Matilda and Tommy gave the reception at Drinkwater — Overflow was too far from the church. The bride’s parents attended, the grandeur of the homestead and Tommy Thompson’s reputation enough to almost reconcile them to the marriage. The house and shearers’ quarters were full, and tents had been erected down to the river. Miss Mattingale was ensconced in the living room, getting happily tipsy on the best champagne. The men were drunker in the garden and the shearers’ quarters. It was the only time Clancy had ever seen drunk shearers use language fit for a ladies’ afternoon tea, for the woman who was still ‘Miss Matilda’ would have no swearing on her property.

The Thompsons and the Clancys were close friends now. Clancy still wondered, for two seconds at a time only, whether Matilda would have been happier with someone like him, but a better man than him, especially the one he had been: a husband who could match her understanding of the land, instead of radio valves. But hers was a good marriage, one of two people, not one plus a tyrant, or even a man who automatically expected his need to be met before his wife’s. A good marriage like his with Rose, and like Benjamin and Mary’s.

Nor was there ever loneliness again. Mary succeeded in doing what Clancy had been unable to do — slowly insinuate their family into the daily life of Gibber’s Creek. Miss Mattingale was joined by her dear friend Mabel, who decided at the age of sixty-three to finally defy her family — most of whom, admittedly, had died by then — and live with Dorothy at Overflow.

Every year now there were the wild Christmas and New Year camps by the river and parties at Drinkwater, with the Lees and a dozen families from town who followed the Drinkwater example of ignoring the colour of a person’s skin, as well as the growing horde of Sampsons — Pete Sampson and his wife seemed to produce new offspring every year.

Mary and Benjamin seemed content with two, young Ben and Nancy, just as Matilda and Tommy had only two sons, Jim and Michael. As Clancy watched Nancy grow — closer to him and Rose perhaps than to her own parents, soaking in bush lore — he did dream, sometimes, that maybe his granddaughter might marry one of Matilda’s sons. It was such an obvious union that he was careful never to mention it, for Nancy was as stubborn as her mother — and her grandmother — and one word of an expectation like that might put her off the boy for life.

Or maybe not.

She heard the whisper of the river, his Nancy, his black swan girl, Rose told him. She heard the music of the stars.