Dedication

  For Lisa Berryman, with love and endless gratitude to

  my most magnificent editor and friend.

  Epigraph

  I write my books on Dhurga land of the Yuin nation. I give my love and gratitude to elders past, who created the living larder and the beauty of my home Country; my love, respect and endless admiration to the elders of today, who give their knowledge so generously and profoundly to us all; and my love and confidence in the all the elders of the future. — JF

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  SYDNEY, DECEMBER 1853

  The bride wore blood, a ruby necklace vivid against her white dress, with the widest crinoline Sydney had ever seen. The satin silk gleamed in the sunlight, its lace caught up by seed pearls, as the tiny young woman stepped from the carriage onto the freshly swept road below the church.

  The dress was magnificent. But it also emphasised a skin too dark for complete respectability, despite Lady Viola’s wealth and title. Perhaps Lady Viola thought her dress so splendid, and her own small shape so insignificant, that her brown skin would not be noticed under her veil and damask gloves.

  Her Majesty Queen Victoria had been married in white, but white was still far from the norm even at society weddings. Only the most wealthy could afford a colour that must be washed after every wearing. The drably dressed women in the watching crowd muttered that blue or green would surely have looked better with that brown complexion.

  The crowd moved closer, as the Matron of Honour adjusted the bride’s veil, under a tiara of more rubies, entwined with fresh white roses. ‘Saw her meself!’ the women could say. ‘Lady Viola Montefiore — a genuine Lady. Of course, you knows about the scandal.’

  The men and boys were more eager to earn pennies holding the bridles of the guests’ horses for the grooms. And this was Sydney, a colony built on thievery. There were pickpockets and cutpurses cunning enough to slip the cravat from your neck without detection. Besides, some new husbands ordered coins to be distributed to the watching crowd, either in joy at marital bliss to come, or in thanks for allowing his bride to enter the church without having her necklace stolen.

  The early morning sky stretched like a blue handkerchief above the church. Seagulls wheeled white above the harbour, and tall-masted ships sailed like swans.

  The bride stood quite still for a moment, small, almost childlike, as the governor, Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy himself, descended the stairs to take her hand. Police in blue uniforms held back the crowd as the Matron of Honour walked towards the church on the arm of one of His Excellency’s aides. The bride and His Excellency followed.

  The new church smelled of heat and freshly hewn sandstone. A sensitive wedding guest might have imagined the sweat stench of the convicts who had shaped its stones. But this was unlikely, among the scents of gardenia and roses, the starch that had stiffened the ladies’ silks, the bay rum that had anointed the chins of the men as their valets shaved them that morning. Few guests knew either bride or groom well. But even though the heart of Sydney society was built on gold these days, or at least from the wealth from selling mutton to miners, English aristocracy still mattered. Besides, Lady Viola’s own fortune rivalled any in the colony.

  The music swelled. The congregation stood as the Matron of Honour began her slow walk down the aisle, followed by the bride and His Excellency. Lady Viola’s face had been solemn as she walked from the carriage to the church, and yet, despite convention that said a bride should look neither right nor left, Lady Viola flashed a smile at the friends in the front pew.

  In the days and months to come the guests remembered that smile, as the bride took her place beside the groom, almost twice her height in his frockcoat of mulberry broadcloth, his white waistcoat and lavender doeskin trousers.

  The bride handed her bouquet to her Matron of Honour. She turned, and joined their friends.

  The ceremony began, and then continued, droning like the flies that buzzed at the stained-glass windows, the words muffled by the rustle of silks, the creak of corsets and crinolines, fans waving, brows being mopped. Bonnets obscured the view of all except those in the front pews or by the aisle. Not that it mattered. The placement of each person according to their social rank was more important to them than the nuptials.

  Vows, kneeling for the blessing, signing the registry. The choir sang. The guests grew restless in the December heat, perspiration dripping under waistcoats and jackets, or the corsets that made breathing difficult even when their wearers were not confined in a crowded church.

  Then the ceremony was over. The bride smiled again above her vast acreage of white (were the roses in her headdress drooping?). The groom gathered her arm into his. The guests remembered, too, his look of love as he gazed down at her, though only the most sentimental witnesses used that term. ‘Dashed fond,’ as one gentleman remarked, was a more manly summation.

  Bride and groom walked together down the aisle, then paused for the taking of the daguerreotype photographic portrait, arranged as a wedding gift by the bride’s dearest friend. Wedding bells pealed above them.

  At last, released, the guests clustered round the couple, throwing rice, with laughter and more sideways glances at each other’s toilettes. Carriage wheels rolled on the cobbles. Footmen waited to usher their employers down the steps, to be conveyed to the reception. Chair carriers clustered at the far end of the street, hoping to transport those who did not maintain their own carriages and had not been offered a place in the vehicles of the more fortunate.

  The first guests had turned to depart when a growing hubbub followed by a shout halted them.

  It was impossible, all agreed later. Newspapers in the colony, and then in England, across India and the Empire, even on the Continent and in America, echoed with the story.

  No one had left the crowd; nor was there even a bush to obscure the view on what had such a short time earlier been a building site. And yet, as the groom cried out, and gentlemen strode around, busily pretending to search for what all already knew could not be there, the conclusion was inescapable.

  The bride had vanished.

  Chapter 1

  KAT

  BRIARGLEN, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1847

  Kat leaned against the stable wall and inspected the object Long William was pointing at the stable wall, ejecting a long stream of yellow that flowed down into the straw. ‘That’s not as big as a horse’s,’ she informed him.

  Long William started. ‘What you doin’ here?’

  ‘Looking at you, of course.’

  Kat had heard the parlourmaids giggling that the new stable boy boasted that his appendage was as big as a stallion’s ever since she’d returned from school a week ago. Kat had been curious, but little Amy, the dairymaid, had been scared when Long William had cornered her in the dairy and tried to kiss her.

  Amy had been too terrified to check the cheeses alone ever since. Kat liked little Amy.

  Kat wrinkled her nose at the object. It seemed more comical than frightening or admirable. ‘It’s no more than a wiggle waggle. You know, the big worms the fishermen use.’

  Long William closed his trousers. ‘You’re no proper young lady!’

  Kat grinned. ‘I don’t have to be a proper one, not with a rich papa.’ She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Do you know what I learned at school, William?’

  ‘No, Miss Kat. I beg your pardon, Miss Kat,’ he added, reluctantly polite. Everyone knew that the master had a heart of gold where Miss Kat
and her ma were concerned. This was a good place, and he didn’t want to lose it.

  ‘I learned that terrible things happen to young men who try to kiss girls who don’t want them to.’

  ‘What kind o’ things?’

  Kat quickly tried to think of a suitable punishment. ‘Oh, it depends how often they’ve tried it. Nothing can happen for years. But then they try it one more time,’ she lowered her voice, ‘and their tongue gets covered in boils.’

  ‘I don’t believe you! Beggin’ your pardon, Miss,’ he added carefully.

  ‘Oh, it’s quite true. You go to bed one night and then in the morning your tongue’s all horrible and oozing. It happened to the butcher’s apprentice down in the village, just last year. He was so ashamed he ran off to be a sailor. Ask the other grooms if I’m not right,’ she added, guessing that the men had little time for a boaster, especially a newcomer who’d frighten a dairymaid. Besides, Miss Kat was the pet of every servant here. The men would tell the boy that Miss Kat always knew what she was talking about.

  ‘How . . . how do I stop it happening?’

  Kat looked thoughtful. ‘You could try brushing your tongue with horse piddle each night. It has to be steaming fresh, mind. And William,’ she looked steadily at him, ‘stay away from the dairy. Your advances are not welcome. But I’m sure you’ve no need to worry,’ she added airily. ‘Just as long as you don’t go near a dairymaid ever again.’

  She picked up the skirts of her sprigged muslin morning dress — slightly puckered near the hem from grass seeds — and strolled down the path, leaving William staring and a good deal paler than he’d been before she’d seen him in the stables.

  The path led to the stream, its water dappled with beech leaves, trout flickering among the shadows. The stream led to the Irishman’s hut: two rooms of stone, a thatched roof, and a chimney with a spiral of smoke as grey as the sky.

  The Irishman had come from Wicklow with Mama when she married Papa. Ostensibly the Irishman was a groom, but Kat had never known him even to curry down a horse; nor was he ever known by his name. He was ‘the Irishman’ to everyone on the estate and in the village too. He spent his winters tending the braziers in the hothouses with their pots of peach and orange trees. Summer saw him checking the ripening fruit and making his selection.

  Now in autumn he fed the vats of fruit with yeast he kept bubbling all year in glass jars on the mantel above his fireplace, far from the windows so no wild strain might contaminate the culture. He swore it had been handed down for seven generations.

  If the smoke from his chimney was any guide, today he’d be distilling the first batch of the poteen. It was a ritual Kat loved — almost as much as Papa loved the illegal brew — ever since she’d escaped from nurse at five years old and seen the drips emerge from the vast snakes of copper tubing that led from still to flasks.

  The wooden door was shut, but she had no hesitation in giving three knocks, then opening it. Any other unexpected visitor might find their head banged by a skillet: the Irishman was ever at the ready in case the revenue men arrived to enforce the law against unlicensed distilling. Miss Kat, though, had entry to any place she wanted.

  ‘I’ve brought you a seedy cake,’ she informed him, as the gust of mutton and cabbage and unwashed man met her face. There was no hint of fruit or fermentation, of course, for the Irishman’s genius lay in keeping every skerrick of fragrance for his brew.

  ‘Put it on the table, girl. I’ve no hands free to take it.’ After twenty-six years there, the Irishman spoke almost like an Englishman now, but the name still stuck, just as the gypsies who camped each winter in the river field were just ‘the gypsies’ and the Frenchman down in the village who’d come to England as a boy after the revolution had become ‘Mr French’ instead of ‘Monsieur du Foret’.

  Kat seated herself on the stool by the still, glanced at the coals glowing red under its copper, then at the tubing, and the flask below it, still with no hint of moisture.

  ‘When?’ she demanded.

  ‘When the good Lord decides, that’s when. You don’t hurry a good brew, Miss Kat. Each batch makes its own time. Ah, here’s the first now.’ They both stared at the drip that grew larger and larger on the end of the tube before finally deciding to fall.

  ‘Now don’t you go sniffing it, Miss Kat,’ he warned, as a second and third drip followed the first, and then the thinnest trickle began to flow. ‘Even the smell of the first flow is enough to kill a man sometimes — or send him blind.’

  Kat laughed. ‘Wait,’ she chanted. ‘Wait.’

  ‘That’s it. It’s what follows has the sun in it, the fire in the fruit . . .’

  ‘And finally, the juice that you throw out.’

  He winked at her. ‘Or distil again, for the dregs are good enough for anyone stupid enough to pay for it. But this,’ he pushed a small flagon under the new flow, which had subtly changed colour and texture, ‘this now will be good enough for your pa an’ his guests.’

  Kat stared at the clear liquid, the firelight fracturing the contents so they glowed a soft gold. Just fruit and yeast and nothing else, certainly not sugar or honey. But it had to be exactly the right fruit at the right time, the correct yeast. It was magic, like the way yeast turned silky flour into cracking bread crust, and liquid egg yolks thickened a sauce. Her stomach growled.

  The Irishman grinned at the sound. ‘Thought that school was goin’ t’ make a lady of yer, Miss Kat.’

  ‘Miss Thackeray tried,’ Kat said complacently. The year at the Young Ladies’ Academy had been the first imposition ever placed on her by her father. She hoped it would be the last. ‘I must dress for dinner.’

  The Squire and his wife and son were dining today. This was unusual, though the early hour of the meal was not. The Fitzhuberts, like their neighbours, kept country hours, so that in summer visitors might dine and return home without the need of lanterns on their carriages.

  But although the Fitzhuberts’ social rank and Papa’s wealth meant they were on visiting terms with twenty-six families in the county, Mama cared little for socialising. Mama spent her days on the cliffs, hunting for fossils, her hat hanging by ribbons from her head and her skirts tucked up into the new-style pantaloons, made almost respectable by Her Majesty having adopted them.

  Mama was eccentric. The girls at Miss Thackeray’s used the term as an insult, but Kat always said it with pride, as did Papa. Papa believed he was the most blessed of men, who owned an emerald-eyed wife whose hair rivalled the firelight, and whose laugh the seagulls answered.

  Mama was also, Papa declared, the only woman in England whose conversation did not bore him — apart, of course, from Kat’s. Papa had even encouraged Mama to become a student of poor Miss Anning, who had died earlier this year. Miss Anning was certain that the bezoar stones she’d discovered were the dung of the giant creatures that had roamed the ancient Earth. Miss Anning had not been able to publish her discoveries, but Papa had had a limited edition of Mama’s paper, The Bezoar Stones and Their Implications for the Diet of Prehistoric Creatures, printed for her as a gift last Christmas.

  Fossilised dung was not a subject that interested many at the dinner table. Nor was the Squire likely to have developed a fascination for Papa’s beloved scale models of steam pump engines, nor even his working models of the steam trains on which Papa’s wealth from railway shares — and much of his conversation — was based.

  The rare guests were almost certainly due to her return from school, Kat thought smugly. She knew that she was beautiful. Papa said her hair was like a flame at sunset, and she had her mama’s eyes. She also had a bosom that was twice the size of any other girl’s at the Academy, and firm enough out of their corset to balance a raspberry on each nipple without dropping it, and what a fuss that had caused when Miss Thackeray marched in and caught her demonstrating the skill. Only Papa’s fortune had meant she was not expelled, which was a pity, as Kat had more than had her fill of school.

  Papa’s fortune and Kat’s return were also the reasons for her invitation to a private dance at the Bellairs’ next week, as well as the dinner with the Lambert family. Kat could finally wear her hair up and her new evening necklines low and let Derringer arrange Grandmama’s pearls at her throat and ears and thread them through her curls, though the arranging took so long Kat could only be bothered with a formal hairstyle for company. She did, however, enjoy the fresh gowns: low-necked pastel silk evening dresses, sprigged muslin walking dresses, even a new riding outfit, with trousers under a daring divided skirt that Mama declared the only possible garment for any woman who did not want to risk a fall at the next fence.