But once she had returned to Overflow, Maria began to write letters too, sending them to Clancy to post, presumably so Ezekiel would not know who they were to be forwarded to: the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in London. Within six months, she received her first reply, addressed to M. Clancy, Esquire, at Rosemere.

A man’s name, or a name that might be a man’s. Soon Maria’s letters were attached to small packages containing carefully preserved plant specimens. By their second year at Rosemere, M. Clancy wrote to at least six men, as well as the society, and received letters, journals that were not about recipes or how to turn cardboard and a frayed handkerchief into a reticule, and sometimes small packages in return.

Clancy did not enquire further. If this deception was needed to give his sister a small portion of happiness on her vast plate of roast mutton and boiled cabbage duty, he would not embarrass her by requesting an explanation.

Nor did Maria give a reason for refusing their invitations to visit Rosemere. At first Clancy suspected his father had forbidden it — Maria must be useful as a housekeeper, if she could not be useful with a marriage. Slowly Clancy came to realise that at Overflow Maria could live without her veil, but in Sydney she’d had to hide even from the servants ever since one of the new chars glimpsed her and screamed.

The third regret was the deepest and the most unexpected: he missed Overflow, even in the fragrant nights in Flora’s bed, where the sheets were of soft Irish linen but no owls boomed in the night.

He had been homesick at school, but everyone was homesick there. He had not expected to miss the country he had grown up in once he had such a gracious home of his own. Gentleman Once said the bush wriggled into your soul and so it had, which even the almost daily rides with Flora could not assuage, for the ‘bush’ near Sydney was goat and cow eaten, chopped for house or firewood, only thin regrowth trees remaining.

No great tides of migrating emus, or the roar of flocks of autumn swallows; no wombat scratches in the dark. Only the possums seemed to have welcomed the invaders. They had welcomed Flora’s roses too, till the under-gardener set traps.

Each time he shook hands on an agreement with a wool broker he smelled the vast flocks again, heard the murmur of the river below the house, saw the rear end of a wombat vanish down one of the holes in the softer soil of the channels. Overflow was his home, even if his father made it clear he had no place there, except for his bi-annual visits to help oversee the shearing and select animals for their yearly stock sale; even if his wife had created a household and social life that surely any man would envy.

There was another concern too. Ezekiel did not share the details of Overflow’s finances with his son. In Ezekiel’s mind, a gentleman should not concern himself with finances. Clancy suspected that view was not shared by most gentlemen, but Ezekiel’s total dominance of their lives financially was not something he could discuss with his acquaintances. The household bills were met by the agent, and Clancy was paid an allowance, from which he paid Flora’s. But as Clancy grew more familiar with the world of commerce and learned exactly how much — how very much — Overflow made on just one of its bales of fine wool, even he could roughly calculate Overflow’s yearly income, as well as how much the Rosemere household cost.