Chapter 4

The men arrived early the next day, Eliza was washing in the small waterfall that tumbled down near their encampment. Reverend Treherne made a point of not looking at her smooth naked body, her perfectly rounded buttocks, her small pert breasts with delightfully large red cherries surmounting them, and definitely not noticing her red slit at the front which was hardly hidden by the sparse hair growing there. Woolley and Lord Loam looked, did a double take, and then were throughly distracted by seeing Lady Elspeth Loam run to her hut holding her breasts to stop them flying in all directions.

“Gentlemen, welcome. So good to see you so keen to help in our enterprise. Please, sit here. I fear you have discombobulated some of the ladies. I can see we shall have to be more organised. Here, this is a kind of bread we are experimenting with from grinding some large seeded grasses.” Woolley thought ‘I saw those grasses when looking for wood, why did I not think of them as substitute corn?’ “Are you well enough? I think if I build another hut here then we might switch to improve your accomodation before I build others. I really think we are all doing well.”

“This bread is good Crichton, you are to be congratulated.”

“Thank you, like some uncivilised tribe, we are reverting to woman’s and man’s work. The women took turns to grind the corn between stones. I fear if we were here too long we would grind out teeth rather on the stone dust that is included. But as to the visiting. Perhaps we might delay you arrival until the sun reaches the ridge on the hill? That way the ladies can be prepared for you. Ah, here is Elspeth.”

“My love, how goes it?” Lord Loam asked.

“I am well thank you. You took me by surprise.” Crichton excused himself to go and help two of the women moving some logs to clear a space for another hut. “He likes us to be be bare chested once we are properly part of his harem. I must say it is quite liberating, but I do rather wobble.” The three men looked at her chest, now loosely covered, and looked rapidly away as each thought of what delights were beneath the thin fabric. Reverence Treherne realised to his shame that his interest in art in London was more to do with looking at the naked bodies used in modelling the classical themes in some of the pictures. He resolved not to look at his intended in that way; but then hoped that he might accidentally see just the same view of her that he had had of both Lady Loam and Eliza. Luckily the lack of underwear meant his physical reaction was not visible.

Crichton returned and they agreed the various low skilled (but needed) tasks to be accomplished. They finished their bread, observing that there was indeed grit in the flour. They all agreed to thinking about how to reduce that. Perhaps some stones would be better than others.

Crichton went about building another hut, this would be for Agatha he said. They assumed from that that she would be the next to have his attention. Was it acceptable for him to be playing with such young women? Mary approached and mildly suggested that perhaps it was not. “But Mary, you did not object to me bedding Eliza.”

“It was too late for her.”

“As it is for Agatha, Unless she can learn survival skills very quickly. If she was much young, come to that if it had been Jane [Mary looked none the wiser] – the scullery girl, she is only twelve I believe. Well then I would have perhaps held back. But Eliza was willing and I was too. To treat your sister differently hardly speaks of our increasingly egalitarian society does it? Anyway, they are both only a year younger than society deems appropriate. We make our own rules here.” ‘You make the rules, not us’ she thought. Mary gave up and went back to scrapping the seagull skins. They would make potential leather clothing, Crichton thought. The hut took shape and inside a small raised dais was created out of sand. In a corner, he dug a hole “There, you won’t need to go down the beach in the night.”

“You mean I should? In that hole? I’m not sure.”

“Up to you. Here, have some coconut milk.” The men delivered some firewood and went away with a load of fish to scrape the scales from. How he managed to catch fish was still a mystery. It was as well it remained so. He used human excrement to lure the fish in to nibble at the tasty treats, Some were caught, some were not; those that were not happily came back for more. A turtle that had lost its way and got trapped in the small atoll was caught and butchered. He wasn’t sure whether smoking, baking or roasting was best. The shell might well be useful for broiling or boiling, he wasn’t sure of that either. The point was to experiment. The men just made vague attempts at experimentation without thinking through the options, the women (including Eliza he was sorry to see) could not get their heads around the idea of not knowing and then trying ideas out. It would be another generation, perhaps, before women started to try ideas to see what worked; though there were exceptions of course.

Leaving the women’s ‘enclosure’ as it was coming to be known, he walked across the headland and began to organise the larger, more robust hut for the males. A palm tree stood out on the beach a little way, surrounded by sand. Somehow it had remained when a storm had washed away the frail topsoil and smaller trees. In time they might recolonise the upper beach but in the meantime he used that to create a wider circle of branches around it, each bound to the central trunk and to each other. The result was a hut that was perhaps three or four times the floor area of the huts he was building for the women. They each needed their own hut whereas the men would share. Not for the first time he wondered if these three would ever rebel and take their women back and force him back to the role of servant/slave. Well, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. So far they seemed docile and obedient to this new monarchy with him as the king.