The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  He smiled. “So the brain can grow. Don’t worry. It will close.”

  “So the brain can grow. How could I not have known?” she marveled.

  And thought of all the things she had not known.

  It was early in the evening in the surgeon’s quarters. The baby was swaddled in a blanket, tucked into the curve of Evangeline’s arm. The surgeon was in the infirmary, attending a sailor with influenza. Hazel sat in a chair with his volume of The Tempest, mouthing words to herself.

  Evangeline pointed at the book. “Where are you?”

  “‘This rough magic I here ab-abjure, and, when I have . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “‘Required.’ Q-U is like K-W.”

  Hazel nodded. “Re-KW-ired. ‘Required some heav-en-ly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses . . .’”

  “‘That this airy charm is for.’”

  “It’s bloody hard,” Hazel said. “‘Ye taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.’”

  Evangeline smiled. “Well done.”

  Hazel closed the book. “How d’ye feel?”

  “Sore. And it’s so hot. This room is stifling.”

  “It’s always hot these days. Even after the rain.”

  Evangeline lay back against her pillow. Tossed her head from side to side. “I must get some air.” She glanced down at the sleeping infant. “Before she wakes.”

  “You want to go up the ladder now?” Hazel frowned. “The deck will be slippery. And it’s dark.”

  “Just for a minute.”

  Hazel put down the book. “I’ll come with ye, then.”

  “No, stay with her. Please.”

  “But ye’ve just—”

  “I’ll be careful, I promise. I don’t want her to be alone.” Evangeline swung her legs over the side of the bed, and Hazel helped her to stand. Suddenly lightheaded, she swayed back against the bed.

  Hazel eyed her. “This is not a good idea.”

  “Hazel, please. ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails.’”

  Hazel rolled her eyes. “‘You cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense.’”

  “Oh!” Evangeline said, clasping her hand. “You’re my best student.”

  “Well, you’re my best teacher. My only teacher, truth be told.” She smiled that vulpine smile.

  Evangeline smiled back. “Look after my daughter while I’m gone, will you?”

  “She’s sleeping. She’ll be fine. Hurry back.”

  Evangeline’s belly was loose under her gown, her bare feet unsteady. She climbed the ladder slowly, stopping to catch her breath with each rung. At the top she paused, her heart beating in her ears, gazing up into the velvet darkness at a thin disk of moon. Though the sky was clear, the air still smelled of rain. Taking a breath, she crossed the sea-slick deck to the railing. Inky water roiled beneath the ship, glittering in the moonlight. She looked out at the whole beautiful expanse of the sea.

  Hearing a noise behind her, she turned.

  A figure was sprinting toward her. A man. In the dim light she could see his sandy hair and bare arms, the sharp angle of his jaw. And then he was on her, his hands on her shoulders.

  Buck.

  “No,” she gasped. “What are you—”

  He pushed her against the railing. “You’ll pay.”

  She smelled him, alcohol and perspiration. Felt his breath on her neck. He slammed her against the railing again with such force that the brass nails jutted into her back and she felt her legs buckle, her feet slip out from under her. And then he was lifting her up, up, to the top of the rail, the ropy muscles of his arms taut around her back. “No—no! What are you—”

  “Stop!” a woman shrieked. It was Hazel. “Stop!”

  For a moment Evangeline hovered on the hard wood of the railing. Then Buck let go, and the world tilted. She screamed as she fell backward through the darkness. Her baby lay swaddled in the surgeon’s room, and here she was, falling, falling through the air. Her mind refused to believe it. This couldn’t be happening. It made no sense.

  The water hit her shoulder first, a hard slap, a shock of pain. She moved her legs instinctively, though they were tangled in her gown and she didn’t know what she was doing. I don’t know how to swim, she thought; I don’t know how to stay afloat.

  Her daughter on the birthing bed, alone.

  I left my baby lying here to go and gather blueberries . . .

  She was sinking. Sinking. Slowly at first, and then her chin was underwater. Her lips. Her nose, her eyes. She strained to see in the grainy darkness, eyes stinging from the salt. Frantically she moved her arms, struggling in her gown, eyes wide open as she tried to fight her way toward the surface, toward the light. But she was falling, still, suspended in space. Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! Her gown rose up, filmy as a handkerchief . . . Cecil’s white handkerchief; lion, serpent, crown . . . And she was fair as is the rose in May. . . . All lost, lost. The ruby ring. The handkerchief. The tin ticket on the red cord.

  In the dim recesses of her mind she remembered something she’d once read about the act of drowning—that the terror was in resisting, in refusing to accept. Once you let go, it wasn’t so hard; you just sank into the water, cool and obliterating.

  By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

  She closed her eyes. Pushing away the terror, she withdrew deeper into herself. Here she was now in the foyer of the vicarage in Tunbridge Wells, grabbing her bonnet from the peg, opening the heavy front door and stepping out onto the stone stoop, pulling the door closed behind her. Setting off on the footpath, a straw basket over her arm. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light . . . She meandered past the privet hedge tangled with roses, that old willow shushing in the wind. Heard the chimes of a church bell, a woodpecker knocking on a tree, a barking dog. Before long, she’d cross the stone bridge over the stream that led to the mountain trail, with its craggy rocks and sour-sweet grass, its grazing sheep and purple thistles. Her favorite place on earth, just around the bend.

  Mathinna

  The last Aborigines were caught about a fortnight ago, and sent to Flinders Island, so that our little native girl is the only one remaining here. She is improving I think, though it will be a long time before she becomes quite civilised.

  —Diary of Eleanor Franklin, 1840; daughter of Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, 1837–1843

  Government House, Hobart Town, 1840

  Tall, slope-shouldered, with a broad forehead, translucent eyelashes, and yellow hair, Eleanor Franklin was, indeed, rather plain. She was also the first person Mathinna had met on Van Diemen’s Land who seemed utterly nonchalant about her presence. “Oh. Hullo. They’re hard boiled,” she said by way of introduction, waving her hand wearily toward a bowl of eggs when Sarah introduced Mathinna to her in the nursery the morning after she arrived. “I despise hard boiled.”

  As they ate, they could hear the housekeeper, Mrs. Crain, speaking in a low whisper with an elderly woman—Miss Williamson, a governess who’d come with the family from England. “It was quite enough to try this experiment once, with that incorrigible boy,” the governess huffed. “To expect me to attempt to educate another savage is too much to ask.”

  “It is Lady Franklin’s request, not mine,” Mrs. Crain said. “You may take it up with her, if you wish.”

  Eleanor looked up. “I could tutor the girl. Might as well put my French to good use, since I’m not doing anything else with it. This place is so dull.”

  And so it was that for three hours a day, three days a week, Mathinna and Eleanor met in the schoolroom after breakfast. Eleanor treated Mathinna the same way she treated her dog, Sandy: with a mild, lukewarm affection. What she lacked in smarts, Eleanor made up in effort; she dutifully taught Mathinna to add and subt
ract and spell. One week she devised a lesson on architecture. She showed her pictures of Gothic design, with its thrilling gargoyles and grotesques, and classical, with its emphasis on proportion and harmony. The fashion in Hobart Town was for boring Georgian, she said, all tiled roofs and sandstone exteriors. Like Government House, the building they were in.

  Eleanor explained how the calendar worked, days turning into weeks into months into years, and though Mathinna paid attention, she didn’t much see the point. The schoolteacher on Flinders had kept a date book open on his desk in which he jotted precise notes about the seasons, particularities of the weather, and his perambulations around the island, but the Palawa elders scoffed at such recordkeeping. Didn’t these colonists know that time doesn’t move in a line from past to present but instead is continuous? That spirits and humans, animals and plants, are connected by the land, which binds ancestors to descendants in an eternal moment? Mathinna started to explain this, as best she could remember, but Eleanor’s eyes got a faraway, glazed look and she picked at her fingernails until Mathinna stopped talking.

  More successful was the study of French. They practiced with Eleanor’s collection of marionettes. After several weeks, their puppets—a blond princess in a powder-blue ball gown and a tiara, and a mountain maid wearing a dirndl—were conversing:

  Bonjour, comment vous appelez-vous?

  Bonjour, madame, je m’appelle Mathinna.

  Enchanté de fair votre connaissance.

  Merci, madame. Je suis enchanté également.

  Mathinna grew to love the melody of the language. It seemed to her logical and beautiful—much nicer than English, pocked as it was with maddening contradictions and inelegant phrasings. Though she did like a play that started on a Scottish heath with witches around a cauldron and featured a royal couple who reminded her ever so slightly of Lady Franklin and Sir John. And another about a shipwreck on a remote island that Eleanor decided they should read aloud.

  “‘But thy vile race,’” Eleanor intoned, in character as Miranda, “‘Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with. Therefore wast thou / Deservedly confined into this rock, / Who hadst deserved more than a prison.’” And Mathinna-as-Caliban responded, “‘As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.’”

  Spinning a wooden sphere, Eleanor identified the seven continents and five oceans. “Here,” she said, putting her finger on a kangaroo-like shape in the northern hemisphere on the other side of the globe from Van Diemen’s Land. “This is where I was born.” She tapped London, and Paris, and Rome—all the important cities, she said—and ran her finger down the spiky coastline to the bottom of Africa, and across a wide blue expanse. “And this is the route we took to get to this godforsaken place. We spent four months at sea!”

  Mathinna touched the heart-shaped mass of Van Diemen’s Land. She traced her own reverse journey with her finger, as she’d done on the captain’s map, up the right side of the island to the tiny speck where she was born. On the captain’s map, Van Diemen’s Land had been huge and Flinders Island small. On this globe, it was merely a rock in the ocean, too slight and insignificant to have a name. It was as if the place she loved, and the people on it, had been erased. No one even knew they existed.

  In this strange new place Waluka clung to Mathinna. His own fear raised in her a protectiveness that calmed her. He spent most of the day sleeping in a wide pocket of her pinafore, but climbed out now and then to make his way up to her neck, where he nestled against her, nuzzling her with his wet nose. In the evenings she was expected to put him in a cage that was brought to her room for that purpose, but after shutting the door and blowing out the candle, she unlatched the cage and let Waluka run across the floor to the bed.

  She spent as little time as possible in her bedroom, with its boarded-up window and looming candle-made shadows. On mild days, when she wasn’t with Eleanor in the schoolroom, she rambled around the cobbled courtyard with Waluka in her pocket, watching the stablemen brush and feed the horses, scratching the backs of the hogs in the piggery and listening to the gossip between the convict maids as they scrubbed laundry and hung it on the clothesline behind the house.

  It was generally agreed that Lady Franklin possessed the brains and the ambition to rule this unruly colony, while Sir John, with his knighthood, provided the status. The maids spoke of him with a kind of benevolent contempt. In their eyes, Sir John was a foolish man, constantly getting himself into trouble and barely getting himself out. They recounted endless stories about his haplessness, such as the time he’d charged out of the house shouting for the carriage with his face half shaved and half lathered. They scoffed at how he combed his few remaining strands of hair across the top of his head. They tittered at how comical he appeared on horseback, with his stomach bulging over his trousers, the buttons on his waistcoat straining at the seams.

  Sir John had achieved fame as an explorer, but each voyage he’d led was more calamitous than the last. There was one expedition to northern Canada that ended in survivors eating their own boots and possibly each other, and another to the Arctic Circle that grew increasingly dire before the remaining few gave up and fled back to England. Only after a vigorous marketing campaign by Lady Franklin was he rewarded with a knighthood for these failed attempts.

  Lady Franklin’s treatment of Eleanor was another source of amusement. Eleanor was the product of Sir John’s first marriage to a woman who’d died tragically young; Lady Franklin, who had no children of her own, tolerated her with barely concealed impatience. When she couldn’t avoid Eleanor, she poked at her with criticism masquerading as concern. “Are you quite well? You’re frightfully pale.” “Dear girl, that dress is so unflattering! I must have a word with the seamstress.”

  Mathinna saw this for herself one day when she and Eleanor passed Lady Franklin in the corridor. “Posture, Eleanor,” Lady Franklin said, barely breaking stride. “You don’t want to be mistaken for a scullery maid.”

  Eleanor looked as if she’d been splashed in the face with water. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. But when Lady Franklin disappeared around the corner, she slumped comically, tucking her arms into wings and crouching into a penguin’s waddle, making Mathinna giggle.

  Lady Franklin had little time for Mathinna, preoccupied as she was with entertaining dignitaries, writing in her journal, taking picnics up Mount Wellington on daylong expeditions, and departing on overnight trips with Sir John. But a few times a month she invited a group of ladies, wives of merchants and government officials, to drink tea and eat cake in the red-paneled drawing room, and on these occasions she summoned Mathinna to show off her newly acquired French and good manners.

  “What would you like to say to these ladies, Mathinna?”

  She curtsied dutifully. “Je suis extrêmement heureux de vous rencontrer tous.”

  “As you can see, the girl has made remarkable progress,” Lady Franklin said.

  “Or is a clever mimic, at least,” one of the ladies said behind her fan.

  The ladies asked lots of questions. They wanted to know if Mathinna had ever worn proper clothing before coming to Hobart Town. If she ate snakes and spiders. If her father had many wives, if she’d grown up in a hut, if she believed in the occult. They marveled at her brown skin, turning her hands over to inspect her palms. They patted her spongy dark hair and peered inside her mouth to confirm the pinkness of her gums.

  Mathinna grew to dread these afternoons in the drawing room. She disliked being pawed over and whispered about. Sometimes she wished she were white, or invisible, just to avoid the stares and whispers, the rude, patronizing questions.

  When they tired of her, Mathinna sat in a corner playing patience, a game of solitaire that Eleanor had taught her. As she squared and fanned her cards, she listened to the ladies commiserate about the inconvenience of living so far from civilization. They complained about how they couldn’t get the supplies t
hey wanted—Leghorn bonnets from Tuscany and opera-length kid gloves, mahogany bed frames and glass chandeliers, champagne and foie gras. They bemoaned the lack of skilled artisans. The impossibility of finding good help. The dearth of amusements, like opera and theater. “Good theater,” Lady Franklin clarified. “You can attend an atrocious production in Hobart Town every day of the week.” They fretted about their skin: how it burned and dried out, blistered and freckled, how vulnerable it was to rashes and insect bites.

  So many odd customs these ladies had! They stuffed themselves into elaborate costumes: corsets with whalebone stays, hats with bows and ribbons, impractical shoes with pointy heels that disintegrated in the mud and dirt. They ate extravagant meals that upset their stomachs and made them fat. They appeared to exist in a perpetual state of discontent, constantly comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in London and Paris and Milan. Why did they stay here, Mathinna wondered, if they disliked it so much?

  On Monday mornings, like clockwork, a black carriage arrived at Government House carrying John Montagu, the Colonial Secretary, and his dog. A balding man with a perpetually smug expression, Montagu wore a double-breasted jacket over a tight-fitting waistcoat, a high-collared shirt, and a floppy black tie. His dog, a muscular beast with an attenuated snout and short, floppy ears, was unfriendly to everyone except its master, who seemed to delight in its twitchy aggression. “Jip can overpower a kangaroo in four paces,” Montagu would brag to anyone who’d listen. It was rumored that he brought the dog with him to Government House to impress, or possibly intimidate, Sir John, with whom he had a simmering rivalry.

  During the hour that the two men met each week, the dog roamed the courtyard. One Monday a convict maid, hanging laundry in the yard, was attacked by the dog. It grabbed her skirt and yanked her to the ground, breaking her arm. “It’s a pity,” Montagu said when he learned of it. “But I did warn those prison wenches to stay out of Jip’s way.”