Wild Island (42 page)

When there was nothing further I could do to help on these days, I went down to the river to draw. It was pleasant there, partly open, partly shaded under dun-coloured native trees or the lime-green willows. St John came that way one morning, riding Aislabie's horse to the Chesneys': every young girl's dream of a handsome stranger approaching on horseback. He dismounted and led the pretty chestnut as we walked back together. All his talk was of the escapees again, Walker and Dido in particular. He told me his opinions had changed under the influence of his acquaintance with them, and with Booth, Point Puer and Port Arthur. He now believed transportation was indefensible. He was corresponding with Maconochie, and had recently met with others leading the anti-transportation movement here. Together they were writing to England to urge their views.

After a week Chesney began to groan and stir. The weather turned cooler as winter approached. St John and Louisa returned to Hobarton and Robert McLeod called, in Richmond on yet another visit to Mrs Ross and her children. Nearly a year into her widowhood, Mrs Ross had opened the proposed school at her house, ‘Carrington', about four miles distant on the other side of Richmond. She had five pupils but needed more. McLeod had persuaded William and Julia Chesney
to send their eldest girls as weekly boarders; now he wanted Mrs Chesney to send Polly and also Liddy, who could help with the infants to pay her way.

‘Harriet?' he said. ‘I have mentioned to Susan Ross that when Mrs Chesney can spare you, you might give drawing lessons once a week while you are here. Mrs Ross cannot offer a wage at present, of course . . .'

As he rode away Mrs Chesney said, ‘I always believed on the ship he had an interest in you . . . but now I wonder if it's Mrs Ross he thinks of? A widow with a little property. He has her interests much at heart, it seems. But it would need a brave man to take on thirteen stepchildren.'

Two weeks later, in the middle of May, Chesney opened both eyes and tried to speak, but he could make only gargling sounds and slumped back in frustration. For several days he tried, then retreated into furious silence. He no longer looked at us, but glared at the door in the wall opposite the bed as though he hoped the angel of death would come through and take him. I contemplated this wall too, on nights when I sat with him. Mrs Chesney allowed herself some rest now he was out of danger.

This room was not the Chesneys' bedchamber but a second parlour on the ground floor. It was to be a library eventually, but had neither bookcases nor books at present. The invalid had been carried here from the cart, and kept there to save running up and down stairs. The walls were distempered in palest duck-egg greenish-blue, which under the yellow lamplight took on the glow of a dawn or twilight sky in a painted landscape. ‘
Watchet
', came to my mind, a country word used by my grandmother's maid, Sukie, for a certain colour of early morning light in spring. Now faint irregularities in the plasterwork suggested trees to me, and a cottage, and I was seized by a desire to draw on the wall. A fresco, like the ones I had seen in Italian Churches on our wedding journey. When I said this jokingly to Mrs Chesney she
said, ‘Why not? It might amuse Chesney.' He would take no interest in anything else. The walls would be papered in time, in any case. Or it could be painted over.

I could not use colours over such a large area, and therefore decided it must be a sepia brush-drawing with washes of tint: a pastoral prospect in the manner of last century. Why not ‘Kenton' itself, as seen from the approach along the carriage drive?

Chesney's angry good eye followed my hand as the house formed in the centre. On the right I put a graceful sapling to frame the scene, life size, floor to ceiling, as though growing in the room. Fields on the left showed distant cows and sheep, and a sheen of river in Chinese white.

Mrs Chesney watched her husband watching. ‘Oh look, Chesney! Harriet has caught the very shape of that hill behind us.'

Mr Chesney tried to shout. Woolna . . . walnut. I had not put in the second of the two walnut trees he'd planted beside the house twenty years ago.

I was working at it one afternoon when Mrs Chesney brought Gus Bergman in. He raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment.

‘Van Diemen's Land as seen from a hill outside Rome? After Claude? Extraordinary. Everyone will be wanting one.'

It was astute; and sarcastic. Or not? This was the first time we had met since the proposal, and I was more agitated than I had expected to be. I smiled but could think of nothing to say. A short, awkward silence ensued, broken by Bess Chesney repeating the news Bergman had brought: Eliza was safely delivered of a boy, to be named Franklin Tasman Gould. Mother and child were both in excellent health. Bergman refused Mrs Chesney's offers of hospitality; she must excuse him, he was in haste.

He bowed to me and smiled and rode away, leaving me also a letter from John Gould, which I assumed would contain the same message—but when I opened it I found it concerned a change in their plans. Eliza and the child being so well, John Gould had decided to return to South Australia for another month or so, before returning
here to collect his wife and sons. Only then would they go on to Sydney, at some uncertain date.

I was disappointed. I had been looking forward to travelling with the Goulds to Sydney, but when a longer, regretful note came a few days later from Eliza, I replied that it was a shame, but could not be helped. We would have longer together in Hobart, where I would soon see her and baby Franklin, and in a year or so we would be in London, working, which was the chief thing. I then wrote again to Quigley's lodging-house in Sydney, explaining the change of plans and saying I would now wait for them in Hobart.

On the day I finished the mural, letting the scene fade out across the wall, Chesney made a grumbling roar. Lifting a shaking left hand, he waved it limply at the adjoining wall.

‘After Gainsborough' this time, I decided with an inward smile: a family group. Mrs Chesney in her best blue sitting on a garden seat under a tree, with Natty, Polly and Liddy on the grass leaning against her knees. Mr Chesney standing behind, arms folded, gun propped beside him, and his spaniel (dear, mad, droopy old Porter) lying at his feet, as indeed the dog lay in the sick room. Julia Chesney and her husband in the background. Chesney was soon able to say slowly and thickly to servants and visitors that ‘it was a deal too flattering to him—not near handsome enough for Bess. But the house was like, very like'.

Mr Gregson, a regular visitor, said he would give me twenty guineas for two such paintings of his own house, ‘Restdown', or ‘Risdon', as people called it. Not on a wall, mind, but decently, on proper canvases. He was an amateur himself; his portrait of Mr Knopwood was considered a good likeness, but he wanted a professional view of his property to send Home to show his cousins how handsomely one might live here. I said that unfortunately there would be no opportunity. I was soon to leave the island.

At midwinter a Bonfire Night was held in a field by the river near the bridge. Tree trunks, dead for years from former clearing, were
dragged by a team of cart-horses into a pile bigger than a cottage. The great pyre was lit before morning service on a bright cold Sunday, and by evening had burned into a red-black mountain of Hell Mouths, flaming caverns around which children played ‘chasings' and shrilled and shouted in the dark.

While it was still light there was a pigeon-shoot, the prize a piece of silver plate. As it grew dark a huge orange moon rose from behind the hills, dwindling to a small, pale disc as it climbed high in the sky. The Church choir sang hymns, and later, at the supper tent, Mr Aislabie drank mulled wine in a teacup which he rested against his prominent corporation, saying with a sigh, ‘Fire and lights against the darkness. What pagans we are at heart! Were you expecting to see St John and Louisa, Harriet? They are not to come after all. Now the escapees are taken, Wallace wants to stay in Hobarton for the trial, which will take place speedily, no doubt.'

The runaways had been taken ten days before at Twofold Bay, between Port Phillip and Sydney, by mere chance. The New South Wales Revenue Cutter had put in there to mend a gaff rig, and seeing a battered whaleboat containing seven men, had grown suspicious. The escapees were now being returned to Hobarton.

‘Seven men? Were there not eight?' I found myself sorry to hear of their capture and hoping that one—Mick Walker perhaps—might have evaded the pursuers.

‘According to the bolters' story, one quarrelled with the rest and asked to be left on Flinders Island.'

‘Can St John do anything for them?'

‘Gregson doesn't think so. He's of the opinion they'll hang, and I agree.
Pour encourager les autres.
Walker's crew has not been violent, but the list of their crimes is long.'

Each time I spoke of leaving, Bess found a reason why it must not be this week or next. At last I became anxious and insisted I could delay no longer; Anna and Quigley had said they would return in
spring, and I had not yet seen Eliza and the baby. I must leave in the first week of August. On the twenty-eighth of July, George Chesney had another seizure and died later that night. Bess Chesney's sorrow this time was of a low, intense, defeated kind, her tears silent and continuous. Dr Coverdale prescribed laudanum, which let her sleep a little, but she wanted Liddy or me with her, to listen to quavering stories about George, and to add names continually to the growing list of friends and acquaintances who must be sent funeral notices, letters and mourning cards.