However, I wasn’t blind to natural grandeur where I found it. I acknowledged the wild beauty of the snaking S-bending harbour, and the graceful curve of the old harbour wall, and the fierce enfolding cliffs guarding the mouth, in the shape of icthyosauri snoozing. The effect, from where I had at last found some stable ground to stand upon, was of a vast marine amphitheatre, the perfect playhouse for extravagant natural melodramas, whose acoustics would be remarkable, I was able to imagine, when the wind was right. Even now, on a still day, I could hear as if they’d been amplified the words of carolling families a couple of hundred yards away, on the other side of the water, across the slender waist of the S. Thanks to such tricks of air and stone I have since, from a similar position, listened in to Lance Tourney’s grunts as he stretched and bent himself in readiness for the call of destiny. And I have heard Camilla too, far away from me, laughing in the night at the jokes of other men, just as I heard her on this day, way way below me, even over the chug of the little fishing boat that was bringing her in.

Don’t ask me how I knew it was her. I had only met her once at Fitzpiers’s party and she hadn’t come close to laughing then. (Who had?) But there are some things you just know. Sharon knew whose baby she was carrying, I knew from whose chest that laughter came. I scrambled down the slate escarpment, which did my shoes no good, and I waited for her at the top of the stone steps that were built into the harbour walls. I couldn’t boast much familiarity with the logistics of boats and harbours but I reckoned that if she ever was going to come up out of the water it would be by means of those steps. You can’t keep a smart Jewish city boy down: I hadn’t been in the village above two hours and already I was getting the hang of the way things worked here. Who was to say that they wouldn’t be electing me mayor, or beglerberg, or hetman, before the week was over?

Out of breath, as much from apprehension as from exercise – like Cortez (forget the stout) on the penultimate ridge – I watched for Camilla and her crew to snake into sight.