Wild Island (40 page)

‘He does not appear to know who he's related to,' said Augusta disapprovingly.

‘To whom he is related,' said Sophy, with an air of ownership.

Jane Franklin said
sotto voce
that what with only having arrived four weeks ago, and fallen for Sophy the moment he set foot ashore, the poor dear boy was at his wits' end. Not a long journey, perhaps, in his case.

‘Was there really a Saint Valentine?' asked Augusta.

‘Someone asks that every year,' said Sophy.

‘If Saint Valentine had not existed we would need to invent him,' Jane Franklin said peacably. ‘Young people must have flirting and courting, otherwise how would one marry? And stationers must sell lace-paper, gilding and bad verse.'

‘Hearts are a very ancient symbol, of course,' offered St John Wallace. He sat at the breakfast table on Jane Franklin's left, disturbingly
handsome. Montagu, on her right, frowned. I had noticed before that Montagu appeared to dislike St John, who now continued, ‘Perhaps your ladyship noticed the heart-shaped motif when you were in Egypt? It occurs frequently there. The shape is said to be derived from the seeds of the herb
silphium
, genus
Ferula
, the giant fennel. Extinct now, but so important to medicine in the ancient world that there is a specific Egyptian glyph for it.'

Jane Franklin shuddered. She had opened a valentine while he was speaking and now let it fall on the table. ‘Loathsome,' she said in a low voice.

St John Wallace thought she meant him to read it. He did so and said quietly, ‘A madman, my lady. Take no heed. A police matter, I should say.'

He put the letter down and Montagu reached out and took it. His face did not change as he read The Black Valentine, as it came to be known. He passed it to Forster, who read it and passed it to his wife, and thus it traversed the table, whereas it would have been better kept quiet. The gossip about it later became as painful to Jane Franklin as the valentine itself.

‘Wallace is right,' said Montagu dismissively. ‘A police matter.'

‘What is it, Jane?' her husband called from the other end of the table.

‘It is nothing, my dear,' she said cheerfully, but she looked suddenly wretched, ill and old.

It was a white rectangle with a printed border of small black flowers, probably cut from a mourning card. Lace-paper had been glued around the edges, and a ring of snakes drawn in heavy black ink in the centre, enclosing the words ‘Such is Woman's Heart'. Inside the card were more snakes, a large black heart and a doggerel verse. Now that Jane Franklin had paid for the HEADS, it said, she should see fit to ‘drop a tear upon the TAIL'. The end of one of the snakes had been made to stick out with, as she put it later in private, ‘coarsely suggestive prominence'.

‘It is about the snakes, of course,' said a small woman at my end of the table, in a low voice. She had a face like a kitten's, and wore
an elaborate costume of purple silk, which gave her complexion an unhealthy look.

‘I mean Lady Franklin's plan to rid the island of them once and for all.' She could not keep the contempt out of her voice. Jane Franklin was speaking to Wallace at the other end of the table. ‘Well intentioned, no doubt, but scarcely wise. A waste of public money, some people say.'

‘There was no public money wasted,' Sophy was scowling violently. ‘My aunt paid everything from her own funds. Six hundred pounds in the first year! After which she was advised to call a halt.'

‘My dear Miss Cracroft [a light laugh] I did not mean to . . .'

There was a good deal of discussion later about how the valentine came to be beside Jane Franklin's plate at the table. Sophy was sure it was Montagu's doing, but to me the whole thing was too crude for him and too carefully executed for Forster. Augusta Drewitt told me she believed it was Forster's wife. Anonymous letters are generally written by women, people say—but not always. It had exactly the secrecy and lewd schoolboy humour I associated with John Price. For all his rumoured pleasure in floggings and convict punishment, there was something vaguely womanish about him. As Chief Police Magistrate he was asked to investigate the matter, but nothing came of it.

Jane's distress was mercifully veiled when Lieutenant Stuart, like an actor entering on cue from the wings, arrived from Port Arthur with Booth's letter to Sir John. The Governor was aware of his wife's agitation, and I believe he began talking about the bolters to change the subject. News of an escape was already known from a signal late the previous afternoon, but now the details of its extraordinary boldness were evident.

‘Captain Booth has married, and he is not so vigilant I suppose,' said the purple woman defiantly, her sac of poison not yet empty. ‘The prisoners are all idle malingerers. When Mr Meredith came down from Great Swan Port last week he told us he saw a road-gang—so called—all the men dispersed along the shore fishing, boiling water for tea, and reclining in the shade. They need a hundred lashes apiece, I said to him, or hanging.'

‘It was devilish hot that day, my dear,' said her husband.

‘Language, Mr T . . .' she frowned.

Another gentleman said gruffly, ‘You would be happy then, ma'am, to see the miserable conditions in which the felons are kept at Black Snake, where they are building the river crossing. I know I didn't sleep for a week after I saw it.'

Jane Franklin rose and the party began to move out to collect bonnets and coats. The sour purple woman continued her complaints to Lieutenant Stuart.

‘It is not easy, ma'am,' he replied, ‘to keep seven hundred men under close watch. And the leader of this escape, a man called Walker, is a particularly clever, determined rogue. It is sometimes difficult not to admire . . .'

He stopped because St John Wallace had clutched his arm.

‘Walker?' he said.

‘Walker, Woolf, Moss, Dixon . . . all the number one crew and two others.'

‘This is my fault,' said Wallace, his face ravaged. ‘Dido? The one they call Dido—Jack Thomas? Walker would not have gone without him.'

‘Your fault?' said Stuart. ‘The man has a bad record, Wallace.'

We were outside in the carriage drive by then and St John sank onto a seat at the edge of the gravel as though he could no longer stand.

‘I encouraged Walker to think he has unusual qualities. I promised to help him. But I have not been there for two months on account of Louisa's child, and Christmas . . .'

‘You weren't the only one to tell Walker he is above the ordinary. Booth has often said so.'

‘We are all to blame. He will be flogged, hanged . . .' His voice was unsteady. ‘Where will they go?'

Stuart shrugged. ‘At present they have turned south, but it's likely they'll head north when they can. Hide among the islands in Bass Strait. Work their way up to New South Wales.'

St John bent his head and put his face in his hands.

The excursion that day was intended to be a visit to the new Tea Gardens at Crayfish Point, but we did not reach there. Just after we passed the lower end of Sandy Bay and began to wind along the narrow track around the coastal cliffs, a groom riding forward returned to say there was a rockfall ahead. The horses were unharnessed, each carriage was turned with great difficulty, and the company prepared to retreat to Lower Sandy Bay to picnic on the rocks. Jane Franklin's carriage, which had been first in the line of four, was now last, and while we stood waiting to retreat, she noticed the opening of a track among the trees. The groom told her it led up steeply to the Mount Stuart signal station.

‘Ah!' she cried. ‘The very thing. It will take my mind off that ghastly . . .
Solvitur ambulando
—isn't that right, Harriet? “It is solved by walking”.'

Her cheerfulness returned. She had climbed Mount Wellington and every other mountain in the world she had come across; this was a mere
bagatelle
. Seeing Sophy's and Augusta's faces, she laughed and arranged for them to return with the others, and it was only Jane's maid Snachall, and a groom and I who accompanied her to the top. She leapt ahead like a hart upon the mountains, up a path so steep it resembled a crumbling earthen staircase, boulders and roots twisting every step. Snachall and I laboured behind with our holdalls and another bag each, while the groom followed with two more, these being the least we could persuade Jane to take.

Here and there on the way up, the dense bush revealed openings where shafts of sunlight descended through green glades into the fern gully below. I would have liked to sit and draw but we panted on, and when we emerged into the clearing at the top, the view was worth the climb. Our little party was greeted with surprise and welcome by the two officers at the signal station. They spread our rug at a good vantage point, put water on to boil for tea, and showed Jane our position on a chart. When they returned to their duties we ate our cold fowl and contemplated Hobart and the estuary spread below us.

‘You see why I love mountains?' said Jane. ‘And why they're often considered sacred? Human littleness seems insignificant in the face of such sublime . . .' A pause. ‘How do you imagine the perpetrator of that vile card expected me to respond, Harriet? Did they think I would be cowed?'

She said she would like to know who had sent the card so she might ask them what they meant by it and explain that she only ever did what seemed to promise the betterment of all.

‘They meant nothing, my lady. It was a hurtful, ill-judged joke.'

‘I am misunderstood here. Misunderstandings occur so easily. Only a week ago, talking to Captain Laplace, I pointed to a group of convicts and said,
Voilà nos richesses
; “Here is our wealth, our riches,”—and he thought I meant it as a joke! I was never more in earnest. Convict labour is the island's most valuable resource at present—and in the end, of course, these men will form the population of the island. Does no one remember that? They are the ore out of which we must refine a society—by education and all the measures my husband's opponents deride. Perhaps the writer of the valentine thought I'd go scuttling Home with my tail between my legs?'

After a short pause she added, ‘It's not as though I miss England. Do you, Harriet?'

‘Yes, I do. London, particularly.'

‘Ah well, London. Yes, London sometimes—for half an hour or so,' she smiled. ‘But the desire for any settled home seems lacking from my composition, left out at birth. Or perhaps it's because I travelled frequently as a child with my father. Home was wherever we were. As Mr Clark, my overseer at the Huon, says of himself, “I am of a very roving disposition”. He went to America but says it was not enough for him. She laughed. ‘America! Not enough!'

We continued to gaze at the view while Snachall packed away.

‘A good companion is the first essential for travelling,' Jane continued. ‘With the right company, even disasters can be borne, as I discovered when I was in Egypt. It was three years after my husband and I were married. He was away at sea and I went to
the Mediterranean to meet him. I arranged to travel for five days from Rosetta to Cairo with the British Consul to Egypt, Mr Robert Thorburn—and a married couple, a Captain and Mrs Scott. But one by one Mr Thorburn's three adult children, and then his nephew, decided to join the party—and when it came to boarding the boats ordered for the five-day voyage down the Nile, they immediately occupied the three large, clean vessels, leaving me and my maid, Lizzie Lumsden, to the single cabin in the fourth boat, which was far smaller and slower than the others. And as we discovered that night when it began to rain, there was no glass in the cabin windows. A wind came up and blew the water in until everything was drenched—which did not deter the rats, however. The boat was infested with them.

‘I wrapped myself in two flannel dressing-gowns and a cloak. Lizzie Lumsden put on all her clothes—poor Lizzie, she looked like a bolster! We pushed the bedstead into the driest corner and huddled on it, wet through, rain blowing in our faces, shivering and sick from the smell of the rats. They ate a good portion of poor Lizzie's quilt,' she shuddered, laughed. ‘We'd drawn it up over us, but threw it off in disgust when we saw the creatures relished the paper backings of the patchwork pieces. And Lizzie's pincushion! They fought over it until all the bran filling spilled out. Compared with the rats, the bed-lice and great black cockroaches were nothing.

‘Four days and nights we endured this, scarcely sleeping or eating. Partly the thought of food made us gag, but there was no kitchen on our vessel in any case. The crew lived on dates, onions and mealy-cakes. Our kitchen and dining-room were on one of the leading vessels, and we were supposed to meet there each night when we docked at the little ports along the way. But our slow boat did not arrive until many hours after the others, by which time dinner was over and the cooking fires extinguished. And generally there was no sign of my fellow travellers—so-called. They had already disappeared ashore on the promised excursions, which I missed.