She lay awake after he fell asleep. She had heard the owl swoop down — owls were silent flyers, even the powerful ones, but she knew how to feel the air for the silence of their wings, just as she could smell when the wind changed from the north, which would mean good rain, or from the east, which would bring drizzle.

Clancy snored beside her. He had shaved before going to Sydney, but his whiskers were long enough to be grey again. She was glad. A man was — odd — without his whiskers, the sign that he had truly become a man.

She was happy, deeply, heart-rich happy. But she was content as well, which was not the same thing. Content to be in a bed, more comfortable than the ground, especially as your bones ached just a little in the cold as you grew older. Content to be in a house, as long as she could spend much of the day with her feet on the ground: bare feet as well as booted feet.

People needed to feel the soil beneath their feet, but not, she had discovered, all the time. Floors were comfortable and carpets pretty, and she enjoyed looking at herself in the mirror too, and dressing in different clothes each day. There was a white dress with cherries on it she would wear for Clancy tomorrow, at least at breakfast before she changed to help with the dagging. They might have more stockmen now — and maybe more than they needed — but she’d still work alongside her husband . . .

Her husband who was proud of her. He had not said it, but she knew it. Overflow was a white man’s house now, a proper house for Clancy of the Overflow, for the man her son would become, and for his wife too.

And that . . . fit. For Benjamin was half white, so needed the right house, the sheep, and she would teach him not to ringbark his land, and where to put the fences if fences they must have.

Clancy was proud of her, a woman who could make a home and dag a sheep, and smell a rainstorm months away. He was not the husband she had expected as a child; nor had the land she’d known continued forever, as she had assumed it would. But still . . . with happiness as well as loss, Rose of Overflow lay there content.

Chapter 54

Chapter 54

How to keep a clean, safe chimney

Send a goose or fat hen up your chimney twice a year to reduce the need for sweeping. Always ensure the wood you use is dry, and your chimney will not catch fire.

OVERFLOW, 1903

CLANCY