Read Online Wanting by Richard Flanagan - Free Book Online Page A

dancing under the southern lights.
    ‘ With me ,’ Robinson wrote, ‘ veni, vidi, vici applies .’
    Wongerneep’s death, a year after they arrived at Wybalenna, rather than depressing her daughter, had the oddly opposite effect: the toddler became more friendly, more lively, more curious of what others were doing. And this in spite of the Protector’s fury when he discovered that, instead of a Christian burial in his cemetery, Towterer had taken Wongerneep’s body to the top of Flagstaff Hill and there built a fire on which he cremated his wife. Mathinna had watched the smoke rise towards the stars and make the moon tremble as, below, her mother charred and turned to ash.
    Thereafter, Mathinna seemed always to be around the feet of adults, as if seeking a new mother, but even at such a young age she had the wit to be helpful rather than troublesome. And so she grew into a lively child who seemed unaffected by the growing gloom and listlessness that infected the settlement of Wybalenna, listening to her father’s stories of a cosmos where time and the world were infinite, and all things were revealed by sacred stories.
    ‘And this nigger, Mr Robinson,’ asked Sir John, ‘Tuttereramajig or whatever—you say he had majesty about his bearing?’
    In answer, the Protector, his bowdlerised account of meeting Towterer complete, and having revealed almost nothing of what actually took place, stood up, went to a sideboard and picked up a straw-coloured wooden box that looked as if it had been made for a hat.
    As though it were some sacred sacrament, he broughtthe box up into the candelabra light that radiated across the table.
    ‘It is the Van Diemonian timber, Huon pine,’ he said. ‘Made under my supervision by Marc Antony.’
    There was a scraping of table legs on the wooden floor as the diners, like the tentacles of a startled sea anemone, pulled abruptly inwards to better see such a wonder.
    ‘He looked like a Saracen,’ said the Protector, ‘and carried himself like Saladin.’
    He opened the box’s lid. The table stared wordless as an irreconcilable form shaped in and out of the greasy shadows, until finally it took on the undeniable reality of a human skull.
    ‘I give you King Romeo, last of the Port Davey kings.’
    After several moments of low murmuring, Lady Jane, delighted with her gift, and even more so with the story of its provenance, which established their skull—as she now thought of it—as one of the finest specimens of its race, thanked the Protector for ‘such an especial gift’ and grew animated.
    ‘And this King Romeo,’ she said, ‘he was the father of that pretty little girl we saw dancing earlier this afternoon?’
    ‘He was,’ said the Protector.
    ‘And that dear little girl then has neither mother nor father, nor family?’
    ‘She has family, Ma’am, but none immediate. They think of such things more loosely and more intricately than we. For us family is a string, for them it is lace.’
    ‘She is an orphan, though.’
    ‘By our reckoning,’ said the Protector, ‘she is an orphan.’
    ‘No one can doubt your good work here, Mr Robinson,’ said Lady Jane more loudly, as outside one dog began barking, then another and another, until the whole settlement’s seemingly infinite population of half-starved curs was yelping. ‘But what firmer proof of the worth of your approach could be demonstrated than to raise just one individual with every advantage of class and rank?’ She turned to her husband. ‘Don’t you think so, Sir John?’ she yelled.
    Sir John mumbled a startled assent, the dogs ceased yowling, and, settling into a steadier, more assured rhythm of speech, Sir John declared that it would be an experiment of the soul worth making, both for science and for God.
    ‘If we shine the Divine light on lost souls, then they can be no less than we,’ he said. ‘But first they must be taken out of the darkness and its barbarous influence.’
    Before arriving, Lady Jane