Medina understood, of course. Tea, the proper making of it, the knowledgeable enjoyment, was, like British sea power, a mystery a foreigner could only gaze upon, awed and confused, an idiot at High Mass. It was not personal. Medina did not think Calley disliked him, or disliked him particularly, it was simply that he loved his country. Or it was not love he felt, but a feverish insistence that seemed to Medina not easily told apart from despair. The cattle, the buildings, the ships, the clothes, the roads, the food, the sky itself, all were the first of their kind. And at the centre of this tangled passion was the army, or more particularly, Calley’s own regiment of foot, whose history he knew from its first being raised in northern shires for the purpose of killing Jacobites. Every battle, every honour, the good colonels and the ones who ought to swing, who ought to be stuck on a fucking pole. When he spoke about the army he was serious, and what he had to say he had considered, on long marches, on long nights squatting at the side of green-wood fires in the rain. Infantry was what counted. Sappers he respected. He did not object to artillery. Cavalry, however, he did not like. Cavalry did not win battles. Cavalry did not know what it was to stand in line while the enemy guns swept away the men on either side of you, made them non-men, butcher’s trash. They thought war was a fox hunt. They were barely soldiers at all.

To amuse himself, Medina sometimes asked Calley his opinion of the Spanish army. In the last two weeks it had become almost a game between them. Medina would ask and Calley would shake his head as though he could not find the loose end of his derision, did not know how to start. When he did begin he was fluent and looked grateful to have a target worthy of his contempt, relieved, though once—they were on the deck of the Medusa, the English coast newly in view—he said, “At least you’re not Portuguese,” and this, some while later (he was learning, slowly, to translate this man) Medina understood as kindness.

The next morning when he woke, Medina was alone in the room. He looked quickly to see if Calley’s pack was gone but it was on the seat of the chair, arranged there with a casual precision, so he would know, when he came back, if it had been touched.

What was it like to trust no one? Was it wise? Or was there a small file, like a watchmaker’s file, that rasped away at the heart until, one day, in the crossing of a street, the middle of a sentence, you ceased to be human at all?