‘Why don’t we go inside,’ says Bess. She means inside the house, but she’s also entering her room, and taking the mother with her. In they go. The door closes, the key turns in the lock.

  Next to the women, Minna is agitated. ‘Mrs Wallace,’ she says, ‘my husband—Constable Manning. Is he here?’

  Mrs Wallace shakes her head. Bess takes her arm and leads her towards the house. Behind them, Minna raises her voice and says, ‘Where is he, then? If he’s not at home and he’s not here, where is he?’

  Mrs Wallace looks back over her shoulder and says, ‘I couldn’t tell you.’

  Bess and the mother go into the house. Karl isn’t needed. Minna, too, is surplus—she’s stranded in the absence of her husband. But they follow Bess—what else is there to do?—and then they’re also stepping inside. The house is full of girls and furniture. Karl looks for signs of the boy, but doesn’t find any.

  Bess has led the mother to the hearth. Karl knows not to join their conversation—his allegiance is to Minna now, because they’re adrift together. The old woman who was sitting on the verandah enters from another room and speaks to him from inside her fortress of dark clothes. Karl introduces himself and Mrs Manning, and is forced to listen to Mrs Muriel Deniston as she wonders whether she and Minna are related, because Muriel has a cousin by the name of Manning. It doesn’t seem to matter that Manning is Minna’s married name: the woman pursues the connection through South Australia, an unexpected second marriage, Victoria, smallpox, two shipwrecks, Portsmouth, and on to a mill in Glasgow.

  All the while, Bess is talking to the mother. There are so many girls in the room—well, four, to be precise—and they all seem to be paying attention to the old woman, but in truth they’re doing just what Karl is: trying to hear what Bess is saying. Minna is also trying to hear Bess, and even the old woman’s eyes slide towards the hearth, but she continues to talk about her maternal great-aunt and the nephew who invented a new kind of soup spoon. Every relative of the old woman’s seems now to be standing in the crowded room, gathering about her so that no one but the mother can hear what Bess is saying. This, Karl realises, is the woman’s intention. When, finally, Bess calls Karl’s name, the old woman shrinks back, exhausted, into her stiff clothes.

  Karl stands and reluctantly approaches the women at the hearth.

  ‘Mrs Wallace, this is my husband, Mr Rapp,’ says Bess.

  Karl greets her, unsure of where to put his hands or what to say. He says, ‘We’re both very fond of your son.’ He knows this is inadequate. The mother looks up at him, but her face is blank. Karl leans towards her ear. ‘He will be found. I’m sure of it. And when he is, you must tell him that his friend Karl says hello, and that I’ll keep my word and teach him how to draw and paint.’

  Bess touches his forearm with one finger.

  He says, ‘We really are so very sorry.’

  The mother holds her hands tightly together in her lap. Bess takes Karl’s arm and guides him to the door, where Minna joins them. Once he and Minna have passed through and are standing on the verandah, Bess stops, remaining inside the house.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ she says.

  ‘What for?’ asks Karl. His voice whines like a boy’s.

  Minna says to Bess, ‘If my husband comes, will you tell him I was here? Tell him I’m waiting for him at home.’

  ‘But why should you stay?’ Karl asks Bess. ‘There’s no need for it.’

  Bess smiles from inside her room and says, ‘I can be a help to her.’

  This feels grotesque to Karl—he wants to enter the house and tell them all that Bess kept the boy because he was necessary to her work. But then he’d have to admit that he let her do it.

  Bess says, ‘Come back with the horses in the morning.’ She closes the door, and Karl and Minna are alone outside.

  The sun is still a little way above the ranges. Surely it should have set by now—but here it is, reminding him with various reds and greens of their arrangement. This sky, to Karl, seems raided, rotted, near its end. He can’t imagine painting it. Its weird, infected light turns Minna’s hair a surprising red. He remembers kissing her in the shade of an ugly tree, telling her she was in love with all men, and believing it as he said it. He remembers promising the sky that, for the sake of the picture, he would never touch a woman who wasn’t Bess. Karl and Minna, both abandoned by their spouses, walk together to the buggy.

  The boy saw the red hill just before sunset. It was a long way in the distance, but he left the Wilparra road and began to cut across country because the hill meant home and Mam, and there was the possibility that he would reach her before the gods did. But it wasn’t likely—he was forced to move slowly because the ground was scratchy with stones and with dry, prickly grass, and his bare feet hurt him. He felt tiredness creeping up on him with sneaky steps.

  The hill never grew any larger, and the sky turned red in the broad, bright way it seemed to now. The sky roared over the desert like the Red Sea. There was Pharaoh’s army, drowning in the waves; and there was the Hooky Man, reaching his long, bent arms out of the red water. There was the great snake, the Akurra, swimming behind the sun. When the sun dropped behind the western ranges, the boy realised that it would be dark before he reached the hill. The hill was already hard to see, because it was evening and because the boy was crying. The snot dripped to his mouth. He wiped his face with his sleeve and squinted and walked and the hill seemed to move away from him, then jump about, and finally to dissolve.

  Once the sky was dark, he continued for a while in the direction that seemed right to him. Then it no longer seemed right, so he stopped. He understood, as he hadn’t properly until now, that he was lost. He observed this feeling, lost: it was bowling a stone at the hollow tree and missing, and never going to look for the stone. It was someone asking you the colour of the moon, and you looked at the moon and saw that no one had ever taught you the word for its colour. Lost was the sun gone forever, and the hill gone, and Mam and Dad and Billy and all the sisters gone, and nothing left but the dark. He sat down in it.

  SIXTH NIGHT

  The Reverend Mr Daniels isn’t sure where he is. He knows it’s night, because it’s dark, and the darkness of the desert is permanent, blazing, and deep deep deep; it’s the well of God, awful and inapproachable. This darkness is so without light that it produces its own radiance. This is the darkness Daniels was dismayed by when he saw it in Spanish paintings: an altarpiece darkness, against which a crucifix hangs suspended, and the hills are black, every doorway and window of the painting is black, the heart of the lily is black and the eye of the angel; the stable, the star; every saint wears black; and there in the dark you can see the dark mourning of the monks. Daniels thinks of papist churches as being full of gold, but the gold is grubbed and sooted, even when it shines, as if the black light has cast a fine dust over everything—almost invisible, and deadly. And here, where Daniels believes there are no churches, no ruins, nothing old enough to have been ruined, nothing that has been destroyed and might be mourned, not enough fires and factories to produce soot, and a treasury of gold still hidden in the ground—here, a black light has spread out into the night, over the hills, across the plains, until the landscape and everything in it is buried in black, and it’s always night, and Mr Daniels is always alone in the desert.

  He’s thirsty. His tongue is a mystery to him—it’s larger than it should be and can find no proper position for itself. He’s misplaced his horse and seems to be wearing a nightshirt: more mysteries. But Mr Daniels has chosen, as his profession, the most profound mystery, and he knows how to live alongside the inscrutable. Once, as a young man full of doubt and education, he listened with scorn as his father said: ‘If we understood the Gospel, we would not believe it.’ Later, as he stood on the deck of the ship that was taking him to the Australian colonies, watching fish fly from the water with their bronze fins outstretched (he thought of a Greek fleet upon a wine-dark sea), he conceded that his father had been right. There is no way to fathom the strangeness of God’s creation. There’s no way to understand it now, in the darkness of the desert. He’s almost sure that he did, at one time, have a horse with him; he also has a memory of seeing, or perhaps carrying, a pair of boots.

  Mr Daniels so wants to love and be loved that even here, in the darkness, he looks for a pulpit or a piece of raised ground, so that he can preach God’s loving word. The song of the angels might return, then, and shake the earth; by this he means the vast music that hoisted him from his bed—whose bed? someone’s bed—and sent him out into the light. The music sent him in one direction and another. Then the sky poured with red, the red burned backwards until the darkness came, and that was the well of God. But there’s no pulpit or raised ground here, just the low plain, and anyway the darkness, audible everywhere, is a sermon.

  Daniels’ feet are bare and the saltbush cuts them, so he finds clearer ground that may be a river or a road. It’s a road—at some point he hears rumbling and shouting behind him and he waits for the music of the angels, but the rumbling and shouting are only a bullock dray advancing up the road with sooty lanterns swinging. Daniels doesn’t intend to hide from the bullocks and their driver; he merely draws back to the edge of the road, where the darkness is as black as a black feather is black. The darkness hides him. It speaks in his ear and flicks at the hides of the bullocks, but it doesn’t reveal Daniels to the driver of the dray. The bullocks stink and sweat. They walk with their heads low, as if participating in a funeral procession, and the driver hunches over the reins. Perhaps he’s whispering ‘memento mori’. The dray rolls by and Daniels thinks to follow it. Again, he doesn’t mean to hide from the driver. He walks quite openly behind the dray, but the darkness never tells the driver to turn around and see that he’s being followed by a pale man in a pale nightshirt.

  Daniels hurries to keep up with the dray, and is not always successful at avoiding the fresh deposits the bullocks leave in the road. But he’s awfully cold, and the dung does warm his toes. The dim lights of the lanterns on the dray take on strange, star-like properties—they wink in and out, and disappear if he looks at them directly. He remembers a horse and water and also a girl—yes, Cissy Wallace was the girl, she held his hand, he leaned into her shoulder, and together they came down from a mountain.

  He remembers, even further back, finding a small pair of boots among the roots of a tree; he remembers wandering with the boots, feeling as if he was being followed, and taking a crazy path to throw off his pursuers. He thought to set the boots beneath a bush as some kind of lure. He was looking for something, hoping to trap it, although he can no longer recall what it was. He waited near the bush, but nothing happened. What was he expecting? And the sun—which he remembers as dark—was beating against his head. Then he thought that he would find a hill or a mountain, a natural pulpit, and look down at the boots from there. He would see what could be seen.

  So he left the boots and walked his horse directly at the hills. At some point, he was climbing and had no horse. At some point, he lit a fire outside a cave. There was a yellow man painted on the side of the cave. He had his arms outstretched as if delivering a sermon, and another yellow shape floated near his head. Daniels understood this to be an image of Joshua stopping the sun. But who had painted it? In the morning, ants on his neck; later, Cissy Wallace sitting beside him. When did the bed come, and the nightshirt, and the music of the angels? He isn’t sure.

  Ahead of Daniels, the driver is calling, ‘Whoa!’ and slowing the bullocks. He’s turning them off the road onto flat, grassy ground. Daniels stops in the darkness and observes the beauty of this: the man unyoking the bullocks, building a fire, smoking a pipe and opening a tin of meat. Daniels doesn’t mean to hide; the darkness hides him. He watches and loves the driver and his camp—the lowing bullocks with their faces in the grass, the smoke hanging above the fire. His body feels as if it’s risen an inch above the ground. Could this be the second blessing?

  He steps forwards into the light with his arms outstretched. The driver, startled, yelps and reaches for a pistol that lies beside him. Daniels jumps at a loud noise. Then he thinks that he may be on the ground, that something may be wrong with some part of his body, that the light of the fire is warm and red, and that the driver, standing over him with a frantic face, is saying, ‘Christ Almighty, it’s the vicar. Jesus. Jesus Christ.’

  Mary’s house is full: the girls (except Cissy, of course), her stepmother, the Englishwoman. But Mary is outside, raking the dirt in her garden. The girls watch from the windows. She’s carried a lamp out with her and has set it on one of the broad stones that mark the garden’s edge. These stones have been moved recently, because Mary has been preparing a new bed in which she intends to plant spinach and turnips. Mary, out in the night, lifts stones and roots with the prongs of the rake. Each of the girls comes in turn to the door of the house and calls out to her. She doesn’t hear what they call, but she knows it’s always a variation on, ‘Mam? What are you doing?’ Mary stands straight and smiles—although she’s not sure if they can see her smile—and says, ‘Go back inside.’ Mary can’t be inside. Denny is alive, and he’s out here.

  When Mary was born, her father opened his Bible and gave her the first female name he encountered. Her siblings were named in the same way. For the Reverend Deniston’s girls, God consistently guided Samuel to the New Testament: Mary, Lydia and Elizabeth. The boys were baptised by the Old. Mary was given to understand that she was not named for the mother of Christ, but for the sister of Martha: the Mary who sat at Christ’s feet and listened to His Word while Martha, in another room, prepared a meal. Mary was taught to admire her namesake’s humility and reverence, but she has always worked like Martha, and been praised for it. At a young age, she realised that she was expected to embody both of the sisters—to work in the world, and live beyond it—and she has dedicated herself to this task. She wonders, as she rakes her garden, what her mother would have named her if she’d had the choice. Mathew gave Mary the choice. She opened the Bible for her first child, and he became Joseph. She didn’t open it for her second, and this child was named what Mary felt at the birth of a girl: Joy. Cecily was named for Mary’s mother and Ada for Mathew’s. Noella was born on Christmas Eve. Deniston was named for Mary’s father. There’s no particular reason for the name Charlotte. It would be difficult for Mary to admit, even to herself, that she simply likes it. But what is the name of this new baby, Joseph’s son, which she must ‘kindly arrange’ to have sent to her? The telegram didn’t say. It didn’t even mention the baby’s mother.

  Mary’s father taught her that there’s a point at which grief stops. It’s something akin to raking the dirt: you rake so far, and stop. Grief comes this far; also beauty, love, and happiness, and pain. They all reach a point and stop, and beyond this point the believer trusts and rejoices in the will of God. Mary believes this to be true and has often been consoled by it. She’s comforted herself with the knowledge that she needs only to be still and know that He is God. But tonight, she can’t seem to be still; she can’t even stay in the house. Denny is alive and outside. He needs a light to guide him home. So here she is, outside, with her lamp, just as Mary, the sister of Martha, might be. But also raking her garden, as Martha would. Mary’s left ear aches in the cool night air.

  Joy comes to the door. Mary straightens and smiles. ‘Help your grandmother feed your sisters, dear,’ she says.

  Ordinarily, Joy would fuss about this—claiming not to know what food was in the house, or how to prepare it, or how much to serve—until Cissy would flare up and say, ‘I’ll do it!’ But Cissy isn’t here tonight, and Joy only nods, turns inside, and calls her sisters away from the windows. Lotta stays the longest, peering out at Mary with her hands cupped around her eyes. Then she, too, jumps down from her perch, and the windows are empty. Mary feels an immense, impatient strength inside her tonight; she’s unsure what it’s for, but she knows it’s not for them.

  As she rakes up the stones and roots, she reminds herself that the fig tree shall not blossom, and the labour of the olive shall fail, and the flock shall be cut off from the fold; knowing all these things to be true, she will yet rejoice in the God of her salvation. She has lost Joseph, possibly forever, and perhaps now Denny too. This new baby will come, with the stain of illegitimacy on it. Mary, who had been promised an end to babies, will exhaust herself for another one. Be still, be still, Mary reminds herself. She can’t be still. Denny is alive. She lays the rake down in the dirt, takes the lamp, and walks out of the garden.

  This is the first time Mary has gone beyond the fence since the day Denny was lost. She walks away from the house and its attendant buildings, its children and its chiffonier, the snakeskin that hangs from the northern eave, the crouching fear of failure. This baby, she thinks, has been sent to me as a consolation. The Lord has taken, and now He will give. When will she reach the point at which grief stops? Is it here, at the foot of the red hill? No, and Mary begins to climb.

  The lamp attracts moths; they accompany her up the hill. Mary thinks: store up no treasure, send no word, and have no fear—always be ready to enter into the life to come. Halfway up the hill, she’s not at all ready. She looks down at the house. It has four of her seven children in it; and her stepmother, who believes that she’s done the loving thing by coming; and the Englishwoman, who lost Denny all over again, and who must think that staying here to help will absolve her of it. Mary looks for the lettuce plant by the gate, although she doesn’t expect to see it in the dark. The lettuce plant contains the name of every person she loves, and she allowed the Englishwoman to cut it with a knife. She turns away from the house and resumes climbing.

  What if Joseph’s baby is deaf? There came a point, with all her children, when they learned to speak and so stepped out of the enclosed world in which they were her babies and she their mother. What if one baby stayed? She’s near the top of the hill now, and can see the silhouette of the cypress pine on its peak. Should she be still, and rejoice, and let the Lord work out His purposes? What if she has purposes of her own?