Bitter Eden (51 page)

By July, when there still had been no word from Peter, Stephen began to worry. What disturbed him most was not that he had heard nothing, but that Cal-lie had not. In some ways it made Stephen feel more at ease, taking it as a sign that Peter no longer de-

pended on her so much. On the other hand, he wished Peter would at least write making it clear to Callie that he was all right. She worried constantly.

Her feelings for Peter, and the uncertainty of his well-being, had opened a rift between himself and Callie he didn't know how to heal. Inside he ached with longing for his brother, yet he couldn't keep from feeling hurt and jealous as Callie continued to talk about Peter. In her own way she was as bad as Natalie was about Albert. Between them Stephen was often made to feel like a piece of farm machinery—used, but unnoticed until he wasn't there when they wanted something of him.

Jack added his own persuasive views to Stephen's general feeling of being taken for granted. "You're off your head," Jack fumed. "Callie's a good girl, but she doesn't know you're alive, Stevie. When are you going to wake up and see it?"

"I don't koow," Stephen said dispiritedly.

"It's not like she's the only girl in the world, you know. There's easily half a dozen that'd run for you if you give 'em a little encouragement. And their Papa's business wouldn't do you harm either. I don't understand you. I don't understand Callie. Hell, I don't understand any of you! You're a damned crazy family if you ask me. What is it? Is she in love with Peter, or what?"

"She loves him," Stephen said.

"Then what in the hell are you doing dying on the vine waiting for her?"

Stephen sat back, playing with his glass. "I'm not dying on any vine."

"What do you call it?"

"How the hell should I know? I love her, that's all."

"Did you ever think of getting over it?"

Stephen laughed. "Get the tooth extracted, eh?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"You have a pair of pliers handy?"

"No, but Til put my money on Agnes Wharton having something a lot softer than pliers to cure you. She's just holding her breath for you to give her the chance. And—I got that straight from her brother's mouth."

"Agnes . . .?" Stephen tried the name speculatively.

"Yeah, Agnes, and even you got to admit she's got everything Callie has and more."

"She's different from Callie."

"She sure is! She loves you. I'm sorry, Stevie, but I get damned tired of seeing you hankering after that little piece of ice day after day, and she doesn't think of anyone but Peter. I like His Magnificence, you know that, but sweet Jesus where does that leave you?"

Stephen shrugged, shifting his weight uncomfortably. "You want another drink?"

"No, I want you to smarten up. Go see Agnes. Give her a chance."

"Maybe . . . after harvest."

"Not after harvest. Now."

Stephen shook his head uncertainly.

"All right, you don't want to give up hoping Callie will finally see you—tell me this, what does His Magnificence think about all this? Is it a one-way thing with Callie, or is he thinkin' the same way about her?"

"I don't know. I really don't. He needs her—needed her, but we haven't heard from him. I don't know what Peter feels."

"I can't say I'm too surprised you haven't heard from him," Jack said cryptically, making knowing faces as he spoke.

"What's that mean?"

"Never mind that now, you're not going to sidetrack

me. If what you say is true—that he needs her and she loves him—you gonna tell me you re gonna step in between them?"

Stephen downed his beer. "Let's go home. I've got to be up early."

"You're not," Jack said.

"Five o'clock. I call that early."

"I didn't mean that. You're never gonna come between Callie and Peter. It just ain't in ya, friend. And you're gonna see Agnes Wharton if I have to hit you on the head and carry you to her door myself."

"Shut up, Jack."

"You shut up! I know what's good for you."

Stephen went to see Agnes. By the end of autumn both Agnes and her family anticipated the announcement of an engagement to follow.

During the month of October, Stephen was once more aware he hadn't heard from Peter. The brewery was complete. Once the hops were gathered, Stephen would fire up the new steam engine in the malt house and begin the first official batch of Berean Beer.

It had been a year since Peter had sailed from England. Stephen was uneasy; he should have heard from his brother by now, no matter what the conditions. The mail delivery became the most important event of the week for Stephen. It was easy to disguise his interest; he told Callie he was waiting for verification of an important hop order.

By the end of November, when still no letter had come, he mentioned it to Callie, and was immediately sorry. Everything Jack had said seemed all the clearer as he listened to her pour out her own fears and worries about Peter's silence.

Resigned, he decided Jack had been right all along. Love her or not, she didn't love him, and he didn't

want to spend his life watching her raise Jamie and long for Peter. As it was they were nearly a family now. Callie filled every function of a dutiful, faithful wife, save one, and that was obviously due only to Peter's absence. She tended his house, raised his child, and loved him.

Stephen sat down patiently listening to her and then tried to comfort her. "Just one l° st l etter can mean a delay of months before we hear from him, Callie."

"We don't even know if he's alive. Maybe his ship. . . . Do you think he has gotten my letters?''

"He must have," Stephen said simply.

She looked up at him, worried. "Then what is wrong, Stephen? It isn't like Peter to be silent. He . . . he always is so happy about everything, and wanting to talk about what he is doing. Even in Newgate . . . he talked ... he wanted company. He'd answer my letters if he could, Stephen. I know he would. Oh, Stephen, if only we knew something. Where is he?"

"He's alive, Callie. We would have heard ... if the ship went down or something happened to him. He'll write soon, I'm sure. By now he probably has started a new hop yard."

"As a prisoner?"

"It's possible; many Australian transportees did it. They say transportation is a light sentence. Even though they're prisoners, they have a life."

"Then perhaps he's just too busy to write. Maybe he's making plans for us to go out there? Do you think . . ."

"I'd think that was it," he said with less certainty than he wished for.

Stephen had no idea of what a term at Van Die-men's Land was like, and no idea how to get informa-

tion. The penal colonies were a world to themselves, secretive, controlled, and closed off from all but the settlers who lived there. There were no ties to the outside world, for to a convict there was no outside world.

In order to write, Peter had to ask permission of the commandant. His letter would be handed unsealed to the commandant for censoring and approval. Whether the letter would actually be sent, Peter was never told. The task of writing a letter that would be approved was in itself a risky business. Any criticism, direct or implied, of the penal colony woyld earn him another flogging on the triangles. Any mention of his life in Van Diemen's Land that could be construed as implying a lack of mercy was considered blasphemy. If found in violation of any of these restrictions the least Peter could expect was flagellation or a long time in solitary confinement. At worst he could be tried and condemned to death; blasphemy was a capital offense. As a result, convict's letters to home and faftiilies were religiously tinted, glowing accounts. They fostered the idea that transportation was a light sentence.

In the beginning Peter had been too tired and too depressed to figure out the intricacies of a letter filled with phrases of repentance and sprinkled with passages from the Bible he was to study and think about every day. After he had been sent to the triangles, thoughts of Callie and Stephen were as painful as were the faces of the people who had watched him being flogged. He didn't want them to know who he was now. He didn't want to reach out to or be known by anyone, not even them.

Stephen wrote to Meg asking if she had heard from Peter. He hoped Peter's silence meant he was permit-

ted only a limited number of letters and had chosen to write to Meg rather than himself or Callie. It wasn't likely, however, for Meg wrote frequently and had never mentioned Peter.

He sat with Jack in a tavern in Poughkeepsie one evening in early December, his beer in front of him untouched.

"What's eating at you?" Jack asked disgruntled. "You're about as much fun as a wet towel tonight."

"That's about the way I feel. Jack, there has to be a way we can find out about Peter. He didn't drop off the end of the earth. But I don't know how to reach him."

"Are you sure you want to? Let's go see Agnes and forget about this/'

"Goddamn it! Of course I want to know about him. He's my brother—remember?"

"You've got a one-track mind."

"If you don't like it, you can always go somewhere else. There's the door. No one is barring it."

"Don't get angry. There's always talk around ... I don't know how true it is, mind, but I listen and learn things now and then."

"About Van Diemen's Land? What would you know about it?"

"From the sounds of it, a hell of a lot more than you do."

"Such as?"

"It's a hellhole."

Stephen sat back in disgust. "So was Newgate." He went back to brooding about a way to find out about Peter. Jack leaned forward, hurt and annoyed that Stephen should dismiss him so easily.

"Listen, I know plenty. I was trying to be nice to you and Callie by keeping my mouth shut. I didn't think you'd really want to know."

"Well, we do, so if you do know anything, tell me."

"I know some whalers . . . I've talked to them a couple of times. I was curious too, you know. I wanted to know how His Magnificence was coming along. These whalers re-rig in Hobart Town. It's right in the middle of one of those penal colonies. They tell me no convict's life is worth spit. They die like flies, Stevie. Tell the truth, more'n likely Peter isn't alive."

"We would have heard."

"If they felt like telling you! He was sent there for life, wasn't he?"

"So?"

"So what difference does it make when he dies? How are you gonna know different from what they tell you? Stevie, I'm tellin' you those commandants out there are little kings. They do what they want and say sorry to no man."

"Oh God, Jack . . . you're wrong . . . you . . ."

"You told me you wanted to know. I'm tellin' you straight, Stevie, honest."

"Where'd you hear this?"

"I told you—some whalers I met."

'Will you introduce me to them?"

"If that's what you want; but Stevie, you're not gonna like what you hear, and there's not a blessed thing you can do. I wish you'd take my advice and forget it."

Jack took Stephen to the docks, wending through narrow streets stacked high with barrels and crates all marked with signs of travel and the wear of a sea journey. Jack tried several pubs frequented by the whalers before he found the man he sought, Tom Baker.

Tom Baker was a burly, gruff man with a short temper. He was a hard man well suited to the lack of comfort of the whaling life. Until he had begun whaling on his own, Baker had worked as part of a fleet,

leaving New York and not returning to port for two years or better. Once he had been gone for four years. His body was marked with the scars of his profession; his mind was marked with harsh and often violent memories of long years with only his mates and the sea for companionship.

He looked Stephen over as Jack introduced them and told Tom that Stephen wanted to know about Van Diemen's Land. Tom twisted back in his chair, his thick arm thrown over the back as he studied the slender, well-built young man Jack had introduced. Without exchanging a word, Tom decided Stephen was a sensitive, bleeding-heart type, as ignorant of the ways of Van Diemen's Land as most of the well dressed young gentlemen from England he had met.

He shot a walloping spew of tobacco into the brass spittoon by the bar. "What t'hell he want tTcnow ferr*"

Jack explained. Tom squinted until his one eye became a slit. He decided he'd tell this clean-minded young dandy what he asked for. It would give him pleasure to watch him squirm inside his expensive clothes. Anyway he liked telling these Englishers what their government did to the men they didn't want. Not that he blamed them—if it were up to Tom Baker, he'd beat them all senseless, and if they didn't shape up he'd hang the lot of 'em. He wouldn't be letting it drag on for years like the Limeys did. If this man's brother were in Van Diemen's Land it'd serve him right to know what it was like.

Tom began to thoroughly enjoy himself. His mates joined in the telling of stories they had heard in Ho-bart Town of convicts who had tried to escape turning cannibal and eating one another until there was only one starving man left. They told of floggings and deaths as a result, and of men working like animals

when they could barely stand from weakness, illness, and fatigue.

Their laughter rose, as did their storehouse of tales as they watched Stephens eyes widen in horror as he placed his hand on his roiling stomach.

By the time they finished telling of the atrocities they had either seen or heard about, Stephen was trembling in a cold sweat, his face ashen, "Oh, my God ... oh, my God ..." s

Jack grasped Stephens shoulder. "You all right? Take a drink, Steve . . . come . on . . . come on, please. Don't pass out on me. You all right?"

Stephen pushed the glass away. "I've got to get him out of there/* he said shakily. "Why the hell didn't we hear this in England? I asked everyone."

The whalers laughed. "How you gonna hear? Who's to tell? Those convicts can't breathe hard or they're gonna taste the cat Why risk it? What fer?"

"But . . ."

Once more Tom squinted, evaluating Stephen. Slowly he said, "Course there've been escapes. Not many, but they've been done. I got a man out once."