She still loved him. Of course she did. But this ‘more’ made her uneasy.

There had been no visit back to Drinkwater. To return there so soon would mean admitting Flora could not invite the Drinkwaters to visit Overflow, though since stockmen gossiped, especially those few with wives, Margaret Drinkwater must know that the Overflow homestead was more like a cockie farmer’s hut, if larger and better furnished, than a squatter’s residence like hers.

If she went back to Drinkwater now, it would be as a pensioner, a poor acquaintance seeking sanctuary, a brief respite from squalor. She was still the Honourable Flora. It was important to keep up standards, thought Flora doggedly, even if the squalor of Overflow meant abandoning any dreams of house parties.

But Maria made standards of some kind possible. It was Maria who laced Flora’s corset loosely on the mornings Clancy had left before she woke. Maria buttoned up her dresses. Maria’s own dresses buttoned up the front or side, like the poorest class of servant, needing no help to put on. Flora gave her own hair its hundred brushings every evening, took the time to make sure it was dressed adequately each morning.

She and Maria breakfasted together after the men had gone out to work, long comfortable breakfasts where, even though Maria had done the cooking, she sat and ate at the dining table with Flora — a table with its legs in cans of water, to drown or divert the ever-present ants — while Mrs Taylor brought in fresh toast, and the jams Maria conjured from the orchard as well as wild fruit, lilli-pilli jelly, apple jelly scented with wattle flowers. It seemed this barren land actually had fruit of its own.

Mrs Taylor did the washing, the scrubbing, polishing the furniture ‘once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year’, her expression showing her scorn for civilised details like gleaming woodwork. Flora had insisted on extra household help too. Mrs Logan had been one of Mrs Chisholm’s orphan girls, brought out to be respectable wives in the colony. She had married a man who’d done his seven years for picking pockets, and now worked for wages at the property where he’d been assigned as a convict.

Mrs Logan knew how to knead bread and feed the yeast, how to dip cloths in beeswax after the honey had dripped out of them to make them fly-proof covers for the food, how to toughen wicks in vinegar to make candles. Yet it was still Maria who made the vinegar, concocted the furniture polish from linseed oil and more beeswax from the hive out the back, which she also tended, and strained and simmered the potato starch so essential for sheets and clothing of linen or cotton. Maria ironed the delicate laces and ruffles, the silks that even Mrs Logan could not manage, keeping three irons to use at exactly the right temperature on the stove in the kitchen shack out the back.