Twenty-three-year-old Adelaide Roberts’ stiff skirt crackled. Sweat trickled down her stomach, and she adjusted her hat to block out the biting sunlight that streamed through the banksias on the edge of the cliff. All around her, dozens of graves were marked with crucifixes that pointed to the sky like tiny ships’ masts. In this cemetery, Ma was everywhere – amid tussocks of grass, on the tongues of fungi, in windswept trees bent as if in prayer. Adelaide couldn’t believe it was two years since she’d passed away.

Da stood beside her, dressed in his best herringbone jacket, moleskins and leather riding boots. He was still handsome, but lately his face had grown weathered and his clothes a little looser. In the broad daylight his eyes were like cuts in his skin as he looked at her, seemingly for answers.

Adelaide didn’t ask what he was thinking. She already knew. He wanted her to find God and contemplate marriage. The Kaiser’s antics on the other side of the world meant her father could no longer afford to keep her. Da made a living operating boats to deliver supplies and selling wool and milk, but the war had drastically reduced the local workforce and, without help, the family farm was failing. The drought in 1914 hadn’t helped much either. Nor had a series of shipping strikes that had reduced her father’s business to peddling to the few locals that could afford what he had to offer.

But the idea of being discarded made her furious. They’d been over it so many times that she’d given up listening. He turned from her, back to his wife’s grave. The grey marble headstone was inscribed with a simple epitaph: Forever in our hearts, Harriet Roberts, 1879–1916. It was a handsome grave, as far as graves went, even though Da hadn’t had enough money to make it as ornate as he’d wanted.

Year by year the war had taken its toll, and Adelaide knew he worried about how much longer he could hold out without selling up. The forty-acre plot where she and her father lived on the periphery of Belowla wasn’t the finest land in the district. It was more suited to sheep than wheat. Da had been bequeathed the property in the formative days of his marriage to Ma by an Uncle Mordue he never knew existed until the day he received a letter from local solicitor and long-time mate Barnaby Sunderland. The land was a boon for the young married couple but was only ever considered a place to raise Adelaide and her brother Joseph, ten years her senior – until the effect of the war on the economy forced Da to think otherwise.

Da’s father had always joked that his son must have been pickled in brine, he loved the sea that much. But the jibe didn’t last after Ned left school at fourteen to work on the wharves and secured his first boat a year later. By the time the new century arrived, he’d added a dozen steamers to his fleet that ferried butter, mail and coal to places with names that danced off the tongue, such as Moruya, Narooma and Wagonga. Customers from Sydney to Eden endorsed his timely supply of goods, passengers and livestock, but bemoaned the indelible stench of the pigs.

A teenaged Adelaide grew accustomed to the odour as she and Joseph piloted her steamer of preference, Cobargo, up and down the coastline catching gurnard, picnicking on remote outcrops and finessing their navigational skills. Ned encouraged his children to borrow his boats. He relished the idea that they’d learn how to use them, gain a respect for the ocean and perhaps fall in love with the vessels too. But it was on the proviso that they only used them on his days off. Sergeant Wallace Greensborough’s son, Patrick, invariably joined Adelaide and Joseph, and the trio often returned home flushed like freshly boiled prawns.

These pursuits were brought to an abrupt halt shortly before Adelaide’s sixteenth birthday, when Ma deemed them unladylike, especially as Patrick, like Joseph, was a decade older than Harriet’s precious only daughter.

Joseph believed that peace was forged through words, not fists, but when the war broke out his parents convinced him he had no choice but to enlist. Reluctantly, he marched from Nowra to Sydney in an ever-growing column of khaki-clad young men, before sailing onward to France. The Waratah March they called it. Adelaide often reflected upon how difficult it must have been for Joseph to assimilate in the army given his views.

Ma passed away not long after that. Food prices went up, employment went down. Recognising there was a demand for wool and milk, Da sold most of his boats and bought a flock of sheep and a small herd of cows.

Honour boards listing the names of those who’d gone to the war were put up in public buildings in every town across Australia. Adelaide’s best friend, Gwynne Sunderland, daughter of the solicitor Barnaby, told her she’d spied Joseph’s name on one of these lists. Adelaide couldn’t bear to look at it, and the thought of doing so roused a sense of shame within her that she hadn’t done more to help her brother avoid the atrocities. In her imagination the letters on the noticeboard glowed with a spectral incandescence, even at night.

When she and Da had arrived at the cemetery, Adelaide had filled the vases on Ma’s grave with a mass of gardenias – the aroma danced in her nostrils now.

‘Hail, Mary, full of grace,’ Da said, his hands clasped in prayer.

Adelaide had recited this prayer so many times, but she’d never comprehended its meaning. ‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus’ made no sense to her. Nor did a virgin birth or an imaginary deity in the sky. There were many things she failed to grasp now that Ma had passed. She frequently wondered how seemingly astute individuals such as her parents could send their only son to the war despite his resistance, and maintain it was a Catholic’s duty.

‘Sacrifice is a divine blessing, Ada,’ her father would say when she voiced her feelings. ‘Want a white feather? Ask a Protestant.’

Now Joseph was living in Birmingham, England, after being paralysed by a shrapnel wound to his spine. Having relocated there with Jocelyn Moncrieff, a nurse who’d cared for him in Calais before he’d recovered sufficiently to marry her, he’d vowed never to return to Belowla while either his mother or father were alive.

Why hadn’t Adelaide intervened, opposed her parents and done more to help Joseph? It pained her to think how her life might have transpired if she had. Now Da sought to offload her, and the only one who’d understand her resistance to that was Joseph.

Her mind returned to Ma and it dawned on Adelaide that hard on the heels of death comes the realisation that unspent love has nowhere to go. Perhaps that was the embodiment of grief? Love without a home.

At her mother’s funeral, she’d stood beside the casket in the church, tormented by guilt and shame. It was her fault her mother was dead. There was no one else to blame. Whichever way Adelaide mulled it over, as she’d done countless times since the accident, her part in Ma’s death was irrefutable, a fact. While the congregation sang about the Almighty Father, Ma had looked as if she was asleep, lying there in her pale lilac dress, a little rouge showing on her alabaster cheeks. Adelaide had felt the congregation’s eyes upon her. If she could have, she would have run from the church, back through time, and stopped the tragedy from occurring. She’d have put Ma on a different horse, taken her along a different track, and then Ma would still be with her.

Birdsong brought her back to the present and she shook herself. Da glanced at her and she mouthed the prayer wordlessly with him: ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’

Adelaide adjusted the bodice of her hospital uniform and brushed back a stumpy coil of hair under her hat. She’d hacked her long, blonde tresses with dressmaking scissors after Ma died, and now was waiting impatiently for them to return to their former abundance. She scrutinised her father and found no trace of the man who had once loved her mother, only a stern countenance and a faint whiff of grog. She loved Da and knew he loved her, but they were like two points of a compass – one pointing north, the other south.

Da made the sign of the cross and wheezed heavily, his lungs scarred by tuberculosis.

‘Whose death are we praying for?’ Adelaide asked. ‘Ma’s or our own?’ She shocked herself. She’d always thought these things but never said them.

Da sighed and met her gaze. His eyes were dark, impenetrable.

‘Certain sentiments are beyond mortal knowing. God has a plan … for us all, Ada.’

‘I’m not here for a divinity lesson.’ She bit her tongue. What on earth prompted her to say such things? To speak to Da like that. She’d always tried her best to please him. She went to church, cleaned the house, cooked the meals, worked at the hospital to care for injured soldiers. In many respects, she’d become the wife he’d lost.

‘Hush!’ His eyes darted about as if he expected someone or something to appear from behind a tree. The waves hurled themselves at the rocks.

Adelaide winced as he took hold of her wrist and led her towards the cemetery’s front gate. It was as if he didn’t want his dead wife to hear. Adelaide stumbled blindly behind him, thinking of the tin of money stashed under the floorboards of her bedroom, earned from the dresses she’d sewn for the women of Belowla in the little time she had spare. When this cursed war was over, she’d find her brother and his wife wherever they were in the world, and together the siblings would set up a dressmaker’s in Sydney, just as they’d always planned, though she knew it would break Da’s heart. Bespoke garments and fine fabrics would line the shelves, a brass bell above the front door tinkling whenever a customer came or went. Women – unemployed, unmarried or widowed – would come from distant corners of the state to learn the skills required to design, make and sell clothes.

She’d got the idea from an article in The Argus newspaper about a female labour colony initiated by feminists Vida Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst, in Mordialloc, Victoria. Joseph was enraptured by the plan when his sister had put it to him. He was a rare individual with the capacity to embrace expansive notions and alternate perspectives. Adelaide was yet to unearth such a combination in another man, and she ached for Joseph’s return. Yet she was aware the brother she had known might no longer exist, was probably just a memory, a shadowy wraith who inhabited her thoughts and plagued her dreams, and she was uncertain who would arrive in his stead. She wondered whether Da ever thought about his son or even cared about the fact that he would never walk again. Joseph was dead to him – and had been to Ma when she was alive – because of his opposition to fight in a war that he said had nothing to do with him or Australia.

Adelaide looked past her father at the dust that swirled along the road to town. The local show had started and he was anxious to be there for the horse race. She hung back; she couldn’t bear to have the same conversation about finding God and a suitable husband again. In between a horn honking and the noise from a vehicle driving by, she heard ‘settle down’, ‘marriage’, ‘partner’. It was the discussion she’d been anticipating all day. But her mind was on the car that abruptly came to a stop beside her.

Gwynne Sunderland swung down from the front seat. She looked smart in her white uniform with a red cross emblazoned across her bust. ‘It’d be easier to find the prime minister,’ she said, smoothing the creases in her skirt and winking at Adelaide. ‘The matron wants us at work earlier than usual this afternoon.’

‘Certainly,’ Adelaide said and cast a surreptitious look at Da. ‘But not before we go to the show. Can you take us?’