He was surprised how much the remark distressed him. What of their travelling together? Their wait in the cathedral, the vigils at the hospital? Had there been no “truth” in any of that? For two, three seconds he stared at her, then crossed again to the window. He knew he would not be able to talk while looking at her. The nature of what he had to say, of course. But also the blindfold, that half-yard of grey silk Rizzo had given as a parting gift. Even more than the dressings it had replaced it made her . . . what? Allegorical. A figure from a masque, a pantomime. Like sharing a room with the Oracle of Delphi.

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?”