He raised his head, acknowledging her presence but without, it seemed, quite seeing her. At his throat he wore a soft black satin necktie with a pearl tiepin. She had given him a gold tiepin engraved with his initials to mark the occasion of their twentieth wedding anniversary, but today he wore a pearl tiepin and she could not recall the last time he had worn the gold one. Did husbands value the things their wives gave them? She no longer knew. Children, an heir—yes, presumably husbands valued these things; but a gold tiepin—paid for with his own money—apparently not.

She observed him then looked away, and though her eyes were no longer on him she continued to see him, for she had spent almost every day of the past twenty-three years with him and there was not a phrase he could utter, a movement he could make, a thought he might express that she could not guess at and predict.

She had been seventeen when they had met. A girl, really.

Seventeen. An age when it was possible to feel fully grown and knowledgeable about the world though one has seen little and experienced less. At seventeen Eleanor had barely moved beyond the walls of her father’s stone cottage in Balmain; her world had been the docks, the foundries, the shipbuilders’ yards that lay between Mort Bay, Ballast Point and Darling Street Wharf. But her mother, whose first husband had been a schoolmaster, and with an eye to improving her daughter’s chances, had enrolled the youthful Eleanor in dance classes, had taught her to play the piano, had taken her, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon better spent—surely—down at the water’s edge, to a lecture at the town hall.

The lecture on that sweltering afternoon had been given by a celebrated professor from the University of Sydney on the Disappearance of the Great Explorer, Mr Ludwig Leichhardt. As no trace of Mr Leichhardt had been found since his party had set out from the Darling Downs in 1848, it threatened to be a short lecture.

It had not been a short lecture and Eleanor had found it necessary to sit perfectly still and not fidget and to ignore the spreading patches of dampness under her clothes as the temperature in the hall had crept ever upwards and the professor had expounded theory after theory to account for the disappearance of the Great Explorer and his entire party. Only a brief reference to the possibility of cannibalism towards the end of the lecture had roused her, briefly, from her torpor.