Amelia was to meet her first pupil the very next day. She was looking forward to teaching again. Captain Robinson’s idea had rather taken her aback, but now she embraced the prospect of serving a purpose. It seemed such a very long time since she’d served any form of purpose at all.

‘I was a primary school teacher before my marriage,’ she’d told Captain Robinson as she’d poured them tea in the sitting room that had once been her parents’. This was the sitting room to the right of the house; the left side of the house had always been hers and Martin’s. Strangely enough, when her parents had moved to Sydney, leaving her the house, she and Martin had never availed themselves of the right-hand side, which had always sat vacant, accusingly so, as if it was blaming them for something.

‘But I gave up teaching after I married. We so wanted a family,’ she continued, ‘but sadly I’m afraid it was not meant to be.’

She passed the American his cup of tea. This was the first time they’d met. She’d given him a guided tour of the house before serving tea, accompanied naturally by a plate of her Anzac biscuits.

‘I must say I rather miss teaching,’ she said. She found Captain Robinson very easy to talk to; there was an aura of ‘calm’ about him that was somehow relaxing. ‘Would you like a biscuit?’ She proffered the plate.

‘I would, yes, thank you,’ he said, taking one. ‘Primary school, you say.’ He seemed very interested. ‘That would be what we would term “elementary school”, I take it?’

‘I presume so, yes.’

‘You’d be accustomed to teaching elementary reading and writing, then?’

‘Oh yes, indeed.’

‘I have an idea,’ he said. And then he’d gone on to outline his suggestion of a possible one-on-one lesson with a select few of his men. ‘I would personally choose which men and with great care, of course,’ he assured her. ‘And they would attend their lesson at a time when I’m here in the house. I wouldn’t wish you to feel in any way threatened.’

‘Well …’ Amelia was hesitant.

‘They’re nice boys, many of them young, barely twenty, and many of them illiterate or semi-literate. They get their more educated friends to write letters home for them. I think it would be nice if they could learn to write one of their own, don’t you?’

The idea sounded most appealing. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I agree that would be very nice indeed.’

‘I need to tell you though, Mrs Sanderson, just in case you don’t know,’ he went on, ‘that the men under my command are coloured.’

‘Oh.’ She hadn’t known that.

Samuel bit into the biscuit he’d forgotten he was still holding. ‘By golly these are good,’ he said, munching away.