‘Where can I buy some wood to tide us over?’ he said, trying very hard to keep anger out of his voice.

‘We have barbecue packs,’ the checkout lady said. She also seemed unsure, casting a nervous glance at Crimplene as if she was bucking an agreed plan. ‘We sell them to tourists at a big…I mean for premium prices. There’s ten logs per bundle at five dollars a bundle.’

Max thought back to the enormous woodstove and he thought of Pippa’s fingers, tinged with blue from the cold. He looked at the four women in front of him. They stared straight back and he felt the anger again. Sure, he was a stranger, and it was none of his business, but he remembered the shadows under Pippa’s eyes and he couldn’t stop being angry.

Anger achieved nothing, he told himself. He was here on a mission. He had to focus.

‘How many bundles do you have in stock?’ he asked.

‘Forty maybe.’

‘If I buy them all will you deliver?’

There was a general gasp. ‘That’s wicked waste,’ Crimplene started but the checkout lady was seeing dollars.

‘Sure we will,’ she said. ‘When do you want them?’

‘You can’t,’ Crimplene gasped but the checkout lady was looking at a heady profit.

‘Now,’ Max told her.

‘I’ll get hubby from the back,’ she said, breathless. ‘For that amount Duncan can get his backside off the couch and I don’t care if it is against what you want, Doreen. Your precious road can wait. It’s uncivilised, what you’re doing to that family, and I don’t mind who I say it to.’ Then as Crimplene’s bosom started to swell in indignation she smiled at Max and gazed lovingly at the very expensive produce in his trolley. ‘Do you want me to ring these through?’

‘Not yet,’ Max said, moving further down the aisle, away from the women he wanted suddenly-stupidly-to lash out at. Pippa was to be neglected no longer, he thought. If he bought the entire store out and the population of Tanbarook went hungry because of it, then so much the better. Vengeance by Commerce. He almost managed a smile. ‘I’ve hardly started.’

‘Go tell Duncan to start loading wood,’ he told the ladies. ‘Now do you know where I can buy fish and chips? Oh, and a clothes dryer?’

‘He’ll probably abscond with my thirty-two dollars and fifty cents.’

Back at the farmhouse, the kids and Dolores were out on the veranda waiting for Max’s return and Pippa was starting to think she’d been a dope. What if he never came back? She hadn’t even taken the registration number of his car.

Who was he?

Max de Gautier. The royal side of the family.

Pippa smiled at that, remembering Gianetta’s pleasure in her royal background. Alice, Gina’s mother, had tried to play it down, but Gianetta had been proud of it.

‘My great-uncle is the Crown Prince of Alp d’Estella,’ she’d tell anyone who’d listen. After the old prince died, she’d had to change her story to: ‘I’m related to the Crown Prince of Alp d’Estella.’ It didn’t sound as impressive, but she’d still enjoyed saying it.

But it meant nothing. When Alice died there’d been no call from royalty claiming kinship. Gina had married her Australian dairy farmer, and, storytelling aside, she’d considered herself a true Australian. Royalty might have sounded fun but it hadn’t been real. Her beloved Donald had been real.

Marc came in then, searching for reassurance that Max would indeed return.

‘I don’t know why he’s so long,’ Pippa told him, and then hesitated. ‘Marc, you remember your mama showed us a family tree of the royal family she said you were related to?’

‘Mmm,’ Marc said. ‘Grandma drew it for us. I couldn’t read it then but I can now. It’s in my treasure box.’

‘Can we look at it?’

So they did. The tree that Alice had drawn was simple, first names only, wives or husbands, drawn in neat handwriting with a little childish script added later.

Marc spread it out on the kitchen table and both of them studied it. Marc was an intelligent little boy, made old beyond his years by the death of his parents. Sometimes Pippa thought she shouldn’t talk to him as an equal, but then who else could she talk to?