Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Anna had hoped for dancing, but although an ensemble was playing, the object seemed to be merely to form groups and talk. St John Wallace and Louisa appeared with Mr Hutchins, the Archdeacon, who was younger than I had expected, about my own age, with a broad smiling face and square jaw. He introduced Mr Phillip Palmer, the Rural Dean, one of those clergymen whose stomach precedes them, and Palmer’s wife, another Harriet, and her sister Rachel Owen, recently arrived from Wales. They were very Welsh, the Owen ladies, with lilting soft accents. The accents on all sides struck me forcibly: Scots, Welsh, Irish, and so many regional English intonations.

  ‘. . . only two servants at the Archdeacon’s house, both convicts,’ Louisa was saying in an undertone, when a stir came in the crowd near us and the official party came through the gathering, shaking hands and pausing to speak briefly. Sir John, with his wife and a young male aide, stopped abruptly when he came to us.

  ‘Ah, Quigley. Some time since we’ve met. And now this loss. Terrible. I am sorry for it,’ Sir John rumbled.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Deeply affecting sight, ship ablaze. Saw it many times in the war, of course. Never fails to strike me to the heart.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘She was with Lloyd’s? A1?’

  ‘Yes, sir, she was.’

  ‘I believe you must go to New South Wales. We have no Lloyd’s agent here, have we, Henry?’ he said to the young aide.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But your greatest difficulty, you know, Quigley, will be in finding another command. Mm, yes. Shipbuilding grows apace here, but is still in its infancy. And most vessels arriving have a full complement of officers. Too many of us about since the war.’ He laughed his comfortable laugh. ‘We are items at a discount, we old salts.’

  Lady Franklin turned to us. She was not dressed in high fashion except for her light brown hair, pulled up into a knot in the French way, with a loose curl each side.

  ‘You have felt no ill effects, I hope, Mrs Rochester, from your evening in the cold?’

  Her voice, unexpectedly low and husky yet precise and clear, was part of her charm. Anna smiled her broad smile, curtsied, did not speak.

  ‘I believe you are come in search of your husband’s grave?’ Jane Franklin persisted. ‘I know I would feel as you do. Most women could not rest until they learned the circumstances of their husband’s death.’

  ‘He is not dead.’ This flat utterance from Anna was a stone cast into the calm waters of social exchange. ‘If he was dead I would feel it. I would know.’

  Jane Franklin was visibly affected. Two decades later she would repeat almost the same words when the Admiralty told her Franklin was to be declared lost. If she had heard a prophecy of it she could not have looked more shaken.

  ‘But, I understood . . .’ she said.

  James Seymour interposed, ‘It is not easy for Mrs Rochester to believe, Lady Franklin. Although her husband’s death occurred more than a decade ago, it is hardly six weeks since . . . Mrs Rochester’s health allowed her to be told of it.’

  Anna smiled. ‘He is not dead,’ she repeated almost gaily.

  Now it had become merely an awkward moment and Jane Franklin was composed.

  ‘You are going down to the peninsula to see Captain Booth?’ she smiled at me. ‘Please give him my kind regards. We are so fond of him. And the Lemprieres—delightful.’

  ‘It seems there may be some delay, Lady Franklin,’ I said. ‘The permit may take several weeks, we understand.’

  ‘Not generally,’ she said, frowning. ‘I don’t see why. Miss Cracroft goes down on Tuesday in the Vansittart with Miss Drewitt. Why do you not go with them? Would you arrange it, Henry?’ She spoke to the young aide again, ignoring our thanks and adding, ‘Leave your cards when you return, bring me news of our friends.’

  She took her husband’s arm, beginning to steer him towards the next group. He parted reluctantly from Quigley and the officers of the Neptune, by now deep in talk of euphroes, knees, and guttered shrattnels.

  ‘You are like me, Quigley,’ Sir John said. ‘We are sailors. Nothing else will do for us. “The sea has soaked our hearts through.” Do you know that line? It is said of Ulysses in “Chapman’s Homer”, you know. “The sea had soaked his heart through.” My wife read it to me and it struck me so deeply I have never forgot it.’

  Later that night Quigley made his adieux with Anna, and at dawn sailed for New South Wales. The following day she asked me where Edward was and when he would return.

  I had been startled by Lady Franklin’s offer of help. Why take any trouble for perfect strangers? Later I understood her as one of those to whom any knot or problem is irresistible, finding solutions a matter of satisfaction.

  13

  WE STARTED FOR PORT ARTHUR AT DAWN; THE AIR SHARP COLD, the wide river a shining mirror of dark hills and streaked, salmon-pink sky. By the time the waterman had rowed us out to the Vansittart, a light breeze was ploughing the image into furrows. I would have liked to stay on deck, but we were ushered down into the cabin. Plain Miss Cracroft and her pretty friend Miss Drewitt sat facing Anna and me.

  Sophy Cracroft said she believed it would be calm, but whether or not, she always chewed a square of seaweed against mal de mer. It was effective on account of the affinity of elements, she added. She offered the little box to her friend and to Anna, who both declined. I accepted and then struggled to get my hand out of my new tight glove while Miss Cracroft waited not quite patiently: a young lady of strong opinions who would not suffer fools gladly. The pastille was dark and salty like liquorice. Miss Drewitt stifled yawns behind her gloved hand.

  The Vansittart shook out more sail and picked up the wind. Miss Cracroft explained that her visit to the peninsula was to condole with Mrs Cart, the wife of the Superintendent of Point Puer, the boys’ prison at Port Arthur. The Carts’ baby, Edward, a beautiful child, had accidentally been given four grains of opium last week instead of a quarter of a grain. He had fallen into convulsions and died. Miss Drewitt was to stay a month with her sister, whose husband was an officer at the Wedge Bay outstation. Through the porthole I watched the morning unfold into one of those translucent autumn days I came to know as so frequent in the island. Anna’s face showed its usual unreadable repose. I wondered whether, like me, she had misgivings. I was feeling slightly sick and hoping Captain Booth would tell us Rowland Rochester was dead.

  Quigley had said the Vansittart would probably take us only as far as Norfolk Bay, where Booth’s new convict railway would carry us the further four miles overland down the peninsula into Port Arthur. But Sophy said no, not this time. She had travelled on the railway before and had not enjoyed the experience.

  ‘A wooden box on wheels with no hood or covering, propelled by convicts panting alongside and leaping up to rest on a side-peg each time we hurtled down some precipitious slope. Like the most violent switchback ride. I was certain we should be hurled out on our heads, or dashed to pieces against a tree . . .’

  To spare her a repetition of this, the weather being fine, the Vansittart would take us all the way round the southern cape and into the bay at Port Arthur.

  On reaching this anchorage we could see no settlement, only heavily wooded arms of land and a small island, cleared of vegetation but for a few trees at the margins of the water. The Isle of the Dead, Sophy explained, lying in the bay between us and Port Arthur. As its name suggested, it was now a graveyard. Military and civilian officers and their families were buried with headstones; convicts were laid anonymously in the soil.

  A whale boat approached, with six men at the oars and a military officer in the stern. As it made fast alongside, the officer rose and climbed nimbly up to the Vansittart’s deck to introduce himself: Commandant Booth. The military title had not suggested this—a thin, youngish man, joking with Sophy about her dislike of his railway. The convicts looked like any wharfingers except for their yellow and grey woollen clothing. I would have liked to study their fa
ces, but after one glance kept my eyes on the view or on their tattooed brown hands pulling the oars.

  Port Arthur was a miniature version of Hobart in a far smaller cove. Only a handful of these whitewashed buildings were cottages, the others being wooden workshops and huts, barracks, a stockade and a hospital. Only two buildings were of stone: a powder magazine like a squat little crenellated tower, and, under scaffolding, a Church up the slope at the back of the clearing.

  We set off walking towards a hillside cottage set slightly apart from the rest of the settlement. Anna could make only slow progress, leaning on Booth’s arm, and we stopped when she cried suddenly, ‘Ajoupa!’ and pointed at the little house. It had green wooden shutters, or jalousies, and an enclosed verandah on three sides. A kitchen garden lay on one side in a state of late summer decline. Behind and above, on the crest of the hill, was the signal tower, a mast with a yardarm and flags.

  Booth seemed taken aback.

  ‘I haven’t heard that word since I left the Indies,’ he said. ‘This is the Commandant’s Cottage, Mrs Rochester, my humble abode. But it does resemble an ajoupa. Nobody has remarked on it before. Perhaps the idea was in my mind when I had the verandah and shutters added.’

  His parlour was a bachelor’s room, four comfortable chairs on an India rug by the fire, a round table and a desk piled with papers, ledgers, drawing instruments, rocks and a gunpowder flask. The Lemprieres were there to greet us. Charlotte Lempriere, a smiling, friendly woman, showed us the offices, and when we returned to the parlour she presided over making the tea. Her husband thanked us for the provisions we’d brought and invited us to dine with them that night. Booth and Sophy Cracroft departed again for the Carts’ cottage at Point Puer in the next bay, while Charlotte took us down the hill to our quarters at the ‘Museum’. Miss Drewitt would stay with us for the night and travel on to Wedge Bay next day.

  The Museum was a small wooden hut. Its central door led into a cluttered room which had clearly once been a place for storage and display and was now overwhelmed. Stuffed animals and birds filled the shelves among books, jars, snakeskins, rocks, nests, eggs, seashells and the orange carapace of a giant crab. Boxes were stacked on two tables, on a schoolroom desk, on the floor. Fishing rods and butterfly nets leaned against a wall; an old school cupboard held bulging sacks. A path had been left through this conglomeration to a door in the centre of the back wall, which brought us into a second chamber, sparsely furnished by comparison.

  There were three narrow metal cot-beds in a row, separated by small side-cupboards—or in one case a three-legged stool. The dormitory impression was confirmed by a mirror hung on the wall, a kitchen chair, and a row of wooden pegs for clothes. A tiny round table held a ewer and basin and three candlesticks. This had been a storeroom, Charlotte apologised, but the shortage of accommodation meant it must presently be used for guests. Booth’s servant, Power, came with hot water, and Charlotte and he left us. An hour later he returned and led us back to the Commandant’s cottage.

  Booth was amiable and talkative, but could not seem to begin the discussion we were so eager for. This is not hindsight. I remember finding his unease almost palpable at the time, and thinking it came from having bad news to deliver. He, too, apologised for our quarters, explaining that Mr Bergman, the surveyor, was occupying the spare room at the Commandant’s cottage. It was hardly more than a cupboard, in any case, utterly unsuitable for three ladies, or even two. He sympathised about the Adastra, showed us fossils and shells, threw coals on the fire and riddled it up violently with the poker, and at last said to Anna that he doubted he could help her. His acquaintance with Mr Rowland Rochester had been brief. She waited in her silent, unnerving way, her eyes fixed on him.

  ‘I know you have suffered a great deal,’ he said, ‘but, forgive me, do you think it wise to go on searching after so many years?’

  For a moment she said nothing, and then replied slowly, ‘You think I should not ask, not care what happened to my husband?’

  Booth looked uncomfortable. ‘No, indeed. I meant only . . . Have you considered what the consequences may be? I hesitate to alarm you, but it would be wrong not to warn . . . Supposing, for instance, Mrs Rochester, that your husband has believed you were dead? He may have . . . formed another attachment?’

  There was a longish silence. Anna kept her great dark eyes on him and at last said in her unhurried way, ‘When I was a child we were told Saint Paul had a thorn in his flesh. I supposed it to be a real thorn, but Sister Marie Augustine said no, c’est un façon de parler. A way to speak of something that pricks and torments so one cannot forget. Rowland Rochester is the same for me.’

  From Booth’s face you’d have thought she had picked up the poker and struck him.

  ‘If he is alive I want to know why he did not come back to help me,’ she continued. ‘And if he is dead I want to know that too.’

  ‘I see,’ Booth said. And then, more gently, ‘Well, I will tell you what I can. Some of it I believe you already know.’

  He sat in the chair behind his desk and at last began.

  ‘I was one of several officers of the Twenty-first Regiment sent to Demerara in August ’twenty-three at the time of the slave rebellion. We took small detachments from the Georgetown Rifle Corps and marched out to the plantations where there was unrest. To show the flag, mop up generally. One group went to Mahaica to relieve the station there, my party went to Nabaclis.

  ‘At a small plantation called Belleur we discovered a man half-dead in a shanty. The slaves claimed they had found him. He had a bullet wound in the leg—the bone was broken—and a high fever. His head was on a rolled-up, mildewed jacket, and inside this was a parcel of waxed cloth containing four thousand pounds in Bank of England drafts, paper money and specie. Two of the bank drafts were directed to a Mr Rowland Rochester, but we could not be sure that was the name of the sick man, of course. We did our best for him, but we also had other urgent concerns. The fighting seemed set to break out again.’

  Somehow the patient clung to life, and against all expectations began to recover. As soon as he could speak, he told them he was Rowland Rochester, but that he was estranged from his family and did not wish to have his plight made known to them. The money came from his having recently sold a small estate to the owner of an adjoining property. He would say nothing, at first, of how he had come to the condition in which they found him.

  When the time came for the 21st to leave Demerara they took him back with them to Saint Vincent. During his convalescence Rowland wrote letters, and at one time received a reply that agitated him considerably, but he did not volunteer any explanation. As soon as he was strong enough, he moved out of the infirmary to a house in the hills where it was cooler, cared for by a quadroon family he employed as servants. Booth saw him less frequently after that. Four or five months later, Rochester, walking with a stick, came to say he was leaving for Spanish Town. Later, perhaps a year later, Booth heard that Rowland had died of a fever there.

  Anna’s face dropped. Booth turned away, picked up a fossil from his desk and turned it in his hands.

  ‘How did you learn of his death?’ I asked.

  ‘One of the sergeants who had been in Demerara with me, a man called Elton, was in Spanish Town for some reason, and on his return he mentioned having heard it.’

  ‘Is Sergeant Elton in Van Diemen’s Land now?’

  ‘No, he died when we were in Ireland.’

  ‘Rowland Rochester was well when he left Saint Vincent? Why should he suddenly die?’

  Booth shrugged, smiled faintly. ‘No mystery there. The mystery is how anyone survives. Yellow fever, or a dozen other kinds of fever, a man already weak . . .’

  ‘Were there other soldiers in your Regiment who knew Rowland Rochester? Did he have a particular friend?’

  ‘Our surgeon, Dr Beckett, had a good deal to do with him of course; they played chess together. But Beckett died of fever before we left the posting. And as I said, after Rowland moved into
the hills we saw him less. A couple of times he spoke of the Reverend Smith in Demerara as a friend, but Smith was accused of helping the slaves during the rebellion. He stood trial and was sentenced to hang, but he’d been consumptive for years and died before the sentence could be carried out.’

  I searched my mind for questions. ‘Rowland’s injuries—do you think the slaves were to blame, that he was caught up in the rebellion?’

  ‘No. He told me his wounds came from a duel.’

  ‘A duel?’

  Booth shrugged again. ‘Common enough in those days.’

  ‘Did he never mention Van Diemen’s Land?’

  ‘No,’ he smiled again, ‘and if he had, I would not have known where it was, then. After we left the Indies we had a stint back at home and four years in Ireland before we came here—and when we were told our next posting was Van Diemen’s Land, we thought it was near New Zealand. What brought Rowland Rochester here?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  He said gently, addressing Anna again. ‘Rowland never spoke of his family. Have you considered, Mrs Rochester, that if he is alive, and has not communicated with any of his people for fourteen years, it may be that he prefers not to?’

  She did not reply. Again he turned away from the look on her face.

  ‘Rowland had quarrelled with his father,’ I said. ‘We know that. But old Mr Rochester is dead now and Rowland’s brother, Edward, is the only one left except for Anna. If he knew this it might make a difference.’

  Booth shook his head. ‘I’m sorry to have no better news.’