Infatuated, yes, with Flora, awed and proud of life at Rosemere. But happy? He had thought he had been happy. Part of that had been the energy and optimism of youth. He had never felt like this. Parts of school had been fun; even games with Maria when they were children, but always at home he had been weighed down by Ezekiel’s expectations and Maria’s stoic acceptance that her chance of a normal life was sliced away as her deformity grew . . .

Happiness was waking to see Rose with dewdrops on her hair, leaning her head against a cow’s flank as she milked it while watching the horizon’s flames of sunrise. Happiness was sitting around a campfire that smelled of the lemon gum leaves Mrs McKenzie had thrown in for the pleasure of their smoke, knowing that the stars above went on forever, while Tiger sang a ballad he’d learned on the convict ship, when the only relief from misery was a song. Happiness was running after a pigeon so fat from drinking its fill at dusk that it just trotted faster and faster, rather than waste the energy to fly, till he and Rose broke into laughter at its indignity, instead of grabbing it for Mrs McKenzie to make pigeon pie.

Happiness was McKenzie riding back from the next town with a letter from Maria, and to his surprise, the continued letters from the boy who would be a poet or a bushman, but was instead confined to a solicitor’s office. Andrew Paterson was still trying his hand at poetry. Sometimes Clancy felt the lad only wrote to him to have an audience for his verses — most of which were bad but a few had a phrase or two that grabbed and did not let go.

Clancy wrote back, when he could, long letters with a page or so written by the campfire at night, meandering on for weeks until there was a chance to post them, on brown paper if McKenzie had forgotten to get writing paper, and with a home-made pen from a lyrebird feather and ink from boiling wattle galls.

He wrote to Maria of a tree that blazed gold in mid-summer, high as a gum tree but the leaves the wrong shape. He sent her orchids that Rose’s sharp eyes picked out and that he pressed and dried between sheets of paper for her. He wrote of mist that wound its way down gullies as if it decided each morning which way to go. Mostly, he wrote to the Paterson lad of the same, though not with the flower samples.

He did not tell Maria about Rose.

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

A good campfire