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all the things we need her to do and that I will like her, that she has recently arrived from overseas and her name is Chantelle Lejeune. Oh, and that she is young, perhaps only twenty years. I made a cross face and told him again I do not need a governess, but part of me is excited. A young, clever woman: nothing like Mrs. Randolph or the chaplain. I am telling myself to be cautious, though. Why would any well-educated French woman come here and stay? We are all the way at the bottom of the world and then a little too much further. (That is what the colonial secretary’s wife said on the day she visited back in April. “How do you survive,” she had asked Papa, “all the way at the bottom of the world and then a little too much further?”)
    But I have never known any different. I was born across on the mainland and came here when I was very small. Papa had once lived in England, but it seems a distant and cold place to me. And as for Ember Island being “a little too much further”—well, it isn’t much further. It is less than an hour on the steamer.
    I do hope she is good company.
October 3, 1891
     
    I had the awful dream again last night. I hate it because it leaves me cold and empty inside. Mother is sick in it, just as she was before she died. So sick I cannot recognise her and I am frightened to hold her hand, even though she begs me to hold it, with tears in her eyes. But then when I give her my hand, she crushes it tighter and tighter; her own fingers are bones and her skin is sinking until her cheeks are sharp hollows.
    I woke up with my heart thundering, gathered up Pangur Ban, and ran straight to Papa’s bed. At first I thought he hadn’t noticed I was there, but then he rolled over and put his big warm arm over me and kissed the top of my head and said, “What is it, Nell?”
    “Bad dream,” I said.
    “The same one?”
    I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me in the dark. “Yes,” I said.
    He stroked my arm with his thumb and I breathed in the warm scent of him.
    “Papa,” I asked, “did Mama love me?”
    “All mothers love their children. Your mother treasured you dearly.”
    “Why do I keep dreaming that awful dream?”
    “I cannot answer, child. Dreams are only nonsense, they are not to be feared, and they do not tell us any hidden truths.”
    “Did you love Mama?”
    He breathed in sharply. I was afraid I’d hurt him. “Yes, I loved her very much. We were happy, in our time. But all times pass.”
    I burrowed my head into his armpit and closed my eyes. He stroked my hair until I fell asleep. In the morning he was up and dressed and gone to work before I woke.
    •
     
    Even though it wasn’t the example of Eleanor’s writing I hoped to find, I was disappointed when it ran out. Through her writings, I knew Eleanor—Nell as her father called her here—only as an adult. This insight into her childish mind made me feel fondlytowards her and I wished, certainly not for the first time, that I had been able to meet her. Mum met her and remembered her as a nice old lady who gave out lollies and wore bright pink earrings; but she died when Mum was a little girl.
    I switched off the lamp and lay down to sleep. I thought about Eleanor, once a young girl, now passed away. All times pass. Death came for us all and it would come for me. And that wasn’t the worst feeling in the world because then nobody could expect anything from me anymore. At length, I slept.
    •
     
    Stacy arrived on the first ferry service, a wheelie suitcase in each hand. One was mine, picked up for me from my mother’s house.
    “Thank you so much,” I said, taking the handle of my own suitcase and leading the way down the wooden jetty. The suitcase wheels bump-bumped in a rhythm over the old boards. “Did she ask any questions?”
    “Your mother? No. She’s used to you being a flake.” Stacy smiled at me from behind her big sunglasses. Her lipstick was bright red and her hair was in a tidy bun. She knew