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so judiciously back at her that now she had to fling her eyes to the sky and say, “Poor darlings.”
    “Here,” said Mr. Malcolm. He didn’t have any sense that this little kid expected him to help her lift the whole disaster to another continent, and then smooth over any tears in the fabrics of place and of time. He kept the cigarette-ish thing in the bunched corner of his mouth as he threw his head back too and began fumbling in the pockets of his vest. He took out two shillings, and offered one in his left hand and one in his right to each of the Rochester children. He did it too as if this were the spacious limit of his charity.
    The children frowned at him. So Malcolm reached down now and opened Hector’s hand and put the shilling in there and closed the fingers for him, and then he did the same with Lucy’s small, grained hand. He was pretty pleased with himself. He was their gift-horse.
    “His head was broken,” Tim whispered to Mrs. Malcolm. “An accident on the road.”
    “Dear God!” she said in a low voice back. “Let me know if there is anything I can do …”
    Was this a token offer? Tim wondered. Tim didn’t like the way, dragging his wife, Mr. Malcolm moved off as soon as Kitty arrived on the wharf. Was she a person beneath his bloody attention?
    “Hello there,” cried Kitty. Her long mouth split in the plainest and most personable of smiles. How could a fellow not like women with their kindnesses so varied?
    “Good evening to you, Mrs. Malcolm,” she called after the Malcolms, and winked at Tim.
    Mrs. Malcolm said over her shoulder almost nervously, “Yes, Mrs. Shea, we met in the store. Didn’t we?”
    And Kitty murmured, “We did, and is that the reason you’re disappearing like a rat down a drain now?”
    How hard his daughter Annie stared at the Rochester child. Tim nudged her round cheek with a knuckle. “Come on, Duchess. Don’t be grim.”
    Kitty said, “She did ask me from the very deck what is papa doing with those children?”
    A trace of chastisement in Kitty’s voice. As if she thought he’d wilfully gone out and collected two children.
    Tim, inhibited by the listening Rochester children, gave a brief summary of the disaster.
    “Their horse dragged their sulky off the edge at O’Riordan’s at Glenrock this morning. Their father Albert Rochester is finished. These infants are on their own now.”
    “Then come, come,” said Kitty when he finished. “Let’s feed you all.”
    “Done already,” he told her with the small pride of a male who manages to put a meal together.
    Johnny performed a cartwheel on the splintery boards of Central landing to show Lucy Rochester it was possible.
    Tipsy excursionists, having crossed the wharf, were struggling now up the ramp to Smith Street and getting up on their parked sulkies and carts. Mr. Malcolm, by now having helped his wife into their trap, unhitched his horse and took some heaving to get himself up. He shook out the reins energetically.
    “I hope the horse is soberer than he is,” Kitty told Tim. “What’s to do with these waifs would you say, Tim?”
    “Careful now,” Tim called to Johnny, who was running into Smith Street and its backing carts and its resentful bucking horses. “Careful there, John.”
    For Johnny had a crazy look in his eye, put there by meeting another child and recognising some answering lunacy there. Soulmates, it seemed. And the steamer trip hadn’t taken all the ginger and stampede out of the boy.
    As they walked along, Smith Street cleared though the dust of others hung still in the air. Old Tapley, who was believed to have once been a London pickpocket and to have been sent to Port Macquarie for it in
those
days, puttered out of Belgrave Street with his little ladder and his tapers and began lighting up the lamps in front of the draper’s, on a slant across from T. Shea—General Store.
    Kitty said, “You did not have your day of solitude then?”
    “No chance.”
    He felt restored