Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Long after Fludde had taken Thea in, rosy with cold and running about, I stood in the dusk feeding and raking the smouldering heap, half praying, watching the smoke rise into the windless air until I was driven inside by more rain.

  Mary Boyes, Bess Chesney, Jane Franklin all asked me to stay with them. I was grateful, but could not bear any company but Durrell and Fludde and Thea—and Nellie Jack, who insisted on coming to stay with us. Each day of the following two weeks was more wretched than the last. All my effort went into not allowing myself to think two recurring thoughts: that Gus’s party had lost the track and was wandering into the depths of the treacherous horizontal scrub, and that this was a terrible punishment for my lie to St John Wallace.

  On the twenty-first of June, snow covered the mountain down to the foothills. I had eaten little for three weeks. The Derwent Jupiter that day carried another article about the lost party and the surveying of the track. Mr Bergman had been married only a year, they wrote, to a widow, Mrs Harriet Adair, companion to the late Mrs Rowland Rochester, both passengers on the ill-fated Adastra. I sat thinking over the last four years, growing colder and colder, unable to force myself to get up and attend the dying fire. It seemed useless to do anything but sit there until I died.

  I was saved by Nellie, who came out of bed in curl papers and nightgown, scolding me as if I were a child, re-lighting the fire, asking what Mr Bergman would say when he came home to find me ‘a skellington’; how I must be brave for little Thea’s sake. The tears rolled down her face and when I began to cry with her I could not stop.

  On the morning of the twenty-fourth of June, Gregson arrived. He burst into tears when he saw my face and I nearly collapsed because I thought the news was bad, but he shouted, ‘No, Harriet, they are found! Bear up. All is well!’ Gus and four of the convicts had walked out to Lake St Clair and had been carried to New Norfolk. Gregson had sent his schooner up to bring Gus and the convicts back, the Vansittart and the Eliza being still away on the west coast searching. Now he would take me to ‘Risdon’, where they were recovering. Two other convicts, too weak to walk out, had been left on Sarah Island. They were rescued by sea several days later.

  When I saw Gus I wept even more. His dear face so sunken and thin! Our belief that they had plenty of provisions was mistaken. Their packs had been washed away as they crossed a river in torrent.

  It was a week before we could tear ourselves away from the Gregsons’ kindness, and when we returned to the cottage, to the joyous welcome of Durrell and Nellie, Thea and Fludde, we found a pile of notes and letters directed to us through the newspapers. Kind messages from neighbours and friends, people whose properties Gus had surveyed, and from people we did not know at all. Durrell had kept them in a basket and we sat before the fire together, opening them, exclaiming and exchanging pages or reading them aloud, while Thea scribbled with a crayon on any paper she could grab.

  Dear Mrs Bergman,

  Please accept my sincere good wishes on the safe return of your husband. We have not met, but I have read in the Derwent Jupiter that you came to this island as companion to the late Mrs Rowland Rochester? If this is true—one cannot always believe the newspapers—we have a mutual connection in Mrs Alice Fairfax, a cousin to my husband. We understand that for some time you have been enquiring about Rowland Rochester on behalf of his family. I would be grateful to speak with you, and believe you might also wish it. I will come to you, or abide by whatever arrangement you suggest, but would be grateful if we could speak privately.

  Yours faithfully,

  Catherine Fairfax.

  She was not late, but I had been waiting half an hour at the window by the time she came walking along. She looked at the cottage and then at the other side of the road. This small place was not what she had expected. It was early July, cold but bright. Gus and I had decided that Catherine Fairfax might be more inclined to speak if it was only she and I together. Gus had business in the town in any case. He would return in the middle of the day to see how we progressed.

  The removal of bonnet, gloves, cape allowed us time to consider each other. She was dressed with care and taste in a grey costume elegantly piped with black along the seams. I was in grey too. I saw it cross her mind that we were alike. A similar age and height, her hair darker than mine. Both our faces a little too thin and worried. She carried herself more gracefully than I, perhaps accustomed to regular horse-riding, I thought.

  ‘You were Anna Mason’s friend,’ she said when we were seated by the fire. ‘I am sorry for her passing. Her life was difficult, I know.’ ‘You were Catherine Tyndale?’ I asked. ‘Your husband is Rowland Fairfax? Is he still alive? Does he know you are here?’

  She nodded, half-smiling. ‘He would have come with me, but he is in poor health, not equal to the journey these days.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘You have spoken to Booth, of course. And therefore you know, probably, or have guessed, that Rowland and I have lived as man and wife for seventeen years, although it was impossible for us to be truly married. Our lives have been shadowed by this secret. No one else knows it. Not our daughter, nor my parents . . . only Alice Fairfax, who has written faithfully over the years.’

  ‘You have corresponded with Alice Fairfax?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘She has always known where Rowland was? Why did she not say so?’

  She smiled, shook her head. ‘Poor Alice. They say women can’t keep secrets but Alice has kept this one. It has been the guilty pleasure of her existence—and as I said, the bane of mine. Alice’s husband died two years after their marriage, as she must have told you, leaving her with nothing. She loved her cousin Lucy—they were brought up as sisters—but she never could abide Lucy’s husband, old Mr Rochester. I believe she kept the secret to spite him at first.’

  ‘But why did she not tell Edward Rochester after his father died?’

  ‘She was afraid by then. She had enjoyed the secret at first when it seemed she was helping Rowland, but like all secrets it took on a life of its own—grew and twisted, and she began to understand that she did not know the whole story. Alice told you, I think, that Rowland went to Spanish Town to arrange the marriage for his brother—but she did not know Rowland had fallen in love with Anna, nor that they had married before his father could prevent the match.’

  ‘But why should he prevent it?’ I asked. ‘Surely he did not care which of his sons married Anna? It was only the dowry that mattered to him?’

  ‘Not quite. What Alice did not tell you was that Old Rochester suddenly claimed to have suspected for years that Rowland was not his own child, but the son of George Fairfax, Lucy’s cousin. Just after Rowland left for Spanish Town, the family solicitor, the present Mr John Gray’s father, grew ill, and according to Rowland’s father, revealed on his deathbed that this was true . . . but whether it is we are not certain. Rowland once asked George, who denied it, but I used to think there were resemblances—and in later years, the two grew close.

  ‘At any rate, Old Mr Rochester arrived in Spanish Town saying Rowland was not his son. But he wanted it kept secret. He wanted Rowland to return to England and marry Lady Mary Faringdon as arranged. If he did so, old Rochester would continue to acknowledge him and give him an annuity. If not, Rowland would be cut off without a shilling. In either case, he would not inherit ‘Thornfield’. Put ‘Thornfield’ into the hands of George Fairfax’s child? Never.

  ‘When Rowland told his father he had already married Anna, the old man was furious at first, but then suddenly declared it did not matter. It was just an “Irish marriage”—a Catholic service with no legal force in England. Anna could still marry Edward. Rowland could still marry Lady Mary.

  ‘Rowland, finding it useless to talk to his father, tried to leave the island with Anna, to sail to Demerara, where he had a small property in his own name, which he could sell. He knew he would have no other money once he quarrelled with his father. But Anna’s father and brother came aboard their ship before it could sail, seized Anna and took her bac
k to the convent. After fruitless attempts to see her, Rowland went to Demerara himself, planning to sell the property to provide himself with funds. He thought he would be back in Spanish Town before his brother Edward arrived.

  ‘But the Slave Revolt had begun and Demerara was in confusion. Rowland sold his estate cheaply to a neighbour who had always coveted it—that was the money in his jacket when Booth found him, but the Masons had followed him and challenged him to a duel. Before it could take place, Rowland was set upon, shot, and left for dead. He would have died, he says, except for the arrival of a group of slaves who rescued him.’

  Our small parlour seemed close and dim that day, filled to bursting with the strangeness of our conversation. The sky outside showed blue and fair. Fludde had taken Thea for a walk to the shore. Catherine and I were both agitated, and I suggested we too should walk, talking as we went. We girded ourselves against the cold, and Catherine resumed her story, as though she wanted it to be over.

  ‘Most of this I only learned later, of course. When Rowland moved into the hills as our neighbour, my servants used to tell me about the sick Englishman. I went to see if there was anything I could do, and as Rowland recovered we talked. He was in love with Anna, determined to find her and take her to England.’

  She looked at me directly. ‘I was twenty and had been married three years. I was lonely in the hills—but that was better than when my husband did arrive—with half a dozen Barracks friends and their island women; drinking, playing cards and quarrelling into the night. My husband was hardly more than a boy, mild enough when he was not in drink, but the rum made him wild. Rowland saw my situation, and when I begged him to let me come when he took Anna to England, he was too kind to refuse. We left Saint Vincent and went straight to the convent in Spanish Town, but the nuns told us Anna had been married to his brother and the couple had left the island.’

  ‘And that was when you collected the baby—Anna’s daughter?’ I said.

  She stopped, her face turned red and white, and I thought she would faint. ‘How did you know? You have not told anyone?’

  ‘It has only this minute come to me. Booth mentioned that your only child was a boy, and when you mentioned your daughter . . .’

  We had reached the top of the steep lane leading down to the shore at Sandy Bay. Halfway down was the rocky outcrop where I had more than once sat painting. We rested there now and she stared ahead.

  ‘I would have told you. That’s why I came. My daughter is married now and expecting a child, and I want to know whether her mother was really . . . whether there is any prospect that . . . But first I must explain. My son was sickly from birth. He died while we were in Spanish Town. The nuns saw my grief—if it had not been for that, I do not think they would have given us the baby. When Rowland first demanded to know what had happened to Anna’s child, they said it had died, but a few days later they sent a servant to bring us back and gave us Maria. She was seven months old—so beautiful, so healthy. Our safety lay in the fact that Mason did not want Edward Rochester to know Anna had had a child, and so he had concealed it carefully. Nobody knew.’

  She paused, wiped her eyes and said. ‘Once we had Maria, everything changed between us, Rowland and I. It felt as though we were her parents. I would have done anything to keep her, and was already half in love with him because he had been so good to me. Rowland believed he had lost Anna to his brother, and being so much together, both in distress, we . . .’ She paused and then continued, ‘By the time we reached England we were united. I took Maria to my parents. God forgive me, I told them my husband and son had died—that Maria was the orphan child of a woman I had known. They believed anything possible in the colonies. Lies, piling on lies, I was terrified at myself, at where it would all lead. Rowland, meanwhile, went to ‘Thornfield’ to see whether his father could be brought to reconsider, but the old man said he had only one son now. Edward. He ordered Rowland out, threatened to have him shot or arrested on charges of trespass if he ever returned.’

  ‘So you decided to emigrate,’ I said. ‘To join George Fairfax, who might be Rowland’s father.’

  ‘No!’ She had spirit enough to be amused now. ‘It was my parents who emigrated. It was one of the reasons why I was so eager to return to England to see them before they left. They had written to tell me they would join my brother, a Lieutenant in the Fortieth Regiment here. He had fallen in love, and sold out of the Army to marry and settle. When Rowland came back to me, we talked endlessly about what we might do—and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to go with them; a perfect opportunity to start again in a place where no one would know us, far away from England and the Indies.’ She was recovering herself, and smiled again now. ‘Well—it seemed far away then—but can you imagine what we felt eight years later when we heard the Twenty-first was to come to Van Diemen’s Land? I knew my husband was dead by then, but it meant Booth would come—and all my husband’s former friends in the Regiment . . .’

  ‘So you have been all this time in the island?’

  ‘My brother settled in the north, near Port Dalrymple, and first my parents, and then Rowland and I, joined him. Rowland had spoken with Alice Fairfax while he was at ‘Thornfield’—he was always a favourite of hers—and told her the whole story. Being sentimental and romantic, as you know, she immediately wished to help. She sent him to see her cousin George, near Liverpool. He was a widower, childless, and after a year, he too, came out to the island. Someone on the ship persuaded him to buy land at New Norfolk, which he did rather hastily when he arrived—but afterwards he too came north.’

  It was now nearly midday. We turned back towards the cottage for luncheon. I was eager to hear Catherine’s account of what had happened at New Norfolk, but she began to tell me about Maria, now eighteen and married to the son of a prominent family in the north. Her first confinement was approaching.

  ‘When I saw the paragraph in the newspaper, I thought of coming immediately to see you, unannounced, but Rowland persuaded me to write.’

  She seemed to have difficulty in framing what she now wanted to say, but after some hesitation began again.

  ‘Rowland says he saw no madness in Anna when they married—but she was very unlike young English women—on account of her strange upbringing. She had seen few other white children, was brought up by black servants. Her mother seems to have been alternately doting and distant. And then Anna had years in the convent. She knew things an English girl would be ashamed to know, but was ignorant of many common matters—which might make some people judge her mad.’ Catherine hesitated again. ‘But I have heard of women whose madness only begins after they have borne a child . . .’

  I told her I believed Anna’s madness had been brought about by the unhappiness of her life, adding what little I knew. She looked grateful, but only half-comforted. We walked on in silence, but as we passed St George’s Church she stopped and asked me if I would go in with her and swear on the Bible to keep her secrets. She apologised. She trusted me, but this was a matter of life and death to her.

  It was cold and still and silent in there that winter’s day, after the sun and buffeting wind outside. There was the lectern, the great golden eagle guarding the Book, and I looked at each small brass feather and at the fierce eyes watching and not-watching me. Should Edward Rochester be told about his brother, and his niece? I thought of who would be made happy and who unhappy by the telling. I thought of the rules men had made for us women to live by, and how sometimes we must ignore these and live by our own rules. I thought of Jane Eyre and Jane Franklin struggling free of the nets cast around them, and I thought of Thea—and I told Catherine I would promise to say nothing about Maria, but Gus might feel it necessary to tell Edward his brother was here. And I put my hand on the Book and swore.

  By the time we reached the cottage Gus was home, and as we sat at luncheon, we came at last to the matter of New Norfolk.

  ‘George Fairfax bought the land,’ Catherine said, ‘and put it into the hands
of a man down here called Lascalles, a magistrate but also a rogue. In the beginning we used to come to Hobarton once a year, but when the school became established we did not have the leisure, and as I said, Rowland’s health is not good.’

  ‘School?’

  ‘My brother always wished to begin a school. A farm-school, to provide pupils with a sound basic education, but also some agricultural training. He and my father bought a property with a large house, ‘Rutherlea’, and began with four boys. This year we have twenty-one, from seven years old to seventeen. My mother and I are matrons, with maidservants, of course. Rowland, who has always been scholarly, teaches Latin, history, grammar. But you see how awkward it was when we stumbled on the trouble at New Norfolk. The shooting of that poor girl . . . any gossip might have revealed the secret that we were not truly married. It would have ruined the school—not only our own livelihood, but my brother’s and father’s.’

  They had come south that February because George saw a notice of the Bridge Meeting in the Courier, and wondered why he had received no word of it from Lascalles. He decided to come down and see Lascalles and attend the meeting, in case it should affect his property. Catherine, Rowland, and Maria joined him for a summer excursion. Catherine’s account of the episode at New Norfolk scarcely differed from what Dinah had told us. At the meeting Cousin George discovered his land had been resumed to the Government almost a year before, and sold to a friend of the Arthur faction. He was beside himself with anger. Perhaps that was what had caused his fatal attack, or perhaps it was seeing the dead girl.

  All Catherine’s fears had been for her daughter and the school, and when Rowland began to understand the import of what they had seen, he decided they must leave as quickly as possible. He arranged it all with Mr Alfred Stephen and the local constable, Mr Mick Walker, who promised to see to George’s burial the following day. It seemed disrespectful to go, but George was dead, and if they stayed they risked everything.