Taminah was scratching now at the strangely pigmented skin of her face. It was a sorrowful habit of hers which Sir Ralph had often witnessed and her cheeks were scarred with welts, where her nails had brought out pinpricks of blood. Sir Ralph took a long sip of the arak. Then he asked, ‘Do we need a hospital here in the forest?’

‘We will need it, rajah. I was in Kuching. I went there in my neighbour Rashid’s mule-cart to buy tallow candles and paraffin for my lamp, and as we drove along the streets, Rashid said to me, “Taminah, can you smell it? And do you see how a vapour hangs in the air?” And I looked and saw it and then I breathed in deeply and I could smell it: the Mal de peste.’

‘Dengue Fever?’

‘I think it is already in Kuching. They say that government soldiers are going to bring in cannon to fire, to try to purify the air. But if it is already there, then it will travel to us and people will begin dying. And some will look to you to help them, rajah. For why are you called rajah if you cannot help the people on your lands?’

Sir Ralph laid aside the arak and looked out at the vibrant yellows and greens of Taminah’s banana grove and the bamboos clustering down towards the river pool, and he thought – as he often did – how much he wanted everything to grow and thrive like these things, but what, in the end, could one man do against the catastrophes decided upon by Nature?

When Sir Ralph got back to his house, he found Leon lying in his room.

Leon looked pale and tired. He said he had been in Kuching ‘to go with boys’ and he needed to sleep now.

The rajah sat down on Leon’s bed. If he had not had the conversation with Taminah about the Mal de peste, he might have been more wounded by the idea of ‘boys’ than he was, but what worried him principally now was that his lover had been in Kuching and might already have caught the sickness that was beginning there.

He reached for Leon’s hand, but Leon moved it away. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘very exhausting. Want fuck all the time.’

The rajah stared at Leon – his smooth brow, his flattish nose, his sensual lips, his long black eyelashes – and thought, whatever he says to me, however he taunts me, I will never not be awed by how beautiful I find him.

‘I’ll leave you to sleep, Leon,’ he said gently. ‘But I have been talking with your mother. She tells me we must start building a hospital.’

‘I know,’ said Leon. ‘I know all about it. Bad fever. Those boys tell me while I am fucking them. I make a joke. I say “is that why we are fucking then, to keep death from the door?”’

Sir Ralph ignored this and said, ‘Taminah suggests we build longhouses and make bamboo bunks – for the sick – where the cannery was going to be sited. On that new plateau.’