But she was loved now, in many ways, by many people, plus a grey-jowled dog. She didn’t need Sam for love. She needed him just because he was Sam, just because . . .

She stopped thinking. Stopped moving. Just watched him, felt him, tried to feel again the connection that always flowed between two people who were linked by life partnership and love. ‘Sam,’ she said slowly. ‘What’s my name?’

His lips moved. They made no sound, nor did his breath change enough to make a word, though she knew exactly what word it was.

Darling. The last word he had ever said to her when she kneeled by him, covered in his blood, pleading for him to know her.

‘Darling,’ breathed Sam McAlpine now. And for two seconds, the longest, most wonderful seconds in her life, Sam McAlpine looked at her.

Chapter 13

A Bush Pudding

Mix in a greased billy 4oz butter or mutton fat with 7½oz sugar, if available, or 6tbsp treacle, 2 hen eggs or 1 goose. Beat well. Add 6¾oz plain flour and 4¼oz of grated raw carrot, parsnip, pumpkin or beetroot. Add 2½oz currants, sultanas or chopped figs if you have them. Place billy in a larger can or bush oven half filled with water. Boil for 1–2 hours. Serve with jam.

OVERFLOW, 1877

FLORA

She saw the native girl four months after the move to Overflow; the months had not been as wretched as she’d feared that first day of shock and anguish.

Ezekiel Clancy had never put into words his resentment of her failure to produce a son. An intelligent man, for all his lack of breeding or education, he undoubtedly knew that Flora was young, with many childbearing years ahead of her. Though not, she prayed, at Overflow. He was civil to her, but spoke little. That seemed to be his way with everyone.

The furniture they had kept from Rosemere had finally arrived, as had six boxes of fly papers, which at least kept her bedroom and the parlour almost fly free. Now she had a dressing table once more too, even if she had no maid to do her hair and must pin it back in the simple knot or plait that were the only styles she could manage. But the delicate sofas looked odd in the Overflow parlour, and soon became grubby, even when frequently washed with fuller’s earth and a damp cloth. One could not ask one’s father-in-law to change out of his outdoor clothes before he entered a parlour.

One had never expected one would even need to ask.

Overflow homestead could never be a Drinkwater, never a venue for house parties. No amount of delicate furniture, or even paint or silken wallpaper, could make it more than an overgrown bush hut. She was trapped there, as much as any convict sent to the hellhole of dust and flies that was Australia.

Clancy was still Clancy. Yet he was not quite the same. He even walked differently, possibly because he wore boots now instead of shoes, as well as loose, worn moleskin trousers and no jacket or cravat. Even his smile had changed: it was wider and more relaxed, his face no longer shaved to perfection but with the odd nick or tuft missed each time, oversights a valet would never permit. He did not even shave every day. He laughed more loudly. He was somehow . . . more . . . Clancy than before.