorseless up and down, he had been bitten by a thousand insects and the blanket was insufficient against the cold of the night.

But, as sleep descended, the thought came to him: There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be.

They had left the river behind on their journey west, but on the second day they found it again. Along the bank a path had been worn by feet before theirs.

'Ah,' the governor exclaimed. 'At last we may meet some natives!'

Rooke wondered how an exchange might begin. By going forward and offering words, he supposed. That first day on the beach, he should have tried fewer trinkets and more words. He had missed another opportunity the day those two men had pa.s.sed his hut.

He would not miss a third chance. He rehea.r.s.ed it: the laying down of the musket, the stepping towards them with empty hands outstretched. He would not wait for the governor, he would take the initiative. But then? How would the dialogue start?

No natives appeared to put the question to the test, but a hundred and thirty-four paces later they saw trees bleeding red sap from fresh scars. Two hundred and seven paces further brought them to a cl.u.s.ter of native huts and a smouldering fire.

'They cannot be far away,' Willstead said.

'That is perfectly true, Lieutenant,' the governor replied. 'What a shame it is that we do not know in which direction.'

The bushes and trees around them could have hidden an army.

'Where are they?' the governor demanded irritably. 'Why do they hide from us?'

Willstead took it on himself to answer.

'I imagine, sir, that they are waiting to see how we declare ourselves. When they understand our peaceable intentions they will approach.'

But the governor was too exasperated to want soft soap.

'But when, Mr Willstead? When might they condescend to speak with us?'

The river widened and the land on either side curved upwards more gently, the undergrowth gone, the trees standing apart from each other among gra.s.s. Here, as nowhere else, the idea of a gentleman's park was not altogether ridiculous.

The governor called a halt.

'Captain Silk, the trowel if you please.'

He dug up a handful of dark dirt and made a fist around it, inspecting the crumbling ball he produced. He peered, he sniffed. Was he going to taste it? Silk, standing solemnly by with the trowel, caught Rooke's eye with a droll expression.

'Lieutenant Rooke,' the governor said, turning so that Silk had to re-arrange his face, 'would you be so good as to note the location of this spot, it is my view that this soil would reward cultivation.'

Rooke got out his notebook and compa.s.s, took bearings from a nearby hill, drew a line representing the river, and generally made a big work of establishing where they were.

'I am obliged to you, Lieutenant,' the governor said, and favoured him with one of his squeezed smiles.

That evening Brugden was again given the gun and shot and boasted that this time he would bring back something better than opossum.

'Put your minds at rest, gentlemen,' he announced to Rooke and Willstead as he set off. 'If there is anything worth eating out there, I promise you it will not get away. If it moves, well then by G.o.d I shoot it!'

He swaggered off with the gun over his shoulder.

'My mind was not especially agitated, in point of fact,' Willstead muttered to Rooke. 'That fellow has been given too much lat.i.tude, in my view.'

He watched Brugden go with a sourness he did not try to hide.

Half an hour later as they sat by the fire they heard the retort of a distant gun.

'Dinner, I imagine,' Silk said.

But a short time later there was a tremendous crashing down the hillside and Brugden burst out of the bushes, cap falling over one ear, his beard full of leaves, and a humid swollen look to one eye.

'The b.u.g.g.e.rs stoned me,' he bellowed, 'saving your presence, sir, but the d.a.m.ned b.u.g.g.e.rs stoned me.'

He held out an arm, showing a swollen red graze.

The governor was not interested in the man's arm.

'What happened, Brugden,' he snapped. 'Quick to it now and tell me straight.'

At this Rooke thought the prisoner looked a little shifty. He struck Rooke as a man with a sharp a.s.sessment of where his own interests lay.