Her heart jumped at her uncle’s familiar voice. She didn’t hear Mrs Harris’s response as the parlour door opened and Cowper stood in the doorway, flushed and panting as if he had run from the mine. She barely recognised him. Before Charles Cowper left England he had worked with her father and been very much a part of her life, but it had been years since she’d last seen him. The years had added inches to his waist and seen the loss of most of his hair. Only a luxuriant moustache compensated for the lack of locks on his head.

‘Eliza, my dear …’ he began but had to pause to catch his breath. ‘What in the good Lord’s name are you doing here?’

Eliza frowned. ‘Didn’t Will tell you I was on my way?’

Cowper coughed. ‘Will was want to keep his own counsel.’

Eliza caught the past tense and her nerves tingled. Something was wrong. ‘Where is he?’ She glanced at the door, half expecting her brother to walk through it.

Charles Cowper placed a hand under her elbow and guided her back to the chair by the fire. He drew another chair up and, holding her hands in his, sucked in his moustache. ‘My dear, you cannot have got my telegram or letter …’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been on a ship for over three months. We only docked a few days ago in Melbourne. Has something happened—’

She saw the answer in Cowper’s face even as he said, ‘Will is dead.’

Will? Dead?

‘But he wrote to me …’ she began uselessly, as if saying it made the fact of his death no longer true. She pulled her hands free from her uncle’s grasp and he sat back in his chair. ‘When? How?’

‘Barely six weeks ago,’ Cowper said. ‘An accident at the mine.’ He glanced out of the window. ‘The Maiden’s Creek, not the Shenandoah.’

Eliza shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. What was he doing at Maiden’s Creek? Didn’t he cease working there a year ago?’

‘He did, and it is as much a mystery to me as to everybody else. The fact remains he was found dead at the foot of the tailings. The doctor was of the opinion that he had been dead at least six hours before he was discovered by the early shift.’

Eliza tore at the strings of her purse, pulling out Will’s last letter to her, dated May the previous year and crumpled and stained from much re-reading. She handed it to Cowper but she knew every word by heart.

Dearest Liza.