And Clancy loved the place. Possibly, still, loved his father and always had, for the old man’s limitations were not his fault. All he had achieved, all he had laboured for, had been for his descendants, and if his son was not the one he felt he should have been given, well, Ezekiel Clancy still did what he felt was his duty.

He could not tell his father it wasn’t grief that kept him from Overflow, but love. The love of a fairy-faced English girl; the small hand in his of the daughter he had lost; the dark-skinned woman who was his heart mate and who never could be mistress of Overflow.

There had been another letter waiting for him at the last shed. Maria wrote to him each month — he suspected she would have written more often if she’d had news she thought he’d be interested in, but her view of the bush, with its microscopes and watercolours, was too far from his.

He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t visited her yet, as he had truly intended to do when he left the McKenzies’ camp. Perhaps it was because Maria was the one person not at that camp who he could talk to about Flora, Clementine and even Rose. If he saw her, the words and feelings might come gushing out, and he didn’t think that he could bear that yet.

He wrote back to her, instead, telling her where he would be next, as well as the shearing stories suitable to tell a lady, about the cook who gave a shearer a sandwich of chopped mouse because he’d complained there wasn’t enough meat in the stew and the Murray cod that was so big it had pulled three men into the river, but they wouldn’t let it go, till finally it took six of them to land it.

Which was how Maria knew he would be near the property they’d called Bear Hill for Christmas.

Dearest Clancy,

Excuse the brevity of this note. I have not been well lately. It is my dearest wish that you might join us this Christmas, and Ethelred joins me in the invitation.

Your loving sister,

Maria

The shortness of the letter troubled him, as did the reference to her illness. He would have to go. But what did you take a scientist sister and her strange wisp of a husband for Christmas, especially when that husband was rich, English and cared only for plants, his wife and his dinner?