His grandfather, Reuben Sussman—an Englishman whose obscure Jewish origins lived on only in his name—was a financier and small-time speculator at a time when the century was new and the markets unregulated who had found himself, while still a relatively young man, in a position of some trust at a modest but long-established and highly respectable provincial bank in the north of England. Through a series of recklessly ill-advised dealings and increasingly misguided decisions the bank, under Reuben’s management, lost so much money the shareholders baulked and took fright, triggering a run that eventually caused the bank to fail. Amid the immediate sensation of the calamity a great many businesses went bankrupt, a great many ruined men took their lives and a great many widows and fatherless children were left destitute. At his trial, it was never firmly established whether Reuben intended to defraud the bank to his own betterment or whether it was simply mismanagement on a spectacular scale but, finding himself the architect of so much misery, it could hardly have come as a surprise when a sentence of transportation and penal servitude for ten years was declared.

Off Reuben went, leaving behind a young wife and three daughters, the youngest just a year old, to the fledgling colony. He served out his term quietly enough—for he was not a violent man nor an indolent one—and eventually earned his freedom. Perhaps at this point the penitent and middle-aged Reuben might have returned home to England (though it is doubtful what sort of a reception he might have got), but fate stepped in. The colony, finding itself deficient in free men with any sort of financial background, offered Mr Sussman a position in the newly created colonial treasury, an irony that went unremarked in a city where half the public buildings had been designed by a convicted forger. His wife having died during his years of incarceration, Reuben sent for his three daughters, the eldest two of whom were now approaching their majority and the youngest but eleven. His three daughters duly arrived and he installed them in a pleasant little sandstone cottage overlooking Dawes Point. Here he lived out his days, and following his death his daughters lived on. The eldest two, Athena and Delphine, never married; perhaps their father’s disgrace, coming when it did in their young lives, had scuppered their chances, though they appeared to bear no grudge. Alasdair remembered his two maiden aunts fondly, seated fanning themselves by the window in their little cottage, sporting the lace caps of some previous century and starting each fresh reminisce with the words, Do you remember how dear Papa used to … And of course the youngest daughter, Lily, did marry, for she was Alasdair’s mother, though the circumstances of her meeting with and betrothal to Fergus Dunlevy were unknown to him.