Early next morning Rooke went down to the settlement. He felt disloyal to Gardiner, but he was consumed with curiosity about the captured natives. He wondered by what stratagem he might get a glimpse of them, but none was necessary. As he passed the parade ground he saw the governor walking down the hill with two men shuffling in fetters. Captain Silk was looking sprightly at the governor’s elbow, a notebook and pencil in his hand.
The bigger of the natives was a finely made man, perhaps thirty years old. There was a roguish sparkle to his eye. It made Rooke think that if Silk were to have been kidnapped, and became the guest of some unimaginable chief of the natives, he would look around in just that way, with eyes that found everything interesting, and the smile of someone having the greatest adventure of his life.
The other was a person of different make, shorter and sterner, a compact mass of outraged dignity. Being here was not an adventure for him, Rooke thought. It was an affront to his sense of himself.
The governor’s narrow face had changed overnight, broadening and beaming. Today he was not nearly so much like the Mathematical Bridge. He held up his hand to the cheerful captive and turned it.
‘Now, Boinbar. This is what we call “hand”. What is the word in your tongue?’
Bo-in-bar. Rooke saw it as if written, committed it to memory. His first word of the native tongue.
Silk licked the end of his pencil and made ready to write the native word for ‘hand’. The quickest jack-in-the-box in the regiment. How had Silk got himself there with the notebook in his hand, Rooke wondered. If one wanted a linguist in New South Wales, would one not ask for Lieutenant Rooke?
Perhaps the governor enjoyed the company of an officer of his own size, he thought, and was shocked at himself. There will be time, he told himself. Silk is no linguist, and then they will remember me.
Now the governor was trying to gain the attention of the other man, holding up his thumb and waggling it.
‘Warungin? Warungin! Here is my thumb, we say “thumb”, now tell me what you say.’
Wa-rung-in. Two words of the native tongue.
But Warungin would not meet the governor’s eye and had no interest in his thumb. Even though hobbled by the fetters he walked upright and stared into the middle distance as though the governor were not there.
These men were like, but not like, those Rooke had seen in Antigua. They were not as tall as the slaves and their skin was not that black that was almost blue. Theirs was a warmer, browner black. Nor did they have those swollen lips, fascinating in their fullness, that the Africans had.
As well as those differences they were born with, there were others that he thought life might teach. These two men of New South Wales carried themselves proudly erect, yielding to no one. Isolation had saved them from becoming like those uprooted Africans he had seen in English Harbour, expressionless black cogs in the machine of empire.
Boinbar looked straight at Rooke, at the red wool coat, the brass buttons, the gold braid, at the straight hair, the smooth cheeks, the pale skin. Under his gaze Rooke saw how strange it might be to have such hair, such skin. To cover the body with fabric and small shiny objects.
His eyes met Boinbar’s and he felt a bubble of laughter in his throat. He saw his own excitement reflected on the other man’s face, the same eagerness to enter the unknown, to be amazed by difference.
But now the governor was turning back towards his house, putting a hand under Boinbar’s elbow.
‘Come, my friend, we will eat now.’
He made large champing motions and hand-to-mouth actions, and Boinbar went with him willingly enough. Silk had to urge Warungin to follow, going so far as to touch his arm, but Warungin withdrew it. Shuffling in the fetters, his face rock-like, he walked up the road, a muscular nugget of disapproval.
Several times in the two weeks following, Rooke found reasons to go down to the settlement, hoping to see more of the native men, but they were never about. Young Timpson told him they spent most of their time at the governor’s house, being shown how to sit on a chair and eat off a plate. But poor homesick Timpson was not much interested in anything that was not about his Betsy, and he had no other information.
Rooke had wanted solitude, had schemed to be cut off from the settlement. He had congratulated himself on achieving it. But, like Midas, he had his riches and was the poorer for them. His isolation was robbing him of the chance to stand beside Silk and exchange words with the native men.
He put his mind to some pretext for calling at the governor’s house. The ledger was all he could think of. He might request a meeting with the governor and pretend to ask his advice about any improvements that His Excellency might suggest, before he filled in too many of its pages. Should he, for example, be recording the height of the tides as well as the wind and weather?
It was a shallow ruse, but who knew how long it would be before he could see more of those new planets Boinbar and Warungin?
He was transcribing his most recent readings into their columns, planning to take the ledger down the next day, when he heard someone hallooing outside: Captain Silk, picking his way down between the rocks.
‘Rooke,’ he called. ‘A visitor to your enchanted isle!’
Silk jumped athletically down the last few yards, lost his balance, nearly tripped, did a quick to-and-fro with his feet and had arrived.
‘By God, you are secret out here,’ he cried, suppressing his panting. ‘A man needs to be a goat to pay you a visit!’
Sure of his welcome, he did not wait for an answer, but went inside.
‘Well, my friend, will you not offer me something cheerful to wet my whistle?’
Installed at the table with a cup of brandy-and-water in front of him, he leaned back so that his chair creaked alarmingly.
‘So, what news?’ Rooke asked.
‘Ah, we are sad down at Government House. The governor and I. It is a blow, I will say. Perhaps you heard? The natives have gone, last night, slipped their fetters and made off.’
‘Gone!’
‘Sadly yes. Warungin had never reconciled himself to our company. Boinbar seemed happy enough—you remember, the taller cheerful chap. The governor is vastly disappointed. We were making excellent progress with the language.’
‘Oh?’
Silk made a show of hesitating. Rooke recognised the signs that he was preparing a bon mot.
‘Our friend Boinbar was quite the devil of a fellow, he was at pains to teach me the words for such important notions as pissing and shitting and the other thing as well. Propagating the species is how I decided to gloss it for the governor.’
Rooke laughed, thinking of the governor primly accepting this form of words.
‘Other than those exceedingly useful notions we have an extensive vocabulary. We know, for instance, that the north wind is boor-roo-way.’
He separated the syllables out carefully.
‘Wait, or was the north wind bow-wan?’
Silk pulled his notebook from his pocket and thumbed through the pages.
‘I think we are not altogether sure, to tell the truth. But the east wind is goniee-mah. The sun is co-ing, a mouse is bo-gul, good is bud-yer-i. And we think that the suffix—gal means tribe. Or perhaps place.’
‘Tribe, I see. Or perhaps place?’
If Silk heard any irony in this, he ignored it.
‘Boinbar seems to distinguish something by the use of the suffix. He refers to himself as Cadi-gal, and then he points across the water and says something like Cammera-gal.’
‘I see.’
‘Well, Rooke, the governor and I were making considerable progress, but we would not pretend to be fluent as yet. His Excellency is confident, however, that there will be other opportunities. We treated them like kings, Rooke, did not of course let them guess at our shortness of supplies, and between them in a day they made short work of what would last us a week. Warungin would not touch anything but fish, but Boinbar tried everything and developed something of a taste for wine. We even taught him to toast the king, excessively amusing to see. We have every confidence that he will return before too long.’
Silk sat up at the table memorising the list of words, covering the English with a hand, staring up into the underside of Rooke’s shingles.
‘Co-ing, the sun. Bo-gul, a mouse,’ he whispered to himself, a conscientious boy learning his lessons. ‘Bud-yer-i, good. Budyeri, good.’
He closed the notebook and stretched a leg out, ostentatiously at ease. Rooke knew something was coming.
‘My intimacy with the native men, I have to tell you, Rooke, is of the most inestimable value for my little narrative. The whole story is excessively diverting. But I lack the beginning: how they were taken. Gardiner would not speak to me about it. It is far and away the most momentous event that has taken place in our time here! I need detail, I need the account of an eyewitness, but he would tell me nothing.’
He leaned forward across the table.
‘What did you hear, Rooke, Gardiner must have spoken to you of it?’
Rooke drew back as if from heat, took advantage of the table wobbling to hide under it, adjusting the chock that kept it steady. When he came up again he had the words.
‘Why, only that it was a complete success!’
He felt a flush coming to his cheeks. He had never learned the knack of lying. He got up and busied himself with some kindling.
‘But Gardiner said nothing to you?’ Silk demanded. ‘At the time, or afterwards? Or at any time since the event took place?’
He would have made a good lawyer, Rooke thought.
‘We speak of all manner of things,’ he said, snapping a handful of twigs over his knee. ‘We have in common an interest in the heavenly bodies, of course.’
He heard himself, Lieutenant Rooke at his least lively. Silk went on watching him. He felt the muscles around his mouth tense, straining to allow his face no expression whatsoever.
‘Well,’ Silk said. He sat smoothing his hair at the back, where it curled in a glossy wave over his collar.
Rooke could feel the pressure of his gaze, that wordless coaxing. He felt ugly in his skin, clumsy in his attempt to be secret. He wondered if writers of narratives could smell when there was more to a story than met the eye.
All Silk hungered for was a piquant addition to his narrative. But if he should get hold of the story the way Gardiner had told it in the privacy of the hut, and make it public, it would be a catastrophe.
The governor would be obliged to act. The colony did not have sufficient officers to hold a court-martial, but he would have Gardiner suspended from duties to live in a kind of blank until a ship arrived that could take him back to England to face judgment.
And then? Gardiner had not disobeyed, only regretted having obeyed. He would not be hanged. Probably. But His Majesty’s service could not accommodate an officer who questioned an order. The best Gardiner could hope for would be to lose rank. That would be like losing a limb. Or he might be expelled in disgrace like those rebels in English Harbour. Whatever the outcome, Gardiner would spend the rest of his life a marked man.
‘Really, Silk, you pay me a greater compliment than I deserve,’ Rooke said. ‘In thinking I might be aware of things. That you are not.’
Outside he could hear the white parrots gathering to roost in the tree on the side of the ridge. They swooped and cavorted with harsh squawks like creatures in pain.
I wish to God I had not done it. He had heard those words, and heard them with sympathy. That made him subject to their dangerous power. He must forget that he had ever heard them.