Lady Jane, who never normally touched children, reached out and took Mathinna by her arm. The child wheeled around grinning, till she saw the white woman who had caught her.
‘You dance beautifully,’ said Lady Jane.
And suddenly embarrassed by the odd spontaneity of it all, Lady Jane dropped Mathinna’s arm. The child ran off and the Protector began talking about the new cemetery they were to inspect. But the mix of spirit and tragedy in one so young intrigued Lady Jane.
Certainly her pity, when aroused, was a profound and terrible emotion. Or perhaps she simply found the idea of watching the children preferable to looking at a cemetery. For whatever reason, she insisted the children return and perform one more dance.
Watching Mathinna again, Lady Jane felt she understood the child. She imagined her grief, her needs, her dreams. Afterwards, Lady Jane set a fierce pace as they walked up the hill to the graveyard, leaving Sir John huffing and puffing some distance behind. The Protector, running back and forth between the two, although relieved to find them as one in support of his work, did notice that Lady Jane’s mind seemed elsewhere. She was thinking of Mathinna’s dancing, her slow way of moving, so distinct and so poignant.
‘One might almost say,’ she said to Sir John when he finally caught up to her at the cemetery gate, ‘her body thinks.’
Sir John’s body, on the other hand, gave no more appearance of an active intelligence than a well-tended pumpkin. Yet Lady Jane had long sensed there was within him some mechanism or spirit, some passion, waiting to be set in motion. In private she had at first called him Bear, because that was how she imagined him: a great bear in hibernation. But over a decade into their marriage, she was still waiting for him to awaken, as she fluttered moth-like around his eminence.
Small as he was large, Lady Jane might perhaps have been beautiful had she chosen to highlight her features. But it was as if she retreated from them. And if that were not exactly the case, it was true that her nature was permanently at odds with itself. Her desire for conformity and approval, which she had inherited from her mother, the daughter of impoverished gentry, was at war in her with the vitality and belief in self that she learnt from her father, a northern midlands mill owner. Like her mother, she had married to better herself, settling on an ageing polar explorer who was, at the time, being lionised by London society as the nation’s greatest since Drake and Raleigh; like her father, she came to see that Sir John’s dullness, as with coal, was only good if it could be burnt to power something larger.
She talked to him of history, landscapes, picturesque ruins and her sensation of vertigo when, as a child, she gathered with vast crowds of the lowliest of London to watch Byron’s funeral parade and thought she might fall forever. He replied with reports of navigation, Admiralty regulations, auroras, and how delightful reindeer tongues were to eat when properly cooked, the skin peeling off like a sock. They had nothing in common other than a respect for ritual. The prospect of eating something redolent of feet notwithstanding, she liked his seriousness, which she mistook for an achievement in which she might share.
But he was boredom from the beginning, and if it was difficult to square the romance that surrounded his name with the torpor of his company, it was clear that he was malleable and that she could become the principal creator of his reputation. She resolved to be both his muse and his maker.
Lady Jane’s aspirations came from the same source as her shame and her energy: her father. Intimacy between herself and Sir John she had discouraged from early in their marriage. It disgusted her, his sounds and flesh and face, and reminded her of all that she had devoted her life not simply to forgetting but to burning out of her being with experiences of a higher nature. Occasionally he forgot himself and was captive to his basest urges: at such times she believed herself exemplary in her tolerance of the revolting bestiality that is man. She endured his clumsy dull repetitions, the finger exercises of one tone-deaf to flesh. She came to see men as weaker—depraved, certainly—and in servitude to an uncontrollable animality, which was only the more mocking in her case because it had never resulted in a living child.
And so she believed in him: because she had no other choice, because she was already ageing, and because after her initial disappointment with both his dreariness and his lack of vigour, she found him unexpectedly amenable to being dragged along in the wake of her ambitions and passions. His chief virtue, she came to realise, was endurance. It was this that had enabled him to survive the horrors of the Arctic in his famed expeditions of 1819 and 1821, and it was this that made him go along without demur or comment with all her dreams and plans. He was her dancing bear.
For this reason, he offered no resistance to her various schemes, which included a plan to rid Van Diemen’s Land of snakes by paying—out of their own pocket—a shilling for every skin brought in; until, ?600 poorer, with snakes still abundant and the previously unknown profession of snake breeder firmly established, the scheme was abandoned. And though he had no interest in it, for the same reason he had agreed to visit the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island. Lady Jane had declared the Van Diemonian Aborigines there a scientific curiosity as remarkable as the quagga roaming free in the Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes. And so the vice-regal party now found itself sitting down to dinner in the Protector’s cottage, while listening to the Protector’s grand and—it had to be said—rather lengthy tales of his historic mission of conciliation.
‘His was the kingdom of the great mountains and wild rivers,’ the Protector was saying as the plates of the second course, roast wallaby, were taken away. ‘The sylvan forests and sublime beaches of western Van Diemen’s Land.’
Believing heft was created in spaces of silence, he had learnt to hold a table by pauses as much as by speech, confusing the politeness of others with growing rapture. He let his gaze sweep up and down the distinguished party seated at his dining table that evening—Sir John, Lady Jane, a half-dozen flunkeys and lackeys —and then his own court: his son, his wife, and the Catechist, Robert McMahon, who, since the tragic drowning of his pregnant wife while disembarking in a wild storm, dressed in the filthiest rags. Did any of them, the Protector wondered, have the slightest idea what work it was to create such a grand tragedy with yourself at its very heart?
‘He was a king, you see,’ he said finally, raising a hand to amplify his grand tone, for it was as if he were talking of places and people long since lost to another epoch—the Middle Ages, the Norman invasion, Viking axes glinting dawn sun down a river mouth—worlds only vaguely divinable through a swirling maelstrom of myth and lofty phrases. And though all knew well that he was talking about people and events not even a decade old, it was, the Protector realised, already another era, and he was both its Norseman, its final destroyer, and its Bede, its only chronicler.
‘And you intended remaking such fallen emperors here as stout yeoman?’ asked Lady Jane. ‘Does science, Mr Robinson, allow of such things?’
The Protector had begun what he termed his ‘friendly mission’ with a vague hope hardly worth calling an ambition. He was possessed by a desire he could scarcely grasp. After it ended, he did not understand what had happened. One world had ended and another begun, and he was no longer moving through that old world in wonder, but trapped at Wybalenna, in a new horror he could not escape. He smiled. He held out his hands.
‘God decrees such things, Ma’am. How can science disallow it? Besides,’ he continued, ‘he were much attached to me. First met him in 1830.’
He said this as though it had been in a newly fashionable London club. But this monarch was not sitting in some darkened corner of the Athenaeum in the heart of the greatest city in the world. Nor was he known as King Romeo, a name he would only be given by the Protector in another time in another world, an absurd, upside down, bastard imitation of England. The story the Protector went on to tell was of courage and nobility, the childlike fear of savages, the tale of a family finally saved. But King Romeo’s true story was something entirely different.
Then, his name was Towterer. He was standing atop a boulder scree on an unknown mountainside in the middle of a vast, unmapped wildland. Maps were, of course, unknown to him. And if he had been shown one, he would have thought it ridiculous. For he lived not on an island, but in a cosmos where time and the world were infinite, and all things were revealed by sacred stories. He was a tall, powerfully built man, careful and wary, and over one shoulder he wore a white kangaroo skin. Heading towards him along a distant ridgeline was a party of men whose coming he had feared, but of whom he was determined not to be frightened. The sacred stories foretold no tragedy; and besides, he trusted in his own guile.
