‘Edmund Ross talks to me, as if from my God,’ he told Leon. ‘You must not be jealous of this.’

‘So you will not send him away?’

‘I do not need to. In time, he will leave. He has his own mission to accomplish.’

‘I wish him to leave you now, Sir Raff.’

‘So you say. But I cannot grant this – not yet.’

‘When will you grant this?’

‘I’ve told you, he will “grant” it of his own accord. He wants to find and capture the Birds of Paradise. When the rains are over, he will leave. He will sail to the Aru Islands and he will not come back.’

WHERE THE RED ANTS LED

As suddenly as they arrived, the storms moved away.

The sun returned and the forest exhaled its lungfuls of water as hot vapour into the sky. The relentless cry of the gibbon was heard again. The island showed itself as a thousand shades of flickering and shining green.

Sir Ralph went out into his garden, where he found several small snakes on his lawn, motionless in the hot sun, the wet grass steaming all around them. He let them be and called Leon and Edmund from the house. He told them to put on their boots. They were going to walk out along the Savage Road, inspect the storm damage, then make their way to the river, to mark out a possible site for the cannery.

As Sir Ralph had feared, the road was disturbed. Much of its surface dressing had leached away into the forest and even the white stones beneath had moved, here and there, kicked up by the violence of the rain, so that parts of the highway now stood in a state of potholed ruin. It was littered with fallen branches and leaves, nuts and berries torn off their stems in the wind. Rats were busy ingesting this scattered debris.

Sir Ralph stood still and stared. That nature had been so harsh towards a thing built to endure, a thing which bore his name and over which so many had laboured, he felt as a wound to his heart. He kneaded his chest. Then he squatted down and took up a few white stones, pressing them back into one of the potholes, as if he himself now planned to cure the road of its suffering single-handed.

Leon went to his side. ‘Don’t be a nin-poop, my rajah,’ he said. ‘More rain will come. But after all the rains, the people will work to make the road better. You don’t do it now.’

Sir Ralph knew his lack of patience to be a fault in him – for which Leon was justified in mocking him. While his house was being built, he’d walked around with a drover’s whip, never letting it fall upon the backs of his labourers, but nevertheless cracking it against the walls, announcing his dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the work. And during his brief time in England, he had found himself driven to fury by the willingness of even the cleverest of men to stand and wait when, very often, they should have acted. He asked himself how anything was done or made in a country where stoic detachment and the prolongation of decision-making were considered to be such unspoken virtues.