Evie wailed from behind the door. ‘No! Shut up!’

‘A letter?’

Mrs Langridge glared at her husband. She’d never defied him or argued with him or pressed a point in all of their twenty years of marriage; but he was an oaf, had always been an oaf. ‘Do you need it spelled out? He’s broken their engagement!’

‘Be calm, woman,’ Langridge said, though he was shocked at the way she’d looked at him. He rapped on Evie’s door with hard knuckles. ‘And best be calm in there, too.’

‘Oh, go away, Daddy! I hate you!’

‘Fine.’

He did just that. Went to his study, poured a Scotch. His daughter’s sobbing still reached him, muffled by the walls between them.

There’s a war on, for Christ’s sake.

Jack Langridge downed the Scotch and poured another.

HANGOVERS

It had stopped snowing by the morning. The sky was pale and windswept, the light sharp off the bright snow and the O’Farrell brothers squinted out across the white ground. It’d melt by the afternoon.

‘We can’t hang about,’ Wilson said. ‘We’ll miss the muster.’

‘I know.’

‘He’ll be no good for the ride.’

They’d already made a breakfast of tea sweetened with condensed milk, and Joseph had made damper and then Wilson had fried some bacon with a knob of lard, the brothers wiping up the pan with their crusts. Gabriel Tait didn’t stir the whole time, not even with the smell of frying bacon, which had hooked the brother’s hangovers and made them salivate.

‘I’ll get the horses ready,’ Wilson said.

‘You’d better saddle his, too. He’ll need it later.’

Joseph went back into the hut. He tried Tait again, shaking him firmly by the shoulder, but the boy was deeply, drunkenly asleep. The cuffs were still hanging from one of his wrists (the ratchet arm had caught again) but they’d at least managed to get the leg irons off. Joseph pulled Tait’s blanket up to his chin and added a log to the fire, then collected their things and rolled their swags and picked up his brother’s rifle and put everything outside. He filled a jug with snow and put it on the floor beside Tait. There was some tea left in the pot, some damper and bacon, too.

‘See you later, mate.’

Outside, Wilson waited with the horses.

‘Reckon he’ll be right?’ Joseph said.

‘Yeah,’ Wilson said. ‘Just the one track to town. Not that hard to follow.’

Book XI

BOOK XI

STENDHAL

After the first barrage, the boy beside Gabriel Tait was instantly killed, hit by shrapnel in the neck and chest. His eyes were still open, unbelieving.