It made for a long night.’

‘We shall get there today,’ she offered.

‘God willing.’ His hazel eyes watched her. ‘You went for a walk?’

She might have guessed he would have noticed. ‘A little way.’

‘Sometimes I fear the whole country is covered wi’ these trees,’ he said. ‘One o’ the men was saying they’re verra hard. Turn the blade of an axe, he said.’ Andrew turned on his heel, contemplating the immensity of the forest about them. ‘Clearing the ground will be quite a job, if all the country’s like this.’

They had tea, climbed aboard the coach and continued the journey. It was a repetition of the day before: mile after mile of lurching, sickening motion, mile after mile of the unvarying landscape. The only difference was that they were all more tired and irritable because of it.

That afternoon, at the bottom of a long, winding descent, they came out into what to the weary passengers seemed a miracle—open country. They had descended the southern flank of a range of low hills. To the northwest more hills were covered in dense bush. As the coach bumped and racketed along Lorna saw how the land ahead, brown under the westering sun, opened into wooded plains that stretched uninterruptedly to the horizon.

Flocks of sheep were grazing between the trees. Here and there a blink of sunlight reflected from the surface of a river and in the distance she could make out the buildings of a little town, the first sign of habitation since leaving the hubbub of Sydney. This plain, then, was the place towards which they had been travelling all these weeks—flat, without feature, seemingly endless, a distant swell of insignificant hills to the north and an empty wilderness behind them.

Lorna had told herself she would not look back, yet now, breathing the malodorous air of the crowded coach, watching through the smeared window as they approached their destination, she could not help herself. At that moment the small Scottish town set by the forbidding waters of the North Sea seemed infinitely desirable. She could smell the cold tang of the sea air, feel the wind seize her hair beneath her cloth bonnet, see the granite house-fronts glitter like ice in the rare sunshine. The familiar accents of the townspeople, her people, filled her memory. Infinitely desirable yet lost like a dream of longing and fulfilment that evaporates with the morning.

Dear God, she thought, tears that would be forever unshed burning behind her eyes. Why did we have to come here? Why?

The sun was well down the sky by the time the coach clattered into the little town.

Hovels constructed of rough-hewn timber and roofed with what looked like bark lined either side of a roadway that was no more than an extension of the muddy track along which they had travelled so long. The town was very small.

They passed a group of men in yellow uniforms supervised by red-coated soldiers and Lorna saw the glitter of chains.

‘Convicts,’ breathed the lady of the silk dress in Lorna’s ear. ‘I hear there is a convict station here.’

‘Is that so?’ Lorna hated what she was seeing, hated it.

The pink-lidded eyes regarded her. ‘There is no need to fear them. I was told they are well guarded. As you can see for yourself.’

‘I canna help feel how wretched their lives must be. Oh, I know it’s necessary but it doesna stop me wishing it were not so. Do ye no’ understand what I mean?’

The woman’s nostrils flared a little. ‘You would not wish to see them walking the streets, free to continue their criminal careers? You do not mean that?’

‘I’m not sure what I mean,’ Lorna said. ‘It’s only that one can still feel for them, can one not, in spite of knowing they’ve done wrong?’

‘It is no doubt the Christian way,’ the woman conceded grudgingly. ‘But one must be practical, too. Of course,’ sniffing, ‘some people know more than others about the feelings of that class of person.’

Lorna gave her a sharp glance. ‘Aye, ma’am, I dare say they do.