They were so good together, those two. Just as Clancy had always dreamed, even if he thought she didn’t know: his family joined with Matilda’s, his descendants hers as well. And, oh, the joy of the past years, feeling Nancy sink deeper into country. Nancy too would want to hold her hand.

‘You’ll have to wait,’ she murmured to the giant bird. And it said nothing, because a bird never did, except to call its challenge to others who might encroach upon its territory or come to mate. That long lovely owl boom of late winter. She wouldn’t hear it again, except of course she heard it now, all ninety-three winters of it. She hoped she’d taught Nancy the bird’s secret, the secret of the swans too. Know the land and know the winds, because knowing is the deepest form of love. And when you loved, you could glide between the currents and rarely need to flap your wings at all . . .

The bird sat there and she slept.

She woke to Nancy holding her hand, Benjamin sitting on the other side of her, Michael bringing out cups of tea and scones. Mary must have made them. How blessed she had been with her daughter-in-law, one who could create grandchildren like hers and who could cook as well . . .

It had been so long a life. So strange a life. So many times she should have died or lived her life in drudgery. The whole of the British Empire, it seemed, had tried to erode all she might have been: her life, her marriage, her son. But it had failed. Guns, poisons, prisons, reservations, refusing her the right to hospitals, not allowing her son to go to school. But she had won, she and Clancy. For they, at least, had defeated the entire British Empire with the steadfastness of love.

One day her people would return. Different people, as the land was different, but the same, as country stayed the same too.

She smiled. Time to leave, she thought to the owl, to Clancy, to all the rich, wonderful years of her life. She would not have missed a single day of them, not the terror as she made her escape from Overflow on Ezekiel’s big black stallion, not that first touch of Clancy’s lips or the sight of Nancy’s baby fist, so pale, clutching at her dark fingers. Not one single minute . . .

And this, her final minute, she would not waste either, but drink in the breath of her country and her loved ones, the murmur of the river and, above, the sunlit blue of the morning sky, always, beyond the sunlight, Clancy’s everlasting glory of the stars . . .

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

William’s Mum’s Pavlova