Richard Flanagan: Wanting

Besides, she understood that what she sold was not herself but a shell, from which at some point she would be freed. A few knew her story, or enough to taunt her, but they never understood that it was not her they were abusing with their vile words and rough fingers and abject bodies, because she was not there in that odd jumble and tug and hitch of two bodies in a muddy lane or the bush behind the town.

‘She was the Governor’s pet piccaninny princess, you know, all pearly smile and tarry flashness,’ she heard a voice say one dark evening as she staggered up Cat and Fiddle Lane. ‘But now she’s lost her looks.’

‘Grown into them, more like it,’ said a second voice, reedy and wretched. ‘She’s just another black ape now.’

Realising they were standing just around the corner, Mathinna halted.

‘A Chartist, more like it,’ laughed the first voice. ‘There for all.’

Though Mathinna did not understand exactly what was meant by this conversation, she understood it was something she could not even shape into thought: that, with those words, something undeniable had been denied her.

‘Jesus, he bleed like a blackfella,’ she said later that night, to a sawyer taking her too roughly from behind.

‘God’s free,’ he said. ‘You’re not.’

Nor was she, but her price was quickly dropping. Her hair was coming out in so many hanks she tied what remained of her red scarf around it, most of her teeth had gone or were going, and her skin was scabby. She traded her raddled flesh for johannas, mohurs, rupees, pieces of Spanish dollars, cartwheel pennies and Degraves’ despised Tassie shillings when she was lucky, and for pieces of pickled pork and long swigs of whatever when she was desperate. Sometimes that was several times a night out the back of various grog shops, occasionally it was bartered quickly off the track that led from Hobart Town through the hills and down D’Entrecasteaux Channel to Oyster Cove, where the handful of survivors of Wybalenna, with whom she spent more and more of her time, were now interred.

She stopped trapping birds. She drank more. It was apparent to her—albeit in a dull and confused way that she found beyond any words she knew, either of her own tongue or of English—that other people seemed to revel and delight with purpose in this life and this world. Ma’am existed for a reason, for hundreds of reasons with names like Education, Advancement, Civilisation. The convicts longed to escape, the soldiers to become settlers, the settlers to make more money. Even the old people at Oyster Cove held the hope of return to the land and the ancestors, if not in this life then in the next.

Mathinna yearned for some similar fire to live by, but in the meantime made do with what helped her endure, with what enabled her to survive. Mostly that was drink. Sometimes she still held her hands over her eyes and looked for the cracks of light. But less and less. More and more she drank towards the darkness.

George Augustus Robinson called in to Oyster Cove on his way home to England, to say a final farewell to what remained of those he had protected. He was mystified that they had little to say to him, and there was no excitement at his visit. He had been particularly interested to meet with Mathinna and see what had become of the experiment of the black princess, but all he met with were sorry rumours.

He reflected on the strangeness of this final meeting many years later in the town of Bath, to which he had retired, as he closed a large trunk full of his assembled papers detailing his strange history of encounters with the savages of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land. Robinson had hoped to make something of them—a book, celebrity, honours, money. That most elusive accolade, greatness. No one was interested. Nor, ultimately, he had discovered, was he. His major cause for regret was not holding out for more money when he brought in the last of the natives. Money, money, money, and what money can make of life!

His ambitions, like his body, were collapsing. He found balance difficult. He hoped for a brass plaque to be attached to his house after his death. He was no longer sure how best to lobby for, or even obliquely suggest, such an honour on the ever-rarer occasions he met the few who paraded themselves as powerful in the old Regency spa town. What was he commemorating? His thoughts were mist. He heard strange chanting. Saw a naked man dancing between the stars and the earth. Remembered rivers, a dark child at his door, fingers greasy with sawing. He awoke early on the eighteenth of October 1866 and, rolling his head to one side in his warm bed, he looked at an autumnal light, red and diffuse, softly falling through a window. He felt a great serenity wash over him, his body peacefully stretched out, and, secure in the knowledge he had been a good man who had helped many others, he died.

SEATS FOR THE FINAL NIGHT were impossible to procure. People who had come by train from as far away as London were begging ticket touts for pity. Lady Jane had been luckier. After she missed seeing the play in London because of fundraising engagements elsewhere, she had been delighted to receive an invitation for that evening’s performance, along with a delightful letter, from Mr Dickens himself.

Travelling into the heart of Manchester that uncharacteristically hot August morning felt to Lady Jane like descending into the cone of Vesuvius. The light was ochre and the sweaty air tasted of sulphur; iron horseshoes and the iron wheels of omnibuses, coaches, wagons and drays were thundering all around her, a cacophony of noise like ten thousand smithies. And like a spectator on a volcano, she was enjoying these marvellous sensations of a most modern city when her landau carriage, taking a side road to avoid the flyblown corpse of a horse, became caught up in a funeral cortege.

She travelled the world now, her vengeance on her husband’s obstinacy applauded as noble grief, her part as loyal widow having emancipated her from men and allowing her freedoms few other women could imagine. Her life, as a studied melancholy, she savoured. To admit to happiness would have been inappropriate, but as her cursing driver sought a way around, she believed herself to be fulfilled.

Craning her head, she could see it was a child’s hearse, half-sized, white-painted, brass-railed and white ostrich feather-plumed. Inside lay a toy-sized coffin. Water from the melting ice packed beneath that small, sad box dripped down the hearse’s jolting rear. As those beads of water splashed on the street’s hot cobbles, vanishing into steam, Lady Jane found her pleasant thoughts evaporating.

‘Faster,’ she yelled to the landau’s driver. ‘Get me there faster.’

At the Grand Western Hotel, Ellen Ternan’s spirits were also not what they had been. All day she had the sense Dickens was avoiding her. She worried that she had lost his respect, she cursed herself for becoming too familiar. Meanwhile Maria Ternan had woken unwell, and by the afternoon her cold was so bad her voice had gone. Against this loss Maria could do nothing, and it was clear that she would not be able to perform that night as Wardour’s love, Clara Burnham.

An hour and a half before the curtain went up, Ellen Ternan received a terse note from Dickens saying Mr Hueffer had found a local actress to fill her role, freeing her to take her sister’s place in the lead. She burst into tears, not knowing whether it was from relief or terror, or both.

Though each evening had seen an ever more extraordinary performance from Dickens, even the cast were unprepared for the intensity and emotion of Dickens’ acting that final evening.

‘It’s as though it’s no longer a play, but life itself,’ said Wilkie to Forster, as they waited in the wings for their calls.