Wild Island (13 page)

Adèle was a late addition to our party. Two weeks before our departure, Jane and I travelled to her boarding school to say farewell, and found her despondent, runny-nosed and weepy, utterly unlike herself. The female headmistress soothed and simpered until Jane
seemed persuaded that these were the predictable results of a spoilt child settling in. While they were speaking, Adèle fixed her eyes on mine for a long pleading moment and then hung her head. I was suddenly hot and desperate and began incautiously, ‘Miss Eyre, I wonder . . .' without really knowing what to say, when the male superintendent, who was also present, made a foolish mistake. Raising his voice to speak over mine (I was clearly some sort of dependent, almost invisible, certainly inaudible), he said with a tolerant smile (patronising, unctuous, odious) that it was only natural for Miss Eyre to be worried. Miss Eyre was herself so young, so recently out of the schoolroom, that she could hardly be expected to understand the strict discipline necessary in the education of young girls. He thought this a compliment, even a joke. ‘Spare the rod and we spoil the child, do we not, Miss Eyre?' he added, leering at her with terrible levity.

He could not know how badly Jane had suffered during her own school days, but he should have noticed the sombre stare she gave him. She looked away down the drab corridor as though seeing into her past. Her narrow form became even straighter. Her chin rose dangerously, her green eyes regarded him calmly with hidden thoughts like a cat. She asked to see the dormitory: a grim place, prison-grey, bare and bitingly cold. She asked to see the kitchen, which occasioned some flurry and vain attempts to dissuade her. The rank bouquet of odours in here began with the sickly reminder of many ancient meals in which grease had formed a large part. Boiled cabbage, something rancid, something acridly burned. Undernotes of mildewy dankness from the stone pantry, the sour reek of a sweating cook, a whiff of fear from the thin scullery maid.

Jane asked to see the library and discovered the miserable shelf of books did not include a copy of Bewick's
A History of British Birds,
nor a single volume by Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron. Adèle was therefore with us on the
Adastra
, pale and slightly subdued but recovering swiftly. When she hugged me fiercely I said, ‘Awful, was it?' She rolled her eyes and emitted a burst of indecipherable French.

We boarded the ship in elevated spirits, our nervous excitement enough to carry us through the early discomforts. I was to share a cabin with Bertha; Jane with Adèle. The ship had eight small cabins and two large ones, each of the latter taking half the wide stern window. One of these was the Captain's, the other was to be Rochester's. The small cabins were four each side, with a narrow row of storage lockers along the centre between them. An open space amidships served as general saloon and dining room.

Captain Quigley, a Yorkshireman of perhaps forty-five, weathered-looking, gentlemanly, was preoccupied with the ship's loading and departure, but he declared himself eager to arrange whatever might add to our comfort; and he was as good as his word in directly having the louvred panel in my cabin door repaired. The cabins were like wooden cells. The smell from the forward privvies, the ‘heads', came and went with eddies of rain and wind. Everything felt damp and clammy. Most difficult to bear were the noises and the continual nauseous motion. At the Hall I had become accustomed to the quietness of wealth, but here on the ship was perpetual din: bells, shouts, hammerings, violent thumps. And always the rhythmic creaking and grating of timbers, the slop and drip of water.

The wife of the bosun, Mrs Farley, appeared with her sister Mrs Tench. There did not appear to be a Mr Tench, or if there was, he was never mentioned. The women wore canvas trousers under short skirts, with men's waistcoats and gold earrings. They lived a subterranean—or rather subaqueous—life in the lowest orlop, and would be our stewardesses for the voyage.

I left Jane and Adèle unpacking boxes to be ‘struck below' when empty, and went next door to arrange Bertha's and my own belongings in the drawers under the bunks and on the hooks around the wooden walls. A knock came as I was finishing; it was Rochester with Dr Seymour. I had assumed the doctor would be an older man, but James Seymour was my own age, brown-haired, brisk and smiling. Rochester left us, saying the doctor would examine his patient. The cabin being dim, they had brought a lamp, which Seymour asked me
to hold for him. He pulled the covers back from Bertha's large form, rolling them to the end of the bunk.

‘You have been this lady's nurse for several years?' he asked. ‘Were you formerly employed at a bedlam?'

‘No, sir. I nursed my stepmother and husband before they died.'

He nodded, already examining Bertha's face and hair, turning her head gently in both his hands, lifting back her lips to look at her teeth. He peered into her eyes, pulling down each eyelid. Had she been used to taking laudanum, paregoric, chloral? Spirits, wine, ale? How much? Other medicaments? What did I give her now? Had she had monthly courses during my time with her? I told him she had not. He looked at me curiously.

‘Mr Rochester tells me there are times when this woman is violent, dangerous to herself and others. Were you not afraid of her when you first came there?'

I said I had been pleased to have the situation, and Seymour frowned but made no reply. Between finger and thumb he took up a pinch of Bertha's skin, which was sagging where she had begun to lose flesh. Dispassionately, he examined her heavy brown body, her private parts. He tapped her chest, listened to the beating of her heart.

Straightening, he said, ‘I would scarcely have believed it if I had not seen it. She has been well cared for. Is that your doing? Dr Carter speaks highly of you in his letter. Or else she has a remarkable constitution. Both, perhaps. What became of her child? Did it survive?'

‘Child?' It took me a moment to understand. ‘I did not know she had borne a child.'

He frowned again, more deeply this time, and said, ‘Then you must forget again. Dr Carter assures me you have his full confidence, and therefore I assumed . . . It was foolish of me. Can I rely on your discretion?'

A child. Rochester's? Rowland's? Had it survived? I wondered whether Rochester knew.

On the third day the
Adastra
dropped down to the Nore, but we ran afoul of another ship's anchor lines and there was more delay. Three more days swinging slowly at anchor again, waiting for wind and tide. New passengers came aboard in a confusion of baggage, chatter, and introductions, and swept down to occupy the starboard cabins.

The first group was a family, a portly elderly couple, the Chesneys, with a plump two-year-old, Natty, his sister Polly, about the same age as Adèle, and a slightly older, pale, starved-looking girl. Mrs Chesney's round face beamed from within a black coalscuttle bonnet. The ribbons and shawl-ends of her mourning costume rippled in the damp wind. Her husband was a farmer in Van Diemen's Land. They had returned to the old country to settle up the affairs of a married son who had died in the cholera, and were now returning to the colony with their two orphaned grandchildren. The thin girl was Liddy, a new nursery maid.

‘Workhouse,' mouthed Mrs Chesney, her head turned towards me and away from the girl, whose pinched face revealed nothing as she clutched the squirming Natty in her arms. When shouts and whistles heralded our moving at last, we gathered along the wet rails to watch everything familiar slide away behind us into the past. Rochester, Jane and I stood together, with Adèle holding my hand. Dr Seymour talked with a gentleman introduced as Mr Robert McLeod, a gingery Scotsman—brought up in Liverpool by an English mother, I heard him say, explaining his absence of brogue. No sign of St John Wallace and his wife. They had come aboard, the Captain said, but remained below.

Rochester said quietly to Jane, ‘Now you will feel the pang of quitting England. It is only when leaving that one comprehends fully what it means to belong to the greatest nation on earth.'

‘We take that England with us,' Jane replied, looking up at him.

‘True,' Rochester agreed. ‘And yet you will find that as we sail further away, it is hard to keep hold on the idea of England. Then one may be seized with the violent yearning to see it again; the castles and green fields, the old cobbled towns and village steeples.'

All we could see from the ship at that moment was the cluttered harbour receding. An English watercolour day: fine rain beading our capes and jackets; softening outlines into mist. A red muffler sang against shifting November greys. Certainly the cottages and castles were there, but so too were the new railway-cuttings being torn through the landscape, the smoke-billowing mills of new red-brick manufactories.

That evening, after Mrs Chesney and I had settled the children in their bunks, she confided that she knew McLeod, and his case was a sad one. He had lived in Van Diemen's Land for seven years with a wife and child. He had been by turns a schoolmaster and a newspaperman, a farmer-settler, and a senior clerk in the Colonial Office. But his wife had disliked the colony. She had been brought up in a town—Gloucester, from memory—and had found their property too lonely and strange. After a time she had refused to set foot outside her house. McLeod took her back to England, but she and her son had died of the scarlet fever last winter, leaving him free to return now to the island.

Dinner was soon the centre of every aimless day on the
Adastra
, for the passengers, at least. Captain Quigley frequently joined us for the meal, at one o'clock in the afternoon, according to naval habit. The Captains whom Quigley had served under during the War had always taken their dinner after the noon soundings. Newfangled post-war Captains might think it fashionable to take their dinner at four o'clock—or heaven forbid, at six! He saw no reason to change.

‘You'll have to watch out, Quigley, steamships'll be overtaking you soon,' said Mr Chesney with loud good humour, talking and eating with equal force.

‘It'll be a while before steamers make these long hauls, Mr Chesney, if ever they do,' said Quigley equably. ‘They're useful in their way, but sail will hold its place.'

‘Well, I don't know. I've a mind to put summat in steam. Ain't I right, doctor? You was a ship's surgeon?'

Seymour nodded. ‘Even so, ships for me are pretty things seen from the shore, never comparable with
terra firma
.'

‘Well then, sir, a question on your own ground.' Mr Chesney thumped his waistcoat under his ribs. ‘There's times when I get the devil of a pain there . . .'

‘Indigestion, sir?' asked the doctor. The Chesneys rolled with laughter.

Mr Chesney waved away the grey soups, vegetable in the first days, then pea or fish, which began each meal. He lived on boiled beef and dumplings with lavish helpings from his own jars of pickle, and slices off his own great yellow moon of cheese, which he brought to the table and offered generously about.

‘Well, McLeod, you sold your property afore you left—and regret it now, I warrant? Wasn't you at the Pitt Water, neighbour with Robertson?'

Chesney gave an appreciative laugh, and added, ‘Mr Gilbert Robertson, there's a rum 'un. Gen'leman farmer, newspaperman—and Lord knows what else. In the Black Wars, being a bit short of o' the ready at the time, he took Guv'ner Arthur's wages for leading out a Roving Party to bring in Chief Eumarrah—and then what does he do but get up in court and defend the prisoner! “Eumarrah and his people are rightful owners of this island,” says Robertson, “and what they're doing now is defending it from the invader—which is us, see?” Well, Guv'ner Arthur didn't like that—so bang goes Robertson back in the jug again, where he'd been afore on account o' libel and slander agin the Guvment. And now he's bin an' bought another newspaper, I hear.'

‘There are seven newspapers in the island,' said Mrs Chesney proudly, ‘though the way news and gossip go around, you wonder why we need any.'