Wild Island (29 page)

‘The Mad Judge,' he told me when we were some yards distant. ‘His little girl likes to give the dairyman's carthorse an apple, and collect her own cup of milk.'

‘I'll never understand this place,' I said. ‘Where else would you see such a thing?'

As we reached Peg Groundwater's gate and started up the front path, the door opened as though she had been watching for us. Without speaking she handed me two pieces of paper, a page of my sketchbook
torn in half. She held up her candle while I read the pencilled notes. The first was in a childish, straggling copperplate:

The second was in a neater, smaller hand:

Thrusting the notes at Bergman, I flew down the hall to Anna's room. Discarded clothes were strewn about. One of the rough sandals she had worn on the
Adastra
lay in a tangle on the floor. All my hard-won calm was gone, turned into doubts and fears. There was a knock and Bergman came in. He looked at my face and said, ‘Quigley's a good man. They'll be back in the spring. Are you all right? Mrs Groundwater is bringing a hot drink.'

He came and took my cold hands between his, saying, ‘What can I do? If I can help, you know you have only to ask.'

We stood like that a moment and I felt, as before, his warm energy passing into me. Peg Groundwater came in as a clock chimed the quarter and he said he must go. Peg and I went to my room, where she had made up the fire, and when she saw I was not ill to collapsing, she left me to rest, as I asked. I opened the curtains and sat by the window, waiting for the day. The first pale grey light showed roofs and grass white with frost. Booth would need our prayers.

In those first hours my thoughts were all of Booth, Anna and Quigley. The agitation I felt was for their safety—abundant fears and dire imaginings. Yet after another day and night when there had been no news of Booth, I found a change entering my thoughts.
Booth was dead, surely, and therefore at peace. I was profoundly sorry for it, and for the dreadful manner of it, but it was over now, and Quigley was right: the search for Rowland was therefore at an end. As for Anna, I had had four months on the
Adastra
to study Quigley, and I believed he would take care of her. All of which meant that for two or three months, until spring—September, say—I was free. For so many years my life had been constrained by the needs of others, my grandmother, Nina, Tom, Anna—that the idea brought a curious flattened excitement.

I counted up the money Anna had left in the cache: nine pounds and some shillings. Together with the ten pounds I had hidden in the spine of a book and the money in my purse, I had twenty-four pounds. My lodgings for the quarter were paid, my return fare to England not in doubt, and my clothes were new. If I wished to, I might buy books and drawing materials, take a ferry across the river, walk all day, buy a currant bun.

In the weeks before the ball I must admit I had sometimes felt impatient with Anna, but after she was gone I missed her. I had strange dreams. In one I was caring for a babe-in-arms, which I knew, somehow, was Anna. I was forced to set it down on the ground because of its struggles, whereupon it turned into a wonderful vase as tall as myself, painted with fruit and flowers, but I was angry because it would not speak to me. In another I was unwrapping an infant from swaddling clothes to bathe it. I undressed it as one would peel an onion, and with horror at last, found nothing there at all.

15

ABOUT THE TIME WHEN NEWS OF HIS BEING LOST ARRIVED AT
the ball, Booth lay huddled in marshy scrub south of Lagoon Bay. Rain had saturated his clothing, which was now stiffening with ice. His tinderbox was soaked, his musket jammed. The dogs were with him, sleeping curled against his chest and back, but a fiery numbness burned in his swollen hands and feet. He could no longer move. From time to time a palsied shuddering ran through him. This was his third night out.

The wind had been coming from the south-west on the previous Thursday morning when he started out from King George Sound with Turner, heading for the whaling stations. Lempriere had worried about him taking Turner, the convict coxswain of the Woody Island Boat, but Turner was safe enough. Surly, but not malicious; a strong walker and useful companion. They had tramped north-east across the Tiers, climbing steadily, but lost the track when the dogs, Fran, Sandy and young Spring, put up a kangaroo. Turner took the game-bag ahead to retrieve the kill, and at that moment a bolt of pain started up in Booth's chest. It stretched across his heart and pressed hard down like a bar of steel. He gasped and stopped. This must be death. Fran stopped too, turned and looked at him expectantly, stood waiting.

He slid into a sitting position against a tree as the pain gave a last violent squeeze and began to recede. The dense undergrowth sheltered him, but as he gazed up at the sky he saw the weather was breaking. Pewter-coloured clouds massing and rolling, wind thrashing the tops of the gum trees. There was an interval of darkness and silence. He must have dozed. When he was able to stand again the pain was gone and there was no sign of Turner. He shouted. No reply but the wind.

As he moved on he thought he glimpsed the convict out of the corner of his eye, but it was a pale grey strip of hanging bark flinging itself against a tree. The rain came, daylight faded, the first bitter night was endless. He prayed, found one part of his mind reciting the Lord's Prayer while another tried to reckon his position. During the night he could feel the frost entering him, turning his body to stone. When at last a slow, overcast dawn lightened the world, he found it hard to move. He dragged himself into a sitting position, hauled himself gradually to his feet and stumbled on. Every gully, ravine, boulder outcrop looked the same. When he stopped there was a buzzing in his ears. Rain and wind ceased briefly and a perfect silence fell. A lone bird called in the dripping canopy. He found a patch of weak winter sun, fell into it and slept.

When he woke the cold stars were out again and once more he thought he saw someone slide between the trees. A green dress. Caralin.
Spare Thou them O God which confess their faults. Restore Thou them that are penitent.
Was it Sunday?
Forgive us our trespasses . . . manifold sins and wickedness . . .
Perhaps God was punishing him for deserting Caralin and his children? No, he did not believe that. Too many evil bastards flourishing like green bay trees. And God would understand: at the time it had simply been the way of the world, men had their mistresses and bastards. How many of his Regiment had taken native women to their beds in India and deserted them when they moved on? But he could not forget his children's birthdays. The ninth of October and the twenty-sixth of April had become terrible dates to him.

Then the posting to Van Diemen's Land and shooting the albatross on the way. As the broken suffering thing crashed to the deck it fixed
him with a bright beady dying eye, full of question. From that moment life had seemed different, not to be used up as easily as possible in pleasure or lazy ambition, but having some new meaning he must learn. For one thing, his memory of the last few years of his life had twisted traitorously in his mind and he knew suddenly what damage he had done, what suffering he had caused. It was like one of those black and white trick pictures—a candlestick one moment, two old witches in profile the next. The pains in his chest began from that time, randomly, as though the dead bird were hanging round his neck, weighing on his heart. For some reason it was also associated in his mind with an earlier sea voyage, when his ship had called at Saint Helena. He had visited the estate where Napoleon died in exile. Peered through the great iron gates and wondered what thoughts Boney had on his deathbed. All those dead and dying men.

At the first convict muster after Arthur appointed him Commandant, Booth looked along the lines of prisoners and saw boys as young as seven. There was nowhere to put them in those days except in the main prison among the old lags. He knew what awaited them, however vigilant the guards. What had become of his own children? Lempriere's much-loved children, Power's children, were a continual reproach.

He had suggested to Arthur the establishment of a separate prison for boys up to fourteen, and Arthur was pleased with the idea. He obtained permission to let them swim in the cove in summer, and their thin white bodies seared his heart again. They bore the scars of old beatings. Limbs were bent with rickets or broken bones ill-healed. He wanted desperately to like them, wanted them to like him—but most were brutal, vicious, foul-mouthed and wild; untameable, disgusting, resentful and sly.

He wrote endlessly to the authorities. A lack of sewing thread and needles, not sent with the bolts of cloth, left the boys half naked one summer. Late in the season he gave up waiting and sent for the necessary items from a mercer in Hobarton—and then spent months answering reprimands from Arthur. At least they were regularly fed. He gave prizes out of his own pocket for diligence: books, small toys.
The boys fought over them or with them, tore them apart. There were small successes, unspeakable failures.

Three years ago he had decided to forget Caralin and marry gentle, doe-eyed, wealthy Phoebe. The week they were to announce the engagement she was taken ill. A summer fever, the doctor said; nothing to alarm. She died three weeks later. Booth told himself he was a scientific man of the new age, and yet he found it hard to rid himself of the thought that she was the victim of a curse set on him. He had not married Caralin, now he would not be allowed to marry. Was that why he hesitated about Lizzie? Ridiculous. He did not believe such things.

Now, lost in the night, he had a vision of himself from far up in the darkness looking down. A scrap of flesh and bone on a tiny dark island in a glimmering sea. Yet everyone was so convinced of their own strutting importance.
The summer of a dormouse.
If he could have stretched his sore, dead mouth he would have laughed and laughed.

And then the stars began to sing, one at a time, joining together until they formed a chord of unbearable beauty.
Lord, oh lord, our light shining in darkness; lucerna pedibus meis
;
a lantern unto my feet
. Time and space collapsed in pain. The darkness began to be pierced by irregular scuffling, screams and the clamour of voices: a woman weeping, a baby crying, a bugle's deep mellow fart. Years later it was daylight again. The dogs were on their feet, restless, alert. Daphne gave a sharp yelp. He heard the call of a bugle. Lempriere. More bugle notes surrounded him faintly, disappeared. The dogs whined. Spring went bounding off, came back. Bugle calls passed into silence and imagination. He kept dropping into an abyss.

They found him in mid-afternoon on Monday, when one of Frances Spotswood's party caught sight of Sandy and raised a shout. Lempriere's group arrived later, the Hobart contingent close behind. Shocked by Booth's emaciation, the filth that caked him, the stubbled, wrecked face like yellow parchment stretched over a skull, they milled around, desperate to help. They built a fire, cut the boots from his swollen feet and put him too close to the blaze. It caused him agonies when his
frostbitten toes began to thaw too quickly. They gave him food and drink and he vomited. They wrapped him in blankets that allowed leeches to continue bleeding him inside the woollen cocoon. In spite of their kindness he survived.

All of June he lay in bed looking out at the winter sky. He knew his collection of escape engines lay below the steps, although he could not see them. He had always admired the machines. Now he thought of the men who had made and used them, imagined their nights at sea or in the bush.

In the second week of July I received a note from Booth saying he was sorry to put me to the inconvenience of travelling down to Port Arthur again, but it would be some time before he could make the journey to Hobart, and he believed I would be as anxious as he to resume our discussion. I was not anxious to resume it at all. I wanted Rowland Rochester to be dead, a swift passage Home in Spring, and a simple, unvarnished story to tell Jane and Rochester.

The day after this came a note from Mrs Chesney urging me to visit them at ‘Kenton'. There was a PS: