Wild Island (37 page)

We went, Peg, Nellie Jack and I, to early Church at St George's in Battery Point, and when we emerged the heat was already stifling. The smell of smoke was everywhere, and as the day wore on, a lavender haze thickened the air. The sun glowed through it like a sinister orange moon. There appeared to be no Orcadian words for this weather. At noon, ‘the top o' the day' in Peg's parlance, we ‘at wur mate'—'ate our meat'—a roast fowl neither of us had appetite for. Nellie ate alone in the kitchen because she preferred to—on account of her teeth, I think, of which she had few. Towards evening, when at last it began to grow cooler, I walked across the Battery Point and halfway down the steep lane to Sandy Bay. Rocks protruding from the hillside here made a convenient spot to sit and make pencil-and-watercolour sketches of the wild sunset flaming across the sky behind the mountain.

The sands, turning pink as the light failed, were empty save for a group of horses being exercised in the shallows. The scene was sublime, and yet I would have given it all for gloomy ‘Thornfield' in a pewter-grey twilight, as it used to be when I returned from walking in the snowy woods on late winter days. A few black rooks cawing harshly above the winter skeletons of trees, snow falling past the yellow lamplight in the kitchen window, Dawlish nodding by the
kitchen fire. Homesickness, like love, is not easily explained to those who have never felt it. To those who have, it will be achingly familiar.

I called at the Post Office two days after Christmas and found three letters. Two from Jane Eyre, written late in the northern summer, full of her plans for the garden now the house was finished. She was expecting a child in the spring. In the later one she said that since we were to leave the island shortly, she would not write again. The third was from Quigley, written on the sixth of November.

The thought of this delay did not trouble me, I found. I wanted to go home, but drawing each day with Eliza was a constant pleasure I was glad to be able to continue—and I would have the chance, too, of being still in the island when her baby was born. I took Rochester's draft to the bank that week, with letters from Jane reporting Rochester in excellent health. They redeemed it at ten percent. With the insurance monies, the remainder of my own savings, and the sums I had earned from Lady Jane Franklin, I now possessed altogether the astonishing sum of five hundred and seventy-eight pounds and some shillings, the contemplation of which reassured me when I thought of the future. Eliza urged me to wait in Hobart and sail to Sydney with them at the end of June after the baby arrived. I wrote to Quigley to say I would follow this plan.

The women and children at Government House were due to leave on New Year's Day, to sail up to New Norfolk on the
Eliza
for three weeks at the Government Cottage, but on the thirtieth of December the Chief Surveyor, Mr George Frankland, died suddenly. He was thirty-eight, a cultivated man, nephew to Lord Colville and first cousin of Sir Thomas Frankland, Baronet. He had built the lovely house ‘Secheron' on the waterside at Battery Point, and entertained the young Charles Darwin there two years before. Darwin's favourite pet monkey died that week and was buried in the garden. Now it was Frankland's turn for burial—not in the garden, of course.

The planned exodus was postponed for the funeral and calls on Mrs Frankland. She, poor woman, had the unfortunate distinction of being sister to Mr William Mason; ‘Mr Muster Master Mason', or ‘Stone' Mason, for his hard heart. Some said it was he who invented
the cruelty attributed to Governor Arthur, a flogging where each lash was delivered at the sound of a drum-tap at half-a-minute intervals, so the punishment was prolonged to an hour and a half. The Governor, it was proved, had never countenanced any such barbarity, but Mason was judged capable of anything.

John Gould's excursions were now halted for Christmas and the sojourn at New Norfolk, but Gould, who hated to be idle, grew restless during the delay caused by Frankland's death. He determined to visit other artists in Hobart to discover what they knew of lithographic printing, the method he had decided upon for his new book.

‘You had better ask Mr Bock,' said Jane Franklin. ‘Mr Henry Melville owns the only lithographic press and stones in the island, but he has retired to New Norfolk to finish his book, a magnum opus on the history of Freemasonry. He plans to have it illustrated when it is done, but at present he sees no one. I advised him to use Thomas Bock as his artist, and they tried the apparatus together, I believe. You'll probably find Bock at Mr Duterrau's gallery on the corner of Campbell and Patrick Streets,' she added, smiling.

Bock, a former convict, lived further up Campbell Street, she added, but his lodgings were full of children and domestic troubles. He preferred to work at Duterrau's house, which was orderly and quiet.

It was a low, six-roomed stone cottage with a central front door. A sign requested gallery visitors to take the side path to the back. Eliza, John Gould and I made our way along this through a flourishing kitchen-garden to the barn, which housed the studio and gallery. Duterrau was in his late sixties, a heavy, square-faced man with dark, greying curls; he, too, was an artist and was working slowly at a large painting on an easel, while beside him Mr Bock talked, between drinking from a mug and eating a slice of bread.

Duterrau's paintings, many of them small studies of the island's black people, were displayed side by side with French and English works he had brought out with him to sell. The picture he was engaged on was to be called ‘The Conciliation'. It showed Mr George Robinson, ‘the Conciliator', standing in the centre of a group of aboriginal men
and women, shaking hands with their leader and vowing friendship between white races and black. Duterrau had compiled it from portraits of the natives Robinson had brought in to sit for him, but he was dissatisfied with the composition, the angle of the spears framing the central figure. He and Gould spoke about this, but my attention was caught by a small still life.

With growing excitement I saw it was surely the work of Madame Vallayer-Coster. It was almost identical to the paintings I had fallen in love with in Paris years before; the same quiet scene, imbued with a sense of mysterious meaning in just the same way. Flowers in a glass goblet, fruit on a table, a parrot. But here one glimpsed a small window behind, an enchanting fragment of distant landscape. I was seized by a great surge of desire to own it.

Miss Perigal managed Duterrau's business like the shrewd Frenchwoman she was at heart, although the Duterraus and Perigals had been Londoners for two generations, she told me. They were Huguenot families, partners in a famous clock-making business. She was Duterrau's sister-in-law, the elder sister of his wife, who had died many years before.

‘Almost certainly by Madame Vallayer-Coster,' she said, ‘although not signed. Mr Gregson wanted it, but it is already sold.'

My disappointment was severe; more severe, I knew, than I should feel over any mere painting. Miss Perigal said she only wished she had more such works. They would sell easily, and at present they had too little to sell. If only Mr Duterrau would continue with portrait painting as he had done when they first came here—there was a great demand for portraits in Hobart. But ever since he met Mr George Robinson and began painting the black people, he had been so affected by their plight that this subject now preoccupied him to the exclusion of all else. Which was not good for business.

Government Cottage at New Norfolk proved to be another large, shabby wooden bungalow set above the river near a picturesque
rocky gorge. There were six bedrooms, guests being crowded into the usual outbuildings and huts. Pastures stretched upriver towards New Norfolk, just out of sight around the next bend in the river. Eliza was happy; the reed-beds and bush-land provided John with hunting grounds, and little Henry had grass to play in, a pony to ride and a plum tree to climb. On this visit I first saw the colony's black swans, floating among the reed-beds in their hundreds as we sailed up the Derwent. Nothing could be more elegant when they were swimming, but when sleeping, or heads-down feeding, they looked like black mops floating on the surface.

A soon as I had a morning's leisure I walked the two miles along the river path and up the steep embankment to St Matthew's Church, a clean little stone building more than a decade old. Graves on one side were dotted unevenly almost up to the wall of the Church. Two huge old eucalyptus trees lent a chequered shade to the dead and living. On this warm summer day it was welcome. Post-and-rail fences separated the graveyard from stubbled paddocks bleached by the sun. At the back, a view down the valley showed layers of hills fading into blue distance. A few minutes confirmed Bergman's account of the grave. A plain tombstone inscribed:
George Thomas Fairfax, 1767 to 1836.

The Church was unlocked and empty. I went in and prayed for Anna and Quigley and myself, for Adèle and Jane and Rochester, and Sophy and Jane and Eleanor and Miss Williamson—and Bergman—and finding, as when I was a child, that my list was becoming embarrassingly long, I consigned all to the Lord's care and rose and looked about me. The interior was pleasant in a way quite different from my beloved London Churches, clean and spare, almost unadorned. I returned to the sunshine again and wandered, reading gravestones. Little Anne Louisa Lacey had been three when she died, her four brothers and sisters younger still. A sudden rustling beside me was accompanied by a male voice saying, ‘A melancholy prospect, Mrs Adair.' Montagu and his wife had come up behind me as softly as a pair of cats.