Eleanor looked as if she’d been splashed in the face with water. “Yes, ma’am,” she said. But when Lady Franklin disappeared around the corner, she slumped comically, tucking her arms into wings and crouching into a penguin’s waddle, making Mathinna giggle.

Lady Franklin had little time for Mathinna, preoccupied as she was with entertaining dignitaries, writing in her journal, taking picnics up Mount Wellington on daylong expeditions, and departing on overnight trips with Sir John. But a few times a month she invited a group of ladies, wives of merchants and government officials, to drink tea and eat cake in the red-paneled drawing room, and on these occasions she summoned Mathinna to show off her newly acquired French and good manners.

“What would you like to say to these ladies, Mathinna?”

She curtsied dutifully. “Je suis extrêmement heureux de vous rencontrer tous.”

“As you can see, the girl has made remarkable progress,” Lady Franklin said.

“Or is a clever mimic, at least,” one of the ladies said behind her fan.

The ladies asked lots of questions. They wanted to know if Mathinna had ever worn proper clothing before coming to Hobart Town. If she ate snakes and spiders. If her father had many wives, if she’d grown up in a hut, if she believed in the occult. They marveled at her brown skin, turning her hands over to inspect her palms. They patted her spongy dark hair and peered inside her mouth to confirm the pinkness of her gums.

Mathinna grew to dread these afternoons in the drawing room. She disliked being pawed over and whispered about. Sometimes she wished she were white, or invisible, just to avoid the stares and whispers, the rude, patronizing questions.

When they tired of her, Mathinna sat in a corner playing patience, a game of solitaire that Eleanor had taught her. As she squared and fanned her cards, she listened to the ladies commiserate about the inconvenience of living so far from civilization. They complained about how they couldn’t get the supplies they wanted—Leghorn bonnets from Tuscany and opera-length kid gloves, mahogany bed frames and glass chandeliers, champagne and foie gras. They bemoaned the lack of skilled artisans. The impossibility of finding good help. The dearth of amusements, like opera and theater. “Good theater,” Lady Franklin clarified. “You can attend an atrocious production in Hobart Town every day of the week.” They fretted about their skin: how it burned and dried out, blistered and freckled, how vulnerable it was to rashes and insect bites.

So many odd customs these ladies had! They stuffed themselves into elaborate costumes: corsets with whalebone stays, hats with bows and ribbons, impractical shoes with pointy heels that disintegrated in the mud and dirt. They ate extravagant meals that upset their stomachs and made them fat. They appeared to exist in a perpetual state of discontent, constantly comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in London and Paris and Milan. Why did they stay here, Mathinna wondered, if they disliked it so much?