‘You look an utter fool,’ said Lady Jane.
Both the Terror and Erebus were spectacularly decorated for the occasion. Seven hundred looking glasses, destined for use in exchange with any natives the explorers might meet in the south polar regions, were hung off the ships’ sides so that the Chinese lanterns with which the deck and masts were lit reflected back and forth across the harbour.
Everyone was excited, everyone was saying the same thing over and over about what a ball it would be, and Mathinna, resplendent in her favourite red dress and a wallaby mask, made her way hand in hand with Sir John, who was sombrely attired in his naval uniform. His only concession now to the evening’s theme was a small black swan mask, which Mathinna, to his annoyance, had tried to pull off and throw into the harbour.
They walked up the gangplank and on to the Erebus’s upper deck, which for that night was to be the ballroom, past the bush flowers and manfern fronds and the awkward lackeys in livery fitting too tight or too loose, the flunkeys who wanted whatever it was that Mathinna already had—a way of being at the centre of things. She did not know this, but she could feel it in the way all these men and women in their strange animal costumes—platypuses, griffins, centaurs, unicorns and wombats—leant down and tried to catch her attention, how they wanted her to acknowledge them, to say something, but she just smiled; smiling was what worked, smiling kept Sir John and Ma’am happy, smiling kept something between you and them. From the corner of her eye she could see others adjusting themselves, with a rustle here and a sigh there, in front of a large mirror at the landing that led up to the foredeck. Around her floated compliments, bitter asides, meaningless words.
‘Our princess of the wilds!’ sighed a wolf.
All week she had practised the quadrille.
‘The sweetest savage!’ said a bear.
Mathinna skipped her left foot back and out and in and lifted her right hand to present it to her partner, one-two-three-four, concentrating on remembering what the beginning of the dance required, five-six-seven, while continuing to walk on, smiling here, smiling there.
‘What became of their beautiful villages, I can’t say,’ a tiger was saying. ‘The cause of enlightenment swept them away too, I suppose.’
She understood nothing of what was being said above her, except that while her blackness marked her out as exceptional, it also made her in some way not just bad, but wrong. And that made no sense, because she could remember all the steps.
‘We didn’t come here for society and civilisation. We came here for what everyone who isn’t a convict comes here for: money.’
The military band struck up, and the extraordinary event strangely reminded Mathinna of the campfire evenings at Wybalenna, and the excitement and wonder she now felt in her stomach seemed oddly familiar and welcome.
‘I felt—for a long time, too—I felt that a good intention would always lead to a good act, and that the truth will take all before it. Well, I don’t have to tell you such feelings don’t last long in Van Diemen’s Land.’
Though Mathinna understood almost nothing of it, she let it all flow in, all the smells and sights and voices, all the music, while trying to remember how to count beats and how many bars it was before you span back around. But she refused all invitations to dance. She told those who asked that she was waiting for the quadrille. That was the dance she had practised, that she loved—the others she knew a little, but not enough to take to the floor, where she was frightened she would look clumsy and foolish.
They danced a cotillion, then a waltz was called for, then a scotch reel. They jigged and skipped, and some but not many danced in the more modern, stately fashion, but still Mathinna refused all entreaties to step up onto that part of the deck designated as a dance floor and instead leant into the main mast, watching, feeling it all build within her, listening to the music, the snatches of conversation, her right foot turning this way and that in a coiled ropes’ bight.
‘Are we no longer Your Excellency but Zeus himself?’ Mrs Lord’s young daughter rather boldly asked when Sir John danced with her, and he jovially shook his swan mask, chins below his beak rippling out in laughter.
As the evening wore on, the dancing grew more animated and excited. Occasionally a voice from beyond drifted through the military band’s ever more determined efforts, the increasingly frenzied sound of so many bodies moving, shoes sweeping. Mathinna was filling with the music, sensing at first the intense desire for communion carried in all the bodies on the dance floor, then only aware of her own body—its memory, its desire—filling to overflowing.
Finally, the bandmaster called the quadrille.
When Mathinna accepted Sir John’s hand and went onto the dance floor with the three other couples, there was polite applause. She felt hot, her breathing was short, but the moment the music started she felt in the centre of the world. She was vaguely aware of expressions of surprise at her accomplishment at the dance, and her steps grew more assured. After the lead couple—Mrs Lord and Captain Crozier—performed the next set of steps, Mathinna and Sir John and the other two couples repeated them. As the intensity built, Mathinna began to introduce slight variations in her footwork, which became faster, more daring.
Mrs Lord, proud of her own abilities, ceased with the simple steps she had been leading with, and led with a complicated sequence involving some rapid step-work. Captain Crozier looked shocked and, though a fair dancer, only just managed to stay with his partner. But the Aboriginal girl repeated Mrs Lord’s steps perfectly, and then, to growing applause, went on to mesmerise everyone with variations on her footwork and body turns, and even Mrs Lord halted for a moment to laugh and clap.
Mathinna was now so excited and so free it was as if she were tumbling through clouds. It was as though she was approaching some truth of herself, and people were applauding her for it. Someone was saying that there were fewer than seventy of the original race left at Mr Robinson’s settlement, but the boat was rising up through her, she could feel the wind lifting and dropping her. Her movements were no longer steps or skips or slides but something magical that had taken hold of her body.
In the midst of the dance’s lively finale, Mathinna realised she was no longer holding Sir John’s hands nor in step with anyone else, as she had so patiently practised, but was moving to something more fundamental and deep-rooted than a dance invented fifteen years before in Paris.
Her cheeks were fired, her body liberated, her mind had never felt so free of what she now knew was a strange fog that had lain upon it for as long as she could remember. And yet she did not sense the strange rupture she was making in the evening. Her eyes had never felt so sharp, so able to see and know everything—but she failed to notice the gasps, the shaking of heads, the angry and dark looks as on and on she span and now jumped, as she felt not the wax with which the oak deck had been prepared but the earth of Van Diemen’s Land, as with two deft movements she kicked off her shoes and became a kangaroo absolutely still, except for its head, click-clicking around, then a stamp, two leaps, and she was flying.
Everyone had stopped dancing and all were staring. What on earth was the child doing? Who was this savage? Why was she still allowed to be on the dance floor?
The band stopped playing.
Lady Jane remembered once saying the child’s body thought. But, she now wondered, looking on in shock as Mathinna danced some unknown barbarous rite, what on earth was it thinking now?
Mathinna felt as if she only had this one moment on the deck of that boat to explain who she was—but who that was, no one would ever know, not even she, for they were all closing in around her. She tried to keep dancing but someone was yelling and something was wrong, so terribly wrong; she felt dizzy, the boat was spinning faster and faster, and she was no longer leaping and flying but falling and falling, and hands were coming to her, white hands, hands in awful gloves like rags used to dress the dying—and was she dying? She was unsure of everything. She wanted to ask but no words came, b
ut she needed to know: was it Rowra?
Mathinna came out of a skipping slumber sensing a presence above her. She opened her eyes and was immediately terrified. Above her loomed the face of a giant black swan. She knew her life was over.
‘Rowra,’ Mathinna whispered.
After she collapsed, Crozier had carried the small child in his great arms down to his captain’s cabin, a room only fractionally longer and wider than the cot in which he laid her to rest, and in which she had now woken.
‘What?’ said Sir John.
The child said not a word more.
Far away, the ball continued, the band played on.
He was all things and all things were him. Looking down on Mathinna, her diminutive body, her exposed black ankles, her dirty little feet, the suggestive valley of her red dress between her thin legs, Sir John felt thrilled.
And after, was thrilled no more.
8
ON A COLD MORNING, during the third day of rehearsals at the Haymarket, halfway through a scene in which Ellen Ternan, playing Rose Ebsworth, has been embraced by her grieving friend Clara Burnham, played by her sister Maria, Ellen abruptly stepped out of character and her sister’s embrace, crying out:
‘Please, Maisy, careful, or I’ll end up wearing pigeon pie!’
It was the first moment of spontaneous performance Dickens had seen from Ellen Ternan, but it was also not part of the script. Though part of him was intrigued and amused, Dickens was weary and simply lost his temper.
‘Damn you, Miss Ternan!’ he said tersely, holding up the script as if it were holy writ. ‘We have ten days left—what are you doing?’
In answer, and not without hesitation, she reached inside her coat and produced a small glossy black bird. It oinked.
‘They are great mimics, sir,’ said Ellen Ternan, unsure of what else to say, holding the bird in her cupped hands as though it were some sort of offering.
‘She’s always collecting dying birds and trying to save them,’ said Maria. ‘She picked up this starling at the entrance of the Haymarket.’
‘Its wing seemed a bit broken, Mr Dickens,’ said Ellen Ternan. ‘And I thought I must keep him warm.’
‘A bit?’ said Dickens. ‘Well, we must be grateful it is not a lot.’
He reached down into the now quiet ball of shiny fluff that she held before him.
‘I’ll have a starling,’ he said softly, retreating into recitation while pushing a finger first under one wing, then the other, slowly unfolding each in turn and inspecting the bird. ‘It shall be taught to speak nothing but “Mortimer”, and—’
Dickens looked up from the starling and for the first time looked into her eyes. He was startled. It was not their colour, which after he could not remember.
‘And,’ he repeated, losing his way, stumbling, ‘and…’
‘And give it to him, to keep his anger still in motion,’ said Ellen Ternan.
‘Henry IV,’ said Dickens, intrigued.
‘Hotspur,’ smiled Ellen Ternan, for whom the Bard was as familiar as bedbugs.
Dickens stared at her for a moment. Later he found the memory of that moment irreducible to words.
‘People forget Shakespeare was an actor first,’ he said finally, when, frightened by those eyes, he had dropped his gaze back to the bird in her hands. ‘And a writer only second. That is the secret of his genius. He had no sense of himself and existed only through his imitations of others.’
There, Dickens thought with an odd shock: I have given you the secret of myself. He stroked the bird, and he felt they both were paralysed with terror. He, who impressed countless thousands without effort, felt clumsy and awkward as he tried to make conversation with a young woman scarcely more than a child, whereas she felt emboldened.
‘An eagle for an emperor,’ said Ellen Ternan, continuing the game of quotation, ‘a kestrel for a knave, and—’ she paused; when Dickens lifted his eyes, for a second time she dared to look him directly in the face. ‘A starling,’ she smiled, ‘a mimic for a writer.’
He turned away, somewhat flustered. Spotting a small pine box that was being used as a prop, he picked it up, as much to rid himself of the nervous energy that was suddenly surging through him as for any other reason. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and formed a nest with it in the box, then placed the injured starling in its crinkled folds.
That evening, as he rode to dinner in a carriage with Catherine, he put his hand high up on his wife’s skirted thigh. She turned and looked at him oddly, then pulled her leg away.
During what remained of the fortnight’s rehearsals, Dickens spent an increasing amount of time in the proximity of Ellen Ternan. To be alone in her company was more difficult, but he contrived moments when others were absent and he unexpectedly present, when by seeming accident he bumped into her. At such times she found him delightful. She found him kind, always helpful, ever merry, and she never wondered why he was always finding her.
He thought her funny and lively; her forceful character, which so clearly irritated her mother, charmed him. Her straightforward judgements and strongly held opinions, and her interests in books and theatre and politics, seemed liberating after Catherine’s professions of inescapable ignorance and stupidity and sullen silences. He saw that Ellen Ternan could also be childish, petulant and obstinate, that her feelings and ideas were sometimes shallow and foolish, but what irritated him in his wife delighted him in Ellen Ternan, and he excused that in which it was impossible for him to delight, for what did such trivialities matter? And not for a single moment did he think what his actions might mean—for, as long as he had no conscious intention, he was sure he could do no wrong.
Dickens’ world seemed charged. It was the play, he told his friends as he had convinced himself—it was charity, it was the opportunity to help others combined with the joy of raising the production to a far more elevated level than he had ever anticipated. And his friends marvelled at his rediscovered energy, at the amount of time and attention he gave every aspect of the resurrected production, and particularly at the care he was lavishing on rehearsals. When at the end of the first week’s rehearsal the starling vanished, presumably having gathered its strength and flown away, Dickens could not withhold the feeling that there was something liberating in the omen.
Yet he was enraged at the sheer lack of generosity his own wife showed towards the production.
‘Why waste all this time on something that was working perfectly well before?’ Catherine asked her husband one morning. She stood before him in his study with a vase of flowers. ‘Look at these,’ she said. ‘Begonias and dahlias and all these beautiful annuals for your desk.’ And when he didn’t look up, she said, her tone suddenly cold, ‘These Ternan women—if they are such good professionals, why do you need to be bothering rehearsing them so much?’
When Catherine stepped forward to place the vase down on the desk, her back, which had been bad since the birth of their second daughter, gave a sharp twinge. She stumbled and then dropped the vase, and flowers and water went spilling over a neat pile of writing.
Dickens leapt up and away from the puddling water. Frantically trying to rescue his pages, he muttered under his breath how she could not even keep house properly and it was no wonder that he was embarrassed to take her out into society.
But you haven’t borne ten children, she wished to reply as she awkwardly got her balance back. You don’t know what it does to you. You grow heavy, your memory wanders, your body leaks, your back burns. But she said none of it.
‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I’m so sorry.’
As she mopped the table with her crinoline, she continued apologising. He shook a wet book that had been open on his desk. He asked her, was she that stupid? She wasn’t. It was Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, dedicated to Dickens by the great historian himself. She knew he pored over it incessantly, once telling a visitor he had read it five hundred times. She stood there, not knowing
what to do. She understood none of it. Surely he would be sick of the book by now.
Her mind seemed to be twisting into something so painful she had to hit her forehead with a fist in a vain attempt to reset the terrible clockwork of her life. She watched mute as her husband rang for a servant to come and clean up, then grabbed his coat and stormed out.
She realised she had never understood him. He was unstoppable, undeniable, he bent the world to his schemes and dreams as surely as he did his characters. And she knew that her part, henceforth, would be the fat and hopeless housekeeper, the hysteric, the invalid, the harridan and the virago.
Yet hadn’t he, in every book and speech and utterance, said it was all about family and hearth and home? And hadn’t she broken her body giving him children and trying to please him? Hadn’t she loved him, and in his books wasn’t such love always triumphant? She could not understand why in his home he had come to despise that same love as stupid.
And as she returned to gathering the strewn flowers, Catherine finally understood that she had been his invention as surely as any of the blurred pages on the desk, as much as any of those dull creatures he passed off as women in his books. He had made her stupid. He had made her that boring woman of his novels; she had become his heroine in her weakness and compliance and dullness.
Only now, having lived with her, he no longer liked that woman and wanted her gone. And she knew he would remake her with his wit, with his tongue, with his cruel names, and to the world she would be ridiculous and heartless. The world, she realised, was whatever Charles wanted. She had no defence.
She tried to rearrange the flowers. Larkspur, dahlias, cornflowers, sweet pea, begonias and baby’s breath. She had gone in lockstep with it all—the ivy-clad cosy old house, the horde of children, the servants who had to be comical, him telling the world in his articles and speeches of their delightful Christmases, the endless merry times at the huge dinners for many. She had stuffed the mutton with oysters, made sure the cock-a-leekie was just as he liked it and the croquettes of chicken not lacking in imagination and the spiky pigeon feet poking perfectly like winter birch trees from the top of the pie. She had played along with all the games and the charades and leapfrogging. And yet, for everything good that had happened, so much more had for so long been ebbing out of her.
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