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

least forty miles distant, if not fifty, and that distance had begun to feel as far as it was possible to imagine to men who only weeks before had managed always to keep in mind the thousands of miles that lay between the wake of their ships and England.
    â€˜To the newlyweds, then,’ said White. And the men cheered, almost seriously, each one with a wedding day to remember cast straight back to it. ‘And how’s your locket, Lieutenant?’ The surgeon turned to one of the younger men, who might not have wanted the entire company to know that he carried a portrait of his wife on a necklace of ribbon, that he kissed it every night, and so fervently that he was afraid of wearing the image away altogether. But there seemed no use denying it, and he ignored the snickering to announce that it would be his own wedding anniversary in a month or so, and he hoped they would all toast the happiness of his marriage then.
    White slapped him on the knee. ‘That’s it, sir—don’t let them mock you,’ as if he himself would have been the last person ever to mention the matter in public.
    â€˜I’m sure most of us have a locket, one way or another,’ said Tench, but gently. ‘Some keepsake to hold as a little piece of the rest of the world.’ He had his own memento of his father, dead four years ago, almost to the day, and he nodded his head to acknowledge him under this vast new sky.
    â€˜I dream less of her now,’ the young man with the locket confessed, as if there was some relief in saying anything aloud about his wife. ‘And sometimes I’m afraid when she turns to look at me she’ll be one of those intemperate hussies we brought out here.’
    â€˜That’s the way of it,’ said the surgeon. ‘That or these tales I already hear of convicts taking up with the Indians, however many beads and mirrors that might be worth.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Although I suspect such encounters are taken more than exchanged.’ He turned back to the young man. ‘But not to worry, you’ve got your little picture to remind you of the right face, whoever you wake up with’—and a great ‘ho’ of merriment surged over the young man’s outrage that anyone could suggest such a thing.
    A little apart from the group, William Dawes smiled sympathetically. ‘When I woke this morning, just for a moment, I couldn’t remember my father’s face—it was only a moment, but . . .’ He raked his fingers through his thin hair; the moment had been breathtakingly unnerving. ‘Be thankful for your locket, Lieutenant. I’m sure you will see her properly a while yet.’
    The young man blushed, Tench coughed, and the surgeon puffed his cheeks full of air and held it there. ‘If it’s seeing things properly,’ he said, ‘I was coming back from visiting the Governor this afternoon, and a woman stopped me in a state of some distress: said she’d seen an alligator running between the tents, and that it was the second one she’d seen in a fortnight.’
    â€˜An alligator?’ Dawes shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to see the surgeon’s face more clearly. ‘What kind of an alligator?’
    â€˜A fourteen-foot one,’ said John White, ‘as opposed to the eight-foot animal she’d seen the week before last. A very sane woman, I’d say on the whole, but she was adamant about this.’
    â€˜I think it would be quite comforting to see an alligator at the moment,’ Tench said carefully. ‘Almost everything we see is so new, at least an alligator would be a thing we might find somewhere else, a thing from some known part of the world.’
    â€˜I’m not sure I’d like to find one getting about in my tent, sir,’ said the surgeon. ‘And certainly not one that ran to fourteen feet.’
    â€˜True, but I had one of your birds laugh at me for the