Taylor did not return for five days. Maria suspected he had dallied in Gibber’s Creek as well as seeking information at Drinkwater. Meanwhile the man who gave his name as Ethelred Fitzharris grew stronger. His eyes were still too swollen for him to read, so she read to him, letting him choose from the small library Clancy had so quietly stocked for her, and which Ezekiel had never guessed at, for it would not occur to him to ever go into her room.

She even read to him from the bound copies of the proceedings of the society and, in return, he told her about lectures no one had bothered to write down or include in the proceedings: about a woman in Western Australia who was as good a correspondent as herself, and who even wrote using her own name or, at least, her married one.

The story of the earl and the actress — and the handsome income — might be a lie. But there was no doubt this man knew and loved plants, and loved reading the land in which they grew.

And he ate. She had never known a man who could eat as much as he did, even when his first hunger must have been sated ten times over.

At first he ate only bread soaked in broth, for his throat was too swollen to swallow easily. But by the second evening he ate Maria’s Irish stew, carefully long cooked to tenderness. She made him custards, glad they had both milk and eggs, and rice pudding sweetened with raisins (kept discreet from Ezekiel, as he would have resented the cost of both rice and raisins, not to mention the cinnamon with which she dusted it). Apple dumplings, pancakes with lemon from the tree behind the dunny, scones dotted with dried lilli-pillies, a jelly she had concocted from the native mint that grew in the gullies and home-made gelatine from long-boiled chicken bones, Afghan biscuits . . . anything she could make with flour and mutton dripping, eggs and the produce of their garden and the bush.

‘I have always been a string bean,’ he apologised once, scraping the last grains of a bowl of rice pudding in a way she knew was not good manners, but a comment on the food. ‘Nothing I eat seems to put on fat. I stay thin if I eat little. I stay thin if I eat a lot. But I am only greedy when presented with food like this, Miss Clancy.’

She flushed and wondered if he would like syrup dumplings and whether Ezekiel would notice that the cream was missing.

And still she kept her veil off, and not once did he recoil.

‘I wonder what you could do with more varied ingredients, Miss Clancy,’ he said on the fifth day, sitting next to her on the veranda while almost cool air rose from what had once been a river.