‘Are you married to the wrong woman, then? That will bring a man to bloody ruin, sure as anything can.’

‘No. I’m not married. I’m quite alone.’

‘That’s not a good state, either. But there are remedies. This is a ships’ town. Wait till the lamps are lit, and then go down to Harbour Cottages – them little hovels set back behind a stone wall at the eastern edge of the quay. The accommodation isn’t the best, but the drabs aren’t fussy there and some of them are bonny. Even I – all skin-and-bone that I am and wearing a bleedin’ cassock – I had them all. The only thing you have to do is pay.’

Ross drank more beer. The shadowy room, lit by a smoky paraffin lamp, now began to take on an altered aspect, as if everything were moving slowly away from him, and he felt sickened suddenly, whether from the drink or from his proximity to the vicar with his filthy pipe and his tales of ragwort poison and prostitutes.

He asked himself whether this was what he wanted to do: find a woman and pour all his darkness into her. He tried to imagine some Watchet girl, fat in the rump, with a high colour in her cheeks and a slurred Somerset voice, trying to coax him towards desire with well-learned obscenities. But he knew that if he found himself with such a person, she would never satisfy his longings; he would simply want to kill her.

‘I don’t want a woman,’ he said to the Reverend, ‘I only want my woman.’

‘Well then. What’s your trouble? Drink up your ale and go to her.’

‘My trouble is,’ said Ross, ‘she’s not mine.’

Ross left The Plough and the Stars soon after this. He walked unsteadily away from Watchet and out onto the deserted road that climbed towards Kilve between hedgerows and fields of young green wheat. He’d drunk enough to feel sick, but not enough to reach that state of euphoria he’d seen in the fishermen at the harbour. He didn’t ask himself where he was headed, or where he would sleep. These things didn’t seem to hold any urgency for him.

It was dark now, but the moon that had risen above the coombs was almost full and lighted Ross’s way. He stopped by an oak tree and vomited up the beer and was glad to get it out of him, and felt light-headed as he walked on, as though he’d been purged of some unknown weight that had held him to the earth.

He threw back his head and looked at the stars, feeling as if he might almost take wing and fly towards them. Then he was lost in a reverie of the sky, imagining the different constellations moving above the far side of the world, where Edmund resided. A longing to see his brother and hold him close to him now invaded him so fiercely it brought pain into his head. But the pain was followed by a slow seepage of something like happiness into his heart as he told himself that there was a way to move his life forward, to catch a flowing tide, if he could only find the courage to leave Bath, to leave everything and everyone behind and travel in search of Edmund. It felt to him as though Edmund was calling to him – as he had often called to him when they were boys – and that now he would answer. In his arduous, easterly journey to save his brother, he would forget Jane.