He told himself that if he were to engage his fellow passengers in conversation and learn something of their lives, he might be able to inhabit the days and nights with better grace, but he could not force himself to do this. Sunk so deeply into his own agonies, his head down, his arms folded and pressed against his chest, he knew he appeared almost as a madman might appear. On the rare occasions when he walked about the decks, or took a meal at a communal table, he saw what he created in people’s hearts: a feeling of unease. It was as if they feared he might do them harm, and a part of him believed they were right to fear this, because he could no longer accurately judge what he was capable of doing or saying.

When asked what he did for a profession – not wishing to risk having his doctor’s skills called upon during the voyage – he told his fellow passengers that he was an archaeologist. He invented a site on one of the hills surrounding Bath where a Saxon burial pit was supposedly being unearthed. And he found, as he anticipated, that nobody was truly interested in a past so distant from them. They had left England and its violent history behind them. They didn’t want to think about slain bodies and axe-heads of stone. They were going to the New World, which perhaps they imagined as a place of untouched vacancy, where History had never made landfall, where they would hold untroubled sway for the rest of their lives.

For Ross, the past was his only real habitation, yet it felt as though it had unfixed itself from any irrefutable truth and become fluid, offering him different versions of events he had thought would remain stable forever. When he remembered, for instance, the day in boarding school when he saved Edmund from his bullying peers by grabbing the tallest of the persecuting boys and holding him out of the dormitory by his feet, he was now not certain whether he had not let go of the child and watched the body fall. It seemed to him that he remembered a falling. He could now believe that he had seen the boy on the ground, his neck broken. He could hear some loud commotion before he himself was grabbed by the arms and led away …

Led away where?

It could not have unfolded like this because he, Ross, would have had to endure the fiercest punishment and there was no punishment, only this memory of the boy lying on the grass and the sound of people’s fear. And it came to him then that what he was imagining was what he now knew himself to have been capable of, not what he actually did. If he was a person who was capable of letting a twelve-year-old boy fall to his death from a window, was he also capable of murdering the woman he loved?