They left at dawn, horses stamping, wanting their oats, dogs stretching and nosing at posts, seeing who had done what overnight, cats slinking back after a night ratting.

It was good to leave the town behind them, he told himself, smug people with their lace-curtained windows who had never opened their lives nor minds far enough to see what was beyond. There was comfort in the saddle, in having his wife on one side, his son on the other.

But not enough. For he had failed his wife and failed his son, just as years earlier he had failed Flora and Clementine. Just as Rose had feared . . .

Rose nudged her horse closer. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. He saw her smile at him. Suddenly he heard the birdsong once again, the grey shrike thrush trilling sugaree from its tree, saw swallows darting, fat with flies, saw his son, his face still carefully expressionless.

‘I’m sorry, Benjamin. I shouldn’t have sent you there.’

His son shrugged.

‘I’ll find you a tutor.’ That’s what young men of good family have before they go to school, he thought. But where would they find a tutor of quality who’d teach a dark-skinned boy, live on a property where the mistress was dark-skinned too?

I’ll begin taking Benjamin with me to the sales, he thought desperately. Get the town used to him. If people wanted the Clancy money, the Clancy sheep and wool, they’d have to learn to accept Benjamin Clancy too . . .

Their horses ambled towards the Drinkwater driveway, its green English trees lush again since the rains. This was now a public road and there was nothing old Drinkwater could do to stop anyone using it. He glanced at the house curiously, through its trees. He hadn’t visited Drinkwater since way back when, before Flora’s death. Another world, another life.

Ah, yes, Drinkwater had had a native wife too, way back in the never-never, but Clancy bet the old curmudgeon wouldn’t let another man’s native wife sit in the living room and Clancy wasn’t having Rose sat in the kitchen, nor his son. And yet according to town gossip the young woman they called Miss Matilda — Jim Halloran’s daughter, the union organiser killed at the billabong — was the one who ran Drinkwater now, since old Drinkwater’s stroke. Margaret had died, back when Clancy was away droving. Miss Matilda had been engaged to Drinkwater’s son, who’d died in the Boer War — there’d been some gossip about him, shot for some crime or other. Drinkwater’s other son was working down in Sydney, leaving just the old man and Matilda in the big house.