Ten minutes later, the axle declared safe, a horn was blown, and a minute after that they were rattling through the streets of Glasgow, the outside passengers returning the waves of small boys, old men and the city’s population of inebriates and gentle idiots for whom a common coach was a masterpiece of human excitement.

Two hours out of the city they stopped to stretch legs and empty bladders. Lacroix stood with Emily beside one of the coach’s yellow wheels. Was she comfortable? Did she need anything? Had she been able to sleep a little? They had not, since their encounter that morning with the master, had any opportunity for a conversation of the sort both knew must come, and soon. This left them strangely free, all large questions, the answers to those questions (if such existed) postponed until the conclusion of the journey. In the meantime they could simply loiter in the moment. He described a cloud to her. She told him she could hear a blackbird singing.

The coachman rounded them up. They resumed their places. On the roof the poet addressed Lacroix in schoolboy Latin; Lacroix responded (he had schoolboy Latin of his own). The man with the ribbon under his chin talked about the weather. He could, he claimed, smell a change on the way, and though to Lacroix the weather seemed exactly what it had been for hours it turned out the man knew what he was speaking about. The western air began to have a hazy appearance. They passed by coils of smoke, sea-flavoured, that spread and grew denser until the scenery on either side, the grand vistas, was entirely lost in it. In the high places they were above it and looked down at a white sea they would, shortly, plunge into again. Lacroix, gripping his strap, sought to ignore it, the odd spectral loveliness of it. He was concentrating. He was trying to think. And he made good beginnings, recalled in detail the whole of the master’s narrative, examined it with a thoroughness quite impossible when he first heard it, the master staring at him like a one-eyed Torquemada.

But after each good start he came up against what he could not make sense of and he faltered and fell into fancies, and into one in particular in which he advertised his whereabouts in a newspaper—the Dundee Courier?—then went alone, north after north, to Iceland, to Greenland, all the while drawing the master’s assailant after him and away from Emily, from everyone. And then he would wait, sitting in some ice cave, ice crystals in his beard, until he saw, in all that whiteness, the tiny black upright of the monster’s approach . . .