Chapter One
Echuca, Victoria
August 1894

Still no moonlight. She couldn’t wait any longer. She had to leave. Now.

Hushed and foreboding, the dead of night could have been full of doom. This particular night, however, it was her friend, even if she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. There’d be no better time than right now to leave him. Alby had said he was going downriver tonight. He would be gone for many weeks, perhaps months—if he stayed away. Tess knew her husband was unpredictable.

Alby intended to be on the paddle-steamer Rodney. The PS Victor, heading in the opposite direction, upriver, would sail tonight too. She had to be on it.

She couldn’t stay a moment longer. God forbid if, for some reason, he returned before she had left, he might very well carry out another of his threats. The broken bone above her wrist, now healed, twinged sometimes, a reminder. She couldn’t risk it.

Leave.

Run.

Her nerves jangled.

How did it get to this? How, indeed. She should have run before she was made to marry Alby. Or after her parents had died. Or when CeeCee Seymour first reached out to her, offering sanctuary.

It hadn’t always been like this. She’d rubbed along beside Alby for years, desolate in the marriage, but resigned, until his growing bad moods had woken her. Oh, she knew she had her prickly moments, but only that—prickly. She’d been a normal person—laughing, happy and confident—who, like everyone else, could feel a spike of temper at times. But she had stopped being allowed to express herself in any way, and over the years she’d learned to dampen that spike to keep the mood agreeable between them. Soon there wasn’t much left of who she’d been at all.

But now, she just couldn’t hide herself anymore; couldn’t hide her dislike of Alby anymore.

Still she hesitated at the door. Why? Freedom was just out there. Last year, walking away from the doctor’s rooms, her arm properly plastered and bandaged, Tess felt a note slip into her hand when CeeCee Seymour’s niece, the auburn-haired Miss Linley Seymour, had passed by. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to have caught you. Do come to tea, Mrs Slattery,’ she’d said loudly and cheerfully for the benefit of any onlookers. Then she’d whispered, ‘Come to this address with your bag packed. Sooner the better. He will never find you, never hurt you again.’ She had smiled pleasantly then crossed the road.

Tess realised then she couldn’t hide it any longer. People knew. Why did I wait so long to leave?
For years she’d thought she could live with Alby, put up with a life without love. She thought she should live with it like so many others did. Live through it.

So she’d stayed.
She clasped her hands on her elbows, rocked a little, stared into the night.

And then there was her pride. Pride goeth before a fall and she’d made her bed—only some of the clichéd, irritating things her now dear-departed mother had sniped. They echoed around her still.
Tess’s first love, Harry Goodwin, had left town in a hurry, left her distraught, weeping and wailing at the loss. At that time, in all her fifteen years, she had thought of no one else, and when she’d heard that he’d talked of engagement to her she was so, so happy. She waited breathlessly for the formal proposal. Everyone waited for the formal proposal.

And then Harry took off.

The town was agog. Tess was crippled by embarrassment. She should have been suspicious. After all, the news of impending nuptials had been delivered to her by Harry’s giggling, conniving sisters, Emily and Victoria. They’d known she’d have been ridiculously happy, ignorant of their deception.

Her mother, believing that Tess’s howling reaction was more than that of a jilted girl—despite Tess’s cries of innocence—had urged her father into making an ‘arrangement’ with Alby Slattery’s father, a settler on a neighbouring farm. Alby had been available and willing, and Mr Slattery had agreed to his son marrying Tess and a tidy sum was handed over to ‘cover the added burden of an unexpected extra person to feed’.
‘You will marry Albert Slattery, my girl,’ her mother had demanded, ‘and quickly. That is that. It will stop the tongues wagging and sullying our reputation.’

But Tess hadn’t been in the family way before she married—couldn’t have been—and, gladly for her, no baby had arrived, not in that first year nor since.

Her great love, Harry Goodwin, had gone. Her life was in tatters. She’d known running away from home to avoid the marriage would only make matters worse. And she’d feared becoming a street woman.So Tess had stayed, obeyed her parents. She moved onto the Slattery property, and began days she’d rather forget.

Oh, if only my adult self could have spoken to that stupid young girl. Alby hadn’t always been so angry. In those early years he had been slow to rise to a temper. But after one big argument, borne of her long-standing resentment and his frustration at her lack of conjugal willingness, sporadic though their relations had been, that slow burn had changed forever.

‘I will never love you,’ she’d burst. ‘I never wanted you, never have and never will.’

There might have been a better way; she wished now she’d found it…