‘Reverend Johnson. The Murrays are my parishioners. I have come to pray and keep vigil.’

‘You can’t come in, Reverend.’

‘I’ve had the smallpox, doctor, and I have brought a second set of clothes with me.’

Caleb stared at the stout defences. Lizzie Murray was dying. Nothing on the earth would ease her suffering, though perhaps she needed this man to ease her way from this world to the next.

‘Constable,’ he addressed Maidment’s man who kept guard at the entrance to the fortress, ‘let the good Reverend in.’

At the sight of the vicar of St Thomas, Posy burst into tears. Murray grasped the Reverend’s hands and wrung them between effusive, almost tearful, words of thanks.

Caleb left the family in peace and returned to the bench on the front verandah.

The warm summer evening was closing in when Reverend Johnson joined him, holding a pannikin of tea.

‘I don’t know what it is about tea,’ Caleb said. ‘Give me good honest coffee any day.’

Johnson took a sip. ‘I, myself, am rather partial to the brew but I think it is the act of making, serving and drinking it that is the solace to the soul, not the brew itself.’

Caleb nodded. ‘Maybe.’

‘I feel you and I did not, perhaps, get off on a good footing, Hunt,’ Johnson said after a long moment.

‘I think we are very different men, Reverend.’

‘I can only imagine the things you have seen. They say war is hell.’

Caleb scoffed. ‘Hell would seem a pleasant alternative, Reverend, but for all of that, there are those who went into battle professing God and came out of it still professing the same deity. Not me.’

Johnson studied him for a long moment. ‘Then I’ll pray for you as well. I think you need to come to a place of peace in your life, Hunt.’

‘I’d be obliged.’ Caleb smiled at the man’s ingenuous belief that prayer would help his troubled soul. ‘Anything to help.’

‘You will probably disagree, but God is working through you. He sent you here.’

Caleb thought about the thug lying dead on the filthy street of San Francisco, a bullet from Caleb’s Colt through his heart. ‘If you had the slightest idea of what sent me here, Johnson, you would not say that.’

‘Wouldn’t I? He works in mysterious ways—’

Before he could expound further on the workings of the Lord, the front door opened and Posy peered around. ‘Reverend? She’s asking for you.’

Johnson tossed the dregs of his tea on the ground and considered the empty cup. ‘I will stay and see this out, Hunt.’

Elizabeth Murray died in the dark hours just before dawn.