Wild Island (61 page)

Booth had also received good news. The steamship affair was settled: he was exonerated. And he was to be Supervisor of the Orphan School at New Town. The Reverend Ewing had been stood down after the Board of Enquiry found his behaviour indecent in more than one case. While I rejoiced for Booth and Lizzie, dragging words together to respond to their pleasure, smiling over the two lovely infants, it was difficult for me to attend properly to anything but my growing fears for Gus. It was only later that I began to think of the ironies of Booth becoming head of the orphanage. Did he ever think of his own children by Caralin? Wonder whether they were in an orphanage somewhere in the West Indies?

I had already learned during these weeks that fear permeates one's whole mind and body like an illness. In the first week or two when Gus was missing I was merely restless, so that only certain kinds of physical activity brought relief. Fludde and I pushed Thea in the baby carriage all the way down to Sandy Bay beach on several days when it was not too wet or cold. The sight of her little figure made plump by outdoor mufflers and bonnets could always make me smile—and yet I was reluctant to leave the house in case news came while I was away. Poor Durrell seemed to feel the same. He pruned the huge mulberry tree, sawing for days and stacking the wood, while Fludde and Thea and I gathered the twigs and leaves and built a damp winter bonfire. Whenever Durrell caught my eye he would say in a long nodding flow, ‘All is well, yus, yus, and all shall be well, yus, and all manner of things shall be well, yus.'

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.

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 back 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 . . .'