entered the attic, I heard the first nearly human sound from Bertha. A groan so filled with longing and anguish that tears came to my eyes, and I began to think of her as a woman rather than a wild beast, and wondered what misfortune had brought her to this.
My pity was greatly increased by finding a hideous garment in a chest in the corner, a thick white cotton jacket evidently made for pinioning the arms. The sight of it made Bertha scream and beat herhead against the wall. She stopped when I threw it on the fire. I was about to add to the flames an old red dress also in the chest, but she gave a cry and put her arm through the bars. When I handed it to her she sank to the ground, pressing it against her face.
To show her I meant no harm, I began to tame her by means of food, as I had trained dogs and squirrels in my childhood. From the first I made sure that her meals each day were at regular times, and appetising. She was a greedy eater, which helped my cause, but it was like taming a lioness. I spoke to her frequently, though the only reply might be silence or growling. I spread a clean new dress on a chair outside her bars, and told her she might wear it if she would only wash herself. She hurled her tin jug and basin at the walls for days, but one day plunged her face into the water and tipped the rest over her head, which I took to be an attempt of sorts. I rewarded her with strawberries and cream and a hand mirror. She stared into this with apparent horror before she flung it, too, at the wall. Her next several meals were bread and water, and so it went. Any return to bad behaviour—this was frequent at first—was punished by bread and water (and greeted with howls and moans).
It was months before I could let her out into my part of the attic and properly clean her cell, and more than a year—the following summer—before we began to sit on the tiny square of roof-leads in the sun. This had to be given up when Rochester came home. Bertha escaped twice over the roof by crawling up the gable in an ape-like way, scarcely believable in so big a woman. She set fire to Rochester’s room and later attacked a guest. It was her stepbrother, Richard Mason, although I did not know it at the time. I had no choice then but to return to a stricter regimen. After the failed wedding I discovered that Bertha and I were the same age: thirty-four that year. Our prospects for the future now seemed equally uncertain.
3
THE FRANKLINS ’ INAUGURAL VISIT TO THE PENINSULA BEGAN AT the coal mines, eight miles north-west of Port Arthur. The official party sailed down the estuary from Hobart at the end of March, and Booth rode up to meet them.
The outstation at the mines lies close to the shore, just behind a sandy beach, which runs out into the bay across two hundred yards of luminous shallows. Booth had designed a jetty seven hundred and sixty feet long and ten feet wide, to carry rails across the sands to where a sudden dark blue line indicates a fall into deep water. This tramway allowed convicts to push coal carts directly from the mines to transport ships anchored at the outer end, where the jetty was enlarged to form a wharf fifty feet wide. The Eliza anchored here, and Lady Franklin’s first words on stepping ashore were an exclamation about the jetty.
‘Beautiful,’ she told Booth. In all her travels she had not seen anything quite like it, not even in Russia, where wood is used so exquisitely. She wanted to know if the timber was eucalyptus, or the remarkable native pine? The dense, slow-growing species, ideal for shipbuilding? Her interest was clearly unfeigned, but to Booth seemed odd for a woman, and yet he felt a similar pleasure in the jetty’s lines. His greater astonishment came when she made it clearthat she too would descend into the coal shaft. Sir John clearly enjoyed Booth’s amazement.
‘My wife is m-more than equal to it, Captain Booth,’ he said.
Was he slow-witted, as rumour implied? What he said
My pity was greatly increased by finding a hideous garment in a chest in the corner, a thick white cotton jacket evidently made for pinioning the arms. The sight of it made Bertha scream and beat herhead against the wall. She stopped when I threw it on the fire. I was about to add to the flames an old red dress also in the chest, but she gave a cry and put her arm through the bars. When I handed it to her she sank to the ground, pressing it against her face.
To show her I meant no harm, I began to tame her by means of food, as I had trained dogs and squirrels in my childhood. From the first I made sure that her meals each day were at regular times, and appetising. She was a greedy eater, which helped my cause, but it was like taming a lioness. I spoke to her frequently, though the only reply might be silence or growling. I spread a clean new dress on a chair outside her bars, and told her she might wear it if she would only wash herself. She hurled her tin jug and basin at the walls for days, but one day plunged her face into the water and tipped the rest over her head, which I took to be an attempt of sorts. I rewarded her with strawberries and cream and a hand mirror. She stared into this with apparent horror before she flung it, too, at the wall. Her next several meals were bread and water, and so it went. Any return to bad behaviour—this was frequent at first—was punished by bread and water (and greeted with howls and moans).
It was months before I could let her out into my part of the attic and properly clean her cell, and more than a year—the following summer—before we began to sit on the tiny square of roof-leads in the sun. This had to be given up when Rochester came home. Bertha escaped twice over the roof by crawling up the gable in an ape-like way, scarcely believable in so big a woman. She set fire to Rochester’s room and later attacked a guest. It was her stepbrother, Richard Mason, although I did not know it at the time. I had no choice then but to return to a stricter regimen. After the failed wedding I discovered that Bertha and I were the same age: thirty-four that year. Our prospects for the future now seemed equally uncertain.
3
THE FRANKLINS ’ INAUGURAL VISIT TO THE PENINSULA BEGAN AT the coal mines, eight miles north-west of Port Arthur. The official party sailed down the estuary from Hobart at the end of March, and Booth rode up to meet them.
The outstation at the mines lies close to the shore, just behind a sandy beach, which runs out into the bay across two hundred yards of luminous shallows. Booth had designed a jetty seven hundred and sixty feet long and ten feet wide, to carry rails across the sands to where a sudden dark blue line indicates a fall into deep water. This tramway allowed convicts to push coal carts directly from the mines to transport ships anchored at the outer end, where the jetty was enlarged to form a wharf fifty feet wide. The Eliza anchored here, and Lady Franklin’s first words on stepping ashore were an exclamation about the jetty.
‘Beautiful,’ she told Booth. In all her travels she had not seen anything quite like it, not even in Russia, where wood is used so exquisitely. She wanted to know if the timber was eucalyptus, or the remarkable native pine? The dense, slow-growing species, ideal for shipbuilding? Her interest was clearly unfeigned, but to Booth seemed odd for a woman, and yet he felt a similar pleasure in the jetty’s lines. His greater astonishment came when she made it clearthat she too would descend into the coal shaft. Sir John clearly enjoyed Booth’s amazement.
‘My wife is m-more than equal to it, Captain Booth,’ he said.
Was he slow-witted, as rumour implied? What he said
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