One of the convict boys said, ‘We’re goin’ t’eat now?’

‘You can do whatever the hell you like, Robbie,’ Turner said.

The boy looked down at the pile of chains, pale and nervous.

They sat down around the lamp on the hay-strewn ground, shared the bacon and bread and rum. When they’d finished, the old man held out a coil of rope to Turner.

‘The sun’ll be here soon,’ he said.

Turner nodded and stood up. The old man gave the convict his back, crossed hands at the wrists. ‘Nice and tight now,’ he said.

‘Mister?’ The girl was sitting beside John Myer. She held out more rope and turned her back to him and John Myer tied up her wrists. The girl’s arms were thin and white, her hands small, the lines in her palms silted. She watched Turner, silently, as John Myer tied her wrists. And he thought, all this way, all these years, to tie this young girl’s hands.

Turner saddled the horse. He kissed the young girl on the head and whispered in her ear. She looked with longing and tearful eyes as he took the reins.

‘Ainsley’s farm,’ he said to the rest of them. ‘Two days from now.’ And then he smacked the old man on the shoulder and walked the animal out of the barn. They heard the thudding of the horse’s hoofs fade away.

John Myer glanced at the old man and then at the girl, both on the ground and leaning back against a railing. Only she was looking up at him.

‘Quick about it, then,’ the old man said. ‘Out with you.’

The morning light had already begun to spread. Soon a heavenly orange hazed the sky above the hills beyond the river, smudged the lower cloud bellies pink. It was John Myer’s first glimpse of this Van Diemen’s Land. He’d come in the night and then fled in it, too. At last the light. The sky reminded him of somewhere he’d been before.

The river was flat, without a ripple, sheens of glass-blue and silver. They were somewhere north of Hobart Town. A few houses spaced across the hills and clearings, dark stands of trees between.

‘We have to go north-west,’ the boy Robbie said, pointing into the thickly forested distance of more hills, fold into fold.

Half an hour later they’d just made the tree line when the fog swept over them. They stopped, stunned and curious. Looking up, the sky was gone, the earth devoured. They could barely see each other. John Myer could only make out the sun, low and veiled and whetstoned into a pure white disc.

‘What should we do?’ the boy asked.

‘Wait, you fool.’

The fog swept fast down the river valley, shrouding the world in white shadowness.

They waited; it was pointless to continue. They waited, until they heard the crunch of boots through the scrub.