Lady Jane was encouraged by the letter.
‘Wisely,’ she told Mrs Lord, a common and vulgar woman said to have used her charms to advance to her position as first lady of the free settlers, ‘we removed her from the pernicious influence of the dying elements of her race, then introduced her to the most modern education an Englishwoman can receive. And,’ she could not stop herself adding, ‘the results are surprising all.’
But when Towterer failed to come to her or even reply—not after her first or second or even third letter—Mathinna’s passion for writing began to fade and she was reminded of how much her feet hurt. And when she discovered her letters stashed in a pale wooden box beneath a skull, she felt not the pain of a deceit for which she had no template, but the melancholy of disillusionment. Writing and reading, she realised, did not exist magically beyond people, but were simply another part of them.
Thereafter she contemplated the lessons of the Widow Munro as she did the thrashings she routinely received at her hand—like being caught in a storm: better avoided, but beyond judgement or anguish. And she seemed to find in her endless punishments cause only for learning something deeper and darker than the grammatical constructions and theological precepts to which she had become utterly oblivious, and her success at which she was now uncaring. One day, she set down her sampler, the bare trunk of the tree of knowledge, took off her court shoes, and walked outside.
Lady Jane discovered Mathinna playing barefoot in the garden with a sulphur-crested cockatoo she had caught and tamed. This would have been punishable but excusable. Her crime paled when compared to that of the Widow Munro, who was found open-mouthed and foul-gummed drinking gin and sugar in the kitchen with the cook.
The search for a tutor began again and turned up several short-lived successors. There was the one-time poisoner Joseph Pinguid. He arrived in a rattly trap on which a wicker chair was improbably secured by old rope, and on top of which he—a plump, red-whiskered man in ragged Wellington boots several sizes too large—was even more impossibly perched. He was undone by the same contrivance: mounting his trap to depart Government House after the first day’s lessons, an oversized Wellington slipped, he seized the chair to keep balance and the chair broke free of the tray. As old wicker and new tutor fell heavily to the ground, there tumbled out of Joseph Pinguid’s overstuffed devil-skin satchel a silver platter bearing the Franklin crest.
There followed Karl Grolz, a Viennese music master, whose abilities were limited to the viola, and then the machine breaker Peter Hay, whose Owenite thinking and endless references to Fourier and Saint-Simon revealed him as one whose thinking was possibly limited by nothing. All went quickly; none made much of an impression, except to further tarnish a project that was already regarded by much of Van Diemonian society with disdain, if not outright contempt. Had not Mrs Lord asked if Mathinna was to be Lady Jane’s pageboy?
‘As though the child were a Gibraltar monkey,’ raged Lady Jane to her husband. ‘Just some exotic ornament to our vanity.’
Abandoning any hope of finding what she sought in Van Diemen’s Land, Lady Jane, through an acquaintance in New South Wales, secured a new tutor from Sydney, who arrived by boat on a hot March morning two months later. Mr Francis Lazaretto was six feet four, a long, lean man with a shock of white hair that bristled over his angular face like a distemper brush. He wore a coat that may once have been dashing but was now as weary as he, patched with bits of grubby flannel. He was a man so funereal in appearance that Sir John found himself calling for a glass of brandy to help him recover after their first meeting, an act out of keeping with both his character and the early time of day.
‘My God, you wouldn’t even employ him as a tombstone,’ said Sir John, throwing the glass down in a single gulp.
But, as Lady Jane pointed out, on an island at the end of the world where trees shed bark instead of leaves, where birds bigger than humans roamed, and where they were charged with turning a cesspit into a perfumery, they had to make do with what was on offer.
‘If the potter’s hand has slipped with the clay he shaped for us,’ she said, ‘we have no choice but to drink as best we can from his misshapen vessels.’
Unburdened by children of her own, Lady Jane had the strongest and most unbending ideas on the nature and necessity of education for the children of others. In Francis Lazaretto she was delighted to meet a mirror who simply reflected back a reverse image of her own strong opinions. His morbid appearance, she now saw, was but a mask for an unexpected intensity.
In a former life Francis Lazaretto had failed in his ambition to become a pantomime actor, but his long study of the genius of nonsense had not been without some good effect. He dared engage Lady Jane in a pedagogical argument by seizing a copy of Rousseau’s Émile from her bookshelf and waving it about in support of his contention that Lady Jane’s ideas would create a young woman profoundly unsuited to the modern world. If nothing else, he understood the value, properly used and convincingly displayed, of a good prop.
‘The authorities concur,’ said Francis Lazaretto, now brandishing that most famous argument for modern education as an exorcist might the good book, ‘that a distinction must always be observed: a woman is educated to be governed; while your suggestions would create an absurdity—a woman like a man, self-governing.’
While this seemed to Lady Jane a distinction with which she disagreed, it proved to her the inestimable worth of Francis Lazaretto. What in another she might have found almost manic, was in him mesmerising.
‘Nine-tenths of what we are, Mr Lazaretto, good or evil, useful or useless, comes, does it not, you would agree, from our education?’
Francis Lazaretto, who had produced a forged letter from the Master of Magdalen College proving conclusively he had passed two years at Oxford reflecting on the classics, had instead known education for only four years as limited rote-learning and almost limitless violence in a Yorkshire boarding school of dubious intent. In consequence, he understood his own achievements as very much his own, and he did not agree at all. What self-made man would? But what self-made man on the make ever disagreed with a superior beyond what was necessary to establish himself as a creature of worth and independence?
‘Of course, Ma’am,’ he replied.
Feeling he had through opposition sufficiently established his bona fides, Francis Lazaretto put down both Rousseau and his own opinion, and introduced St Thomas Aquinas in support of Lady Jane’s arguments and in contradiction of his own, quoting the great ecclesiastical authority as declaring that all men are, at first, a clean tablet on which nothing is written.
‘Precisely,’ said Lady Jane, pleased to discover the immortals had also been persuaded by her convictions. ‘The distance between savagery and civilisation is measured by our control of our basest instincts. And the road travelled to civilisation is, I intend to show, enlightened education.’
Sir John was less sure about what he termed Francis Lazaretto’s ‘insinuating midshipman’s air’, but Lady Jane understood her husband’s lack of enthusiasm as the jealousy of a man untutored in these great debates.
‘On this forsaken prison-island, we have had the good fortune to find the one man who understands the gravity and necessity of our experiment,’ she told him, as a convict footman lit a fire of cow dung in the coal grate to keep at bay the mosquitos. Above all else, it was her husband’s thinning hair that annoyed her, the white wisps of which reminded her of a spider’s web—and revolted her because in them she intimated her own approaching age, and with it the vile cage in which all old women were put. Sir John kept the wisps plastered over his dome with a black pomade that on hot days left his brow criss-crossed with greasy dark streaks.
‘God could not have been kinder,’ she said coldly.
Seeing the reformation of a savage as a moment when his personal destiny—hitherto sorrowful, following his transportation after a shop-keeper swore false witness against him—might be forever after linked with that of the nobler histor
ies of Science and Christianity, Francis Lazaretto at first approached his task with sincere industry, devising a complete syllabus of Latin, Greek and rhetoric, each day beginning and ending with a thorough study of the Scriptures. In accordance with the most modern thinking, while literacy was stressed to the utmost, frivolities such as novels were banned and a wide variety of moral grammars imported from Sydney for Mathinna’s edification.
Lady Jane was publicly delighted and privately intimidated by Francis Lazaretto’s programme, which he presented in a carefully tabulated chap book, with each left-hand page of columns accounting for another week of lessons, prayer, marks and attitude, and each right-hand page blank in order that he could record there his observations of Mathinna’s progress, for which the programme admitted no possibility of alteration, far less failure.
‘It would break me,’ said Sir John, but on seeing his wife’s thin lips purse, quickly mumbled, ‘but a child is a tabula rasa, not an old moth-eaten book.’
The room designated as the schoolroom faced the harbour and had large windows to aid reading. Yet they always seemed to draw Francis Lazaretto to look at the world outside and the brilliant sun spilling off the sea beyond. For he was given to manias, and weather seemed to set them off—hot weather leaving him euphoric and cold weather conducive only to melancholy. It had been hot when he had met the Governor and his wife, but then the weather changed and the mountain grew iron-grey with snow cloud as Lady Jane’s grand experiment finally got properly underway.
And as the sun on the water vanished, as the water turned to ruffled lead, Francis Lazaretto found he had no heart for any of it. It was, he realised, pointless. Pointless and meaningless, as he felt almost everything in his life to be.
His second week began and Francis Lazaretto wept not long after. He sat and stared at the grey cloud. The child seemed to understand when he talked to her of his pain. She understood many things, he came to realise, and he told her about his life and the women he had known, and the way all that was also meaningless and pointless. She taught him a dance, which she said was that of the echidna, along with several words of her native tongue.
In his third week of tutoring, the clouds melted and his mood improved markedly; the need to instil Latin declensions and Greek conjugations reasserted itself, but it was all too late. Mathinna had warmed to her tutor, and the tutor’s concerns seemed to have altered considerably. Lady Jane walked in one day to find them both playing with Mathinna’s parrot: they had devised a form of football in which the bird and they competed for a walnut that the bird rolled with its beak.
‘Mr Lazaretto no Mr Lazaretto at all,’ said Mathinna after the second month. ‘He Jesus Christ and he been sent among us to—’
‘He is what?’
‘He the saviour, Ma’am,’ said Mathinna, who had found Mr Lazaretto’s catechism more extraordinary and certainly more entertaining than any she had ever heard. ‘Of us all. He say others do not see it, like they do not see the snakes flying over Hobart Town of a night and the bats under our feet of a day. He say as God was unknown to me, so he unknown to the whitefellas, but this will change come next Easter, Miss.’
It transpired that Francis Lazaretto had never been a tutor, though he had once worked as a dancing master. Apart from acting, he had no aptitude for anything much beyond playing ditties on a button accordion and a certain dexterity at Aunt Sally, a game he taught Mathinna, in which they competed to knock down a set of skittles by lobbing long staves.
Lady Jane did not accept that her failure with Mathinna disproved her theories—rather it demonstrated powerfully their rightness: clearly too much had transpired by the age of seven, and what must happen was the breaking of all bonds from birth. Only in this way would change for the better be possible. What was clearly needed, she now told Sir John, was the building of a world that would shape the earliest impressions favourably—from birth children must breathe in the fresh air of civilisation, not the stinking miasma of forests.
The design for the glyptotech having arrived, Lady Jane purchased some hundreds of acres to the northwest of Hobart in Kangaroo Valley, where she intended to build her temple to the arts. It would help regenerate the empty and frivolous of the colony, she told Sir John; it would be an area conducive to the study of natural history; and it would show how art, properly understood and in its most classical expression, as represented in twenty-four plaster of Paris reproductions, could help the soul advance from primitive passion to civilised reason. In this way, Lady Jane’s plans for Mathinna’s advancement were never completely abandoned, but were used as an argument for new projects.
So it was that the child, who was unobtrusive and charming, grew up avoiding her lessons, Francis Lazaretto and she having arrived at a perfectly acceptable arrangement that saw them pass the morning together playing and left her afternoons free to do whatever she wished. Late one summer afternoon, when Sir John had gone into the Government House gardens with Montague to take some air, he looked up from a conversation about a new wharf that was not going well to see the Aboriginal girl in a red dress.
Though, on arriving in Hobart, she had soon acquired an extensive wardrobe of cuts and colours, Mathinna’s inevitable preference was for red. Nothing had caught her fancy like the red dress that Lady Jane had herself worn as a child, and which she had given Mathinna as a present on the first anniversary of her arrival. Button-shouldered and short-sleeved, belted with a black velvet band, the red dress was made of the lightest silk and cut in the simple high-waisted style popular in the wake of the French Revolution, when anything more elaborate was deemed aristocratic decadence.
Mathinna was at the far end of the main gravel path, playing with her cockatoo, sprinkling water over its awkwardly outstretched wings as it strutted around a fountain like an old drunk. As the bird waddled, Mathinna danced, a strange dance, where at times her own body seemed to be floating. As they came closer, Sir John realised that she was singing in her own strange yet strangely incantatory tongue.
Until that day he hadn’t really noticed Mathinna, viewing her as one more in a very long series of his wife’s enthusiasms, best endured like wind and snow, silently and stoically. That day, though, he saw her as if for the first time. Only now, as they walked towards her, did Sir John notice her eyes, which so many others had commented on. They seemed the largest and darkest eyes imaginable. And though only very occasionally and only after considerable encouragement and admonition could they be properly glimpsed, he understood why they were so much admired. She had learnt the odd art of playing the coquette, which she regarded as simply a different animal dance.
Only now, as they continued on past her, did Sir John finally realise she was, as Montague put it admiringly—and he was from the beginning anything but an admirer—the most beautiful savage he had ever seen. But it wasn’t her looks—neither Nubian nor of the Levant, but something else again—that first enchanted Sir John. It was the way she smiled at him.
It was true, as he told Lady Jane over dinner, that it was ‘the contrast of that wild beauty with the civilised dress of the Age of Reason’ he found delightful, but it was the sudden, unexpected flashing gleam of teeth that disarmed him. Gleam of teeth, swirl of red, puddle of eye, dance of feet. Sir John had been everywhere—but he had never seen anything like her. He felt as if he had just awoken.
On the day the glyptotech opened, Lady Jane looked up at the wild mountain, its snowy peak lost in mist, and then back at the sandstone Greek temple that now sat at the head of that picturesque forested valley. Once, perhaps, she thought, Zeus did sport here, transforming into whatever animal he needed to be—a bull, a goat, a swan—in order to take yet another mortal or goddess unawares. At that moment a kangaroo came bounding across the temple. As its rising and falling body linked the Corinthian columns at the front of the temple with sweeping arcs of flight, Lady Jane laughed at her absurd fantasy.
Mathinna stood with Lady Jane and the official party, but her status was changing. Less and less
was she the Franklins’ adopted daughter, and more and more was she some other creature whom they came to regard as they did several other pets around Government House—the albino possum, her cockatoo, a wombat—an exotic object of amusement.
Sir John had begun to seek Mathinna out and have her sing songs in her native tongue; then, as he got to know her better, he had her dance the kangaroo dance and the possum dance, the echidna dance and the emu dance, but the one he particularly enjoyed was the black swan dance, in which she would jack-knife her body backward and jolt her arms forward and out, as if rising into flight.
Those who wished to enter the Franklins’ circle had to acknowledge Mathinna, had to profess themselves amused and charmed by the black girl. She took pleasure in her status, demanding curtsies from all, and she now castigated the servants, whom she had once been too shy even to look in the eye, for not satisfying her whims.
And when, that day of the opening of Ancanthe, as the glyptotech was named, Mathinna’s cockatoo flew onto Montague’s shoulder and left a wet, white dropping trailing down his black coat, not even Sir John’s assurance that such things were good luck could drown out the laughter of the black girl, so raucous and uninhibited that it infected the whole party until they were all laughing.
A humiliated Montague whispered to his wife that the child behaved not like a lady, but some wild thing. And he pointed to the ground, where they could see her naked toes forking their way in and out of the mud.
‘Like filthy grubs and worms,’ sneered Montague. ‘It is as if dirt itself were a pleasure.’
The more Mathinna stopped being what the Franklins expected and the more she became herself, the more the Governor grew to like her. He was fascinated by ‘the forest sprite’, as he called her, both because of her general liveliness and her particular ability to appear out of nowhere and startle people: none more so than Lady Jane, who found it a trait at first amusing, then slightly disturbing and finally immensely irritating—for what exactly had the child heard, and what had she seen? And what did she know, what did she think, that smiling black enigma?
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