laugh and easy movements restored in him any sense of youth and purpose. No one more than Sir John himself was struck by the enigma that was his life. And when he met Mathinna the next morning, he told her more stories of the great polar lands, tales of endless ice and frozen worlds, while inside, his heart was scalded all over again by the most sinful desire.
‘But you can only keep power,’ Montague said to Chief Justice Pedder, laying down his cards and handing over to Pedder a proposal for several new penal reforms which Sir John had that morning announced he wished to see enacted, ‘if you forgive nothing and remember everything.’ The proposal was written in Lady Jane’s hand. And both men, who had survived the pestilential intrigues of a prison yard become a society and kept their power for a long time, read the document carefully, for both men fully intended to continue to survive and keep power for a longer time yet.
Sir John could not help it. Nor could he help himself. That smile, that laugh, that way of pulling at his arm to gain attention, tugging at his trouser leg, leaning and rolling against him as if he were a rubbing post, that way of —he shuddered with the memory. So many sensations, too many memories—all innocent, of course—but something led him to put them out of his mind. It was her touch, he thought with a shock as abrupt as the sensation of her fingers, her hand. Her body touching his.
Above all, she loved toasted cheese. Sir John would have buttered toast and toasted cheese prepared for her, and then would watch her greedy little mouth intently as the yellow fat oiled her hungry lips. Once sated, she would immediately look for her parrot with which to play—or, failing to find the bird, for Sir John to come with her, which invariably he would, faithful as a puppy, timid as a possum and certainly more tractable than a cockatoo, sometimes peeved, sometimes frustrated, but ever obedient.
Sometimes he snuck into her bedroom just to watch her sleep—so unlike Lady Jane, who seemed like an old wheezing dog in comparison with this angelic child who hardly emitted a whisper. He thrilled at seeing the dark down on her exposed forearm, and as he leant in with his candle, the better to see her, he would wish to kiss her eyes, her lips. But, terrified of his engorged heart, he would abruptly straighten and leave.
He was enchanted and, like all those enchanted, he wanted proximity to his enchantress, and he manoeuvred and manipulated to make sure he got it. If he thought there was a wrongness, even a perversity, in his growing infatuation, he gave no sign of it. Rather he advanced into it, had the whole of Government House enthuse about this marvellous experiment being conducted with such vigorous joy, implicated society by having them applaud Mathinna when she entered a room, had Hobart Town wave when she sat with him in the vice-regal carriage as they travelled through the city.
When it snowed he took her sledding on the lower slopes of the mountain where he had a passable run cleared by some convicts: how Mathinna squealed as she rode down on the sleigh he had specially built. When it shone he took her sailing on the expanse of the Derwent estuary, though this rather bored her. And when her possum went missing and she was inconsolable, he personally took toasted cheese to her rooms, and was mystified when she threw the plate at the wall. Mathinna never told him that when the animal had not returned from its nocturnal life to her bed at dawn, she had gone searching, only to find one of Montague’s kangaroo dogs cracking a skinned possum carcass between its slobbery jaws.
She was given a wombat and a horse as consolation, and life rolled on. They picnicked, played Aunt Sally, and over Lady Jane’s objection that it was irredeemably middle class, Sir John taught Mathinna cribbage rather than Lady Jane’s preference, calabresella, a game for three, which she said was popular with the clergy of the Latin peninsula. He countered that if he were to teach a game it would be English.
But the game’s nationality was meaningless to Mathinna. She simply loved the jumping dance of the stick markers up and down the crib board, calling it the kangaroo game. Over the leaping markers were to be heard burps, laughter, sighs, sneezes, giggles, groans and squeals. In time there were discussions, opinions and observations. Then came sulks, squabbles, silences, jealousies and battles of will, for which Sir John would seek to make amends with fruit mince pies, outings and more toasted cheese.
Mathinna seemed to grow up at some absurdly accelerated pace; by nine he noticed her budding beneath her virginal white-silk Regency dress with its high waist and low collar. By ten there was a swelling suggestion of breasts and, with it, a changed attitude—more knowing, more devious, he felt in his more frustrated moments, and also more attractive, as if the two were somehow related, as if a new coyness and a new confidence were the same, as though the new passion for privacy and the new desire for experience were somehow one, and he determined to be an indivisible part of that oneness.
Her body—so small compared to her large head—moved with such grace, as Sir John himself noted, like the native tiger-cat, sudden leaps and Russian ballet-like bounds, and in her physical naturalness she seemed complete, as if she were already fully formed, an adult at ten, as though there were little more life allowed her.
Lady Jane could not help it—the idea of having to travel to a ship on a damp and wave-splashed tender simply for an evening’s entertainment irritated her. For while she liked the aura of adventure, the slightest disruption to her routine was only ever a source of annoyance. And so, whenever she embarked on any of her travels to new worlds, she always insisted on taking her old world with her. That was why she had taken her forty- eight hat boxes on her celebrated journey through the heart of southwestern Van Diemen’s Land, borne aloft through its unmapped jungles on a blackwood palanquin shouldered by four barefoot convicts; and it was why she was in no particular mood to take pleasure in the elaborate costume in which her husband now appeared before her, ready for the grand costume ball on the departing Antarctic expedition ships, the HMS
She had found him uncommonly animated and altogether unbearable since the two ships had arrived the autumn before, en route to the southern polar regions. On the day of the ships’ berthing, Sir John had visited them and, after the obligatory ceremonies and inspections, was taken to the chart room of the
On a long narrow table, the furled charts, sextant, compass and battered pencil stubs, and the open bottle of his favourite drink, Madeira, awoke in him a long dormant desire to return to exploration. The two captains, Crozier and Ross, had been greatly pleased to meet the famed polar explorer, and Sir John in turn had been at once flattered and overjoyed at what he described as having his family with him—by which he meant the Royal Navy explorers, but which Lady Jane was soon to come to think was more an asylum for the socially maladroit. The three explorers had quickly struck up a seagoing camaraderie—the language, passions and boisterous midships slaps and shoves—all of which Lady Jane found excluding and exceedingly dull.
They toasted English valour and English genius, they drank to English discoveries still to come, with the unworded hope shared by all that they too might one day become part of such a glorious English history. As he drained his second glass of Madeira and soon after discovered himself on his fifth, Sir John felt unburdened. He thought of how he would love to leave the wretched colony, be rid of its poisonous politics, his wife’s intense ambitions, and once more exist in the white emptiness of the polar regions, where the choices and demands were straightforward: to explore, to chart, to survive, to return. The cold, the hunger, the deaths, the risks—all of these seemed not cause for concern or fear, but points of pride, realities that only he and a select few had met and conquered.
And Crozier!
‘Such a fine specimen of a man,’ he later told Lady Jane. ‘It is said he is the handsomest in the Royal Navy!’ Sir John did not add that such physical grandeur made him feel at once awkward, fat and clumsy in his presence, but also buoyed—more manly, taller and braver than he felt when in the company of others. ‘Many of the ladies think,’ he added, with a confidential inhalation, ‘that he takes after Byron.’
‘Only if he traded tallness for talent,’ sniffed Lady Jane, who found Crozier’s height off-putting. Though he did exude a certain dull sensuality that reminded Lady Jane of sitting next to a wet hunting dog, she could see no sign of any vice on the empty face far above. Though she would never have admitted it, she had secretly always rather envied Byron his gift for dissipation. But that was beside the point. Crozier was, once spoken to, phenomenally dull.
It had hardly thrilled her, then, when what had been intended as a provisioning and repair stop of only a few weeks had lengthened into several, and then it was apparent that winter was upon them and the wolfhound would stay with them, for the expedition chose to winter in Hobart rather than risk their lives in the long Antarctic
