I was worried about Anna. She was still not strong, and even Louisa and I were near collapsing with shock and weariness. But Anna revived at the sight of Quigley, though his face and clothes were disfigured with soot. When the wagonette arrived we summoned our last desperate energies and rose to mount into it, but as Louisa began to follow Anna, a pony trap approached from the other direction and drew up alongside us. During the evening St John had managed to send a note to Archdeacon Hutchins, and here was a servant with orders to take the Wallaces to the clergyman’s house.
It was thus only Anna and I, Quigley and McLeod who entered the inn—just as a single bell began tolling. A death knell for the Adastra, I thought, but McLeod said it was the curfew. Convict-assigned servants must not be in the streets after this time, eleven o’clock. So early! I felt whole days and nights had passed since we had scrambled from the ship. The innkeeper’s wife showed a lively interest in the evening’s drama. I responded as well as I could, tired to the bone and stifling an impulse towards manic laughter as I looked about me. Twelve thousand perilous miles we had come—to this. It might have been any down-at-heel English coaching-inn from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
The smell of stale beer and roast meat filled the entry, and as we went to climb the stairs we passed the door of a loud smoky taproom. Sporting prints hung on the staircase; brown oil-cloth and drugget covered the floors; there was a long-case clock on the landing. Stopped, of course. The cheap ewer and basin in our room came from an English pottery, the dented pewter might have belonged to the George Inn at Hay. What else had I expected? I don’t know. The familiarity should have been comforting, but I felt obscurely deceived, caught in an illusion as deep as life. As if all these months we had been going nowhere.
I lay awake, my mind running uselessly like a mouse on a treadmill. The room was strangely motionless after the ship; the taproom downstairs continued noisy. There were other sounds too, familiar yet strange, for it was months since we’d heard them; a town clock somewhere rang the hours and quarters, dogs barked and a rooster crowed although it was far from dawn. I prayed, dropped in and out of turbulent dreams. A bell began ringing and the stables of the inn came alive with footsteps and whistling. The jangle and whicker of horses came next, and then bells and more bells. From the prison up in Campbell Street near the Scotch Church, the maidservant said when she came with hot water.
Anna was slow to wake and I was reluctant to urge her, but we managed to meet Quigley, Seymour and McLeod for a late breakfast in a private back parlour where everything except the greasy fried eggs was brown. Quigley had been out early. The fire had arisen from the combustion of McLeod’s paper, he said, which had probably become damp during the voyage, heating as it began to rot. The insurance would pay, but there was no Lloyd’s agent in Hobart. He must go to New South Wales to file the insurance and meet his co-owner of the Adastra, who was also there. He was worried for his crew, stranded here without pay or work. He would take most of them with him on the Marian Watson, leaving Hobarton for New South Wales in four days. He wanted us to go too: to abandon the search for Rowland.
‘What can Captain Booth tell you that will be to anyone’s advantage?’ he argued, speaking to Anna, glancing at me. ‘Rowland Rochester is dead by all accounts. And if not, how long are you to look for him? Winter is coming. Sydney is warmer in winter, Anna. You will prefer it. And if you do find Rochester he may not thank you. Let sleeping dogs lie, eh? What do you say, m’dear?’
Similar thoughts had occupied me during the night. The search for Rowland, which had seemed so reasonable in the presence of Jane and Rochester, those two inspired romantics, now began to look like mere folly. The Captain’s argument was tempting, except that I would have to explain our decision to Jane and Rochester at some future time. In any event, Anna would have none of it. Oblivious to complications, or apparently so, she smiled and said we would find Rowland first—and then go to Sydney. I found it hard to understand why she should still wish to find Rowland when she seemed so attached to Quigley, but we could not change her mind. In the end it was agreed that she and I would wait in Hobart Town until he returned.
‘Four weeks,’ he said. The Marian Watson was the only ship regularly making the run to Sydney and back, generally in that time. ‘Six at most. Do what you can in four weeks,’ he said to me. If he could bring back another ship, we would leave for England. Otherwise, well, it would depend . . .
Mr Chesney came in cock-a-hoop, brushing aside the loss of his cargo. Unfortunate, yes, but it was insured, and nothing compared to the good news he’d just learned. The summer harvest across the island had fetched unheard-of prices, most of it sold to the new settlement at Port Phillip, or Melbourne, where everything was wanted. Potatoes had fetched twenty pounds the ton! Chesney could not wait to discover what profit his son had made. The Chesneys’ neighbours, whose mother had taken them in last night, were returning to Richmond today with an empty cart. With no cargo to wait for now, Chesney was eager to go with them.
‘Port Phillip is barren as a desert,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Lieutenant Collins tried to settle there thirty years a’gone and gave it up. If Fawlkner and his lads are to stay there, they’ll need our crops forever and a day. A ready-made market on our doorstep!’
And Chesney’s friend Mr Thomas Gregson was released from prison. The new Governor had accepted a petition against the sentence. Ha! A blow to the Arthur faction! If this was Sir John Franklin showing his colours, they suited old Chesney. Arthur gone, a benevolent new Governor in place, and ready markets for the crops. Lord! A new golden age at hand. Nowt to do but fill your pockets.
Our sea legs buckling, we walked slowly down to the Wharf again with Chesney to say our farewells, only to find there was an hour to wait while the ferry was loaded. Mrs Chesney had taken Liddy and the children along to the warehouses, or godowns, or ghauts as Louisa would say, at the other end of the cove, but Anna could not walk so far. We sat waiting on two kitchen chairs, which providentially formed part of the freight surrounding us: laden handcarts, chicken coops, crates and boxes, garden tools, a goat. Chesney talked to anyone who came within range. The weather was more summer than autumn, warm and sunny. Dazzling water, layers of blue hills along the opposite shore fading downriver, where a white lighthouse shone on a rocky outcrop.
To me the whole scene resembled a stage set, like the inn. ‘An English Wharf’, with colours falsely bright because the sun was so strong. Not really England, nobody fooled for a minute, everyone accepting the counterfeit as they do in the theatre. Behind us, at the back of the town, Mount Wellington loomed like painted scenery from a different play altogether, some Gothic drama.
Mrs Chesney’s returning party became visible while still some way off. She had acquired a new basket and several brown-paper parcels; a mop; a bucket; and two gentlemen. One of these, a portly figure pacing beside her in clerical black, proved to be Mr Aislabie, the vicar at Richmond, also waiting for the ferry. The other, a shabbier, laughing man, carried Natty on his shoulders, bending to talk to shy Liddy. He was forty perhaps, sturdy and muscular-looking in a brown jacket, the pockets sagging because they evidently carried many odds and ends. His black hair was too long, hanging in loose waves and curls that lifted in the breeze because Natty had seized his hat. He wore several days’ growth of beard.
‘This is Mr Bergman,’ said Bess Chesney, ‘the surveyor we spoke of on the ship. I have been asking him whether he has heard of Mr Rowland Rochester but he thinks not.’
‘I am not in a fit state for introductions,’ said Bergman with a brown grin. He swung Natty to the ground, retrieved his hat and passed his hand across the dark stubble on his chin. ‘I come from two weeks of camping at the Huon River, surveying Lady Franklin’s new settlement. I have hardly been an hour off the cutter.’
‘He has come out of his way to help,’ Bess Chesney explained. ‘I’m much obliged, Mr Bergman.’
He said a few sympathetic words about the loss of the Adastra
before bowing and striding away. His pleasant face might be Jewish, I thought—or not, but it was gypsyish, clever-looking.
Anna and I parted from the Chesneys with embraces and tears, promising to visit them at ‘Kenton’ before we quitted the island, as they demanded a hundred times.
The Derwent Bank was as English as the inn; mahogany and brass, the smell of beeswax polish and money. While I waited with St John Wallace in the reverent hush—Anna chose to stay at the inn, Louisa was still recovering at the Archdeacon’s—I became aware of just how shabby I was. An elderly clerk took our draft away to some sanctum sanctorum and returned to say the Bank would cash it at a discount of fifty percent. Faced with my astonishment, he acknowledged kindly that it was a high rate, but the signatory, Mr Edward Rochester, was in failing health. (This was my first example of the swift rumour mill of Van Diemen’s Land.) If Mr Rochester should not reach England alive—which Heaven forbid, of course—the bank might incur ‘prolonged expense in securing its equity’.
‘Is fifty percent legal?’ I protested. ‘In England the rate is set at four percent to prevent usury. This colony follows the laws of England, does it not?’
The clerk was happy to explain, with a broad condescending smile. ‘The Usury Laws are one of the few exceptions here to the law of England. In a new colony it is important to encourage investors by affording them the opportunity of making higher gains.’ I retrieved the draft, not quite snatching. I would spend my own money and ask for reimbursement from Jane and Rochester when we reached England again. It did cross my mind that Rochester might be dead and Jane in straitened circumstances, but being angry at the bank’s rapacity, I brushed the thought aside.
St John looked at me questioningly but did not interfere. When we emerged from the bank he asked how we would manage and seemed satisfied when I explained. I returned to the inn, and when Anna was ready we walked slowly to a dressmaker’s in Elizabeth Street—again chosen only because it was close. Luck was with us. The pretty young assistant was tiny, neat, dark, French, and aghast at our sad sartorial state. She fetched the proprietress, Madame Delage, a Scotchwoman married to a Frenchman who had escaped to Edinburgh in the Terror. We heard the story during the next several hours of choosing and fitting. Monsieur Delage owned the draper’s and haberdasher’s shop adjoining his wife’s premises; the young assistant was his niece; ‘a wee marvel,’ said Madame. While Anna was being fitted I crossed the road to a stationer’s for the other necessities of life: pen and ink, pencils, writing paper and sketchbook.
It makes me smile to recall the gowns we chose that day, ridiculous now, but at the time I thought Anna looked like Spanish royalty in her ruby satinette. A lavender-and-yellow Madras wanted letting out; two more walking-costumes would be made up from pattern books. Anna refused to wear white because her mother had always worn it, and black because Christophine thought it unlucky. I chose three skirts for myself: dove-grey, blue-grey and black, with four matching bodices. And so to stays, petticoats, small linen, nightgowns, gloves, stockings, combs, hairbrushes, handkerchiefs, silk flowers, ribbons, fans . . .
With an eye on the mounting cost I tried gently to curb Anna’s childlike desire for everything she saw, but still the total came to one hundred and eighty-six pounds eight shillings and threepence halfpenny. Shoes and boots we bought afterwards at a nearby cobbler’s; another forty-three guineas. I kept reminding myself that our return passages would be paid by the insurance, and that we would spend nothing once we were aboard ship, bound for Home again. In the meantime we must look our parts: a well-to-do invalid widow and her meek dove-grey companion.
I was puzzled by Madame’s pleasure when I paid with sterling, but later discovered it was commonplace in the colony to settle only a fraction of any bill, putting the rest on account. Or to pay with a mixture of the curious local currency: Spanish dollars, Indian rupees, specie from New South Wales, or the four-pound notes issued by the Van Diemen’s Land Bank and engraved by a convict artist.
My views of Montagu are coloured by what happened later, of course, and I don’t claim to be unprejudiced, but I detected no whiff of sulphur about him that day. I’d expected a bluff military man, all ruddy nose and side-whiskers, but Montagu was as sleek as an otter, urbane and charming. As he murmured about the loss of the Adastra, I felt our value being weighed in his private balance, reckoned down to the last jot and tittle. He made me think of a plover, or peewit, one of those neat grey, black and white birds that look like gentlemen pacing gravely forward with their hands behind their backs. Much later I remembered how fierce plovers can be, how they protect their territory by swooping to attack the heads of their enemies.
‘Unfortunately,’ Montagu’s smile was regretful, ‘my clerks find no record of a Mr Rowland Rochester in the colony. The Doctor and Mr McLeod will have told you, Mrs Rochester, that we keep very precise records, but there is nothing.’
Anna and I had come to the Colonial Office with St John Wallace, Doctor Seymour and McLeod. St John thought it would be useful to have Seymour and McLeod with us, since they knew Montagu and the colony, and would have a better grasp of any names and places the Colonial Secretary might mention.
Now Montagu gave the shadow of a shrug. ‘Not a few who come to the colonies are—how shall I put it—seeking to begin afresh? Many continue to New South Wales, of course.’
‘We are advised Captain Booth may know something of the matter?’ said McLeod.
‘The events you refer to took place many years ago. Which of us can trust our recollections over such a time?’ Montagu smiled broadly, secure, I supposed, in his own reputation for an infallible memory.
‘Certainly you could go down to see Captain Booth,’ he added, ‘if you consider it worthwhile. A permit could be arranged.’ He turned to Anna again. ‘There can be no unauthorised visits to the peninsula, Mrs Rochester, as you will readily understand. Only felons of the worst description and most desperate character are sent to Port Arthur. They are the smallest proportion of convicts arriving—and reoffenders, of course. Nine-tenths of transportees are assigned as domestic servants, or to work on roads and buildings, or in Government offices.’
‘I believe Mrs Rochester is eager to learn whatever Captain Booth can tell us,’ said McLeod. ‘We would be obliged to you, sir, for a permit.’
‘Very well. I believe your time will be wasted, frankly, but you must be the judge, of course. It should not take more than a few weeks. How long are you in the island?’
‘A few weeks?’ McLeod was clearly surprised. He looked at Seymour and was about to speak again when the door was flung open without a knock and two gentlemen came in. The first was what I had expected Montagu to be: big, florid, heavy-breathing. He was startlingly ugly yet dressed like a fashion plate. A toad in a frock coat. His eyes protruded, oyster-like, from a grey pouchy face. His nose was a ‘colonial strawberry’, bulbous and purplish.
‘John, I must speak with you,’ he said abruptly to Montagu.
‘May I present Mr Matthew Forster, our Chief Police Magistrate,’ said Montagu, rising. His tone suggested he disliked the unceremonious intrusion, but Forster took no notice. ‘And Mr John Price, our Assistant Chief Police Magistrate.’
Price was not much beyond thirty, taller and more pleasant in appearance than Forster, but with the same arrogance. He wore a monocle and Forster a lorgnette. The sight of two men staring thus through eyeglasses might have been humorous, but something about these two stifled any impulse to laugh. They quizzed Anna and me with careless insolence. Montagu said he believed he would have the pleasure of seeing us again at Lady Franklin’s reception for the Neptune. He must have rung a bell, for an aide appeared and we were smiled out before we knew it.
The invitation to the reception was unexpected. I had not imagined joining the social life of the colony. Left to myself I would have sent apologies, but Anna gazed at the pasteboard like a castaway seeing a ship, and Seymour said that to have any chance of finding Rowland we must enter the proper circl
es.
McLeod left for Richmond to see his friend Dr Ross, intending to return for the reception. James Seymour had affairs of his own, and Quigley, waiting to leave for Sydney, came and went, busy with arrangements for his crew. Anna and I moved from the Hope and Anchor to lodgings in a large stone cottage on Battery Point. Mrs Groundwater, the landlady, was an Orkney woman, her lilting voice carrying the attractive Scotch-Welsh modulations of her birthplace, with many odd words and phrases. Her husband and son were whalers, away at sea two years at a time. She let by the quarter only, which meant we would lose money if we left early, but we were the sole guests, the house was clean and quiet, and I was content. We had a bedroom each with a small sitting room between us: three guineas a week with breakfast and dinner, washing and coals extra.
Anna had never dealt with money and refused to begin. At ‘Coulibri’, when she was a child, everything was simply there: clothes, food, servants—that was how she preferred it. There had been no need for money at the convent, nor while she was with the Rochesters. Even so, I insisted on showing her where I had put the unused bank draft and what remained of my funds. If anything should happen to me she must know where to find it. She was more interested in unpacking the altered costume just delivered. With it came a note from McLeod. His friend Dr Ross being gravely ill, he could not return for the reception.
On the given night we joined a queue of men and women most variously arrayed, in every style from last-century court dress to the latest fashions and the barely formal. As our names were announced we curtsied past the official party, propelled swiftly onward by the queue behind us. Sir John looked like an amiable bear in naval evening dress, the crown of his head bald, a crescent of dark little curls at ear level. Lady Franklin, small and neat beside him, made me think of Jane Eyre as she might be in another twenty-five years; there was the same cool intelligent appraisal, the feeling of energy suppressed.
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