It was too late. There was no sign of Jamie; the lad was as quick with his feet as he was with his hands.

Reeve swore and closed the creaky door, running one hand through his hair as he turned back to the dying woman and the dying fire and all his dying hopes.

“Is there word come from your da, then?” Callie asked in a bright voice. She sounded almost like her old self. “It’s off to America we’ll be, one fine day soon.”

Near tears, Reeve knelt beside his mother’s cot and took one of her thin, work-roughened hands into his own. “No word yet,” he said softly.

Callie’s eyes, sea-green like her eldest son’s, were fixed on the shadowy ceiling of the hovel where Marcus had left her so many years before. “Never a letter,” she said on a long sigh. “Ain’t it strange there was never a letter?”

Reeve let his forehead rest against hers for a moment and drew a deep, steadying breath. “Da wasn’t much for writin’,” he answered gently after a very long time. Privately, he believed his father was either dead or the worst sort of scoundrel, but of course he couldn’t say that. Indeed, he wished he’d pretended that there was a letter from America, with passage money for them all. What harm would it have done to lie to Callie now?

It might have been a mercy.

“I’m dying, ain’t I?” Callie asked, and her eyes lost their dreamy quality. She was lucid and full of misery.

It was hard for Reeve to speak, impossible for him to lie. He struggled for a few moments before offering a tentative “Father McDougal says you’ll go to heaven, sure and straight.”

Callie smiled at the prospect. Despite years of suffering, years of waiting and fruitless hope, she believed. Reeve couldn’t recall a time when her faith had so much as wavered, though his own was long gone. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ll go to heaven.” Her dark hair, without even a strand of gray, fanned out over her coverless pillow, and she arched one finely etched eyebrow. “But what of you and Jamie? Where will you go—to America?”

Reeve shook his head. He could no longer keep back the truth. “I’ve got a berth on a sailing ship, Ma,” he said, and even now he felt a singular excitement at the prospect. “A whaler. Her home port is in New South Wales, at Sydney Town.”

Callie’s aquamarine eyes widened. “New South Wales! What of Jamie? Will you take him with you?”