He had not even tried. She had not even known enough of life to realise such simplicity might be tolerable, even enjoyable, and demand that he give them to her. Possibly, probably, she would have refused to live in a cottage with a clerk for a husband. But he should at least have offered her the choice.

Once the bodies were laid in the earth, one small, one even smaller, each wrapped in a silk quilt, a little moth-eaten now, the edges nibbled by mice; once the soil, so hard to dig he had needed a crowbar to fashion the hole, had been replaced, he dug six post holes; cut six posts; then laid four poles on them, wired securely to make a fence. The fence would not stop the sheep or roos from nibbling at whatever grew there — nor did he want it to, otherwise the grave would be a patch of weeds in the dust of Overflow.

No funeral. No investigation either, for which he was grateful. Old Drinkwater was the local magistrate. He would understand only too well what had happened. Clancy would send him a letter, and another to send to the church at Gibber’s Creek, asking that someone might travel to Overflow to give a memorial service. Flora was an Anglican. He suspected that a Catholic priest would more likely be a visitor to the debris of a gold-mining town like Gibber’s Creek. But words were words and God was God and if there were a God and mercy and heaven, Flora and Clementine were in His arms now.

He prayed they were. He prayed that God existed, that something existed in which someone could have faith, could trust. But he did not have the right prayers to create them.

Nor could he fully articulate even what he felt, except loss and guilt and anger. Anger at Ezekiel, who might have made his daughter-in-law’s lot so much easier, who had promised her family so much, but not delivered it. Yet even as he thought it, Clancy knew that was unfair. Ezekiel Clancy had no true idea of the cost of a gentleman’s life. Even before the flood, Overflow had been stretched to support the gracious life of Rosemere. Ezekiel had made a fortune from breeding sheep with good wool, but it had taken his son decades to realise that despite this, the ex-convict with no formal education was not a good businessman, or even a competent one.

He was angry at God, for giving rain and then withdrawing it; angry at Flora, who had closed her eyes not just for the minute it must have taken Clementine to drown, but to all the possibilities of a good life at Overflow. But mostly, of course, the anger was directed at himself.

Flora had trusted him. Clementine had trusted him. He had let them die.