She began to make her preparations straight away. Halfway through her packing, she returned to the letter and read through what she had written. She imagined Julietta looking at the terrible words, then setting the document aside, folding it into smaller and smaller configurations until it resembled some failed attempt at an origami figure. And she would hold this in her soft hand and feel that her life, too, had suddenly got smaller, that some vengeful spirit was intent on folding away her joy.

Jane took up her letter and crumpled it and threw it into the fire. To the obedient flames, which snatched at the paper and let it curl and char and fall to ashes, she whispered, ‘I refuse to do it.’

THE HAND OF THE ENGINEER

He arrived in a prau from Singapore. He carried on the boat a cargo of gunpowder, for which the rajah had paid ‘too much silver’.

Sir Ralph had not wanted to hire this man, but progress on the riverside cannery had been so disappointingly slow that Leon – whose dreams of the enterprise seemed to overturn all the other content of his mind – had insisted that the whole thing was doomed unless it were put into the hands of an engineer.

‘We do not need such a man,’ argued Sir Ralph. ‘I oversaw the building of my house by Chinese labour. I can oversee the setting up of your cannery.’

‘Not true, my rajah,’ said Leon. ‘All is desperation at the river. Logs jamming there. Men wounded. And mangroves still with feet in the water. A bloody chaos! We need gunpowder to blast – boom! Then we can begin properly. And for powder we need an engineer. I will go to Singapore and find him.’

His name was Septimus Scaife. He had learned his skills in the cold and grime of the factories of Northern England. A wound to his right hand, which left it with an unassuageable tremble, had caused his dismissal from his job as a builder of iron towers and railway bridges. Nobody in England wanted to employ an engineer with a shaking limb.

But Scaife had suspected that on the other side of the world, where methods of construction lagged behind those being tried in Manchester and Sheffield, he would be hired for good money – for his knowledge, far more than for his physical skill. And he was not wrong. He was taken on at Singapore by a Muslim rajah trying to build an aviary out of steel and wire, to satisfy his favourite wife’s love of captive birds, and it was here, as he was finishing this beautiful construction, that Leon had found him and lured him to Sir Ralph’s domain with promises of silver.

Until he had seen the river and the disposition of the forest on either side of it, Septimus Scaife had told Leon that he could not know whether the cannery scheme was workable or not. What he could say was that ‘a good sufficiency of covered buildings’ would be needed to house it and that it would be difficult to site these securely without first blasting the mangroves from the water.