It struck him that he ought to have a valet, though he had never perceived this lack in his household before. But a gentleman ought to have a valet. This fussing about dressing oneself was petty, it was undignified. In London a gentleman of his standing, a minister of the Crown, would have a valet, unquestionably. And a butler. His parliamentary colleagues, those who had been born in England, who had been educated there, thought nothing of keeping a manservant to dress them, a butler to open their front door, a liveried footman, a carriage. But those, like himself, born in the colony scorned such ostentation, they mocked it, and perhaps this was simply to mask their discomfort. His grandfather had been a navvy, had built canals and railways with his bare hands, could not sign his own name on a document. And his father had had so many servants they had been housed in a separate wing, yet he had never learned how to deal with a single one of them until the day of his death. This incongruity between his grandfather and his father troubled Alasdair occasionally. It troubled him now. He felt that he took an uneasy middle path between them.

There was no sign of Alice.

He abandoned the search for the gold tiepin. He dug out another pin and stabbed it in his new tie. It stuck out inelegantly, in the wrong place, at the wrong angle. He sat down on a chair and stared at himself in the mirror.

Where had Verity gone?

And to whom?

Charles Booker-Reid’s house at Woollahra was a late Regency mansion constructed to imposing and ultimately overambitious proportions by an English merchant who had come to the colony, made his fortune then promptly lost it all building a lavish and increasingly costly house worthy of his position. With its portico and Doric colonnade it rivalled the Rothes’ Hyde at Potts Point, and how Booker-Reid had ended up with it was a mystery to Eleanor, though oddly in keeping with what one did know about the man, which was, for the most part, unfavourable.

Alasdair said nothing in the cab, remained closed off from her and unfathomable, when she felt herself fizzing and bubbling and light-headed beside him, the blood pulsing through her veins and throbbing in her ears. She imagined herself making light-hearted conversation with him here in the cab, imagined herself making a clever and humorous observation—for all her troubles were over and his, though he did not yet know it, were over too—but she said nothing. No observation, clever or otherwise, presented itself to her, so she sat in silence. But inside she felt herself fizzing and bubbling.

She imagined, over and over again, the constable arriving at Miss Trent’s door.