The day was breezy but the breezes fitful. High cloud, slow-moving, no swell to speak of, the colour of the sea a rich impenetrable green. Emily and Lacroix were the only passengers. They moved freely around the deck, Emily’s arm wound tightly through Lacroix’s. After the hospital, the long cooping-up of the carriage ride, she declared herself relieved to be out in the air. He told her she should have tried travelling on the roof of the coach, that he had felt himself inflating like one of Montgolfier’s balloons.

“I would rather have been up there,” she said. “I would have been with you and you would have held on to me.”

“Yesterday,” he said, “we were still simply friends. Travelling companions.”

“Nonsense,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“You know it’s nonsense, John. Do you not remember our walk on the beach?”

“I remember every moment of it,” he said. “I remember you being very angry with me.”

“That part you may forget,” she said. “And I wasn’t angry with you. I was angry with how little men understand the lives of women. And not because they cannot understand but because they will not trouble to. They will go to the greatest lengths to understand rocks or the smelting of iron. They will speculate endlessly on the nature of the divine and how we should say our prayers. Women they only pretend to give their attention to.”

“Is that true of Thorpe?” asked Lacroix.

“You should not think of Thorpe any longer,” she said. “He was never your rival.”

“You knew him first.”

“Yes. And liked him. As you will like him, perhaps.”

“I hope I will,” he said, “for Jane’s sake.”

“My rival,” said Emily, “was my own sister.”

He denied it, as vehemently as he dared.

They crossed the firth, entered the sound between Mull and the headland. The day was half warm, half cool. When the bows raised spray the water wore a crown of coloured light. Out of earshot—they knew there were English speakers on the boat—they set themselves to be practical, to try, in to and fro, to sift what they knew from what they didn’t, what they could guess from what they could not. Emily started with the master. Were not all seamen notorious for their yarns? The simplest explanation for the strangeness of his story, its character of the incredible, was that it was, in part or in entirety, made up. Lacroix shook his head, said that could not be. Everything he had seen of the master, and he had seen a good deal of him on the journey up from Bristol, convinced him of his honesty. A scrupulous man, a plain speaker. And what of his injury? That was no invention.

This brought them to his assailant.

“When I think of him,” said Lacroix, “when I picture him . . . ” He faltered. She heard him shrug.