I woke, I don’t know after how long, to find the doctor sitting beside me writing in one of his notebooks. He smiled when he saw me; it made us a conspiracy of two.

‘Hello, you,’ he said.

‘What are you working on?’

‘Birds again today.’ He had stood another of his mist nets across two poles that projected over the stern. I could see something in it, small like a finch. A larger bird, white with a yellow face, hovered in the slipped air behind us.

‘Gannet,’ he said, and he tilted his book towards me so that I could see his drawing of the obliging bird.

‘A fine likeness,’ I said, and though I might have said it anyway, it was. He had captured in tiny strokes of a pencil the bold flight feathers of its wings, and the soft down of its belly, the dark eye. He touched the pencil to his lips.

‘You were gone a long time with your father,’ he ventured.

‘Yes.’

‘What did you discuss?’

‘Oh, nothing. Family.’

His face took on a thoughtful frown. ‘You know, he really is endangering himself—’

I must have raised an eyebrow.

‘—with his drinking. You must make every effort to stop him. The tremens back at Hummock Island, that was a warning sign. Once it is chronic enough, it can endanger the, er, the mesentery. Very painful. And sadly it may end in sudden death.’

‘How much do you know about his drinking?’

He grimaced. ‘My dear, I would not have raised this, but I have several times now had to put your father back in his bed, and indeed to clean up after him, when there have been excesses.’

‘Oh my. Was this…lately?’

‘Yes, this past week.’

‘But I, I threw all of his grog overboard. You saw me do it. Even the ration for the others—there is nothing left for him to drink!’

‘He is finding it somewhere, I regret to say.’

My hands were pressed on the warm timbers of the deck, either side of my hips. He looked down now at my right hand and placed his on top of it. Nobody else could see the gesture, hidden as it was by my body and his. There was a ring on my index finger with a small stone set in it. It had been my mother’s, a gift my father gave me when I turned twenty-one, too many years ago now.

He rolled his thumb over the stone and toyed with it and I felt all sorts of suggestions in that small gesture, delicate enough that he did not even disturb the finger it rested upon.

~