Wild Island Read Free Page B

ailments, consumption and occasional accidents, with a score of lunatics at the asylum and an accouchement now and then. And floggings, of course.
    After three years of this, dissatisfaction made Casey almost constantly irritable, although he’d cheered up no end last year when he had to cut Edward Howard’s arm off. A difficult amputation just below the shoulder, done in only ten minutes from tourniquet to sewing up, with nothing but brandy and laudanum to quiet the patient. The main bone had been smashed when Howard, a convict bolter, was shot accidentally as he was retaken. The prisoner recovered remarkably quickly, but Casey’s feat passed unnoticed. Six months later when the Colonial Surgeon, Dr James Scott, performed the same operation inHobart Town, all the senior medical men gathered to watch, loud with praise.
    When Casey heard this he’d become morose and quarrelsome. He and Booth had nearly come to blows last November. Casey came raging in at midnight just as Booth returned from one of his scrambles up to Hobarton and back in the same day. Demanded to know where the hell Booth had been and why he, Casey, had not been told, etcetera, etcetera, insisting he was in charge when Booth was away.
    Booth had been twenty hours on the go by then, having started for Hobart at four that morning. He wearily explained that this was a military establishment: the Commandant’s second-in-command was the next ranking military officer, Lieutenant Stuart from the Coal Mines. Casey refused to believe it—in the coarsest, vilest language. Booth, exasperated, told him he was behaving like a jilted housemaid. Casey squared up belligerently and for a moment things looked ugly, but then he turned, slammed out and wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Hobarton, who confirmed what Booth had said—which only increased Casey’s sullen resentment. The quarrel lasted until Booth’s fever on Christmas Day, when Casey’s attention was immediate, solicitous, and wonderfully effective. Yes, if ever Booth needed a medico, he’d want Casey—the proud, stubborn Irish bastard.
    Power brought in hot water and Casey went out, no doubt to begin breakfast without waiting. Booth shivered as he washed and dressed. But it was never as cold here as at Home. Winter there now, January. Snowing in Basingstoke, probably. He wondered idly whether he would ever see it again. (He would not.) At the breakfast table he found Lempriere drinking coffee and talking to Casey about the weather. So that quarrel was mended, too. How could Casey quarrel with Lempriere, the Commissariat Officer, and the most affable creature in the world? About potatoes—how Irish!—in the allotment that Lempriere shared under regulations with the MO.
    Lemp was describing now how one might construct a wind-measuring machine. The study of weather was one of his passionatehobbies, together with natural science, painting and drawing, and the study of the French horn.
    ‘ Mon vieux ,’ he greeted Booth. Lemp’s forebears were from the Channel Islands, France and Portugal, but he’d been born in Hamburg, where his father was a merchant for a time. After fifteen years in Van Diemen’s Land he spoke English daily, savouring its oddities; French for pleasure and to educate his children, and German in rare moments of melancholy and Weltzschmerz .
    ‘I have been down at the office,’ he said now. ‘Killick is waiting to see you. He was on duty at Mount Arthur until last night and walked in at daybreak this morning. He says he saw a ship entering the Derwent as he started out, and later heard what he thinks was cannon-fire. He believes it’s the new Governor arrived early. So I am come to ask if we can have our Metaphysicals tonight instead of tomorrow night? If it does prove to be the Governor you’ll be called up to town and we shall miss again as we did last month.’
    They had formed the Metaphysicals three years ago. A most select club, they joked: Lempriere, Booth and Casey, with