These words, flung at him by his wife, echoed about the drawing room; they ricocheted from one wall to the other. They silenced the great clock in the hallway and the one on the mantel. They expelled all other thoughts from Alasdair’s head and for a time he was insensible.

He had misheard, surely? Had inserted these words into the space between them because they were so much on his mind. He had invoked them. Invoked Verity.

I know about Miss Trent.

Thoughts crowded and jostled, spilling one over another until he was bewildered. Until his only recourse was attack: ‘How dare you! You would accuse me—my wife!—in my own house?’

She did not flinch but faced him with a fury that, for a moment, took him aback.

‘I have seen you with her! I know where she resides! Here, I have the letter you wrote to her, arranging your tawdry little liaison!’ And with a trembling hand she pulled from her reticule a crumpled envelope and shook it in his face. ‘Do you deny—’

‘Hypocrite!’

The word fell, crashing to the floor, and the cockatoos in the ancient fig outside erupted into screaming flight.

He repeated it—

‘Hypocrite!’

—and at least had the satisfaction of seeing her step back, the fury turn to—what? He could not guess. But before she could think to summon a reply he caught her by the arm, just above the elbow, holding her fast and speaking in a low voice: ‘I am well aware what you did last year—and as we still grieved for our lost child!’

The charge was made and in her face he saw—

But he could no longer read her face, the mask she wore. The strangeness of her, it felled him. And when she began to reply—

‘No! Do not speak another word. I will not hear it. Your behaviour is utterly, utterly beyond the pale. I forbid you to speak of this. I forbid you to leave this house or to speak of this to anyone!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: ANY TRAIN TO EMU PLAINS

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ANY TRAIN TO EMU PLAINS

The rain began as soon as Alice had closed the front door following Mrs Dunlevy’s return. Great fat drops, slowly at first, but with a quality to them that, you knew, meant a downpour, steady and drenching and prolonged. Already Alice could hear it rattling on the roof tiles, dripping into the gutters, pattering onto the leaves of the great fig tree outside.