I cooked her fish, some of the strange ones the doctor had netted, whose brothers floated, bug-eyed, in a jar of spirits below deck. She enjoyed the meal, sitting in the bow, legs crossed beneath her, implacable. I sat with her while she ate, and watched her patiently. As I suspected, her demeanour softened in my company alone and she talked more freely. Her eyes roved the horizon. It was not the sky that held her attention, though it was wide around us, shifting its light by the hour. Nor was it the sea. She glanced at its moving surface and I fancy she noticed things floating or things alive there, but although they might divert her eye—a flicker—her head never turned.

She was directed wholly forward and thus did not look back at the rest of those aboard. This interested me because it signalled a complete disregard for whether they might attempt to overcome her and seize the musket. Argyle had indicated to her in his gentle way that we were bound for Gun Carriage Island and this appeared to fit with her plans. She did not react adversely, at any rate. Her body tensed with impatience: everything about her posture demanded that we travel, that we arrive elsewhere and soon. She was in a hurry.

I watched her as she ate, and tried to divine what I could about her from the taut plane of her back. I discerned very little. I felt that an Englishwoman would reveal more of herself by being less naked. The small judgments and inferences that can be made from clothing, from hair, from ornamentation.

Mr Argyle had whispered to me as I fried the fish. He had heard of Tarenorerer.

‘Worked in the north-east of Van Diemen’s Land, among the settlers,’ he said. ‘Though I spose that term, worked…mean any number of things with settlers.’ The moment with the gun made sense to him because they said of her that she’d been taught the use of firearms; that she then took that knowledge, the knowledge that placed us above them, and used it to teach her fellows. Who in turn stole guns themselves, and applied the new-found knowledge in earnest, putting Englishmen and Scots behind the bead for the first time anyone knew of. The trigger; the concussion, men in uniform falling bloodied. It took little of this in any town to found a myth. It had happened in Sydney when I was a child, when Pemulwuy ruled the night. Bodies left as they fell, eyes agape in horror at departed visions. Bodies arranged to terrify: impaled, dismembered, disembowelled.

In Tarenorerer’s case, according to Argyle, the settlers responded with inevitable savagery. And they were hunting her.