Wild Island (8 page)

As the party approached one dwelling, they saw an old woman sitting on the ground outside, staring out to sea, keening low and mournfully. A dirty petticoat hung round her shoulders. Her fingers fretted the neck of her ill-fitting dress. She stopped abruptly when Mr George Robinson, the Superintendent, approached her. He whisked away the petticoat, thrusting it at his assistant (his son) to be got out of sight.

Was Robinson a trumped-up, illiterate Cockney bricklayer—or a courageous half-saint? Booth had heard both. In Hobart he was known as ‘the Conciliator' and praised for his efforts, but these people were dying with terrible speed under his regime.

Wybalenna meant ‘black man's house', or so Robinson said. He knew some of the tribal languages, and with a show of ease translated the old woman's tremulous song.

‘Over the water is her land, she smells it on the wind. The spirit of it calls to her night and day. She, the child of it, calls back in answer. She knew every bush and tree, every nest and burrow, the shape of each stone. If she cannot be buried there she does not know how she will find her ancestors when she dies. I tell her, Your Excellency, Your Ladyship, that Our Lord Jesus has strong powers. He will lead her to the ancestors.'

The Governor nodded sagely. His wife murmured something inaudible.

Mrs Evans only rejoined them when they started back to the ship. She seemed loath, now, to say anything about her recent experiences, preferring to tell Booth she believed she was acquainted with his sister. They had met while she was staying with relations in Mitcham. An unexpected connection—but then, not really unexpected, he thought. He had come to understand there are always more connections than we know about, across the widest spaces. So many links between the colony and England, most of them fluid. Water, ink, blood, each carrying its own cargo. Frail ships criss-crossing the seas, their holds packed with innocent-looking objects as dangerous as guns: china tea sets; bolts of flannel; packets of seeds and bank drafts. All bearing the message that there are certain ways in which life must be lived, and ways in which it most assuredly must not.

The message was scored all the deeper by ink on millions of pages carrying the stories we live by: the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, the latest Romance or Newgate novel. Blood and more intimate fluids made their own connections, rarely spoken of in polite circles. Mrs
Evans, Char, himself; the Arthurites and the Franklins; all entwined in invisible currents across the surface of the globe.

What he could not write to Char, because it would sound like boasting of a too-readily assumed familiarity with the new Governor's wife, was that he had found Lady Franklin perilously easy to talk to. Wherever they stopped on the east coast she had spoken to settlers, had asked how they came there, sought their opinions of the colony, their views on the keeping of bees, fowl, sheep.

On one occasion, as they walked back to the ship afterwards, she and Booth were somewhat ahead of the rest of the party, and she said suddenly, ‘You think I go too far in the questions I ask? Your face seemed to say it, Captain . . .' She smiled. ‘It is my dear father's fault.'

She and her father were the best of companions, she said. Perhaps because her mother had died when she was six. Her father—he was a silk merchant—took her travelling with him from when she was very young. Her elder sister, Fanny, preferred to stay in London; Mary was a babe-in-arms. Her father had encouraged Jane's endless reading, writing and learning because he had no son. Her brother had died, full of promise, at fourteen. Her Uncle Guillemard, her mother's brother, had seen her eagerness for travel and study and had seemed to encourage it, but sometimes now, in retrospect, she could not help seeing in his methods a desire to show her she was not so clever as she thought.

In algebra, for instance, he would sometimes give her theorems far beyond her capacity, and was not displeased to see her cry with frustration at her own stupidity. One of his fond names for her was ‘Poll-parrot'. Fond, but carrying the criticism that she repeated things she did not understand. She knew she irritated him, which made her awkward in his company. He had not meant to be unkind. She had much to thank him for and was grateful. It was just that he saw her father too proud of her, unwilling to curb, and wanted to warn her that women could not be like men, they were unfitted for it mentally and bodily.

Jane began to speak then of how one's actions could be misunderstood, and Booth found himself telling her how he had shot the albatross two days out of Tristan da Cunha because he wanted to test Coleridge's story of the Ancient Mariner. He would not be satisfied with superstition, even from a great poet whose works he loved and venerated. He wanted to know the truth of the world.

If she had not stopped dead in surprise at what he was saying, he would have gone on to tell her how much he had been affected by what he had done. He had learned that day how much an experiment may affect the experimenter. But her pause had given the main party a chance to catch up with them, and Sir John took her arm and asked her what they had been talking about so intently. ‘Ancient Mariners,' she said, smiling fondly at him.

And after all this, on the last day and almost at the last minute, just as the official party was boarding the cutter to go back to Hobart, Montagu had handed Booth the letter. There had been a hundred opportunities to speak of it earlier, but this was planned, of course. Montagu had looked directly at him and said with a faint smile, ‘A confidential matter, Booth.'

Booth handed it to his clerk with an order to take it up to his cottage, and had no time to think of it again until he returned there in the late afternoon. Two pages, one of them a letter, the other a covering note from Montagu. He read Montagu's first.

Emphatic. And then the letter itself, from a firm of solicitors in England: Gray, Walsh and Tilney. Addressed to Mr John Montagu,
Colonial Secretary in Hobart Town, and dated seven months ago. Which probably meant that Montagu had kept it at least a month before handing it over.

Booth sat for a few moments and then read the letter again, although the meaning was plain. He had been expecting something like this for a decade—not about Rowland Rochester, his conscience was clear there—but about Caralin and the children. If questions were asked about Rowland Rochester, then knowledge of Caralin was bound to come out—which would probably end any idea of marrying Lizzie. But why did Montagu ask him not to reply directly? Could the Colonial Secretary have some personal interest in the matter? In these small colonies the webs of kinship, loyalty and enmity could be as intricate and invisible as those in a country village. It had been the same in India.

Booth began a reply to Montagu and half an hour later had thrown two attempts in the fire. There was not even the distraction of mending his pen. Three days ago he had given up his quill and begun to use the new Government-issue steel nibs. The faint scratching of pen across paper made the dog Fran, asleep in front of the fire, open her eyes in hope of mice or rats. But she was growing accustomed to the noise and soon let them fall closed again. She was a brindle terrier, square and sturdy, Booth's favourite among his half a dozen gun-dogs. Better behaved than half the Regiment.

In the end he wrote four lines saying he was due in Hobarton in three weeks' time for the Hammond trial, and if the matter could wait until then, he would on that date give himself the pleasure of waiting on the Colonial Secretary.
Nil desperandum
, as Char would say. Perhaps it could all be mended. Except for Caralin and the children. Nothing could mend that.

4

THE DAY AFTER THE FAILED WEDDING AT
‘
THORNFIELD
',
I LEARNED
from Dr Carter that my patient, Bertha, was in fact the sugar heiress Mrs Fairfax had spoken of, Miss Anna Cosway-Mason. She had married Edward Rochester in Spanish Town fourteen years before. Dr Carter's grey, tufted eyebrows twitched as he told me. He was one of those portly, elderly babies with a soft halo of white hair through which his pink scalp glowed.

‘You did not know it?' I asked. I thought he might have been in the secret. He shook his head.

‘I had formed the idea,' he said, ‘as perhaps I was intended to do, that she was the unfortunate mistress of old Mr Rochester. Edward brought her here when his father was dying. I was called in to examine her and instructed that her presence was to be kept a perfect secret.'

‘And Mrs Fairfax?'

‘Much the same, I think. She knew you were the nurse, of course, but did not allow herself to know more. Did she never speak to you about your patient?'

‘Never.'

Dr Carter had spent an hour attending to Rochester's head wound after the melee in the attic. He learned, then, that Edward Rochester's marriage had taken place in 1824 when Anna was said to be eighteen.
But the Mason family had lied about her age, Rochester claimed, and about her mental soundness. She had gone stark mad within a year of the marriage. Carter shook his head, whether in sympathy for Bertha or Rochester, or in perplexity at the whole condition of wedlock, I did not ask. As he spoke he examined Bertha. After the struggle she had seemed half-stupefied, had fallen into a heavy sleep and stayed so ever since. I was troubled because her condition did not seem natural to me, but Carter said he would reserve judgement until the following afternoon, when he would call to see her again.

Next day there came another blow to Rochester. Jane Eyre had left the house during the night, telling no one. He scoured the house and grounds, then rode off immediately in search of her—but could find no trace. I was more concerned with Bertha, who still did not wake. On the contrary, she seemed more deeply insensible than ever. Dr Carter's verdict was tentative and puzzled.

‘I have seen nothing quite like it,' he said. ‘There is no brain fever, but she is certainly in a most profound, unwakeable sleep.'

He bled her, taking a pint from each arm, but it brought no change. He said she must not lie always flat, for the damage it might do to her lungs and the sores that might form on her skin. He instructed me to roll her from one side onto the other, twice a day. Bertha could survive a long period without food, in his opinion, but water she must have, fortified with brandy and a cordial of his own devising. Matthew, the groom, would come morning and evening to help me. Dr Carter tied his bag and brushed the side of his tall hat with his coat sleeve as he spoke.

‘Pray for her, Harriet. She is beyond my skill.' He rammed his hat on and departed.

After three weeks there was still no sign of Jane Eyre. Rochester continued to ride off each day and come back each evening with a face like a stone wall. At the end of the second week he shut himself in the library and took to sleeping on the sofa day and night. He rang the bell for a grilled chop at odd hours but ate little, Dawlish said. It was by then late August, sultry and hot. Mrs Fairfax seemed shocked
and aged and kept her room. Dawlish cooked a meal once a day for the household, but fruit was coming off the laden trees, brought to the kitchen in the gardener's baskets, and I ate the late plums and early apples as I passed through. The kitchen was fragrant with the smell of boiling jam. The summer went on with no news of Jane Eyre—and Bertha slept. As she lay there on her back, her long black hair in two plaits down across her breast, she looked like some ancient queen lying in state. Like a sleeping princess in the old stories.

Rochester came up to see her. He stood for several minutes in silence and then said abruptly, ‘Mrs Poole, Dr Carter tells me you are a woman of some education.' He corrected himself with a wry twist of the lips, ‘Mrs Adair, I should say. Since there is little you can do at present for your patient, you would oblige me by giving lessons to Adèle for an hour or two each morning until I can arrange a school.'