They sat on a bench. The smell of fish was as strong in the bar as it had been on the front by the pots. It leaked from the men’s clothes, their homespun, their shoes made of bark or sealskin. One man seemed to be wearing birds on his feet and it was hard not to comment on it. A bottle was asked for, a bottle was brought, and though there must have been complicated rules pertaining to hospitality, the offering of gifts, rules stretching back to the time of the brawny saints, the islanders seemed glad enough to forget them in another’s ignorance. Medina topped up tumblers, tin mugs, vessels of horn. He made encouraging remarks to them, sometimes in Spanish.

“Anyway,” said Calley, raising his glass. “We’ve been wanting to hear about a friend of ours. Someone you might have seen . . . ”

The men listened and when Calley had finished those who had understood translated for those who had not. There were glances and nods, then one of the English speakers, a sonorous voice, his English full of strange inversions, unexpected stresses, said there had been an Englishman, though whether he had arrived recently or perhaps during the War of the Three Kingdoms dressed in the armour of Cromwell’s New Model Army, was unclear. There was a long teasing-out of details. Calley could be patient when he needed to, when there was some advantage. Slowly, the Englishman took shape. He had come alone, in the summer, a week or two before the feast of Almus. The fiddle could not be confirmed but the man with the birds on his feet thought there was one, yes, and that the Englishman had played it at the landing place and the bairns had danced to it.

And now?

He has gone to Cola, said another. He pointed to a corner of the bar. Calley and Medina looked there. A wall.

“It is an island,” said the man. “You may go there tomorrow I think.”

“And why did he go to this other island?” asked Calley. “Why did he leave here?”

The question, translated, produced an answer they all seemed agreed upon. One word, a single word, not English. Calley and Medina waited. The word was passed about, flew from mouth to mouth until the most confident of the English speakers, his face in an ecstasy of concentration, suddenly opened his eyes wide, nodded emphatically and said, “Grief.”

They reached Cola the next afternoon. The sea was calmer and they were not sick this time.

On Cola the story of the Englishman thinned out. What on Mull had been plural and feathered became, on the new island, a single voice, thin as a bootlace, the speaker not from the island at all but an official of some sort, dressed like a lawyer and there to collect rents. It was true, he said, there had been a stranger but he had stayed on the island no more than three days.