Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Five ten-pound notes were folded in.

  You must know how eagerly we look for a word from you. To think of you in those distant regions at our bidding inspires anxious thoughts, even without the mystery of Mr Rochester’s brother, which renders your journey a matter of such profound interest to us. It is impossible to convey our thanks, dear Harriet. We must remain in your debt and endeavour to show you on your return how we value your help. Believe me when I say you are always in our thoughts. I will write no more, being in haste to send this. We pray for you daily, knowing you are in God’s care, which has brought us out of dire troubles and into a happiness greater than any I have ever known.

  Jane Rochester

  The second was a note from Lady Franklin, saying she would be obliged if I would make it convenient to call at Government House at three in the afternoon on the following Wednesday or Thursday.

  The third was from Robert McLeod in Richmond. Dr James Ross had died on the first of August. His wife Susan was left in difficult circumstances with thirteen children.

  I spent some time considering how best to answer Jane, and at last wrote that Anna had gone away with Quigley, but Captain Booth was kindly assisting me with enquiries about Rowland in the island.

  16

  LADY FRANKLIN WAS UPSTAIRS IN HER ‘OFFICE’, THE MAID TOLD me. Later, when I used the word, Jane Franklin explained gently that she preferred to say ‘writing room’ or ‘anteroom’, but the servants were apt to forget. The ‘office’ was a gentleman’s place of business. She shuddered at the idea of being thought one of those ‘bold, masculine, independent women who ape men’.

  I understood. Mr Robert Murray, editor of the Colonial Times, had recently accused the Governor’s wife of being secretly at work on a novel, which he claimed was a satirical attack on Hobart society designed to allow her London friends to mock the raw colonials. A woman with an ‘office’ might be that kind of woman. The Advertiser had followed Murray’s lead, but said the book was not fiction but a lampooning history of the island—cribbed from Mr Henry Melville’s The History of Van Diemen’s Land, since Lady Franklin could know nothing of the matter herself. It would annoy the Arthurites, which was no doubt the lady’s intention.

  Various explanations were offered in Hobart as to why Robert Murray had decided to loathe the Franklins. Some said it was because he had been left off the guest-list for their first levee, either by accident or because Murray was a gentleman convict, transported for the ‘gentleman’s crime’ of bigamy. Others said Sir John had refused to shake his hand when they were introduced. Gus Bergman believed Murray and Montagu considered themselves to be the only aristocrats in the island, and hated having to defer to a couple of nobodies. Murray claimed to be the bastard son of one of the royal princes; Montagu was kin to the Duke of Manchester. For them the Franklins represented a despised new order arisen since the war.

  Lady Franklin’s father was ‘in trade’, a cloth merchant; Franklin’s was even more deplorable, a shopkeeper! Nobodies. Murray was a dour Scot, a John Knox of our times—and former Army, with nothing but contempt for the Navy. His writing was clever and full of barbed wit, but humourless. To him, Jane Franklin was the pretentious wife of a naval fool, famous not for finding the Northwest Passage, but for disastrously failing to find it. You could imagine him deciding to take the new couple down a peg or two before he’d ever seen them.

  Others, like Boyes, added cynically that battles sold newspapers. Jane Franklin believed the word ‘blue-stocking’ had done the damage. It was used to describe her in an English newspaper sent out to announce their appointment, and was not accurate, she insisted. But it seemed to have made the pressmen in the colony bristle like hedgehogs. How little they understood her. A paid female scribbler? Horrors! She shrank from any kind of public notice.

  Not ‘office’, therefore. ‘Writing room’, ‘anteroom’; they had a more courtly ring. They brought to mind Miss Hester Stanhope, say, writing invitations for her uncle the Prime Minister; or Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, copying the immortal lines. Women writing in the service of men: no one could object to that.

  Jane Franklin thanked me for coming and apologised; I was prompt to the hour and now she must ask me to excuse her for three minutes while she finished a letter to her father. Half-a-dozen lines, no more. The Thomasina’s sailing had been brought forward to catch this evening’s tide and the mail must be aboard by four. She hoped I might find something of interest among the books on the table.

  She resumed her writing and I turned the books over. An album of pressed seaweeds, two volumes of sermons, Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Bentham’s Panopticon Versus New South Wales. There were London newspapers several months old, and the local Colonial Times, folded open at a page where one passage had a faint exclamation mark in pencil at the side:

  Mr District Constable ‘Tulip’ Wright appeared with Mrs Cooper a well-known ‘Nymph of the Pave’ who was to answer Mrs East for assaulting her together with John Younghusband a ‘man about town’ with cakes for sale. The witness showing evidence of exchange of pugilistic compliments said she was bathing her black eye when Mrs Thompson came out with a log of she-oak and threw it—called him a varmint—a wretch—a stinking cakeman and said she’d larn him . . .

  Whose pencil mark was it? Would Lady Franklin read such things? I discreetly considered the room. More books, in two tall bookcases and on small tables. Chairs in green velvet, a tapestry firescreen. A vase of leaves giving off a faintly bitter, musty smell—or perhaps that came from the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ bulging with specimens. Fossils, shells and bones, birds’ eggs, seedpods, butterflies pinned in rows, brown unidentifiable lumps. It resembled the assortment in Booth’s rooms. I later found such collections to be ubiquitous in the houses of the colony. This room’s general effect was warm and peaceful, however, a place of private studious pleasure. It was genuinely an ‘anteroom’; at the further end a door led into the bedchamber.

  It did not escape Lady Franklin that I was taking notice. She paused in her writing and said, ‘These furnishings are old favourites. I have carried them to many countries. With my chair, my Turkey rug, flowers and a few books, I have felt at home from the Nile to Saint Petersburg. My “campaign furniture”, I call it.’

  She smiled, blotted and sealed her pages, scrawled a direction, wiped her pen, pulled the bell to summon a servant. Later, when she was so vilified in the newspapers, people said she had no sense of humour, but in fact she frequently made wry little jokes. Like that one, they were often so subtle they passed without notice. I once heard her say among a mixed group that her husband and Mr Thomas Archer, two huge men, ‘were the bulk of the Legislative Council’. It was received in heavy silence.

  ‘Captain Booth says in his note he is quite recovered, but of course he would say that. I hope you really found him well?’

  She came over and sat in the shabby velvet chair and spoke of Booth’s ordeal. She asked about the families on the peninsula with friendly interest and wanted to know what I thought of the Port Arthur Church. She shouldn’t have told Booth she thought the gable ends ‘clumsy’, but he had taken it in good part, dear man. Architecture was one of her interests. She was about to have plans drawn up for a new Government House to be built on the Domain. This place was falling about their ears. There were two or three convict architects here—or she might persuade Mr William Porden Kay, her stepdaughter’s cousin, to come out from home. He, too, was studying to be an architect. Noticing that I’d picked up Pasley’s essay, she asked if I’d read it. I told her it had been one of my father’s favourites. He’d read parts of it aloud to me when I was a child. She said her own father had done the same.

  ‘So Booth is to marry Miss Lizzie Eagle? And Mrs Rochester is gone to New Holland? Where did you discover Mr Rochester’s grave?’ ‘We were not able to, my lady. He may have lived here under another name. It may be impossible to . . .’


  ‘Another name?’ She was interested, a bird poised above a wormhole, a game dog stilled to point. ‘Ah well, I won’t pry. After all, the impulse to escape is easy to understand. Who has not at some time imagined changing their too-familiar self for some other? Not that I mean to condone deception. I need not fear you will misunderstand me, Mrs Adair?’

  ‘No, my lady,’ I said.

  ‘This colony is small, the walls have ears, there are few educated women and too many gossips. In short, a good deal of mischief may be done by a word in the wrong company.’

  When I came to know her better I understood that she tried to practise the reserve she was advising, but her impulse was always towards candour, discussion, an exchange of ideas about the difficult, fascinating world.

  ‘When I think of what this place could be . . .’ she said, ‘Athens, Dublin, Edinburgh . . . They are all small, out-of-the-way cities, and yet each has been a distinguished centre of learning. Distance is nothing these days. Traffic to this part of the world will increase as England comes to know more of our island’s beauty and rare interest.’ She peered at me keenly. These penetrating stares were greatly disliked by some people. They were misleading. She was short-sighted even then, but would seldom use spectacles. Her eyes would trouble her greatly in the years to come.

  She paused, changed the subject. A parcel of gifts had come to her from the peninsula: a seaweed collection, a bushranger’s skull—Mr Lempriere had kindly boiled it for several hours to enlarge the sutures, the phrenology was curious—and a number of drawings, including three of mine. She had been astonished to find them so accomplished. (Tact was never her most reliable quality. She could be a model of diplomacy or blunt as a bargee.) Giving me no pause to reply, she said she was pleased to have the sketches. She was making a collection of views in the colony. On seeing their quality she and Miss Cracroft had formed a plan (plans flew from her brain like the sparks from Port Arthur coal). Perhaps I had heard that Mr John Gould, who had published A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, was shortly to arrive in the colony with his wife?

  ‘Oh, good heavens! No, I did not know it, but I am so very glad! I am acquainted with the Goulds, my lady,’ I said. ‘I knew Eliza Gould in London when she was Miss Coxen. We were close friends. I would love to see her again.’

  Lady Franklin sat expressionless for a moment and then said, ‘Twenty years ago I would have thought that an extraordinary coincidence, but I have come to know the smallness of the human portion of the world. It does not surprise me now.’

  She said Sir John was anxious to give the Goulds every assistance. Mr Gould would be away from Hobarton on collecting excursions, gathering material for a book on the birds of New Holland. This would leave Mrs Gould much alone, making drawings from the specimens as they were obtained. It was therefore Lady Franklin’s scheme that rather than working solitary in lodgings, Eliza Gould must stay at Government House and draw in a room here. Eleanor Franklin and Miss Cracroft would attend once a week with Eleanor’s governess, Miss Williamson, as a lesson. Lady Franklin would join the circle herself when at liberty. If I was agreeable we would decide on a fee to cover my labours and such drawings as could be useful to the Goulds, and she might wish to purchase some of my sketches herself.

  Unfortunately, she added, her stepdaughter showed no gift for drawing, but she must persevere. The child was not yet fifteen; much might yet be done with her education. I heard the doubt in Lady Franklin’s tone and only understood it when I came to know Eleanor, whose intelligence was acute in many directions, but whose stubborn lack of interest in certain subjects was often a refusal to like what her stepmother liked.

  ‘Sophy, on the other hand,’ continued Lady Franklin, ‘has quite a talent.’

  Drawing had been one of their regular pastimes on the Fairlie during the voyage out, but Eleanor had showed a little spirit of resistance to learning. Some degree of resentment was to be expected, of course.

  ‘I lost my own mother when I was a child, and I know I would not have taken kindly to a stepmother,’ she admitted.

  Eleanor’s mother had died of consumption not long after the child’s birth. Sophy was ten years old when baby Eleanor was taken in by the Cracrofts, so the girls were more like sisters than cousins.

  ‘And the bond between sisters may be close and yet occasionally troubled, I know. I have always been closer to my sister Mary—Mrs Simpkinson—than to my older sister Fanny, who is Mrs Majendie now. Do you have sisters, Mrs Adair?’

  But at that moment the clock struck four and she rose, looked out of the window, and briskly led the way downstairs.

  ‘That was the carriage returning with Sophy and Eleanor. They were to call for Mr Knopwood. He is in town a few days to see his doctor and lawyer. Not in good health, poor man. We’ll take tea with them. Sophy needs proper companionship. Since her cousin Mary married Mr Price last month, she has only Miss Williamson—apart from the Maconochies, of course . . .’

  She hesitated, did not finish the sentence, began again.

  ‘I had hopes of Mr St John Wallace’s wife as a friend for Sophy, but now Mrs Wallace is expecting a child, it is unlikely . . .’

  Half my mind continued to listen while the other half took in the idea of Louisa expecting a child. I was pleased for her, but immensely surprised. Their marriage must be in a healthier state than had seemed at all likely from her revelations on the Adastra.

  Sophy had charge of the tea things. Eleanor was talking ponies and dogs to Knopwood, who was warming his hands at the fire. His white hair seemed sparser, a more ethereal cloud; he was thinner and frailer, but smiling still. He clasped my hand and said, ‘Ah, Mrs Adair! I wish I had known we were to meet! Mr Rowland Rochester! You see I have not forgot. I knew I had seen the name! I have set them aside for you but they are at my house. I meant to send them but I have been ill, you know.’

  I thanked him and tried to discover what he had found.

  ‘Why, the books I promised you!’

  He seemed to imagine we’d spoken of it before. Sophy supplied him with tea and a buttery muffin that engrossed his attention. After a pause I tried again, but he had forgotten Rowland and wanted to talk about the villainous lawyer in England who could not be brought to send him the two thousand pounds left to him in his sister’s will. There was another sign of age in the way he began to repeat himself. He thanked Jane Franklin, as I had heard him do twice before, for her kindness in asking him to dine last Christmas. He followed this by saying calmly that he doubted he would last another summer. By the coming Yuletide he hoped to be with Betsey, his dear dead girl.

  ‘Tush!’ said Jane Franklin kindly. ‘You have many more Christmasses yet to spend with us—or you will have to answer to me, sir.’

  He laughed weakly and said, ‘If I am not with you then I will be answering to God, ma’am, and so it seems I am answerable every way!’

  They chuckled gently but her face was sad.

  Elizabeth Coxen at nineteen had been a quiet, sweet-natured girl, painfully shy in company, yet humorous and quick in private. We first encountered each other in a bookshop called Benson’s, just off the Strand, in the year ’21. Benson’s in those days had a room set aside for the sale of hand-coloured prints, painted fans and drawings. There was a fashion for animal subjects, and Elizabeth and I were both selling these, one or two a week. It was one of those friendships that blossom immediately out of mutual liking, mutual interests, and we began meeting to draw and talk at the new zoological gardens in Regent’s Park, and this continued after Eliza married John Gould. He was always pleasant to me in a rather lofty way. I’m afraid I thought him a pompous little man—and Tom couldn’t bear him. Gould opened a taxidermist’s shop in Broad Street, Soho, and being largely self-taught, went briefly to Scotland to learn more from Mr John Edmonstone, a freed black slave from Guyana, who was demonstrating taxidermy to medical students at the University of Edinburgh.

  Now, meeting again, Eliza and I talked of those days,
and of her children. She had been forced to leave her two little daughters and her son Charles, her lovely Charley, with her mother in London. Her eldest son Henry had come with them—he was seven—and so had her nephew, who was fourteen and also named Henry, but known as ‘Scrammy’ because his right hand was deformed. It had been accidentally shot by a relative when he was younger. In a month Scrammy would sail to Sydney alone and set off to the back country of New South Wales to find his uncles, Eliza’s brothers, who had taken up land there. She looked forward to spending several months with them on the way home, when her husband’s collecting in Van Diemen’s Land was finished.

  ‘It is so good,’ Eliza whispered, pressing my hand, ‘to see a familiar face among strangers.’ Such very kindly people, she added hastily. Nothing could be kinder than the attentions she and her husband had received since their arrival. They had also brought a maid-companion, Mary Watson, a cheerful, practical young woman, more friend than servant, who took care of little Henry, and her husband’s manservant James Benstead, and Mr John Gilbert, a colleague of Gould’s, a fellow naturalist.

  John Gould’s assurance of manner had increased with his fame. He was already called ‘the Bird Man’ and clearly relished the title. Sophy and Henry Elliot were amused by his swaggering, and agreed Gould had the habit of thinking well of himself on all possible occasions. Jane Franklin, overhearing this, said that in her view he was entitled to do so. Undoubtedly he did have a rare talent for locating birds, even those shy or seldom seen, and no one could quarrel with his skills at recording and preserving them. He had also mastered the curious art of ‘pishing’—making soft twitterings and calls fatally enticing to birds. It was like her to know such a word. She seemed to have an endless degree of tolerance for Gould. What might have irritated her in someone else was forgivable in him, perhaps because he shared her passionate eagerness for knowledge, and seemed to take it for granted that a woman might feel the same.