‘Yes. I even know where she’s buried.’ Nancy grinned. ‘I know where all the skeletons are buried, but not their exact ages. Are you going to let me tell my story my own way, or not?’
It wasn’t really a question. It rarely was with Nancy. ‘Your way,’ said Jed.
Nancy glanced out the window, where young Clancy was sitting on a swing rocking Mattie gently on his lap. ‘It was a wonderful five years . . .’ she began.
Chapter 7
Victoria Sponge Cake
4 eggs, 8oz caster sugar, 4¼oz plain flour, 1tsp baking powder, 3tbsp boiling water, 1tsp butter
Beat the eggs and sugar together for 20 minutes till pale yellow and thick. Add the flour and baking powder, then boiling water in which the butter has been melted.
Bake in two buttered and floured tins in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes or until lightly browned and the edges shrunk slightly from the sides. Do not overcook. Cool. Spread one cake with whipped cream and sliced strawberries, place the other cake on top of it. Top with more strawberries and cream or dust with icing sugar. A good colonial addition is the juice of the passionfruit spread over the top layer of cream. This cake must be served with a cake slice to avoid spillage.
SYDNEY, 1870–75
CLANCY
It was a wonderful five years. An almost perfection of years.
The first weeks he watched Flora and Maria poring over catalogues and sketching furniture designs, choosing rose varieties, curtain patterns, silverware as well as the final preparations for the wedding. Maria did not even bother to wear her veil with her new sister.
His father left for Overflow after assuring himself he’d got his money’s worth, returning only for the wedding in Sydney’s new cathedral, a wedding attended by society, the families of his school friends — though few of their parents had ever invited a convict’s son to their homes — as well as other prominent families, even ones who had never met either bride or groom. But with the promise of an Honourable — or even Lady — a surprising number of them came, and drank champagne at the reception too.
The wedding: watching Flora in tiers of pale blue lace-draped silk entering on his father’s arm. Clancy had never seen such beauty, never hoped for it, never been so happy. He was delighted also that he had achieved his father’s ambition of being a gentleman at last, and that even Maria had felt confident enough to attend, sitting at the end of the pew by the wall and heavily veiled, but there nonetheless.
And then the nights: Flora allowing him her body, rose perfume combining with the scents of sex and lavender-stored sheets.
Within a year, the house was transformed, the ‘parlour’ given the more acceptable name of ‘drawing room’, with walls newly covered in grey silk, its curtains green and silver-blue, almost the same colours as the shafts of light reflected from the harbour. The second year the rose bushes bloomed, over a thousand of them, carefully graded from deep red on the top part of the hill through shades of pink to white by the driveway just as Flora had first dreamed, so that carriages began to rumble up the cobbled hill just to glimpse the sight, with underplantings of alyssum and rosemary and French lavender to give colour in the few winter months when the carefully fed and pruned roses didn’t bloom on that sun-drenched hill. No one, of course, refused an invitation to any of the parties thrown by Mrs Clancy (‘Lady Flora, you mean? A darling girl! I know her well!).