Free Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

other officers for the Sunday dinner. He thought of it as a tithe of gratitude for not having to dine there on the other days.
    One evening in the settlement’s first winter, he arrived at the barracks—a long dark hut with an incongruously splendid mahogany table almost filling the space—to see the governor there at its head alongside Major Wyatt. It was an honour His Excellency paid now and again to his officers rather than dine alone in his own residence. Major Wyatt always thanked him fulsomely. As far as the rest of them were concerned, the governor’s presence made for careful conversation.
    Rooke installed himself between Silk and young Lieutenant Timpson and, he hoped, out of the line of sight of Major Wyattand the governor. Timpson was tedious, inveighing against the women prisoners—all damned whores in his view—and forever bringing out the miniature of his sweetheart, expecting wonderment and admiration from other men. He was too young and artless to know that another man’s sweetheart in an oval frame was of limited interest.
    Silk’s opinion of young Lieutenant Timpson was that he protested too much. Mark my words, Rooke , Silk had said. We will be seeing him with us at Mrs Butcher’s before the end of the year and will hear no more of this Betsy . Rooke was inclined to agree. Mrs Butcher had kept an establishment in Devizes, apparently, and knew how to run a good house. Sometimes with Silk and sometimes alone, Rooke had visited her hut and found her to be both hospitable and discreet, offering the choice of several pleasant convict girls and the privacy of a canvas curtain.
    Timpson’s innocent prudery was tedious, but Rooke was happy to admire Betsy for the hundredth time, and agree what a sweet and dear face she had, if it allowed him to take his place in the furthest and most dimly lit corner of the room.
    At the head of the table, the governor and Wyatt sat glumly as the boy set their plates of food in front of them. Silk broke the silence.
    ‘Ah, the daily diabolical morsel!’
    It was a risk, Rooke thought, to draw attention to what was on each plate, but the governor went so far as to laugh. Wyatt followed, and the whole table joined in. Only Silk could havegot away with it, but he had judged well: men confronted with yet another insufficient meal of elderly salt beef and a spoonful of pease porridge were glad of any distraction.
    His Majesty’s victualler had assumed that New South Wales would produce at least some of the food its colonists needed, but this had proved to be optimistic. The heart of the mop-like tree was called cabbage, although Rooke thought it as fibrous and probably as tasty as oakum. Various sparse greens grew by the stream, and the leaves of a sprawling vine had been found to make a faintly sweet tea which he had come to savour. That was the extent of the vegetable production of the place.
    Gardens had been planted, but what with the grubs, soil that was no better than sand, and theft by prisoners, no turnip or potato had ever grown bigger than a marble.
    Now and then the governor’s shooter brought back game from the woods. His Excellency was generous in sharing it with his officers, and Rooke, like the others, had relished the various unrecognisable joints of tough but tasty meat. No part of the creatures was wasted, since Surgeon Weymark paid the shooter for the heads. Rooke had seen Weymark’s watercolours, the stump where the kangaroo or opossum neck had been hacked off with the hatchet cunningly hidden in the picture by a spray of foliage.
    But the fact remained: supplies were running short.
    The mess cook spread the food out as he served it, to make it look more substantial. To Rooke, the stratagem suggested aninteresting calculation: how large a circle could be made with a given quantity of pease and salt beef?
    But whether thin or thick, whatever diameter its circle, and no matter how interesting the problem involving pi, the food was insufficient, because the