But they were not all unkind. Mistress was kind, and Miss Maria’s eyes looked at the land almost as if she was one of the real people. Mr Clancy was kind too. She had seen pain on his face when he had chained her that first day of horror, and she had seen anguish almost like hers, as if he too was trapped, even if he wore no chains.

There were even truly sunlit times when Miss Maria would lift a finger to her lips and allow her outside for longer than the few minutes mistress permitted her in the mornings, while mistress and Miss Clementine slept each afternoon. When she looked at Miss Maria, Rose knew that she too longed for time hearing the voices of the bush and not the homestead, for of all the people with pale skins, only Miss Maria seemed capable of truly seeing, despite the strangeness of her face.

Sometimes too if the men were ringbarking or cutting wood, Rose could slip to the horse pen with an apple for the stallion, stroke his nose and whisper to him about how they were both prisoners, longing to be free.

The horse understood her, even though he was as foreign as the sheep. She was no threat to the big horse, did not smell or look like the men who had tormented him on the voyage out from India. She even tried climbing the fence and sitting upon the horse’s back, imitating the posture of the men she’d watched, the frightening one called Flanagan and Mr Clancy.

The stallion had been unsure at first — and so had she — but gradually she learned to let her legs hang loosely against his sides, keeping her heels away from his ribs, to lean forwards on his neck with her face close to his mane, and found to her surprise that he quietened when she did so, for both positions must have been familiar to him in his safe world of long ago.

Neither of them had known how easily safety and familiarity could vanish.

Other times in those precious tiny portions of freedom she walked up the hill behind the house, always looking, listening, for footprints or calls that might say her people had come back, that she could cast off the shoes Mrs Flora insisted she wear and join them. But there was never even a dust print to show they might be here.