Now, he felt like weeping. He would perhaps have wept had Leon not reminded him that they were going to the river to determine where the cannery was to be sited. But the word ‘cannery’ sparked a tiny flame of optimism in his brain. He could almost immediately see and hear the marvellous workings of such a place, like an enormous threshing machine, running on steam-driven belts. He stood up and they walked on, soon veering away from the road and taking the path to the river.

This path was slippery with mud, flooded in parts, and long before the three men reached the river they could hear the risen water in a new turbulent conversation with itself, growling up against boulders, laughing down rapids. Leon stopped and turned to Sir Ralph.

‘Sir Raff,’ he said. ‘Before we can build the cannery, you must bring the Savage Road here, to this place where we are.’

‘You are right,’ said Sir Ralph. ‘For the lumber haulage. For steam machinery.’

‘But I would suggest that we must make not just one, but many branches of the road, all arriving at the cannery site. As soon as the rains are over …’

Then began a discussion about how near the river the new enterprise should stand. Sir Ralph envisaged it, rising on stilts, an enormous longhouse, almost at the water’s edge. To bring the netted fish and the wounded soft-shell turtles as near as possible to some system of belts carrying them to the building where they would be adroitly decapitated, eviscerated, cleaned, filleted and boiled before being sealed into the cans would ensure, he felt, ‘the efficiency and speed of the operation’.

But Leon reminded him that the river was ‘like the sea’. Nothing about it was stable or predictable. In days, or even hours, it could rise ‘two heights of a man’. If the cannery was sited too near the river, it would be at risk from flooding. The success of the whole undertaking – of what Sir Ralph now called in his mind ‘The Cannery of Salvation’ – would depend upon getting the positioning of the factory precisely right. This, in turn, would depend upon engaging an engineer to work out a plan for the enterprise.

While Sir Ralph and Leon walked on, talking as they went, Edmund was distracted by glimpsing two large Swallowtail butterflies, well known to him as Papilionidae, sucking fruit and moisture from a fig tree not far from the path. He stood very still, observing them, moved as he always was by the jewel-like colours, metallic blues and greens adorning their wings, with here and there patches of crimson which always reminded him of the flash of red above a capercaillie’s eye, a wonder seldom seen but one that had once moved him to tears.

Had he had his butterfly net with him, he might have captured both insects with one skilful flick of his arm. But without any equipment he was helpless. Edmund stepped quietly from the path towards the Swallowtails. He saw that they were so concentrated on the rain-washed figs that they didn’t move at his approach. He longed to touch them, but even as he reached out his hand, they spread their huge wings and rose silently into the tree canopy.