Clancy had planned to join Flora and Margaret Drinkwater in Sydney as soon as the shearing was done. But that year, with so few stock still after two years of poor lambing — and such a poor clip on them — Ezekiel declared that they would do the work themselves.

It was hard, hand blistering, back wrenching. Clancy could shear, of course — any boy who had grown up on a sheep property could shear. But not sheep after sheep, day after day. Many nights he simply grabbed bread and cheese and dropped to his bed and was glad Flora was not there to see.

He was glad . . .

He did not miss his wife, he realised as he lay, his boots still on, on the bed they had shared, bread and cheese in hand. He could not tell when his adoration for his wife had become duty. She was no longer the shining girl he’d adored. Nor was he the wealthy grazier, smiling as he’d indulged her in whatever fancy she might wish. Whoever the two of them had become, they were no longer ‘in love’, to use the phrase from the novelettes he had heard Flora read aloud to Rose. He was not sure he and Flora still shared respect, or even affection.

He realised all too well that she now looked down on him as a bumpkin who was comfortable with men far below his ‘station’. He saw her simply as a burden.

He thought of the other women he knew, from Margaret Drinkwater to Maria to Mrs Taylor, who worked in the main homestead, then went back to the hut whose walls were pasted with cut-outs from the illustrated papers to tend the dinner she had left slowly simmering on the fire she had lit and banked that morning, to feed her husband and son. These women did not just make the best of their own lives, but diligently forged the best life they could for those around them. That was how you thrived — or at least survived — out there. You worked hard, and you worked together.

It had never occurred to Flora that she might work at anything more demanding than embroidery. Flora waited: waited for the wealth to return, waited for the rain that would bring it, the rain Clancy suspected might not come for years, just as it had not through most of the 1840s, when Drinkwater and Ezekiel defied the weather to gain vast worthless properties that became valuable only when the drought broke. Clancy dreaded the moment when Flora realised that there would be no escape from this life handed to her. She would need to work for it.

Flora’s adoption of Rose made him deeply uneasy too. He had chained the girl only because he knew how fragile his wife was mentally. He still could not bear to think how he had done that to a child, even though he knew that children who misbehaved were often chained in institutions.