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.
“This is different,” Eleanor said.
For the first few days, Eleanor sat with Mathinna at the table in the schoolroom, mapping steps on a chalkboard, with Xs for each participant and arrows designating where they should go. Then the two of them began practicing together in the yard behind the henhouse. Eleanor was too self-absorbed, not to mention intellectually incurious, to be a particularly inspiring schoolteacher. She plodded from subject to subject as if checking items off a list. But these same traits, as it turned out, made her an excellent dance instructor. Color rose to her cheeks and her eyes sparkled as her every step was admired and emulated. She looked so pretty as she turned! And as soon as she tired of one dance, she could move to another. She was playful and persistent, happy to spend hours demonstrating the moves.
Out in the courtyard one sunny afternoon, Eleanor conscripted a stable boy, two convict maids, two idling buggy drivers, and the butcher to practice with them. Upon learning that the head butler, Mr. Grimm, had taken up the fiddle, she persuaded him to saw a jaunty tune. The air was mild and the atmosphere convivial, and it was thrilling to touch another person’s hand in public without fear of rebuke.
To Mathinna, the dances, with their choreographed footwork, were as logical as mathematics: the careful fitting together of a sequence; a series of movements that, done in the correct order, produced the intended result. Once she mastered them, it was as if her body moved on its own. Soon enough she was helping Eleanor corral the other dancers into their proper places. She loved the pace of the songs that drove them forward: one–two–three–four, one–two–three . . . step-step-step-step, stepstepstep . . .
“She will be ready in time, won’t she?” Lady Franklin asked Eleanor a week before the party.
“She will. She’s learning.”
“Her dancing must be a triumph, Eleanor. Otherwise, what’s the point of including her?”
The big event was four days away, then three, then two. Mathinna watched as a crew of workers erected a large sailcloth tent in the side garden and laid the wooden dance floor. As soon as the tent was up, half a dozen convict maids were enlisted to decorate it, overseen by Lady Franklin, who did not so much as lift a teacup but could spy a misplaced chair or wobbly table leg at five hundred paces.
The music played in Mathinna’s head on a continuous loop. In bed at night she moved her toes—one–two–three–four, one–two–three—and tapped her fingers to the rhythm. She danced instead of walked, held her head a little higher and fluttered her arms in the air as she went about her day. The household staff was friendlier to her than they’d ever been. They smiled when they saw her coming down the corridor, complimented her footwork, quizzed her about the differences between a waltz and quadrille.
Only Mrs. Crain, passing through the courtyard as Mathinna practiced her steps, offered a critique. “Remember that these are formal English dances, Mathinna,” she said with a frown. “You must control your native flourishes.”
The scarlet dress still fit Mathinna around the waist, but it was too short, and the sleeves were tight.
She stood on a stool in the center of the room while Hazel sat on the floor, pinning the skirt around her. “Bloody dark in here,” she muttered. “I can barely see what I’m doing.”
Mathinna looked down at the part of Hazel’s russet hair, the smattering of freckles on her forearms. A round metal pendant around her neck glinted in the weak amber light. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“What?” Hazel touched her throat. “Oh. I forget I have it on. Turn around, I need to pin the back. It belonged to a friend.”
Looking over her shoulder at her, Mathinna said, “Why doesn’t your friend wear it?”
Hazel was silent for a moment. Then she said, “She’s dead. This is all I’ve left of her. Well, except . . .”
“Except what?”
“Oh . . . this and that. A handkerchief.” Pushing Mathinna gently off the stool, Hazel said, “We’re done. Let’s get it off ye and I’ll hem it before I leave.”
As Hazel stood behind her, undoing the buttons, Mathinna said, “I used to wear a necklace that my mother made out of green shells, but Lady Jane took it.”
“Ach. I’m sorry. Shall I steal it back for ye?”
Mathinna shook her head. “You’ll end up in solitary like Sarah Stoup, and I’ll never see you again either.”