They’d been sent north from Sydney Cove to Newcastle and mainly it was tree felling, upriver for a month inside huge stands of cedar, twelve-hour days and deadly snakes, the lash to coax their labour. Or it was the cliff mines for coal, shafts cut straight down into the sandstone, the sea spilling in and black lungs for the effort. But still, lime burning was the worst. Shells sliced their feet out on the mudflats where they fired the oyster beds and filled buckets of quicklime, the smoke burning their eyes raw and blind, a misery like no other.

The guards, to a man, were the cruellest under the Crown. There wasn’t a convict soul didn’t think about running, all the time, every day and every night.

‘The blacks’ll get you,’ said the one they called Lacey, who’d himself absconded twice before but couldn’t run again, his feet swollen and bruised blood crawling up his legs. ‘They’re cunning fucks!’

‘I’ll take me chances,’ Dingle Donovan said, still scowling at Johannes Meyer. He was the leader here, among the ruined Irish bound for China. His teeth were as rotten as his soul, though they said he’d once been an upstanding man in Kilkenny and could play the fiddle. ‘The rest of you can stay and sew curtains with the German here.’

Two days later, twelve men and two women serving the officers’ barracks absconded, soldiers in pursuit and blacks on their trail too, silent through the bush. Eight were returned inside a week, most of them found sitting down in the scrub or leaned back on a tree, waiting and in a daze, starving. The rest were left to their fates, predictable enough.

Dingle Donovan managed to stay out for two months. One day he limped back into the settlement, in rags and half-mad, his frail body broken out in sores and pustules from the hard sun, a spear wound festering in his leg, feet chewed and black. They tried to feed him but nothing stayed down. He died the next day on a cot in the hospital, no blanket spare to cover his corpse.

‘What’d I say?’ Lacey said and shook his head. ‘Didn’t I say it?’

THE ELECTRICAL MONK, BROTHER SALINAS

The abandoned hut was a low, rough thatching of branches and broad leaves, not far from the riverbank. Montoya ducked his head and looked in the doorway. He saw a sagging hammock and a stool on its side, a couple of wooden bowls on the ground and a box with its lid askew and bent on the hinges, a small pile of animal bones, some firewood, a rusted hatchet.

He turned to Elisabeth, who stood behind him. ‘Well, he’s not in there.’

She glanced into the hut. ‘What now?’