Lieutenant (6 page)

‘Odd, though, is it not, that the natives are avoiding us? Gardiner told me that they approached him in the fishing boat
yesterday. He gave them some fish, but they did not stay to chat.’

‘Word must have travelled. Of the impressive equipment, you know, of the other man.’

But Silk had finished with that joke. ‘Rooke, my friend, will you be good enough to help me?’

‘Help you?’

‘I do not mean with the writing, no. But I will not be able to be everywhere at once. There will be things you hear of, which I will miss. I look to you as a friend.’

He touched Rooke’s arm.

‘Will you do that, old fellow? Will you help me make my narrative a sparkling gem of a thing before which Mr Debrett will bow down in praise?’

Rooke was surprised by the nakedness of the appeal. He had never seen anything matter to Silk. Nothing—except, perhaps, Private Truby on the deck of
Resolution
—was more than material for an anecdote.

He saw that for Silk, as for himself, New South Wales was not simply four years of full pay and the chance of advancement, and that evading the more unsavoury duties of their profession was not the only imperative. For Silk, as for himself, the place promised other riches. New South Wales was part of a man’s destiny.

S
hipboard life did not prepare a man for scrambling up a hillside that was like a French pastry, and halfway up the promontory on the west side of the cove, Rooke paused. It was partly to catch his breath but partly to look down at where
Sirius
, his home for most of the past year, was already a miniature below him.

He heard the ship’s bell over the glaring water: quaver crotchet, quaver crotchet, quaver crotchet, quaver. Seven bells. Half past three. The timekeeper on board would be showing half past five in the morning.

The clock on the mantelpiece in the parlour at Church Street would be showing the same time. The room would be dark, clenched tight with the dank chill of late winter. In this hard empty light and breathless heat it was difficult to believe.
Upstairs everyone would be asleep under heaped blankets. Anne would be curled under his eiderdown in the attic.
I will keep it
warm for you
, she had promised.
And undertake to return it, on condition
that you come back safe
.

For an instant he felt it: just how far he was from home.

He was weary at the thought of the officers’ mess on
Sirius
and yet another evening meal there. All those faces were known too well, and the voices that could only utter words he had heard ten dozen times before. In the congestion of the ship he had perfected the art of creating a bubble of mathematics that no one quite dared to burst. Until there were enough tents and huts he would have to continue to live on board. But an astronomer was obliged to be close to his instruments at all hours of the night, so as soon as he could he would remove to the promontory.

From the end of the point the view was worth the climb. To the east the bright waters of the harbour went out towards the sea, serrated by so many headlands, so many inlets, a few islands. To the west were more headlands, more inlets, more islands.

Just before the end of the ridge dropped away to the water there was a level place about the size of Major Wyatt’s parade ground, backed by a low cliff. No trees obscured the sky. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich must once have been just such a high open hilltop.

As a crow might fly, the settlement was less than a mile
distant, but this spot felt remote. Rooke could not see the encampment, only hear the distant clunk of axes and the occasional shout. The person he was among those people—Second Lieutenant Rooke, good with numbers although inclined to be awkward with people—was someone he inhabited like a stiff suit of clothes. To stand here, where the solitude without matched the solitude within, was to be unburdened.

A man on this promontory would be part of the settlement, but not in it. Present, but forgotten. Astronomy would make a convenient screen for a self that he did not choose to share with any of the other souls marooned along with him.

The wind had fallen away. The western horizon was sliding up to meet the sun, making the port a sheet of soft gold patched with the shapes of headlands and islands.

Rooke was turning to go back to the settlement when he realised that he was being watched. Two native men were standing a short distance away, as still as the rocks, men whose dark skin made them part of the landscape. They were not looking at him but out at the water.

He remembered the men he had greeted on the first day, and the way they had reacted to Surgeon Weymark’s pistol. Rooke thought its power might have been more eloquent than Weymark intended.

This seemed another chance.

‘Good afternoon! Good afternoon!’

He took a few steps towards them.

‘I am pleased to meet you!’

That was absurd, but at least it was words.

One man shifted the spear in his hand fractionally. Neither of the natives acknowledged by the slightest flicker of expression that a man was calling out that he was pleased to meet them.

When they began to move towards him, he thought that they were responding at last. They were not. They walked past, an arm’s length away, for all the world as if he were invisible.

Hoy
, he thought of saying.
Hoy, I am here, you know!
He even opened his mouth to speak, rehearsing the tone he would try for: amused, light, cheerful. But something about the dignified way they walked kept him silent.

Where the rocks dropped away to the water, the two men stepped down. Rooke could see that they had no sense of deliberating how to descend, thinking this way or that way? Their path was as familiar to them as Rooke’s had been beside the Round Tower.

He went to the edge and looked down. One of the men was lying on a rock with his face almost in the water, spear over his shoulder. The other had waded in knee-deep and, as Rooke watched, he darted his spear with a movement too quick to see and held it up with a shining fish flapping on the prongs. He flipped it off, broke its spine in his hands and tucked it into the cord around his hips. Rooke was ready to give a congratulatory wave. But the man only bent back towards the water.

Why had he not spoken up when they passed so close? A
different sort of fellow—Gardiner for instance, or Silk—would not have let himself be ignored. Silk would be down there with them on the rocks, trying his hand with a spear, probably, and taking notes.

When they came back up he would not be shy. He would stand in their way until they stopped and would offer them something, his handkerchief perhaps.
Good afternoon
, he would say again, right into their faces. They would not be able to pretend no one was there.
Good afternoon
, he would say, and hold out the handkerchief.
Would you care to accept this?

But as he continued to watch the men, they moved around the point towards the next bay and out of sight without once glancing up.

Rooke was taken aback when the governor resisted the idea of him establishing an observatory.

‘The stars will have to wait, Mr Rooke,’ he snapped. ‘Dr Vickery will understand that we have more urgent matters to attend to here.’

Rooke watched his brows drawing together, creating two deep grooves. He had not prepared for this. On
Sirius
, he had been an astronomer, alongside the governor in the cabin with Mr Kendall’s timekeeper, but on land he had to recognise that things were different.

‘Hear me on this, Lieutenant: I have more than a thousand souls for whom I am responsible, and so far nothing but a few tents to offer them by way of shelter.’

The governor was turning away.

‘But, sir, you will remember that the Astronomer Royal has provided instruments. On the basis that they will be used in the furtherance of science. In particular the comet which Dr Vickery has predicted later this year. Which he considers of the highest degree of importance.’

The governor seemed as surprised as Rooke at this fluent speech and looked at him dourly.

‘I would not wish to take issue with the Astronomer Royal. That is certainly true. But why so far, Lieutenant? My wish is that the settlement remain compact, for the security of all its members. Until we can establish an intercourse with the natives we have no way of knowing their intentions.’

He was turning away again, but Rooke could not yield. He must have that lonely headland. Desperation gave his mind wings, his mouth words.

‘With the greatest respect, sir.’ That was a useful phrase he had heard Silk use with the governor to good effect. ‘An observatory must be in a position of perfect darkness. For its best operation. As you would know.’

This was two kinds of lie, the first being
as you would know
. The governor, an adequately competent navy man, knew enough of the night sky to get a ship from one place to another,
but nothing whatever of the needs of an astronomer. And the business of
perfect darkness
: well, that was at best a half-truth. The fires and flickering lamps of the settlement would hardly interfere with anyone’s view of the stars.

Rooke watched the governor’s narrow face: peevish but thoughtful. He was about to use his authority and simply forbid.

‘In addition, sir,’ Rooke said quickly, hoping that some further argument would come to him as he spoke. ‘In addition, sir, the calculations are difficult. Particularly regarding a comet. For someone of my abilities. Limited abilities.’

Rooke could hear how his words laboured. He sometimes thought that he arrived at a sentence the way other people did multiplication: the hard way, by adding. He felt himself colouring but floundered on. ‘Distraction, sir, distraction will tax my powers. To the limit. Solitude and quiet will be essential.’

That was no half-truth but a simple lie. He knew it, and the governor knew it too. The Great Cabin on
Sirius
had never offered solitude or quiet. At one end of the chart table, Rooke would be calculating the ship’s longitude with the aid of Dr Vickery’s
Almanac
and the
Requisite Tables
. At the other end, the midshipmen would be doing their navigation lessons. By the window the commodore would be at his own desk with his papers and charts. In the corner there might be an animated discussion between a couple of officers about, for instance, the respective merits from a culinary point of view of the various
fish that the sailors were catching off the side. Rooke could be called on for his opinion and give it without missing a beat in his calculations.

The governor, isolated both by his position and, Rooke thought, his temperament, might have understood a man who enjoyed his own company best of all. But to allow him that enjoyment could look like an indulgence, and indulgence to one officer would open him to trouble from others.

The governor put his thumb under his chin and caressed his lip with a forefinger. Rooke could feel him performing a brief but complex calculation, one in which the need to demonstrate his authority against this mulish junior lieutenant was set against the future usefulness of a cooperative one. Rooke felt a flush of panic. Gilbert was nothing more than a naval captain of unremarkable talents, older but less gifted than himself. How was it that he could stand between a man and his proper life?

‘Very well, Lieutenant Rooke. Have your headland. Let the Astronomer Royal get his comet. But, let me warn you, at the first sign of trouble you will be recalled. We are not so lavishly supplied with men. There may be a time when every musket is needed. And Lieutenant’—he lowered his voice— ‘speaking of that, I wish you to ensure that your weapon is loaded at all times.’

Then a private came bustling up and that was the end of the interview.

Out of sight of the governor Rooke stopped and laid a hand on his cheek, hot with the bitter flame of what he had so nearly lost.

Squeaked through
, that was his thought.
A narrow squeak
. What squeaking? Why squeaking? It was a relief to wonder about the silly phrase rather than what would have happened if the governor had said
I regret, Lieutenant, but my decision is final, kindly
do not ask again
.

He must remember how fragile his position was. There might be a destiny awaiting him here, but the governor was not interested in it. If he knew what was in his lieutenant’s mind he would remind him that he was not a man of science,
an
astronomer of the fairest promise
, but just another of the governor’s subjects.