He nodded. For the first time he felt conscious of how he must look. And God knows how he must stink. He wanted to apologise. He would shave, he would wash. Which bag had the soap been in, the Windsor soap?

“We will not disturb you,” she said.

He thanked her. He could not remember her name, then it came to him. “Emily,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. And for the first time she smiled at him.

* * *

He slept for a long time and woke to the uncertain light of an hour he could only guess at. He knelt up on the bed, elbows on the window sill. Evening or dawn? He tried to work out which way the window faced, could work out nothing, but slowly the light deepened and he knew it was morning. He felt hollow, bare as the hills. But also rested, easy, without any sharp complaint from the body. He had taken none of the tincture the day before; not much the day before that. He was sober, factual, inescapably present. He was not sure how much he liked it.

He scratched at himself then got off the bed and went to where the instrument hung from its peg on the narrow end wall. An English guittar, a Scottish guittar, the body shaped like an almond, an intricate brass rose over the sound-hole. Ten wire strings. What was the wood? He wasn’t sure, though there was tortoiseshell and ivory on the neck. Curious tuning mechanism at the top: no pegs but a brass box with a key like the key to a secret drawer in a desk. Softly, he ran his fingers over the strings, then, his ear almost against the sound-hole, he brushed them again and smiled. The guittar was tuned to play an open chord of C major. Just to touch it was to make something sweet with it.

He had slept in his shirt. Now he pulled on his trousers—the same he had lain in on the old man’s straw, that he had come ashore in—pulled on the rags of his stockings, his boots. The door, hidden on the far side, was plain enough on this, the planks painted with a scene of two men on horseback riding on a lane under the shade of trees. The style was loose, amateurish, but also vivid and pleasing, and with a sort of charm to it. He imagined the artist was one of the sisters though he could not decide which of them was the more likely.