I say nothing: I have grown almost mute; months have passed since I was able to make myself properly understood. The foreman whose house I live in hands out daily beatings to his own children and I am not exempted from his floggings; the food is a vile pap and I am never free of hunger. In my eyes, Kew is not a garden but an untended wilderness. One night I break into a greenhouse and uproot some shrubs – I half hope to be caught, and I am. I am sent to live with a clergyman who I come to hate even more than the gardeners; one night, while he lies slumped over his brandywine, I help myself to the contents of his purse and make my escape. I walk towards Greenwich, guided by the lights of the fairground; for the first time in months I am able to disappear into a crowd. Under a tent people are dancing; I slip inside unseen and somehow I am drawn into the dance; the people who pull me in are of a kind familiar to me – barrow-pushers and pedlars, costermongers and gypsies. They show no surprise at having me in their midst; at dawn I cross the Thames with them and it is as if I were going from Honam to Guangzhou. In the rookeries of East London everything is familiar: the close-packed hovels, the bare feet, the barrows, the ordure on the streets, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the toffs in their sedan chairs, the nippers running wild: it is as if, after travelling all the way around the world, I had found my way home …

What a journey!

Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to?

I do not know whether it was because of the narcotic effects of the opium or the enchantment of Mr Chan’s narrative, but I was positively crushed when it came time for me to leave. Mr Chan walked me back to the sampan, and before I knew it I was back at Markwick’s Hotel. It was as if weeks, or months, had gone by since I left – yet there was still plenty of daylight outside. My head was spinning and I was about to lie down when my eyes strayed to my desk, to alight upon Charlie’s note. I woke to my senses in a panic, recalling the projected expedition to the cemetery on French Island.

Had Charlie left already? Was he lingering in wait for me? Pausing only to splash some water on my face, I ran to his lodgings in the American Hong. And there, to my astonishment, I learnt that he had yet to return from the meeting of that morning! I was told that he had gone, with Mr Wetmore, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, to deliver a letter to the merchants of the Co-Hong; they had been admitted into the Consoo House several hours before and had not been seen since.