Wild Island (28 page)

Quigley arrived on the
Lady Phillipa
two days before the ball, to Anna's joy and my considerable relief. He had found a temporary command as Master of this brig on a trading run between Hobart, Port Phillip, Sydney, Moreton Bay, and back to Sydney again. A stopgap for a few months until the summer, when the ship would make an England voyage. We must stay in Van Diemen's Land until he returned to take us to Sydney and Home. He had not yet received the insurance monies. They would come, but with these landlubbers everything took so long; ‘They would none of them survive at sea.'

The ball was not only to celebrate the Queen's Birthday: the Franklins were entertaining the officers of the
Conway
, about to leave Hobarton after two months of repairs and revictualling. Killing two birds with one set of
expensive
wax candles, said Sophy Cracroft. She was moving about the ballroom speaking to different groups before the dancing commenced. What did we think of the illuminations? A hundred pounds! Just for a crown in lamps over the entrance and candles for the ballroom. Of course the local merchants made sure the price of every article was double to Government House. The hire of the set of huge silver sconces was extra. These had originally been sent out for the Presbyterian Church, but when they arrived they were judged too popishly ornate to use, and were now hired out to every public gathering in the colony.

‘Not above four hundred people, I think?' she said, over the music. ‘Aunt and I sent out a thousand invitations. But we have had such bad weather, and the bushrangers are out.'

Captain Hasluck of the
Conway
wrote his name on my card for two dances. Bergman arrived late, but proved to be a capable dancer. He took me in to supper, where we found Robert McLeod eating chicken and ham. He was in town only briefly, he said, attending to some business for James Ross.

‘He is still not well. He was about to open a school at his house, ‘Carrington' in Richmond, but that must be delayed. Susan Ross has enough to do with an ailing husband and thirteen children.'

He asked me what we had learned from Booth and, including Bergman in the explanation, I told them, adding that we might hear more tomorrow.

‘But I don't see Booth here?' said McLeod.

I had been looking for him too, with no success. I wanted some forewarning of whether his news next day was likely to cheer Anna or dismay her.

‘He has probably been delayed,' said Bergman. ‘At any rate, Anna appears happy enough,' he added, watching her with Quigley.

Shortly after midnight, Lady Franklin was obliged to retire, seized with one of her headaches. Mr Robert Murray of the
Colonial Times
had recently noted with his usual asperity that these appeared to attack her ladyship after a few hours in company with the respectable classes of the town. He implied that she found the worthy burghers dull. He did not say quarrelsome, narrow-minded, stubborn and money-grubbing. As he had written on other occasions, many of them were all those things and proud of it.

Bergman suggested a breath of air, and he and I left the din and went into a windowed corridor overlooking the garden and entry. Several coaches were waiting in darkness although the ball would not end for hours yet. You could hear the occasional harrumph of a horse and the jangle of harness. The rain had stopped and the sky was frostily clear. An upper window was open and the air coming in smelt of smoke and damp earth. Through the dripping trees the black lines of ships' rigging rose and fell, and the river wrinkled silver and black under the moon's path. A cluster of candles near us had burned down until they were guttering low, drowning amid stalactites of wax. A man appeared at the end of the corridor and came towards us.

‘Lord! It's hot as the devil in there. Chatter and noise fit to burst your brains. No wonder Lady Franklin has the headache. I can't bear it myself.'

It was Dr Pilkington, easing his high collar, stretching his chin up out of it. ‘Mrs Adair, Bergman. Booth not here tonight? I thought he was going to escape for a few days? He works too hard, that he does.'

‘Things are brisk down there at the moment. So many new transportees this year—and more expected,' said Bergman.

‘I don't know where he'll put them. The Government at Whitehall wants reports, but it's sure and certain no one reads them, for they understand nothing of how matters are here.' Pilkington shook his head. ‘Do they think penitentiary buildings spring up from the ground by nature in this part of the world?' He shrugged. ‘Well, my girls are missing Booth. He has a little flirtation with Lizzie, d'y' know.'

I said I had been looking for Booth myself but had not seen him. ‘But Miss Lizzie Eagle does not seem to lack partners, even without Captain Booth,' I added. Elfin small, with raven-black Irish hair and a fine pale complexion, she would have graced a ballroom anywhere.

‘Hm,' said Pilkington. ‘Well, the young ladies will soon have to choose among their beaux. The Twenty-first Regiment sails for India before the end of the year. The Governor would like to be on his way too, by all accounts. Will you look at him there now? Hands behind his back, legs braced apart as though he's on the deck of a ship. And it's my belief that's where he'd rather be.'

‘Have you heard Henry Elliot's story?' asked Bergman, ‘Sir John looked up at a great mass of fleecy clouds and said, “Look at that, Henry, ice-continents in the sky. A great Arctic in the heavens. What would it be to sail a barky into that, eh?”'

Pilkington was silent for a moment before he answered, ‘When a man's lived in those out-of-the-way places for months, years . . . he's never the same, I suppose. Or perhaps it takes an uncommon kind of a man to venture there in the first place?'

Music from the dancing was a bright thread in the corridor. Pilkington shivered, sneezed and blew his nose on a great silk handkerchief. ‘It's turning colder again,' he said. ‘And my dear Mrs Adair you have no wrap at all. Let us go in before we catch our deaths.'

As we turned back there was a commotion. A soldier plunged into the corridor on a surge of freezing air, pulling off riding gloves and putting his shako under his arm. We followed him into the ballroom and stood inside the doorway as he made his way through to the
Governor. The news was clearly unwelcome. Henry Elliot went to the musicians and halted them, and the room fell quiet.

Sir John's round face was solemn as he announced that he had just received a message he knew would be as painful to all as it was to him. ‘Commandant Captain Charles O'Hara Booth is lost on the Forestier Peninsula. He has been missing since last Thursday, south of East Bay Neck.' He frowned and consulted the paper in his hand. ‘Near Dr Imlay's whaling station. Mr Thomas Lempriere is leading a search party from Port Arthur, and another party will leave immediately from Hobarton.' He scanned the gathering. ‘Volunteers are to assemble in the small reception room opposite us here.' He asked us to pray for Booth.

For a moment I felt faint. Bergman had turned away to say something to Pilkington. By the time he turned back to me I had recovered myself.

‘Will you excuse me, Mrs Adair? Are you ill? Are you sure? Of course I shall join the search, but I will stay until I see you well.'

‘You must go,' I said. I could easily find my way to Anna and the Captain, or Dr Pilkington would take me.

‘Indeed, indeed. Go, Bergman,' said Pilkington, his face grave. I will see to Mrs Adair. And I must find my wife and Lizzie.'

We repeated our assurances until Bergman gave a bow and hurried away. The Doctor and I attempted to move back to the ballroom, but the hall was filling with people. We began a slow progress through the milling throng, who seemed caught in a slow turbulence, like leaves in a river's eddies. As we passed we caught snatches of talk. Three nights out, freezing conditions, people shook their heads. And most of the officers from Port Arthur would be out with the search party: what a moment for a mass escape if the felons knew of it!

Rumours crossed the ballroom faster than we did. People kept stopping Pilkington to ask or tell, and I was forced to wait because he'd taken my arm firmly under his elbow, and each time I tried to escape, it tightened involuntarily. One man claimed Sir John was not revealing all he knew. Booth had been walking with a convict, a man
called Tanner. The convict had returned to the settlement—supposedly to report the Commandant missing, but it was more likely that he wished to rouse others to revolt. Tanner was a vicious felon who had been sentenced to twenty-five lashes by Booth a few weeks earlier. The convict had now taken his revenge, probably.

Augusta Drewitt caught my arm on the other side and whispered that I must not be alarmed, but a convict called Tucker, goaded by an unmerciful flogging from Booth, had murdered the Commandant and called the convicts to revolt. She therefore intended to continue dancing all night, Government House being the safest place in the colony. Why go home to be murdered in her bed? But it was apparent that few shared her feelings. Servants were sent for wraps and carriages, and a scurry outwards began. Mr Littlejohn's band played on but the dancers dwindled. The crowd at last began to thin, but hours seemed to pass and still I could see neither Anna nor Quigley. When only eight couples were left, they were not among them. I went to look in the ladies' dressing room while the doctor attended to his wife and stepdaughter. Anna was not there, and her cloak and boots were gone. She had taken them a long while ago, the maids thought.

I changed my slippers for boots, collected my wrap, and returned to where Pilkington was trying to cheer his distraught wife and Lizzie. They clung together, white and tearful, looking as if they might collapse at any moment. The doctor hastened away to call their carriage, promising they would convey me home on their way. I said we had come in sedan chairs which were ordered to return for us, but the doctor believed they would take some other fare in the present confusion. He thought Quigley must have gone to join the search party, asking some other family to take Anna. I considered this unlikely but did not know what else to believe.

Lady Franklin came downstairs on Sophy Cracroft's arm. She looked ill, but spoke sympathetically to Lizzie and her mother and suggested the remainder of the supper should be wrapped to send with the search party. Sophy went to give this order and Lady Franklin turned to me and asked if she might take my arm for a moment.
Her face was ghastly pale. We walked a few steps to another group, and she spoke disjointedly of Booth's fine qualities and the sudden treacherous changes in the island weather.

This must have been the moment when Dr Pilkington sent a servant to fetch Mrs Pilkington and Lizzie to the carriage. He had been called to attend a woman having a fit in the morning room. Mrs Pilkington and Lizzie went home, not understanding that I was to have accompanied them. By the time Lady Franklin and Sophy disappeared upstairs again, as they soon did, the ballroom was almost empty and I could see no one I recognised. I made my way through the hall and out into the entry. It was after four o'clock. I was weary but the cold revived me. I looked about for the sedan chairs, but there were none. I now felt an urgent desire to be home, to know Anna had reached there safely.

The Franklins' Scottish steward, Mr Hepburn, saw me standing irresolute, and in the ensuing conversation I spoke about sedan chairs, and perhaps he did too; his strong accent made it hard to tell. We were floundering by the time Bergman came by on his way out, and Hepburn insisted on explaining my plight. Bergman seemed to grasp the import, and went to see whether one of the two carriages preparing to leave could take me, but one was going in the wrong direction, the other overladen already. They were the last.

‘It's no matter. I shall wait here until it grows light. Or I can easily walk,' I said. Bergman looked at me dubiously.

‘We can walk together if you'll allow me?' he said. ‘Or would you prefer to wait here until daylight? It will be another hour or more. I'm on my way home to change. My house is in the Battery. You are at Mrs Groundwater's? They are not far apart. It is generally frowned upon in Hobarton for a lady to walk alone with a gentleman to whom she is not related, but in these circumstances . . .'

‘You'll miss the search party.'

‘No, the first one went half an hour ago, the military contingent. Another leaves at dawn with civilian volunteers. It gives us time to assemble more lanterns, ropes, blankets.'

I explained I was anxious to get back to the lodgings to make certain of Anna. He nodded briefly, said, ‘May I?', tucked my arm under his without fuss, and we set off into the cold dark. His breathing warmth was pleasant, comforting, his greatcoat rough, smelling faintly of tar and smoke. We fell into step. The cold came up through the soles of my boots and my feet began to grow numb.

‘Do you think Booth has a chance?' I asked.

‘He's been lost before and survived. He and Casey were out for two nights on the Tiers a couple of years ago.'

‘In weather as cold as this?'

‘No.'

‘Have you ever been lost?'

‘When I first arrived. A colleague and I stumbled about in the bush at Jerusalem Corners for two days. Our donkey, Nelly, led us out when she was hungry, and tired of going in circles. And you?'

‘Only in London.'

He gave a huff of laughter. Walking briskly on, we passed the garden gate of a large house, where three people stood under the light of a lantern on a pole. One was a maidservant, shivering, grasping a shawl round her and holding a large tin jug. Beside her was a youngish man too thinly clad, carrying a little girl of about four. The child was bundled warmly in a coat, mittens and a little woollen cap, with a cup in one hand and an apple in the other. The man had looped a muffler loosely about his own neck and hers. As we went by he and Bergman raised their hats to each other.