face of an anvil, thrashed the child with a tea-tree stick for insolence, and, when the child would offer neither explanation nor apology for her animal behaviour, thrashed her a second time for dumb insolence. After, she was taken to a room kept specially for such malevolent offenders and locked there for the rest of the day and the night. Without bed, hammock or palliasse, its sole furnishing was an unfired chamber pot, cracked such that it leaked over the already putrid floor on which she slept.
The following morning, Mrs Trench, aided by two wardsmen who each took an arm, dragged Mathinna to the washroom. There, with the wardsmen holding her down as she bucked and thrashed, Mrs Trench stripped the child, shoved her around a little in the name of looking for lice, and threw a bucket of cold water over her. Though Mathinna lost the fight, her struggle was recognised when Mrs Trench tossed her seashell necklace and red dress back at her, saying that as long as she wore something on top, she could keep them. Her head was then shaved of its dense black curls, and she was dressed in a stained blue gown and calico pinafore, both large enough to sit over her red dress and several more.
Because Mathinna was, in her way, a person of note, she was solemnly presented by the Warden with something few children received, a pair of wooden clogs, which had belonged to a boy who had died of fever during the night. Her only response was to throw them back at the Warden. After being thrashed again, she was taken barefoot to the punishment room for a second day and night with the cracked chamber pot.
Despite the Warden spending the rest of the day burning the forest behind the orphanage, despite the air by the afternoon being choked with smoke rather than the peaty aroma of forest, two more children were carried away with typhoid that evening. It was clear to all the staff, who heard it from Mrs Trench, and to all the children, who heard it from the staff—who knew it for a fact—that the blacks had ‘powers’. Even more pervasive than the acrid taste of ash was the dread that now settled over the orphanage. Everyone knew that the sulking black child was exercising her vengeance.
The only conclusions to be drawn from the Warden’s wise compromise the following day, when he thrashed Mathinna for a fourth time but then let the child witch doctor sleep in the dormitory with the other girls, were that the black girl was indeed an emissary of the Devil and that the Warden had won them all a reprieve from death. For the fatal contagion ended, and it was clear that while no amount of burnt forest had halted the plague, this one providential act had.
In the dormitory, the rich scent of ammonia rising from the damp hammocks of the bed-wetters, whose inexplicable sin defied all beatings, mingled that moonlit night with the swarms of strange insects that the island seemed to breed in biblical proportions—flying ants, moths the size of small birds, mosquitoes. The black girl’s Satanic reputation was enhanced when she, who refused to eat of a day, of a night caught the moths with lightning strikes of her hand and gobbled them up.
In spite of Sir John telling Lady Jane he had been advised that visits of any type would only further distress the child and not help ease her into her new life, Lady Jane went to the orphanage three days later to retrieve Mathinna. She was motivated partly by wounded pride, by a measure—real but not large—of appropriate concern, and by a desire to remind her husband that such an action, taken without consultation, was unacceptable.
But there was something else; something buried so deep within Lady Jane that it took the form of a physical pain she did not dare seek words for. She was not an hysteric. She refused to open herself up to such morbid sensations as she had seen women of feeble character do, embracing the maladies of their own mind. But still it came on her in waves, leaving her short of breath and disoriented, as the Warden led her through the Orphanage’s many rooms in accordance with the Governor’s earlier instructions. For Sir John had lived too long with his wife’s will to believe he would be obeyed, and so, as a seasoned naval officer, he had prepared a wily line of second defence.
The children slunk away from Lady Jane like animals, one part fearful and two parts desperate for food and life; the only sleek and content being she saw in this grove of misery was a large ginger tomcat, fat on the rats that even at this hour sported along the shadowed kickboards. Lady Jane tried to talk to one boy, but he seemed indifferent to her or anybody or anything, as though he had withdrawn from life. She asked other children: did they get enough to eat? was all well here?
But they seemed not to hear, far less comprehend. Their faces were subdued and empty, their skin chapped and often scabby, their expressions expressionless. Lady Jane noticed an eerie absence of whispering or pulling hair or giggling. The children seemed too exhausted to do much more than cough and hack and scratch, beset with everything from consumption to dysentery to chilblains, the tormented wounds of which scabbed their arms with bloodied buttercups.
Though the orphanage was but a few years old, there was a stench about it. Lady Jane could identify one scent as that of decay, but beyond it, over it, was another odour she could not name, that she would later describe in her diary only in the vaguest terms: the place smelt, she wrote, ‘
‘House fire,’ said the Warden in a low whisper. ‘Mother burnt to death. Only girl saved.’
Apart from an occasional low, long whimper, the child gave no sign of pain or interest. Instead she merely stared at the ceiling with intensely vivid blue eyes that looked as if they had been mistakenly buried in charred pork, as if they were wondering why it was taking so long to be interred in one of the toy-sized coffins that waited, white-painted, racked and ready, in the cellar storeroom where Lady Jane was next taken.
‘Marvellously and completely self-contained, we are,’ said the Warden as he raised the lantern around his macabre store. ‘Our boys make these themselves.’
Leaving the coffin room, Lady Jane asked to be excused the rest of the tour, and so instead they went to the second-storey dining room, in which the officials of the institution took their meals and from where it was possible to look out on a rear courtyard where the children passed their idle time. Through the whirling glass she looked down on that muddy square.
Lady Jane swallowed.
Were it not for Mathinna’s colour, she would not have recognised the already scabby, shaven-headed child in a drab cassock who sat alone and unmoving in the dirt below. When hit in the face by some mud hurled at her by another child, Mathinna bared her teeth and appeared to hiss, which, oddly, seemed to put an end to the attack.
Lady Jane had come to take her home. She did not care what her fool husband thought or did, or what the wretches that passed for colonial society might say. She had intended simply stating her desire and leaving immediately with Mathinna. But something stopped her from saying what she wished, from doing what she desired. Instead she said she hoped Mathinna was eating properly.
‘Eating?’ said the Warden, who had come to stand at the window with Lady Jane. ‘Eats nothing. Except insects.’
There was a long silence. Even words seemed unnecessary luxuries at St John’s.
‘My dear Warden,’ Lady Jane began, then halted and shook her head. She just wanted to leave.
The Warden leant in closer. ‘Yes, Lady Jane?’
‘Mr—how do I say this? The child never ate insects all the years she was with me.’
‘She has reverted to type,’ said Mrs Trench, who now joined them.
‘Did she,’ asked the Warden, ‘hide her true nature from you? All those years? Is what we see below the truth of these people?’
They stared for a few moments without speaking at the mud-spattered, bedraggled girl. Lady Jane’s vision began blurring, and she turned to face the Warden.
‘She struck me as…’ said Lady Jane, but some certainty, some conviction, was missing from her voice, from the words spilling from her mouth. She brushed her eyes with a kid-gloved finger. ‘At least, initially, that is, she— she appeared intelligent, seemed—’
‘Intelligent?’ said the Warden, as though it were a matter to ponder. He seemed deeply understanding, and his understanding was somehow terrifying and impossible for Lady Jane. He smelt of smoke and sounded like clanging iron. ‘No,’ said the Warden finally. ‘Never that.’
‘Rat cunning, more like it,’ said Mrs Trench.
