She patted the rain from her cape. ‘I don’t know how I feel, Collis. I believe that I’ve told you everything possible. I have thought about you as a lover, but it could never be a passing relationship, a brief affair. I would have to commit myself to you, and I would expect commitment in return.’

‘Is that why you were so upset when you saw me with Maria? Because you’d already committed yourself, and you expected the same from me?’

She raised her head. The evening was very dusky now, and through the rain her face seemed to have the quality of a delicate luminescent painting.

‘I suppose so,’ she said.

Collis stood beside her trap for a while, and then went over without a word and took the rough rope rein of his own mount. Over in the far corner of the yard, sitting in the open doorway of a boxcar marked ‘Specie & US Mails’, were a dozen Jamaican porters, most of them half-naked. At a signal from the railroad official, they jumped down from the boxcar and gathered up all the hand baggage that couldn’t be strapped to the mules and began to file out of the railroad yard and along the muddy road towards the town. One of them, the last, even carried a small boy on his back, on a wooden seat that was fastened around his shiny black head with a cloth band. The boy, in a sodden sailor suit, was pale-faced and fast asleep.

The chief muleteer, a fat man in a wide straw hat, now called, ‘Hoi, hoi, hoi,’ and waved his arm like a threshing flail, for everyone to follow. Unsteadily, everyone did so, shaken in their rickety traps, or with their bottoms swaying dangerously on the narrow wet backs of their mules.

Collis had never seen a town so dilapidated and discouraging as Aspinwall. Front Street, along which they followed the rusting tracks the of the trans-Panama railroad, faced out across the misty harbour, where small sailboats glided like ghosts. On the east side of the street, towards the town itself, there was a white stone freight depot, a couple of derelict wooden houses, one of which sported a fading sign that read ‘Café du Chemin de Fer’, an icehouse, two tired-looking saloons, a railroad office, and further along, the Hotel Colón, a run-down three-storey balconied building.