Lieutenant (15 page)

The merest sliver of moon was a line of light along the horizon. As he watched, it rose until all but the last fraction of its circumference was free. It spread out along the horizon and seemed to flatten itself, clinging to the earth as if reluctant to rise.

It was simply an effect of the atmosphere, but how odd and interesting that the human mind should be so constructed as to find it a thing of beauty. Knowledge of why it happened only made the sight more lovely. He was willing to sit transfixed, the mosquitoes whining around his ears, until the instant where the stretched liquid parted and let the moon sail alone through indigo space.

Tagaran had praised him again that day:
kamara budyeri
karaga
, she had said,
kamara
speaks well. He liked the way she called him
kamara
.

There was a particular sly mocking glance that she shot sideways at him when he was being slow. Other than his sister, Tagaran was the only human in the world who trusted him to be able to laugh at himself.

Perhaps this was what it was like to have children of one’s own, and move with them in an atmosphere of easy playfulness. He supposed that one day, like most men, he would marry. If he did, and had those unimaginable children of his own, he would remember this. He tried to picture himself telling them the story.
Then one night the two native children slept in my hut
.

He thought there might not be any words for what was happening between himself and Tagaran. Like the language of the
Cadigal
that he was learning, word by half-understood word, the language of his feelings for her was beyond his reach. He could only step forward blindly, in trust.

Perhaps it was the brandy, but in the eerie wash of moonlight he sat content to the point of euphoria.

F
rom Rose Hill, Silk sent Rooke messages to the effect that the breadbasket of the colony was even quieter and stupider than he had feared, and that all he had to show for those weeks was an understanding of clod moulding, information he would just as soon have gone to his grave without. If the governor did not soon send for him, he wrote, he would be forced to come down with some painless but disabling ailment in order to rejoin the human race in Sydney Cove.

In Silk’s hands, even the complete absence of material in itself became material. Rooke read his notes and wondered if Silk had made a copy for his narrative. Or would he expect Rooke to keep his correspondence?

He had just dismissed the messenger when another arrived to summon him to the parade ground. A prisoner had been
caught digging up potatoes in the government garden and secreting them under his coat. He was to be flogged.

Rooke knew that the settlement could not tolerate the theft of food. No one could argue with that. But hunger was beginning to dominate everyone’s days. The prisoner women had scoured the shoreline around the bays, picking off every limpet and winkle, but were still pale and scrawny, their eyes dull. The only person in the settlement that Rooke had seen still looking robust was the gamekeeper, Brugden. Out in the woods, who was watching if the hunter ate what he shot rather than bring it back for the communal pot?

As for this poor devil who had taken the potatoes, well, man was an organism that demanded food. To take food when it was available was—purely in scientific terms—a correct response to hunger.

The hard-faced judgment that called the action
theft
and demanded punishment was another matter.

As a servant of His Majesty it was justice Rooke was obliged to obey, but he wished the prisoner had not stolen the potatoes. Had not tried to hide them under his coat. Above all, that he had not been caught.

The man was very fair, his curly hair shining like wire in the sun, the skin of his back so white as to be almost luminous. And gleaming: the poor wretch was sweating. His body knew what was coming.

All the marines were obliged to be present, and most of the
prisoners. What was the point of punishment if no one saw it? Warungin was there too, standing beside the governor and glancing about. Rooke supposed this must be part of his education. There was British civilisation, in the form of china plates and toasts to the king, and there was British justice.

Warungin was unconcerned, only interested. Unlike everyone else present, he did not know what he was about to see.

A thought occurred to Rooke. He slid his eyes around while keeping his head at the regulation angle. With the intensity of prayer he hoped that he would not see Tagaran watching from behind the trees, wondering at this unusual gathering of the
Berewalgal
.

And if she were? If he caught sight of her, peeping out from behind a tree with that look she had, avid for knowledge? Would he break ranks, go over to her—somehow make her understand that she must leave, cover her eyes, block her ears—while the ranks of other redcoats looked on?

He stood at attention with his musket at the slope. He was already sweating in his jacket, his heart was thudding, and the thing had not yet started.

He was close enough to hear the governor explaining to Warungin, pointing towards the thief lashed to the triangle in the bright empty space where the ground beat back the light.

‘A bad man. Stole food.’

Warungin watched the words form on the governor’s lips.

‘This man took food that did not belong to him.’

Warungin nodded, whether with real understanding Rooke could not say.

‘So we punish.’ The governor was determined to be clear. ‘Every man is the same. If he steals, he is punished.’

It was interesting to hear that magnificent idea—the product of hundreds of years of British civilisation—spelled out so plain.

Then the flogger came out onto the patch of sandy ground. He shook out the cat, separating the tails, thwacked the butt into his palm once or twice.

Even the birds seemed to have fallen silent.

Rooke set himself to thinking of the muscles in his back. How ingenious was the mechanism of the spine, that could hold the body upright no matter what was going on in its head. He thought of his feet. Such small balancing points, and yet they knew how to stop him toppling. He imagined a carved replica of himself, complete with musket, jacket and wooden face, standing on a base as narrow as his feet. Would it fall over? He thought of the way the ground was pressing up against the soles of his shoes. Or rather the way his feet were pressing down into the ground. That was gravity. It was the tremendous hand that kept the cosmos in its place. Kepler had got close to understanding, Newton had snared it in words.
Every particle of
matter in the universe attracts every other particle
.

Rooke was performing a species of magic, or trying to. He
was removing himself from the place and time he occupied, while leaving his body there staring into the middle distance, musket at the correct angle.

At the first sickening crack of the knots against the skin, the prisoner cried out, but so did someone else. Rooke saw Warungin trying to rush forward, shouting at the flogger, his face distorted. He strained against the governor holding him back and looked wildly around at the marines in their ranks. He met Rooke’s eyes and shouted to him, some word over and over. Across the space between them it was one man begging another.

Lieutenant Rooke looked away. He stiffened his neck further back into his collar, gripped the butt of his musket more tightly. He could feel the sweat slimy on the wood. His collar was choking him, his cap was squeezing his head, his jacket seemed made of iron.
Stop, stop, stop
, was the only word his brain could produce.
Stop
, to Warungin, to make him not go on calling to him.
Stop
, to the flogger, to drop the whip, walk away.
Stop
, to the governor, to take pity on all of them.

He clenched his hand around the gun, squeezed up his toes in his shoes. He was a stone, a piece of wood, a replica of a man.

Wyatt and Weymark on either side had got hold of Warungin’s arms. Between the inhuman noises the prisoner made at each stroke, Rooke could hear the governor continuing to work away at explanation.

‘Bad,’ Rooke heard. ‘Bad man. Thief.’

The governor’s face pinched up, trying to make Warungin understand.

‘Took food. Stole food that was not his food.’

Warungin had stopped struggling but his face was turned away from where a man’s back was methodically being reduced to red pulp. Rooke could see the powerful tendons in his neck straining. At each stroke and each cry from the prisoner, Warungin flinched.

This was justice: impartial, blind, noble. The horror of the punishment was the proof of its impartiality. If it did not hurt, it was not justice. That was what the governor was trying to convey, but the noble concepts evaporated in the light.

Rooke heard the shocking wet slap of the cat landing on split flesh, twenty times, thirty times, fifty times. At each stroke, the man’s body convulsed against the ropes that held him to the triangle. The flogger had to stop and comb his fingers through the tails of the whip after each lash to clear the flesh that clogged them.

The prisoner endured seventy-four lashes before his body sagged from the ropes. It was Surgeon Weymark’s job to judge whether the wretch had taken all he could on this occasion. He barely touched the man’s wrist in a gesture of taking his pulse before nodding that, yes, he had had enough, cut him down.

A hundred and twenty-six lashes left for next time. Rooke thought that the idea of that waiting for you might be worse than the present pain.

Even when the man was cut down and dragged off, Warungin’s mouth was still a peculiar strained shape. There was a grey overlay, like a dusting of ash, to the brown skin of his face. He was staring down. Rooke thought he might be about to vomit.

The governor touched his arm.

‘It is over, my friend,’ Rooke heard him begin.

But at his touch Warungin flung up his arm as if the governor’s hand were red-hot.

‘Let us return to my house, I will give you something to eat,’ the governor said.

Warungin did not reply, did not look at the governor or any of the other assembled
Berewalgal
. He did not even glance at Rooke. As soon as Wyatt released him he turned his back and walked away. Rooke watched him go, this man with whom he had sat cross-legged on the ground.

Warungin was not thinking
punishment, justice, impartial
. All he could see was that the
Berewalgal
had gathered in their best clothes to inflict pain beyond imagining on one of their own. Seen through his eyes, this ceremony was not an unfortunate but necessary part of the grand machine of civilisation. It looked like a choice. When those fine abstractions fell away, all that remained was cruelty.

And Rooke had been part of it. He had not cried out with horror or rushed forward to put an end to it. He had looked away when Warungin called to him.

Chosen
to look away. No one had held him there. He had made that choice, because he was a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Marine Force.

There it was, in the very words. Force was his job. If he was a soldier, he was as much a part of that cruelty as the man who had wielded the whip.

S
ilk was at last recalled from Rose Hill at the beginning of summer. He was full of the dreariness of the place.

‘Listen to this, Rooke, you had better sit down, otherwise you are likely to fall over from excitement. Listen:
Dod
says he expects this
year’s
crop of wheat and barley to yield full 400 bushels
. Have you ever heard anything so scintillating?’

‘But you will make something of it. Turn, you know, a sow’s ear…’

‘Oh, no talk of sows, if you please! I have to admit, though, that the place had its charms in spite of its dullness. They have cleared a great deal of ground, and from the top of the hill I was struck by how grand and capacious the prospect seemed, after not seeing an opening in the woods of that extent for such a long time.’

He felt in his pocket for his pencil.

‘I must remember that, it was a striking and novel sensation.’

Rooke watched him write, thinking of his own threadbare notes in his own small book. How might he begin the task of telling Silk about what had been happening on the point?

‘And what have you been up to, Rooke?’ Silk asked at last. ‘Has there been anything of note to report?’

Silk was hardly waiting for an answer, he was so sure there had been nothing
of note to report
.

‘Well,’ Rooke began.

He must tell, otherwise what up till now had been simply private would take on the dangerous power of a secret. The task was to tell, but to minimise. To reveal, but reveal something so small and so dull that Silk would not pause to examine it.

But while he was assembling words and rejecting them, Silk was fiddling with the things on the table, and came across the blue notebooks, insufficiently hidden under Montaigne.

‘
Grammatical Forms of the Language of N.S. Wales
,’ he read. ‘Why, look here, I believe you have been making a study of the native tongue. Oh, and
Vocabulary
of N.S. Wales
. May I…?’

He had his thumbs ready to spread open one of the little books, only his unfailing courtesy demanding he go through the motions of asking permission. Rooke cursed himself for not hiding them properly. With Gardiner and Silk both gone, and no other visitors from the settlement likely, he had forgotten to
be careful. He realised he had never pictured another eye looking at the words he had written, and could not think quickly enough how to say,
No, Silk, do not open it
.

‘I think you will find not much of interest,’ he said. ‘My researches are, you know, in a very preliminary… Were there natives at Rose Hill? Any encounters?’

For a moment he thought the ruse had worked.

‘Why yes, I had almost forgot to tell you,’ Silk said, putting the book down, although keeping his hand on it. ‘While I was there a hut was burned to the ground, luckily empty. Some time later a man out hoeing ground was attacked, a spear in fact pierced the ground between his feet, but by good fortune he was not struck.’

Rooke watched Silk’s thumb absently stroking the edge of the book, where the blue cloth was worn.

‘There is trouble brewing, is my feeling, but what to do when the attackers will not let themselves be seen? The governor plans to send another ten men and one of the small cannons. The Rose Hill redoubt is superbly positioned. A dozen men could fight off any force of natives.’

Rooke had hoped for a diversion, but had not expected this. The small dramas taking place in his hut had filled his horizon. Out in the greater world of His Majesty’s penal settlement, it was apparent that other sorts of events were beginning to rumble, and his ignorance was dangerous.

While he was talking, Silk had again picked up the book
and seemed to feel he had sufficient permission to open it.

‘Ah yes, I have this myself, if you remember. See this here,
budyeri
, my spelling differs from yours, but the word is clearly the same. And look, here is
bial
, meaning no, although I felt that a double e made the pronunciation less open to error. But look at all these pages! My word, Rooke, you have had your nose to the grindstone.’

Rooke reached for the book, but Silk was still turning through the pages and would not yield it.

‘No, Rooke, there is no need to be modest, this is a considerable achievement. You must learn not to hide your light under a bushel, my friend!’

He leaned back, closing the book on his finger but keeping a grip on it. Rooke told himself that his unhappiness at Silk reading his notes was a remnant of all the other idiosyncrasies which he had to conquer. He would have to accept that privacy was a luxury his life did not offer. If his time of being alone with the natives had come to an end, he supposed he must accept it gracefully.

‘You know, do you not,’ Silk said, ‘that I was hoping to have a chapter on the language in my narrative?’

Perhaps his tone was more challenging than he had intended, and he followed it up with a somewhat windy laugh.

‘May I ask what you are planning to do with these
Grammatical Forms
? Will you publish?’

Silk was moving too fast for Rooke.

‘Publish? Publish this?’

‘Well, in that way your labours would find a wider audience, would they not?’

How different Silk was from himself, Rooke thought. Silk could imagine no use for words other than reaching an audience. Why would a man labour, if not to publish? Until recently he himself would have viewed things the same way. Would have leapt at the idea of his endeavours having a public readership.

In deciding to learn the language of the natives, he had thought to take a single step: to write down the words. Now he saw how far he had travelled from the world he once shared with Silk. Tagaran seemed to have led the way down some other road altogether.

‘There may be some interest. Among scholars. Who might collect the languages of far-flung tribes. Publish—I do not, I would not think, I fear there may not be an extensive number. Of readers.’

He saw something in Silk relax, as if he had succeeded in getting a dead weight up to the top of a slope and could let gravity do the rest.

‘Absolutely, Rooke,’ he said. ‘I have to concur. Probably not of much general interest. And my grief is that I have so little of the language here, in part because of my sojourn at Rose Hill. I am as it were thinking aloud here, you realise.’

He hesitated, but Rooke wondered whether the hesitation
was merely a piece of theatre.

‘It occurs to me, Rooke,’ Silk said, as if just arriving at the thought, ‘it occurs to me that we might be able to enter into a partnership, you and I. What say you add your vocabularies and your grammatical forms to my own journal—with full credit to you, naturally—in the form of an appendix?’

He did not wait for Rooke to reply but hurried on.

‘Needless to say, you would share what Mr Debrett has promised me—we can come to some arrangement as to that—a proportion of the amount on a
pro rata
basis.’

He paused. Rooke could only think of one word:
No!
but said nothing. Silk hurried on.

‘By which I mean of course that if, say, your contribution, in terms of numbers of pages, was a sixteenth of the whole, then you would have one sixteenth of the profit…what do you say, my friend?’

‘Yes, well, I know what
pro rata
means, Silk, thank you.’

‘Why, Rooke!’ Silk’s jocularity was a little forced. ‘Are you haggling with me? Believe me, we will come to an arrangement that will suit you. You will get a fair share, you may be sure of that.’

Something in Rooke caught alight the way a twist of tinder did, a quick white flare.

‘It is not about my share, Silk! I am not haggling with you over the pounds, shillings and pence!’

Those two notebooks recorded the best of his life. Perhaps
he would be obliged to share them, but they would never be a matter of profit.

Silk was leaning forward across the table watching Rooke’s face. Just as he had on the day he had wanted to know about Gardiner, Silk was catching a whiff of something hidden.

‘Well, there may not be enough,’ Rooke said. ‘To show. In the end. Let us wait and see. Shall we?’

He reached over the table for the books and got one, but Silk was leafing through the other.

‘I will hold you to that, Rooke,’ he said absently, and Rooke thought,
Hold me to what? I have promised nothing
. Silk turned another page, and Rooke saw his narrow face quicken with surprise.

‘
Tya-
something or other…Go on Rooke, what is it?’

Rooke could not do other than oblige.

‘
Tyerabarrbowaryaou
.’

‘Thank you, and here is the meaning: I shall not become white.
This was said by Tagra
…’ He stumbled on the name, tried again. ‘
Tagaran—after I told her if she washed herself she would become
white, at the same time throwing down the towel as in despair
. Such a sad little picture, Rooke. Surely it was cruel to make her such a promise?’

‘No, no, it was spoke in jest! Both, we both spoke in jest. It was a joke. That the white people think their skin superior…’

The white people
. He was speaking as if he were not one of them.

‘It was spoke in jest,’ he said again, but heard the hopelessness in his voice. ‘She is a clever child, she is not so silly as to believe…We enjoyed the joke of it.’

He had written
as in despair
in order to indicate that her despair was feigned. To him it had obviously been a joke. What native, even a child, would believe that washing would make them white? He had failed to record the joke on the page, in the same way he failed to note that they were breathing, or that their hearts were beating.

Silk was not listening.

‘My word, Rooke, you have certainly made considerable headway, and perhaps not only with grammatical forms!’ He held the book to the light from the window and read. ‘
Goredyu
tagarin, I more it (that is I take more of it) from cold. That is, to take off
the cold. At this time Tagaran was standing by the fire naked, and I desired
her to put on clothes
.’

It was his own arrogance as a man of science to have so precisely written down every detail of that small event so charged with delicate feeling. Stupidity, too, to have carefully formed every letter in his clear hand, so any eye in the world could read it.

‘A child, you say? I hesitate to contradict you, my friend, but listen to this:
Wana
something-or-other, you will not have me, you don’t want my company? This must be you, Rooke, and here is the answer:
Wana
-something-or-other else, I don’t desire your company.’

His animated face was full of surprise, admiration and—could it be?—something like envy.

‘My word, but you are ahead of the rest of us here. Are Mrs Butcher’s beauties not enough for you? What a sly dog you are!’

A sly dog
? Rooke did not know what Silk could be talking about, and then he did. He heard the words again in Silk’s voice, had a picture of Tagaran—some leering, grotesque Tagaran—flaunting herself at him. He felt himself flushing, a wave of heat that rose from his neck into his face, his ears, his scalp.

‘No! No, no!’

Silk smiled, watching him with an inviting quirk of the eyebrow. The story was almost visibly forming about him:
Our
quiet friend Mr Rooke and his little friend Tagaran
.

Calm, Rooke told himself. Calm at all costs, or the story would be graven in stone.

‘No, no, you misunderstand. What you read there. She was not speaking to me but to another child.’ In trying to be casual, his voice had become husky. ‘Some of them come now and then. To beg food from me. And so on.’

This was surely dull enough, and not even a lie.

‘I myself had no part in the exchange other than recording it. They were having an argument. One was going off. In a huff. But came back later.’

He was explaining too much. Silk was watching, smiling, his legs crossed, jerking one knee up and down so his foot bounced,
waiting for silence to do its job.

‘One of them has proved herself to be an excellent tutor of the language.’

One of them
. It was to protect Tagaran, but it was a betrayal. Tagaran was not
one
of any of
them
. She was herself, unique in every particle.

‘My dear Rooke,’ Silk said at his most urbane, ‘there is no need to explain. We are both men of the world.’

Men of the world! If he had been a man of the world he would have seen how those words could be read. A man of the world would never have been so fatally innocent as to write them down.

In Silk’s mind there could be no intimacy with a native girl that was not physical. And how can I hope to persuade him otherwise, Rooke thought, when I myself do not understand and have no word for that intimacy?

I should have known
, he cursed himself.
Should have remembered
his nose for a secret
.

He had lived in that place that seemed so different as to be inviolable. He had drifted along without time or space or consequence. Everything had been suspended while he and Tagaran floated in some corner of the cosmos in which the impossible could unfold. Now the iron laws of time and place were asserting themselves.