Wild Island (27 page)

Two days of rain followed, spent in Booth's or the Lemprieres' cottage, talking, playing cards, at the piano, or copying out music. Bergman proved to have a pleasant baritone, and we sang—everybody sang. I visited the little school house, made jam tarts with Charlotte, read to the children. Lempriere showed me his portrait of Booth, just finished. He was dissatisfied with its air of stiffness—all Booth's fault. The Commandant could so seldom be got to sit still, Lempriere had been forced to sketch the face while Booth was sitting as a magistrate. And from the neck down it was not Booth at all! It was Lempriere's eldest son Edward, wearing Booth's dress-jacket and
epaulettes. Booth judged it a capital likeness. He was pleased to look suitably severe.

On the third day it turned fine again. Sophy returned from the Carts and there was a general expedition to a fishing spot nearby. She was more friendly now, grasping my arm almost possessively to tell me
sotto voce
that she was relieved to be away from the Carts' deep mourning, which was ‘frightful'. She flirted with Booth but ignored Bergman, who grilled fish over a fire on the rocks. Booth pointed to a promontory where he and his number one whaleboat crew had nearly captured a whale a few months earlier. It had escaped in the end, but gave them an hour or two of capital sport. Bergman showed me a scrimshaw medallion with a similar landscape etched into it: a cliff, a ship leaning into the wind, a whale breaching. Sophy took it out of my hands and played with it carelessly until the fine leather cord snapped and the medallion disappeared into the water.

Edward and Thomas leapt in with joyful shouts, reckless of their clothes and the icy sea, and floundered about waist-deep, retrieving shells and weed until they were shuddering with cold. Poor Sophy's apologies faded at last as Bergman insisted that he liked the thought of it lying there in the depths, waiting. Perhaps in a hundred years it might be brought to the surface in a net, or as in a fairytale, someone might find it in the belly of a great fish. Or the tides might wash it up on the sands.

‘Someone, a complete stranger to us, will wear it again in the future.' Sophy took me aside later and told me that although Mr Bergman appeared pleasant, he was immoral. He was known to have a child by his convict housekeeper. A boy. I said Augusta had mentioned it.

14

FOUR WEEKS, QUIGLEY HAD SAID, SIX AT MOST. BY THE END OF
May it was seven, and there was no news from him and nothing from Booth. The
Marian Watson
returned, but he was not aboard. We settled in our lodgings to wait, but Anna was bored from the first and showed signs of increasing melancholy as the days passed.
‘Je m'ennuie
,' was her lethargic refrain. She was always a late riser, and would have stayed in bed all day if I had not coaxed and bullied her out.

The weather was partly to blame. Autumns in Van Diemen's Land are frequently times of late radiance, warm golden after-ends of summer. I know this now—but it was not so that year. Two days after we returned from the peninsula the rains came, bringing an early winter. When it was not wet it was bitingly cold. In our landlady's Orcadian dialect the weather was masculine, with a wealth of terms denoting fine distinctions of foulness, and I soon became accustomed to Peg Groundwater's morning greetings: ‘He maks a feer skuther', with a shake of the head. Or a ‘feer gushel', or a ‘sweevle' when it was windy. And ‘Snae on t'moon'en!' when it snowed on Mount Wellington, the weather gauge for the town.

If the weather had been fine I might have been able to persuade Anna to walk a little and explore the town, but after one attempt she would not even attend Church on Sundays. She complained of
being cold even in front of the blazing fire, and I ordered extra coal in quantities that made thrifty Mrs Groundwater stare, and gave me wakeful nights over our dwindling funds.

Many afternoons we spent playing simple card games, the stakes being buttons from Peg's button jar. Anna was childishly gleeful when she won, sulky when she lost. The lamp was lit at four in the afternoon and the evenings were long. Most of the time she sat by the fire in a huddle of shawls. She liked oysters and toast, roast fowl and hot chocolate, not tea. She asked for mulled wine, or Negus, and James Seymour, who came to see her once a week, agreed it might serve as a tonic. Peg Groundwater did not like to have wine in the house, but as a medicine it was permissible.

Apart from the doctor and Peg, we saw no one. Louisa and St John had left Hobarton for Richmond, where they were to stay with Mr Aislabie, the vicar. St John would begin his report with the small Richmond gaol, to provide a comparison with the main prison at Port Arthur when he went there later. McLeod was also at Richmond, still with Dr Ross and his family. Ross continued unwell.

I wrote to Jane Eyre and Mrs Fairfax, and on three occasions was able to explore the town for an hour in the morning while Anna slept, but Peg said she became agitated if I was not there when she woke. I was now almost Anna's prisoner, as she had once been mine. No invitation came from Government House—which was partly my own fault. We did not leave visiting cards when we returned from the peninsula, for we had none. It had not seemed worth the expense of having them printed when we knew nobody and were soon to leave. But as time went by and I grew desperate to keep Anna in spirits, I regretted this and was thinking of ordering them when an invitation arrived. Lady Franklin had found us somehow, or perhaps it was Sophy. The Governor's wife would be ‘at home' on this day, at this hour.

Sophy made introductions. Mrs George Frankland of ‘Secheron', wife of the Chief Surveyor; Mrs Josiah Spode of ‘Boa Vista', wife of the
Superintendent of Convicts; Mrs John Montagu of ‘Stowell', wife of the Colonial Secretary; Mrs Matthew Forster of ‘Wyvenhoe', wife of the Chief Police Magistrate; Mrs John Gregory, the wife of the Treasurer. These ladies smiled in a small way, but did not trouble to feign any interest in us. They conversed about children and domestic matters, favouring us with the same faint smiles now and again to show we were included.

There were few gentlemen present; the Reverend Knopwood turned out to be one of them. With snow-white hair in elfin locks and a benign smile, he was thin and straight as an old schoolmaster. His hands, trembling slightly, rattled his teacup and saucer. He sat by the fire with Mrs Parry, a widow. His friend for years, he said. She too was in black, and as thin as he, but she carried herself more firmly, sat fiercely upright in her chair. She held a speaking tube in one hand, the ring-laden knuckles of the other clasped over the head of a black and ivory cane. Her little King Charles spaniel snored in her lap. In spite of the ear trumpet she seemed to hear perfectly well. Knopwood asked me what I thought of the town and I said I was surprised to see it so flourishing. I had imagined bark huts and bushrangers.

‘Hush, my dear,' he said softly. ‘You won't mind . . . I beg you not to speak of bushrangers before Mrs Parry. She lost a son by the violence of such poor wretched souls some years since.'

When I raised the subject of Rowland Rochester, Knopwood said he thought he knew the name but could not quite recall . . . If God preserved him he would be seventy-five next month and had seen more curious things than he could tell. Twelve men hanged in a row on a public gibbet in Hobarton. Families of aborigines coming into the kitchen of his dear old house above the shore, ‘Cottage Green', twenty years ago, to cook potatoes in the fire. The black people had been handsome in those early days, but now—such a terrible shame . . .

He had seen so much—a lost husband was nothing! People were here one moment and gone the next. Life is an odd journey and we might as well face it smiling and singing. Who said that? Virgil? Rowland Rochester . . . He felt sure he would remember. The other
day a line had come to him; ‘a slumber did my spirit seal', and he'd been delighted because he thought it was his own invention. Then he remembered it was Wordsworth!

‘I met him, you know, William Wordsworth,' Knopwood nodded. ‘He was up at Cambridge in my time. Younger than me, of course. He was at St John's, I was Caius. It was just before the revolution in France and he was going for Holy Orders too. Ha! He might have come to Van Diemen's Land instead of me. But it could never have been the other way round. You'd never wring a jot of poetry out of me. No indeed, not with a laundry mangle!'

He had met Lord Nelson too, in the year 1793. ‘Good Lord, what a time ago that is. Forty-five years.'

He turned his head to assess me with his best eye, the other being of slightly milky appearance. He had been a young curate in the Reverend Edward Nelson's parish of Burnham Thorpe. Captain Nelson, as he was in those days, was the Reverend's son, and came into the congregation some Sundays. And now he was Lord Nelson, famous and dead these thirty-three years and the world a different place. As for Hobarton, Knopwood believed you might meet anyone here. More than one family was rumoured to be secretly related to the crowned heads of Europe.

‘Your friend Mrs Rochester is from the Indies?' he said, his bright as a boot-button good eye following Anna, across the room with Sophy. ‘I was at Port Royal, Jamaica, in the year '03. We sailed home by the Windward Passage in the shortest time ever known then: twenty-three days, five hours and a half, from Cape Tiberoon to Chatham Dockyard! I daresay they've done it quicker since. Everything is quicker now. Well, I'll soon be on my last voyage out. The great leap into the dark, as Thomas Hobbes said. Ain't that so, madam?' he turned to Mrs Parry. ‘We are both ready for the great leap.'

Hmph, she said. He might leap if he chose, but she'd thank the Almighty to spare her until her little dog died, then she'd go in peace. As for Nelson, he'd fought off the French and died a hero—and what had been the use of it, that long war? Everyone was as Frenchified
nowadays as if the little Corsican had won! And would it have been such a bad thing? All the world French, even this colony? There are worse things.

Knopwood asked her about Rowland Rochester. Yes, Mrs Parry thought she'd heard him mention the name. Well, it would surely come to him, and he would send me a note to Mrs Groundwater's, if he lived. The doctors had said he must die twenty years ago.

‘Mrs Adair doesn't want to hear that,' said Mrs Parry.

‘Yes, she does, madam. She ought to hear it. It is a lesson in what one may survive with the Lord's help.'

He had had a stone and should have been cut for it but there was no surgeon in Hobarton to do it in those days. He had suffered agonies when the doctors passed a bougie up into his bladder and poured caustic in to dissolve it. Three times in a week they'd treated it, until he thought he'd go mad with pain, but the remedy had worked. The Lord had granted him another twenty years. He was certain he would remember where he'd heard of Rowland Rochester—as soon as we parted, probably.

A note came from Booth. He would be in Hobarton for the Government Ball in two weeks on the thirtieth of May, and if convenient, would call on us the following day to give us further news. When I read this to Anna a smile slowly appeared on her placid face. ‘He has discovered Rowland,' she said.

‘I don't think it can be that,' I said gently, ‘or he would surely have said so. It may be some small clue.' I was annoyed with Booth for not giving any hint of whether the news would be welcome or not, and I prepared myself to distract Anna from dwelling too much on it, but this proved unnecessary. We, too, had received an invitation to the ball, and her mind became fixed on the need for a dark red velvet cloak, with a lining of merino and a fur collar against the cold.