Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Down goes the Earl of Bylaugh’s library, I thought, the seeds and fabrics and windows and china. I imagined the boxes of books and paper bursting open as they tumbled over and over in the currents and fell to the bottom. Bales of bright fabric unwinding in great slow ribbony folds through the dark water. Seeds and teacups and saucers scattering into the tide; writing slopes and chairs, windows and oaken doors sinking down, down to the seabed. The printing press, the harp and the steam engine emitting last watery sounds as they plunged in an uprush of bubbles, far beyond reach, fathoms deep.

  11

  EARLY IN THE MORNING OF THE DAY WHEN THE ADASTRA SANK, George Boyes was upstairs in Hobart Town’s new Treasury building, standing at the window of his office. At about the time the ship entered the estuary fifty miles downriver, he was looking out towards Government House next door. The Vice-Regal residence was still ‘the old place’ at this time, a whitewashed wooden building set on ten acres along the shore in the centre of the town’s cove. Ten acres had seemed enough when Hobart was only a clearing above the beach, dotted with tents and huts. The Governor’s cottage had been begun in those early days as a bungalow in the Indian style, but by the time the Franklins arrived thirty-four years later, haphazard additions and ‘improvements’ had turned it into a long barn-like structure two storeys high.

  Hasty construction and poor foundations were now causing trouble. A chunk of ceiling had come down during Governor Arthur’s final months, narrowly missing him and his secretary and bending an iron poker. Every year the place seemed a little less dignified, more crowded by the busy harbour and burgeoning town. Which might well be a metaphor for the Governor’s own situation, thought Boyes wryly.

  To some, Hobarton’s Government House was irredeemably ugly. Boyes allowed it a certain ramshackle charm, pale among the trees with its red brick chimneys—if seen from the east in a boat offshore, say—and far enough away. The northern aspect was not so bad either; the carriage drive came in there. The shabbiest sides were those adjacent to the town, west and south, where a clutter of kitchens, sculleries, laundries, drying yards, stores, outhouses, stables and offices straggled out to the boundaries.

  All this would be demolished when the long-planned new Government House was built, but at present it was a warren of constant activity which never failed to interest Boyes—there was always something in it that made him wonder at the human condition.

  He now saw Snachall, Jane Franklin’s maid, emerge from between the carriage-house and stables. She walked up to the sentry box, spoke to the guard, and came through in Boyes’s direction. Minutes later his clerk came in with a note from Lady Franklin.

  It was a printed card, but the words Lady Franklin requests the pleasure had been crossed out with a stroke, and the charming message written on the back—yes, it was charming, it always was—conveyed urgency. Jane Franklin ‘depended upon him’ to bring his wife Mary to dinner that evening. She had ‘a particular wish’ to see them. No apology for the late summons—she did not say ‘summons’, but clearly it was. ‘An impromptu gathering . . .’ The Neptune was in. Captain Hasluck and his first lieutenant would dine at Government House with them en famille. All of which meant that Boyes must leave early, ride home and warn Mary, order the carriage out and miss his favourite part of the day, a golden late-summer evening in the garden with his family. This northerly would drop by midday. They could have walked down to the bay and taken the dory out for an hour’s fishing.

  In spite of these regrets, as soon as he and Mary arrived at Government House that night, Boyes admitted to himself that Jane Franklin had been right to send for him. The Montagus were there—and inexplicably, the Maconochies also. Disaster. Montagu had taken a violent dislike to Alexander Maconochie, Sir John Franklin’s private secretary, from the day they met. For no clear reason at first, but during the recent Clapperton Affair, Montagu had come to know that Maconochie was advising the Governor to dismiss him, and he now regarded Maconochie with vindictive loathing.

  Sir John had not followed his secretary’s advice, but Montagu, saved by the skin of his teeth, had sworn he would never meet Maconochie again in public or private. He was known to be a good hater. Throughout the row Maconochie, the mad Scotchman, had displayed the absent-minded good temper of one preoccupied with ideas, yet he must know Montagu had wrecked several careers before now. Whitehall would not tolerate quarrels among its colonial officers. Even Franklin’s tenure and reputation might suffer if there was an eruption.

  As Boyes led Mary in among the other guests to greet the Franklins, he considered the situation. How had it come about that the two couples were here together? Had the Maconochies come to dinner without warning? It was possible. They lived with their children in a tiny cottage in the grounds of Government House, and were eccentric. But no, Jane’s call for help had come this morning. Boyes believed that after a year he could judge her well enough to know this was not an error. It seemed to him far more likely that she had issued the invitations deliberately, believing she could act as a peacemaker.

  She was cursed with a regrettable urge to do good, a tendency to embroil herself in matters better left alone, a passionate eagerness for life which she expected everyone to share. An elderly gentleman had once told her admiringly that the Greeks have a word for it: kefi. Boyes did not like this story. The Greeks who sprang to his mind were Helen of Troy, Antigone, Electra, Clytemnestra: women who caused a great deal of trouble to their friends and relations.

  They were dining en famille, as Lady Franklin had said in her note: not in the dining room but on a long section of broad enclosed verandah looking out across an informal garden to the harbour. This verandah had been open and almost unused while Colonel Arthur was governor. Neither he nor his wife Eliza had time for the picturesque. He kept an unsleeping eye on his wicked kingdom, she was busy with her hive of children. But when Jane Franklin first saw it, in spite of the weather that day, which was frightful, she was seized, she told Boyes, by the memory of delightful terraces in the Mediterranean looking down on sunny little ports. The verandah would be perfect for summer gatherings. Her husband would like to drink his tea—or something stronger—in contemplation of the shipping.

  It was one of her first mistakes about Hobarton. She soon discovered the afternoon sea breeze, which whirled up tablecloths, needlework, papers and hair and drove the ladies indoors. Not easily beaten, she had the verandah enclosed with three-quarter-length windows, and plants in tubs brought in to give the air of a conservatory.

  ‘Family’ was always a generous term with the Franklins, and there were rarely less than a dozen sitting down to dine. Tonight, Eleanor Franklin, Sir John’s daughter by his first wife, sat beside her governess Miss Williamson, an elderly, somewhat crotchety, spinster. Ella was fourteen and ‘difficult’. Miss Williamson was close enough to say a quiet word or put out a restraining hand. It was sometimes enough. The child’s face was almost laughably like her father’s, round and plump-cheeked, but it was inclined to carry a scowl quite foreign to John Franklin.

  Sophy Cracroft was there, but not her cousin Mary, who was staying at New Town with Mrs Price, her fiancée’s mother. Sophy was flirting as usual with Sir John’s aide, the Honourable Henry Elliot. He and Sophy played at mutual interest, but each knew perfectly well that when Henry chose a bride it would be in England under the watchful eye of his father, Lord Minto—and it would be someone a good deal more eligible than Sophy, who possessed neither fortune nor rank. This might have been painful for the girl, but Boyes and his wife had watched Miss Cracroft and decided privately that for all her flirting she did not want a husband, and regarded the young men who passed through with spinsterish detachment. ‘Not the marrying kind?’ Mary suggested. And yet Sophy had something, they agreed. Not beauty but intelligence, and a kind of inward smouldering which a man might easily misinterpret as readiness for physical passion. Henry Elliot, a family friend, was young, witty, handsome and amiable, and thus a safe and useful partner, Mary argued.
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  ‘Family’, for Lady Franklin, also meant anyone who had come out on the Fairlie with them; thus the Maconochies, Archdeacon Hutchins, and another strange Scotchman, the cowherd from Leith, Mr John Hepburn, one of Sir John’s crewmen in the Arctic on his early, near fatal journey. Visiting naval officers or scientists, too, were ‘family’, no matter what their nationality. Tonight there was no language barrier; Captain Hasluck and his first lieutenant were English. Jane Franklin’s French was fluent, but during her travels she had made herself clearly understood to Italians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Russians, Armenians and Americans.

  As soon as they sat at table, Sophy, on Boyes’s left, gave him a histrionic look and began to brief him in a series of desperate asides. He was right. Aunt had convinced herself that a Franklin family dinner would dispel Montagu’s enmity against Maconochie, but she had been seized by terrible doubts as the evening approached. A lost cause, Boyes thought. It only remained to see what form the explosion would take and how the damage might be contained.

  The pea and ham soup was tense but calm. Montagu and Maconochie had been placed as far from each other as possible. Sophy began to talk about the new young Queen and Lord Melbourne, and Lord Melbourne’s wicked mad wife, and their sad mad son, while all the time watching the table nervously. By the second remove Boyes had begun to think he was mistaken. The evening might pass quietly after all. Montagu seemed content to be visibly contemptuous. Mary Boyes was on his left and Lady Franklin on his right; he was responding to their attempts at conversation with cold monosyllables. With any luck he might hesitate to let factional politics show in front of the visiting naval officers. You could never tell who might come to hear of it in London.

  On Boyes’s right was Mary Maconochie, silent, darting hostile glances at Montagu across the table. Her husband was eating his fish with untroubled enjoyment and lecturing Miss Williamson, using the prongs of a fork to draw on the tablecloth. Lady Franklin spoke across a pause in which Maconochie’s accent and the clink of cutlery were the loudest sounds in the world.

  ‘Captain Hasluck has been admiring our harbour,’ she told her husband.

  Sir John nodded, smiling. ‘A great asset,’ he said in his calm, slow way. ‘A deep-water harbour at the end of the main street. Indeed, a valuable asset.’

  ‘Is the interior of the island accessible, sir?’ asked Hasluck. ‘Does agriculture extend far?’

  ‘North and east, yes. Handsome properties. You would be astonished,’ Sir John rumbled on. ‘But to west and south, no. Impossible. Which is to say, r-rugged . . .’

  ‘Mountainous, from the charts, sir?’ said Hasluck. He sensed a growing uneasiness in the air but laboured on.

  ‘M-m-m, yes,’ said Sir John, nodding. ‘But of great b-beauty. Or so we hear. We hope to make a tour in that region next spring, don’t we, m’dear?’

  ‘There is a road then, sir?’

  ‘No, no road,’ Sir John laughed. ‘The surveyors are carving a track, and if necessary we shall make our own. Explorers, eh?’

  ‘A carriage road runs up through the centre of the island,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘From Hobarton here, to Launceston at Port Dalrymple in the north. Some enterprising gentlemen from there have recently begun to make a settlement across the Bass Strait at Port Phillip on the mainland of New Holland. The town is to be named for Lord Melbourne.’

  ‘And if you’re minded, Hasluck,’ added Sir John, ‘to take a landsman’s view while you’re here (ha! ha!), Mr Cox’s coach makes the journey up twice a week. Pretty countryside. Said to resemble the L-lake District at Home.’

  ‘You will understand, Captain Hasluck,’ Lady Franklin leant forward, spoke urgently, ‘how much we wish to advance commerce between south and north here. The chief impediment at present lies in fording the Derwent River. Hobarton is on the southern shore, as you see. The river near the town here is far too wide to bridge, and therefore the coach must travel twenty miles upriver to Black Snake to cross where it is narrower. At present this is accomplished by ferry, but there have been tragic accidents. A causeway and bridge are in building, and the completion will be a great thing. It is one of Colonel Arthur’s valuable schemes—and Mr Montagu, of course,’ she added hastily, ‘has pursued it since the Colonel’s departure.’

  Montagu looked at her and inclined his head a contemptuous inch. Lady Franklin flushed. Mrs Maconochie gave Montagu a basilisk stare and said loudly, ‘Of course, Captain Hasluck, when the crossing is finished, the land beyond the river will increase greatly in value. Do you not own a very vast piece of land there, Mr Montagu?’

  Boyes said quickly, ‘Further up beyond the causeway there’s another pleasant hamlet. Its official name is Elizabeth Town but the inhabitants call it New Norfolk, many having come from Norfolk Island when that was resumed for a penal settlement. Our Government cottage and farm is at New Norfolk. We call it His Excellency’s “country seat”.’

  ‘We laughingly call it that,’ explained Jane Franklin, following his lead. ‘But do not imagine a Petit Trianon or anything of that sort, Captain. The place is neglected and a little too thoroughly en plein air. The wind whistles through it.’

  ‘But it sits so picturesquely by the river, my lady?’ said Henry Elliot. ‘A little paradise in my view.’

  ‘Oh, I grant you, Henry, the sweetest spot imaginable. A perfect refuge from civilisation.’

  Maconochie, hearing this last remark, called cheerfully across the table some Latin tag about civilisation and rustication, which he then translated into impenetrable Scottish-English, blank to the growing hostility. Boyes and Elliot both began to speak but paused to give way to each other. Mrs Maconochie’s voice drove harshly through.

  ‘As to that, my dear, a new scene of civilisation would be well enough. But at present Van Diemen’s Land is nothing but a little stage where the tragedy of misused power is played out every day.’

  ‘Have you seen our new theatre, Hasluck?’ asked Henry Elliot. ‘We have Mrs Robinson in The Bandit of the Rhine this season, disguised as a . . .’

  ‘Disguised!’ cried Mrs Maconochie in quivering tones. ‘There are venomous reptiles in this island disguised as gentlemen. There are wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are TOADS of loathsome complexion!’

  Montagu threw down his napkin, pushed back his chair and made to rise, saying distinctly, ‘Lamentable, hardly unexpected . . . madwoman . . . want of breeding . . .’ but Captain Hasluck was now also on his feet and speaking urgently. The alarm of his words made itself felt on the whole company, and as he spoke Eleanor Franklin also rose, with a sharp cry of, ‘Oh, look!’

  ‘Your Excellency, Lady Franklin, pray excuse me,’ said Hasluck. ‘I believe there is a brig afire in the harbour. If I am not mistaken she lies directly between the Neptune and the Calcutta. The Calcutta has her masts unstepped and cannot move. May I beg your permission, sir, to go to my ship? My lady, will you excuse us?’

  Eleanor Franklin called, ‘Oh do look, Papa! Such fountains! They have set the pumps. What ship is she?’

  Elaborate consternation, a pantomime babble of relief. Lady Franklin rose and led a clustering at the windows so that Sir John and their guests could watch the burning vessel. Eleanor Franklin prattled on and for once was not reproved. Jane Franklin rang the bell for a telescope. Hasluck and his lieutenant left with Henry Elliot, who was asked to return to explain what was happening. Mutton would be kept for him, said Lady Franklin. And rhubarb tart.

  As Mrs Maconochie rose trembling from the table, Boyes upset a glass of wine into her lap. Her anger was already passing into furious wild sobs. She gave a gasp and wail, holding out her skirts. Boyes, apologising, led her from the room. Her husband would have stayed, but Mary Boyes took him firmly by the arm and followed them. The party gradually settled. Boyes and Mary returned but the Maconochies did not. Nobody mentioned them. It grew dark. The burning ship could be seen heading out into the river, towed by the new steam tug. The ladies left the gentlemen to their port.

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p; Henry Elliot returned soon after the gentlemen had rejoined the ladies in the drawing room. Sophy was at the pianoforte playing a tricky scherzo. She knew everyone expected her to stop, and indeed, would have been glad to. She knew she did not play particularly well, and was struggling with four sharps, which for some reason she always found more difficult than four flats, but a sense of duty made her persist through the repeat. When at last she finished, Henry told them the ship was the Adastra, Master Captain Quigley, and her voyage a curious one altogether, apparently. There had been a deathbed marriage and the strange return to health of a beautiful Creole madwoman.

  It was just the kind of story to catch Lady Franklin’s attention, to penetrate the violent throbbing of the headache beginning to grip her. She was subject to these attacks, usually after high emotion. She felt now the familiar tightness in her brain, the slow onset of nausea, the flickering rim of lights beginning to close off her vision from the edges, the first deep pain. She longed for her visitors to be gone so that she might fall into silence and darkness with fifteen perhaps thirty-five perhaps sixty ruby drops of laudanum in a glass of water. With an odd fixed smile she endured farewells and thanks.

  When at last she could begin to make her way upstairs, half-blindly now, she stopped and turned. She asked Henry Elliot to see that the Captain of the Adastra and his passengers received invitations to the formal reception for the Neptune a few days hence. Sir John would like to hear more about the voyage of the lost ship.

  12

  OUR FIRST NIGHT IN THE COLONY—OR WHAT REMAINED OF THE night—was spent at the Hope and Anchor Inn, merely because it was barely two hundred yards from the wharf, the nearest respectable hostelry, said McLeod. Although all the inn’s conveyances had long since been retired for the night, he persuaded them to rouse a groom and send a wagonette to fetch Anna, Louisa and me. The gentlemen would walk. McLeod and Quigley had found us as the entertaining spectacle came to an end and the crowd began to disperse. James Seymour was at the hospital with an injured crewman.