In the dim recesses of her mind she remembered something she’d once read about the act of drowning—that the terror was in resisting, in refusing to accept. Once you let go, it wasn’t so hard; you just sank into the water, cool and obliterating.

By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

She closed her eyes. Pushing away the terror, she withdrew deeper into herself. Here she was now in the foyer of the vicarage in Tunbridge Wells, grabbing her bonnet from the peg, opening the heavy front door and stepping out onto the stone stoop, pulling the door closed behind her. Setting off on the footpath, a straw basket over her arm. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light . . . She meandered past the privet hedge tangled with roses, that old willow shushing in the wind. Heard the chimes of a church bell, a woodpecker knocking on a tree, a barking dog. Before long, she’d cross the stone bridge over the stream that led to the mountain trail, with its craggy rocks and sour-sweet grass, its grazing sheep and purple thistles. Her favorite place on earth, just around the bend.

Mathinna

The last Aborigines were caught about a fortnight ago, and sent to Flinders Island, so that our little native girl is the only one remaining here. She is improving I think, though it will be a long time before she becomes quite civilised.

—Diary of Eleanor Franklin, 1840; daughter of Sir John Franklin, Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, 1837–1843

Government House, Hobart Town, 1840

Tall, slope-shouldered, with a broad forehead, translucent eyelashes, and yellow hair, Eleanor Franklin was, indeed, rather plain. She was also the first person Mathinna had met on Van Diemen’s Land who seemed utterly nonchalant about her presence. “Oh. Hullo. They’re hard boiled,” she said by way of introduction, waving her hand wearily toward a bowl of eggs when Sarah introduced Mathinna to her in the nursery the morning after she arrived. “I despise hard boiled.”

As they ate, they could hear the housekeeper, Mrs. Crain, speaking in a low whisper with an elderly woman—Miss Williamson, a governess who’d come with the family from England. “It was quite enough to try this experiment once, with that incorrigible boy,” the governess huffed. “To expect me to attempt to educate another savage is too much to ask.”

“It is Lady Franklin’s request, not mine,” Mrs. Crain said. “You may take it up with her, if you wish.”

Eleanor looked up. “I could tutor the girl. Might as well put my French to good use, since I’m not doing anything else with it. This place is so dull.”

And so it was that for three hours a day, three days a week, Mathinna and Eleanor met in the schoolroom after breakfast. Eleanor treated Mathinna the same way she treated her dog, Sandy: with a mild, lukewarm affection. What she lacked in smarts, Eleanor made up in effort; she dutifully taught Mathinna to add and subtract and spell. One week she devised a lesson on architecture. She showed her pictures of Gothic design, with its thrilling gargoyles and grotesques, and classical, with its emphasis on proportion and harmony. The fashion in Hobart Town was for boring Georgian, she said, all tiled roofs and sandstone exteriors. Like Government House, the building they were in.