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not help wondering if his marriage had been unwise.
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    Rosetta appeared at her parents’ house in Fitzroy that afternoon. She had concocted an excuse, as ridiculous as it was hasty, which had to do with the need to collect a particular wedding present from her mother, a fine china tea service without which, she claimed, it was not possible to properly begin married life.
    She wasted little time after her arrival, pausing only to throw herself upon an overstuffed, patterned sofa before tearfully revealing the dreadful nature of her assault. She did not, however, receive the response she had expected. Rosetta heard only a small, uncomfortable cough, then silence.
    â€˜But Rosie,’ her mother said finally, ‘did you really never anticipate something like this?’
    Fanny’s strained expression only intensified when she saw Rosetta’s face. It was marked with an anger that she knew couldovertake her daughter in an instant. She had observed it many times before; the flashing eyes and jutting jaw.
    â€˜How could I,’ Rosetta retorted, springing to her feet, ‘as you told me only about pretty frocks and charming conversation and a thousand other things but nothing about this, this violation!’ With that, she picked up a small embroidered cushion and flung it across the room. The thunderous crash heard when the Coalport china dish it collided with hurtled to the floor seemed to echo Rosetta’s stormy mood.
    Fanny, appalled by this display, took a large breath. Grappling now with the reluctance to speak of intimate matters that had left her daughter so ill prepared, she gripped the arms of the straight-backed velvet chair in which she sat before explaining, as briefly as was possible, those acts – she called them ‘physical congress’ – that customarily took place between man and wife.
    â€˜Of course, this is the way in which babies are made,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘That is, after all, the purpose of marriage.’
    Rosetta felt the burn of mortification. How stupid, how ignorant she had been. She did not want her husband or his babies. Rosetta wished to go home, back to safety, to a world where if not completely unfettered she would at least not be bound to Louis for all eternity. ‘Let me return,’ she begged. Fanny ignored her daughter’s plea.
    â€˜At first it is a shock, of course I understand that. But that is what a wife must do. She must obey. Marriage is forever. You must make the best of it. You can never leave. You would be disgraced.’
    This painful conversation occurred as Rosetta sat in Fanny’s parlour, an ordered room of stiff mahogany furniture and precise botanical prints. It was the beginning of June, a cold month in Melbourne, but there was no coolness in Rosetta. For the first time the enormity of what marriage meant struck her like a blow. Her breath came quickly as she felt the weight of realisation press against her chest.
    â€˜I will never be free again.’ The thought was appalling.

NINE
    MELBOURNE, 7 NOVEMBER 1899
    Rosetta has no idea it will be at the Melbourne Cup, the colony’s premier racing event and prime occasion for ostentatious display, that she will meet a woman whose destiny will be intimately interwoven with her own. Nor does she know that one day she will, like this same woman, be on the closest terms with some of the most celebrated inhabitants of Europe and Great Britain.
    On the morning of the Cup, a day of clear skies and brilliant sunshine, Rosetta’s chief preoccupation is the challenge of accommodating her stays. Though she is still only nineteen and it has taken some time for her pregnancy – the result of her disastrous wedding night – to show, still she struggles with the lacing and the many hooks and eyes.
    There has been at least one redeeming feature of being with child. ‘Louis, you really cannot expect me to share a bed with you in my