Read Online The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay - Free Book Online Page A

it was important to do—when you were making up a new piece of empire on the underside of the world.
    Weddings were a good start. Seven couples lined up and much was made of fine examples and healthy morality, particularly in the wake of the storm and the physical melee that had taken place under cover of its noise and confusion. But it was also important for the Governor to stand, at the end of the spate of marriages, and make clear the colony’s position on bread and wine. In this place, he announced, there was no such thing as transubstantiation; the bread and the wine of religious communion were always just bread and just wine, at no point turned into the literal body and blood of Christ. There would be no such magic, no such miracles. This had to be stated, and stated publicly; there was still some rancour among the Catholic convicts that they’d been transported without a priest and confessor, and it would do no good if they fell to practising their superstitious and transformative beliefs while no one was paying attention. Things like that could undermine a place as it tried to find its feet. Things like that could be perilous to order and advancement. The Governor’s voice whistled a little on words like ‘transubstantiation’—he was missing a front tooth—but everyone stood still enough, and looked at their feet and the dirt beneath them, and the sanctity of the moment was preserved.
    Yet at the base of his own quietly religious soul, it seemed to Dawes that if ever there was a venue for transformations, this might be it. Another week on, and the place itself stood so remarkably altered. There were more tents between the trees, the Governor’s portable canvas house sat larger and more sturdy, and the new leaves of the British-born plants were trying to make their way in newly regulated rectangular beds where everything had grown unchecked and untrammelled before. Coffee, indigo, the cactus that would deliver bright red cochineal from its bugs—these were the things expected to thrive. And now the year itself was turning towards what should be its autumn, while local leaves still sat greenly on their trees and only Dawes’s thermometer gave any indication of the seasonal transformation that must have been happening, in some other, less obvious way, all around them.
    â€˜Should we cheer for the newlyweds?’ asked Tench mischievously after the vicar had given the final benediction.
    â€˜We should cheer as much as possible,’ said John White, ‘or it’ll be groans of God give us strength.’ He’d have had more time for discussing the intricacies of bread and wine if he could have made anyone talk to him about where he might find some fresh vegetables, now that he had more than a thousand bodies ashore to care for. Yes, those vegetable beds were pressed with seeds and new green had sprung up here and there. Early sprouts looked promising, but even in the short time since ‘taking this place on for the empire,’ as the surgeon, an eyebrow raised, liked to put it, so many of those little leaves and buds had withered and failed, peas one week, cabbages the next.
    â€˜Anyway, marriage is as beneficial for the body as it is for the heart—do them all a power of good,’ the surgeon added. ‘I should have doled out a measure of lime juice for their wedding breakfast.’
    â€˜A delightful memory for them,’ said Tench. ‘A lovely thing to think of through their years together.’ Here they were, this group of men, learning each other’s tempers and humours, learning the footfall of one from the footfall of another, learning each other’s stories. It was less cosy to think that this would be the size of their company for who knew how long— just these men, just each other, and whatever the dimensions of this place proved to be. William Dawes had already calculated that the indigo-blue hills to the west were at