Wanting

9

ON HEARING THE DOOR creak open—the vice-regal mansion’s ramshackle nature meant it moved up and down and sideways, and, in consequence, everything was loose or jammed or, improbably, often somehow both—Sir John turned from the window, where he had been watching a storm front make its way up the Derwent. Lady Jane was looking at him with her eerie light-blue eyes, which he had once, if only for a short time, found so enchanting, but whose odd expression he came to realise he would never understand.

‘You’ll pay,’ said Sir John.

‘What do you—’

‘What?’ snapped Sir John, who now remembered what he had been trying to recall for the previous several minutes. ‘What Montague said to me, that’s what. That I’d pay.’ Once Sir John had prided himself that he forgot nothing. Now he had trouble recalling even a small thing said a few moments before. More strangely, large things once simple and obvious were becoming ever more diffuse and vaporous. And just as reports and memoranda more and more frequently blurred as he stared intently at them, he had the disconcerting impression that so too was his wife now blurring and dissolving into a stranger.

‘When did Montague say such a thing?’ he could hear her asking.

‘When I refused his nephew a land grant,’ said Sir John. ‘That’s when. And after Pedder’s brother-in-law was not awarded the wharf contract, he said something similar.’

‘But that was years ago—’ Lady Jane began, but Sir John was waving a hand back and forth in a gesture of futility.

‘And now he and our enemies have triumphed,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagining.’

Outside, a storm of terrible force finally broke. Several boats were sunk in the chaos, houses unroofed, trees blown over, drays and carts tossed about as if children’s toys. A fine bay stallion owned by Mr Lord was impaled when a spar was tossed like a toothpick from an adjacent sawpit into the poor beast’s belly. And inside Sir John’s head, the dark cloud of a growing melancholy broke now into a storm just as ferocious, as hopes, desires and memories were thrown hither and thither, smashing his sense of himself as a good man and a noble leader. As much as to battle an odd vertigo that had suddenly enveloped him as to explain himself, Sir John picked up some official papers and brandished them in front of Lady Jane.

‘It has not been as it should,’ he said, and his voice was for a moment—but only a moment—a snarl. ‘Here,’ he said, rustling the papers. Then he dropped them as though they were burning his fingers. ‘Orders arrived from the Colonial Office this morning. Signed by the Secretary himself.’ His body was shaking, almost wobbling with rage. ‘I am to be recalled.’

And having said this, Sir John felt suddenly spent. Lady Jane shot him a look he recognised as being at once utter shock and pure contempt. And how, he wondered, am I to blame for a humiliation as public as this? He recalled their triumphant reception on first arriving in Hobart, the accolades, the extraordinary joy as if he were liberating the people from a tyrant. And yet deep within his soul he sensed his crime was somehow linked to his failure to offer the reassurance of a new tyranny.

‘Why?’ asked Lady Jane, her voice implacable iron.

It was bewildering, thought Sir John. What was it Crozier had said in his cups? You set out to discover a new land because you sense you have always been lost.

‘Because…it seems they have persuaded the Colonial Secretary I am incompetent and corrupt and—’

‘But in truth?’

‘In truth? Perhaps because I wasn’t corrupt. But I’ve been a fool.’

‘Until you took this wretched commission in this godforsaken island,’ said Lady Jane suddenly, and uncharacteristically furious, ‘we had no enemies. We were sought as ornaments to power, never disposed of as its necessary sacrifice.’

It was true he had not sought the commission, that all this was his wife’s work—but then, his entire life since meeting her had been her work. She had relieved him from his most secret vice, his own immeasurable lack of ambition. Was he to blame for that? For submitting to her so completely? He had once overheard Montague say he was a ‘weak character’. And was not this the unspoken heart of the Colonial Secretary’s accompanying letter, in which he wrote of ‘the inappropriate weight given to others’?

This confused Sir John more than anything else. Was it weakness to be at ease with what life brought—be it suffering and starvation in the polar ice, or pleasing another human being by doing as she wished—or was it wisdom?

‘Trust to it,’ Montague had said when they first arrived, gesturing with a thin arm in the direction of the dilapidated capital and, beyond it, the ceaseless vegetation walling in the city, the endless nameless mountains, the mapless rivers.

But trust to what? A weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam’s exile?

Or had Montague meant the people—the brutes that served him, waited on him, acted as clerks and flagellators and cooks and barbers and just about everything else? They were all convicts, a grotesque parody, a hideous pantomime, a revolting insult to memory; and that, in Sir John’s eyes, made them only more ridiculous in their imitation of all things England. He could see they were becoming something else, though, as savage as the savages, and out in the backblocks, it was said, they were regressing to a similar way of life, dressing in kangaroo skins, living in clans, sleeping in bark huts, working only to kill the native animals on which they subsisted. Oh, he had trusted to it all right, Sir John thought bitterly, trusted too much and for too long, and now he was paying the price.

As Lady Jane walked to the door, she halted, seemed to ponder something, then turned.

‘The black girl,’ she said.

Sir John felt such a phrase did not augur well. Lady Jane spoke of ‘Mathinna’ when she was happy with her, which was rarely, and ‘the black girl’ when she wasn’t, which these days was frequently.

‘I see even you’ve given up on her.’

Sir John seemed to be thinking.

‘Those strange vapours that seized her on the Erebus last year,’ Lady Jane went on. ‘It seems they affected her badly.’

Sir John waited.

‘It is a kind of hysteria she contracted,’ she said. ‘Do you not think so?’

Sir John was unsure.

‘Rather than getting better quickly, as one might have expected with a white child,’ said Lady Jane, ‘she has grown worse.’

As the weeks had become months, Sir John knew, Mathinna had learnt to avoid being seen, and if seen, how to amuse without offence. She had become more like a pet than a child in the house.

‘Listless,’ said Lady Jane.

He knew that Mathinna no longer pushed herself forward, grabbed legs or hid behind dresses. That what remained of her routines and schedules had crumbled under the weight of her sullen refusal to engage with anything she was shown or taught. That she was terrified of him.

‘And wild,’ said Lady Jane. ‘An animal that attacks the servants. Hitting and screaming and scratching. She even bit one of the serving maids, Mrs Wick, and when compelled to resume her daily schedule, she was slovenly and withdrawn. It is as though the sickness has affected her very soul.’

Then for the first time both the Franklins understood something in Mathinna’s behaviour as the most public defeat of their time in Van Diemen’s Land. For the black child would not become white.

‘She is exasperation,’ said Lady Jane.

‘It is beyond explanation,’ replied Sir John.

‘God knows how she will fare in London,’ said Lady Jane. And with that, she turned again and left the room.

Sir John returned to the window and the pewter haze of rain. Down on the street, a beggar had taken off his ragged coat and was holding it over the head of an old crone as they hurried away. How at that moment Sir John envied the beggar his selflessness, his very life! And in this endless world that teemed with so much life, so much love, with so many things, he realised he was alone.

A manservant appeared with coffee.

‘Later.’

There was about the island, his position, his own faded ambitions, the utterly unjustified reputation he carried with him as an ever-heavier burden, something intolerable and entirely absurd. It was baffling, as he increasingly found most human things to be. Sir John had at his disposal one regiment of some six hundred soldiers, half of whom were drunks and all of whom were dissatisfied. Yet these few unreliable men kept some tens of thousands of convicts subjugated—or, rather, the tens of thousands of convicts subjugated themselves. Why, it was as miraculous and ridiculous as anything in the world! But in their meek complicity he saw his own nature amplified—after all, he had passed most of his life imprisoned in the desires and dreams of others.

An aide-de-camp appeared to remind him of—

‘Later.’

As Sir John sat in his dimming study, slumped on a sagging chaise, he resented the Van Diemonians in general and just about everyone he knew in particular: his wife, Montague, Mathinna—especially Mathinna. He despised and loathed them all and simply wanted to be gone from them, far away. How he longed to flee back to the comforting old dream of being with a small band of men in the ice, where he was free of such things. He sat there a long time, alone, silent. As the light ebbed, as the dark advanced, it slowly became clear to him who was responsible.

‘The savage,’ he hissed.

Of course, he thought. One always had enemies, that was clear; he should have given them land and contracts, and more besides. That too was clear. But in this instance they had been armed.

And by whom? The savage had caused his downfall. How had he not seen it? The monster had seen an opportunity to destroy him and seized it, signalling with her behaviour—at first so obviously intoxicating him with some magic, and then disparaging him—yes, it was she whose actions had fed the rumours, armed his enemies, created the scandal that had led to this pretty pass. Montague may have fired the gun, but Sir John could now see it was Mathinna’s witchery that had primed his shot.

Yet this terrible thought left Sir John oddly cold and quiet. Outside, the storm subsided to a fitful drizzle. All that remained was the sound of a pod of spouting whales in the vast river beyond, followed by the distant cries of the whaling boats and the harpooners beginning the slaughter.

Five years hence, Sir John would recall this moment as one of an infinite peace. As he lay in Crozier’s cabin on the ice-bound Erebus, he heard the slow cracking and terrifying splintering of timbers under impossible pressure. The ship was pitched wildly to its side by the ice, his cot jammed level between the wall and floor, with wood and ice and wind groaning and shrieking their fatal destiny ceaselessly. An intolerable mist full of the moist black stench of gangrene spread from beyond his cabin into the midships. Inside, on the same cot on which Mathinna once lay before him in a pretty red dress, the great polar explorer rolled back the covers and his bandages with a mixture of horror and fascination, to investigate by the greasy whale-oil light the stinking stump that had once been him.

In his final agony, Sir John’s thoughts were only of catching birds with a small dark girl who still laughed at him, and his head momentarily filled with the improbable smell of a world that he now recalled as Eden after rain. His mind was a jumble of so many good things, cockatoos and whales and children, when suddenly he saw the cabin he was being tortured within, the cot he was dying in, a rumpled red dress, a whimpering wallaby face. There came to him a sense of his own horror. Cold was crossing his skin, invading his being, fine shards of ice were already webbing his lungs.

‘South by west,’ he began quickly chanting, as if it might redeem him, as though it were a lodestone that might yet point the way to an escape. ‘South-southwest, southwest by—’ But then there erupted from him a sudden sound of infinite dread that rose and fell in the eerie dark beyond, then was lost forever. By the time Crozier rushed into his cabin, camphor-soaked handkerchief firmly clasped over his own wasted face, the greatest explorer of his age was already dead.

That evening, Sir John was relieved that they had guests for dinner, including Edward Kerr, an agent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, a party of London investors that owned the northwestern quarter of the island. Kerr had arrived on a hard-ridden roan horse, and everything about him suggested a muscularity of character and purpose that Sir John, ill-assembled and worse-starred, admired. The Governor made no mention of his own fate; that, he decided, could wait for official proclamation in the Gazette. Though Mathinna’s gradual abandonment of decorum and her slovenly dress meant she no longer attended formal dinners, one of the guests had seen her hanging upside down in a tree near the entry circle.

‘I do believe,’ said Lady Jane tersely, when mention was made of this, ‘that some effort to save them from extinction must be made, and that it is for us to offer an example.’

‘Why, Lady Jane, you are aware,’ said another voice, ‘that some of the blacks’ most brutal leaders were those we raised as Christian children. Just look at Black Tom who went over to the blacks and became a perfect brute.’ It was the solicitor-general, a man whose name Sir John constantly muddled with an old friend’s, one further defect in the eyes of his growing number of enemies. ‘I was only reluctantly drawn into the debate, but I argued to your husband’s predecessor, Governor Arthur, that the government had a legal duty to protect its convicts, who were vulnerable to attack working out in the hinterlands.’

‘And what did you advise, Mr Tulle?’ asked Lady Jane.

‘That if you cannot do so without extermination, then, I said, exterminate. There was no safety for the white man but through the destruction of his black opponent. We put a bounty on their heads for several years. Good money. Five pounds a head.’

‘My whole and sole object in those heroic years was to kill them,’ said Kerr over the wombat consommé, in a refreshingly frank and, Sir John felt, welcome manner. At this point Lady Jane rose, said she had had a long day, and with a smile excused herself. Kerr then showed himself to be that most necessary of middle-aged men for a frozen social event: the raconteur oblivious to the sentiments of others. After rising to farewell Lady Jane and rather dashingly kissing her hand, he was again seated and holding forth with his reflections.

‘And this,’ continued Kerr, pointing his soup spoon, as presumably he once pointed a pistol, ‘because my full conviction was and is that the laws of nature and of God and of this country all conspired to render it my duty.’

His gentle voice, his calm, almost reserved manner, his boyish, wavy blond hair, his near absolute absorption in his own experience—all somehow combined with the shocking violence of his story to give his words a mesmerising charm.

‘As to my having three of their heads on the ridge of my hut, I shall only say that I think it had the effect of deterring some of their comrades, of making the deaths of their companions live in their recollections, and so extended the advantage the example made of them.’

Franklin realised Kerr was an extraordinary man. He could not have known it without living for so long as he had on the island, but now everything was clear to him in a way it never had been before. There was an honesty about Kerr that was bracing, even thrilling—he knew it, he exuded and exhaled a terrifying self-belief—what man with three heads staked on top of his home does not?

And in his candour, thought Franklin, was some terrible truth that was compelling, some strange combination of desire and freedom, some acceptance not of peace but of the violence of which Sir John increasingly feared he himself was inexorably composed, the violence that he had begun to believe was the true motor of the world, the violence he sensed but could not admit to himself was at the heart of what had passed between him and Mathinna. It was not the violence that was wrong, thought Sir John, it was the lack of courage in not carrying it through to its logical end, as Kerr so forthrightly did. Sir John envied Kerr’s serenity in accepting his own wretched destiny; he wanted such serenity, such certainty. He turned away from this strange hero of the Black War and pondered his own future where what Crozier had called ‘that crystal desert of oblivion’ beckoned.

‘We are the emissaries of God, science, justice,’ continued Kerr. ‘We know pity and the Devil knows what else. But nothing beats three staked heads. What was it that young naturalist Darwin said when he visited here a few years past and sat in this very dining room? “Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.” You think such freedom easily won? Perhaps you think it can happen without several staked heads.’ Kerr smiled. His mica eyes betrayed nothing yet told everything: he had the chilling certainty of a man unafraid of the horror he has discovered in himself.

Sir John sensed in Kerr’s profound judgements something that went beyond good and evil. But the Christian pity and scientific curiosity of him and his wife, which had led them to adopt Mathinna—would not such virtues be rewarded?

‘I think not,’ said Kerr, and it was as if that extraordinary man had read Sir John’s very thoughts.

Sir John smiled. There was a thing pitiless and intolerable that he felt the island brought out in men; the wild lands, the seas, all seemed to draw a man’s soul to something beyond its own normal boundaries, perhaps even to demand it. And tonight this thought pleased him. Sir John could feel the attraction, the immense satisfaction of being a soul that answered to no creed, that knew no rules, the power of being a small god that he had first sensed in Robinson, that he had since seen in the large free settlers with their feudal farms, the sealers with their harems of black women.

‘People come here to get on, you see,’ said Kerr.

Sir John did see, and it was as if he were seeing it all for the first time, but it was too late. The gods were created by just such brigands and rapists in their own image, to serve them and their needs.

‘They don’t want to take in the sublime wilds and delude themselves they can enlighten those who have lived in the darkness of the woods too long,’ Kerr went on, now drumming a martial beat on the table with his soup spoon. ‘You understand, of course.’

Sir John did understand. And he, who had been determined about little in his life, was now determined Lady Jane would too.

Subsequently, Sir John’s departure was so dignified that it won him the respect he had never known as Governor. He showed no sign of anger, nor shame, nor rage, at what all now said were so clearly the wicked manipulations of the Arthur faction. It was almost as if he welcomed his fate, and he seemed to demonstrate in his going so much that had been absent in his administration.

It was noted with approval how Sir John was finally decisive with his wife on the matter of the black child, who, he now said, would not be taken with them to England. He declared medical opinion against it: experience showed savages’ bodies were constitutionally incapable of surviving a robust climate; it was as proven and undeniable as were the advantages she had enjoyed which would ensure her future was bright indeed. He did not involve his wife in the matter of the memorandum ordering that the child be taken away to St John’s Orphanage. He would not hear her protests, but observed that it was as fine an institution as had ever been erected, and that the child would there be able to finish her education to the satisfaction of all. He would not enter into an argument with Lady Jane about the experiment being not yet ended.

‘It was unscientific yearnings from the beginning,’ Sir John said, and though the word they both knew he intended was mad, there was about his statement the tone of undeniable conviction. When Lady Jane said that she must prepare the child, and went to assure her that her destiny was still promising, it was already too late. They had taken Mathinna the morning before, without warning or explanation, but with the precaution of giving her a special breakfast of toasted cheese. Whether this was to calm the fear she might have or to assuage the guilt he possessed, he was unsure: he simply felt it an act born of necessity, rather than nostalgia.

Sir John walked over to the large log fire to warm himself as his aide-de-camp now told him of the morning’s petitioners, nodding agreement here, shaking his head there, while happily dreaming all the time of the ice to which he knew he could now return. The polar regions existed beyond politics and progress; doubt visited every day, but had little choice but to leave quickly. The emptiness invited simple decisions, and required that these be honoured with inordinate courage; for the decisions were momentous but not complex, and in spite of all the talk of discovery, of survival, it was a world of lost children whose failures were celebrated as the triumphs of men.

And at the pleasant thought of absconding from adulthood, of returning to an implacable solitude as if to the womb, to an inevitable oblivion that by the strangest alchemy of a nation’s dreaming would inexorably become celebrity and history, he smiled again and called for his glass once more to be filled, all the while trying to halt his hand from trembling.

Winter was upon the island, the snow low on the mountain, and while a man dreamt of returning to being a child, there was huddled in the back of a jolting dray a shivering girl leaving the tattered remnants of her childhood behind forever. She was clutching a possum-skin rug around her to keep at bay the driving sleet, to deny an ever-encroaching solitude that felt increasingly like death. She knew only what little she had been told: so that her experience of other children might be broadened, she was being boarded for a few days at a nearby school, and was to take nothing with her, neither possessions nor pets. It was, the child realised, odd, but little about her life wasn’t.

Mathinna lay down, curled into the rug, closed her eyes and let her frail shell of a body ride the bumps and jolts. She told herself she was warm and safe and, consoled by such necessary untruths and with the comforting fullness of toasted cheese in her belly to further the illusion, she somehow fell asleep and dreamt of running through wallaby grass.

When she awoke, the horse was straining its traces, pulling the cart up a steep, muddy road towards a lonely building that burst out of the dark earth like the head of a broad arrow. The oppressive solitude of St John’s Orphanage seemed heightened by the dark forests and snow-mantled mountain that wrapped around it. At its centre was a sandstone church with a tall steeple, on either side of which the children’s dormitories—boys on the right, girls on the left—fell away like broken wings.

That most children there weren’t orphans, but illegitimate or unlucky with careless parents, was hardly the point. Though St John’s was intended to be for children without virtue, in practice it was for those without defence, children who had annoyed the authorities by running through the streets of Hobart Town unattended, by playing, in imitation of their adult betters, games of flogging and hanging and bushranging. They were now rounded up and locked away at St John’s.

Every day began with church, and the church stalls had been built to stop moral pollution of any kind. The boys could not see the girls, and the convicts and all the massed undesirables were kept out of sight of the pious free settlers from the nearby enclave of the newly rich, which was called, appropriately and dismally, New Town. While the fireplaces were arranged around the free settlers’ pews, those designated orphans were denied even the possibility of movement to keep warm. They offered up prayers for the wicked and the fallen, the lost and broken, the sick and the invalid, the poor fatherless and miserable motherless children, and afterwards they went back to cough and freeze and be beaten once more.

On the day Mathinna arrived, the church service had been held over an hour late because the typhoid had claimed another child overnight, bringing the total who had died in the previous month to five. There was a listlessness about the whole place that subdued even the sharp scent of imminent violence normally permeating the building. Mathinna was told nothing about what was happening to her, nor what place it was through which she now walked with a lack of concern that only someone who did not realise this was her destiny could manifest. She was led down a dark corridor that tunnelled through the building and opened out onto a veranda at the back, and there told only to wait.

She looked out over a squalid yard. Though muddy that winter’s day, it still drew the children as a place where one could, if not get warm, then at least gaze on the distant heat of an even more distant sun. Warmth was, for the children, an idea—the one philosophy they were introduced to at St John’s—and from an unshadowed corner, two skiving boys, seeking to acquaint themselves better with it, turned to stare at the new arrival.

As Mathinna stood there, possum-skin rug wrapped around her, feeling sleepy and queasy from the cart ride, she noticed a sulphur-crested cockatoo alight on a rusting whaling try-pot set below a dripping gutter. Mathinna’s eyes sharpened. The bird was clearly an escaped pet, for it jumped from foot to foot while alternately crying out ‘Love youse!’ and ‘Fug youse!’ It was a beautiful large parrot, its coat fine, its bearing splendid.

Mathinna smiled, as if at the sight of a friend. She stepped forward, her hand proffered as a perch, and the bird cocked its head and turned a glistening ebony eye at her, then threw up its sulphur crest in greeting. It had taken two hops towards her when it was felled by a rock. Mathinna looked up and saw a smiling boy proudly waving a slingshot, then back at the parrot convulsing in the mud. She leant down and with a single quick movement wrung its neck, then turned away, and abruptly doubling up, vomited cheese and toast into the try-pot.

Some time later she was fetched by an old man with a gammy leg, who, hobbling and cursing as they went, took her up flights of bare pine stairs to a storeroom stacked with clothing. Here she showed the first signs of resistance after Mrs Trench, a woman of great girth and gasping speech, attempted to take off Mathinna’s green seashell necklace and red dress, her best clothes that she had worn for the occasion. Mathinna bit Mrs Trench’s hand so hard it bled. The Warden was summoned but was a good hour arriving, having been overseeing the burning of the forest behind St John’s, from which he knew the foul, fatal typhoid miasma to be emanating.

Angry at his important work being interrupted, the Warden, a man of later years with the build and pocked face of an anvil, thrashed the child with a tea-tree stick for insolence, and, when the child would offer neither explanation nor apology for her animal behaviour, thrashed her a second time for dumb insolence. After, she was taken to a room kept specially for such malevolent offenders and locked there for the rest of the day and the night. Without bed, hammock or palliasse, its sole furnishing was an unfired chamber pot, cracked such that it leaked over the already putrid floor on which she slept.

The following morning, Mrs Trench, aided by two wardsmen who each took an arm, dragged Mathinna to the washroom. There, with the wardsmen holding her down as she bucked and thrashed, Mrs Trench stripped the child, shoved her around a little in the name of looking for lice, and threw a bucket of cold water over her. Though Mathinna lost the fight, her struggle was recognised when Mrs Trench tossed her seashell necklace and red dress back at her, saying that as long as she wore something on top, she could keep them. Her head was then shaved of its dense black curls, and she was dressed in a stained blue gown and calico pinafore, both large enough to sit over her red dress and several more.

Because Mathinna was, in her way, a person of note, she was solemnly presented by the Warden with something few children received, a pair of wooden clogs, which had belonged to a boy who had died of fever during the night. Her only response was to throw them back at the Warden. After being thrashed again, she was taken barefoot to the punishment room for a second day and night with the cracked chamber pot.

Despite the Warden spending the rest of the day burning the forest behind the orphanage, despite the air by the afternoon being choked with smoke rather than the peaty aroma of forest, two more children were carried away with typhoid that evening. It was clear to all the staff, who heard it from Mrs Trench, and to all the children, who heard it from the staff—who knew it for a fact—that the blacks had ‘powers’. Even more pervasive than the acrid taste of ash was the dread that now settled over the orphanage. Everyone knew that the sulking black child was exercising her vengeance.

The only conclusions to be drawn from the Warden’s wise compromise the following day, when he thrashed Mathinna for a fourth time but then let the child witch doctor sleep in the dormitory with the other girls, were that the black girl was indeed an emissary of the Devil and that the Warden had won them all a reprieve from death. For the fatal contagion ended, and it was clear that while no amount of burnt forest had halted the plague, this one providential act had.

In the dormitory, the rich scent of ammonia rising from the damp hammocks of the bed-wetters, whose inexplicable sin defied all beatings, mingled that moonlit night with the swarms of strange insects that the island seemed to breed in biblical proportions—flying ants, moths the size of small birds, mosquitoes. The black girl’s Satanic reputation was enhanced when she, who refused to eat of a day, of a night caught the moths with lightning strikes of her hand and gobbled them up.

In spite of Sir John telling Lady Jane he had been advised that visits of any type would only further distress the child and not help ease her into her new life, Lady Jane went to the orphanage three days later to retrieve Mathinna. She was motivated partly by wounded pride, by a measure—real but not large—of appropriate concern, and by a desire to remind her husband that such an action, taken without consultation, was unacceptable.

But there was something else; something buried so deep within Lady Jane that it took the form of a physical pain she did not dare seek words for. She was not an hysteric. She refused to open herself up to such morbid sensations as she had seen women of feeble character do, embracing the maladies of their own mind. But still it came on her in waves, leaving her short of breath and disoriented, as the Warden led her through the Orphanage’s many rooms in accordance with the Governor’s earlier instructions. For Sir John had lived too long with his wife’s will to believe he would be obeyed, and so, as a seasoned naval officer, he had prepared a wily line of second defence.

The children slunk away from Lady Jane like animals, one part fearful and two parts desperate for food and life; the only sleek and content being she saw in this grove of misery was a large ginger tomcat, fat on the rats that even at this hour sported along the shadowed kickboards. Lady Jane tried to talk to one boy, but he seemed indifferent to her or anybody or anything, as though he had withdrawn from life. She asked other children: did they get enough to eat? was all well here?

But they seemed not to hear, far less comprehend. Their faces were subdued and empty, their skin chapped and often scabby, their expressions expressionless. Lady Jane noticed an eerie absence of whispering or pulling hair or giggling. The children seemed too exhausted to do much more than cough and hack and scratch, beset with everything from consumption to dysentery to chilblains, the tormented wounds of which scabbed their arms with bloodied buttercups.

Though the orphanage was but a few years old, there was a stench about it. Lady Jane could identify one scent as that of decay, but beyond it, over it, was another odour she could not name, that she would later describe in her diary only in the vaguest terms: the place smelt, she wrote, ‘of something wrong’. It was a smell trapped in the putrid canvas hammocks she now walked past in the stinking dormitory, their umber weave mottled with large florettes of urine and blood, it was embedded in the ammoniacal rough floor boards, it was embodied in a small mound of angry red and yellow flesh that lay in a rude cot in a corner, wrapped in lint and greased like a cold roast potato.

‘House fire,’ said the Warden in a low whisper. ‘Mother burnt to death. Only girl saved.’

Apart from an occasional low, long whimper, the child gave no sign of pain or interest. Instead she merely stared at the ceiling with intensely vivid blue eyes that looked as if they had been mistakenly buried in charred pork, as if they were wondering why it was taking so long to be interred in one of the toy-sized coffins that waited, white-painted, racked and ready, in the cellar storeroom where Lady Jane was next taken.

‘Marvellously and completely self-contained, we are,’ said the Warden as he raised the lantern around his macabre store. ‘Our boys make these themselves.’

Leaving the coffin room, Lady Jane asked to be excused the rest of the tour, and so instead they went to the second-storey dining room, in which the officials of the institution took their meals and from where it was possible to look out on a rear courtyard where the children passed their idle time. Through the whirling glass she looked down on that muddy square.

Lady Jane swallowed.

Were it not for Mathinna’s colour, she would not have recognised the already scabby, shaven-headed child in a drab cassock who sat alone and unmoving in the dirt below. When hit in the face by some mud hurled at her by another child, Mathinna bared her teeth and appeared to hiss, which, oddly, seemed to put an end to the attack.

Lady Jane had come to take her home. She did not care what her fool husband thought or did, or what the wretches that passed for colonial society might say. She had intended simply stating her desire and leaving immediately with Mathinna. But something stopped her from saying what she wished, from doing what she desired. Instead she said she hoped Mathinna was eating properly.

‘Eating?’ said the Warden, who had come to stand at the window with Lady Jane. ‘Eats nothing. Except insects.’

There was a long silence. Even words seemed unnecessary luxuries at St John’s.

‘My dear Warden,’ Lady Jane began, then halted and shook her head. She just wanted to leave.

The Warden leant in closer. ‘Yes, Lady Jane?’

‘Mr—how do I say this? The child never ate insects all the years she was with me.’

‘She has reverted to type,’ said Mrs Trench, who now joined them.

‘Did she,’ asked the Warden, ‘hide her true nature from you? All those years? Is what we see below the truth of these people?’

They stared for a few moments without speaking at the mud-spattered, bedraggled girl. Lady Jane’s vision began blurring, and she turned to face the Warden.

‘She struck me as…’ said Lady Jane, but some certainty, some conviction, was missing from her voice, from the words spilling from her mouth. She brushed her eyes with a kid-gloved finger. ‘At least, initially, that is, she—she appeared intelligent, seemed—’

‘Intelligent?’ said the Warden, as though it were a matter to ponder. He seemed deeply understanding, and his understanding was somehow terrifying and impossible for Lady Jane. He smelt of smoke and sounded like clanging iron. ‘No,’ said the Warden finally. ‘Never that.’

‘Rat cunning, more like it,’ said Mrs Trench.

‘Animal instinct,’ said the Warden, ‘highly honed. As Mrs Trench—much experienced with the savages—has alluded to. Do we commit Rousseau’s fallacy? Thinking rat cunning equates with humanity or civilisation? No. Why? Because when rewarded, the child pretended to one thing. But here we see that they are capable of the grossest deceit. Precisely because progress is impossible, they regress quickly.’ He looked Lady Jane in the eyes and his thin lips slowly formed a pained smile of knowing compassion. ‘Is this painful for you to hear? I know, Ma’am. How can it not be? But to us here at St John’s Orphanage, they are all God’s children. Wherever they come from, Ham or Abraham, it matters not.’

The Warden believed in God’s love and pity. A terrible love. A most terrifying pity. And against all that belief and all that love and all that pity, against all the questions already answered, even a spirit as indomitable as Lady Jane’s faltered.

She swung back to the swirling glass and the sight of Mathinna beyond, so buffeted by waves of memory and emotion she thought she might sink beneath them. How she longed again to hear the tinkling of the bell as the child made her way around the house. For arms wrapping around her legs and waist, grabbing and holding her. Why had she pushed the child away when she had secretly longed to be so grabbed and held?

And then she could no longer hold down that deep buried feeling. She could no longer deny the memory of her three miscarriages. She could not forget her grief, and then the cruel awakening to her barren body, her loneliness, her inescapable sense of shame as a woman, her desperate desire for a child, her pride that rescued her and then crushed her and made her move relentlessly and constantly, desperately seeking to raise herself and her husband forever after, as though they might somehow escape the gravity of her grief.

Until that day on Flinders Island when she had seen Mathinna dance in a white kangaroo skin, Lady Jane had deluded herself that it was science, reason, Christianity; that the ruse of a noble experiment might somehow bring her the mystery that other women took for granted, but she never admitted what it really was that she longed to know: the love of a mother for a child.

She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over, that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, hold her close, feed her warm soup and bread. She wished to be the mother she had tried so hard never to appear, to put her nose in Mathinna’s wild hair and comfort and protect her, and revel in her difference and not seek to destroy it, because in that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below, and the white coffins below that.

Then this thought was replaced by a different voice that whispered how all these things were regrettable but unavoidable, that somehow the stinking hammocks and rats and cold mud and burnt children were for a necessary purpose. It made no sense. But finally her head succeeded in steadying her reckless heart. And Lady Jane recognised the truth of what she was being told: that her great experiment was the most ignominious failure, and that she must not suffer the further humiliation of taking Mathinna home to England. At that moment, everything in that room, in St John’s, smelt to her of wet stone.

She turned away from the window and the sight of that filthy, bedraggled figure. She took a deep breath. None could ever underestimate her courage.

‘What you say accords with common sense,’ she said slowly, stumbling over the words as though it were a confession extracted by some terrible means. ‘I can see that she is simply reverting to her animal nature.’

‘It is what we have worked with before,’ said the Warden gently. ‘There are places for all in our colony’s kitchens and sculleries, Ma’am. But you cannot raise gazelles from rats.’

Lady Jane could see that whatever magic Mathinna had possessed as a small girl on Flinders Island had now vanished. Now she was no longer pretty but dirty and unattractive, no longer delightful and happy but spiteful and miserable. In truth, thought Lady Jane, she has under my care only gone backwards, and can only degenerate further. The dance had left the dancer.

Watching Lady Jane’s carriage return, seeing her enter Government House alone, Sir John hoped he would be seen as callous by more than just his wife. It would help—if only in a small way—restore his standing with the colonists, and with that, he might find some small measure of pride restored. He despised himself for it and despised humanity for it. He recognised it as a conclusive argument for his return to something for which he was in every other respect congenitally unsuited—by weight, by age, by character—the white world of polar exploration. It was the only emptiness he knew greater than himself.

The day after they sailed from Van Diemen’s Land, when there was enough sea between them and the child, in an act that was composed equally of contrition and cunning, Sir John made a gift to his wife of a painting of Mathinna done by the convict Bock shortly before the fateful ball.

She was wearing her favourite red dress, and the picture was marred only by one detail: her bare feet. For Mathinna had, typically, kicked off her court shoes for the sitting and Bock had painted her barefooted. Because it was a watercolour, he did not feel he could paint shoes over the feet, and when, on Lady Jane’s instructions, Bock painted a copy with shoes, it had somehow lost the delightful spontaneity of the original. And so the paintings had been rolled up and stored away and forgotten, until Sir John had the original searched out and framed.

‘It really is a fine likeness of the child when she was at her most admirable,’ he said as the wrapping paper fell to the floor. ‘Predating her rather sorry decline.’

Lady Jane wanted to scream.

With a piece of shaped timber, the framer had achieved more in a moment than she had with her previously invincible will over the last five years. His oval frame neatly cut Mathinna off at her ankles and finally covered her bare feet.

Lady Jane stepped out of the dimness of their cabin into the intense daylight of the quarterdeck. There was a beautiful freshness about the sun, the ship, the wind, the sea. It was as though the world had been born anew. The freshly washed decks steamed; the light broke the sea into a million diamonds.

She turned and strode to the stern. With an uncharacteristically violent motion, she threw the painting in the wake of the ship. It dipped and rode the air as it fell. For a moment it seemed as if it might fly. Then it smacked into the sea, tearing on impact. It quickly drifted away, face down. When she turned, Sir John was standing behind her, black streaks across his forehead as the wind blew his long greased hairs into writhing question marks.

It was 1844. The last pair of great auks in the world had just been killed, Friedrich Nietzsche born, and Samuel Morse sent the first electrical communication in history. It was a telegram that read: What hath God wrought.

‘I loved her,’ said Lady Jane.