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Chapters (53)
  1. Cover
  2. About Alison Stuart
  3. Also by Alison Stuart
  4. Title Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Prologue
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. Eleven
  18. Twelve
  19. Thirteen
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-One
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-One
  48. Forty-Two
  49. Forty-Three
  50. Forty-Four
  51. Author’s Note
  52. Acknowledgements
  53. Preview of The Goldminer's Sister

Now Caleb Hunt stood an arm’s length from her, looking at her in a way she had never thought any man would—or should—look at her.

‘What do you see?’ she asked.

‘I see an amazing woman,’ he said. ‘Strong, beautiful and clever. A mother who risked everything for the sake of her child. A woman I am proud to call my wife.’

‘And I see an amazing man,’ she said. ‘A man who has seen more horror in his life than any man should. A man with healing in his hands and his heart. A man I am proud to call my husband.’

‘No. It is you who have healed me, Adelaide. That man arrived in this town a broken being who cared for no one but himself. I had forgotten what it was to love and be loved.’

She held up her hand and their palms touched.

Adelaide curled her fingers around his. ‘Netty says that before you came to Maiden’s Creek, my heart was dead. It beat enough to keep me alive, but I had shut it away.’ Tears pricked the back of her throat. ‘She said she knew you would be the one to bring me back to life.’

Caleb drew her into his arms and kissed her, not a hurried, snatched kiss but a long, slow exploration.

‘How,’ he whispered into her hair, ‘do I get you out of this infernal dress?’

She leaned her forehead against the snowy white linen of his new shirt and laughed. As she fumbled with the colourful cravat he had tied around his high, stiff collar, the candlelight glinted on the bright gold of the ring on her finger. The ring made from Shenandoah gold that would tie her heart to this man and this land for the rest of her life.

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Keep reading for a preview of The Goldminer's Sister by Alison Stuart - out July 2020

Gold is a fever. Will it lead her to love ... or death?

A suspenseful romance set on the turbulent goldfields of 1870s Australia.

Author’s Note

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading The Postmistress.

You are probably curious as to whether Maiden’s Creek is a real town or just a figment of an author’s imagination. It is both. I deliberately chose to make it a fictional town because that gave me scope to play with a history, setting and inhabitants in a way unconstrained by using an existing town. However, it is based very heavily on a little gold-mining settlement in the High Country of Victoria that I know very well, called Walhalla. Today Walhalla is a picturesque village of less than twenty inhabitants, buried in a steep-sided valley about fifty miles north of Moe. Aberfeldy and Sale are real towns. Shady Creek existed as a coaching stop on the Melbourne–Sale coach route as described. Buneep (as it was called then) is modern-day Bunyip.