Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  At about this time I had a conversation with Jane Franklin that I recorded in my journal with a grim amusement worthy of Boyes:

  Jane: I shall be sorry to lose you, Harriet. If your friends don’t come soon I think I shall make a match to keep you in the island. A clergyman? A schoolteacher? Someone musical. Bergman . . . Ah, I have it! McLeod. His newspaper is begun—and heaven knows we need some benign influence in that quarter.

  Me: Thank you, ma’am, but I mean to return to London to work on the bird lithographs with Eliza. Besides, Mr McLeod is interested elsewhere, I believe.

  Jane: If you mean Mrs Ross, he has proposed and she has refused him. How do I know? Susan Ross’s sister Charlotte Lempriere came up to town recently, and Mrs Ross of course told her. Charlotte returned to the peninsula and told Lizzie Booth, who sent a note about it to her sister Nan in Richmond. Nan spoke under a vow of secrecy to Julia Chesney, who told Mrs Parsons, who told me. Et voilà!’

  Jane was amused but shaking her head, deploring it all.

  When the Groundwaters sailed I moved into another lodging house. I was boarding by the week now, expecting Anna and Quigley any day. But as time passed and there was no sign of them, I was forced to move frequently, driven out by verminous beds, a mouse plague, a room that filled with smoke whenever the kitchen fire below was alight, and fellow tenants from the too-friendly to the frighteningly sinister. Each time there was the difficulty of finding a new place, and the expense of a boy and a barrow—my possessions having multiplied somehow in spite of another hazard, a larcenous landlady. I said nothing of this to Sophy or Lady Franklin, but as generally happens in Hobart, they heard of it. I made it a joking matter, which did not deflect Jane’s interest.

  ‘You must come to us, of course,’ she said at once.

  I thanked her, reminded her she had even fewer bedrooms this Christmas than last. The whole rear wing was closed for repairs. The site of the new Government House had been decided, two miles upstream on the Domain.

  ‘Why do you not buy a cottage, Harriet?’ Jane said suddenly. ‘I will lend you the money. It will be an excellent investment. Leave it in the hands of an agent when you go home and it will bring you a steady ten percent. You can pay me two percent when you are ready—which leaves you eight, still twice what you would get in England.’

  Money interested her as another kind of practical puzzle. She had managed to invest Miss Williamson’s little savings at fourteen and a half percent, Miss Williamson told me.

  ‘Or rent a small cottage?’ Jane went on. ‘Even if you pay a whole quarter and leave before the end, you will hardly lose more than you do now by paying weekly and moving so frequently. It’s the fourth of December today—you will hardly sail now before Christmas. Do you know Arthur Sweet, the young clerk in Sir John’s office? He and Tom Cracroft are friends. His mother is a widow. She has a cottage to let in Battery Point near St George’s Church.’

  Jane knew such things because she was always saying to people, ‘Tell me about yourself. Where do you live? What is your work? How do you manage?’

  Ada Sweet was a Yorkshirewoman my own age, so tiny that the top of her neat cap just reached my shoulder. Her father, Old Mr Coombes, was barely taller. He and his wife owned the cottage next door to Mrs Sweet and Arthur, but Old Mrs Coombes had died, and now the widower had moved in with his daughter so the cottage could be let. By this means they would pay the mortgage until the house could be Arthur’s. She would like to let to a single lady, worried about having children next door because her father worked all the ground, nearly an acre, as a kitchen garden. There was no fence between the two places. She sold some fruit and vegetables among the goods in the mixed shop at the front of her cottage.

  The place to let was a crooked little house of three rooms in an odd dog-leg formation. The front door opened to a narrow hall with a room to one side, and then the hall opened into a large brick kitchen, from which a cupboard-staircase led up to a servant’s attic. Another door from the kitchen opened into a bedroom, placed domino-fashion across the back. Twelve guineas the quarter. Too much, we both knew. Mrs Sweet looked at me, not unkindly, but with the look canny northerners have for daft, soft southerners, and we both knew I would agree. It was spotlessly clean, as simply furnished as a nunnery, and I was by then in love with the apple tree outside the kitchen door, and the tethered goat, and the heady new idea of independence.

  Only one thing kept troubling me about the cottage: a small chair in the fireside corner like the one Nellie Jack had occupied at Peg’s house.

  I walked up to the Female Factory. It was further than I thought, and even on this sunny summer day, almost Christmas again, this place was grim, tucked under a hill on the shadowed, cold side of the Rivulet up towards the mountain. Too much like the grey school from which we had rescued Adèle. Here the smell was of strong lye, boiling linen and sour milk. There were clattering sounds of work, women’s voices, the crying of babies. Nellie was in a room where prisoners of good behaviour were put to spin and weave wool into blankets. But there was no wool, said the matron. It was given by farmers, or bought if there was money, but mostly there was none. The room was freezing. Nellie sat huddled on a stool, leaning awkwardly asleep against a wall like an ancient crone. She held a tiny baby on her lap, also asleep, but both came sharply awake as we entered. Nellie had been there two months but it might have been years from the grey look of her.

  When it came to signing the form to leave, her belongings were said to be one brown shawl and a walking stick. I was surprised, remembering neither, but rather an old school satchel Peg had given her, in which Nellie had kept a couple of cotton scarves, a tin brooch, hair-pins, two handkerchiefs (never used) and a set of patent false teeth (also never used) bought from a pedlar at the kitchen door. There was no satchel, said the matron. Nellie kept twitching my sleeve so we left. When we were a hundred yards from the gates, Nellie cried ‘Hah!’ and threw the walking stick into the ditch. After a few more steps she stopped, went back, picked it up and used it again to hobble along.

  Later I saw she was not wearing her wedding ring, which I had never known her without. She said another woman had advised her on her first day there to hide it up inside herself, in her wossname, privates, like. But two women come in that night and one sat on her chest while the other searched down there and took it. One young woman kept a few coins in her hair and had it nearly all pulled out. You were better to have nothing in there. I asked her about the pretty baby. ‘It won’t larst,’ she said. ‘They don’t, there.’

  It was a wrench to leave the cottage three days before Christmas to go to ‘Kenton’. I took Nellie, hoping that when I left the island Bess would employ her. I was the first ‘Adastra’ to arrive—and the only one, as it fell out. Rain began next morning, spoiling the raspberries and cherries, and apparently delaying Louisa, St John and James Seymour, who still did not arrive. McLeod was not expected; he was attending to his newspaper.

  Christmas came and went with no sign of the missing guests and many tedious discussions of why this might be. Two days later the sun reappeared and we began pickling walnuts. Liddy, Nellie, Bess and I sat outside the kitchen door with a tub of the green fruit, and wearing old gloves to prevent our hands turning black from the juice, we pricked them soundly with a fork and tossed them into a pail of brine. A rider came into the yard and I knew it was Bergman. He was limping, and my mind flashed to Rowland Rochester.

  A twisted ankle, Bergman said: it was nothing. He had returned to town for Christmas, and being now on his way back to Sorell to resume work, brought apologies from the Wallaces and Seymour. St John was ill, but he was in Seymour’s care. Louisa and the baby were in excellent health.

  Bergman drank Bess’s famous ginger beer and made her laugh, and then asked if I would walk down to the river. I was determined to be calm in spite of a feverish tumult inside. I watched him put his old hat on again, I looked at his brown face and the rough dark curls he was pushing aside, and knew that if he asked
me again to marry him, I would say yes. I wasn’t sure how or when the change had come, but I was certain now. I felt happy, buoyant and breathless.

  He said nothing until we turned along the bank by the reed beds and then he told me Mick Walker was dead, had died on Christmas Eve in the hospital. This was the cause of St John’s illness. The Courier had printed the bare fact, but the circumstances were being kept quiet. Indeed, they were hard to fathom. Walker and Dixon had somehow escaped from the prison in Argyle Street two days before Christmas. They managed to bolt half a mile down the road to Wapping, a rookery of shanties between the theatre, wharf and slaughterhouse. Walker had then managed to get a message to St John, who went down there . . .

  ‘. . . which must have taken some courage,’ Bergman added. ‘The place is so dangerous even the constables leave it alone. Walker told Wallace that he and Dixon had been deliberately allowed to get away so they could be “shot while attempting to escape”.’

  While Walker was speaking the slum was raided. Gaolers and constables burst in and Walker and Dixon were shot. They were taken to the hospital, where Walker died late on Christmas Eve. St John had insisted on staying with him, and when Walker died he began raving and trying to prevent the body from being taken away for burial in an unmarked grave.

  ‘Dixon is still alive but Seymour doubts he can survive,’ Bergman said.

  Through Seymour, Wallace had sent for Bergman and asked him to take me to find the Carmichaels at Copping.

  ‘But why? What is the use now? Can nothing be done about John Price, about this corruption?’ I was too angry for tears, choked by a helpless sense of injustice.

  ‘That’s just it. Wallace believes the Arthurites must be called to account. And the Carmichaels may know something which will help the case,’ said Bergman.

  He told me he had three days of work at Sorell to finish, and after that, if I was willing, we would go. His manner was friendly, but cool and businesslike. He added that there had been no shipping arrivals over Christmas, no sign of Anna and Quigley. He gave me the address of Quigley’s agents in Sydney and advised me to write for news.

  With the walnuts soaking we began on the jam. Through all the pitting cherries, weighing precious sugar, sorting jam crocks and jars, my mind would persist in returning to Bergman’s coolness, Walker’s death, Anna’s and Quigley’s delay. We made twenty-eight pounds of cherry conserve on the morning James Seymour arrived. Dixon was dead. St John, as before, needed not so much a doctor as a theologian. Archdeacon Hutchins was with him.

  23

  I REACHED SORELL BY COACH FROM THE CHESNEYS’ WITHOUT incident, and met Bergman, who was waiting with the pony-trap. Sorell to Forcett is some seven or eight miles, which passed easily enough, though not without a degree of discomfort from the plank seat that made me glad the ride was no longer. The day was warm, warmer than any day in the previous January, as we both said. I asked whether he had seen St John or Louisa, but he had been working at East Bay Neck for a week and had no news. Other topics failed us too: we could not seem to fall into our old comfortable manner together, and after a few attempts I began to think he did not want to talk, and we travelled in silence.

  At Forcett I lodged the night with the Misses Driscoll, whose main livelihood was poultry, two acres alive with turkeys, chicken, geese, ducks, and flocks of tiny quail, which seemed to flee from under every bush. Their servant, Yankey Tom, a black man, took the cart, and I was shown into a small white room, while Bergman rode away to his camp nearby. In the morning we set off again. Once more the day rose quickly to heat, and our stilted conversation met with no better success than the day before.

  Just before noon we jolted up to a farm gate on which hung two recently skinned hides, still bloody, black with flies. A hut was visible in a clearing beyond, among tall gum trees. Smoke rose from the chimney. Once through the gate the building revealed itself as two huts set at right angles with a gap between. A rank stench filled the air. A rough-coated dog dutifully drew attention to us in deep unthreatening barks. Outside the larger hut, where a wooden bench and table stood against a sunny wall, a young woman plucking a fowl looked up from dowsing it in a bucket of water. She paused and stared as we approached, did not smile. Bergman lifted his hat and asked if this was the Carmichaels’ property.

  ‘Dinah!’ she shouted.

  A little girl in a cotton pinafore and bare feet came out of the hut, clasping a rag doll. She stared at us and wheeled back inside, appearing again almost immediately, clinging behind the skirts of a woman about my own age, carrying another small child on one hip. Bergman gave our names and said we would like to speak with her—or her husband—on a private matter. The women wiped their hands on their aprons, their expressions guarded. He said I was a friend of Mr George Fairfax and would like to know something more of how he had died at New Norfolk. Perhaps she had seen how it happened?

  ‘Dinah,’ said the older woman, pointing at herself. ‘Sal,’ pointing at the young woman. ‘My husband’s sister.’

  They turned into the hut and we followed with the small package of gifts Bess Chesney had provided: a length of calico, tea, jars of jam, walnuts and several recent newspapers. The women kept their eyes away from it. The interior of the cabin was airlessly hot. Flies droned in circles. It was one long wooden room with two alcoves, each curtained off by a blanket pegged to a rope across it. The far end wall was stone, most of it being a wide fireplace where a pot steamed on a hook above a fire. I was offered a chair and Dinah apologised for the smell; they were boiling tallow for candles on a fire out the back.

  When we were settled, Bergman repeated that we did not want to cause trouble, but would like to hear anything they could tell us. George Fairfax had died the night of the Bridge Meeting?

  Dinah said slowly, ‘Aye, a terrible hot day it was—like today.’

  Led carefully by Bergman, she admitted eight or ten gov’ment gen’lemen were in New Norfolk that night for the meeting—not lodged at The Eagle, but at the Bush Inn above the river. And so when the Fairfaxes came off the coach at midday—the two Mr Fairfaxes and Mrs Fairfax and the daughter—there warn’t no beds left at the Bush, so they was sent across to The Eagle.

  ‘The two Mr Fairfaxes?’ asked Bergman, after the slightest hesitation.

  Yes, the two gen’lemen (patiently, as though Bergman were a little backward).

  ‘Did they say where they had come from?’

  Yes, but then, no. The older gentleman, Mr George Fairfax, he wrote in the book Harris’s Landing, but that was wrong. Harris’s was on the other side of the river where the bridge was to be built—and he didn’t live there any more than she did. He’d come on the coach hadn’t he? No one lived there. Mr Magistrate Harcourt grazed his horses on it.

  ‘The younger man was Mr Rowland Fairfax?’ I asked.

  She looked doubtful. She could not rightly say, now. It being such a hot day, Mrs Fairfax and her daughter had stayed in the back parlour reading while the two men went out walking and came back, and later they went out again to the meeting at the Bush Inn. The daughter was about thirteen. She and Sal spoke a few words when Sal took in some barley water. She, Dinah, was not taking much notice because Mr Henry Arthur came in about that time, to visit his brother Mr Charles Arthur, and that put her on edge. You had to keep an eye on Mr Henry.

  Mr Charles Arthur was generally magistrate up north at Muddy Plains, but he was at New Norfolk because he’d changed places with Mr Thomas Mason, the one they called ‘Mister Muster Master Mason’. Mr Mason had been in trouble a few months previous, for insulting another gentleman. There was talk he must lose his place, but Governor Arthur let him change for six months with Mr Charles Arthur instead.

  Mr Henry said he would join his brother, who had already left for the meeting, but he stayed and stayed and in the end did not go—all on account of Mr George Stephens, the brother of Mr Alfred Stephens, Lawyer Stephens, who was there too. Mr Henry and Mr George called for brandy and water and persuaded Mr Montesquieu
and Mr Ross to play at cards. Which she didn’t like on account of when Mr Henry Arthur was gaming and drinking there was no saying what he might do. He had once rid a horse up the stairs into the Launceston Hotel and got the poor beast stuck so it had to be shot. And another time he tried to climb the spiked front railings of a respectable house and got himself stuck hanging by the breeches, shouting and threatening any who tried to help. And Mr Ross just as wild sometimes—and her husband Seth was away, gone to the meeting too.

  Dinah noticed Sal staring at her and fell silent.

  At any rate—Dinah spoke quickly now as though to get finished—after the meeting the two Mr Fairfaxes were walking back and the older one had a fit as they came in and died.

  ‘A fit?’

  ‘Yes, an apperlectic fit, the doctor said.’

  ‘Was it your local doctor?’ I asked. ‘A good man?’

  ‘Our Doctor Maynard was good,’ she nodded at me. ‘But it weren’t him. They fetched Dr Brand from the meeting, a gov’ment gen’leman.’

  After a pause she added: it being that hot, the poor man was buried quick and she was sorry for our loss but there it was. Sal brushed something from her skirt and began to breathe again. The two women exchanged a look. Bergman and I too exchanged a look of suddenly renewed complicity and interest. The Arthurites had brought in an Arthurite doctor, not the local man.

  There were voices outside, sounds of horses and men, and the women rose and began to set out bowls on the table with platters and spoons. Sal peered through the one tiny window, in which a dry hill was framed. The little girl stared at me but looked away shyly when I smiled at her.