They laid Billy in the boat and cast off on the slow-running river. They gave him the golden candlestick to cradle in his arms, as a child would cradle a loved toy, to soothe him to sleep.

QUEEN OF THE ISLANDS

The ship left Plymouth at the beginning of August.

It shuddered and rolled through the early summer storms of Biscay and came into calmer waters off the coast of Portugal, where it took on more passengers and supplies before pressing upon the vast and empty seas that broke on the shores of Africa. After numberless weeks, or days counted at approximately eighty to ninety – in a world where everything was approximate and at the mercy of the wind – it would, or might reach its destination, which was Australia. One of its ports of call was Singapore.

It was an old three-masted brig, the Queen of the Islands, carrying English and Scottish emigrants who had decided to exchange the quotidian for the unknown and who carried with them all that they wished to salvage from their former lives, which was not much. Many were burdened with babies, both weaned and unweaned, some nurtured with precious care and some hauled around carelessly, like unnecessary luggage, as though they were not really wanted on the voyage and not expected to survive the journey. Already, before the coast of France was gone from sight, one baby had died, when its mother was too seasick to produce milk for it. The little body was wrapped in sacking and sent sliding down a plank into the ocean. The human parcel was so light, it floated obstinately on the waves for a good few seconds, before the water reared up in a sudden sweep of shimmering green and drew it under.

There were also convicts aboard. They were housed in darkness, in the space the seamen called ‘’tween decks’, below the waterline of the ship, and they were almost never permitted, it seemed, to come up into the light, to breathe the fresh air. It was said that you could travel on this journey and never see them. For their crimes, they had been placed in a shadowy region where none but they would ever be found. But sometimes, as you climbed down towards the bowels of the Queen, you could hear the sound of hammering, as though these unhappy people had been put to keep building and repairing the ship, even as it sailed on.

Mostly, Valentine Ross kept to his cabin.

Remembering the ‘hutch’ he had been shown aboard the Rainsford, he was grateful that in this dark little space on the berthing deck of the Queen of the Islands he could at least stand upright. The bunk, where he was to spend so many uncountable nights, was hard and narrow, but there was at least a straw paillasse upon it and a pillow which might once have been plump with feathers, but which now resembled a slab of pastry dough.

Ross had stowed his few possessions, which included a pharmacopoeia containing tincture of Jesuit’s Bark for fever and guaiacum for syphilis as well as opium, mercury and arsenic, in a sea chest, which also served as a table. In this materia medica resided Valentine Ross’s one frail hope of a future. He spent much time on his knees, in a slumped attitude oddly resembling prayer, staring at the bottles and phials. With these, he thought, he might possess the power to rescue his brother from whatever maladies had befallen him. And if he could do this, then his life would not remain the futile thing that it now appeared to him – a life of empty yearning, failed endeavour and sudden, unanticipated cruelty. It would take wing again. He would have saved a beautiful soul.