They sat on the hull of an upturned skiff listening to the secret life of the river at night. The first ferry would not come until daybreak. (It would harden out of river mist, water-glare, the boatman, sculling, grey as a heron.) A drover arrived; they heard his song long before they saw him. When he noticed them, their silhouettes against the river, he stopped his singing and kept his distance, squatting among his cattle. Over on the far bank, by Swansea, smudges of dirty orange fire showed in the throats of furnaces.

9

The Polish woman had said thirty drops or thirty to start with but it was hard on a rolling boat among beasts who skittered in their dung, who danced on their blunt hooves when the boat went about, to measure the drug in any exact way. He put it directly on his tongue, a private rain, bitter despite the licorice. Then a swallow of whisky, mouthfuls of northern air, the public rain, the salt and rot of the sea.

The boat was low in the water; that was her type. You did not look down at the sea, you looked across at it, and with every second roll the foam broke in through the scuppers. To be on the boat was to be without any meaningful shelter. He was up by the bows. The crew—there were three of them—kept mostly to the stern, one on the tiller, the others doing little obvious besides sitting. They knew where to be dry. They sat. They watched whatever they watched, the weather, the birds, an island on the beam, an island ahead . . .

To Lacroix the islands were a surprise—how soon they came on them, how many there were, how close to each other, how varied. He wanted to call back to the sailors—“Which is this?”—but they seemed unsure still as to whether they had agreed among themselves he was there at all, an Englishman with a torn face eating fish from his pocket. To have called to them would have forced them to acknowledge him. It would, he thought, be indecorous.

And did he really care about the names of the islands? This was the tall one, this the sleek, this the bare, this like something made entirely from light and water. They were beautiful—more so than he had prepared himself for, and it comforted him a little that he had had the sense to find them, the world’s scattered edge, that there was in him, perhaps, some trace of a wisdom that could guide his actions.