Miss Trent, who had been abandoned by God or favoured by him, depending on how the thing was viewed, lay in a bed at the far end of a long and overcrowded women’s ward on the second floor of the hospital. She lay unmoving and with her eyes closed. She did not look like the same woman whom Eleanor had helped up the stairs to her apartment and left seated on the settee as she was beginning to haemorrhage. This woman looked smaller, slighter, more fragile. It was still a rather plain face: too pale, too narrow, too sharp where it might have been better softer. Her eyelids were a shade of mauve and they flickered as though the eyes beneath the lids moved constantly in some hectic dream. Otherwise she did not stir.

There was nothing very appealing about her—there had been nothing then, there was nothing now. If Miss Trent held some secret allure, then she held it very close.

But Eleanor could not draw away.

There was unfinished business. Not the unfinished business she had anticipated, which was to hear of the girl lying in the morgue, halfway dispatched to some meagre and anonymous plot of land in a nearby churchyard; nor the alternative—shackled in a cell at the mercy of constable, prison warden and judiciary. But neither outcome, apparently, was Miss Trent’s fate.

The door which Eleanor had expected to close remained firmly open.

She could not, for the moment, muster her thoughts. She studied Miss Trent’s hands. They lay, or had been placed, on her chest as though she were dead. One finger twitched. These were not aristocratic hands but neither were they servant’s hands. Something between. A governess, a shop girl. If these hands had scrubbed wooden tables and emptied slops or gutted fish it had been a long time ago. But who knew the truth of Miss Trent’s former life? Miss Trent was recently arrived in the colony, which meant she was free from the curse that dogged every Sydney-born man and woman. No one would ever wonder if Miss Trent’s people had arrived here in chains on transport ships, their backs seared and split open by the lash; no one would wonder if her grandmother had been a convict and a prostitute. Fortunate Miss Trent.

‘You may sit,’ said one of the nurses, indicating a chair, her eyes sweeping over Eleanor’s face, but Eleanor did not sit. She was, after all, not a visitor and she hardly cared if the patient lived or died. Instead she studied Miss Trent, whose life she had, inadvertently, saved. She could go no nearer and she could not draw away, for it is a terrible thing to save the life of one who is despised. It is a burden.

The mistress lived.