“I will wait for you here,” said the sailor. “I will smoke my pipe.”

They walked the curve of the bay. Lacroix described what he could see. He said he thought reading Hutton had made him into a better observer, more exact.

“I cannot stop thinking,” she said, “of where he is. I seem to see him sometimes.”

“I assume you mean Henderson rather than Hutton.”

“When I see him he is running.”

“He cannot run over the sea.”

“What if he does not need to?”

“These are imaginings, Emily. He may be a hundred miles away. He has returned to England perhaps. For all that we know he is back in the Peninsula.”

“I do not believe it,” she said. “And neither do you.”

He looked at her. With her eyes covered was she developing other ways of seeing? He thought not, told himself not (apart from anything else soldiers generally did not run unless they were ordered to). Still, it unnerved him. Emily was also Basemath, daughter of Solomon, dreamer of dreams. As Emily, she was for the moment almost helpless. As Basemath he did not know what powers she might yet have, what her limits were.

He sat her on a rock and settled beside her. They were in the shadow of the ridge but ahead of them the ship floated in a light so pure and perfectly clear he could fancy he saw, across three hundred yards, the glint of a gold ring in a sailor’s ear. A woman approached them. She was young, sturdy, carried a basket and addressed them in Gaelic. She showed Lacroix what was in her basket. Eggs, oatcakes, a ball of red wool, some combs and spoons carved from horn. She could not keep her gaze from Emily, and when she looked at Lacroix her expression was part fierce, part fearful, as if she wondered what manner of man travelled with a woman like this, her eyes bound. By tomorrow, thought Lacroix, Emily will be a story. Over time she might be folded into song. He bought two eggs from her, two of the oatcakes, then, for its redness, and because the woman’s appearance felt like part of the theatre and fate of these days, that he was in the presence of not one but two creatures touched by the uncanny, he took the skein of wool. He had no idea what the price of these things might be and if she was telling him she may as well have saved her breath. He held coins on his palm and she picked among them. The deep, deep seriousness of her! She spoke once more—a blessing, he hoped—then walked on down the beach towards the sailor.

“What’s this?” said Lacroix, and touched Emily’s face with the wool. She took it from him, sniffed it, pressed it in her hand.

“Lovely,” she said.

“And can you tell its colour?”