SYDNEY COVE, 24 SEPTEMBER 1793
The baby was beetroot, waving red fists as it yelled, its face scrunched up like a tiny monkey’s. It exactly resembled the hundreds of other newborns he had held — and looked completely different too.
His son. His tiny, perfect, incredible son.
He glanced at Rachel, sleeping now, pale and still in the bed. He had sent a message on the ferry to Maria, out at Rose Hill, to come and help for a few weeks. She had come on the return ferry, glad of the chance to make a few coins, for the harvest had been poor.
Maria was downstairs, now chopping the last of the winter parsnips for a chicken broth and giving the peelings to the o’possum, as though she had never been away. Nanberry was on another voyage to Norfolk Island. The Surgeon held his son, wrapped in a swaddling cloth made from a carefully hemmed part of an old sheet, worn so thin that another kick from the baby might rip a hole in it.
He had dreamt of this day. His wife would be in her silk-hung bed, there would be carpet on the floor, and brocade curtains; they would hold a christening with silver cups and teething rings, and a fine dinner for all the guests afterwards, to toast the baby’s health. Instead he was in a house of crumbling convict bricks; his son’s mother was a convicted felon, still serving a sentence for theft.
He was not a well-regarded London specialist with honourable colleagues and friends; his brother officers were thieves and rogues, more intent on making as much money as possible, now that Governor Phillip had left, than on governing the colony.
But today none of it mattered. This small child meant more than anything he had ever known.
Rachel stirred in the bed. ‘What shall we call him?’
‘Andrew Douglass Keble White.’
She frowned. ‘But that’s what you called Nanberry.’
‘Nanberry didn’t want the name. Andrew Douglass was the Captain who recommended me for this post.’ He smiled at her, this lovely woman, the mother of his son, his companion and his friend. ‘Without him I would not be here.’
And the baby would never have been born. This miraculous child. His son. He touched the child’s hair with one finger. It was dark already, like his, and he had the blue eyes of the very young. The baby let out a yell again.
‘He’s hungry.’ She held out her arms.
He let the baby go reluctantly. He sat on the bed, watching them both. ‘He will be my true son,’ he said softly. ‘Everything my eldest child should have will be his.’
Rachel smiled vaguely, too worn out to wonder at the meaning of his words. But the Surgeon knew. His son would not be brought up a convict brat. His son would be a gentleman, like his father.
His son must go to England.