Kate Grenville by The Secret River

Author:The Secret River [River, The Secret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Historical - General, Penal colonies, Novel, General, Literary, Historical, Land tenure, New South Wales, Fiction - Historical
ISBN: 9781841959146
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Published: 2007-04-10T07:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

A Hundred Acres

With his servants on the place, he was less anxious about leaving with the Hope. Dan and Ned were gormless sorts of men, but they were men: it was a little wrench each time to leave Sal, but at least it was not just one woman out there alone among the trees.

Things were beginning to go smoothly. He and Dan had wrestled the awkward stones into place to make Sal a fireplace in the hut with a sod-lined bark chimney and wide enough to take lengths of fallen timber. In the heat of mid-November it was hard to imagine ever needing a fire, but Webb had warned him that the winters here were sharper than in Sydney, and he looked forward to sitting in the hut with the fire blazing. He thought he would never tire of the way a fire here was not a mean creaking thing, two frugal pieces of coal balanced against each other, but an extravagant licking of clean yellow flames around a heap of wood.

The children were flourishing on the river as they had not in Sydney. Johnny, going on for two years old, was on the go all day, poking things into other things or balancing things on other things, always with some scheme in his mind that made his little face go blank with concentration. Dick was growing into a straight and sinewy seven-year-old, the baby clucked and crooned to herself, and even Bub had turned the corner. Far from suffering from the rough diet, he appeared to be thriving on it. He was still inclined to burst into tears more than a boy of five should, and there were still mauve shadows under his eyes, but he was finally putting on flesh.

Business was good. The Governor had decreed that townships with garrisons of troops be made along the upper reaches of the river. That way, even though the blacks were frequently committing their outrages and depredations, the farmers themselves would be safe and not abandon the place. So humble Green Hills became regal Windsor, and the scattering of huts upstream of it became Richmond. The redcoats patrolled the riverside farms, and went out into the wilds every other week to hunt down and bring to justice the perpetrators of the outrages.

Townships suited a man with a boat full of desirable objects. Instead of putting in to one isolated farm after another, Thornhill need only call in at the new villages and be relieved of his goods on the spot, and load for the return trip to Sydney.

He made a point of getting some little gift for Sal on every trip to Sydney: a pair of teacups, a mat for the dirt floor, a blue shawl to remind her of the one her father had given her, although this was coarse compared to that cobweb of soft threads.

For himself he bought a pair of boots, the first he had ever owned. When he put them on he understood why gentry looked different.

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