“I would sell you one of them,” said Cornelius, emerging almost under Lacroix’s arm, “if I thought you had any money. Though I suppose Jane is not really in a condition to be sold.”

“No,” said Lacroix, “that would not do.”

The question of Jane’s condition, the facts of it, had been settled some days earlier, a supper-time conversation, an aside from Jane herself, no blushing or awkwardness. She was five months with child and the father was Thorpe. The other two had nodded and smiled as though between them was an agreement that the facts were pleasing ones, or certainly not troubling ones. Lacroix hoped his own expression had been something similar. He did not think she was disgraced, not at all, but the word had been in his head. That, and other words that belonged to the world of the barracks.

He climbed out of the trench (it would make a fine defensive position, a line of muskets, artillery on the hill behind, cavalry waiting on the far side) and stretched himself out on the heather, tipped the hat over his eyes and carried the blonde and the dark hair into sleep with him.

He woke, stifled by the hat. He brushed it from his face and sat up, slightly giddy. He was looking seawards, and though there had been nothing out there when he lay down, now, at the centre of his view, less than a mile from the shore, was a ship. She looked, he thought, like a military vessel. She looked, in fact, exactly like the ship that had stopped the Jenny and boarded her. Was it? You are going the wrong way, Mr. Lovall, if you hope to meet with the French. He had not, of course—the pockmarked lieutenant—believed a word of his story. Collecting rents! And now they were here, and he, Lacroix/Lovall, was perched on a hill on a treeless island, his face floating in the eyepieces of their telescopes.

Launch a boat, row a boat. They could be on the beach in twenty minutes.

“It is the emigration ship,” said Ranald. “For Canada.” He was standing up to his chest in the trench and must have come up while Lacroix was sleeping. On each stumped wrist he wore his false hands, two sheaths of buckled leather ending in blocks of wood and a pair of right-angled hooks, iron. There was no sign of the Frends.

“A navy ship?” asked Lacroix.

Ranald shook his head. “It is a private man who owns her though she was a navy ship once. She is called the Nessus.”

“The what?”

“The Nessus.”

“Ah, like the centaur?”

“I do not know the centaur.”

“A sort of Sphinx, but Greek. Will she stop here?”

“Here? No. Here the chiefs do not want the people to leave. They are wanted for the burning. The kelp.”

“But she is headed south, I think.”