'Heavens, no! Do you mean to take them back?'

  'I do not. On my part the move was one of those reasonable, wise, profoundly mistaken actions, influenced to some extent by my esteem for Mrs Macquarie. I must now go and present my excuses with what face I can put on it, and she having been so kind.'

  'What did the little girls object to?'

  'Everything, but particularly the fact that some of the other children were black.'

  Although Stephen's sallow face was almost pink with close shaving and although his wig was powdered, Her Excellency was not at home. He had been fully prepared for the interview, with excuses, explanations, thanks all to hand; and now, feeling oddly put out, he walked down the drive, only slightly encouraged by the sight of a cockatoo new to him landing in a gum-tree and raising a crest like his own familiar hoopoe. 'Shall I ever, at any time, get out of this sink of iniquity and travel inland with a fowling-piece and a collecting-case?' he asked the kangaroo. Only a little way below Government House the ugly crowds of convicts and soldiers reappeared, enlivened, but only a little, by Surprises ashore. He made his way slowly through them to Riley's hotel and called for a tint of whiskey. It was the man of the house who brought it and on seeing Stephen he cried 'Why, it is your honour again, and a very good day to you, sir. How well your honour is looking.'

  'Tell me, Mr Riley,' said Stephen, 'is there ever an honest horse-coper in this town? Or at least one that merits Purgatory rather than Hell? I saw a yard called Wilkins Brothers with some animals in it, but they did not look quite wholesome to me.'

  'Sure they are only purple dromedaries, sir.'

  'Ah? They looked quite like horses to me: but miserable screws I will admit.'

  'I meant the Wilkins brothers, sir. I take it your honour is not in the penal line?'

  'Faith, no. I am the surgeon of that frigate down there.'

  'And an elegant ship I am sure she is. But here in the colony by purple dromedaries we mean little small bungling pickpockets, jackeens that get transported for robbing the poor-box or a blind man's tray. You was thinking of hiring, I do suppose?'

  'We are here for something like a month, so buying and selling again might be the more easy.'

  'Oh more easy by far, with the creature always under your hand, and she used to you.'

  'Why do you say she?'

  'Because I have three beautiful mares behind the gable of the house itself, and any one of them would carry you fifty Irish miles a day for your month on end.'

  They were all three long past mark of mouth, but Stephen settled for a flea-bitten grey with an amiable face and a comfortable walk, the pace she was most likely to travel at, and a somewhat more ancient but very steady bay for Martin, who was no great horseman.

  On the grey he rode towards Parramatta; but scarcely was he clear of the houses, barracks and hovels than he met Jack Aubrey and the carpenter. He turned back with them, and learnt that their voyage could hardly be called a success: the spars were there, and remarkable timber too, said the carpenter; but as they were Government property it appeared that authority would have to be sought from a number of sources, and Mr Jenks, whose consent had to be obtained first, was not in the way. 'Obstruction at every infernal step,' said Jack. 'How I hate an official.' But his face cleared when Stephen told him of the little girls' escape and asked whether he disliked having them aboard.

  'Never in life,' he said. 'I quite like to see them skipping about. They are far better than wombats. Last time we touched here, you bought a wombat, you remember, and it ate my hat. That was in the Leopard: Lord, the horrible old Leopard, how she griped!' He laughed at the memory, but Stephen saw that he was not his old self: there was an underlying resentment, and he looked yellowish, far from well.

  As they were parting to leave their horses at different stables, Jack said 'Surely it is a very shocking thing for both governor and lieutenant-governor to be away at the same time. I cannot get any sense out of Colonel MacPherson. How I wish I knew when Macquarie was coming back.'

  'I mean to wait on Mrs Macquarie again tomorrow, and perhaps she will tell me,' said Stephen.

  In the morning, trim once more, but this time with a face not only smooth but with a look of unusual satisfaction, or contained hopefulness, because Martin had come back with a most gratifying account of his interview: John Paulton wholly accepted both proposals - was infinitely touched that Dr Maturin should think his book the proper vehicle for a tribute to M. de Lavoisier, whose death he too had deplored - would welcome Padeen and put him to some gentle task such as watching the lambs - and he sent a graceful note with a postscript reminding Stephen of their engagement for Sunday, which he looked forward to with the keenest delight. More than this, within three quarters of an hour of leaving the ship, Adams returned with word that the change of assignment had been made. There was no difficulty about it at all; and any other request on the part of the gentleman would receive the promptest attention.

  He greeted the lodge-keeper and the saluting sentry (for he was in uniform, his best) and walked up the drive. Beyond the kangaroo be saw Dr Redfern walking down it, and when they were at a proper distance he took off his hat, saying 'Dr Redfern, I believe? My name is Maturin, surgeon of the Surprise.'

  'How do you do, sir?' said Redfern, his stern face breaking into a smile as he returned the salute. 'Your name is familiar to me from your writings, and I am very happy to meet you. May I be of any service to you in this remote corner of the world? I have a fair experience of its ways and its diseases.'

  'Dear colleague, you are very good, and in fact there is a kindness you could do me. I should very much like to see my former loblolly-boy, Patrick Colman: he was transported, and now it seems he is in your hospital. If you would leave word at the gate that I am to be admitted, I should be most grateful.'

  'An Irishman, with a complex dysphony and little English, an absconder?'

  'The same.'

  'If you will come with me, I will take you there myself: I am on my way. But no doubt you were going to Government House?'

  'I have to call on Her Excellency.'

  'I am afraid it would be a call in vain: I have just been to see her, and she must keep her bed some days longer.'

  They walked down together, Dr Redfern greeted on every hand, and they talked with barely a pause. At one point Stephen said 'What you say about liver is particularly interesting. I do not like my captain's at all, and should be glad of your opinion,' and at another he said 'There is another of those vessels emitting smoke. Is it a fumigation against pests, against disease?'

  'It is sulphur burning to bring out hidden convicts or choke them to death. Many of the poor devils try to stow away. Every ship leaving is smoked and every boat is stopped by the party at South Head.' But most of the time they spoke about such matters as the thin-thread ligature of arteries, Abernethy's triumphs, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

  When they came nearer Dawes Point Redfern's cheerfulness declined and he said 'I am ashamed to display this hospital in all its squalid nakedness. Happily Governor and Mrs Macquarie are engaged on a new building.' As they walked in he said 'Colman is in the small ward on the right. His back is healing, but there is a dejection of spirits and an utter neglect of food that makes me anxious: I hope your visit may comfort him.'

  'Do you happen to know whether there are any other Irishmen in the ward?'

  'Not now. We lost both others a week ago, and since then he has had almost no company. His dysphony increases in English, what little English he has.'

  'Certainly. On a good day he is positively fluent in Irish, and he sings it without a check.'

  'You speak the language, sir, I collect?'

  'Indifferently; it is a child's knowledge, no more. But he understands me.'

  'I shall leave you together while I look at the other men with my attendants: you will feel no constraint, I trust.'

  There was a gathering in the hall and then they went in, Redfern accompanied by his dresser and two nurses. Padeen, was on the right hand, at the end of a row of quite wide-spaced beds, by the window. He was lying on his belly, so nearly asleep that he did not move when Redfern drew back the sheet covering him. 'As you see,' said Redfern, 'the skin is healing - little inflammation: bone almost entirely covered. Earlier floggings had rendered it coriaceous. We treat with tepid sponging and wool-fat. Mr Herold' - to the dresser - 'we will leave Colman for the moment and see to the amputations.'

  It was not the half-flayed back that wounded Stephen, who like any naval surgeon had seen the results of many a flogging, though never on such a monstrous scale, so much as the extreme emaciation. Padeen had been a fine upstanding fellow, thirteen or fourteen stone, perhaps: now his ribs stood out under the scars and he would barely weigh eight. Padeen's face was turned towards him on the pillow: eyes closed, head skull-like.

  Stephen laid a firm, authoritative medical hand on his back and said low in his ear 'Never stir now. God and Mary be with you, Padeen.'

  'God and Mary and Patrick be with you, Doctor,' came the slow, almost dreaming reply: the eye opened, a singularly sweet smile lit that famine-time face and he said 'I knew you would come.' He held Stephen's hand.

  'Quiet, now, Padeen,' said Stephen: he waited until the convulsive trembling had stopped and went on, 'Listen, Padeen, my dear. Say nothing to any man at all, nothing. But you are going to a place where you will be more kindly treated, and there I shall see you again. There I shall see you again. Till then you must eat all you can, do you hear me now, Padeen. And till then God be with you, God and Mary be with you.'

  Stephen walked out, more moved than he bad believed possible; and still, as he walked back to the ship after a particularly interesting conversation with Dr Redfern, he found that his mind was not as cool and steady as he could have wished. A lorikeet, or what he took for a lorikeet, flying from a clump of banksia changed its current for a moment. So did the sound of music in the cabin, which he heard well before he crossed the brow.

  It was Jack and Martin, studying particular passages of the D minor quartet: Stephen observed that the viola's sound was mellower than usual, and at the same time he remembered their engagement to dine with John Paulton. Fortunately he was already dressed.

  'I have just seen Padeen in the hospital,' he said; and in answer to their enquiries, 'He is in very good hands. Dr Redfern is an admirable man. He told me a great deal about the local diseases, many brought about it appears by the dust, and about the convicts' state of mind. In spite of their failings they are always kind and tender to one of their fellows that has been flogged, and ease his sufferings as much as they can.'

  'I remember when I was disrated and turned before the mast when I was a boy,' said Jack, 'that when a man had had a dozen at the gangway his messmates were invariably very good to him - grog, sweet-oil for his back, anything they could think of.'

  'Dr Redfern also gave me directions for our projected journey,' said Stephen, taking out his 'cello, 'and will send me letters to some of the respectable or at least intelligent settlers.'

  'You did mention a journey before we crossed Capricorn,' said Jack, 'but I have forgotten just what you had in mind.'

  'Since the ship is likely to be here for about a month,' said Stephen, 'I thought that with your leave we should travel inland towards the Blue Mountains and back in a southern sweep to Botany Bay for perhaps a fortnight, come aboard to see whether our services are needed, and then make a northern tour, passing by Paulton's place, until she is ready to sail.'

  'With all my heart,' said Jack. 'And I hope you will find a phoenix on her nest.'

  Chapter Ten

  'We seem to have been living this life of wandering tinkers for ever,' said Stephen, 'and I must confess it suits me very well - no peevish bells, no responsibilities, no care for the morrow, wholly dependent on the benevolence of others or of Providence.'

  'So long that I have almost come to like this starve-acre landscape,' said Martin, looking over plain, covered, where it was covered at all, with thin coarse grass and low bushes, with gum-trees of various kinds standing here and there, the whole, in spite of the tracts of bare sandstone rubble, giving a general impression of a dull silvery grey-green, hot, dry and brilliantly lit. It seemed completely empty at first, but far over to the south-east a keen eye, or better a small spy-glass, could make out a group of kangaroos of the largest kind, while troups of white cockatoos moved among the taller, more distant trees. 'I sound ungrateful,' Martin went on, 'for not only has it fed me very well - such quails, such chops! - but it is a naturalist's treasure-house, and Heaven knows how many unknown plants that worthy ass is carrying, to say nothing of bird-skins. I only mean that it is wanting in wild romantic prospects or indeed anything that makes a countryside worth looking at, apart from its flora and fauna.'

  'Blaxiand assured me that there were wild romantic prospects farther into the Blue Mountains,' said Stephen. And for a while they ate steadily: they were dining on grilled wombat (all their meals were necessarily grilled or roasted) and it ate like tender lamb. 'There they go!' he cried. 'And the dingoes after them.' The kangaroos vanished in a fold of the plain half a mile away, moving at a prodigious speed, and the dingoes, which had presumably relied on surprise, gave up the hopeless chase. 'Well you may say starve-acre,'said Stephen, looking east and west. 'I remember Banks telling me that when first they saw New Holland and sailed along its shore the country made him think of a lean cow, with bare scraggy protuding hip-bones. Now you know very well what affection and esteem I have for Sir Joseph; and I have the utmost respect for Captain Cook too, that intrepid scientific mariner. But what possessed them to recommend this part of the world to Government as a colony I cannot tell - Cook, who was brought up on a farm; Banks, who was a landowner; both of them able men and both of them having seen great stretches of its desolation. What infatuation, what wilful...' He broke off, and Martin said 'Perhaps it seemed more promising after so many thousand miles of sea.'

  After a silence Stephen reverted to their wandering life. 'What a time it seems!' he said. 'Our faces-forgive me, Martin - have already assumed something of that raw brick-red so usual in New South Wales; and I think we have seen everything our predecessors have seen...except the platypus.'

  'The emu! The echidna!' cried Martin. Blaxiand assured me it was not to be found in his neighbourhood, but that it was not uncommon in the streams nearer the coast. He had never seen it, and indeed knew no more than I: it is strange that so remarkable an animal should be so little known in Europe. I have only seen Banks's dried specimen - no dissection possible - and read Home's superficial paper in the Transactions, together with Shaw's description, neither based on a living animal. Conceivably our next river - our last, alas - will yield one.'

  'How kind Mr Blaxiand was, and what a splendid dinner he gave us,' said Martin. 'I know I speak like a man whose god is his belly, but this riding and walking and searching for specimens after so many months at sea gives one the appetite of an ogre.'

  'He was indeed,' said Stephen, 'and where we should have been without him I cannot tell: this is no country to lose one's way in. After one day of wandering in the worst kind of bush, we should have ridden tamely home, if we had survived at all.'

  Mr Blaxland, a fellow-member of the Royal Society with a large holding inland from Sydney, had made them heartily welcome, and had warned them of the danger of getting lost. Just to the south of his land there were great stretches of a kind of scrub where the leaves joined overhead, where sense of direction was easily lost, and where the parched ground was littered with the bones of absconders. He had lent them an ass to carry their already overflowing collections and Ben, a morose bearded middle-aged Aboriginal, who showed them a hundred edible plants, led them within shot of their dinner as though the desolate featureless plain were marked with signposts, pointed out a whole sparsely-inhabited and to their eyes almost invisible zoological garden, made fire, and sometimes, when they were to wait for some nocturnal serpent, lizard, opossum, koala, wombat, he built them huts from the great sheets of bark that hung from the gum-trees or lay at their feet.

  For reasons that did not appear he was much attached to Mr Blaxland; but he was not attached to Stephen or Martin and he was often impatient at their stupidity. He had picked up some Newgate English from the convicts, and as they stared at what seemed to them an undisturbed patch of shale and dead grass he would say 'Buggers Can't see fucking track. Blind, no-see sods.'

  'And certainly,' said Stephen, reverting to Blaxland, 'it was a noble dinner. But of all the dinners we have eaten during this journey the one I enjoyed most took place before ever we set out. For a dinner to be more than usually successful it seems to me that the host must be more than usually cheerful, and Mr Paulton was in as fine a flow of spirits as could be imagined. And how well he played! He and Aubrey dashed away as if they were inventing the music by common accord; it was a delight to hear.' He smiled at the recollection, and then added, 'You did have the impression, did you not, that he was happy to know nothing about Padeen's evasion?'

  'More than that: he told me privately that managed with discretion it would be thought he had gone to join his friends in the bush, living with the blacks.'

  'You rejoice my heart,' said Stephen. 'And speaking of blacks, it occurs to me that some of our difficulty in communicating with this one,' - nodding towards Ben, who sat at some distance with his back turned - 'quite apart from language, is the fact that he and his people have no notion of property. Each tribe has its frontiers, to be sure, but within that territory everything is common; and seeing that they have no herds, no fields, but walk about all the time for their living, any possessions other than their spears and throwing-sticks would be a useless burden. To us property, real or symbolical, is fundamental; its absence is known to be misery, its presence is thought to be happiness. The language of our minds is wholly different.'

  Ben said 'Shut up. Get on horse.'

  They saddled their patient old mares - Ben had nothing to say to straps and buckles: he was a guide and protector of fools for Blaxland's sake, in no way a servant. Indeed, his world did not include the man and-master relation at all, and nothing that they could give him did he want. Mounting, they rode slowly on towards their last river.

 

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