Wild Island (31 page)

My plan to return to Hobarton via the Chesneys had to be given up. It rained heavily for two days, and a signal warned that the floods were out at Sorell and Richmond. I returned to Hobart on the
Vansittart
on the fourth of August. Three letters were waiting for me at the post office. The first was from Jane Eyre, written on the sixth of February.

There was a paragraph here about the plans for Adèle's schooling nearby, and two enclosed notes from her, one for me and one for Polly.

A page here about refurbishments to ‘Ferndean' and the garden, and news of Dawlish and John, who had resumed their former capacities as cook and butler.

Five ten-pound notes were folded in.

The second was a note from Lady Franklin, saying she would be obliged if I would make it convenient to call at Government House at three in the afternoon on the following Wednesday or Thursday.

The third was from Robert McLeod in Richmond. Dr James Ross had died on the first of August. His wife Susan was left in difficult circumstances with thirteen children.

I spent some time considering how best to answer Jane, and at last wrote that Anna had gone away with Quigley, but Captain Booth was kindly assisting me with enquiries about Rowland in the island.

16

LADY FRANKLIN WAS UPSTAIRS IN HER
‘
OFFICE
',
THE MAID TOLD
me. Later, when I used the word, Jane Franklin explained gently that she preferred to say ‘writing room' or ‘anteroom', but the servants were apt to forget. The ‘office' was a
gentleman's
place of business. She shuddered at the idea of being thought one of those ‘bold, masculine, independent women who ape men'.

I understood. Mr Robert Murray, editor of the
Colonial Times
, had recently accused the Governor's wife of being secretly at work on a novel, which he claimed was a satirical attack on Hobart society designed to allow her London friends to mock the raw colonials. A woman with an ‘office' might be that kind of woman.
The Advertiser
had followed Murray's lead, but said the book was not fiction but a lampooning history of the island—cribbed from Mr Henry Melville's
The History of Van Diemen's Land
, since Lady Franklin could know nothing of the matter herself. It would annoy the Arthurites, which was no doubt the lady's intention.

Various explanations were offered in Hobart as to why Robert Murray had decided to loathe the Franklins. Some said it was because he had been left off the guest-list for their first levee, either by accident or because Murray was a gentleman convict, transported for the ‘gentleman's crime' of bigamy. Others said Sir John had refused to
shake his hand when they were introduced. Gus Bergman believed Murray and Montagu considered themselves to be the only aristocrats in the island, and hated having to defer to a couple of nobodies. Murray claimed to be the bastard son of one of the royal princes; Montagu was kin to the Duke of Manchester. For them the Franklins represented a despised new order arisen since the war.

Lady Franklin's father was ‘in trade', a cloth merchant; Franklin's was even more deplorable, a shopkeeper! Nobodies. Murray was a dour Scot, a John Knox of our times—and former Army, with nothing but contempt for the Navy. His writing was clever and full of barbed wit, but humourless. To him, Jane Franklin was the pretentious wife of a naval fool, famous not for
finding
the Northwest Passage, but for disastrously
failing
to find it. You could imagine him deciding to take the new couple down a peg or two before he'd ever seen them.

Others, like Boyes, added cynically that battles sold newspapers. Jane Franklin believed the word ‘blue-stocking' had done the damage. It was used to describe her in an English newspaper sent out to announce their appointment, and was not accurate, she insisted. But it seemed to have made the pressmen in the colony bristle like hedgehogs. How little they understood her. A paid female scribbler? Horrors! She shrank from any kind of public notice.

Not ‘office', therefore. ‘Writing room', ‘anteroom'; they had a more courtly ring. They brought to mind Miss Hester Stanhope, say, writing invitations for her uncle the Prime Minister; or Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, copying the immortal lines. Women writing in the service of men: no one could object to that.

Jane Franklin thanked me for coming and apologised; I was prompt to the hour and now she must ask me to excuse her for three minutes while she finished a letter to her father. Half-a-dozen lines, no more. The
Thomasina's
sailing had been brought forward to catch this evening's tide and the mail must be aboard by four. She hoped I might find something of interest among the books on the table.

She resumed her writing and I turned the books over. An album of pressed seaweeds, two volumes of sermons, Charles Pasley's
Essay on
the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire
, Lyell's
Principles of Geology
, Bentham's
Panopticon Versus New South Wales.
There were London newspapers several months old, and the local
Colonial Times,
folded open at a page where one passage had a faint exclamation mark in pencil at the side:

Whose pencil mark was it? Would Lady Franklin read such things? I discreetly considered the room. More books, in two tall bookcases and on small tables. Chairs in green velvet, a tapestry firescreen. A vase of leaves giving off a faintly bitter, musty smell—or perhaps that came from the ‘cabinet of curiosities' bulging with specimens. Fossils, shells and bones, birds' eggs, seedpods, butterflies pinned in rows, brown unidentifiable lumps. It resembled the assortment in Booth's rooms. I later found such collections to be ubiquitous in the houses of the colony. This room's general effect was warm and peaceful, however, a place of private studious pleasure. It was genuinely an ‘anteroom'; at the further end a door led into the bedchamber.

It did not escape Lady Franklin that I was taking notice. She paused in her writing and said, ‘These furnishings are old favourites. I have carried them to many countries. With my chair, my Turkey rug, flowers and a few books, I have felt at home from the Nile to Saint Petersburg. My “campaign furniture”, I call it.'

She smiled, blotted and sealed her pages, scrawled a direction, wiped her pen, pulled the bell to summon a servant. Later, when she was so vilified in the newspapers, people said she had no sense of humour, but in fact she frequently made wry little jokes. Like that one, they were often so subtle they passed without notice. I once heard her say among a mixed group that her husband and Mr Thomas Archer, two huge men, ‘were the
bulk
of the Legislative Council'. It was received in heavy silence.

‘Captain Booth says in his note he is quite recovered, but of course he would say that. I hope you really found him well?'

She came over and sat in the shabby velvet chair and spoke of Booth's ordeal. She asked about the families on the peninsula with friendly interest and wanted to know what I thought of the Port Arthur Church. She shouldn't have told Booth she thought the gable ends ‘clumsy', but he had taken it in good part, dear man. Architecture was one of her interests. She was about to have plans drawn up for a new Government House to be built on the Domain. This place was falling about their ears. There were two or three convict architects here—or she might persuade Mr William Porden Kay, her stepdaughter's cousin, to come out from home. He, too, was studying to be an architect. Noticing that I'd picked up Pasley's essay, she asked if I'd read it. I told her it had been one of my father's favourites. He'd read parts of it aloud to me when I was a child. She said her own father had done the same.

‘So Booth is to marry Miss Lizzie Eagle? And Mrs Rochester is gone to New Holland? Where did you discover Mr Rochester's grave?' ‘We were not able to, my lady. He may have lived here under another name. It may be impossible to . . .'

‘Another name?' She was interested, a bird poised above a wormhole, a game dog stilled to point. ‘Ah well, I won't pry. After all, the impulse to escape is easy to understand. Who has not at some time imagined changing their too-familiar self for some other? Not that I mean to condone deception. I need not fear you will misunderstand me, Mrs Adair?'

‘No, my lady,' I said.

‘This colony is small, the walls have ears, there are few educated women and too many gossips. In short, a good deal of mischief may be done by a word in the wrong company.'

When I came to know her better I understood that she tried to practise the reserve she was advising, but her impulse was always towards candour, discussion, an exchange of ideas about the difficult, fascinating world.

‘When I think of what this place could be . . .' she said, ‘Athens, Dublin, Edinburgh . . . They are all small, out-of-the-way cities, and yet each has been a distinguished centre of learning. Distance is nothing these days. Traffic to this part of the world will increase as England comes to know more of our island's beauty and rare interest.' She peered at me keenly. These penetrating stares were greatly disliked by some people. They were misleading. She was short-sighted even then, but would seldom use spectacles. Her eyes would trouble her greatly in the years to come.

She paused, changed the subject. A parcel of gifts had come to her from the peninsula: a seaweed collection, a bushranger's skull—Mr Lempriere had kindly boiled it for several hours to enlarge the sutures, the phrenology was curious—and a number of drawings, including three of mine. She had been astonished to find them so accomplished. (Tact was never her most reliable quality. She could be a model of diplomacy or blunt as a bargee.) Giving me no pause to reply, she said she was pleased to have the sketches. She was making a collection of views in the colony. On seeing their quality she and Miss Cracroft had formed a plan (plans flew from her brain like the sparks from Port Arthur coal). Perhaps I had heard that Mr John Gould, who had published
A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains
, was shortly to arrive in the colony with his wife?

‘Oh, good heavens! No, I did not know it, but I am so very glad! I am acquainted with the Goulds, my lady,' I said. ‘I knew Eliza Gould in London when she was Miss Coxen. We were close friends. I would love to see her again.'

Lady Franklin sat expressionless for a moment and then said, ‘Twenty years ago I would have thought that an extraordinary coincidence, but I have come to know the smallness of the human portion of the world. It does not surprise me now.'

She said Sir John was anxious to give the Goulds every assistance. Mr Gould would be away from Hobarton on collecting excursions, gathering material for a book on the birds of New Holland. This would leave Mrs Gould much alone, making drawings from the specimens as they were obtained. It was therefore Lady Franklin's scheme that rather than working solitary in lodgings, Eliza Gould must stay at Government House and draw in a room here. Eleanor Franklin and Miss Cracroft would attend once a week with Eleanor's governess, Miss Williamson, as a lesson. Lady Franklin would join the circle herself when at liberty. If I was agreeable we would decide on a fee to cover my labours and such drawings as could be useful to the Goulds, and she might wish to purchase some of my sketches herself.