‘Come on, it can’t be that bad,’ Collis chided him.

‘Oh, no? Well, there’s plenty of fog and fever in San Francisco, apart from thieves, and rats, and Mexicans, and winter rain. And the Chivalry will do their darnedest to kill you off, if they don’t like the look of you. And if you go sniffing around Laurence Melford’s daughter, that’ll be sudden death.’

‘You didn’t tell me he had a daughter.’

‘Oh, sure he does,’ said Andrew, tipping back his wide-brimmed hat and looking up at Collis with cynical amusement. ‘Laurence Melford has the tallest, most toothsome young daughter you’ve ever seen in your life. She looks like her mother, you see, Althea Melford, and she’s a rare beauty, only the general opinion is that Sarah Melford’s even finer. But old man Laurence don’t like the idea of anything but the cream of the cream for Sarah, as far as a husband’s concerned, so the suitors get kicked out of the front door just about as fast as they try to get in. That’s just a warning, if you ever get as far as meeting the Melfords.’

‘I’ll take it in the spirit it was given,’ said Collis. ‘Now, will you join me for lunch?’

Andrew Jackson Hunt shook his head and stretched out his legs even further. ‘Round about noonish I’ll have myself a measure of bourbon and a dry cookie,’ he said. ‘That’s all that a man needs.’

‘Please yourself,’ said Collis, setting his hat straight.

Andrew nodded. ‘I generally do. Be seeing you.’

In the week that followed, the Virginia steamed slowly down the coast of Georgia and Florida, with the sun hot and high overhead during the day and the passengers sleeping under awnings on the decks or fanning themselves in their cabins. Gradually, the coastline of Florida broke into fragmented keys, rafts of palms and grass on a remote, sapphire-blue sea, and then they were alone on the Gulf of Mexico, under a faultless sky, and an ocean that was marked only by the wide white wash of the Virginia’s paddles and the shadow of the smoke that trailed from her funnel.

Collis, after shaving in the confines of his shared cabin and breakfasting on oranges and fruit pasties taken aboard at Jacksonville, would walk the promenade deck with Hannah West until it was time for midmorning coffee. In her white and lemon-coloured summer dresses, under the shade of her white tasselled parasol, she looked even more desirable, and Collis found it increasingly difficult to talk to her in remote and gentlemanly terms. But since she had told him what she really felt about Walter West on the afterdeck at Charleston, she seemed to have become increasingly withdrawn, and now she spoke only of her childhood in Wakefield, and of what she had learned at school, and how she hoped to prosper in San Francisco. Collis found his attention wandering to a sluttish-looking half-breed girl who had come aboard with the oranges, or maybe the fruit pasties, and who had taken to sitting on the foredeck smoking thin cheroots, her long black hair blown in the wind, her toes brown and bare and her blouse loose and low.