Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  ‘Well, McLeod, you sold your property afore you left—and regret it now, I warrant? Wasn’t you at the Pitt Water, neighbour with Robertson?’

  Chesney gave an appreciative laugh, and added, ‘Mr Gilbert Robertson, there’s a rum ’un. Gen’leman farmer, newspaperman—and Lord knows what else. In the Black Wars, being a bit short of o’ the ready at the time, he took Guv’ner Arthur’s wages for leading out a Roving Party to bring in Chief Eumarrah—and then what does he do but get up in court and defend the prisoner! “Eumarrah and his people are rightful owners of this island,” says Robertson, “and what they’re doing now is defending it from the invader—which is us, see?” Well, Guv’ner Arthur didn’t like that—so bang goes Robertson back in the jug again, where he’d been afore on account o’ libel and slander agin the Guvment. And now he’s bin an’ bought another newspaper, I hear.’

  ‘There are seven newspapers in the island,’ said Mrs Chesney proudly, ‘though the way news and gossip go around, you wonder why we need any.’

  After the meal, Chesney took snuff and a number of tots of the Captain’s rum and told us he and Mrs Chesney had gone out in the year ’10. Hobart Town was still called ‘the Camp’ in those days.

  ‘There was nothing but tents, a few huts, and the Gov’ment store. It had only been settled six years, o’course.’

  ‘We would have starved but for kangaroo our first year,’ Mrs Chesney said.

  ‘Eighteen-oh-four they sent a party down from New South Wales to settle it. An’ only because they thought the French was about ter grab it.’

  Mrs Chesney explained how to make kangaroo soup in a Papin’s Patent Digester, and Mr C’s favourite, kangaroo ‘steamer’, a stew of salt pork and kangaroo.

  ‘Aye,’ he nodded. ‘With a slice of pease pudding there’s nowt to equal it.’

  He speared another piece of cheese with his knife, and smiling widely, said Mrs Chesney would have it that cheese was considered common nowadays, servant’s prog. But he’d been partial to it all his born days. It went with the pickle. Like him and Mrs Chesney, different as chalk and cheese, yet they’d got on right as a trivet for over forty years. Mrs Chesney smiled broadly and said she’d like to know which he thought she was, pickle or cheese or chalk?

  ‘Ah,’ he said, nodding, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Pickle, my dear. Full of divers fruits and spices, ha, ha! The cheese is me, round and plain. Yeller I may be, but green I ain’t! If you’d seen a halfer what we’ve seen . . .’

  He shook his head at the impossibility of conveying his strange experiences and went on to describe the occasion on which a neighbour had had his arm shot away by a bushranger.

  Mr Rochester and Jane listened to all this in reserved silence, until Chesney, when he finished his story, began to question Rochester about the ‘sleeping lady’. Rochester replied curtly, barely civil. Yet Chesney persisted, and McLeod, too, appeared curious, until Rochester clearly made up his mind to be rid of the subject. With stony emphasis he gave the same careful account of Bertha’s misfortunes that he had given to St John Wallace: her marriage to his brother Rowland when she was just out of a convent; Rowland’s death, which had precipitated her into madness, followed by years in ‘private seclusion’; and then a fit, a fall, leading to her present state of suspended animation. He made no mention of his own marriage to her.

  He finished by saying he was travelling to the colony because his brother may not have died in the West Indies, as the family had believed, but in Van Diemen’s Land. ‘It is a painful story,’ he added coldly, ‘but no mystery. I have explained thus far in deference to an interest perhaps natural among fellow travellers—and to avoid impertinent speculation. Any further discussion would be offensive to me.’ Mr Chesney was silenced, for the time being at least.

  After that conversation, Jane and Rochester spent most of their days in Rochester’s private saloon, even taking their meals there. The weather, moderate while we were in the Thames, grew wilder as we headed for the Bay of Biscay. As the Adastra dipped into the black troughs of the sea, bucking and rolling her way up again to the foaming peaks, a terrible nausea arose in me. I crawled down to my bunk and there followed days and nights when I remember only the swirling wooden walls, ghastly retching and illness. Mrs Tench bathed my head with vinegar-water and gave me some vile dose.

  When I finally woke one morning feeling I might live, the walls still creaked but the gale was over. I went on deck, righting myself against the plough and rise of the ship. The salt wind sucked away my breath, pulled at my clothes and filled me with sudden elation. Adèle and Polly Chesney chattered at my skirts, recounting all they had done while I was ill, and the ship heeled on towards a bare horizon. Later, lurching back down between decks, I came upon the Captain and Mr Chesney arguing. Robert McLeod stood listening, directly in my path.

  ‘The cargo is right enough, Chesney,’ the Captain was saying. ‘There’s been no great shift or we’d feel it in the lie of her.’

  ‘It ain’t that I question your judgement, Quigley, but I sh’d like to go down and see for meself. No need for you to come. Give me a feller with a light who knows his way. I need nowt else.’

  ‘I’ve no man to spare just now. The gale’s done its usual prying and loosening—nothing too bad, but extra work until all’s set right again.’

  ‘Ah, Mrs Adair,’ said Chesney noticing me, half-joking. ‘You’re a stout-hearted woman? Not afraid of the dark places below? You’ll fetch a lantern down to the hold wi’ me while I look about? McLeod here won’t disobey the Captain, and my wife would do it but she don’t care for rats.’

  ‘Mrs Adair,’ said the Captain. ‘I’m glad to see you well again.’

  ‘It’s too early for mutiny, Chesney,’ said McLeod. ‘Mrs Chesney won’t like to see you hung from the yardarm. Not that I don’t sympathise. I’ve been thinking of my books down there. Five hundred books, and reams of paper.’

  ‘Five hundred volumes?’ I repeated.

  ‘Part of the Earl of Bylaugh’s family library. My father was the Earl’s land agent and I spent a good deal of time there when I was young. When I went back I found the books going to auction.’

  ‘That’s an immense cargo,’ I said.

  ‘It’s nowt,’ said Chesney. ‘I’ve three thousand feet of building timber down there, mahogany windows and doors, two cottage pianofortes, twenty bolts of cloth, two harps. I sh’ll make a penny or two in Hobarton. A’course, there might be damage, as what I’m saying to the Captin. The china, for instance. A dozen porcelain dinner services packed in straw and feather bolsters: who knows how they’ve fared?’ He looked gloomy, then brightened. ‘The engine’ll be none the worse. A steam engine for Hoskinson’s flour mill. You’d be interested in that, McLeod.’

  Conversation about the cargo dominated the meal that evening. Jane and Rochester were not present but the Wallaces came in at last. They had been as ill as I and both looked pale. Jane and I had briefly wondered together about St John’s wife; had he chosen a homely-looking girl or someone as beautiful as himself? The latter, I saw now. Louisa Wallace’s thick, heavy golden hair and dark brows and lashes made you remember the Viking blood in England. Her features were regular, her complexion of pearly English fairness, her eyes as blue as speedwells. She and St John were as well matched as a pair of china figurines. Or bookends rather, since they did not look at one another and there was a sense of constraint between them.

  ‘They have quarrelled while they were ill, no doubt,’ Mrs Chesney whispered.

  ‘You have to furnish a whole country,’ Mr Chesney continued between mouthfuls. ‘If the colony has no history, bring the history with you. We’ve no castles in the island, no ruins, do y’see? No building older than thirty years.’

  He seemed to be arguing that his cargo was a service to society. The colony must be made into a new England. He was bringing the furniture, windows, piannyforties and such, and soon Hobart Town would be just like Lunnon. He didn’t claim to be book-learned—he was a
sight too busy to be reading all day, but he liked a gurt big picture with plenty of action. A sea-battle, or Waterloo Field, or such. Looked well in the dining room and made summat to talk of when you was sat by some mule-ish dinner guest with nowt to say for hisself.

  St John Wallace frowned and said he hoped Hobarton would never be exactly like London. ‘Why transport the poverty, the divisions of wealth and rank? Why not learn from our mistakes and build a better city?’

  I was about to defend London, but McLeod said, ‘Then you are a follower of Edward Wakefield? He seems to think it possible to construct a perfect England in the colonies. I doubt it, myself.’

  ‘I deplore Wakefield’s ideas,’ St John answered. ‘He tries to persuade the British Government to let him buy land cheap from the native peoples and sell it to men of his own choosing—generally one of his brothers—who will form a governing rank. An oligarchy, no less. Most of his papers on the subject were written while Wakefield was in prison for abducting an heiress—running off with her before she came of age. Can you trust a man like that? Besides, he and his followers persecute the Church Missionary Society, of which I am a member, because we question both the legality and the humanity of what he proposes.’

  McLeod shrugged. ‘His settlement in South Australia does not progress quite as he wanted, apparently. His latest venture is the New Zealand Company. He’s managed to persuade some influential men to join him. Sir William Molesworth is one—although for myself I don’t understand how Molesworth can be allowed to chair a Committee on the colonies and at the same time enter into a commercial arrangement with Wakefield.’

  Chesney stared at the men as if they were speaking Double Dutch, and then said, ‘Brought anything besides books and paper, eh, McLeod? Summat to make a bit o’ brass?’

  McLeod smiled. Only a printing press. He hoped to begin another newspaper with his friend, Dr Ross. Hence the paper, too. There was a shortage of it in the island and in New South Wales.

  ‘And you, sir?’ Chesney asked St John.

  ‘Nothing you would term cargo,’ said St John Wallace, smiling, ‘Only what I carry in my head. In my view we should revel in the fact that Van Diemen’s Land has no famous battlefields steeped in ancient blood, no rotten or pocket boroughs held in the grip of some titled family. Here is the chance to create a new way of life. Not perfect—we shall never be that while we are on earth, but better than before.’

  ‘Brought no cargo?’ exclaimed Chesney. It sounded to him as though Wallace and McLeod had brought the heaviest cargo in the world—ideas, notions. And Radical ones, at that. ‘It’s a wonder we’re not listing summat terrible. It’s not the cargo we’ve to worry about, it’s your brains a-turning on your pillow of a night!’

  7

  NOTHING CAME FROM LIZZIE ON BOOTH’S BIRTHDAY, LATE IN August. Last year she had sent him a booklet of flannel pen-wipers embroidered with a purple flower. Since that midwinter visit he’d been up to town twice, briefly, and both times had sent a note asking if he could call. No reply. The second time he’d looked for Pilkington at the Barracks, but the doctor was visiting the Orphan School at New Town that week. Booth told himself it was just as well: he could not afford to marry and that was that. But it was not, of course. He thought of her now more than ever, stirred by the recollection of her frail white neck, the secret darkness of her hair. He’d been too sharp about the Forster gossip, and in any case, he was dissatisfied with ending their flirtation in such a poor fashion.

  The visits to town had also brought invitations to dine again at ‘Stowell’ with Montagu and ‘Wyvenhoe’ with Forster. He was pleased, but felt a sense of being drawn into the hands of a polite press gang. The other guests were always ‘Arthurites’: Swanston, almost invariably—and nearly as frequently now, John Price. Swanston did not like Price, it was clear. There would also be one or both of the Macdowell brothers: Edward, the Solicitor General, and Thomas, the newspaper editor. Edward was married to Swanston’s daughter Jeannie. On one occasion the Treasurer was there: John Gregory, a thin, sallow man, almost a caricature of the desiccated miser. A man of Montagu’s kind more than Forster’s, he did not appear to be enjoying himself—but then he always looked like that. Certain glances between these men suggested complicity in matters from which Booth was excluded. Or did he imagine it?

  Booth had received permission to stay as Military Commandant at Port Arthur when his Regiment moved on, and they had upped his salary a little in token recognition that there had been no increase in the four years since his arrival, but the promotion to Major was refused. Others had ‘prior claim’.

  To compound his dissatisfaction, misfortunes at the settlement seemed to multiply that spring. Two prisoners drowned at Hope Beach in September, and while he and Casey walked up to inspect the incident, two others, Cripps and Reid, bolted from Port Arthur.

  Booth was furious. He liked both of them and had believed they liked, or at least respected, him. They were healthy young men, perfectly ready to be freed in a year or two and lead useful lives. Cripps was retaken a week later with a quantity of curious meat in his possession, and gave a confused account of Reid having drowned. The half-boiled, half-roasted flesh was sent to Hobarton and declared by the doctors to have human hairs in it. At a special Magistrate’s sitting Booth committed Cripps for murder and sent him to Hobarton for trial. He was making yet another start on paperwork in arrears when a signal came that a whaler was moored too close to shore again, in breach of the Act. Walk up to the Neck again, serve papers imposing the fine, walk back. It was a ridiculous waste of his time. Why could it not be delegated to a clerk? No, not allowed.

  Winter was persisting beyond its time. There were days when even Lempriere sounded merely stoical. His sons Thomas and William had scamped their lessons, gone fishing and lied about it, fought in the kitchen and broken Charlotte’s best basin. He would have to give them a sound whipping. Was their bad behaviour caused by living at a penal settlement?

  ‘And someone in the Store has allowed turpentine to drip into a sack of flour,’ Lempriere added. ‘A hundredweight ruined and tomorrow is Officer’s Ration Day and we are so short of it. Always, everywhere, something to be irritable about if one allows oneself.’

  Meanwhile, Corporals Annandale and Quinter were missing, not returned from the search party looking for Cripps and Reid. It seemed certain they must have perished, but the search for them went on in appalling weather until at last they were found, only half-dead.

  And Lacey, convict supervisor at the mines, got drunk on his liquor ration and offered to fight the Master of the Swan River Packet, then swore long and inventively at Lieutenant Stuart in the presence of other convicts. Lacey, a pugnacious little gnome of a man, had helped to plan the coal galleries and was known to be a favourite of Booth’s. How had he managed to get drunk on his tiny liquor ration? Smuggling? An illegal still? Impossible. Contact with whalers? Or planned mischief? Had the rest of them sacrificed their portions to Lacey and deliberately stirred him to fight because they were jealous of what they perceived as Booth’s favouritism? Punishment must be seen to be done. But how, exactly, to carry it out?

  A note came down from Edward Macdowell: Cripps not to be tried, insufficient evidence. Booth admitted to himself that he was pleased, but even this disturbed him. Was he peculiar in thinking that the eating of a companion was defensible if there was no murder involved? Would he himself, in extremis, eat Lempriere? Casey? Assuming they were already dead, of course. For example, if Casey had died that night two winters ago when they were lost together on the Tiers, and he, Booth, had been starving for days? He thought he might have.

  He put the matter to Lemp. Would Thomas eat him? After all, when the spirit departs, the body is no more than a husk. Was it not tantamount to suicide to die when a supply of fresh meat was at hand? Lempriere snorted and said something guttural in German and then something smooth in French—something about difficult to swallow? In English he would only say Booth was working far too hard. He shou
ld acquire a hobby, like marriage or bee-keeping or learning the French horn. In any case, there wasn’t enough flesh on Booth to make a decent meal, nor would there ever be if he kept tramping up and down the peninsula at this rate.

  In October Booth was called up to Hobart again to sit on the court martial of Private Ward. He was glad of the excuse, desperate to see Lizzie. But poor Ward. He’d been in hospital with disease of the brain a month ago, and had now been caught preparing to kill Captain MacKay for some imagined grievance. ‘Discovered behind MacKay’s quarters armed with a loaded musket and nine rounds of ball cartridge about him.’ Fourteen years transportation if found guilty. Every day seemed to bring a new ugly knot of trouble on top of the regular grind, and no satisfaction in any of it except the recovery of young Annandale and Quinter. And perhaps if Lizzie . . .

  Booth trekked up to Hobart and sat dutifully at Ward’s court martial. A guilty verdict. He walked back to the Barracks and heard news just arrived: the King was dead, had died last June. Long live the Queen. Queen Victoria, how odd. He decided to walk to New Town without letting the Pilkingtons know he was coming. Bring them news of the King’s death, a perfect excuse. And if they were not there he would lie in the grass of their garden and sleep. His spirits lifted as he walked. This evening spring had come at last—with blossom in the gardens, green fuzz on saplings, a ragged old woman, half drunk, selling flowers from a basket and singing. He bought two bunches of violets and an armful of drooping lilac that smelled of England. So the King had died in June and would never see another spring, and now there was a girl Lizzie’s age on the throne.

  The Pilkingtons were at home, and Mrs Pilkington went into Irish raptures over the flowers but Lizzie was cool. Said she had not received his notes last month in time to reply. She had been staying with her sister Nan and Nan’s husband at Richmond. The King’s death proved a useful topic until Pilkington came in and the atmosphere began to thaw. Taking a medical view of the royal demise, the doctor thought it interesting that poor old Billy Boy, who should have been dead anytime these three years, had managed to hang on to life until his niece reached her eighteenth birthday. The King had said he’d be damned if he’d die to suit the convenience of Victoria’s mother and that bastard Conroy who wanted the regency in their hands. He’d keep going somehow until Victoria came of age.