She kept on, but after a time her footsteps slowed. She looked about her. The villas here were a little less grand as she neared the docks; the space between each one had shrunk. She would have liked to sit down but there was nowhere. She had a sudden fear someone of her acquaintance would see her from a passing carriage or an upstairs window.

A cab was now coming towards her pulled by an ageing grey, the driver a youngish man in a green bowler hat, and she saw it was the very cab Alasdair had caught, though empty now of its fare.

She stepped out and flagged down the man. ‘The fare you just dropped off,’ she called up to him, ‘a gentleman in a top hat whom you picked up in Elizabeth Bay—I wish you to take me to the same address.’

The driver nodded resignedly and barely waited for her to climb in before awkwardly turning the cab around and starting back the way he had come.

For a some minutes this extraordinary stroke of luck took up all Eleanor’s concentration and she stared out of the window without seeing the rows of houses that flashed past, the docks that now came into view. Someone had left an umbrella in the bottom of the cab. It rolled against her foot. She pushed it away with her toe.

But already the cab was slowing.

‘Wait!’ cried Eleanor. ‘Just wait.’

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE CLEVER LIE

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE CLEVER LIE

The world was a different place this morning and Alice Nimrod stopped at the top of Elizabeth Bay Road to raise her face to the day and feel the sunlight enter her skin and flood her body. A hatred of rain, of cold, ran deeply in her. She felt her body close in on itself during the three months of winter and open up again as the first hint of spring filled her air. The sun had brightened and warmed this day in a way that made Alice believe the words of priests, made her believe that the light that streamed through the stained-glass windows of the cathedral was a glimpse of Heaven. But to know that it was the second day of June, to know that winter had barely begun, was a weight that hung heavily, and she could no more ignore it than Man could ignore his own mortality, and so she was a little saddened.

She set off again, walking briskly; the jubilation at her clever deception of Mrs Flynn was fading a little. Her plan was to find her sister. The sense of urgency that she felt could not easily be put into words but it caused her heart to beat too fast and her breath to come in short gasps as she hurried along Darlinghurst Road. And now the first doubts crept in: what if Mrs Dunlevy returned home and found her not there?

What if she lost her position?