‘Yes,’ said Alasdair. He would have liked to say, I understand, but he could not say it for he did not understand. Their child, destroyed.

‘The police have left me alone. I am not worth their while,’ she said.

At this, Alasdair sat dumbfounded.

‘You did not know?’ she asked, turning to him and scrutinising his face. ‘I thought that was why you were here.’

‘No, I did not know.’ He took a long breath. ‘I came here to say I will do whatever can be done. I will engage the best lawyer in the colony to defend you.’

For a time neither spoke.

‘Well, now you shall not need to,’ she said. ‘But it was a kind thought.’

‘A kind thought?’

He stood and turned about. A nurse further down the ward, tending another woman, looked up and stared at him. He sat down again.

‘It was not a kind thought, Verity. It was necessary. To save you.’

He flinched at the melodrama of his own words, at the assumption that he could save her. But he had not said yet what he most needed to say.

‘Verity, it is no longer possible for me to continue in this manner. Indeed, I do not wish to. We cannot marry but we may be together—if not here, then in another city. Melbourne. London. Wherever you wish it to be.’

His words burst from him, the more so for being so long contained, and once they were free, he was free, and a world of possibility opened before him. Before them both.

‘If I must retire from public life I will do so, gladly.’ He gave a little laugh, afraid that he might not be able to express what was in his heart. ‘All those things that mattered to me I no longer care for. They are like … dust. I will find something else to do. With you at my side.’ He touched her face. ‘Verity, there will be other children.’

The hansom cab into which the minister had climbed had gone some little time ago, in a flurry of whips and shouting and the clatter of hooves, and a quiet calm had then descended on the peaceful little bay so that it was once more like any other morning.

But it was not like any other morning, for the minister’s wife stood in the road, her arms by her side with no hat and no gloves. With nothing.

A face had appeared briefly at an upstairs window of a neighbouring villa, a servant stood at an opened back door and paused in wonder, but now both were gone. Elsewhere blinds were closed, curtains drawn, doors were closed. After a time Eleanor turned and went back inside.

A short time later Alice emerged and went off up the street, returning with a second cab. Eleanor came out of the house and this time she wore hat and gloves and coat and got into the cab.