“Just watch out for yourself,” Olive said.

Mathinna

It is increasingly apparent the Aboriginal natives of this colony are, and have ever been, a most treacherous race; and that the kindness and humanity which they have always experienced from the free settlers has not tended to civilize them to any degree.

—George Arthur, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, in a letter to Sir George Murray, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, 1830

Government House, Hobart Town, 1841

The winter, it seemed to Mathinna, was lasting forever. The courtyard still wore a thin crust of frozen mud that crackled when she walked across it. Her bedroom was unheated; the cold seeped deep into her bones. She crept around the main house, searching for a place to get warm. Shooed out of the public rooms by Mrs. Crain, she sought refuge in the kitchen.

Slicing a pile of potatoes, nursing a tumbler of sugar-laced gin, Mrs. Wilson talked about her long-ago life in Ireland—how she’d once been a cook on a fine estate on the outskirts of Dublin but was unjustly accused of stealing linens to sell on the street. Her employer had recently returned from Paris with a steamer trunk of linens, and Mrs. Wilson was under the admittedly mistaken impression that she was doing the household a favor by disposing of the old ones. No one would’ve caught on if the napkins weren’t monogrammed; it was her mistake not to remove the stitching. She genuinely believed that her ladyship would’ve been pleased to know that her old cloths—rags, really—were being put to good use.

“She’d be pleased to know the cook was pilfering her linens?” the newest convict maid said with a smirk, ironing a sheet in the back of the room.

Mrs. Wilson looked up from her potatoes. “Not pilfering. Disposing of.”

“Ye pocketed the profits, yes?”

“It wasn’t her ladyship turned me in,” she huffed. “The butler had it in for me. My mistake, I suppose. Pushed off his advances one too many times.”

The maid smiled at Mathinna. “What d’ye suppose Lady Franklin would do if I had a mind to lift a table runner or two?”

“Don’t be getting high and mighty. You’re one to talk. Silver spoons I hear it was,” Mrs. Wilson said.

“Just one spoon.”

“All the same.”

“At least I’ll admit to my crime.”

Mathinna looked back and forth between them. She’d never heard a convict maid challenge the cook. The maid gave her a wink.

“I’m just teasin’ ye, Mrs. Wilson. Something to do on a cold gray morning.”

“You’re lucky to be here, Hazel. Ye should know your place.”

The maid held up the sheet and folded it by the corners. “There’s none of us lucky to be here, Mrs. Wilson. But your point is taken.”

“I should certainly hope it is,” Mrs. Wilson said.

A few days later, when the cook was doing her daily rounds at the abattoir and the dairy shed and the henhouse, the new maid came into the kitchen again with a basket of linens. She lifted a black iron from a row of irons on a shelf and set it flat on the glowing coals of the fire. Then she fell into a chair. “Ah, me feet.” She sighed. “It’s too long a walk from there to here.”