One morning when Mathinna arrived in the garden, Sir John was standing next to a box draped in a sheet. With a magician-like flourish he removed the sheet to reveal a wire cage containing a formidable black bird with patches of yellow on its cheeks and tail. “Montagu gave me this blasted cockatoo and I don’t know what to do with it,” he said, shaking his head. “No one wants to go near it. Now and then it makes a dreadful sound, a sort of . . . caterwaul.”

As if on cue, the bird opened its beak and emitted a piercing kee-ow, kee-ow.

Sir John winced. “See what I mean? I’ve done a bit of research, and it turns out that a British naturalist named George Shaw discovered this species. Named it Psittacus funereus because, well, as you can see, it appears dressed for a funeral. Though there is some question about the Latin name of the eastern versus southern yellow-tailed cockatoo . . . well, never mind. At any rate, it appears that I am stuck with it.”

“Why don’t you let it go?” Mathinna asked.

“I’m tempted, believe me.” He sighed. “But apparently creatures like this, raised in captivity, lose the ability to survive in the wild. And I can ill afford to insult Montagu while he’s overseeing the question of convict discipline. You seem to have tamed that . . .” He gestured toward Mathinna’s pocket, at the lump of Waluka’s body. “The truth is, your people are more naturally attuned to wildlife than we Europeans. Closer to the earth, and so on. I hereby grant this bird to your care.”

“To me?” Mathinna asked. “What do you want me to do with it?” She peered through the bars at the sullen-looking cockatoo as it hopped from one foot to the other. She watched it lift a green cone with its foot and root around with its beak for the seeds. Its crest, short and ink black, gave it an intimidating air. Kee-ow.

“Just . . . I don’t know. We’ll find a maid to feed it and clean its cage. You can . . . talk to it, I suppose.”

“You can’t talk to it?”

Sir John shook his head. “I tried, Mathinna, I really did. The two of us don’t speak the same language.”

Mathinna was in the schoolroom with Eleanor, practicing her handwriting, when Mrs. Crain popped her head in the door. “Lady Franklin requests the girl’s presence in her curio room. Wearing the red dress. Sarah has ironed it and is waiting in her room.”

Mathinna felt a familiar dread in the pit of her stomach. “What does she want with me?” she asked.

Mrs. Crain gave Mathinna a curt smile. “It is not your place to ask.”

When she left the room, Eleanor rolled her eyes. “You know how Jane likes to show you off. To take credit for civilizing you.”

Sarah helped Mathinna dress and escorted her downstairs.

“Ah! Here she is.” Lady Franklin turned to a thin, stooped man in a black wool coat standing beside her. “What do you think?”

He cocked his head at Mathinna. “Extraordinary eyes, you’re quite right,” he said. “And the dress is splendid against that dark skin.”

“Did I mention she’s the daughter of a chieftain?”

“You did indeed.”

“Mathinna,” Lady Franklin said, “this is Mr. Bock. I have commissioned him to create your portrait. For the purposes of science as well as art. Scientific research, as you may know, is a keen interest of mine,” she told Mr. Bock.

“One gathers as much,” he said, looking around at the taxidermied menagerie.

“I think people will be much interested in seeing this remnant of a native population that is about to disappear from the face of the earth,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Ah, well . . .” The tips of Mr. Bock’s ears reddened slightly, and he slid his eyes toward Mathinna. She looked behind her to see if he meant to communicate with someone else, but no one was there.

Oh. He was embarrassed on her behalf.

She thought she had become inured to the way Lady Franklin spoke about her in her presence as if she had no feelings or didn’t comprehend what she was saying. But Mr. Bock’s acknowledgment of it made her realize how insulting it was.

Every afternoon for a week, Mathinna sat for hours in front of Mr. Bock’s easel in the least-used drawing room. He was quiet for long periods of time, speaking only to admonish her not to fidget or look away, to sit up straight, lay hands in her lap. Sarah told her it was rumored that Mr. Bock was a famous painter in England before he was sentenced to transport for stealing drugs. The fact that he might be an ex-convict made him somehow less intimidating.

Each day, when Mr. Bock dismissed her, Mathinna left the room without looking at the painting in progress. She’d seen the framed pictures on the walls in Lady Franklin’s quarters—natives with exaggerated features, bulbous noses, and saucer eyes. She was afraid of how she might appear on Mr. Bock’s easel.

Late on Friday afternoon, he announced that he was finished. He called for Lady Franklin to take a look. Scrutinizing the portrait, she cocked her head. Nodding slowly, she said, “Well done, Mr. Bock. You’ve managed to convey her mischievousness. And that woolly hair. What do you think, Mathinna? Doesn’t it look like you?”

Mathinna slid off her chair and walked slowly to the easel. The girl in the portrait did resemble her. She gazed directly at the viewer with large, blackish brown eyes, her hands folded in her lap, bare feet crossed, lips turned slightly upward. But she didn’t look mischievous. She seemed melancholy. She had an air of preoccupation, as if she were waiting for something, or someone, beyond the canvas.

Mathinna’s heart quavered.

The painter had captured something about her that she knew to be true but had not consciously understood. Wearing the scarlet dress had felt like a game to her, an elaborate charade. It was not a dress her mother would’ve worn, or any other woman on Flinders. It had nothing to do with the traditions she’d grown up with or the way of life of the people she loved. The dress was an impersonation.

But the truth was, her past was slipping away. It had been a year since she’d arrived in Hobart Town. She could no longer see her mother’s face. She couldn’t summon the smell of the rain in the Flinders cove, or the grainy feel of the sand beneath her feet, or the expressions of the elders around the fire. In bed at night she mouthed words in her language, but her language was disappearing. Mina kipli, nina kanaplila, waranta liyini. I eat, you dance, we sing. It was an eight-year-old’s vocabulary; she had no words to add. Even the songs she once knew seemed to her now like nursery rhymes filled with nonsense words.

Seeing herself on the canvas showed her how much her life had changed. How far she was from the place she’d once called home.

Government House, Hobart Town, 1841

Mrs. Wilson was in a foul mood, grousing about the day’s delivery, a random collection of ingredients that even a seasoned cook like herself was hard pressed to turn into dinner. “Turnips and gristle!” She bustled around the small space like a hedgehog in its burrow. “What the good Lord am I expected to do with that?” Rooting around in baskets, she found celery root and a few limp carrots. “Suppose I’ll make a turnip pudding,” she muttered, “and some crackling from this sorry excuse for a roast.”

Mathinna sat in a corner of the kitchen, as she often did, working on a floral needlepoint of dark green leaves and pink trumpet-shaped flowers. Waluka lay curled around her shoulders, his hot-water-bottle belly against her neck. She watched as Mrs. Wilson gathered ingredients, slapping lard into a cast-iron skillet, shaving bits of fatty meat off the hunk in front of her and tossing them into the pan. A maid came in with Lady Franklin’s tray from lunch, which only exasperated the cook further. “Don’t stand there gawping. Give that here! Move along!” She cleared a space on the crowded table, plunked down the messy tray, and shooed the maid out the door.

Neither she nor Mathinna noticed that spatters of lard, sloppily thrown toward the skillet, had landed on the coals and ignited a fire. The room filled with smoke.

Mrs. Wilson let out a cry and flapped her arms. “Don’t just sit there, child. Help me!”

Mathinna leapt to her feet. A spear of flame had jumped from the hearth to the wall and now lapped at a hand towel hanging to dry. She started to ladle water out of the barrel, then, realizing it was taking too long, grabbed a pile of dishtowels and dumped them into the water. She handed the dripping towels one by one to Mrs. Wilson, who used them to bat at the flames. When the towels ran out, Mathinna scooped water from the barrel with a small bowl and flung it toward the hearth. It was several minutes before the two of them, working feverishly, were able to extinguish the fire.

When it was finally out, they stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, surrounded by clumps of soggy towels, surveying the now-even-blacker wall above the fireplace. Mrs. Wilson sighed, patting her bosom. “Good thinking, you. It’s lucky I have a kitchen left to cook in.”