He had paid for the tea and escorted her to her tram stop. He had offered to make some enquiries on her behalf and they had arranged a meeting for the following day. He had bowed to her again and gone about his business.

But his world had been turned on its head.

He had made some enquiries. The fiancé, Mr John Brewster of London, had arrived on the Thermopylae on 1 November. He had spent two nights at a hotel on MacLeay Street then taken a room in a boarding house a few streets to the south in Kings Cross. He had taken up the position of clerk at the government department’s offices, but less than a fortnight into his new position had succumbed to a fever. Within a few days, his condition deteriorating rapidly and his landlady alarmed, he had been moved to St Vincent’s Hospital where he had died the following day, alone and unmourned and under the care of the Sisters of Charity. He had been buried three days later at the nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church, though there was nothing to suggest Brewster was, or had ever been, a Catholic. Clearly expediency had prevailed: there had been no one to speak on Mr Brewster’s behalf, his family being in England and his fiancée being by this time halfway to Cape Town, so the Catholics had won the day—or they had opened their arms to a lost soul far from home, depending on how one viewed it.

It struck Alasdair as more than a little feeble to journey halfway across the world only to succumb to a fever three weeks after arriving. Why, he had lived in Sydney his whole life—some forty-five years—and he had never succumbed to a fever once, fatal or otherwise. That this man had done so smacked of weakness, frailty, ineffectualness. It made one wonder what exactly Miss Trent had seen in the fellow. Surely she deserved better.

A clerk! Worse—a dead clerk!

However, he had done as he had promised and made enquiries. The superintendent of the government department within whose division Brewster had, albeit briefly, been employed granted Alasdair an interview and expressed surprise at the way Miss Trent—of whose existence he had not been made aware until this moment—had been treated. He left the room, spoke to one or two people, sent and received a telegram, and announced, with some satisfaction, that the Royal Mail steamer the Oriental was due to sail for London in seven days’ time and, if Miss Trent so desired it, passage could be reserved for her on it.