Said like that, Harrie supposed it did sound … common, though in her eyes her work was a form of art. It’s just that her art was applied to living skin, rather than canvas. And it wasn’t beneath her: she was common. She eyed James, waiting for him to go on, as no doubt he would.

  ‘I know how you feel about what you do, and Friday tells me you’re very good at it, but not everyone appreciates tattoos. You know as well as I do that it’s a specific sort of person who gets them.’

  ‘Like Friday?’

  ‘Er, yes, though I was thinking more of sailors and the like. And sailors don’t have a particularly good reputation, do they? And neither, by association, will you if you carry on with it.’

  Harrie could see now where James’s argument was going. ‘And you’re worried that that will reflect on you?’

  ‘More on the practice, specifically. How can I expect my patients to heed my advice on cleanliness and sober habits if they think I condone my wife jabbing needles into dirty, smelly sailors? Anyway, it’s not safe. Look at this business with Jonah Leary.’

  Harrie realised with a jolt of fear that he did have a point; what if Leary turned up at Leo’s while she had Charlotte there? ‘Is it just the tattooing you don’t approve of?’ she asked.

  A knock came at the bedroom door, and Daisy called timidly, ‘Excuse me, sorry, it’s me.’

  James slipped on his shirt. ‘Come in.’

  Accompanied by the sound of grizzling whimpers in the background as she opened the door, Daisy said while staring fixedly at her boots, ‘Excuse me, Charlotte’s up. She wants Harrie.’

  Harrie fetched her and brought her in. Charlotte’s face was flushed and she was being very clingy. ‘She feels very hot to me.’

  James felt the child’s forehead and cheeks. ‘It’s a warm morning. Plenty of fluids today, I think. I’m not sure what you mean by “just” the tattooing.’

  ‘I do understand what you’re saying, you know,’ Harrie said. ‘Before I started on the needles, I drew flash for Leo. Those are the tattoo designs. Would I still be able to do that? He’s always paid me well for those.’

  ‘Could you do that from home?’

  ‘Well, I’d need to drop them off when they’re finished, but, yes, I could.’

  James considered for a moment, then grinned. ‘I think that’s a reasonable compromise, Mrs Downey, don’t you?’

  Relieved and pleased, Harrie smiled back. She’d raise the issue of working for Nora later — surely he couldn’t object to that? ‘Yes, I do. I’ll tell Leo today.’

  Now that the possibility of Leary snatching Charlotte had once again been raised, Harrie saw sinister shadows lurking everywhere on the way down George Street. Her nerves weren’t helped by Charlotte herself, who insisted on being put down and allowed to walk — although, actually, she ran, in all directions, and quickly. Harrie had to go into the nearest draper and purchase a length of twine to tie around her middle, a trick she’d employed with Hannah Barrett, also an expert escapologist. Once Charlotte was forced to slow down, she went very slowly, examining everything she encountered — each stone, blade of grass, spider and lump of dog shit. Harrie doubted they’d reach Leo’s by dinnertime.

  When they finally did, at a quarter to eleven, Charlotte wanted to do a wee. Harrie had been working very hard to get her to use the pot again, so Leo had to be prevailed upon to fetch his, so as not to disrupt her training.

  ‘What’s wrong with the lass’s nappy?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s what they’re for, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can tell you’ve never washed four dozen stinky clouts,’ Harrie said.

  ‘Why would I? How was the wedding night?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  Leo grinned and tamped tobacco into his pipe. ‘It was a good do. I enjoyed myself. So did Serafina. I suppose you’re here to hand in your notice?’

  ‘I am, actually. I’m really sorry. How did you know?’

  ‘I imagine fellows like your James aren’t too keen on the missus working, never mind working in a job like this. Am I right?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Harrie peeped into the other room; Charlotte was off the pot and wandering around. She hoped it was only a wee she’d done. ‘Hang on a minute.’

  Yes, a small one. Harrie emptied the pot out the window, put Charlotte’s nappy back on her and carried her into the tattoo room.

  ‘It’s just the tattooing he objects to. He’s happy for me to carry on doing the flash. Is that all right with you?’

  ‘Can’t say I’m not disappointed, with you having such a good eye. How do you feel about it?’

  ‘Well, if it makes him happy. He’s a good man.’

  ‘Happy,’ Charlotte said, clapping her hands.

  ‘Aye, he is that,’ Leo agreed. ‘And worth keeping happy, I’d say. As for the flash, the more you can draw the better. Which reminds me; now that I’m not being forced to pay that magsman George Barrett a retainer, I think it’s about time you had a pay rise. Would an extra guinea per series suit you?’

  ‘Oh! That’s a lot. Are you sure?’ Harrie was delighted. ‘Thank you very much.’

  Leo waved away her thanks. ‘Friday’ll be disappointed. She’s got plans for something new on her leg now the phoenix is finished, and wanted you to do it. Still, can’t be helped. Perhaps you could draw something new for her.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her, shall I?’

  Leo nodded, and amazed Charlotte by sucking on his pipe and puffing smoke from the side of his mouth. ‘I heard something the other day, about Jonah Leary. I’ve been keeping an eye on him. I didn’t mention it yesterday because, well, it wasn’t the day for it, but a mate told a mate who told me he’s gone to Van Diemen’s Land.’

  ‘Looking for his brother?’

  ‘Must be.’

  ‘For how long, I wonder?’

  ‘Well, there’s thousands of convicts down that way, so it could be months. Let’s hope so.’

  Enormously relieved to hear that Leary was no longer in Sydney, on the way home Harrie still couldn’t shake off the unnerving sensation that she and Charlotte were being followed. But every time she turned to look, all she caught from the corner of her eye was the barest glimpse of long, silver-blonde hair.

  Chapter Sixteen

  February 1832, Sydney Town

  Sarah and Adam were just about to sit down to supper when someone knocked on the back door. Growling and barking, Clifford darted across the dining room, poised to pounce.

  ‘Pretend we’re not home,’ Sarah said, buttering a slice of bread.

  Adam got up from the table, his napkin still tucked into the open neck of his shirt.

  ‘Only me,’ Friday announced as he opened the door.

  Disappointed, Clifford retreated to her basket. Friday was a frequent visitor and had long ago stopped being terrified of her.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Sarah asked. ‘We’re just having supper.’

  ‘Not hungry, thanks.’ Friday pulled out a chair. ‘Wouldn’t mind a drink, though. What have you got?’

  ‘Tea.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Red wine and brandy. No gin.’

  ‘Brandy’d be good. Ta.’

  As Sarah went out to the parlour to fetch it, Friday asked Adam, ‘How’s life in the jewellery business?’

  ‘Good. Plenty of money to be made if you’re selling what people want, and we are. How’s life in the prostitution business?’

  Friday made a disparaging face. ‘Plenty of money to be made if you’re selling what people want, and I do.’

  Adam laughed and speared a round of cucumber with his fork. ‘Sounds like you need a change of profession.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  Sarah plonked the brandy decanter on the table and sat down. ‘Don’t drink it all, please. It wasn’t cheap, that one. What are you talking about?’

  ‘I think Friday’s fed up with her job,’ Adam remarked.

  Sarah said, ‘You’re always fed up with your job.’

  ‘I know.’ Friday poured herself a generous drink. ‘Well, most of it. Mr Meriwether’s all right, I suppose. I don’t mind doing that.’

  Adam said, ‘Is he the old goat with the whips?’

  Friday frowned at Sarah. ‘That was supposed to be private. It’s business.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Sarah went pink. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t have told me if it’s private.’

  ‘Oh, who cares?’ Friday waved a dismissive hand. ‘Anyway, I’m here to talk about Harrie. I’m worried.’

  ‘So am I.’ Sarah moved her plate aside.

  ‘She seems all right to me,’ Adam said.

  ‘But you don’t know her like we do. She still seems … what’s the word I’m looking for?’ Sarah looked at Friday.

  ‘Haunted?’

  ‘That’s it. Or maybe even “hunted”. That feels closer. She should be happy now but it’s as though she can’t rest, as if something’s driving her to … well, I’m not sure what. And I think she might be losing weight again.’

  ‘I wonder if Rachel’s back. She said she isn’t,’ Friday said doubtfully.

  ‘Oh God, don’t start that bloody ghost business again.’

  ‘Come on, Sarah, even you weren’t sure. The bat?’

  Adam, who’d stopped eating, looked from Sarah to Friday, and back to Sarah again. ‘What bat?’

  ‘Oh, it was something that happened when Gellar was here. Nothing important. Not now, anyway.’

  Friday, who’d been slouching in her chair, sat up straighter, took a humongous gulp of her drink and rubbed the back of her neck. ‘I have to say something. I said a bit of a mean thing to Harrie the other day. I sort of asked her if she thinks Rachel knows she’s got Charlotte.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Friday!’ Sarah said. ‘You know how guilty she feels about everything. What did you do that for?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was just before the wedding and I was feeling —’

  ‘Jealous?’ Sarah shot a meaningful look at Adam, who was busy staring intently at his half-eaten supper. For a while, he’d also suffered the effects of Friday’s jealousy.

  ‘It slipped out,’ Friday said. ‘I didn’t mean it. I said I was sorry.’

  ‘Too late then. You’d have already put the idea in her head!’

  ‘If it wasn’t already there. You know what she’s like.’

  Looking hugely confused, Adam said, ‘Are you talking about an actual ghost? Because you don’t believe in them. I know you don’t.’

  ‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘But Harrie does. She’s the one who thinks she can see Rachel. But she can’t really. It’s part of her illness.’

  ‘I didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t seen her,’ Friday said. ‘You know what a rubbish liar she is. I think we should talk to James. Because if she does think she’s back, she could be getting really sick again.’

  When Friday got back to the Siren’s Arms, Elizabeth told her a letter had arrived for her; she’d put it under her bedroom door. Friday raced up the stairs and along the hall, fumbling in her reticule for her key. Could it be from Aria? If it was, she’d never drink, or swear, or say another mean thing about anyone ever again. She unlocked the door and threw it open, and there the letter lay.

  Snatching it off the floor, she sat on her bed and scrabbled at the seal, but already her heart was sinking. The letter’s condition was far too good for it to have come all the way from New Zealand. And then she knew what it must be.

  ‘You scabby, fucking old bitch,’ she said out loud as she unfolded the single sheet, the disappointment of it making her dizzy.

  To Friday Wolfe, Sarah Morgan, and Harrie Clark

  You didn’t think I’d forgotten, did you?

  £250. If you don’t want to feel the hangman’s rope around your worthless necks, be at the stable yard of the Harp and Angel on York Street, this Sunday night at six o’clock. Someone will be waiting for you.

  B

  The rotten, bloody cow. She still couldn’t spell their names right, and didn’t she know Sarah and Harrie were married now? She must do.

  This was Bella’s third demand, and each time the amount went up. They had the money — they hadn’t heard from her since they’d paid Rowie Harris, so it had been accruing in the bank — but that wasn’t the point. After this, they would have paid her six hundred pounds: a fortune, and not even a small one, for most folk.

  Today was Monday. There’d be plenty of time during the week to ask Matthew to withdraw the money. He was a good man, Friday reflected. He never pried, and never asked what the money was for.

  Bella had been smart this time choosing a public meeting place just on dusk — even smarter than she usually was. Amos Furniss had been murdered and robbed, and Rowie Harris had been thumped; they’d both met Friday in a lonely part of town late at night. This time there’d be folk around, otherwise known as witnesses. Whoever collected the money on Sunday — no doubt either Louisa or Becky — would be fairly safe from attack, which, as far as Bella was concerned, meant they wouldn’t lose it.

  Friday put the letter aside and fetched her gin from the dressing table, noticing with a start that the bottle was nearly empty. She’d only opened it the night before. She’d have to get a couple more. Bella’s demand was bloody annoying, but, to be honest, it felt like just one more stinking turd on the great, steaming heap of shit her life was becoming. She hated her job, nobody had murdered Bella yet, Harrie still wasn’t right, and most achingly painful of all was the gaping hole left in her heart by Aria’s absence. Except for the gift at Christmas, she’d heard nothing from her. Either she couldn’t get a letter past her mother, a possibility Friday, perversely, was praying for, or everything she’d written in the note accompanying her gift had been lies, and Friday could hardly bear to think of that.

  She opened another drawer and took out the note, which she kept carefully wrapped in the linen handkerchief with the comb, feathers and the lilac ribbon, and read it for at least the hundredth time.

  My beautiful Friday,

  Here are my precious huia plumes. They are my right to wear as befits my status as a princess of high rank. You are my princess.

  Our time together was so short, but I will never forget it. I will never forget you, and I will do everything I can to come back to you. You live forever in my heart.

  Aria Moehanga Te Kainga-mataa

  No, Aria hadn’t been lying when she’d written that. Friday suspected Aria never told lies. But to have heard nothing at all was agony. After making Leo give her Tumanawapohatu’s address in New Zealand she’d written half a dozen letters of her own, and still there had been only heartbreaking silence.

  Perhaps she should go and see Serafina Fortune again. Serafina had said she’d find love with someone tall, dark and strong, and that must be Aria, surely? But is that really what she’d said? Or had Friday only dreamt that?

  It was getting hard to tell, these days.

  Sarah and Friday stood outside James’s surgery, hogging the shade under the eaves of the small porch and staring out at the other patients suffering in the stark, bright heat of the gravelled front yard. Sarah had taken an hour off work and Friday hadn’t yet started. The morning was almost unbearably warm already, the heat made worse by a thick, hot wind. In the west enormous sepia and white clouds drifted across the sky, and the smell of smoke tainted the air.

  Friday pulled out the neck of her bodice and blew down it. Sweat was trickling down her sides and her shift stuck clammily to her skin.

  ‘He does know we’re here, doesn’t he?’ Sarah asked.

  Friday nodded. ‘He’s got someone in there, but he saw me and waved when I banged on the window.’

  ‘Christ, it’s hot.’ Sarah took off her bonnet and used the brim to fan her face. ‘We got bugger-all sleep last night. And the mosquitoes! The Tank Stream’s full of them. We had to shut every single window. It was murder.’

  ‘At least you haven’t got the horrors. I can’t decide whether to spew, shit or pass out.’

  ‘Well, whose fault’s that?’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  ‘Shut up yourself. Have you been to the bank yet?’

  Friday stifled an acidic burp. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘You haven’t told Harrie, have you?’

  ‘No. Have you?’

  ‘No, and I don’t think we should. Not at the moment.’

  A window opened and James stuck his head out. ‘Come on, in you come.’

  Friday and Sarah scooted through the door of the surgery and down the narrow hallway, passing a deathly pale, glassy-eyed and profusely sweating man with his arm in a sling. The fingers poking out of it were swollen and a greenish-black colour. The stink was appalling. Friday retched, clapping a hand over her mouth.

  The smell wasn’t any better in James’s office.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ Friday said as she sat down, dug a handkerchief out of her reticule and applied it to her lower face.

  ‘My apologies,’ James said as he lit a candle infused with oil of lavender. ‘My last patient — you may have passed him in the hall? I’ve just sent him off to the hospital. The poor fellow pricked his finger on a rose bush and now has a gangrenous hand and forearm, and will most certainly lose the arm. And, I expect, his life. You wanted to talk to me? I assume it’s about Harrie, or you would have come to the house.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Sarah said. ‘How do you think she’s getting on?’ She made a fist and rapped on her head, as though she were knocking to be let in.

  For a moment, James said nothing. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered eventually.

  ‘Because we don’t think she’s doing very well at all,’ Friday mumbled through her handkerchief.

  Sarah said, ‘Put that away. We can’t hear you.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ll be sick. The smell.’

  James wafted the air above the candle towards her. Friday stuffed the handkerchief up her sleeve and breathed through her mouth. ‘We thought with being married and getting Charlotte she’d come right, but she hasn’t.’