Lieutenant by Kate Grenville Read Free Book Online

his pistol, aimed from a short distance, cocked the hammer and fired. Thenative men jumped back from the explosion.
    The smoke floated away. A smell of gunpowder filled the air.
    The shield was a solid thing, a slab of wood two feet long and a good inch thick, but the ball had gone clean through it and left a ragged hole and a long split top to bottom. The old man picked it up. In his hands it fell into two pieces and he fitted them back together and touched with long fingers at where the ball had burst through the wood. He held the shield up against his belly and gestured, would it do the same thing to him?
    ‘Oh my very word, yes, my black friend,’ Weymark cried encouragingly. ‘Split you from skull to arsehole, by God!’
    Weymark thought it a fine joke, and so did Captain Barton, and by a kind of contagion Rooke laughed too.
    The black men were not entertained. They frowned and spoke to each other urgently.
    ‘Upon my word, Weymark,’ the commodore called. ‘You have frightened them now, what were you thinking?’
    But the surgeon was untroubled. ‘Well, sir, if they do not care for my exhibition of sharp-shooting, perhaps they would prefer a little music, they will find I am a man of multitudinous talents.’
    Pursing up his lips, he began to whistle. Only the surgeon, Rooke thought, could be so casual with the commodore, but when a man had palpated your side day after day you would perhaps allow him a certain liberty.
    It seemed that the natives did not like the surgeon’s music any more than they had enjoyed his performance with the pistol. Their faces were stony. After a minute they took the two pieces of shield and disappeared into the woods.

T he small bay soon had a name: Sydney Cove. It seemed made according to a different logic from the world Rooke knew. There were trees, as there were in other places, but each was stranger than the last. Some were mops, with a bare pole for a trunk and a bush of foliage twenty feet above the ground. Gnarled pink monsters twisted arthritic fingers into the sky. The squat white trees growing by the stream were padded with bark that flaked in soft sheets like paper.
    Red parrots sidled along branches, chattering and whistling. Could they be taught to talk, he wondered, or learn a tune, like the one old Captain Veare had in his parlour in Portsmouth? Catching one would be the first difficulty. The birds watched him sideways, cannily. Birdlime, or a net. He had no birdlime, no net. And he could whistle a tune for himself, although he hadto admit that there was something about these woods of New South Wales that made a man fall silent.
    Buxtehude seemed another species here, the dialogue of a fugue from another world.
    Even the rocks were not like any others he had seen, monstrous plates and shards piled haphazardly on each other. How might he describe them to Anne? Thinking of her face, the look she had as she listened to him—her head tilted, her eyes watching him, patient while he found words—he remembered the French pastry he had eaten with her at the teashop in St George’s Street a few days before the fleet sailed. Layers of pastry interleaved with layers of custard, it was somewhat along the same lines as the stony parts of this landscape.
    It had been impossible to eat, the custard squirting out at each mouthful. He and Anne had begun by being embarrassed but ended by laughing at each other’s efforts. My dear Anne, I find myself in a land remarkably like the pastry we had that day at Pennycook’s, that needed to be eaten in private, in other respects it is a dry and stony place .
    He pictured her reading it in the little parlour. He hoped it would make her smile.

    Within a day of the fleet dropping anchor, the work parties of prisoners had begun to hack at the bushes and trees. Two weekslater the head of the cove was a clutter of bleeding timber, scraped yellow earth and tents that tilted and sagged. As soon as a large enough piece of ground was cleared, the