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September 3, 1815 AD
The suit does not fit properly. The coat pulls across the shoulders, the waistcoat sits too high, the cravat refuses to hold its shape despite four attempts. William walks beside Silas through the darkening streets, their boots striking the uneven ground in a rhythm that feels too loud, too conspicuous. The Harding residence glows amber in the last light of the setting sun. Twenty yards from the gate, William's feet simply stop moving.
March 3, 1815 AD
Dawn breaks wrapped in fog as William prepares to board the ship that will carry him away from Sydney forever—but first, there is one last meeting in the Domain, one final gift, and one impossible promise that will cost them both more than either can bear to count.
LockedMarch 1, 1808 AD
The road out of Sydney is not a road at all—just an ambition carved through bush that wants to swallow it back. Thirty men in chains march westward beneath a sun that has opinions. Their feet bleed into red dust. A brown snake crosses their path without hurry. And somewhere in the column walks Jeremiah Flint, who built a life in this colony once, lost everything to drought and fire and grief, and now begins again at sixty. He has wisdom to share. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen.
September 3, 1815 AD
The women withdraw. Port and cigars appear. The fire has been built higher, the furniture rearranged into configurations that reflect alliances William is only beginning to understand. Fitzpatrick claims a chair by the hearth and stares into the flames like a man conducting an argument with himself. When William approaches, the old pastoralist doesn't look up. He's deciding, he says, whether he's a fool or a hypocrite. Possibly both. William should sit. There's something he needs to hear.
September 3, 1815 AD
After the women withdraw, Douglas Fitzpatrick corners William by the fire to confess the bribery and broken convicts that built his fortune—forcing William to confront what his own ambitions will rest upon—but before he can process the lesson, Silas arrives with news that shatters everything: Hartley's creditors are moving in a fortnight, and their carefully laid plans have just run out of time.
September 2, 1815 AD
Silas is late. Unusual for a man whose punctuality borders on obsessive. When he finally arrives at the Crown and Anchor, there's something in his bearing that William cannot immediately read. Not quite anxiety, but something adjacent to it. He's received an invitation, he says. To dine at the residence of Sir William Harding. Tomorrow evening. And he's arranged for William to attend as well. The words land like stones dropped into still water.
May 27, 1815 AD
Saturday walks replace Saturday drinks as William and Silas climb the ridges above Hobart Town, trading confessions that neither has spoken aloud in years—and when Silas admits his approach was never accidental, William must decide whether a friendship born from calculation can become something neither man expected to find.
August 23, 1815 AD
The Charlotte Anne brings Sir William Harding and the scrutiny of proper English society to Hobart Town—but on a rain-soaked Saturday, Silas leads William to a neglected warehouse on the waterfront, produces a brass key, and makes a proposition that terrifies them both: a partnership that will bind their friendship to commerce and risk destroying everything they've built.
August 23, 1815 AD
The Charlotte Anne drops anchor, carrying Sir William Harding and his household from England. The whole town buzzes with news of titled arrivals and handsome daughters. But when William reaches the Crown and Anchor, Silas barely acknowledges the gossip. There's something different about him today—a tension in his posture, a restlessness in his hands. He wants to walk, he says. Wants to show William something. Away from listening ears. The rain is falling, but Silas is already reaching for his coat.
LockedFebruary 28, 1808 AD
Ten months. Fifteen thousand miles. Thirteen men dead in the hold. And now, at dawn, a cry from the masthead that changes everything: Land ho. William Jeffries grips the salt-crusted rail and watches Australia emerge from the mist—sandstone cliffs glowing amber, white birds screaming overhead, a harbour that opens like a mouth. Beside him stands Old Tom, the man who kept him alive through the voyage. By nightfall, Tom will be gone. Some lessons cost everything.
November 10, 1814 AD
Six years have carved away the frightened Portsmouth youth, leaving something harder in his place—but when a merchant's daughter steps down from a carriage at Campbell Cove and looks at a convict checker as though he were worth speaking to, William Jeffries allows himself to want something that every careful calculation tells him he cannot have.
September 3, 1815 AD
Henry Bradshaw's interrogation cuts straight to the question William dreads most—what is he hiding?—but the answer he gives earns the merchant's rough laughter instead of ruin, and when weathered pastoralist Douglas Fitzpatrick tests him with the same bluntness, William's refusal to flinch opens doors he hadn't known existed.
LockedNovember 14, 1814 AD
She comes back four days later. The counting room at Warehouse Three becomes their sanctuary—ledgers open between them like props in a theatre whose script they're writing as they perform it. She teaches him the mechanics of colonial trade. He tells her the truth about Portsmouth, about Jack Hawley, about the theft he didn't commit. Somewhere between the manifests and the margins, something dangerous takes root. Something that could destroy them both.
April 22, 1785 AD
As news of William's birth spreads through Hanover Street, a procession of neighbours arrives bearing humble offerings—meat pies, hand-me-down clothes, and a carved wooden rattle—whilst a parish priest delivers a blessing that sounds uncomfortably like prophecy, and Edward begins to understand that the greatest inheritance he can leave his son cannot be measured in coin.
February 28, 1808 AD
After three hundred days at sea, the cry from the masthead shatters William's grey existence between waking and sleeping—and as the Resolution threads through sandstone cliffs into Sydney Harbour, he glimpses something unexpected beneath the alien birds and burning sun: not merely a prison, but a colony where ambition has carved civilisation from the edge of the known world.
September 3, 1815 AD
Lieutenant Governor Thomas Davey crashes into the drawing room like a storm in a stained waistcoat, his apparent drunkenness masking eyes that miss nothing—and when he strips bare the uncomfortable truths about how every man present actually built their fortune, William finds himself caught between two visions of colonial authority that may tear the evening apart.
LockedNovember 10, 1814 AD
Six years have remade him. The frightened youth who stumbled down the Resolution's gangplank is gone—carved away by sun and labour and the particular education that survival demands. William Jeffries is twenty-nine now, a checker with a ticket of leave in his pocket, reading cargo manifests at Campbell Cove whilst the colony's commerce flows around him. He has learned to want nothing he cannot earn. Then a carriage arrives at Warehouse Three, and a woman with copper hair steps onto the dock.
The ledgers tell one story; the gaps between entries tell another—and when Blackwood invites William to witness what happens in the warehouse after midnight, the price of admission is learning exactly how much of himself he's willing to trade for a future worth having.
LockedMay 6, 1815 AD
The Saturday marketplace has become William's refuge—a glimpse of ordinary commerce, transactions conducted in daylight, untainted by shadow ledgers and midnight shipments. He pauses at a tool merchant's stall, examining chisels of fine English steel, and feels the prickling sensation of being watched. The man who approaches is his own age, well-dressed, with auburn hair and eyes that seem to take in everything they observe. He knows William's name before William offers it. He has a proposal.
LockedApril 1815 AD
Ezekiel Blackwood is an excellent teacher. He knows the ledgers, the shipping routes, the customs officials who can be reasoned with. He knows which rules matter and which are merely suggestions. He knows how to spot a man who will bend and how far that man can be bent before he breaks. William Jeffries is learning quickly. Perhaps too quickly. There are lessons Blackwood wants to teach him that don't appear in any ledger. And there are invitations that, once accepted, cannot be refused.
September 3, 1815 AD
The second course arrives—lamb with rosemary and the finest wine William has tasted since leaving England. Elizabeth Harding pauses at his section of the table, and the conversation turns to Portsmouth. She mentions families her mother knew there. The Ballys. Do you know the name? William's heart stutters. Then dessert arrives: a trifle of ambitious construction and questionable stability. Rather like the colony itself, someone observes. Rather like all of them.
January 8, 1815 AD
When Reginald Donnelly offers William a position in Van Diemen's Land that could remake his future, it comes with a price neither he nor Eliza anticipated—and in their hidden clearing, she forces him to choose between a love that can never be more than a secret and a life that might finally be worth living.
September 3, 1815 AD
Elizabeth pauses at William's place during the lamb course to probe about his accent—she's detected Portsmouth, and her mother once corresponded with merchant families there—but when the conversation turns from dangerous territory toward the colony's power to liberate people from their pasts, something genuine passes between them that neither quite expected.
November 14, 1814 AD
What begins as legitimate consultations in a dusty counting room becomes something far more dangerous, as Eliza Donnelly offers William an education in colonial commerce—and when their lessons overflow into a hidden clearing in the Domain, both discover they are willing to risk everything for something neither can quite name.
LockedApril 22, 1785 AD
As dawn breaks over England's greatest naval port, a dockworker's wife begins a labour that will test the limits of her endurance. Her husband races through waking streets, desperate for help. What follows is a single day that unfolds from crisis to celebration—a difficult birth, a physician's unexpected kindness, neighbours who give what little they have, and a priest's blessing that carries strange weight. This is how William Jeffries entered the world.
April 15, 1807 AD
As a violent storm breaks over Portsmouth, Elizabeth and Edward Jeffries sit amongst neighbours who were once friends, watching their twenty-two-year-old son stand trial for a theft that will define the rest of their lives—whilst in the gallery, whispered certainties clash with quieter doubts about what really happened that day.
April 22, 1785 AD
When Elizabeth Jeffries's labour begins in the small hours, her exhausted dockworker husband must swallow his pride and race through Portsmouth's class-divided streets, from the cramped cottages of Hanover Street to the gleaming brass doors of the High Street gentry—knowing that the help his wife desperately needs lies in the hands of men who barely see him as human.
March 17, 1815 AD
After fourteen days at sea, Van Diemen's Land emerges from the mist beneath a mountain that watches like a judge—but when William arrives at the offices of Samuel Hartley, he finds not the mentor Donnelly promised but a too-smooth young man named Blackwood, and instincts honed by seven years of survival begin whispering that something beneath the surface is very wrong.
February 28, 1808 AD
As William's sea-weakened legs betray him on a gangplank burning beneath the Australian sun, his fate and Old Tom's diverge with the scratch of a captain's quill—one man bound for the death sentence of the quarries, the other for the government farm at Parramatta, their brief farewell carrying the full weight of debts that can never be repaid.
February 28, 1808 AD
On his first night upon solid ground in ten months, William lies awake in a Sydney barracks as his sea-trained body rebels against the stillness—listening to the alien screams of creatures he cannot name, trading grim wisdom with a man who built a life here once and lost it all, and feeling something cold and patient take root where grief might have been.
September 27, 1815 AD
News crashes into the Crown and Anchor like a gunshot—Hartley has been found hanged—but before William can grieve, the dead man's housekeeper pulls him into a back alley with papers that could give him everything and a whispered warning that changes everything else: she heard two voices that night, and the rope wasn't from the household.
September 3, 1815 AD
The dessert course arrives as a collapsing trifle—which Governor Davey immediately compares to colonial administration—and then he drops Blackwood's name directly into conversation, describing warehouse irregularities that circle terrifyingly close to William's own secrets. But what William witnesses is worse than exposure: a room full of powerful men who tacitly acknowledge they all depend on the shadow economy they publicly condemn.
April 22, 1785 AD
When the baby presents shoulder-first, Elizabeth Jeffries must endure an agonising ordeal whilst a gentleman doctor and seasoned midwife fight to turn the child—and in the golden aftermath, a dockworker makes a vow over his newborn son that the dangerous wharves of Portsmouth may not let him keep.
LockedApril 15, 1807 AD
The gallery is full. Portsmouth has come to watch. Elizabeth Jeffries sits in her Sunday clothes on a Wednesday morning, close enough to see her son's face when they bring him in. She has not slept. She has not eaten. She has rehearsed a thousand prayers, though she no longer knows if anyone is listening. The evidence seems clear. The verdict seems certain. But some in the crowd whisper of a man with copper-coloured hair who vanished before the constable struck.
July 11, 1815 AD
Midwinter finds William commanding midnight operations on the harbour and meeting bribed officials by lantern light—but when news arrives that a titled magistrate from England will soon bring old hierarchies crashing back into colonial society, he finally breaks his silence with Silas about exactly what he's becoming, and receives something harder than forgiveness in return.
March 1, 1808 AD
The road to Parramatta is not a road at all but merely an ambition carved through bush that bleeds amber resin and harbours creatures that can kill before sundown—and as William stumbles westward on ruined feet, a fifteen-year veteran of the colony begins teaching him the only lesson that matters: how to see this land before it destroys him.
September 3, 1815 AD
The walk to Harding's residence feels like a march toward execution, and when William's feet freeze twenty yards from the glowing windows, Silas must remind him that controlling what powerful men see is something he's been doing his entire life—but knowing that and believing it are very different things.
May 6, 1815 AD
The Saturday marketplace has become William's only refuge from Blackwood's shadow world—until a young merchant with blue eyes and a Bristol accent approaches with questions that feel like recognition, and an offer of friendship that seems too good to be true in a place where nothing comes without a price.
September 3, 1815 AD
The drawing room swallows William in candlelight and scrutiny, but Sir William Harding proves nothing like the stern magistrate he expected—and when the magistrate's watchful daughter pauses in her quiet circuit of the room, her glance lasting no longer than two heartbeats, William feels himself seen in ways that have nothing to do with borrowed suits.
September 2, 1815 AD
Silas arrives at the Crown and Anchor with an invitation that lands like a betrayal—tomorrow evening, William will dine at the magistrate's residence among the colonial elite, whether he's ready or not. As fury gives way to cold calculation, William must decide whether stepping into the light is the bravest thing he's ever done or the most foolish.
September 3, 1815 AD
The hallway swallows them in warmth and light. William's name is announced to a room full of faces that turn to assess him—curious, evaluating, finding him wanting or worthy in ways he cannot yet read. Sir William Harding's handshake is firm but not aggressive. Henry Bradshaw's questions cut closer than comfort allows. Douglas Fitzpatrick watches from the fire like a weathered predator deciding whether to strike. And then the Lieutenant Governor arrives, and everything changes.
March 2, 1808 AD
As the bush gives way to golden wheat fields and the government farm rises from the landscape like a promise or a prison, William learns the full measure of what this country can take from a man—and standing in the dusty yard beneath Overseer Garrett's assessing gaze, he makes a silent vow that seven years will transform him into something the system never intended to create.
End of list
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Jamie Greyson was shoved through a Portal into a dimension that shouldn't exist, by a partner he no longer trusts. In the dust and desperation of Clivilius, the son he'd only just begun to know arrives with a slit throat and no heartbeat. The lagoon brings Joel back. But when Jamie begs for a second miracle, Clivilius answers with silence. Some debts, it seems, are only paid once.
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Thrown into an unfamiliar world with nothing but her medical kit and a backlog of questions, Dr. Glenda De Bruyn never asked to lead. But when strangers start arriving—wounded, lost, and dangerous—triage becomes survival. Each decision risks more than a life; it tests what remains of her logic, loyalty, and control. As the lines blur between science and myth, Glenda must confront not only the fractures in her patients—but the ones inside herself. In Clivilius, everyone bleeds. Not everyone gets patched up.
Men are vanishing across Tasmania, and Detective Senior Constable Karl Jenkins is running out of time, patience, and sanity. Every lead points to Luke Smith—but proving it means crossing lines Karl can't uncross. He breaks into houses without warrants. He sees faces in windows that shouldn't be there. He chases the wine-soaked Gladys Cramer through high-speed pursuits only for her to slip away. His partner becomes collateral damage. His sergeant's warnings go ignored. Karl knows something monstrous is happening on this island, and he'll tear through every boundary to expose it. Even if it destroys him.
