“You are welcome to stay with us,” she said. “Cornelius is delighted to have another man in the house. He will take you to his excavation. He will want your views on the origins of the world. He cannot take seriously the thoughts of his sisters on such matters.”

The rest of the morning was given up to correcting his appearance. He took his bag with him down to the water. There was a boathouse there, and by positioning himself at the far side of it he was hidden from the main house, though in such a landscape—all light, open ground and water—any sense of hiding was relative, unconvincing.

He shaved, made his face raw with the blade, then cooled it with the water. He took off his boots, stockings, shirt, glanced over his shoulders and peeled off his trousers. He walked into the water, gasped as it reached his belly, then squatted down, rubbing at himself vigorously. He plunged his head under the water and kept it there until it throbbed. Each man his own baptist. But you couldn’t stay long in such water, or he couldn’t. He came out and dried himself with his shirt then carried out a cautious audit of his bruises. In places his skin was spoiled paper. Odd streaks and flarings of brown and yellow and green. Amazing no bones had been broken, though he wondered if one or more of his ribs might be cracked. If so, there was nothing to be done about it. He pressed the water out of his hair, tilted his head to clear his ears of the sea.

When he opened his bag he saw that his nankeen trousers had been carefully rolled up and put back in. He dug deeper hoping for a clean shirt, touched the writing case, a waistcoat, a pair of woollen stockings, a neck-stock, the bundled pistol, but no shirt. His shirts were being worn by footpads in Glasgow. The soft linen. The careful stitching. Somehow the thought didn’t trouble him much. God knows they were wretched men, a wretched woman with them, but make a jury out of those he had met on the island—the singers in the house, Ranald, these curious Frends—then see who they thought most fit to wear good linen.

He dressed in the nankeen trousers, put on fresh stockings (they felt wonderful), his boots, and finally the old stinking shirt, damp now. He started back for the house but paused to lean an eye against the gap between two boards in the boathouse wall. Inside, like some patient creature in its stall, was a rowing boat twelve or fifteen feet in length, a pair of slender oars resting across the beams above. He could not imagine the Frends in such a vessel, could not at all picture Cornelius pulling at the oars. It had, presumably, come with the house and would stay in there, afloat on shadow, until they left.