The dowager arched an eyebrow. “That remains to be seen.”

When Sir John was distracted by a pile of cakes, Mathinna slipped away and wandered through the crowd. Someone handed her a small goblet filled with a golden liquid, and she took it with her as she made her way toward the far corner of the tent, near the dance floor, where the musicians were setting up their instruments: a small piano, an accordion, a fiddle, a harp, a wide shallow drum. Watching them warm up, chatting among themselves with easy familiarity, she felt an aching loneliness.

As she took a sip from the glass, her throat filled with molten fire. After a moment the heat subsided, leaving a sweet, warm taste in her mouth. She took another sip. Then drained the glass.

“Are you ready, ma fille?” Sir John said, bowing to the ground in a showy display of formality. Lightly he took Mathinna’s hand in his white-gloved one for the Grand March. Partygoers began flocking to the dance floor two by two, falling in line behind Sir John and Mathinna like Noah’s animals as they circled the large wooden dance floor, the ladies as colorful and fragrant as freesia, the men as sleekly tailored as pigeons.

Mathinna put her shoulders back and her chin up. Here she was, the girl in the portrait in her red satin dress.

The first dance was a quadrille, one of her favorites. Following Sir John’s lead, she executed each move fluidly, her footwork light and precise as she glided around the floor. One–two–three–four, one–two–three, stepstep-stepstep, stepstepstep. But the joy she’d felt in mastering the dance was gone. At the round tables just beyond the perimeter, people chattered behind their fans, exclaiming and pointing, but she ignored them. (She was two-dimensional, after all. Impervious to stares and whispers.) Circling her, Sir John whispered, “You are making quite an impression, my dear. You know that, don’t you? Twirl! Show them what a lady you’ve become.”

Taking small steps in time to the music, the girl in the portrait turned, the scarlet skirt billowing around her. As she and the three other ladies in her group came together in the middle, it meant nothing to her that two of them only pretended to touch her hands.

Between dances—as was the custom—accompanied by a jaunty piano tune, Sir John and Mathinna made a show of visiting the other dancers, pantomiming conversation and laughter. She widened her eyes and stuck her chin even higher in the air, imitating Lady Franklin’s obsequiousness when dignitaries from London came to stay. Sir John, who seemed to recognize the mimicry, observed her with bemused delight.

After a few dances, his face became alarmingly flushed. He kept blotting his forehead with a handkerchief, attempting to stanch the sweat that trickled down his neck, dampening his collar. Eleanor, dancing beside them, looked concerned. At the end of a quadrille, she took her father’s hand. “Let’s rest, shall we?”

“I’m fine, daughter dear!” he protested as she guided him to an empty table. “I don’t want to foil your chances with that eligible bachelor.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Dr. Dunne may be handsome, but he’s a bit of a bore. He keeps going on about convicts’ rights.”

“Then, by all means, use me as an excuse to evade him.” Sir John sank into a chair. “Tell your mother you forced me off the dance floor.”

“Stepmother. And she should thank me,” Eleanor said tartly. “At least someone is looking out for you.”

Mathinna, partnerless now, stood beside a wooden tent pole watching Noah’s animals line up for the Scotch reel. Spying another goblet of that golden liquid on a silver tray, she took a sip, then swallowed it quickly, feeling the heat slide down her throat all the way to her stomach.

The music began with a merry fiddle. The women turned, their skirts flouncing up as they circled their partners. As the tune grew louder and more insistent, the women clapped in time to the fiddle while the men hopped in the air, snapping white-gloved fingers. Watching the pale-skinned, pastel-hued partygoers from a distance, Mathinna saw something clearly for the first time, as if through a lifting fog. Yes, she could pose as the girl in the portrait, wearing a pretty satin dress and ribbons in her hair; she could master the steps to the quadrille and the cotillion and the Scotch reel; she could speak English and French and curtsy like a princess. But none of it would be enough. She could never be one of them, even if she wanted to. She would never belong in this place.

Well, maybe she didn’t want to belong.

Her head felt fuzzy, as if she’d been spinning in a circle and stopped to catch her breath.

Slowly, slowly, she began to sway from side to side. She felt the music seep through her soles, the percussive snap of the fiddle like the beat of a drum. Her feet moved lightly under her dress, her small steps mimicking the dancers’ exaggerated ones. She felt the rhythm inside her gathering force, rising from her toes to her thighs to her gut to her shoulders and up through her arms to the tips of her fingers. Closing her eyes, she felt the warmth of a long-ago campfire on her legs, saw the orange glow of it through her lids. Heard Palle brush his hand across a drum skin and begin to shush out the rhythm as the Palawa elders chanted to the tempo and a spray of muttonbirds rose into the sky.

Moving faster now, Mathinna arched her back, responding to the music with her entire body. She remembered things she thought she had forgotten: Droemerdene leaping and turning through the night sky, Moinee dancing across the land, down toward the ground and up to the stars, rocking and swaying, hunching and whirling. An ecstasy of movement, an obliteration of sadness. A celebration of life, hers and all of theirs: her mother’s, her father’s, Palle’s, Waluka’s, those of the elders she didn’t remember and the sister she’d never met . . .

The music dwindled, then stopped.

Mathinna opened her eyes.

The entire party, it seemed, was staring at her. As her senses sharpened, she heard the tinkle of silver on china. A shrill laugh. Ladies huddled in groups, whispering behind fans. Eleanor stood alone, her face a rictus of disbelief.

Mathinna smelled rose water, and under it the tang of vinegar. The strong perfume of the golden wattle. The raisiny whiff of liquor on her own breath.

Lady Franklin was marching toward her, a smile frozen on her face, spots of red high on her cheeks, like a painted doll. Coming to a halt, she leaned down and hissed, “What—on earth—was that?”

Mathinna looked into her eyes. “I was dancing.”

“Are you trying to humiliate us?”

“No,” she said.

“You are clearly intoxicated. And have . . . I don’t know”—Lady Franklin was so close that Mathinna could feel her vibrating with rage—“reverted to your natural savage state.”

“Perhaps, my dear,” Sir John said, coming up behind his wife, “it’s best to let the wretched girl be.”

Mathinna looked at Lady Franklin, with her wattlebird neck and red-rimmed eyes, and Sir John, moist and disheveled in his too-tight tuxedo. The two of them seemed like strangers to her, both terrifying and grotesque. She blinked swiftly to keep from crying. “Peut-être,” she said.

Lady Franklin sighed. She raised her fan, motioning for Mrs. Crain. “Tell the band to begin again, and take this girl to her room,” she told the scowling housekeeper. “The sooner we forget this unfortunate incident, the better.”

Government House, Hobart Town, 1841–1842

But nobody forgot.

Almost imperceptibly, at first, things were different. The next morning Sir John did not summon Mathinna for his morning constitutional. From the schoolroom window, she watched him stroll through the gardens, his hands behind his back and head down, Eleanor by his side.

The tea-drinking ladies came and went; Mathinna was not asked to join them in the parlor. Eleanor left for a six-week trip to Sydney without saying goodbye.

Mrs. Crain informed Mathinna that from now on, especially with Eleanor away, she would no longer be served breakfast in the nursery but would instead take all her meals in the kitchen outbuilding with the cook.

“I hear ye caused quite a scandal,” Mrs. Wilson said to Mathinna as she ladled cooked oats into a bowl. “Dancing like a primitive, were ye?” She looked around to be sure no one else was listening, then whispered, “Well, I think it’s grand. They thought they’d mold ye in their likeness, didn’t they, with a few French lessons and some fancy petticoats. But ye are who ye are. They can build their fancy houses and import their china teacups and dress in silks from London, but they don’t really belong here, and deep down they know it. They don’t understand a damn thing about this place, or you. And they never will.”