And there was even less in that of her grandmother, Molly Dowd, a domestic servant in a merchant’s house in Liverpool, England, and transported at the age of eighteen for some undefined misdemeanour in the first decade of the century, arriving in the penal colony already six months pregnant with Eleanor’s mother. She was an elusive and shadowy figure this Molly Dowd, the year of her birth and the date or place of her death being unknown and unsubstantiated. She had disappeared very early from Eleanor’s mother’s life, the misdemeanour that got her transported being sometimes euphemistically referred to by her mother as theft and other times as lewd and licentious behaviour though it seemed clear to Eleanor, now, that her enterprising grandmother had been caught selling the one thing she had—herself—right under the roof of the merchant’s house. Again, hardly something to aspire to.

Next month her mother would be twenty years dead and there was no one now who remembered that Eliza Tremaine had ever been Eliza Bass, and one would have to go far back into the annals of the colony to connect Eliza Bass, schoolmaster’s widow, with Eliza Dowd, daughter of a felon. No one ever had made this connection, so far as Eleanor knew, and for this she was thankful, for while it was fine to live in a colony that had sprung triumphantly from the quagmire of a penal settlement, it was quite another to have a grandmother who was a convict and, in all likelihood, a prostitute.

But yet Eleanor was elated. To attend a political meeting on one’s own was, it turned out, invigorating. She had sat through hundreds of dull political meetings in her time, always as Alasdair’s wife, always with the single thought on her mind: was it enough to get him elected, was it enough for him to retain his seat? She had rarely, if ever, considered what Alasdair said at such meetings, what the other speakers said, what might be at stake. For if one had no power in a society, why should one concern oneself with its politics? She did not know the answer to this but it troubled her. Her elation waned a little.