“Philip, Philip, Philip,” Tansy muttered, shaking her head. The late afternoon sunshine shimmered over the freckles sprinkled across her nose, turning them to gold. “Philip this, Philip that. ’Ere you are, pinin’ for that waster after all this time, like some fluttery spinster ’oping for one last chance at a ring and a bed, and you just nineteen!”

“I need Philip,” Maggie insisted, thrusting out her chin and fixing her eyes on some point beyond Brisbane and its plight. Then, as an afterthought, she added hastily, “And I love him.”

“Some Yank you are,” Tansy retorted skeptically. “About as independent as a tit-baby!”

Hot color flooded up over Maggie’s well-hidden but shapely bosom and streamed into her face. Her pewter-colored eyes snapped with weary outrage. “I’m as independent as you are, Tansy Quinn, and I’ll thank you to remember it!”

“I,” huffed Tansy with a quick upturn of her nose, “am not dependin’ on some man to make me way easy!”

Maggie bit back a comment about Tansy’s ship-board flirtation with a certain young quartermaster and replied coolly, “I can’t understand why you hate Philip so when you’ve never even met him.”

There was a softening in Tansy’s manner, though she refused to meet Maggie’s gaze. “I don’t need to meet the bleeder to know ’e’s as useless as nipples on a boar. What kind of man drags a girl ’alfway ’round the world and can’t even pay ’er passage? You paid a pound for your kit just like the rest of us, Maggie Chamberlin, and you’d best be recallin’ what you promised to do in return.”

Maggie well remembered her promise: She’d agreed to work at least three years before leaving the country. The contract would be nullified, however, once she became Mrs. Philip Briggs, for if there was one thing Australia wanted more than nannies, servant girls, factory workers, and seamstresses, it was wives for its men. “I haven’t forgotten,” she said softly, turning away from the rail and the tragedy ashore.

She nearly collided with John Higgins, Tansy’s quartermaster. A very tall man with shoulders as narrow as his hips and an eyepatch that gave him a likeness to a pirate, Higgins regarded himself rather too highly for Maggie’s taste.

She stepped back, trying to ignore the way the seaman’s eyes swept over her person before dodging to Tansy’s face. “No point in droppin’ anchor here,” he imparted with a shrug in his voice that seemed to dismiss Brisbane’s suffering as a minor annoyance. “We’re off to Sydney Town on the evenin’ tide.”

“And how far is that?” Maggie asked politely, wishing that she were standing anywhere but down-wind of John Higgins, who gave off an odor reminiscent of rancid chicken soup.