The little gold carriage clock chimed the hour and Eleanor raised her head to listen. She had sat on the settee in Miss Trent’s drawing room for a long time. She was not certain how long. She held the gold tiepin in her gloved left hand. Her fingers closed over it then released it. She wished to hold it tightly and at the same time to take it to the window and hurl it far from her into the tangled garden below. She did neither. The chimes ceased. She sat.

She thought of the clock on the mantel—a present from a loving father, and the old sea chest in the bedroom.

Miss Trent’s people were dead. She was alone here, perhaps had journeyed across oceans by herself. It struck Eleanor that they were alike in this way, she and Miss Trent, for her own parents were many years dead. She still thought from time to time of her mother, the schoolmaster’s widow. Almost never of her father, because the loss was so much greater. But he came to her now, William Tremaine, his callused hands, his sea-salty smell, an impossibly tall man, or so he had seemed to her as a child of three, four, five years old, with steel-grey hair, a sun-coarsened face and eyes permanently squinting after a lifetime at sea scanning distant horizons. A man who had lived his life and settled down to old age before his first and only child had come along, travelling to New South Wales to take up a land grant in the inner harbour suburb of Balmain. He had built himself a two-storey sandstone cottage with a crow’s nest in the roof from which lofty vantage point he could sip his rum of an evening and train his spyglass on the many and varied vessels on his doorstep. He had also taken a wife, his neighbour, Mrs Eliza Bass, widow of a schoolmaster whose husband and three children had perished in a single year from typhoid. The widowed Mrs Bass, who was well into her middle years and must have considered herself past the age of marriage and motherhood, at the age of forty-eight had found herself married once more and mother to a thriving baby girl.

There had been no further children. Eleanor had grown up the child of two ageing parents who had both experienced the best and the worst of life and were content to count their blessings and enjoy their quiet good fortune.

Were they alike then, she and Miss Trent? Were their origins, were the paths they had followed, so different? Eleanor had loved her father with an intensity that occasionally made her stop and gasp at his loss even now. But it was her mother who had made the decision, that hot December afternoon twenty-three years ago, that they attend the lecture at the town hall. And now Eleanor was the wife of the minister.