‘He has a way with colour,’ Karl says. He holds out one of the boy’s attempts at mixing tints, about which Bess sees nothing exceptional. ‘Don’t you think? He should learn properly. What do you say, Denny? We’ll have to talk to your mother.’

  Bess tells Karl that the closest house, according to the map, is on a property called Wilparra, and that they’ll stop there first. They’ll have to pass through this property on the way to Fairly, where Karl says Denny lives; Bess allows Karl to believe they’ll take the boy all the way to town, but in reality she hopes to shed him at Wilparra. She looks at Denny, who’s dressed in his wrinkled clothes—they seem to have shrunk since yesterday. He’s crouched near one of those awful, lumpy lizards, the shinglebacks. He is watching the lizard and the lizard is watching him.

  ‘It’s time to go,’ Bess calls, and Denny comes to her. When Karl invites the boy to share a horse, Denny steps into Bess’s shadow and won’t answer.

  ‘So, my little friend,’ says Karl, ‘I hoped we’d have some more talk about colours.’ He shrugs and laughs and turns away as if Denny hasn’t hurt his feelings.

  The boy rides with Bess, in front of her in the saddle. Looking down, she can see the way the sun has burned his scalp through his fine hair; when he turns his head, she sees the crust at his nostrils and the dirt embedded in his neck. When he gets home, his mother will have to scrub him vigorously. Every few minutes he leans forwards as if he’s about to stroke the horse’s mane, but he always sits back up without touching it. She considers the planes of his neck and shoulders, and she asks him questions: How are you feeling? Do you know the name of that tree? Where did you sleep before you found us? How common are those wallabies with the striped tails? He gives short answers. Bess is interested by the number of flies he allows to crawl on his skin and clothes before he shakes or swats them off.

  Karl rides beside them, leading the packhorse. He sings cheerful songs in Swedish. He says, ‘This would make a fine picture.’

  Bess says, ‘The flight into Egypt.’

  Karl nods, but Bess knows he’s unconvinced. He keeps looking over at her and the boy, and she suspects that he sees a woman and child riding together through a fir forest. There’s snow on the ground, and the low winter sun picks gold out of the boy’s light hair.

  The ride to Wilparra takes much longer than Bess anticipated; it’s early afternoon before they see the first fence and another hour before they spot any structures. A breeze has picked up, and there are distant clouds on the southern horizon. Bess wonders if this means rain, and if they’ll reach shelter before it arrives. She wonders how much further they can push their horses, which definitely won’t reach Fairly by dark. But that’s immaterial, because here, having come to civilisation, they can hand over responsibility for the boy.

  The Rapps ride towards the buildings of Wilparra and reach a sort of road. There are cartwheel ruts in the road, with grass growing in them. The horses pick up speed, as if they can smell water, and a flock of white cockatoos comes screaming out of a grove of gums in a nearby hollow: a spring, no doubt. The fence that runs alongside the road is broken here and there, and a lazy windmill turns in a broad, empty pasture. Bess studies the structures in the distance. Which is the house? It must be that long, low shape beside the long, low hill. Bess counts four chimneys. What will they find when they reach it? A maid, a cook, a grey cat, a garden with roses in it. Adi Carlin with her arms wide open.

  ‘We’re very close now,’ she says to the boy, who leans forwards as if to pet the horse again. She realises he’s unpeeling his sweaty back from her sweaty front. Kangaroos recline like odalisques in the shade of the acacias.

  As they pass the outbuildings, Bess sees no sign of people, domestic animals, equipment or stores. Some of the doors are open and all the roofs appear to slump. Well, perhaps Wilparra has fallen on hard times. She looks back at the chimneys, hoping to see smoke. It’s hard to tell—the house is in shade. But the homestead gate is open, which isn’t a promising sign of habitation. Bess and Karl stop their horses and look up at the house, which stands at the top of a gentle slope. It’s not as big as the house at Thalassa, though it’s built from the same sturdy brick. The roof is slate, and someone has planted pepper trees against its windows. The windows are all shuttered and saltbush has crept onto the verandahs. Karl calls out, ‘Hej? Är det någon här?’ Bess knows he would never call out in Swedish if he actually expected anybody to be there. The house is obviously deserted; although the structure is more or less intact, it announces itself as a ruin. It knows it’s lost its purpose, and is anticipating a reduction to its constituent parts. Bess isn’t sure why she’s so perturbed by this: she’s seen farms fail. Wealth disappears—her father’s, for example. Maybe the Wilparra patriarch was also fond of baccarat.

  Karl is tying horses to the gateposts. He raises his arms up to Denny, who allows himself to be taken from the saddle and placed on the ground, but doesn’t join Karl as he walks up the slope towards the house. Karl looks back, sees that the boy isn’t following, then claps his hands and begins to run as if heading out on some thrilling adventure. When he reaches the house, he bangs on the shutters and knocks at the door, calling, ‘Hello! Hej! Hej! Hello! Good afternoon!’ He’s like a boy running up and down the long verandah, and sure enough, Denny can’t resist him—he looks up at Karl and back at Bess, then back at Karl again. Bess takes his hand. Something about the uncertainty of that hand inside her own makes clear to her, for the first time, the palpable existence of this boy. If they’d set out when they first found him, he could be with his mother now. They walk up to the house together.

  When Bess and Denny reach the front door, she opens it and steps inside. The boy releases her hand and stays on the verandah, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The rooms are dark and mostly empty—she walks through them and finds a few awkward pieces of furniture, evidence of mice, and not much else. Karl calls out to her, ‘Is it safe?’ She returns to the front door and steps with relief out of the house.

  ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  But it’s the nothing that horrifies her—the emptiness of the house, and also of the plain and ranges. This country is supposed to feel like virgin wilderness; instead it feels abandoned.

  ‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ Bess says. She begins opening the shutters to let light into the rooms. She’d rather not sleep in the house, but it’s the sensible thing to do, especially if it’s going to rain. They’ll light a fire in one of the fireplaces and find a well or pump, tomorrow they’ll ride to Fairly, and for the rest of today and into the evening Bess will watch the boy and draw him. She hasn’t stolen this extra time with him—it’s been given to her. She need not judge herself for it. ‘Do you understand, Denny? The horses are tired and it may rain.’

  Denny picks up a stick and starts to make shapes in the dust by the front steps.

  ‘Denny,’ says Bess, ‘did you hear me? We’ll stay tonight.’

  Karl says, ‘We certainly will! We’ll be warm and dry, and we’ll wake up early, and tomorrow you’ll see your mamma.’ He lifts Denny and hoists the boy over his head and onto his shoulders. Denny’s stick falls to the ground. ‘Shall we give the horses a drink? Shall we watch the sunset? Do you think the moon will be green tonight, or will it become too cloudy to tell?’

  Then Karl, still with the boy on his shoulders, jogs down the slope towards the horses. When he reaches them, he turns and grins back up at Bess. On a different day, she’d follow him, and together they would make up their own name for this place—they’d call it ‘Wheelbarrow’. They could name the whole world, if they had the cook and the maid and the two studios with good light. The boy sways on Karl’s shoulders with both his fists clenched in Karl’s hair. He also looks up the slope towards the house, and Bess is surprised to see the terror on his face.

  Ada knows from the women in the house that this afternoon’s train will bring shearers with it. She likes to imagine them stepping down onto the platform of Fairly’s railway station in a cloud of smoke and hair, their beautiful beards shaped to advertise their skill with blades, their arms so strong they could lean together to tip the train off its tracks. Most will go to Thalassa, but others, on their way to stations further out, will pass by Undelcarra. Last year, Ada took Lotta and Noella down to the gate to see them pass. The men tipped their hats and spoke as if the girls were ladies; when walking off, they called, ‘Give my regards to—’, without the girls ever knowing for whom the regards were meant. Lotta was most impressed by discovering that they carried their knives and forks with them.

  The men always make a lot of noise. This year, when Mopsy starts barking at the sound of them on the road, Lotta begs Ada to take her down to the gate, and Ada agrees. Noella sniffs and shows no inclination to join them. They shut Mopsy inside the house—in the last few days, she’s become a little crazed with strangers. Lotta is shy as she walks down the path to the road, but when she’s near the gate, she runs ahead and throws herself onto its bottom rail. This frightens Ada; but the gate holds, and Lotta doesn’t know how to open it. Ada believes in the power of the gate. Nobody will open it who isn’t supposed to, and inside it they’re all safe. Denny, though, is not inside the gate, and neither is Cissy, nor Joe, and neither is Dad, who left mid-morning with the cart.

  Lotta squints up at the shearers.

  ‘Who’s this, who’s this?’ demands a man in a blistered black hat, with a loud, rolling voice. He stamps his foot in the dust of the road. Lotta seems to know that he’s teasing her, and she laughs coquettishly, glances back at Ada, and hoists herself higher on the gate. Her mouth is open; she might be about to bite into the wood.

  ‘It’s a princess,’ says a man with a thick red beard, and he winks at Ada, who places her hands on her sister’s shoulders.

  ‘What? What? A princess?’ says the man in the black hat. ‘And here’s me without crown nor carriage.’ He removes his hat and makes a deep, sweeping bow, at which Lotta titters. Then he returns the hat to his head.

  The shearers step closer to the gate and Ada thinks that she can hear the rattle of their cutlery. There are six of them, all bearded, each with callused knuckles and sunburned faces. But when the man with the red beard puts his hand on the gate, his fingernails look clean and neat, as if he takes care of them. Lotta leans backwards so that she presses against Ada, and both girls look up into the hat-shadowed eyes of the men. The man with the black hat crouches so that his face is level with Lotta’s.

  ‘Tell me, princess,’ he says, ‘do birds fly?’

  Lotta glances up at Ada, then back at the man. She nods.

  ‘Say it—yes or no?’ says the man.

  ‘Yes,’ says Lotta.

  ‘Do seagulls fly?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lotta.

  ‘Do galahs fly?’ asks the man and, when Lotta says yes, he asks, with increasing speed, if crows, eagles, magpies, swallows, cockatoos, ducks, dragonflies, bees, sugar gliders, flies and mosquitoes fly, and each time Lotta answers, with an anxious giggle, ‘Yes.’ So that when he asks, in the same brisk, businesslike way, ‘Do rabbits fly?’, Lotta answers, ‘Yes.’

  The shearers throw their arms in the air and roar with delight at her mistake; all except the man with the black hat, who looks at Lotta as if full of regret—not at having tricked her, but at her having allowed herself to be tricked. He remains crouching at the gate. Ada wraps her arms around Lotta and kisses the top of her head. She wishes Cissy were here.

  ‘Now,’ the man with the black hat says to Lotta, ‘isn’t that a silly game? I reckon you’re too grown up for silly games. And your sister’—he looks at Ada now—‘is definitely too grown up, aren’t you, miss? You’re the oldest, I bet?’

  Ada shakes her head.

  ‘Second oldest, then?’

  ‘Fourth,’ Ada says.

  ‘Well now,’ says the man in the hat. ‘So there are five of you altogether?’

  ‘Seven,’ says Ada, and the man whistles.

  ‘All girls?’ he asks.

  ‘Denny’s a boy,’ says Lotta loudly, as if pleased to be able to contribute.

  ‘And where’s this Denny, then? Can we meet him?’ asks the man. The flies on the brim of his hat look blue and green against the black felt.

  ‘He’s lost,’ says Lotta.

  The man’s eyes grow large. ‘He’s never lost?’ he says. ‘Hear that, mates? A boy’s gone and got himself lost!’

  The shearers murmur and shake their heads. The one with the red beard says, ‘More’s the pity.’

  Ada knows, now, that the men have already heard about Denny and have been talking about him as they walk along the road. They know Denny lives in this house, and they’ve stopped precisely because Denny is missing. The older Ada grows, the more she finds that she understands what people are thinking, and why they do the things they do. This morning, for example: Dad whistled in the stable as he greased the cartwheels; Mam packed food and tea; they smiled and kissed goodbye; Dad set out with the cart; and all the while they were angry at one another, and sorry, and sad, but pretending not to be. After Dad left, Mam told Ada and Noella that they needn’t go to school today, not if they didn’t want to; Noella was overjoyed and thought Mam was giving them a treat, but Ada understood that Mam, although she would never say so, didn’t want to let them out of her sight. Ada doesn’t find her ability to understand people remarkable, although as far as she can tell most other people don’t have it. She thinks that the shearer with the black hat might, because he’s studying her face, as if sizing her up.

  ‘What if,’ he says, ‘what if we was to find your brother? What would you give us for a prize?’ He looks from Ada to Lotta and back to Ada. Lotta, whose only possessions are the feathers she collects, washes and sorts into piles based on colour, length or shape, trembles at this question.

  ‘We don’t have anything,’ says Ada. ‘My father might …’ But she doesn’t know what Dad would or could give them, so she doesn’t continue. She can hear Mopsy barking at the window.

  ‘How’s about a kiss?’ suggests the man with the black hat. He’s still crouched down at the gate and has to look up to see Ada’s face. ‘A kiss for whichever one of us brings him home safe?’

  This makes Ada think of a fairytale that has long disturbed her, in which a king in need of help promises to give up the first thing he sees when he reaches his castle: his daughter, as it happens. The other shearers grin, but the man with the black hat cocks his head to one side and raises his eyebrows, expecting an answer. His lips look greasy behind his brown beard, and the thought of his mouth touching any part of her fills Ada with revulsion. But wouldn’t it be worth it, if it meant having Denny safely back behind the gate?

  ‘Well?’ demands the man.

  Ada nods noncommittally.

  ‘Say it,’ says the man, with a mild smile and narrowed eyes. ‘Yes or no.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ada. Lotta looks up at her in astonishment.

  ‘How’s about, then,’ continues the man with the hat, rising now to his full height, ‘a deposit? With the rest on credit, like. Just so we’ll be extra thorough looking for your brother.’ He tilts his cheek towards Ada and she sees, with relief, that he doesn’t mean to involve his mouth at all; that he simply wants her to kiss him the way she might kiss her father. She rises on her toes to do this, trying to avoid his beard, but he moves his head and she ends up tasting his prickled mouth all the same. The shearer smells strongly of himself. The other men cheer.

  ‘Fair’s fair,’ says Redbeard, presenting his cheek. ‘It could be me that finds him.’

  Ada, kissing Redbeard’s cheek, is faster, but he doesn’t even try to turn his head.

  ‘And me,’ says another man.

  The remaining four shearers offer their cheeks in turn, and Ada kisses them, thinking all the time that she mustn’t cry. Lotta has shrunk away from the gate, so Ada must lean over her in order to deliver the kisses. The gate remains closed.

  The men, kissed, look oddly bashful; one of them pushes at the shoulder of another. The man with the black hat, though, who’s older, looks at her with approval.

  ‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘All right, mates, let’s get looking for that boy.’

  He stands up. The other shearers all straighten and settle their shoulders.

  Ada sees now that they have no intention of looking for Denny—that they were teasing her as they’d teased Lotta. But she hopes that she’s wrong. She’s wrong sometimes.

  When the shearers walk away, it’s as a group. Almost immediately, though, they’ve separated and are strung out in a line, one walking in front of another: the man in the black hat leads the procession, and Redbeard brings up the rear. Lotta climbs back onto the bottom rung of the gate to watch them go. Ada has heard that Chinamen always walk in single file like this, stepping in each other’s footprints, but she doesn’t know if this is true. She’s never seen more than one Chinaman at a time.

  Later in the afternoon, out west on the Willochra, Sergeant Foster spots a kangaroo, aims his rifle, shoots, and misses. Neither of his Aboriginal companions react to any part of this. They’re both getting on Foster’s nerves. Billy, whose skill at cricket Foster is sure his exhaustion must have exaggerated (although he still likes the idea of adding him to the Port Augusta police team), rides like a western stockman—that is, with sloppy stirrups and his legs too far forward, not at all neat or upright; and Foster has had his eye on Jimmy since he snuck off and hid among the grass trees for no reason, presumably, other than to make Foster feel like a fool. He usually likes being alone with his native constables but finds himself desiring Wooding’s company, which shows some desperation.

  Foster longs for his days in the Northern Territory, where there was no one to object if he took a woman on his rounds. Ah, the books he’d have written and the women he’d have bedded if he’d never left the Territory. This whole affair is pointless; surely the boy is dead by now. They’ve spent the day riding in the direction of any unusual gathering of hawks—birds are usually the first sign of a body—and are now further south than Foster ever intended to go. According to Billy, they’re not far from the northern pastures of Thalassa. The best outcome, now, would be to find this suspicious vicar so that the search, called off, can be seen to have produced at least one result. Rainclouds have rolled in and the sunset this afternoon only registers as a sour pinkish-grey above the hills.