Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  At the Forster ménage there were no ‘made’ dishes. Brown Windsor soup, a plate piled with slabs of oily fish, the bloody beef, pot-greens. Cold mutton at the side, jugs of floury gravy, boiled potatoes and turnips. Honest barrack-room fare.

  Charles Swanston was a man Booth found less easy to read than the others. He was older than most of the Arthur faction, nearly fifty now, and still called Captain by many—although as with Montagu and Forster, the title was now honorary. Like them, he had sold out of the Army years ago. Swanston was Director of the Derwent Bank and a prominent figure in Hobart. He had famously, in the year ’14, ridden from Scutari to Baghdad carrying vital despatches. One thousand five hundred miles in forty-eight days. An average of thirty-one miles a day in unbearable heat. How could you survive that? Pity the poor horses. Those bad-tempered tough little Indian hill-ponies, probably.

  Montagu would not have approved of the conversation here; the humour was broad, vulgar, especially from Forster. He told an obscene story about a local widow and an apple. Swanston did not comment, but Booth thought he saw disgust in those cool eyes. Forster was choking with hilarity. He had drunk a great deal, but was one of those men who appear almost unaltered until they keel over, except for a purpling of the face and a tendency to be tediously persistent and increasingly unintelligible on some topic. Forster’s was horses. He was trying to persuade them to join him in buying a racehorse called Lady Dancer.

  ‘I’m not interested, Forster,’ said Swanston.

  ‘Thirds, then,’ said Forster. ‘You, Booth. Fifty pounds shall buy you a leg of a Lady Dancer.’ He winked, hung his tongue out, mock panting.

  ‘Too rich for me,’ Booth smiled.

  ‘Gi’ me y’r note of hand, tha’ll do. Wha’ say?’

  Booth kept smiling, shook his head.

  ‘Nonsense,’ growled Forster. ‘A bachelor may borrow, I s’pose? Swanston here’ll lend it you. Apply Derwen’ Bank first thing in mornin’. See good terms for Booth, eh Swanston? A li’l below goin’ rate? Nag’ll make y’r fortune.’

  ‘I heard that too often in Ireland,’ smiled Booth again. Forster had been in Limerick for fourteen years after the War. He should know how many men had been ruined by trusting in horses. But Forster continued to urge.

  ‘Leave the man alone, Forster,’ said Swanston lazily. ‘You’re being a bore. Booth knows his own business best. Perhaps you should take a leaf from his book.’

  Forster muttered oaths, drank more, recovered his humour.

  At the Mess the following night, Booth lost money at cards. He went to see his agent the next morning, and by the end of their conversation had decided he definitely could not afford to get married—so he might as well buy the pretty little spy-glass, which was not expensive for the beautiful thing it was. It would be useful to have a second one.

  Wharton’s funeral was at three o’clock on the Wednesday. Afterwards Booth dined with the Pilkingtons, who for the first time left him alone with Lizzie after the meal. He understood; he was now to be treated as a suitor. The Pilkingtons would leave with the Regiment for India in a year. Decisions must be made, a little pressure applied. A year was barely long enough for an engagement. Young ladies and their mamas must have time to fuss. Lizzie’s black curls were tied each side with little blue satin bows. She was little herself: small, white and soft, sweet and sharp. Everything was going swimmingly until he mentioned to her that he’d dined with the Forsters. And then, how did the mood change so quickly?

  Lizzie said, ‘Poor Mrs Forster, how she must suffer.’ Booth did not like this but did not speak quickly enough to stop it. Lizzie rattled on about Forster’s fondness for low company, villains and ‘ladies of the pavement’ as the newspapers called them. Booth said with a frown that it was not a fit subject—and yet he knew he had laughed over equally dangerous gossip with her before. Lizzie made a face at him and said (her accent so droll, so irresistible he’d let her talk at other times just to hear it) had he not seen the Courier?

  Forster was known to visit the ‘ladies’ house in Harrington Street, which was under the protection of Constable Tulip Wright. Such comical things were written in the newspapers when the constable married the daughter of the licensee of the public house next door. A ‘he-Tulip and a she-Tulip’ the paper called them, they were such dandies. You never saw such costumes. But Mrs Lowe, who ran the cat-house, claimed he had promised to marry her. She took ‘Tulip’ to court. Not for breach of promise, but on some trumped up charge—and Forster, a good friend to ‘Tulip’, had made sure the Constable was acquitted!

  Lizzie laughed and her glossy black ringlets shook. She was playing with her small male lapdog, stroking its belly almost up to its prick, her hand delicate and smooth. Booth felt the stirring of arousal in his body even as his mind became deeply uneasy. He knew she was only doing what young girls do, showing off a pretended worldliness. But he said again, perhaps too severely, that these things were hardly fit to speak of, that newspapers and gossipers should mind their tongues. Lizzie was surprised and angry.

  ‘But sure everyone knows it’s the truth!’ she cried. Booth was silent. Lizzie grew angrier still. ‘Forster has given his wife a pox.’

  Booth rose and left then, thinking perhaps Lizzie was too Irish for him. All the Irish are wild at heart, even the educated ones. It’s the old lawless mad poet-warrior in them. He was glad to be going ‘home’ to the peace of the peninsula. A man needed eyes in the back of his head and the diplomacy of a Machiavelli for the intrigues of Hobarton. Well, at least the Rochester matter was buried, that was the chief thing. He did not like to think too much about how that desirable conclusion had been reached, but the relief remained. He could try to forget it again, and with it, all his past sins.

  6

  THE ADASTRA SAILED FROM DEPTFORD THAT NOVEMBER IN A grey drizzle of rain and we were all aboard, Jane and Rochester, Bertha and I—and unexpectedly, Adèle. Jane kept close to Rochester, her arm in his. He looked like a portrait of Napoleon, maimed hand thrust inside his jacket, a black patch over one eye. Surly, saturnine, damaged enough to wring the heart of any woman. Almost any woman.

  Bertha lay motionless on the narrow bunk down in the cabin she was to share with me, still profoundly asleep—as indeed she had been through all the difficult journey from the George Inn. She had been brought aboard strapped to a litter carried by four crewmen; did not wake even when the pallet was tipped almost vertical to allow its descent below decks. The carriers showed a furtive curiosity. One crossed himself. They backed out of the cabin hurriedly as soon as she was in the bunk. She was travelling as Mrs Rowland Rochester, sister-in-law to Mr Edward Rochester. ‘The unfortunate sleeping lady,’ Captain Quigley said. It sounded to me like a freak show at a country fair.

  Adèle was a late addition to our party. Two weeks before our departure, Jane and I travelled to her boarding school to say farewell, and found her despondent, runny-nosed and weepy, utterly unlike herself. The female headmistress soothed and simpered until Jane seemed persuaded that these were the predictable results of a spoilt child settling in. While they were speaking, Adèle fixed her eyes on mine for a long pleading moment and then hung her head. I was suddenly hot and desperate and began incautiously, ‘Miss Eyre, I wonder . . .’ without really knowing what to say, when the male superintendent, who was also present, made a foolish mistake. Raising his voice to speak over mine (I was clearly some sort of dependent, almost invisible, certainly inaudible), he said with a tolerant smile (patronising, unctuous, odious) that it was only natural for Miss Eyre to be worried. Miss Eyre was herself so young, so recently out of the schoolroom, that she could hardly be expected to understand the strict discipline necessary in the education of young girls. He thought this a compliment, even a joke. ‘Spare the rod and we spoil the child, do we not, Miss Eyre?’ he added, leering at her with terrible levity.

  He could not know how badly Jane had suffered during her own school days, but he should have noticed the sombre stare she gave him. She loo
ked away down the drab corridor as though seeing into her past. Her narrow form became even straighter. Her chin rose dangerously, her green eyes regarded him calmly with hidden thoughts like a cat. She asked to see the dormitory: a grim place, prison-grey, bare and bitingly cold. She asked to see the kitchen, which occasioned some flurry and vain attempts to dissuade her. The rank bouquet of odours in here began with the sickly reminder of many ancient meals in which grease had formed a large part. Boiled cabbage, something rancid, something acridly burned. Undernotes of mildewy dankness from the stone pantry, the sour reek of a sweating cook, a whiff of fear from the thin scullery maid.

  Jane asked to see the library and discovered the miserable shelf of books did not include a copy of Bewick’s A History of British Birds, nor a single volume by Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron. Adèle was therefore with us on the Adastra, pale and slightly subdued but recovering swiftly. When she hugged me fiercely I said, ‘Awful, was it?’ She rolled her eyes and emitted a burst of indecipherable French.

  We boarded the ship in elevated spirits, our nervous excitement enough to carry us through the early discomforts. I was to share a cabin with Bertha; Jane with Adèle. The ship had eight small cabins and two large ones, each of the latter taking half the wide stern window. One of these was the Captain’s, the other was to be Rochester’s. The small cabins were four each side, with a narrow row of storage lockers along the centre between them. An open space amidships served as general saloon and dining room.

  Captain Quigley, a Yorkshireman of perhaps forty-five, weathered-looking, gentlemanly, was preoccupied with the ship’s loading and departure, but he declared himself eager to arrange whatever might add to our comfort; and he was as good as his word in directly having the louvred panel in my cabin door repaired. The cabins were like wooden cells. The smell from the forward privvies, the ‘heads’, came and went with eddies of rain and wind. Everything felt damp and clammy. Most difficult to bear were the noises and the continual nauseous motion. At the Hall I had become accustomed to the quietness of wealth, but here on the ship was perpetual din: bells, shouts, hammerings, violent thumps. And always the rhythmic creaking and grating of timbers, the slop and drip of water.

  The wife of the bosun, Mrs Farley, appeared with her sister Mrs Tench. There did not appear to be a Mr Tench, or if there was, he was never mentioned. The women wore canvas trousers under short skirts, with men’s waistcoats and gold earrings. They lived a subterranean—or rather subaqueous—life in the lowest orlop, and would be our stewardesses for the voyage.

  I left Jane and Adèle unpacking boxes to be ‘struck below’ when empty, and went next door to arrange Bertha’s and my own belongings in the drawers under the bunks and on the hooks around the wooden walls. A knock came as I was finishing; it was Rochester with Dr Seymour. I had assumed the doctor would be an older man, but James Seymour was my own age, brown-haired, brisk and smiling. Rochester left us, saying the doctor would examine his patient. The cabin being dim, they had brought a lamp, which Seymour asked me to hold for him. He pulled the covers back from Bertha’s large form, rolling them to the end of the bunk.

  ‘You have been this lady’s nurse for several years?’ he asked. ‘Were you formerly employed at a bedlam?’

  ‘No, sir. I nursed my stepmother and husband before they died.’

  He nodded, already examining Bertha’s face and hair, turning her head gently in both his hands, lifting back her lips to look at her teeth. He peered into her eyes, pulling down each eyelid. Had she been used to taking laudanum, paregoric, chloral? Spirits, wine, ale? How much? Other medicaments? What did I give her now? Had she had monthly courses during my time with her? I told him she had not. He looked at me curiously.

  ‘Mr Rochester tells me there are times when this woman is violent, dangerous to herself and others. Were you not afraid of her when you first came there?’

  I said I had been pleased to have the situation, and Seymour frowned but made no reply. Between finger and thumb he took up a pinch of Bertha’s skin, which was sagging where she had begun to lose flesh. Dispassionately, he examined her heavy brown body, her private parts. He tapped her chest, listened to the beating of her heart.

  Straightening, he said, ‘I would scarcely have believed it if I had not seen it. She has been well cared for. Is that your doing? Dr Carter speaks highly of you in his letter. Or else she has a remarkable constitution. Both, perhaps. What became of her child? Did it survive?’

  ‘Child?’ It took me a moment to understand. ‘I did not know she had borne a child.’

  He frowned again, more deeply this time, and said, ‘Then you must forget again. Dr Carter assures me you have his full confidence, and therefore I assumed . . . It was foolish of me. Can I rely on your discretion?’

  A child. Rochester’s? Rowland’s? Had it survived? I wondered whether Rochester knew.

  On the third day the Adastra dropped down to the Nore, but we ran afoul of another ship’s anchor lines and there was more delay. Three more days swinging slowly at anchor again, waiting for wind and tide. New passengers came aboard in a confusion of baggage, chatter, and introductions, and swept down to occupy the starboard cabins.

  The first group was a family, a portly elderly couple, the Chesneys, with a plump two-year-old, Natty, his sister Polly, about the same age as Adèle, and a slightly older, pale, starved-looking girl. Mrs Chesney’s round face beamed from within a black coalscuttle bonnet. The ribbons and shawl-ends of her mourning costume rippled in the damp wind. Her husband was a farmer in Van Diemen’s Land. They had returned to the old country to settle up the affairs of a married son who had died in the cholera, and were now returning to the colony with their two orphaned grandchildren. The thin girl was Liddy, a new nursery maid.

  ‘Workhouse,’ mouthed Mrs Chesney, her head turned towards me and away from the girl, whose pinched face revealed nothing as she clutched the squirming Natty in her arms. When shouts and whistles heralded our moving at last, we gathered along the wet rails to watch everything familiar slide away behind us into the past. Rochester, Jane and I stood together, with Adèle holding my hand. Dr Seymour talked with a gentleman introduced as Mr Robert McLeod, a gingery Scotsman—brought up in Liverpool by an English mother, I heard him say, explaining his absence of brogue. No sign of St John Wallace and his wife. They had come aboard, the Captain said, but remained below.

  Rochester said quietly to Jane, ‘Now you will feel the pang of quitting England. It is only when leaving that one comprehends fully what it means to belong to the greatest nation on earth.’

  ‘We take that England with us,’ Jane replied, looking up at him.

  ‘True,’ Rochester agreed. ‘And yet you will find that as we sail further away, it is hard to keep hold on the idea of England. Then one may be seized with the violent yearning to see it again; the castles and green fields, the old cobbled towns and village steeples.’

  All we could see from the ship at that moment was the cluttered harbour receding. An English watercolour day: fine rain beading our capes and jackets; softening outlines into mist. A red muffler sang against shifting November greys. Certainly the cottages and castles were there, but so too were the new railway-cuttings being torn through the landscape, the smoke-billowing mills of new red-brick manufactories.

  That evening, after Mrs Chesney and I had settled the children in their bunks, she confided that she knew McLeod, and his case was a sad one. He had lived in Van Diemen’s Land for seven years with a wife and child. He had been by turns a schoolmaster and a newspaperman, a farmer-settler, and a senior clerk in the Colonial Office. But his wife had disliked the colony. She had been brought up in a town—Gloucester, from memory—and had found their property too lonely and strange. After a time she had refused to set foot outside her house. McLeod took her back to England, but she and her son had died of the scarlet fever last winter, leaving him free to return now to the island.

  Dinner was soon the centre of every aimless day on the Adastra, for the passe
ngers, at least. Captain Quigley frequently joined us for the meal, at one o’clock in the afternoon, according to naval habit. The Captains whom Quigley had served under during the War had always taken their dinner after the noon soundings. Newfangled post-war Captains might think it fashionable to take their dinner at four o’clock—or heaven forbid, at six! He saw no reason to change.

  ‘You’ll have to watch out, Quigley, steamships’ll be overtaking you soon,’ said Mr Chesney with loud good humour, talking and eating with equal force.

  ‘It’ll be a while before steamers make these long hauls, Mr Chesney, if ever they do,’ said Quigley equably. ‘They’re useful in their way, but sail will hold its place.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I’ve a mind to put summat in steam. Ain’t I right, doctor? You was a ship’s surgeon?’

  Seymour nodded. ‘Even so, ships for me are pretty things seen from the shore, never comparable with terra firma.’

  ‘Well then, sir, a question on your own ground.’ Mr Chesney thumped his waistcoat under his ribs. ‘There’s times when I get the devil of a pain there . . .’

  ‘Indigestion, sir?’ asked the doctor. The Chesneys rolled with laughter.

  Mr Chesney waved away the grey soups, vegetable in the first days, then pea or fish, which began each meal. He lived on boiled beef and dumplings with lavish helpings from his own jars of pickle, and slices off his own great yellow moon of cheese, which he brought to the table and offered generously about.