The ferry docked. As I drove off, the ferry-man in his orange safety vest waved cheerily as if he took me for a local and I waved back. This time I drove off diagonally, the way the locals were doing. No scrape. If things had been different, and Wiseman’s younger daughter had stayed near home instead of marrying a man from further north, I’d be a local.

I drove around, up the valley of the Macdonald River to the village of St Albans, and then back. I stopped and looked at huts made of vertical slabs of timber, now teetering sideways into the grass, and various old-looking brick cottages. I stopped at every graveyard and looked for the markers that I remembered from my visit here with Mum, but I couldn’t find ‘Henery’.

The cows were all behind fences now.

After dinner I sat up in bed in Room 9. It was as pink by night as it was by day. I had my notebook and pen at the ready. I looked around, trying to feel receptive to a spirit, but met only the cold grey eye of the TV. Outside a dog was yelping, tied to the verandah post, while its owner was no doubt drinking in the bar beneath me.

Jane Wiseman had six children, I wrote in my notebook, trying to focus my mind. She probably breastfed each one for a year or two, weaned them, and fell pregnant again straight away. She’d have been in a permanent blur of hormones.

By contrast, Wiseman must have been a man of huge energy and drive, with enough power of will to turn his life from disaster to triumph.

If I was honest with myself, I didn’t know what I wanted Jane Wiseman to tell me when she appeared at the foot of the bed. And maybe she knew that, because even after I turned out the light she didn’t appear. From the bar a murmur of voices floated up and the occasional laugh, possibly at the expense of the lady in Room 9.

The bed, although sagging in the middle, was comfortable. Next thing I knew, it was morning.

Jane may have been nowhere to be found, but her house was still here, so I decided to look around. I found myself in the central hallway, where I’d been with Mum all those years ago. It had begun life as the back of the original house. I peered up, looking for the bricked-over openings of old windows, but it seemed that the place had never had windows at the back or sides.

The door—originally opening onto the yard—was embedded in stone blocks, half a metre thick. It was low-browed, squat, solid as the stones themselves, held in with jambs the size of railway sleepers.

I was visualising the house in the watercolour: a powerful box, with windows only at the front, and this one tunnel-like doorway at the back. Standing there fingering the ancient wood, I realised it was reminding me of the doors of castles I’d seen in Europe. Doors designed to keep people out.