‘No, it was not your fault,’ he admitted wearily. ‘I’m sorry I accused you. I’m ashamed that we took you prisoner. I didn’t think . . .’ He paused. ‘No, I did think. I knew it was wrong at the time.’ But he had chosen to sacrifice this young woman to please his wife. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, knowing no words could cover the magnitude of all he had done and had not done.

She gazed at him thoughtfully in the dusk. Perhaps she understood what he would like to say, if he knew how, because she said, ‘Dinner is ready, if you want to join us. Mr McKenzie says you can ride with us, if I agree.’

‘Do you?’ he asked numbly.

‘Yes. But maybe you have too many memories to do that?’

And he realised there were memories he wanted to keep. This girl could talk of Clementine, not as the dead child but the laughing one. He could share memories of his daughter with her.

Nor, come to that, did he have anywhere else to go, except that longing for green grass.

He stood, rubbed his eyes roughly with his sleeves and hoped that the firelight would flicker too much to show that he’d been crying. ‘I’d like to join you all. Are you related to Mrs McKenzie?’

‘No. She’s Gadigal.’ Rose said the word as if it meant something to him. ‘Mr McKenzie says that my people — the people of Overflow, of Drinkwater — have been taken to a place a long way down the coast, on a reservation.’

They began to walk. ‘I thought a reservation might be heaven, back at Overflow.’ She shrugged. ‘I learned that it isn’t. If I try to join my family — if they are still alive, haven’t been sent out to slave somewhere — they’ll shut me up in the reservation too.’

‘You weren’t . . .’ he stopped. He had been going to say she hadn’t been a slave at Overflow. She’d even been allowed to sleep in Maria’s room, to care for Clementine. But an ancient Roman might have said the same of any slave in his household: ‘They eat the same food as we do, except for on feast days of course, and you can’t give a slave the good wine. They have comfortable beds . . .’

She had worked all day, every day. She had not been paid. And, yes, she had been chained.

He stopped. ‘Can you forgive me?’

She considered. He could just make out the whites of her eyes in the starlight, the campfire a brighter star beyond. An owl hooted, far off, one of the giant ones they sometimes saw at Overflow, capable of carrying off a lamb, and sometimes they did if one was sickly. Rose seemed to be listening to it.