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introduced her husband to his small, dark-haired daughter.
    Hudson bent over the child, marvelling as her little fingers wrapped shyly around his. The palm of his hand was scarred, Sally noticed—a burn, months old, that caused the hand to curl somewhat at rest. For a moment, she thought of the letter she had read a thousand times, his heartfelt description of that mutinous survivor dragged from the ship’s burning wreckage…But she shook the thought from her mind, and looked into his face instead.
    “I called her Clarissa,” Sally told him. “I hope that was all right?”
    “Beautiful. She has your eyes.”
    “Poor thing, hope she doesn’t have my looks.”
    “She’ll be ’right,” her husband said, an Australian-sounding expression that rather lacked the romance Sally might have wished. Still, she was here, and the family was together at last. It would, indeed, be right.
    It took some weeks, sweltering in the tropical summer, but the contrast between Sally Hudson—a literate, married young mother—and a recent influx of Fenian convicts encouraged the overburdened warden to hand over a Conditional Pardon and a transfer of her person to Sydney.
    There the Hudsons resumed their married life, bolstered by the golden inheritance she had claimed from her father’s safe. And if she studied Jimmy’s back sometimes, when he stood up from the tin bath or slept shirtless in the heat of summer, if her eyes traced the foot-long scar along his shoulder-blade and wondered if it had been made by a piece of burning ship’s timber, she never said a word. Certainly he never did—mere mention of the event turned him first pale, then taciturn. Everyone who came to Australia had a past they were leaving behind, not the least James Hudson. In any event, he’d hardened during their months apart, and his patience was short: it was not wise to venture remarks that could be taken as criticism.
    A second daughter was born in 1859, a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed imp with whom Jimmy fell instantly in love. They named her Alicia, after Sally’s one faithful Edinburgh relation, and Jimmy bought the infant a real doll, and a lacy dress, and a little painting of an English shepherd to go over her cot.
    Jimmy’s work on the docks, which half the time brought him home stinking of raw wool, also left him in a position to pocket tips when a shipment of some value was being loaded, on or off. He no longer hid what he was doing, and although Sally could not condone his criminal acts, neither could she claim that she did not know what James Hudson was. The fine balance between the husband’s goals and the wife’s disapproval sometimes came to a head, and Jimmy did not always stop at a shaking. Sally lost a tooth once. Another time she was left with a ringing in her ear for weeks. However, this was her bed, one that she had made herself, and he never hit the children—not with his fist anyway. A lot of wives couldn’t say the same.
    Jimmy did provide, give him that. Sally did not have to find work outside of the home. She hired a series of small, malnourished girls, some locals, others transported from England for stealing a loaf of bread or apples from a tree. She let them sleep in the kitchen while they learned a few basic skills and lost the gauntness of their faces, she taught them their alphabets, then freed them to work for some other wife with slightly greater resources.
    Neither Hudson spoke of how they had come to Sydney, although between Jimmy’s nightmares and his horror of the sea, over the years Sally had picked up most of the story. Their daughters learned not to play “shipwreck” in Papa’s hearing, as Sally’s tongue avoided the use of words such as “mutiny” or “explosion.”
    In the course of time, Sally was given her Certificate of Freedom. She could have returned to Britain, after that—and was tempted from time to time, when Jimmy was in a black temper. Twice he was arrested, once convicted: the four