He found Emily in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table facing the door to the outside. She had dressed herself in clothes and colours he did not think were meant to live together. She had misbuttoned the neck of her dress. Once she knew it was him, that he was alone and not accompanied by some official propelled on to the island by news of a stranger, a gunshot, she wanted to know about Ranald. He told her. “Oh Ranald,” she said. It was her turn to weep. He watched her with the openness that had become habitual, the way her tears darkened the silk. When she was easier he told her what he had seen from the hill. He said he thought it was the emigration ship, the Chiron, and that she would pass the island as the other had, a mile or so from the shore. The timing was right, the heading. What else could it be? She nodded—a slow, blind, feeling-out of his voice.

Then, after a pause during which the cat sauntered between them, hopeful perhaps that normal life was about to be resumed, its old paradise of spills and splashes, he told her he did not believe any more that Calley was merely some deranged, solitary assassin. Calley had followed orders; that was what men like him did. It didn’t matter whose orders. He would not be the last to come, he would not be the end of it. Then he told her what he intended to do. He gave to it the character of a revelation, knowing she was used from childhood to the authority of such moments (and had it not, in its suddenness, its completeness, been very like a revelation?). But for several seconds she was silent and he began to think she could not have understood him. He was about to repeat himself when she said, “And me?”

“You?”

“Yes.”

He said he could not ask her. That he had no right to.

“No right even to offer me the choice?”

“But your sister. The child. Thorpe!”

“Thorpe is the last person I wish to see. Do you not know that?”

He shook his head. He did not.

“John,” she said. “Ask me. Ask me.”