Still, Mary’s heart beats, her hair swings, her fingers sink into cool soil and pull up turnips and spinach, the sun draws out the freckles on her dry, bright cheeks, and she bears child after child. Her children are rarely sick; none has ever died. It’s her lot and duty to be content, so she’s wary of both great joy and sadness. She sows and reaps and then, because she thinks she must, takes all her harvest and stores it for the life to come.

  Mary, looking up at her father as she lies in the white bed, holds Lotta’s sweaty hand in order to remind herself of the reality of her earthly flesh. Childbirth and the weeks following it are the closest she’s come to fully occupying her body, and Lotta was her hardest labour and recovery. The itchy agony of those haemorrhoids! About which, of course, she never complained. Mary tries to see her children as belonging to God: only borrowed. She and Mathew have agreed, finally, that there will be no more of them. He built the room off the verandah to sleep in; Mary hung the portrait of her father above her bed. Mary was taught that humans prove their superiority to animals by regulating their desires. Does she still desire Mathew, and did she ever? Love and duty are so bound up together, and Mary is willing to leave someone else to puzzle them out.

  The door opens and Mary closes her eyes as the older girls tiptoe through her bedroom and into their own. Is Denny cold? Has he found food or water? Is he with Mathew now, and coming home? She tugs at his thread, but it doesn’t answer.

  Mary prays ‘Thy will be done,’ and waits to feel as if she has passed a heavy object over to a person more able to carry it. She lets go of Lotta’s hand. Still heavy-laden, Mary falls asleep.

  Sometime in the night she wakes to the sound of a child sobbing and—strange sensation—it fills her with hope. But it isn’t Denny crying to be let in. It’s Lotta, who’s wet herself and is sniffling into Mary’s left ear. Mopsy, unimpressed by this disturbance, jumps down from the bed and goes out to sleep in her basket by the stove. Mary changes Lotta, tucks her back in, kisses her hair and smooths it, and feels the kick of Lotta’s chilly feet. Then Lotta asks for a song, so Mary sings her mother’s favourite hymn. ‘Love divine, all loves excelling,’ she sings in her low voice. Lotta burrows into Mary, her breathing slows, Mary stops singing the words and hums the melody until Lotta’s mouth opens and her breathing against Mary’s neck becomes long and messy, sticky with sleep. Mary rests her chin on Lotta’s head, feels how warm it is, how tiny, and chases away the dreadful thought that if she’d been told two days ago to sacrifice one child—that it was God’s will and there was no avoiding it—then she might have chosen this one, the youngest and another girl.

  The boy stopped before the sun set. It wasn’t a decision; his legs simply became heavier and heavier, until he couldn’t move them. He tried to sit, and was surprised to find the ground so quickly. It just came up. There was an acacia tree beside him—had it always been there? His head ached and he thought he might be crying, but when he wiped at his face there were no tears. His tongue sat hot and heavy in his mouth, but his legs were cold—they felt like wood. Sometimes, when he ate a lot, his father told him he had hollow legs, and now he felt the truth of this: his legs were hollow, his tummy, and his arms. His eyes were hollow. He closed them and, when they opened again, the sun was gone. The sky was high and cold through the sparse leaves of the acacia. He was lying on the ground now, and felt something scratch against his neck on many legs—when he brushed at it, he found the rough edge of the sack. It took him some time to remember why he had a sack at all. His thoughts rocked back and forth, not settling, until he recalled the socks in his pocket. They were still a little damp, and he sucked what moisture he could out of them. Then he slept without agreeing to, and woke without knowing that he had. He just slept and woke and slept and woke. That night, if he’d heard the gods call his name, he might have gone to them.

  Minna waits for Robert in the house attached to the police station. She’s quite amused by this idea of living in a police station, although it horrifies her mother. Minna knows Mama hoped for a more prestigious son-in-law than Robert; her resistance to the match didn’t dissipate until Minna implied that she was pregnant with Robert’s child. Minna is not, as far as she knows, pregnant with Robert’s child. But she is now married to him, and he need not be a constable forever.

  Meanwhile, he and Minna will live in this house, which is meant for a family; Robert has really occupied only two of its rooms. When Wilhelmina toured it for the first time, she said, ‘Obviously the kitchen is too small.’ It’s true that all the domestic arrangements will have to change. Robert had a woman coming in to cook and clean, and she took his washing with her, but she prefers to work for bachelors, so Minna’s mother has offered to pay for a maid. Until they’ve found someone suitable (which may take some time—good domestic staff is scarce this far north), Annie Bell can come from Mama’s house to help. Together, Annie and Minna are undertaking an inventory of the wedding gifts and household goods. When this list is made, Wilhelmina will decide what other things are needed.

  When Annie visited earlier today, Minna was afraid that she might talk about Robert’s mouth and fingers, about the sounds he makes when he’s inside her. Which should be private, she understands. But she’s giddy with delight. She’s holding herself back from laughter at all times. She can’t help but feel that Denny Wallace, by disappearing, has made her rightful joy seem immoderate, and that this is a kind of theft. So she was falsely gloomy with Annie: ‘Poor little thing, it’s all too dreadful.’ And then optimistic: ‘Oh, they’ll find him.’ Then she made excuses and hurried Annie out. Minna wants to wait for Robert alone. She wants to walk through all the rooms in the house and press herself against each surface. This, at last, is what bodies are for: binding yourself tight to things and people. One day she will be pregnant with Robert’s child, and this idea excites her.

  When she hears Robert’s horse outside, Minna goes to meet him at the door. He picks her up and swings her about, and she likes the secret feeling of his hands in her armpits. She serves him his tea, though he says he’s eaten, and she asks him how things are with the Wallaces. He sits on a chair that belongs to Minna now, eats from Minna’s plate, and when he speaks, his words become Minna’s as soon as he says them. He’s tired and dirty. He doesn’t look like the Swedish painter, but perhaps he’s beautiful after all, with the red high in his cheeks. He’s like a man who’s fought his way through a battle to deliver an urgent message. Minna’s whole body beats for him. He belches unashamedly and they laugh together; it’s understood that nothing about their bodies is private any longer. Robert grins like a boy.

  ‘What’s kept you busy today, little Minnow?’ he asks.

  ‘Busy? All I’ve done is sleep.’

  ‘All you’ve done is sleep?’ Robert leans forwards and pulls at her chair until their faces are very close.

  ‘All day,’ says Minna.

  Robert blows gently against her forehead and she watches the movement that his lips must make to do it. That’s more thrilling to her than the feel of his breath against her skin: to see his body move to please her.

  ‘You came home to me tonight,’ she says.

  ‘Didn’t I say I would?’

  ‘Will you come home tomorrow night?’

  ‘Would you be lonely if I didn’t, little Minnow?’ Robert kisses the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Promise you’ll come home.’

  ‘All right. I promise.’

  ‘What if you’re out in the hills and you can hear the lost boy crying? And you can see him up on a cliff? And you could rescue him if you stayed? Will you still come home then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Robert says, trying to claim her mouth.

  ‘And what will you do when you come?’

  ‘I’ll do this,’ says Robert, and they go to bed.

  It isn’t like their wedding night: Robert is more single-minded. He smells in the bed, and Minna likes it—he isn’t a bridegroom, he’s a husband, and she desires him even more. But he’s tired, and after he’s spent they lie with legs entwined and talk at the edge of Robert’s sleep. Minna asks him questions. ‘Do you love me?’ she asks, and the answer is yes, yes. ‘Will you always?’—and the answer is also yes. But yes isn’t enough, she wants more, not more ‘yes’ but more of the him he was while they were apart.

  ‘What did you eat today?’ she asks and, when he tells her, ‘Who made it all?’

  ‘Dunno,’ drowsily, then, ‘Mary Wallace, I s’pose.’

  ‘She’s deaf, you know.’

  ‘She can still cook, can’t she?’ Robert says, tickling Minna’s waist and tweaking one nipple. ‘There’s other women helping. And one of her girls made milk pudding.’

  ‘Which girl?’

  ‘I don’t know their names.’

  ‘Was it Joy? No? Cissy?’

  ‘Cissy,’ Robert says. ‘That sounds familiar.’

  ‘Cissy Wallace made blancmange?’

  ‘Milk pudding,’ says Robert. ‘Bit on the watery side.’ He jiggles Minna’s breasts with his big red hands.

  Minna kisses him. The watery blancmange delights her. But she thinks of Mary Wallace and all that cooking and says, ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Wallace want to go looking for her boy? Instead of cooking all day?’

  ‘Who’s going to feed us, then?’

  ‘I’d want to go out looking, if I lost my baby.’

  ‘You’d go out looking, would you?’ says Robert, stretching his arms in a way that says: sleep now, no more talking.

  Indignant, smiling Minna: ‘Isn’t that natural in a mother?’

  Robert traces one finger up Minna’s arm. Minna would like to feel it inside her, it doesn’t matter where; but the finger promises nothing—he’s so near to sleep. He says, ‘If she was looking in the first place, maybe he wouldn’t have got lost.’

  Minna considers this. It seems an unkind thing to have said. ‘But how could she have known about the storm? And she was all alone.’

  Robert rolls in the bed and says, ‘Mmmmm.’

  Her constable is leaving her now, for hours of sleep, and tomorrow she’ll be alone for hours waiting for him to come home again. Minna considers the Wallace family. Mrs Wallace was alone because the girls were all in town at Minna’s wedding. So who is at fault? Mrs Wallace for not watching, the dust for rising, or Minna for getting married? Minna has been blaming the little boy, she realises, for wandering off alone. Now she sees the part she played in the disaster.

  ‘I’ll take the food that’s left from yesterday,’ she announces. ‘Annie says there’s piles.’

  Robert makes an indulgent growl. He’s burrowing into the bed. She sleeps soon after he does, and dreams so many times of Robert waking her to say goodbye that in the morning she isn’t sure which of them, if any, was real. Either way, he’s gone.

  TALES OF THE YADLIAWARDA AND IRISH HOUSEMAIDS

  I

  My name is Arranyinha. I’m called Nancy. My brother’s called Billy, my mother’s Pearl. Our family name is Rough. My mother used to work for a family called Roughley—that’s why. You want a story for your book? This one here’s a story I used to tell George and Bear when they were kids. I’m thinking of this story with that boy lost out there.

  This story happens far from here and a long time past. Some people live beside a river, they’re comfortable and there’s good food, their place is rich. But there’s trouble: rats everywhere, eating all their food and everything. So they get together and the boss—now he’s a fat one—the boss says we’ll sort this out, we’ll give a big reward to anyone who kills those rats. A man turns up and says he’ll do it, he wants that big reward. Now he’s a clever one, the man, he has a magic pipe. He plays the pipe and those rats come out, they follow the man all the way into the river. All those rats drown. That’s why that river is choppy now and dangerous—river’s full of rats. The man with the pipe says, Where’s my big reward? But the boss won’t give it. Everyone laughs at the man with the pipe and he goes away. Everyone’s happy now because those rats are in the river.

  A night goes by, maybe another night. The man comes back with his pipe. He plays that pipe and instead of rats coming after him, it’s kids. All the boys and girls in that place hear the pipe and follow it. He doesn’t take them to the river. They go along dancing to a big hill. The boss and the people say: Those kids will have to stop at that hill! It’s too big to climb! But the man plays his pipe and there’s a loud noise and the hill opens right up. The man with the pipe walks in and the kids follow him and the hill closes again. All the kids are gone, stolen by the man. After that there’s a big crack in the side of that hill. Just one boy was left behind—he wasn’t fast enough. But I’d say to George that all I needed was one boy, and when Bear was bigger I’d make it two boys who escaped. I’d say, Two boys is all I want.

  I had my own girls later. Their skin was light and they were taken from me.

  One time old Joanna heard me tell that story about the rats and wanted to know where I learned it, and I said, You told me. She said, When? One night when it was storming, I said. We hadn’t lived at her house for too long. I was still such a skinny one. Old Joanna was scared of the storm, so she sat with me and George and said she’d tell a story. Now I’m telling it to you.

  II

  Surely you scientific gentlemen have better things to do than pester me for stories? All right. I’m Anne Catherine Bell. People call me Annie. I was born in Sydney, New South Wales, but Mother and Da were born in London and in Dublin. I don’t tend to put that round—smells of convict, which they were, bless the pair of them. Also sounds Roman Catholic, which Da were, but I keep that quiet too. Mrs Baumann wouldn’t like it. I know she’d prefer to keep a German girl, but she says I’m better than a black. Not that she minds the blacks, she always says, only they’re unreliable—once she had a girl who was good at her work but when it got too hot she’d walk off somewhere cooler, and if she took offence with something Mrs B said or did she’d vanish for a day or two, then come back like no one could have missed her. They only want discipline, says Mrs B. I wouldn’t know.

  It’s all right here at Mrs Baumann’s. I get every Sunday afternoon free, don’t I, and Cook’s not lazy like some are. She passes wind, though, something chronic. The best thing about Mrs B is that her chair means you always know just where she is. She can’t creep up.

  Now, this is terrible about that missing boy. When I were little I were that scared of the bush, I thought any kid within three yards of it was lost forever. One time Mrs B were out visiting at Thalassa and took me along with her. I went into the kitchen and got talking to the cook there, fat old Pearl. She were talking about being a girl. When I were a girl, she said, but in that funny way they have, I can’t do it. So Pearl’s a girl, and she’s sitting by the fire and she sees a light shining up on top of a hill, looks like a fire. But there’s no people up on the hill to build the fire. Her mam says to her, ‘Don’t be frit, that’s just the spirit cooking damper for her lost little ones.’ I don’t know what sort of spirit. A ghost, maybe? This spirit was a mother whose kids went off, a boy and girl, and the spirit thinks she’ll cook damper so the kids’ll smell it and be hungry and come back.

  But they don’t come back, so the spirit makes a hill and she climbs up to listen for them crying. When she’s climbing she’s singing a song—a song about a bird, I think it was. There was a song for the boy and another one for the girl, and the mother found them. She found the boy first; she followed the sound of the bird and he was at the end of it, or something like. Though if she’s the one making the song, how can she follow it? Maybe I’m remembering wrong. I forget how the girl was found. It took a long time, I know that much. What matters, I suppose, is that she found her. The finding is what matters.

  They’re funny, mothers, how you lose them. And you never think you will. They say you recover from it in time, though I’m still waiting. You wanted a story? Well, I told you one, and it’ll serve.

  THIRD DAY

  Sergeant Foster orders his men out of bed well before sunrise and makes sure they raise a respectable amount of noise, waking Thalassa dogs and more than one rooster. Foster likes to make noise in the morning and sees no reason, on this occasion, for restraint: he’s annoyed not to have met the men of the family; not to have been offered a room in the main house for the night; to have been fed with his subordinate, Constable Wooding, Third Class, in a makeshift dining room (although the madeira was excellent); and then to have found his native trackers sampling the same madeira in the kitchen. The morning is cold enough that the breath of men and horses comes out white and cloudy. Any colder and there’d be a frost.

  Foster and Wooding leave Thalassa before the trackers, who know to wait half an hour before setting out: Foster always rides ahead of his trackers, in part because he dislikes the fuss that is sometimes caused by the sight of Aboriginal men in uniform. It’s getting light by the time he’s on the road, though still a way off from sunrise. This is the period Foster calls ‘piccaninny dawn’—an excellent time of day. Foster has seen the way a camp of natives stirs at this greyish hour, and he admires them for their industry. He’s willing to refute anyone who claims that the Australian native is indolent and childlike. On the contrary, he’ll say—‘they’re quick and crafty, very skilled; certainly the desert blacks, who aren’t blessed with the fat fish and rainfall of the coasts. You simply have to turn those qualities to the good.’ Foster often feels disheartened by the difficulty of this task, but never at this hour of day, not as long as he’s already up and on his way somewhere, as he is this morning.