Wild Island (60 page)

‘But of course you are connected with it! Do you not recall asking me for a subsidy in June or July? And for permission to pass bulletins from your office? Are not the Macdowells your particular friends?' said the Governor, astonished.

Montagu shook his head. ‘Much as it pains me to refer to it,' he said, ‘you must know, sir, that your memory—or lack of it—is the great joke of the colony. My own memory, by contrast, is known for its accuracy. If it comes to a challenge, which of us will be believed?'

The Governor gaped at Montagu for a moment, Henslowe said, as though he could not believe his ears, and then replied, ‘And you consider that the manner in which you have just addressed me—confounded impudence—is not a challenge in itself? You are disgracefully mistaken, sir. You had better apologise at once. I shall then consider whether to issue an official reprimand.'

Montagu stood silent, gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘Good Lord!' said Franklin, ‘Have you gone mad? You are relieved of your duties, sir. Dismissed for insolence. With immediate effect.'

Montagu grew pale, turned and left the room. He only began to grow nervous, Henslowe said, when the Governor appointed Boyes to act as Colonial Secretary until England should make a new appointment, and refused Montagu's request for another interview. He began to understand Sir John might stick to the decision this time.

‘The Governor holds all the cards,' Boyes said, ‘if only he can play them—which, unfortunately, I doubt.'

Montagu wrote an apology, but the Governor refused to rescind the dismissal. It was now the week before Christmas and Jane had returned to Government House from New Norfolk. Montagu sent a note begging her for an interview. She was not well and refused, but at last agreed. Montagu was in a terrible state, weeping and trembling. She felt for him in spite of all he had done. If Whitehall backed Sir John's decision, he was ruined. Dismissal for insolence from a post of Colonial Secretary was too great a fall ever to be reversed.

Montagu must have said a great deal more to Jane than she ever repeated, but after a time they were both weeping, she admitted. She
told him his letter of apology was so formal it sounded insincere. They rewrote it together. Sir John, not knowing Jane had largely composed this second letter, was so affected by it that he almost relented, but decided he must not give way. This was the turning point. Montagu was convinced that the Franklins had planned this last humiliation: Jane making him recast the letter while secretly knowing it would be useless. His fury redoubled and he arranged to leave immediately for England, repeating to anyone who would listen: ‘I'll sweat him, see if I don't. I'll persecute John Franklin as long as he lives.'

The Franklins now prepared to endure an anxious wait: eight months, at least, to hear whether Montagu's dismissal was accepted by the Colonial Secretary in London, Lord Stanley. Jane suffered a relapse. She could not help thinking fearfully of several earlier dismissals—the former Treasurer, Mr Gregory, was one—so reluctantly and with such grating unpleasantness approved by Lord Stanley. If the decision should fall the wrong way, it would be Sir John and not Montagu who suffered.

The Great Census was supposed to be taken on the first day of 1842, but Arthur Sweet, who was in charge of completing the form for the ‘Palace', celebrated the New Year with Tom Cracroft and several bottles of claret, port and other spirituous liquors. The result was that he did not fill in the form until the fourth of January, by which time everyone had a different opinion of how many had been in the house on the last night of the old year. In the end he wrote ‘forty-one', which was about right. Twenty-five servants and sixteen family and friends, and the whole place falling around them.

30

THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A LETTER I WROTE TO GUS ON THE
fifth of April, the first anniversary of our marriage, when I was not the only one worrying about the rain. After so many postponements, the Franklins had set out for the west at last, dangerously late in the season. Autumn was not the time to begin an expedition through a region of ‘impervious forests, rugged mountains, tremendous gullies, impetuous rivers and torrents and swamps and morasses', as Calder had warned them.

Gus and Calder had spent most of January on the Frenchman's track with the convict party, making ready in case the Franklins should decide to proceed with the long-planned journey, which the Montagu affair and Jane's illness had again thrown in doubt. Indeed, when they returned to Hobart in early February, Sir John told them it must be abandoned for the third summer in a row. Jane was not
strong and he was behind in his work, having spent the last three weeks writing a tortuous account of the Coverdale Affair to Lord Stanley in London.

Franklin was determined to lay bare now the saga of the Arthurites' power in the colony. The dismissal of Montagu was not the work of a moment. Years of treachery must be recounted, every accusation supported by copies of the minutes of endless meetings, copies of letters and sworn statements of witnesses.

Boyes shook his head and predicted this document would do Franklin more harm than all his enemies put together, but he could not dissuade the Governor from sending it. Jane relied on being able to edit it, but at the crucial time she was too ill. Inevitably, therefore, it was four times longer than it should have been, full of longwinded outrage, blustering pompous digressions.

Nobody in the colony, not even Boyes, read the document until it was published two years later in London, by which time Jane had cut it ruthlessly. The original was sent that February on the same ship that carried Montagu to England to make his case in person. When it arrived in London the wordy mass was scanned with increasing impatience, while Montagu, called in to speak to it, had only to deny each point with the dignified brevity he immediately guessed Lord Stanley would prefer. In Montagu's plausible presence the accusations were made to look like the ramblings of an old naval buffoon.

Montagu may also have taken the opportunity to point out how curiously this document differed from earlier crisp letters sent to London over Sir John's signature. Lord Stanley would not have missed the point. Either Sir John's powers had waned alarmingly, or there had been other minds at work, and Sir John's not the most cogent of them, whether his former helper had been Montagu, or disgracefully, Lady Franklin. Montagu certainly implied that he could have said a great deal more about the Franklins if he had not chosen gentlemanly reticence. But news of this treachery only came to us much later.

In the meantime Jane suddenly revived, as she was wont to do at the mention of travel, and became eager for the expedition to
‘Transylvania', the old name for the wild western region of the island. An absence from town would restore them, she argued. Their low spirits were the result of three months in a man-made wilderness, with petty human malice tearing at their vitals, forests of dark intention, thickets of misunderstanding. Like any hurt animal they must drag themselves into the real wilderness to lick their wounds. Healing would come in the sublime purity of Nature. This journey might bring hardships too, but of a nobler kind. After these terrible weeks of confinement—she in her sickroom, her husband at his desk—there would be joy in the mere physical activities of riding, walking.

The orders were reversed, and Gus and Calder went up again to restore provisions and shelters as speedily as possible. Before they left, Sir John laid the foundation stone for Jane's glyptotek Museum at Ancanthe, her native botanical garden in Kangaroo Valley. This was her response to England's refusal to fund an object so unnecessary to a convict colony; she would build it herself.

In the end it was the twenty-ninth of March before the Franklins' expedition started on horseback from New Norfolk. Autumn was in the air, bright mornings fiercely cold and heavy with dew, nights suddenly freezing. The party included three more than originally planned. Sir John had intended to bring only his aide, Mr Bagot, but now Boyle, his orderly, was there too. There was Jane and her maid Stewart, Calder and Gus, and two late additions: Dr Milligan, and Mr David Burns, a newspaperman recently arrived in the island. And a dozen convicts.

Rain began on the second day as they made their way to the base camp at Lake St Clair, which they reached on the second of April. The next day they left the horses and began to walk, although Jane had her sedan chair, and on some afternoons used this. Calder had planned for the group to stay together, but when they reached the Lake he confessed to Gus, watching the rain, that he thought the party could not now hope to reach Macquarie Harbour. The narrow river gorges quickly became impassable when torrents came flooding down from the peaks. They would be forced back at some point. He asked Gus
to return to New Norfolk to collect another half-dozen convicts and bring more supplies up to this camp in case of a rapid retreat.

They had allowed eight days to walk the sixty-six miles through the bush from Lake St Clair to the Gordon River, and a week to sail home on the
Breeze
, which would be waiting for them in Macquarie Harbour. The Captain had instructions not to stay at the rendezvous after the eighteenth of April. If they were not there by then, he should assume they had turned back. We expected them in Hobart on the twenty-second or twenty-fourth of April. Jane had spoken confidently of being on the
Breeze
by the sixteenth, Sir John's fifty-sixth birthday. And here was another reason, I believe, why Jane was determined to continue with the expedition. If they had been in Hobart on the Governor's birthday some kind of celebration would have been inescapable. In their present mood they could not bear the idea. The pity of friends would be as hard to stomach as the crowing of enemies.

There was no sign of the party on the twenty-second or twenty-fourth—nor a week later. And no news of them from the Lake St Clair camp. The
Colonial Times
and the
Courier
spoke of the ‘doomed expedition', which they reminded readers they had always condemned. Boyes, now acting Colonial Secretary and therefore officially in charge of the colony in Sir John's absence, remained sanguine until the first of May, when he received a note from Gus, still waiting at Lake St Clair. The rivers were in spate, and he believed the party must be trapped between two flooded canyons.

There was an enclosure in this for me, and I learned for the first time that Gus was not with the main party, and rejoiced selfishly and too soon. By the twentieth of May, when they were a month overdue, the papers could talk only of the ‘lost' expedition. The weather was bitter. Sophy and Eleanor were not speaking to each other because Eleanor had said they must be dead, and Sophy had said it sounded as though she wished them to be, and Eleanor had said Sophy was wicked and horrid, and Sophy had said where was Eleanor's religion now? Gus and his convicts set out from Lake St Clair to search, taking as many stores as they could carry.

On the twenty-fourth of May, over a month late, the
Eliza
came blithely up the Derwent carrying the Franklins safe and sound. By the skin of their teeth they had reached the
Breeze
before it departed, but the ship had then been imprisoned for nearly three weeks in Macquarie Harbour, unable to get out of the vast bay into the open sea through ‘Hell's Gates', the dangerous narrow opening. Once through, they had met the
Eliza
and transferred into her.

Invited to dinner to hear of the adventure, I could not help laughing at Jane's account of their adventures: Stewart's reckless bravery, the plum pudding Jane had kept secret until her husband's birthday and carved into slivers, a slice for everyone, convicts as well. By this time they had been living on three ounces of salt pork a day each. Mr Burns, the journalist, read
Master Humphrey's Clock
during the days of waiting in the bush, his tears at the fate of Dickens's Little Nell joining with the ever-falling rain. But at every mention of snow, sleet, freezing conditions, swollen rivers, I fought down a rising terror, and when I returned home that night, I went into Thea's nursery and sat by her little sleeping form and prayed and wept. There had been no news of Gus and the convict search party since they left Lake St Clair.

A week later came the fourth anniversary of Booth's being lost and found, and he and Lizzie came to town for a dinner at Government House. I was invited again but could not bear to go, my mind now half-paralysed, able to think only of Gus. Booth and Lizzie called on me next day. Thea, three-and-a-half now, was eight or nine months older than little Amy Booth, but the two infants were much intrigued with each other. While the two little girls carefully examined each other and Thea's playthings, Booth told me Jane had dissolved into tears while speaking of Gus's party. She had said she would gladly bear the expense of every possible further extension of the search. Booth reminded me that he had survived, alone and without food. Gus, with plenty of supplies, would easily do so. He and his men were no doubt holed up snugly somewhere, waiting out the weather. I was comforted—until they were gone.