Mathinna grew to dread these afternoons in the drawing room. She disliked being pawed over and whispered about. Sometimes she wished she were white, or invisible, just to avoid the stares and whispers, the rude, patronizing questions.

When they tired of her, Mathinna sat in a corner playing patience, a game of solitaire that Eleanor had taught her. As she squared and fanned her cards, she listened to the ladies commiserate about the inconvenience of living so far from civilization. They complained about how they couldn’t get the supplies they wanted—Leghorn bonnets from Tuscany and opera-length kid gloves, mahogany bed frames and glass chandeliers, champagne and foie gras. They bemoaned the lack of skilled artisans. The impossibility of finding good help. The dearth of amusements, like opera and theater. “Good theater,” Lady Franklin clarified. “You can attend an atrocious production in Hobart Town every day of the week.” They fretted about their skin: how it burned and dried out, blistered and freckled, how vulnerable it was to rashes and insect bites.

So many odd customs these ladies had! They stuffed themselves into elaborate costumes: corsets with whalebone stays, hats with bows and ribbons, impractical shoes with pointy heels that disintegrated in the mud and dirt. They ate extravagant meals that upset their stomachs and made them fat. They appeared to exist in a perpetual state of discontent, constantly comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in London and Paris and Milan. Why did they stay here, Mathinna wondered, if they disliked it so much?

On Monday mornings, like clockwork, a black carriage arrived at Government House carrying John Montagu, the Colonial Secretary, and his dog. A balding man with a perpetually smug expression, Montagu wore a double-breasted jacket over a tight-fitting waistcoat, a high-collared shirt, and a floppy black tie. His dog, a muscular beast with an attenuated snout and short, floppy ears, was unfriendly to everyone except its master, who seemed to delight in its twitchy aggression. “Jip can overpower a kangaroo in four paces,” Montagu would brag to anyone who’d listen. It was rumored that he brought the dog with him to Government House to impress, or possibly intimidate, Sir John, with whom he had a simmering rivalry.

During the hour that the two men met each week, the dog roamed the courtyard. One Monday a convict maid, hanging laundry in the yard, was attacked by the dog. It grabbed her skirt and yanked her to the ground, breaking her arm. “It’s a pity,” Montagu said when he learned of it. “But I did warn those prison wenches to stay out of Jip’s way.”

On Flinders, Mathinna had often gone to bed hungry. The Palawa had been accustomed to hunting and foraging from the coast to the highlands on Van Diemen’s Land, but the smaller island was largely barren, and the missionaries did not share their food. Here there was plenty to eat, though much of it tasted strange in her mouth. Mutton chops and mushy peas, cold toast that stood upright in a silver server, small white kernels of rice she first mistook for grubs. The Franklins drank bitter herbs steeped in boiling water at every meal, redeemed only by the sugar that Mathinna soon discovered made everything taste better.

One Sunday afternoon Mathinna was invited to join the Franklins at a luncheon in the dining room for a visiting English bishop and his wife and young daughter. Over cold pheasant pie and calves’ brains in aspic, the bishop asked Mathinna what natives liked to eat. She told him about hunting muttonbirds, how they’d pull the bird out of a hole, snap its neck, and toss it into a fire. She demonstrated how they’d pluck most of the feathers and spit out the rest as they bit into the skin.

“Mathinna!” Eleanor gasped.

Sir John chuckled. “She’s quite right, you know. Why consume some birds and not others? Many an explorer has perished from unnecessary scruples about what he’s willing to put in his mouth.”

The rest of the table was silent. The bishop wore an expression of disgust. Lady Franklin looked aghast. Mathinna was annoyed at herself. For a brief moment she’d forgotten how peculiar these people were. She wished she hadn’t said anything.

“It’s not true,” she said quickly. “I made it up.”

After a moment, the bishop laughed. “What a peculiar creature!” he exclaimed, turning to Sir John. “I might believe anything she tells me about her people, so remote is their experience from ours.”

“Perhaps it’s time for the girls to leave the table,” Lady Franklin said. “Sarah, will you take them outside for some fresh air?”

Mathinna sighed. Lady Franklin had invited her friends’ children to play with her before, and it rarely went well. They did not seem to know whether to treat Mathinna as an equal, or as a servant, or with a wary, forced politeness, as if she were the pet of an acquaintance you might not trust not to jump or nip.

When they were in the garden, Mathinna scampered up a blue gum tree, hand over foot, shimmying across its elephant limbs while the bishop’s daughter, Emily, shivered in the cool air below. Peering down at her through the ragged leaves, Mathinna called, “Climb up here with me!”

“My mama won’t allow it. It’s dangerous,” Emily said, gaping up at Mathinna in her formal clothes.

Mathinna climbed down. “What do you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to see my pet possum?”

“I suppose.”

“Mama has one of those,” Emily said when Mathinna brought out Waluka. “It’s dead, though. She wears it as a fur around her neck. It still has its tiny black eyes.”

Mathinna tucked Waluka back in her skirt pocket. It was becoming clear that the things that had made her happy on Flinders were considered childish, impetuous, and strange here. A young lady wasn’t supposed to run around barefoot and half dressed, or shout into the air, or climb to the tops of the trees, or have a possum as a pet. From now on, she would keep Waluka out of sight when strangers were around. She wouldn’t talk about hunting muttonbirds. She would stay quiet about her past.

That night, in the darkness of her bedroom, she danced with Waluka on her shoulders as she had on the white sand on Flinders, one hand on his small back to keep him steady. Perhaps, as Lady Franklin said, it would be easier if she could let go of Flinders in her mind—forget her people and their way of life. Perhaps it would make living in this strange place easier. Perhaps she would feel less painfully alone.

Government House, Hobart Town, 1840–1841

The Franklins hosted a boating party for Eleanor when she turned eighteen. On the occasion of Lady Franklin’s forty-ninth, Sir John surprised her with a signed edition of Oliver Twist and a trip to Melbourne. Lady Franklin threw a large formal banquet in honor of Sir John’s fifty-fifth. Mrs. Wilson, with a great show of fanfare, was granted her birthday off, with pay.

The Franklins didn’t know Mathinna’s birth date, and neither did she, so they picked a random date on the calendar: May 18, three months to the day after she’d arrived in Hobart Town. “Mrs. Wilson could make a cake for her, at least,” she overheard Eleanor say to Lady Franklin a few days before. “She’s turning nine. Old enough to notice.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lady Franklin replied. “Her people don’t notice such things. It would be like commemorating the birth date of the family pet.”

But Mathinna did notice. To have been assigned a birth date and then denied the customary acknowledgment felt particularly callous. She woke up and practiced French with Eleanor (who seemed to have forgotten that the day had any significance), ate an ordinary midday meal in the kitchen with Mrs. Wilson, and spent the afternoon roaming the property with Waluka. She kept hoping that she might be surprised with a cake after all, but the hours passed with nothing. Only Sarah, putting away laundry in Mathinna’s room after her solitary supper, mentioned anything about it. “So it’s your birthday, I heard. Nobody says a word about mine neither. Just another year closer to me ticket of leave.”

Unlike Lady Franklin, Sir John seemed to genuinely enjoy Mathinna’s company. He taught her cribbage—which she called the kangaroo game because of how the stick markers jumped up and down the crib board—and often summoned her to play it with him in the late afternoons. He invited her to join him and Eleanor in the garden before breakfast, under the shade of the gum trees and sycamores that dotted the property, for his daily morning constitutional, as he called it. On these strolls he taught her to identify the flowers they’d imported from England: pink-and-white tea roses, daffodils, purple lilacs with tiny, tubular flowers.