‘Oh, my dear, I am so glad you reached us safely. It is a terrible journey, is it not? Truthfully, I can only manage it once a year.’ She held out her hands. ‘I am Margaret Drinkwater. It is so good to see you, Mrs Clancy.’

Impossible not to like her. Flora took the hands, an informality quite permissible in two Englishwomen in the wilderness. ‘Please do call me Flora. Thank you so much for inviting us to stay.’

‘It is a delight. You must tell me everything, absolutely everything, about Sydney and the news from home and what fashion will do next. Oh, and this must be darling little Clementine.’

No butler, but a housekeeper in a starched apron who curtseyed, and well-trained maids too, who took Clementine to the nursery, brought up a porcelain bathtub for Flora with endless hot water, and laid out her clothes for dinner.

Margaret’s own maid dressed her hair. The joy of being able to ring for a cup of tea and Bath biscuit! Flora did not need to be told that by tomorrow morning all dust and stains would be removed, Clementine’s napkins fresh and ironed, and her own trunk and hat boxes packed properly with sufficient tissue paper once more.

Flora relaxed even further in the dining room at a table long enough to seat twelve, portraits on the wall, and Mr Drinkwater himself, at least twenty years older than his wife, with grey sideburns, but handsome with it. He and Clancy talked stock prices while Flora and Margaret chatted over chicken consommé, crayfish aspic, saddle of mutton with sauce Eglantine, anchovies on toast, then a plum cream, politely at first of Sydney gossip and the latest scandal involving the Prince of Wales.

Later, in the drawing room (not a parlour — how wonderful to be in a room that was not what the middle classes called a parlour), the conversation merged into the beginnings of friendship over thin porcelain cups of China tea while the men drank port and smoked cigars back in the dining room.

‘The last year has been a nightmare,’ Flora admitted. ‘I had no idea the family’s position was so . . . precarious.’ It was perhaps too much to say on so brief an acquaintance, but such a relief to say it aloud, and to someone who understood.

Margaret looked sympathetic as she wielded the teapot. ‘Another season or two, and I’m sure all will be well.’

‘You said you travel up to Sydney each year. You have a house there?’ For a moment Flora hoped for an invitation for the winter.

‘We stay at the Wentworth Hotel. But when . . . when we have sons, we will take a house there, I expect, for their education. It will be so good to have you near,’ Margaret repeated. ‘May I visit? I know it is a considerable trek, and not for a simple day’s outing, but I would so like to see Overflow.’

Flora stared. ‘You have never been there? But you are our nearest neighbours.’