Wild Island (21 page)

It was the hideous blaze of ‘Thornfield' all over again, more terrifying here because we were trapped. Mrs Tench appeared from the smoke and led us blindly along, every familiar thing obscured. I clung tightly to Polly's hand, my holdall slung across me like a
satchel, my other hand gripping the back of Liddy's skirt. My throat filled with suffocating smoke, my heart pounded and leapt. Mrs Chesney and Anna, Liddy and Natty were pushed and pulled into the longboat, which was then dropped down into the smoke. A splash as it reached the water. Polly, Louisa and I waited, then scrambled down by rope ladder into a dory. Mrs Tench and Mrs Farley clambered in after us and the
Adastra
disappeared in engulfing smoke. The rower, a gnarled waterman with a pipe between his teeth, stared grimly as we pulled away.

When we reached the wharf a sailor helped us to where Mrs Chesney, Anna and Louisa had sunk onto the wooden steps of a warehouse. Liddy and Polly clung to us. Natty's little face was swollen from crying. I stood on the top step and tried to see across the water above the crowd, but dizziness and weakness overcame me and I almost fainted down onto the step again. It was twilight now, growing darker every minute, eels of lamplight wriggling on the dark waves, and the sounds of crackling and crashing coming to us with sinister clarity.

Mr Chesney, torn and dirty, came pushing through with another gentleman: their neighbour from Richmond, Mr William Parry. He was in town on a visit after the harvest. Mr Parry's mother lived in town and had offered to take the Chesneys in for the night. I urged him to go. A cold evening breeze had banished the heat and the children should be indoors. Chesney was persuaded at last; he believed Wallace and McLeod were on their way to find us.

After a time, Wallace appeared and tried to comfort Louisa, who began to weep uncontrollably when she saw him. He said the
Adastra
must be towed away from the other shipping and scuttled, and we saw, indeed, that the dark cloud with the orange blaze at its centre was growing smaller as the ship moved back out into the wide river. There were shouts, ‘She is going . . .' A general groan and gasp from the watchers. ‘Gone . . .'

Down goes the Earl of Bylaugh's library, I thought, the seeds and fabrics and windows and china. I imagined the boxes of books and paper
bursting open as they tumbled over and over in the currents and fell to the bottom. Bales of bright fabric unwinding in great slow ribbony folds through the dark water. Seeds and teacups and saucers scattering into the tide; writing slopes and chairs, windows and oaken doors sinking down, down to the seabed. The printing press, the harp and the steam engine emitting last watery sounds as they plunged in an uprush of bubbles, far beyond reach, fathoms deep.

11

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF THE DAY WHEN THE
ADASTRA
SANK
, George Boyes was upstairs in Hobart Town's new Treasury building, standing at the window of his office. At about the time the ship entered the estuary fifty miles downriver, he was looking out towards Government House next door. The Vice-Regal residence was still ‘the old place' at this time, a whitewashed wooden building set on ten acres along the shore in the centre of the town's cove. Ten acres had seemed enough when Hobart was only a clearing above the beach, dotted with tents and huts. The Governor's cottage had been begun in those early days as a
bungalow
in the Indian style, but by the time the Franklins arrived thirty-four years later, haphazard additions and ‘improvements' had turned it into a long barn-like structure two storeys high.

Hasty construction and poor foundations were now causing trouble. A chunk of ceiling had come down during Governor Arthur's final months, narrowly missing him and his secretary and bending an iron poker. Every year the place seemed a little less dignified, more crowded by the busy harbour and burgeoning town. Which might well be a metaphor for the Governor's own situation, thought Boyes wryly.

To some, Hobarton's Government House was irredeemably ugly. Boyes allowed it a certain ramshackle charm, pale among the trees
with its red brick chimneys—if seen from the east in a boat offshore, say—and far enough away. The northern aspect was not so bad either; the carriage drive came in there. The shabbiest sides were those adjacent to the town, west and south, where a clutter of kitchens, sculleries, laundries, drying yards, stores, outhouses, stables and offices straggled out to the boundaries.

All this would be demolished when the long-planned new Government House was built, but at present it was a warren of constant activity which never failed to interest Boyes—there was always something in it that made him wonder at the human condition.

He now saw Snachall, Jane Franklin's maid, emerge from between the carriage-house and stables. She walked up to the sentry box, spoke to the guard, and came through in Boyes's direction. Minutes later his clerk came in with a note from Lady Franklin.

It was a printed card, but the words
Lady Franklin requests the pleasure
had been crossed out with a stroke, and the charming message written on the back—yes, it was charming, it always was—conveyed urgency. Jane Franklin ‘depended upon him' to bring his wife Mary to dinner that evening. She had ‘a particular wish' to see them. No apology for the late summons—she did not say ‘summons', but clearly it was. ‘An impromptu gathering . . .' The
Neptune
was in. Captain Hasluck and his first lieutenant would dine at Government House with them
en famille
. All of which meant that Boyes must leave early, ride home and warn Mary, order the carriage out and miss his favourite part of the day, a golden late-summer evening in the garden with his family. This northerly would drop by midday. They could have walked down to the bay and taken the dory out for an hour's fishing.

In spite of these regrets, as soon as he and Mary arrived at Government House that night, Boyes admitted to himself that Jane Franklin had been right to send for him. The Montagus were there—and inexplicably, the Maconochies also. Disaster. Montagu had taken a violent dislike to Alexander Maconochie, Sir John Franklin's private secretary, from the day they met. For no clear reason at first, but during the recent Clapperton Affair, Montagu had come to know
that Maconochie was advising the Governor to dismiss him, and he now regarded Maconochie with vindictive loathing.

Sir John had not followed his secretary's advice, but Montagu, saved by the skin of his teeth, had sworn he would never meet Maconochie again in public or private. He was known to be a good hater. Throughout the row Maconochie, the mad Scotchman, had displayed the absent-minded good temper of one preoccupied with ideas, yet he must know Montagu had wrecked several careers before now. Whitehall would not tolerate quarrels among its colonial officers. Even Franklin's tenure and reputation might suffer if there was an eruption.

As Boyes led Mary in among the other guests to greet the Franklins, he considered the situation. How had it come about that the two couples were here together? Had the Maconochies come to dinner without warning? It was possible. They lived with their children in a tiny cottage in the grounds of Government House, and were eccentric. But no, Jane's call for help had come this morning. Boyes believed that after a year he could judge her well enough to know this was not an error. It seemed to him far more likely that she had issued the invitations deliberately, believing she could act as a peacemaker.

She was cursed with a regrettable urge to do good, a tendency to
embroil
herself in matters better left alone, a passionate eagerness for life which she expected everyone to share. An elderly gentleman had once told her admiringly that the Greeks have a word for it:
kefi
. Boyes did not like this story. The Greeks who sprang to his mind were Helen of Troy, Antigone, Electra, Clytemnestra: women who caused a great deal of trouble to their friends and relations.

They were dining
en famille
, as Lady Franklin had said in her note: not in the dining room but on a long section of broad enclosed verandah looking out across an informal garden to the harbour. This verandah had been open and almost unused while Colonel Arthur was governor. Neither he nor his wife Eliza had time for the picturesque. He kept an unsleeping eye on his wicked kingdom, she was busy with her hive of children. But when Jane Franklin first saw it, in spite of the weather
that day, which was frightful, she was seized, she told Boyes, by the memory of delightful terraces in the Mediterranean looking down on sunny little ports. The verandah would be perfect for summer gatherings. Her husband would like to drink his tea—or something stronger—in contemplation of the shipping.

It was one of her first mistakes about Hobarton. She soon discovered the afternoon sea breeze, which whirled up tablecloths, needlework, papers and hair and drove the ladies indoors. Not easily beaten, she had the verandah enclosed with three-quarter-length windows, and plants in tubs brought in to give the air of a conservatory.

‘Family' was always a generous term with the Franklins, and there were rarely less than a dozen sitting down to dine. Tonight, Eleanor Franklin, Sir John's daughter by his first wife, sat beside her governess Miss Williamson, an elderly, somewhat crotchety, spinster. Ella was fourteen and ‘difficult'. Miss Williamson was close enough to say a quiet word or put out a restraining hand. It was sometimes enough. The child's face was almost laughably like her father's, round and plump-cheeked, but it was inclined to carry a scowl quite foreign to John Franklin.

Sophy Cracroft was there, but not her cousin Mary, who was staying at New Town with Mrs Price, her fiancée's mother. Sophy was flirting as usual with Sir John's aide, the Honourable Henry Elliot. He and Sophy played at mutual interest, but each knew perfectly well that when Henry chose a bride it would be in England under the watchful eye of his father, Lord Minto—and it would be someone a good deal more eligible than Sophy, who possessed neither fortune nor rank. This might have been painful for the girl, but Boyes and his wife had watched Miss Cracroft and decided privately that for all her flirting she did not want a husband, and regarded the young men who passed through with spinsterish detachment. ‘Not the marrying kind?' Mary suggested. And yet Sophy had something, they agreed. Not beauty but intelligence, and a kind of inward smouldering which a man might easily misinterpret as readiness for physical passion. Henry
Elliot, a family friend, was young, witty, handsome and amiable, and thus a safe and useful partner, Mary argued.

‘Family', for Lady Franklin, also meant anyone who had come out on the
Fairlie
with them; thus the Maconochies, Archdeacon Hutchins, and another strange Scotchman, the cowherd from Leith, Mr John Hepburn, one of Sir John's crewmen in the Arctic on his early, near fatal journey. Visiting naval officers or scientists, too, were ‘family', no matter what their nationality. Tonight there was no language barrier; Captain Hasluck and his first lieutenant were English. Jane Franklin's French was fluent, but during her travels she had made herself clearly understood to Italians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Greeks, Russians, Armenians and Americans.

As soon as they sat at table, Sophy, on Boyes's left, gave him a histrionic look and began to brief him in a series of desperate asides. He was right. Aunt had convinced herself that a Franklin family dinner would dispel Montagu's enmity against Maconochie, but she had been seized by terrible doubts as the evening approached. A lost cause, Boyes thought. It only remained to see what form the explosion would take and how the damage might be contained.

The pea and ham soup was tense but calm. Montagu and Maconochie had been placed as far from each other as possible. Sophy began to talk about the new young Queen and Lord Melbourne, and Lord Melbourne's wicked mad wife, and their sad mad son, while all the time watching the table nervously. By the second remove Boyes had begun to think he was mistaken. The evening might pass quietly after all. Montagu seemed content to be visibly contemptuous. Mary Boyes was on his left and Lady Franklin on his right; he was responding to their attempts at conversation with cold monosyllables. With any luck he might hesitate to let factional politics show in front of the visiting naval officers. You could never tell who might come to hear of it in London.

On Boyes's right was Mary Maconochie, silent, darting hostile glances at Montagu across the table. Her husband was eating his fish with untroubled enjoyment and lecturing Miss Williamson, using
the prongs of a fork to draw on the tablecloth. Lady Franklin spoke across a pause in which Maconochie's accent and the clink of cutlery were the loudest sounds in the world.

‘Captain Hasluck has been admiring our harbour,' she told her husband.

Sir John nodded, smiling. ‘A great asset,' he said in his calm, slow way. ‘A deep-water harbour at the end of the main street. Indeed, a valuable asset.'

‘Is the interior of the island accessible, sir?' asked Hasluck. ‘Does agriculture extend far?'