Ross went in search of Chesterfield, to ask him to furnish him with paper and ink. He would write a letter to Jane and post it back to England, when the Queen of the Islands stopped at Simon’s Town to take on supplies. He would accuse her of bad faith, taking the ring into her own possession, when the conditions of that possession had been savagely betrayed. He would request that it be given to Sir William for safekeeping until his return with Edmund to Wiltshire.

He found Chesterfield shepherding a small group of convicts round and round the deck, as they enjoyed a brief respite from the dark hole in which they lived. The men wore leg irons and Ross could see that these had so chafed their ankles that many of them had to endure the agony of weeping sores. But Chesterfield was gentle with them, exhorting them to ‘take good gulpings of fresh air’ and to lift their white faces to the southern sun. And when Ross saw this, he retreated to his cabin without disturbing them. Confronted by people whose future was one of unremitting hard labour, who would never again be free, he pitied them. In these feelings of pity resided a guilty kind of joy.

THE MIDDLE CHILD

If Ireland had always been famed for the quantity of rain which fell upon it all year round, so that the bright greenness of the fields might be enough to dazzle the yellow eyes of the golden eagle, it was also true that one year in ten, a hot summer broke out and the green began to fade towards dry beige and above the hedgerows the air was a shimmering mirror.

It was such a summer which began after the arrival of Clorinda Morrissey and her niece Aisling in the house of the McKinnon sisters. Above the strand, the sky was the softest bird’s egg blue and when the sun went down over the sea it flared such a brilliant crimson that the watchers on the shore, if they had witnessed sunsets over the Sahara Desert, might have compared it to these.

In this exalted kind of weather, a delightful lethargy fell upon the house. Miss Elizabeth spent less time at her painting and more time sitting in the shade of the apple trees, dreaming of all that she and her sister might offer to the young stranger who had suddenly appeared among them. Miss Maeve put her vibrant energy into contriving ever more mouth-watering picnics for them to take to the strand and teaching Aisling how to press wild flowers between the pages of the McKinnon family bible. As for Clorinda, she watched with tenderness all that was going on around her and kept asking herself the same question: was she compelled by moral right to return Aisling to her life in Dublin, or might she send word to Michael and Kathleen that their seemingly unwanted girl had found a new home and ask that she be allowed to stay there, at least until the summer was over?