He blabbed to the old man things he had not spoken of to anyone. The lancers in the snow. The man who crawled out of the forest with most of his face slashed off and who lay by their fire with his shirt over his head and was dead by morning. He told him about the killing of the horses at Corunna, the troopers ordered to execute their own mounts. A first order to shoot them, a second order to cut their throats. Both botched.

Did he listen? Could he make any sense of it? Ravings in a foreign tongue? About the rest of it he said nothing. He had no story yet with which to speak about that.

On the fourth or fifth day—the sixth?—he was woken by rain falling through the smoke-hole. It was not heavy and he lay still, letting it put its fingers through his hair. A cold rain with a clear marine smell. When he opened his eyes he saw first the marbled grey of the sky above the thatch, then, turning his head, he saw, close beside him, a pair of narrow boots—laces, eyelets and hooks, the black leather spotted with mud. Above the boots the hem of a dress, a coat. He looked up. A blonde face with ringlets of blonde or even golden hair, was hanging over him. She watched him a while, without much expression. Then her face lifted, the boots turned, and there was nothing but the suggestion of a scent that had not been there before and did not belong to the old man or the fire or the dogs or the rain. He was puzzling over it when another pair of feet came into view, a pair of metal pattens, buckled around shoes. He rolled his head. A darker, plainer face looked down at him, a pinched gaze, a frown. She spoke. He shook his head and she spoke more loudly.

“My sister thought you might be Thorpe,” she said. “But you’re not.”

She moved away from him. He saw Ranald in conversation with the old man. The old man had stopped his singing and seemed suddenly quite ordinary. Then Ranald came and squatted on the ground beside Lacroix.

“Are you fit to ride?” he asked.

There was a pony outside. It looked wily and bad-tempered. With Ranald’s help, his stumped wrists, his hooks, Lacroix climbed into the saddle. The two women were there, the blonde one in a blue cloak, the other in a brown coat like a man’s coat. It may, indeed, have been a man’s coat. Ranald had said they were the Misses something, sisters who lived on the west side of the island. The one who had spoken to him had certainly not sounded local. A southern voice. A city voice? Not, he thought, a gentleman’s daughter. Not quite. Even in a reduced condition one recognised such things. Could not avoid recognising them.