Wanting by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page A

corpulent husband, ‘you almost wish to hold the little wild beast and pet her.’
    It was an unexpected observation for them both. She resolved not to let such feelings frighten her. For Lady Jane, what saved the child from being a child was that she was a savage, and what saved her from being a savage was that she was a child.
    Presuming the Governor’s wife more interested in artefacts than individuals, the Protector explained how the child’s necklace was made out of hundreds of tiny, vivid green seashells, threaded on several yards of possum sinew, then wrapped around her neck a number of times. When he went on to say that the necklace had belonged to the child’s mother, who had passed away some years before, and the white kangaroo skin to her father, who had died only the week before, Lady Jane was all the more taken.
    ‘The dear little waif,’ she said.
    ‘Leda,’ said the Protector. ‘Her name is Leda. Seven years of age. Youngest on the island.’
    ‘And what eggs, Mr Robinson,’ Lady Jane smiled, ‘do you expect her to bring forth for posterity?’
    ‘Eggs?’ asked the Protector, slightly confused. ‘I meant the child, not a chook.’
    ‘You must protect her from swans,’ said Lady Jane, making small mischief.
    ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ said the Protector, whose knowledgeof classical mythology extended little beyond the names contained in his battered copy of Carswell’s Classical Names & Almanac .
    ‘Leda,’ said Lady Jane.
    ‘Yes,’ smiled the Protector. ‘A beauty in the ancient world.’
    ‘The ancients believed that, in order to rape the beautiful Leda, Zeus transformed into a swan.’
    ‘Marvellous tale, of course,’ laughed the Protector, utterly appalled by the story, by Lady Jane’s frank language and, above all, by the exposure of his own ignorance. ‘The divine ancients!’ he sighed. ‘Such stories! Mind you,’ he quickly added, as the children ran past them at the dance’s end, ‘we prefer to call her Mathinna.’
    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