An urgent tap at the window stopped her heart and she put a hand to her chest. She went to the window and threw back the heavy crimson curtain, at first seeing nothing, but a second tap proved to be the overgrown Moreton Bay fig reaching out in the darkness and in the wind and in the rain with its outermost branch towards the house, towards her. And the giant possum, a male, unmoving as the rain splashed onto its sodden brown pelt, its yellow eyes unblinking and unsurprised. They—the possum and the monstrous ancient tree—had something timeless about them, as though they had both been here a great many years, before this house and this suburb, before even the city itself. There was a recrimination in the tap-tap-tap, in the unblinking yellow eyes.

Eleanor let fall the curtain and turned away. She was going out. She must get ready.

The rain continued to fall. The night lengthened and the city, a place of sparkling water and dazzling light in the daytime, became a place of shivering misery from which men scurried.

Eleanor sat in a hansom cab as it splashed through the deserted streets. She had sent Alice out into the night to find the cab and the girl had taken an umbrella and gone all the way up to MacLeay Street before she had found one.

It was a filthy night, and Eleanor wondered about Alasdair’s meeting and who might see fit to attend it on such a night. But they were all well attended, he said, and the newspapers said it too. Two hundred people had come, they reported, or two hundred and fifty, to hear the Premier speak, more to hear Mr Barton. Yet Eleanor was yet to attend a single one of Alasdair’s meetings this time around, when she had attended a dozen or more the last time, a year ago. She had intended to go with him this evening, but in the end she had not. The rain; it was the rain that had stopped her. But there were still three weeks to go. Twenty days. She leaned back in the cab as a weariness overcame her.

They had left William Street and turned north into College Street. A void on her left, utterly black and impenetrable, was Hyde Park. Soon they would be at Macquarie Street and the moment of arriving would be upon her. She awaited with a growing dread the slowing of the cab, the opening of the carriage door, the dash through the puddles and the cold gripping the back of her neck, but it could not be put off. One could hardly tell the cabbie to turn about and take her home again. She pulled her fur closer about her.

Mrs Dunlevy wore white.

‘We’re here, lady,’ called the cabbie above the pounding of the rain.