Clancy helped her into the carriage as she expertly lifted her long draped skirts into the carriage, then sat facing the horses. The bustle was uncomfortable — she had never worn one till that visit to Paris — but she had grown used to it on the voyage out, as well as the sweat that trickled down her neck and dampened her silk stockings. Clancy climbed in and sat opposite her. Not just handsome, she thought gratefully, but a true gentleman, despite his birth.

Yes, she could love this man. Astoundingly, wonderfully, already did love him, the strength of him, a body used for more than rugby at school or fox hunting, for the way he smiled at her, his delight shining as gold as the sunlight on the water of this unexpectedly lovely colony.

The colony of New South Wales was indeed small, but her family’s debts had meant Flora had always lived in relative social isolation. A small colony would provide more company — or considerably more personal prestige — than the sixteen families, not counting the vicarage, their family dined with at home. Sydney was smelly certainly, so far, but Flora had experienced several dock areas on the voyage. All docks stank.

She peered from the carriage window — the vehicle was entirely fashionable, from the polished imported English oak to the velvet cushions on the seats.

Flora loved it all, the seagulls diving into blue water after ships’ rubbish, the neat houses, the gardens of fruit trees and vegetables, the tethered goats who gazed with malice at the carriage, as if to say, ‘Once we are free we’ll wreak revenge for this captivity.’ She glanced at a mob of natives, squatting half naked by a clump of trees, and then slid her gaze away. Her mother had taught her early to ignore what ladies were not supposed to see.

‘I suppose everything looks so small and plain to you after London,’ Clancy said apologetically.

She laughed. ‘Horatio . . . Clancy . . . I’ve been living in a cold stone tower in Northumberland. The only time I saw London was when we passed through it to buy my trousseau. I hated it — dirty snow and yellow fog.’ She met his eyes. ‘I’m going to love Australia. I think I love it already.’

She was also saying, ‘I love you.’ They both knew it. She loved Sydney’s freshly cobbled streets, not slippery with hundreds of years of chamber pots and decayed cabbage, like London’s, even if these had been built by convict labour, though Clancy informed her that the former common sight of chain gangs breaking rocks had vanished with the end of transportation. She loved the views as the horses laboured up the hill to the more fashionable part of Sydney, the sun sparkling like crushed diamonds on the harbour, the tree-clothed tongues of olive-green headlands poking out into the blue. She smiled tolerantly at the pretentious houses, with their imposing gates, their turrets and carriage houses.