Wild Island (63 page)

Thea called us Ma and Pa, even though she knew—we made no secret of it—that Louisa was her real mother. We said nothing about McLeod. I still don't think that was wrong. We finished rebuilding the cottage I'd bought from old Mr Coombes, adding several more rooms, and moved there. Fludde reclaimed her daughter Betty from the Orphanage, and she was brought up with Thea. A quiet child with light-brown hair and her mother's swift, interrogating, self-sufficient look, Betty, more than Thea, always wanted to draw when I drew, and read avidly from the moment she learned to. Thea would throw herself sprawling in a chair and read for a whole afternoon with an intent expression, but what she loved most was animals and an active life of walking and riding.

Every summer we spent two months living on Gus's land beside the Huon River, in a little cabin that always reminded me of Dinah Carmichael's: a great fireplace made of stones, curtained-off bed-places and a long table with chairs. The children of the family living nearest us there were three boys, who grew up almost as brothers with Thea and Betty. We rowed on the lucent tea-coloured water among the reeds and moorhens, walked on the quiet tracks between the great gums, read away wet days before the fire. Here I learned to love the landscape I had once feared, and to see in it not always beauty, but glimpses of the sublime.

31

IN 1851, SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE FRANKLINS LEFT VAN DIEMEN
'
S
Land, Gus, Thea, and I travelled to England for a year. Tasmania had sent three hundred and ninety-four items to the Great Exhibition in London, which Gus was eager to visit, and we thought Thea old enough now to enjoy the travel and benefit by a stay in the great city. She was thirteen that year. I was also curious to see London again myself, although my old hungry yearning for it had long gone. We arrived in mid-September, by which time the price of entry to the Exhibition had dropped to a shilling and it was full of families. Someone had written to
The Times
suggesting that a portion of the entrance money should go towards the search for Sir John Franklin and the
Erebus
and
Terror
, vanished six years before into the vast white secrecy of the Arctic.

Faced with the splendour of the Crystal Palace, the huge glass arcades, the magnificent tree growing in the main hall—the grandeur of it all—I felt, as I said to Gus, very colonial. I admired it, and yet could not help feeling I preferred the simplicity we were accustomed to. Gus laughed and looked at me affectionately.

‘The difference between grand and grandiose is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps,' he said. ‘We're country mice these days.'

Once inside, the Exhibition was almost beyond imagining.

‘Oh, look, Ma! Pa, look!' Thea was still the bright, forthright child she had always been, only fitfully aware of being now a young lady. She pored over the machinery and tools with Gus; the working looms, printing presses, daguerreotype machines, and her favourite, the vast steam hammer which could gently crack an egg. At last I urged them on to the Russian vases twice the height of a man, the life-sized elephant statue, the plethora of clothes and textiles, the vast array of musical instruments. We bought a Tempest Prognosticator worked by leeches, and illustrated cards to send home. Like the Queen and Prince Albert, we visited three times that autumn, wandering through the crowded rooms until we were so weary we could marvel no more.

For Thea, London itself was also a great exhibition; every street an astonishment of finery and filth; trains and thronging people. For me it was much the same, but not exactly the place I'd carried in my imagination for twelve years. I felt a similar jolt of strangeness when we called on Jane Franklin. She and Sophy had been living in her father's house in Bedford Place, but had recently moved to rooms in Spring Gardens, not far from the Admiralty.

When we were first shown in to see her she seemed for a moment a stranger: a small, thin old lady wearing the kind of lace cap Jane had always disliked. But the room was familiar: Persian carpets, flowers, books, curios, the writing slope put aside on a chair. And as soon as she smiled and spoke, her personality was vivid and irresistible as ever, the sense of a quick, eager intelligence that Robert Murray and others had so deeply resented in the Governor's wife. She kissed me, took Gus's hand and pressed it, turned to Thea with a smile, ‘This is Thea. What glorious hair! You are as beautiful as your mother.' She smiled. ‘Both your mothers.'

Thea's hair was a glory, a joyous thing; strangers often smiled with pleasure at the shining fall of copper-coloured waves down her back. Her face lacked Louisa's madonna perfection, but I loved it all the better for the more generous mouth, the clear, considering grey eyes with no trace of Louisa's fierce blue discontent.

‘What do you think of London?' Jane asked her.

‘I like the zoo, my lady,' said Thea. She hesitated. ‘But I do not think I should like to live here always.'

Jane smiled and said, ‘You prefer your island? I'm inclined to agree with you. Hobart is very lovely.'

‘I like the Huon even better,' said Thea.

‘Oh, the Huon!' Jane turned to Gus. ‘I suppose I should not recognise it now?'

As Gus, Thea and Jane began to talk about the Huon, Sophy drew me aside. She was now ‘quite stout', as she had warned in a recent letter. Black bombazine stretched tightly across her ample bosom (always apt to heave), her troubled heart. I had come to the conclusion many years before that she did not like being young. She found it too agitating, too beset with troubling decisions: all those messy, perilous possibilities of love, marriage, children. Now she had apparently decided at the age of thirty-eight to embrace elderliness as a safe port beyond the storms of youth. She wanted to thank me, as she had already done in letters, for my attentions to her poor dearest brother Tom. He had died two years earlier in Hobart—the weak chest again. During his last illness he had lived with Mary and John Pride, who had moved to New Town.

‘And now her
fifth
child by That Man!' hissed Sophy. ‘Poor Mary, she always seemed so stoical, so determined not to let us see she regretted her marriage. And so we were quite unprepared for that ghastly outburst just before we left. It upset us all—as though we had not enough troubles at the time.'

In the last two weeks before the Franklins' departure from Hobart, Mary had fallen into a strange madness of grief. She trailed behind Jane and Sophy, weeping as they supervised the packing. We tried to reassure her. Tom Cracroft and Henry Kay were staying on, and she had many good friends in the town; but Mary could not be consoled—and the talk of leaving Tom sent Sophy into floods of tears.

‘Our nerves were in shreds by the time we boarded the ship,' Sophy added. ‘And we were desperately anxious all the way home. Not just on Mary's account. We were braced to endure more newspaper
scandal over the Montagu quarrel—and we knew my uncle would never have a suitable post while Lord Stanley was in office.'

But when they arrived in London they discovered to their chagrin that nobody cared a fig about Montagu's wickedness or Lord Stanley's ill-treatment of Franklin. England was in crisis, the Government tottering over the repeal of the Corn Laws. A squabble in a distant colony was like the cry of a spoilt infant. Lord Stanley had refused to re-open the case or even grant Franklin an interview.

‘It was unjust, disgraceful.'

Only the old ‘Arctics' were sympathetic. Sir John Barrow had already begun preparations for a new expedition to decide, finally, the question of the Northwest Passage. He wanted his dashing young protégé, James Fitzjames, to lead it, but Fitzjames had annoyed the Admiralty and the Royal Society, and they wanted Ross and Crozier—and Ross had married his Anne at last, and promised not to leave England for two years. In May 1845, eleven months after the family returned to London, the
Erebus
and
Terror
set off with Franklin as Captain of the
Erebus
and leader of the best-equipped expedition in the history of Arctic exploration. Fitzjames was his second, Crozier was commander of the
Terror.

All this we learned from letters at the time, and during '48 and '49 we waited for news of their triumphant return, but none came. There was still none a year later when the decade ended. Sophy's letters had begun to rage against the Admiralty, reluctant to send search vessels. Jane was raising money for a private search, churning out letters of appeal for help. The American shipping magnate Mr Henry Grinnell had subscribed $5,000, and then raised it to $10,000. After Jane's next letter he made it $15,000, and when he read the note she sent to thank him, he raised the sum to $30,000. A letter she wrote to the President of the United States was said by the MP Sir Robert Inglis to be ‘the most admirable letter ever addressed by man or woman, to man or woman'.

Now, a year later, there were more difficulties, Sophy confided. ‘Aunt's family have turned against her. That is why we are here in
Spring Gardens—why we had to leave her father's house. He insists she must give up spending money on the search for Uncle. He wants her to leave all in the hands of the Admiralty—who do nothing! Her sister Mary Simpkinson—and Mary's husband, and her son Frank—all support old Mr Griffin, of course.'

Eleanor Franklin, too, wished to abandon the search. She had married Gell (‘the wedding day fixed without Aunt Jane's knowledge,' Sophy had written to us, her letters fizzing and crackling with fury) and by 1850 the Gells believed Sir John was dead.

‘All this is sad and shocking,' Sophy's familiar handwriting had come tearing across the page. ‘The Gells know Aunt has only a life income and no capital. She is living in a straitened manner, which grieves me and would astonish you, Harriet, and all our distant friends. My uncle had only the
interest
of his
first
wife's fortune, whereas my aunt gave him all hers, capital and income. If it were not for her generosity, her own fortune, or rather the remnant of it, would not now pass to the Gells.

‘The Gells are opposed to sending another ship and to every plan devised by my aunt,' she wrote. ‘Gell asks Jane to sign a contract that she will repay all she is spending on the search, back to the time of Sir John's death, if he is discovered to be dead. . . Gell is requesting plate, linen and pictures belonging to Sir John . . .'

The lamb-faced clergyman Jane had called ‘her son' was showing the wolf beneath the skin—unless it was all done at Ella's insistence, as Sophy believed. As we talked that day in London I began to understand Jane's situation.

‘While Uncle is presumed still alive, Aunt, as his agent, can spend the interest of his monies and her own on the search,' Sophy said, ‘but if he is declared dead, she will lose control of his estate—and much of her own, which was given into Nuncle's control when she married. It will almost certainly become part of the residue left to Eleanor—though nobody knows exactly how the will is written.'

I asked how the search stood at present.

‘There is a ship preparing in Aberdeen . . . Which reminds me . . .' She turned to Jane, and said almost sternly, ‘If you are quite determined, Aunt, on going to Aberdeen, I suppose I had better go to the station and enquire about trains and tickets. For myself, I cannot believe that acting on messages ostensibly from the dead is an entirely Christian . . .'

She rang sharply for her bonnet and wraps and began fussing with purses and gloves, while Jane said, ‘Leave it until later, Sophy, and then take a hansom.'

‘Good heavens, no—the expense! No, of course I shall walk. My leg is almost painless today.'

‘Will you allow us to escort you, Miss Cracroft?' asked Gus. ‘Thea and I? We'll take you in a cab and bring you back in no time. We're immensely fond of jaunting about London—and we love railway stations—and have only a limited time to indulge ourselves.'

Sophy protested but at last capitulated, and when Jane and I were left together Jane told me this was all on account of a letter from a clairvoyant, which Sophy disapproved of. They had received such letters before, of course—too many—but this one was not in the usual mould.

‘The writer is a Captain Coppin,' Jane said, ‘a bluff old sea-dog, salt of the earth and briny, and what's more he's kept the matter quiet for nearly a year, which does not look to me like a thirst for notoriety. I can imagine him smoking a ruminative pipe over it night after night until at last his wife has persuaded him to write to me—about his daughters: Annie, who is ten and very much alive, and poor little ‘Weasy' (for Louisa), who would have been five except that she has been dead these twelve months.'

Six weeks after her funeral, Weasy had appeared to Annie, heralded by a ball of bluish light, Jane continued. The Captain's three other children also saw their dead sister, and later the ghost-child fell into the habit of sitting at the table with them at mealtimes. The Captain, unable to see the little girl, felt at something of a loss. Casting about for conversation, he asked suddenly: was Sir John Franklin still alive?
Where was the lost expedition? Then Annie cried out in astonishment because to her the room seemed to fill with snow and ice. She saw large round childish handwriting appear on the wall, saying
Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel
, and she drew a chart at Weasy's direction—which the Captain judged remarkably accurate, though Annie had never seen such a chart before. In consequence of all this, the Captain ventured to take the liberty of suggesting that Lady Franklin's search vessels might be looking in the wrong place, since all their attention seemed fixed on the Wellington Channel.