Cornelius preferred to speak rather than eat. He had put on a waistcoat of green silk with two rows of metal buttons and a high collar. He was excited, slightly drunk. Lacroix, picking out the little bodies of the cockles with a pin, heard clearly about half of what he said but enough to piece together a sort of family history, and one that might have been made no truer by his hearing the other half of the tale. The Frends were Londoners, the children of a man in trade, though one whose true vocation had been teaching some personal and bramble-wild version of the Gospels. They spoke of their father—the sisters adding occasional asides when Cornelius paused to refresh his glass—with a wry, elliptical humour, that seemed to have at its roots more fear than love. The impression was of a great high-coloured puppet, a Mr. Punch, spouting Revelation and using his tools more for the disciplining of his children than the earning of their bread. There were followers (tailors, printers, carpenters). Sunday meetings in the parlour, hours of prayer. Visions, trances. Jane was the angel lifted on to a stool to sing the psalms. Emily was valued for her prophetic dreams—“She made them up,” said Jane; “I made up some,” said Emily—though valued even more for her ability to make two and six feed them all for a week.

“Of course,” said Cornelius, “they were not called Jane and Emily then.”

Lacroix raised an eyebrow.

“I was Basemath,” said Emily. “Jane was Tapeth.”

“Tapeth?”

“And Basemath. The daughters of Solomon.”

“You chose new names for yourselves?”

“Not I,” said Cornelius. “I am unaltered. Original.”

“Thorpe chose our names,” said Jane. “He said our new names should be like empty boxes. For us to fill as we liked.”

“So you are no longer the daughters of Solomon,” said Lacroix. “We are Thorpists!” cried Cornelius. “Phyrronists! Free livers!” Lacroix tried the ugly cheese. It fizzled on his tongue, tasted briny, rotten, creamy, unaccountably good. He drank a glass of wine. He didn’t want anything stronger. He was experimenting with clarity, with time in its ordinary clothes. And he liked these people, liked their company, felt no urge to blur their faces with strong drink.

Through the windows, the day seemed powerless to put itself away.

Cornelius set out in a new direction. He spoke of his excavations, the things he had found in the hill—not the hill behind the house, another, further down the coast. Beads, pottery. He had even found bones, though Emily insisted they were merely the bones of a cow. “But tell me, Lovall. How is she qualified to tell a man’s bones from a cow’s?”

“I am as qualified as you are, brother.”

“Thus speaks Basemath!” said Cornelius, raising his arms above his head as perhaps the congregation had once done at their father’s prayer meetings. Then he winced and touched, tenderly, the sides of his face.