“They are all safe,” said Ranald. “Can you walk a little?” He stood and moved to the door. Lacroix followed him. After the light in the house he felt blind outside. He took the other’s arm and let himself be guided. They walked a mile. Perhaps it only felt like a mile. Other than their own footsteps it was just the night birds and the now-and-then sound of running water, like the playing of small glass bells. They came to a house. It was on its own and loomed out of nowhere. Ranald tapped at the door with his elbow but went in without waiting for an answer. The door was very low. Even men of modest stature—and neither Highland infantry nor light cavalry were tall—could brain themselves going in in a hurry in the dark. Lacroix thought of the grave barrows he had explored as a boy with his father on the Wiltshire Downs. His father’s bent back, the dance of the candlelight. It was well known that wild men sometimes slept out in the barrows. Fugitives, curled in the burial chambers . . .

“Through here!”

A passage, a second door. Ranald was kneeling by the side of a fire that burned dully in the middle of the room. He put his face near the ground and blew on the embers until two or three small blue flames appeared.

“The house belongs to an old man you will see in the morning,” he said. “He is called Jesse. You can stay here. He will not trouble you.”

“In Lisbon,” said Lacroix, “I slept in an onion loft.”

Ranald nodded. He was spreading straw on the ground. He seemed to manage well enough without hands. He made a bed beside the smouldering peat. The smoke-hole was not directly above the fire-pit and the smoke gathered in lazy wreaths under the roof.

“Here,” said Ranald. “It is good to rest now.”

Lacroix sat on the straw. Ranald held out a tin cup to him that Lacroix assumed would have whisky in it but it turned out to be water. He drank then lay on the straw. Ranald draped a blanket over him. Like a mother, like a sister. Lacroix spoke for a while though he did not know if Ranald was still there, if anyone was. He shifted himself, writhed worm-like, until he had his face under the smoke-hole and could see through to the sky, a single blue star. The music of the old woman’s song went through him like the blood-memory of the sea. He was being handed down, deeper and deeper. For a while he did not dare to shut his eyes, to lose sight of the star. Then he could not fight it any longer and he let himself go.

10

They headed north on tracks, greenways, hollow ways. The river was never far away. If they could not see it they could hear it, or see between the trees the light it carried.