Wanting Read Free

Romeo bleed till his patient’s skin was clammy and the Protector once more felt calm. Then he staunched the flow and handed the brimming pannikin of blood to one of the crescent of black women, indicating she was to dispose of it outside.
    The Protector straightened up, bowed his head and began to sing.
    ‘ Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom; lead Thou me on! ’
    His voice was quavering and shrill. He swallowed, then with a deeper, louder and more determined baritone continued.
    ‘ The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on! ’
    The black women seemed to be joining in—badly, it was true—but then he realised that they had merely altered their dirge-like keening to meld with his hymn.
    ‘ Remember not past years! ’ he sang, now at the top of his voice, but sometimes even he could not erase the past years. He halted mid-verse but they did not. He rolled his sleeves back down, turned around and was surprised to see Mathinna looking intently at him, as though at once believing he had magical powers and seeking to divine what they were, and yet beginning to doubt the sorcerer’s potency. Unsettled, he searched for a new rhythm of words to soothe his nerves.
    ‘Now is the period in which King Romeo’s pulmonary system will find its equilibrium,’ the Protector began. ‘Whereby well-being…such that blood…’
    Mathinna looked down at her naked feet, and so too for a moment did the Protector; then, feeling an embarrassment verging on inexplicable shame, he looked back up and away, and walked out of the hut into the relief of the cold sea air.
    He felt angry, but his anger perplexed him. This was the surgeon’s work, but the surgeon had himself died miserably a month before, and his replacement was promised but could yet be months away. And as angry ashe was with the old surgeon for succumbing to dysentery, furious as he was with the Governor for not replacing him more speedily, he was proud of his own ability as a man of medicine, a man who knew how to bleed and blister, who could prepare enemas and dissect corpses and write competent reports—he, a layman, a carpenter, self-reliant and self-made and self-taught, the very triumph of self.
    In the afternoon the Protector spent his time to achieve what he felt was good profit, preparing plans for a new, larger cemetery to cope with the mortality that was afflicting the settlement. Near dusk he went to the old burial ground with the natives and asked them to tell him the names of the buried. They seemed very apprehensive to name any of the dead, and, disgruntled at such ingratitude, he dismissed them.
    The Protector was determined his new burial ground be complete for the imminent visit of the Van Diemonian Governor, Sir John Franklin, and his wife, Lady Jane, expected a week hence. The wind was gusting up from the south: with such favourable weather it could well be earlier. Sir John was a man of science, one of the age’s greatest explorers and a man of many projects, whether they be exploring the vast Transylvanian wilds of the island’s west or founding scientific societies or collecting shells and flowers for Kew Gardens.
    Yes, thought the Protector as he paced out the exact dimensions of the graveyard, a new cemetery and a raisingof the standards of the natives’ hymn-singing were real and reasonable goals that he could achieve before the vice-regal visit. Above all else, the Protector prided himself on his realism.
    That evening the Protector gave his lecture on pneumatics to an audience that combined the officers and their families and the natives. His final text ran to one hundred and forty-four pages. He felt he had well advanced his argument with logic and occasional practical example, such as when he heated a bottle over a steaming kettle he had hanging over the fire. By holding the bottle over a peeled boiled egg, the egg was slowly sucked up into the bottle.
    Troilus laughed at this point and said loudly, ‘Wybalenna