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Denniston, bursting at the seams in 1900, is already nearing the pinnacle of its short life.
    Some things never change, though. The isolation is one. The precipitous foot-track is still the only access up, and the Incline itself the only method of getting bulkier goods delivered. Another unchanging feature is Bella Rasmussen. At fifty-nine she is the oldest woman on the Hill, judged by age or by years of residence, take your pick. Bella, like many of the women here, has yet to leave the Hill. Twenty years she has lived, undisputed Queen of the Camp, in the log house Con built her. On a clear day she can see down to the small town of Waimangaroa, and follow the railway track south to Westport. She can see the river emerge from its gorge and flow across the swampy coastal plain; see it widen and enter the great stretch of ocean. But in twenty years she has never been off the plateau. The Track is too steep for her old legs and riding the Incline is unthinkable. So here she stays, happy enough. Bella would not consider her life a trap, a prison. Occasionally she might remember with a secret smile those high old days in Hokitika, when she ran her own saloon, with ten girls in her employ; when her customers, in town for a good time before they rushed upriver after the latest rumour of ‘the colour’, paid for their drink and a song (and other favours) in flakes of gold, and were gone next day. But those days are long past. Bella is a respectable widow, let no one forget it. Itinerant workers come and go around her; Bella remains. The new expanded Bins rattle and clank scarcely a chain from her back door. Bella cleans and cooks, laughs and gossips through it all. She has her place in this community and she has Rose.
    It is fifteen years since Bella’s beloved ‘husband’, Con the Brake, first brake-man on the Incline, storyteller, adventurer, and by most accounts Rose’s true father, left the Hill. Ostensibly he left to findRose in that brief, famous time when all the West Coast was on the lookout for the small child, dragged off the Hill by her demon mother. Murder came into the story, and riots and worse. A song about the Denniston Rose is embedded into Coaster folklore. No one sang about Con, though, the once-loved giant with a strange accent, for he never returned and left his Bella heartbroken. Once he wrote — a letter Bella never showed for she had by this time established herself as a widow. It was a brief note — hardly a letter, put into her hand by a miner recruited from England and just arrived on the Hill. The miner said the note was given him by a sailor. A big feller, he said, with a grizzled beard and a shock of white hair.
    ‘I met him in a tavern by the wharves, Missis,’ said the miner, ‘and when he heard I was bound for the coalmines of Denniston he begged a scrap of paper from the proprietor, scratched his head a bit and scribbled this down. He said to take it to the log house and if I couldn’t find a fine lady by the name of Mrs C. Rasmussen, to tear up the paper and throw it to the wind.’
    Bella had given the young man a shilling and a wedge of cake and asked him to keep quiet about the letter. When he had gone — tramping his way over the plateau to Burnett’s Face — she sat and wept over the hasty words.
    I think of you Bella, no day goes by I don’t, but the high seas are my home and I was mad to think otherwise. I am a man for the sailing ship, cannot stick with the dirty black steamers so I am never in your waters. Your bloody New Zealand Steam Ship Company has your trade all sewn up. No sheets and halyards for them. I talk to you sometimes and show you the sights in my head, but what use is that to you? Ah well, we must take what comes, Bella, that is life. I am sure you have made a good one, we are both strong people. Conrad.
    That note arrived five years after Con left. In the first year, people on the Hill feared for Bella’s sanity. But Rose returned, the tough little battler,