‘I sure do, but no one here can make coffee, so tea it is,’ Caleb said.

As he passed Mama, she put her hand on his arm. They looked at each other in that odd way again, as if they were talking without speaking. Mama stood aside to let him pass and half-shut the door behind her.

She perched on the edge of his bed and felt his forehead. She nodded to herself and picked up his left hand and kissed it. ‘Are you truly feeling better?’

Danny nodded. ‘My head and tummy don’t hurt any more. I just feel a little tired.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have gone without telling you. Uncle Richard said we were going to look for bushranger’s gold.’

Mama shook her head and her voice sounded shaky as she said, ‘I’m not cross. I’m really not. You’re safe now and that’s all that matters.’

‘What about Uncle Richard?’

She took a deep breath. ‘He’s dead, Danny. I’m afraid he got caught by the fire.’

Danny considered that news and decided that Uncle Richard being dead came as something of a relief.

‘He wanted to kill me,’ he said.

‘I think he was very frightened.’

‘That’s what Caleb said.’ Danny summoned up the question he had asked Caleb. ‘What did you mean when you said I was his son?’

Mama shivered as if suddenly very cold. She covered his hand with both of hers. ‘I have always told you to be honest, Danny, and never to tell lies, but I am guilty of telling you the biggest lie of all. Richard Barnwell was your father and he wanted very much for us all to go back to England with him and be a proper family.’

He jerked his hand free from his mother’s grasp.

‘But—but—you weren’t married,’ he blurted. ‘Does that mean I’m a—I’m a … bastard.’ The last word came out as barely a whisper.

He remembered a woman with a baby coming into the post office. When she had transacted her business, the other women had tutted and shaken their heads and called the child ‘a poor, fatherless bastard’. He’d asked his mother what that meant and she had said that the child’s parents had not been properly married.

Is that what he was? A poor, fatherless bastard? Except he had a father. A father who had come back into his life and who had wanted to marry his mother. Would that have meant he would have no longer been a bastard? But Uncle Richard had held a gun to him. He had left him to die in the bushfire. He didn’t want to be a poor, fatherless bastard but he certainly didn’t want to know that the father he had idolised had been Richard Barnwell.