Cobwebs red with dust hung from the parlour ceiling, like a shaggy chandelier. No one had bothered to even sweep since Maria left. A bush rat had nested in Clementine’s mattress. Flora screamed at the rat droppings and the hairless pink baby rats, while Clementine peered, fascinated.

‘Babies,’ she declared, reaching small hands towards them. ‘I want to play with the babies!’

‘Clementine . . .’ began Flora, almost too shocked to speak. The child looked at her mother, as if wondering what she was upset about. She must think baby rats were like the kitchen kittens back in Sydney . . .

‘Rose, take Miss Clementine outside,’ ordered Clancy. It had been a shock to see him, dressed in workmen’s clothes, a beard all too obviously recently shaved off, leaving the lower part of his face paler. He was broader shouldered than she remembered, more muscled. She could not even see the shadow of a gentleman about him now.

Flora hid her face in her hands as Rose led Clementine to the kitchen, to see what Mrs Taylor was stewing for lunch, and Clancy hauled the mattress outside. He held her as she sobbed. At last he brought in folded hessian sacks as if those could possibly make a new mattress for their daughter.

And yet that was what her daughter’s mattress was. A pile of hessian sacks, even if it had a feather quilt and one of her soft linen sheets, a single note from the lost songs of Rosemere, covering it.

The house was silent without Maria. Mrs Taylor cooked, then left for her own house while Rose served at the table: greasy mutton stew from a ewe whose entrails had been ripped by a dingo. Flora had seen the source of their meat in the fly-proof meat house out the back and only just made it to the latrine before she vomited, then retched again at the latrine’s stench.

Later, at luncheon, when she enquired about the smell, so much fouler than she remembered, Clancy admitted that without Maria’s housekeeping no one seemed to be adding the wood ash to the dunny hole three times a day to soak up the leavings and cloak the stink.

‘Better see to it, my girl,’ Ezekiel told her, forking up a lump of potato. ‘Or we’ll be up to our ears in maggots.’

She screamed. She shrieked, ‘NO! No! No!’ But not aloud. She simply sat at the table, trying not to look at the food, the room or the people. Only Rose was properly dressed, in the black and white of a maid she had worn in Sydney too, the gleam of her apron still not stained by the mud in Overflow’s water. But even Rose, dear helpful Rose, was not correct either, for no black maid ever served at any table Flora had eaten at before. A kitchen maid, perhaps, but not serving in a dining room . . .