Through the window, through the thinning fog, he could see the flickering of the emigrants’ fires and imagined for a moment the state of their hearts. Then he began to speak.

“Did you follow the war, Emily?”

“You mean did I read about it in the papers? Did people talk to me about it?”

“Yes.”

“I heard things,” she said. “One could not avoid Trafalgar.”

“The business in Spain,” he said, “it was a great . . . muddle. It is not even clear they wanted us there, the Spanish. Certainly I cannot believe they would want us there again.”

“They can manage on their own?” she asked.

“Their what?”

“They can manage alone?”

“No. Not really. They had some success at first but the French have been fighting for years against armies vastly superior to anything the Spanish can put in the field. In Spain you see generals dressed like emperors and soldiers carrying, I don’t know, billhooks from the time of the Armada. It’s not a lack of spirit. They’ve plenty of that. It’s a lack of everything else. And it was not just the army. The whole country. No real order. Bad kings and bad governments. Centuries of it. And then there’s the nature of the physical country. The only decent roads are the ones the Romans left behind them—”

“John?”

“What?”

“Is this what you want to tell me? About the roads?”

He started again. “I went out to Lisbon in the summer. We sailed in convoy from Falmouth, were nearly wrecked in the Bay of Biscay, arrived at the mouth of the Tagus on the 29th of August. I don’t think you’ve been anywhere like that. Lisbon, I mean. I know I hadn’t. Lovely from the water but to walk through the middle of it . . . Heat, stink. Most of the buildings are whitewashed so you can hardly look at them in the full light of day. A church on every street corner, their steps covered with beggars, the beggars covered in flies. Feral dogs. Ten thousand cats that look too thin to be alive but somehow are. For a week we loathed the place, then began to see something else in it. I’m not sure what to call it. You rest your hand on a stone at midnight and the stone is warm. You see a street lined with orange trees and imagine all your life you have been waiting to see exactly that.