Making his voice high so it will project, as per his religious training, he calls out to the town: ‘Nobberians, to those of you who remain I say you have done well, and you must do well some more. To those of you who have suffered, I say you have suffered well and you have suffered so your fellow may live; and you must suffer some more. The curfew will go another day at least, so bed yourselves in a little deeper and continue praying. What God asks of you is hard and that is why he asks it of you, for it is the depth of your hardship that is the measure of your soul’s worth, and what is that puny thing measured against eternity? I would be surprised if any town on this island were as …’

He pauses, struck by one of those unwanted insights that are gifted so suddenly to the drunken, and realises that in all likelihood no one can hear him; perhaps they never could. He has addressed the town every morning since he arrived and there has never been any reply, and if there ever were one he would silence it. I compose soliloquies over a silent crowd, he thinks, pour monologues into a void, recount sermons to the dead. This is all a waste of time. There were perhaps over a hundred people here when he arrived, now there may be no more than sixty. They are dwindling, he thinks, and my faculties are dwindling with them, as though our strengths were all connected.

‘If you have a loom in your house you should be working,’ he calls. ‘If you have clay in your house you should be building, forming. Work goes on beyond the man who works it. It is the legacy we leave to our—’

About to say children, he catches himself; their children are probably dead, and he should not have them thinking too much about a coming generation that will not arrive; it is a bad line of arguing. He scrambles around in his mind to find a new way to start.

Peasants, de Fonteroy had said, are impossible to persuade, but easy to manipulate for the same reason; while the rich are even easier to break because they believe in flattery, but there are no rich here left to flatter. Fear, then, the man decides, is what the sensible sort would impose.