Was he? Alasdair tried to recall. It had all been so quick, all he could remember of the man was the uniform and the pistol. Had he been an Aboriginal? Perhaps. Dark-skinned, at any rate. A disquieting sense of a threat, unknown and unknowable, stole over him. A settler, downtrodden and destitute, made desperate by drink and debt and idleness—this was a type he understood, saw every day and could dismiss. But the blacks … One could see such a fellow every day for a year, for ten years, look into the fellow’s eyes and have not the slightest idea of his thoughts, of the feelings that stirred his soul.

He stared at the water cascading all about them and turned his mind elsewhere. He could take the lease on a small furnished house in one of the better parts of Melbourne, overlooking the river, for he had visited the southern city and he had been much taken with the river and the elegant bridges that traversed it. Like a European city, everyone said, though he had not been to a European city and neither had most of the people who said it.

The rain thundered on the roof of the cab with the sound of a cavalry charge and mud splashed up from the horse’s hooves and coated the windows and Alasdair pictured the small furnished house.

They said no more to each other, though there was much, surely, to be said, and after an interminable time the cab turned sharply, went downhill and turned again, and slowed to a juddering halt. Alasdair paid the driver and dismissed him and followed at a dash the umbrella that Alice, the maid, held over his wife’s head.

CHAPTER FOUR: A HIGH IN THE BIGHT

CHAPTER FOUR

A HIGH IN THE BIGHT

Many miles to the west a winter mist hung low over the blue gums on the banks of the Nepean River and at the railway stations higher up the line a frost prickled the ground, but here, where the harbour met the ocean, Friday morning dawned an unwavering and brilliant blue. The sun dried out the puddles and sparkled on the water and on the windows of the new villas in Elizabeth Bay in a way that was at once delightful and blinding. The ground was still damp underfoot and in places the gutters still overflowed, but otherwise it was as though the week of rain had never happened, that one had imagined the whole thing. Such was the weather in Sydney.