Wild Island (32 page)

Unfortunately, she added, her stepdaughter showed no gift for drawing, but she must persevere. The child was not yet fifteen; much might yet be done with her education. I heard the doubt in Lady Franklin's tone and only understood it when I came to know Eleanor, whose intelligence was acute in many directions, but whose stubborn lack of interest in certain subjects was often a refusal to like what her stepmother liked.

‘Sophy, on the other hand,' continued Lady Franklin, ‘has quite a talent.'

Drawing had been one of their regular pastimes on the
Fairlie
during the voyage out, but Eleanor had showed a little spirit of resistance to learning. Some degree of resentment was to be expected, of course.

‘I lost my own mother when I was a child, and I know I would not have taken kindly to a stepmother,' she admitted.

Eleanor's mother had died of consumption not long after the child's birth. Sophy was ten years old when baby Eleanor was taken in by the Cracrofts, so the girls were more like sisters than cousins.

‘And the bond between sisters may be close and yet occasionally troubled, I know. I have always been closer to my sister Mary—Mrs Simpkinson—than to my older sister Fanny, who is Mrs Majendie now. Do you have sisters, Mrs Adair?'

But at that moment the clock struck four and she rose, looked out of the window, and briskly led the way downstairs.

‘That was the carriage returning with Sophy and Eleanor. They were to call for Mr Knopwood. He is in town a few days to see his doctor and lawyer. Not in good health, poor man. We'll take tea with them. Sophy needs proper companionship. Since her cousin Mary married Mr Price last month, she has only Miss Williamson—apart from the Maconochies, of course . . .'

She hesitated, did not finish the sentence, began again.

‘I had hopes of Mr St John Wallace's wife as a friend for Sophy, but now Mrs Wallace is expecting a child, it is unlikely . . .'

Half my mind continued to listen while the other half took in the idea of Louisa expecting a child. I was pleased for her, but immensely surprised. Their marriage must be in a healthier state than had seemed at all likely from her revelations on the
Adastra
.

Sophy had charge of the tea things. Eleanor was talking ponies and dogs to Knopwood, who was warming his hands at the fire. His white hair seemed sparser, a more ethereal cloud; he was thinner and frailer, but smiling still. He clasped my hand and said, ‘Ah, Mrs Adair! I wish I had known we were to meet! Mr Rowland Rochester! You see I have not forgot. I knew I had seen the name! I have set them aside for you but they are at my house. I meant to send them but I have been ill, you know.'

I thanked him and tried to discover what he had found.

‘Why, the books I promised you!'

He seemed to imagine we'd spoken of it before. Sophy supplied him with tea and a buttery muffin that engrossed his attention. After a pause I tried again, but he had forgotten Rowland and wanted to talk about the villainous lawyer in England who could not be brought to send him the two thousand pounds left to him in his sister's will.
There was another sign of age in the way he began to repeat himself. He thanked Jane Franklin, as I had heard him do twice before, for her kindness in asking him to dine last Christmas. He followed this by saying calmly that he doubted he would last another summer. By the coming Yuletide he hoped to be with Betsey, his dear dead girl.

‘Tush!' said Jane Franklin kindly. ‘You have many more Christmasses yet to spend with us—or you will have to answer to me, sir.'

He laughed weakly and said, ‘If I am not with you then I will be answering to God, ma'am, and so it seems I am answerable every way!'

They chuckled gently but her face was sad.

Elizabeth Coxen at nineteen had been a quiet, sweet-natured girl, painfully shy in company, yet humorous and quick in private. We first encountered each other in a bookshop called Benson's, just off the Strand, in the year '21. Benson's in those days had a room set aside for the sale of hand-coloured prints, painted fans and drawings. There was a fashion for animal subjects, and Elizabeth and I were both selling these, one or two a week. It was one of those friendships that blossom immediately out of mutual liking, mutual interests, and we began meeting to draw and talk at the new zoological gardens in Regent's Park, and this continued after Eliza married John Gould. He was always pleasant to me in a rather lofty way. I'm afraid I thought him a pompous little man—and Tom couldn't bear him. Gould opened a taxidermist's shop in Broad Street, Soho, and being largely self-taught, went briefly to Scotland to learn more from Mr John Edmonstone, a freed black slave from Guyana, who was demonstrating taxidermy to medical students at the University of Edinburgh.

Now, meeting again, Eliza and I talked of those days, and of her children. She had been forced to leave her two little daughters and her son Charles, her lovely Charley, with her mother in London. Her eldest son Henry had come with them—he was seven—and so had her nephew, who was fourteen and also named Henry, but known as ‘Scrammy' because his right hand was deformed. It had
been accidentally shot by a relative when he was younger. In a month Scrammy would sail to Sydney alone and set off to the back country of New South Wales to find his uncles, Eliza's brothers, who had taken up land there. She looked forward to spending several months with them on the way home, when her husband's collecting in Van Diemen's Land was finished.

‘It is so good,' Eliza whispered, pressing my hand, ‘to see a familiar face among strangers.' Such very kindly people, she added hastily. Nothing could be kinder than the attentions she and her husband had received since their arrival. They had also brought a maid-companion, Mary Watson, a cheerful, practical young woman, more friend than servant, who took care of little Henry, and her husband's manservant James Benstead, and Mr John Gilbert, a colleague of Gould's, a fellow naturalist.

John Gould's assurance of manner had increased with his fame. He was already called ‘the Bird Man' and clearly relished the title. Sophy and Henry Elliot were amused by his swaggering, and agreed Gould had the habit of thinking well of himself on all possible occasions. Jane Franklin, overhearing this, said that in her view he was entitled to do so. Undoubtedly he did have a rare talent for locating birds, even those shy or seldom seen, and no one could quarrel with his skills at recording and preserving them. He had also mastered the curious art of ‘pishing'—making soft twitterings and calls fatally enticing to birds. It was like her to know such a word. She seemed to have an endless degree of tolerance for Gould. What might have irritated her in someone else was forgivable in him, perhaps because he shared her passionate eagerness for knowledge, and seemed to take it for granted that a woman might feel the same.

She also thought it admirable that while he had started life as a gardener like his father, Gould had mastered Latin and rudimentary French so that he could use the Linnaeus system of classification. She often looked through the books he had brought with him, his Forsfield and Vigors, his Sparmann, Cuvier's
The Animal Kingdom
, and Temminck's
Manuel d'ornithologie, ou Tableau Systématique des Oiseaux
qui se trouvent en Europe.
These were kept in the workroom assigned to the Goulds, which soon became known as the Bird Room.

In reality it was two rooms, a disused brick kitchen dating from the earliest years of the colony, and a low-ceilinged chamber connected to it, once a small servants' hall, probably. This had plenty of south light from old-fashioned windows looking out onto the laundry yard. It contained a long scrubbed table at which Eliza and I worked, and shelving for birds, cages, and other necessaries. Stray cats attracted by the birds used to prowl the area at night, leaving the smell of toms rank against the doorway in the morning—which may be the reason why I have never since been able to like the scent of lavender. It retains for me an association with cat urine and bird slaughter, lavender oil being used to protect the bird-skins against infestation by insects. Thyme and rosemary were employed for the same purpose, the dried herbs packed between the feathered skins as they were layered into boxes.

Like any alchemist, Gould closely guarded the recipes he used in his taxidermy, but I know they included alum, boracic powder and carbolic acid, with naptha, strychnine, and many forms of arsenic. On the shelves he kept jars of Fowler's solution, one percent of arsenic, and
liquor arsenii
and
hydrargyri rodidi
, white arsenic; and there was ‘Paris green', and ‘King's yellow', or orpiment, which I had used for making Tom's colours. The skinning had to be carried out in the most precise fashion, and John Gould went at this delicate work in the old kitchen with the care of a surgeon and the avidity of a butcher.

He prepared only a handful of stuffed, mounted birds while he was in Hobart, most of them gifts for the Franklins. Among them was a little goshawk everyone declared wonderfully lifelike—and it was, but I had become fond of it while it was alive, caged, and privately thought it perverse to kill any creature to give it a spurious semblance of life. What had disappeared with its life was its character, as I explained to Bergman, who called in one day when I was alone there. It had been an intelligent bird, quick to recognise certain voices and people. Bergman's brown face tilted slightly to one side, considering.

‘That's hard for you,' he said. ‘But we're back to the old subject, time. Taxidermy, embalming—they're some of the ways in which humans try to defy death. Art is the same, isn't it? Sculpture, your drawings, portraiture—all ways of countering mortality.'

He was at Government House to attend a meeting in preparation for the voyage to the South Cape and Port Davey. Surveyors and hydrographers would carry out further coastal mapping, John Gould would capture birds, Lady Franklin would observe. Bergman had called to say he had suddenly wondered whether George Fairfax's presence at the Bridge Meeting meant he owned land in the area. On searching the records he had discovered this was so.

‘A property across the river from the town at New Norfolk was owned in the name of George Fairfax from the year 'twenty-seven, but resumed to the Crown in mid-'thirty-five, six months before the quarrel at the Eagle.'

‘Why would it be resumed to the Government?'

‘Several reasons: neglect is the most common. Failure to improve the land in some stipulated way over a period of years, or non-payment of rates or dues—or because the Government wants the land back for its own purposes—something like the bridge.'

‘I wonder if there's any record of Fairfax objecting to the process? We might discover an address through those papers.'

‘I thought of that. There's nothing—which is interesting in itself. It suggests that he certainly wasn't living in the area. Perhaps not in Hobart, or even in the island.'

We talked for a time about what this might mean, but came to no conclusions, and soon drifted back to the more interesting topic of art and mortality. We were still talking half an hour later when Eliza came in.

Louisa and St John returned from Port Arthur in September and were among many who came to the Bird Room to meet the Goulds and exclaim over the doomed creatures in the cages, the skins, eggs
and nests; to see the delicate skeletons soaking in spirits of salts or laid out to dry, to admire drawings in progress. Louisa's condition was now very apparent.

‘December,' she replied tonelessly in answer to my question, and looking directly at me, grimaced. I was puzzled. She had said she wanted a child. St John had news, he said, and we walked down through the shrubbery to a seat near the water. It was early spring, still cool but pleasant in the sunshine.

St John had had several conversations with ‘Mick' Walker, but the convict refused to say anything about New Norfolk. Walker was an extraordinary man, added St John; of uncommon personal attractiveness. His face had what one could only call nobility, a pure, classical form of beauty rare in men, like the head on a Greek or Roman coin—miraculously unmarred by the bad life he had lived. The man's physique was no less striking. He was strong and well formed, a natural athlete—like the Adam of some new and better race, fresh from the hand of God.