In the hotel parlour the air was a fug of tobacco fumes, and under that the slightly sweet, slightly pissy scent of island tweed. The company was mostly men. One of them was singing and Lacroix thought it was a song he had first heard the night he wandered into the house at the bottom of the hill, the night Ranald sat beside him in his red coat asking if he had come far.

When it was finished, people began to notice the newcomers. They glanced at Lacroix but at Emily they stared. It was as if, in their heightened mood of parting they felt themselves visited by a figure from one of their tales of misfortune, one of their endless tales of misfortune. Lacroix thought he might need to say something—an introduction, an explanation—though feared he would sound like the manager of a fairground sensation, that they would expect him to promise she would tell their fortunes or stand unflinching against a door while he threw knives around her head. Then he saw Spinkey crossing the room in his gear of 1780, and it was clear from the way the Russian held out his arms that he was equal to the moment, that a show of largesse was in the offing, that it would be quietly approved of by the company, and that they would not need to spend the night camping beside the water. He greeted Emily like a fellow exile. He looked at her, held her sightless gaze without a trace of awkwardness, as though his work had somehow habituated him to the appearance of blindfolded women. There was a room. The very last he had. It was on the top floor of the hotel. It was simple, bare. He was ashamed of it. It was where the cats slept. But if they thought such a room would not insult them he could make up a fire, bring up hot water . . .

A girl was summoned, the same one who had shown them to their rooms the last time they stayed, the putative daughter. They went up the stairs with her—the girl first with the candle, then Lacroix with the bags, then Emily holding on to a fold of his coat. Over four flights of stairs she stumbled only twice. The room was, as they had been told, a dormitory for cats. It smelled of cats and of what they had brought up there but it was, otherwise, a perfectly good room with a window that looked out over the harbour. Lacroix, after a certain amount of struggle, got the window to open. They were, on this floor, just above the fog. The moon was directly ahead of him. A fist’s width to the left of it was a star or planet, blue and trembling.