Chapter 22

A Pumpkin Chatney (sic)

1lb pumpkin, chopped, 1lb tomatoes, 1lb chopped onions, 7oz sugar, 1tbsp treacle, 2tsp each of black peppercorns, whole allspice, ground ginger, 2pt vinegar, red wine if possible

Simmer till thick, and bottle while hot.

OVERFLOW, 1879

CLANCY

Horatio Clancy rode along the river bank — or, rather, along the dune of sand that edged increasingly fetid waterholes, where snake and wallaby drank together, too desperate even to worry about the horse that trod so near.

Worry lived with him now, like a shadow who shared his horse. Worry for Overflow, the sheep gaunt, the lambs picked off by dingoes. The wool clip this year would pay for the shearing, the men’s wages, but that would be all. He needed to write to Flora, not to order her to come home, but to tell her that there would be no more bank drafts from Overflow and suggest — only suggest — that when he joined McIntyre’s team to drove the sheep that they must sell, at far less than they had paid for them, he could escort her and Clementine back to Overflow, even if Margaret intended to stay longer.

He worried for his father too. Ezekiel’s dreams had diminished. He clung merely to the survival of the great estate he’d established, for the continuation of his family name. While Flora stayed in Sydney there could be no grandson. His eyes accused Clancy every meal.

Clancy worried for his daughter, about the typhoid, dysentery, measles and other fevers that still ran rampant through Sydney every summer, even if the plague-wracked convict ships came no more.

He was anxious about Flora with a depth that was beyond worry, for worry implied that a pleasant path might be found for those who one worried for, and there was none he could see for Flora. While the drought continued — and possibly it would, for a decade, or more — there would be no wealth for Flora Clancy, no house that even faintly possessed the grandeur of Rosemere.

He and Flora were bound forever. She could not even return to England where her father had died and from where her brother still sent querulous letters demanding payment of his debts. That brother would not welcome a sister and her child. It was even doubtful that by the time she arrived there, her brother would be able to support her. Nor would Clancy allow her to take his child to England.

Clancy worried about Maria too. For the first time in her life she’d had educated female company: not just the stockmen’s wives, but a woman who could share reading with her, who would appreciate her beautifying the homestead with vases of lyrebird feathers, the approximation of elegant meals she created from kangaroo, flour and lard. She’d had a child to love, holding the child far more than Clementine’s mother did.