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.
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.