‘You want to smoke, señor?’ the girl asked him.

He looked at her. She had the dark colouring and the accent of a Mexican, but there was something distinctly European about her face and her figure. She could have had French or German blood in her, or maybe even Slavic, because her eyes were deep-set and her cheekbones were angular and high. There was only a slight smile on her lips, and that was noticeably mocking.

‘You’re most kind,’ Collis told her, with exaggerated courtesy. He watched her closely as she reached into the waistband of her skirt and produced a small wooden box with a decorated label. She opened it up and offered it to him: three dark hand-rolled cheroots of Cuban Tobaccos. He took one and put it between his lips, and she leaned forward so that he could touch the tip of it to the lighted cheroot she held in her own mouth and suck it into life. While he sucked, she stared at him, very close, with her deep, moist eyes.

‘Are you going far?’ he asked her, when his cheroot was properly alight.

‘To San Francisco,’ she told him.

‘Do you know anyone there?’

She shrugged.

‘So what are you going to do, if you don’t know anyone?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Work in a bar, maybe. Anywhere is better than Jacksonville.’

‘You didn’t like it there?’

She ran her hand through her thick, greasy hair. Washed and dressed properly, he reflected, she could have been almost beautiful.

‘It wasn’t the city,’ she said.

‘Was it your parents? A man?’

‘A man? More like a dog who eats his own sick.’

Collis smiled wryly. ‘Well, I suppose we all have our troubles.’

The girl blew smoke out of her nostrils, without taking the cheroot out of her mouth. ‘This man, he was more than trouble. He was crazy. You never met nobody so crazy.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it. Could I borrow your cheroot again? Mine’s gone out.’

While Collis fed once more off the red tip of her cheroot, she held his wrist to steady his hand, and looked at him fiercely. The fierceness was passionate, rather than aggressive, but all the same Collis found it more than a little disturbing, especially since he was dressed in nothing but his nightshirt. Once his cheroot was alight again, he stood well back from her and eyed her cautiously.

There was a long silence between them, while they both stood and looked at each other. The sky was gradually fading from indigo to pale blue, and the lights that hung from the Virgina’s masts began to pale. The girl turned to the ship’s rail after a while and rested her elbows on it, smoking, her arms crossed under her breasts so that they were provocatively plumped up.

‘I suppose it wasn’t in my cards, that’s all,’ she said. ‘A slave woman in Bryceville told my fortune in the tarot cards, and she said I was going to travel, and be lonesome.’