Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Now, lost in the night, he had a vision of himself from far up in the darkness looking down. A scrap of flesh and bone on a tiny dark island in a glimmering sea. Yet everyone was so convinced of their own strutting importance. The summer of a dormouse. If he could have stretched his sore, dead mouth he would have laughed and laughed.

  And then the stars began to sing, one at a time, joining together until they formed a chord of unbearable beauty. Lord, oh lord, our light shining in darkness; lucerna pedibus meis; a lantern unto my feet. Time and space collapsed in pain. The darkness began to be pierced by irregular scuffling, screams and the clamour of voices: a woman weeping, a baby crying, a bugle’s deep mellow fart. Years later it was daylight again. The dogs were on their feet, restless, alert. Daphne gave a sharp yelp. He heard the call of a bugle. Lempriere. More bugle notes surrounded him faintly, disappeared. The dogs whined. Spring went bounding off, came back. Bugle calls passed into silence and imagination. He kept dropping into an abyss.

  They found him in mid-afternoon on Monday, when one of Frances Spotswood’s party caught sight of Sandy and raised a shout. Lempriere’s group arrived later, the Hobart contingent close behind. Shocked by Booth’s emaciation, the filth that caked him, the stubbled, wrecked face like yellow parchment stretched over a skull, they milled around, desperate to help. They built a fire, cut the boots from his swollen feet and put him too close to the blaze. It caused him agonies when his frostbitten toes began to thaw too quickly. They gave him food and drink and he vomited. They wrapped him in blankets that allowed leeches to continue bleeding him inside the woollen cocoon. In spite of their kindness he survived.

  All of June he lay in bed looking out at the winter sky. He knew his collection of escape engines lay below the steps, although he could not see them. He had always admired the machines. Now he thought of the men who had made and used them, imagined their nights at sea or in the bush.

  In the second week of July I received a note from Booth saying he was sorry to put me to the inconvenience of travelling down to Port Arthur again, but it would be some time before he could make the journey to Hobart, and he believed I would be as anxious as he to resume our discussion. I was not anxious to resume it at all. I wanted Rowland Rochester to be dead, a swift passage Home in Spring, and a simple, unvarnished story to tell Jane and Rochester.

  The day after this came a note from Mrs Chesney urging me to visit them at ‘Kenton’. There was a PS:

  Please my dear ask our agent Mr Mather to send the following to be added to our acount there being none bought since I was away.

  2 silver thimble one paper mixed needles

  3 pr small tortusseshell sidecombs—you will no what kind

  3 capcauls—white ribbon for trimming

  2 Ridding Combs—head lice at a plaugue!

  15 yds strong canvas for mens trowsers

  2 lbs arsenic—mice and rats bad

  4 lbs epsom salts and ribbon for shoes

  Mr Chesney wishes one pound erly turnip seed and a hat of his normal kind Beaver Felt his being Blown away into the sea when he was riding and Sugar Plumbs for the children.

  I made arrangements to return from Port Arthur by way of the Chesneys.

  When I saw Booth again it was a bright winter morning, pleasant in the sun, icy out of it. He had insisted on dressing, said Power disapprovingly. I found him in a wicker chair on the verandah, padded with cushions, his possum-fur rug across his knees. St John Wallace and Gus Bergman were with him. Six weeks had passed since Booth’s rescue, but I have never seen a man so thin. His jacket hung on his narrow chest. He looked weak but cheerful, calm in a way he had not been during our earlier visit.

  ‘So Mrs Rochester has gone with Quigley,’ Booth said, taking my hand in his bony grip for a second. It was like holding a bunch of keys. ‘You see I have asked Mr Wallace to join us, and Gus Bergman, too. I believe you will understand why when you hear what I have to say.’ He spoke falteringly of the kindness he had received during his illness. Power fussed around him. Lempriere played chess with him and neglected his trumpet practice. Charlotte Lempriere made broths and custards. He had received notes from the Governor and Lady Franklin, Montagu and Forster. Port wine came from Casey, letters and books from Dr and Mrs Pilkington, and Lizzie. There had been no convict rebellion. The prisoners had expressed concern for his welfare. Booth’s eyes filled with the unstoppable tears of illness and he turned to look out at the water.

  He spoke of Caralin, his common-law-wife in the West Indies: he believed she must be dead; he could get no news of his children.

  ‘Why did you not take her back to England with you?’ asked St John.

  ‘I wanted to break the news to my father first. I would need his help, and to borrow money. Do you know what he said? “Do you want to kill your mother? Ruin Charlotte’s engagement? Put an end to your own chances in the Army? You’ll turn yourself—and this mulatto woman and her piccaninnies—into paupers.” And I understood suddenly that Caralin would be humiliated at every turn. She would hate it.’

  There was silence.

  Because of Caralin, Booth continued, he had understood Anna’s quest from the start, the painful longing to know about a lost loved one. But he also knew that if Caralin was not dead, if she had deliberately severed contact with him because she had found a new way of life, enquiries from him might imperil or destroy it.

  During his time in the bush, he added matter-of-factly, he had heard the stars singing and had come to believe that if he were rescued, it would be a sign God had forgiven him. Nevertheless, it was hard to forgive himself. He had come to the terrible knowledge that some wrongs cannot be righted. The reparation owed must be paid to strangers. He would tell everything he knew about Rowland Rochester.

  Power came in with coffee and bread and urged Booth to eat. Booth smiled and his thin hands obediently took the bread. Power waited until the Commandant had taken a mouthful and then, with a satisfied grunt, left the room. Booth laid the food aside and said, ‘Rowland Rochester is in Van Diemen’s Land, or has been. I saw him here two years ago.’

  Bergman made an exclamation. I said, ‘You saw him?’

  Booth coloured faintly at our astonishment and looked for a second like his old self. ‘I salved my conscience by arguing that it did not affect the outcome. When I spoke to you I still believed Rowland was dead. Now I am not so sure.’

  Booth explained that when Rowland left Saint Vincent he did not go alone. He took with him a young Englishwoman, the wife of a Lieutenant in the 21st. She was a girl of seventeen or eighteen, with a baby boy always sickly. Her husband was only a year or two older, still wanting a barrack-room life of drinking and gaming with his friends, while she lived neglected in the hills.

  ‘She and Rowland had formed an attachment?’ This was Bergman, who must surely, I thought, be thinking of his own situation. Why did he not marry his convict woman if he was so fond of her and the child?

  ‘No. I don’t think so. It was generally thought she simply used him as an escort home to England. And yet on the day when I saw Rowland at the Black Snake Inn, two years ago last February, this woman was with him.’

  He shook his head. ‘It happened by mere chance. I had leave to go to Oatlands for the wedding of a friend. I hired a horse at New Town but it cast a shoe after Austins Ferry and I had to stop at the Black Snake to have it re-shod. The coach for Port Dalrymple came in as I was waiting. There were passengers getting out and in, and something about one man—his limp, I suppose—caught my eye. And then the woman turned and I recognised her. It came into my mind that they might have married bigamously under another name—in which case they certainly would not want their earlier connections known.’

  Booth smiled wryly. ‘I was in a mood to oblige them. I had my own secret and was in no hurry to expose others in a similar fix. If it had been only Rowland I would have approached him, or asked openly later in barracks whether anyone else had seen him, but the woman gave it all a different complexion. I was cu
rious though, as you can imagine, and made a few careful enquiries later, but no one seemed to have heard of Rowland since Saint Vincent. I came back down here and almost forgot it until nearly a year later.

  ‘To explain this I have to go back four years. Soon after I arrived here I began to notice a convict named Thomas Walker, or “Mick” Walker. He was a head taller than most of his fellow prisoners, uncommonly good-looking, and uncommon in other ways, too. He could read and write, and although his record was bad—continual attempts at escape—he was well behaved, courteous, articulate. I would have used him as a clerk, but he told me he was a good oarsman and I needed a man for the number one whaleboat, the Commandant’s boat. In fact he proved so useful I was sorry to lose him when he came up for his ticket-of-leave in ’35. On my recommendation he was appointed constable at New Norfolk.’

  ‘Former convicts are often made constables,’ said Bergman, seeing my surprise. ‘Especially if they have any education and have been of good conduct.’

  Booth nodded. ‘There are backsliders, of course, but I did not expect Mick Walker to be one of them. To my great surprise, he was returned to Port Arthur a year or so later, convicted of housebreaking. I ordered him back on the number one whaleboat, telling him he’d been a fool to reoffend. Then he said the charge against him was false, trumped up by the ‘Arthur faction’ to disguise the death of a man called George Fairfax.’

  ‘George Fairfax!’

  Booth nodded at me.

  ‘You recognise the name, of course, and so did I. I ordered him to be silent at once because we were in a muster group, but his coming out with that name shocked me, because I associated it with Rowland Rochester.’

  Booth’s voice was growing hoarse. He had a fit of coughing, drank some water and coughed again.

  ‘When we found Rowland in Demerara fifteen years before,’ he continued, ‘the name on the documents in his jacket was Rowland George Fairfax Rochester, which struck me as unusual. Every schoolboy knows “Black Tom” Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s heroes in the Civil War, but the Earls of Rochester were Royalists, and I remember saying something to Rowland about it being odd to have Roundheads and Cavaliers in the same family. As soon as Walker said “George Fairfax”, my mind leapt to the idea that if Rowland had taken a false name, it might well be that. Therefore, I concluded that Rowland Rochester, alias George Fairfax, was dead.

  ‘I had Walker called in to hear privately what else he might say. But he’d changed his mind and wouldn’t speak of it again. He’d decided it might be the worse for him if he was thought to have “blabbed”.’

  Booth shrugged. He raised his hands, still discoloured from frostbite, let them fall in a gesture of defeat.

  ‘What could I do? If I wrote to Arthur, my letter must go through the Colonial Secretary, Montagu. It would never have reached the Governor; it would have been returned with some scalding comment on my lack of judgement in listening to a convict. My name would be black-marked for the future—without doing Walker any good. I asked him about the names, Rowland Rochester, George Fairfax, but they meant nothing to him.’

  Booth coughed again and turned to Bergman, indicating that he should continue.

  ‘It is rare that several senior members of the Arthur faction would be in New Norfolk together,’ said Bergman, ‘but they were there in February that year for a meeting with the Bridge Association, and there was some kind of quarrel afterwards.’

  ‘The Government had talked of building a bridge at New Norfolk for at least five years,’ he added, ‘but nothing was done, and at last the New Norfolk settlers determined to build it themselves, by subscription. By February ’36 they’d made representations to the Executive Council, and it became necessary to have a general meeting. Whatever happened took place after the meeting, late that night, at the Eagle and Child—and it must have been serious, because the Arthurites quarrelled over it. Henry Arthur resigned and went to the new settlement at Port Phillip. Alfred Stephen moved to New South Wales.’

  Power came in again and Bergman fell silent. It was past midday. We moved into the dining room, Booth slow but determined, speaking about general matters while Power served an excellent thick soup and bread. Afterwards, Booth told us that in the end he had done nothing about Walker’s story, even after the arrival of the letter from Rochester’s lawyer, which had been like a prod to his conscience. He recounted his evening with Montagu and Forster and his feeling that they did not want the matter discussed. At this point he had another paroxysm of coughing and was clearly reaching the end of his strength.

  ‘I want to add,’ he insisted when he recovered himself, ‘that I am now far less certain that George Fairfax and Rowland Rochester are the same man. The quarrel at New Norfolk was on the eighth or ninth of February, and I travelled up to the wedding on the tenth, the day I saw Rowland Rochester. Once I knew this, I asked Bergman to visit the graveyard for me, to discover whether there is a Fairfax buried there.’

  Bergman nodded. ‘A headstone with only the name George Fairfax, and the dates: seventeen sixty-eight to eighteen thirty-six.’

  ‘I assume that makes him too old to be Rowland Rochester?’ said Booth.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Rowland was born in seventeen eighty-nine.’ My mind had gone back to Mrs Fairfax’s stories. ‘There was a scapegrace older cousin called George, the black sheep of the family. Could that be why Rowland came to the colony? Because George Fairfax was here?’

  There was a silence before Booth said, ‘You see why you may stir up a hornet’s nest if you continue to ask questions about Rochester and Fairfax?’

  St John Wallace had not spoken so far, but his silence and the severity of his face had emitted cold disapproval. Now he spread his hands and said, frowning, ‘If we were certain that George Fairfax was, in fact Rowland Rochester, then my duty as proxy to my cousin Jane would be clear. But as that now appears impossible, I don’t understand why I am here, Captain?’

  ‘I assume that Mr and Mrs Rochester will want to know more of Walker’s story—if he can be brought to tell it—in case it does cast light on Rowland’s whereabouts. And I thought that might be your province, Mr Wallace. After all, you are here to speak with the convicts, to examine them as to their education and their prospects. Walker might say more to you than to me.’

  St John Wallace’s reluctance was clear, but at Booth’s urging he agreed to speak to Walker, although he held little hope of finding out anything.

  I asked Booth the name of the woman who was Rowland’s companion.

  ‘Catherine Tyndale.’

  ‘Is her husband still with the Twenty-first? Perhaps he . . .’

  ‘Tyndale shot himself soon after his wife left with Rowland. The official verdict was “an accident while cleaning his gun”. It was not investigated out of respect to the family, but also because the provocation probably came from our commanding officer, Major Champion, who loathed Tyndale, and singled him out for continual minor punishments. Champion made all our lives a misery. He was afterwards murdered by another of his victims, Private Ballasty, who shot Champion dead as he rode into barracks—and was hanged for it.’ Exhausted, Booth told us, as we gathered to leave, that he’d written to Dr Pilkington and Lizzy Eagle. Smiling through his fatigue, he said she had agreed to marry him.

  My plan to return to Hobarton via the Chesneys had to be given up. It rained heavily for two days, and a signal warned that the floods were out at Sorell and Richmond. I returned to Hobart on the Vansittart on the fourth of August. Three letters were waiting for me at the post office. The first was from Jane Eyre, written on the sixth of February.

  My dear Harriet,

  I confess I feel the oddity of writing this to send halfway around the world, trusting to its arrival in a country we failed to reach ourselves. It is little more than two months since we left you, but how much longer it seems! As you may imagine, thoughts of you are never far from my mind. I wonder each day how you are faring, what you may discover, and when we will see you again. />
  As to our own circumstances, I begin with what is nearest my heart, and what you will doubtless first wish to know: Mr Rochester is recovered! Whatever the cause of his illness, his health began to improve from the moment we turned back towards England. By the time we disembarked at Liverpool he was weak but vastly improved. He is now in good health and spirits and insists my affection caused me to exaggerate the severity of his condition. I am not persuaded. I can never forget those days when we feared he would not live. Adèle too, is flourishing.

  There was a paragraph here about the plans for Adèle’s schooling nearby, and two enclosed notes from her, one for me and one for Polly.

  Edward and I have now been at ‘Ferndean’ for two weeks in great mutual contentment. This will be our home. Even now in winter it is beautiful. Snow is falling into the woods as I look out from where I write. I cannot recall whether you ever saw ‘Ferndean’, but you will understand, I am sure, when I say I have few regrets about the loss of ‘Thornfield’ with its burden of sad memories. In spring we begin our schemes of improvement. By the time you receive this it will be summer here, and the work long commenced. Edward plans to have the trees cleared some further distance around the house to allow of more light entering the rooms . . .

  A page here about refurbishments to ‘Ferndean’ and the garden, and news of Dawlish and John, who had resumed their former capacities as cook and butler.

  We trust you will arrive—I mean, of course, have by now arrived—in the colony without further alarms. Mr Rochester asks me to say he desires Bertha Mason to have everything due to a gentlewoman, without extravagance, of course. We depend on you to judge what is fitting, and beg you will use the enclosed towards her comfort and your own.