‘I don’t know. She’d have been in her late teens at the time Nancy was talking about.’

‘I’d go for the tumour, but if it was that, it’d probably keep growing, even if it wasn’t malignant.’

‘Just getting bigger?’

‘And spreading. Maybe putting pressure on her brain, or eventually stopping her from breathing or swallowing.’

‘Oh, my word. The poor girl.’

‘Look, it’s just a theory. Find out more from Nancy. It might even have been something as simple as an accident to her face. Burns were terribly common with so many fireplaces and long skirts. They didn’t have plastic surgery back then.’ Scarlett yawned. ‘Sorry, I think my brain is tired too.’

‘You need to sleep. Good night, brat. And thank you. Sweet dreams.’

‘Sweet dreams to you too.’ The phone clicked as Scarlett put down the receiver.

Jed slowly put down her own receiver. Even as an eight-year-old, too weak to feed herself, Scarlett would spend an hour answering a question, or longer if you let her. Now after years of determination and intense therapy, she only needed a sniff of a medical mystery and she’d be scrambling through old issues of The Lancet. But tonight she had only wanted to sleep . . .

Something was wrong.

Chapter 5

Mrs Ryan’s Strengthening Mutton-bone Soup

Simmer about 4 hrs: 1kg mutton chops with 175g barley, 10 whole carrots, 6 sticks celery, 10 whole onions, 160g sultanas, 10 cups water. Add more water as necessary. Cool. Skim off the fat. Remove the vegetables and add chopped fresh ones. Salt and pepper to taste. Reheat till the veg are cooked.

SYDNEY, 1979

SCARLETT

Something is wrong, thought Scarlett desperately, lying back on her pillow. She’d even gone back to using her wheelchair to get to lectures, something she wasn’t going to tell Jed, who had enough to worry about.

Was the mysterious syndrome returning to blight her life now? She’d been born with it, spent her childhood fighting it, and she’d won, she thought, but now . . . There were still no diagnoses for most conditions like hers. No diagnosis meant no prognosis either.

She had thought — assumed — that getting stronger every year would mean she’d keep all the strength she had gained forever, or at least till she grew ancient. But what if she’d been wrong? What if her strength was only temporary, if there was some so-far-unidentified virus even now flaring up again, to weaken her muscles forever?

Not going to happen, she (almost) reassured herself. She’d been pushing herself too hard lately, that was all. She’d been studying too hard, going to the movies with William, even the beach. Walking on the sand was harder than a workout at the clinic gym, and waves going back and forth all the time in a seemingly endless ocean were frightening after the predictably one-way flow of the river back home.

But Alex had been too afraid of her fragility to even sleep with her. She didn’t want William to think of her as a cripple. William was so wonderfully, gloriously strong, all two metres of him, taking after his Maori grandfather. But William was working at the Whole Australia Factory back in Gibber’s Creek during the week now that he had left the police force, helping to design roof modifications for solar power systems. As long as she could walk by next weekend, William would never guess she’d had to use her chair again.