Wanting

Sir John turned from the window, where he had been watching a storm front make its way up the Derwent. Lady Jane was looking at him with her eerie light-blue eyes, which he had once, if only for a short time, found so enchanting, but whose odd expression he came to realise he would never understand.

‘You’ll pay,’ said Sir John.

‘What do you—’

‘What?’ snapped Sir John, who now remembered what he had been trying to recall for the previous several minutes. ‘What Montague said to me, that’s what. That I’d pay.’ Once Sir John had prided himself that he forgot nothing. Now he had trouble recalling even a small thing said a few moments before. More strangely, large things once simple and obvious were becoming ever more diffuse and vaporous. And just as reports and memoranda more and more frequently blurred as he stared intently at them, he had the disconcerting impression that so too was his wife now blurring and dissolving into a stranger.

‘When did Montague say such a thing?’ he could hear her asking.

‘When I refused his nephew a land grant,’ said Sir John. ‘That’s when. And after Pedder’s brother-in-law was not awarded the wharf contract, he said something similar.’

‘But that was years ago—’ Lady Jane began, but Sir John was waving a hand back and forth in a gesture of futility.

‘And now he and our enemies have triumphed,’ he said. ‘It is beyond imagining.’

Outside, a storm of terrible force finally broke. Several boats were sunk in the chaos, houses unroofed, trees blown over, drays and carts tossed about as if children’s toys. A fine bay stallion owned by Mr Lord was impaled when a spar was tossed like a toothpick from an adjacent sawpit into the poor beast’s belly. And inside Sir John’s head, the dark cloud of a growing melancholy broke now into a storm just as ferocious, as hopes, desires and memories were thrown hither and thither, smashing his sense of himself as a good man and a noble leader. As much as to battle an odd vertigo that had suddenly enveloped him as to explain himself, Sir John picked up some official papers and brandished them in front of Lady Jane.

‘It has not been as it should,’ he said, and his voice was for a moment—but only a moment—a snarl. ‘Here,’ he said, rustling the papers. Then he dropped them as though they were burning his fingers. ‘Orders arrived from the Colonial Office this morning. Signed by the Secretary himself.’ His body was shaking, almost wobbling with rage. ‘I am to be recalled.’

And having said this, Sir John felt suddenly spent. Lady Jane shot him a look he recognised as being at once utter shock and pure contempt. And how, he wondered, am I to blame for a humiliation as public as this? He recalled their triumphant reception on first arriving in Hobart, the accolades, the extraordinary joy as if he were liberating the people from a tyrant. And yet deep within his soul he sensed his crime was somehow linked to his failure to offer the reassurance of a new tyranny.

‘Why?’ asked Lady Jane, her voice implacable iron.

It was bewildering, thought Sir John. What was it Crozier had said in his cups? You set out to discover a new land because you sense you have always been lost.

‘Because…it seems they have persuaded the Colonial Secretary I am incompetent and corrupt and—’

‘But in truth?’

‘In truth? Perhaps because I wasn’t corrupt. But I’ve been a fool.’

‘Until you took this wretched commission in this godforsaken island,’ said Lady Jane suddenly, and uncharacteristically furious, ‘we had no enemies. We were sought as ornaments to power, never disposed of as its necessary sacrifice.’

It was true he had not sought the commission, that all this was his wife’s work—but then, his entire life since meeting her had been her work. She had relieved him from his most secret vice, his own immeasurable lack of ambition. Was he to blame for that? For submitting to her so completely? He had once overheard Montague say he was a ‘weak character’. And was not this the unspoken heart of the Colonial Secretary’s accompanying letter, in which he wrote of ‘the inappropriate weight given to others’?

This confused Sir John more than anything else. Was it weakness to be at ease with what life brought—be it suffering and starvation in the polar ice, or pleasing another human being by doing as she wished—or was it wisdom?

‘Trust to it,’ Montague had said when they first arrived, gesturing with a thin arm in the direction of the dilapidated capital and, beyond it, the ceaseless vegetation walling in the city, the endless nameless mountains, the mapless rivers.

But trust to what? A weird land predating time, with its vulgar rainbow colours, its vile, huge forests and bizarre animals that seemed to have been lost since Adam’s exile?

Or had Montague meant the people—the brutes that served him, waited on him, acted as clerks and flagellators and cooks and barbers and just about everything else? They were all convicts, a grotesque parody, a hideous pantomime, a revolting insult to memory; and that, in Sir John’s eyes, made them only more ridiculous in their imitation of all things England. He could see they were becoming something else, though, as savage as the savages, and out in the backblocks, it was said, they were regressing to a similar way of life, dressing in kangaroo skins, living in clans, sleeping in bark huts, working only to kill the native animals on which they subsisted. Oh, he had trusted to it all right, Sir John thought bitterly, trusted too much and for too long, and now he was paying the price.

As Lady Jane walked to the door, she halted, seemed to ponder something, then turned.

‘The black girl,’ she said.

Sir John felt such a phrase did not augur well. Lady Jane spoke of ‘Mathinna’ when she was happy with her, which was rarely, and ‘the black girl’ when she wasn’t, which these days was frequently.

‘I see even you’ve given up on her.’

Sir John seemed to be thinking.

‘Those strange vapours that seized her on the Erebus last year,’ Lady Jane went on. ‘It seems they affected her badly.’

Sir John waited.

‘It is a kind of hysteria she contracted,’ she said. ‘Do you not think so?’

Sir John was unsure.

‘Rather than getting better quickly, as one might have expected with a white child,’ said Lady Jane, ‘she has grown worse.’

As the weeks had become months, Sir John knew, Mathinna had learnt to avoid being seen, and if seen, how to amuse without offence. She had become more like a pet than a child in the house.

‘Listless,’ said Lady Jane.

He knew that Mathinna no longer pushed herself forward, grabbed legs or hid behind dresses. That what remained of her routines and schedules had crumbled under the weight of her sullen refusal to engage with anything she was shown or taught. That she was terrified of him.

‘And wild,’ said Lady Jane. ‘An animal that attacks the servants. Hitting and screaming and scratching. She even bit one of the serving maids, Mrs Wick, and when compelled to resume her daily schedule, she was slovenly and withdrawn. It is as though the sickness has affected her very soul.’

Then for the first time both the Franklins understood something in Mathinna’s behaviour as the most public defeat of their time in Van Diemen’s Land. For the black child would not become white.

‘She is exasperation,’ said Lady Jane.

‘It is beyond explanation,’ replied Sir John.

‘God knows how she will fare in London,’ said Lady Jane. And with that, she turned again and left the room.

Sir John returned to the window and the pewter haze of rain. Down on the street, a beggar had taken off his ragged coat and was holding it over the head of an old crone as they hurried away. How at that moment Sir John envied the beggar his selflessness, his very life! And in this endless world that teemed with so much life, so much love, with so many things, he realised he was alone.

A manservant appeared with coffee.

‘Later.’

There was about the island, his position, his own faded ambitions, the utterly unjustified reputation he carried with him as an ever-heavier burden, something intolerable and entirely absurd. It was baffling, as he