‘No!’ I took him by the arm. ‘Whatever it is you need to put right, it is already inside you. It’s you who decided to be his victim. You who drank, you who forced them to pension you off. It’s you who sought out the poison that made you blind. It hurts me to tell you these things, but the answer to all of this is still you.’

His face was fixed like the rocks in obstinacy. ‘You want this to be more complex than it is, my dear. That is in the nature of women, I think.’

The old fool patted my hand. ‘The solution is straightforward. We will find him, and if there is any chance presented, we will kill him.’

~

Argyle edged us out of the cleft in the rock, prised us out like a crab.

We followed the coast as the afternoon sun grew strong and the wind shifted to an onshore easterly that ruffled everything. Gulls and gannets followed us now and I wished they would leave us, for fear they would disclose us and our new passenger to whoever it was that gave chase. We came around a point and followed a long beach under the sheared rock of the Cape Barren mountains. Behind the sand lay a tea-brown lagoon, the stoppered mouth of a creek coming off the mountain. The dense trees in there swayed with the wind. Who owned it? Who would ever own it?

Tarenorerer had taken the master’s glass and she stood on the deck gazing southward, legs athwart and the hard drum of her belly tilted slightly forward. She spoke quietly from under the brass cylinder, words I couldn’t catch. I tried looking down the line of the glass to see what she saw. That way was open sea, and faint in the distance, lilac on the horizon, stood the shoulders of a low mountain. That was what she had fixed upon. And what, I asked myself, could hold her attention about a stretch of empty sea and the speck of distant land?

Should be burnin, this time o’ year. Why them old ones not burnin it? When she lowered the glass from her eye I saw sorrow there, grief that had callused over. Perhaps it was these tiny glints of her pain, visible only in stealth, that drew me to her.

Onward, north-east, points and bays. The heavy hull of the Moonbird barely registered the chop of the sou’-easter. It was a world that sounded of rushing water under the bow and the small complaints of the rigging. Squeaks and knocks, the drum sounds of sails pulling taut. The warmth of the sun, that minor orchestra and a tiny swaying; all of it conspired to make me drowsy. I sat myself beside the steps, facing astern, and let sleep overtake me.