“But this is excellent,” said the man. “We are Frends and you are Lovall!” A look of childish excitement came over his face. He held up what he had been washing. “Do you want to see what I’ve got here? Amber beads. We found them yesterday. Ranald and I. Where do you think they come from? Eh? Amber is derived from the resin of trees. There are no trees on the island. None to speak of.”

The woman said, “Mr. Lovall is not well, Cornelius. He needs rest.”

Cornelius wrinkled his nose. “Emily will look after you,” he said. “It was your coming ashore on a cow that made us think you might be Thorpe. It’s the sort of thing he would have done.”

Lacroix nodded. He looked to the woman, the dark-haired sister. (Where had the other gone?) He expected her to lead him through one of the doors at either end of the room, or perhaps up the stairs. Instead, she went to the tongue-and-groove wall at the back of the room, pushed at it and swung open a piece of the wall the width of five or six planks. There had been nothing to suggest the presence of a door. No handle, no visible hinges. Cornelius laughed. “It was what decided us on the place. Who does not wish for a secret room?”

Inside, it was ordinary enough. No grotto, no workshop of filthy creation. It was narrow, ran parallel to the large room, had a window looking over the land at the back of the house.

He sat on a chair. The woman came and went. Linen, cushions. A chamber pot! There was a couch under the window that was changed, with some small effort of dismantling, into a truckle bed. She made it up. He watched her, her briskness, her slight clumsiness. Then he pointed to the instrument hanging from a peg at the far end of the room. “Who plays that?” he asked.

“I do,” she said, tucking in the blanket at the bottom of the bed.

It was not quite a lute or a cittern, not a Spanish guitar, but something like them all. There had been one, all unstrung and in poor repair, in the corner of his music master’s room at Wells.

“It’s an English guittar,” he said. “Or is it a Scottish guittar up here?”

She answered him but spoke to the bed. He could not make out the words. When she was finished she stood back from the bed, pushed a lock of hair behind one ear, turned to him. He noticed again the redness of her eyes. It was the smoke from the weed-burning perhaps.

“There are no curtains or shutters,” she said. “Can you sleep in the light?”