Christmas dinner: goose, ham, pudding, while Maria sipped goose broth and brandy-flavoured ice cream. Even in two weeks she had grown thinner. But she played charades with them that evening, laughing as Ethelred acted out Noah’s Ark — he made a most excellent elephant, lion and camel — and Tavy recited an old poem from his Scottish childhood, undoubtedly exciting, or possibly hilarious, but in such a broad accent that it was unintelligible.

They laughed at that too.

It was only later, as Ethelred and Tavy sat with port and cigars, that Clancy came out onto the veranda — cigar smoke reminded him of Rosemere and Rosemere of too much else — and found Maria softly weeping as she watched the moon.

‘Maria, darling . . .’ He put his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

‘I . . . just wanted more. That’s all. Just a little more. I am not even going to get the three months.’

‘Of course you will —’

‘No. I can feel it growing. It will be soon. Even a few days, perhaps.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘If there is anything you need to say to me, brother mine, you had better say it now.’

And he told her everything: McKenzie’s brown-eyed stockboy who was a girl, a girl he knew — Rose, who they’d seen in chains and left there; how love had grown and how he hadn’t seen it; how their father would never have a native bride at Overflow. ‘Nor will I ever love another,’ he said.

‘Are you so sure? You loved Flora, remember?’

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘But not like the love I feel for Rose. I loved Flora’s beauty. I loved her gaiety. Yes, I loved her too. But with Rose, it’s as if she and I are the only feet upon the land. I . . . I see the world differently when I am with her. Truly see it, hear birds I’d never know were there. I’m sorry. I can’t explain it.’

‘You don’t have to. I know just what it is like.’

And she did, he realised. Brother and sister, so unexpectedly born from the father who had no true love to give, who had hated the land and tried to transform it and had succeeded, for a while, had each found the same kind of love. They had each found not just a love of sky and soil and everything that hopped or blossomed in between, but a person who shared that love and vision.

And both must lose that love too: hers to such early death, and his because it was impossible, totally impossible. ‘Absolutely impossible,’ he said, then realised he had said the words aloud.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Maria bluntly.