He folded the cartridge paper, cut it with his clasp knife until he had eight rectangles laid like playing cards on the blanket. He glanced at the lamp, the flame, then opened the bag of powder and the larger bag of lead balls. The first cartridge fell apart in his fingers but the next was a passable success and the third—a neat tube of ball and powder, a loop of thread wound beneath the ball—was one he might have shown to the colonel and won a nod of approval for. When he had finished, he gathered the cartridges together, put one aside, and after looking round for somewhere to keep the remainder, lifted the fiddle from its case again, opened the little lined box that lay under its neck, and stowed the cartridges there. It turned out to be perfectly sized for them.

He half-cocked the pistol and loaded it with the set-aside cartridge. Powder, ball, wadding. Everything pressed home with the swivel rod. When he had primed the pan he went on deck.

It was the first of the dusk, the sky mostly clear, the wind steady from the west. To starboard, the land, though miles off, was picked out with strange precision by the low sun. He knew roughly where they were and that the distance held mills, foundries, towns, whole cities darkening with human population, yet he could see no smoke haze or glint of fire. Only bays and headlands, pristine and fret-like under a sky the colour of irises.

He drew back the hammer to cock the pistol fully, held it at arm’s length, then, after a second, brought it back to his chest, barrel to the sky. It seemed wrong somehow to shoot towards the land, even if the ball would only travel a fraction of the distance, and he crossed to the other rail where there was nothing but sea, the flaring sun, an infinite play of shadow on the water. He held the pistol out again. The gun had no sights—it was not that type of gun—and there was, anyway, nothing to aim at but the sun itself. He breathed in, breathed out, slowly squeezing the trigger. Squeezed it a little harder. Felt it start.

6

Tom had just left. He had smelled of the fields, the animals. He had smelled as close as a man can to a May morning. She had made no mention of it, of course, it was too whimsical, but she served him his coffee in one of the cups reserved for the family, one of a set with gilded lips, the porcelain painted with wild flowers. She had not done that before. The cups were old and beautiful and very fragile.

She washed it now, washed away the grounds (that she might have studied to tell her fortune), dried it on her apron and set it back among the others in the dresser.