She was free of napkin changing now too, the boiling of bottles and milk for feeding, despite her love for Clementine. She was free too of endless chatter about fashion and people in England who were important for some reason never explained. She was free to order the house as she wished again, no longer seeing Rose’s troubled eyes as she gazed out the window, no longer having to pretend she did not know the girl crept out into the night. And yet, ironically, she missed also conversation, desperately, for Ezekiel rarely spoke to his embarrassment of a daughter, and these days Clancy was too tired to give more than a ‘thank you’ to his sister when she passed him his plate. Mrs Taylor’s small gossip about the workmen on the property, or how the one-horned cow was drying up, was little consolation.

But now at least her mind was free, no longer dulled with tiredness. Her body was free to walk a precious hour at dawn, before the milking and butter making, or in the afternoon while the men were out in the paddocks. She could even take notes about what she had seen again, writing on the notepaper Flora had left, using the feather pens and mulberry ink she herself made so carefully. She could dry her samples, package them; and whenever there was mail to send to Sydney, Clancy would quietly add hers to it, helpful, as when he told Ezekiel that the letters to M. Clancy were his, a nickname from school that had followed him to adulthood.

In a few years, she thought, she would be able to teach Clementine all this. The child was quick to learn and fascinated by the natural world. But by the time Clementine was old enough to understand the true nature of mushrooms, part in the light but mostly subterannean, Flora and Clancy might have taken their child back to Sydney.

She sniffed the fungi again, then placed it in her basket. A lizard peered up at her from a tangle of dead gum leaves. She bent slowly to observe it. It was about a finger long and no wider, with a blunt tail. She was fairly sure she had not seen one like it before, nor seen it described. She must sketch it before she forgot the details, and make a note of where and when she had seen it. She might even write a monograph on lizards . . .

She did not want Flora’s life, though she envied her beauty. She did not want her brother’s life either. She did not know what she longed for, nor why she cried at night, when no one saw, for if she wiped the tears away she’d have to feel the bulging cheek that kept her from any life but this.

The lizard was tired of pretending to be a stick. It scuttled under a banksia. Maria stood, refusing to wipe these tears too.