Alasdair left the offices of the government department and walked the short distance to the quayside where he stood for a time watching the ships dock and listening to the cicadas. He had secured her passage home—indeed, it had proved a surprisingly simple matter to arrange—and his heart surged as he imagined her gratitude when he calmly announced the miracle he had thus performed.

And yet when he met her at the same teashop that afternoon and reported his progress, he failed utterly to mention the department’s generous offer. And when the Oriental sailed for London seven days later Miss Trent was not on board. Instead, Miss Trent was moved from the seamy Surry Hills boarding house in which she had found herself to a more suitable premises at Woolloomooloo, and if she had been encouraged to believe—initially, at least—that the government department of her late fiancé had somewhat tardily decided to offer recompense and were paying her board, four months later she was no longer labouring under any such misapprehensions.

The cab creaked to a stop on the corner of a tree-lined avenue of once-grand three- and four-storey residences. Most were past their prime and slipping on their poorly laid foundations, peeling and splintered, and unrepaired but still with a genteel air of faded glory. The people who lived here had known better times, too, a generation or more ago, and had watched their fortunes decline as their street had declined. But they had clung on, subdividing and subdividing again, selling small parcels of themselves until what remained was two small rooms in the top storey of a house in which the roof leaked and one girl did the work that once a team of domestics would have done. But still that genteel air, still the tradesman sent to the back door and spoken to peremptorily.

Alasdair paid the driver and stood on the pavement until the cab had turned the corner. The leather portfolio was under his arm and it felt a little ridiculous here in this street; he might be a bailiff or an inspector of some kind. He wished he had not brought it. He realised he had left his umbrella in the cab and started forward, but the cab was gone and he was not about to run after it. He did not need an umbrella; the sky was a clear, brilliant, dazzling blue. To have an umbrella was to make oneself more ridiculous.