The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  On Flinders, Mathinna had often gone to bed hungry. The Palawa had been accustomed to hunting and foraging from the coast to the highlands on Van Diemen’s Land, but the smaller island was largely barren, and the missionaries did not share their food. Here there was plenty to eat, though much of it tasted strange in her mouth. Mutton chops and mushy peas, cold toast that stood upright in a silver server, small white kernels of rice she first mistook for grubs. The Franklins drank bitter herbs steeped in boiling water at every meal, redeemed only by the sugar that Mathinna soon discovered made everything taste better.

  One Sunday afternoon Mathinna was invited to join the Franklins at a luncheon in the dining room for a visiting English bishop and his wife and young daughter. Over cold pheasant pie and calves’ brains in aspic, the bishop asked Mathinna what natives liked to eat. She told him about hunting muttonbirds, how they’d pull the bird out of a hole, snap its neck, and toss it into a fire. She demonstrated how they’d pluck most of the feathers and spit out the rest as they bit into the skin.

  “Mathinna!” Eleanor gasped.

  Sir John chuckled. “She’s quite right, you know. Why consume some birds and not others? Many an explorer has perished from unnecessary scruples about what he’s willing to put in his mouth.”

  The rest of the table was silent. The bishop wore an expression of disgust. Lady Franklin looked aghast. Mathinna was annoyed at herself. For a brief moment she’d forgotten how peculiar these people were. She wished she hadn’t said anything.

  “It’s not true,” she said quickly. “I made it up.”

  After a moment, the bishop laughed. “What a peculiar creature!” he exclaimed, turning to Sir John. “I might believe anything she tells me about her people, so remote is their experience from ours.”

  “Perhaps it’s time for the girls to leave the table,” Lady Franklin said. “Sarah, will you take them outside for some fresh air?”

  Mathinna sighed. Lady Franklin had invited her friends’ children to play with her before, and it rarely went well. They did not seem to know whether to treat Mathinna as an equal, or as a servant, or with a wary, forced politeness, as if she were the pet of an acquaintance you might not trust not to jump or nip.

  When they were in the garden, Mathinna scampered up a blue gum tree, hand over foot, shimmying across its elephant limbs while the bishop’s daughter, Emily, shivered in the cool air below. Peering down at her through the ragged leaves, Mathinna called, “Climb up here with me!”

  “My mama won’t allow it. It’s dangerous,” Emily said, gaping up at Mathinna in her formal clothes.

  Mathinna climbed down. “What do you want to do, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to see my pet possum?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Mama has one of those,” Emily said when Mathinna brought out Waluka. “It’s dead, though. She wears it as a fur around her neck. It still has its tiny black eyes.”

  Mathinna tucked Waluka back in her skirt pocket. It was becoming clear that the things that had made her happy on Flinders were considered childish, impetuous, and strange here. A young lady wasn’t supposed to run around barefoot and half dressed, or shout into the air, or climb to the tops of the trees, or have a possum as a pet. From now on, she would keep Waluka out of sight when strangers were around. She wouldn’t talk about hunting muttonbirds. She would stay quiet about her past.

  That night, in the darkness of her bedroom, she danced with Waluka on her shoulders as she had on the white sand on Flinders, one hand on his small back to keep him steady. Perhaps, as Lady Franklin said, it would be easier if she could let go of Flinders in her mind—forget her people and their way of life. Perhaps it would make living in this strange place easier. Perhaps she would feel less painfully alone.

  Government House, Hobart Town, 1840–1841

  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 i
n 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.

  Government House, Hobart Town, 1841

  Mrs. Wilson was in a foul mood, grousing about the day’s delivery, a random collection of ingredients that even a seasoned cook like herself was hard pressed to turn into dinner. “Turnips and gristle!” She bustled around the small space like a hedgehog in its burrow. “What the good Lord am I expected to do with that?” Rooting around in baskets, she found celery root and a few limp carrots. “Suppose I’ll make a turnip pudding,” she muttered, “and some crackling from this sorry excuse for a roast.”

  Mathinna sat in a corner of the kitchen, as she often did, working on a floral needlepoint of dark green leaves and pink trumpet-shaped flowers. Waluka lay curled around her shoulders, his hot-water-bottle belly against her neck. She watched as Mrs. Wilson gathered ingredients, slapping lard into a cast-iron skillet, shaving bits of fatty meat off the hunk in front of her and tossing them into the pan. A maid came in with Lady Franklin’s tray from lunch, which only exasperated the cook further. “Don’t stand there gawping. Give that here! Move along!” She cleared a space on the crowded table, plunked down the messy tray, and shooed the maid out the door.

  Neither she nor Mathinna noticed that spatters of lard, sloppily thrown toward the skillet, had landed on the coals and ignited a fire. The room filled with smoke.

  Mrs. Wilson let out a cry and flapped her arms. “Don’t just sit there, child. Help me!”

  Mathinna leapt to her feet. A spear of flame had jumped from the hearth to the wall and now lapped at a hand towel hanging to dry. She started to ladle water out of the barrel, then, realizing it was taking too long, grabbed a pile of dishtowels and dumped them into the water. She handed the dripping towels one by one to Mrs. Wilson, who used them to bat at the flames. When the towels ran out, Mathinna scooped water from the barrel with a small bowl and flung it toward the hearth. It was several minutes before the two of them, working feverishly, were able to extinguish the fire.

  When it was finally out, they stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, surrounded by clumps of soggy towels, surveying the now-even-blacker wall above the fireplace. Mrs. Wilson sighed, patting her bosom. “Good thinking, you. It’s lucky I have a kitchen left to cook in.”

  Mathinna helped her clean up the mess. They dumped the wet towels in the sink, mopped the floor in front of the hearth, and cleared the table. When they were finished, Mrs. Wilson said, “Now where did that creature of yours get off to?”

  Instinctively Mathinna reached up to her neck, but of course Waluka wasn’t there. He must’ve slid away when she sprang to her feet, but she had no memory of it. She looked in the rush basket, under the old wooden cupboard, behind the breakfront where the bowls were kept.

  “Hiding in a corner, no doubt,” Mrs. Wilson assured her.

  But he wasn’t.

  Mathinna felt a sudden coldness—a sickening alarm. Waluka didn’t stray. He was afraid of everything. But the fire . . . the tumult . . . Her gaze drifted toward the doorway, which Mrs. Wilson had thrown wide when the room filled with smoke. She could make out something . . . something in the courtyard.

  She moved as if in a trance through the doorway and out into the cold air. As she got closer, stumbling over the cobblestones, her eyes fixed on the small white lump.

  Matted fur, a trickle of red.

  No . . .

  When she reached it, she collapsed on her knees. She touched the soft body, slick with something viscous. It was broken and bloody, its eyes dull, half open.


  She heard a low growl, and then a shout: “Move away!” She looked up, her vision murky with tears. Montagu’s dog was charging toward her, nose down, trailing a chain that clanged along the cobbles, Montagu waving madly behind it. “Bloody hell, get away from that thing or Jip will eat you too!”

  Mathinna lifted the small possum, cradling him in both hands. He was still warm. “Waluka, Waluka,” she keened, rocking back and forth. When the dog bounded up, snarling, she staggered to her feet and lunged at it, baring her own teeth. A guttural howl traveled up through her body until she vibrated with it. She howled until the dog backed away and the convict maids dropped their baskets; until Mrs. Crain burst through the servants’ door of the main house and Mrs. Wilson came running across the courtyard; until even Lady Franklin emerged on the balcony above the green drawing room, with a look of mild annoyance, to see what all the fuss was about.

  For months, Mathinna felt the ghost of Waluka’s presence. The weight of his body on her shoulders, his soft, warm belly and shallow breath against her neck. The tap of his paws on her skin when he ran up the length of one arm and down the other. The bony ridge of his spine as he lay next to her in bed. The possum had been her only remaining link to Flinders—his beating heart linking her to her mother, her father, Palle, the elders around the fire. And now that heart was still.

  So many losses piled up, one on top of the other, each tamping down the last. Her chest heavy with the weight of them.

  “Maybe it was for the best,” Lady Franklin told her. “A wild animal like that isn’t meant to be domesticated.”

  Well, maybe Lady Jane was right. Maybe it was for the best. Without him, perhaps she could finally leave Flinders behind, tuck away her few remaining memories and embrace her role as the girl in the portrait in the red satin dress. It would be a relief, she thought, to let it go. She’d become accustomed to stiff shoes; she ate aspic without complaint. She conversed in French and kept track of dates on a calendar. She was tired of feeling as if she lived between worlds. This was the world she lived in now.