The Woman Who Walked Alone

A porcelain-pale Victorian belle, Iris Champneys, is auctioned off to the Earl of Lemister like a rare Sèvres vase, her dowry the only glitter in a transaction that reeks of mothballs and mildewed honor. While her sister Muriel—petal-lipped, tremulous—has been lured into indiscretion by a louche poetaster whose ink is blacker than his heart, Iris slips through gas-lit corridors to retrieve the incriminating billets-doux, only to be cornered by Lemister’s monocle, a circular guillotine that pronounces her virtue forfeit. Divorce is barked; society snickers; the young matron’s reputation is tossed like a torn doily into the Thames. Cut to the ochre vastness of the Transvaal: Clement Gaunt—once the Earl’s underling, now a sun-scorched foreman—wrangles cattle and his own heartbreak, his yearning for Iris braided into every whip-crack. Enter Hannah Schriemann, a vermilion-lipped siren in calico, who guns down her boorish husband and, spurned by Clem, frames the only man who ever said no. Seven bullet-fast years sprint past; Gaunt, now a shackled fugitive with the horizon for a prison bar, staggers onto the sun-baked caravan road where Iris—no longer a drawing-room ornament but a tavern-keeper with smoke in her hair and rifle oil under her nails—pours gin for prospectors and dreams in equal measure. Learning that the gallows await Clem, she vaults onto her mare, gallops through dust like a comet, and sells Hannah a bedtime tale: Clem is already dead, hanged for her sin. When the police haul the living man into the parlour, Hannah—confronted by her own spectral guilt—shrieks out the truth like a kettle boiling over, and two bruised souls who once danced in chandeliers now sway beneath the Southern Cross, finally solvent in the only currency that matters: absolution.