After a few dances, his face became alarmingly flushed. He kept blotting his forehead with a handkerchief, attempting to stanch the sweat that trickled down his neck, dampening his collar. Eleanor, dancing beside them, looked concerned. At the end of a quadrille, she took her father’s hand. “Let’s rest, shall we?”

“I’m fine, daughter dear!” he protested as she guided him to an empty table. “I don’t want to foil your chances with that eligible bachelor.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Dr. Dunne may be handsome, but he’s a bit of a bore. He keeps going on about convicts’ rights.”

“Then, by all means, use me as an excuse to evade him.” Sir John sank into a chair. “Tell your mother you forced me off the dance floor.”

“Stepmother. And she should thank me,” Eleanor said tartly. “At least someone is looking out for you.”

Mathinna, partnerless now, stood beside a wooden tent pole watching Noah’s animals line up for the Scotch reel. Spying another goblet of that golden liquid on a silver tray, she took a sip, then swallowed it quickly, feeling the heat slide down her throat all the way to her stomach.

The music began with a merry fiddle. The women turned, their skirts flouncing up as they circled their partners. As the tune grew louder and more insistent, the women clapped in time to the fiddle while the men hopped in the air, snapping white-gloved fingers. Watching the pale-skinned, pastel-hued partygoers from a distance, Mathinna saw something clearly for the first time, as if through a lifting fog. Yes, she could pose as the girl in the portrait, wearing a pretty satin dress and ribbons in her hair; she could master the steps to the quadrille and the cotillion and the Scotch reel; she could speak English and French and curtsy like a princess. But none of it would be enough. She could never be one of them, even if she wanted to. She would never belong in this place.

Well, maybe she didn’t want to belong.

Her head felt fuzzy, as if she’d been spinning in a circle and stopped to catch her breath.

Slowly, slowly, she began to sway from side to side. She felt the music seep through her soles, the percussive snap of the fiddle like the beat of a drum. Her feet moved lightly under her dress, her small steps mimicking the dancers’ exaggerated ones. She felt the rhythm inside her gathering force, rising from her toes to her thighs to her gut to her shoulders and up through her arms to the tips of her fingers. Closing her eyes, she felt the warmth of a long-ago campfire on her legs, saw the orange glow of it through her lids. Heard Palle brush his hand across a drum skin and begin to shush out the rhythm as the Palawa elders chanted to the tempo and a spray of muttonbirds rose into the sky.

Moving faster now, Mathinna arched her back, responding to the music with her entire body. She remembered things she thought she had forgotten: Droemerdene leaping and turning through the night sky, Moinee dancing across the land, down toward the ground and up to the stars, rocking and swaying, hunching and whirling. An ecstasy of movement, an obliteration of sadness. A celebration of life, hers and all of theirs: her mother’s, her father’s, Palle’s, Waluka’s, those of the elders she didn’t remember and the sister she’d never met . . .