He waited in the corridor while the doorkeeper helped Emily put on stockings and shoes and one of the brown woollen robes, then they went through the heavier air of the male ward, down a flight of stairs, down the next, and turned towards the gallery and the armchairs where he had slept off the brandy. He tried to recall if he’d been happy that day. He thought he had, but his emotions of the last week seemed to have altered by the hour, to be packed like strata in rock, like one of Hutton’s “angular unconformities,” and he was thinking he might try that out on Emily, the geology of feeling, of sentiment, and what she might say of it, if she would think it clever, when a voice called out his name—barked it—and the world he had been walking in was a world no more.

“You! Lacroix! Aye, sir. Lacroix, Lovall, or whatever you call yourself now.”

A figure had risen, shot-like, from one of the armchairs. A man in a seaman’s short black coat, his head and shoulders framed by a window, a rolled cap in his hand. His right eye was covered with a patch strung on black ribbon. The other eye was trained on Lacroix like a weapon.

“It is you. I know it is. I can still see well enough for that.”

“John?” said Emily. “Who is it? He has mistaken you, I think.”

“No mistake, madam. I brought him up with me from Bristol, sat with him at my table—”

“Captain Browne?” Lacroix stepped closer. He drew Emily with him, though he hardly knew she was there.

“You did not think to come across me again, eh?” said the master. “Had washed your hands of me.”

“But . . . why are you here? You have been hurt?”

“Hurt? Oh I’d say I had been hurt. Yes. I’d say that much. Is this lady in your care?”

“She is.”

“Then I hope you were not the cause of her troubles.”

“Far from it,” said Emily. “Very far. Who is this person, John?”

Lacroix would have told her, had opened his mouth to do so, but the master reached out for him, caught hold of his free arm between elbow and wrist. Forty years of pulling rope in that grip.

“You knew?”

“Knew?”

“That he was after you, damn you! That he would come for me!”

“Who? Who are you speaking of?”

“Your friend from Spain, Lacroix. The one who calls himself Henderson.”

Lacroix shook his head.

The master went on. “Bandy legs. London voice. Face like a choirboy who’s sold himself to the devil.”

“Called Henderson?”

“Well, we know how easily a man makes up a new name for himself. Said he was in the army with you. In Spain.”

Lacroix shook his head again. “There were many of us in Spain.”

“That is not an answer.” The grip tightened.