Wild Island (62 page)

We had reached the top of the steep lane leading down to the shore at Sandy Bay. Halfway down was the rocky outcrop where I had more than once sat painting. We rested there now and she stared ahead.

‘I would have told you. That's why I came. My daughter is married now and expecting a child, and I want to know whether her mother was really . . . whether there is any prospect that . . . But first I must explain. My son was sickly from birth. He died while we were in Spanish Town. The nuns saw my grief—if it had not been for that, I do not think they would have given us the baby. When Rowland first demanded to know what had happened to Anna's child, they said it had died, but a few days later they sent a servant to bring us back and gave us Maria. She was seven months old—so beautiful, so healthy. Our safety lay in the fact that Mason did not want Edward Rochester to know Anna had had a child, and so he had concealed it carefully. Nobody knew.'

She paused, wiped her eyes and said. ‘Once we had Maria, everything changed between us, Rowland and I. It felt as though we were her parents. I would have done anything to keep her, and was already half in love with him because he had been so good to me. Rowland believed he had lost Anna to his brother, and being so much together, both in distress, we . . .' She paused and then continued, ‘By the time we reached England we were united. I took Maria to my parents. God forgive me, I told them my husband and son had died—that Maria was the orphan child of a woman I had known. They believed anything possible in the colonies. Lies, piling on lies, I was terrified at myself, at where it would all lead. Rowland, meanwhile, went to ‘Thornfield' to see whether his father could be brought to reconsider, but the old man said he had only one son now. Edward. He ordered Rowland out, threatened to have him shot or arrested on charges of trespass if he ever returned.'

‘So you decided to emigrate,' I said. ‘To join George Fairfax, who might be Rowland's father.'

‘No!' She had spirit enough to be amused now. ‘It was my parents who emigrated. It was one of the reasons why I was so eager to return
to England to see them before they left. They had written to tell me they would join my brother, a Lieutenant in the Fortieth Regiment here. He had fallen in love, and sold out of the Army to marry and settle. When Rowland came back to me, we talked endlessly about what we might do—and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to go with them; a perfect opportunity to start again in a place where no one would know us, far away from England and the Indies.' She was recovering herself, and smiled again now. ‘Well—it seemed far away then—but can you imagine what we felt eight years later when we heard the Twenty-first was to come to Van Diemen's Land? I knew my husband was dead by then, but it meant Booth would come—and all my husband's former friends in the Regiment . . .'

‘So you have been all this time in the island?'

‘My brother settled in the north, near Port Dalrymple, and first my parents, and then Rowland and I, joined him. Rowland had spoken with Alice Fairfax while he was at ‘Thornfield'—he was always a favourite of hers—and told her the whole story. Being sentimental and romantic, as you know, she immediately wished to help. She sent him to see her cousin George, near Liverpool. He was a widower, childless, and after a year, he too, came out to the island. Someone on the ship persuaded him to buy land at New Norfolk, which he did rather hastily when he arrived—but afterwards he too came north.'

It was now nearly midday. We turned back towards the cottage for luncheon. I was eager to hear Catherine's account of what had happened at New Norfolk, but she began to tell me about Maria, now eighteen and married to the son of a prominent family in the north. Her first confinement was approaching.

‘When I saw the paragraph in the newspaper, I thought of coming immediately to see you, unannounced, but Rowland persuaded me to write.'

She seemed to have difficulty in framing what she now wanted to say, but after some hesitation began again.

‘Rowland says he saw no madness in Anna when they married—but she was very unlike young English women—on account of her strange
upbringing. She had seen few other white children, was brought up by black servants. Her mother seems to have been alternately doting and distant. And then Anna had years in the convent. She knew things an English girl would be ashamed to know, but was ignorant of many common matters—which might make some people judge her mad.' Catherine hesitated again. ‘But I have heard of women whose madness only begins after they have borne a child . . .'

I told her I believed Anna's madness had been brought about by the unhappiness of her life, adding what little I knew. She looked grateful, but only half-comforted. We walked on in silence, but as we passed St George's Church she stopped and asked me if I would go in with her and swear on the Bible to keep her secrets. She apologised. She trusted me, but this was a matter of life and death to her.

It was cold and still and silent in there that winter's day, after the sun and buffeting wind outside. There was the lectern, the great golden eagle guarding the Book, and I looked at each small brass feather and at the fierce eyes watching and not-watching me. Should Edward Rochester be told about his brother, and his niece? I thought of who would be made happy and who unhappy by the telling. I thought of the rules men had made for us women to live by, and how sometimes we must ignore these and live by our own rules. I thought of Jane Eyre and Jane Franklin struggling free of the nets cast around them, and I thought of Thea—and I told Catherine I would promise to say nothing about Maria, but Gus might feel it necessary to tell Edward his brother was here. And I put my hand on the Book and swore.

By the time we reached the cottage Gus was home, and as we sat at luncheon, we came at last to the matter of New Norfolk.

‘George Fairfax bought the land,' Catherine said, ‘and put it into the hands of a man down here called Lascalles, a magistrate but also a rogue. In the beginning we used to come to Hobarton once a year, but when the school became established we did not have the leisure, and as I said, Rowland's health is not good.'

‘School?'

‘My brother always wished to begin a school. A farm-school, to provide pupils with a sound basic education, but also some agricultural training. He and my father bought a property with a large house, ‘Rutherlea', and began with four boys. This year we have twenty-one, from seven years old to seventeen. My mother and I are matrons, with maidservants, of course. Rowland, who has always been scholarly, teaches Latin, history, grammar. But you see how awkward it was when we stumbled on the trouble at New Norfolk. The shooting of that poor girl . . . any gossip might have revealed the secret that we were not truly married. It would have ruined the school—not only our own livelihood, but my brother's and father's.'

They had come south that February because George saw a notice of the Bridge Meeting in the
Courier,
and wondered why he had received no word of it from Lascalles. He decided to come down and see Lascalles and attend the meeting, in case it should affect his property. Catherine, Rowland, and Maria joined him for a summer excursion. Catherine's account of the episode at New Norfolk scarcely differed from what Dinah had told us. At the meeting Cousin George discovered his land had been resumed to the Government almost a year before, and sold to a friend of the Arthur faction. He was beside himself with anger. Perhaps that was what had caused his fatal attack, or perhaps it was seeing the dead girl.

All Catherine's fears had been for her daughter and the school, and when Rowland began to understand the import of what they had seen, he decided they must leave as quickly as possible. He arranged it all with Mr Alfred Stephen and the local constable, Mr Mick Walker, who promised to see to George's burial the following day. It seemed disrespectful to go, but George was dead, and if they stayed they risked everything.

Constable Walker took them downriver in a skiff and landed them at Black Snake Inn, where they could meet Cox's coach going north. Mr Stephen assured them the matter would be kept entirely quiet, in everyone's interests. At the Black Snake there was difficulty over
the coach seats, and then just as they were boarding the diligence at last, they saw Booth! She was so ill with worry she had had pains in her chest all the way home. When they reached ‘Rutherlea' again, she had never been so glad to see any place in her life.

St John Wallace had found them by accident. He had read a pamphlet against transportation written by her father, and called at the school while he was in the north. Her father introduced several of the schoolmasters, naming among them Mr Rowland Fairfax.

Rowland died two years after Catherine told me this story. Catherine and I corresponded until she died twelve months ago. Her daughter Maria had only the one child, a boy, a great comfort to his mother and grandmother, but he disappointed his father's family by having no interest in farming. He converted to the Church of Rome in his twenties, and by the age of thirty-four was a Catholic priest in Melbourne, where many lady parishioners apparently sighed over his dark good looks, which were believed to be of Italian origin. They were devastated when he died of a fever on a visit to Rome. They are all three dead now, he, Catherine and Maria, and I have kept Catherine's secret, as I promised, until it can harm no one.

This letter began to be distributed on street corners in Hobart that autumn. The Franklins refused to believe it was genuine, since they
had heard nothing further from England, but a month later they received the original. Lord Stanley had given a copy to Montagu, and only later posted it to Sir John. The printed version had come from a copy that Montagu, in his triumph, sent straight to Forster.

Franklin was stoical, Jane incredulous. How could this happen? How dare Lord Stanley treat her husband in such a fashion, lay him open to such public humiliation? She asked the question (more than once) of Mr Bicheno, who now arrived to take the position of Colonial Secretary. He could supply no answer. He was large and benign, similar to Sir John in appearance. They made, as Jane said, ‘a droll-looking pair, so alike in age and size and bonhomie'. Had they always been working together, she added, their time in the island would have had a happier outcome. This new contentment did not quite make up for the humiliations of the ‘Black Book', a volume Bicheno had unwittingly brought with him, sent from Montagu to Swanston, a compilation of documents supposed to prove the Franklins' depravity, beginning with Montagu's claim that Lady Franklin was ‘a scheming dangerous woman, with an altogether malign influence on her imbecile husband'. It was handed about among the Arthurites and a copy ‘for the better information of the public' was available for perusal at the Derwent Bank.

Now the Franklins waited to discover whether Sir John would be replaced. They had expected this to be mentioned in Lord Stanley's letter, but there was no news until, in
The London Times
dated the 24th February 1843 and received in Hobart in July, Jane saw a notice that Sir John Eardley Wilmot had been appointed Governor of Van Diemen's Land.

Two weeks after she saw it, Sir Eardley Wilmot arrived. By error he landed on an unfrequented part of the coast—and still Sir John had received no letter of official notification that he was to be recalled. At last the
Gilmore
came in with it, a duplicate; the original arrived on the
Eamont
a day later. Forced to make a hurried, undignified, inconvenient exit from the ‘Palace', the Franklins went to stay with Ainsworth, and later moved to the cottage at New Norfolk. Jane was
ill with suppressed anger, Sir John almost bemused, it seemed, by the sudden turn of events. In the meantime, the
Rajah
returned, Miss Kezia Hayter and Captain Ferguson were married, and the vessel sailed again with the newlyweds and the Franklin party aboard. At Port Phillip the Franklins transferred to the
Flying Fish
, bound for England.