Around the house itself the generations of Isons had coaxed a cottage garden into existence. Bore water was banned—too salty—and there was more cow, horse and poultry manure than indigenous red dirt in the flowerbeds. Roses and honeysuckle choked the tank stands, lobelia crept toward the white pebble paths, lilac grew hard against the walls of the house. Pansies, daisies, hollyhocks, poppies, dahlias, foxgloves. Daffodil bulbs lurked forgotten and dormant along the borders of the lawn until the spring. One evening the children swung their wooden swords at all the dead and fading agapanthus heads at the road gate, a beheading frenzy that left them high-coloured and unmanageable at the dinner table. Beulah had also planted a herb garden—not for cooking, foreign muck, but for the idea itself. Rosemary goes well with lamb, Auntie Beulah, Anna’s mother said. Rubbish, the old woman replied. Anna liked the odour of the bruised leaves on her fingers. Hugo wheezed and sneezed and rubbed his eyes from September to February. There was nothing to see in the vast blue bowl of the sky but, according to Dr Pirie, the air swam with miniscule particles of dust and pollen. Make sure he doesn’t run around in the evenings, no cut flowers in his room, and keep him away when the men are reaping. Anna stood with her mother and the doctor, three heads peering down at Hugo, who gasped on his pillow and tore at his throat as if to open the way for a healing draught of air. The soil on the six-forty acres was very poor, but it always supported a dense blue carpet of Salvation Jane. Anna’s father would stare at it with his hands on his hips. What’s a man to do? Spray year after year? He took her out into the thick of it and taught her how to pinch-pluck the tiny funnelled flowers and suck the base. A hint of honey on her tongue, and she realised that the air was heavy with bees, slowly, dopily lurching from one flower head to the next. Anna was expected to pin a rosebud to her ball gown or tuck a flower behind one ear but she hated all that fuss, that business. A boy gave her a chunky envelope. She opened it and inside the soppy card was a sachet, essence of rose. Anna thought of Beulah’s old-woman smells, ‘The Rose of Tralee’ grinding out of the pianola, all that soppy business to do with flowers and love. The boy was waiting, a pink, pimpled, mouth-breather, so she tore open a corner of the sachet and rubbed a drop of the fumy oil between her thumb and forefinger. For a moment she thought of a rose thorn catching in the round pad of her thumb, drawing the blood. You like it? he asked. She blinked awake, put her finger to her nostrils. Cheap and nasty. Anna reeled with it. Put some behind your ears if you like, the boy offered. Anna smiled. On the inside of my wrist for now, she said. One day in Berkshire, Anna bought a postcard to send home. A stone house, a thatched roof, a real cottage garden. She thought it would amuse her mother: The seat of the Isons, Mum! It was a favourable sign, buying and sending that postcard, thinking of someone else for a change. She was starting to recover, she’d found her return ticket. When she got home, a year had passed. She made a pilgrimage to the spot where Lockie had been killed. She was not sure of the exact place, and knew it would worry her parents if she asked, so she set out on foot to find it. Somewhere past the schoolhouse ruin, apparently. The road twisted like a snake through cuttings and washaways. Gravel dust accumulated on her toecaps and tiny pebbles flicked into the cuffs of her jeans. It might have happened anywhere. Would there still be scratches on the rock face, oil or blood in the dirt? In the end she found a jam-jar of wildflowers and a flimsy wooden cross no higher than her knees. Anna guessed that Mr Kelly had made the cross, using slats from the broken-backed chairs he used for kindling wood. Mrs Kelly would have provided the wildflowers—there were never any cultivated flowers where the Kellys lived. The wildflowers were dusty, wilting, four days old. One year and four days since the day Lockie died. Anna saved the water in the jar but tossed out the wildflowers. There were plenty more growing on the banks of the sunken road. Those poor people and their grief. Would they have brought Lockie’s dog with them? Anna was willing to bet that very few locals came a-visiting the Kellys after it happened. When her father took over the Four Square Store, he seemed to grow into a big, beaming, contented man. He had townspeople around him all day long, the very thing he’d sadly lacked, out there on the six-forty acres. He sold everything and dispensed coffee, tea and biscuits in a small cleared area between the groceries and the hardware, warmed by a potbelly stove. Everything, and that included potplants, creepers and cut flowers in a bucket, trucked up from Adelaide three times a week. He suggested a Flower Show at a council meeting. Mrs Allen won with a hybrid rose cultivated half a century earlier on Showalter Park and perfected by her in the garden behind the manse. All month Sam has been telling Anna that it’s cruelly ironic, the bank’s new logo. No phone call, no invitation for a chat with the manager, just this letter out of the blue, announcing the foreclosure, one paragraph on recycled paper decorated with the Sturt Pea. As if they fancy themselves as environmentalists, he snorts. When Anna visits Chester Flood he takes her for long walks in the prison compound, pointing out climbing roses, herb gardens, vast fields of carnations ready for harvesting and sale to the city’s florists. I’ve discovered that I’ve got green fingers, he says. I actually enjoy gardening. Anna will meet the challenge of cramped conditions in her house near the sea. She will enlist Rebecca and Meg to nail lattice walls to the open porch and they will take her to nurseries in the hills behind the city when the weather is fine. Hanging ferns, geraniums in terracotta pots, an African violet on the shelf above the kitchen sink. Flowers on the sideboard, flowers by her bed, flowers in her last grasp.