Terence noted how the two women eyed one another with steely intensity and, with a sinking heart, realised that the first challenge had been made and that Granny Gwyn was all too capable of taking up the gauntlet and throwing it back.

*

Sal woke to the melodic sound of birdsong and the delicious smell of freshly brewed coffee. Despite the fact she and Max had spent what was left of the night eating and drinking and catching up on the months they’d been apart, she had slept dreamlessly and felt refreshed and eager for the new day as she stretched luxuriously and kicked off the sheet.

The small travelling clock she’d brought with her told her it was past eleven, but there was no rush, not here, and she lay a moment longer to absorb her surroundings.

The steeply pitched roof kept the sun from shining directly into the windows, but the dappled light that came through the nearby trees, danced on the wooden walls and up into the high, bare rafters. Max had built this one-roomed cabin log by log, had crafted the sturdy hearth and chimney from the dark red stones that lay scattered throughout the bush in these parts, choosing each of them for their colour and the veins of black, blue and grey that streaked them. He’d planed the wooden floor and polished it to a gleam, cut each wooden roof tile and placed it with care, and even refurbished the ancient cooking range.

Sal eyed the few pieces of furniture and the rudimentary kitchen which consisted of a stone sink, two lines of shelves and a mesh meat safe hanging from a nearby hook. There was the sagging couch where Max slept when she was visiting, a handcrafted table and two chairs and the bed she lay upon, which had been built into the niche beside the hearth. On cold nights she could lie here warm and cosy, watching the flicker of firelight on the walls – but on this hot, sultry day the heat from the range was almost unbearable.

There was no running water or electricity, and certainly no bathroom. The vast copper boiler out the back had to be laboriously filled by hand with buckets carried back and forth from the river, the bath was a big tin tub and the dunny a hole in the ground sheltered only by canvas walls strung from a nearby tree. It was primitive and isolated, but Max’s tender care showed in every glowing beam and neat dovetail – and to Sal it was the most beautiful place in the world.