Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  A man brought in to us in bulky furs, his nose and the lower half of his face covered by a mask of caribou skin chewed to air-penetrable softness by an Inuit woman (there would have to be an Inuit woman to have kept him alive). Suddenly he might say English words, ‘God Save the Queen’. Or his own name, or the name of his leader, ‘Franklin’. If only it could be Fitzjames, who still haunted Jane even more than all the others! Because he was young and brilliant, and if he had perished, lost such a future, probably while obeying orders he did not agree with.

  ‘We have discovered nothing here,’ Jane whispered. ‘It is my fault.’

  She felt that if only she tried hard enough, she should be able to will the objects to reveal themselves. They must be there. Two hundred metal canisters for messages, a thousand volumes of reading matter on each ship, costumes for amateur theatricals, boots, shoes, medals . . . Sometimes, she said, she tried to send her mind out like a bird speeding across thousands of miles of ice, scanning for a dark speck: a man, a ship. At other times she tried to make herself an emptiness into which the ice and wind might flow, bringing . . . what? A voice? A vision? She worried that her fears and furies made a silent chaos around her so that nothing could get through.

  She had forgiven everyone now, except herself. Of course she had known her husband was too old for the voyage. He had only been given the expedition because of the humiliations in Tasmania. She had not tried to dissuade him because she agreed with what Parry had said to Lord Haddington: ‘If you don’t let Franklin go the man will die of disappointment.’ But it had led to the deaths of not only her husband, but a hundred and twenty-eight men besides. All those mothers, wives and families, all that long waiting. Jane groaned. This was a burden weighing heavier on her every day for twenty years. If giving up her own life could have brought them back, she would have done it in an instant.

  ‘You could not have dissuaded him,’ I argued. ‘He would have gone no matter what—and so would every man of his crew.’

  ‘Not enough kindness, not enough love,’ she muttered, shaking her head, not heeding me. She knew she loved her husband more now than when they were together; not the old man as he would be with his elderly smells, his fumbling and deafness; it was the idea of him she loved, noble, heroic.

  Eleanor, too, her stepchild, she had not loved enough.

  ‘You know Ella is dead?’ Jane looked at me, her face troubled. ‘We were so shocked. Gell took her with their little boys to Wales on holiday, but there had been scarlet fever in the village. Her children sickened with it; she nursed them through, but died herself.’

  At the funeral Gell had held out an olive branch; how could she refuse? Now Ella’s little boys came to Jane’s London garden to help sweep up the autumn leaves and make a bonfire, and she paid them in ‘wages and rations’: bright new-minted pennies and ginger cake.

  Mathinna. She had not loved Mathinna; she had been dreadfully sorry for the child. How could she leave that bright little girl to die among the ghastliness of the stricken tribe at Flinders Island? But she, Jane, had not spent enough time with Mathinna. Perhaps if she had ignored the doctors’ advice and brought her back to England with them? But the Orphan School with Booth as supervisor had promised well. Why had Mathinna been taken out of the school? Three aboriginal children Jane had tried to help, and only one had lived happily, the boy who became a constable at Muddy Plains. The other boy had run away, and Mathinna had died tragically, drowned in a puddle while the worse for drink, the newspapers said.

  Sophy. Perhaps, in Sophy’s case, she had done a little spark of good. She had loved Sophy like a daughter, and yet—never to be spoken, of course, hardly to be thought—perhaps it had been Sophy in the end who caused the failure of the expedition?

  ‘Crozier proposed to her again two days before the Erebus and Terror sailed, and she refused him again—with great severity, he told me. He was in a pitiable state.’

  ‘But . . .’ I hesitated. ‘Sophy could not marry him if she did not love him?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, ‘but she had kept him hoping for five years. Why not let him hope for another two, during the long hard voyage? Instead she told him she felt nothing for him, would never marry him.’

  And thus when the expedition left, Crozier was in a state of melancholia, and taking too much rum as consolation. ‘That was plain from a letter Ross showed me, the very last one Crozier sent from the Whale Fish Island just before they entered the ice.’

  After her husband died, she added, Crozier must have assumed command, with Fitzjames as his second. But Fitzjames had no practical experience of the Arctic, his field was magnetics, and Crozier was probably in no fit state to lead; devastated by Sophy, missing Ross.

  ‘Then blame Ross for marrying Anne,’ I said, ‘or the Admiralty—or chance, fate, destiny . . .’

  But Jane was following her own thoughts. ‘Men believe women have no power, and yet great matters may turn on a woman’s emotions.’

  I hesitated for a moment, and then told her how I had lied to St John Wallace to prevent Thea going into the Orphan School. Jane’s face showed her shock. She shook her head, but then after a minute she hugged me and said she could not find it in her heart to blame me. ‘He died in India, I suppose? St John?’

  ‘No,’ I said unable to resist a laugh. ‘He went to the hill station at Darjeeling, where the Army wives go for the hot weather—and thrives there, according to Jane Rochester.’

  We sat in contented silence as the sun began to rise like a vision of glory, angels and archangels and all the company of heaven soaring up to the great vault above us from a burst of golden rays across the horizon. The waters of the sound became a shimmering molten mass, the sight grew in splendour every moment. Wisps of lavender clouds flamed deepest crimson, and the world was remade in an ecstasy of light and colour.

  ‘This,’ said Jane, tears running down her face, ‘this is what they saw. What they were drawn back to see again and again.’

  Later, a wagonette came towards us along the road, and I begged a ride for us back to the lodgings.

  ‘Passing strange,’ I said to Gus when we were together again in London—and after I had been saturated with blissful news of railways, tunnels, steam engines, routes and scenery, ‘that it might have been Sophy’s character that caused the loss of the expedition.’

  Gus was dressing for dinner. He raised his eyebrows at me and repeated the objections I had made. When I told him Jane’s answer he said smiling, ‘Only very young men, or very ignorant ones, underestimate the power of women. Was anything found in Sitka, in the end?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  In 1876 Gus and I went to England for the third time—the last, it must be—for a ceremony at Westminster Abbey installing a memorial to Franklin. We arrived in July, two weeks before the nominated date, only to find Jane had died a few days before. She was eighty-three. Sophy was sixty-two—fat, inconsolable, and again facing a return to live with her mother. No hope of rescue this time.

  The day of Jane’s funeral was cold and grey although it was the middle of summer. England so green: that old surprise again. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery beside her sister Mary. As we drove to our hotel afterwards the heavens opened and rain came down like floods of tears for every one of our scattered dead.

  The unveiling ceremony in Westminster Abbey two weeks later seemed an anti-climax. The Abbey was magnificently itself, stone lifted to heights beyond possibility, the sublime enfolding the human in intricate embrace. We were too few in a corner, a cold little gathering. Sir George Back was the only one who looked warm—large, ruddy, gleaming with prosperity. Beside him was old Mrs Osmar, widow of the purser of the Erebus. She was fragile and fine as ancient lace, needing her daughter’s assistance for every move. Mrs Blanky, widow of the ice-master, was equally ancient but much different. Her vivid brown eyes glared from a shrunken little brown face; her scrawny determination strong as tarred twine. Sophy stood next to her, almost a caricature spinster. Shabby,
umbrella’d, deaf, the last surviving authority on the wishes of Nuncle and Aunt, shouting ‘Hush!’ in ringing tones.

  Sir George Back performed the unveiling. Another irony, I said to Gus. George Back was one of the few people in the world Sir John detested, because of Back’s selfishness on two very early Arctic journeys. We had often heard the story in the old collapsing Palace a million miles away.

  And then it was time. The veil was drawn back and there was the bust of Sir John in Carrara marble.

  ‘A fine heroic portrait,’ murmured Sir George to the surrounding air, ‘but not a perfect likeness.’ He read aloud, sonorously, Tennyson’s lines:

  Not here! The White North has thy bones; and Thou

  Heroic sailor-soul

  Art passing on Thine happier voyage now,

  Towards no Earthly Pole.

  Afterwards Gus and I went to Regent’s Park and sat in the Zoological Gardens and talked about Eliza Gould; a fond old couple, holding hands. The prisoners behind these bars were neatly labelled. Shrill children fed the monkeys who swung about looking, as the Queen had said when she visited the monkey house, ‘dreadfully, horribly human’. Perhaps it’s true, I thought, perhaps we are no longer angels or devils, as we once believed we were, but merely animals, as Mr Darwin insists.

  ‘I shall be glad to be getting home,’ I said.

  We called on Sophy once more before we sailed. She was copying out her aunt’s correspondence which she had been retrieving for years, and changing words, as I have said before, leaving out lines, destroying some letters altogether.

  Seeing the expression on our faces, Sophy grew defensive: ‘I lived with Aunt for forty-five years—forty-five years—and nobody, no, not even my uncle, understood her as I did. I think I might be allowed to know, Harriet, what my aunt meant. What she would have wished.’

  She was beginning to breathe gaspily, always a sign that her feelings were hurt and yet she knew she might be in the wrong. As we took our leave she went back to her editing, protecting dearest Aunt and Nuncle from posterity, deciding what should be kept, and what should vanish as though it had never been.

  Acknowledgements

  ANY NOVEL WRITTEN OVER NEARLY FORTY YEARS, AS THIS ONE has been, must acquire debts of gratitude to a host of people. Foremost comes my family—sine qua non—my husband Brian, Kate and David, and Elizabeth; Richard and Jane; Sheila, John, and Lyn, all of whom have given me unflagging support. I’m particularly grateful to Kate and to Elizabeth McMahon, who read the manuscript innumerable times and made many acute suggestions. And to Bruce Cornelius, with whom it all began.

  Dear friends were early readers: Ruth Blair, Jenny and Paul Boam, Trauti and David Reynolds, Mary and Saxby Pridmore. Their encouragement kept me going; their companionship and hospitality have enriched my life as well as my work. Margaret Scott, Sarah Day and Cassandra Pybus were supporters from the outset; Caroline Lurie kindly read an unfinished draft; Maureen Matthews always told me I could do it. Amanda Lohrey has been the most generous and perceptive mentor a writer could have in the later stages.

  My heartfelt thanks to Hannah Fink, who introduced me to my agent, Gaby Naher, who then showed the manuscript to publisher Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin. I am immensely grateful to Gaby and Jane for their confidence in Wild Island, and would like to thank the Allen & Unwin team, especially senior editor Sarah Baker, for their friendly expertise.

  From the beginning I had wonderful help with historical research. Gillian Winter and Margaret Glover gave me a wide array of useful archive references. Margaret Glover’s ‘Women and Children at Port Arthur’ was an early pleasure (together with many other articles published in the papers and proceedings of THRA, the Tasmanian Historical Research Association), and the beautiful First Views of Lake St Clair, by Gillian Winter and Tony Brown, has been a recent one. I am very grateful to Ronnie Bramich and his family for access to his fascinating thesis on the development of old Government House in Hobart. Cynthia and David Hooker gave me The Fate of Franklin by Roderic Owen just when I needed it. Kerry Dunbabin and John Evans shared their wide knowledge of the peninsula and east coast areas. The modern Lempriere family took the trouble to bring me copies of their forebears’ family tree. Alison Alexander’s Obliged to Submit (later Governors’ Ladies) fed my interest in the period; her prize-winning monograph, The Ambitions of Jane Franklin, was published by Allen & Unwin just as Wild Island was finished.

  Many other writers have enlarged my knowledge, but a few books have been particularly important: The Journal of Charles O’Hara Booth edited by Dora Heard; Volume 1 of L. Robson’s A History of Tasmania; Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Sir John Franklin in Tasmania, 1837–1843; also Ian Brand’s Escape from Port Arthur; Ken McGoogan’s Lady Franklin’s Revenge; Penny Russell’s This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin’s Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839, and Joyce Eyre’s master’s thesis on ‘The Franklin-Montagu Dispute’ (for knowledge of which I’m indebted to Ruth Blair and Ralph Spaulding). I borrowed Mrs Chesney’s shopping list from Kettle on the Hob: A Family in Van Diemen’s Land, 1828–1885 by Frances Cotton.

  The staffs of the Tasmaniana Library, the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, and the Library of The Royal Society of Tasmania were always patient and helpful.

  I am very grateful to Arts Tasmania for a Small Grant; to Southerly for publishing two extracts from early drafts of the novel; and to the Australian Society of Authors for a ‘Mini-Mentorship’ towards manuscript development.

  Profuse gratitude, always, to Charlotte Bronte for Jane Eyre and to Jean Rhys for Wide Sargasso Sea. Errors and omissions are, regrettably, all my own work.