Flora did not dare let the girl accompany Maria on her walks, in case she escaped. Maria must forgo wandering in the bush and teach the girl to dress, to serve at table, how to milk a goat and cow, how to make butter and damper, though she acquired few other kitchen skills, little else beyond boiling a pudding, which every time the girl seemed to think a miracle as it was turned out of its bowl. Rose had no talent — and little interest — in cooking.

But she adored Clementine; spent hours teaching her to walk, feeding her and sponging her dresses clean. How could she not love Clementine? thought Flora.

For Clementine was enchanting: running rather than toddling, crawling when her small legs failed, for she could crawl faster than she could run. Clementine could say Mama, Papa, Auntie Maria and Rose now too. She called Ezekiel ‘Grandzac’. Flora had tried to correct her, but Ezekiel shook his head, for once grinning with true pleasure. ‘If my granddaughter thinks I’m a Grandzac, I ain’t going to stop her sayin’ it.’ Ezekiel’s accent too had changed in the past year. She realised he now made no attempt to sound like anything but the guttersnipe he had once been.

Fine clothes did not make a gentleman. Ezekiel had given up even the pretence.

But Rose was a triumph. How could Maria have thought it best to leave her be? Every day the native girl learned something new. She managed sewing within a few days too, first of all the simple hemming required to take up Sarah’s too-long aprons till they fitted her, then the more complex task of altering dresses, and washing them once she had learned what she initially seemed to think a hilarious habit of repeatedly pushing clothes around in water — it was the only time Flora had seen the girl laugh, except with Clementine — then hanging them in sunlight, the constant, glaring sunlight of Overflow.

For it still did not rain. For the first few months Flora was unaware of the significance of this. Rain had been a nuisance all her life. Flood had — temporarily — ruined her husband’s family and was severely curtailing the life of her own family, as her father and brother informed her in the letters that reached Overflow six months after they’d been posted, indignant that the debts her father had thought he might run up for the rest of his life remained unpaid.

And still it did not rain.