A short carriage ride east of the city lay the inlet of Elizabeth Bay. Here the straight lines to which men aspired and which they had largely achieved in other parts of the city were abandoned. One road led directly down to the water, it was true, but the rest followed their own path, twisting and snaking and turning back on themselves seemingly on a whim. To live in Elizabeth Bay was to be forever climbing and descending, so the horses that pulled the carriages, the tradesmen’s drays and the hansom cabs that stepped lightly elsewhere, here laboured and strained and lost their footing. This was a shoreline still in the process of being tamed, where retaining walls and waterside parks and mooring for pleasure craft vied with sheer cliffs and rocky escarpments and scrub, where the newly built villas overlooking the bay perched tentatively, not quite yet master of the landscape.

On one of the newly paved streets was a row of villas made of honey-coloured sandstone, built in the Italianate style—with slate roofs and bay windows and cast-iron balustrading—by a team of Italian stonemasons brought to the colony at some expense. The new villas all had names, but they were not the Berwicks or Amblesides or Windermeres of a hundred other merchants’ houses that imagined a homesickness for a mother country most had never visited; these houses were named for the men who had built them, for the men who had bought the land and subdivided it, and for the politicians who had smoothed the passage of development. (One or two even echoed the ancient names the people of the Eora nation had once used, names cut down and made palatable to the European tongue, but these were very much the minority.) The new villas had bathrooms, they had running water and the new electric lighting. One or two subscribed to the telephone service. They were houses for the new century, built in the dying months of the old one.

Inside one of these houses a maid moved from room to room lighting fires, drawing curtains, trimming wicks—for the house still retained a handful of kerosene lamps and the maid avoided, where she could, the new electric lights. This house was named Yarran, a Jewish-sounding name, perhaps, though more likely a corruption of Yarrandabby, the old Gadigal name for the headland, though it had been many years since an elder had stood on this headland and uttered its name.

Her tasks completed, the maid—whose name was Alice Nimrod—went silently upstairs to the room of her mistress.

She was a slight figure, insubstantial—not in height, for she was as tall as anyone in the house, taller than some, but in presence. She had worked five years in the large, newly built house, though she was not yet twenty, and she moved warily in the manner of one who dwells in another person’s house.