When he reached the ward she was still sleeping. He fetched a chair from the other end of the room and sat beside her. The woman with the red hair offered him something to read. It was a religious tract, Calvinist, an essay on the Fall, innate sinfulness, hell. He read the first two pages for the sake of politeness (he thought she might be watching him) and marvelled at how unattractive it was, how sad a branch to clutch at as you were swept down the river, how little there was in it of love or even kindness. When he glanced up, the woman was indeed watching him. She smiled encouragement; he read another page, knowing it for the despair it was. He had had such voices in his own head for months. They were as familiar to him as the folds and creases of a sick-bed. He was listening for something else now. A different voice, a different message. Or just the silence that might precede such a message. He would settle for that. A cessation, a hush.

Other visitors came to see other women. Each arrival was a moment of interest and the curtain lent a certain theatricality. Hawkers came up. A milkmaid, a woman selling thread and yarn, then a girl with a tray of prawns and periwinkles.

Lacroix decided he would leave again—an hour by the bed of someone sleeping is a long hour. He would take a turn in the town, make enquiries about the mail coach from the south, its schedule, but as he stood she woke, her right eye flickering open, her hands travelling up to the covered eye, the dressing, the bandage.

“No, no,” he said, taking her hands and settling them back on the blanket. “You must not touch.”

“John?” she said. She rolled her head on the pillow. He sat down, shifted the chair to make it easier for her to see him.

“John? I was afraid you would not come.”

“Not come?” He was grinning at her, leaning in to hear her. “Why should I not come?”

She did not answer him. She looked past him into the ward, then shut her eye, lay back, sighed, opened the eye again to look at him. In some curious way one eye seemed more expressive than two.

“Rizzo is pleased,” he said.

“Pleased with himself,” she said.

“That’s true,” said Lacroix.

“When he did it,” she said, “he was as white as paper. I was afraid his hand would tremble. Do you know how he prepares? By threading needles. He told me so. He threads a needle ten times. And John, there is a glass roof and before I lay down we all looked out. Rizzo and Mr. Crisp, his assistant. I could see very little of course but I imagined a great deal. I thought I could see Jane and Cornelius and even Ranald.”

“On the island? What were they doing?”