After leaving the coffee shop he headed straight for the Blakes’ apartments over Angarrack’s, the shoemaker’s shop, but before entering the building he felt compelled to stand and look across the sea at St Michael’s Mount. Rain pelted down at a deep slant, giving the Mount and the castle built on its top, its servants’ buildings and tall swaying trees a fairy-tale quality. The scene touched Oliver’s deeply rooted French and Celtic ancestry. Monks, soldiers and noble families had all lived on the Mount. It fascinated Oliver as much as it did Kerensa; she would tell him of the legends she knew and the fantasies she made up of dragons, giants, and maidens locked away in dungeons and awaiting rescue.

Oliver stood there now, forming a tale, with Kerensa as a kidnapped maiden and he as her knightly rescuer – to be told at bedtime of course. He ignored the cold wind and the rain dripping off his hat and coat. The tide was slipping out, revealing more and more of the ancient causeway, laid down for the passage of carts and pedestrians to and from what the sailors and mariners called the Cornish Mount. The ships moored and sheltered at its pier swayed in the wind. If he had had the time, Oliver would have called on the St Aubyns and carried across the talk from the coffee shop but the need to see Peter Blake beckoned more strongly, and Oliver cursed Blake, whom he hated, as an infernal nuisance.

He entered Seth Angarrack’s noisy, industrious workshop, the premises rented from Peter Blake, and took the stairs to the rooms above three at a time and rapped on the door with his riding crop.

A woman, hastening on from her middle years to old age, opened the door and gawped at him with her mouth wide open before shrieking, ‘What are you doing here? Go away! If you want the master he’s out and he won’t be back for hours!’

‘Then inform your mistress I wish to be received,’ Oliver retorted, meeting the woman’s hostility and lack of respect with a harsh look. ‘She is at home, I take it?’ he ended with a snap.

The woman sprang back and began to quiver. ‘You’re not welcome here, go away, go away!’

‘Who is it, Mrs Blight?’ came a gentle voice from within.

Mrs Blight did not reply and the light irregular footsteps approaching the door quickened. It was opened wider and a young woman whose appearance matched her voice looked up at the man on her doorstep.

‘Sir Oliver!’ she said, with the greatest surprise. ‘You are the last person I expected to call on us.’

‘It is your husband I have called to see, Mistress Blake,’ he said in a pleasanter tone. ‘According to your servant he is not to be found at home. I wish to see him on a matter of some urgency.’