The George is one of those rabbit-warren inns, centuries old. The curved oak beams were once part of Tudor ships; now they supported crooked corridors, low doorways, unexpected steps. Not a straight wall in the place. Rochester’s room was the largest, but even here there was only space for a curtained bed with a chest at the end, a night table, a chair each side of the fire, and a low stool. Rochester was seated in one of the chairs with a dark crimson counterpane tucked around him. His right forearm was bandaged and he had a patch over one eye. He looked like a domesticated pirate, slightly ridiculous, sadly tamed. Dawlish was nodding in the opposite chair, but at our coming she pulled herself awake, bobbed a curtsey and went out. Jane motioned me to the empty chair, and placed herself on the stool close to Rochester. He took her hand in his good one and they sat for a moment beaming at each other as though they’d lost a farthing and found a shilling, as my father used to say. In the conversation that followed it was clear they were a mutual pair, a joint self. There would be no more talk of her leaving, marriage or not.
‘Mrs . . . Adair,’ said Rochester. ‘You see that Miss Eyre has appeared again, like the little witch she is. We have been making plans, deciding on a course of action in which we hope you will join us.’
I responded with a polite murmur but I was thinking about Jane, the subtle difference in her. She was as straight and determined as ever, but now with an easier, less defensive confidence.
‘We intend to make a sea voyage,’ Rochester was saying, ‘taking my . . . Bertha Mason with us. We hope you will accompany us as the invalid’s nurse and Miss Eyre’s companion.’
The West Indies, I thought with a lifting heart, Spanish Town. It would be like Italy and the South of France: olive trees, white houses, sunshine and grateful warmth. Bertha would be placed in some kindly mission convent, we would make a leisurely tour back to England through the Mediterranean . . .
‘I would be glad to,’ I replied. ‘I would be curious to see the West Indies.’
They looked at each other, smiling.
‘We do not go to the West Indies. Van Diemen’s Land is our destination.’
My astonishment amused them. Rochester explained that he had never been wholly satisfied with his father’s account of Rowland’s death and had set his lawyers to look into the matter. After much correspondence, they had discovered that when Rowland arrived in Spanish Town, he had fallen in love with Bertha and written to his father announcing his intention to give up his engagement to Lady Mary Faringdon and marry the heiress himself. It was this letter that made old Mr Rochester set off for the Indies so hurriedly. When he arrived, there had been a great quarrel and a scuffle between the two men, after which Bertha had been sent to a convent and Rowland had gone to Demerara. But it now seemed Rowland might have married Bertha before his father arrived.
‘Can you imagine my feelings when I heard this?’ said Rochester. ‘If it was true, then my own tie to Bertha was bigamous and invalid! My years of suffering were at an end. I was free! I wanted to believe but dared not hope. Everything hinged on whether my brother had married Bertha, and whether he was still alive when my marriage to her took place, or whether he had died in Demerara beforehand. When I came to know Jane, I told her I was enquiring into the death of my brother, but I could not explain why it was of such vital importance to me!’
Through Army records, his solicitors had discovered references to a Lieutenant Charles O’Hara Booth of the 21st Regiment, who had found Rowland mortally ill at Demerara. They hoped Booth might know more of the matter—might even know whether Rowland was alive now, and where he could be found. But the 21st was now in Van Diemen’s Land. Letters had been despatched months ago but no reply had come.
‘When Miss Eyre disappeared,’ Rochester glanced sideways to where she sat smiling at him, ‘I became sunk again in Stygian gloom.’ Jane took up the story. When she ran away from ‘Thornfield’, she had intended to visit her uncle in Madeira, as he had been urging in his letters. She had therefore gone to her uncle’s lawyer in London, only to discover that her uncle had died, leaving the largest part of his estate to her, and the residue to her cousins in England, whom she now heard of for the first time. She decided to visit them in the north, but could not forbear calling at Millcot on her way, to hear news of Rochester. In this way she had come to know of the fire.
Now Jane and Rochester had devised a new plan. ‘Thornfield’ was in ashes; there was no home for him until ‘Ferndean’ was refurbished, which would take many months. They would therefore travel to Van Diemen’s Land and enquire personally about Rowland. This would be far better than the exchange of letters over months, years. There was nothing to prevent such a journey, everything to recommend it.
At first I thought they were mad, but gradually I understood. In England they could not live in the same house until they learned the truth about the marriage. After the débâcle of their wedding, convention would frown on it. But on a ship, or in a distant country, who could object? They would not be the first people to take refuge in the colonies from an awkward situation at home. I was wondering why they did not leave Bertha Mason in England, but Rochester answered my thought.
‘I will not have it said that I abandoned my wife to die of neglect,’ he scowled. ‘For I must consider her to be my wife until the alternative is proved . . . And if she were to die while we were away, even of natural causes, there would be gossip. I will not have any vicious slur cast a shadow across my future with Miss Eyre.’
A transfigured smile from Jane.
‘When we discover the truth and can marry at last,’ Rochester continued (a leap of faith, I noted), ‘it will be in all bright honesty with no doubtful stain. Dr Carter assures me the sea voyage will do the invalid no harm. It may even be beneficial.’
They glowed by the fire like a pair of children planning a great adventure, brimming with mutual tenderness and passionate hope. A quest for the truth: that was how they saw it. Jane would be Rochester’s nurse, companion, faithful servant and protector. Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Sam Weller to his Pickwick, pageboy to Good King Wenceslas, gender notwithstanding. They would be together, that was the chief thing.
He was maimed, punished, repentant. She was rewarded for her suffering, burning with energy and joy. She would discover new worlds and give them to him. In the end there might be a husband for Bertha and a long-lost brother for Rochester, but if not, they could be together on land and sea for a year or two—and much might happen in that time. They had found each other again and England was too small to hold their need for each other. How could they keep still? The continent was tainted by Rochester’s life there with former mistresses, the West Indies a place of bitter memories. Where better to go than towards the unknown regions?
Some sober reflection must have followed, because a few days later Rochester decided a nurse-companion was not sufficient to safeguard Jane’s reputation on their travels, he must engage a lady’s maid as well. Jane laughed and said she never had any difficulty in doing up her own buttons. If he must add another member to the party, a doctor would be of more use. For Bertha, she said; but I believe she was thinking of Rochester’s own health.
The doctor they found, James Seymour, had served twice as Surgeon Superintendent on convict transports to New South Wales. Seymour was in England now, going back to stay permanently. Shipping agents found Rochester a private cargo vessel, the Adastra, embarking at Deptford for New South Wales in a month. He was not of a temperament to linger once he had decided on action.
Just as this was settled, St John Wallace came to stay at the George. He was one of the three cousins Jane had discovered through her uncle. They were the children of her mother’s stepsister, and all considerably older than Jane. St John was a clergyman recently home from missionary work in India. Both his sisters, Diana and Mary, were married and living in the north. When Jane wrote to tell them of her planned travel to the colony, St John replied saying he would come to Hay at once. Jane feared he would try to
dissuade her, but it proved quite otherwise. He wanted to join them. The meeting took place in the private parlour at the George, a room taken over for Rochester’s use now he was recovering. In my new role as Jane’s duenna, I sat at one side.
The first astonishment was St John Wallace’s appearance. He was so remarkably beautiful in face and figure that he might have been one of Nina’s actor friends made up as a hero, if perhaps a somewhat effeminate one. Jane said afterwards that he had the face of a marble angel on a tomb, but to me there was something too sensuous for an angel in the curve of the lips, the arch of the brows, the impression that Mr Wallace knew exactly the effect he had on others. My grandmother’s servant, old Sukie, would have called him ‘neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring’, and I was surprised when he said his wife regretted she had been unable to accompany him.
He regarded Jane’s letter as a Divine Direction. After three years in Delhi he had finished his report on missionary education in India and had been praying to be guided to his next service. Here it was. This journey to the colonies would allow him to make a similar study of the education afforded to convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. He had written to the Church Missionary Society, the Women’s League, Mrs Elizabeth Fry, the Anti-Transportation League, and the Wilberforce Committee. His salary would be paid by the Society for the Dissemination of the Bible in Foreign Parts.
‘Oh Lord,’ I heard Rochester mutter to Jane. ‘Now I am truly punished for my sins.’ She flashed him a warning smile but he only grumbled louder, ‘Are we to take with us every Tom, Dick and St John?’
Jane’s cousin heard it and looked startled. When he decided to laugh I began to like him. He turned his perfect profile downwards to a satchel and brought out a thick tract which he handed to Rochester: An Account of English Efforts in the Progress of Christian Education at Kolcuttah and etc. Among his friends at university, he said, were Mr William Broughton, now Bishop of Sydney, and Broughton’s close friend Mr William Hutchins, who had sailed with Sir John Franklin a year ago to be Archdeacon of Van Diemen’s Land.
Rochester groaned loudly and said, ‘But your wife, sir? So recently home from India, and looking forward, no doubt, to a lengthy period in England? Will she like another voyage so soon? And one fraught with peril of every description? I am told ladies’ hair does not grow well in the colony.’
St John smiled. ‘My wife will not object,’ he said. ‘And while I understand that my cousin Jane already has an able companion (the smile was turned in my direction), I believe Mrs Adair will also be occupied with nursing duties? Who better than my wife, then, to be a second companion and chaperone?’
‘A bulldog of a woman, no doubt,’ Rochester remarked in another audible aside to Jane, as St John Wallace bent over his satchel again. Louder still, Rochester said, ‘On your own head be it then, sir,’ and rose and limped ostentatiously from the room, feigning a greater degree of disability than he really had, and adding grimly that Mr Wallace must of course stay at the George Inn at their expense as long as he wished. Cousin Jane must get to know Cousin St John (this was said with a mad wicked laugh in Jane’s direction). But for himself, if Mr Wallace would excuse him, he had pressing business . . . elsewhere.
By late November our party was aboard the Adastra making our way down the Thames towards the Channel. England, with all its greatness and littleness, was falling behind in our widening wake. Ahead were strange islands.
5
MONTAGU ANSWERED BOOTH’S NOTE, ACCEPTING THE SUGGESTION that the Rochester matter could wait until Booth came up to Hobarton for the Hammond trial. But a week before that date, Hammond hanged himself in his cell and the trial was cancelled. A note from Montagu rearranged their meeting for the twenty-first of June. Booth would have liked it to be sooner. He was thinking about it too often. But on the sixteenth of June came a further postponement. This time no reason was given and no future date set. Did Montagu really think it of so little importance? Or was he, Booth, being left to stew in his own juice? Well, the answer was to try to forget it. There was plenty else to occupy him here.
Shelter had always been the most urgent task at Port Arthur. Timber had by necessity been used green, there being no time to let it season. As a consequence, all the wood in the buildings of the settlement was still half alive. It groaned and cracked like pistol shots in the night when the air cooled; it bent and sprang with every change of weather. On the second of July it began to rain and kept on for three days. Leaks announced themselves by ‘plick, plick’ in nearly every building. Swollen doors and windows stuck fast; the roof of the blacksmith’s forge sagged again; the cabbage crop was a-swim in the field. Seven hundred prisoners were confined, cold, bored. Booth plashed about directing repairs, mud sucking at his boots, his feet numb, water streaming from his tarpaulins, but not unhappy. The urgent practical work took his mind off other worries.
In Lempriere’s crowded cottage, Charlotte and the children placed buckets, pans and chamberpots under the drips. They stared up at stains blooming on the ceiling. Like a dog! No, an elephant! Very like a whale. Lempriere brought out the Shakespeare and read Hamlet aloud. Mary, nearly seven, suddenly enacted her own mad scene: a fit of violent temper. In the hospital up the hill, Casey supervised the removal of supplies out of the path of a clay-coloured stream twisting across the storeroom floor.
On the morning of the seventh the rain stopped, the sky turned blue and the semaphore picked up a signal. Captain Booth is required immediately at Hobarton. Booth was irritated to find his mind turn immediately to the Rochester letter. Half an hour later came a second message: Lieutenant Wharton Young drowned Little Swanport.
Booth’s throat and chest muscles seemed to constrict, bile rose into his mouth. He reached his cottage and shut himself in his room. Wharton. No, a mistake, surely. Wharton was such a strong swimmer. His father had been Governor of Trinidad in the 1820s and he’d swum every day. ‘Beauty’ Wharton, the serious one of their foursome, the youngest. Always Peddie, Picton Beate, Booth and Wharton Young. His elder brother Henry was also here in Van Diemen’s Land with the 52nd Regiment. Less than a year ago, Wharton had married Amy Fenn Kemp, a daughter of Mr Anthony Fenn Kemp, the prominent settler. It was Wharton’s horse Booth had ridden in the ‘Gentlemen’s Invitation’ on that mad day at Kilkenny races. A watery grave, a watery grave; he could not stop his mind from repeating it.
When he emerged they told him a third signal had come: Lieuts Stuart and MacKnight also required Hobarton. The Vansittart was coming down to the coal mines to collect them. The oddity of this distracted him. All three chief officers on the peninsula called up to town together? Unprecedented. On account of a regimental funeral for Wharton? Possibly, but strange, even so. Some shuffling of duties became necessary. Lempriere would take charge here at the main station. Casey must do the four-hour walk north with Booth to the coal mines to relieve Stuart. MacKnight must walk in from Eaglehawk Neck to the coal mines to meet them.
Booth set off with Casey just as the short winter day folded into red-gold dusk. The rain had stopped, the cold stung their faces and made their eyes water. Booth wore forage gear with his shako, which was easier to wear than carry, and it kept his head warm. The haversack on his back held his regimentals and the Rochester letter. He decided he would see Montagu, by hook or by crook. Wet black forest closed around them and he breathed in deeply its smell of fresh leaf mould. Tall pale trunks of the eucalypts gleamed like church pillars in the light from their lanterns.
Silence fell between them the first hour. Not hostile; preoccupied with the dark track, the rhythm of tramping. After a time they began talking about the dead man and his brother, about Amy Kemp and her father, the Kilkenny Races . . . They reached the coal mines at nine and found MacKnight already there. They had stew and potatoes and turned in at midnight, and at four in the morning they were up again, waiting for the sloop coming down Storm Bay from Hobarton. Soon after midday they were in Hobart in cold sunshine, walking up the hill into the Barracks. As the
y crossed the parade ground, Dr Pilkington came out of the infirmary. He was staff surgeon of the 21st Regiment and Lizzie’s stepfather.
‘Booth, my dear. What a terrible, sad shame it is,’ said the doctor. His tumbling black Irish curls were streaked with grey. ‘I pity his father and his brother. Poor Wharton! And poor little Amy Kemp. A wife not hardly a minute and a widow now! And Private Tribute drowned too. Did you know that? Wharton’s body comes down the coast today. Post-mortem tomorrow.’
Booth grimaced and felt sorrow overcoming him again, the weakness of tears. He looked back down the estuary, towards the way he had come. Blue hills and sea, pale beaches. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Sure and they say the boat swamped in the waves as it came near the strand.’
They stood a moment in silence before the doctor asked, ‘Is it this has brought you to town, Charles? This terrible thing?’
‘I suppose so. A summons, no explanation. The funeral perhaps . . . but it’s odd that Stuart and MacKnight should be called as well. Unless there’s something else? Have you heard anything?’
The doctor raised his eyebrows and beckoned Booth aside to a place where a short section of waist-high stone wall offered the opportunity to lean and look down at Government House and the cove.
‘And that I have. It’s as much of a secret as anything ever is in this place—which means only a dozen people know it. The Twenty-first is recalled. They’ll give us a twelvemonth to pack up and settle our traps, I suppose.’
Booth said nothing. His mind had been so filled with Wharton’s death that he’d forgotten this possibility. Now it felt like a blow to the gut, like hearing of another death.
‘Five years,’ Pilkington was saying. ‘It was in my mind they would keep us longer here.’
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