Mr. Hogsmead was imposingly tall, reed-thin, wore a pince-nez, and appeared to have little interest in anybody other than one particularly buxom convict maid named Eliza, whom the entire household observed coming and going from his chambers at all hours of the day and night.

With the Franklins gone, there was little for the staff to do. When Mrs. Wilson discovered a group of convict maids lolling on barrels and gossiping in the courtyard, she directed them to remove every last pot and ladle from the shelves and scrub the kitchen with lye and vinegar. The stable boys washed out the horse stalls and scoured the carriages; the maids aired linens and polished candlesticks to a gleam.

Without a routine or schoolwork, Mathinna existed in a strange purgatory. She wandered the property, forlorn and forgotten. Nobody seemed to realize that she was alone—or if they did, they didn’t give it much thought. She lingered in the kitchen with Mrs. Wilson, hung upside-down from a branch of the gum tree in the far corner of the garden, played with Eleanor’s collection of marionettes. She ate when she felt like it, which wasn’t often. She didn’t bathe. Sometimes she visited the cockatoo, desolate in its cage, squawking its mournful refrain. Kee-ow, kee-ow.

At night in her bedroom, dark as a tomb, Mathinna listened to the rustling of the trees outside her boarded-up window and the creaky lament of the gray galah birds, and curled into a ball, trying to evade the loneliness that crept under the covers and nestled in beside her. After a few days she took to sleeping in Eleanor’s room, with its tall windows overlooking the garden. Eleanor would be horrified if she knew, but she didn’t, did she? Each morning Mathinna slept in longer; it became harder and harder to pull herself out of bed. When she did emerge, in late morning, she spent hours on the upholstered window seat, staring out at the weepy fronds of the blue gums, listening to the warble of the magpies.

Perhaps Lady Franklin had been right—a view of the outdoors did make her melancholy.

No. She was melancholy already.

One rainy afternoon, Mathinna slipped into Lady Franklin’s curio room and gazed at her father’s ochre-and-red patterned spear and the skulls gleaming white in the gloom. Her mother’s shell necklaces pinned to a board behind glass. The portrait Mr. Bock had painted of her in the red satin dress. In the entire time she’d been with the Franklins she had never seen another brown-skinned person. She looked down at the backs of her hands and turned them over to look at her palms. She thought about the tea-drinking ladies and their prurient questions. The dance-party guests and their horrified stares. Why wasn’t it obvious before? She was just another piece of the Franklins’ eccentric collection, alongside the boiled skulls and taxidermied snakes and wombats.

A marionette in a pretty dress. A cockatoo in a gilded cage.

In the courtyard she unlatched the door to the wire cage and reached inside. Despite her aversion to it, she felt a strange kinship with the poor creature—separated from its own kind, at the mercy of people who didn’t even try to understand it. When she lifted it out, it was as bulky and lightweight as a hen. Its ashy feathers were silky soft. The bird allowed her to carry it to the trees just beyond the garden and set it on a branch, where it stared at her with its head tilted, seemingly confused. What are you doing with me? Kee-ow.