She had heavy eyes the next morning, tired enough even to doze when they got under way after their rough luncheon of sweating cheese and three-day-old bread. Clementine lay on the eiderdown beside her. Flora woke only when the cart stopped.

‘Overflow,’ said Clancy, smiling and holding out a hand to help her down.

Flora stared, determined not to weep.

Chapter 10

Hearth Cakes

Take 4½oz of plain flour, 3oz of currants and a dessertspoon of sugar if available. Rub enough butter into the mixture to make it crumbly and stick together. Roll out the dough till it is as thick as your finger. Cut it into rounds with a glass. Fry each side in butter in a pan on a low fire till brown, or cook on a hot hearth stone. Butter and eat while hot.

OVERFLOW, 1876

FLORA

The house — the home of the owner of one of the largest grazing properties in New South Wales — was a hovel. None of the tenants at home lived in degradation like this. No driveway, just a cart track leading abruptly to the front door then veering off to the outbuildings around the back. A square house of rough wood planks, not even an attic, with a shack attached behind, from which a thin drift of smoke curled into the emptiness of sky. A roof of grey wood shingles, except for a veranda in the front covered with hideous corrugated iron.

No garden. Rough pole pens held a milking cow, its calf penned next to her; a plot of Indian corn; another of potatoes; one more splattered with big grey pumpkins and a scattering of fruit trees behind. A dead sheep — or half of it — hung in an open shed, only a stretch of netting keeping it from the flies that suddenly were everywhere, crawling in her eyes and over Clementine.

She thought of seventy thousand dead sheep, the maggots breeding in decay.

And yet there were living sheep too, many sheep. The smell of sheep, so pleasant back home, tolerable at Drinkwater, was overwhelming here. Sheep faces peered around the garden pens, dusty sheep grazed on hills pimpled with dead tree stumps, the sheep exchanged for Rosemere. Red dogs that looked half savage yelled at the end of ropes, the ground around them scattered with bones covered with crawling cloths of flies.

If she could have run, she would have fled, carrying Clementine. But her hand shook even as she tried to take Clancy’s so he could help her from the cart.

‘Flora! I’m so glad you have made it safely.’ Maria ran from the front door — planks nailed together, not even painted. Safely? Flora wondered. No one had mentioned danger. But this land had snakes, spiders, bushrangers. Until now she had never thought those might endanger her.

‘Come inside. The flies . . .’ Maria’s face at least was protected by her veil. She wore a plain brown cotton dress, the kind a farmer’s wife might wear, covered with an apron even a farmer’s wife would have known to remove before she greeted any guest, much less the wife of the heir.