They set off. He twisted in the saddle hoping to see the old man, to bow to him, but only a dog remained by the door to watch him leave. He turned back and gave himself up to the journey. Ranald walked by the pony’s head. The women, both brisk walkers, stayed several paces to the fore. There was nothing so obvious as a road or even a track but to the women, to Ranald, to the pony itself, no doubt, the way was clear enough.

It was the same bare land he had seen from the hilltop the day he arrived, a heathland of coarse grass and heather, though less broken, less riddled by water. The rain stopped. The wet grass shone. No one spoke to Lacroix and he was grateful for it. He dozed on the pony’s back, woke, dozed, and waking a second time saw, through a haze like a heat-haze, the dark blue line of the sea.

As they came closer he caught on the breezes the smell of smoke. It grew stronger and more bitter.

“It’s the weed,” said Ranald. “They are burning the weed.”

He nodded. He remembered William saying something about it, the ash, the residue, sent south and used for industry. Glassmaking. Other things too, he thought. A high value on it.

At a hundred yards it began to make his eyes itch. They mounted the grassed back of the dunes and near the top moved between two trenches where the kelp was burning. On either side of the trenches men and women poked the fires with iron poles. Ranald called a greeting to one who, standing in the bitter smoke, answered him briefly through the cloth over his mouth and nose.

The party descended to the beach. The sand was firm and the onshore wind kept the smoke from their faces. They moved by the edge of the sea, northwards, the pony sometimes choosing to walk in the surf, Ranald, slipping off his brogues, barefoot in the water beside it. The women watched him, then glanced at the sea as if alone or in different company they might have stripped off shoes and stockings and gone in themselves, worn the Atlantic round their ankles like bracelets.

Once or twice Lacroix thought to ask where they were headed but knew he would see it soon enough and that once they were there they would be back in the social world, asking questions, answering them. He supposed he would tell more lies, or more half-truths. He found himself hoping—or not hoping, imagining—they would catch him out, or that on this empty strand they would pass some man who would come close, peer up, and say, are you not Captain Lacroix of the — Hussars? Do you not know your regiment is even now preparing to embark for the Peninsula? That you are looked for at every hour?