“I have something for ye.” Hazel was beside her now, on the barrel. “I’m going to slip it in your pocket.” She sat closer, and Mathinna felt a tug on her apron. “Put your hand in.”

It was . . . tiny shells. Strung together. A big clump of them. She looked at Hazel.

“All three necklaces. Yes, I nicked ’em. I doubt Lady Franklin will notice. Anyway, I don’t care. They belong to ye.” Reaching for Mathinna’s hand, she said, “There’s something I want to tell ye.”

Mathinna looked down at her brown hand in Hazel’s pale freckled one. They were almost the same size.

“My friend—the one who died—taught me a trick to play in your mind when you’re troubled. Ye think of yourself as a tree, with all the rings inside. And every ring is someone ye care about, or a place you’ve been. Ye carry them with ye wherever ye go.”

Mathinna remembered what her mother had said about thinking of yourself as the thread of a necklace, the people and places you treasure as the shells. Maybe Wanganip and Hazel were saying the same thing: that if you love something it stays with you, even after it’s gone. Her mother and her father and Palle . . . the spiny mountain ridge and the white sand beach on Flinders . . . Waluka . . . the sister she never knew. Hazel, even. Each a separate shell. All embedded in the rings.

Maybe she would always be alone and apart. Always in transition, on her way to someplace else, never quite belonging. She knew both too much and too little of the world. But what she knew, she carried in her bones. Her mother’s love. The shelter of her stepfather’s arms. The warmth of a campfire. The silky feel of wallaby grass against her shins. She’d seen a strip of land from the open ocean and learned to rig a sail. Felt the shapes of different languages in her mouth and worn a dress of scarlet satin. Posed for a portrait like the daughter of a chieftain that she was.

She felt her fear unspooling like a tight fist opening. It was as if she’d been standing on a precipice and suddenly tipped forward. There was no point in feeling afraid. She was already falling, falling through the air, and her future, whatever it held, was rushing up to meet her.

Hazel

Beautiful as it was, it was sown in blood, as indeed we may say of the whole civilized structure of this island.

–Oline Keese, The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer, 1859

Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, 1842

With the Franklins’ departure date approaching, Hazel’s days were now spent packing linens into cedar chests, wrapping china in rags, cataloguing silverware and figurines, and filling wooden crates.

The convict maids were told that their employment would end when the Franklins embarked. The new governor might or might not use labor from the Cascades. It was often a surprise to newly arrived British gentry that convicts, not even ex-convicts, would be working in their homes, with convictions ranging from vagrancy to murder. But free-settler labor came with its own problems. You had to pay them, for one thing, and unlike a captive labor force, if they decided to walk off the job there wasn’t much you could do to stop them.