One day Mathinna awoke to find that Sir John and Lady Franklin had departed for a holiday in the riverside town of Launceston, a two-day journey, and that she would be staying at Government House in the care of a houseguest, a Mr. Hogsmead, from Sussex.

Mr. Hogsmead was imposingly tall, reed-thin, wore a pince-nez, and appeared to have little interest in anybody other than one particularly buxom convict maid named Eliza, whom the entire household observed coming and going from his chambers at all hours of the day and night.

With the Franklins gone, there was little for the staff to do. When Mrs. Wilson discovered a group of convict maids lolling on barrels and gossiping in the courtyard, she directed them to remove every last pot and ladle from the shelves and scrub the kitchen with lye and vinegar. The stable boys washed out the horse stalls and scoured the carriages; the maids aired linens and polished candlesticks to a gleam.

Without a routine or schoolwork, Mathinna existed in a strange purgatory. She wandered the property, forlorn and forgotten. Nobody seemed to realize that she was alone—or if they did, they didn’t give it much thought. She lingered in the kitchen with Mrs. Wilson, hung upside-down from a branch of the gum tree in the far corner of the garden, played with Eleanor’s collection of marionettes. She ate when she felt like it, which wasn’t often. She didn’t bathe. Sometimes she visited the cockatoo, desolate in its cage, squawking its mournful refrain. Kee-ow, kee-ow.

At night in her bedroom, dark as a tomb, Mathinna listened to the rustling of the trees outside her boarded-up window and the creaky lament of the gray galah birds, and curled into a ball, trying to evade the loneliness that crept under the covers and nestled in beside her. After a few days she took to sleeping in Eleanor’s room, with its tall windows overlooking the garden. Eleanor would be horrified if she knew, but she didn’t, did she? Each morning Mathinna slept in longer; it became harder and harder to pull herself out of bed. When she did emerge, in late morning, she spent hours on the upholstered window seat, staring out at the weepy fronds of the blue gums, listening to the warble of the magpies.

Perhaps Lady Franklin had been right—a view of the outdoors did make her melancholy.

No. She was melancholy already.

One rainy afternoon, Mathinna slipped into Lady Franklin’s curio room and gazed at her father’s ochre-and-red patterned spear and the skulls gleaming white in the gloom. Her mother’s shell necklaces pinned to a board behind glass. The portrait Mr. Bock had painted of her in the red satin dress. In the entire time she’d been with the Franklins she had never seen another brown-skinned person. She looked down at the backs of her hands and turned them over to look at her palms. She thought about the tea-drinking ladies and their prurient questions. The dance-party guests and their horrified stares. Why wasn’t it obvious before? She was just another piece of the Franklins’ eccentric collection, alongside the boiled skulls and taxidermied snakes and wombats.

A marionette in a pretty dress. A cockatoo in a gilded cage.

In the courtyard she unlatched the door to the wire cage and reached inside. Despite her aversion to it, she felt a strange kinship with the poor creature—separated from its own kind, at the mercy of people who didn’t even try to understand it. When she lifted it out, it was as bulky and lightweight as a hen. Its ashy feathers were silky soft. The bird allowed her to carry it to the trees just beyond the garden and set it on a branch, where it stared at her with its head tilted, seemingly confused. What are you doing with me? Kee-ow.

She turned and went back to the house.

Several hours later, when she returned, the cockatoo was gone. She wondered whether it had flown into town or into the bush, and whether it would ever come back. She wondered what would happen if she tried to leave, herself. Would anyone even notice? Maybe not.

But where would she go?

Early morning. She winced into the light. Thick-headed, ears clogged and aching, throat so sore it was hard to swallow. She lay in bed all day, floating in and out of sleep, feeling like a muttonbird burrowed in a hole. Sunlight thinned and faded as she stared at the pink-flowered canopy above her head. Her throat was parched but she had no water. She felt hollowed out with hunger, but too weak to move. After a while she dozed off again, waking in a fever in the dark and tossing off her blankets before drifting back to sleep.

When she woke she was shivering, her teeth chattering. Daylight, gray this time. Rain pattering the mullioned windows. She thought of Flinders, of how the rain thrummed the roofs of the cottages. The smell of sweet grass through the open doorway, babies swaddled in wallaby skins, her mother singing, her father puffing on his pipe, blowing smoke into the gloom. Her memories drifted, changing shape. Now she was running, running through the wallaby grass on a brilliantly sunny day, up the hill to the spiny ridge, her face tilted to the sky, the sun warm on her eyelids . . .

A faint knock at the door. A voice. “Mathinna? Are ye in there?”

She opened her eyes, closed them. Too bright. Lemony. Midmorning, perhaps. Yes. She cleared her throat. Croaked, “Yes.”

The door opened. “Good lord,” Hazel said. “I knew something was wrong.”

Hazel brought Mathinna lamb broth, tea made from sassafras leaves, and a paste made of ground fenugreek seeds for her phlegmy cough. She made her gargle with salt water. She brought a pot filled with lukewarm water that she dipped towels into before wringing them out and placing them on Mathinna’s forehead and chest to cool the fever.

Feeling a trickle of water down her cheek, Mathinna opened her eyes. She looked up into Hazel’s face: the smattering of orange freckles, ginger lashes, her clear gray eyes.

“Mrs. Crain sent us back to the Cascades,” Hazel told her. “She said we’re not needed while the Franklins are away. But I knew I should come back. I had a feeling.” Leaning closer, she tucked in the blanket. The disk she wore around her neck swayed against Mathinna’s cheek.

Mathinna reached up and touched it.

“Is it bothering ye?”

“I don’t mind. I was trying to see what’s written on it.”

Hazel held it out. “It’s a number. One seventy-one. They made us wear these on the ship. So if any of us went missing, they’d know it.”

Mathinna nodded. “Did your friend go missing?”

“Well, she went overboard. So I guess she did.” Hazel removed the spongy cloth from Mathinna’s forehead and put her hand where it had been. “Fever’s down. Shut your eyes.” Draping another cloth on her forehead, she gave Mathinna a long look. “I’ll tell ye a secret. Just before she died, my friend had a baby. A girl. Ruby. She’s mine now. They’ve taken her to the Queen’s Orphan School, but I’ll get her back when I earn my ticket of leave.” She traced the blunted edge of the disk with her finger. “It’s a bad place, that orphanage.”

“I know,” Mathinna said. “My sister died there.”

“Did she?” Hazel gave a long sigh. “I’m sorry.”

“It was before I was born.”

Hazel shook her head slowly. “Ruby has to survive. I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t.”

After Hazel left the room, Mathinna closed her eyes. She thought of all the people she’d lost. The sister she never knew and her long-dead parents. Her stepfather, Palle, standing on the ridge on Flinders as she sailed away. Did he think of her? Did he worry? She wished she could let him know that she was all right, but she had no way to reach him. And besides, she didn’t know that she was.

Government House, Hobart Town, 1842

Mathinna was sitting in the kitchen outbuilding one morning, a week after the Franklins returned from Launceston, practicing times tables on a slate, when Mrs. Crain appeared in the doorway. “Good morning, Mathinna. Lady Franklin requests your presence in the red drawing room.”

She looked up, heart thumping in her chest. Lady Franklin had not requested her presence since the dinner dance. “What does she want with me?”

Mrs. Crain pursed her lips. “She did not say. And it is not for you to inquire.” She would not meet Mathinna’s eyes.

The brocaded draperies in the drawing room were closed. The oil lamps cast strange shadows. Mathinna had to squint to make out the figure of Sir John, standing at the bookcase with his back turned, hands clasped behind him, motionless as a gargoyle. Lady Franklin sat in a chair, a book of maps open in her lap.

“Come in, come in. Mrs. Crain, you may stay. This won’t take long.” She motioned Mathinna forward with an impatient flutter of her fingers. Closing the atlas, she said, “How are you, then? Well enough?”

The question allowed only one response. “Yes, Lady Franklin.”

“How do you occupy yourself these days?”

“She was studying mathematics when I found her, madam,” Mrs. Crain reported.

“Ah. Good for you, Mathinna. I wouldn’t have expected that, in Eleanor’s absence.”