Clementine too had a change of clothes, but napkins were a problem. Clancy rinsed the dirty ones in buckets of water and tied them on to the dusty coach to dry. The servants would need to boil them properly at Drinkwater.

They stopped to water the horses at midday, as well as rinse more napkins. The creek was thin and rocky, but the breeze and stillness were welcome after the journey’s jolting. It seemed as if every bone was slightly out of place.

She managed a smile as Clancy laid a blanket for her under a loose-topped tree whose shade was not nearly adequate, but still cooler than the carriage. She began to feed Clementine. Queen Victoria had fed her own children and so Flora Clancy could too, at least when there were no Horse and Jockey Inn maids with bottles of milk. She was still not expert with napkins, nor getting the child to settle.

All at once she felt someone watching her. She quickly covered herself with a clean napkin and looked up.

A group of natives stared at her, the men entirely naked, carrying spears, women with only a string around their waists and fur-covered bundles on their backs, and dark-skinned children who gaped at the carriage or laughed.

She had seen natives almost every day since she had been in the colony, crouching in rags under trees in Sydney or dressed in neat cast-offs in the impeccably clean cottages she visited with the ladies of her charities, encouraging the dark daughters into service and the boys too to be grooms, sailors or fishermen.

These were the first wild natives she had seen. Would they attack? But Clancy must have seen them before her. He didn’t seem concerned. Indeed within a minute the party had moved away, silently, vanishing somehow between the trunks of the trees.

They reached Drinkwater before dusk, and all her fears leached away. For this was how life should be.

A two-storey house with attics, set among oaks and elms, already flashing gold and red for autumn. Proper trees after the dusty sticks that were entirely the wrong colour and allowed in the heat instead of giving enough shade. The lawn was green and perfectly scythed, the first lawn she had seen since Sydney. A river glinted below the house, while on either side sheep grazed in proper fenced paddocks, looking almost as sheep should look, even if these were dusted grey-red instead of white.

Drinkwater had none of the grandeur of Rosemere. But it was a gentleman’s abode and comfortable. It might even be soothing, she thought hopefully, after the anguish and pain of the last year, to spend time in the country in a house like this before the work of establishing a new home in Sydney.

The carriage rode smoothly around the gravel driveway and stopped by a wide veranda. A woman stepped out to meet her: her own age, perhaps, and pretty, in a simple blue silk dress that was exactly correct for greeting visitors in the country, and skin that had been properly protected from the sun.