Eleanor gazed at the rain as it beat against the carriage window, drumming an insistent and incessant rhythm. It had been there for days—not the rain, though that had been present for days too, but the insistent and incessant drumming. She could pinpoint its beginning precisely to the moment she had received the note that was folded now inside an envelope in her writing desk drawer, a note that began My dearest and went on to confirm a meeting of which she had no knowledge; a note that was unsigned, though she recognised the florid and careless hand of her husband.

She understood her husband was having an affair.

CHAPTER TWO: FROG HOLLOW

CHAPTER TWO

FROG HOLLOW

The distance from Elizabeth Bay to Surry Hills was about two miles, mostly by way of Darlinghurst Road and Crown Street. The maid, Alice Nimrod, made this journey in the rain not long after Mrs Dunlevy had departed in the hansom cab. It was not a journey she wished to make, but she was soaked through already from the dash all the way to MacLeay Street to find her mistress a cab so more rain hardly mattered.

The maid hastened through the dark and deserted streets, and the rain beat down on her hat and coursed down her neck and splashed up over her boots. Her coat was wet through, and her skirt clung to her legs so that her cold flesh shrunk from it. She pulled her collar tighter about her and half closed her eyes against it, but nothing could stop it, the relentless rain. On and on she went, Alice Nimrod, and it was fear that drove her on.

It was not the kind of fear one feels at a sudden loud sound in the night and that stops the heart and freezes the senses. No, this was a fear that resided daily in her breast, that beat a dull rhythm in her head and in her ears from morning to night, and was the fear of the servant who has been plucked from the pit of poverty and hopelessness and, having once been saved, whose every waking hour was shaped and determined by the threat of sinking back into it. With her mistress gone, Alice had cast off the spotless white apron and cap and snatched up her coat, but beneath her coat she still wore the ugly black dress with its stiff white collars and cuffs that marked her as a servant. She had left the house of her employer without permission, and if her mistress found her gone she faced dismissal.

She faced disaster.

For a moment she faltered, raised her eyes to the darkened sky and considered turning back.