SPOILERS!!!
In Dunedin BAo goes to the meeting led by the mayor. Everybody is against the Chinese popularion, and they tell exaggerated tales about Chinese workers. Bao tries to defend his compatriots, but it is useless. The next day Bao is chased by some white men and is given a tremendous hiking, and the mob crowd in the area where the Chinese live, threatening them. Peta has heard about it and reaches home to tell March and Aroha. What Aroha thinks is that Bao is dead, and this just confirms the curse. March takes the lead, and both Aroha and March go to face the men. March has guns, and when she shoots twice, the men disband. Aroha finds Bao badly injured, but alive, which means that the curse is broken. Bao is taken home, and the doctor tells them that his life is not at risk, but he needs to rest for a few weeks.
Robin is having more and more problems. The newspaper portray him as a idle social butterfly, who enjoys shallow entertainment, whereas his workers hardly make money to get by. March does not like it either, and she goes to talk to a journalist, Silas Spragg, and she suggests they do an experiment. She will live as one of the seamstresses for a month. So she is hired by the competition, and starts living with Leah and the Smiths. March realises that life is not as easy as she thought.
Robin has decided to volunteer in the Anglican church as a way to make up for all the problems he has. There he meets Reverend Burton, who we saw before in the Sea of Freedom Trilogy, and Robin starts helping in the soup kitchen. Reverend Burton is amiable and welcoming. While working in the soup kitchen, Robin runs into Bertram, his old fellow actor in Vera's company, and they talk. Robin says how he is not good at managing his company and how he misses being an actor. Bertram tells him that if he has money to burn, he should sell his companies as he is doing more harm than good, and he can use his money to create his own company and theatre, and Bertram is willing to help. Bertram tells him that he has stopped drinking, and that happened when his wife, who he had been estraged from, died. Now he looks after his sixteen-year-old daughter, Lucille. Robin feels he needs to talk to someone, so he decides to approach the reverend., and that is how he also meet his wife, Kathleen, who was one of the main character in the aforementioned trilogy. When Robin tells him about what he has talked to Bertram, Kathleen has no doubts that he has to do it and follow his dreams.
In the factory there is a new girl, Lucille, who is Bertram's daughter, who feels very cold. Emily comes up with the idea to make fire in a corner. That proves to be a bad idea, as the factory starts to burn. March and Leah and some other women are trapped on the third floor. March orders the woman to make a rope out of denim, but the rope reaches as far as the second floor. Then Robin appears, and he has the idea to use the carts containing fabric for the women to jump onto, and that is what they do. Bertram is desperate trying to find his daughter, and when he describes it to Robin, he knows that it is a girl he saw in the barn. They run there, and Lucille comes out of his hideout, crying and saying that the fire was all her fault.
I wonder how things will pan out now and what Robin will do with his ideas for the theatre.
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