Wild Island (4 page)

‘We cannot have felons praising our prisons. Port Arthur must be a place of dread.'

Booth had seen too many strong, healthy backs turned to bloody pulp by the lash; too many able men screaming and weeping. He explained that if he kept his charges working long hours and well fed, they had neither the time nor the inclination for rebellion. The Government gained by labourers in good health. But he knew from these episodes that if Arthur ever heard about Caralin and the children, there would be no mercy. He'd be stripped of his command before you could say Jack Robinson. He had never told Lempriere or Casey about Caralin, although he'd come close some nights. The only people who knew were his three best friends who'd been in the Indies with him: John Peddie, Picton Beete, and Wharton Young, all now separated at posts around the island. They would never speak of it.

The weather cleared, and a signal came inviting Booth to the new Governor's first public levée for gentlemen, followed by a ‘drawing-room' in the evening for wives, but naturally this could only include those who lived near Hobart Town. Booth could not attend. He was kept at the peninsula again, this time by a whaling infringement. He walked up to East Bay Neck, issued the fine and walked back, by which time the roof of the blacksmith's shop was collapsing. He was invited up to dine at Government House the following week, met Sir John at the Mess the following day, and scrambled back to the peninsula the day after.

‘
Ensuite?
' demanded the Lemprieres when he settled by their fire on the night of his return. How did they appear, the new couple? What did they look like? What did she wear?

Booth smiled, shrugged. ‘
Bouleversement entier!
We're clearly in for a different regime absolutely. Chalk and cheese. Sir John is affable, gentlemanly . . . all you'd expect. A big man. He'd make four of me. Three of you, Thomas. Lady Franklin is a clever woman I should
say—talks with great eagerness and attention. Not in an overbearing way . . . Her manner is friendly, no standing on ceremony.'

She had once been very pretty no doubt; was now old. Forty-five, she'd mentioned it herself. Her two companions were Sir John's nieces, Miss Sophy Cracroft and Miss Mary Franklin. Unassuming girls, evidently pleased with their daring adventure to the colonies. Miss Franklin was prettier and smiled more easily than Miss Cracroft, who might be fierce if roused. At any rate, Lempriere and Charlotte must judge for themselves, which they would have the opportunity of doing in six weeks' time, towards the end of March, when the Franklins would make their inaugural tour of the peninsula.

2

IT MAY SEEM ODD THAT I AGREED TO GO TO THE COLONY WHEN
I knew almost nothing about it. A sea voyage of four or five months, Harriet, they said. Twelve thousand miles. And at once I began to think of how readily I could sell drawings of the strange flora and fauna of that place when we returned to England. I was worried about money—about the want of it, I mean.

I have always drawn, and for much of my life made a living by it, but four years before this time there had come a great change in my fortunes, and for a time I had no leisure to draw. After some months, however, I could resist no longer, and began sketching corners in the lonely mansion where I now found myself, and the room in which I was almost as much a prisoner as the patient I was nursing.

My troubles began with the death of my husband, Thomas Lawrence Adair, an artist more than twenty years older than I. Like many wives and daughters of artists, I was his assistant; I learned to grind his colours, prepare etching plates, and paint drapery and small commissions, generally portraits of women and children. When Tom died suddenly in the bleak January of 1831, many of his huge, laboured canvases of Biblical scenes were still unsold, stacked against the studio walls, and I discovered we owed debts everywhere. The
bailiffs seized all our belongings, and I found myself at twenty-nine a widow nearly penniless, with the care also of Nina, my stepmother, who was ill and aging.

We moved into a tiny room and I tried to go on earning our living by the same means as before, but as a widow I could get no credit from the colourman or the oilshop, and was often in want of materials. Mr Linnell, the well-respected teacher, would advance me six and ninepence for a copy of certain Dutch paintings in the Pall Mall gallery, and I sold sketches of dogs or birds, and hand-coloured etchings.

In this manner we scraped along until Nina died two years later. She had been as true a mother and friend to me as anyone could have been, and with her loss I came to my lowest ebb. I understood now how impossible it would be to save against illness or old age. Friends said I would marry again, but I thought not. I therefore began to look for a situation as a drawing mistress in a school, or as a governess. This was easier said than done. I grew shabbier, thinner and more anxious by the day, and my appearance had no reassuring effect on prospective employers.

At last I obtained, by exchange of letters, a situation in a northern shire. There was to be a three-month trial, since no interview was possible at such a distance. The duties were described as ‘nurse-companion to a patient sometimes difficult', which gave me the idea that it might be a child. The wages were suspiciously high, but this was explained as being on account of the isolated setting of the house, which did not attract servants. It was a wrench to leave my beloved London, but as the coach jolted north and the countryside opened around me, I began to believe the rural air might restore my health and spirits.

When I first saw ‘Thornfield Hall' in the spring of '33 it seemed made for such a purpose. A Jacobean mansion of mellow rose-brick with clusters of barley-sugar chimneys, rooks in immemorial elms, ancient yews and pines. The great trees set the house rather gloomily in shadow, but the villages of Hay and Millcote at about two miles distant were sunny, the whole scene a perfect English pastoral—from
a distance. Only later did I discover that the calm of ‘Thornfield' was spurious, its peace a fiction.

The owner of the estate, Mr Edward Rochester, was away when I arrived. Mrs Alice Fairfax, the elderly housekeeper, was the person I must satisfy. My position in the house was ambiguous; I shall say more of it later. Mrs Fairfax explained that Mr Rochester was frequently out of England. She never knew when he'd be coming or going. She, too, was a widow escaped from genteel poverty, but in her case there were connections with the Rochester family. She had come to ‘Thornfield' many years before as housekeeper-companion to the late Mrs Rochester, Edward Rochester's mother, who was her first cousin.

Mrs Fairfax was lonely. Indoor and out, there were sixteen servants, most of whom had been in the family's service for years, and they carried out their work each day with little need of direction. She could not be intimate with
them
, and there being no one else for company, she began to call me to her housekeeper's room several times a week for tea. Her innocent vices were soon apparent: a modest pride in the intricate white widow's caps she sewed for herself (long lace weepers hanging each side like the ears of an albino spaniel) and an old woman's eagerness to tell stories about the past.

Mrs Fairfax knew the present Mr Rochester disliked such talk and would call it gossip, but she carried on this minor rebellion almost indignantly. She would not
of course
speak of the family to anyone she could not trust, but I was a gentlewoman, and at any rate, this was not gossip in her view, but a way of honouring the dead. Telling how the Rochesters and Fairfaxes of earlier days had laughed and cried and quarrelled and married. How this one had a taste for mustard herrings and that one for gunpowder tea, until death gradually took them all and left her stranded among her furniture.

‘The Rochesters and the Fairfaxes have always intermarried. George Fairfax, who . . . now there's my wool gone down . . . Thank you. When my cousin George—he was Lucy's cousin too, naturally . . .'

Like many of the elderly she was repetitive, her stories smooth as pebbles from the wash of time and handling. I could not always
remember which George or Edward was which; whose pug it was that had bitten the Bishop—but Lucy was the late Mrs Rochester. She and Mrs Fairfax had been close as girls, but poor Lucy had not lived long into her second son's childhood. Perhaps it was just as well. She had not survived to know of the tragedy: her eldest son, the present Mr Edward Rochester's brother Rowland (her favourite—everyone's favourite, although one shouldn't say it) had been killed in the West Indies thirteen years ago in the slave rebellion.

If indeed he
was
killed . . . Sugar had been a shocking price those years, and cotton and coffee, too. Some people had refused to buy coffee in sympathy with the slaves. They had contrived substitutes from roasted corn and burned carrot powder, but these never tasted well to her. Rowland loved good coffee. How different the household would have been if he had lived!

‘There is some doubt whether he really died?' I asked.

Well, she had heard Mr Edward say so, but Rowland must be dead—or why did he not return? No one would give up lightly such an inheritance as ‘Thornfield'. There was more hesitation when she spoke of Rowland than in her other stories, as though she found herself near a boundary she knew she must not cross. I asked her if he had resembled Mr Edward.

No, she said. Rowland had been lighter in colouring and more cheerful in temperament: more a Fairfax, always merry, with a fondness for society, but a scholar, too. Excellent at the pianoforte, and with a fine singing voice. There had been eleven years between the two boys, so they had not been close. Lucy had borne three babes in between, but none survived. Rowland went away to college while Edward was still only a boy, and by the time he returned to ‘Thornfield', Edward had gone to board with a tutor.

Mrs Fairfax hesitated again. ‘Not to speak ill of the dead, but the tragedy was old Mr Rochester's fault. He fell ill one winter about fourteen years ago and began to think of making his will. He deplored the idea of dividing ‘Thornfield' to leave half the estate to each brother, and so resolved to bequeath it wholly to Rowland. Edward's future
would be secured by arranging his marriage to the stepdaughter of a certain wealthy Mr Mason, a friend of Mr Rochester's in his youth. Mason was a planter in the West Indies. Miss Cosway-Mason was to have a dowry of thirty thousand pounds! Hardly believable—but half of it was to be in property, a sugar plantation.

‘To be sure, there had been unpleasant rumours about Mr Mason. His reputation was damaged somehow, but old Mr Rochester would insist on the marriage. This was in '23, eight years after the end of the war, and England was not so prosperous then as now. Money was tight, you remember, and business in a poor way from the long years of fighting Bonaparte.'

It was all leading up to that Yuletide of '25 when the banks suddenly closed and no one could get any money. The ‘Black December' they called it afterwards.

‘Mr Rochester was in trouble about money as early as '23. He had been forced to mortgage land. And there was also the question of carrying off Rowland's wedding to Lady Mary Faringdon in suitable style. Oh yes, the engagement had been a fact for several years. Only the sudden death of Lady Mary's brother, Rowland's close friend, had delayed an announcement of the betrothal. The match was such a source of pride to old Mr Rochester. Lady Mary would have had little in the way of dowry—the Faringdon estates are all entailed on the male line—but the family is old aristocracy and that's what counted with him.

‘Edward Rochester had just finished Oxford and was travelling on the continent. Old Mr Rochester hated to travel and was not fully recovered from his illness, and so it was Rowland who went to Spanish Town to meet Mr Mason and his stepdaughter, to inspect the dowry property. But something went wrong. Old Mr Rochester received a letter and fell into a fury. Oh, he was in such a state! He set off at once to follow Rowland to the Indies (unheard of! Old Mr Rochester had such a cordial dislike to travel).

‘And what happened next I do not fully understand to this day,' said Mrs Fairfax. She hesitated, pausing suddenly in her knitting, her
lips pursed and her old face troubled. ‘At any rate, when Mr Rochester came back he would say only that Rowland was dead, and Edward married and gone to the continent with his new wife, this heiress. And then a few months later, we heard she too was dead! A dreadful hole-in-the-corner business, all of it. No proper marriage, no funeral for Rowland or the deceased heiress.

‘None of this is ever spoken of, of course,' she repeated. ‘Perhaps I should not have mentioned it, but I know I can trust you to be discreet, my dear.'

Mrs Fairfax and I took tea together for two years and ten months. About six months into this time I met my employer at last, when Mr Edward Rochester arrived without warning one bleak evening. I was called to speak with him in the library, and saw a dark, restless man in his late thirties, sitting behind a desk. A craggy, unhappy face. After a first searching look at me, which would have shown him a tall, thin woman no longer young, of no interest but useful in her way, he turned his eyes back to the papers his agent was placing before him. He glanced up now and then as he spoke.