There were three of these Promissory Notes, totalling around six hundred pounds. I guessed that was a massive sum for someone in his position.

Around the same time, I learned from another document, he mortgaged his inn. This was a man taking a big financial risk.

In 1817 he was unable to redeem the mortgage on the inn and had to surrender it. Of his debt to Alexander Riley I could find no record. Around the same time he was granted 200 acres of land on the Hawkesbury. Against this entry, the record noted ‘he has recently sustained great loss’.

I read on, hoping to find out what had happened.

He settled on that land and built what he described as a ‘farmhouse’. He went on trading up and down the river, carrying other people’s crops to the store in Sydney. Each year he applied for convict servants—every settler’s source of free labour—and was usually granted half the number he’d asked for. His farm flourished—his speciality was ‘hogs’ for the salt pork trade. When construction on the Great North Road began, running right past his land, he supplied the lucrative government tender to ‘victual the convicts’ who were building the road.

But why had he moved to the Hawkesbury? What had happened with the mortgage and all that money he’d borrowed?

The answer came when I went to the Sydney Gazette, Sydney’s first newspaper. In 1817 it reported that both of Wiseman’s boats—trading up and down the coast—were wrecked, within three months of each other. They were his main source of income. With them gone, he had no hope of repaying Alexander Riley or discharging the mortgage on the inn. Whether to escape his debt or simply to start again, he settled on the Hawkesbury.

In 1821 Jane Wiseman died ‘after a lingering illness’. She was about forty-five years old. I scoured the records for the slightest hint that her illness might have lingered because she was pushed down the stairs by her husband. I would have loved to find some tiny thread to start tugging on—all those petitions and letters about importing this, that and the other weren’t especially dramatic. But there were no clues.

A year after Jane’s death, in 1822, Wiseman married the widow of one of his farm-workers, a man named William Warner. His bride’s name was Sophia. Now the obsessive-compulsive researcher, I went back to the Old Bailey records and found the trial of a William Warner—perhaps the same one, perhaps not—at about the right time. Like Wiseman, Warner had been a Thames lighterman and had stolen some timber.

Wiseman could have known Warner back in London. It made me wonder if he had known Sophia then, too.

In spite of the lesson I thought I’d learned from all those scrawled family trees I’d dreamed up, I found myself leaping to fill in the blanks. Wiseman grows up knowing Sophia. He comes to love her and plans to marry her. But he’s tempted by Jane and she falls pregnant. He has to marry her, even though he’s still an apprentice. Sophia marries William Warner and comes out to Australia with him when he’s transported. Warner comes to work for Wiseman. Sophia is with him and the childhood romance is rekindled. There’s an argument with Jane, who’s jealous. She falls down the stairs. Warner conveniently dies too. Wiseman and Sophia marry and live happily ever after. I had to remind myself that, although this was a good story, that’s all it was: a story I’d made up out of almost nothing.