Though worried for Edmund, Valentine Ross had consoled himself with the idea that, by the time the letter was in his hands, Edmund would have recovered. Now, with a sudden shiver, he understood that this might not be the case. He conjured an image of his brother lying in darkness in some fearful hovel, roofed with mud and leaves, suffering agonies of fever, dysentery and thirst, untended by any human hand. And immediately, Ross’s mind, so shrouded in blankness on his morning walks, was filled with resolution: he had to leave England without delay. By some means – though he had no idea, yet, how this was to be done – he had to travel halfway round the world to Borneo and save Edmund’s life.

He’d saved it before.

At their cold and violent boarding school, fellow occupants of Edmund’s dormitory, objecting very strongly to the boxes Edmund kept under his bed, filled with soil, leaves, worms and live insects, had one day seized the boxes, tipped their contents out of a high window and prepared to bundle Edmund himself into the void, held only by his feet in their faithless hands.

Hearing him scream, Valentine had rushed into the dormitory, assessed at once what was about to happen to his brother, approached the largest of Edmund’s antagonists, picked him up bodily, without staggering or faltering, carried him to an adjacent open window and stuck the boy’s head and shoulders out of it, announcing that he would tip him ‘entirely out’ unless Edmund was released. To his satisfaction, Valentine had seen the immediate slack-jawed panic on the faces of the dormitory inmates. He pushed his captive further out into the air and heard his screams now join with Edmund’s.

Moments later, Edmund was once again standing by his bed, white with terror and disposed to weep at the loss of his insect collection, but unharmed. Valentine tugged his victim back into the room and threw him to the floor, where he saw to his astonishment that the boy was losing control of his bladder. The sudden recognition of his own strength, his own power, thrilled him more than anything he had known. His voice was choked with excitement as he said, ‘If you touch my brother again, I’ll put you all into the Sanatorium for the rest of term.’

The capercaillie was still wandering about the field. That his presence hadn’t frightened away the bird, Ross took as a sign that the spirit of Edmund was looking calmly upon the improbable idea that his brother could suddenly appear by his side at Kuching.

Yet now Ross exhaled a long, exasperated sigh. He saw that the whole plan was preposterous. Edmund would know – as he himself knew – that such a journey towards unknown islands, towards the green darkness of swamp and rainforest, presented to him the worst fears that he could imagine. Valentine Ross was a man who was fond of order. His dedication to doctoring was born of his idea that the physician’s primary task was to identify the nature of the patient’s ‘disorder’ and to do whatever he could to restore body and mind to harmony. To travel to a region of the world where the climate alone seemed designed to make men ill, where trees crowded the sky, where ants could swarm from the forest floor into every space occupied by humankind, where leeches could burrow into the body’s veins and arteries, was a task so completely beyond his capabilities that he now wondered how it could ever have entered his mind.