Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Pilkington was silent for a moment before he answered, ‘When a man’s lived in those out-of-the-way places for months, years . . . he’s never the same, I suppose. Or perhaps it takes an uncommon kind of a man to venture there in the first place?’

  Music from the dancing was a bright thread in the corridor. Pilkington shivered, sneezed and blew his nose on a great silk handkerchief. ‘It’s turning colder again,’ he said. ‘And my dear Mrs Adair you have no wrap at all. Let us go in before we catch our deaths.’

  As we turned back there was a commotion. A soldier plunged into the corridor on a surge of freezing air, pulling off riding gloves and putting his shako under his arm. We followed him into the ballroom and stood inside the doorway as he made his way through to the Governor. The news was clearly unwelcome. Henry Elliot went to the musicians and halted them, and the room fell quiet.

  Sir John’s round face was solemn as he announced that he had just received a message he knew would be as painful to all as it was to him. ‘Commandant Captain Charles O’Hara Booth is lost on the Forestier Peninsula. He has been missing since last Thursday, south of East Bay Neck.’ He frowned and consulted the paper in his hand. ‘Near Dr Imlay’s whaling station. Mr Thomas Lempriere is leading a search party from Port Arthur, and another party will leave immediately from Hobarton.’ He scanned the gathering. ‘Volunteers are to assemble in the small reception room opposite us here.’ He asked us to pray for Booth.

  For a moment I felt faint. Bergman had turned away to say something to Pilkington. By the time he turned back to me I had recovered myself.

  ‘Will you excuse me, Mrs Adair? Are you ill? Are you sure? Of course I shall join the search, but I will stay until I see you well.’

  ‘You must go,’ I said. I could easily find my way to Anna and the Captain, or Dr Pilkington would take me.

  ‘Indeed, indeed. Go, Bergman,’ said Pilkington, his face grave. I will see to Mrs Adair. And I must find my wife and Lizzie.’

  We repeated our assurances until Bergman gave a bow and hurried away. The Doctor and I attempted to move back to the ballroom, but the hall was filling with people. We began a slow progress through the milling throng, who seemed caught in a slow turbulence, like leaves in a river’s eddies. As we passed we caught snatches of talk. Three nights out, freezing conditions, people shook their heads. And most of the officers from Port Arthur would be out with the search party: what a moment for a mass escape if the felons knew of it!

  Rumours crossed the ballroom faster than we did. People kept stopping Pilkington to ask or tell, and I was forced to wait because he’d taken my arm firmly under his elbow, and each time I tried to escape, it tightened involuntarily. One man claimed Sir John was not revealing all he knew. Booth had been walking with a convict, a man called Tanner. The convict had returned to the settlement—supposedly to report the Commandant missing, but it was more likely that he wished to rouse others to revolt. Tanner was a vicious felon who had been sentenced to twenty-five lashes by Booth a few weeks earlier. The convict had now taken his revenge, probably.

  Augusta Drewitt caught my arm on the other side and whispered that I must not be alarmed, but a convict called Tucker, goaded by an unmerciful flogging from Booth, had murdered the Commandant and called the convicts to revolt. She therefore intended to continue dancing all night, Government House being the safest place in the colony. Why go home to be murdered in her bed? But it was apparent that few shared her feelings. Servants were sent for wraps and carriages, and a scurry outwards began. Mr Littlejohn’s band played on but the dancers dwindled. The crowd at last began to thin, but hours seemed to pass and still I could see neither Anna nor Quigley. When only eight couples were left, they were not among them. I went to look in the ladies’ dressing room while the doctor attended to his wife and stepdaughter. Anna was not there, and her cloak and boots were gone. She had taken them a long while ago, the maids thought.

  I changed my slippers for boots, collected my wrap, and returned to where Pilkington was trying to cheer his distraught wife and Lizzie. They clung together, white and tearful, looking as if they might collapse at any moment. The doctor hastened away to call their carriage, promising they would convey me home on their way. I said we had come in sedan chairs which were ordered to return for us, but the doctor believed they would take some other fare in the present confusion. He thought Quigley must have gone to join the search party, asking some other family to take Anna. I considered this unlikely but did not know what else to believe.

  Lady Franklin came downstairs on Sophy Cracroft’s arm. She looked ill, but spoke sympathetically to Lizzie and her mother and suggested the remainder of the supper should be wrapped to send with the search party. Sophy went to give this order and Lady Franklin turned to me and asked if she might take my arm for a moment. Her face was ghastly pale. We walked a few steps to another group, and she spoke disjointedly of Booth’s fine qualities and the sudden treacherous changes in the island weather.

  This must have been the moment when Dr Pilkington sent a servant to fetch Mrs Pilkington and Lizzie to the carriage. He had been called to attend a woman having a fit in the morning room. Mrs Pilkington and Lizzie went home, not understanding that I was to have accompanied them. By the time Lady Franklin and Sophy disappeared upstairs again, as they soon did, the ballroom was almost empty and I could see no one I recognised. I made my way through the hall and out into the entry. It was after four o’clock. I was weary but the cold revived me. I looked about for the sedan chairs, but there were none. I now felt an urgent desire to be home, to know Anna had reached there safely.

  The Franklins’ Scottish steward, Mr Hepburn, saw me standing irresolute, and in the ensuing conversation I spoke about sedan chairs, and perhaps he did too; his strong accent made it hard to tell. We were floundering by the time Bergman came by on his way out, and Hepburn insisted on explaining my plight. Bergman seemed to grasp the import, and went to see whether one of the two carriages preparing to leave could take me, but one was going in the wrong direction, the other overladen already. They were the last.

  ‘It’s no matter. I shall wait here until it grows light. Or I can easily walk,’ I said. Bergman looked at me dubiously.

  ‘We can walk together if you’ll allow me?’ he said. ‘Or would you prefer to wait here until daylight? It will be another hour or more. I’m on my way home to change. My house is in the Battery. You are at Mrs Groundwater’s? They are not far apart. It is generally frowned upon in Hobarton for a lady to walk alone with a gentleman to whom she is not related, but in these circumstances . . .’

  ‘You’ll miss the search party.’

  ‘No, the first one went half an hour ago, the military contingent. Another leaves at dawn with civilian volunteers. It gives us time to assemble more lanterns, ropes, blankets.’

  I explained I was anxious to get back to the lodgings to make certain of Anna. He nodded briefly, said, ‘May I?’, tucked my arm under his without fuss, and we set off into the cold dark. His breathing warmth was pleasant, comforting, his greatcoat rough, smelling faintly of tar and smoke. We fell into step. The cold came up through the soles of my boots and my feet began to grow numb.

  ‘Do you think Booth has a chance?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s been lost before and survived. He and Casey were out for two nights on the Tiers a couple of years ago.’

  ‘In weather as cold as this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever been lost?’

  ‘When I first arrived. A colleague and I stumbled about in the bush at Jerusalem Corners for two days. Our donkey, Nelly, led us out when she was hungry, and tired of going in circles. And you?’

  ‘Only in London.’

  He gave a huff of laughter. Walking briskly on, we passed the garden gate of a large house, where three people stood under the light of a lantern on a pole. One was a maidservant, shivering, grasping a shawl round her and holding a large tin jug. Beside her was a youngish man too thinly clad, carrying a little
girl of about four. The child was bundled warmly in a coat, mittens and a little woollen cap, with a cup in one hand and an apple in the other. The man had looped a muffler loosely about his own neck and hers. As we went by he and Bergman raised their hats to each other.

  ‘The Mad Judge,’ he told me when we were some yards distant. ‘His little girl likes to give the dairyman’s carthorse an apple, and collect her own cup of milk.’

  ‘I’ll never understand this place,’ I said. ‘Where else would you see such a thing?’

  As we reached Peg Groundwater’s gate and started up the front path, the door opened as though she had been watching for us. Without speaking she handed me two pieces of paper, a page of my sketchbook torn in half. She held up her candle while I read the pencilled notes. The first was in a childish, straggling copperplate:

  Chère Harriet,

  Poor Cpn Booth dead with Pierre Maman Papa Edwd Rchstr. Too much time wasted my life and yours. I pray for you and Christophine, adieux, Anna.

  The second was in a neater, smaller hand:

  Dear Harriet,

  Forgive this haste we leave on the instant or lose the tide. We carry the search party on our way. Poor Booth. No finding Rowland now. Return VDL for you in spring. Anna’s happiness will ever be my first object. Yr srvnt, Ned Quigley

  Thrusting the notes at Bergman, I flew down the hall to Anna’s room. Discarded clothes were strewn about. One of the rough sandals she had worn on the Adastra lay in a tangle on the floor. All my hard-won calm was gone, turned into doubts and fears. There was a knock and Bergman came in. He looked at my face and said, ‘Quigley’s a good man. They’ll be back in the spring. Are you all right? Mrs Groundwater is bringing a hot drink.’

  He came and took my cold hands between his, saying, ‘What can I do? If I can help, you know you have only to ask.’

  We stood like that a moment and I felt, as before, his warm energy passing into me. Peg Groundwater came in as a clock chimed the quarter and he said he must go. Peg and I went to my room, where she had made up the fire, and when she saw I was not ill to collapsing, she left me to rest, as I asked. I opened the curtains and sat by the window, waiting for the day. The first pale grey light showed roofs and grass white with frost. Booth would need our prayers.

  In those first hours my thoughts were all of Booth, Anna and Quigley. The agitation I felt was for their safety—abundant fears and dire imaginings. Yet after another day and night when there had been no news of Booth, I found a change entering my thoughts. Booth was dead, surely, and therefore at peace. I was profoundly sorry for it, and for the dreadful manner of it, but it was over now, and Quigley was right: the search for Rowland was therefore at an end. As for Anna, I had had four months on the Adastra to study Quigley, and I believed he would take care of her. All of which meant that for two or three months, until spring—September, say—I was free. For so many years my life had been constrained by the needs of others, my grandmother, Nina, Tom, Anna—that the idea brought a curious flattened excitement.

  I counted up the money Anna had left in the cache: nine pounds and some shillings. Together with the ten pounds I had hidden in the spine of a book and the money in my purse, I had twenty-four pounds. My lodgings for the quarter were paid, my return fare to England not in doubt, and my clothes were new. If I wished to, I might buy books and drawing materials, take a ferry across the river, walk all day, buy a currant bun.

  In the weeks before the ball I must admit I had sometimes felt impatient with Anna, but after she was gone I missed her. I had strange dreams. In one I was caring for a babe-in-arms, which I knew, somehow, was Anna. I was forced to set it down on the ground because of its struggles, whereupon it turned into a wonderful vase as tall as myself, painted with fruit and flowers, but I was angry because it would not speak to me. In another I was unwrapping an infant from swaddling clothes to bathe it. I undressed it as one would peel an onion, and with horror at last, found nothing there at all.

  15

  ABOUT THE TIME WHEN NEWS OF HIS BEING LOST ARRIVED AT the ball, Booth lay huddled in marshy scrub south of Lagoon Bay. Rain had saturated his clothing, which was now stiffening with ice. His tinderbox was soaked, his musket jammed. The dogs were with him, sleeping curled against his chest and back, but a fiery numbness burned in his swollen hands and feet. He could no longer move. From time to time a palsied shuddering ran through him. This was his third night out.

  The wind had been coming from the south-west on the previous Thursday morning when he started out from King George Sound with Turner, heading for the whaling stations. Lempriere had worried about him taking Turner, the convict coxswain of the Woody Island Boat, but Turner was safe enough. Surly, but not malicious; a strong walker and useful companion. They had tramped north-east across the Tiers, climbing steadily, but lost the track when the dogs, Fran, Sandy and young Spring, put up a kangaroo. Turner took the game-bag ahead to retrieve the kill, and at that moment a bolt of pain started up in Booth’s chest. It stretched across his heart and pressed hard down like a bar of steel. He gasped and stopped. This must be death. Fran stopped too, turned and looked at him expectantly, stood waiting.

  He slid into a sitting position against a tree as the pain gave a last violent squeeze and began to recede. The dense undergrowth sheltered him, but as he gazed up at the sky he saw the weather was breaking. Pewter-coloured clouds massing and rolling, wind thrashing the tops of the gum trees. There was an interval of darkness and silence. He must have dozed. When he was able to stand again the pain was gone and there was no sign of Turner. He shouted. No reply but the wind.

  As he moved on he thought he glimpsed the convict out of the corner of his eye, but it was a pale grey strip of hanging bark flinging itself against a tree. The rain came, daylight faded, the first bitter night was endless. He prayed, found one part of his mind reciting the Lord’s Prayer while another tried to reckon his position. During the night he could feel the frost entering him, turning his body to stone. When at last a slow, overcast dawn lightened the world, he found it hard to move. He dragged himself into a sitting position, hauled himself gradually to his feet and stumbled on. Every gully, ravine, boulder outcrop looked the same. When he stopped there was a buzzing in his ears. Rain and wind ceased briefly and a perfect silence fell. A lone bird called in the dripping canopy. He found a patch of weak winter sun, fell into it and slept.

  When he woke the cold stars were out again and once more he thought he saw someone slide between the trees. A green dress. Caralin. Spare Thou them O God which confess their faults. Restore Thou them that are penitent. Was it Sunday? Forgive us our trespasses . . . manifold sins and wickedness . . . Perhaps God was punishing him for deserting Caralin and his children? No, he did not believe that. Too many evil bastards flourishing like green bay trees. And God would understand: at the time it had simply been the way of the world, men had their mistresses and bastards. How many of his Regiment had taken native women to their beds in India and deserted them when they moved on? But he could not forget his children’s birthdays. The ninth of October and the twenty-sixth of April had become terrible dates to him.

  Then the posting to Van Diemen’s Land and shooting the albatross on the way. As the broken suffering thing crashed to the deck it fixed him with a bright beady dying eye, full of question. From that moment life had seemed different, not to be used up as easily as possible in pleasure or lazy ambition, but having some new meaning he must learn. For one thing, his memory of the last few years of his life had twisted traitorously in his mind and he knew suddenly what damage he had done, what suffering he had caused. It was like one of those black and white trick pictures—a candlestick one moment, two old witches in profile the next. The pains in his chest began from that time, randomly, as though the dead bird were hanging round his neck, weighing on his heart. For some reason it was also associated in his mind with an earlier sea voyage, when his ship had called at Saint Helena. He had visited the estate where Napoleon died in exile. Peered through th
e great iron gates and wondered what thoughts Boney had on his deathbed. All those dead and dying men.

  At the first convict muster after Arthur appointed him Commandant, Booth looked along the lines of prisoners and saw boys as young as seven. There was nowhere to put them in those days except in the main prison among the old lags. He knew what awaited them, however vigilant the guards. What had become of his own children? Lempriere’s much-loved children, Power’s children, were a continual reproach.

  He had suggested to Arthur the establishment of a separate prison for boys up to fourteen, and Arthur was pleased with the idea. He obtained permission to let them swim in the cove in summer, and their thin white bodies seared his heart again. They bore the scars of old beatings. Limbs were bent with rickets or broken bones ill-healed. He wanted desperately to like them, wanted them to like him—but most were brutal, vicious, foul-mouthed and wild; untameable, disgusting, resentful and sly.

  He wrote endlessly to the authorities. A lack of sewing thread and needles, not sent with the bolts of cloth, left the boys half naked one summer. Late in the season he gave up waiting and sent for the necessary items from a mercer in Hobarton—and then spent months answering reprimands from Arthur. At least they were regularly fed. He gave prizes out of his own pocket for diligence: books, small toys. The boys fought over them or with them, tore them apart. There were small successes, unspeakable failures.

  Three years ago he had decided to forget Caralin and marry gentle, doe-eyed, wealthy Phoebe. The week they were to announce the engagement she was taken ill. A summer fever, the doctor said; nothing to alarm. She died three weeks later. Booth told himself he was a scientific man of the new age, and yet he found it hard to rid himself of the thought that she was the victim of a curse set on him. He had not married Caralin, now he would not be allowed to marry. Was that why he hesitated about Lizzie? Ridiculous. He did not believe such things.