Clancy shook his head. A brown snake had been raiding the henhouse. He didn’t want Clementine putting an unwary hand into a nest with a brown snake.

‘Not this time, my pumpkin. Maybe Mrs Taylor has made butter for a good girl to eat on her damper for lunch.’

‘I want to get the eggs,’ said Clementine stubbornly, looking back at her mother. But Flora just shook her head, managing a smile at her daughter as the pair went out.

Mrs Taylor had not got around to making butter for over a fortnight. Flora was all too aware it was her duty to see that the woman carried out her assigned tasks. But Mrs Taylor no longer seemed to recognise Flora’s authority. Flora had never thought it needed to be enforced before. One was superior and so servants did what they were told or, at least, what they had been told to do by other servants, the duties passed on for generations, so in a well-run household, one only ever spoke to the very most senior servants . . .

She looked at the three letters again as Clementine’s small feet danced out of the room, her hand in her father’s, forgiving him for the crime of fetching eggs with her. And after the egg collecting? Would Clancy take the child to see the lambs’ tails docked, or, worse, castrated? A process Clementine already knew about and was all too eager to explain to her mother, as well as how Mrs Taylor might fry the results in mutton fat to make ‘bush oysters’.

Escape. All three letters offered escape. Margaret’s for a week and Maria’s for perhaps two or even three months. And Mrs Glossop . . .

The woman was impossible. The Castle an abomination. Yet such was Flora’s desperation that she considered it.

For at The Castle ‘Lady’ Flora and undoubtedly ‘Lady’ Clementine would be treated as royalty — or at least as the Glossops felt royalty should be treated. She had no doubt Mr Glossop knew exactly how the Clancys were placed financially. He would be delighted to pay her dress bills — fashionable dresses, with no bustles and the wider skirts she had noticed in Sydney. She would have a lady’s maid again — untrained, perhaps, for she doubted Mrs Glossop knew which servants to hire, but easily replaced when a suitable person was found. Mrs Glossop might even be hoping that ‘Lady Flora’ would be able to ensure a better class of servant, like the Rosemere butler she had acquired.

There would be nurses, a nanny, maids and under-maids and probably lobster puffs every night for supper and French champagne at luncheon and an infinity of garden parties, picnics and musical evenings. All completely, totally impossible here at Overflow.

She glanced out the dusty window to more dust, at the cow pen beyond, at the flies on the glass, the endless crawling flies.

All so tempting. To be Lady Flora and not a drudge.