‘But . . . but why? The Prof doesn’t even like women students! He says we’re just going to get married and are a waste of lecture space.’

  ‘True. But he does like you. I heard him call you “a truly formidable intelligence” once. I don’t think he has ever paid a higher compliment. But it’s more than that. Everyone in the faculty knows how hard you’ve worked to get here. Other women might be here to snag a husband. You’re going to go on to do incredible work. And we all know it. And you are also loved by a lot of people. Just about everyone you’ve ever met. Even Mr Rossini, who makes your cappuccino, keeps asking after you. You are most definitely loved.’ He met her eyes.

  ‘Soup’s ready.’ William stood in the doorway. He stared at her and Alex so eagerly in conversation, his face carefully without emotion. ‘I’ve put yours on the table.’

  Alex looked up at him. ‘Thanks, but maybe a tray in here would be better, then Scarlett and I can begin to go through the notes.’

  Scarlett smiled at him. Alex, whom she had loved and who had loved her, did love her, but never with William’s kind of love, the kind that took you to the bathroom and heated soup. Alex, who would make sure she could stay at uni until she recovered and she would recover.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Alex. It wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was.

  Chapter 9

  Sauce Eglantine

  Boil 27oz of rose hips in as little water as possible. Press through a sieve. Add 8oz white sugar and the juice of three lemons. Simmer till thick. Serve with roast mutton.

  THE COLONY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, MAY 1876

  FLORA

  Flora rode in a carriage borrowed from the Drinkwaters, with a cart to carry the most necessary belongings and Clancy on horseback. Flora was alone in the carriage, except for Clementine in her basket on the floor, for Sarah had given her notice just before they left. She had found a new position — Flora suspected there were many eager for the prestige of employing the Honourable Flora’s lady’s maid, as well as her expertise with hair and Paris fashions.

  Flora would need to ride in the cart the last two days of the journey, for the track to Overflow was rough and narrow and, even then, passable only in dry weather.

  The rest of their possessions — the many trunks that held Flora’s clothes and the furniture kept back from the Rosemere sale — had been in storage and would follow soon.

  They set out before dawn, for their first stopping place was in the mountains, a fashionable resort where many Sydney dwellers took respite from the summer heat, though Rosemere had captured the cool harbour breezes, so the Clancys had never sought refuge there.

  By the time it grew truly light, Clementine had been fed and Flora had dozed, the cushions comfortable despite the jolting. She pulled up the window shade and looked out.

  It had never occurred to Flora to wonder about the land beyond Sydney or, rather, she had assumed it consisted of small, neat farms and vast estates, like those she’d known in England, for a sufficiency of towns were marked upon the map in Clancy’s study. Towns surely meant civilisation.

  And this was almost as she’d expected, even if they seemed to have left cobbled streets behind them: neat farms and (mostly) orderly farm houses, orchards, fields of wheat and vegetables, sheep and dairy cows.

  The carriage climbed at last into the mountains. They spent the night there, at a hotel with chandeliers and blessed cold air, and a fire blazing in the fireplace in the bedroom, and a colonnaded dining room where civilised food was served by liveried waiters and the claret was excellent.

  Dressing was difficult without Sarah. Flora wore only the lightest of side-lacing sports corsets now, out of the city, but they must be laced. Clancy knew enough to help her, but he would not pull tight enough. She would have to face the other guests at breakfast with a waist of a full twenty inches. But at least he could do up the buttons on the back of her gown. She managed to dress her own hair in the simplest of styles, drawn back into a simple bun, and hoped there would be no acquaintance who might see them.

  The descent that day was harder. Clancy and a groom borrowed from the hotel tied a log to the back of the coach, for its brakes weren’t equal to the muddy slope. Mist descended, which made her homesick for Northumberland even as she huddled Clementine to her in her shawl.

  And when the mist rose, the land was nothing. Just trees and more trees, and sometimes ghosts of trees, mile after mile of them, dead and white and leafless, with thin tussocks below on soil that glinted with rock.

  Ringbarked, said Clancy, removing the bark from all around a small strip of the tree to stop the roots feeding the higher branches, an easy way to kill the trees and clear the land. They’d stopped for the luncheon the hotel had packed for them: cold chicken, potatoes Russe, its mayonnaise slightly curdled, cherry cake, bread and apples, a strangely meagre meal for such an establishment. ‘Father’s had another hundred acres ringbarked at Overflow this year. He’s determined to make up his losses.’

  They travelled on. More trees, or death of trees; houses made of mud and sticks. The last proper inn for their journey was the Horse and Jockey — small, but with properly plastered rooms for both of them, soft and clean feather beds, proper bell ropes to ring for servants, maids who cared for Clementine and knew the importance of a bath with repeated jugs of hot water to relax a jolted body, as well as a private dining room — or at least one that the proprietress, Mrs Marks, kept private for them that evening — set with silver cutlery.

  Young maids who looked like Mrs Marks’s daughters served watercress soup, an unknown but delicious fish in hollandaise sauce, roast turkey with chestnut stuffing, devilled sardines on toast as a savoury — so few houses in the colony even knew the place of a savoury before dessert — then apple pie, possibly the best Flora had ever eaten, followed by coffee — real coffee, not from a bottle of essence — with small bowls of walnuts and hazelnuts, quince paste and perfectly crystallised cherries and slices of apricot.

  She had slept deeply, and even happily, on the vast feather mattress, knowing the Marks daughters and daughters-in-law would attend to Clementine when she woke to be fed and burped. There, in sheets that smelled of lavender, with rose-scented potpourri on the dresser, a tray with tea and oatmeal biscuits brought to her as soon as she rang next morning, it was possible to feel that life was finally falling into place again.

  She could survive two years on a country estate — of course she could. And if there was a little . . . social embarrassment . . .. when they returned to Sydney, her impeccable family background would soon make society forget and be as eager as ever for invitations to her dinners and parties.

  The next two inns were squalid — she was glad long sleeves hid the flea bites. Tough greasy mutton roasted with the yellow vegetable called pumpkin that was cattle food back home and had never been served in Sydney; beds that were ropes across bush poles, with lumpy horsehair and bedbug mattresses on top. She had left off her corset the day before, but on the next morning insisted that Clancy pull it tight, and help with her hair too, dabbing it with lavender to clean the dust from it, and packing damp cloths for her face and hands too. They would stay at Drinkwater tonight, Overflow’s nearest neighbour. She must arrive as the Honourable Flora.

  Clementine too had a change of clothes, but napkins were a problem. Clancy rinsed the dirty ones in buckets of water and tied them on to the dusty coach to dry. The servants would need to boil them properly at Drinkwater.

  They stopped to water the horses at midday, as well as rinse more napkins. The creek was thin and rocky, but the breeze and stillness were welcome after the journey’s jolting. It seemed as if every bone was slightly out of place.

  She managed a smile as Clancy laid a blanket for her under a loose-topped tree whose shade was not nearly adequate, but still cooler than the carriage. She began to feed Clementine. Queen Victoria had fed her own children and so Flora Clancy could too, at least when there were no Horse and Jockey Inn maids with bottles of milk. She was still not expert with napkins, nor getting the child to settle.

  All at once she felt someone watching her. She quickly covered herself with a clean napkin and looked up.

  A group of natives stared at her, the men entirely naked, carrying spears, women with only a string around their waists and fur-covered bundles on their backs, and dark-skinned children who gaped at the carriage or laughed.

  She had seen natives almost every day since she had been in the colony, crouching in rags under trees in Sydney or dressed in neat cast-offs in the impeccably clean cottages she visited with the ladies of her charities, encouraging the dark daughters into service and the boys too to be grooms, sailors or fishermen.

  These were the first wild natives she had seen. Would they attack? But Clancy must have seen them before her. He didn’t seem concerned. Indeed within a minute the party had moved away, silently, vanishing somehow between the trunks of the trees.

  They reached Drinkwater before dusk, and all her fears leached away. For this was how life should be.

  A two-storey house with attics, set among oaks and elms, already flashing gold and red for autumn. Proper trees after the dusty sticks that were entirely the wrong colour and allowed in the heat instead of giving enough shade. The lawn was green and perfectly scythed, the first lawn she had seen since Sydney. A river glinted below the house, while on either side sheep grazed in proper fenced paddocks, looking almost as sheep should look, even if these were dusted grey-red instead of white.

  Drinkwater had none of the grandeur of Rosemere. But it was a gentleman’s abode and comfortable. It might even be soothing, she thought hopefully, after the anguish and pain of the last year, to spend time in the country in a house like this before the work of establishing a new home in Sydney.

  The carriage rode smoothly around the gravel driveway and stopped by a wide veranda. A woman stepped out to meet her: her own age, perhaps, and pretty, in a simple blue silk dress that was exactly correct for greeting visitors in the country, and skin that had been properly protected from the sun.

  ‘Oh, my dear, I am so glad you reached us safely. It is a terrible journey, is it not? Truthfully, I can only manage it once a year.’ She held out her hands. ‘I am Margaret Drinkwater. It is so good to see you, Mrs Clancy.’

  Impossible not to like her. Flora took the hands, an informality quite permissible in two Englishwomen in the wilderness. ‘Please do call me Flora. Thank you so much for inviting us to stay.’

  ‘It is a delight. You must tell me everything, absolutely everything, about Sydney and the news from home and what fashion will do next. Oh, and this must be darling little Clementine.’

  No butler, but a housekeeper in a starched apron who curtseyed, and well-trained maids too, who took Clementine to the nursery, brought up a porcelain bathtub for Flora with endless hot water, and laid out her clothes for dinner.

  Margaret’s own maid dressed her hair. The joy of being able to ring for a cup of tea and Bath biscuit! Flora did not need to be told that by tomorrow morning all dust and stains would be removed, Clementine’s napkins fresh and ironed, and her own trunk and hat boxes packed properly with sufficient tissue paper once more.

  Flora relaxed even further in the dining room at a table long enough to seat twelve, portraits on the wall, and Mr Drinkwater himself, at least twenty years older than his wife, with grey sideburns, but handsome with it. He and Clancy talked stock prices while Flora and Margaret chatted over chicken consommé, crayfish aspic, saddle of mutton with sauce Eglantine, anchovies on toast, then a plum cream, politely at first of Sydney gossip and the latest scandal involving the Prince of Wales.

  Later, in the drawing room (not a parlour — how wonderful to be in a room that was not what the middle classes called a parlour), the conversation merged into the beginnings of friendship over thin porcelain cups of China tea while the men drank port and smoked cigars back in the dining room.

  ‘The last year has been a nightmare,’ Flora admitted. ‘I had no idea the family’s position was so . . . precarious.’ It was perhaps too much to say on so brief an acquaintance, but such a relief to say it aloud, and to someone who understood.

  Margaret looked sympathetic as she wielded the teapot. ‘Another season or two, and I’m sure all will be well.’

  ‘You said you travel up to Sydney each year. You have a house there?’ For a moment Flora hoped for an invitation for the winter.

  ‘We stay at the Wentworth Hotel. But when . . . when we have sons, we will take a house there, I expect, for their education. It will be so good to have you near,’ Margaret repeated. ‘May I visit? I know it is a considerable trek, and not for a simple day’s outing, but I would so like to see Overflow.’

  Flora stared. ‘You have never been there? But you are our nearest neighbours.’

  ‘The Clancys do not entertain,’ said Margaret carefully. Of course, Flora realised, Maria could never be a hostess. But now it would be different.

  She smiled as she took a tiny macaroon. ‘You will be our guests at our first party. Have you ever played tennis? No? Oh, my dear, it is so much fun. The latest fashion in Sydney and at home!’

  Suddenly ideas — a future — gleamed before her. They must build a tennis court at Overflow! And billiards too. All of Sydney — all who counted — would long for an invitation to their house parties. And she would plant roses. Great gardens of roses for guests to walk among. A rose maze, the flowers trellised for guests to wander. Roses grew so quickly in the heat. Even English society might talk of Flora Clancy’s rose maze at Overflow. All the past year’s . . . disagreeableness and disappointments . . . would be forgotten.

  They set off as dawn greyed the sky the next morning, Flora now in the cart, Clementine asleep in her basket at Flora’s feet, Clancy driving and his horse and two packhorses on leads behind. She sat with bags of flour and a keg of sugar packed among her luggage, surveying the way in front, for a proper road must be cut now, wide enough for carriages to pass, trees cut and those ruts filled in . . .

  The cart had jolted its way along the track. At last Clancy stopped, unharnessed the horses and led them to drink, while Flora retired behind the cart to feed Clementine. Clementine grizzled until her father appeared, held the baby over his shoulder and began to walk her up and down. Miraculously, she gave a large burp and quietened. ‘The tea is made,’ he said.

  He’d lit a small fire, with water boiling in a tin and the luncheon the Drinkwater housekeeper had supplied set out on a picnic blanket — almost, she thought, like the picnics we had back in Sydney.

  ‘The bread is fresh,’ he said. ‘But I could toast it if you’d prefer it more breakfast like.’

  ‘I’ll toast it,’ she said. ‘It will be an adventure.’ She thrust away memories of toasting forks, crumpets and fires at the Abbey. She took the slice of bread he offered her and stuck it on the end of a long green twig.

  ‘See?’ she said triumphantly after a short time. ‘Perfectly toasted.’ She spread it with butter and quince jelly and handed it to him, then cut a slice for herself.

  He munched it quietly, gazing around. For the first time since they left the mountains she took in their surroundings. The bush had seemed so unchanging that she’d barely looked at it. But here was a large pond, lily covered, though the flowers were evidently not in season. A white sandbank rose behind it, and a glint of what must be the river that formed the main watercourse of both Drinkwater and Overflow. ‘Why wasn’t Drinkwater affected by the flood?’

  ‘Their river paddocks are longer than ours. Their sheep and shepherds would have heard the flood coming and run uphill.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ she said, biting her toast, slightly uncomfortable about how at home he seemed in this isolation, sitting on the ground as if there was no place he’d rather be.

  ‘More than fortune,’ he said shortly. He glanced at her, hesitated, then added, ‘Old Drinkwater was married before, to a native woman. She taught him native lore, like how far the river rises in a flood. He’d have made sure there were safe places for his stock to retreat to when the river rose. Dad,’ Clancy had called Ezekiel ‘Father’ back in Sydney, ‘followed his path out, then kept going further along the river, so as not to tread on old Drinkwater’s toes.’

  ‘They’re not friends?’ she asked, dismayed. Mr Drinkwater had welcomed them so warmly . . .

  ‘Rivals as much as friends. Drinkwater enjoyed showing off last night.’

  She was not ignorant of business, even though she was a woman. ‘And Mr Drinkwater did not invest his profits in an expensive Sydney house and paying off his daughter-in-law’s father’s debts, but in a business that would bring a return on his money.’

  ‘We will have a Sydney house again,’ he said gently.

  Yes, they would, she thought, but it would not be Rosemere. She suspected that Sydney had enjoyed the scandal of an aristocrat’s financial ruin just as much as they had enjoyed entertaining her. She had used her pregnancy as an excuse to refuse invitations, and entertaining guests themselves had been clearly impossible in that embarrassment of a house, even if they’d had the money to do so adequately. But her husband clearly had not understood at all. He had even asked which of her friends she wished to come to her during her confinement.

  She loved him still. Of course she loved him. But in the past seven months she had begun to see him as alien: he simply did not understand how things should be. He was and would remain a colonial, who despite his education and intelligence never could truly be a gentleman.

  But she could still ensure he made the impression of one. It would take work, re-establishing their position, turning Overflow into the most desirable destination for a country party, despite its distance from Sydney. But she was the Honourable Flora. She would manage.

  Clancy stood, the now-sleeping baby still over his shoulder, and tipped the remnants of the tea onto the coals, then kicked dirt over them. ‘Time we were off.’