Cissy is trying not to think about the tracker. He lay so quietly in the dray last night, as if asleep, but his eyes were open. He looked much more substantial than Mr Daniels, who remained unconscious beside him. Each time the dray jumped on the rutted road, the tracker narrowed his eyes as if waiting to see how much it would hurt. Sometimes he would begin to groan, then immediately stifle it. Sitting beside him in the cart, rain running beneath her collar, Cissy veered between feeling responsible for and revolted by his suffering.

  ‘Yes,’ says Cissy.

  ‘Was he very badly injured?’ Mrs Axam asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody would tell me.’

  Mrs Axam nods as if that’s as it should be. ‘Where did they put him?’

  ‘I think somewhere in the stable.’

  ‘And was he wearing that fur cloak of his?’

  ‘Yes, madam, when I saw him last.’ Suddenly, Cissy smells the cloak, as if it’s just walked through the room.

  ‘I wonder,’ says Mrs Axam. She lifts her hand and places it on Cissy’s—on the hand with which Cissy holds the brush. She looks at Cissy in the mirror.

  Mrs Axam says, ‘You’re tall, aren’t you, for your age.’

  ‘Yes, madam,’ Cissy says, colouring slightly; she’s proud of her height.

  ‘And brave,’ says Mrs Axam, ‘and helpful.’

  Cissy sees that Mrs Axam has let her wad of hair fall onto the carpet; her skinny dog is sniffing at it.

  ‘I wonder if you might help me, too,’ says Mrs Axam. ‘I want to give that poor man, the poor tracker, a new coat. I have it ready—there it is, folded on the chair.’

  Cissy follows Mrs Axam’s eyes and sees that on a chair by the door there is, indeed, an object that could be a folded black coat. It looks to be of sturdy quality—much finer than the tracker’s mangy fur.

  Mrs Axam turns in her chair to face Cissy, still holding Cissy’s hand. ‘It was my husband’s, but he never wore it. Imagine how comfortable the man will be in a proper coat, with sleeves and buttons. What I would like you to do, Cecily, is take it to him in the stable. Can you do that for me?’

  Cissy nods.

  ‘But,’ says Mrs Axam, ‘I’m terribly worried that someone will see that old cloak of his and think it’s just to be thrown away, or burned. Just a dirty old thing. That would be a dreadful waste. So when you take that nice new coat there to the stable and give it to the tracker, I’d like you to bring his old cloak back to me. Do you understand?’

  Cissy is surprised by the request. She’d like Mrs Axam to understand that she, Cissy, is also the kind of person who would sit on the head of a horse. But she’s horrified by the thought of having anything to do with the tracker’s cloak, and this horror makes her pause. Why would someone like Mrs Axam want such a thing?

  ‘And I, in turn, might be of help to you,’ says Mrs Axam. ‘Now, I can’t imagine you’re still at school.’

  ‘I am,’ says Cissy.

  Mrs Axam lets go of Cissy’s hand. The broken contact is a relief. ‘Fifteen and at school? That’s most commendable. And when you finish school? Will you stay at home to help your mother, or will you look for a position?’

  Cissy says, ‘I’m not sure, madam.’ She thinks of Miss McNeil and the Training College in Adelaide.

  ‘Very good,’ says Mrs Axam, exactly as if Cissy had given a definite answer. ‘A friend in town is looking for a maid and do you know, Cecily, I think you’d be just the thing. Yes, you would be most suitable. Do you know of Mrs Manning?’

  It takes Cissy a moment to understand that ‘Mrs Manning’ means Minna. Mrs Axam is offering to help Cissy gain employment with Minna, so that Cissy will wash Minna’s dresses, clean her outhouse, serve her dinner, and polish, forever, silver bowls with candles in them. She will sweep up after Minna Baumann, she’ll inhale Minna’s dust, smell her waste, scrub her plates, say ‘yes, Mrs Manning; no, Mrs Manning’ all day long to Minna Baumann. But, thinks Cissy, Minna would never sit on a horse’s head. She remembers Minna kissing Robert in private on her wedding day; she remembers despising her for it, and wanting to be kissed herself. Cissy wants to be useful. She wants to do, do. But serving Minna Baumann cannot be her one idea.

  Cissy hears the sound of Nancy singing. Mrs Axam hears it too; and Cissy sees that she would like a firm commitment before Nancy can interrupt them. Suddenly, Cissy understands that the cloak is, for today at least, Mrs Axam’s one idea. It’s an odd idea, but Cissy can accept it. And she’s prepared to receive something in return, but that something can’t be Minna. It seems to her that Mrs Axam might be prepared to offer almost anything in exchange for this trivial favour. The world grows larger, then, but so does the awfulness of finding the tracker and touching his cloak.

  ‘Well, Cecily?’ says Mrs Axam. ‘What do you say to that? A position with Mrs Manning? I’m sure it would be helpful to your parents.’

  Cissy takes a deep breath. ‘No. No, thank you. Miss McNeil says I should be a teacher. She says I should go to Adelaide, to the Training College.’

  ‘And who is Miss McNeil?’

  ‘My teacher,’ Cissy says.

  Mrs Axam nods. ‘You must be an intelligent girl. Would you like to attend the Training College?’

  Cissy can’t imagine being a teacher—she’s not nearly as splendid as Miss McNeil, and is bound to make a fool of herself. She doesn’t like the thought of spending all her time with children, teaching them simple things she already knows. But wouldn’t it be better than sweeping Minna’s floors? And if she went to Adelaide, she would have the opportunity to see the sea, which she’s heard so much about. Cissy suspects that when she hears the rhythm of her Tennyson, she hears the sea. So, would she like to attend the Training College?

  ‘Yes, madam,’ she says. Nancy’s singing grows nearer.

  Mrs Axam studies Cissy’s face. Cissy squares her shoulders and lifts her chin.

  ‘I see,’ says Mrs Axam. ‘And can your parents spare you?’

  Cissy understands that they’re discussing money now, and that this requires some delicacy on her part. She swallows, conscious of the dignity of her mother, and says, ‘I expect it would be hard on them.’

  Mrs Axam narrows her eyes as if preparing for a negotiation; Cissy has seen her father do this when he’s buying seed. The dog coughs like a little vicar. ‘Well,’ says Mrs Axam, ‘if you were to bring me the tracker’s cloak, and to do it inconspicuously, so that Nancy didn’t see you, then perhaps we might discuss this further.’

  Before Cissy can answer, Nancy is in the room.

  ‘Too slow,’ says Mrs Axam, but to herself. She turns back to the mirror, and it’s as if Cissy no longer exists.

  ‘Sorry, missus,’ says Nancy. ‘I said to this one, don’t disturb you people. Didn’t I say it? Where’s that lamp? It’s here.’

  Cissy stiffens. She’ll soon be old enough that Nancy wouldn’t dare scold her.

  Nancy lifts the lamp from the mantel, apologises again to Mrs Axam, and indicates with a tilt of her head that Cissy should leave the room. Cissy does; but just before she steps through the door, she takes the coat from the chair. Then she and Nancy are in the hallway, and the door to Mrs Axam’s room is closed.

  ‘What’s this?’ Nancy asks, indicating the coat.

  ‘She said to take it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know what for,’ says Cissy, and Nancy manages to look both sceptical and indifferent. ‘I want to leave now. I want to go home.’

  ‘Well, nobody will stop you.’

  ‘The sergeant wants to speak to me.’

  ‘Oh, that one,’ Nancy says. ‘Stay or go, suit yourself.’ She offers the lamp to Cissy, who refuses it: no lamps, no chores. I am a lamp, thinks Cissy, and I am lit. Nancy shrugs. She turns and goes down the hallway, carrying the lamp ahead of her as if she expects it to provide light.

  Cissy, holding the coat against her beating heart, resolves to go to the stable. If June has been reshod, Cissy will leave, and damn the sergeant. She walks through the dining room, and everything in it seems to shudder as she passes: glass and crystal, keys in cabinets, silver on sideboards. If Mam were here, she would feel the tremble produced by Cissy’s footsteps and say, ‘Lightly, Cissy, lightly.’

  Out onto the verandah now, into the yard, around the house, past the kitchen and through the kitchen garden, ignoring everyone she sees: Cissy Wallace with her head held high, marching through a crowd of ruffled hens, carrying a woollen coat. Her skirts are clean—old Pearl washed and wrung them last night, aired them by the kitchen fire, and ironed them dry this morning while Nancy cooked Cissy’s egg. She’s washed her face and neatened her hair and saved, mind you, the minister from certain death. Half a league onward, all in the valley of Death. She’s seen the way Minna Baumann kisses her husband—as if each kiss were a kind of plea. She’s seen Minna’s husband asleep by firelight and felt his knee against her back. She’s loved Miss McNeil without ever deciding to, and she’s a citizen of South Australia.

  Striding down to the stable, Cissy feels the rain on her face and hands and in the parting of her hair. Stay dry, Denny, she thinks. Come home, Denny. She’ll check on June and, while she’s in the stable, well, it’s possible she’ll look about and find the tracker. Nancy said they had to cut his trouser leg open, because of the swelling. Cissy holds the coat to her chest as if to keep it from getting wet and thinks of the tracker rocking from side to side in the back of the cart, and the minister lying thin and long beside him. Cissy sat close to their heads with her feet drawn up so that she wouldn’t touch either of them. Billy rode behind on Virnu with his head bent into the rain, for all the world as if he’d never met Cissy in his life. If she finds the tracker, then yes, she might take the old cloak (she hopes it will be folded, set in a corner, and ready for disposal) and leave the new one in its place, then deliver the awful, furry thing to Mrs Axam. Imagine Miss McNeil’s face when Cissy says, ‘I’m going to the Training College.’ Cissy thinks of Miss McNeil in the arms of her brown, happy Welshman. The body unfettered! Read this book, says Miss McNeil, think this thought; but Cissy has no time to read and think, she has to do. She recites poems while walking because it’s a way to do two things at once. She marches through Thalassa and every second step is a stressed syllable: My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure. Sheep are being driven, bleating, through the wet, and Cissy waits for them to pass.

  Here, at last, is the stable, cool and smelling of grain and hay, and here’s June, still unshod. And here’s Billy, sitting on a stool in the doorway of a smaller room. Cissy has known Billy since she was seven, old enough to know that her father pays him. She’s secretly intimidated by him, because he’s indifferent to her rages; she tends to treat him as a guest who’s always on the point of leaving. But when she sees him here in the Thalassa stable, she could run to him, lay her head in his lap, and cry. She doesn’t; she’s too old for that. Billy looks at her with the same expression her father uses when he knows she’s about to irritate him.

  ‘I thought my horse might be ready,’ she says. ‘I mean, I know she’s not my horse. But I thought she might be ready.’

  Billy nods, then flexes his hands to crack the knuckles. Behind him, a window pours dusty light into the smaller room. Cissy can’t see any sign of the tracker, but she knows he must be in there. She makes a half-hearted attempt to peer over Billy’s shoulder.

  ‘Is he very badly injured?’ she asks.

  ‘We’ll see,’ says Billy. ‘The doctor’s due from Quorn.’

  Cissy tightens her arms around the coat, takes a step forwards, and says, ‘I need to go in there.’

  ‘What for?’

  Cissy finds that she’s ashamed to say. With Billy here, sitting on the stool in the doorway, the harness room seems forbidden. ‘Does he have his furry cloak?’ she asks.

  Billy looks at the coat in her arms, then back at her face. ‘Yes. He never takes it off.’ A pause. ‘Unless he really has to.’

  Cissy shudders. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s part of him,’ says Billy, but Cissy doesn’t understand. ‘What’s that you’ve got?’

  ‘It’s a coat from Mrs Axam,’ Cissy says. She looks down at the dark bundle in her arms as if she’s not sure how it got there. ‘A new one for him. I’m supposed to give it to him.’

  Billy looks at her for a long moment, then says, ‘Better leave him be.’ There’s nothing unkind about the way he says it, but Cissy understands that he will never rise from his stool or let her into the room, though Mrs Axam might sit on the heads of a hundred horses. And June isn’t ready, Denny is lost, Cissy will finish school and look for a position, she’ll go away from Mam and Miss McNeil. She has no power at all over her own heart.

  Cissy, afraid she’s going to sob, thrusts the coat at Billy, and he takes it without a word. Then she runs out into the stable yard, where it’s still raining, light and steady, as if it will never stop.

  Minna is reading the one interesting book she can find in Robert’s house—the memoir of a shipwrecked sailor—when she hears horses and the low voice of a man outside the police station. She’s sure that it’s Robert, and debates waiting for him in the bedroom—she likes the idea of him finding her in his bed. But Robert knocks at the door, which is unexpected, and when she hurries to open it, she finds the Swedish painter and his wife. They’re both quite wet. Karl Rapp looks astonished to see Minna standing in the doorway. Mrs Rapp seems less surprised, as if every door her husband knocks at opens on an informally dressed woman. They announce that they’ve come to the police station in order to report a missing child.

  Minna says, ‘But this is wonderful! We’ve been looking for him for days.’ She finds herself ushering them into the parlour with her mother’s graceful gestures, and sitting in an armchair as if bundled in black silk. The parlour is more untidy than it should be. It occurs to her that she should offer tea, but there’s no one to prepare it—other than herself.

  Karl Rapp tells her about a waterhole, some missing apples, and a place Minna doesn’t catch the name of. It begins with ‘w’—ah, Karl means Wilparra, which he pronounces as if it’s spelled Wilporough. Something about the boy wandering off from there last night? The painter’s not what he was last week: there’s something dimmed about his face. But he’s still very beautiful. His damp hair is the colour of late-summer grass.

  Minna, in turn, tells the Rapps about the search for Denny Wallace; her heroic husband features prominently in her account. She describes Sergeant Foster, although she’s never met him, and reports his statement that children, when lost, always walk in a straight line, while adults wander in a circle. To this, Mrs Rapp responds, as if quoting somebody, ‘Anything that embodies itself with freedom seeks a rounded shape.’

  ‘Gosh,’ says Minna.

  Karl says, ‘We must go to these Wallace people and tell them we found their son.’ He glances at his wife. ‘And lost him again. How far is their farm? Our horses are tired.’

  ‘It isn’t far,’ says Minna, who has never been good at judging distance. ‘You take the road by the church, going north, and follow it until you see the odd hill that sticks up out of nowhere. Theirs is the house beneath it.’

  ‘Hill?’ says Mrs Rapp.

  ‘Yes,’ Minna says. ‘You might have seen it as you came in from Wilparra. You wouldn’t have passed the house, that’s on a different road, but you will have seen the hill in the distance. It’s quite striking.’

  ‘Then we know the place,’ says Mr Rapp. ‘We stopped there, yes, for the piece of aloe?’

  Mrs Rapp nods. How drained she looks. She has, at some point, removed her riding gloves, and she slaps these lightly against one knee. ‘I wonder,’ she says, and apparently what she wonders is whether someone ought to be sent out looking for the boy along the Wilparra road.

  With pleasure, Minna says, ‘I’ll raise the lads.’

  Neither Karl nor his wife seems to understand what Minna means by that; she isn’t sure herself. But since she’s offered to take action of some kind, she goes into the hallway and opens the front door. Having stepped with purpose onto the verandah of the police station, she stands helpless for a moment. The rain has stopped, the air feels sticky, and the flies hover as if dangling on gummy threads. There’s no one on the road but a tall, dark native man, heading north; he’ll have to do.

  Minna calls, ‘Hello there! You!’

  The native doesn’t stop.

  ‘You! Boy!’

  He looks over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, you! Come here!’

  Slowly, the native comes back down the road and stops in front of the police station. She knows she’s seen him in town before—he’s from Thalassa. He stays on the road and she stays on the verandah, but even like this he’s taller than she is. No part of her body is interested in him.

  ‘What are you called?’ she asks.

  The man tugs at the red handkerchief around his neck. Then he says, ‘Tal, missus.’

  ‘Very well, Tal,’ Minna says, and draws her purse from the pocket of her skirt. ‘I’ll give you sixpence now if you run over to the hotels and find able-bodied men to help with a task. And sixpence later, when you’ve done the job.’

  He considers this possibility and says, ‘Can’t do that, missus.’

  ‘I know you can’t enter the hotels, but you needn’t. You can call through the door, or ask someone outside. Tell them I’ll pay well.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Ten shillings,’ says Minna. ‘At least. If they carry out the task.’

  ‘What task?’

  Minna is growing impatient with him. ‘They’re to look for the missing boy on the Wilparra road. That’s where he is.’

  ‘What for Wilparra?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ Minna says. She takes sixpence from her purse and holds it out to him. ‘Quickly, now,’ she says. ‘Go longa hurry hurry. It’s very important.’

  He takes the money.