Free The Far Horizon by Gretta Curran Browne

what?’
    The cook glanced round the kitchen at the girls and then lowered her voice into a confessional whisper. ‘I was charged, m'lady, with a crime of passion against my unfaithful lover.’
    ‘Indeed?' Elizabeth looked at the big buxom woman and decided not to probe further. ‘And how long, Mrs Kelly, have you been here?’
    ‘In Botany? Eighteen years, m'lady. But I earned my Pardon eleven years ago. So I’m as free to leave the colony as you are.’
    ‘And yet you choose not to go back to Ireland?’
    ‘And leave my poor chicks with no mother to care for them?' Mrs Kelly shook her head. ‘What would my Gracie do without me for a start? No, it’s here I'm needed badly. And sure, what would there be for me back in Ireland once it was learned I was in Botany Bay? I'd not get a job in a lovely kitchen like this.’
    Mrs Kelly straightened her apron. ‘No, m'lady, thank you for asking, but I'm happy where I am. And I hope my cooking and service will be as satisfactory to yourself and His Excellency the new Governor as it was to Governor Bligh and Governor King.’
    ‘I'm sure it will,’ Elizabeth smiled.
    Another of Mrs Kelly's sighs wafted over the kitchen, and again Elizabeth caught Gracie smiling sweetly at her as she turned to leave.
    ‘There now, me darlings,’ Mrs Kelly cried robustly before Elizabeth was even out the door, ‘I think we'll find life a whole lot more respectable now there is a woman in charge of Government House. That we will! And remember what I told yiz – yiz'll not go wrong in this life if you have nothing to do with men – wicked, wicked men!’
    *
    Although Government House was indeed the grandest residence in all of Sydney, George Jarvis gave his mind no time to be impressed by its spacious rooms and elegant furnishings, because in his mind he could still remember the cool shaded rooms of a palace in Surat, with gold goblets and ruby and sapphire-encrusted fruit trays, all left lying about so carelessly in the chamber of rooms where he and his mother had lived.
    But he was impressed, truly impressed, by the sight before his eyes now.
    George’s living quarters in Government House were next to Lachlan and Elizabeth’s on the upper floor of the house; a small sitting-room and a larger bedroom with a closet for washing and dressing, all nice enough, but it was the view from the windows that impressed and entranced him.
    From the window he stood and gazed on what Captain Pritchard had described as the most beautiful harbour in the world, “ even more beautiful than the harbour at Rio, ” and Sydney Harbour truly was beautiful with its sandy beaches and inlets of the bluest water shimmering under the golden sun.
    Long ago it seemed now, in Cochin, as a boy, George had believed he had been captured and transported by slave-traders to the end of the world, the very edge of it.
    How young and foolish he had been then, before his journeys to China, and then to England and Scotland – all the countries that had helped him to grow up. But now he was grown, and he knew that at last he really had reached the end of the world, in this fifth part of the earth, in this wilderness called New South Wales.
    He turned as someone knocked on the door. A young girl entered … a maid by her dress. She seemed about to speak casually then stopped suddenly with her mouth open and stared at him.
    ‘Yes?’
    She looked at him with wide blue eyes. ‘Are you … George Jarvis?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It’s … it’s m’lady … Mrs Macquarie … she said to tell you … her and the Governor are ready to eat luncheon.’
    George nodded and smiled. ‘Tell her I shall be right down.’
    As she turned to leave the maid paused and looked back at him. ‘Would … would you like me to show you the way to the dining room?’
    ‘Yes,’ George realised, ‘I don’t know my way around yet so that would be a help.’
    The girl’s cheeks blushed a bright pink, but she said not a word to him as she walked beside