Each week, Ruby was paler and more withdrawn. No longer did she cling to Hazel when she arrived or cry piteously when she left. She had become almost indifferent, examining Hazel coolly under her eyelashes. Within several months she was treating her like a benevolent stranger. She allowed Hazel to play pat-a-cake with her, but seemed to barely tolerate it, like a cat struggling against an embrace it didn’t invite.

One Sunday, Ruby’s upper arms were bruised; another week red strips were visible across the backs of her legs. “Did someone hurt you?” Hazel asked, searching her eyes. Ruby pulled away, discomfited by Hazel’s intensity and too young to understand what she was asking. When Hazel complained to the warden, he tilted her chin and said, “No marks appear on children who don’t deserve them.”

Hazel’s heart was a wound that wouldn’t heal.

What was happening to Ruby that she didn’t know about?

Everything.

Olive was standing just inside the main gate at the Cascades, waiting for her, when Hazel returned from the governor’s house one evening. Hazel hadn’t seen her in a while. She’d been sentenced to three weeks in the crime yard for profanity and insubordination—no surprise.

Lifting her chin toward a group of women across the courtyard, Olive said, “Ye need to be careful. Some think you’re getting special treatment. First the surgeon’s quarters on the ship, then the nursery. Now the governor’s house.”

Hazel nodded. She knew Olive was right. Other convicts had it much worse. Their employers drank, worked them to the bone, beat them. How many women were pregnant now with babies they didn’t ask for? She’d seen women do almost anything to avoid their assignments, including sucking on copper pipe to turn their tongues blue and upset their stomachs so they’d be too sick to work.

“Just watch out for yourself,” Olive said.

Mathinna

It is increasingly apparent the Aboriginal natives of this colony are, and have ever been, a most treacherous race; and that

the kindness and humanity which they have always experienced from the free settlers has not tended to civilize them to any

degree.

—George Arthur, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, in a letter to Sir George Murray, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, 1830

Government House, Hobart Town, 1841

The winter, it seemed to Mathinna, was lasting forever. The courtyard still wore a thin crust of frozen mud that crackled when she walked across it. Her bedroom was unheated; the cold seeped deep into her bones. She crept around the main house, searching for a place to get warm. Shooed out of the public rooms by Mrs. Crain, she sought refuge in the kitchen.

Slicing a pile of potatoes, nursing a tumbler of sugar-laced gin, Mrs. Wilson talked about her long-ago life in Ireland—how she’d once been a cook on a fine estate on the outskirts of Dublin but was unjustly accused of stealing linens to sell on the street. Her employer had recently returned from Paris with a steamer trunk of linens, and Mrs. Wilson was under the admittedly mistaken impression that she was doing the household a favor by disposing of the old ones. No one would’ve caught on if the napkins weren’t monogrammed; it was her mistake not to remove the stitching. She genuinely believed that her ladyship would’ve been pleased to know that her old cloths—rags, really—were being put to good use.

“She’d be pleased to know the cook was pilfering her linens?” the newest convict maid said with a smirk, ironing a sheet in the back of the room.

Mrs. Wilson looked up from her potatoes. “Not pilfering. Disposing of.”

“Ye pocketed the profits, yes?”

“It wasn’t her ladyship turned me in,” she huffed. “The butler had it in for me. My mistake, I suppose. Pushed off his advances one too many times.”

The maid smiled at Mathinna. “What d’ye suppose Lady Franklin would do if I had a mind to lift a table runner or two?”

“Don’t be getting high and mighty. You’re one to talk. Silver spoons I hear it was,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“Just one spoon.”

“All the same.”

“At least I’ll admit to my crime.”

Mathinna looked back and forth between them. She’d never heard a convict maid challenge the cook. The maid gave her a wink.

“I’m just teasin’ ye, Mrs. Wilson. Something to do on a cold gray morning.”

“You’re lucky to be here, Hazel. Ye should know your place.”

The maid held up the sheet and folded it by the corners. “There’s none of us lucky to be here, Mrs. Wilson. But your point is taken.”

“I should certainly hope it is,” Mrs. Wilson said.

A few days later, when the cook was doing her daily rounds at the abattoir and the dairy shed and the henhouse, the new maid came into the kitchen again with a basket of linens. She lifted a black iron from a row of irons on a shelf and set it flat on the glowing coals of the fire. Then she fell into a chair. “Ah, me feet.” She sighed. “It’s too long a walk from there to here.”

Mathinna was standing close to the hearth, warming her hands. “I thought they brought you in a cart.”

“They’re making us walk now. Say it’s good for us. Bloody torturers.”

Mathinna looked over at her. Hazel was as slight as a sapling, with wavy red hair pulled back under a white cap. Like the other convict maids, she wore a blue dress and white apron. “Have you been at the Cascades for long?”

“Not really. This is my first outplacement.” She rose from the chair and wrapped a rag around her hand, then went to the fireplace and lifted the iron out of the coals. “What’s your story, then?”

Mathinna shrugged.

The maid licked her finger and touched the iron’s flat surface before carrying it to the ironing board and setting it on a trivet. “Where’re your real mum and dad?”

“Dead.”

“Both of ’em?”

Mathinna nodded. “I have another father, though. He’s alive, I think. On Flinders.”

“Where’s that?”

She drew a line upward in the air with her finger. “A smaller island. Up north.”

“Ah. That’s where you’re from?”

“Yes. It’s a long way from here. I came on a boat.” Nobody had asked Mathinna these questions. Or any questions, really. Her answers felt strange in her mouth—they made her realize how little she’d told anyone about herself. How little most people wanted to know.

“You’re alone then, aren’t ye?” the maid said. “I mean, there are plenty of people here”—she gestured vaguely around them—“but no one’s really looking out for ye.”

“Well . . . Miss Eleanor.”

“Really?”

No, not really. Mathinna shook her head. She thought for a moment. “Sarah used to, I guess. But one day she stopped coming.”

“From the Cascades?”

Mathinna nodded.

“Hmm. Dark curly hair?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

The maid sighed. “Sarah Stoup. She’s in solitary. Caught drinking.”

“Oh. Does she have to pick tar out of rope?”

“How d’ye know about that?”

“She said it’s a horrid job. A good reason not to murder someone.”

“Well, she didn’t murder anybody. But they need that rope for the ships. They’ll use any excuse to make ye do it.” Plucking a napkin out of a basket at her feet, the maid said, “I could try to get a message to her, if ye want.”

“That’s all right. I don’t really . . . know her.”

The maid smoothed the napkin on the ironing board. “It’s hard being here. I’m from far away too. Across the ocean.”

“Like Miss Eleanor,” Mathinna said, thinking of the globe in the schoolroom, that wide expanse of blue.

She gave a dry laugh. “Miss Eleanor was on a different kind of ship.”

Mathinna liked this maid Hazel. She was the first person she’d met in this place who talked to her like a real person. Nodding at the jumbled linens in the basket, she said, “I could help you fold those.”

“Nah. It’s me job.”

Mathinna sighed. “I’ve finished my schoolwork. There’s nothing else to do.”

“I’ll get in trouble if I let ye.” Hazel pulled a pile of napkins out of the basket. “But . . . maybe later I could teach ye something. Like how to make a poultice. For if ye skin your knee.” She pointed at the bundled dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. “Ye start with mustard. Or rosemary. And grind it up with lard, maybe, or soft onions.”

Mathinna gazed up at the hanging herbs. “How do you know how to do that?”

“My mother taught me. A long time ago.”

“Is she still alive?”

Hazel’s face clouded. She turned back to the linens. “I wouldn’t know.”

To celebrate the advent of spring, it was decided that the Franklins would host a dinner dance in the garden. In a short visit to the schoolroom, Lady Franklin announced that Mathinna’s studies would be suspended while Eleanor taught her to dance. “If she is to attend, she must learn to waltz, and do the Scotch reel, and the cotillion, and the quadrille,” she told Eleanor.

“But we’re memorizing times tables,” Eleanor said. “She’s right in the middle of them.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake. Learning to dance will matter more to her social prospects than times tables, I assure you.”

“You mean your social prospects,” Eleanor said under her breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. What do you think, Mathinna? Would you like to learn to dance?”

“I know how to dance,” Mathinna said.

Eleanor and Lady Franklin looked at each other.