Wild Island (41 page)

‘Do you wonder that when we reached Cairo I expressed my dissatisfaction plainly and refused to continue with Thorburn and
his group? Captain Scott and his wife said I must be exaggerating, and I have reason to think they later gave an ill report of me to other travellers. Indeed, a German Countess told me so. She offered to take me with her, but . . .' She hesitated. ‘I had by then met a clergyman, a Swiss-German missionary very familiar with those parts. His name was Mr Rudolf Lieder.' She stopped and shook her head. ‘A musician, a linguist; a scholarly man, cultivated.'

She broke off again, staring fixedly at the view. We sat silent until the signal tower behind us began creaking and clacking as the six wooden arms were hauled into new positions. When it was quiet again the lieutenant invited us to walk half a mile across the clearing to look eastwards, out to sea. The signal had been about the whaleboat absconders. He began to point into the blue distances and explain where they might be.

A few days later it was reported in the
Colonial Times
that on the day after their escape, the bolters had raided Mr Young's Fishery near Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, seizing a quantity of flour and sugar, a musket and clothing slops. They had killed a pig and taken the carcass, but offered no violence or incivility.

Days went by after that without further news; and then weeks. I thought of them on nights when I was wakeful, of trying to sleep in an open whaleboat at sea, or in the bush, hungry. Or were they already drowned, washed up among leathery black tangles of kelp in some unfrequented cove? They were strangers to me, and yet they joined Anna and Quigley and all that inward company of the absent or dead who prowl the back of the mind, unheeded for days and then vividly remembered.

Visiting Louisa and the baby, I discovered St John had been ill since Saint Valentine's Day. He had not returned to Port Arthur. He was recovering, but would see no one except James Seymour and Archdeacon Hutchins. Louisa hoped they would persuade him to give up his work here and return to England. I did not say so, but I
thought St John would not leave until he knew what had become of Walker and Dido.

John Gould sailed on the
Potentate,
leaving Eliza more at leisure, but with a list of drawings to complete. The mood of Government House calmed after the Montagus sailed in early March. A week after Jane and Sophy left, I received an invitation from the Chesneys. They were planning a grand ‘dehooney' and kangaroo hunt in April; I must go down for it and stay on afterwards. I wrote to thank them and accept, feeling it would be churlish to refuse their kindly offered hospitality a second time. I would be back in Hobarton long before the arrival of Eliza's baby in late May.

Once the family and guests were gone, the Government House servants ran up and down the stairs carrying bolsters and bedding. The drying-yard was afloat with linen billowing like sails. Empty rooms were ‘turned out' and put under dust-sheets. Convicts went on with the endless whitewashing of the plank exterior, and Eliza and I worked in companionable silence punctuated by animated conversations, murmurs, fits of laughter. Towards the middle of April, John Gould returned, and he and Eliza began making preparations for their departure.

The bird skins, eggs and bones were carefully packed. Over three hundred finished drawings were laid between sheets of tissue in seven portfolios sewn into cotton cases. Dried herbs made layers above and below, and the finished bundles were swaddled in tarpaulin against damp, mice, moth, beetle and other forces of corruption. Like a twin-child with the infant to come (which would share Eliza's cabin), the package of drawings would be carried in a separate cabin with John Gould during the voyage.

21

THE MAIL COACH FOR RICHMOND WAS CROWDED WHEN IT LEFT
at dawn from Kangaroo Point, the heavy dew and glittering spiderwebs writing autumn's first signs across the grass. Passengers perched wherever they could find lodging on the outside of the vehicle, and inside there were six of us, yawning, squashed into jovial discomfort. Six and a damp infant, a tiny boy—who was quiet at first, but soon became shrill, eager to escape the arms of his parents, a young farming couple. He was desperate to clamber towards the interesting howls coming sporadically from a basket on the lap of the elderly woman beside me. Whenever a new howl emerged, the child would stop still and stare at us, its eyes wide as saucers.

At the approach to Mount Rumney many of us alighted and walked up the hill to save the horses, and it being by then a most beautiful day, we continued on foot down the other side, where the road curved and wound through a forest of tall eucalpyts. Sunshine dappled down into the summer-dry dusty undergrowth, two or three wooden huts became visible in parched clearings, and a bird was shouting ‘be
cause
-of-it', ‘be
cause
-of it', ‘be
cause
-of-it' in the canopy. When we reached the bottom of the valley it was only a mile further to the baiting halt for breakfast at the Horseshoe Inn near the Cam Bridge. Here the baby ate a quantity of its parents' porridge and bacon
and eggs, with bread-and-milk, sips of ale and weak tea. It was pensive by the time we resumed our seats, the little fringed eyelids drooping, and as soon as the coach moved off, it fell asleep. The child's father drew out a
Courier
, which he folded and gave to his wife. Cradling the sleeping infant across her lap and one arm, she read an article aloud in a slow, halting manner. It was about the whaleboat escapees.

‘They are taken, then?' someone asked.

No, still at large. This was about a letter just come in from an isolated sawyers' and shipbuilders' camp at Port Davey on the rugged west coast. It had taken six weeks to reach Hobarton. The bolters had raided this camp and another at Macquarie Harbour. They had seized food, tobacco, guns, clothing-slops and rum, but had paid for what they took and used great courtesy, offering no threats.

‘Ah! Paid, aargh!' cried the farmer, adding in broad country tones that, ‘There mun be folks a-helpin' they.'

The escapees had rowed thousands of miles, read his wife laboriously, avoiding search vessels by dragging their boat ashore each night into the bush, or so it was thought. At first they had gone south and west, but now they must have doubled back, because the two most recent sightings were on the east coast. At Mr Webber's place on the Schouten Islands, they had rowed in bold as brass and professed to be in search of the runaways!

‘Why, the larky divvils,' cried the farmer admiringly, slapping his knee.

A supposed ‘officer', addressed by the others as ‘Sir' and smartly turned out in a brown petersham coat, white duck trousers and stove-pipe hat (Walker!), had been carried out of the boat across the muddy landing-place by two of his crew. He had even questioned Mr Webber's men! But at Captain Hepburn's property further round the Schoutens, a man had recognised them and fired his musket. One of the felons—it was not known which—screamed and fell from the boat, but was hauled back in by his friends. All this was four weeks ago. Where were they now, the newspaper asked.

‘Winter on the way,' said the old lady with the cat. ‘They'll drown or starve or die of cold.'

An animated discussion ensued as the coach rocked along the side of the valley while I stared out the window at the shining strip of water below us, like a narrow silver lake with hills rising beyond. This inlet came to an end at last, and we turned across the bottom of the valley and rattled between bone-dry hills into the English greenery of the village. Richmond was the second largest town in the island then, with a windmill, a prison, and seven public houses along its main street. The largest was the Richmond Arms, where Polly and Liddy were waiting for me in a pony-cart with an aboriginal stable-boy called Worra at the reins, but Polly insisted on driving. She had grown tall and tomboyish. Liddy was thin and tiny still, but a new bloom of health gave her a fragile prettiness.

We trotted through the village, crossed the handsome sandstone bridge over the Coal River, and passed the tiny Catholic Church. The dusty road ran between bleached fields dotted with haystacks. A mile or so further on, ‘Kenton' revealed itself gradually as an imposing square of sandstone two storeys high, half-hidden by the English trees in front, and a hamlet of barns, sheds, huts and cottages at the back. As we drove into the yard a yapping, barking, baying din began. Mr Gregson's hunting-pack—shut in the barn, said Polly.

Everything was in a state of bustle remarkable even for the hospitable Chesneys. The smell of roasting meat, ubiquitous in the colony, choked the air indoors. The kitchen thrummed with heat. Bess Chesney greeted me with affectionate distraction, shooed drowsy late-summer flies and ushered me into the drawing room, where several women sat perspiring and talking. The room seemed crowded with extra chairs. Louisa was fanning herself. The nursemaid had put baby Thea to sleep upstairs, she said. Flies tried persistently to settle on humid flesh, and buzzed at the windows. Augusta Drewitt sat with Mrs Parry, who gave me her cheek to kiss and said I was in better looks than six months ago. Julia, the wife of the Chesneys'
surviving son William, was too fashionably dressed and too tightly laced for the occasion, her face beetroot with heat.

St John came in and repeated to us the story of the escapees from the
Courier
. It was still not known which one had been shot, he said, his beautiful face troubled. The
Eliza
had sailed to the Schoutens as soon as the latest news came in, but Walker may have managed to get up to the islands, the Kent Group. It would be difficult to locate them there. They could live on fish, sea birds, game, and stores left by sealers, perhaps.

At the evening meal Mr Chesney was exuberant, teasing the young ladies, tickling the babies, urging the older children to excesses of pudding and laughter. They had been overexcited all day, said Julia Chesney indulgently, ever since they'd watched the pigs killed this morning. Mr Bergman had not arrived.

At dawn next day the weather was cooler but bright. The men rode out towards the dry paddocks: Chesney and Gregson in hunting pink, the others in more motley attire. Gregson blared tantivvies on his hunting-horn, the dogs ran yelping and sniffing. When they were gone the women dawdled over breakfast with the children, or made prolonged
toilette
s, while a few of us gathered to receive Mrs Chesney's orders. Late in the morning Augusta and I were setting a children's table for luncheon outdoors in the kitchen yard when the pony-cart came back, too fast, with men on horseback behind, dust billowing round them. A pile of soft grey bodies of kangaroos filled half the bed of the cart, blotched with dark blood and clots of flies, and beside them Mr Chesney lay insensible, his head on the knees of his son William. He had suffered an apoplexy and fallen from his horse.

In the first horrified awkwardness people waited solemnly for news. Dr Coverdale was attending Chesney. No one liked to begin the meal although the men had not eaten since sunrise and the smell of savoury meat was everywhere. At last, after questioning glances, nods and murmurs, the children were fed, adults ate quickly in unnatural quiet, and the guests departed. I would have gone too, but Bess Chesney held my hand and for twenty-four hours did little but weep. After that she
set about dragging her husband back from the brink of death with the Lord's help. She watched night and day at his bedside, letting me take only a few hours when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She read the New Testament aloud to him although he gave no sign of hearing, beginning with the feeding of the five thousand—something she thought would interest him—and going on to the other miracles. Withered arms restored, the woman with an issue of blood ten years, lepers, multitudes leaping up in health and thanksgiving.

‘There is so much in the Bible about healing the sick,' she said in astonishment. ‘Why do clergymen make so little of this and so much of sin?' she asked St John, who visited ‘Kenton' every day. He replied, ‘We are all in need of forgiveness.' She looked puzzled.